CELL 8 Read online

  “I’ll dance with whoever I want.”

  Someone dropped a fork.

  Maybe a loudspeaker snapped.

  John noticed nothing. There was nothing that he could later explain. He was concentrating on counting out time. If anyone could, he could. If I just keep counting, this fucking feeling will go, I’ ll calm down again.

  He’d learned how to do this.

  To not hit.

  Never to hit again.

  He looked down at the man who was sneering at him and violating the air with his hand; he ran his own hands through the long hair that he no longer had, tried to tuck it behind his ears as he had always done when agitation and fear pushed aside what should have been control. He saw Elizabeth’s sixteen-year-old face and he saw Helena’s thirty-seven-year-old face, and he looked at the woman who had just been dancing herself dizzy and who was now standing stock-still some way off, and then at the drunken hands that had pushed against her and suddenly everything just exploded: all the fucking years of counting and all the fucking years of repressed anger that pushed against his chest from inside when he tried to sleep. And without being aware of it he pulled back his leg and kicked with all the might that only time can muster; he hit him somewhere in the middle of his laughing face and then heard nothing of the confusion and commotion as the people around surged toward him.

  PART I

  monday

  IT WAS A RATHER BEAUTIFUL MORNING; STOCKHOLM IN THE MIST IN THE distance, the encroaching sun, vapors dancing on the water. Half an hour more, then dock, town, home.

  John looked out of the plastic porthole. The enormous ferry glided slowly down the channel, at no more than a few knots—the waves formed by the metal prow as soft as from any small boat.

  It had been a long night. He was tired, had gone to bed sometime after four, but hadn’t been able to sleep. That’s the way it was sometimes, when what was happening now became confused with what had happened back then. His eyes were aching, his head was aching, his whole damn body was aching. He was frightened. It was a long time since he’d been frightened; he’d found an everyday routine and settled down—Helena sleeping beside him and Oscar fast asleep in his bed next door. They had a life together. The apartment was small but it was theirs; sometimes it felt like there had never been anything else, as if he could forget everything else.

  There was a draft from the porthole. The cabin was cold, as always in January. Two evenings onboard, a good wage, his own cabin and free food—that was enough and he could deal with it. Dance-band music and drunk conference delegates were something that he had gradually learned to cope with. After all, he was a father now, and a regular income almost compensated for the feeling that sometimes gripped him in the middle of a song, onstage with the others. A feeling of loneliness, despite all the sweaty, laughing couples on the dance floor, of not being able to talk to anyone, not being able to move.

  He had kicked him in the middle of the face.

  John closed his eyes, squeezed his eyelids shut until it hurt, and then he looked out again. Stockholm was getting closer; the skyline of Södermalm looked as if it was falling down into Stadsgård dock.

  It shouldn’t have happened.

  He was never going to hit anyone again.

  But that bastard had had his hand up her skirt, he had thrust himself against her, and she had tried to get away, his hand on her behind. John had warned him, and people had stopped dancing, and when the man took his hand away and laughed at him, stood there right in front of him, it had felt like it was someone else, as if John was an onlooker, the raw energy, it wasn’t his.

  Someone knocked on the cabin door. He didn’t hear it.

  They had called it low impulse control. Back then, a long time ago. They had examined him and talked to him and given the diagnosis, a young teenager who fought everything he could fight against. Someone had of course talked about a mother who had died when he was young and someone else about the things that had happened later. But even back then he had scoffed at things like that. He didn’t believe that the explanation lay in his childhood. It wasn’t the result of difficult potty training or broken toys; he hit everyone he came into contact with because he had no choice, because he wanted to.

  The noise by the open cabin door continued.

  Stockholm grew outside the porthole, the skyline defined into buildings. It was the kind of winter day that he had grown to appreciate: Stockholm, a warm sun that brought color to your cheeks, and then the cold returned with the dark, a fight between the life that was waiting and the past that had to go. He gazed over at a jetty as they sailed by, a big villa that he always watched out for—it lay in such a good position, right down by the water, a well-maintained garden hidden beneath a thin layer of snow. He saw the ice around the abandoned jetty where an expensive yacht was normally moored in summer. Stöpis.

  One of his favorite words in Swedish. Water that ran over the ice when the temperature rose, and then froze again during the cold nights. Stöpis. Several layers of thin ice with water in between. He didn’t even know what it was called in English, had never got around to learning it, if it even existed.

  There was another knock on the door.

  This time he heard it. Far away, a knock that penetrated his thoughts. He turned around to face the cabin: a bed and a wardrobe and white walls, a door at the far end where the noise was coming from.

  “Am I disturbing you?”

  A man in a green uniform, tall, broad shouldered, red beard. John recognized him. One of the security guards.

  “No.”

  “Can I come in?”

  He pointed to the cabin. John didn’t know what his name was.

  “Of course.”

  The security guard came over to the round window and looked, distracted, at the city in the distance.

  “The view. It’s lovely.”

  “Yes.”

  “Will be nice to get ashore.”

  “Why are you here?”

