Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  The traffic was getting busier and they had to brake more often and Sven tried not to look anywhere other than straight ahead, they only had a few kilometers to go.

  “You were right, Ewert.”

  The Söderled tunnel and not too many bends left that required maneuvers involving both the clutch and the accelerator.

  “They do have access to explosives.”

  He didn’t notice, but he lowered his voice.

  “And people who have access to explosives blow things up. Where? What? Who are they going to blow up, Ewert?”

  ———

  Ana opened the door and went out onto the stairs, past the elevator, kept going down, she moved fast, she knew that there wasn’t much time.

  ———

  He was tired, had probably never felt so empty, forty-eight separate call-outs in one week, two genuine and forty-six intentional: mopeds, cars, cellar storerooms, tires, containers, climbing frames, fences, trash cans, bushes, house gables, trees. This one had developed into big flames and black smoke—someone had poured gas over the car—and the big stones and empty bottles had started to rain on them as usual, but only once they had started to put out the fire and from farther away than normal, but the message had been clear enough, a police car for fuck’s sake, he hadn’t been hit more than once on the leg, but the hate felt stronger than usual, the pubescent voices sharper, it’s a police car for fuck’s sake, let it burn.

  Thom had just pulled in the hose and pump and opened the door to the front of the large truck when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Someone had come too close. He’d heard footsteps but hadn’t registered them and spun around with his arm raised, not more spit and stones, nearly lashed out, his body shaking, when he came face to face with a stranger.

  A woman. Thirty, thirty-five years old.

  And she pulled back when she saw his hand.

  “Oh . . . sorry.”

  He lowered his arm, tried to hide it, get rid of it.

  “I’m sorry, I thought . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I understand. It was me who . . . have you got a moment? Have you got time?”

  Dark hair, beautiful eyes that weren’t alive but that had been alive and wanted to live again.

  “Time? For what?”

  He had been about to hit someone who wasn’t even threatening him.

  It wasn’t her.

  It was not long ago. He had seen one of them who set fire to the car, a young boy who had darted forward to the rolled-out, water-filled hose and stabbed at it with something that resembled a sword with a curved blade. That was when something even deeper in Thom had burst. He’d ordered the guys holding the hose to turn around and direct the water jet at the child with the sword, they had hit him on the chest and he’d collapsed, screaming kill as they normally did, but even louder, we’re going to kill you next time.

  It wasn’t her.

  “I saw you here this morning.”

  The woman with the dark hair and eyes that had once been alive raised her voice to be sure that she was heard.

  “Quarter past six, a moped leaned up against a bench on Råby Torg. Engulfed by flames before you got there.”

  Maybe she took a step closer.

  “Twenty past eight, the blue container by the playground. It was already burned by the time you came.”

  Another step.

  “And now. I saw what happened. The third time today. Isn’t it?”

  Thom listened but felt unnerved, she had watched him, counted.

  “I’ve seen this, them, you, so many times.”

  He still didn’t say anything, she didn’t seem to be sick, he’d met mentally unstable people all his life and she wasn’t one of them, but the feeling that someone was watching him, he didn’t like it.

  “My name’s Ana. And I live there.”

  She turned and pointed to one of the blocks that looked just like all the others, a couple of floors up, it was difficult to see where she was pointing.

  “That’s enough. Just leave.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Like I said. That’s enough.”

  He walked around to the other side of the fire engine, checked the hose and the pump one more time, sorted out what had already been sorted out, and hoped that she would be gone by the time he went back around.

  She hadn’t.

  “I . . . I’m a social worker here in Botkyrka, I’ve been working in the family unit for years, with addictions, so plenty of alcoholics and drug addicts. And a whole lot of young people, even . . . children. And they . . . please listen, just for while . . . an addict doesn’t go anywhere unless she wants to. So to get anywhere you have to meet her at exactly the right time. When she’s been drinking or shot up her veins long enough, is weak and down and reachable, only then will she really listen.”

  Thom looked at the woman who was blabbing on about something.

  The police car that had just been on fire and the stones and bottles against their body armor and the teenage rants about hate and that he was going to die. And now her. She still didn’t look like she was sick, he’d learned to spot it in their eyes, but still, uncomfortable.

  “I’m sure you’re a reasonable person. But I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I don’t want to understand either. Please will you just let me do my job?”

  He mounted the step up to the front passenger seat, his place, Officer in Charge Front Passenger Seat.

  “What I’m talking about? What you are . . . now.”

  She followed after him, two quick steps.

  “Not an alcoholic, not a drug addict, that’s not what I meant. But right now you’re just so . . . despairing and weary. You’re reachable.”

  As if she saw straight through him.

  He didn’t like it.

  “You said you live here?”

  “Yes, that’s my window.”

  “Then go back home. And use your time to control your fucking kids instead.”

  “I don’t have any children. Not anymore.”

  She just stood there, so he couldn’t close the door.

  “I want you to come there, third floor, TOMAS on the door. Now, or this evening, or tomorrow morning. I just want to talk to you for a while, soon.”

