‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s something on your mind.’
I look at my phone. I should’ve heard something by now. We have to be able to talk to each other.
‘They operated on Grim yesterday.’
‘I understand.’
‘But I still haven’t heard anything. I don’t even know what happened.’
‘Ring the hospital then.’
‘I will.’
Sam stops in front of the mirror.
‘You’re scared.’
‘It’s weird, talking to you about it.’
‘About being scared?’
‘No, about him.’
When she’s finished buttoning her shirt, she adjusts the collar, inspects the results in the mirror and pats down a crease on her arm.
‘I get that,’ she says. ‘But you’ll have to learn.’
‘Doesn’t it feel weird for you, hearing it?’
‘What’s the alternative, though? For you to not talk about him with me at all? He is your friend. Of course I don’t like it, considering what he did to me.’
He is my friend. It’s weird to hear someone else saying it, even when she says it. I need to tell Grim, I think to myself, that I don’t blame him for trying to get hold of the list. It’s true, I don’t. He must’ve been desperate, exhausted from being on the run. If I’d been in his situation, would I have done the same? Maybe.
I’m going to tell him that today.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry for …’
She takes my face in her hands and pushes her lips against mine.
‘You said it. That’s good. But if you lie to me again, I’m off.’
‘I won’t.’
The clock is ticking behind us in the kitchen, and I can hear it at first, but then it fades out because as she keeps kissing me something happens.
Everything’s singing.
56
The call from Karolinska is logged in my phone at fourteen minutes past eleven in the morning, and the person on the other end, the consultant, delivers his message concisely.
This morning, the ninth of December at five past eleven, John Grimberg was pronounced dead.
At that point, his heart had been lying still for over an hour, after complications resulting from an acute surgical procedure they had been forced to undertake to deal with the repeated blood clots caused by yesterday’s operation. His life could not be saved. The consultant’s words.
I count — five past eleven, minus an hour — and work out that my friend must have taken his last breath on the operating table at about the same time as I was in the apartment on Alströmergatan telling Sam that I was scared.
It’s the ninth of December. Everything was singing. Just now.
Now everything is silent.
PART III
What You Know about Me
Stockholm
December 2015 and March 2016
57
No stars in the Stockholm night, but that’s the only thing.
The clock is ticking, traffic lights change, buses sweep down the road, and music pounds away inside the clubs. Passing by on the pavement, you can smell the cigarette smoke and perfume, hear people’s laughter.
I am a long way away from them. I’m walking like someone who doesn’t want to be seen.
No stars, but that’s the only thing, they were shining down on the city yesterday and now they’re gone. In the world, nothing else has changed. My friend has left it, with no concrete trace, one second he was lying there in his hospital bed, the next …
Nothing.
The bleeping of the heart-rate monitors echoes in my ears. Sound that comes from someone still alive. It has stopped.
I walk across Kungsholmen to Karlberg station, catch the last commuter train south, towards Salem. The floor of the carriage is sticky from spilt booze. In one corner, a few red-nosed men and women are nodding off. Somewhere just before Rönninge, a handful of kids hop on, mid-party. It’s Wednesday, but that sort of thing doesn’t make as much difference as you’d think. One kid is playing music on his phone — Rihanna, shine bright like a diamond — and as the train weaves its way into Rönninge it stops abruptly, making another kid fall over.
The rest laugh and help him to his feet. I watch them with interest.
We were like them once. Remember? Me and you, we were just like them once.
I walk the streets of Salem, pass the bus stop where me and Grim met a young Angelica Reyes. I see our old street, the housing blocks of the Triad reaching upwards towards the dark sky. I pace past what was once the entrance to Grim’s, and around the edges of the place where I grew up, just as I used to all those days and nights when I didn’t have anywhere to go but didn’t want to go home either.
I wasn’t alone then, not even during those long years without Grim, or while he was at St Göran’s. He was around, somewhere out there in the world, and I knew it.
And now?
By the water tower, where we first met, I stand and stare at its heavy silhouette, just aware of a dark matt firmament beyond. I remember a shot that whined through the air, and there he was. Sitting up there with an air rifle, shooting at birds. That’s how we met. I was curious and I climbed up myself. I was sixteen. When we looked at each other, something happened, electric almost. Suddenly there was a before and an after, a time before I met Grim and everything that happened afterwards.
Everything that happened.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. There should’ve been a time for us. There really should. A chance to be together again, on equal terms. And then one of us went and died alone on an operating table.
It wasn’t supposed to end like this.
I’m lying on my back on the cold earth. The moisture is seeping through my clothes. I can’t work out how long it’s been since I stepped off the train.
Everything’s so lonely now.
But he can’t really be gone? It must be an illusion; he’s going to appear at any moment, out from between the trees, onto the gravel. He’s going to lie down next to me and ask me what I’m playing at.
I wait. Is he coming?
It can’t just end like this, surely?
I lie there for ages. Love is a spark. He’s not coming.
