Two Soldiers (33 page)

Footsteps that passed by his door. That stopped. That turned. That opened the door.

Hermansson.

Her brow was sweaty along the hairline.

“You and I are going to have a conversation later.”

She had looked in, said something, and was already closing the door again.

“Hermansson—”

She shook her head.

“Did you keep going?”

“A
long
conversation.”

“In the middle lane?”

She didn’t answer, he hadn’t expected her to.

Ewert Grens stretched his limbs, which creaked loudly. A circuit of the office in silence to loosen up. He stopped in front of the map between the two windows with the red line in felt-tip pen that had meant freedom for the youths driving the car and death for the young woman who was lying in the trunk kicking against the metal. If he went closer, carried the line that stopped at the water on across the water, about twenty minutes’ gentle walk to Råby, it didn’t look
particularly big from above, white squares around a yellow stripe that was the asphalt on a highway and a black line that was the metro tracks.

“Sven?”

He had called someone who was at that moment walking around in one of the white squares, in a passage down in the cellar, behind a bomb technician and his dog.

“Yes?”

“So far?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s not good enough.”

“Six hundred and five hours. We’ve managed to go through one hundred and eighty doors. We need assistance.”

“Tomorrow.”

“Seven thousand, eight hundred and twenty apartments left, Ewert.”

“You’ll get six more dogs at half past six tomorrow morning. Two from Malmö police. And four from Customs and Excise.”

“And locksmiths, Ewert. Two, maybe even three. For inhabitants who refuse to open the door.”

“They can be there in an hour.”

He drew another line on the map on the wall, a fierce, mint-green color—if the highway was one side of a frame, and the metro lines another, then only two short sides were needed to link them together, a long chain of road blocks, patrols, dog handlers, uniformed policemen, and civilian policemen who from now on would surround Råby and become a net that was impossible to break through.

There was a knock on the door. Again.
You and I are going to have a conversation later
. So soon?

“Come in.”

Lars Ågestam.

“You?”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

“Say what you want and get out.”

He was carrying something in his hand. And his voice was considerably quieter than it had been a few hours ago.

“You’re working late today.”

“What do you want, Ågestam?”

“Thought that maybe you wouldn’t. Not today, I mean.”

Grens shifted his weight uneasily.

“Right?”

“Is everything OK, Ewert?”

“Do you want something or not? You’ve said enough today and I’m tired.”

“You can still be a total idiot sometimes, Grens. And you made a mistake. But that’s not why I’m here.”

Ewert Grens snorted at the person who was still in his office, but he didn’t shout and he didn’t chase him out.

“Earlier on today . . . you gave us coffee.”

“Yes . . .”

“And cakes.”

“There’s none left, Ågestam.”

It looked like the detective superintendent had combed his thin hair again and not that long ago either, and Lars Ågestam couldn’t remember it ever lying like that for several hours in a row.
And one thing you can be damn sure of, Grens—I know exactly what day it is
! He held out the rectangular wooden box that he’d been carrying, put it down on the desk.

“I ordered this from Systembolaget. A good vintage. From 1952. Which is exactly sixty years ago.”

Ewert Grens didn’t reply. But he reached over for the box and opened it. A beautiful bottle. And so strange. Such deep discomfort at the idea that someone should know and approach him and be part of his day. And yet it felt almost nice that someone had. He let it stand between the stacks of files and studied the label in great detail in order to avoid looking at Ågestam.

“Some things do get better with the years.”

He lifted the bottle up, still without answering.

Sometimes it was good to have a glass in the evening. Like now, for instance.

Lars Ågestam was holding something else in the other hand, a corkscrew and two cognac glasses.

“You should really have coffee with it. But you normally drink enough of the stuff, so we’ll skip it today. Any presents?”

He filled the glasses to just over half.

“Must be thirty years since the last one.”

Raised glasses, the first mouthful.

“But you’ve already got what you wanted.”

“Armagnac? That’s lovely.”

“A murder.”

Another mouthful, a full flavor, good vintages often were.

He smiled a bit.

“Yes, a murder.”

They didn’t say anything else for a few minutes while they stood relatively close and drank a few centimeters at a time until they were both holding an empty glass.

“And you’d prefer to sit here by yourself for the rest of the evening?”

The detective superintendent nodded and Ågestam took with him an empty glass and an empty wooden box when he left the room. He’d gone as far as the photocopier and kitchen when Ewert Grens caught up with him and held out his hand.

“Um . . . thank you.”

The strange feeling persisted.

Grens went back to the beautiful bottle and felt happy. Not because Ågestam had known. But that he had known and yet not said anything, but had come himself and left after a short time; he’d understood.

Ewert Grens had been twenty-nine the last time he had shared, really shared, this day with anyone else. He remembered with horror his fiftieth birthday, sitting in a garden on a wooden chair between Sven, who had understood, and Bengt and Lena, who would never understand and how he’d cringed every time he was forced to smile
and say thank you to those who had come to surprise him without saying anything.

It hadn’t felt like that at all now. He’d had a glass of something strong and looked at Ågestam and it had tasted good.

Maybe next time. Sixty-one.

Maybe then.

———

“Are you finished?”

I have an accurate time of death
.

If I get DNA, blood, fibers, fingerprints.

“Soon.”

If I have all four
.

“Nils, I need . . .”

Then it’s not my responsibility
.

“Ewert?”

“Yes?”

It’s not my job to worry about the consequences
.

“You can come down here.”

