“You have no idea what you’re missing.”
Three long gulps.
“You wanted . . . you said, you bastard, that you wanted to show me something.”
A cup of coffee. Some meaningless chat about a wall. Maybe it didn’t seem like much. But something like that could sometimes be the kind of warmth that a tired detective superintendent only occasionally felt all the way from his feet to his belly.
“Yes, I did.”
He picked up the folder and opened it.
“A fucking investigation report? I’ve seen it all before.”
“Not this one.”
Ewert Grens held the first document up in front of the boy on the bunk and he moved back.
“You should read it.”
Even farther back.
“Or, maybe, would you like me to read it for you?”
Leon Jensen still didn’t answer. Grens moved the document closer to the young face again.
“Maybe it should’ve been you, you fucking pig.”
Ewert Grens arrested his movement, about halfway between the two of them.
“Maybe it’s you I should have blown up. Not Pereira.”
And now retracted it, put it back in the folder.
“Excuse me?”
“Maybe it should have been you who spewed up your own intestines. Maybe it should have—”
Grens stood up, opened the door, walked out, and closed it behind him, then turned to the hatch.
“As you like. Your choice.”
He started to walk away, seven blue uniforms and one white coat over there, mattresses and injection at the ready.
“Oi, you, pig.”
He screamed through the hatch, like yesterday.
“Listen to me, you pig bastard!”
And perhaps Grens walked a bit slower.
“Yes. I’m listening.”
“What was his name? You said yesterday . . .”
“Jensen.”
“I fucking well know his name was Jensen!”
“Daniel Jensen.”
He didn’t shout anymore, and Ewert Grens didn’t stop walking.
Late evening again. That must be why he never went home to bed. Because it simply wasn’t worth it. The days and nights passed so quickly that they blended into each other and more often than not, he stood, as he was now, by the window looking out onto Kronoberg courtyard and realized that he didn’t know whether it was the darkness of evening or morning.
It was evening. He was sure of it this time.
The night’s conversation in a remand corridor with an eighteen-year-old who wanted to know and was frightened and called him pig bastard, it was as if it had generated energy. He should be tired. He’d sat at his desk for the rest of the night and through the dawn, then in the morning and afternoon had had preliminary meetings with Wilson in an office farther down the same corridor and with Ågestam over at the public prosecution offices and with Krantz, in among all his microscopes and brown paper autopsy bags in the forensics lab, then watched Sven and Hermansson question boys who behaved like old jailbirds and either remained silent or whispered I don’t need to answer that question or just sneered, all these waking hours and still that unfamiliar feeling of not being quite so alone.
He suddenly started to hum. And it took a while before he realized, heard it.
Siwan’s version of “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.”
Music that would never be heard in this office again. He turned toward the bookshelf and the files and the cacti that filled a hole. He didn’t feel angry, or disappointed. On a couple of occasions previously he’d caught himself in the act when he’d hummed or taken a few unconscious dance steps and every time had punished himself, without understanding it, by shouting at other people.
He didn’t this time. He just stopped humming, but smiled, sheepishly, instead.
Ewert Grens sat down on his chair and continued to leaf through the documents he had already looked through. The picture from the youth hostel outside Nässjö, one of the very first participants in the new witness protection program. The man who had been Daniel Jensen the day before and now looked at the camera as Sonny Steen. They had traveled there together in the same car, a silent eighteen-year-old beside him in the passenger seat, watching the only place he’d ever known shrink in the rearview mirror. Only once during the four-hour journey had he spoken: an irritating scraping noise from somewhere in the front of the car had resulted in a breakdown just outside Mjölby, and before Grens could do anything, the boy had opened the door and then the hood, asked for a wrench, and after a couple of minutes mumbled the solenoid, and explained that the car should start again now. Grens held the shiny picture closer, it was a good one, he remembered that he’d taken more, varied the aperture and lens, and this one with the red house at the edge of the forest was so clear and had a definition that made him wonder why he stopped taking photographs.
He needed his glasses to look at it in a bit more detail. A neutral face. Closed, straight mouth. Eyes that looked straight at the camera. Hair that was long and moved in the gentle breeze.
That wasn’t all though. The irritation, the anger, wasn’t visible.
When Grens took the picture, the eighteen-year-old gang leader and drug addict had spent the first two months of his witness protection program in a red house in a forest under a new name and had had no contact with his past—and only a drug addict’s days without drugs could cause the kind of restlessness that any policeman in Stockholm so often met and recognized.
He straightened his glasses and tried to get even further into the frozen past.
The eighteen-year-old in the picture was wearing a black turtleneck sweater. Ewert Grens remembered the irritation that had accompanied major withdrawal symptoms, but also that when he had stood there with his poker face looking into the camera, he had insisted on wearing the sweater despite the summer heat and when Grens had asked him to pull down the neck, he’d screamed no, and so had answered his question. He had injected in his neck. He’d had a relapse. He was on his way to losing. Unsuccessful witness protection programs often looked like this: relapses every few years at ever shorter intervals until drugs, crime, prison once again became daily life and the only hope for a gang leader and drug addict to jump ship and start again was already lost.
