The circular fountain near town hall, twenty centimetres high, wasn’t actually much of a fountain — it looked more like a giant blue Frisbee made of shattered tiles. An opening in the middle leaked water over the tile shards and kept the whole thing constantly wet. Astrid had never liked it, and her opinion was not improved when the left turn onto Hamntorget seemed to come out of nowhere. There was no help to be had from tossing her phone aside or swerving, either.
Its height and rounded edge worked together in perfect symbiosis with the Corolla’s angle of attack and speed, flipping the car onto its side, its roof scraped ragged by the fountain. When the car finally came to a stop a few metres on, resting upside down in the middle of the bike path like a helpless beetle, Astrid unfastened her seatbelt and crawled out of the car.
Shit. Her head was pounding, and her eyes…whether she was seeing double or if things were just blurry, she didn’t know. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. The driver was going to get away. Astrid just knew that the bastard would keep on waltzing through life as if nothing had happened. As if this were all a fucking game.
She looked for the red car, which would soon turn right onto Kungsgatan and then, in all likelihood, go back the way it had come. But in fact, it didn’t turn at all. Instead it kept going, right past the nightclub in the old ferry station, heading for the edge of the quay.
What was he doing? Astrid dashed across the cobblestones toward the water. Everything was spinning as if it were Midsummer and she had gone all in on a game of dizzy bat. She stumbled several times and realized she must have hit her head in the crash. But that would have to wait.
The BMW sailed right over the edge of the quay and flew several metres through the air before striking the water. Astrid kept running, and she noticed that others were now rushing from different directions and gathering in a cluster at the water’s edge. She stopped near the crowd, caught her breath, and cleared her throat.
“Hello, this is the police,” she said in the most authoritative tone she could muster. “We will need to cordon this area off, so I need you to move aside at least twenty metres!”
Most of the people turned to look at her.
“Yes, I’m talking to you! Come on, move aside as quickly as possible,” she went on, gesturing with both arms.
As the crowd began to move away, she could see the back of the car sinking into the dark water.
“That goes for you too.” She pointed at the last few people, who didn’t want to tear themselves away, and then she approached the edge of the quay.
There was no sign of the driver. Just a mass of bubbles rising to the surface. She really ought to jump in, but she would never manage. Astrid had never felt comfortable in the water, and in addition she had —
“Astrid Tuvesson?” The voice startled her and Astrid nearly lost her balance as she turned to face the uniformed officer. “May I ask you to blow into this please?” he went on, holding out a Breathalyzer.
2
Theodor Risk climbed up on the bench, sat on the backrest, and gazed out at the empty schoolyard as he drew a cigarette from his pack and defied the sign stating that smoking was forbidden on school grounds. He put on the red Beats he’d received from his dad for Christmas and pulled up Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” on his phone. In a minute or so the calm would be broken by shouting students anyway, as the others in his class streamed out of their double hour of gym class.
For his part, Theodor had spent the last hour with his therapist. As usual she had harped on about how important it was for him to join in and make friends. For him to be part of a community, as she liked to say. Theodor wanted to throw up all over her and her disgusting southern Swedish accent. Fuck, he hated that Skånska accent. It was without a doubt the absolute worst of all the dialects. But just as he did every week, he sat there like a lobotomized puppet and accepted her platitudes.
Like how important it was for him to open up and talk about how he was feeling in his heart of hearts. His “heart of hearts” was her number-one favourite phrase. Come on, let’s take a journey inside together, she would say in her sticky-sounding Skånska, holding out her hand as if she seriously expected him to take it. Only if he allowed her all the way in would she truly be able to help him. He sucked in the smoke and shook his head at the very thought. As if anyone would ever be able to help him.
Still, for the first few months he had followed her directions to the letter. He had talked about how he was doing, what he was thinking, and how everything felt. About his relationship with his father, who seemed to believe that he made his children a priority when in fact he was never around when they needed him. About the betrayal he’d felt at having been left home alone for several days — a betrayal that still felt like an open wound but which no one ever talked about, as if it had never happened. Theodor told her about the panic he had felt when he was locked up in a space the size of a coffin, and his fear that he would die as soon as the oxygen was used up. That everything would be game over.
Not to mention the schizophrenic disappointment that had washed over him when he realized he would survive. That his suffering would continue. At one point he had even held her hand and, with his eyes closed, brought her along deep down inside him. But she continued to pressure him despite all of this, as if she only had one song to play on repeat.
He had seen no other way out than to start lying, saying that he was making friends, that everyone liked him and he was becoming popular. That his appetite for life was returning, and even that he sometimes thought it was fun to sit at home, studying and hanging out with his family. He lied that the lump in his chest was getting smaller and he could finally breathe easy again.
But now, apparently, she had seen right through him. Her constant nagging about new friends had increased. What she didn’t understand was that there was no lack of people who wanted to be his friend. He just didn’t want to befriend anyone. He took a drag and gazed at all the idiots that had begun to fill the schoolyard.
Dumbasses, that’s what they were. Every single one of them was just an idiot on two legs, topped off with an ugly accent. But he had been a good boy and hadn’t touched a single one of them. He hadn’t crossed that line even once.
