“Give it to me.”
Ewert Grens opened the security door and walked down the corridor, past the rows of silent, waiting offices.
A person had just been bleeding from his ears, had looked at him with different-sized pupils.
That was all he had seen.
That was all he was able to see.
He could not possibly know that this single act of violence was linked to a murder and was the continuation of a process that had started many years ago, far away; it would prove to be the most extraordinary criminal investigation he had ever come across.
A BRIGHT LIGHT SHONE FROM ONE OF THE UPSTAIRS WINDOWS. IF ANYONE had been walking along Mern Riffe Drive just then and looked up at the exclusive twelve-room house, he or she would have seen a man in the window, stocky, around fifty, a mustache and dark, slicked-back hair. He or she would have seen his pale skin, his tired eyes, how he stood there, completely still, staring listlessly into the dark and had then started to cry, his tears rolling slowly down his round cheeks.
It was still night in Marcusville, Ohio. Several hours until dawn. The small, silent community was asleep.
Everyone except him.
Except the man who was crying with grief and hate and loss, who was standing in the window of what had once been his daughter’s room.
Edward Finnigan had hoped that at some point it would pass. That he would be able to stop the hunt, that he would stop delving into the past, that he would be able to lie down next to his wife again, undress her, make love to her.
Eighteen years. And it just got worse. He grieved more; he missed her more and more—he hated more.
He shivered.
Pulled his bathrobe tighter around his body, moved his bare feet back a step from the dark wooden floor onto the thick carpet. He lifted his gaze from the town out there, the streets where he’d grown up, the people he knew so well, turned and looked around the room.
Her bed. Her desk. Her walls, floor, and ceiling.
She still lived here.
She was dead, but this room, it was still hers.
He had shut the door. Alice woke up so easily and he wanted to be alone; here in Elizabeth’s room he could cry, hate, and yearn without upsetting anyone. Sometimes he just stood at the window and stared at nothing. Sometimes he lay on the floor, or bent down over her bed, her teddy bear and the pink pillow, just as it had been back then. Tonight he would wait by her desk, sit in the new chair that she had never used.
He sat down.
Pens and erasers in a pile in front of him. A diary with a lock. Three books, which he leafed through absently; she had never really got past the horsey stage. A bulletin board on the wall; a yellowing sheet down in the left-hand corner: her schedule from Valley High School, one of Marcusville’s two public high schools. They’d been clear about that, that she should go to an ordinary school. If the daughter of one of the governor’s closest advisers didn’t go to the local school, that would signal dissatisfaction, and that was what politics was all about, giving signals, giving the right signals. Above the schedule, another sheet of yellowed paper, some telephone numbers, doodles and scrawls in pencil around the edge. At the top, a message from the trainer of Marcusville Soccer Team about a series match against Otway, a reminder of a doctor’s appointment at Pike County Hospital in Waverly, confirmation of a field trip to WPAY Radio Station, 104.1 FM in Portsmouth.
She had stopped midstep.
She had been on her way and he had taken all that away from her.
Edward Finnigan hated him. He had taken Elizabeth away forever, from the next day, from life, from this house.
The door handle moved. Finnigan turned his head quickly.
She looked at him with resignation in her eyes.
“Not tonight as well.”
He sighed.
“Alice, go back to bed. I’ll come soon.”
“You’ll sit here all night.”
“Not this time.”
“Always.”
She came into the room. His wife. He should touch her, hold her. But he couldn’t anymore. It was as if everything had died eighteen years ago. After a year or so they had had sex with each other twice a day, every day, so she would get pregnant, so they would have another child. But it hadn’t worked. There was no way of knowing whether it was their shared grief or just the fact that she was older and the female body slowly becomes less fertile. Not that it mattered. They never held each other anymore.
She sat down on the bed. He shrugged.
“What do you want me to do? Forget?”
“Yes. Maybe.”
Finnigan got up abruptly from what had once been his daughter’s chair.
“Forget? Elizabeth?”
“The hate.”
He cocked his head.
“I’ll never forget. And I will never stop hating. Damn it, Alice, he murdered our daughter!”
She sat in silence for a while, resignation in her eyes; she found it difficult to look at him.
“You don’t understand. It’s not about Elizabeth anymore. You’re shutting her out. You don’t feel anything anymore.”
She paused, took a deep breath, steeling herself to continue. “Your hate. Your hate is blocking everything out. You can’t love and hate at the same time. That’s just the way it is. And you’ve chosen, Edward. You made your choice a long time ago.”
“I never got to see him die.”
He paced backward and forward across the floor, the anger pulsing through him, forcing him to move.
“We waited. Years we waited. Then he died! Before he was supposed to die. We never got to see it. He decided when it was over. Not us!”
Alice Finnigan sat on her daughter’s bed. The only child she’d ever had. She would never stop grieving either. But this, Edward’s hate, their marriage that was no longer a marriage—she was about to give up. She had forgotten what it was like to live, for real. A couple more years sullied by this bitterness and she would go, leave behind whatever this was that she no longer recognized.
