Without him saying a word, a skinny man gets off his exercise bike and quickly wipes the saddle and handlebars with paper towels.
The static fluorescent strip-lights reveal the shabby walls. The air is heavy with the smell of sweat and tiger balm.
As usual, the group of old junkies is standing outside the dividing Plexiglas wall, and two Albanians from the Malm? gang are loitering by the folded table-tennis table.
Joona Linna finishes a set of pull-ups, lets go of the bar and lands softly on the floor. He looks over at the window. Dusty sunlight fills the gym again. His grey eyes look like molten lead for a few seconds.
Joona is clean-shaven, and his blond hair is cut short, almost in a crew-cut. His brow is furrowed, his mouth set firm. He’s wearing a pale blue T-shirt, its seams stretching over his bulging muscles.
‘One more set before we switch to a wider grip,’ Marko says to him.
Marko is a wiry older prisoner who has taken it upon himself to act as Joona’s bodyguard.
A new inmate with a thin, birdlike face is approaching the gym. He’s hiding something against his hip. His cheekbones are sharp, his lips pale, and his thinning hair is pulled up in a ponytail.
He isn’t dressed for the gym. He’s wearing an open rust-red fleece jacket that reveals the tattoos on his chest and neck.
The thin man passes beneath the last security camera mounted in the ceiling and enters the gym, then stops in front of Joona.
One of the prison guards outside the Plexiglas turns, and the baton hanging by his hip swings against the glass.
A few of the inmates have turned their backs on Joona and Marko.
The atmosphere becomes tense, everyone moves with a new wariness.
The only sound is a high-frequency hum from the ventilation.
Joona stands underneath the pull-up bar again, jumps, and pulls himself up.
Marko stands behind him with his sinuous tattooed arms hanging by his sides.
The veins in Joona’s temples throb as he pulls himself up again and again, raising his chin above the bar.
‘Are you the cop?’ the man with the thin face asks.
Small motes of dust drift gently through the still air. The guard on the other side of the Plexiglas exchanges a few words with an inmate, then starts to walk back towards the control room.
Joona pulls himself up again.
‘Thirty more,’ Marko says.
The man with the thin face is staring at Joona. Sweat glistens on his top lip, and is dripping down his cheeks.
‘I’m going to get you, you bastard,’ he says with a strained smile.
‘Nyt pelk??n,’ Joona replies calmly in Finnish, and pulls himself up again.
‘Understand?’ the man grins. ‘Do you understand what the fuck I’m saying?’
Joona notices that the new arrival is clutching a dagger by his hip, a homemade weapon made from a long, thin shard of glass bound with duct-tape.
He’ll aim low, Joona thinks. He’ll try to get below my ribs. It’s almost impossible to stab someone with glass, but if it’s held by splints under the tape it can still penetrate the body before it snaps off.
A few other inmates have gathered on the other side of the Plexiglas, looking into the gym with curiosity. Their body language betrays a restrained eagerness. They just happen to stand in the way of the cameras.
‘You’re a cop,’ the man hisses, then looks at the others. ‘You know he’s a cop?’
‘Is that true?’ one of the onlookers says with a smile, then takes a swig from a plastic bottle.
A crucifix swings on a chain around the neck of a man with haggard features. The scars on the insides of his arms are frayed from the ascorbic acid he’s used to dissolve the heroin.
‘It is, I fucking swear,’ the prisoner with the thin face goes on. ‘He’s from National Crime, he’s a fucking pig, a dirty cop.’
‘That probably explains why everyone calls him “the Cop”,’ the man with the plastic bottle says sarcastically, and chuckles silently to himself.
Joona keeps doing pull-ups.
Reiner Kronlid is sitting on the exercise bike with a blank look on his face. His eyes are perfectly still, like a reptile’s, as he watches the scene play out.
One of the men from Malm? comes in and starts to run on the treadmill. The thud of his feet and the whine of the belt fill the cramped room.
Joona lets go of the bar, lands softly on his feet and looks at the man with the weapon.
‘Can I give you something to think about?’ Joona says in his Finnish-accented Swedish. ‘Feigned ignorance is born of confidence, illusory weakness is born of—’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ the man interrupts.
After his time in the Paratroop Unit Joona received enhanced training in unconventional close combat and innovative weaponry in the Netherlands.
Lieutenant Rinus Advocaat trained him for situations very similar to this. Joona knows exactly how to deflect the man’s arm, how to crush his throat and windpipe with repeated blows, how to twist the glass knife from his grasp, how to jam it into his neck and break off its point.
‘Stab the cop,’ a member of the Brotherhood snarls, then laughs. ‘You don’t have the nerve …’
‘Shut up,’ a younger man says.
‘Stab him,’ the other man laughs.
The prisoner with the thin face squeezes the makeshift knife and Joona looks him in the eye as he comes closer.
If Joona is attacked now, he knows he’s going to have to stop himself from following through with the sequence of movements that are imprinted in his body.
During his almost two years in prison he’s managed to steer clear of serious fights. His only aim has been to serve his time and start a new life.
He just needs to deflect the arm, twist the weapon from the man’s hand and knock him to the floor.
Joona turns his back on the newcomer with the knife. As he exchanges a few words with Marko, he can see the man’s reflection in the window looking onto the yard.
‘I could have killed the cop,’ the man says, breathing hard through his thin nose.
‘No, you couldn’t,’ Marko replies over Joona’s shoulder.
15
Twenty-three months have passed since Joona was found guilty of using violence to help a convicted felon escape custody. He was taken away to the risk assessment unit at Kumla Prison.
The prison service transportation unit took his few possessions, custody documents and ID. Joona was led into the reception centre, where he was stripped, made to give a urine sample for a drug test, and given new clothes, sheets and a toothbrush.
After five weeks of evaluation he was placed in Unit T instead of the secure unit in Saltvik where convicted police officers are usually sent. He would spend the next few years in a cell measuring six square metres, with a plastic floor, a sink and a small, barred Plexiglas window.
For the first eight months Joona worked in the laundry with the rest of the inmates. He got to know a lot of the men on the second floor, and told each of them about his work with the National Police and his conviction. He knew it would be impossible to keep his past a secret. Whenever a new prisoner arrives in the unit, the others are quick to ask a relative on the outside to find out what they were sentenced for.
He has a relaxed relationship with most of the groups in the unit, but keeps his distance from the Brotherhood and its leader, Reiner Kronlid. The Brotherhood has links to extreme right-wing groups, and is involved in drug-trafficking and protection rackets in all the big prisons.
By the end of the summer Joona had encouraged nineteen prisoners to start studying, at various levels. They formed a support group, and so far only two of them have dropped out.
The monotonous routines make the whole establishment run very slowly. All the cell doors are opened at eight o’clock in the morning and locked at eight o’clock in the evening.
As soon as the automatic lock clicks open each morning, Joona leaves his cell to shower and have breakfast before the entire unit heads down into the ice-cold tunnels that link the different parts of the prison like a sewage system.