58
We go to the church. It’s the feast of Santa Lucia and I’m sitting there with Sam, in a rare moment of tranquillity. All my emotions are new, as though I’m experiencing them for the first time. This moment terrifies me, anyway; I feel weightless, as if the only thing keeping me on the ground is Sam’s hand inside mine. I’ve almost stopped eating. I can’t really explain why, it just … occurred. I don’t feel any hunger, none. Why would I eat? His life could not be saved.
I go to HQ every morning, in spite of everything. No one says I should go home. They don’t say anything.
On Monday the fourteenth of December, it’s been five days since John Grimberg died.
On that day, two strange things happen.
The first is a phone call from a man whose number I don’t recognise. He represents the undertakers appointed to deal with John Grimberg’s death.
‘And why are you calling me?’
‘I spoke to the hospital staff. You seem to have been his only visitor, so …’
‘I understand,’ I say, even though he never does finish that sentence.
‘I was thinking … as far as I can see, John Grimberg left almost no personal possessions, and the few he did form part of an ongoing …’
I don’t like the man from the undertakers. Grim might be dead, but that shouldn’t prevent us from speaking in complete sentences.
‘Yes,’ I manage.
Apparently, the funeral will take place in Salem Church on the twenty-second of December, at twelve o’clock.
‘Thanks then,
’ I say.
The twenty-second of December, twelve o’clock.
Something that cannot be fixed is broken. I’m crying, suddenly it’s here, I can’t stop. Sitting there, phone in hand in my office, I fall. Burning, tearing inside my chest. Something in there wants to get out.
That’s the first thing.
The second thing that happens does so shortly after I’ve pulled myself together, and concerns the Reyes case.
Something, says Birck, has happened.
59
‘Something’s happened.’ Birck’s standing in the doorway with his phone in his hand. ‘How’s it going? Shall I come back later?’
‘What’s happened?’
‘It’s Jonna Danielsson.’
‘What about her?’
Birck says she’s waiting in reception. Apparently, she wants to talk to me about something. The receptionist did try to get hold of me, but I didn’t answer, so she called Birck instead.
‘But it’s you she wants to talk to.’
‘About what?’
‘She won’t say. Why didn’t you answer anyway?’
‘I was busy,’ I mumble, but my face is hot, my eyes feel swollen, and I wonder how I must look.
‘You really should eat something,’ Birck says before he goes. ‘Drink something, at least. Shall I get you a glass of water?’
Like a child, I think to myself. That’s how they regard me now, helpless. Maybe that’s just as well.
‘Yes, please.’
‘And Danielsson?’
I stare at my desktop phone, then pick up the receiver and ring down to reception, ask them to let the visitor in.
After that, my decidedly unsteady legs carry me to the bathroom, and I wash my face. When I get back to my desk, there’s a glass of water waiting for me and I drink from it greedily.
Jonna Danielsson shifts position in her chair.
‘Can’t be done,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘Sitting comfortably in that chair.’
‘Aha. Right, maybe I should give up trying.’
She smiles an uncertain smile. Then she puts her hands in her lap and starts chewing on her bottom lip.
‘It was … Well, it’s about this John Grimberg.’
‘What about him?’
‘When was it we met last time?’ she says. ‘Out in Norsborg.’
‘November, I think. Why do you ask? What about John Grimberg?’
‘I read in the paper that he died recently. But just after we met, you and me, I saw him.’
She looks at me as if she’s trying to see what importance I attach to the information.
I can’t do this. Not now.
‘Did you?’
‘He came to my place.’
It was pretty weird. She had just got back from a seminar and had barely locked the door when the doorbell rang through the hall.
Through the peephole, she studied the man waiting outside. She saw that he was standing in plain sight, with a friendly expression and his hands at his sides, making no attempts to hide them. She could tell that he, somehow, must’ve worked out that she was the type who expected to inspect her visitors first. That made her curious, so she let him in.
He said his name was John and that he’d been a friend of Angelica’s. She realised then who he was, and instantly felt uneasy, not least because he was so polite and personable.
‘That was the guy you’d asked me about a day or two before,’ she says. ‘I realised that then.’
She took a step backwards and asked him to leave.
He told her that he wanted to talk to her about Angelica.
‘What for?’
The man called John thought that maybe Angelica had something that other people wanted to get at.
‘He asked me,’ she says, ‘whether I’d got anything from Angelica, or if I had anything that used to belong to her. I said, “No, like what?”
‘I was stunned, of course, and upset. Along comes someone — just like you did, but you’re a cop — along comes someone, five years after the death of my best friend, ripping it all open again. I said that to him.’
He apologised.
‘If it turns out,’ he concluded, ‘that you do find something amongst your stuff, or happen to hear anything about Angelica, please contact me. Especially if it’s something about a list.’
‘A list? What kind of list?’
‘I can’t really explain. But,’ he added, ‘if you find it, don’t go to the police.’
