The Steel Spring (2 page)

Jensen nodded.

‘But as I say, you’re in with a chance.’

‘What sort of chance?’

‘Impossible to say. Maybe ten per cent, maybe only five. In all probability even less than that.’

Jensen nodded.

‘Bear in mind that in the space of less than five seconds, all the blood in the body sluices through the liver. The liver is the great factory of the body. Can it really be transplanted? I don’t know.’

‘We’ll know in a few days’ time.’

‘Yes,’ said the doctor.

He looked at Jensen contemplatively.

‘Would you like something for the pain?’

‘No.’

‘It’s a long journey.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you got a return ticket?’

‘No.’

‘Very encouraging,’ the doctor said sarcastically.

He lapsed into silence and appeared in doubt about something. In the end Jensen said:

‘What is it?’

‘Something I’ve been meaning to ask you for a long time.’

‘What?’

‘They say you’ve never failed to solve a case. Is that true?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Inspector Jensen.

The telephone rang.

‘Sixteenth District police. Inspector here.’

‘Jensen?’

Jensen had not heard the police chief’s voice for four years, still less seen him. Was he ringing to say goodbye?

‘Yes.’

‘Excellent. You’ll be receiving written orders within the next few minutes. They must be carried out with all possible speed.’

‘Understood.’

‘Good.’

Jensen looked at the electric clock on the wall.

‘I go on sick leave in eighteen minutes’ time,’ he said.

‘Oh? Are you ill?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry to hear that, Jensen. You’ll have to brief your stand-in.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a matter of extreme importance. Orders from … well, the highest authority.’

‘Understood.’

The police chief paused. Finally he said:

‘Good luck then, Jensen.’

‘Thank you.’

Inspector Jensen replaced the receiver. The police chief had sounded nervous and harassed. Perhaps he always sounded like that.

‘In the space of less than five seconds,’ said the doctor. ‘All the blood in your body.’

Jensen nodded. A few moments later he said:

‘Where are they transferring you to when this district closes down?’

‘The central detoxification unit, I assume. And you?’

The doctor suddenly stopped himself. Changed the subject slightly.

‘Have you seen the detoxification unit?’ he said.

Jensen shook his head.

‘It’s vast. Looks like a gigantic prison. The biggest complex I’ve ever seen. And what about you?’

Jensen said nothing.

‘Sorry,’ said the doctor.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Jensen.

There was a knock at the door. A police officer in a green uniform came in, stood to attention and handed over a red file. Jensen signed for it and the constable left the room.

‘Red,’ said the doctor. ‘Everything’s top secret these days.’

He put his head to one side so he could read the operational code name.

‘What does that mean? Steel Spring?’

‘Don’t know,’ said Jensen. ‘Steel Spring. I’ve never seen the name before.’ He broke the seal and took out the orders. They consisted of a single typewritten sheet.

‘What’s that?’

‘An arrest list.’

‘Really?’ the doctor said dubiously. ‘But nobody commits crimes in this country, do they?’

Jensen read the text slowly through.

‘Nobody commits crimes and nobody gives birth. Everybody thinks the same. Nobody’s happy and nobody’s unhappy. Except the ones who kill themselves.’ The doctor stopped and smiled a quick, melancholy smile.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I really ought to mind my tongue.’

‘You’re impulsive.’

‘Yes. Anything interesting in your arrest list?’

‘In a way,’ said Inspector Jensen. ‘Your name’s on it.’

‘That’s good. There’s research showing how important it is before a major operation for the patient to joke and display a sense of humour. It shows zest for life. Right, I must be off now. And so must you. You don’t want to miss the plane. Best of luck.’

‘Thanks,’ said Inspector Jensen.

The instant the door closed, he picked up the telephone, dialled three digits and said:

‘Jensen here. The doctor is just on his way down to reception. Arrest him and put him in preventive detention.’

‘The police doctor?’

‘Yes. And be quick about it.’

He ended the call and immediately rang another three-digit number.

‘Jensen here. Ask the head of the plainclothes patrol to come up. And ring for a taxi.’

The electric wall clock was showing one minute to ten as the head of the plainclothes patrol came into the room.

