Box 21 aka The Vault

‘Do you understand what it says here?’

Alena read a few lines and then looked up at him. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘Next to her bed in the hospital. The only thing that was hers. Seemed to be, anyway. Is it hers?’

‘It’s Lydia’s handwriting.’

He explained that because it was in Lithuanian, no one had been able to translate the text during the hostage crisis, when she was still alive.

While Bengt was alive, he thought. While his lie didn’t yet exist.

Alena leafed through the book, then read the five pages of text and translated it for him. Everything.

Everything that had happened barely twenty-four hours earlier.

In detail.

Grajauskas had planned and written down precisely what she later put into action. She had worked out how the weapons would be delivered, together with a ball of string and the video, and left in a toilet waste bin. That she would hit the guard over the head, walk to the mortuary, take hostages, blow up corpses. And demand the services of an interpreter called Bengt Nordwall.

Ewert listened. Now and then he swallowed. It was all there, in black and white. If only I had known. If only I had had this stuff translated. I would never have sent him down there. He would have been alive now.

You would have lived!

If only you hadn’t gone down there, you would be alive.

You must have known!

Why didn’t you say?

You could have spoken to me. Or to her.

If only you had admitted that you knew who she was. At least you could have given her that.

Then you would still be alive.

She never wanted to shoot you.

She wanted confirmation that what had happened in those flats wasn’t her fault. That she had never chosen to wait around, ready to undress for all those men.

Alena Sljusareva asked if she could keep the notebook. Ewert shook his head, grabbed the blue cover and put it away in his briefcase. He waited until twenty minutes before the departure time, then accompanied her to the exit. Alena had her ticket in her hand, showed it to a uniformed woman in the booth, then turned to him and thanked him. Ewert wished her a good trip.

He left her in the queue of passengers and went over to a corner of the terminal building from where he had an overview of people arriving off the ferry, as well as those waiting to go on board. Leaning against a pillar, he tried to think about the other ongoing investigation, about Lang in his cell and Ohrstrom studying the faxed pictures. She would soon get some more. But his mind drifted, he was too preoccupied with the two women from Klaipeda. Absently he observed the strangers milling about, something he had always enjoyed doing. The arrivals walked with the sea still in their bodies. They all had somewhere to go, the ones with red cheeks and large duty-free bags full of spirits who had drunk, danced and flirted the night away before falling asleep alone in their cabins below deck. Others dressed in their best clothes had been saving for years for a week’s holiday in Sweden, on the other side of the Baltic. And there were a few who wore rumpled clothes and had no luggage at all, having left in a hurry just to get away. He studied them all – it was all he could bear to do right now – and forgot about time for a while.

Alena Sljusareva would be on her way soon.

Ewert was just about to walk away when he saw what was probably the last group of passengers coming off the ferry.

He recognised him immediately.

After all, it was less than two days since he had seen this man at Arlanda being given a dressing down by a plump little Lithuanian diplomat, and then manhandled through security flanked by two big lads there to see him off on the one-hour flight to Vilnius.

Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp.

He was wearing the same suit that he had been wearing when he was escorted up the steps to the plane, the shiny suit he had had on when he stood blocking the broken-down doorway on the fifth floor, having flogged Lydia Grajauskas unconscious two days earlier.

And he wasn’t alone. Once through passport control, he waited for two young women, or rather girls, sixteen or seventeen years old. He held out his hand and they both gave him something they had ready for him. Ewert didn’t need to see any more to know what it was.

Their passports.

In debt already.

A woman wearing a tracksuit with the hood pulled down over her head hurried forwards to meet the little group, keeping her back turned. Ewert watched her as she greeted the three arrivals and, as he believed was customary in the Baltic states, kissed them all, light little kisses on the cheek. Then she pointed towards the nearest exit and they followed her. None of them had much luggage.

Ewert felt sick.

Lydia Grajauskas had just shot herself in the temple. Alena Sljusareva had fled and was now only a short voyage from home. Both had been ruthlessly exploited for three years in flats with electronic locks. They had been threatened, abused and had to pretend they were turned on as they were going to pieces inside. And it only took twenty-four hours, twenty-four hours, before they had been replaced. A day and a night was all it took to find two young women who had no idea of what lay ahead, who would be trained to smile when they were spat at, so that those who traded money for sex could still count on one hundred and fifty thousand kronor per girl every month.

In a couple of minutes, the ferry would pull away from the quay. He stayed where he was. They disappeared in the crowd, the hooded Baltic woman, Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp and the girls, barely old enough to have breasts, teenagers who had just given away their passports.

There was nothing he could do, not now. Lydia and Alena had dared to question and fight back, but that was unusual. At least, it was the first time Ewert had heard about it. The two new girls were children, frail and scared. They would never dare to testify at this point, and that motherfucking pimp would deny everything.

Consequently, no crime existed yet.

Maybe it didn’t, but he was sure that he or a colleague would come across them. There was no telling where or when, but sooner or later they too would go straight to hell.

As soon as Sven had seen the entry in the technical account – one videotape in a plastic bag with two sets of fingerprints, identified as Lydia Grajauskas’s and Alena Sljusareva’s – he put everything else to one side. First he looked for it in the forensic science department, where it should be.

It wasn’t there.

He asked the language experts, who might have taken an interest in the Cyrillic writing, and the night duty crew.

It wasn’t there either.

He also drew a blank in the impounded property store, which was the last of the likely places. Not there.

His stomach was contracting again. A sense of unease that grew and intensified, turning into irritation, and then into anger, which wasn’t like him, and he hated it.

He located the technician who had been first on the scene, good old Nils Krantz, who had been around for as long as Sven could remember, and well before that. Krantz was at work, a domestic violence case in a flat in Regering Street, but he took time off to speak to Sven on the phone. He described where they had found the video, what they had found with it, basically confirming what Sven already knew from the documentation.

‘Good, thanks. And what was on the tape?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, what was on the tape?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘That’s not my job. It’s up to you lot.’