Her voice oscillated.
‘What?’
Sam’s eyes fell onto her hand, which was resting on top of mine. She removed it, folded her arms, and stared out of the kitchen window.
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’
Then she screamed at me. It culminated in her holding up her hand, the one with four digits. The only trace of the fifth is a discreet scar on her skin.
‘Look,’ she screamed. ‘You’re always avoiding it, but look at it. Look what he did to me. And you’ve been lying to me for weeks. Or is it longer than that?’ She grabbed a cushion from one of the dining chairs and slung it at me. ‘Eh? Lying again? I’m so fucking tired of this.’
‘Even when I’ve told you the truth, you don’t believe me,’ I said in a louder voice, and launched the cushion back at her. Then, louder still: ‘Is it any wonder I didn’t say anything?’
‘But how am I supposed to know you’ve told the truth?’ she spat, with tears in her eyes. ‘How the fuck I am supposed to know that, after everything?’
I had the urge to throw something against the wall, something hard. A glass or a bowl, something that could smash. Not because I was angry with her, I don’t think, but because it hurt so much to be confronted with how badly I’d behaved. I was so frustrated by everything I’d done.
‘It’s always something, Leo. You are always hiding something. Don’t you get it?’
As quickly as the rage had inflated itself, so it got punctured. Sam was standing in front of me, panting through her half-open mouth. I took the cushion from her hands, pulled out the dining chair, put the cushion back in its place, and sat on it.
‘You’re right.’
‘I …’ Sam rounded the table, pulled out the chair opposite me. ‘I can’t do this. I haven’t got it in me.’ She slumped in her chair. ‘Not again.’
Our eyes met.
‘There’s nothing more, Sam. This is all of it.’
‘Is it really?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know if I believe you.’
That was the last thing she said that night, and I fell asleep restless and anxious, with my face an arm’s length from her back and those words echoing around inside my head.
The next morning, I woke up in an empty bed with a text from Sam on my phone.
Staying at Mum’s for a few days.
The cat brushed up against my legs, mewing in the silent apartment.
I’d never needed a Serax so badly.
I was chain-smoking all day, and by lunchtime I found myself standing staring at the half-empty whisky bottle in the cupboard. I was seconds away from reaching up and pouring myself a few fingers — fuck knows, maybe a whole glass would’ve been good — when it struck me that the last time I’d held it was when Grim was there.
Now he was lying in a coma with a bullet in his head.
I might never be able to talk to him again.
I avoided the bottle. I made no attempt to get hold of any pills.
I laid low.
She still hasn’t come back.
‘I’m not going to leave you,’ she said when we spoke yesterday. ‘Not yet. But I … I need some distance right now.’
I said I understood, because I did.
I do.
But these days without Sam are so long, so lonely. The fact that our lives are so deeply intertwined is something I haven’t really grasped until now. It scares me.
It’s been almost two weeks, and she’s still living with her mother. Occasionally, if I’ve got time, I’ll walk past the gallery where she works, just to see her. When I do catch sight of her — a glimpse of her hair or shoulder, or her sweeping past in there — my stomach flutters, and I realise that I love her, before I’m overwhelmed by how great the distance between us has grown, how sad it is, and the fact that it’s all my fault.
Then I drag myself away, dejected. A few days will pass before the need to see her grows too strong for me to resist. So I go back there, and the whole thing starts all over again.
I met someone by mistake. That’s the truth of it. Two and a half years ago. I shot a colleague dead; his name was Markus Waltersson. I was in Visby at the time, among shadows in the harbour. It was a mistake, but I was the one who made it, just like Abrahamsson. Grim and Waltersson, or me and Abrahamsson — we were all at the wrong place at the wrong time. Chance might be more important than you’d care to admit. It would be simpler if everything did have a meaning, but maybe sometimes it just doesn’t. Sometimes things happen as a consequence of events that lead to other events, chain reactions that reach a climax.
I think I understand Waltersson’s family — understand his sister, Tove Waltersson — in a way I didn’t before. It’s weird, impossible to put into words, so I stay quiet. I probably know how Abrahamsson must be feeling, too, I think, if I put my mind to it. But you can’t wear two pairs of shoes at once.
There’s time. Waltersson died, and that was my fault. I’m living with that, struggling to accept it.
Grim isn’t dead, though: he’s breathing. My friend’s still breathing. I can hear it.
37
Time passes. Midnight comes around, and Friday the fourth of December is off to an unremarkable start. I’m still standing there.
A man comes out of one of the doorways on Fridhemsgatan, points a little fob towards the Audi and makes the headlights flash briefly.
Patrik Sköld opens the driver’s door, sits down behind the wheel, and eases out into the traffic, going with its flow.
He disappears, and I can’t follow. If only I’d had a car. I’m left standing there, wavering. The people of the city are a blurred crowd of backlit figures.
