Penelope locks the door behind them and then walks over to one of the bulletproof windows with a view of Ostermalm Square. The window is opaque from outside. She looks down and understands that some of the people moving about on the square must be police in disguise.
She slowly touches the window. She can hear nothing from the outside world.
The doorbell rings.
Penelope jumps and her heart starts to pound.
She walks over to the monitor, finds the intercom button, and presses it. The female officer’s face appears and she says that Penelope’s mother has arrived.
“Penny? Penny?” her mother’s anxious voice asks from behind the officer.
Penelope presses the combination to the door lock and hears the mechanism tick an answer before she can open the heavy steel door.
“Mamma,” she says quietly. The sound of her own voice drops into the apartment’s oppressive silence.
Penelope lets her mother into the room, then closes and locks the door. After that, she can’t seem to move. She presses her lips together and feels her body start to tremble. She forces all feeling from her face.
She glances up at her mother but doesn’t dare meet her eyes. She waits for her mother’s tirade and accusations because she wasn’t able to protect Viola.
Claudia has stopped and takes a slow look around.
“Are they taking good care of you, Penny?” she asks.
“I’m fine now.”
“But they have to guard you.”
“They are, so I’m safe here.”
“That’s all that matters,” Claudia says in words almost beyond hearing.
Penelope tries to swallow her tears.
“There’s so much I have to take care of now,” her mother says, and turns her face away. “I… I just can’t realize that I have to arrange Viola’s funeral.”
Penelope nods slowly. Her mother reaches out her hand to touch Penelope’s cheek, but Penelope startles back and her mother jerks her hand away.
“They tell me that it will be over soon,” Penelope says. “The police think they’ll get that man… the man… who killed Viola and Bjorn.”
Claudia nods and looks at her daughter with a face so naked and unprotected that Penelope is surprised to see her smile. “Just think, you are alive!” Claudia says thickly. “Just think, I have you again! It’s all that matters now… It’s the only thing that matters.”
“Mamma.”
“My little girl.”
Claudia reaches out her hand again, and this time Penelope does not shy away.
77
Jenny Goransson is in charge of the stakeout. She’s positioned in the bay window of an apartment three floors up on Nybrogatan 4A. She’s waiting. The hours pass. No one has reported anything. All seems quiet. Routinely, her eyes sweep in surveillance of the square and up to the roof of Sibyllegatan 27. Some pigeons startle and fly up and away.
Sonny Jansson is positioned on that roof. He must have shifted and scared the birds.
Jenny contacts him and finds out that he had moved to look into another apartment.
“I thought they were in the middle of a fight, but then I realized they’re actually playing Wii and jumping around in front of the television.”
“Return to your position,” Jenny says drily.
She lifts her binoculars to peer at the dark area between the kiosk and the elm trees again. She’s decided it could be a potential hot spot.
Blomberg calls in. He’s undercover as a jogger running down Sibyllegatan.
“I see something in the cemetery,” he says in a low voice.
“What?”
“Someone is under the trees, about ten meters from the gate.”
“Check it out, Blomberg, but be careful,” she says.
He jogs past the horse stairs by the Military Museum’s gable and on into the cemetery. The night is warm and green. He moves silently onto the grass next to the gravel path and thinks that he’ll soon stop and pretend to stretch. Right now, he just keeps going. There’s a rustling among the leaves. The light left in the sky is blocked by branches and it’s dark between the gravestones. He is startled by seeing a face near the ground. A woman of about twenty. Her hair is stubby and dyed red and her green military backpack is lying next to her head. Blomberg begins to see more clearly as another person, a black-clad, laughing woman, pulls up the other woman’s sweater and begins kissing her breasts.
Blomberg carefully moves away and reports back to Jenny Goransson: “False alarm. Lovers.”
Three hours have passed. Blomberg shivers. It’s getting chilly. The dew is forming on the grass as the temperature drops. He rounds a corner and pulls up abruptly in front of a middle-aged woman with a well-worn face. She seems extremely drunk as she wobbles on her feet. She’s walking two poodles on a leash, jerking back angrily as the dogs eagerly sniff the ground and want to pull away.
Near the edge of the cemetery, an airline attendant passes by. The wheels on her blue carry-on clatter against the asphalt. She gives Blomberg a disinterested glance and he hardly glances back although they’ve been colleagues for more than seven years.
Maria Ristonen hears the sound of her own heels echo along the wall. She’s pulling her carry-on toward the entrance of the subway to check on someone almost hidden near the entrance. The carry-on gets stuck in a cobblestone and skitters sideways. She has to stop and as she bends down, she checks out the person in the shadows. He’s very well-dressed but he has an odd look on his face. He seems to be waiting for someone and he eyes her intently. Maria Ristonen’s heart begins to beat harder and she hears Jenny Goransson’s voice in her earpiece.
“Blomberg has seen him, too, and he’s on the way,” Jenny says. “Wait for Blomberg, Maria. Wait for Blomberg.”
Maria feels she can’t hesitate too long. The normal thing would be to walk along again. She tries to move more slowly and now she’s nearing the man with the odd look. She’ll have to walk past him and then her back would be to him. The man draws back farther in the shadows as she approaches. He has a hand inside his jacket. Maria Ristonen feels the adrenaline pump through her veins when the man suddenly steps toward her and pulls something out that he’s had hidden. Beyond the man’s shoulder, Maria sees Blomberg take a stance, weapon suddenly in his hand. Jenny shouts that it’s a false alarm. The man holds only a beer can.
“Bitch!” The man spits beer toward her.
“Oh God,” sighs Jenny in Maria’s earpiece. “Just keep on going to the subway, Maria.”
The rest of the night passes without incident. The last nightclubs close and then only a few dog owners and aluminum-can collectors go by. Then the newspaper delivery people. Then more dog owners and a few joggers. Jenny Goransson can hardly wait for her relief at eight a.m. She gazes at Hedvig Eleonora Church and then at Penelope Fernandez’s blank window. She looks down at Storgatan and then back toward the priory, where the film director Ingmar Bergman grew up. She pulls out a stick of nicotine gum and studies the square, the park benches, the trees, and the sculptures of the hunched woman and the man with the slab of meat on his shoulder.
There is a small movement near the high steel gate guarding Ostermalms Saluhall. Gourmet food stalls have reinvigorated the interior of the huge redbrick building. Now the weak shine of glass in the entrance is briefly hidden by dark movement. Jenny Goransson calls Carl Schwirt. He’s on a park bench between the trees where the Folk Theater had once been. Two garbage bags of scavenged cans sit between his feet.
