by Eva Hudson
Another gunshot, snapping the air in two. And another. Automatic fire, ripping across the square. The uniformed officer took cover, crouching behind a stall, opening Ingrid’s route out of the square. She willed herself to run faster.
A second burst of automatic fire. A bullet flew off the cobbles at her feet. Then something tugged at her coat. A dog? Ingrid pushed harder, her lungs raw as they heaved in the cold city air. The horror on the face of the woman in front of her confirmed what she feared: behind her someone had been shot. The screaming wasn’t fear, it was agony. Her own bullet wound pulsated with the memory as she ran.
She reached the edge of the square and ran down a street that was crammed with trucks and vans. She glanced left and right as she ran, looking for an opportunity to escape. Or hide. There were more trucks parked in the side streets, most with their rear and side doors open for unloading.
She looked over her shoulder: three men in pursuit, two with SIGs in their hands. She swerved toward the sidewalk, putting herself closer to pedestrians, using them as a shield. A TNT truck pulled out at a cross street, blocking the road. Ingrid accelerated toward it, then ducked behind it, putting her momentarily out of sight of the chasing cops.
Something caught her eye. A van parked a few spaces down. The engine was running. Side door open. Man standing next to it. Ingrid couldn’t work out why her eyes wouldn’t stop looking at it. She checked over her shoulder. The cops still hadn’t made it to the TNT truck. Then she turned her vision to the street ahead but her eyes were drawn back to the van. Then she realized why. In red letters on the side of the dirty white van, it said: Magnus Jonsson, Frukthandlare.
42
Ingrid leapt through the side door of the van and the man slid it shut behind her. The rear was separated from the driver’s compartment by a metal mesh: there wasn’t anyone in the front seat and the back of the van was empty apart from a few coils of rope, some flattened fruit and vegetable boxes and a pile of old blankets.
Why isn’t he getting in the van?
Outside, the chasing officers were shouting. Ingrid made out something along the lines of ‘where did she go?’ but their voices were quickly drowned out by the screeching of tires and a fresh invasion of sirens. Her heartbeat pulsed painfully in her ears. She noticed a rip in the fabric near the hem of the woolen coat. That tug hadn’t been a dog. It had been a bullet. The skin on her scalp prickled.
They were trying to kill me.
The voices outside got louder. Angrier. Dogs were barking incessantly. The van shook as emergency vehicles raced over the cobbles toward Stortorget. The driver’s door opened and the man jumped up into the seat.
“You got them?” He looked at her in the rearview mirror. He was white, late twenties, and gave the impression he had a lot of muscles under his padded jacket. Ex-military.
“Drive,” Ingrid said.
“I don’t know whether you noticed, but there’s a bit of a commotion going on.” He had a London accent, and that nasty English habit of trying to make fun of difficulty. “We’re not going anywhere, darling.”
“Drive,” Ingrid repeated through chattering teeth. “They’re after me.”
He turned his head and looked at her. “Nah, they’re just in a pickle cos of yesterday. S’got nothin’ to do with you, love.”
Ingrid scrambled onto her knees and crouched directly behind him. “Drive.” Through the windshield, she could see the street was filling up with ambulances and police cars. “Either you put this van into gear now or we’re stuck here for…” Ingrid could hear the dogs yapping outside. “Seriously, just go. Now! Get us out of here.”
He turned the key in the ignition and the engine rattled into life. The tick, tick, tick of the indicator was matched by a flashing light in the rear corner of the van. He pulled out and they started moving. Slowly. Too slowly.
“Faster.”
“You can see the bloody road. What am I supposed to do, drive right through them?”
“Find a way.” Ingrid slunk back down behind the seat, out of view.
He sounded the horn. “This was supposed to be a simple pick-up. No one said nothing about being a bloody getaway driver.” A sharp maneuver, and then Ingrid felt the van accelerate. “What the fuck’s going on back there? There are dogs and everything.”
“Just keep moving. Don’t do anything stupid.” As soon as she said those words she regretted them.