“I’m going back to bed. And I want you to come with me.”
He shook his head.
“I’ll stay here, Alice.”
She got up from the bed and was walking toward the door when he asked her to stop.
“It feels . . . it feels just like when someone breaks off a relationship. Alice, listen to me, just for a minute. You love someone, so you feel you’ve been abandoned. But that’s not really it, that’s not what really bothers you, that’s not what’s so painful that it makes your whole damn body burn. Please listen to me, Alice. It’s the power. The power you no longer have. Being forced to be at the mercy of someone else’s decision. Losing the power to decide yourself when your relationship is over. That’s always what hurts, more than the loss of the love that is no longer there. Do you understand?”
He looked at her with pleading eyes. She said nothing.
“That’s what it feels like. That’s how I’ve felt since he died. If only I could have been there and seen him die, see him gradually lose the ability to breathe, if I’d been able to be there and have closure . . . then I could have moved on, I know it, Alice. But now. It was him who decided. It was him who finished it. Alice, of course you understand, you have to understand, my whole body is burning, burning!”
She said nothing.
She looked at him, turned around, and left the room. Edward Finnigan remained standing where he was in the middle of the floor. He heard her closing the door to their marital bedroom.
He listened to the silence, heard a light wind blowing outside, a branch tapping against the window. He went over and looked out into the dark. Marcusville was sleeping, would sleep for a while yet; it was three hours until dawn.
IT WAS ALREADY LUNCHTIME WHEN EWERT GRENS RANG FOR A TAXI AND then hurried down the corridors of the police headquarters. He was late and he hated that, she was waiting, she was sitting there, depending on him, they’d made her look nice, brushed her hair like they always
did, helped her to put on one of the blue dresses. He asked the driver—a short thin man who laughed a lot and talked for the entire journey about Iran, his home country, how beautiful it was, the life he’d had there and would never have again—Grens asked him after a couple of endless quarter hours on Kungsholmen to drive slightly faster, showed him his ID, said it was a police job.
Fourteen minutes across town and seventy miles per hour over Lidingö Bridge.
He asked to get out of the car a short walk away from the big building. He needed to gather his thoughts. She was waiting for him.
He had been well and truly battered. First had to get rid of the man who had slurred in Finnish. Blood running out of his ear. A whole morning had passed and Grens hadn’t been able to dislodge the image of the person lying on one of the police station sofas. Mottled eyes, one pupil small, one pupil dilated.
Aggravated assault. That wasn’t enough. It was more than that.
Attempted murder.
He got out his mobile phone, rang Sven Sundkvist, the only person he could actually tolerate in the building where he’d worked all his adult life. He asked him to stop what he was doing, he wanted the identity of the person who kicked other people’s heads in, then he wanted him brought in for questioning, because that sort of behavior should cost him time behind bars.
Slowly walked the last hundred yards to the nursing home.
He’d been coming here for twenty-five years, at least once a week, to the only person he’d ever really cared about, the only person who’d ever really cared about him.
He was about to walk into her room again. He would do it with dignity.
They’d had their whole lives ahead of them.
Until he had driven over her.
He had long since realized that the images from that day would never stop crowding his mind. Every thought, every moment, he could relive those seconds.
The big fucking tires.
He didn’t make it.
He didn’t make it!
The wind was blowing in off the water, freezing Baltic temperatures straight in the face. He kept his eyes on the ground—the gravel path was partially covered in ice and he knew that the excessive weight on his good leg made it difficult to hold his balance; he had nearly gone head over heels a couple of times now and cursed the pointless seasons and poorly maintained path loudly.
He had felt the van lurch when it hit her body.
Grens crossed the large parking lot at the front of the building, found the window where she normally sat, looking out into thin air.
He couldn’t see her. He was late. She trusted him.
He hurried up the steps, nine in all, carefully salted. A woman of his own age was sitting at the slightly oversized reception desk, one of the ones who had been there when they first came in one of the police transport vans; he’d arranged it all, she had to feel safe.
“She’s sitting in there.”
“I didn’t see her at the window.”
“She’s there. She’s waiting. We’ve saved her lunch.”
“I’m late.”
“She knows you’re coming.”
He glanced in the mirror that hung outside the restrooms between reception and the patients’ rooms. His hair, face, eyes, he was old, looked tired, sweaty from his skating on ice. He held back a short while, until his breathing had steadied.
He had sat with her bleeding head in his lap.
Grens walked the short distance down the corridor, past the closed doors, stopping in front of number fourteen, the numbers in red above her name on a sign by the handle.
She was sitting in the middle of the room. She looked at him.
“Anni.”
She smiled. At the voice. Maybe the sound of the door opening. Or the light in the room, that now came from two sources.
“I’m late. Sorry.”
She laughed. It was a high, bubbling laugh. He went over to her, kissed her on the forehead, took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped dry the saliva that was running down her chin.
A red dress with light stripes.