  The security guard pointed at the bed but didn’t wait for an answer, just sat down.

  “The incident last night.”

  John looked at him.

  “Right . . .”

  “I know who it is. The kind of guy who gets too close. He’s done it before. But that’s not the point. It’s never a good idea to kick anyone in the face onboard.”

  There was pack of cigarettes on the shelf that doubled as a bedside table. John took one out, lit it. The security guard moved demonstratively away from the smoke.

  “You’ve been reported. Around fifty witnesses is a few too many. The police are already at Stadsgård dock waiting.”

  Not that.

  The fear he had not had to feel for so long. That he had nearly learned to forget.

  “I’m sorry, buddy.”

  The green uniform on the bed. John looked at it, took a drag on his cigarette, couldn’t move.

  Not that.

  “John—that is your name, isn’t it? Just one thing. Personally I don’t give a damn if some Finnish bastard who deserves it gets his head kicked in. But you’ve been reported. And the police will take you in for questioning.”

  John didn’t scream.

  He was convinced that that was what he was doing, but no sound came out.

  A single silent scream until his lungs were empty. Then he sat down on the bed, lowered his head, his hands clasped to his cheeks.

  He couldn’t understand why, but he was for a moment in another place, in another time; he was fifteen years old and he had just hit a teacher from behind with a chair: a single blow to Mr. Coverson’s face just as he turned around. He lost his hearing on one side as a result, Mr. Coverson, and John could still remember how he felt when he faced his victim in the courtroom, when he realized for the first time that every blow has a consequence. He had cried as he’d never cried before, not even at his mother’s funeral. He had understood, truly understood that he’d robbed the man of something vital, forever, and he’d known that he’d hit some
one for the last time. Three months in that shitty, awful juvenile detention center had not changed that.

  “They’ll stop the shuttle bus.”

  The security guard was still sitting down. He was taken aback by the intensity of John’s reaction, the sudden terror that filled the simple cabin. To be questioned by the police. To risk being charged with assault. Sure, no one would want that. But this—his head was shaking violently, his chalk-white face that couldn’t speak—the guard couldn’t comprehend it.

  “They’ll be waiting for you there. When you drive off.”

  John could hear him somewhere above his head, a voice that dissolved and disappeared in cigarette smoke.

  “But if you went down the ordinary gangway with the other passengers who don’t have vehicles, you might be able to buy yourself a couple of hours more.”

  He left the ferry in a crowd of people with duty-free shopping bags and suitcases on wheels, as the morning rush hour built up in the city, and then hurried along the sidewalk away from the center, toward Nacka. There was moisture in the air and carbon dioxide and something else that carried him to Danvikstull, where he flagged down a taxi with a sweaty hand and said he wanted to go to Alphyddevägen 43. He had been dreading this day for more than six years but had long ago decided he would not run away. He wanted to get home. To Helena, to Oscar. He wanted to hold them and talk about the future and he wanted to eat rice pudding with blueberry jam, as if it were his last meal.

  THE EARLY MORNING STUNG EWERT GRENS’S CHEEKS. HE DIDN’T LIKE THE long fucking winters; there was nothing about them that he liked, especially around now, at the beginning of January. He hated every day of the cold. He had problems moving his neck, and his left leg wouldn’t do as it was told—defects that only seemed to get worse as the temperature plummeted. It made him feel old, older than his fifty-seven years. Every joint, every muscle that had lost its youth, shouted out for spring, for warmth.

  He was standing outside the main door on Sveavägen. The same stair that led to the same apartment on the fourth floor where he had lived for nearly thirty years now. Three decades in the same place, without getting to know even one of his neighbors.

  He snorted.

  Because you don’t want to. Because you don’t have the time. The kind who just get in the way. The kind who hang up notices on the bulletin board by the main door asking people to stop feeding the birds on their balconies. Neighbors who only talked to each other when someone played their music too loud and too late, and who threatened to call in noise pollution officers or the police. Don’t fucking want to know people like that.

  Stuck at a complete standstill in traffic, he had been on his way to see Anni when he suddenly remembered that his visit this particular Monday had been postponed until lunch. Every Monday morning, for all these years, and then some junior nurse books her in for physio. Tired and irritated, he had pulled out of traffic, crossed the middle of the road, and driven back to park in the space that he’d just left, only to discover that it had been taken. He swore loudly and parked where he shouldn’t.

  He wasn’t expected at Kronoberg for another couple of hours and had therefore started to walk up the stairs to his apartment when he suddenly stopped on the second floor. Not there. Too big. Too empty. He hadn’t been home at all for a while. The sofa in his well-lived-in office at the far end of police headquarters was very narrow and he had difficulties fitting his large frame onto it, it was true, but he slept better there. And in fact he always had.

  So he started to walk slowly along the sidewalk. Crossed Sveavägen, down Odengatan, past the Gustav Vasa Church, then turned into Dalagatan. The same route, twenty-five minutes, no matter what time of year. Thin gray hair, a furrowed face, an obvious limp because his left leg was lame—Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens was the sort of person other people moved away from on the sidewalk, the sort of man who is heard without having to say a word.

