The Thin Blue Line

by Christoffer Carlsson

  ‘So you’re going to let us do it.’

  ‘I tracked down Sarac,’ Sköld goes on, ‘to find Grimberg. That’s true. But not to hurt him or to threaten him, just to see what he knew. He might know something I don’t. At that point, I didn’t know that you two had also started working on the case.’

  ‘So you want to tell us what you know, or what you think, but you don’t want it getting out that it came from you. Easy. We can arrange that.’

  ‘I’m going to need a bit of time to think, too.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Can we meet after the weekend — Monday? Monday evening?’

  Neither Birck nor I are particularly inclined to say yes, but something tells me we don’t really have much of a choice.

  Birck and I climb out of the car. He looks dubious. Doesn’t look good, a narcotics offence. Regardless of the surrounding situation, it’s not unthinkable that someone who was prepared to commit such a serious offence on duty might also be prepared to commit an even more serious crime to protect his old unit.

  As Sköld disappears into the night, it could be Angelica’s murderer getting away.

  ‘In that case, why would he tell us so much?’ I say when Birck points that out.

  ‘To trick us into trusting him.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yeah, maybe.’

  A nasty wind sweeps across Nybrogatan, and the night continues in that vein — nasty, and dark.

  I head home. The place is empty tonight, again. I shuffle restlessly on the spot as Kit brushes around my feet. Since Sam left, I’ve made the effort to take care of him, make sure he eats and drinks. Most of the time, he sticks close to me or lies down on the rug in the hall, waiting for Sam to come back.

  I drink coffee, to keep myself off the booze. The cat falls asleep on the rug. Sam. The pain of missing her is almost physical, a pain in my chest about level with my heart.

  i need you, I text her at about five. There’s hours left before dawn arrives and I write, i love you. come home?

  45

  Morning is unfurling, and I head out. Need to get away from here. The streets, empty and open as they are, are easier to cope with. I head towards Solna and the hospital, where something’s happened.

  One of the nurses emerges from Grim’s room and shoves past the two officers posted to guard my friend around the clock, saying that he’s going to get a doctor.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I ask.

  ‘Who are you?’ the nurse asks me, but then moves on without waiting for me to reply.

  The two cops, serious and upright, look quizzical.

  The door creaks open a bit. I take two steps into the room and I can hear a low groan coming from the bed.

  Grim is no longer in a coma.

  He’s lying perfectly still. His mouth is moving but there’s no sound. The bandage around his head covers his eyes and would be obscuring his vision, if indeed he has his eyes open.

  ‘Grim. It’s me.’

  The low moaning, like a muffled wail, resumes.

  ‘It’s me,’ I repeat. ‘Leo. The doctor’s on the way. They’re coming.’

  I study the array of tubes and machines, unsure whether he’s only still alive thanks to them. I hope not.

  Grim’s hand looks for mine and grasps it.

  ‘Grim. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he hisses and gives my hand a short, gentle squeeze, almost like a tug.

  Like a confirmation.

  ‘Are you in pain?’

  Nothing at first. Then he squeezes my hand again.

  ‘No?’ I say tentatively. ‘You’re not in pain. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  Another squeeze. He’s scared. I can sense it in his touch.

  I tell him that its Saturday the fifth of September, that he’s in Karolinska Hospital with a bandage around his head. It covers his eyes. I tell him that he isn’t blind.

  I can feel the lines across the palm of his hand. Our skin, the two thin membranes meeting, is all that separates us from each other.

  Scared? Who wouldn’t be?

  ‘What were you doing on Kungsholmen? You were approaching on foot from the direction of City Hall,’ I attempt. ‘What had you been doing there?’

  ‘You,’ he forces out, and I don’t know what he means by it.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Live there.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘I …’ He hesitates. ‘Safe.’

  ‘It makes you feel safe to be around where I live?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  I don’t know why that means so much, but it does.

  ‘There’s something I need to ask you. It’s important.’ I lower my voice. ‘I’ve got the list. In your flat, I found it in the toilet. Do you know which one I mean?’

  Seconds of silence. Then his hand squeezes mine.

  ‘When did you get hold of it? From who?’

  No answer.

  ‘Grim. When did you get hold of it? Was it …’ I hesitate. ‘Was this what it was all about? Is it what you were after? The Angelica murder, our meetings, was that …’ I stumble, not sure how to express the feeling. ‘Was that it? You mustn’t lie to me now, Grim. You have to tell me the truth.’

  I look at him, the parts of his face not covered by the bandage — his chin and mouth, one ear, his jawbone and cheeks, his nose. Not one muscle is tense, I think to myself. Maybe he just can’t.

  A tug on my hand. Once. That was it.

  ‘You knew it existed and you planned to use it. I was supposed to help you find it. Am I right?’

  A slight hesitation at first, I can feel it despite him not moving a muscle. Something, I don’t know what, is flowing between us.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he grunts.

  ‘That was it?’ I ask, for confirmation. ‘And the person you were going to contact about it was Patrik Sköld.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I try and think my way through to the next question, but everything is moving so slowly.

