“And that is why we don’t have a search warrant. Are you listening, Ewert? We cannot go in.”
“She’s lying in a trunk. I don’t need any damn papers, I need information.”
He kicked the door again, a bit higher up this time.
“If we go in it . . . it would be trespassing.”
He pointed at the name on the mailbox—SANTOS, written in spiky letters on a scrap of paper.
“The boy named Gabriel Milton is not paying any rent. He doesn’t have a lease. Someone named Santos does. We’re not the ones trespassing, Hermansson. He is.”
Grens had his black gloves in the outer pockets of his jacket, he pulled them out and put them on. Mariana Hermansson saw him do it, opened a holster strapped to her chest, and pulled out a gun, pulled the slide back with her thumb and index finger until she was certain that the bullet was ready in the chamber.
“That’s not necessary. They’re not here.”
He pressed down the door handle. Locked. He balled his hand, moved slightly to the left, and hit the oblong window between the door and concrete wall, put his hand through past the jagged edges and turned the lock.
There was only one light on and Ewert Grens walked into a hall, empty but for something leaning up against the wall that was shiny and had rows of identical small white pearls around the edge. He lifted it up, weighed it, a shoehorn.
“They won’t be coming back here. But we’re looking for information, anything that might show where or how members who are free might help members on the run. If she’s alive, Hermansson, we have to know.”
Grens walked toward the kitchen, but signaled to her that she should stay where she was by the partially broken entrance.
A table, some chairs. That was all.
He opened the fridge, lots of empty bottles, some half full, two unopened. Coke and beer. He turned them upside down and emptied the contents in the sink and then left them there, opened the larder and the only thing to be found there was a packet of gumdrops. He emptied that as well, no red or green left. He pulled out drawers of cutlery and plastic bags, opened a cupboard above the stove and emptied a bag of sugar, flicked through a pile of napkins, lifted the lid on the coffee machine, ran his fingers through a packet of pasta, and unscrewed the bulbs in the ceiling lights.
Nothing.
Ewert Grens sighed, loitered by the sink and the bottles—they weren’t even old enough to carry the content of those bottles out of the liquor store. It was so easy to forget, how young these people who had lived as adults so long actually were.
He went into the bedroom, lifted up the pillows and the covers. A big knife slipped in under the mattress, handle like a knuckleduster with sharp points, a long blade that was partially serrated. He reached in under the bed and found a white tube in a ball of dust, Hydrocortisone-Urea, sniffed it, smelled of nothing. He got up and went back toward the door but then stopped halfway, poked the red rug on the linoleum floor with the tip of his shoe. It was thick, soft and didn’t belong. He guessed it probably cost more than everything else in the apartment put together. He smiled, the lonely pearl-studded shoehorn in the hallway and the thick, soft hundred-thousand-kronor rug in here, they were from the same burglary from a large house that wasn’t in Råby.
The sitting room.
Empty beer cans, some rogue peanuts and full ashtrays on a sticky glass table. Pizza boxes stacked in a half-meter tower. A corner sofa with a blue fabric cover that was big enough for three sleeping bodies. He lifted up one cushion at a time, pulled off the dirty-smelling covers, and turned them inside out, in all five square pieces of brown hash fell out, he guessed about thirty grams each.
Down there, spread out along the bottom of the sofa, gold- and silvered-colored coins. Grens picked them up, rubbed them with his fingertips, let them rest in his palm. KRONOR—fencer’s currency. EURO—drug dealer’s currency. And BAHT—for the Thai villages where every small group went to practice their shooting.
Every time the same world came out of pants pockets like these.
He was heading back toward the hall when he went closer to the flat-screen TV, eighty inches on the living room wall, long high loudspeakers on either side.
“Sven?”
He again struggled to take his phone out of one of his jacket pockets, of which there seemed to be so many that trapped his searching hands.
“Yes?”
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“This time I want you to look in CRS.”
Sven Sundkvist stretched over toward the passenger seat again, the computer on the dashboard and the crime reporting system.
“Ewert?”
“A TV. Model number 47LG4000-ZA. Serial number 906WRGX40359.”
Ewert Grens was panting in the way he did on the few occasions he walked up the stairs. Sven guessed he was bending down, squatting in the small gap between the plastic casing and the wall, trying to read the small numbers on the back of the TV screen.
“Reported stolen. Break-in at SIBA’s warehouse in Kungens Kurva at the beginning of June. One of a total of one hundred and four items that were reported stolen in the same incident.”
Grens examined both loudspeakers, a Blu-ray player, two computers. Different model numbers and different serial numbers, but the same answer.
He hung up and pushed over the pile of DVD cases that were leaning up against a chair leg. Violence, pornography, pornography, violence, violence, violence. And, he picked it up, he’d read correctly, a cartoon, eight installments of Aladdin at the bottom of the pile.
So big, and yet so small.
———
He breathed in the humid, late-summer air from an evaporating, but still all-enveloping dark.
A hallway, a kitchen, a bedroom, a sitting room.
