‘We could always try the doorbell,’ she says, pointing at the entry-phone beside the gate.
Hurtig rings three times without getting an answer, then turns towards Jeanette. She thinks he looks a bit deflated.
‘We climb over,’ she decides, and puts her torch in her mouth so she has both hands free. She scrambles up nimbly, swings over the spiked iron railings at the top and lands softly on the gravel drive on the other side.
Hurtig has a harder time, but is soon standing beside her with a smile on his face and a long tear in his jacket. ‘Damn, I didn’t know you could climb like that.’ He seems to have livened up, and she smiles back at him.
The drive leads up to a large, grey, two-storey stone house, probably built at the turn of the last century and renovated relatively recently. Next to two tall, dark pine trees to the left of the house there’s an outbuilding, a garage, also built of grey stone but about a hundred years later.
Jeanette switches on her torch and notes that the grass in the large plot is tall, and that in spite of the renovations everything looks unkempt, an impression reinforced by the fact that the fruit has been left to rot on a number of apple trees, bathing the garden in a sweet, musty smell.
The house is dark, and they realise at once that there’s no one home. Through the window in the front door they can see a little blue flashing light, a sign that the burglar alarm is switched on.
Jeanette crouches down in front of the garage. ‘Wheel tracks,’ she says. ‘Relatively fresh.’ The grit in front of the garage is almost dry, protected by the branches of the trees above. The drive is covered with pine needles and the tyre tracks are clearly visible.
Hurtig puts his hands in his jacket pockets and shivers. ‘Come on, let’s take a look inside the house.’
They walk around the villa, but it looks just as abandoned as Dürer’s apartment in the city. Jeanette peers in through a window. At least there’s furniture here, she thinks, as she sees a couple of sofas, a table and a piano. All covered by a thick layer of dust.
Camouflaged by the darkness and the trees behind the garage is a car, covered by a tarpaulin. A Citro?n, dark blue, showing signs of rust.
‘Hang on …’ She stops and sweeps the beam of her torch along the bushes in front of the house. ‘Do you see? What’s that?’
The torch is aimed at part of the foundation, between two of the windows.
‘There’s a cellar. Or there used to be. The windows have been covered up.’
She nods. ‘Just what I was thinking.’
One of the big blocks of granite looks very different than the others. It’s roughly the size of a cellar window, while the other bricks used in the foundation are smaller.
They do another circuit of the house and count a total of eight cellar windows that have been covered by new stones. The garage doesn’t appear to have a cellar.
‘Does it mean anything,’ Hurtig wonders, ‘or do you think it’s just an unusual way of insulating the place?’
‘I don’t know …’ Jeanette shines the torch at one of the blocks again. ‘It must have been a hell of a job getting them in. I’ve got a feeling someone wanted to hide the fact that there is a cellar, rather than …’
Hurtig scratches his chin and looks thoughtful. ‘I don’t know. But we’ll find out if we can get a search warrant. Do you think we should put a watch on the house in case someone shows up?’
‘No, not yet. But I think we should take a closer look at the garage before we go.’
It’s big enough for two cars, the doors are locked, and there’s only one little window high up in the stone wall at the back. The outbuilding reminds Jeanette of a small bunker, and she gives Hurtig a wry smile. ‘Have you got any tools with you?’
Hurtig smiles back. ‘There’s a toolbox in the boot. Are we going to break in?’
‘No, just take a look at what’s in there. And I want to take a sample of the paint on that car, just in case.’
‘Agreed. Off you go, then, you’re clearly better at climbing than I am.’
Two minutes later Jeanette is back with a penknife and a heavy wrench. She scrapes off a few flakes of paint from the car and puts them in a small plastic evidence bag, then hands the wrench to Hurtig. She can’t reach the window herself.
He stands on tiptoe, and, as he pulls his arm back to strike at the window, he looks at her over his shoulder. ‘What do we do if an alarm starts shrieking?’
‘What all vandals do. Run like hell.’ She grins. ‘Just hit it …’
Three heavy blows on the window, and the sound of breaking glass seems deafening to her.
Then complete silence. They wait for ten seconds before Jeanette speaks.
‘Give me a leg up, then,’ she says, pointing at the broken window.
Hurtig cups his hands, and she climbs up.
There’s just room for her to stick her head and the torch through the window. The beam plays across a sturdy workbench below the window, then across a concrete floor towards some heavy-duty shelving against the wall nearest the house. She points the beam around the room, then returns to the shelving.
Completely deserted. Not a single thing inside, as far as she can see. The workbench and shelving are quite empty.
That’s all. A perfectly ordinary garage, albeit very spacious and tidy, which doesn’t seem to have been used for anything but parking cars.
Skanstull – a Neighborhood
PEOPLE SAY IT’S dangerous to wake a sleepwalker.
Sofia Zetterlund’s awakening in the Clarion Hotel perhaps doesn’t entirely support that thesis, but her physical reaction is so strong that she’s having trouble breathing, and her pulse rate goes so high that she can’t get up from her seat.
‘Sofia, are you OK?’
In front of her stands Carolina Glanz.
She sees a face stiff from cosmetic surgery. It’s a miracle of the human physiognomy that it can still express concern.
‘Geht es Ihnen gut?’ she hears distantly from the man beside her.
She’s no longer bothered about him. ‘Ja,’ she replies in a tone of derision, and finally manages to stand up. ‘I have to go,’ she then says to the young woman, and pushes past her roughly, without meeting her anxious gaze.
She doesn’t look back once as she walks away from the bar, through the lobby and out into the street.
Go home … I have to go home.
She goes over the pedestrian crossing towards the Ringen shopping centre, ignoring the red light, which leads to angry horn blowing and sudden braking. When she reaches the other side her legs feel like they can no longer carry her, and she sits down on one of the benches outside the shopping centre and hides her face in her hands.
Her head is still spinning, and she doesn’t notice her tears, or the driving rain.
Or the fact that someone sits down beside her.
‘You shouldn’t go there any more,’ Carolina Glanz says after a while.