Two Soldiers

by Anders Roslund

  Ewert Grens glanced over at the trauma room, the closed door.

  “Proof, Grens. Give me proof and I’ll bring your murderer down. Him. Whoever that is.”

  The young woman lying in there, who was there to be used, thrown away.

  “I want all four. Blood, DNA, fibers, fingerprints. And then, Grens, the exact time of death. When I’ve got that, I’ll lock him up, and this time for life.”

  ———

  As if it was his fault.

  With the last almond slice in his hand, he leaned back in the ER sofa.

  Every intervention by a police officer has consequences.

  It wasn’t his job to evaluate them, weigh them up, try to understand how long these consequences might last.

  He had learned that. That’s how it was.

  It didn’t help.

  He swallowed some dry crumbs, looked around the silent waiting room, closed his eyes.

  As if it was his fault.

  ———

  She lay on her back with her blue-uniform arms alongside her blue-uniform body.

  Her face was pallid. Her eyes frozen.

  Her mouth, when he got closer, looked almost as if she was smiling.

  Ewert had been at her bedside with a couple of long strides and was standing as he often did, close. Sven stopped just inside the trauma room door, looked at her from there, as he often did. If he was afraid of death, Ewert despised it. If he avoided dead bodies, Ewert always tried to get nearer, leaned forward, prodded what was lifeless. But sometimes, if only for a brief moment, it was clear that his contempt was also fear, perhaps even the same fear that Sven himself struggled with. He had seen it more frequently in the past year, that Ewert seemed to go too close, prodded too hard, maybe it was even stronger than it was for Sven—for isn’t it that contempt is fear wrapped up tight, tight?

  “What’s her name?”

  Nils Krantz was standing on the other side of the bed. The forensic scientist first photographed the whole of her immobile body, then close-ups around her left thigh, then finally her mouth and teeth.

  “She’s dead.”

  “I need to get to know her. What’s her name?”

  He took out a packet of sterile cotton swabs from his black bag, dipped them one at a time in a glass bowl of distilled water, and used them to take some blood samples from the torn material at the back of her left thigh, and the blood that had dried on her cheek and in clumps in her hair.

  “Her name was Julia.”

  Each cotton swab in a separate protective plastic sleeve with a paper back that was then taped closed with the wiry forensic scientist’s name and place of find written on the front.

  “Nils?”

  Krantz photographed her mouth. Two rubber-gloved fingers against the upper teeth.

  “One of her front teeth is loose.”

  “Nils, I—”

  “Like someone has hit her.”

  The rubber gloves opened her still-flexible jaws even wider, a new cotton swab to the loose tooth.

  “Nils, I want him. The youth who murdered her. I want him in the car with her. I want . . .”

  Nils popped the cotton swab in the protective paper bag, meticulously wrote on it, sealed it, and then continued with several more swabs, tooth by tooth along her upper jaw.

  “Nils . . . it’s like this. I can prove that together they forced a female prison warden through the main gate of Aspsås prison and were then involved in two armed breakouts. I can already get them done for aggravated assault and kidnapping. But him . . . I’m going to do him for murder! And while he’s inside, we’re going to smash the whole network, break it down piece by piece from the core out, send every member and hanger-on and prospect to rehabilitation homes and secure training units and prisons with special young offender units and . . . Nils, now listen really fucking carefully, we are not going to be able to do that until we can prove that it was him who forced her into the back of the car and then into the trunk, that it was his actions that killed her.”

  “Him?”

  “Nils . . . are you listening? Blood. DNA. Fibers. Fingerprints. All four.”

  “Ewert, him?”

  “Yes.”

  “There were five of them in the car.”

  “Him.”

  ———

  The detective superintendent stayed standing where he was, looking into a face that wasn’t yet twenty-five, eyes that didn’t meet his, lips that didn’t ask why he was staring.

  “Someone has hit her. I’m sure of it now, Ewert.”

  Grens nodded at the forensic scientist who was the same age as him and holding a cotton bud in her mouth, but he didn’t hear him.

  Not even twenty-five.

  And this horrible unease, it wasn’t anger and it didn’t help to punch the walls.

  “Nils, I need all four!”

  She lay there. And for them she wasn’t real.

  Leon Jensen and Gabriel Milton had played their own games at an unbelievable speed as children. Impulsive, immediate kicks, I have discovered something, I want to do it, I want to do it right now.

  My gain. My satisfaction.

  And they were still doing it. Playing. Other games. So the girl lying there who couldn’t see him and couldn’t speak to him, she wasn’t for real either. She was an immediate gain, satisfaction.

  Cops and robbers. Only the game had changed names. Cops and murderers.

  “Several blows. See here. Above the mouth.”

  Nils Krantz pulled a swab out from the space between her front teeth and held it up. Grens looked at it and shrugged. A stick. And a bit of cotton.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Nor do I. But the forensics lab will.”

