Box 21

by Anders Roslund

  Ewert sighed. ‘No idea.’

  ‘He probably had no idea either. Heroin shut off that awareness. That much he did know. It shut the door on his shame.’

  Sven looked down at Ewert. He hadn’t been listening and was already heading down the stairs.

  ‘Listen, we’ve got a prostitute who’s pointing a gun at the people down there, so please excuse me, Sven. Let’s talk about this some other time.’

  One floor down. Sven caught up with him.

  ‘Hey, Sven.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A negotiator. I need someone who is good at hostage negotiations.’

  ‘He’s on his way.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was her only demand.’

  Ewert stopped in mid-step. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I just heard when I phoned in your request for reinforcements. She got one of the hostages to speak for her, a senior doctor. He described the mortuary situation on her behalf, as it were. She doesn’t speak Swedish and not much English either.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘When he was done with the preliminaries, she made him read out a name she’d written down for him on a piece of paper. Bengt Nordwall.’

  ‘Bengt?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Search me. Control took it to mean that she wanted him here. I would’ve come to the same conclusion.’

  Ewert hadn’t come across Bengt on police business for a long time. Then, yesterday, there he was outside that broken-down door. Now they were to meet again, only a day later. He preferred their private relationship, talking in the rain, breakfasts. His one friendship out of uniform.

  They hurried through the ground floor, following a few hundred metres of corridor leading straight to Casualty. They gave cursory nods to the hospital staff they met, hoping to escape their questions. No time to stop and explain, not yet. Along to the front door and out on to the ramp where the ambulances usually pulled up several times daily, unloading heavy stretchers and injured people.

  This was the point where all available patrol cars had been told to meet up. Not much time had passed since the alert went out, but already Sven counted fourteen cars parked in the large waiting area. Or fifteen, including the one coming through the large automatic gates with its blue light still rotating.

  Ewert waited for another five minutes. Eighteen marked cars, pulled up side by side. He had unfolded a map of metropolitan Stockholm across the roof of the nearest one.

  The men gathered behind him. No one said much. They were all waiting for him to speak. He was the boss here, Gold Command, a large, noisy DSI with thinning grey hair, a slight limp and a stiff neck after a tricky encounter with a wire noose. Said to be a peppery old bastard. They had all heard of him, but no one had worked with him or even seen him in action. He was known to skulk in his room, working on his investigations alone and listening to Siw Malmkvist. Not many people were allowed in, but then, hardly anyone fancied knocking on his door in the first place.

  They waited patiently until he turned round and looked thoughtfully at them. Seconds went by before he started to speak.

  ‘We have a female perpetrator. Yesterday she was carried unconscious from her pimp’s flat. She was brought to this hospital and has been cared for here. So far, so good. So far, we’ve come across this kind of thing before.’

  He looked around. They were listening intently. How young they are, he thought. Good-looking and strong, but what do they know? They probably hadn’t come across this kind of thing before.

  ‘But, for some reason, at lunchtime today, she recovers enough to do something we could never have foreseen. She gets hold of a handgun, God knows from where. She can hardly move but all the same she damn well manages to knock her guard out cold and walks off, gun in hand. Finds her way to the mortuary in the basement and steps inside, locking the door behind her. And then she takes the five people who were down there hostage. Then she sticks plastic explosive all over them and phones us.’

  Ewert Grens spoke calmly, addressing colleagues he had never seen before and who had probably never seen him.

  He knew what he had to do, what was expected of him.

  He arranged for an even bigger evacuation. According to the information from the mortuary, she had about half a kilo of explosives and detonators, but she could have rigged some more or hidden it anywhere. She had passed through large parts of the hospital on her way down there and could have stuffed the shit into all sorts of nooks and crannies.

  He extended the area to be cordoned off outside the hospital. Not only was the access road closed, but he also had tall wire-net barriers erected along the ring road, the whole way, where the commuter traffic was just now growing dense.