  “Talk?”

  “Yes. And maybe get your help.”

  She hadn’t raised her voice. She wasn’t uptight. She seemed to be calm, and that’s what was so frightening.

  “Just go away.”

  “Your help to . . .”

  She turned toward what had just been on fire, and what had been on fire yesterday and would be set alight again tomorrow.

  “. . . to . . . stop all this. Forever.”

  He opened a blue-and-white door, got out of the car that belonged to Västerort Police, looked in through the window at the glove compartment that didn’t contain the two cassettes that for so long he hadn’t been able to part with.

  Now they had been burned to cinders, a voice on a piece of plastic had melted in the flames.

  Grens and Sundkvist bounded up to Solna coroner’s office in three short steps and already caught a glimpse of the body through the window. A young woman in a uniform on her back on a table and Grens imagined for a moment another young woman in another uniform, he had just been to visit her, the white cross in the grass in a corner of the kilometer-square graveyard, carefully watered the purple bush that had a name he’d heard and promptly forgotten. He wondered whether she too had lain on her back on a table, he had been so far away for so long and hadn’t even tried to find out—if someone who was going to meet her for the first time, met her like this.

  Nils Krantz, the forensic scientist, was standing on one side of the body, and Ludvig Errfors, the forensic pathologist, on the other. Grens went closer, whereas Sven stayed in the doorway.

  “So you’re here as well? Shouldn’t you be done and back in your lab with your microscopes, busy analyzing? I told you that we didn’t have much time.”

  Krantz
cut away the tape around the woman’s wrists with a scalpel, her arms in front when the tape loosened, crossed over her chest and stomach, as if she was protecting her heart.

  “I was the one who wanted to see how she was lying before the tape and clothes were removed.”

  The forensic pathologist had recognized the detective superintendent’s frustration and wanted to avoid adding to it. Grens heard him but his eyes didn’t leave Krantz’s hands cutting another layer of thick tape and then pushing it down into the paper bag.

  “You want four stages of technical evidence that can link them, him, as you said, to the car and body. I’ve already got the first, DNA, from the scrapings from between her teeth and sent that over to the NLFS for analysis.”

  “When?”

  The National Laboratory of Forensic Science. Grens’s body was shaking. The NLFS means Linköping and competition with other analyses.

  “I’ve used our own transport. And I’ve asked them to prioritize us. And I’m guessing . . . you’ll have an answer by this evening, at the latest.”

  “Nils, for Christ’s sake, I said that you had to be fast!”

  Krantz opened the bag and held it out.

  “And this is the start of the second piece of evidence, fingerprints. Why the rush?”

  Ewert Grens didn’t look at the brown paper bag or the gray tape.

  “Because they’ve murdered once already, because they’re on the run, because they’ve crossed the line and will murder again, because—”

  “That doesn’t make this case any different from any others.”

  Grens was shaking even more, an arm pointing without knowing where, and a head with blazing red cheeks up close.

  “Because they’re role models. You know as well as I do that five thousand youths are on their way in and following every single step. And if they succeed? If they carry on succeeding? Nils, it’s contagious, it’ll spread.”

  “That still doesn’t make it different from anything else. So I repeat . . . why the damn rush?”

  A young woman.

  “You just don’t understand.”

  A provisional delivery room.

  “Why, Ewert?”

  His job. His decision.

  “Because every intervention a policeman makes has consequences.”

  Nils Krantz put the brown paper bag down on the table close to the dead woman’s feet.

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “That’s what I just said. That there’s no way you can understand.”

  It was hard to tell, but it seemed like the forensic scientist was moving even slower when he brushed the woman’s hands with carbon dust and pressed her fingers on the form for fingerprints, ten small squares and two large for the palms. And then, without even looking at Grens, carried on, even more slowly, cutting up her clothes and putting them piece by piece in new paper bags and photographing the naked body from every angle.

  “See you at Kronoberg.”

  The black bag in his hand when he left the autopsy room.

  “Remember, we haven’t got much time, Nils!”

  “You’ll have an answer by this evening, at the latest.”

  Ludvig Errfors had a pen in his hand, which he pointed at the young woman’s face when he took the position where Krantz had just been standing.

  “Blunt trauma.”

  The forensic pathologist didn’t like anger and had no desire to confront the kind emanating from Ewert Grens right now, the kind that was incomprehensible and couldn’t be handled because not even the person who was angry knew why.

  “Here. The area around the nose, and here, the upper part of the mouth.”

  The pen pointing at the upper jaw.

  “A fist. And if you remember, the scrapings of skin between her front teeth.”

  Grens remembered.

  The first blow to her face, enough to make her compliant.

  “But if you follow the pen when I draw lightly on her skin . . . apart from the mark on her forehead, which we know comes from the glass at central security, I can identify . . . here . . . three further blows. The first knocked out her jawbone. Full force blunt trauma. And then two more. After her jawbone has already been knocked out.”