“What, like bringing the entire Swedish police into what should be a bloody simple handover!” He swung the van to the right, sending Ingrid tumbling against the inside of the door. “You better bloody have them.”
“Are they following us?”
“Shit.” He slammed on the brakes.
“What?”
“Road’s blocked.”
“Why?” They couldn’t stay still, they just couldn’t.
“Just traffic. Gridlock.”
Ingrid looked at the back of the man’s head as he checked his wing mirrors several times, then put the van into reverse. “There’s got to be another way.”
“You can’t go back.”
“If I reverse I can get down that side street.”
“No.” She was loud and firm.
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Inhale. “The dogs have my scent. You go backward, they go forward… Game’s over, buddy.”
He sounded the horn, making Ingrid shiver. “What the hell have you done?”
There was no way to answer that question. “Don’t use the horn. Don’t give the cops any reason to look in our direction.”
He nudged the van forward. “This is fucking chaos.”
Ingrid was still breathless from her sprint and her chest heaved with each deep breath. Even inside the van her breath was turned to steam. “What can you see in the wing mirror?”
The man looked down. “More gridlock. Bunch of cops talking.”
“Are they checking vehicles?”
He leaned forward and peered into the mirror. “Doesn’t look like it, but I ain’t exactly got a Royal Box view.” He put the van in neutral and yanked on the handbrake. “We ain’t going nowhere.”
“You have to try.” Without windows in the van’s rear doors she couldn’t assess the threat herself.
“Nah. Not what I mean. We ain’t going anywhere until you hand over what I’ve come for.”
“I do that and you could just open this door.”
“You don’t do that and it’s exactly what I’ll do.”
Ingrid didn’t like being in such a weak bargaining position. “Tell you what. I’ll give you two of them. You want the third, you get me out of here.”
He turned and looked at her through the mesh. “Show me.”
“Deal?”
“Show me the goods.”
The voices outside the van got louder and footsteps constantly thudded as the cops searched for her. Ingrid reached into her pockets and fished out the Perspex tubes. She held them so he could see them. “Now drive.”
He reached up and unhooked a hatch in the dividing mesh. His expression told her to hand them over. Ingrid pushed them through the foot-wide hole and he snatched them.
The fact that he took them confirmed what she suspected: ex-military, not intelligence or police. An investigator would never have taken the bait. Now he could no longer pretend she had just jumped in his van. He was a mercenary, probably as expendable as she was, hired by a third party through the back doors and corridors of ‘plausible deniability’ that extended from Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs to beach bars in Jamaica. He threw the tubes into the glove box then put the van into gear and nosed out into the traffic.
“Take your jacket off,” Ingrid said. It was a red ski jacket.
“Nice try.”
“I’m serious. You give me your jacket, you get off Gamla Stan, you drop me off and I walk away. Trust me, the cops don’t know what those tubes are, so the only problem you’ll have is if they send a sniffer dog to inspect the van.”
“What’s in it for me?”
Ingrid took a deep breath. “Think about it. You really don’t want me to get arrested. I know what you look like, know you’re ex-military, know what vehicle you’re driving.”
A gap in the traffic opened up and he changed into second gear. Progress.
“Head south.”
“Which way is that?”
Ingrid sighed. Surely anyone who’d been in the military would know how to find south? Hadn’t he memorized the map before deployment? “Straight ahead.”
“Your jacket.”
“Jesus, give a guy a chance.”
“One sleeve at a time. It’s not like we’re going fast, then push it through the hatch.”
He didn’t say anything. Ingrid felt the van slow down. “Now which way?”
Ingrid poked her head above the seats. “Right. Then take a left when you come to a bigger road. It’ll be the main road that leads to Södermalm.”
“Whatever that is.”
Ingrid glanced at the dashboard and saw the satnav. Map-reading was becoming a lost art like basket-weaving and book-selling. The sound of sirens echoed through the city, searing into her skull.
