Sven Sundkvist was holding a passport with a dark blue cover that flashed in the light of the corridor’s bright fluorescent tubes. Schwarz, William John, nationality Canadian/Canadienne. He flicked through it, distracted: a photograph of the man crouching in the holding cell just a few yards in front of him, his date of birth looked about right, thirty-five years old, born in some hole that he’d never even heard of.
Sven gave it to Hermansson and asked her to take it to forensics for investigation.
“I will. In a while. When we’re done here.”
She smiled, I may be new but I’m not your lackey. I’ d be happy to do it but I work on an equal footing. Sven smiled back, Of course, you’re making a stand, I would too.
The prison doctor was young, thirty at most. Sven saw him coming down the long corridor and thought to himself that they always are, young, recently qualified, working in a detention center didn’t give much status, somewhere to start and get some experience, nothing more than that. Schwarz stared down at the floor and mumbled something incomprehensible while the doctor held his arm and took a blood sample for a DNA analysis. The fear in the cramped cell seemed to diminish, Schwarz wasn’t shaking anymore, wasn’t breathing as heavily, until he suddenly sprang up and shouted again, convulsing like before.
“Not again!”
He pointed at the doctor’s hands, at a diazepam enema that was going to be stuck up his rectum.
“Not again!”
The young prison doctor had taken the blood test that he’d come for and then tried to conclude his visit by giving the patient a sedative. The doctor looked at the officer who was sitting in the cell and then at Sven and Hermansson, shook his head, shrugged and threw up his hands, then put the tube of milky fluid back in his bag.
Someone gives me medicine. Someone puts me in a sack. Someone gives me oxygen, regular breaths every two minutes.
John Schwarz sat leaning forward on the bunk in the open holding cell. He wasn’t shouting anymore, he didn’t move. Sven Sundkvist and Hermansson had stayed until he sat down and the panic seemed to have ebbed, at least for a while. They waited a few minutes more, and took a call from Ewert Grens, who wanted them both to be present when Schwarz’s apartment was searched in a couple of hours—a routine operation to secure any evidence a forensic investigation of his clothes and shoes might give; he’d managed to leave the scene of the crime and sometimes not even a plea of guilty and several witnesses were enough for the judge on duty.
One last look at the man who was now sitting quietly in the cell, then they left, took the lift down, and made their way to their own offices.
“Is that normal?”
“Schwarz?”
“Yes.”
Sven sifted through images from his nearly twenty years in the police.
“No. Some seem to shrink when they get into the cell. But that—no. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a violent reaction.”
They kept going, punched a code into a lock on the door that separated one corridor from the next, walking in silence and trying to understand how the past could spark such terror, what earlier experiences in a person’s life would be strong enough to generate such a fear of small spaces.
“My son.”
Sven turned to Hermansson as he spoke.
“He’s named Jonas. He’s seven, nearly eight years old. He’s adopted. And the first few years, the first two years to be precise, we couldn’t understand it, Anita and I, he was just like Schwarz was now.”
They were nearly there, slowed down, wanted time to finish the conversation.
“He screamed just like that. In panic. If we held him too tight, if we hugged him for too long, if he was constricted and couldn’t move freely. We talked to everyone we could at the time. We still don’t know. But when he was a baby in the orphanage in Phnom Penh, they kept his whole body tightly bound in his blankets.”
They had passed the photocopier, stopped outside Sven’s office.
“I don’t know. Just something I recognized in Schwarz.”
He looked at her.
“I’m certain of it. He’s been confined in some way before.”
tuesday
MARIANA HERMANSSON HADN’T SLEPT WELL. A sound, much like the one that John Schwarz had released in the hallway outside the holding cell the day before, had woken her on at least two occasions. She didn’t know if it was her or someone else who’d passed her bedroom window. Maybe it hadn’t been there at all, maybe it had been a dream, the workings of her tired mind.
She was twenty-five years old and had now been living in her apartment, a sublet on the west side of Kungsholmen, for six weeks. It was expensive and furnished with the owner’s excessive number of chairs from his own workshop, but living only a short walk from police headquarters in Stockholm, city of apartment waiting lists, made paying out the extra thousands a little easier.
It was still cold when she locked her front door in the block of apartments by the north end of Västerbron and walked through Rålambshovsparken to the walkway along Norr Mälarstrand. Ten minutes of open park and the smell of water before she hit the asphalt again.
She was still caught in the sound that had kept her awake last night.
In the open holding cell with the shaking body on the bunk, who tried to hide himself from the people who were standing near and far away.
His fear had been so potent, you couldn’t escape from it—as if it were contagious and she couldn’t get rid of it.
She breathed in the air that felt almost clean, deep breaths as she looked out over the water, watched a boat pass and disappear into the snow-white trees that lined the Långholm canal. She was starting to get used to the capital. More lunatics, longer traffic jams, and the feeling of having moved here by chance, it was all still there, but with each day that passed it got easier to keep the loneliness at bay. The days were work, the evenings were work, she wanted it to stay that way, until her soul had arrived and moved in too. And she was happy in the old police headquarters at Kronoberg. Grens was who he was, intense and cantankerous, and with eyes that held a sadness, and she was starting to understand Sven better; what she had first thought was shyness was in fact thoughtfulness, he was wise and friendly, her biased view of a faithful husband—she could just picture him with his wife and adopted son at the kitchen table in a terraced house in Gustavsberg.