They had lacked knowledge when they opened the door, and they knew not a bean more when they closed it. Ewert Grens stuck his hand in through the broken windowpane, as before. He reached over to the lock, turned it. Her eyes on his neck, he could feel them, she hadn’t changed.
“He had no lease. So, he was trespassing.”
She looked at him, didn’t answer.
“And according to police orders, we have a duty as police officers to intervene in the event of any ongoing crime.”
Maybe he smiled.
“In other words, we were forced to do it. Or are you going to stand here and hinder a police order, Hermansson?”
They started to walk back the same way, but not as fast, and when they got to the big parking lot, Grens pulled a heavy key ring from one of his pants pockets, rifled through long and short and narrow and wide keys without finding anything sufficiently sharp. Hand down in his pocket again and he swapped the keys for a spare gun magazine, gave a satisfied nod when his fingertips tried the hard edges and then there was a scratching noise as a straight line appeared first on the left side of the silver car and then the right side of the black car, the color missing, the kind of sound that gives you a sense of power for a moment.
“The trade-in value, Hermansson.”
He looked at his silent colleague.
“It falls after a while, you know.”
They carried on through the high-rise blocks that wouldn’t wake up for a few hours yet, but Ewert Grens remained in the apartment that those who had the information they needed would not return to.
A knife with a knuckleduster. Some lumps of hash. A rug worth a hundred thousand. An animated Aladdin film. A pile of Thai money.
Perhaps he knew a bit more. He sighed. He knew nothing.
That could be the summary of every gang member he had ever met and would meet.
“Erik?”
The light phone pressed hard to his ear, Erik clearing his throat, he could hear it.
“Yes?”
Half an hour ago, Ewert Grens had hung up while his boss was still speaking.
“Where are you?”
And no one likes to be left hanging in an electronic void.
“County Communications Center, Ewert. Somewhere that’s outside Råby.”
He waited again. Wilson’s voice had been irritated, but less irritated than it could have been. Ewert Grens might think and say a lot about his new boss, the sort of thing that shouldn’t be thought or said about anyone, but he had to give it to him, he was professional, bigger than wounded pride.
“Eighteen years ago, Erik. And this is the continuation. Can you even begin to understand it?”
Someone standing in a vast room, the size of a soccer field, surrounded by computers and screens and staff, the only one who could possibly imagine how it felt, what it was that could hook you, drive you on, give you no rest.
“Ewert . . . what is it you want?”
His voice already different, the irritation over a conversation that had been cut dead had now become the resolve to succeed in a common goal.
“Julia Bozsik. The prison warden.”
Grens was standing in darkness that would shortly be dispelled by a dawn that was already starting some way off, another world.
“Yes?”
“Leon Jensen. Alexander Eriksson. Marko Bendik. Reza Noori. Uros Koren.”
“What about them?”
She was lying in the trunk of a car. And they had put her there. It wasn’t just one hunt. It was two.
“The dog units, Erik. And the helicopters. And the patrols on land and sea. They have to continue looking, the getaway car is out there somewhere!”
He looked around. The high-rises, the concrete. And eight thousand apartments.
“And send as many here. You know as well as I do, Erik, the others are here!”
“You’ve already got everyone.”
“I want more people here!”
“You’ve emptied the entire county.”
“Then call Uppsala! Ring Eskilstuna, Nyköping! Empty all those fucking counties too!”
“Ewert . . .”
“And then, when you’ve done that, I want you to wake and send the whole riot squad! Stop every car on the road to and from Råby, identify each person in every seat, turn every metal heap inside out!”
“Ewert . . .”
“They’ll find more guns, sawed-off shotguns, axes, knives, truncheons, nunchucks, baseball bats than any of them have ever seen before. They should seize them and put it all in a big goddamn pile without recording anything. We haven’t got time for that. She doesn’t have time for that!”
Ewert Grens pointed at Hermansson’s left wrist, the watch there, and she held it up.
“And when you’ve done that, send all the transport police! They’ll search every apartment, every storage room in the attic and the cellar!”
Her watch, small numbers that were hard to read.
But he was certain.
One hour and twenty-seven minutes left.
———
It had started to rain.
Small, light drops that became fat, heavy when they hit the windshield, a hollow sound that pounded against your head.
“It smelled vaguely of marzipan.”
“I’m sorry?”
“In the apartment. It smelled like the taste of marzipan.”
“Really?”
“They’ve had dynamite there. Very recently.”
———
Sven Sundkvist had continued to drive through the dawn toward Stockholm, and Mariana Hermansson had looked for the light halo that always hovered in the sky above the capital, more and more obvious the closer you came.
Marzipan. Dynamite.
Ewert hadn’t said any more, and they hadn’t asked; it wasn’t necessary. Someone who carves up a prison warden and escapes from one of Sweden’s maximum security prisons and then, holding an automatic, frees other gang members from two other prisons has decided on something, and explosives, more violence more force, was part of all that.
“Ewert?”
They had left the E4 and Essingeleden when the call came.
Hermansson detached the microphone from the radio set and passed it to the backseat.
“Yes?”
“Where are you?”
“Drottningholmsvägen. Approaching Fridhemsplan. Just . . . turned into Hantverkargatan.”