The driver started to remove his jacket, leaning awkwardly as he steered with his elbows.
“Anyone following?” Ingrid asked.
He glanced at his right wing mirror, thinking he was still driving in the UK. Realizing his mistake, he looked left. “Um…” He briefly looked ahead, then back at his left wing mirror. Ingrid tried to angle herself behind him to check for herself but all she could see was the side of the dirty and dented van.
A hard thud. Ingrid was thrown against the mesh.
“Stupid fucker.” He’d slammed into the car in front. “Don’t worry,” he said, horns blaring all around, “I’ll get us out of here.” He slipped the van into reverse and lurched backwards with such speed that Ingrid was tossed against the door like a cookie in a jar.
“What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” He accelerated and swerved around the car in front. Ingrid could hear people shouting in the street, and the chorus of car horns turned into a cacophony. The engine roared as he put his foot to the floor.
“You should have stopped.”
“You’re joking, right?” He weaved through the traffic at what felt like forty or fifty miles per hour.
“Because while you worked your British charm on the other driver, I could have slipped out. Now—”
“Now we’ve got the cops after us.”
Her insides lurched. She could hear the siren. She felt a pressure on her chest. Breathing was hard. She looked around the van. She stared at the tow rope and the cardboard boxes but she couldn’t make her brain come up with a way of using them. Hiding under the blankets was the only solution her exhausted head could devise.
You’ll find a way. You always do.
She looked again. There was no way of opening the rear doors from the inside, but the side door? She scrambled over to it. There was a lever to slide it open.
When the cops pulled the van over, she could slip out if the meathead created a scene. She looked over at him: he seemed more than capable of attracting attention. He blasted the horn and gesticulated at other drivers as he accelerated south.
“There’s a bridge.” He sounded panicked, as if the bridge was out. Or blocked.
Ingrid braced herself against the side of the van. She remembered the officers on Vasabron when she’d crossed into Gamla Stan. But instead of slowing, he speeded up.
“Jesus, that was close.”
She didn’t want to know what he’d just missed. She scrambled onto her knees and peered over the front seats to see uniformed officers on the bridge reach for their radios as they ran toward their parked cars. The van lurched wildly as it left the bridge and swerved onto Södermalm. The island was bisected by a wide commercial avenue lined with stores on both sides.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of here.”
Ingrid couldn’t take her eyes off the straight road ahead. One set of traffic lights after another lay ahead of them. Every intersection was a potential roadblock. She looked again at the lever and considered opening it and jumping out into the road. But he was going too fast. There were too many oncoming vehicles. It was suicide.
For a split second she considered it. No jail. No diplomatic incident. A Jane Doe in an unmarked grave.
“Jesus!” Ingrid inhaled sharply as he swerved past pedestrians on a crossing. She scanned the road for an escape. He wasn’t going to make it out of the city. No chance he’d even get to the next island. She could hear the siren of the chasing police car and knew it wouldn’t be long before another emerged from a side street, trapping them in a pincer movement. Above the sound of the engine was the noise of a helicopter. She held onto the lever, ready to slide the door open and run.
“Should I just keep going?”
They had almost crossed Södermalm and there were no cops manning the bridge over to Hammarby. There was no sign of another police car coming to intercept them.
“Yes,” Ingrid said, her head trying to picture what was on the next island. As far as she knew, it was all luxury waterside apartments and recently built roads. He accelerated up onto the ramp and over the bridge, the icy water eighty feet below. If a police vehicle blocked the south side of the bridge, it was all over. Ingrid tried to speak, but her mouth was too dry. She swallowed hard. “Take the next exit.”
She could see the slip road leaving the bridge and curving down in a wide circle underneath it to the new developments below them.
Ingrid grabbed onto the lever. She’d read about what she was going to do. She’d studied the training manual. Watched instructional videos. But she’d never actually done it. She thought of all the buildings she’d jumped off for fun. All the hours and years of parkour training she’d done. How much harder would it be to drop out of a slow-moving vehicle?