She was there, kicked the wall to dislodge the snow on her shoes and went in, door to the left, and upstairs to forensics. Nils Krantz, an elderly forensic scientist, the sort who had started out as an ordinary policeman and then got his training in the force, she was sure of it, had promised yesterday to have Schwarz’s passport ready for pickup this morning. He had sighed, as they always did, but had then taken it, gone over to his desk, and started to look through it, without giving her another glance.
Krantz was already there when she opened the door.
Reading glasses on his forehead, hair just as unkempt as always.
She didn’t need to say anything—the passport was lying on the table, ready for pickup. Krantz got up when she came in, pointed at it, and shook his head lightly, smiled that smile that she still couldn’t work out, whether it was friendly or ironic.
“John Doe.”
She hadn’t heard properly.
“What do you mean?”
“This. An unidentified man. A John Doe. Congratulations.”
EWERT GRENS WASN’T THERE. NO MATTER HOW HARD SHE STARED AT his chair. And Hermansson was in a rush. She didn’t know why, a tension somewhere in the middle of her stomach made her feel hounded, it gnawed at her and irritated her, made her breathing labored. Whether it was her recent conversation with the doctor who had given her an update on the battered Finn Ylikoski’s critical condition, that their work might turn into a murder inquiry at any moment, whether it was Schwarz’s reaction outside the holding cell, the terrified scream, or whether it was this, the false passport in her hand, she didn’t know; all she knew was that she wanted rid
of it, that it was stealing her energy so she had to go somewhere else, get away from Grens’s empty office.
She went to Lars Ågestam instead, the public prosecutor who had been given responsibility for the preliminary investigation, to brief him on what Krantz had just told her. Then she went back to Kronoberg and her own office, read the report that had been filed twenty-four hours earlier, then her own reports on the arrest at Nacka and a police search at the same address.
She was worried. Which was rare.
This feeling, his face that had been so terrified and yet empty at the same time, it kept getting in the way—she wanted to move on, and fiddled with the tall pile of outstanding investigations.
But she had to do it.
On Ågestam’s orders, she called the Canadian embassy and inquired about the passport that was lying on a table in front of her. The clerk answered. Gave precisely the answers that she didn’t want to hear. She interrupted him, got up with the receiver still in her hand, told him that she was on her way over, that she would continue the conversation when she got there.
Hurried steps down the corridor, she was still buttoning her jacket when she passed Grens’s office.
He was there now, she knew before she even got there—you could hear the music playing loudly out in the corridor, something from a time before she was even born, Siw Malmkvist singing and Ewert moving to the rhythm on his chair. She had seen him dancing around the room on a couple of occasions when he thought no one was looking, in the middle of the floor to that empty music. She should ask him sometime, who it was he was actually holding, there, next to the desk, dancing to a Siw Malmkvist chorus.
She knocked on the open door. He looked up, irritated, as if he’d been interrupted in the middle of something important.
“Yes?”
She didn’t answer and instead walked in and sat down on the visitor’s chair. Grens stared at her, astonished, unused to people just coming into his room without permission.
Hermansson looked at him.
“I—”
Ewert Grens lifted a finger, put it to his mouth.
“In a moment. When she’s finished.”
He closed his eyes and listened to the voice that filled the room, the voice of the sixties and youth and the future. A minute, maybe two, until first of all the voice and then the band were silent.
Ewert looked her in the eye.
“Yes?”
Hermansson considered telling him what she thought about having to wait so he could listen to some music.
She decided not to, not this time.
“I went up to see Krantz this morning. He worked very late last night.”
Grens was impatient, indicated with his hands that he wanted to hear more. She continued, felt breathless without knowing why, as if she was hurrying more than she needed to.
“John Schwarz’s passport. It’s fake, Ewert. The photograph and the stamp, Krantz is convinced they’ve been manipulated.”
Ewert Grens gave a loud sigh. He was suddenly tired.
A fucking awful day.
Right from the start, as soon as he’d come into the building just after six this morning, the investigation gloom had dominated in the corridors. Idiots who reported on pointless interviews, came back after disastrous investigations, handed out autopsy reports that said nothing. He had let a couple of hours pass, then taken a walk in the small park that had no name, before coming back to an office that was just as empty as when he left it.
John Doe.
An unidentified foreign man in custody.
That was all they fucking needed.
“Excuse me.”
Grens stood up, left the room, and walked down the corridor. He stopped in front of the coffee machine, black with nothing in it, plastic cup burning the palm of his hand as he slowly walked back, and holding it steady as he walked over the carpet.
He blew on the liquid and put the cup down on his desk to cool.
“Thank you.”
He looked at her, surprised.
