Two Soldiers Read online

  The shape of three cars grew out of the dark next to the last single-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac.

  “Söderby. Twenty-three miles northwest of the city center. They searched the nearby park with a heat camera, the warehouses are linked by the dense undergrowth. Then suddenly it registered faint heat.”

  It was still raining heavily, big drops on the camera lens.

  “There, to be precise. The lighter car.”

  He zoomed in again, a big white car became even bigger.

  “The trunk. Something giving off heat. Something that isn’t moving.”

  Ewert Grens found it hard to stand still.

  A couple of hours earlier. STORBODA. 19:23. CAMERA 14. Three men had gotten out of a car and started to run. Then the driver had stopped, slammed his hand on the trunk, shouted something.

  Grens moved in even closer to the wall of screens.

  “Can you call the helicopter?”

  Three computer screens and a microphone in front of the operator at the desk beside him.

  “Yes.”

  “I want it from another angle. I want to see the car at an angle from the front.”

  “But the heat is registered in the trunk.”

  “At an angle from the front.”

  Ewert Grens, Sven Sundkvist, Mariana Hermansson, and Erik Wilson followed every movement of the helicopter as the camera moved perspective and the car became clearer in the bright light.

  A bit farther down. Slightly more to the left.

  Until it fell on the hood of the car. And the small round metal symbol that Grens had expected to see.

  “Mercedes.”

  He turned to the operator again.

  “I want you to link up to the position map.”

  The square screen to the right of the white car on a deserted street become a road system with hundreds of small shining lights, half moving restlessly in different directions, half standing still—the exact position of all patrol cars.

  Grens was standing so close that he could touch them, he searched for light spots closest to where the illuminated car was.

  There.

  Two small lights that indicated two patrol cars, a road block, the intersection E18 and route 267.

  “They’re too far away.”

  His finger on the flat glass to the left, it left a mark on the sensitive electrics.

  “She’s lying in there and they’re too far away.”

  There.

  Another one.

  Ewert Grens measured in the air—not even a kilometer. Unit 2319. A motorcycle some way down Rotebroleden.

  He grabbed the operator’s microphone and turned it toward him.

  “Two-three-one-nine.”

  All that blasted crackling.

  “Two-three-one-nine!”

  More crackling. And a faint voice.

  “Two-three-one-nine. Over.”

  “I want you to reroute. One kilometer east. The end of Söderbyvägen. Now!”

  ———

  The room that was so full of life suddenly fell silent and workstations switched to screen-save as hundreds of eyes focused on a wall where the meter-high TV screens were linked up to become part of one enormous image.

  A motorcycle moving at great speed toward the city center, powerful searchlights concentrating on a stationary white car.

  Ewert Grens had a firm grip on the microphone.

  “The trunk. She’s been in there for . . . hurry up . . . if she’s still breathing . . . force it open now!”

  The helicopter moved closer. The raindrops were even bigger.

  Wide reflective strips around wrists, stomach, shins, that scattered the dark when the motorcycle driver stopped, opened one of the panniers and took out two long objects.

  A wrench. A screwdriver.

  With the microphone, Grens pointed at what was happening only three meters from him, and yet, several kilometers away.

  “Give him more light!”

  The helicopter sank lower, even closer.

  A new searchlight was switched on and the white helmet drowned in the bright light as the screwdriver was forced into the lock on the trunk and the end knocked hard with the wrench, once, twice, the third time he hit his hand, then again, the fourth time the screwdriver was forced in sufficiently far, the wrench gripped it and turned the point around a full turn; if there had been any sound they would have heard the lock mechanism breaking.

  The motorcycle officer turned to the camera briefly, as if he was looking at them so he didn’t need to feel alone.

  Suddenly the picture vanished, dissolved, gone.

  The helicopter had tried to get even closer and the ten large screens slid out of focus. The beam of light doggedly focused on the trunk while the helicopter pilot angled the camera, turned, zoomed out, turned, turned again.

