Knock Knock Read online

  The missing documents could only have been removed by a police officer and handed over to someone who paid for them—only an active police officer could gain access to that restricted archive. This unease was because he found it inconceivable. Corrupt colleagues? In his forty years on the force, Ewert Grens never investigated the crimes of those who do the investigating. And right now he didn’t have time, he was searching for a person who hid while four murders were committed in her vicinity, a little girl who had chosen not to remember, but might remember now. A young woman who could be a dangerous threat to a certain violent criminal who might have gotten ahold of her records.

  Grens wandered around the silent and empty hallways of his department for another half hour, still waiting for a phone call that never came. When his restlessness became too urgent and destructive, and he began crashing into himself again, he took care of it as he often did nowadays, driving up to the Northern Cemetery to sit for a while on a simple park bench in front of plot number 603, a spot he avoided visiting for many years. The white cross looked a little crooked, and the brass plate with her name on it had some green schmutz stuck to it. He used the weight of his body to stand the cross upright again, and cleaned the plaque with water fetched from a tap in a corner next to the rakes and watering cans. He dried the brass off with his sleeve. Anni Grens. That’s what stood on the plaque. She’d held his hand tight for just a short time, which ended before their journey together barely even began. It had taken him thirty years to scrape together the courage and longing to meet anyone else. Laura. The autopsy technician whose eyes seemed so present and whose mouth held the warmest smile he’d ever seen. She had made him feel calm despite the fact that they met in the coldest place there is—a morgue. He never understood how someone who spent their time carving up dead people could seem so full of life. He’d sat here on this park bench, debating with Anni if maybe it might be time to meet someone like Laura—and a half year later decided to go back to spending his days on his own. He didn’t miss his meetings with Laura, he was the one who ended it, but it had been nice to have a woman’s help in breaking out of this prison of his own making.

  He was walking back through the enormous cemetery, about half-way to his car, when the phone rang. A blocked number at five in the morning, not many people were awake yet.

  “Yes?”

  “Couldn’t find much. But I got something that might point you in the right direction.”

  His contact at the Swedish Tax Agency. They never said each other’s names out loud, nor made any other personal references, either. They both behaved as if they were being listened to, because they had so much to lose if they really were.

  “It took me a while because so much from that time has yet to be digitized. But the fact that you were able to give me the month and the year helped quite a bit. And it appears, from the handwritten notes I found, that she was prepped for a new name and a new social security number.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “But, unfortunately, I couldn’t find which name, or which social security number.”

  Grens stopped in the middle of the carefully raked path. Graves all around him. They didn’t scare him anymore.

  “Are you kidding me? Is that all? What goddamn direction are you planning to point me in? Straight into a stone wall?”

  “However . . .”

  It was clear that his contact was annoyed. Or tired. Or maybe annoyingly tired.

  “. . . there is some information about placing her in a foster family.”

  “And I repeat myself: tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Unfortunately nothing about which family.”

  “Goddamn . . .”

  “But—and now here comes your direction—I do have a location for you.”

  Grens started walking again. He left the graves behind him. It was even more peaceful here at the memorial slope where families spread their loved one’s ashes.

  “Yes?”

  “Söderköping. Not a big town, located near . . .”

  “I know where it is. Anything else?”

  “I was just about to tell you that. In one of those handwritten notes, I found the name of the department head who made all the arrangements. Probably retired by now. She definitely knows. I’ll text you everything I have on her.”

  The detective superintendent was about to hang up.

  “By the way . . .”

  But changed his mind.

  “. . . the girl. What was her name? Originally?”

  “Lilaj. Just like the others.”

  “I figured that much. But I can’t remember her first name. No matter how hard I try.”

  “Zana.”

  And then it came back.

  Zana Lilaj.

  She’d looked just like her name. A little flower with tangled hair.

  It was still too early for rush hour, and it only took him a few minutes to drive back to the police station and the little café on Bergs Street, which opened earlier than any of the others and baked the most delicious cinnamon buns. At this time of day they were piping hot and straight from the oven. He liked to sit at a table by the window and watch his colleagues streaming by on their way to start their workdays.

  He knew her name now. And the name of the department head who gave her a new identity—his contact had even sent him the address in the town of Söderköping. In her role as the head of that city’s child welfare office she had, according to the notes, been responsible for authorizing the girl’s new placement. She would know the name of the foster family who took on a child with no parents or siblings, would know who had raised her, who had turned her into an ordinary citizen.

  He dipped the cinnamon bun into black coffee, a habit that calmed him.

  Söderköping. In Östergötland. Not so far from the E4 highway or the sea. Grens had visited that beautiful little town on the Göta Canal, first in connection with a triple homicide perpetrated by a young man who cut the throats of his best friends and didn’t have any friends anymore, and then on a later occasion for an interrogation of two elderly women who had been fighting over an even more elderly man, then decided to kill their mutual lover and blame each other instead. So this would be his third visit to that summer idyll.

  Another coffee, and this time accompanied by a piece of apple cake with vanilla sauce—it was never too early for some things.