  He was singing now.

  Once he’d passed the old alkies who sat on the benches in Vasa Park and the forlorn entrance to Sabbatsberg Hospital, he normally picked up speed. His lungs needed that time to get going properly, and he sang, loud and out of tune, not bothered by the people who turned and stared, all the way to police headquarters while the blood pumped around his ungainly body. Always Siw Malmkvist, always a song from a time that no longer existed.

  I know that I acted hastily

  Yes my words were heartless and cruel.

  This morning Siw’s version of Patti Page’s “Don’t Read the Letter,” 1961. He sang and remembered long days without loneliness, a life so far in the past that it was hard to keep track.

  Thirty-four years in the police force. He had had everything. Thirtyfour years. He had nothing.

  In the middle of Barnhus Bridge, which linked Norrmalm with Kungsholmen, he sang even louder. Over the noise of the traffic, the strong wind that always lay in wait just there, he belted it out across Stockholm, suppressing the agitation and thoughts and feelings that at times nearly tipped into bitterness.

  Is it too late to be sorry?

  Forgive me for being a fool

  He unbuttoned his coat, pulled off his scarf, let the old lyrics float freely between the cars that drove by in second gear, and the people who hunched up and hurried past on their way somewhere. Grens was just coming to the chorus when he felt an impatient vibration in the inner pocket of his jacket. Once. Twice. Three times.

  “Hello.”

  He talked loudly into the electronic void of his mobile phone. A couple of seconds, then a voice that he detested.

  “Ewert?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you up to?”

  As if you cared, you little ass kisser. Ewert Grens loathed his boss. Just as he loathed, in principle, everyone in his workplace. It was not something he tried to hide. No one could avoid noticing. This little runt, a cocky superintendent, was too young and too self-important to even tie his own shoes.

  “What do you want?”

  He heard his boss taking a breath, bracing himself.

  “Ewert, you and I have different roles to play. Different areas of responsibility. For example, it is me who decides who is employed here. And where.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “So I was wondering how it was that you, as I’ve just found out, have already given the vacant post in your section to someone. Someone who, by the way, has nowhere near the experience required to be a detective inspector.”

  He should hang up, he should sing what he had to sing. The sun had just risen and Stockholm was waking up on the right side of the bed, it was his time, his ritual, his fucking right not to have to deal with idiots.

  “That’s the way it goes. When you’re not quick enough.”

  A train passed underneath him, the sound echoing off the bridge and drowning out the voice on the phone. He didn’t mind.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  The voice tried again.

  “You can’t employ Hermansson. I’ve got another candidate. Someone who’s qualified.”

  Ewert Grens was about to start singing again.

  “There you go. Too late. I signed all the necessary papers yesterday evening. As I realized that you’d stick your oar in.”

  He snapped the phone shut and put it back in his inside pocket.

  He continued on his way, cleared his throat—he would sing the whole song from the beginning again.

  Ten minutes later he opened the heavy door at the main entrance on Kungsholmgatan.

  The lunatics were already there.

  A line waiting for the morning’s reports. Every Monday the same, full house, the curse of the weekend. He looked at them, most of them tired; the apartment had been burgled while they were at the cabin, a car stolen from a parking lot, a shop window smashed and the display taken. He walked over toward the corridor and locked door, behind which lay the stairs to his office, a couple of floors up and a few doors down from the coffee machine. He was just abou
t to punch in the code and go through when he saw a man lying on the sofa farthest away. A line number clutched in his hand, his face twisted and crooked, coagulated blood trailing from one ear. The sound of his voice unclear, as if slurring his words, a language that Grens was sure was Finnish.

  Blood had been coming out of her ears.

  A step closer. The prostrate man reeked of alcohol and the smell was so rank that Grens stopped abruptly.

  It was his face. Something wasn’t right.

  Grens breathed through his mouth. Two steps forward and then he bent over him.

  The man was heavily bruised.

  His pupils were different sizes. One small, the other dilated.

  The eyes, he saw them in front of him, her head in his lap.

  He hadn’t known, not then.

  He went quickly over to the registration desk. A short exchange, Grens waved his arms around and the young policeman stood up, hurried behind the detective superintendent over to the drunk man who’d arrived half an hour earlier in a taxi and had just lain there on the sofa ever since.

  “Get a patrol car to drive him to the ER—neurology—at the Karolinska Hospital! Now!”

  Ewert Grens was furious as he jabbed the air with his finger.

  “Severe head injuries. Different-sized pupils. Blood draining from the ears. Slurred speech.”

  He wondered if it was too late.

  “Everything points to a brain hemorrhage.”

  He, if anyone, should know. That it might be too late. That you couldn’t always ensure recovery from a serious head injury.

  He had lived with that knowledge for more than twenty-five years.

  “Have you registered his complaint?”

  “Yes.”

  He was searching for the young policeman’s name badge, made it obvious that he was looking straight at it; made eye contact again.