by Jens Lapidus
She knew there had to be a connection she wasn’t seeing. Had Benjamin killed his own father out on Värmdö? Maybe he’d seen an opportunity, given that his father was already officially dead. She needed to get away from those thoughts. It made no difference what had actually happened: she was his defense counsel. She had to take his plea and work with it, fight for it, as long as she followed the law and the codes of practice. And now that he could say more than the occasional word or two, it was clearer than ever that he denied the crime. Her job was to fight for that stance.
Then there was Teddy. He refused to get in touch. She wondered whether he was annoyed that she’d attacked him after everything that happened at the barn—but she’d seen him at the courthouse since then.
It bugged her. The fact that she wanted to talk to him. See him. It wasn’t just about their work together.
She grabbed her bag. Fished out the Läkerol box. Shook out a pill. Stesolid—her friend. Her mom had already called five times, wondering when she’d be home. “It’s Saturday, surely you’re not going to be working all night?” Emelie had given evasive answers. She didn’t have time for a lecture on how a firm like Leijon should treat its staff over the summer. “Your dad’s put up the blackout curtains in the living room. Good, eh?” Emelie hummed in response.
“Hello, hello. Burning the midnight oil, are we?”
It was eleven thirty. Emelie spun around. Magnus Hassel was leaning against the doorframe. Her box of pills was still on the table.
Magnus had an orange pocket square in his jacket pocket.
“Tons to do this time of year.”
“True, plus I’ve been off,” said Emelie.
“Right, we talked about that. Everything okay? Are you feeling better now? Will we be seeing you back here full-time?”
“I hope so. I don’t really know what was up with me. I feel a lot better now anyway.”
Magnus took a step forward.
He was almost directly above the box now. Emelie glanced at it—it was wide open. If he looked down and studied the contents, he’d see it was filled with pale capsules rather than the usual green sweets.
He said: “And you’ve been hanging out in Kungsholmen, I hear?”
Emelie felt the color drain from her face. Kungsholmen—that was where the courtroom was. She didn’t know how Magnus could’ve found out she’d been there for the remand hearing. Must be some lawyer she didn’t know about who’d squealed to Leijon.
If Magnus found out what she was up to, that would be it.
“Nah, not really,” she answered evasively.
Magnus unbuttoned his jacket and leaned back against her desk. He always did that: unbuttoned it before he sat down anywhere. The box of pills was just inches from his leg.
If he knew she’d taken on the case despite him expressly telling her not to, there’d be no way back.
He leaned forward. “No? Because I heard from Jossan you two had fun the other night. At her place.”
And with that, Emelie understood: Josephine lived in Kungsholmen, just a few hundred yards from the courts. Magnus clearly knew she’d been there, to Jossan’s place. He wasn’t talking about her other trips to Kungsholmen. She felt her shoulders drop. Her fingers relax.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m having a little summer party at my place in the country on Friday. It’d be great if you could come.”
Emelie breathed out. “Sure,” she said.
He picked up the Läkerol box and held it in his hand. Emelie froze. What was he going to do now? It was so dumb. If she got the boot for taking on the defense case, she only had herself to blame, but if they kicked her out because of the pills, that would be pure bad luck.
Magnus shuffled close, put the box down. He’d clearly just wanted to move it.
“You can come with Jossan and the others from the department. I’m going to book a water taxi from Stavsnäs.”
45
Two weeks in custody now. The only okay part of each day: the hour on the roof. Kerim always had his turn outside then, always the same time. They passed each other cigs between the slats, they talked, sometimes they just walked around, like caged tigers at the zoo. Kerim right now: the only person he talked to. Nikola had never even seen the guy properly, just caught a glimpse of his silhouette through the gaps in the bars.
Today: another nice day. Strips of sunlight through the bars. Nikola wondered why they even needed bars above their heads—the walls were thirteen feet high: it wasn’t like anyone could climb over them. And if someone did manage to pull a Spider-Man, they wouldn’t have anywhere to go. Jumping a hundred feet to the ground was hardly an option. There was a reason they were on the roof.
