Anger Mode (9 page)

Walter squatted beside the body and pulled on the latex gloves that he always had with him. He carefully lifted the blanket to confirm what he already knew. A girl of around fifteen, sixteen years, just as Lilja had warned him.

She was pale and lifeless. Her eyes were closed and she looked peaceful, lying there. She was, however, just an empty shell, an object as lifeless as the clothes on her body. This morning, she had awoken to the last day of her all-too-short life, and Walter wondered what she had been thinking in the last minutes before Death took her. For a brief second, he wished he could trade places with her. He felt a pain in his chest and took a deep breath. Always the same powerless feeling, always the same bloody spasm in his lower chest.

He began by examining the girl’s head, lifting it up gently so that he could see the fracture at the back of the skull.

Swedberg crouched beside Walter. “Too damned tragic, eh?” he said in a quiet voice, scrutinizing the girl.

“What have you found out?” asked Walter flatly.

“For starters, this is what she had on her,” said Swedberg and held up a transparent forensic sample bag.

Walter scanned the contents of the bag: a small plaster figure in the shape of a winged skeleton.

“Mobile phone?” asked Walter.

“Not on her, in any case,” answered Swedberg.

“Anything else?”

“Malin Sjöstrand, fifteen years old,” answered Swedberg. “Cause of death: blunt-force trauma to the back of the head, probably from the fall on the stairs. We are taking her in for a post-mortem, if you have no objections.”

Walter nodded. He stood up and went up the stairs to the uniformed police officers.

“Who’s in the flat?” he asked a police officer.

“Ambulance crew and a female officer,” answered the police officer tersely.

Walter entered the flat and went through a narrow hallway into a living room. A middle-aged woman sat curled up with her knees against her chin in one corner of the sofa. Her face was almost as pale as the girl on the stairway. Her gaze was blank and her mascara had left black streaks down her cheeks. Beside her sat a woman police officer. Two male paramedics were crouched over the woman and attempting to get a reaction from her. Walter summoned the police officer with a wave. “Is that the mother?” he whispered.

“Yes,” replied the police officer. “Karin Sjöstrand, mother to Malin Sjöstrand; she’s the one
who …”

“Have you discovered anything else?” he interrupted.

“No, nothing. She’s currently in a state of shock, according to the paramedics. They want to take her in, but she refuses to leave the sofa.”

“I see,” nodded Walter. He sat down beside the curled-up woman, who didn’t take any notice of his presence.

“My name is Walter Gröhn and I’m a detective from the County CID,” he said, in as gentle a voice as he could muster. Tenderness was not his strongest suit.

The ambulancemen noted with interest how Walter tried to connect with the woman.

“Are you the girl’s mother?” continued Walter.

No reaction from the woman.

One of the ambulancemen, an older man with a fretful face, explained why she was not answering.

“She’s paralyzed with shock,” he said, almost whispering. “We want to get her to A&E as quickly as possible.” The second paramedic nodded in agreement.

Walter stood up from the sofa and went out into the stairwell. He wanted to be sure that the girl was on the way to the post-mortem and not still lying on the stairs.

“Get some rags and wipe the blood off the stairs, if you please,” he ordered the policeman who had been standing by the door earlier.

The policeman turned around, confused.

“Rags?” he said as he stared at Walter.

“Rags, you know, also known as floor rags,” explained Walter.

“We don’t have any rags with us,” the policeman said, apologetically.

“Then you’ll have to improvise,” suggested Walter. “Go and buy some at the nearest petrol station.”

The policeman continued to look confused.

An elderly woman with weepy, bloodshot eyes and a wrinkled face suddenly opened the next door. In one hand, she held a floor mop. Beside her, on the hallway floor, there stood an empty plastic bucket.

“You can take water from my bathroom,” she began, in a shaky voice. “I don’t have the strength to do it myself, you see. My legs don’t carry me so well nowadays.” She held out the floor mop with a shaking hand.

Walter scrutinized the hunchbacked old lady, who must have been at least eighty years old. Her blue-silver hair was flattened at the back. It looked as if she had just got out of bed.

“That’s very kind of you,” thanked Walter. “My colleague in the uniform down there will take care of it. And in return, maybe he can offer to clean your flat since he is already cleaning up.” Walter grinned at the lady who smiled back, somewhat uncomfortably.

“Thank you, but I already have a cleaning lady,” she said.

The policeman did not appear to be in the least amused as he took a firm grip of the floor mop and bucket and went into the lady’s flat.

Walter re-entered the flat. The paramedics had, as gently as possible, tried to get the shocked woman to lie down on the stretcher. They had failed and instead were discussing other options when Walter came in.

He crouched down in front of the woman and stretched out his hand.

“Come on, Karin. We’re going to see Malin,” he said and smiled sympathetically at her. Karin lowered her eyes from the wall and looked at Walter. An antique Mora grandfather clock struck with slow, sleepy chimes.

“Are we?” she asked, with the bewilderment of a child.

“Yes, we are,” Walter smiled. “She’s lying at the hospital waiting for you. It’s best that we hurry up.”

Walter took Karin’s hand while he nodded to the ambulance crew to prepare the stretcher. She hesitated for a moment. Then she stood up slowly with Walter’s hand firmly in hers. He led her to the stretcher and felt her grip his hand even harder.

“Promise that I’ll get to see her?” Her voice was fragile, and she looked into Walter’s eyes with a tired, feverish gaze.

“I promise,” Walter answered and freed his hand from her grip.

The younger of the paramedics approached Walter after they had loaded Karin into the ambulance.

“I don’t understand why you lied,” he said, and stared at Walter questioningly.