  He held the swab up to Ewert’s face.

  “You want all four. Well, you might have your first here.”

  Ewert Grens grabbed his eyeglass case from the outside pocket of his jacket.

  “I still don’t see anything.”

  “DNA. From the perpetrator. This . . . I guess a scraping from the skin on a finger or maybe the back of a hand.”

  ———

  Her name is Julia.

  The ER at the Karolinska hospital slowly got smaller in the rearview mirror, hands hard on the wheel.

  Her name was Julia.

  ———

  A murderer.

  You.

  ———

  He had thought he would visit her later on today, in his new jacket, she would probably have liked it. But the agitation that he couldn’t explain to Sven and that didn’t seem to diminish no matter how long he held on to the wheel or the gearshift or whatever else that wouldn’t break when a grown man gripped it as hard as he could, he couldn’t bear it. And it was so close. They’d even passed it on the way back. He stopped a couple of hundred meters down the road and parked beyond the entrance that was labeled Gate 1, then started to walk along the wide paved path between the square pieces of grass and big trees and aging gravestones that roared at whoever passed. When grief had been an unending ocean, it had taken him eighteen months to dare to venture from the entrance all the way in to this part of Norra cemetery that was called Block 19B, for the first time, to a stretch of turned-over soil on Plot 603.

  You can’t regulate your grief, Ewert. What you are frightened of has already happened, Ewert.

  Since that first visit, he had continued to walk here several times a week and every time lost himself in the strange calm.

  He didn’t manage that now.

  The guilt that he had carried all his life and that he had decided to bury with Anni, it was there again, looking at him.

  He avoided it, stretched over a low, newly built stone wall, and took down a metal watering can from an equally newly built but already rickety wooden stand, filled it, and then watered the purple bush until every leaf was drowning.

  The guilt was still there.

  But it wasn’t her. Not anymore.

  It was him.

 
An eighteen-year-old who breathed criminality and tore people to pieces, classified as one of the most dangerous in Sweden, despite the fact that he was still really only a child, would never manage to get out, since he had spent so long making his way in.

  Grens looked at the grave, the grass, the beautiful, white wooden cross.

  It didn’t help.

  As if it was his fault.

  ———

  Sven Sundkvist was still in the car, the radio on some commercial station playing music that Ewert Grens couldn’t stand, and without asking, he leaned forward and turned it off and Sven didn’t ask why. Every time they headed north and then when they came back, they passed the graveyard. The detective superintendent ordered a short stop, disappeared into the forest of gravestones, and always managed to turn off what sounded like music, no matter what it was, before he’d got back into the car with a damp right sleeve and dirt on his shoes.

  They drove along Solna kyrkväg, past the Karolinska hospital, and out onto the E4, south toward Essingeleden. Neither of them said anything, both still beside the bed in the ER, looking at a young woman who neither saw nor spoke. Not until Grens sped past the exit at Stora Essingen and then Hornsberg.

  “We should’ve turned off there.”

  “No.”

  “Have you forgotten—”

  “We’re continuing on.”

  “Continuing on?”

  Sven Sundkvist looked at his boss.

  “Where?”

  “South.”

  “Where, Ewert?”

  “Back. Back to Råby.”

  ———

  The police station at Råby was a low, colorless building on the periphery of a suburb he had once known so well and now didn’t know at all. As far from the exit from the E4 as from the entrance to the metro and it was possible to see both from every identical high-rise. Grens got out of the car in the desolate parking lot behind the station, walked through the morning for the second time; it was warmer, the rain had stopped and a hesitant sun shone on the wet asphalt.

  He looked around—the windows in eight thousand apartments looked back.

  They’re here. He is here.

  Ewert Grens made for the staff entrance, a small, brown door between two tired rowan trees, and he sighed. Aspsås prison. Österåker prison. Storboda prison. And a young woman who was no longer there.

  But despite everything, they’d done the right thing.

  The staff who’d let someone go because he was threatening life with a knife, who’d turned the barrel of a gun on the security camera, and who’d raised the alarm without putting up any form of defense. It was either that or a bloodbath, and Grens didn’t particularly care for bloodbaths. He was grateful that those who screamed for prison staff to be more armed had not yet been heard. On a day like this, it would have meant just that: a bloodbath. The more closed and escape-proof a prison was, the more violence was needed to get out; walls guarded with automatic firearms only meant that with every breakout, the absconders would have even more automatic firearms.

  One flight of stairs up, a short corridor, past two narrow offices and a small, red kitchen.

  He still knew his way.

  The coffee machine was new, he noticed, a cup of blackness, he tasted it and approved and pressed for another, even though Sven shook his head, another one, just as black. The door to the office and Section Against Gang Crime was closed, but unlocked. He opened it and they went into a room with more eyes than anywhere else.

