“We’re suspects, not witnesses,” Hammar said into the phone. “I mean, the other way around, not witnesses but suspects. No, no—”
She interrupted. “I get the point. We’re witnesses.”
Hammar had clearly been deeply shaken by the events of the afternoon. The bizarre crime scene collided with the image of a peaceful, safe Sweden. Brand realized she had shown lack of control in her treatment of Hammar earlier. Looking back, she thought the man had carried himself rather well. He had actually managed to stay steady in spite of, or maybe because of, the carnage around them.
“I admire the way you kept cool out there, Krister,” she said. “That business was bad, real bad. I had a partner in New York, Willie Urrico. Great guy. He came out of a bloody crime scene one time and made a comment that afterwards turned famous. ‘I nearly shit my socks,’ he said, and we all laughed. Cut the tension perfectly, you know? Pretty soon everybody on the force was saying it whenever things went sideways. And I’ll tell you honestly right now, entering that room in the manor house, I nearly shit my socks.”
“How do you do it?” Hammar asked. “How do you walk into scenes like that, day after day?”
“I’m not sure,” Brand said. “All the good cops who I know, they cope. Cops cope. That’s what they do. Of course police also eat the gun at higher rates than any other profession apart from shrinks. So maybe coping will only get you so far.”
They listened to each other breathe for a while. It had been only a few minutes since a low-ranking uniform had put Brand in the office, but the wait to be questioned felt overlong.
Hammar finally broke the silence. “I’m sitting in a room without windows, alone.”
“Me, too. Talk to me if anything happens.” They hung up.
Eleven minutes later by the clock on her cellphone, a Ljusdal Detective Inspector named Sven Bok entered. He took his place across the table from Brand. The man struck her as impossibly green. His spiky haircut and boyish features made him appear too young to be a cop.
“So, Detective Brand,” he began. Then he stopped. He fixed his eyes on a sheaf of papers he had brought in with him. She waited him out. Brand realized the guy was disturbed by the case.
Bok swallowed hard and continued. “Could we go again through your actions earlier this afternoon?”
“I’ve already told the responding officers,” she said, playing for time.
“Well, yes, of course.” Bok was deferential. “As you know yourself from your police work, going through an experience repeatedly can bring up new facts you hadn’t thought of before.”
She was impressed by the man’s easy command of English. The younger the person was in Sweden, she thought, the better they were with foreign languages.
“Sure, okay,” she said. “As soon as I realized the side door to the garage hung open—”
“I have to interrupt,” Bok said, holding up his hand. “Why were you at Sofieborg Manor House in the first place?”
“My attorney—would it be possible to have my attorney present here? I don’t know the protocols.”
“I’m sorry, just for now, if you could simply answer my questions.”
“Yes, of course,” Brand said.
“I realize you’ve been through this already. But as we said, perhaps some additional details will become clear.”
Brand liked the detective. She didn’t want to give him a hard time. “We visited the manor house because Mr Hammar believed it would be good for me to see an example of fine old Swedish architecture.”
“Your visit was…tourism?”
She felt a need to dodge the whole “reason for your visit” line of questioning. “I realized something was wrong as soon as I saw that a door had been left open. No one was around. The place was deserted. So naturally the wide open door concerned me. You have an issue around here with burglaries in unoccupied summer homes?”
“Well, yes, it is a problem.”
“I directed Mr Hammar to remain in the car. I approached the house. I saw blood. A great deal of it. I entered the ground floor and proceeded upstairs following the trail of blood.”
“I’m sorry, I have to ask, why not call the police right away? Why enter? Couldn’t that have been a dangerous decision?”
“I felt I had to address the safety of anyone inside. I did tell Mr Hammar to call emergency.”
“So you discovered the two victims. What did you do?”
“I checked for signs of life. Then I immediately exited and waited for your responding officers.”
“Yes, okay,” Bok said. “Did you disturb anything at the scene?”
“No. The scene disturbed me, not the other way around.”
“Remove anything from the scene?”
“No,” Brand lied. “Oh wait, I had maybe a little bit of blood on the bottom of my boots.”
Brand thought of the wedding dress. Along with her Glock, she had left the vest, the dress and the clump of soiled tissues in the Saab. “I pulled up a window shade. I thought what little light there was left outside might make it easier to see. I wanted to make sure there were no additional victims.”
“Raised a window shade,” Bok repeated.
“There were five windows on the right side as you enter the main room on the second floor. I unshaded a single window in the middle.”
Bok stared at her for a long beat, then looked away. “I’m sorry you had to see this on your first visit to our country,” he said briskly, gathering his papers together. “Very upsetting.”
“Yes,” Brand said, trying to sound noncommittal. “One of those scenes, you know, we’ve all encountered them—they make it hard to believe that there’s a hell below this.”
“We’ve all seen them, we’ve all seen them…” the Swedish detective repeated. “Of course you may have encountered worse during your time in New York City. You see, here we are a small town. We don’t all see such scenes. Not often. Never, in truth. Some crime comes out of big cities. Mostly for extreme injuries or deaths such as this, it’s