He was certain that he’d never seen it before.
“You look lovely. New dress. It makes you look so young.”
She hadn’t aged, not like him. Her cheeks were still smooth, her hair as thick as before. He was losing his energy out there, with every day that passed. She seemed to be conserving hers, days in a wheelchair in front of a window, it was as if she still had everything.
The bright blood just didn’t stop running from her ears, nose, and mouth.
His hand on her cheek, he released the brake that locked one of the back wheels, rolled her out through the door, down the corridor to the empty dining room. He moved one of the chairs by the table nearest the large window with a view down over the water, and positioned her there, then got cutlery and a glass and a hard plastic bib; the food was standing in the fridge, some sort of meat stew with rice.
They sat opposite each other.
Grens knew that he should tell her. Only he had no idea how.
It didn’t change anything.
He fed her at the same speed that he ate himself; the homemade stew had been reduced to a suitable brown and green and white mash on her plate. She ate well, she had a good appetite, she always had. He was sure that that was why she stayed so well, all these years in a wheelchair, far removed from other people’s conversations, as long as she ate and got energy, she would be there, wanting to live and keep on living.
He was nervous. He had to tell her.
She swallowed and something got caught in her throat; a severe coughing fit, he got up, held her until her breathing was regular again. He sat down and took her hand.
“I’ve employed a woman.”
It was hard to meet her eyes.
“A young woman, like you, back then. She’s smart. I think that she’ll be good.”
He wondered if she understood. He wanted to know. He wished it were possible to know if she was listening, if she was really listening.
“It won’t affect us. Not like that. She could have been our daughter.”
She wanted more food. A couple more spoonfuls of the brown stuff, one of the white.
“I just wanted you to know.”
By the time he was back out on the veranda by the entrance, it was blowing a mixture of snow and rain. He tied his scarf, buttoned his coat all the way up. He was down the steps and had started to walk across the parking lot when his mobile phone started to ring.
Sven Sundkvist.
“Ewert?”
“Yes?”
“We’ve found him.”
“Bring him in for questioning.”
“A foreigner.”
“He kicked a person in the head.”
“Canadian passport.”
“I want you to bring him in.”
The rain intensified, the drops mixed with snow seemed ever bigger, ever heavier.
Ewert Grens knew that it wouldn’t help in the slightest, but he looked up at the sky and cursed the endless winter, damning it to hell.
IT WOULD SOON BE LIGHT IN THE SMALL TOWN IN SOUTHERN OHIO THAT was dominated by the huge prison with high concrete walls. It was cold out, snow falling as it did throughout the winter, and the inhabitants of Marcusville would start their day by clearing the driveways to their houses.
Vernon Eriksen did his last round through the corridors of locked-up people.
It was half past five; one hour left, then he would finish his night shift, change into ordinary clothes, walk to Sofio’s on Main Street, a Mexican restaurant that did a decent breakfast, double blueberry pancakes and crispy fried bacon.
He’d left West Wing and was on his way to East Block, his footsteps echoing on the walls that he still thought of as new, even though they’d been there for more than thirty years now. He could clearly remember the building at the edge of town that was to become high walls and cells that would accommodate prisoners, and for that very reason divided the inhabitants
of Marcusville into two camps as it slowly grew: those who saw it as new job opportunities and a second chance for a backwater town, and those who saw it as a fall in property prices and a constant worry about the criminal elements in their midst. He hadn’t thought about it much himself. He was nineteen and had applied for a job in the newly opened prison and had then just stayed there. He’d therefore never had reason to leave Marcusville; one of the leftovers, a bachelor who instead clung to the work that had become his everyday as the years passed and now, now that he was over fifty, it was too late to break out. He sometimes went to Columbus for a dance, occasionally ate dinner with a woman some miles south in Wheelersburg, but that’s where it stopped, nothing more, no intimacy, he always left before.
His life, it had somehow always been connected to death.
He mused on it every so often, that it had somehow always been present, right from the start.
It wasn’t that he was frightened of it, not at all; it was just that it had always been there, he’d lived with it, worked with it. As a child, he’d often sneaked down from their apartment upstairs and between the wooden banisters on the stairs watched his father receive clients in Marcusville’s only funeral parlor. Then, as a teenager, he’d become part of the family business, another pair of hands to help with the cleaning, arranging, and dressing of bodies that lacked life. He’d learned to give it back, if only for a while—the undertaker’s son knew that with makeup and a professional hand you could create the illusion of a living person, and the nearest and dearest, when they looked into the coffin, weeping, to say good-bye, that was what they wanted.
He looked around.
Walls that were more than thirty years old. The prison was starting to look worn.
Nearly fourteen hundred inmates who were to be punished, imprisoned, and occasionally freed. A little more than half as many employees, somewhere between seven and eight hundred. An operational budget of fifty-five million dollars, approximately forty thousand dollars in expenses per prisoner per year, one hundred and seven dollars and sixty-three cents per prisoner per day.
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