hit him, felled him, made him shake. He had never felt fear like it before, fear that spilled over into panic, and then angst, and when he still couldn't breathe, death.
He was frightened of a man lying on the floor with three gaping wounds in his head and a breakthrough in a conference room in Warsaw and nights in a small cell and a death sentence that would become even more critical inside those walls, and Zofia's cold voice and the children's feverish skin and of no longer being able to tell the difference between the truth and lies.
He sat down on the floor of the elevator, exhausted, and avoided the guard's eyes until his legs stopped shaking so much and he dared to walk gingerly to the door that was standing half open at the end of a rather nice corridor.
One more time.
Piet Hoffmann stopped a couple of meters from the door, emptied himself as he always did of all thoughts, all feelings, pushed them aside and kicked them down and then he had put on his armor-that thick, horrible layer, his bloody shield, he was good at it, at not letting himself feel anything-one more time, one more bloody time.
He knocked on the door frame and waited until the feet that he heard scraping the floor stood in front of him. A policeman in civvies. He recognized him. They had met on two occasions. Erik's boss; the one called Goransson.
'Do you have anything that should be left out here?'
Piet Hoffmann emptied his inner pocket and trouser pockets of two mobile phones, a stiletto, folding scissors and put it all in an empty glass fruit bowl on the table opposite the door.
'Hold out your arms and spread your legs.'
Hoffmann nodded and turned his back to the man who was tall and thin with an ingratiating smile.
'Apologies. You know that we have to do this.'
The long, slim fingers felt over his clothes, against his neck, back, chest. When they pressed against his backside and balls, they touched the thin microphone lead twice without feeling anything. It slipped down a bit and Piet Hoffmann held his breath until it got stuck, about halfway down his thigh. It felt like it was going to stay there.
Big windows with deep white sills and a view over the still waters of Norrstrom and Riddarfjarden. The room smelled of fresh coffee and detergent and there were six chairs around the meeting table. He was last, only two places left, he moved toward one of them. They studied him without a word. He passed behind their backs and made sure to feel the fabric of his trousers with a casual hand: the microphone was still there, but facing in the wrong direction. He adjusted it as he pulled out a chair and sat down.
He recognized all four people, but had met only two of them before, Goransson and Erik.
The state secretary was sitting closest to him and she pointed to a document in front of her, then got up and held out her hand.
'The document-. I've read it. I assumed… I assumed that it concerned a… woman?'
She had a firm handshake. She was like the others, the ones who press too hard and think that it's the same as power.
'Paula.'
Piet Hoffmann kept hold of her hand.
'That's my name, in here.'
The uncomfortable silence dragged out and while he waited for someone to start speaking, he looked down at the papers that the state secretary had referred to.
He recognized Erik's way of expressing himself.
Vastmannagatan 79. The secret report.
A copy of the same document lay in front of each of them. They were already part of the chain of events.
'This is the first time that Paula and I have met like this.'
Erik Wilson was careful to look everyone straight in the eye when he spoke.
'With other people. In a room that we haven't secured. Where we don't have control.'
He held up the report, the detailed description of a murder witnessed by one of the people at a meeting table in the Government Offices.
'An unprecedented meeting. And I hope that we will leave having made an unprecedented decision.'
Ewert Grens had been lying on the office floor when Sven Sundkvist had knocked on his door a couple of minutes earlier and walked in. Sven hadn't said anything, hadn't asked any questions, he just sat down on the corduroy sofa and waited, like he always did.
'It's better here.'
'Here?'
'On the floor. The sofa is starting to get too soft.'
He had slept there for a second night. His stiff leg didn't ache at all and he had more or less gotten used to the cars accelerating all the way up the steep slope on Hantverkargatan.
'I want to report on Vastmannagatan.'
'Anything new?'
'Not much.'
Ewert Grens lay on the floor and peered at the ceiling. There were some large cracks near the lamp, which he had never paid attention to before. Whether they were new or whether the music had always just been in the way.
He sighed.
He had investigated murders all his adult life. Vastmannagatan 79, a feeling somewhere in his chest-there was something that didn't fit. They had identified the body, the flat owner, even the remains of amphetamine and bile from the mule. They had blood stains and the angle from which the gun was fired. They had a witness with a Swedish voice who chose to raise the alarm and a Polish security firm that meant the Eastern European mafia.
They had as good as bloody nothing.
They were no closer to a solution than they had been in Copenhagen Airport the evening before.
'There are fifteen flats in that block. I've interviewed everyone who was there at the time of the murder. Three of them have observations that might be of interest. On the ground floor- Are you listening, Ewert?'
'Carry on.'
'On the ground floor there's a Finn who can give a pretty good description of two men he'd never seen before, as he has the best possible observation point-everyone who goes in or out passes his door. Pale, shaved heads, dark clothes, forties. Only through the peephole and only for a few seconds, but you can actually see and hear more than I thought from there and he also mentioned a Slavic language, so it all fits.'
'Polish.'
'In terms of the tenant, that would seem likely.'
'Mules, bodies, Poles. Drugs, violence, Eastern Europe.'
Sven Sundkvist looked down at the older man on the floor. He just lay there and couldn't care less what anyone else thought, with a confidence that Sven could never achieve, as he was the sort who, no matter how much he had tried to change it over the years, wanted to be liked and therefore tended to be amenable and not make a fuss.
'There's a young woman who lives on the fourth floor, a couple of doors down from the crime scene, and an old man up on the fifth floor above. Both of them were at home at the time of the murder and said that they heard what they describe as a clear bang.'
'A bang?'
'Neither of them was willing to say more than that. They don't know anything about weapons and couldn't say whether it was a gun shot. But they are both certain that what they called a
'That's all?'
'That's all.'
The ringing from the phone on the desk was sharp and irritating, and did not let up, despite the fact that Sven remained sitting on the sofa and Ewert stayed on the floor.
'Should I answer?'
'I can't understand why they don't give up.'