I walk over to the doorway Sköld emerged from, push my face to the glass and look inside. The timer light in the stairwell is still on. On one wall is a list of residents and their flat numbers. I squint to read the names, and recognise one of them the second before the light goes off: C. Hallingström.
The man from the National Police Authority. Founder of the Specialist Gang Squad.
There’s an invisible connection between SGS, the man in the car, and Angelica. I’m concentrating on that, for now. Sam may have left me, Grim is a hair’s breadth from death, and nobody wants anything to do with me. This is one way to keep going.
38
The room is guarded by two police officers. They’re standing on the other side of the door and, despite not hearing them, you never forget their presence.
On one side of the room is a large east-facing window. There’s a little silver bauble hanging from the blind, as if Karolinska Hospital were keen to remind people that there isn’t an awful long time to go until Christmas; that even this long year will ultimately come to an end.
My friend is lying on his back with a substantial bandage around his head. His arms lie limp at his sides; his breathing is in light gasps. He’s been in a coma since the nineteenth of November. The bullet remains inside his head, because they couldn’t remove it. Another operation, under a specialist surgeon, an expert in the field, is scheduled for the next few days.
‘Grim,’ I say, and I notice that my own voice sounds unfamiliar, as though it belonged to someone else. ‘It’s me, Leo. Can you hear me?’
I can’t detect any movement or changes in his breathing, no deviation in the monotonous bleeping of the machine. Carefully, I place my hand on top of his, feel his cool skin and the prominent veins.
Nothing. The thought occurs to me that this is just a body. Grim, the person, is not here.
I gently stroke the back of his hand with my thumb.
‘Grim. Can you hear me?’
I have to ask, don’t really know what else to do. I ask at least once on every visit.
People are saying that Nikola Abrahamsson and Viveka Cehaic are to be censured for what has happened. That he was
not legally entitled to act as he did; that she should have been clearer in her communication. Cehaic said Christ, it’s him and Abrahamsson thought she meant the suspected terrorist.
They are to be censured, that’s all. I get the urge to hurt somebody when I think about it.
I lift my hand from Grim’s.
I’ve spent a lot of time trawling databases of late. I’ve done searches and queries that risk landing me in trouble, since I can’t point to a current case that I’m involved in. They’ll probably find out sooner or later, but I don’t have the energy to worry too much about that.
Those searches have delivered a clear result: nothing suggests any connection between the events of the last few weeks, between our investigations into Angelica’s murder and Nikola Abrahamsson shooting Grim under that bridge.
On the contrary, I’ve only found things that suggest that events unfolded broadly as Abrahamsson, Cehaic, and their superiors reported to the Special Investigations Unit, where the prosecutor in charge had dutifully initiated a preliminary investigation.
Two separate events in motion: a world collapsing in Paris, sending aftershocks through Sweden; and then us, investigating a five-year-old murder and making unexpected discoveries. Two different processes, crossing in that instant, that’s all.
But, at the same time: there’s something not quite right.
It can’t be that simple.
What was Grim doing down there, so far from his hideout on Södermalm? Was he meeting someone? If he was, who? He walked out into a Stockholm crawling with police, all desperately tense. There’s no way Grim would’ve ventured out if he didn’t need to.
I study his face. It looks peaceful, still and relaxed. The last time we met was in his flat, on the sixteenth of November. Me, Grim, Birck, and Sarac. I’ve been over that meeting so many times inside my head that the memories have started to dissolve, mixing with other occasions, other days, but I am almost certain: Grim said nothing, neither then nor since, to indicate that he might be downtown just three days later.
Something is missing.
39
On the evening of the nineteenth of November, a man was arrested in Boliden, a village near Skellefteå in north-east Sweden, on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks. The arrest was not remotely dramatic, given that they were dealing with a radicalised Islamist. The young man offered absolutely no resistance whatsoever.
The prime minister applauded SEPO’s efforts, and as soon as the interior minister had found his way to a microphone, he chimed in in agreement. He was smiling, for the first time in days. So was the National Police Chief, and the journalists.
Finally, everyone was on the same page.
The fact that the original information concerned a group, and not a single individual — no one seemed to care about that anymore. Or perhaps it was no longer relevant. No one knew for sure.
What we do know for certain is that the only thing people cared about was that the arrest meant that a concrete and serious threat to the country’s security had been averted.
The young man was interrogated by SEPO for three whole days. After that, he was released without charge. It had all been a mistake, a misunderstanding, a miscommunication. A miss, of some kind.
The prime minister, interior minister, and others didn’t say much, which was probably fortunate. Not even the racists — those sitting in parliament, or the bog-standard racists out there among the remnants of the welfare state — seemed to know where to direct their frustration.
Me neither. It was the police operation, in which thousands of my uniformed colleagues were given extra weapons and sent onto the streets, that had left my friend in Karolinska with a bullet in his head. Whichever way you look at it, that’s indisputable.
Today, the morning of the fourth of December, the former terrorist suspect dominates the front pages once again.