  ‘How did you find out about the list?’

  The name, short and weak, slips into the room:

  ‘Angelica.’

  ‘She told you about it.’

  He smiles gently.

  ‘Course she did.’

  ‘Who had she got it from? How had she managed to get hold of it?’

  He attempts to say something else, I can see his mouth moving but can’t hear any words. I get up from my chair and lean over him, so that my ear can sense Grim’s warm breath escaping.

  ‘Not sure,’ he whispers.

  ‘But you have a hunch.’

  ‘Not sure,’ he repeats. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  He has betrayed me. I have betrayed others, by trusting him time and time again.

  We are two of a kind.

  We do exactly the same thing — he does it to me, I do it to Sam. I’m no better than him. Maybe we deserve each other.

  Everything is a circle. I collapse into the chair again.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  Grim opens his mouth but nothing comes out. He gives my hand two quick squeezes: he doesn’t understand.

  ‘Why did you try and trick me?’ I elaborate. ‘Did you really think I was going to give you the list if I found it first?’ The question comes out again, angrier, I’m not in control of it: ‘Why did you trick me?’

  ‘I …’ His tongue finds its way out between his lips, moistens them slowly. ‘Because I never learn.’

  That’s the last thing he says to me that morning.

  The door opens. At last, the doctor’s here.

  46

  I see us sometimes, in my mind’s eye.

  It’ll be summer
one day, maybe the next one, or the one after that, and the sun will be shining white and warm over Norr Mälarstrand. I see us there, yes, there we are, arriving at the waterfront terrace from different directions.

  Grim’s hair is sun-bleached and unruly. He’s wearing sunglasses, which he takes off when he sees me, then he gives me that big smile, the one that for a second always makes him look seventeen again. As I embrace him, I can smell his hair and the softener in his clothes, the heavy scent of sunscreen and sweat. That’s how I imagine him.

  We order some beers and sit smoking at one of the tables, laughing at the past, and from the bar’s speakers Peggy Lee sings time is so old and love so brief. Wounds heal, distance in geography and lifestyles can be bridged, you can get yourself through anything.

  Death is a long way off. We speak about it frankly and openly, the way you can when you feel secure. We talk about how close we’ve come to it, not once but several times, we both recall — at the same instant, as those with a shared past do — something that happened to us in Salem.

  It’s about the girl, the one who was standing waiting for a bus one night. The one who later lost her life, tragically; but on that particular night in Salem, after having her life saved by two strangers, death was a long way off for that girl, too.

  We talk about her, Angelica. Grim asks if I really think she was in love with him. I say I don’t know, that he would know better than I would. But maybe. Probably. He’s easy to fall in love with, I can imagine, and she was a girl with a sense of adventure. He’s living with someone now, I don’t know who, and working somewhere, and we might not get together that regularly — that’s often the way in the middle part of your life — but when we do, those meetings mean a lot to me.

  Love is pure gold and time a thief, Peggy Lee sings and we toast something banal, and we laugh again and I think how it was winter for so long, that those years without Grim were so lonely, and how the summer that surrounds us has finally arrived.

  In my imagination, we speak about the solution, me and Grim, as though it’s already happened. The solution to the Angelica murder, we say, but never in any more concrete terms than that. That’s where the illusion disintegrates; a crack or a tear appears in the dream’s backdrop, and the light of reality breaks on through.

  This, me and him on a terrace in the sunshine, is never going to happen. We’re too far away from each other. Everything’s too messy, too complicated, too raw.

  The solution to the Angelica murder. What is the solution?

  Perhaps it’s Patrik Sköld. I can see the weapon in his hand, and the motive that drove him to it. But he was partly telling the truth; his suspicions about Grim’s motives have been proved right. Part of me wishes I’d never asked, that I’d never heard his explanation.

  Because I never learn.

  Maybe we’ll never get any closer to each other.

  47

  ‘Are we agreed on this?’

  It’s Morovi asking the question, Monday morning. She often does that, says we and our when she means you and your. Apparently, it’s something to do with leadership, using a certain form of words to indicate that her understanding is based on ours.

  Both me and Birck answer yes. We’re agreed.

  The meeting has been going on for less than fifteen minutes, which has proved to be sufficient to present all the latest developments in the Angelica Reyes case. Morovi seems surprisingly unmoved. She moves her fingers down the list of informants.

  ‘Someone at SGS is supposed to have taken Angelica’s life because she gained access to this list by selling sex to them. She is then alleged to have used it to extort money, and then been threatened with death by this person, so she goes on to contact John fucking Grimberg to help her disappear. The perpetrator beats her to it, kills her, and retrieves the list. Or so he thinks. The murderer, being familiar with our methods since he is, at least technically, one of us, carries out the crime in such a way that it could easily be mistaken for a classic case of man kills woman in fit of rage. That’s the theory.’

  ‘More or less,’ Birck replies.

  ‘And we don’t know who?’

