the plastic bag. Moved the pills one by one through his fingers. Counted them again. Even numbers, odd numbers.
Odds and evens.
Sarac shivered and pulled the blanket up over his legs. In spite of the heat in the gloomy little room, his fingertips and the end of his nose were always cold. He looked down at the notepad on his lap and tried to put his thoughts into words. But as usual they wouldn’t play ball. The senior consultant had suggested that he try to write down what he felt, and that was his task in advance of his next therapy session. Of course he could ignore the whole thing, tell the psychologist to go to hell and shut himself away in his room the way a couple of the other patients did. But he was keen to go on acting compliant for a few more days.
Janus, he had written. Not much to offer, really, and certainly not the sort of thing he was thinking of telling anyone.
I owe everything.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.
The loop of music was back in his head again. The lyrics that had helped him unpick his stroke-damaged brain last Christmas. Helped him reveal his own secrets. And his sins.
Anxiety tightened its grip around his heart and lungs.
Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.
He put the pad down and took the bag of pills out of the pocket of his cardigan. Moved the tablets around again like pearls on a strand.
Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Only three more performances to go. Then the film of his life would be over at last.
* * *
Julia Gabrielsson turned the wheel and changed lanes abruptly as she put her foot down and with satisfaction felt the car respond instantly. It hadn’t driven more than a couple of thousand kilometers and still had that new-car smell, which was obviously preferable to the odors that would become ingrained in the seats over time. Fast food, various bodily fluids, and, not least, tedium. She had worked out a long time ago that you had to push yourself forward on Mondays, when jobs that had come in over the weekend were allocated. That way you could get hold of a decent car so you didn’t have to drive about in one of the worn-out old patrol cars that were parked in the far corner. So she always got in at six o’clock on Monday mornings and raided the key cabinet before going down to the gym. She made sure she was back in time for the morning meeting at a quarter past eight, alert, fresh from the shower, eager to get to work, and with the key to the best car in her pocket, while her bleary-eyed colleagues were sipping their first cups of coffee and wishing it was still the weekend.
She liked cars, liked driving fast. Dad used to practice his J-turns and controlled slides with her in the works parking lot every winter once she turned thirteen, and she had beaten the crap out of all the guys on the emergency response driving course. One of the many advantages of being the daughter of a police officer. It was just a shame Dad couldn’t see her now.
She finished overtaking and pulled back into the right lane.
“How long have you been back in Sweden?” Julia took her eyes off the traffic for a few seconds. High time for a bit of mundane chat with the civilian. Get him to reveal who he was and, more importantly, what he was doing on her team, in her murder investigation.
“Three weeks, give or take,” Amante muttered distantly.
“UN or Foreign Office?”
Amante shook his head. “Europol. Lampedusa. An Italian island in the Mediterranean.”
“Yes, I know. Where all the refugee boats from North Africa end up.”
Underestimating her general knowledge was a black mark, a big one that more than swallowed up the feeble plusses he had managed to scrape together so far. But she thought she’d give him a chance to correct his mistake. Or commit another one so that she could comfortably and guiltlessly file him away in the box marked Dry Academics, Type 1A.
“So you worked on refugee issues?”
“Yep. For two years,” he said with an awkward little smile. He seemed to have realized that he’d come across as patronizing.
“And now you’re here with us.”
She paused, waiting for him to explain why. But Amante merely sat there without speaking. Clearly she was going to have to try a different tactic.
“We could certainly do with some fresh blood in the Violent Crime Unit.”
That was perfectly true. The head of the unit, Pärson, held his protective hand over the old Tic Tac guys. He let them drink their way surreptitiously toward retirement at the end of the corridor. Or toward a fatal heart attack. The old men blocked the paths of other people’s careers as successfully as they did their own arteries, so the division was roughly fifty-fifty.
“We’ve been on our knees since Skarpö,” she added.
Amante looked up. “I was out of the country. Missed most of that. There were a lot of fatalities, weren’t there? Two police officers?”
“Nine dead in total. And even more injured. Several different criminal gangs clashed out there, and three of our colleagues got in the way. We still don’t really know why.”
“Oh.” Amante looked out of the side window. He wasn’t taking any of the juicy bait she was dangling right in front of his nose. He seemed more interested in the buildings swishing past along Sankt Eriksgatan.
Strange. Pretty much every police officer Julia knew wanted to talk about Skarpö. Tried to get the details out of her, anything that, against all odds, hadn’t yet been dissected and analyzed in the media or on the internal gossip network. About the gangsters and officers who had died out there, and above all about David Sarac, the heroic police officer who had survived.
“So what do you think of Eva Swensk, then?” she said in an attempt to find a fresh topic of conversation. “Our new national police chief,” she added, in a poorly disguised imitation of his dry tone of voice.
Amante turned his head toward her. “Do you know her?”
The traffic ahead of them slowed down. Julia changed lanes again and accelerated past a few more cars before skillfully pulling back into a gap. She gained five car lengths by the maneuver.
“No, I can’t really claim I do. We’ve only met a few times. I listened to a couple of her talks when she was regional police chief. She’s got a reputation for being tough and efficient. But I was still a bit surprised when Stenberg gave her the job. I thought it was going to be yet another man.”
Or, to be more accurate, one particular man, she thought. For some reason Deputy Police Commissioner Oscar Wallin had lost the race to Eva Swensk. Wallin had done all the dirty work of the reorganization only to find himself unexpectedly—and to the delight of many—pushed aside when it was time for the minister of justice to appoint a new national police chief. She still wondered what had actually happened. But Wallin wasn’t the sort of man you called up for a chat, so she’d had to contain her curiosity. It had been several months since she last heard from him, which left her feeling slightly disappointed.
Wallin was one of the few police officers she regarded as a role model. Someone who, even though he was only four or
