The music had stopped. No more Siw. Ewert looked around the room, though there wasn’t much to see. It was small and, apart from the cassette player and the tape rack, totally impersonal. Everything was regulation issue. Pale wood furniture, bits and pieces identical to the furnishings in the Inland Revenue offices on Got Street and the National Insurance building in Gustavsberg. Impersonal or not, he spent more time in the room than anywhere else, from dawn to dusk, and later too. Quite often he didn’t go home at night, preferring to sleep on the sofa by the window. It was small in relation to his big body, but it didn’t matter. Oddly enough, he slept well here, much better than in his proper bed. Here he escaped the sleepless nights, the endless hours battling with the dark that plagued him in his own flat, where he could never find peace. Sometimes he didn’t go home for weeks on end, without understanding what kept him away.
‘Oldйus and Lang, eh? I don’t think so. They exist in parallel worlds. Oldйus is hooked on heroin. It’s all he wants. Lang is a criminal, not a junkie, even if he has pissed classified substances at Aspsеs once or twice. And that’s that. They have nothing in common, not outside.’
Sven shifted about in the visitor’s chair, then leaned back and sighed. Suddenly he seemed tired.
Ewert looked intently at his friend.
He recognised what it was: resignation, hopelessness.
He thought about Oldйus. He had no time for people like that, small-time junkies who picked holes in their noses. Life was too short and there were too many idiots.
‘OK. What the fuck. One nutter more or less. We can always ask him about Lang. Can’t do any harm.’
A shiny brand-new car crept towards the large gate in the grey wall. The kind of car that would smell of leather upholstery and pristine wooden dashboard if you opened one of the front doors.
Jochum Lang spotted it as soon as he had passed through central security and started to cross the yard. He hadn’t talked to them and hadn’t asked for a car, but he understood all the same: they would be waiting outside, that was part of the deal.
He nodded a greeting and the man at the wheel nodded in response.
The engine ticked over while Jochum gave the finger to the security camera and pissed against the concrete wall. No hurry, the car was waiting and nothing disturbed his ritual. All the time in the world to finish having a piss, show the finger again and drop his trousers down, as the gate slowly swung shut behind him. Somehow, he wasn’t really free until he’d done it, pissed on the wall, shown the guards his arse. He knew it was childish and pointless, but with his freedom came the urge to prove that none of those bastards could humiliate him any more and that, after two years and four months, he was the one who’d do the humiliating.
He walked over to the car, opened the passenger door and got in. They stared at each other in silence, without knowing why.
Slobodan looked older. At thirty-five his long hair was already going grey at the temples, he’d grown a thin moustache that was also tinged with grey, and there were new wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
Jochum tapped lightly on the windscreen.
‘New car. Traded up, I see.’
Slobodan looked pleased.
‘Sure thing. What do you think?’
‘Too flash.’
‘It’s not mine. It’s Mio’s.’
‘Last time you were driving one you’d just nicked. Started it up with a screwdriver. Suited you better.’
The car moved off smoothly, just light pressure on the gas.
Jochum Lang took the train ticket from his trouser pocket, tore it up and threw it out the window, shouting abuse loudly in a broad Uppsala dialect, roaring about what he thought of the prison service’s parting gifts, not fit to wipe the shit off your arse, and let the pieces blow away in the strong wind. Slobodan was talking on his mobile, which had been ringing for a while. He accelerated, leaving the gate and the high, grey wall behind them. Then, after a minute or two, the rain started up, the windscreen wipers going slowly at first, then faster.
‘I’m not picking you up because I wanted to. Mio asked me to do it.’
‘Ordered you.’
‘Whatever. He wants to see you as soon as.’
Jochum was a big man, broad-shouldered, who took up a lot of car space. Shaved head, a scar from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. Some poor sod had tried to defend himself with a razor. Jochum talked with his hands, waving them about when he was upset.
‘Look, last time I did something for him, I ended up here.’
They left the narrow prison drive and moved out on to a wider road that was quite busy already, people on the way to work.
‘You took the rap, sure. But we looked after you, and your family. Right?’
Slobodan Dragovic turned to Jochum smiling, showing off poor-quality dental work, as he answered his phone, which was ringing again. Jochum stared silently straight ahead, absently following the wipers as they spread the water over the windscreen. Right enough. A total screw-up when he’d done a cash collection and that fucking witness who should’ve known better, who talked and pointed until the court passed a sentence. He followed the paths of the raindrops, thinking that he knew all the hazards, but shit happens, that’s true enough. Mio was always close at hand, watching him with borrowed eyes and ears every morning when he woke up and looked around his cell, looking out for him, looking out, that’s what they did.
The gleaming new car gathered speed on its way through the landscape as it changed from rural to urban, and then through the northern suburbs, on towards central Stockholm.
Suspects were questioned in a room below the custody cells.
Wasn’t much of a room, really.
Filthy walls, which had been white once, a heavily barred window at the far end, a worn pine table in the middle of the floor and four plain wooden chairs, straight out of some school canteen.
Sven Sundkvist, interview leader (IL): Please remain seated. Hilding Oldйus (HO): Why the fuck are you picking up innocent people?
IL: Mixing amphetamines with washing powder, you call that innocent?
HO: Don’t know what you’re on about.
IL: Crap drugs. Cut. So far we’ve got three users with corroded veins. They gave us your name.
HO: What the fuck are you talking about?
IL: And you were in possession.
HO: Wasn’t mine.
IL: We took the bags of white powder from you at the time of your arrest. All six were sent to the labs.
HO: Weren’t fucking mine.
IL: Twenty per cent amphetamine, twenty-two per cent Panadol Extra and fifty-eight per cent washing powder. Oldйus, sit down.
Ewert Grens opened the door and went in. He had to pass through eight locked doors to get here, but hadn’t even noticed. His mind was on the reports, and he could still hear Sven’s voice reading aloud, ‘causing serious injury’, over and over in his head. And he saw the police van that hadn’t stopped in time, him holding her in his arms until the paramedics put her on a stretcher and carried her off, away from him.
He was fighting Sven’s voice, trying to rid himself of the words, and looked up briefly into the harsh overhead light. Then he concentrated on the man sitting opposite Sven, noted his thin face and how a finger was scratching nervously at a wound on one nostril, the drops of blood trickling down towards his mouth and chin.
IL: DSI Ewert Grens enters at oh nine twenty-two.
HO: [inaudible]
IL: What was that, Oldйus?
HO: Wasn’t fucking mine.
IL: Stop messing about. We know you sold cut speed on the Plain.
