straight from the carton and closed the door quietly. Mustn’t wake Anita.
He had not put it into words, but this was exactly what he had feared.
A different truth.
When the truth changes, lies emerge. A lie can only be dealt with when it is known to be a lie.
He went back into the sitting room and settled on the sofa.
He had just started to be part of Bengt Nordwall’s big lie.
He was convinced that Ewert had watched this very film and realised the same as he had. Ewert had watched and then wiped it, to protect his friend. Now Sven faced the same dilemma. Bengt Nordwall’s lie had become Ewert’s. If he himself did nothing, he too would have to live with it. He could do the same as Ewert: look away to protect a friend’s reputation.
He started the video again and fast-forwarded it to find out how long the film was. Twenty minutes. He checked the time. Half past two. If he started from the beginning and watched the whole of Lydia Grajauskas’s story, he would be finished before three. Then he could tiptoe into the bedroom, leave a note on the pillow explaining that he had a night job, get dressed and take the car into town. The drive took only twenty minutes.
It was nearly four o’clock when he opened his office door. Morning had already arrived, bringing light from somewhere out at sea, from the east, light that had followed him along the deserted stretch of motorway between Gustavsberg and central Stockholm.
He got himself more coffee, not so much to stay awake – his mind was alive with ideas, and sleep was simply not an option – but because he hoped the coffee would help him to sharpen up and get a grip before the buzzing in his head took over and crystallised into its own conclusions, the way thoughts do at night.
He cleared his desk by piling papers and photographs and folders on the floor. When he sat down at the bare desktop, the wooden surface seemed new to him. He had probably never seen it like this, not for years anyway; he had worked here for five or six years.
He took a ball of paper from his pocket. It was the drawing of Ewert, rescued from the kitchen sink. He flattened it out in the middle of the desk. Now he knew that the purple man had gone beyond the point of no return and tampered with evidence, in order to protect his own interests, to protect a lie that wasn’t his.
Absently retracing the outline of the man he had drawn, Sven Sundkvist felt an impotent rage. He had no idea what to do with this knowledge.
Lars Еgestam did what he usually did when he couldn’t sleep. He dressed in his suit and black shoes, put only the minimum in his briefcase and left his house to walk into work with the dawn – three hours through Stockholm’s western suburbs.
It had been an odd conversation, hard to follow too. As a rule he didn’t have problems understanding but this time Ewert Grens, a man he both admired and pitied, had insisted that on the one hand the police had no notion of Lydia Grajauskas’s motive for knocking out her guard, taking five hostages and killing a policeman before shooting herself, but that, on the other hand, her best friend Alena Sljusareva knew nothing that had any bearing on the case and could therefore be left to her own devices back home in Lithuania.
Sleep had been impossible.
At the time, he had decided to trust Grens after all.
Now, in the light of the rising sun, he walked with purpose. He had already phoned Soder Hospital to say he wanted to visit the mortuary once more.
He didn’t knock. Nothing odd about that, Ewert Grens never knocked.
Sven started and looked at the door.
‘Ewert?’
‘Bloody hell, you’re early, Sven. What’s up?’
Sven blushed, aware of how obvious it was. He stared down at his desktop, embarrassed and exposed. There he was, staring at his purple version of Ewert.
‘I don’t know. It seemed a good idea.’
‘For Christ’s sake, it’s just gone five in the morning. Normally there isn’t another soul around at this time.’
Grens made a move to step into the room. Sven Sundkvist glanced nervously at his drawing and covered it with his hand.
‘Come on, son. What’s on your mind?’
Sven was not much good at lying, especially not to people he liked.
‘Nothing special. There’s just such a lot to do at the moment.’
He was suffocating. Must be as red as a beetroot.
‘Ewert, you know how it is. Soder Hospital, all that. The media are on our backs. And you’d rather give all that a miss. But we need some kind of basic story for the press office.’
No more of this, I can’t handle it, he thought, looking down at the desktop.
Ewert Grens took a step forward, stood still for a moment, then backed out, talking as he went.
‘Good. I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Sven. And I’m pleased you’re dealing with the hacks.’
Soder Hospital was a huge lump of a building, usually ugly, but now in the early sunlight it was almost beautiful, coated in a pale red glow that cast its reflection on gleaming windows and roofs. It was nearly six o’clock when Lars Еgestam walked through the main hall, which was barely awake.
He took the lift down to the basement, the same route Grajauskas had taken two days ago, a badly injured woman with a plastic bag hidden under her hospital clothes, whom no one would beat up again.
The last part of the corridor was cordoned off with blue and white police tape, from roughly the point where Sven had been lying in wait, some thirty metres away from the door, but close enough to see that it was no longer there. Еgestam bent down under the tape, avoided the bits of broken wall, and made for the hole where the door had been. It was sealed with a criss-cross of tape that he ripped off.
A hallway, then the room where they had been found on the floor. Their outlines in white chalk were close. Her body so near his. Their blood mingling. He had died with her. She had died with him. Еgestam felt certain it had been deliberate, this final resting place of theirs, side by side.
It was silent down there. He looked around the room. Death terrified him; he didn’t even wear a watch any more as it just measured time. And yet here he was in a mortuary, alone, trying to understand what had happened.
The tape recorder. He placed it in the middle of the floor.
He wanted to listen to them talking.
He wanted to be part of it, afterwards, as he always did.
‘Ewert.’
‘Receiving.’
‘The hostage in the corridor is dead. No visible blood, so I can’t make out where she shot him. But the smell is odd, strong. Harsh.’
Bengt Nordwall’s voice. Steady, at least it sounded steady. Lars Еgestam had never met him and never heard his voice before.
He was trying to get to know a dead man.
‘Ewert, it is all one fucking big con. She hasn’t shot anyone. All the hostages are still here. All four of them are alive. They’ve just walked out. She has got about three hundred grams of Semtex round the doors, but she can’t detonate it.’
He noticed the man’s fear. Nordwall continued to observe and describe what he was seeing, but the tone of his voice had changed, as if he had understood something which the listeners upstairs had not and which Еgestam, a late listener, was trying to grasp now.
‘You are naked.’
‘That’s how you wanted it.’
‘How does that feel? What is it like to be here, in a mortuary, standing naked in front of a woman with a gun?’
‘I have done what you asked me to do.’
‘You feel humiliated, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘All alone?’