Kerim said: “I’m buzzin’ today, man.”
“What about?”
“Everythin’. Honestly, everything. I get to see my kid today.”
“Nice, supervised visit?”
“Something like that.”
“Think I’m seeing my lawyer.”
“Who you got?”
“Her name’s Emelie Jansson.”
“Never heard of her. She any good?”
Nikola didn’t really know. “Hope so,” he said.
Kerim moved inside his cage. He seemed to be walking around, thumping the bars. They rattled.
“I’ve had a bunch of them, but I’ve got Pehr Söder now. He’s pretty sweet.”
“Does what you want? Talks to the guys on the outside?”
“Nah, man, actually no. And I respect him for it, ’cause I know he’s one of the best. He cracks the witnesses like eggs.”
“When’d you have him last?”
“That whole Safe City thing, you hear about it?”
“Nope.”
“I mean…,” Kerim began. He still seemed to be moving around his cage: his voice would occasionally disappear. “I did a few years, theft. But when I got out, I screwed things up right away. The more crap I got tangled up in, the better stuff the county and social services came up with. In the end, they fixed it so I was a group leader in their Safe City project. It was sweet. Free jackets, a place we could hang out at night when we weren’t out patrolling. But the best was the actual patrolling—they fucking paid me for it, to go out there, recruiting brothers.”
“That’s insane.”
“They’ve only got themselves to blame. Listen: my old man, he ran from the Turks, went to fucking university in Germany—he’s insanely smart. But here, he’s an unemployed nobody, he’s applied to hundreds of things but all he can get’s work as a cleaner on the metro. He sits around staring at TV from back home all day, eating börek and smoking Marlboros. Like all the other brothers’ parents. ’Course I want the guys to work for me. Wasn’t a hard decision.”
A whirring noise.
Getting louder. It was coming from above. Suddenly it wasn’t whirring anymore—it was thundering. Nikola looked up. A helicopter.
What the f— A heli-fucking-copter, right above their heads.
Kerim shouted something, but Nikola couldn’t hear what he said. Hair blowing all over the place, like he was in a hurricane. His clothes flapped.
Nikola ran forward and tried to peer through the bars. It was the first time he’d seen Kerim properly. The guy: built like a brick shithouse—inked right up his neck. Even had a green tear beneath one eye.
Something was happening in there.
The helicopter was still hovering above them. Nikola saw something drop down: a rope, something hanging from the bottom of it.
Kerim moved in his cage: got into position—he grabbed whatever was hanging down from the helicopter. Nikola tried to see what it was.
Another sound mixed with the roar of the helicopter. Nikola could make it out now: Kerim was holding something. An electric saw. Fast: Kerim sawed into the bars on one side. Made a foothold for himself, so he could heave himself up.
Twenty seconds later: Kerim sawed through the bars over the roof of the cage. Nikola watched two of them fall to the ground with a
clang.
The wind. The storm.
He heard a voice. Kerim. He was standing on the roof of Nikola’s cage.
Shouting: “You coming, man? I’ll get you out.”
Linda’s face when she found out.
Teddy’s expression when he heard.
Bojan’s sighs when one of them told him. Cutting.
Chamon’s grin: thumbs-up. The guys in Spillersboda’s laughter when they read about it.
Zoom forward. Isak’s smile when he found out about something like that.
The thundering of the rotor blades was close now. Kerim shouted again: “C’mon, yes or no?”
Nikola shouted back: “No, man, I can’t. Sorry.”
A serious smile. A glint in his eye. A sulky voice.
Two days after Kerim’s escape: Linda on her first visit. Supervised. They had all the reason in the world to allow it: Nikola had stayed in his cage when he’d had the chance to run. It wasn’t even illegal to make a break for it in Sweden—there was nothing in the statute books that said you couldn’t be rescued by helicopter.