Walter raised his eyes to the clear, starry night sky. Condensation steamed out of his mouth as he breathed. The pain in his chest had subsided and he could breathe freely again.

“She’ll see her again,” he said, without taking his eye from the Big Dipper. “I never said under what circumstances.”

The paramedic scrutinized Walter thoughtfully for a few seconds. Then he got into the ambulance, shaking his head.

SOME JOURNALISTS HAD merged with the group of bystanders outside the barriers. Walter stiffly crept under the plastic tape that separated the tragedy from the everyday world. When he straightened up, he found himself standing in front of the worst news jackal of them all.

“Jörgen Blad, from the newspaper
Kvällspressen
,” said the short, corpulent reporter, while thrusting a minivoice recorder under Walter’s nose. Small, chipolata-like fingers gripped the voice recorder, in which he hoped he would win an exlusive from Walter. He held the voice recorder so close that Walter could smell the taco spices on the reporter’s hand. Presumably, he had been sitting in some Tex-Mex bar, stuffing himself with a load of greasy enchiladas. Walter hated Mexican food. It was always over-spiced and as greasy as the hair of a high-priced lawyer from the Östermalm district. Since he had a previously unfinished bone to pick with Blad, he decided to keep the process as short as possible.

“Oh, I can always recognize you,” Walter began and pushed the voice recorder to one side. “My eyesight is not that bad yet.”

“What can you say about the deceased?” insisted Jörgen and thrust the voice recorder forwards again.

“That she’s dead,” Walter said and started to go towards his car.

“Who’s the person in question and how did she die?” Jörgen continued and followed Walter.

“Too early to make a statement,” Walter answered abruptly.

“About what?” Jörgen asked. “About who she is or how she died?”

“That, you will have to guess,” Walter said and opened the door. “You people at
Kvällspressen
are usually quite adept at making up a story.” He slammed the car door shut.

And so the time for the first retribution had arrived.

Finally, he was being rewarded for his relentless work. It had been a difficult task, and he had been obliged to use accomplices, but they were everywhere, the unscrupulous who would sell themselves for a fistful of cash with no qualms. Everything had been carefully planned: the burglary, the planted evidence, and then the girl who became his instrument. She would be the first step on his road to recovery. Another failure was not an option. This war had no victors. All were doomed to defeat. All that remained was to ease his suffering.

The woman would suffer as he had suffered. She had kindly allowed herself to be touched by his vengeance and she would now have to live with the agony of having killed her own child. She would be made accountable and tortured by her own uncertainty, where the questions would eat away at her like maggots on a corpse.

But his victory was mixed with ambiguity. Who was to blame? Who was truly deserving of his fury? He was drowning in his yearning for her. His grief and hate got the better of him again
.

WALTER LEANT OVER the girl’s peaceful face. Her eyes were closed and her mouth sealed with stitches. He observed her in silence. She somehow appeared alive despite being dead, like a young actress with make-up to mimic the dead in some staged scene.

Her eyelids twitched slightly. Curious, he leaned closer. Suddenly, her eyelids opened. Two black holes grinned back at Walter and he fell backwards, horrified.

He awoke soaked in sweat. The alarm clock showed five minutes past four. The image of her empty eye sockets stayed on his retina, despite the fact he was wide awake. This had been happening more often over the years, these dreams about the children and how death always shrouded them.

He had never been able to confront the pain of Martine’s death. He had convinced himself that she was just out of town and would soon be coming back, standing there on the doorstep and greeting him with the warm smile that she had inherited from her mother.

Still, deep down, he knew that this was a dishonest, pathetic self-indulgence. He knew that she had been cremated and that the ashes had been scattered in the wind on that weekday eleven years ago. Anything else was just an illusion to keep him going.

His back felt sore as he got out of bed. He sat himself at the kitchen table, holding his back and massaging it even though he knew it would not help.

He had three injured vertebrae in his lower back, which would never fully heal. He was now paying for his carelessness with his back in his younger years. According to the doctors, there was no point in surgery. Regular exercise would help, but a single session with an over-zealous instructor at the gym had been more than enough for Walter. Walter and endorphins quite simply were not compatible. He had to roll with the punches, as it were.

He laid down again and not only went back to sleep – which was definitely not a common occurrence, especially after a nightmare – but also accomplished the feat of oversleeping. The mobilephone ringtone that played Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” abruptly shattered his slumber.

Newly awake, he grasped his mobile phone and searched for the green button.

“Do you know what time it is?” Lilja began.

Walter had no idea what time it was. He turned around awkwardly and saw that it was nine-thirty.

“It feels like seven?” Walter suggested.

“Hardly,” Lilja muttered. “We’ve picked up Karin Sjöstrand from the psychiatric ward. You were supposed to head up the interview with her at nine-thirty. Or were you thinking of working from home today?”

“Give me half an hour,” Walter groaned and got out of bed.

Despite the lack of parking and constant traffic jams, there are some advantages to living in Vasastan if one works at Kungsholmen, Walter thought, as he left the lift on the fifth floor of the police station precisely thirty-eight minutes after Lilja’s call.

The interrogation room on the fifth floor was one of the detention centre’s smallest. Twelve square metres with no window, one table and four chairs was pretty much all there was. In the centre of the table, there was a microphone from which the cable disappeared down through a hole in the dark oak. Two robust fluorescent strip lights projected a high-contrast glare in the room that highlighted the smallest of facial details with an eerie intensity. A person looked at least twenty years older in here.

Before Walter entered the interrogation room, he pulled Jonna to one side.

“Now, I want you to listen to me.”