  The shortest wall, the one closest to the corridor, Target List Alcatraz, long rows of black-and-white photos above carefully worded notes, blue ballpoint, ID number, address, gang status. The most dangerous, all one hundred and fifty of them. Grens and Sundkvist went farther into the room, the same eyes once more, but now arranged in groups over two longer walls; the ones staring from the right were defined as established, so multicriminal that they had left the piles of blue files on the desk; the ones staring from the left had got even further in their criminal development and now could only go further up. Ewert Grens stretched his arm out in an irritated swipe. God, he hated this. A stupid ranking list that became counter-productive the moment it was set: when the authorities defined someone as so dangerous that he moved higher up the wall, that person had succeeded, and would soon know and therefore continued to be even more aggressive in order to get even higher up, be more successful.

  He went closer. They all looked the same.

  The same staring eyes.

  Including the nine faces that had recently been moved over to the left-hand wall, obvious holes from the red and yellow drawing pins in the wall, and two alternative names: Råby Warriors / Ghetto Soldiers. He stopped at the top, the leader of this group, eyes that seemed to hate the most and that followed him wherever he went in the room.

  ———

  José Pereira had a plastic cup in his hand. The new coffee machine was quieter than the last one, he hadn’t thought about it before, just part of the stillness of dawn.

  September, late summer.

  A bit lighter. Almost morning.

  Only twelve hours had passed, it felt a lot longer. He had, as always, been late and run the last stretch from the bus stop, almost fifteen minutes into the first half when he opened the gate near the edge of the woods at Tallkrogen playing fields, and then stayed there in order not to disturb others, watched the green-and-white team on the gravel between the trees. The two girls running around out there with headbands over their long hair. Two girls born fourteen minutes apart. From a distance it was so clear that they were quite tall now, almost young women, and sometimes he wondered how much longer he would be allowed to come here, stand watching, and then drive the growing, slightly sweaty pair in the backseat home. Or would he be met in the same way that he’d behaved toward his parents, with such embarrassment that they finally chose to stay at home? He had never aged hand in hand with his own children before, and every step they took together was a first. He’d leaned against one of the trees and gradually started to relax as he always did when his everyday surrounded by violent youths was swapped for an everyday with twenty-two younger children running around with a black-and-white ball, and right then and there that was all there was: the ball, the joy, the disappointment, all the things that are contained between the painted white lines.

  That was where he was when his phone rang.

  Half an hour into the match, and the number was the opposite of everything there.

  Erik Wilson, the relatively new head of City Police Homicide, who explained that two, probably three members of the criminal network that had previously been called Råby Warriors and was now called Ghetto Soldiers, had first started a disturbance in a maximum security prison, and then escaped.

  Plastic cup in his hand, half full. He left the coffee machine and his pigeonhole, and walked toward a door that was open, despite the fact that he was quite certain he’d just closed it, the Section Against Gang Crime, an office with walls full of faces.

  He had asked Wilson to send two cars, one to take him back to Råby immediately, and the other to drive home two sweaty girls with oversized white socks an hour later. He’d headed back to Råby police station to put together official and unofficial information about the five wanted, violent youths, and had several times turned around to look at the patrol car’s empty backseat and the faces that peopled it, faces he had caught as minors and handed over to social services, arrested as fifteen-year-olds and handed over to the public prosecution authority, and as the car approached the high-rise blocks, he recalled all the visits to the kitchens of despairing, single mothers and it was strange to think that he’d just been standing in a reality that should be every young person’s reality, and yet sometimes stood in such sharp relief to another that no one had ever chosen.

  José Pereira crushed the brown cup and dropped it in one of the trash cans outside the janitor’s office, walked past the kitchen and into the Section Against Gang Crime, through the half-open do
or that he was now absolutely convinced he had left closed.

  ———

  A beige jacket. Only a few meters in front of him. It didn’t turn around. But the big-framed body and bald head and the manner of leaning with one hand up on the wall, shifting the weight over to the right leg, was all too familiar.

  “Grens?”

  Ewert Grens had heard steps that weren’t his own or Sven’s, now the voice. They were not on their own any longer and he turned around.

  “Morning.”

  Grens looked at the policeman who was pretty well middle-aged, but still had thick, dark hair, was still slim, and had friendly eyes, even when he was agitated.

  They hadn’t aged at the same rate.

  “So you’re here again, Grens, eh?”

  The detective superintendent from City Police shrugged.

  “Yes. And I need your—”

  “You were here earlier this morning.”

  José Pereira nodded demonstratively at his other guest, a younger man, closer to the door.

  “You were both here this morning. You were clocked. And because you didn’t even consider following the directive, you managed to undo a whole night’s work within twenty minutes and put our strategy in danger.”

  Ewert Grens turned back to the wall and the group of nine staring faces.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Pereira.”

  “That your unnecessary foray this morning is exactly the kind of thing that we’ve learned we don’t need.”