The papers went wild. News reports sent sparks flying. Spectacular escape from prison. Precision flight needed for escape. Drug lord still on the run—“Not many could manage to fly a helicopter like that.”
Nikola smiled. Hoped Kerim was somewhere warm, flip-flops on, a cold drink in his hand, a disgusting amount of licorice to eat.
“I’m glad you stayed,” Linda said. “Though I do wonder whether your grandpa would’ve laughed if you’d gone with him.”
The policeman sitting at the end of the table, supervising the visit, cleared his throat. “You can’t talk about that.”
Nikola saw the sadness in her eyes. She said: “Teddy’s not doing too well.”
“What, why?”
“I don’t know what’s up with him exactly, but he’s stressed. Up to something shady, I think.”
The policeman cleared his throat again. “You can’t talk about that, either.”
His mother pushed back her chair. “I can’t talk to my son about his uncle?”
“No, sorry.”
She said: “Grandpa’s gone away, to Montenegro.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but I might go down there for a while, too. Come back for your trial. Is that okay?”
“Why?”
“I’ll have to explain later. Teddy wants us to.”
“Okay, I trust him.”
“How did things end up like this, Nikola?”
“I haven’t fucking done anything, I’m innocent….”
The policeman interrupted them again. “Give it a rest now, you can’t talk about the case. You want me to bring this to an end or what?”
Linda’s eyes flashed.
Nikola hissed: “You just have no idea.”
Linda nodded. “You’ve got no idea what compassion is. You should be ashamed.”
For the first time in years, they agreed.
46
The world did a series of emotional U-turns. Teddy: a walking firebomb. Teddy: a cunt hair from exploding. Teddy: unstable as a smack addict with a newly sharpened needle. But all the same: he had a plan. Squeeze Kum. Make it too risky for him not to tell the truth.
He was working day and night. He hated hotel rooms. He loved that Bojan and Linda had gone down to his dad’s homeland. He liked the fact that Nikola was behind bars: protected. He saw in the papers that some guy had escaped from the same prison in a helicopter.
He bought five cheap prepaid phones, threw his old one down a drain. He wandered around, stopping at different ATMs, banks, and currency exchanges, withdrawing as much of McLoud’s money as he could. He got Tagg and Loke dressed up to take out dough, too: he needed cash, didn’t want to leave a digital trail.
He didn’t bother calling Emelie. The truth was, he hadn’t really had time to think about her lately.
Teddy took detours, made everything he did complicated, changed hotel rooms every other day, turned around at least once a minute. They wouldn’t catch a scent of him again, not through Swedish Premium Security, Mazern’s people, or the cops.
He continued his rounds of the gambling clubs: asked about Mats Emanuelsson and Sebbe. Most people just looked at him like he was an idiot, so he went back to Bosse and Boggan—pressed them as hard as he could. But they had no answers: “We already told you everything we know.”
He went through the material Sara had collected over and over again. His eyes ached. He popped Cipramil and aspirin.
As far as he could tell, there was nothing strange about the divorce papers. He read the preliminary report. He went through the rest of the police documents line by line. Instructions from the prosecutor, interviews with neighbors living close to the cabin, incident reports, crime reports, exchanges with the phone company, trying to get the mast records. Flecks of light danced in his eyes, and he tried to take a twenty-minute nap to sharpen up his senses. Picked up the papers again. The desk in his room looked like it belonged to a nutty professor. There: he was in control again now. There was a crime scene report in the police files. He compared it with the report from the preliminary inquiry, the material that had been made public. Word for word. It was the same report: time, place, scope, photographs. The cottage where he and Dejan had been holed up. Where they’d kept Mats in the box. To which people had come when he wasn’t there, and tortured Mats.
