CELL 8 (9 page)

“You smell?”

“The smell, I have to get rid of it.”

The officer turned to his colleague who was standing just outside the door, the silver-haired one who had come back for the next day’s shift.

The older man nodded.

“You can have a shower. But we’ll sit with you.”

“I want to be alone.”

“Under normal circumstances, we lock the door and the guard sits outside. But not in this case. We don’t have time for assault suspects who commit suicide in our showers. So you shower. In our company.”

He sat down on the wet drain, his knees pulled up, back against the wall that was hard.
Elizabeth’s eyes, they laugh so.
The water pummeled his body, he increased the pressure and turned up the heat, hot drops on his skin.
Their hate, I don’t understand it.
Face up, he closed his eyes, it burned, he tried to suppress the thoughts that refused to back down.
Dad crying, he’s holding me, I’ve never seen him cry before.
He sat there for thirty minutes, didn’t pay any attention to the officer who was sitting far too close. The water, the heat had helped him to be resilient, at least for a while.

John Schwarz now knew.

He had to get away from there.

He couldn’t face dying again.

HERMANSSON HAD JUST LEFT EWERT GRENS, BUT EVEN BEFORE SHE
turned out of the corridor she heard the music again, just as loud as a short while ago. She smiled. He had his own style. She liked people who had their own style.

In her hand she was holding a passport, one that didn’t exist.

She still hadn’t fully recognized that this was just the start of something that would become so much more, but she had a feeling. Schwarz had been with her for more than twenty-four hours now, refusing to leave her thoughts. So she hurried along Bergsgatan, Scheelegatan, Hantverkargatan, a few minutes’ walk east along the road toward the center of Stockholm, and any moment now, a few hundred yards ahead, she would see the ugly building beside the Sheraton Hotel. She paused briefly, her eyes searching for the windows of the Canadian embassy a few floors up, when she was suddenly surprised by a voice, from behind, up close.

“Hey, bitch.”

He was standing on the other side of the high iron fence, in the grassy churchyard around Kungsholmen Church, a middle-aged man staring at her with great intensity.

“Hey, bitch, look at this.”

He’d undone the top button of his pants, was fiddling with the zipper now.

She didn’t need to see any more.

She already knew.

“Get your dick out, you bastard.”

She put her hand inside her jacket, for just a second, then held up her gun.

“Go on.”

She looked at him as she spoke, her voice calm.

“And I’ll blast it off. With the new police-issue hunting ammo. Then it’s done.”

For a long moment, he looked at the bitch who was holding a gun and said she was from the police. Then he bolted, ran away, tried to do up his fly, fell over one of the low gravestones with almost illegible writing and moss growing around the edges, kept on running without looking back.

She shook her head.

All these nut jobs.

The city bred them, fed them, hid them.

Mariana Hermansson watched him until he disappeared into some bushes, then kept on walking, past the city hall and under the railway bridge, a couple of minutes more, then an elevator up to the glass door that opened from the inside when she rang the bell; she was expected.

The Canadian embassy official introduced himself as Timothy D. Crouse; he was a tall young man with short blond hair. He had a friendly face and walked and talked like they usually did. Hermansson had met quite a few in connection with various investigations and had already been struck by how similar they were, embassy people, no matter what nationality or ethnicity, the way they walked and moved like diplomats, the way they talked like diplomats . . . she wondered if they were like that from the outset and that’s why they were attracted to it, or whether they became like that along the way, fitting in so they wouldn’t be noticed.

She handed him the passport that belonged to a man who was now sitting in custody in a holding cell, suspected of attempted murder. Crouse felt the dark blue cover with his fingers, the paper inside, he studied the passport number and personal details.

He didn’t take particularly long and seemed to be certain when he spoke.

“This is genuine. I’m convinced of it. Everything’s correct. I’ve already looked up the number. The personal details are identical to the ones that were entered when the passport was issued.”

Hermansson looked at the embassy man. She took a couple of steps forward, pointed at the computer.

“Can I have a look?”

“There’s no other information. I’m sorry. That’s all we can get up.”

“I want to see
him
.”

Crouse considered her request.

“It’s important.”

He shrugged.

“Of course. Why not? You’re here. And I’ve already given you all the other information.”

He pulled over a chair and asked her to sit down beside him, poured a glass of water, and then apologized for the time it took for the computer to hook up to the system.

Two men in dark overcoats were now standing outside the glass door and were let in by a female employee. They passed by Crouse’s desk, nodded in recognition, and continued on.

“Soon. We’ll get there soon.”

The screen started to come alive. Crouse typed in a password and then opened something that looked like a register. Two new screens, names in alphabetical order: a total of twenty-two Canadian citizens with the surname
Schwarz
and the first name
John
.

“The fifth from the top. See. He has this passport number.”

Crouse nodded at the screen.

“You want to see what he looks like.”

A new register, a new password.

A photograph of the John Schwarz who had ordered and received the passport that was now lying in front of them on the desk, the John Schwarz who, according to the Migration Board, also had permanent residency in Sweden, now filled the computer screen.

Crouse looked at it without saying anything.

He leaned forward, flicked through the passport, then pulled up the photograph and personal details.

Hermansson knew what he was thinking.

The man in the passport was white.

The man she had described who was suspected of attempted murder and who was now sitting in a holding cell was white.

But this man who was beaming at them from the Canadian authorities’ computer, the man who had once been the legitimate owner of the passport that Crouse was holding, he was black.

EWERT GRENS WAS IRRITATED. THE DAY THAT HAD STARTED BADLY AT SIX
in the morning when he opened the main door to the police headquarters had now, as the morning slid into lunch, got worse. He couldn’t face any more idiots. He wanted to sit behind his closed door and play loud music and have the time to systematically go through at least one of the piles of investigations that should have been closed ages ago. He didn’t get time to do more than start before someone knocked on the door. Pointless questions and unfounded reports that he snorted at as before, and people who came to say he should turn down the music, who he told to go to hell.