  “Ewert?”

  Ewert Grens turned around.

  He hadn’t noticed the tall, athletic man opening the café door and slipping inside, until he got to Grens’s table.

  “I thought I might find you here.”

  Short dark hair, square face with a straight nose, and a chin that looked like it belonged to a superhero in a comic book. Erik Wilson. Head of the homicide unit, and therefore Grens’s boss. He’d once been a handler for the criminal infiltrators that the police publicly denied, but privately believed were indispensable. Until an operation went to hell and degenerated into a kidnapping in a high-security prison, and the police chief was forced out, and Wilson moved up. Strangely Grens found him easier to get along with now as a superior than when they were both detective superintendents—perhaps Ewert Grens had finally accepted there was a need for several versions of the truth in one police corridor.

  “Sit down. There’s room.”

  “Ewert, I didn’t come here to have a coffee.”

  “Well, that’s what you do here.”

  “The officer on duty woke me up forty-five minutes ago. Someone found a dead man in a staircase on Brännkyrka Street.”

  Grens poured even more vanilla sauce over the small plate where his apple cake already seemed to be drowning.

  “I don’t have time.”

  “Ewert—I want you to take over.”

  “Sorry, in the middle of another investigation. You want some app
le cake?”

  Erik Wilson shook his head. He’d been standing up, but now he pulled out a chair and sat down across from Grens.

  “What investigation?”

  “Breaking and entering. Landed on my desk yesterday.”

  “And since when, Ewert, do we prioritize a break-in over a possible murder?”

  “Since break-ins started being connected to four murders that might possibly become a fifth. Since crimes started being committed inside the police station. I’m headed to Söderköping in a couple hours, and hopefully I can explain more when I get back.”

  Wilson was searching for napkins and found an unused one on the table next to them, used it to dry off a stray drop or two of sweat along his hairline and his cheeks. It had been raining earlier, the heat broke somewhat, but it was still unseasonably warm.

  “It’s not often I give you a command, Ewert. Because we both know you’re usually more effective when I don’t give you orders. But I’m giving you one now. You’re not going anywhere except to Brännkyrka Street 56, immediately, and you’re going to take over as lead investigator no matter who’s in charge right now.”

  It didn’t make sense.

  Ewert Grens had no interest in socializing with his boss, not even eating apple cake with him. But over the last few years he had reassessed Erik Wilson. And he’d learned this his boss was no asshole. Grens was one now and then, because he could be, but Wilson didn’t have it in him. Besides, Erik Wilson had learned to trust him. He knew that when detective superintendent Ewert Grens said he needed to go to Östergötland, it was better to just let him do it, if you wanted results, which Wilson did.

  So this new persistence didn’t make sense.

  “What are you not telling me?”

  Erik Wilson waved his hand dismissively.

  “What, Wilson?”

  “I want you to form your own opinion without any prior knowledge.”

  “If you want me to put off a trip that might help me solve a homicide investigation that I’ve been working on for years, then I need to know why.”

  His boss sighed, leaned forward and lowered his voice even though they were alone in the café, other than the owner behind the counter who couldn’t possibly hear them.

  “I talked to Hermansson yesterday. Or maybe she talked to me, she seemed to need it. In confidence. She told me about the break-in you were looking into. But also about the crime scene investigation you once were in charge of there—and she doesn’t like what she sees in your face. She’s worried.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “She also told me about four members of a family who were executed with jacketed bullets, half lead and half titanium. One bullet on the right side of the forehead and one bullet under the left temple. On every single one.”

  Then Wilson lowered his voice a little more.

  As if he hardly wanted to be able to hear himself.

  “The corpse on Brännkyrka Street. Where I need you to go right now. The officer who was the first on the scene described the very same thing.”

  “Same thing?”

  “An execution. A bullet to the right side of the forehead. A bullet at the left temple. And according to preliminary reports: jacketed bullets that are half lead, half titanium.”

  Erik Wilson crumpled up the wet napkin, dropped it onto Grens’s plate, which was scraped clean by now.

  “First an apartment break-in where nothing is stolen that pulls you into the past. And then a few days later a dead man in a stairwell executed in a familiar way. It might be a coincidence. That happens. But I’m a police officer, so I don’t really believe in coincidences—do you, Ewert?”

  He was lying on his back. As if relaxing. That was the impression he gave at first. Not dead—but rest with a different ending, an awakening. Maybe it was his mouth. The smile. People who smile seem alive. But as Ewert Grens got closer, the impression changed. The dead man wasn’t smiling. He was terrified. Or at least he had been at the moment of his death.

  He had known it was the end.

  Stretched out on the concrete floor of a stairwell with light switches that sat too high and that were hard to push in. Life can cease in darkness, too.