  ‘We’re meeting Patrik Sköld again tonight. It could be him. Or else he knows who it is.’

  ‘And we’re agreed on this,’ she says.

  ‘Yes?’ says Birck, confused.

  ‘Good. I’m going to ask again, since what we’re about to do amounts to nothing less than shooting our own force in the foot, revealing a group of highly successful officers as potential criminals, including a prostitute-visiting murderer, costing the justice system several million kronor and starting a media campaign against our own HQ the likes of which has never been seen before.’

  ‘Yes?’ Birck says weakly.

  ‘And this is all because of a five-year-old murder of a prostitute, a crime we might get to prosecute, but where the suspect, if we were to find one, is likely to walk free. Chances are I’ll get sacked, and what might happen to you I have no idea, but it probably won’t be much fun. So,’ she concludes, ‘I want to be perfectly sure that we are in agreement.’

  Birck clears his throat.

  ‘Are you trying to get us to drop it?’

  She shakes her head, and lowers her voice.

  ‘Investigate SGS,’ she says to me. ‘Find something conclusive. Who was there, when, what they did, and so on, focusing on the time around the murder. And not a word to anyone. Goes for you, too,’ she adds, staring at Birck. ‘You’re working on this now. Off you go.’

  i’ll probably come home tomorrow

  Sam leaves it at that. A warmth spreads through my chest, means I don’t hear Birck’s question.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I asked you what you were thinking about.’

  ‘Aha. Patrik Sköld.’

  ‘Me, too.’ Birck looks with disdain at the bit of paper in his hands, a duty roster from SGS. ‘We should’ve arrested him.’

  good, I text Sam, attach a picture of Kit. we miss you. Then I put my phone away.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I don’t know, but we should’ve done something. Now he’s had an entire weekend to tidy things up. Or disappear — we don’t even know if he’s still in Stockholm, or the country. I’d much rather have had him locked up.’

  ‘But on what grounds? We’ve got nothing. Calm down.’

  ‘I will.’ He sighs, lets go of the piece of paper. Something is hanging back in his voice. ‘I was thinking, you mentioned that you’d been to see Grim.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve heard at HQ that he’s conscious, apparently. Did he say anything? Was he … Was Sköld right?’

  I can hardly bring myself to say it.

  ‘He was trying to get hold of the list.’

  ‘So you were a useful idiot. How does that feel?’

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘Yeah … or however you might put it.’

  ‘He’s my friend. How do you think it feels?’

  ‘You need some new friends,’ Birck mutters. ‘Shall we keep going?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  We examine printouts of duty rosters and staff records. We do have access to them, but it’s not straightforward. That’s why it’s taken so long. Our efforts so far have led us to one, not particularly helpful, conclusion.

  During its short existence, between 2008 and 2011, SGS was a powerful place.

  With a staff of more than thirty to call on, most of them operatives and men, even if the proportion of women eventually climbed to a little more than a quarter. On top of that came the countless informants and informal colleagues constantly used by the unit. They had premises here at HQ and out at a local station in Huddinge. The number of cars being used by SGS seems to fluctuate between five and ten, depending on which records you consult. Some of the vehicles, including a white A
udi A3 registration PVV 219, are listed as operative equipment — that is to say, classified — and as such not recorded in all documentation.

  In October 2010, thirty-one people — twenty-three men and eight women — were working within SGS. A few days before Angelica’s murder, much of the unit’s manpower had been deployed on a large-scale smuggling bust. The documents show that five people — four men and one woman — can be immediately excluded from our inquiry. They were in Gothenburg at the time, since that’s where the smuggling was taking place, even if the goods themselves were ultimately intended for Stockholm.

  ‘That leaves twenty-six people,’ says Birck. ‘And of them, I would probably dare to suggest that we can rule out another six. Three, for example, are in court, giving testimonies in the trial of those accused of shooting up a restaurant in Husby, two were at a conference in Chicago, and one was on holiday.’

  ‘So we have a list of twenty possible suspects,’ I say.

  ‘Of whom, five have strictly administrative roles,’ Birck adds. ‘Can computer geeks and desk jockeys kill someone like Reyes?’

  ‘I would think so.’

  ‘But would you put money on it being one of them?’

  ‘The opposite more like.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Birck says, his eyes fixed on his computer screen. ‘So get rid of them for now. Then we’ve got fifteen. Not bad, really. More than half the names on the list have dropped off.’

  I study it.

  ‘Four of them are women. Do we rule them out? Considering the third-customer thing, I’m thinking. That’s a man of course.’

  ‘And the question of incitement?’

  ‘You mean that one of the women might have hired a guy to kill another woman?’

  ‘Alright,’ says Birck. ‘I hear you. I’ll adjust the list.’

  Eleven candidates is still too many. Both he and I know that. To rule out others will take closer investigations and we’ve yet to talk about how we’re going to undertake them. Birck is eyeing the piles of paper on his desk with obvious displeasure.

  ‘Duty rosters, equipment lists, and staff records don’t cut it. We need more.’