“Sorry?”
“For getting me one as well.”
“Did you want one?”
“Yes, please.”
Ewert Grens lifted the hot cup demonstratively to his lips, tasted the first drops.
“An unidentified foreigner. Do you know what a pain in the ass that can be?”
He’d understood and dismissed her sarcasm. She swallowed her rage, then spoke.
“I am of course new here. But I’m certain. Schwarz’s reaction. It stayed with me all of yesterday evening, all night, this morning. There’s something wrong, that’s all there is to it.”
Grens listened.
“I called the Canadian embassy. I’m on my way over there now. You see, Ewert, the passport number, that’s genuine enough.”
Hermansson held up her hand.
“And it was issued for a man by the name of John Schwarz.”
The heavy breathing, forcing its way up.
“And even though both the photo and the stamp have been manipulated, which we’ve just had confirmed, it’s never been reported stolen.”
She waved the passport she was holding between her fingers.
“Ewert, there’s something that’s not right.”
THE DOOR TO THE HOLDING CELL IN KRONOBERG DETENTION CENTER WAS still open. John Schwarz was sitting on the bunk with his head in his hands, just as he’d been sitting the evening before, just as he’d been sitting all through the night. He counted each breath, terrified that he would suddenly stop, have to make sure that I get air, that it goes down my throat and reaches my lungs, don’t dare to sleep, can’t sleep, sleeping means not knowing whether I’m breathing or not and not breathing means I’m dead.
Now.
The officer beside him had taken over from his colleague a couple of minutes earlier. He’d tried to talk to the suspect, say hello to him, but the bent head hadn’t heard, hadn’t seen, he was somewhere deep, deep inside himself.
I’m going to die now.
Twice during the night he’d got up and banged his forehead hard against the bars until two arms had dragged him away. He’d shouted something incomprehensible, not so much words as a cry, a sound.
I’m dead now.
It was a long time since someone had demanded so much space in the holding cell. He wasn’t violent, it wasn’t that, but the guards on duty had called for the doctor and reinforcements, and there was a tangible feeling that something was about to go badly wrong, this man, he’s going to go to pieces in front of our very eyes.
Dawn had brightened into morning, and it was now daylight.
It was probably around half past nine. Or just after. And John Schwarz suddenly got up, looked at the two guards, and spoke coherently for the first time since he came there.
“I smell.”
The officer beside him in the cell had also stood up.
“You smell?”
“The smell, I have to get rid of it.”
The officer turned to his colleague who was standing just outside the door, the silver-haired one who had come back for the next day’s shift.
The older man nodded.
“You can have a shower. But we’ll sit with you.”
“I want to be alone.”
“Under normal circumstances, we lock the door and the guard sits outside. But not in this case. We don’t have time for assault suspects who commit suicide in our showers. So you shower. In our company.”
He sat down on the wet drain, his knees pulled up, back against the wall that was hard. Elizabeth’s eyes, they laugh so. The water pummeled his body, he increased the pressure and turned up the heat, hot drops on his skin. Their hate, I don’t understand it. Face up, he closed his eyes, it burned, he tried to suppress the thoughts that refused to back down. Dad crying, he’s holding me, I’ve never seen him cry before. He sat there for thirty minutes, didn’t pay any attention to the officer who was sitting far too close. The water, the heat had helped him to be resilient, at lea
st for a while.
John Schwarz now knew.
He had to get away from there.
He couldn’t face dying again.
HERMANSSON HAD JUST LEFT EWERT GRENS, BUT EVEN BEFORE SHE turned out of the corridor she heard the music again, just as loud as a short while ago. She smiled. He had his own style. She liked people who had their own style.
In her hand she was holding a passport, one that didn’t exist.
She still hadn’t fully recognized that this was just the start of something that would become so much more, but she had a feeling. Schwarz had been with her for more than twenty-four hours now, refusing to leave her thoughts. So she hurried along Bergsgatan, Scheelegatan, Hantverkargatan, a few minutes’ walk east along the road toward the center of Stockholm, and any moment now, a few hundred yards ahead, she would see the ugly building beside the Sheraton Hotel. She paused briefly, her eyes searching for the windows of the Canadian embassy a few floors up, when she was suddenly surprised by a voice, from behind, up close.
“Hey, bitch.”
He was standing on the other side of the high iron fence, in the grassy churchyard around Kungsholmen Church, a middle-aged man staring at her with great intensity.
“Hey, bitch, look at this.”
He’d undone the top button of his pants, was fiddling with the zipper now.
She didn’t need to see any more.
She already knew.
“Get your dick out, you bastard.”
She put her hand inside her jacket, for just a second, then held up her gun.
“Go on.”
She looked at him as she spoke, her voice calm.
“And I’ll blast it off. With the new police-issue hunting ammo. Then it’s done.”
For a long moment, he looked at the bitch who was holding a gun and said she was from the police. Then he bolted, ran away, tried to do up his fly, fell over one of the low gravestones with almost illegible writing and moss growing around the edges, kept on running without looking back.
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