‘They could have sorted it out,’ Christian said. ‘If he’d had the bollocks to stay and fight for it, then they wou—’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Yes, I do know that. They’d had problems before, but they’d always sorted it out.’
They were fifteen, and both believed that they understood everything. In fact, they understood nothing.
Later, Christian looked for his wallet in the pockets of his jeans, but couldn’t find it. They had shared a bottle of spirits that Michael had got cheaply, out in Salem, and at first Christian thought he’d got too drunk and lost it somewhere. He did his best to look for it in the darkness, but it wasn’t there.
‘Weird, eh?’ he slurred. ‘I was fucking sure I had it with me.’
‘You must have left it at home,’ Michael slurred back, taking a swig from the bottle. ‘I haven’t seen it since we came out.’
They were both tipsy, and Christian was starting to enjoy the sensation of tilting over. Focusing took a while. Michael climbed down from the bench to go for a piss behind one of the dugouts. He swayed, reeled over to one side, and hit the ground. He laughed, and so did Christian.
The fall had caused something to glide out of Michael’s jacket pocket: a wallet. Christian noticed it from the corner of his eye, squinting as Michael tried to get to his feet.
‘What the fuck …’ Christian began as he leant forward to pick it up.
He opened it. It was his.
‘What is this?’
‘Your wallet.’
‘You said you hadn’t …’ The three hundred-kronor notes were missing. ‘Where’s the money?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You nicked my fucking wallet!’
Michael managed to stand up and laughed, dismissively.
‘I was going to give it back to you later, when you’d got properly paranoid.’
Something about his tone of voice made Christian not believe him.
‘Are you a fucking benefits-scrounger, or what? Who the fuck does a thing like that? Give me my fucking money!’
The next minute, Christian was lying on his back next to the bench. His cheek was throbbing, and his jaw ached like hell.
‘What the fuck?’ Christian hissed as he struggled to get to his feet.
He leaned against the bench for support, and once he was standing up he grabbed Michael’s jumper and jumped on his friend, pushing him over and then clenching his right fist.
It must all have been over in seconds, but it felt much longer: they found themselves on the ground below the bench, hitting each other in the face, kneeing each other wherever they could reach. Christian managed to bust his friend’s eyebrow, and his own nose was clicking. One of his teeth was loose.
‘Who the hell nicks their mate’s wallet?’ Christian spluttered.
‘Who the fuck calls someone a benefits-scrounger? Look at them at school, you can tell who’s on benefits and who isn’t. Don’t compare me to them.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Shut up.’
Later they went to A&E and explained how they’d been attacked by a couple of immigrants. They’d worked that out themselves, that that would be the easiest solution. They got stitches and bandages, and somewhere along the line a police report was filed, but nothing ever came of it, which wasn’t really surprising.
As they left the hospital, Michael thrust his hand out in the darkness, without a word. In it were three hundred-kronor notes.
‘When will the others be coming?’ Christian asks now.
‘In about an hour. First we’ll have the meeting, map out our strategy, and then we pep each other up.’ His mobile phone buzzes. ‘Jonathan’s already on his way,’ he says, his eyes fixed on the screen.
Jonathan. The poor sod got trapped with an amphetamine habit last summer, and they’ve been exploiting him ever since. And he’s got no idea. Or maybe he does suspect something.
The television news-anchor is staring into the camera. Beside her is a picture of the leader of the Sweden Democrats.
‘Fuck this,’ Michael says. ‘Turn that shit off.’
‘Don’t you want to hear it?’
‘I don’t want to hear anything to do with that bastard.’
Christian picks up the remote. The screen goes black.
Stockholm. From above, it looks like a patchwork of water and greenery, with the odd cluster of high-rises, suburban detached houses, and other buildings dotted about. People have long since forgotten that the only thing saving them from extinction is that Mother Nature hasn’t decided to brush them from her shoulders. Lifetimes have passed since she last showed her true force, and, considering how humans behave, that is somewhat surprising.
‘Don’t you think?’ the taxi-driver concludes.
I’m sitting in a car that is moving through the streets of Kungsholmen, about a kilometre from the yard in Vasastan where someone pushed a knife into Thomas Heber. It is late afternoon. Darkness has fallen. On the radio, someone is singing If you’ve got no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. St Göran’s is rising in front of us.
‘Eh?’
The taxi-driver sighs audibly.
‘Never mind.’
The car stops on the turning circle. I pay in cash, and step out into the cold. I think I tell the taxi-driver to have a good evening. He waits for the door to close, and then drives off without saying a word. I stand there, my eyes following the red tail-lights as I smoke a cigarette.
Another car arrives. It heads into the car park, turns into a space before the lights, and then the engine turn off, and it stays there. I drop the cigarette onto the ground. It fizzes in the snow.
The visiting rooms are sparse and cool, very quiet. At St Göran’s, they’ve decided that it’s best this way. The place is a storage unit for those unfortunate souls who, one way or another, have stared into the abyss. They’ve seen the abyss staring back and blinking before it tried to consume them.
