“You think so?” Mia asked.
“You don’t?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“You don’t seem to agree with me,” he said, “but I thought she seemed very mature.”
“What if Aida is not telling us everything about her home life?” Mia asked. “Maybe she resents having to take on responsibility for her little sister.”
“Right. Or more. It was actually her little sister she first thought of when she entered the apartment, wasn’t it?” Henrik said. “She was focused on her, as if she were worried something had happened to her.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“I’m not sure. I’m just not completely convinced that Aida isn’t holding something back. About their family situation, I mean. She seemed so composed, so resigned, despite having just lost her mother in such an horrendous way.”
“How should she have seemed, then?” Mia asked. “People react in different ways.”
“Yes, but it seems to me at her age she should have been more hysterical, more in shock. It feels as if the family is hiding something, and...” Henrik picked up his sandwich and raised it to his lips, but then put it back down again. “We really need to talk to the little sister. She’s the one who was home when all of it happened, after all... She must have heard her mother’s screams. She would know if someone else was in the apartment and if it was someone she recognized. I don’t understand why the grandmother doesn’t want us to talk to her. What’s she scared of?”
“That something really fucking unpleasant is going to come out, probably?” Mia said.
“For example?”
“I don’t know! Something!”
“Well, if you hadn’t gone at it so hard, we maybe could have coaxed a little conversation out of her, in spite of everything,” Henrik said.
Mia sat up in her chair. “What? So you’re saying it’s my fault?”
“I’m not saying anything, Mia. I just think it’s damn unnecessary for them to prevent us from talking to the girl. Someone locked her in. It was presumably not the mom, so it’s very possible that the girl saw the perpetrator. We really need to talk to her.”
“Okay, the situation is really fucking frustrating,” Mia said. “But don’t fucking go saying it’s my fault.”
“For the second time, Mia, that wasn’t what I said. We’ll have to concentrate on finding new leads for now.”
“Have we gotten anything from neighbors?”
“Not yet. We’ve only just gotten a hold of the neighbor in the next apartment over. We’ll be questioning him later.”
Henrik took another bite of his sandwich.
“And Shirin’s coworkers at the hospital?” Mia asked.
“We haven’t talked to all of them, but she clearly missed work a lot. But otherwise no interesting information yet.”
“So what’s our next step if we don’t get to talk to Sara?”
“Don’t forget that we have two other very important people to question.”
“Who’s that?”
“The two paramedics on the scene.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
PHILIP ENGSTRÖM PUSHED a Sobril out of its blister pack, slipped it into his mouth, cupped his hands under the running water and swallowed as he drank.
With his wet hands still against his face, he sat down on the toilet and tried to collect his thoughts for a moment.
He recognized her. He had seen the victim before, somewhere.
Or was it just déjà vu?
He shivered and saw that someone was trying the door handle. Far away he heard a voice calling for him, and he was able to make out words like police questioning. How long had he been sitting in the staff bathroom?
Shit, he really had to get himself together.
He held his hands up. The shaking had decreased.
Slowly, he got up and washed his face again.
Was it true that he hadn’t tied off the tourniquet properly? He was almost certain that he had, but he wasn’t absolutely sure. His memory was cloudy. Again. Maybe the pills were beginning to have side effects... Maybe the tourniquet had failed, but he probably couldn’t have saved her anyway, she probably would have died anyway.
While he dried his hands, he repeated to himself that few reports were filed among paramedics. Because people worked so closely with each other, it was a big deal to report a colleague. Any mistakes simply went unrecorded. And no one would self-report a mistake. Not among the old crew, at least.
But Sandra was new, and Philip was unsure how to act around her. She had said that she wouldn’t hesitate to report him if he made another mistake. But he hadn’t made a mistake. The tourniquet must have failed. He hadn’t.
He raised his hands in front of his face.
Examined them.
They were completely steady.
* * *
Jana Berzelius turned off the warm water, stepped out of the shower, and wound the towel around her body. She opened the bathroom door and looked out into the hallway and noticed the late-afternoon sunbeams creating abstract patterns on the parquet floor. Then she snuck toward her bedroom.
“Why are you acting so nervous? I’ve seen you naked before.”
Danilo stood there with his arms crossed over his chest.
She quickly walked past him into the bedroom and locked the door behind her. She reminded herself that she had to pretend he wasn’t there.
She had to ignore him completely. That was the only way to bear this torment.
She took clean lingerie from a drawer. She pulled on her panties, dropped the towel and hooked her brassiere. She was just thinking that she should dress in black for tonight’s dinner with Per when she saw a bit of dust float across the floor. She looked toward the door and saw a shadow through the crack at its bottom.
“What the hell are you doing?” she said.
“Looking at you,” he said from the other side.
