He had stood there and looked at the immobile body that was drifting in and out of consciousness, that couldn’t move and couldn’t comprehend what had actually happened. The fear, the three of them could only imagine the sheer terror that would take hold of him when they shut the door: to wake up after a while alone in the freezing cold, not knowing whether he was dead or alive, gradually to remember bits of what had happened and still not understand.
He stopped and knocked his shoes on the edge of the sidewalk to dislodge some of the snow, waited for a moment, then continued on, the final steps.
Mern Riffe Drive looked like all the other streets in Marcusville.
Even though it was so close, he had in fact not come here very often, just got into the habit of looking into their house as he passed. He lived on the other side of town himself, the houses here were a bit more expensive, a bit bigger; even in a small community like this there was a place for people who were that little bit better off.
The Finnigans’ house was at the end of the street, the last house on the left-hand side. He had known Edward Finnigan all his life—there weren’t many years between them and they had gone to school at the same time—but they didn’t really know each other, they didn’t have anything in common other than a lifetime and a love for the same woman in a small town in Ohio.
He had avoided visiting this place; that’s what had happened, he didn’t have the strength to see her in a home that wasn’t his.
He tried to remember as he opened the gate in the picket fence. Twice.
He had lived in the town for fifty years and he had come to this house only twice. The first time when Edward got his job with the governor in Columbus and had invited everyone who was anyone to a kind of cocktail party one Friday afternoon. Vernon, the senior corrections officer at Marcusville’s most dominant workplace, was obviously one of them, people who in Finnigan’s eyes were important. He had been reluctant to go, uncomfortable as he was with parties that breathed emptiness, but he had eventually gone and given his congratulations on the new job and had a few sweet drinks and then sneaked off as fast as he could. The second time was when Elizabeth had been found murdered, he had gone the next day to offer his sincere condolences. He had watched her grow up, a beautiful, happy, and outgoing girl, and he had understood their loss.
The white snow was falling thicker. He knocked on the door.
It was Alice who opened it.
“Vernon. Come in.”
She was an exceptional woman, Alice. Overshadowed by her dominant husband, but whenever he met her in town, in the shop or the post office, she had always been as easy to talk to as he remembered. And then she was beautiful, like before, she could smile, even laugh—he had never seen her do that in her husband’s presence.
Edward Finnigan wasn’t just a bad person; he was a bad husband.
Now they looked at each other—she had tired but friendly eyes. Vernon wondered if she ever thought about the past, that she had made the wrong choice, about how things could have been.
“Take off your coat. I was just making some tea.”
“I won’t stay long. I’m sorry that I called so early, but I knew that you’d want to hear what I have to say, both of you.”
“I’m sure we’ve got time for a cup of tea. Come on in and sit yourself down.”
Vernon looked around at the large hall and the rest of the house. Just as he remembered it. The wallpaper, the furniture, the thick carpets on the floor, they hadn’t changed anything. Eighteen years since the last time. They had found her on the floor and like a reflex he looked into the room, as if she were still lying there. Their grief hadn’t diminished; if anything it was maybe even greater now. It certainly felt like that—he went in and it was impossible not to feel it thrust in your face.
He stopped in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Is Edward at home?”
“In the cellar. You remember that he likes shooting?”
“He showed me the range the first time I came here.”
“He normally does.”
It smelled of cinnamon tea and some sort of pie, maybe apple. Vernon caught a glimpse of the large porcelain dish through the glass window of the oven.
“I’ll go and get him, if you like. And have a look, for the second time.”
He smiled at her, she smiled back. It wasn’t difficult to see that she hated the cellar and the shooting range down there.
He opened the cellar door, a faint smell of damp, of enclosed air that should be let out. The corridor was about sixty-five feet long and wide enough to be able to walk down it while someone else stood and fired. At the far end, a target, five holes with frayed edges close to the middle. Finnigan was about to fire five more, stood completely still, took a deep breath each time he fired the pistol. Vernon watched: it was a good series, ten hits close to each other.
Finnigan had realized that he had a visitor now and signaled to him to wait a moment, then pressed a red button at shoulder height on the light concrete wall. The target ran on a wire, a quiet squeak. He unhooked it with one hand, looked at it, added up.
Vernon studied his satisfied face.
“You shoot well.”
“Particularly in the mornings. If I concentrate. If I come straight down here after a long night and imagine Frey’s face, if I picture it then fire at the target.”
His eyes. Vernon worked with psychos and people who’d been sentenced to death, but it wasn’t often that he saw eyes with so much hate.
“I wanted to speak to you and Alice.”
“We’ve never really spoken much, you and me. What’s it about?”
“I’d rather tell you upstairs. When you’re both listening.”
Finnigan nodded, took the magazine out of the pistol, and did a recoil operation to remove the last bullet. He went over to the gun safe that was screwed to the wall.
