'Hundreds! Demonstrators, outside Kronoberg prison.'
'Units on their way. With you any moment now.'
'Risk of prisoner escape!'
'Drive on! Drive on!'
Fredrik stared at the people outside the car windows, heard their shouting and read their placards. What was all this in aid of? He didn't understand. He didn't know these people. What did they want with his name and his story? It was none of their business what he had done, it had been his battle, and his very own hell. Lots of these people were lying on the ground, risking life and limb. For what? Did they really know? Did they think he was grateful? He hadn't asked for this.
There was no difference between the demonstrators and the journalists camping outside his gate. They extracted life from the lives of others; now they were using him for their own purposes, it was his turn. Why this need? It wasn't as if they had all lost their only child, or aimed a gun at another human being and shot to kill. He wished he had the courage to wind the window down, ask them about these things and force them to meet his eyes.
But the four of them inside the car sat as if paralysed, under siege. The big young man at the wheel was obviously stressed, breathing heavily and making meaningless gestures, alternately releasing the handbrake and shifting through the gears. Grens and Sundkvist seemed utterly calm and still, just waiting patiently.
Then the voice came over the radio.
'Alert all cars. Assistance required! Go to Kronoberg prison, Berg Street entrance. Demonstrators, about five hundred. Stone-throwing. Please disperse. Nothing else. And take your personal opinions home with you.'
Fredrik realised that Grens was observing him, watching for his reaction. Nothing doing. Fredrik had heard what they'd all heard; he was astonished, but showed nothing and said nothing.
The young driver changed gear to reverse. Raced the engine. Released the brake and let the car move back ten- odd centimetres, as if to test the courage of the demonstrators.
They stayed put. And they screamed.
He shifted to first gear and let the car crawl forward for a metre, no more, again racing the engine. They stayed, and instead of screaming they shouted out their contempt in sing-song voices. Fucking cops. Filthy pigs.
Suddenly some of them got up and walked towards the car. One had a stone. He threw it at the rear window. The glass broke and the stone bounced against the seat between Fredrik and Ewert. It fell to the floor after hitting the driver's seat. Fredrik felt splinters of glass cutting the back of his neck. It hurt. He looked at Grens and saw blood flowing down his cheek.
The driver shouted
'Drive! Fuck's sake! Drive!' Ewert howled.
The driver had a gun held to his head. In front of him were people lying on the ground.
He hesitated.
The bullet passed close to his left ear and went through the windscreen in front of him. Now he heard nothing any more. He focused on a tree at the end of the street and put his foot down. Voices cried out and the car bumped as he drove it over human bodies. He left Berg Street at the same moment as the police buses arrived.
The demonstrators got up and ran towards the new vehicles, packed with policemen in full riot control gear, who found themselves locked in, surrounded. The buses shook as the crowd threw themselves against them, rocked them a couple of times and then pushed them over on their sides.
The men outside lined up, some with their trousers down. When the flak-jacketed police officers crawled out, they were pissed on.
He wasn't put in the same cell. This one was on another floor, and higher up. Apart from that, it looked identical: the same size, the same furnishings, a bed, a table and a washbasin. He had changed into the sack-like prison uniform. The same restrictions applied: no papers, no radio, no TV and no visitors.
He didn't mind at all.
There was no way this kind of thing would break him. This was how it was. He didn't want to read the papers anyway, or meet anybody. He didn't want to long for anything.
When they escorted him to his cell, another prisoner had spoken to him. Fredrik recognised him by sight; he was one of the nation's pet criminals. An engaging character, who charmed the public but seemed unable to stop himself from committing some simple-minded new crime every time he was released from prison. Maybe he was trying to avoid the other society, the one outside the walls. This prison pro looked startled and then walked straight up to Fredrik, slapped his back and said that as far as he was concerned Fredrik was a hero. 'You mustn't let the bastards get to you,' he said, adding, 'If the screws don't treat you right, just let us know and we'll have it fixed so you're looked after properly.'
The screws did treat him right. It might have been their own decision or there might have been forces pushing them, but there was definitely less of the staring through the bloody observation panel, and he got mugs of coffee more often than he should've, and when he was taken to the wire cage on the roof for his exercise session he got more than his allotted hour; he knew that and the screw knew that. Some days he actually got a double ration, two hours spent behind a fence with razor wire on top, but with the sky above.
Every second day Kristina Bjornsson visited him, speaking about documentation and strategy. Actually there was nothing more to present now than there had been the first time round, and the arguments in the Court of Appeal would be no different from those she had presented previously. Her reason for coming along was to keep Fredrik's courage up, give him greetings and messages from Micaela and try to persuade him that there was a future for him.
He appreciated it. She was just as able and as kind as he had been told she would be.
Still, he saw through her efforts to cheer him up. This time it would not be like the magistrates' court, where the one reservation about freeing him had come from the only person with legal training, the judge. This time everyone with any influence on his sentence would be lawyers, men and women who evaluated reality in terms of the written law. What mattered this time was paragraphs and praxis. He was resigned to a heavy sentence.
He told Kristina that, which upset her very much. She told him that this in itself would condemn him, because the court could sense when the accused expected a conviction. It had the same effect as a confession. And the reverse was true too. There were several examples, many of which he recognised. She had defended clients who had committed the most imbecile crimes, but who went free because they felt they should, and what they felt became shared by everyone in the courtroom.
The duty officer knocked on his door. He had brought a tray of food, meat and two veg, a glass of juice. Fredrik shook his head, he simply wasn't interested. Yes, it looked very tasty, but no, he wasn't hungry. He felt eating was somehow disgusting, and a betrayal, as if to eat was to pretend that nothing had really changed. If he didn't eat, he didn't join in. This was not his life. He had had no choice in the matter.
When the trial began, he was transported every morning to a new high-security court, also located in Berg Street. The threat from demonstrators had been noted and acted on. This time the interrogations in court were shorter and the questioning stricter. Some witness statements were replaced by tape recordings. He sat in the same place as before and gave in principle the same answers. He felt they were all in a play and that the last time round had been a rehearsal. Now it was time for the premiere and their performances would get expert reviews. He tried his best to sit straight, keep calm and look convinced of his right to be freed in the end. The last bit was hard, because he didn't care. He wasn't at all sure that he wanted to go back home. Could they read that? It must show.
The trial took only three days.
He was done with longing. Every night he lay on the bed in his cell, trying to trace something worth living for in the piss-coloured ceiling.
One hour.