Now back in Boliden, he has invited the entire village round for an Arabian meal, which he intends to cook with the help of other residents at the refugee centre where he currently lives. The young man wants the gathering to be an answer, the papers explain, a way of demonstrating that he came here to live in peace, alongside others.
I read all this sitting in my office at work. When I hear the phone, I’m so consumed by my own thoughts that I’ve no idea how long it’s been ringing for.
‘Hello?’
‘Is that Leo Junker?’
‘It is.’
Despite it still being early, it sounds like Dr Miranda Shali from Forensics has already had her morning espresso. She says she’s now had time to look at the memory stick I gave her a few weeks ago.
‘It contains images and … I don’t suppose you could come up, could you?’
I’m sitting in front of a computer in one of the many rooms that comprise Forensics’ IT department. As Miranda Shali moves the mouse, her bracelet scrapes against the tabletop, a gentle, pleasant sound.
‘Is this what was on the memory stick, besides the pictures?’ I ask and then swig some of the weak coffee I’ve collected from the machine on my way up.
‘Parts of it. I haven’t been able to restore it completely.’ Clicking away, she opens a collection of image files and flips between them. The subjects of the photos are long and thin.
‘Someone put the memory stick into a computer and tried to erase the content. When you do that, though, you leave fragments, or whatever you might call them, behind. That’s what I’ve used to restore these. And don’t worry — restoring files that have been destroyed like this wasn’t possible five years ago, so it wasn’t that they missed anything. They never saw this. This was me and new technology versus an old memory stick.’ Shali smiles. ‘Me and the new technology won.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘A sheet of paper.’
‘Paper?’
‘Or a list, in fact. A PDF containing a list of names. If you look here,’ she says, tapping the screen with her index fingernail, ‘this long, thin slice is part of the image, a single line in the list. When I’ve attempted to restore the file, each row has ended up being an image of its own.’ She clicks through a series of similar long, thin image files. ‘But on the stick, they were all part of the same PDF.’
The row highlighted on Shali’s screen:
Avdic, Margit1979AlbyBH5210756288
‘Open the next one,’ I say.
Cors, Jaako1984KistaOG5210756288
The third follows the same pattern, except that the long combination of digits at the end is slightly different:
Geldin, Linus1980HusbyBH5210754219
‘I’ve managed to restore seven rows,’ she continues. ‘I’ve put them together here, along with their position on the original list — I managed to find that, too. Judging by how they’re positioned, I’d say that it contained ten times as many rows to begin with.’
I study the page on the screen, a list containing large gaps. Avdic’s, Cor’s, and Geldin’s names sit together, while the other four are scattered from the top to the bottom of the page.
‘You hardly need a PhD in nuclear physics to work this list out.’ Shali returns to the first row, Margit Avdic. ‘Born 1979, lives in Alby, and has gang connections. If I’m not mistaken, she was together with one of the members of the Stockholm chapter of the Brotherhood. This,’ she adds, referring to the number at the end, ‘is the officer number of her police handler.’
‘Handler? You mean she was an informant?’
Shali takes a deep breath.
‘That’s what the list is. A register of police informants in Greater Stockholm, in around 2010. Lots of them are now uncovered, dead, or out of the picture for various reasons, but several of them are still active today.’
I put down my coffee.
‘Fuck me.’
It’s pretty much impossible to describe the significance of the list for anyone
outside the service, but if it were to leak to the media now it would probably lead to several resignations from the National Police Authority’s board, all needing to be replaced one by one. In the underworld, people would die. Criminal networks would be shaken up as leading members were revealed to be informants and infiltrators.
Even that pales into insignificance compared to the power the list would’ve had then, in 2010.
A list that Angelica had access to, a list she hid away on a memory stick in a little hole in the wall, behind her bed. A list that someone had tried to erase.
‘Can you see when the material was deleted?’
‘From what I can see, some changes were made on the twelfth of October, at 23.28. I cannot see what, but some kind of activity took place then.’
‘Can you print me a copy?’ I ask. ‘Not the individual lines, but that composite you made.’
Shali turns away from the computer, pulls out a drawer, and returns with a piece of paper.
‘This?’
There’s a green Post-it note attached, bearing the words For Leo.
‘Thanks,’ I say, pinching the paper between my fingers. ‘Listen, this duty number.’ I put my finger alongside 5210756288. ‘It belongs to Patrik Sköld, right?’
‘Yes.’ Shali bites her bottom lip. ‘The guy from SGS. What a place that was.’
‘Did you work there? When?’
‘Briefly.’ Shali checks her watch. ‘I never saw that list, but I did hear about it. It has to be the same list. That’s why I asked you to come over. Have you got time to hang around for a while? This is … This ought to stay between us, for as long as possible.’
40
SGS needed her help.
She was seconded to them in the summer of 2009, by which time the squad had been operational for a little over a year. Out on the streets, they were winning the war, but in the digital arenas, where a significant amount of gang crime was committed, they were way behind. SGS needed someone who knew about computers.
The Thin Blue Line Page 13