Erik Wilson again. The voice, tension.
“I want you to come here.”
“And I asked you—”
“Now, Ewert.”
This time it was Wilson who hung up and Ewert Grens who was left holding a detached microphone and echoing silence.
They turned into Bergsgatan, still full of parked cars that would soon accompany their owners elsewhere. Sven Sundkvist slowed down and looked for a space that didn’t exist.
“Carry on.”
Ewert Grens had a hand around each headrest, pulled his heavy body as far forward as the two in the front were pulled back, and nodded toward a small park with old trees that was squeezed in between the town hall and the eastern entrance to the police headquarters.
“Go up onto the sidewalk. And then across the grass.”
Sven Sundkvist turned around and looked at his boss.
“It’s urgent, Sven. And it’s a shortcut.”
Deep tire tracks on the damp ground, pass card in the slot by the door, into the stone corridor to security and the glass doors, pass card again, next slot.
“Wait.”
Grens took three steps back and pointed at the security phone.
“Call Lars Ågestam.”
The security guard did not point out that it wasn’t his job, and that the public prosecutor was in a completely different building on a different switchboard. He knew who was standing in front of him and therefore scrolled methodically through the computer register before dialing a number and passing over the receiver.
“Ågestam?”
From the very first day they had worked together ten years ago, they had disliked each other. Perhaps loathed, maybe even despised each other. The older, frustrated detective superintendent was everything the younger, formal prosecutor was not.
“Yes?”
“I want a warrant for a house search and to intercept calls.”
They had avoided each other as much as possible and each time they ended up working together on an investigation, as detective superintendents and public prosecutors sometimes do, the contempt had intensified, so that neither of them could be bothered to pretend anymore.
“Reasons?”
“Absconding. Helping others to escape. Are you writing this down? Ana Tomas, Råby Allé 34.”
“Crime classification?”
Ewert Grens pulled out a handwritten note from his back pants pocket, unfolded it, and put on his glasses.
“There isn’t one yet. Are you writing this down, Ågestam? Amanda Hansen, Västra Ringen 102. Sonja Milton, Albyvägen 42.”
“Reasonable suspicion?”
Finger on a row of names, documentation from SAGC and PSIU, known addresses where Leon Jensen and Gabriel Milton had been observed.
“Nothing yet. Deniz Johnson, Råby Allé 102. Wanda Svensson, Råby Allé 114, Sofia Eriksson, Råby Backe 1B.”
“Ewert?”
“Yes?”
“To put it politely, you’ve never made my work any easier. But this . . .”
“I need it.”
“And I need a reason to justify a warrant. Without that we will not intercept calls nor carry out house searches.”
A hand slammed the glass wall behind the security guard as the red color from his face spilled down his neck.
“Get up from that damned desk of yours and go over to the window! Look out! What you see there, Ågestam . . . reality. I work out there. There’s no alternative this time. In Råby, the way things are now, normal surveillance of the addresses won’t work.”
A corridor, two flights of stairs, another corridor.
They entered the heart of the police headquarters, the County Communications Center, a room full of three screens at every desk and walls covered in considerably l
arger screens—a room that was alive. Every emergency call in Stockholm county came through here, the position of every police car was registered and followed, the security cameras at Zinkensdamm metro station or Sergels Torg or one of the exits from Nynäsvägen, places that existed here the minute anyone wanted to visit them.
Grens, Sundkvist, and Hermansson made their way past occupied workstations toward the round table in one of the corners, to Erik Wilson and the chief of staff and then to P1 and P3k and P7. They were doing what Grens probably should also do but never would, drinking coffee and looking at papers and bemoaning the lack of resources in a seemingly never-ending staff meeting, the only purpose of which was to say that it had taken place.
More coffee cups than usual. Empty, half full.
They had been sitting there for twelve hours—evening had turned to night had turned to dawn—but they didn’t look tired, that’s how it worked, things happened and would perhaps happen, someone else’s trauma or anteroom to insanity, it was never anything anyone said, but was the driving force to what became a policeman’s prerogative.
“He’ll just continue.”
Grens had sat down on the empty chair to the right of his boss.
“And escape from every prison.”
Erik Wilson looked at him. In the way colleagues do when you talk about something that others don’t understand.
“He’ll carry on . . . in the way he started.”
They had stood beside each other, white lab coats over their uniforms. And watched a life being born.
“You said it was urgent.”
Wilson nodded at the wall with ten screens, each one a meter square—deserted highways with watchful streetlamps, silent buildings that would sleep on for a while yet, others that captured the odd drunk on his way home, cameras that were all installed high up.
“I want you to look at the bottom left.”
An almost black screen.
Faint light somewhere in the background, a narrow paved road in the foreground, a couple of low houses if he peered long enough into the dark.
“We got a call from one of the helicopters fourteen minutes ago. And have since downloaded the picture they wanted us to look at.”
Grens moved closer, he didn’t want anything between him and the screen.
“Ten hours in the air. They’ve concentrated their search on the area north of the tolls, the stretch from Aspsås prison all the way to Haga. But it was when they got here that they put in a call.”
Two Soldiers Page 23