  One punch would have been enough. Another punch had made her as cooperative as he wanted.

  But he’d hit her twice more. And those punches were about something else. About respect. Not from her, he already had that, but from the others. He punched her twice for the sake of the others sitting beside him in the car, who needed to see and understand that he still deserved their respect.

  To harm another person to make yourself good enough.

  The kind of assault he witnessed in pretty much all gang-related violence. Grens didn’t understand it, and he would never understand it, because to understand it would somehow be to accept it.

  He said nothing, it wasn’t for anyone else’s sake, he just turned away from the table and the woman lying on it, and punched the wall. The forensic pathologist glanced at the detective superintendent’s knuckles, dots of blood, then drew new circles on the body in front of them, now on one of her thighs. Grens watched, but didn’t listen. He had read in the transcripts of interviews with staff from Aspsås prison that Alexander Eriksson had sliced the face of one warden with a coffee jug, seen pictures of Leon Jensen stabbing Julia Bozsik in the back of the thigh with a piece of metal, and now evidence that he had later punched her in the back of the car, once to make her comply, and then three times more to earn the others’ respect.

  Violence against someone who in that moment was weaker, not because they had to, but because they could.

  Errfors drew on the cold skin and Grens realized that his life revolved around the consequences of violence, the underlying assumption of almost every day in a homicide section. But also how this violence stood out from the lone madman who stabs someone in the chest forty-eight times in a particular pattern, or the frightened, jealous man who kicks against a cunt that no one else wants. The introspective violence for personal satisfaction and the functional violence to get someone to do something that the perpetrator wants. But this was like bleaching teeth so that the mouth was attractive to whoever it was smiling at; it was superficial, injury to achieve favor.

  Ewert Grens remained standing under the bright light after Errfors had finished, and didn’t move until Sven came closer and put a hand on his shoulder.

  His fingers ached. The white bandage, discolored by dried blood.

  He wasn’t going to punch any more walls. Not now.

  ———

  Mariana Hermansson was on her way up the steps to Solna coroner’s office when Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist came down. She noticed her boss’s hand was wrapped in a bandage that was white in some places, red in others, and then looked at Sven—they both knew that this was having a deep effect on him and that he was reacting with a different sort of anger than before. She walked the short distance to the car with them, it was important that they listened.

  “I widened the cordon around the scene of the crime.”

  She couldn’t help looking at the bandaged knuckles.

  “And as rain is forecast, it’s now been covered and transported to the forensics’ space in the garage.”

  She’d seen him hit walls and furniture and cars before.

  “The twenty-two road blocks throughout the county have now been cut to ten, as you ordered, Ewert, and will be reduced further in the next few hours, to four, all concentrated around Råby.”

  But never so hard and never with his fist.

  “One on the E4 southbound by the bridge at Fittjaviken. One on Glömstavägen by Masmo. One on the E4 northbound by Salem. And one on Hågelbyleden just after Tumba.”

  Ewert Grens opened the car door. The white and red fabric was thick and he found it difficult to get hold of the handle.

  She couldn’t help herself any longer.

  “Your hand?”

  “It’s fine, Hermansson. Four road bl
ocks. Every road in to Råby.”

  “Your hand, it—”

  “Get into the passenger seat, so I can drive.”

  He already had his bandaged hand on the gearshift. She stood by the door, staring at it.

  “Västerort Police?”

  “Can you please close the door?”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s just say that I requisitioned it.”

  “And our car?”

  “Something about the paint.”

  He reversed out of the tight parking space and drove between the parked vehicles to the exit.

  “The paint?”

  “I didn’t think much of the new black color.”

  Mariana Hermansson gave up and turned to the backseat and Sven.

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “It was torched.”

  She didn’t ask any more questions. She could ask later, as she often did when she and Sven shared a pot of tea in the Homicide kitchen.

  “We’ve still got two helicopters in operation—one on standby at Bromma airport, and one that’s circulating between the four road blocks.”

  Grens’s movements were still clumsy when he crossed the bridge over Essingeleden, into Gävlegatan and Sankt Eriksgatan. He listened carefully to her without showing it, was struck by her competence, so uncomfortably demanding. He had only once told her that she was good. And would never do it again. It was as if he needed her, the fact that she demanded something from him, and if he was to say it again . . . it would be something bigger, become something else.

  “Since eight p.m. yesterday evening, when one news flash followed the next on every channel, the CCC has received around two hundred and eighty-three tips from the public, of which sixty-seven are about the getaway car’s possible route. Two are of particular interest.”

  A crumpled envelope from a jacket pocket, notes on the back.

  “The first, a sighting around nineteen fifty-five hours on Mälarvägen between the roundabout and the gas station on the Upplands Väsby exit. A driver, I think it was a tanker, has given a time and a registration number. He said that he signaled several times to a young man who jumped out of the driver’s seat and, without paying the blindest bit of attention to the vehicle behind, went around to the trunk, opened it and leaned in for a few seconds and ‘did something with his hands,’ before getting back into the front seat and driving off.”