Ewert Grens paced back and forth between the bookshelf, the sofa, and the window, as he often did, turning his mind to another eighteen-year-old he’d visited one evening, one night, and would visit one night again, at least, who had been sitting in an interview room with Sven and Hermansson all day and carried on with that damned silence lark that Grens had come to hate and would never learn to manage, which was why he’d harassed Krantz and Errfors and Ågestam and Wilson, so that he could conclude the case without a confession and still safely link a young murderer to an equally young prison warden.
The bookshelf and the sofa and the window one more time before he went back to the desk and opened the forensic scientist’s final report the secretion/DNA comes from Jensen (Grade +4) that started with the results he had been given earlier from the National Laboratory of Forensic Science and the fingerprints unit and that the prints definitely originate from Jensen (Grade + 4) were connected to the restlessness and unease that he’d carried in his breast for so long.
He continued, probably didn’t hear the careful knocking on the door.
One photo of Jensen’s left hand, marks across the back of his hand, someone had bitten hard with a force that only comes from fear, teeth marks that matched those of the dead Julia Bozsik.
One photo of the T-shirt Jensen was wearing when he was arrested, marked with seventy-four white circles around bloodstains, blood from Julia Bozsik and Leon Jensen, and yet another person, Gabriel Milton. Grens vividly recalled a burned face and beaten-up body.
Another knock on the door, and he still didn’t hear it.
Several photos of stolen goods that had been found under the beds of fourteen minors.
> Several photos of weapons that had been seized from lockers in public places and lockers in schools.
An irritating noise—as if someone was hammering somewhere.
One photo of three tires in an empty apartment, all back left-hand tires with traces of amphetamines and heroin.
One photo of a fragment of undetonated bulk industrial explosive, the same as was found in Råby police station and the bathroom next door to the Section Against Gang Crime that was the center of the explosion, which was also found in small amounts on the floor of an apartment in Råby Allé 67, the tenant of which was a certain Eduardo Santos.
Nils Krantz’s report went on and Grens immersed himself in every step of the report that would result in a judgment and long sentence.
It was only when there was a fourth knock, and Grens tried again to ignore the disturbing noise, that he realized that it was at his own door.
He checked the alarm clock beside the phone. 00:30. One and a half hours earlier this time.
And then he looked over at the door that would open on his order.
“Superintendent Grens?”
“Yes?”
The same security guard from the Kungsholmsgatan entrance. The same warden from Kronoberg remand prison.
The same night shift.
“Jensen.”
“What about him?”
“He’s shouting and making threats. And wants to talk to the pig with the limp.”
“Not the pig bastard with the limp?”
“Not this time.”
He hummed quietly to himself. “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” again. And then louder. When they were on their way out of the elevator.
Just like the night before. A group of uniformed wardens outside a cell door, armed with mattresses, and a doctor in a white coat armed with sedatives. And Leon Jensen’s voice screaming I’m going to kill them all.
This time they seemed to be relieved when they saw the detective superintendent who usually slept in one of the Homicide offices, didn’t ask to stay where they were, but moved after silent nods down to the end of the remand corridor and then waited there, watching as Grens stepped up to the cell door.
He knocked on it. Opened the hatch.
“You wanted to talk to me again?”
“Maybe.”
“But not . . . blow up?”
He didn’t get an answer. He hadn’t expected one either. But nor did he get any threats when he opened the door and went in.
The smell of smoke was gone.
Everything seemed to be in order.
The eighteen-year-old was sitting on the edge of the bunk. It was night, but he didn’t look tired. A remand cell didn’t exactly offer anything other than days that could be slept away. Ewert Grens put down the two cups of coffee, one on the table, one on the window ledge by the bars, then he opened the folder and drank half of his cup while the one on the window ledge remained untouched.
“It’s good.”
“That stuff?”
“Like yesterday. From the coffee machine, still doesn’t get any better.”
Grens drank the rest of his cup and watched Leon’s arm reach out for the warm liquid, lift it to his mouth, swallow, and then promptly put it down again.
“Are you trying to kill me, you pig bastard?”
Ewert Grens leaned toward the barred window and caught the almost full cup, emptied it, crushed it, and smiled.
“Your dad.”
The folder on his lap, the top document, and Leon didn’t pull back, not like yesterday. But he didn’t look at it either, avoided it, eyes to the side, above, below. Not even on the single line of text, the name he’d already heard.
“Daniel Jensen.”
The next document, a picture, the exterior of Hinseberg prison for women and a gray day, a lot of snow, it looked cold.
“He disappeared. Just before you were born.”