Alexandra was different. She was totally unlike anyone else in his grade; she didn’t speak Skånska or stand around giggling with the other girls. When he stopped to think about it, Alexandra was the only one who had never annoyed him. He hadn’t told anyone how he felt, but he felt something. And secretly, he suspected that the same went for her, since she always looked away as soon as their eyes met. Just like she would now.
Alexandra was standing over by the graffiti wall with some of the lame-os from class, and sure, he’d never timed it, but he was convinced that she’d never held his gaze for this long before. The feeling was so intense that he had to work hard not to look away first. What did this mean? Was it an invitation to talk to her? She looked happy. But what would he say? And what would he do about her friends?
Then the spell was broken. Not because of a furtive glance but because his phone rang, silencing Lemmy in his headphones. Theodor didn’t even have to look at the screen to know who it was. Of course he would call and interrupt this moment.
“Hey,” Theodor said, trying for a neutral tone, his annoyance seeping through.
“Hi, Theodor, it’s Dad. How’s it going?”
“Fine.”
“Great. And your therapy, did it go okay?”
“The usual.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Dad…that’s between her and me, you know that.”
“Yes, but it’s not like you can’t talk about it. If you want to, I mean.”
“I don’t want to.”
“No, no, okay. Completely unrelated: you know Mom has that opening reception tomorrow night down at Dunker? I just wanted to make sure you would be there by six at the
latest.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes, you have to. And I was also thinking we should surprise her with a trip to Copenhagen this weekend.”
“Um, hold on, does that mean I have to go too?”
“Yeah, it’ll be fun. You know, stay at a hotel, go to Tivoli, eat those red hotdogs.”
Theodor didn’t even try to hide his sigh. “Look, I can’t. I have three tests next week and I have to stay home and study.” Only the first part was true. But Theodor would rather stay home alone and do schoolwork than spend a whole weekend with his family.
“Okay, okay, we’ll talk more about it tonight. Maybe I can help you. But it’s good to hear things went well with the therapist.”
Theodor allowed silence to speak for him, and three minutes later, after some dutiful small talk about nothing, he was finally able to end the conversation and let Lemmy back in again.
3
Einar Greide sipped his steaming rooibos tea, which he’d let steep in the pot all morning to get that extra-rich taste only Celestial Seasonings’ Madagascar Vanilla could provide. The clock in the forensic medicine department underneath Helsingborg Hospital told him it was time for a coffee break, and while Greide thought coffee breaks were pointless, he didn’t exactly have much else to do besides making sure his tea was perfect.
It was only Wednesday, and so far the week had offered up three extremely obvious causes of death — the doctors’ decisions to call for autopsies had been an absolute waste of taxpayer money. But Greide had performed his duties as required and scribbled down the already-obvious answers in his reports. Beyond that, he’d had time to delete all the old emails from his computer, clean his office, and switch out a couple of Woodstock posters for new prints he’d bought in Berlin with Franz: old VW buses painted with colourful flowers. The question was, how would he occupy himself for the two and a half hours that remained of his shift after the break? Not to mention all of Thursday and Friday.
Not since the summer of 2010 had anything happened at work that really piqued his interest, and that was nearly two years ago. Not that he wished anyone ill. Quite the opposite. It was just that he was so desperately bored. Greide felt like a gym junkie who had been barred from working out for six months. His brain had grown lazy and was well on its way to shrivelling up into nothing. Two years ago, an entire school class had been wiped out, and he had put in so many braids — one per victim — that by the end he’d looked like a white Snoop Dogg. Now his hair hung in a limp grey ponytail, and he had started to seriously consider cutting it off.
Greide’s colleague Arne Gruvesson had already taken paid leave for the rest of the week. He hadn’t even had time for a proper coffee break before rushing off to do a big grocery shop for a confirmation celebration or something. “Nice of you to cover for me!” Arne had called from the corridor, adding that he would keep his phone nearby in case anything came up.
As if Greide would call Arne if something came up. As if he would ever decide to call that loser. How Arne had even managed to become a pathologist was a mystery Greide had long since given up hope of solving. “Careless” was his middle name. Not to mention “sloppy” and “totally worthless.”
It was more the rule than the exception that Arne would miss something. Most of the time it was some small detail that didn’t really affect his performance. It didn’t take a genius to state that the cause of death was extreme head trauma and internal bleeding, or a perforated abdomen from a car crash.
But once in a while Arne missed something much more crucial. Like the time two years ago when he’d assumed, in the midst of an ongoing investigation, that one of Torgny Sölmedal’s many victims had been killed in a common car crash, even though both of her eyes were burned to such a degree that there was no way it could have been an accident. In fact, the injuries to her eyes were why she had crashed in the first place.
And today they had received a fresh traffic death that had been preceded by a spectacular car chase through the downtown before coming to an end at the bottom of the harbour. Of course, as if God himself were directing this ironic play, the body had ended up on Arne Gruvesson’s table while Greide had been busy with the very exciting case of Gerda Nilsson, age ninety-four.