‘I’m on sick leave from ten o’clock,’ said Jensen. ‘As you know, you’re to take over until further notice.’

‘Thank you, Inspector.’

‘Don’t thank me. As you know, I’ve never had a particularly high opinion of you, and you didn’t get the post on my recommendation.’

The man opened his mouth to say something but apparently changed his mind.

‘Here’s a list of forty-three individuals who live or are active in the district. They are to be apprehended immediately, searched and put into preventive custody. The regional prosecutor’s office will send officers over to fetch them later today.’

‘Er, Inspector?’

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘What have these people done?’

‘I don’t know.’ Jensen glanced at the clock. ‘And anyway, you’re the inspector now. The car’s in the usual space. The keys are in the pen tray.’

He stood up and put on his hat and overcoat. The man at the desk studied the arrest list and said:

‘But they’re all …’

He broke off.

‘That’s right,’ said Jensen. ‘They’re all doctors. Goodbye.’

He picked up his suitcase and went.

The airport lay to the south, a long way from the city. Getting there by car from the Sixteenth District police station took an hour and a half if you were lucky. The journey had been considerably longer in the past, but in recent years the inner city had turned increasingly into one huge traffic-flow system, an apparent jumble of flyovers and criss-crossing motorways. Virtually all the older buildings had been pulled down to make more living space for automobiles, a planning solution that had resulted in a city centre apparently consisting of soaring columns of glass, steel and concrete. Divided up into squares and corralled by the multi-lane highways were groups of multi-storey car parks, office buildings and department stores with small shops, cinemas, petrol stations and gleaming chrome snack bars on the ground floors. Many years earlier, when this city plan was being implemented, critical voices had been raised to say that the system would make the city inhuman and uninhabitable. The experts had brushed off the criticism. They argued that a modern city should be built not for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages but for cars. As on so many other issues, both sides had subsequently been proved right. This was entirely in the spirit of the Accord.

The taxi moved swiftly through the inner city, plunged into the road tunnel by the Ministry of the Interior and surfaced in an industrial area eight kilometres further south.
It continued over a bridge and approached the suburban belt.

The air was chilly and the skies were cloudless on this early autumn day. Hoar frost veiled the concrete surface of the motorway, and the greyish air, poisoned with exhaust fumes, lay like an enormous bell over people, cars, roads and built-up areas. The experts at the Ministry for Public Health calculated that the polluted air now extended fifty or sixty metres into the air. Just a few years before, the bell of air had been estimated to be just fifteen metres high, with a diameter of twelve kilometres. The latest measurements at ground level showed the area had more than doubled. The investigation had been carried out as part of a routine programme, and had not caused any measures to be taken. The report had been declared confidential, since it was feared that the findings could cause anxiety to certain parts of the population, but before that it had been circulated among senior police officers. Jensen had read it and passed on the papers without comment.

The traffic was dense but fast moving. The sides of the road were lined with coloured posters reminding people of the forthcoming democratic elections. Posters bearing the image of a lantern-jawed man with thinning hair and vivid blue eyes alternated with others that were just a letter of the alphabet, a big pink ‘A’. The man was the future head of the government, an individual considered to represent the totally interdependent concepts of welfare, security and accord better than anyone else. Married into the royal family, he had previously been the head of the National Confederation. He was currently the Minister for the Interior. Before the grand coalition he had been a social democrat.

The taxi driver put on the brakes as a policeman signalled
to him to stop. They were on their way up on to a long bridge, and ahead of them, constables in green uniforms were busy with a traffic jam. The driver wound down the side window, took a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blew his nose. He looked impassively at the grey-black marks on the handkerchief, cleared his throat and spat out of the window.

‘Another demonstration,’ he said. ‘We’ll be through in no time.’

Thirty seconds later, the police constable waved the traffic ahead, and the driver engaged gear and eased the car forward.

‘Morons,’ he said. ‘Taking up a whole lane.’

