Anger Mode

by Stefan Tegenfalk

  JONNA WAS SUPPOSED to report to the head of the RSU, Johan Hildebrandt, for debriefing, but decided instead to clock out and take the rest of the day off. Her frustration from the meeting had gradually turned into indifference and she felt fed up.

  She slammed the car door and remained sitting behind the wheel with the car keys in her hand. With her gaze fixed on nothing in particular, her thoughts ran in circles in her head, in exactly the same fashion as when her relationship with Peter had irrevocably come to an end. After trying to find the appropriate emotions, with an obsessive’s compulsion, to redress the situation, she had found herself stuck in an emotional no-man’s-land. On closer analysis, she realized she had never really loved Peter. At least, not in the way he had expected. He had demanded a form of unconditional, submissive passion. Love with a capital “L” was an illusion. She had compensated for her lack of suitable emotions with something else. Something more contemporary, like sharing the washing up and the bills, or even just having a healthy sex life or somebody to come home to or to go to parties with. The flat had felt abandoned during the first weeks after the break-up and it would take a long time before she would be able to bare her soul to somebody else again.

  She put the key in the ignition and took out her mobile phone. It had been on silent mode since the meeting and the display showed five missed calls and three messages. A few years ago, there would have been significantly more. After she had started at the police academy, her contact with old friends became more sporadic. They quite simply had nothing in common anymore and just rehashed old memories or stuck to stilted and superficial chitchat. Most had already started families and bought houses, which dominated the topic of conversation. By breaking up with Peter, she had gone from square one in the social monopoly game to the margins of the game board.

  Sandra Kalefors was one of her few girlfriends who still had not locked herself in with a family and thrown away the key. A boyfriend that she occasionally dated was the closest she had got to a committed relationship. Sandra had called three times and left two text messages. It was probably a date for dinner at one of their favourite bistros or for cruising the bars to hunt for young studs in baggy jeans.

  Now was not the time for Sandra or RSU.

  Instead, she set a course for the Karolinska University Hospital and Walter, to keep him up to date with the latest developments in the investigation or, rather, the lack of investigation as far as they were concerned. She also wanted to know how he was feeling. She had no idea what had happened, other than he obviously had been suddenly admitted to the hospital.

  Jonna was obliged to show her police ID in order to visit Walter, who lay in a room in ward twelve, close to the ward where Bror Lantz had lain a week earlier. An argumentative and self-opinionated intern was of the opinion that Walter would not be up to having any visitors and therefore asked her to come back later.

  Considering how the day had progressed, she was not in the mood to humour the sanctimonious student doctor. So, against regulations, she flashed her ID and hoped he would not make a telephone call to complain. After some grumbling, the intern asked one of the nurses to show Jonna to room thirteen. She was allowed fifteen minutes, not a second more.

  Jonna looked at Walter silently as he explained.

  “In the brain?” she blurted out. He described it as if it was only a broken finger. There were actually benign tumours too; she knew that. Not even a cynic like Walter could have hidden something as monumental as the beginning of his own demise.

  “So that’s why you had dizzy spells,” she added. “Because the tumour has been pressing on a nerve that controls your sense of balance.”

  “Clever girl,” Walter said.

  “When are they going to operate?”

  “Apparently, a specialist surgeon, Täljkvist, has shown an interest in digging into my skull,” Walter explained, moderately enthusiastic. “He’s a specialist in something called neuro-navigation. Also, he thinks I’m a challenge because the tumour has spread between the cerebellum and the brain stem. At any rate, he wants to take it out as soon as possible. So tomorrow, it’s party time.”

  “Getting a specialist to operate sounds really good,” Jonna said, trying to sound encouraging.

  “Sure,” Walter agreed, “just as long as he’s under sixty and without a hangover.”

  Jonna laughed and fidgeted a little. She did not know if she should tell him that he had been suspended from duty pending the result of an internal investigation. He would, of course, be informed about it in due course. But should she break the bad news to him? She was unsure if she was even authorized to do so. That kind of information was probably subject to a confidentiality regulation. Jonna decided to start with the news of the investigation itself.

  “The Ekwall and Sjöstrand investigations have been cancelled and a new one has been started under SÄPO and Åsa Julén,” she started, rambling on. “SÄPO is of the opinion that an Islamic terrorist cell is behind Drug-X, and they believe there are links to Ekwall and Lantz as well. According to SÄPO, the objective of the terrorist cell is to neutralize our courts and, by so doing, the whole infrastructure of a functional society, with the aim of preparing the way for their own laws. SÄPO are also looking for traces of the drug in the taxi driver and in Ekwall’s wife.”

  Walter’s face turned dark red. He was just about to say something when the door was opened by the intern. The thin-haired man went up to Walter and asked if everything was okay, but frowned when he saw Walter’s troubled face. He turned to Jonna and made it clear that her fifteen minutes were now up.

  Jonna got ready to leave the room, but Walter ordered her to stay. “Sit down,” he said and gestured at Jonna.

  “No, you should rest now,” the intern explained and gave Walter a stern look.

  “No, thank you,” Walter refused, in a firm voice. “I know when I need to rest.”