Then he saw it: something wasn’t right. The crime scene technicians had found a cigarette butt on the stone steps outside the house. But that was missing from the preliminary inquiry report. Everything else was an exact copy—except for the cigarette. Someone had changed the report, made sure the prosecutor and court never found out about the damn cigarette butt. Someone had made sure it was never analyzed—there might’ve been DNA from whoever ordered the kidnapping on it.
Next day: he was waiting outside the Royal Tennis Hall, on the other side of the street. The shotgun in a bag on the ground by his feet.
Three Swedish flags fluttering by the entrance. A clock above the doors: ten o’clock. Mazern was inside.
Stable, steadfast Sweden. Kum played tennis with business leaders and start-up entrepreneurs. He could pretend to be fully integrated all he liked—but if he did that, he damn well shouldn’t be hiding things from Teddy. And now: his morning game was almost over. His X5 parked next to the other SUVs and nine hundred thousand kronor rides.
They’d fired at Teddy, hurt others. Now it was Kum’s turn to have a taste of his own medicine.
The building looked old-fashioned and modern at the same time. The yellow bricks—old-time feeling. The curved roof and huge windows—like it was space travel, not tennis, going on inside.
The doors opened. Out first: one of his gorillas. Or maybe it was just Kum’s opponent for the day. The guy was broad shouldered, looked like a bouncer.
Then Mazern himself. Tennis racket in a bag on his back. Teddy took a step back, into the bushes.
Thirty feet away from his car.
The gorilla waddled forward.
Kum behind him.
Teddy would be able to shoot him soon, right in the stomach, nice spread of buckshot from his old Remington—but then whatever Mazern knew about all this Emanuelsson crap would go with him to the grave. That was no good.
Instead, he waited.
The gorilla’s head snapped this way and that like some kind of secret service bodyguard. They knew Teddy was after Kum. They were on their guard.
Other people were coming out of the tennis courts now. The flags fluttered in the wind.
Now: Kum opened the car door. The gorilla climbed into the passenger seat.
Teddy stepped forward. Raised the shotgun.
Bam.
He took a shot, straight at the back of the car.
Could see clearly through the side windows: Kum and the gorilla were stooped down inside.
He walked around the vehicle. Stopped right in front of it. The SUV was high.
Ba
m.
A shot through the windshield.
It shattered into a thousand pieces. Mazern must’ve been covered in them.
A clear enough message.
Teddy ran. Made sure no one was following him on the other side of the bushes.
He’d called for a taxi to pick him up on Lidingövägen. It was waiting for him nicely.
He jumped in. Let them do a few loops until he was sure no one was following him.
He opened the door to get out and head for his own car. But first: he reached for the camera by the rearview mirror. Ripped it out. Just to be on the safe side.
Teddy kept up contact with his dad and Linda. They were enjoying themselves down there, even if Linda was worrying about Nikola. He visited the hospital Mats Emanuelsson had been taken to after the kidnapping, Saint Göran, and tried to talk to the doctors and other members of the staff. One after another, they gave him the cold shoulder. “Confidentiality, confidentiality, confidentiality”—he got it the first time. So he went back to Cecilia’s. Wanted to understand. “He was only working part-time, so how did you manage? Do you know if he was doing anything on the side?” Cecilia cracked her neck. Maybe they’d just been living on his poker winnings.
“He jumped from the boat. Do you know why he did that?” he asked.
“No, but he was very depressed for years after the kidnapping.”
“Tell me more about the computer.”
“I’ve already told you.”
It was all empty talk. Teddy couldn’t take any more of it, and he took a step forward. Closer. He towered above her. Her breath at chest level. He took hold of her shoulders.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” Cecilia’s eyes: wide, like she’d seen a ghost.
“Tell me about the computer.”
Her eyes were even wider now. “Let go of me.”
Teddy let go. Cecilia slumped down into a chair. He wondered what exactly he was doing.
After a few moments, she got up. Smoothed the creases on her blouse. Glared at him. “Get out.”
“Not before you’ve answered one question. Did you make a copy of the contents of that computer?”
Her eyes narrowed. “How did you know that?”