That’s what he said.
Jonna studies my reaction. I nod. We are familiar with this. Go on.
‘I got his number before he left. I must admit I was a bit shaken up for the rest of the day. I’ve been there before, right, I know that world. I’m not easily scared. And I know the police, too, I know how you work. Do you know how many cops I met?’
‘While you were …’
‘Yes.’
‘More than I’d like to think, I suppose.’
‘Must’ve been at least one a week while I was doing that. And you always knew they were cops, you’ve got a certain way. You couldn’t put it into words, but you just always knew.’
‘I understand. I think.’
I imagine Grim’s visit. Him standing outside the door, introducing himself, then shaking her hand.
‘Was that it?’ I ask, and it feels like there’s a cord around my neck.
‘Not quite,’ she says, looking uncertain once more.
You see, after he’d left, something occurred to her.
60
Angelica stayed over at Jonna’s the night before someone took her life. They’d been working at opposite ends of town on the eleventh of October before they met up at Slussen and then went to a mutual friend’s place in Skärholmen. They’d stayed there, drinking, until well into the night. Instead of travelling back into town and John Ericssonsgatan, Angelica slept at Jonna’s in Norsborg, mainly because that was the closest bed but also because Angelica had some clothes to pick up from there.
They arrived at about half-three, and at nine a.m. Angelica’s fast, sprightly footsteps could be heard from the hall, the door slamming as she left.
Angelica had rinsed away the tiredness and the hangover with tablets. She usually did.
And she’d forgotten the clothes that she was supposed to pick up, Jonna noted when she dragged herself out of bed an hour or so later and spotted them lying in a bag in the hall.
‘I forgot them myself,’ she says. ‘When me and Angelica were meeting for lunch, which we’d arranged the day before. I had a punter, so I was heading straight home after lunch, so I had to sort myself out, and of course it was all last minute. I was hungover and dopey as fuck, so when I rushed out the door I forgot the bag of clothes.’
Jonna didn’t realise until she was sitting at a table in the restaurant and spotted Angelica, who was late, walking past the window. Angelica asked if Jonna had seen her diary.
‘No?’
‘Are you sure?’ Angelica asked. ‘I know I had it at yours yesterday.’
Of course Jonna wasn’t sure: she’d had no idea it might be in the flat, so she hadn’t looked for it.
Jonna said she could drop the clothes round later; she was going to go home for a shower and a change of clothes after her last customer anyway, so she could also have a look for the diary and bring it if it did turn up.
‘Great,’ said Angelica. ‘That would be great. There’s something I have to tell you, too.’
‘What’s that?’
‘We’ll talk tonight.’
Jonna didn’t give it a second thought, Angelica was like that sometimes. Angelica described the diary’s appearance, and that was the end of it.
‘But,’ Jonna says, ‘that’s not really what happened in the end
. I got home later than I’d hoped, and I was really fucking stressed because I’d gone overtime with the punter. I got in the door, jumped in the shower, and then a quick change. I grabbed the bag of clothes as I left. Then, standing in the doorway, I remembered what she’d said about the diary. I had a very quick look, but I couldn’t see it. Shit, I thought to myself, I’ll have to look for it later, that’s if it’s even at my place. She could’ve left it somewhere else. Now, I loved Angelica so much, but she was always so dippy and distracted. So yeah, I took the bag of clothes and caught the metro. If the diary was at mine I’d find it and I’d be able to give it to her the next day, no big deal, I thought. And then I got there about midnight. You know the rest.’
Her best friend on the bed, all that blood. The darkness outside and a detective, Levin, arriving at John Ericssonsgatan in the rainy October night. An investigation with good prospects rumbling into action.
Yes, we know the rest.
‘Do you know what it was she was going to tell you?’
‘No. That was just something she mentioned in passing. I guess that … No, I don’t know.’
Her best friend was going to tell her something. That she was going to run away? Perhaps Angelica Reyes wasn’t planning to set off without saying farewell to her friend.
‘But the diary,’ I say.
Yes, the diary. It was days before she thought about it — must’ve been the shock. That’s what happens: you forget. It wasn’t until the Saturday after the murder that she thought about it, and even then only because it was right in front of her.
She was watching some brain-dead comedy show on TV — just to do something. The TV was on a little shelf, next to a dry pot plant. Should water that, she thought to herself, and that’s when she saw it. In front of the plant was a little blue diary. It hardly stuck out. Maybe the fact it took Jonna so long to find it wasn’t just down to her state of mind after the murder; it might also have had something to do with the diary itself. It sort of blended in with its surroundings.
It was one of those diaries with a little cord to keep it shut. She opened it and flicked through. The pages didn’t contain much at all: there were days at a time where Angelica hadn’t made any entries. She wrote in her appointments, when she needed to call the benefits agency, and, occasionally, reminders about bills: rent, electricity, mobile phone. The odd party.
The Thin Blue Line Page 20
