The door to the flat on the fifth floor of number 3 Volund Street had been replaced. The large hole in the panel was no more. There was nothing to show that just a few days earlier the police had broken in to stop an incident of gross physical violence, a naked woman lashed across the back thirty-five times.
The two girls, still in their teens, stood behind the man who could have been their father while he unlocked the door. When they went into the flat, they saw the electronic locks on the door, but didn’t know what they were. The man closed the door and showed the girls their passports. Then he explained again that the passports had cost him. Therefore they owed him money and would have to work to pay it off. The first customers were due two hours from now.
The girl who had started to cry downstairs was still crying; she tried to protest, until the man, who until only a few days earlier had been called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp by two other young women, pressed the muzzle of a gun to her temple. For a brief moment she thought he would shoot.
He told them to undress. He was going to try them out. From now on it was important that they knew what men liked.
Lisa was feeling hot after running all the way from the hospital. She had only stopped when she could see Ylva’s house in Hogalid Street.
She hadn’t been thinking straight earlier. She was capable of love, of course she was, not for a man, but for her nephew and niece; she loved them more than she loved herself. She had put off coming here. Normally she’d pop in to see them every day, but she had lacked the strength to walk into the house and tell them that their uncle had died, that he had crashed down a stairwell the day before.
They adored their Uncle Hilding. To them he wasn’t a hopeless junkie. They had only met the other Hilding, straight out of prison, round-cheeked and easy-going, full of a calm that had always vanished a few days later, when the world around him began to look dangerous, reminding him of the shadows he couldn’t cope with and couldn’t confront. They had never seen that awful junkie. They had never seen the change. He was only there for them for a few days at a time, and then when he changed into something else, he disappeared.
She had to tell them, though. They must not be informed by having black-and-white police photographs pushed into their faces.
Lisa held Ylva’s hand in hers. They had hugged each other before going to sit side by side on the sofa. Both were feeling the same way: not quite grief, more a kind of relief that they knew where he was and where he wasn’t. The sisters weren’t certain that they should feel that way, but now that they were together, it seemed easier to accept these impermissible feelings.
Jonathan and Sanna sat in the two armchairs opposite the sofa. They had sensed that this wasn’t one of Auntie Lisa’s usual visits. Not that she had said anything yet, but as soon as she opened the front door they had started to prepare themselves for what she would say. The way she had pressed down the door handle, said hello, and walked to the small sitting room all made it obvious that this was not just an ordinary visit.
She didn’t know how to begin. There was no need to worry.
‘What’s the matter?’
Sanna was twelve, and still in the zone between little girl and young teenager. She looked at the two grown women she trusted implicitly and repeated her question.
‘What is it? I know something’s wrong.’
Lisa leaned towards the children, reaching out to put one hand on Sanna’s knee and the other on Jonathan’s. Such a little boy, her fingertips met easily around his leg.
‘You’re right. Something is wrong. It’s to do with your uncle.’
‘Hilding has died.’
Sanna spoke unhesitatingly, as if she had been waiting to say this.
Lisa’s hands tightened their hold. ‘He died yesterday. In the hospital, on my ward.’
Jonathan, only six years of life inside his small body, watched as his mum and Auntie Lisa cried. He hadn’t grasped this, not yet.
‘Uncle Hilding wasn’t an old person, was he? Was he so old that he had to die?’
‘Don’t be so silly. You don’t understand a thing. He killed himself with drugs because he was a junkie.’
Sanna glared at her little brother, making him the target of the bad thoughts she didn’t want to have any more.
Lisa’s hand moved to stroke Sanna’s cheek. ‘Don’t think about him like that.’
‘But he was.’
‘Don’t say these things. What happened was an accident. He died because he lost control of his wheelchair and it fell down the stairs.’
‘I don’t care what you say. I know he was a junkie. And I know that’s why he’s dead. You can pretend what you like, because I know anyway.’
Jonathan listened but didn’t want to know. He got up from his armchair, crying now. His uncle wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be.
He shouted at his sister. ‘It’s your fault!’
He ran from the room and all the way downstairs and across the concrete flags on the courtyard, screaming all the way.
‘It’s your fault! You’re stupid! It’s your fault, if you say that!’
The afternoon was fading into evening. Lars Еgestam was surprised to see Ewert Grens open his office door without knocking. His looks, his massive body, thinning grey hair, the straight leg that made him limp, none of that had changed.
‘I thought you weren’t coming until tomorrow.’
‘I’m here now. And I’ve brought you some information.’
‘Information about…?’
‘The murders. That is, the investigations into the incidents at Soder Hospital, both of them.’
He didn’t wait for Еgestam to offer him a seat, he simply grabbed the nearest chair and carelessly dumped a pile of papers on the floor. Then he sat down opposite the young prosecutor, whom he had mentally consigned to his large category of ‘stuck-up prats’.
‘First, Alena Sljusareva. The other woman from Lithuania. She is on her way home now. I have questioned her and she has got nothing to offer us. Didn’t know who Bengt Nordwall was, didn’t know where or how Grajauskas had got hold of arms and explosives. She had never heard of any kidnapping plans. I helped her to catch the ferry to Klaipeda and so forth. She needs her home and we don’t need her.’
‘You sent her home?’
‘Any objections?’
‘You should have informed me first. We should have discussed the entire matter, and if we both agreed that sending her home was reasonable, the final decision would still have been mine.’
Ewert Grens stared at the young man with distaste. He felt the urge to shout, but refrained. He had just created a lie and presented it to the prosecutor. For once he chose to hide his anger.
‘Anything else?’
‘You have sent home a person who could be guilty of a serious gun crime, as well as being an accessory to the potential destruction of property and aggravated taking of hostages.’ Lars Еgestam shrugged.
‘But if this woman is on board a ferry… that’s it. End of story.’
Grens fought his contempt for the young man on the other side of the desk. He couldn’t explain it properly; he always despised people who used their university education as a reference for life, who hadn’t actually lived, only pretended to experience.
‘Right. Next, about Jochum Lang.’
‘Yes?’
‘Time to lock him up for good.’
Еgestam pointed at the papers which Ewert Grens had dumped on the floor.
‘Grens, that pile is interview transcripts, one after the other. No result. He’s stonewalling. I can’t hold him for much longer.’
‘You can.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You can and you can even inform him that he is a suspect for the murder of Hilding Oldйus. We have a positive