  And slowly the picture cleared.

  It was hard to comprehend what it was they could see.

  Something dark, quite large, in the middle of the trunk. Something that wasn’t moving. Someone who wasn’t moving.

  A body resting on its left side. The face turned away. A woman’s long hair. Silver tape stuck to her neck.

  The police officer looked into the open trunk.

  And turned around for the second time, toward the camera, he still didn’t want to be alone.

  He sees the face, the color of the skin, almost gray. But the sound, it vanishes.

  The persistent sound from the helicopter, not many meters above his head, is no longer there.

  Of course he sees it. It’s there, big and powerful, the wind beating his cheeks, it comes in even closer, but he can’t hear it.

  He’s moving in a world without sound.

  He pulls off the tape that hides her lips, puts two fingers into her mouth, pulls something that feels like material out of her throat, grabs hold of her jacket and shirt and pants, pulls her toward him.

  ———

  He sits down on the edge of the trunk and puts his hand to her face while he waits for the ambulance, his fingertips lightly on her soft skin.

  Now he can see her eyes. Now he can hear again. Now he knows.

  The car that stood parked in the middle of the grass had cut deep tracks in the small, fragile park with no name that linked the eastern entrance of the Kronoberg police headquarters with the city hall. Detective Inspector Sven Sundkvist opened the driver’s door and got in.

  He was ashamed.

  He was, after all, the type who would be—a hard-won, cultivated lawn, just to gain fifteen seconds.

  Hermansson beside him in the passenger seat, he turned the key, started the engine, and waited for the man who was never ashamed to get in too.

  “I’m driving.”

  Ewert Grens stayed standing where he was until Sven had moved.

  “From now on, until the end of this fucking investigation, you’ll sit in the back.”

  Blue light on the roof and rain drumming on the windows and metal as they turned from Drottningholmsvägen toward Tranebergsbron. Grens drove fast, but still put his hand out for the cell phone that was lying in front of him on the dashboard.

  “Where are you?”

  “Where I always am.”

  Nils Krantz from Forensics, who had been around in Kronoberg as long as Ewert Grens.

  “I want you to leave your microscope and come to a car trunk in Söderby.”

  “A car trunk?”

  “Yes.”

  Quick movements in a laboratory that was at once large yet cramped, sinewy hands packing a forensic scientist’s tools into a black bag on his way to a dark blue van in the Kronoberg garage.

  “Who?”

  “A woman.”

  “In what state?”

  Grens held the wheel tight with his free hand.

  “In what state, Ewert?”

  “Dead.”

  The crown of Tranebergsbron, a metro train on one side of the car and the oncoming traffic on the other, and way below, the choppy water of t
he Mälaren.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who certified the death?”

  “No one as yet. But someone at the hospital will. Soon.”

  Nils Krantz paused, coughed.

  “I’ll go. To the body.”

  “We’re on our way to what is presumably a murder scene. Jump in your fucking van and stop babbling.”

  “The body is also a presumed murder scene. That’s where we’re going, Ewert. First and foremost. The car trunk will wait for us.”

  Ewert Grens slowed down as the car approached the first set of traffic lights at one end of the bridge, a sharp U-turn, then he made another call, this time to the vast room with the big screens, CCC, and ordered a patrol car to wait at the main entrance to the Karolinska hospital.

  “Hermansson.”

  He turned toward her, then back to keep his eyes on the bridge and the rain and the road.

  “You’ll be picked up when we get to the hospital. Go out to Söderby and the car. Make sure that it’s cordoned off and guarded by uniformed police, that everything else outside is covered until this lousy weather has passed, and that if anything, anything at all, Hermansson, blows away in the wind, that a picture has been taken of it beforehand. I want to know exactly how it was lying, where it was lying.”

