Ewert Grens pulled over a cardboard box that was sitting on the edge of his desk. He leaned forward, opened the lid and peered inside. The contents belonged to Alena Sljusareva. She had been arrested a few hours earlier by two policemen, who had also impounded all she carried with her.
Ewert turned the box upside down. Her life scattered over his desk. Nothing much to it, only the essentials for someone on the run. He picked over her possessions, one by one.
A money clip with a few thousand kronor, her pay for opening her legs twelve times a day for three years.
A diary. He broke the lock and leafed through it. Cyrillic letters making up lots of words he didn’t understand.
A pair of sunglasses. Cheap plastic, the kind you buy when you have to.
A mobile phone. The model was quite up to date, more functions than anyone could ever cope with.
A single ticket for the ferry from Stockholm to Klaipeda for today, 6 June. He checked his watch. The ticket had ceased to be valid.
He started putting her life back in the box, read the chain-of-custody list, signed it and put it in with the rest.
Ewert knew more than he wanted to. Now he had to interrogate her. And she would repeat exactly the things he didn’t want to hear. So he would listen and forget, tell her to pack her bag and go home.
He rose, followed the corridors to the lift that would take him to the custody cells. The duty officer was expecting him and led the way to the cell where Alena had spent the last hour and a half. The officer used the small square hole in the door to check on the prisoner. She was sitting on the narrow bunk, doubled up, her head resting on her knees. Her long dark hair almost reached the floor.
The guard unlocked and opened the door and Ewert stepped into the tired little room. She looked up. Her eyes… she had been crying. He nodded a greeting.
‘I am Detective Superintendent Grens. I believe you speak Swedish?’
‘I do, a bit.’
‘Good. I am going to ask you some questions now. We are going to sit here, in the cell, with the tape recorder between us. Do you understand?’
‘Why?’
Alena Sljusareva tried to make herself smaller. She did that sometimes when someone had been too rough, when her genitals hurt, when she hoped no one would look at her.
Ewert Grens, interview leader (IL): Do you remember seeing me before?
Alena Sljusareva (AS): In the flat. You’re the policeman who hit a stick on his stomach. Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp. He fell down.
IL: You saw me doing that, but you ran away all the same?
AS: I saw Bengt Nordwall too. I panicked. I just wanted to run away.
He was sitting on a hard bunk in a police cell, next to a young woman from a Baltic state; his back ached from sleeping for a few hours on the office sofa and his leg ached as usual. His breathing was laboured, he was tired and he didn’t want to be there any longer. He didn’t want to destroy the one thing he had left, his pride, his identity. He hated the lie that he had to live with, that forced him to carry on lying.
AS: I know now. Lydia is dead.
IL: Yes, she is.
AS: I know now.
IL: Before she died, she shot an innocent policeman dead. Then she killed herself, one shot through the head, using the same gun. A nine-millimetre Pistolet Makarova. I would very much like to know how she got hold of that gun.
AS: She is dead. She is really dead! I know now.
She had kept hoping, as one does. If I don’t know whatever it is, it hasn’t happened.
Alena crossed herself and burst into tears. She wept bitterly, the way you weep only when you finally understand that a person, whom you will miss, no longer exists.
Silently Ewert waited for her to stop, watching the tape unwind. Then he repeated his question.
IL: A nine-millimetre Pistolet Makarova.
AS: [inaudible]
IL: And plastic explosives.
AS: It was me.
IL: Me?
AS: I went to get it.
IL: Where from?
AS: The same place.
IL: Where is that?
AS: Volund Street. The basement.
Grens slammed his fist into the tape recorder, almost hitting her. How the hell had this broken, scared girl on the run managed to slip past the guard outside the building, raid the basement and carry off enough explosives to blow up a substantial part of a large hospital?
He frightened her, this man who hit out, just like the rest. She made herself smaller still.
He apologised and promised not to do it again.
IL: You knew what she was going to use it for.
AS: No.
IL: You handed over a loaded gun, without asking why?
AS: I knew nothing. And I asked nothing.
IL: She didn’t explain?
AS: She knew that if she did I would have insisted on being there.
Ewert switched off the recorder and removed the tape. The lie. Questions and answers which would never be transcribed. This cassette must vanish, just like the film of their shared story had vanished.
He looked at her, she looked away: didn’t want anything more to do with him.
‘You’re going home.’
‘Home? Now?’
‘Now.’
Alena Sljusareva got up quickly, stuck her feet in the regulation prison slip-ons, pulled her fingers through her hair and tugged at her blouse.
They had promised each other that they would go home together. That would never happen now.
Lydia was dead.
She was on her own now.
Ewert called a taxi. The fewer police involved, the better. He escorted her to the Berg Street door. An older man with his younger woman, or perhaps a father with his grown-up daughter. Few passers-by would have guessed at a detective superintendent from Homicide sending a prostitute back home.
Alena sat in the back as the taxi manoeuvred through the city afternoon traffic, from Norr Mдlarstrand to Stureplan, down Valhalla Way to join Lidingo Way, the route to the harbour. She would never come back here,