Vernon looked at him. All these guns, he thought, semiautomatics and automatics and pistols of various sizes, all the weapons in all the guns safes in this country. And that pistol there that he was locking in behind the glass, it had his fingerprints on it.
Finnigan turned toward Vernon, he was ready, folded the target into his pocket, pointed up and they walked together toward the stairs.
To begin with there was the kind of awkward silence that sometimes occurs. Each with a cup of tea, a piece of the warm apple pie, a bit too sweet for this time in the morning, but Vernon ate it, it felt best to.
One hundred fifty thousand dollars it had cost. To escape his death.
He looked at them, their faces.
The Finnigans didn’t know that.
Nor did they know that there was still a man somewhere in Canada who regularly received payment for a passport and a past.
They chatted: a little about the snow that kept falling, a little about the new café by the post office with the rather odd Mexican decor, a little about the neighbors next door who had a great black dog that barked at everything and everyone who happened to pass.
The Finnigans were both waiting to find out why he’d actually come.
It had taken four months to find Schwarz.
He looked at their faces again.
A person who was roughly the same age as John, with permanent residency in two countries and who was willing to hand over his passport, his history, his life, for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
He couldn’t draw it out any longer, couldn’t worry about how to say it and how they would react.
He put down his cup and waited until they had done the same.
“John Meyer Frey.”
He looked at them, first one then the other, and then revealed a truth that was more than six years old.
“John Meyer Frey is alive. Right now he’s sitting in a cell awaiting trial in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. He’s been in custody for a few days now under a false identity.”
They waited for him to continue.
“And it’s been confirmed. It is him.”
He then explained what little was known. Frey had died, Frey had been buried, and even so, earlier that week he had been arrested and detained following an aggravated assault on a ferry crossing from Finland to Sweden. It had taken a few days to determine his identity with the help of Interpol and the FBI. A dead man. Who was alive. Vernon saw their distressed faces and then fielded all the questions he couldn’t answer, about how and when and why, that was all they knew right now, that John Meyer Frey was alive.
It’s strange how ugly people can become. Vernon had seen it before in connection with executions, how the victim’s family seemed to relish the fact that yet another person was going to die, that they would get their revenge and that the death would be settled—one all. He had seen it and reflected on the fact that their bodies, the way they moved, that everything that was part of them could change and quite simply become ugly.
Edward Finnigan sitting to his left, apple pie on his chin, had after a while understood what it was that Vernon was trying to tell them. The inconceivable had gradually become conceivable and now he stood up, ran toward the living room and a glass cabinet there, a bottle of cognac in one hand and three glasses in the other. Such light steps, bubbling from his chest the kind of joy that only someone who is about to kill can feel.
“That bastard, so he’s alive!”
He put the glasses down on the table, one behind each teacup, and filled them.
“So I’m going to be able to watch him die!”
Vernon lifted a hand, he didn’t want any. Alice glanced at him and did the same. Edward Finnigan shook his head and mumbled something that Vernon thought sounded like pussies, he wasn’t quite sure, but Finnigan immediately emptied his own glass, took another one, and then slammed his hand down on the table.
“Eighteen years! I’ve waited eighteen years for that miserable creep to die while I watch! My retribution! Now, you see, it’s time now!”
He spun around with his arms raised, that gurgling sound again. He took the bottle and poured another glass, drank, drank and continued to spin.
Vernon watched Alice, who sat with her head down, looking at the table, at the pie crumbs that had hardened on the porcelain plate. He wondered whether she was thinking about retribution, words like the ones that Edward Finnigan used instead of revenge. In her eyes were tears, and it felt like they’d spoken about this many times before.
“I’m going upstairs to lie down. I don’t want to sit here anymore.”
She looked at her husband.
“Are you satisfied now, Edward? Will it stop now? Edward, will it stop?”
She rushed toward the stairs and the second floor. Eighteen years of grief permeating every word, every thought.
Vernon remained seated, cleared his throat.
A bad taste.
He tried to swallow it, but it lay there, obstructive, choking.
EWERT GRENS SHUT THE DOOR TO HIS OFFICE AND SAT DOWN AT HIS DESK. He closed his eyes, listened to her voice—they were alone for a while, Siw and him, the past that found its way through the investigation files. With each verse he went back a few years, to a time when he and Anni were two young police officers who had started to discover each other, his first nervous, mumbled sentences, the very first time he held her hand, so new and so long ago, a whole adult lifetime ago.
He turned to the very large cassette player, increased the volume until it couldn’t get any louder.
Tweedlee dee tweedlee dee—give it up give it up, give your love to me Tweedlee do tweedlee dot—gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme all the love you got Her voice, her version of “Tweedlee Dee,” recorded 1955, was so fresh, so young, maybe the first song she ever recorded, he wasn’t sure but nodded in rhythm, Anni’s hand in his, everything that was about to start, everything that never had the time to get started.