Not even when I arrest you, put you in prison, again
.

He had pressed Nils Krantz as far as he could. It was late in the evening and he would soon have answers that it normally took twenty-four hours to get. It was his day and he had got his present. A murder. And now he wanted to open it.

“Light jacket. And now you smell of alcohol . . .”

The forensic scientist was standing by one of the long tables in the laboratory with his black bag only an arm’s length away.

“Yes.”

“I’ve never seen you in anything light-colored before. And I’ve certainly never seen you drink a glass of what you smell of right now.”

“That’s probably true.”

“Ewert?”

“Nothing.”

“I’ve known you for over—”

“Absolutely nothing, Nils.”

Two men looking at each other in a room full of bags that say
AUTOPSY
and white cotton swabs with the remains of blood on them. Two men who could have been sitting in an armchair watching TV a long time ago, but who this evening, like every other evening, preferred, no matter the time, to be here, where there was a context, rather than in an empty apartment where there was nothing.

They were now standing on either side of three different documents,

Grens followed every line with his finger,

Krantz underlined with a pencil the keywords that would later be summarized in a final report.

“Three out of four.”

“Yes, and if you only knew how much I’ve pushed the NLFS and got them to—”

“And the fourth?”

“Sorry?”

“The fingerprints. I explained that I wanted
all four
.”

The forensic scientist had only a few hours earlier raised his voice and then pushed over two of his microscopes.

It hadn’t been worth it. He would never do it again.

“Soon.”

White rubber gloves on when he carefully extracted the piece of tape that he’d ripped from the dead woman’s wrists a few hours ago, and put it on the grille in the red metal cabinet.

Fifteen drops of superglue in an aluminum tray on the hot plate at the bottom of the cabinet.

One hundred and fifty degrees and the white gas looked quite beautiful through the glass door.

“Your jacket? And the alcohol?”

“Absolutely nothing, Nils.”

A dish of warm water and a tin with a vibrant yellow powder which the forensic scientist mixed, stirred, whisked, then poured the yellow liquid into a bottle.

Ten minutes. The whitish gas had become transparent. Krantz’s rubber gloves took out the tape, studied it with a magnifying glass, and nodded.

Obvious fingerprints.

The yellow liquid over the tape, rinsed off with water, and the prints had become luminous.
The one who first taped her mouth and later pushed a sock down her throat
. The forensic scientist moved closer to the lamp, which made them clearer even for Grens. He compared them with the fingerprints that he’d secured during the autopsy and were now in a line on the transparent foil.

“So we can confirm then that those are hers.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And . . . who else?”

“We’ll know in a couple of minutes.”

Side by side down the Forensics corridor, Grens’s great lumbering body and Krantz’s considerably smaller, a closed door to a room at the end.

“The forensic engineer. That’s his chair and he’s the expert. But at this time of night . . . and as you’re so . . . I’ll do it myself this evening.”

A narrow room. The forensic scientist moved the fingerprints that had been luminous only minutes ago from the scanner to a computer and Ewert Grens tried to stand behind him so he could see. He didn’t manage, the walls and cabinets kept knocking his back.

“If you turn the screen a little. You know, the light, Nils, maybe it would be better if I sit here.”

He had three already.

And if he could get the fourth.

This anxiety, Grens didn’t understand it, it had hounded him since a conversation in the middle of the night.

“One
detail
.”

Now, with the fingerprints on a big white screen, it was getting stronger and becoming decidedly uncomfortable.

“One more.”

Krantz had traced a papillary ridge to the far left that split into two, a
fork
. He needed at least eight to ten details, preferably even more. Unique patterns on a person’s fingers that were there before birth, there after death. The next line ran slightly closer to the middle only to suddenly break off, a
gap
, before continuing again.

“And there, the right loop, you see? Curved. One
delta
.”

In Krantz’s hands, each new detail became a red dot on the screen, a network that bit by bit became an image that would become a pattern.

“Eleven. That’s enough for us to be certain.”

It quite possibly only took a few seconds.

The computer compared the patterns of one hundred and twenty thousand fingerprints with the ones here.

But the anxiety that had been rampant for nearly twenty-four hours now and had deepened to great discomfort, understood nothing about time.

“Hit.”

Ewert Grens looked nervously between the two pictures. Red points that showed an identical pattern. The anxiety, discomfort, in that moment changed to something else.

Something that perhaps resembled relief.

“Completely sure?”

Krantz pointed at the red line that linked what could only be found in
one
individual.

“Eleven details. Yes. I’m completely sure.”

One press of a button away.

One more.

———

He wasn’t tired. The dark and the car and the southbound highway. Every time the same strange feeling when thoughts were clearly washed away by adrenaline and anticipation, and the energy that should have run out surged again.

He’d had three.

He had all four. And a time of death. He had all five.

He was driving fast, on his way to a woman who had given birth to her child in a prison cell. He’d been standing beside Erik Wilson, and she had looked at him afterward. She was only seventeen and had felt it lying quietly on her stomach for a short while.

The highway exit past the police station, over there, one of the delayed evening trains that raced into the platform at Råby station,
and exchanged people on their way home for people on their way out. A blue-and-white car with a police emblem on the door, he seldom traveled in one of them, so much easier when he turned onto one of the paths for pedestrians and cyclists and drove right up to the door of Råby Allé 34.

The smell in the elevator was just as strong. But this time he chose to hold his breath and go up, even tried to read the spiky scrawls that had replaced the mirror; if they meant anything, it wasn’t important to him.