  “But …” the doctor began.

  “You leave and you stay,” interrupted Walter, pointing first at the intern and then at Jonna.

  “I don’t think …”

  Walter stopped the doctor, saying he shouldn’t think excessively. The doctor sighed morosely and then left the room. Before he closed the door, he said he would be back in another fifteen minutes. If Walter did not accept his advice, he would be forced to relinquish responsibility for his health.

  Walter asked the doctor to close the door behind him.

  Jonna continued to relate in detail what had transpired during the morning meeting. Walter had calmed himself down and nodded patiently as Jonna described how the meeting had progressed.

  “That didn’t sound good at all,” he concluded, after she had finished her report. “It sounds very far-fetched to me.”

  “I agree completely and I have a few thoughts,” she replied and pensively bit her bottom lip.

  “I see.”

  “Yes, if we ignore Drug-X to start with …” Jonna slowly began.

  “Carry on,” Walter abruptly replied.

  “To date, we have three murderers if we include Bror Lantz. But we have absolutely no motive for the murders. At least, no motive that is so far credible.”

  “Nothing new about that,” Walter rudely retorted.

  “The problem is that none of them know why they did what they did. Why did they become overwhelmed with a rage that disappeared when they took a life? Also, everyone except Lantz has confessed.”

  Jonna suddenly paused.

  “Carry on,” Walter said. “You said that you had been thinking. Not that you were going to start thinking.”

  Jonna sat quietly in the chair and looked as if she had forgotten her name.

  “Who would want to punish a prosecutor and a judge?” she finally said.

  “Apparently, an Islamic terrorist cell that wants to throw the Swedish justice system into chaos by poisoning its practitioners,” Walter answered ironically.

  “Yes, but, apart from them, who else?”

  “There’s no sho
rtage of loonies out there,” Walter chuckled. “According to SÄPO’s own reports, there are about one thousand mentally ill people who could potentially bury an axe in anybody’s head. Then we have all the opponents of the legal system, anarchists, left- and right-wing hooligans and, of course, those that have personal reasons for revenge.”

  “It’s precisely the latter that I’ve been thinking about,” Jonna said.

  “Revenge?”

  “Exactly. Somebody who’s been wrongly convicted or, in some other way, feels violated or damaged and wants to wreak vengeance on the court system.”

  “By drugging people with a compound that only national governments and the largest pharmaceutical corporations can in theory produce?” Walter asked dubiously.

  “Something like that,” Jonna suggested, without sounding completely convinced. Maybe this was as far-fetched as SÄPO’s theory after all. The more she thought about it, the more difficult it became to believe it.

  “Funny you should mention it,” Walter said. “I was thinking along the same lines myself. But I couldn’t join up all the dots. Why go to all the bother of such an advanced drug? Why not simply kill the relevant judge or prosecutor?”

  “You’re right,” Jonna said. “Why make everything so complicated?”

  “How did you progress with the plaster figures, by the way?” he asked and closed his eyes.

  “I sat up most of the evening and surfed the net,” Jonna said. “I finally managed to find the manufacturer.”

  “And?”

  “They’re manufactured in the USA by a small company that sells exclusively over the internet. According to their home page, they only have these figures. All on the death theme. I almost got the feeling that they were Satanists or something else cult-like.”

  “Taking into account the time difference, I assume you were able to call them?” Walter said.

  “Naturally,” Jonna said. “But I got nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “I said I was from the Swedish police and wanted to know if they had any customers in Sweden and, if that was the case, the names of the people they had sold the little angels of death to. But they were not so eager to please.”

  “Why not?”

  “Translated literally, they told me that I could take my baton and stick it up …”

  “I get the picture,” Walter said. “We will have to see if SÄPO reacts to the death angels in the memo I wrote. They could contact the FBI and obtain some assistance to get the list of Swedish buyers.”

  “Presumably,” Jonna said.

  “Is there any reason to discount SÄPO’s terrorist theory?”

  “Absolutely,” Jonna replied resolutely. “I don’t believe that stuff about the terrorist prince. In that situation, he would have poisoned almost all the water supplies in the Western world – or spread panic and chaos in some other way.”

  “Good,” Walter said and opened his eyes. “It so happens that I have a proposition.”

  “Well, there was something else,” Jonna said cautiously, before Walter could continue.

  THE FIST CAME from nowhere and he fell heavily to the floor. A burning pain spread across his face as he drifted in and out of consciousness. Distant voices echoed in the confusion into which he had so suddenly been thrown. Jörgen had turned around when he heard the parquet flooring creak behind him, but did not register what happened after that. One second, he was standing and looking at the pile of furniture on the living room floor; the next second, he was lying on the floor in a sea of pain.

  “Noooo, Chri-ist, you hit too bloody hard. His fucking lights went out!” Jerry Salminen roared in Finnish Swedish and punched the wall with his fist. A fist-sized hole appeared in the plasterboard wall.