He longed for her.

He wanted to hold her, feel her steady breathing.

He had been there the day before and normally waited for a few days, but he felt compelled to go out there again this afternoon, a hamburger in the car and he should be able to squeeze in a short visit.

Grens waited until Siw had sung her last, then lifted his new cordless phone that he couldn’t quite get his head around and phoned the nursing home. One of the younger female staff answered, one of the ones he had gotten to know. He said that he’d thought about coming out in a couple of hours and wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t clash with a visit from the doctor or some group activity.

It felt better. The anger that always lurked in his chest shrank a little, didn’t take up so much space, he had the energy to sing along again to Siw’s “Seven Little Girls (Sitting in the Back Seat).”

Seven little girls sitting in the back seat
     hugging and a-kissing with Fred

He even whistled, out of tune and with a sound that could peel the walls.

I said, why don’t one of you
     come and sit beside me

Ten minutes. That was all. Then the door again, someone feeling lonely. He sighed, put the report he was reading to one side.

Hermansson. He waved her in.

“Sit down.”

He didn’t know why. And was still unsure how he should deal with his reaction. But it made him happy whenever he saw her. A young woman . . . it wasn’t that, and he was careful to keep it that way.

It was something else.

He’d considered sleeping at home in his large apartment more often, thought that he’d be able to cope.

He suddenly found himself reading the movie listings in
Dagens nyheter
, he who hadn’t been to the movies since James Bond and
Moonraker
in 1979, when he’d fallen asleep watching it, all the boring, endless space voyages.

On a few occasions he’d even nearly gone to those fucking awful shopping streets in the center to try on some new clothes—he hadn’t done it, but
nearly
.

She put a piece of paper down on his desk. A picture of a man’s face, a passport photo.

“John Schwarz.”

A man somewhere in his thirties. Short, dark hair, brown eyes, black skin.

“The original owner of the passport.”

Grens looked at the picture, thought about the man who
called
himself John Schwarz and who, according to the reports he’d got from Sven, Hermansson, and the prison staff, was not doing well at all. He was a nobody now. The Swedish police authorities didn’t even have a name for him anymore. His strange behavior, his fear, and the kick he’d given someone else in the head; he was carrying some baggage with him, he came from somewhere.

Who? Where? Why?

The investigation of an attempted murder had just become more complicated.

“I want you to set things up for questioning.”

He paced restlessly around the room as he always did, from the desk to the worn sofa where he sometimes slept, back to the desk, back to the sofa.

“You’ll get him to talk. I’m sure that you can do it better than Sven or me, that you can reach him.”

Grens stopped, sat down on the sofa.

“You have to find out who he is. I want to know what the hell he’s doing here. Why the singer in a dance band is running around hiding behind a false identity.”

He leaned back; his body was used to the hard stuffing, he had lain there many a night.

“And this time, report directly to me, Hermansson. I don’t want to have to get any information via Ågestam in the future.”

“You weren’t here this morning when I came in.”

“I am your boss. Is that clear?”

“If you’re here next time, or at least contactable next time, then I’ll report to you in detail. If you’re not, I’ll report to the prosecutor who’s heading the investigation.”

She had left his room angrier than she cared to admit and was on her way to her own office. She hadn’t got very far when she suddenly turned—she just had to do it.

She knocked on the door again, for the second time in twenty minutes.

“There was something else.”

Grens was still sitting on the sofa. He sighed, sufficiently loudly to be sure that she heard, then waved his arms around in front of him and said that she should continue.

“I have to know, Grens.”

Hermansson took a step into the room.

“Why did you promote me? How did I manage to bypass the officers with far longer service than I have?”

Ewert Grens heard her question. He wasn’t sure whether she was joking.

“Is it important?”

“I know your views on policewomen.”

She wasn’t joking.

“Well?”

“So explain.”

“City Police employs about sixty people a year. What the hell do you want to hear? How good you are?”

“I want to know why.”

He shrugged.

“Because you are. Really fucking good.”

“And policewomen?”

“The fact that
you’re
good doesn’t change anything. Policewomen aren’t good enough.”

Half an hour later he was sitting in the car on his way to the woman he’d longed for. A hamburger and a low-alcohol beer from the fast-food place on Valhallavägen just before he turned off for Lidingö. It was still cold outside, the thermometer hadn’t managed to get above zero, not even at this time of day. He felt the chill, as he always did after he’d eaten, and the damn heater in the car wasn’t working.

He phoned Ågestam, who answered, out of breath, in his shrill, almost falsetto voice. Grens really didn’t like the young prosecutor, and the dislike was mutual. They’d met and worked with and against each other a couple of times too many in recent years, and with each investigation their differences became more pronounced.

But today he held his tongue. He was on his way to see Anni and wanted to keep hold of the feeling that the prospect of the visit had given him.

Instead he explained that he wanted information about the committal proceedings that Ågestam was going to instigate later that afternoon against a man who was still called “John Schwarz” in the court papers. They talked about Ylikoski’s cerebral edema; he was in the neurosurgical ward at the Karolinska Hospital, still sedated so he could breathe with a respirator. They discussed how claustrophobia now dominated the holding cell corridor, then talked briefly about the details of a false identity, and “Schwarz,” waiting to learn if his case would go to trial, and with what charge.

“Aggravated assault.”

Ewert Grens started; the car swung into the middle of the road and was about to cross the continuous white line when he gripped the steering wheel, forced the veering vehicle back, and continued driving on the right side.

“Aggravated assault? Did I hear you right, Ågestam? This is attempted murder!”