A renowned physicist is resident here after having attempted to kill his wife. It was covered in the media, the story of him discovering how, while he was spending his nights in a lab underneath the Technical University, she was being entertained by his closest colleague. They had been professional rivals, with diverging theories on why something was the way it was. One night, he came home early to discover his wife and his colleague in the same bed. Exhausted and sleep-deprived, he attempted to kill them both, but was unsuccessful.
Others sitting here fell into psychoses from which they have never emerged, yet all of them made sure to commit a couple of grievous crimes before disintegrating altogether. All are heavily medicated. Surprisingly few had troubled childhoods. Surprisingly, many had no baggage whatsoever.
I could have ended up here — if things had got a little bit worse, if everything had spun out a little bit more. A whisper in the dark might have tipped me over the edge. That might still be all it would take.
‘It’s been a while,’ says Johanna, the nurse who leads me to the visiting room.
‘I know. Must do better.’
‘I never said that. You shouldn’t ask too much of yourself. John will be here shortly. I’ll be outside if you need me.’
‘Thanks.’
She walks out, leaving the door open.
The first time I came, they wouldn’t let me keep my shoes on when I met him. I had to take my belt off, and put it in a plastic tray along with my keys, my phone, and a lighter. After that, they searched me. It was for my own safety, as well as the safety of patients and staff, since there had recently been a spate of attempted escapes. Apparently the renowned physicist had convinced one of the other patients that his family had come to take him to the gas chamber. If you take that sort of thing seriously, which is probably easily done in here, it makes for a pretty good reason to flee.
>
Every now and then you hear them, the noises which reveal that all is not quite as it should be — the monotonous banging on walls, mantra-like mumbling, the occasional outburst. Most of the time, you hear the most telling sound of all.
Silence. As though the world has been heavily anaesthetised.
The sound of clinking chains comes through the open door. Grim is led in by a warder I recognise: Slog. He’s an ogre with a shaved head, freckled skin, and a red goatee. Slog spent a couple of years of his increasingly distant misspent youth on Stockholm’s football-hooligan scene, and he was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He went through one of the Prison Service’s rehabilitation programmes, and before long he managed to use his contacts to get himself employed as a warder. The nickname dates from back then. He later applied for and got a job at St Göran’s, his success probably due in no small part to his physical stature.
‘Leo Junker,’ he says. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages. Good to see you.’
‘Same to you.’
We shake hands. It feels good, Slog has a reassuring handshake. He helps Grim into the chair. This takes a while. Grim’s hands are bound, and from his wrists a long chain runs to his ankles. No one moves quickly in that get-up. It’s by no means standard issue for St Göran’s, but Grim is considered so dangerous that it is deemed necessary. He avoids looking at Slog, instead staring at an invisible spot on the floor, between his feet.
‘We’ll be outside,’ Slog says.
‘I know.’
I manage to smile weakly at him, and then wait until he has left the room and closed the door behind him before I turn to Grim.
The time in St Göran’s has changed the man who was once my friend. The short hair is longer, but unkempt and uneven. The warders tell me that he sometimes rips out tufts of it in his sleep. His medication has caused him to put on weight, making his face seem unnaturally swollen. It has also made him colour-blind, a rare but evidently possible side effect. He might, of course, be lying. Nobody knows. When it comes to John Grimberg, no one can ever really be sure of anything.
When our eyes finally meet, his are hollow and grey, reflecting nothing more than the tabletop that separates us.
‘Hello,’ he says.
‘Hello.’
‘You got them to take my phone again.’
‘It wasn’t your phone, though, was it?’
Grim shrugs and looks away again.
‘You wanted to see me,’ I say. ‘Well, here I am.’
‘How’s Sam?’
‘Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘Did you say hello from me, last time?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I forgot all about it.’
‘Are you lying now?’ Grim says, grinning.
When he smiles, he’s seventeen again, and I start trembling inside.
I can’t remember how many times I’ve been to see him. Every time I meet him, it’s as though I’ve entered a bubble where space and time are slightly distorted, twisted. Sometimes I’m convinced that I’ve been there for at least an hour, when in actual fact it has been just a few minutes. Other times, I think I’ve just got there, and then when I get out I realise I’ve spent over two hours with him.
Grim doesn’t really get up to anything, at least nothing that could be considered leisure. The patients at St Göran’s are subject to strict treatment regimes, are heavily medicated, and those who have been sectioned are treated like the prisoners they really are. Not only that, but Grim is in ‘special measures’, and his visitors are vetted.
At first, Grim would ask me to visit, not the other way round. According to the staff, he doesn’t get any visitors, aside from the occasional police officer who wants to quiz him about some crime that, for one reason or another, they believe he has some knowledge of. Grim has no family, no real friends. The ones he does have are the kind of people who might disrupt his treatment if he were to meet them. A month or so ago, a man called ‘Jack’ managed to talk his way in. He had once been a policeman, which probably explains how he did it. He turned his back on the law, and the force, many years ago, and now does assignments for whoever pays most. What he wanted with Grim is still not clear, but whatever it was must have involved a pay-off of some kind. Since that incident, the staff are even more careful, even more controlling, in terms of who gets to see him.