She grabbed the towel from the floor.
“Stop it.”
“Or what?”
She heard his muffled, irritating tone through the door and felt infuriatingly frustrated. First, she had broken her promise to herself not to talk to him. Second, he clearly hadn’t understood what she had said. But there were other ways of communicating.
Most people understood pain. Even Danilo.
She waited to get dressed until the shadow had disappeared. The hangers scraped against the pole as she pulled them back and forth in her closet looking for the black suit that she had purchased six months ago and worn only once. As she pulled the pants on, she felt how tense her arms were. She tried to relax before leaving the bedroom.
Danilo was sitting in the kitchen, and she felt his gaze as she silently walked past. It was as if he’d expected that she would go in to him.
Her high heels felt cold when she put them on her feet.
“Where are you going?” he called out.
But she didn’t answer. She grabbed her coat and left the apartment.
* * *
Mia Bolander sat next to Henrik Levin in one of the interrogation rooms at the police station. She pulled her hands into the arms of her ribbed knit sweater and sank down a bit in the chair. She looked at Philip Engström, who was sitting directly across from her.
“We’ve just talked to your colleague, Sandra Gustafsson. We might as well start right away with what happened this morning,” Henrik said. “From what we understand, you two were first on the scene?”
“Yes,” Philip answered.
“We appreciate that you both gave us your fingerprints and DNA so quickly,” Henrik said.
“We were just following protocol,” he said.
Mia studied the man in front of her. He was in his thirties, and even though he had dark circles under his eyes,
he appeared to be in excellent shape. He probably worked out regularly, only drank water, and avoided alcohol and junk food and candy, to stay in condition. But who the hell wanted to save lives if you can’t have a life yourself?
“Tell us what it looked like when you arrived at the apartment,” Henrik said.
“When we got there, the daughter was sitting on the stairs outside the apartment door. The older daughter, that is. She was waiting for us. Then, when we came into the apartment and walked to the living room in the back, we saw the patient tied to a chair and her hands...well, they were completely severed and lying on the ground.”
“And by ‘the patient,’ you mean Shirin Norberg?”
“Her last name is Norberg?” Philip asked with raised eyebrows.
“Yes,” Mia answered.
“Okay.”
“Why are you wondering? Did you know her?”
“No, no,” Philip said. “I must have confused her with someone else.”
Mia looked at him and nodded slowly.
“Was there anyone else in the apartment when you were there?” Henrik asked.
“Yes. The little girl, the patient’s daughter Sara,” Philip said.
“And besides her?” Henrik asked.
“No one else, from what I know.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said. “We were mostly focused on the patient, but there wasn’t anyone else in the apartment.”
“Okay,” Henrik said. “And how would you describe the older daughter’s frame of mind?”
“Her frame of mind?” he repeated, thinking. “Of course she was extremely upset.”
“And how was she acting?” Henrik said. “Did she say anything?”
“She mostly stood with her hands covering her face. She understandably didn’t want to look.”
“Did she say anything?”
“No, not directly. She told us that she had tried to free her mom’s arms, but it was too much for her. I understand it, too. I could hardly bear to look. How her hands were...it feels unreal in a way. I can’t understand how someone could do that.”
“We can’t, either,” Henrik said.
“But what I’m wondering about,” Mia said, “is how it happened that you left Aida and Sara behind on their own? Even though their mom had clearly been subjected to deadly force, you left them alone in the apartment? Was that really good judgment?”
“That was our best judgment call,” Philip said. “We knew that the police were on the way. We even met them in the stairwell on our way out. And however bad it sounds, we have to focus on saving the patient. It’s our job to save lives.”
“Yes, but this time you weren’t able to,” Mia said.
“No,” Philip said, “we weren’t.”
* * *
The slices of rosemary-rubbed venison on the plate displayed a faint pink center.
“Oh, that looks good,” Per Åström said, taking the plate from the server.
“In contrast to filet mignon,” Jana said, swirling her wineglass two times.
Per was dressed in a dark suit and white shirt. It was evening, almost seven o’clock, and the restaurant Durkslaget was almost fully booked.
The table near the window was set with candles.
“Tell it like it is. You don’t want to come to my place,” he said.
“I want to save you the trouble of fixing dinner,” she said.
“That’s nice, but I had already bought all of the ingredients.”
“Then you have dinner all set for tomorrow.”
“Can I invite you? We can have ice cream for dessert.”
“I don’t like ice cream.”
“Is there anything you do like?”
“Eating in peace.”
“Just for that, I’m going to talk the entire time.”
“Do you see how surprised I look?”
“Yes, truly.”
“Cheers.”
They raised their glasses, drank and began eating. The venison was accompanied by potato gratin, steamed beans and cream sauce.