  Sven Sundkvist hadn’t sat in the backseat for years. It was Ewert’s place. The one he normally chose and where he’d stayed ever since the day that the only person he’d ever cared for died, had forever left her room in a care home for those who couldn’t take part in daily life. Now Ewert was sitting in front of him. In the driver’s seat. His broad neck, driving fast and erratically, Sven had thought it was lack of practice for the first kilometer, but now realized it was something else.

  Something that had just happened.

  When a helicopter sank lower, closer. When a motorcycle police officer used a wrench to hit a screwdriver.

  When they stood side by side in front of the huge image on the screens and saw a young woman’s face.

  Ewert had known even then. She was dead. And he’d changed, as he always did when death came calling and someone had stolen another person’s life. It usually started with his breathing, heavier, deeper, then his movements, agitated, brusque. His eyes sharper, his neck flushed, the vein on his temple swollen. All adding up to an anger that needed room.

  Sven Sundkvist looked at the stocky, furrowed neck in front of him, forced himself not to blink until everything became fuzzy.

  An anger that left room for nothing else.

  Ewert Grens’s driving force, and Sven had learned to recognize it.

  But this time the anger was different. His movements, his voice—he was driven in a way that Sven had never seen, and he didn’t know how to deal with it.

  The rage that resembled sorrow.

  ———

  The patrol car was waiting outside the main entrance to the Karolinska hospital, engine running, and two uniformed police officers in front. Hermansson nodded to her boss and to Sven and got out of one car and into the other and disappeared while Grens rolled slowly toward the emergency room to wait outside the closed gates.

  Both vehicles arrived at roughly the same time.

  The ambulance from the right, no siren, but the blue light flashing and reflecting in the row of windows. The black or dark blue forensics van from the left, Nils Krantz’s tired face behind the wheel.

  The gates slid open and the three vehicles drove in and parked next to each other by the loading dock. Grens and Sundkvist stayed in the car, a few minutes were enough to witness a screaming child being admitted farther up, blue in the face, about five years old; closer at hand, a drunk young man was already being taken down the corridor, conscious, but with blood pouring from his head and nose.

  The emergency-room ambulance entrance in any major city is a strange place.

  Some people who will live on with fear. Some who will not remember. And those who no longer exist.

  Sven was watching the ambulance that was nearest, the driver got out of the front seat and hurried to the back, opened the doors, everything looked as it should, someone in a green and yellow uniform sitting beside someone lying under a blanket on a gurney.

  It didn’t look like it should at all.

  Sven could see the face above the green and yellow. He shouldn’t be able to do that. The arm should be in the way. It should be moving up and down, should be squeezing the ball-size BVM resuscitator that covered a mouth and a nose, twice for every two breaths outside her body and then to her chest, taking the other hand and both pressing a point just under her breastbone, thirty compressions to the arrested heart.

  “Status?”

  The first doctor had come out from the hospital building via the narrow doors to the ER and was running toward the ramp.

  “Young woman, identity not yet known.”

  The yellow and green uniform left its place in the ambulance and rolled out the gurney it had been watching.

  “Found in a locked car trunk. The police ordered transport to Karolinska hospital.”

  The yellow and green uniform gave his report as he steered the gurney to the ramp on his own. Sven Sundkvist remained still.

  It didn’t look like it should at all.

  There should have been two of them. There should have been someone else walking beside the gurney, who carried on with the ventilation and heart massage while the doctor checked the papers that spewed out of the ECG machine that should be situated above the unmoving woman’s head.

  “No attempts at resuscitation. Either at the scene or in the ambulance.”

  He knew. Ewert knew as well. They had stood side by side and seen her face on a ten-meter wide screen. But that wasn’t the way he was made. This fucking fear of death. Or not death, so much as not being alive. And as long as he didn’t think about it, refused to see it, then it didn’t exist either.

  The blue uniform.

  She was lying in the fetal position.

