Box 21 by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström Page B

position and shake himself unconscious.
     
     
EG: Six months at least. Up to eight years. But you’re in luck. We’re in a good mood today. What if the impounded bags got lost?
     
HO: What the fuck d’you mean, lost?
     
EG: Well, there are things we’d like to hear more about. Tell us about a friend of yours called Lang. Jochum Lang. You know him.
     
HO: Never heard of him.
     
     
Hilding’s face was twitching violently. He grimaced, his eyes rolled back, his head turned this way and that. He scratched the wound. He was terrified. Jochum’s name clawed at his mind and he wanted to shake it off, dump it, he didn’t want it.
     
Not here. He was about to protest when someone knocked on the door. A woman detective put her head in. Ewert couldn’t remember her name, but she was a summer locum, Skĺne dialect.
     
‘Sorry to interrupt. It’s for you, Superintendent. I think it’s important.’
     
Ewert waved her inside.
     
‘Don’t worry. This is all going to hell anyway. This little smack head seems to be in a rush to get out and die.’
     
Sven nodded when she glanced at him. She walked towards the table to stand behind Hilding. He got up, pointed at her, thrust his crotch at her lamely a few times.
     
‘Got yourself new pussy, Grens? Pig’s pussy, eh!’
     
She swung around, slapped him hard with the flat of her hand.
     
He lost his balance, stumbled forward holding both hands against his cheek, which flared bright red.
     
‘Fucking pig!’
     
She stared at him.
     
‘Inspector Hermansson to you. Get out. Now.’
     
Hilding, one hand covering his flushed cheek, kept swearing while Sven took a firm grip on his arm and escorted him out of the room.
     
Surprised, Ewert glanced at Sven, then turned to his young female colleague.
     
‘You’re Inspector Hermansson?’
     
‘That’s right.’
     
She was young, maybe twenty-five, no doubt in her eyes. She showed nothing. Neither surprise nor anger, unfazed by being called ‘pig’s pussy’, unexcited by having dealt a violent blow to Hilding’s face.
     
‘Something important, you said?’
     
‘The central switchboard called. You’re needed at an address in the Atlas district. Völund Street. Number three.’
     
Ewert took note and searched his memory; he’d been there before, not long ago.
     
‘It’s somewhere along the main railway line, isn’t it? St Erik’s Square area?’
     
‘That’s right. I checked it on the map.’
     
‘What’s up?’
     
She had a sheet of paper in her hand, torn from a police notebook, and she looked at it quickly, didn’t want to make a mistake. Not in front of Ewert.
     
‘Our local colleagues have forced entry, following a report of serious physical abuse in a flat on the fifth floor.’
     
‘And?’
     
‘It’s . . . quite urgent.’
     
‘Anything else?’
     
‘There’s a problem.’
     
     
     
     
     
It was one of the older properties in a good area and had been carefully restored. Each street door was flanked by well-kept lawns with small trees dotted about, despite the lack of room, and narrow borders glowed with red and yellow flowers.
     
Ewert Grens got out of the car and scanned the long façade with its rows of windows. Turn-of-the-century building, the sort where you could hear your neighbours, their heavy steps in the kitchen, when they turned up the volume for the news, when they went out to put something in the rubbish chute. He looked at the windows with their expensive curtains. Flat after flat where people lived and died, only a breath away from their neighbours. But they never met, never knew anything about the person next door.
     
Sven Sundkvist, who had parked the car, joined him.
     
‘Völund Street. Looks expensive. Who can afford to live here?’ he muttered.
     
Eight windows on the fifth floor. Violence had broken out behind one of them. Ewert compared them. They all looked the same, the same damn curtains, the same damn plants – different colours, different patterns, but still the same.
     
He snorted in the general