They met the march up on the bridge. It was not a particularly large one. Jensen made a practised assessment of its size and composition. Between two thousand, five hundred and three thousand people, divided roughly equally between the sexes, and a surprising number of children for a country with a birth rate in permanent decline. Some of the children were so small that they were in pushchairs or sitting on their parents’ shoulders. The demonstrators were carrying placards and banners, and Jensen read the slogans as the march went past. Some were easy to understand. They complained about issues like poor air quality and non-recyclable packaging, but also about the current government. ‘Accorded to Death’ was a recurring slogan. But most of the texts were incomprehensible. They were about solidarity with other races and foreign peoples, countries he’d never heard of and combinations of letters he didn’t understand, but assumed to be acronyms. Some of the marchers were carrying pictures of foreigners with strange names, presumably heads of state or political leaders. The intention appeared to be to sing the praises of some of these and denounce others. There were also placards with a variety of old-fashioned
and obsolete slogans and sentiments like class struggle, proletariat, capitalism, imperialism, the working masses, and world revolution. At the front and back of the march there were massed red flags.

The people in the cars and along the sides of the road seemed wholly unaffected, doing no more than glance distractedly at the flags and placards. The onlookers seemed simply indifferent. Admittedly they all appeared dissatisfied and nervous, with nowhere to go, but their reaction had nothing to do with the demonstration. Jensen knew this from experience.

The demonstrators were marching four abreast. The police calmly and systematically made way for them and kept the traffic moving. There was no commotion; the whole thing seemed harmless.

The procession had passed by, and the taxi driver accelerated and asked without much interest:

‘Who are that lot? Some kind of socialists?’

‘I don’t know.’

The driver looked at his watch.

‘Well they’re holding up the traffic. We lost at least three or four minutes back there on the bridge. Why don’t the police clear them off the streets?’

Jensen said nothing. He knew the answer to the question, nevertheless.

Demonstrations of that kind had been going on for the previous four years. They were still relatively insignificant in scale, but were being staged increasingly often, with participant numbers seeming to swell each time. The marches always followed roughly the same pattern. They began somewhere in the suburbs and headed for the city centre, either to some foreign embassy or to the coalition parties’ central offices, where
the march would break up of its own volition once the participants had chanted slogans for half an hour or so. There was no legislation outlawing demonstrations. In theory it was for the police themselves to decide on an appropriate response. In practice, things worked rather differently. The Ministry of the Interior initially gave orders that the demonstrations were to be halted and dispersed, that placards and banners were to be examined, and confiscated if any of the slogans were considered indecent, distressing or offensive. The clearly stated aim was to protect the general public from experiences that might put people on edge or spread a sense of insecurity. But police intervention had exactly the opposite effect. Despite the fact that these were not mass demonstrations but generally just groups of a few hundred people, attempts to break up the demonstrations led to skirmishes, disorder and serious disruption of the traffic. After a time, the police were ordered to use other methods, but there were no specific instructions on the measures to be taken. The forces of law and order did their best. They stopped some marches, for example, while they subjected all those taking part to breath tests. The constant rise in drunkenness had led the government some years previously to pass a law making the abuse of alcohol illegal, not only in public places but also in the home. Being under the influence of alcohol in any setting at all had therefore become a criminal offence, a fact that had increased the burden of police work almost to breaking point. The new legislation had had no impact on drinking to excess, and it soon proved ineffective in clamping down on the demonstrations as well, since the marchers were never under the influence of alcohol. This strange circumstance was to Jensen’s mind the only essential feature that distinguished the demonstrators from the
population as a whole. Two years before, the alcohol policy had changed, with the new focus on price rises and chemical substances. In the meantime, the police had been ordered to leave the demonstrators in peace. It was decided by the government that the police should confine themselves to keeping certain foreign embassies under surveillance and directing the traffic along the march routes. Since then, the demonstrations had passed off calmly, but they were happening increasingly often, and more and more people were joining in, even though there was never a word about them in the papers, on radio or on television. There were rumours, however, of some anxiety at government level. In the most recent elections, voter turnout had slumped in a very disquieting way. No one understood why. Only vague figures had been released for publication, and these were commented on only in the most general terms. And the collaborating parties were engaging this year in propaganda more concentrated than they had ever employed before. The campaign had been launched back in the late spring, and was now accelerating to its peak.