  Grens sank down next to the body, his damned knee cracked and wobbled and his hip protested, but the pain was almost a relief. It meant life. Most of the dead man’s face, whatever wasn’t taken up by that terrified smile, was broken and bloody, and the detective superintendent’s eyes were drawn to the bullet holes on the right side of the forehead and under the left temple. And he knew—this was no coincidence. Suddenly he was seventeen years younger in a third-floor apartment with a hopping girl, counting her dead family members. He didn’t just move back in time—he was thrown there, slung. Those two entrance holes were no coincidence. They were copies of what he saw back then. When the medical examiner measured the distance between the nose and the entrance hole, the cheek and entrance hole, the hairline and entrance hole, he would find—Grens was convinced—the proportions to be exact.

  The same shooter. Same signature.

  And this was—once again—Ewert Grens’s investigation. Years later it continued with a somewhat slower and less agile, but also older, wiser, and more experienced detective superintendent. Once again Grens became lead investigator on site, responsible for the crime scene, making the decisions. But this time there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d miss a four-by-four-centimeter hole beneath a hardwood floor.

  “His identity, Ewert.”

  Mariana Hermansson was wearing thin plastic gloves while handing him a thick black leather wallet. Grens wondered how she and Sven Sundkvist could already be at the crime scene when he arrived. Hermansson lived in the inner city, but it was still early and Sven would have had to drive at least twenty minutes. Erik Wilson must have called them immediately after receiving the alarm—already confident he’d be able to convince his unruly detective to take over. Ewert Grens couldn’t decide if he thought that was a good or bad thing.

  “Well, we can certainly rule out robbery.”

  Hermansson unfolded the bulky wallet and fished out a driver’s license from a plastic pouch on one side and a hefty stack of bills from the compartment on the other side, five hundred kronor banknotes mixed with fifty-euro bills and a few hundred-dollar bills as well.

  “Real.”

  She slid a thumb over the license’s plastic surface, over the raised image of Sweden, over the UV.

  “His ID is real, anyway. I’m not sure about the cash, the technicians will have to determine that.”

  She turned the license over so Grens could get a better look at the front. The face on the floor wasn’t exactly whole, unlike the one in the photograph, still it was obvious they were the same person. Gray and somewhat unkempt hair, an upper lip that was significantly wider than the lower, a steely, closely clipped mustache, and on one cheek three liver spots, which formed a small triangle and gave the impression of a pair of eyes above a mouth—a face within a face.

  “Dejan Pejović. Forty-seven years old. Guessing from his name and appearance, I’d say he was from the Balkans. If he’s got a police record we’ll be able to get everything to you in an hour.”

  Grens didn’t answer her. Preoccupied. He was trying to figure out what felt so familiar.

  “Ewert? What is it?”

  “I think . . . the name. I’ve seen it before.”

  “You’ve seen it? Where?”

  “In the same red-flagged file you gave me. He was questioned in connection with the original crime, part of the suspect’s circle. So, Hermansson—he is definitely in our records.”

  Grens used the dead man’s shoulder for support as he stood up and stretched out his knee, waiting for that throbbing pain to lessen. The stairwell had been blocked off with blue-and-white police tape, and Krantz and Errfors, the forensic technician and the medical examiner respecti
vely, had arrived with their black tool bags. One deceased person who gave so many living people their jobs. This was the moment they were all waiting for; without the consequences of violence, none of them would have a purpose. The meaning of death as a condition for the meaninglessness of life.

  “Number three hundred and ten.”

  Ewert Grens looked at the dead man, who recently was as alive as he and Mariana were right now.

  “Murder, Hermansson. You know I count them. He’s my three hundred and tenth.”

  Nothing could replace the rush.

  Grens wasn’t even ashamed of it anymore, though he surely was in the beginning. That’s just how it was. How he was.

  A murder investigation grabbed hold of him, lifted him up and pushed him on, gave him something to look forward to tomorrow. The meaning of death as a condition for the meaninglessness of life. Every time someone used violence to declare a person’s life less valuable than their own, the rush arrived just as strong, it welled up from deep inside and got him through his hellish nights. Sixty-four years old, stout, balding, and alone, or twenty-three years old, slender, strong, and in love, with his arm around his classmate—three hundred and ten times and still the feeling was the same. So long ago and yet somehow only a moment had passed. He remembered his first time, as a new recruit at the Uppsala Police Station, called to the scene where a husband had killed his wife. Grens, who had never seen a dead person before, parked his patrol car outside a mansion on Valsätra and followed his commanding officer through an unlocked door. The man was just sitting there at his kitchen table with his wife on the floor at his feet, a bloody ax sticking out of her back. Completely empty. That’s how Grens remembered the husband’s, the murderer’s eyes. A bottomless, wordless pit. The man didn’t protest as the officers pulled him away by his upper arm, and it was there, at that moment, the very first step toward the patrol car with his first murderer arrested that Ewert Grens felt it for the first time. The same rush that now filled this forty years’ older detective in a dim stairwell, and which meant he was slowly getting closer, closer. So distinctly different from that other emotion, the worst of them all, the one he connected to a hopping girl and being convinced he’d found a murderer and then having to meet that bastard’s scornful laugh as Grens was forced to let him go free.