  Through the proper channels, he also asked for assistance from the national police force, especially that the Flying Squad should be available and prepared for a possible raid within the hour. He had phoned one of the squad’s senior men, John Edvardson, whom he had met several times and knew to be a clever man, as well as a Russian speaker. They talked through the situation. Even with Bengt there, Ewert felt it was important to have a second man on hand who could communicate in the language they would be negotiating in.

  Sven was standing a couple of metres away watching his colleagues clustering at the ramp and taking orders from Ewert. They were there, completely alert. Truly present. Concentrating on the situation at hand and nothing else.

  He wasn’t. Deep down he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the prostitute from across the Baltic, pointing her gun at five medics who had had the bad luck to be in the mortuary at the wrong time, or that Jochum Lang had just been identified as Hilding Oldéus’s killer, a few floors up.

  Sven didn’t mind his job. It wasn’t that. He even liked it and still set out for work with a light heart in the morning. True, he had considered doing something else, something that didn’t mean having to deal with the consequences of violence, something a little easier to live with. But he had always rejected the idea, tried to think of it as a game or a dream. He liked being a policeman, and had no real urge to start over in another job.

  But right now, he wasn’t there.

  He wanted to go home. Today he belonged with Anita and Jonas. He had promised. This morning he had kissed their sleeping cheeks and whispered that he’d be home soon after lunch. They could enjoy being a family again then.

  He backed away a little further. Partly hidden behind a waiting ambulance, he phoned home. Jonas answered, as always stating his full name, Hello, my name is Jonas Sundkvist. Sven explained that he wouldn’t be coming home and felt awful, and Jonas started to cry because he had promised, and Sven felt even worse and then Jonas shouted that he hated him, because Mummy and Jonas had made everything nice, with a cake and candles. By now Sven couldn’t take much more, so he just held the phone out in front of him and looked over at Ewert, who was nearing the end of his briefing, and at the massed colleagues, who were starting to disappear quickly in all directions. Sven took a few deep breaths and pulled himself together enough to mumble ‘Please forgive me’ into the electronic void that is created when someone hangs up.

  It was June and high summer, so when a major hospital in central Stockholm was evacuated and the main traffic arteries were blocked and lined with tall wire fences, there were whoops of joy in the media. They could smell blood and chaos, some real news to satisfy a distrustful public, bored by silly-season trivia. The flashing blue lights of eighteen cars converging on the hospital had been noted and followed. Now the newshounds were mingling with the general public outside the two narrow Exit-Only passages, where uniformed police were opening and closing the barriers for hospital staff who were still coming out.

  Ewert Grens had asked the police and hospital press officers to organise a press conference as far away as possible, and then to give away as little as possible to the journalists. He wanted to have some peace in the room that had been set aside as a centre of operations, and total calm in the basement corridors near the mortua
ry. He recalled with horror a hostage drama on the west coast a few years ago, when the hostage-takers had been ensconced in a private villa and kept the hostages covered with high-calibre weapons. The perpetrators had been violent men, well known to the police, and they had just entered negotiations and were waiting for the next call when a journalist from one of the national TV channels, who had managed to find out who the negotiator was and get his mobile phone number, called during a direct broadcast and tried to blag himself an interview.

  Ewert knew all this wouldn’t help. He could send the hacks miles away to utterly pointless press conferences, but they still wouldn’t leave anyone in peace.

  An Eastern European prostitute who has been beaten up and then takes hostages in the hospital where she’s being treated – it was a red-hot story.

  They would hang on until the bitter end.

  One of the three emergency surgery theatres near the Casualty entrance had been designated centre of police operations. Two of the theatres were in regular use, but were free at the moment, and the third was on stand-by, fully equipped, but rarely used. After much pushing and shoving, the once sterile tables now served as temporary desks and the members of the operational command group, never fewer than three and never more than five, had already found themselves special places to sit.