  The yellow and green uniform continued to roll the gurney in front of him toward the trauma room and the next doctors. Grens hurried behind it, Sven a few steps behind him, watching his boss’s face, the tired eyes, the tight lips.

  “She’s dead.”

  The gurney didn’t stop. But it did perhaps slow down. The young doctor didn’t look at him when she spoke.

  “And who are you?”

  “Grens, City Police. I want to have a closer look at the body.”

  She didn’t answer, continued on into the trauma room, as did Grens. The gurney was pushed into the middle of the room and the blue uniform was lifted over onto a bed.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Leave.”

  “Her body is a murder scene. We need to work with it.”

  The doctor looked at him now for the first time.

  “She has not been declared dead yet.”

  The tired eyes, the tense face that Sven didn’t recognize.

  “That’s just a formality. She’s been dead for some time.”

  ———

  Ewert Grens had walked away from the bed and the doctor with the sharp voice and emptied the grumbling vending machine of almond slices and sandwiches and then sunk down into a sofa in a corner of the ER waiting room.

  “He attacked her, threatened her.”

  He wasn’t talking to Sven, who was sitting close by, he hadn’t even noticed, nor was he talking to any of the coughing, snuffling, sick, weak, limping, sore bodies that filled all the chairs in the waiting room, probably not even to himself.

  “He stabbed her, kidnapped her, killed her.”

  It was just something that had to get out. In the same way that the kind of anger that gnaws and prods you inside has to come out. He thought about pieces from his past: her lying under a tiny, white cross in a huge, impersonal graveyard and about him lying on the floor of a mortuary, shot, and him lying stabbed to death in a sho
wer room in prison, and that it didn’t matter whether it was someone he’d loved, or his best friend, or someone he’d never met alive, they all belonged together in a very obvious way that the girl lying on the bed in the trauma room did not.

  And only he could see that, feel that.

  ———

  A cup of black coffee. And a sandwich with dry cheese and something red, red pepper maybe.

  Grens was restless, wandered impatiently up and down the hospital corridor, fiddled with his cell phone, dialed the number for the switchboard at the police headquarters in Kronoberg, asked to be transferred to Ågestam, the public prosecutor.

  “You again?”

  “Have you done what I said? Got up from your fucking desk and gone over to the window and had a look at reality?”

  “You’ll get a warrant for intercepting phone calls. But not for a house search. Not without reasonable suspicion and a crime classification.”

  “Ågestam—”

  “And you can shout as much as you like.”

  Ewert Grens didn’t shout. He whispered.

  “She’s dead.”

  You.

  “He killed her.”

  “He?”

  “Yes.”

  It’s you.

  “You know who?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  It just carries on through you.

  “Grens, how do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  Cell phone in his hand, if he lowered it, held it closer to the floor, the prosecutor’s voice was almost bearable.

  “Grens, can you hear me? You wanted a search warrant and didn’t get one because I don’t have anything to go on. And you know that won’t stand up in court. I need evidence. You know that too. So I don’t understand . . . what is it that you actually want?”

  It just carries on through you.

  And I’m the only one who can see that, feel that.

  “I want you to prepare. For locking him up.”

  The rumble of the coffee machine blended with the regular beeps from the ER rooms and he raised the phone to his ear again, the prosecutor’s voice was clearer.

  “Grens, these criminal networks, you know how it works, when you send them to me to send them to court, we can’t touch them. We can’t reach them, Grens, not all the way, the gap is too wide. Old members of the jury, and even older members of the jury who have never walked through a high-rise estate and have never met a gang member, are expected to sit opposite them and try to understand how a criminal network operates; how a core of only a handful of members with high criminal status surround themselves with a large number of younger children whenever they commit crimes, the kind who buzz around and are prepared to do anything, whatever it takes to belong. That this really exists, here in Sweden, really truly. Every time I’ve brought proceedings, I’ve not succeeded in convincing the court fully of the power, size, how things will look outside our windows very soon if we don’t get them to understand.”