He swung the van to the left and entered the ramp. The curve was tight, forcing him to slow down. Ingrid looked up through the windshield, trying to time it perfectly. She pulled on the lever and yanked open the side door.
“What the fuck are you—”
When the van passed directly underneath the bridge, Ingrid slipped feet first onto the road, tucking her knees and rolling onto her side, spinning out from the ramp and rolling down the hill. Her shoulder slammed into the blacktop. She tucked in her jaw to protect her head and rolled over and over, through the snow, unnoticed by the cops as they chased the van. The ground was steep and she kept falling, while the sounds of the sirens got further and further away.
She lay hidden in the deep snow for several minutes, waiting until the convoy of cop cars had gone past. When there was a lull in the traffic noise, Ingrid pushed herself up, discovering for the first time how sore her shoulder was. She shook the snow from her coat and started walking.
Transcript from Riksdag Committee Hearing 23
December 20 2015
BILUNGS: Please state your name and rank.
NYSTRÖM: I am Inspector Hanna Nyström, Police Sweden.
BILUNGS: Thank you. And thank you for coming today. Can you please explain to this committee how your work relates to the events of December last year.
NYSTRÖM: Certainly. In April this year I was brought in to review Police Sweden’s actions on December 15th and 16th last year with a specific mandate to look at how the suspect evaded capture and to conduct a ‘Lessons Learned’ package so that changes could be made, either to command structures, or the way we handle evidence, or… I had an open remit. Nothing was off limits.
BILUNGS: And by ‘suspect’ let us be clear, you are talking about the woman who was kidnapped instead of Anna Skyberg?
NYSTRÖM: Yes.
BILUNGS: And, before I go any further, can I assume that you believe the woman who was kidnapped from the Republik café is the same woman who was seen at Stortorget market?
NYSTRÖM: Yes. I was able to cr
eate a robust timeline for her. A combination of forensic and CCTV evidence puts that beyond doubt.
BILUNGS: Am I right in thinking you have not published your report yet?
NYSTRÖM: That is correct, but I have concluded the work. And as it is my—and Police Sweden’s—understanding that this committee will not be publishing its findings for some time, I am authorized to share certain information with you as my report is due out shortly. In February.
BILUNGS: OK, so let me begin then by asking you who this woman was. Or is.
NYSTRÖM: Ah. That I cannot tell you. We found several DNA samples—the hair in the sink at the Freedom Hall, the Russell Athletic bag—but her sequence did not match any on our database. Ethnic profiling showed her to be of northern European extraction and the specialist we consulted thought there was a probability in excess of sixty per cent that she was Scandinavian. Um, so, yes, after the request was made public for information about her identity, we received in excess of two thousand phone calls from members of the public offering potential names for her. Three names, in particular, kept coming up, but all three women had extremely compelling alibis.
BILUNGS: So you have no idea who she is?
NYSTRÖM: Not quite. We employed a psychological profiler who offered some interesting insights—for instance, he suggested the woman was likely a recidivist with a long criminal record based on her tolerance to withstand stress and the variety of offenses committed. But, obviously, she had not been in custody in Sweden, and there is no record of anyone with her DNA profile having served time in any European penal system.
BILUNGS: So you don’t know who she is? She isn’t Scandinavian then?
NYSTRÖM: Well, so this is how reviews work. We look at all the evidence and—without the pressure of an unfolding investigation—we weigh that evidence differently. But, yes, you are right, there are many reasons to think that she is not Scandinavian. The first is the items she left behind at the cabin at Järlåsa. The Russell Athletic backpack, for example. We were able to determine that it was a model that had never been on sale in Europe, only in the United States, well, all of North America, and Japan, Korea and a few other Asian countries. The pair of Calvin Klein underwear in the bag, they were widely on sale, but the pair of socks we found in the cabin were a brand called Brasher. They are available from specialist shops in a few places, but they are a British make and they have extensive distribution in the United Kingdom.