  Ewert had to use threats, and then more threats, against the telephone company to extract the number of the mobile phone used to contact the police on the emergency number. The number was ex-directory, but was registered to the man who had made the phone call, a senior registrar called Gustaf Ejder. Ewert printed the number in colour and put it up on the wall, next to the number of a stationary phone in the mortuary that was already hanging there.

  His place was at what had been a surgical trolley, jammed in between two stainless-steel cabinets. He had been waiting and drinking coffee from paper cups for almost two hours, and he was getting impatient.

  ‘She’s winding us up.’

  Nobody heard him. Maybe it helped to say it out loud.

  ‘Maybe she knows exactly what she’s doing. Knows that silence will stress us out. Or maybe she’s packed it in, realises it’s all going to pot and can’t take any more.’

  He drained the latest paper cup, scrunched it up and started to pace about the room, glancing now and then at Sven in the far corner, where he was seated at one end of another trolley. Sven had had a phone glued to his ear.

  ‘Ewert, that was Ĺgestam on the line, just back from a meeting with Errfors about the autopsy. He said he’d like to do Hilding Oldéus as soon as possible. This afternoon, preferably. Then he became curious and wanted to know what we were up to. He had heard about the alert and the evacuation and must have a fair idea that this is something pretty big.’

  Ewert stopped in the middle of the room and threw the crumpled paper cup hard against the wall.

  ‘That little creep! He reckons this case smells big, prosecution-wise. Good for his career, so now he wants in on it. But when we ask him to hold Lang he’s not so keen. Mafia hitmen who beat junkies to death, oh dear! Not such good material for interviews.’

  Ewert didn’t like Lars Ĺgestam.

  Generally speaking, he had no time for the young public prosecutors, all prissy hairdos and shiny shoes, kids with no experience, only university degrees, but who could still tell him what was permissible evidence or sufficient grounds for a charge. He and Ĺgestam had locked horns and come to dislike each other about a year ago, when Ĺgestam had been appointed as head of investigation in a case involving sexual abuse of minors. Ĺgestam had performed to the cameras after each day in court, and had been repeatedly told to go to hell and stay there by Grens. Since then, the wannabe leading prosecutor had been obstructive on several occasions and they had continued to shout at each other. This time he swallowed his irritation. When he walked away from Lydia Grajauskas’s empty hospital bed almost two hours ago, he had already realised that having to put up with Ĺgestam was a distinct possibility. The Grajauskas affair would be right up the young prosecutor’s street, with the promise of plenty of publicity, and he would surely bow and scrape and brown-nose whoever he needed to, to be seconded to this case.

  Ewert paced up and down under the intrusive overhead glare. The harsh strip lights were powerful enough to illuminate surgery, but were just annoying now. He waved crossly upwards. As if that would help.

  Sven Sundkvist sat quietly in his corner of the room, resting his hands on the trolley desk and pretending not to notice Ewert’s pacing and waving.

  ‘Don’t you see, Ewert, history is repeating itself. Grajauskas is driven by shame, just like Oldéus. Do you see what I mean? Shame is what motivates her actions.’

  ‘Sven, not again. Not now.’

  ‘Do you remember what we found in the bathroom cabinet at Völund Street? The vodka and Rohypnol? What do you think they were for? She needed to switch off too. She was ashamed, couldn’t bear to face herself.’

  Ewert deliberately turned his back on Sven and asked a question. ‘How long has she been down there now?’

  ‘You do actually understand, don’t you? They humiliate her over and over again. She hates what is happening to her, but has to carry on. In a way she allows it to happen, but wants nothing to do with it. She tries to live with her shame, but it’s impossible, of course.’

  Ewert didn’t turn round, only slammed his fist into the wall and almost screamed out his question. ‘I asked how long? Sven, you heard me. For how long has that woman been threatening to kill five people who she just happened to come across? Answer me!’