He listened, two minutes and forty-five seconds, he knew exactly how long it was, then turned around again and lowered the volume a touch. Back. But to only thirty minutes earlier. He thought about Schwarz, so close to falling to pieces when he looked at his wife, who had known nothing, as if they would both burst. Grens had doubted the wife’s claimed ignorance to begin with, it had seemed incredible that she didn’t know, how could someone live so intimately with another person without knowing such a dark secret? He didn’t doubt it anymore. She hadn’t known. That thin bastard, who had managed to hide an entire life from her, must have done a lot of acting and suppressed the rest; Ewert Grens, if anyone, knew that it was possible.
He snorted loudly into the room.
After over thirty years in the police force, he’d thought he’d heard it all. But even he couldn’t have made this story up, and it seemed to get better by the day. Grens knew now that it was true, every word was true; Schwarz really had done what no one else had come close to before. He had escaped from his own execution, locked up on Death Row in one of the most heavily guarded prisons in the United States. Damn, that wasn’t half bad!
The little bugger had managed to fool them all! Grens was positively amused—to stick your tongue out at a system that was building itself into the ground with all its new prisons and that was totally convinced that long sentences were the primary solution to escalating violence, that was good, that was really fucking good.
He heard the knock on the door.
“Am I disturbing you?”
“Not if you let me finish listening.”
They all sounded the same, all Grens’s lala songs. But it was quite sweet really, when he sat there with his eyes closed, his big body moving to the beat. Hermansson waited, as she had learned to do.
“Did you want something?”
The music had finished and Grens was back in the present.
“Yes, I thought that maybe you and I could go dancing.”
Grens was taken aback.
“You did, did you?”
He remembered her question the day before, about how long it had been, about why. He remembered his answer. You can see how I look. With a limp and a neck that won’t move.
“What do you want?”
She looked toward the door.
“Helena Schwarz. She’ll be here soon. I asked her to come.”
“Right?”
“We have to talk to her. You saw for yourself that she’s about to fall to pieces. It’s our responsibility to keep her together as far as we can.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“But he’ll talk more then. If she’s there. I’m convinced that that’s needed if we want him to continue.”
Grens stroked his thinning hair over his pate, picking up his eyebrows on the way. She was right, of course she was right.
“You did well, just now. In the interview room. You got him to calm down, to trust you. And someone who trusts you will also let you know what you want to know.”
“Thank you.”
“No flattery intended. Just an honest description of what happened.”
“Shall we dance?”
She made him feel uncertain. Almost shy. He raised his voice, as he always did, to mask it.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Twenty-five years, Ewert. You said that you hadn’t danced for twentyfive years. That’s my whole life! And you’re always sitting here, listening, marking the beat. You want to dance, that’s not hard to see.”
“Hermansson.”
“I’m asking you out. Tonight. A place where they play your kind of music. I’ll decide where, all you need to do is come.”
He was still embarrassed.
“Hermansson, it’s not possible. I can’t dance anymore. And what’s more, even if I could, even if I wanted to—I’m your boss.”
“And?”
“It’s not appropriate.”
“If you were to ask me out. But it’s me asking you. As a friend, not as an employee. I think we can keep the two things separate.”
Grens put his hand to his head again.
“It’s not just that. Hermansson,
for Christ’s sake, are you putting me on? You’re a young, beautiful woman and I’m an ugly old man. Even if we were to go out as friends, I would still feel . . . I’ve always despised older men who run around pawing young women.”
She got up from the visitor’s chair, held out her hands.
“I promise, I feel perfectly OK about this. You’re not exactly the sort who paws. It would just be fun. I want to see what you look like when you laugh.”
Grens was just about to answer when Sven appeared in the doorway with Helena Schwarz by his side.
“I promised to bring her here.”
Ewert nodded to him.
“Can you stay? I’d like you to listen.”
Helena Schwarz hesitated before entering the room, her eyes anxiously scanning the walls. She was still a bird. The big, knitted sweater with overly long arms and a thick polo neck that swallowed up her throat, baggy jeans that looked like they’d been bought for someone considerably bigger, clumps of cropped hair that stood straight out. She was on her guard, ready to fly away; if she could have walked to the window and flown out, she would have.
“You can sit down there.”
Grens pointed to the chair beside Hermansson. Helena Schwarz crept over, sat down without saying anything, staring straight ahead.
“Why doesn’t he have a lawyer?”
She tried to look at him, her anxious eyes every which way.
“A public defense counselor, Kristina Björnsson, has been appointed, but he didn’t want a lawyer present for the interview.”
“Why not?”
“How the hell do I know? You’ll have to ask him yourself.”
Ewert Grens made a sweep with his arm toward the detention corridor.
“I understand that you’re distressed. I’ve never heard anything like it either. But I believe him. Unfortunately. I believe that he’s telling the truth, that he was sentenced to death for the murder of a girl his own age.”
Helena Schwarz winced, as if he’d hit her.
“But you should know that there’s more. And for you, some of it might be positive.”
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