respect and grief for the father and daughter; their history seemed to be without end and so sad.
He had fallen into silence until they reached the large entrance hall of the main terminal, then he continued his narrative about a man who had been imprisoned and forced to abandon his family because he refused to deceive the authorities about his pride in flying the Lithuanian flag, a challenge to a society that wouldn’t allow it. And then, after serving his sentence, he had been sacked from his army post, only to be imprisoned a couple of years later for treason. He had been deemed a risk to state security because he and three erstwhile colleagues, still in defence jobs, had stolen and smuggled weapons and sold them to a foreign power.
At this point the Lithuanian suddenly interrupted his story to bemoan the tragic fate of the girl. Then he shook hands with them and walked off, disappearing among the queues of suitcases lined up at the check-in counters. Ewert and Sven followed him with their eyes for a long time, both of them with the feeling that he had done what he set out to do and had expressed in words a series of events which for some reason had clearly moved him, and so had tried to unload some of it on the two Swedish policemen.
Ewert stopped looking at the cassette player for a moment and glanced along the queue of stationary cars. Still as long as before. In the driver’s seat, Sven was twitching restlessly, revving the engine now and then.
‘Ewert, we’ll be late.’
‘Not now. I’m listening. To Siw.’
‘I promised. I promised this time.’
Today was Sven’s forty-first birthday. When he left in the morning, Anita and Jonas had still been asleep, they had all agreed to celebrate later on. He had taken the afternoon off, promised to be back home by lunchtime. His birthday. On his birthday, at least, he wanted to make sure that he was allowed to take his Anita in his arms, the woman he had loved since they met in senior school, and to be next to Jonas and hold his hand hard enough to make him protest.
For almost fifteen years they had waited for a child, for Jonas.
They had agreed early on to try to create a life that was a combination of them both, but failed and failed. Anita had been pregnant three times. The first time she had a still birth after seven months: an induced labour in a hospital bed, complete with pushing and contractions and pain. Afterwards, with their dead baby girl next to her, she had wept in his arms. The next two pregnancies ended in late miscarriages, tiny hearts that suddenly stopped beating.
Their shared longing was something he could feel any time. For years it had tainted everything they did together, robbing them of pleasure and almost suffocating their love for each other. Until one day, almost eight years ago to the day, when they had travelled to a small town some twenty kilometres west of Phnom Penh. The representative from the adoption bureau had met them at the airport and taken them on a journey through an unknown landscape.
And then there he was, waiting for them, lying in a simple little bed in the local orphanage. He had arms and legs and hair, and was already called Jonas.
‘I should be sitting on the bus back home.’
‘You’ll make it.’
‘Or be waiting at the bus stop at Slussen. At the very least.’
‘You’ll get there soon.’
He had promised. This time too.
He remembered it well, his fortieth. It had been a very hot day and his birthday cake had gone sour in the back seat of a police car. A five-year-old girl had been raped and tortured and dumped in a wood near Strдngnдs. He had promised, had been on his way home to the table, all set for his little party, and it had been hard to explain to Jonas on the phone why someone would hurt a child with a knife and why it meant that he had to wait for his dad to come home.
He wanted to be with them so much.
‘I’ll turn on the blue light. Fuck the rules. I want to get home.’
Sven glanced at Ewert, who shrugged. He stuck the plastic dome on the roof of the car and waited for the siren to kick in. Then he pulled out of the queue, crossed the double white lines and zigzagged between cars that were trying to get out of his way into some space that hadn’t existed before. In a minute or two they were clear of the hold-up and the three sets of lights.
Sven accelerated towards the centre of town. That was when the emergency call came through.
They missed it the first time. What with the siren and Siw’s singing, it was drowned out.
A doctor had found Hilding Oldйus’s dead body on a staircase, near the ward where he was being treated for a heroin overdose.
Oldйus had been badly beaten. Difficult to identify. The doctor, a woman, had said that he had had a visitor; she had taken him in herself. Her voice had sounded very weak, but her description of the visitor was clear. He had been tall, heavily built, shaved head, sunbed tan, a scar running from the corner of his mouth to his temple. That was why the emergency call had been for Grens and Sundkvist.
Ewert stared straight ahead. There was something like a smile on his face.
‘Twenty-four hours. Sven, twenty-four hours was all it took.’
Sven looked at him.
He was thinking about Anita and Jonas, who were waiting, but he said nothing. He just changed lanes to get to Vдster Bridge and on to Soder Hospital.
She was sitting at the back of the bus. It was almost empty now, with an older woman a couple of rows in front of her and a woman with a pushchair in one of the centre seats. That was it. Alena Sljusareva would have preferred to hide among lots more passengers, but most people had got off two stops before, at Eriksdal Sports Complex – the athletic type, off to some event.
The bus turned off the ring road and drove on, past the Soder Hospital Casualty reception. She had been there a year or so before, with Dimitri trailing her. Someone who had wanted extras had lost his cool and done things they hadn’t agreed on. Up a small slope, a half-turn to the bus stop right in front of the main hospital stairs: the end of the journey.
She looked around. If someone was watching out for her, that person was keeping a low profile.
She tipped her umbrella forward to cover her face. It was bucketing down.
In the entrance hall she cautiously scanned the walls, hung with artwork made of metal, glanced at the hard benches full of people with paper cups of coffee and then quickly looked down the four corridors.
No one took any notice of her at all. They were all preoccupied with getting better.
She went to the kiosk, bought a box of chocolates, a magazine and a bouquet of flowers already wrapped in transparent plastic. She was obviously going to see someone who wasn’t well; she was one of the people who popped in to visit during their lunch break. One of the many.
The lift to the surgical wards was the one furthest away. The long corridor wormed its way into the interminably large building; she met recent admissions, off to some test or other, and slowly fading long-stay patients, and lost souls who didn’t know what was going on and never would. Every now and then new corridors opened up, going this way or that, all identical to the one she was in. Too many corridors, she didn’t like them.
The lift was waiting for her with its door open. She had to go right to the top, all seven floors. Alone in the tight space she watched someone in the mirror, a twenty-year-old wearing an oversized raincoat, someone who wanted to go home, nowhere else, just home.
The door opened. She hid behind her shield, kept a firm grip on the box of chocolates and the bouquet of flowers. A doctor passed her in a hurry and vanished through a door halfway along the corridor. Two patients walked towards her, in the usual plain hospital clothes with plastic bands around their wrists. She glanced at them quickly and wondered how long they had been there, if and when they would ever leave.
The TV room was on her left. She heard the sound of the news as she approached, a burst of music that was trying to sound important. She spotted the guard, who stood near the door, his arms crossed on his chest. Green uniform, truncheon at his side and a holster for the handcuffs. He was looking at the patients on the sofa: two boys, wearing their own clothes, and next to them a woman. Her face was badly damaged and one of her arms was in plaster. Her eyes were fixed unseeingly on the news presenter. Alena wanted to meet those eyes – just a moment would be enough – but the woman on the sofa sat motionless, isolated from the world around her.