Despite all this, Grim still manages to get hold of mobile phones and cigarettes. If you can do that, you can also get hold of other stuff. Like weapons.
Grim might actually be insane. Either way, being locked up here twenty-four hours a day can’t be good for him. Grim isn’t a sociable person, never has been, but the isolated world of St Göran’s could grind anyone down. Sometimes, when we’re sitting opposite each other, I realise that I’m quietly suffering with him.
It might well have been this that made me agree to meet him, after a long period of reflection. I agreed on one condition — that Grim would stick to the truth. I realised that he would demand the same from me.
‘If you lie to me, I won’t come back,’ I said.
‘If you lie to me, I don’t want to see you,’ Grim replied.
When I don’t respond, Grims says, ‘She’s not with that fucking body-piercer anymore.’
‘No, that’s right.’
‘Well, you can thank me for that.’
‘I’m not going to thank you for anything.’
‘Okay.’ Grim shrugs. ‘I heard about the murder on Döbelnsgatan.’
‘Oh, did you?’
‘How’s that going?’
‘No idea.’
Grim raises one of his thin eyebrows.
‘That bad, eh?’
‘It’s no longer our case. SEPO took it off us.’
‘Ahh,’ Grim says, sticking his bottom lip out, ‘Poor little Leo, did big, bad SEPO come along and pinch the exciting murder case?’ He grimaces and puts his hands to his eyes. The chains clink, accompanying his pretend crying. ‘Boo-hoo.’
Then he starts laughing.
I pick my phone up. I’ve been sitting here for two minutes. That’s all.
‘Fucking cops,’ Grim says, looking serious again.
These sudden mood swings are another side effect of the medication, the staff at St Göran’s tell me. But they don’t know Grim like I do, and I’m not so sure. He’s always been unpredictable. I read the most recent text he sent, the one I got earlier.
stop getting them to take the phones off me, can you come over?
‘It didn’t take long for you to sort out a new phone,’ I say. Grim doesn’t reply. I’ve suspected this for a while — he’s got someone on the inside, someone he’s managed to manipulate enough that they are prepared to smuggle in phones for him.
‘What else do you have access to?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean.’
Grim smiles, feigning ignorance.
‘Are you and Levin still not on good terms?’ he asks.
‘Me and Levin?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I think he’s avoiding me.’
Grim stares at his palms, as though looking for instructions on what he should do next.
A little over six months ago, I hit rock bottom. To call it anything else would be skirting around it. I had shot dead a colleague on Gotland, in Visby harbour.
That’s bad. I know.
His name was Markus, Markus Waltersson. That day still haunts me, and not only in my dreams. Sometimes I glimpse his face — a face in the crowd at a market or in an underground station.
The whole thing is now referred to as the Gotland affair and it became common knowledge, so I assume that providing the exact details won’t be necessary. I was working at the department of Internal Affairs, and was then posted
to Gotland on Superintendent Charles Levin’s instructions. A consignment of weapons was due to change hands. IA were there, since the police operation relied heavily on informers, but something went wrong. Shooting broke out, I hit a colleague in the neck, and I was then suspended. That summer flew past in a haze of cigarettes, prescription drugs, and strong alcohol. They asked if I wanted to meet the family. I said no. I think he had a sister.
Then something happened. A woman was found dead in my apartment block; she had been shot. The person ultimately responsible was John Grimberg. Or Grim, as people called him. He had once been my closest friend.
Everything could be traced back to what had happened when I was sixteen. I was responsible for Grim’s sister Julia’s death. At least, that’s how Grim saw it.
Julia’s death started a chain of events that shattered the already dysfunctional Grimberg family and swept Grim to the edges of society, to its dark underbelly. He slowly managed to drag himself up, becoming someone else. He decided to go back to the beginning, where everything had started to go wrong. And that’s where I came in.
I was going to lose something, just as Grim once had. I was going to lose Sam.
There is some kind of absurd logic to this that stayed with me for a long time afterwards; it might even still be there. At least part of the logic. It’s possible that he used Sam to draw me in. Nobody really knows, perhaps not even Grim himself.
Exactly what happened on Gotland was never established, besides the fact that I had been stationed there by Levin as a fall guy if something went wrong. Levin had, in turn, been forced to do that by someone else, someone higher up. Secrets from his past were to be exposed if he didn’t do as they said. What it was that would have come to light, I still don’t know. Levin refuses to discuss it.
Grim knows all this. He has asked me, and I have answered. No lies.
‘How does that feel?’ Grim asks. ‘That he’s avoiding you?’
I put my phone away and notice the grey desktop, the distance between us growing.
The Falling Detective Page 9