Henrik felt how cold it was when he placed his bare hands on the cold steering wheel. As soon as he turned the key in the ignition, the CD player started at full volume. Markoolio’s voice sang joyfully about Phuket, about summer all year round and then “Thai, Thai, Thai.” Henrik immediately turned the CD off and backed out from the drive.
In the silence he thought about the previous evening. After the pizza stop and before they called it a day, he and Mia had managed to start up a conversation with yet another couple of known heroin addicts. They had even spoken to a man who had been of use in earlier investigations about narcotics and who had given them important information that eventually led to them catching underage dealers. Henrik had hoped that this time too he could get the man to talk. But just like the other heroin addicts, he had been extremely taciturn.
“But bloody well tell us if you know anything,” Mia had said three centimeters from the man’s face. After that she had threatened him with various nasty consequences if he didn’t give them information that would help the investigation.
Henrik had got hold of her arm and made her sit down on a chair. Then she had calmed down. Most of all they wanted names. But to snitch in the underworld after all meant virtually signing your own death warrant.
Stopped at a red light, Henrik found himself thinking that he ought to put more emphasis on the weapons that had been noted in the investigation, a Glock and a .22 Sig Sauer. Besides, he must phone the transportation department and remind them to hurry along with trying to identify any vehicles that the speed cameras might have caught on the road in the area where the boy had been found dead.
Henrik felt energetic. He was hoping for a productive day.
When he got out of his car in the police garage, it was half past seven. He saw there was a light on in Gunnar’s room and he soon saw Gunnar sitting in front of his computer, fingers tapping away keenly on the keyboard.
“Did you have trouble sleeping, too?” said Henrik.
“Oh no. It was just a bit awkward trying to fit on a sofa here in the office,” Gunnar answered without taking his eyes off the screen in front of him.
Henrik smiled. “I thought I’d go through the files again. I just can’t fathom these murders,” he said.
Gunnar whirled around on his chair and looked at him.
“Do go through it all. I’m just going to forward some emails from curious reporters to the press officer. Twenty-two left.”
Gunnar whirled back and went on writing.
Henrik went to the conference room, turned on the lights and looked down from the window at the empty roundabout. Norrk?ping had not woken up yet. On the large table he laid out the files which summed up the cases with Hans Juhlén, the unknown boy with carving in his neck they were calling Thanatos, and Thomas Rydberg, and sat down to look through them all.
The file about Thomas Rydberg still consisted mainly of thirty or so pictures that Anneli had taken at the scene the day before. The last four pictures were taken outside in the docks area. Henrik looked at them absentmindedly and felt a tiredness creep up on him. He closed the ring file noisily and wandered off to the kitchen where he drank a large glass of water. A thought suddenly occurred to him that he had seen something on the photos.
He banged the glass down and hurried back into the conference room and opened the Rydberg file again. Once more he looked through the photographs, page by page, photo after photo. He was close to giving up again when he got to the very last photo. It was an overview of the crime scene, and Anneli had probably been kneeling when she took the photo. The wide-angle showed forensics busy working. In the background through the open doors of the hall you could see the container depot. Several different-colored containers stood there.
He tried to see what was written on them. But it was too small to see. Instead he quickly got up, ran down the corridor to Gunnar’s room.
“Have you got a magnifying glass?”
“No, look in Anneli’s room.”
Anneli’s office was in perfect order and every item had its given place. Henrik opened the desk drawers, one after the other. In the bottom one he found what he was looking for and hurried back to the conference room. Now he could see the details he needed on the photo. The picture was taken from too far away for him to be absolutely certain, but on one container there were some letters and numbers.
Henrik immediately opened the Juhlén file and got out the list with the ten combinations. He started to compare them and suddenly gave a start. The combination had the same format: four letters and six numbers.
*
At a quarter to eleven Henrik Levin and Gunnar ?hrn got in the car to drive to the docks. They had arranged to meet the harbor director who would show them round the container depot.
When they turned in to the parking area a man of short stature with reddish hair and black glasses was standing there waiting for them. He was wearing a blue checked shirt and light jeans. He gave them a friendly smile and introduced himself as the managing director, Rainer Gustavsson. He asked if they wanted some coffee, but Henrik politely declined and asked instead to be taken directly to the container area. Rainer Gustavsson took the lead.
They were just loading a large ship, container after container lifted up by the gantries on the dock. Metal hit against metal, cranes were moved and trucks driven in an endless line. Several longshoremen in blue overalls with company logos were standing on the deck. They were all wearing safety helmets. Two men checked that everything was safely stowed and fastened. They knocked on the steel wires and now and then one of the men pulled out a spanner to tighten them.
Henrik looked up at the hull where the containers towered five high.
“It requires a lot of working hours to load a ship,” said Rainer. “And it must all be done quickly. If something goes wrong and delays the ship, money starts ticking away directly. Efficiency is everything in the freight world.”
“How many containers can you load on a ship?” Henrik asked.
“The largest ships that come to us can take six thousand six hundred containers. But there are ships in the world that can take more than eighteen thousand containers. If you lose one minute for every container, then that would mean more than three hundred hours delay. That’s why the loading is very important and in recent years we have made wide-ranging investments in the docks to improve the logistics. Now we have a complete system to deal with everything from notification, in-delivery, examination, estimates, repairs and out-delivery. Thanks to our two new ship-to-shore gantry cranes we can also handle larger and larger container ships,” said Rainer.
“What sort of goods do you handle?” said Gunnar.
“Every type imaginable.” Rainer straightened his back as he said that.
“How do you check the contents?” said Gunnar.
“Customs does that. But sometimes it’s hard to determine who is responsible for the freight.”
Rainer stopped and looked at the two men.
“We’ve had quite a few investigations here over the years. The local council as well as the Environmental Protection Agency have stood in front of fully-loaded containers, looked inside and tried to work out what they contain.”
He took a deep breath and lowered his voice a little. “Not long ago we had three people from Nigeria who had filled a container with scrap from old cars. They wanted to send it from here to Nigeria because they thought the scrap was valuable. What we regard as scrap here, can be useful there. But they didn’t know about documentation. That meant that the council had to take over the case and the entire container had to be emptied to evaluate its contents. Some car parts were confiscated as they were seen as hazardous waste. I don’t know what happened to the container after that.”
Rainer started walking again.
Henrik and Gunnar came up on either side of him.