Box 21 aka The Vault

receiver. Connecting you now.’

He heard Anni breathe, between the gurgling and mumbling she usually made on the phone. He hoped someone was around to wipe away the dribbles.

‘Hello, Anni. It’s me.’

Her shrill laughter. His body grew warm, almost relaxed.

‘You have to help me. I don’t understand what’s going on.’

He spoke to her for nearly quarter of an hour. She panted and laughed now and then, mostly staying silent. He missed her the moment the call ended.

Getting up from the chair his body felt heavy, but not tired. He walked along the corridor to the far too large meeting room. The door was never locked.

He fumbled about in the dark, looking for the switch on the wall and found it higher up than he remembered. It was for not only the lamps, but also the TV and the video and the whirring overhead projector. He had never got a grip on how these bloody things worked and swore a great deal before he managed to find a channel that worked with the video.

Wearing plastic gloves, he extracted the cassette from the bag he had been given at the mortuary, which he had kept hidden in the inner pocket of his jacket.

The first images were drowning in bright bluish light. Two women were sitting on a sofa in a kitchen with sunlight pouring in through a window behind them. Obviously whoever was holding the camera wasn’t sure how to balance brightness and focus properly.

The women were easy to recognise all the same.

Lydia Grajauskas and Alena Sljusareva. They were in the flat with the electronic locks, where he had seen them for the first time.

They wait in silence, while the cameraman moves the lens up and down, then turns the microphone on and off, presumably to test it. They look nervous, the way people do when they are not used to staring at the single eye that preserves whatever it looks at for posterity.

Lydia Grajauskas speaks first.

Two sentences. She turns to Alena, who translates.

‘This is my reason. This is my story.’

Grajauskas looks at her friend and says two more sentences.

She nods with a serious expression and waits, for Alena, who turns to the camera again and translates.

‘When you hear this, I hope that the man I am going to talk about is dead. I hope that he has felt my shame.’

They speak slowly, careful to enunciate every word in both Russian and Swedish.

Ewert Grens sat in front of the TV for twenty minutes.

What he saw and heard did not exist. Lydia was transformed once more from perpetrator to victim, from whore to abused woman.

He got up and slammed his fist on the table as he usually did, hit it several times, hard enough to hurt. He shouted and hit. Sometimes there was nothing else you could do.

I was there a few hours ago.

It was me who had to talk to Lena!

Who do you think is going to tell her about this?

She doesn’t deserve this.

Do you hear me?

She must never know this.

He must have shouted out loud; he thought it was only in his mind, was certain of it. But his throat felt rough, which it wouldn’t if he had been silent.

Ewert looked at the empty, flickering screen and rewound the tape.

‘When you hear this, I hope that the man I am going to talk about is dead. I hope that he has felt my shame.’

He listened to their introduction again and then rewound it again.

He could see them on the mortuary floor. She was face down, her arm twisted underneath her body. Bengt naked, his genitals ripped by the bullet, the hole through his eye.

If only you had admitted you knew her when she asked.

Bengt. Fucking hell!

She asked you!

Maybe if you’d said yes…

Maybe if you’d told her that you knew who she was.

Then you might still be alive.

That might have been enough.

That you acknowledged her, understood.

He hesitated, but only for a few seconds. Then he pressed the red button with REC on it in white letters. He was going to wipe what he had just seen. From now on it no longer existed.

Nothing happened.

He pressed the same button again, twice, but the tape didn’t move. He checked the cassette and saw that the safety tab on the back was broken. It was their story and they had done everything they could to make sure that no one stole it from them, recorded over it. Ewert looked around. He knew what he had to do.

He got up, stuffed the tape into his pocket and left the room.

It was after midnight by the time Lena Nordwall stood at the sink with the four mugs that still smelt of coffee. She rinsed them in hot water, in cold, in hot and in cold again. It took her half an hour before she felt able to let go. She dried them one by one, needed them to be absolutely dry, using a clean towel to make sure. Then she lined them up on the kitchen table. They gleamed in the lamplight.

Lena picked the mugs up, one by one, and threw them against the wall.

She was still standing by the sink when one of the children came downstairs, a little boy in his pyjamas. He pointed at the shards of china and said to his mother that mugs make an awful noise when they break.

NOW PART TWO

THURSDAY 6 JUNE