“I know.”
“Then you know—”
“That’s what they told me. That he was on his way there when he disappeared. To Hinseberg. To . . . me.”
Ewert Grens had started a sentence that he wouldn’t finish. If that was his truth. If that was the truth he wanted.
Next picture.
A barred window in the background. And a slightly blurred newborn baby on a stomach.
“You were born there because your mother was being threatened and your father had been too.”
The eighteen-year-old sitting on the remand bunk stood up abruptly, was being threatened, they were talking about something that he knew more about than most people.
“Why?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“Fucking bastard . . .”
“It’s simple—I don’t know.”
It was hard to determine whether he believed him or not. But he sat down again after a while and the loud voice died down.
Next picture.
A woman in a blue dress with the baby on her lap.
“Who’s that?”
“You.”
“And the other person?”
Grens turned the photograph around so he could see it better, looked closely at the picture that was starting to fade.
“A midwife. You were in foster care even before you were born.”
They were silent again.
Rain outside the cell window, drops that drummed monotonously on a piece of brown metal.
The kind of downpour that would last a while.
“Did he want to?”
“What?”
“Come. When I was born.”
That’s what they told me. If that was the truth he wanted. That he was on his way there when he disappeared.
“I don’t know.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t have children.”
“What the fuck do you think, pig man? If he hadn’t overdosed. If he hadn’t . . . died. Would he? Would he have come?”
Ewert Grens would often leave at the sound of voices like that. Or raise his own in response.
This time, he didn’t.
“I think . . .”
Sometimes a lie was perhaps better. When you still can’t talk about everything.
“I think he would have wanted that.”
But a lie often needs to be bigger and grander in order to sound like the truth.
“He nagged and he threatened. A bit like you. He wanted to go. But when we let him, when he was given permission to be there for your birth . . . he was just like all the others, given the chance, he had to take it, if he had the chance to escape and get a hit, then he took it . . . like all drug addicts, first himself, then everyone else.”
The eighteen-year-old boy sat quietly on the bunk, listening. He was possibly a bit calmer too. It was always hard to tell when someone wore their aggression, refused to let it go.
“Craving.”
“I’m sorry?”
“That’s what we feel.”
“We?”
Ewert Grens smiled. And Leon Jensen almost smiled. A lie begets a lie. As close as he would ever get to his father.
Grens held on hard to the folder, hand over the photo he had thought of showing next, taken just a few years ago, after the most recent judgment and before the sentence that the boy’s father was obviously serving right now, the photo that was above the name that the detective superintendent had not yet revealed. The truth. Sometimes it’s simply not needed. Ewert Grens kept his hand there when he closed the folder, making sure that neither the text nor the photo could be seen.
“You’ve never considered, well . . . rethinking? I think . . . that if you don’t rethink, sooner or later everything will go to the dogs.”
It wasn’t something Ewert planned to say. So he had no idea why he said it.
“Rethink what?”
“How you want to live.”
“Live?”
“Your life is important!”
Leon Jensen looked at him with scorn for the first time that nigh
t.
“For who?”
It was not something he’d planned. So he didn’t know why he’d said it. Which was why he didn’t really understand what he was thinking himself.
For me.
“For you.”
Your life is important for me.
“Your life is important for you. For your mother. For—”
“Shut the fuck up!”
There hadn’t been much more to say.
Grens had got up, folder in his hand and both the plastic cups in his jacket pockets, when he pointed to the lamp, which was on.
“Turn it off. Try to get some sleep.”
He’d walked toward the door, opened it, and then stood there.
He’s not going to turn it off. He never turns it off.
And then he turned around again.
“Or else . . . leave it on. I normally do.”
And when he was about halfway down the remand corridor, the voice that always screamed shouted: “Respect!”
He had heard and the strange warmth spread from his feet all the way to his stomach again.
“Respect, pig bastard!”
He woke early.
A couple of hours of deep sleep on the soft sofa between five and seven and he was rested, every muscle relaxed, easy in his heart that so often raced.
He sat down in front of the pictures on the computer and the eighteen-year-old he’d visited two nights in a row. A ninety-minute escape divided over forty-three cameras and three prisons. The thin timeline on the bottom of the screen moved him forward and back with the same unmasked figure. He paused for a long time on the picture from the prison wall, leaned back to focus on the unfocused. First the hands that were carrying a serious firearm along the top of the wall, which meant power, having power. Then the face, so proud when it looked into the camera and shouted something.
No yesterday. No tomorrow.
You neither live before nor after, but only have now to lose.
But if I don’t move the timeline any more this time. If I stop and zoom in on your eyes instead.
I see something else.
What you’re actually frightened of, I, if anyone, can see it, how damn lonely you are.
He turned from the computer to the open folder and the eighteen-year-old photograph that he’d taken himself outside a red house.
Two Soldiers Page 46