  Sven took a couple of deep breaths, looked up and turned his head towards the man who was shouting at him. He sighed. Then he checked the clock next to the phone on his trolley.

  ‘It is one hour and fifty-three minutes since Control received her call.’

  ‘How long has she been down there?’

  ‘Our guess is about two hours and twenty minutes. Her guard had a pretty good idea of what time it was when she knocked him down. The lunchtime news had just started when she went to the toilet. Say she spent a few minutes there. Add the few minutes it took to ask him to come along and then attack him. We’ve timed a slow walk to the mortuary and added it all up. I would say that she has been down there for two hours and twenty minutes, give or take.’

  Ewert stared at his watch.

  ‘Two hours and twenty minutes in a closed room, with hostages, but no demands. True, she asked for Bengt, so she can communicate in Russian. Since then nothing but long, bloody suffocating silence. She knows that we’re getting tense. Let’s turn the tables.’

  When Ewert had realised that a command group was required for this operation, he had instantly decided that Sven must be at his side, as well as Edvardson from the national force. Next he contacted Homicide and asked for Hermansson, the young female locum with a broad Skĺne dialect. He had seen before that she was careful and systematic and now she had proved to be tough as well. She hadn’t batted an eyelid at the Oldéus interrogation when he tried to provoke her, thrusting his crotch and shouting insults, nor when she gave the little drug-crazed idiot a hard slap.

  The four of them made up the core command group. He turned to Hermansson, whose desk space was at the other end of Sven’s trolley.

  ‘I want you to ring Vodafone. I’ve already told the suit in their marketing department that they have to comply with our every wish. Tell them to block that woman’s bloody mobile. No outgoing calls. None. Next, phone the hospital switchboard and tell them to do the same to the land line they have down there in corpse city. That should do it.’

  She nodded, understood. The prostitute, who spoke only Russian and was threatening people with a gun, would not be able to call the shots. They would manage the means of communication and she would have to accept their terms.

  Ewert Grens went over to the kettle that someone had put on a stool, and filled it with some water from the jug on the floor beside it. Then he took a plastic cup from the pile and heaped in three teaspoons of instant coffee.


  ‘So now we decide if there’s going to be any talking. Now we are the ones stressing her out. We make her wait. Not the other way round.’

  He didn’t wait for an answer.

  ‘And Bengt, where is he?’

  Bengt had held on to her. His hands had grabbed her belt, and when he couldn’t hold on any longer, she had been dragged away, out of the van while it was still moving.

  Twenty-five years. Almost. He was close.

  When this mortuary business was done.

  There was a witness upstairs. Finally, the sentence Lang had deserved for so long. His punishment for Anni.

  Sven pointed in the direction of the door.

  ‘Nordwall is sitting out there, in the waiting room. Sharing a sofa with some of the last Casualty patients.’

  Ewert looked, and waited before he spoke.

  ‘I want him in here. In half an hour we’ll have the Flying Squad boys in place outside the mortuary. That’s when he’ll make the first contact.’

  The kettle hissed angrily. He turned it off, filled his cup with hot water and gave it a stir with the spoon before blowing on it and attempting to sip the scalding, dark-brown fluid. Then a phone rang, the one that had been put on a cupboard in the middle of the room and had only one designated function.

  Hermansson had just had time to get through to the hospital switchboard to tell them about disabling the mortuary phone, but the police emergency call centre had recognised the number and transferred the call, just as they had been instructed.

  Ewert checked the caller’s number on the screen.

  He stood still, letting it ring.

  Fourteen signals. He counted them.

  When they stopped, he was smiling.

  Lydia Grajauskas looked at the clock above one of the doors. She had just tried to ring again. As before, the female student had dialled the number and then held the handset to the doctor’s ear.

  Fourteen rings. She had waited as the dull note rang out again and again. No reply. It bewildered her. Maybe the call hadn’t got through, or maybe the police had simply ignored it.