A thought had been growing inside him all afternoon, but only now did it bloom in full. And why not? After all, Greide had nothing better to do, so he slurped down the last of his cooling rooibos tea and left the break room.
Everything was exactly as he expected. The toxicology report showed a blood alcohol level of .275, which certainly supported the theory that this was a case of drunk driving in which the victim had drowned after being knocked unconscious when the car hit the water. A theory that seemed to be corroborated by the substantial facial injuries. Greide figured this was exactly what had happened — but again, he had nothing better to do.
Greide swiped his security badge, opened the door to the morgue, and breathed in the cool, dry air as he approached the wall of refrigerated drawers. He opened the one Gruvesson had labelled with Peter Brise and the date. Right away he was struck by the way both legs were drawn up into a fetal position, as if rigor mortis still had its grip on the limbs, even though the cold water should have lessened the body’s stiffness.
Greide also noticed that the body appeared to be relatively unscathed. Especially considering that the car must have hit the water at a fairly high speed. The seatbelt hadn’t even left a mark across the left shoulder, something that was almost always present in violent collisions, especially in cases where the airbag failed to deploy, which happened more often than one might think. Of course, in this case, the state of the airbag wasn’t something Gruvesson had had the energy to investigate.
In contrast to the body, the deceased’s face was wounded and swollen. Identification would have to be done by other means. These injuries were more than sufficient to have induced unconsciousness in the man, who did not appear to weigh more than seventy-five kilos. And just as Gruvesson had stated in his all-too-brief report, it seemed that the left cheekbone, with its open wound just below the eye, had suffered the greatest blow. Confusing right and left was a classic Gruvesson mistake.
Or maybe that wasn’t it. Greide pushed the thought away and leaned over to study the wound more thoroughly. It looked almost clean; not much blood at all. Such a thing wasn’t that unusual, since the body had spent an hour or two underwater. The strange thing was that the blood that was there appeared, for some reason, to be coagulated.
Greide took out a scalpel and carefully scraped along the edge of the wound. Sure enough, the blood was dry. How could that be? Greide couldn’t come up with an answer, but he felt a shudder course through his body. An idea started to take shape. But before he could be certain, he would need to do a few more tests. Perhaps the fetal position wasn’t a result of rigor mortis at all.
His pulse racing and his adrenaline pumping, Greide pulled his hemostatic forceps from his breast pocket and focused his attention on the lower portion of the torso, which showed the beginnings of fat deposits despite the body being otherwise thin. The scalpel cut into the flesh with no resistance, and after a few well-judged incisions Greide removed a sugar cube–sized tissue sample with his forceps.
Greide rushed down the corridor to the lab, where he cut a thin slice from the sample, set it in the middle of a slide, placed a cover slip over it, and turned on the microscope.
It took only a moment to confirm his suspicions. There was an explanation for the coagulated blood, the largely undamaged body, and the curled-up position. How it had happened, Greide couldn’t say. But it wasn’t his job to explain it. And of course, he would have to open the thoracic cavity and perform a thorough examination of the lungs before he could go out and broadcast his findings. But he wasn’t anxious in the least. In fact, he was convinced that Arne Gruvesson was, once more, guilty of a disastrous misjudgement.
It was as if a g
reat weight had fallen from Greide’s shoulders, and he could truly feel how the corners of his mouth no longer drooped under the influence of gravity. At last, he could put in his first braid in nearly two years.
4
The black-and-white photograph measured 180 by 135 centimetres and depicted a jungle of mangrove trees and their endless chaos of above-ground, snakelike roots. Then there was the lead frame, which weighed a lot more than one might expect. Fabian Risk sent up a silent prayer as he lifted the last in the series of three and hung it in place.
His lumbar region had begun to protest at increasing volume in the past hour, and if he didn’t get some rest soon, those twinges would likely explode into full-on lumbago.
But Fabian didn’t want to put a damper on the mood by saying anything to Sonja. After all, he was here for her. Fabian had surprised her by taking the entire day off work to assist her as she hung her first big art exhibition.
Sure, it was in the smallest of the three exhibition halls at Dunker Culture House, but still, this was a big deal. After all the years of hard work and self-doubt, Sonja finally had a chance at a true breakthrough. If everything went as planned, she would make a name for herself. Fabian understood why it was so important to her that everything should be perfect, right down to the tiniest detail.
But that hadn’t stopped him from thinking about the police sirens echoing off the building facades on Hamntorget as he carried in the last pieces. Thanks to his phone, Fabian had been able to access the local news from Radio P4 Malmöhus, which reported a car chase through central Helsingborg that ended when one of the drivers went over the edge of the quay, crashing into the water.
An hour or so later, when the identity of the deceased driver was made public, the item reached the national level on Eko, the financial news report. It seemed that Peter Brise was one of the country’s shining stars in the IT sector. His company, Ka-Ching, had doubled its revenues many times over in the past year and its future was predicted to be very bright. In Fabian’s eyes, this made the sequence of events seem even stranger. He also couldn’t understand why the driver of the other car hadn’t been mentioned even once.
Eighteen Below Page 2
