Anders Roslund - Box 21 aka The Vault

‘Sven, I must ask you this. Is there anything you know that I ought to know?’

Sven still did not answer. He had no idea what he should say.

Lars Еgestam repeated his question.

‘Is there something?’

He had to answer.

‘No. I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

Еgestam began pacing the room again, breathing rapidly, nervously. He had barely begun.

‘One of the best officers in the force, so I should relax, shouldn’t I? Sit back and wait for the results of his investigative work, right?’

A couple of deep breaths before he carried on.

‘But I can’t relax because something is not right. Don’t you see? Which is why I lie awake at night. Which is why I feel compelled to go to work absurdly early and lie inside the chalk lines around the position of a dead body on a mortuary floor.’

He turned round and stopped in front of Sven, looked at him. Sven tried to meet the other man’s eyes, but stayed silent. He knew that no matter how much he said, it would never be enough.

‘Sven, I phoned Vilnius.’

Еgestam didn’t move away.

‘I asked our Lithuanian colleagues to locate Sljusareva. They found her in Klaipeda, back at her parental home.’

He perched on the edge of his desk and held up a bundle of papers, the documentation on the case he was talking about.

‘There is no transcript of the interview with Sljusareva that Grens claims to have carried out. He decided unilaterally that she should leave this country. What he says is all we know.’

His voice cracked, knowing well that he was about to say something he should never say, not to a policeman, not about a colleague in the force.

‘Ewert Grens is telling a story and it doesn’t hold water.’

He paused.

‘I have no idea why. I think Grens is tampering with the evidence in this investigation.’

Еgestam pressed Play on the tape recorder on his desk and the two men listened to the end of an exchange they had both heard before.

‘ Stena Baltica ? That’s a bloody boat! This is something personal! Bengt, over! Fuck’s sake, Bengt. Stop it! Squad, move in! All clear. Repeat, move in!’

No decision about choosing loyalty or truth. Not a word. Not yet.

‘Sven!’

‘Yes?’

‘I want you to go to Klaipeda. You are not to mention this to anyone, nor that you are going to interrogate Alena Sljusareva. You will report the results of the interrogation directly to me. I want to know what she really has to say.’

A strong smell hung in the air at Palanga Airport. The moment he passed the gate on his way to the luggage carousels, the smell of perfumed disinfectant hit his nose. The floor was still wet from washing and the smell told him that he was abroad, in a foreign place where they used chemicals and scents long since banned in Sweden. One hour and twenty minutes, he thought, one bleeding hour and they even clean the floors differently.

This was his second visit to Lithuania. He couldn’t remember much from his first trip, not even which airport they had flown into. It had been a big thing for him, a new recruit to the force, to be asked to escort a high-profile criminal on a journey outside Swedish borders. Now that prison was probably all that was left of his memory. It had felt like travelling back in time, with barking dogs, damp corridors, stale air that weighed on his lungs, tuberculosis warnings posted everywhere and pale, silent prisoners with shaved heads sitting in their small, overcrowded cells. A strange experience, one he had never really spoken about, not even with Anita.

He left the terminal building and summoned one of the waiting yellow cabs. Klaipeda was twenty-six kilometres south of Palanga. He was going to see Alena Sljusareva and hear things he didn’t want to know.

He had phoned home from Arlanda to say good morning to Jonas and promised him a present, something secret, a surprise. Sweets, no doubt, bought in a hurry in the airport shop. He didn’t have much time in Lithuana; he was due back in Stockholm early the next morning, and he knew that what he had to do here would take up every waking hour.

The driver took his time on the road from Palanga to Klaipeda. Sven Sundkvist considered telling him to speed up, but refrained. Settling into his seat, he told himself that the few minutes gained wouldn’t make up for the time it would take him to explain to the driver what he wanted.

It looked pretty, the landscape lit by the sun. He knew that it was a poor country, with eight out of ten of its people living precariously close to the poverty line, but he felt that there was a kind of dignity in what he saw this time, something likeable. Nothing to remind him of that prison. The news reports at home showed clichйs every time, so like everyone else he believed what he was shown, because it looked like what he had been fed before: all these grey people living in permanently grey weather. This was different. It was summer in a place full of real people, real lives, real colours.

He told the driver to take him straight to the hotel. He was too early to check in, but Hotel Aribт was far from full and he was given a room at once.

He wanted a little rest and tried the bed, the narrowest he had ever seen. Only a few minutes while he tried to visualise the woman he was about to meet, to remember what she looked and sounded like.

The scene in the flat had been chaotic. Alena Sljusareva had been upset, screaming about her friend who was lying unconscious on the floor, and about the man in a shiny suit, whom she called Dimitri-Bastard-Pimp, who was standing nearby next to a hole in the apartment door. Sven Sundkvist didn’t have a chance to take a proper look at her and of course had had no idea that later the same week he would watch her in a video and meet her in a strange city on the other side of the Baltic.

Alena Sljusareva had been standing in the room next door, just as naked as her unconscious friend.

She was dark, darker than most of the Baltic prostitutes who had ended up as items in the documents on his desk.

While they took care of the injured woman and confronted the pimp, who was making a fuss about his Lithuanian passport and diplomatic status, she had disappeared. That is, until she was arrested at the Baltic ferry terminal, about to board a boat that was ready to depart.

Ewert had interrogated her and, a few hours later, decided that she could go home to Lithuania after all.

Sven Sundkvist got up and had a shower. He put on lighter clothes; he hadn’t realised it would be so warm. The grey clichй must have stuck in his mind. He opened his briefcase, looked thoughtfully at the small tape recorder and then closed the case again. He would interrogate her, but the old-fashioned way, taking notes. He didn’t know why, maybe he was afraid of what she would tell him, afraid of her voice explaining what he didn’t want to record.

He walked through the centre of the town, the buildings beautiful but breathing from another time, the people he met, traces of Lydia Grajauskas in their faces, over and over again.

She had instructed him to walk to the lakeside and take the small ferry across Lake Curonia to Smilty Island. The heat that had struck him first in Palanga, then in Klaipeda, was now more intense. The sun scorched the back of his neck during the short boat trip and he realised he should have brought some sunscreen. He would turn brick red before the evening.

Once he stepped off the ferry he was to turn right and walk along the beach to an old fort housing an aquarium, a big one, the posters told him, with one hundred species of Baltic fish and a dolphinarium. She had explained that she wanted to be among people, and at lunchtime this place was full of schoolchildren and other visitors who came along to watch the fish. The two of them could stroll about among the tanks and talk for as long as they liked without anyone taking notice.