“You did a nice job on the radio, by the way,” Per said.
“You think so?”
“Of course. No doubt about it. You have, what should I say, a natural authority. You disarmed the program host completely. It’s obvious you’re an expert on the subject. You can also formulate your thoughts in a way that listeners understand. Your voice is perfect for radio.”
“How touching.”
Per laughed and combed his hand through his blond hair. “I agree with you that the primary duty of the criminal justice system should be to prevent crime. And I think that we have to further increase our standards for the burden of proof.”
“Really?”
“You heard about the innocent father who was released after nine years in prison, right?”
Jana nodded. The case had received a great deal of attention in the media. A sixty-six-year-old man had been sentenced to fourteen years in prison for extensive, ongoing abuse of his daughter. He allegedly raped her up to two hundred times over the course of many years. The man was also said to have tortured her with razor blades and lit cigarettes. But as he sat in prison, it turned out that the daughter was making similar accusations toward other people, one of whom was a trusted police officer.
Per wiped his mouth with his napkin.
“And then a new affidavit showed that the injuries that the daughter supposedly sustained from the father’s alleged abuse didn’t match the accusations, either. He was awarded a new trial and was freed. He asked for a record amount in reparations.”
Jana raised her eyebrows.
“Oh, really,” she said.
“Guess how much.”
“I don’t know. A lot?”
“Good guess,” Per said. “It’s difficult to place a value on suffering, of course, but he requested two million dollars and received one and a half. It’s the highest amount ever paid out by the Office of the Chancellor of Justice.”
“That type of case is problematic,” Jana said.
“Yes, it’s typically one person’s word against another, but what I wanted to say was that what happened to this father could very well happen to another father. That’s why we should increase our standards. More?”
Per held out the wine bottle.
“Yes, please.”
“Now, tell me what you’re thinking about,” he said as he filled her glass. “And don’t go saying you weren’t thinking about anything, because you knew exactly how much he received. You just didn’t want to say so.”
Jana laid her silverware on her plate, took a sip of wine and looked at Per. His differently colored eyes met hers. One blue, the other marbled brown. She didn’t want to tell him about her mother’s death. It was personal and she wanted to keep it that way. Instead, she continued their conversation.
“I wonder how many of those in prison right now are innocent,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “All of them claim they are, right?”
“Just like Danilo Peña.”
Jana lingered a little on the words, then reached for her wineglass and took another sip. She knew that she was taking a risk by saying his name, so she swallowed slowly as she waited for his reaction.
“Danilo Peña, right,” he said, cutting the last bit of the venison. “Why bring him up? Do you think he’s innocent?”
Jana shook her head and took yet another sip. Should she ask more? Or let it go?
“You said that he’d escaped. Do you know anything else about him?”
Per shrugged his shoulders. “The police have searched everywhere. He used to have an apartment in...”
“Söder...” Jana stopped herself. Per looked at her with his forehead wrinkled.
“...Södertälje,
yes,” he said, nodding. “But he isn’t listed at that address anymore. And he has no family, no relatives, probably not many friends, and no home. He’s like a ghost.”
“So where is he, then?”
“Still in the city, the police think. I do, too. But don’t worry. We’ll catch him soon.”
“I’m not worried.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Why is that?”
“Because then I’d get to hug you and tell you everything will be okay.”
“Per...”
“Jana?”
“Stop it with that.”
“A person can dream, can’t he?”
“Please don’t.”
“Okay. In that case, I’ll take the check.”
“No, let me.”
“But I asked you out.”
“You always ask me. Let me pay.”
“If I know you, there’s no sense in protesting.”
“You’re learning,” she said, waving the server over.
* * *
Philip Engström loosened his belt and let his pants fall to the floor. His legs immediately felt cold. It was just past 8:00 p.m., and he was glad that, despite the conversation with the police, he’d been able to end his twenty-four-hour shift on time. Working in emergency services was like playing the lottery. Either you were lucky and got to leave the station on time, or you were unlucky and got a call just before your shift ended, which meant you were heading out again instead of heading home.
He pulled his work shirt off and thought how only losers had regular hours. And in this line of work, you had to be available to put the needs of others before your own.
When he opened his locker in the changing room, he thought about the staff in Stockholm Värnamo who, a few years ago, had defied their directive and changed shifts in the middle of a call. They had been called to a man in his sixties who was having chest pains. After examining him, it was decided that the man should be taken to the hospital in Jönköping. But the ambulance staff’s shift was almost over, and so that they wouldn’t have to work overtime, they changed both ambulance and paramedics in Värnamo. This meant that this life-or-death ambulance ride was delayed by at least fifteen minutes. Upon their arrival in Jönköping, the patient was unconscious; they couldn’t save him in the end.
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