  Tor Hedman went towards the rotund man on the floor. He approached carefully and nudged the man’s head with his size thirteens. At first glance, the man did not seem to present much of a threat. Even so, Tor was on his guard when he bent over him to see how hard he had taken the blow. He had read the Lisbeth Salander novels and knew not to judge a book by its cover. If a thin anorexic could floor a blond giant, then this little fatso could take Tor, despite the fact that he was over two metres tall and had been a hardened criminal for thirty-five years.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Jerry exclaimed.

  “You can never know for sure,” Tor said and pointed at the man with one of his skinny, tubular arms.

  “Know what?”

  “He could jump up and nail us both,” Tor answered and looked at Jerry with a serious face.

  Jerry was just about to ask Tor if he was a complete idiot, but stopped himself, because he already knew the answer. If there was one thing Tor detested, it was being called an idiot. Jerry knew this after eight years in his company.

  Despite his one metre and seventy-five centimetres of height, Jerry looked like one of the seven dwarfs next to Tor. Not widthwise, however. Jerry pumped iron seven days a week and had been regularly taking steroids for the last four years. He had a natural aptitude for bodybuilding. Jerry’s forearms were as big as Tor’s thighs and, on the beach, he received envious stares from men without muscles and from women of all ages and shapes. He could thank his mother for his genetic pedigree; she was built like a Finnish sauna.

  Jerry looked around anxiously. They had gone through the entire flat without finding what they were looking for. Was it a CD or a DVD? Was it a file on a PC or a videotape? Or was it one of those fucking USB memory sticks that were so small that they could be hidden inside an arsehole?

  Jerry didn’t have a clue. “Nix, he must have fucking hidden it somewhere else,” he swore and started to pace around the room. “We’ve bloody well torn the whole fucking floor to bits and still not found any fucking multimedia evidence.”

  “But we don’t know what to look for,” Tor said, waving his inner-tube arms about. “The bloke said that the sucker would know what we needed to find.” Tor looked up from the man on the floor and gazed inquiringly at Jerry.

  “I know that, but Christ,” exclaimed Jerry, unable to control himself any longer. “No fucking way are we going to find that out if you nail the fucker before he’s spilled his guts.” He kicked the heap of wreckage on the floor.

  A muffled groan came from the floor as Jörgen recovered consciousness. He squinted with one eye, not able to make out anything. The pain from the eye that had swollen shut after the blow rushed through his nerves. His head was about to explode from the pain. It felt as if his brain was at least three sizes too big.

  “Water, quickly. He’s waking up!” Tor screamed and took hold of Jörgen’s hair. He was going to drag him into the bathroom, but did not have the strength.

  Jerry shoved Tor out of the way and instead lifted up Jörgen by his arms. Jerry only worked out for the body mass. Strength was incidental. It was therefore with some difficulty that he dragged the paunchy journalist by the arms into the bathroom.

  Jerry heaved Jörgen’s upper body over the toilet rim and pushed his head into the bottom of the bowl.

  “Flush it,” he shouted at Tor.

  Tor flushed the toilet and a gurgling sound was heard deep down in the toilet.

  “Good, he’s coming to,” Jerry said and gritted his teeth as his arms began to shake from the exertion. The fatso was hardly a featherweight.

  “Flush again, fuck it,” Jerry ordered and forced Jörgen downwards against the porcelain as hard as he could. Jörgen moaned from the pain and the water was coloured red with blood, as his nose had been broken. He flailed wildly with his arms while choking violently.

  Jerry pulled Jörgen’s head out of the toilet bowl and let him drop to the bathroom floor. Jörgen coughed up toilet water while blood spurted out of his nose.

  “Now tell me, what the fuck have you done with the multimedia evidence?” Jerry screamed and squatted down beside Jörgen.

  At first, Jörgen did not understand. It felt as if he had been run over by a truck. He fumbled wi
th his hand, over his forehead, down towards his swollen eye and then his nose. His eye had swelled to the size of a tennis ball and his nose was as broken as a bad engagement.

  He pressed the tennis ball and an excruciating pain shot through his body. Jörgen could not contain the pain and howled uncontrollably.

  “So far, so good. Now he’s talking at least,” Tor concluded.

  Jörgen started to hyperventilate in an attempt to lessen the pain. It felt as if he had a thousand needles in his eyeball.

  “So answer me!” Jerry yelled. “What have you done with the evidence?”

  “Who are you?” Jörgen blurted out between deep gasps.

  Jerry was really fed up with everything. Everything had gone wrong from the very beginning.

  Zlatan, the locksmith, had made a fuss and wanted more cash to pick the door lock. Then they had been forced to wait until the sucker came home, since they could not find the evidence despite having slashed the furnishings to shreds. And anyway, it was Jerry who should be asking the questions, not that fucking loser on the floor.

  Jerry twisted Jörgen’s wet hair. Jörgen screamed and flailed his arms in defence.

  “What have you done with the evidence?” Jerry shouted in Jörgen’s ear.

  “What evidence?” Jörgen asked in despair. He felt the tears pour out of him.

  Jerry thrust his face so close Jörgen could feel his bad breath.

  “Shit, why is it so fucking difficult to get you to talk?” Jerry hissed, with saliva bubbling at the corners of his mouth. He pressed one finger on Jörgen’s swollen eye, but quickly removed it when a heart-rending screech bounced off the bathroom walls.