‘OK, let’s go!’ he concludes, lowering his arm.
Jeanette hears Hurtig mutter ‘Jawohl, mein Führer’ to himself, but can’t be bothered to comment.
Everything happens very fast after that. The first group of three men force the gate with a heavy bolt cutter and move quickly up to the main entrance, where they take positions on either side of the door. The second group disappears out of sight round the left-hand side of the house, and the third heads towards the garage. Jeanette hears the sound of breaking glass and a cry telling anyone inside the house that it’s the police, and that they should lie down on the floor.
‘Ground floor secured!’ they hear from inside the house, and Hurtig comes to stand beside her. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It was a stupid thing to say. I actually like these guys, but sometimes I think they get a bit carried away with the militarism.’
‘I know what you mean,’ she says, touching his arm lightly. ‘The difference between them and the thugs can sometimes be hard to see.’
Hurtig nods.
‘First floor secured!’
‘Garage secured!’
Jeanette watches as the head of the unit emerges from the house and gives the signal that it’s OK for them to approach.
‘The house is empty, but it was alarmed,’ he says when Jeanette and Hurtig reach the steps. ‘One of the old sort, not connected to a security company, just designed to make a hell of a racket. Effective once upon a time, but not these days.’
‘Is everything under control otherwise?’
‘Yes. No girl on either the ground or first floors. The basement’s empty, but we’re checking for concealed spaces.’
The six masked men who had been inside the house come out onto the steps.
‘Nothing,’ one of them says. ‘You can go in now.’
First came nothing, then came nothing, and then came nothing, she thinks, remembering the lyrics to an old song by Kent as she goes through the door with Hurtig and the other police officers gather on the lawn.
They walk through the sparsely furnished hall into the living room. The house smells musty, and there’s a thin layer of dust like a dull skin covering all the furniture and ornaments. The walls are covered with paintings and old posters. Most of them have a medical theme. On one of the bookcases there’s a skull next to a stuffed bird, and the room looks to Jeanette like some sort of museum.
She goes over to the shelves and pulls out one of the books. Forensic Medicine Textbook, she reads. Published in 1994 by the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Uppsala University.
The kitchen isn’t quite as musty, and Jeanette detects the sharp smell of cleaning fluid.
‘Bleach,’ Hurtig says, sniffing the air.
Jeanette can’t see anything of immediate interest in the kitchen. She goes out into the hall and up the stairs to the first floor. In the background she can hear Hurtig going through the kitchen cupboards.
The bedroom is empty apart from a wardrobe and a large bed with no sheets or blankets. Just a bare, stained mattress. As Jeanette opens the wardrobe door Hurtig calls to her from downstairs, but before she goes down she looks at the neatly hung dresses, blouses and suits. A strange feeling washes over her as she sees the old-fashioned women’s underwear. Corsets and suspender belts made of nylon and other synthetic materials, and white underpants made of coarse linen.
In the kitchen Hurtig is searching through one of the drawers. He’s laid a number of different objects on the worktop beside him.
‘He has damn strange things in his cutlery drawer,’ he says, pointing at the row of tools.
Jeanette looks closer and sees a number of pairs of pliers, a small saw and several different sizes of tweezers. ‘What’s this?’ she says, holding up a wooden stick with a small hook at the end.
‘Weird, but so far not illegal,’ he says. ‘Come on, let’s take a look at the basement.’
The cellar smells of mould, and down there they find nothing but a box of half-rotten apples, two fishing rods and a pallet with eight bags of easy-mix concrete on it. Otherwise the four damp rooms are completely empty, and she can’t help wondering why it took six police officers almost ten minutes to work out that there were no hidden rooms.
It’s a disappointed Jeanette and an equally frustrated Hurtig who emerge onto the steps in front of the response unit and their commanding officer.
‘OK, just the garage left before we can go home,’ she says, and starts walking dejectedly towards the building next to the house.
One of the masked police officers comes up beside her and pulls his balaclava up to free his mouth. ‘The only thing we noticed once we’d forced the door was that the window was broken. Looks like someone broke it with the wrench we found on the ground outside.’
Rather shame-faced, Hurtig goes over to the officer who’s holding a sealed plastic bag containing the wrench. He says something, looks uncomfortable, then climbs up onto the concrete drain cover immediately behind him. Jeanette notes that the concrete looks new, and presumes that this was why those bags of cement were in the cellar.
She looks into the garage, but doesn’t even bother going inside. She already knows that the only things in there are a workbench and some empty shelves. Nothing else.
They walk back to the car. Jeanette is disappointed that they found nothing useful at all and have made no progress. But at the same time she’s relieved that they didn’t find Ulrika Wendin dead inside the house.
Hurtig gets in the driver’s seat, starts the car and pulls out onto the main road leading back to the city.
They drive the first few kilometres without speaking. Then Jeanette breaks the silence.
‘Did you say it was you who broke the window because you didn’t have a key? Or did you confess that you don’t know how to pick a lock?’
Hurtig grins. ‘No, I didn’t have to confess that I’m useless at picking locks. He said they got into the garage using a sledgehammer. It was impossible to get the door open because it had been bolted from the inside.’
‘Stop the car, for God’s sake!’ Her yell makes Hurtig slam on the brakes automatically, and the police van behind them blows its horn angrily, but stops as well.
‘Drive back, fast as you fucking can!’
Hurtig gives her a quizzical look, then turns the car round and puts his foot down, making the tyres smoke. Jeanette winds down the window and sticks out her arm, and the van does a quick U-turn when she gestures for it to follow them.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she mutters through clenched teeth.
Nowhere
DURING HER INTERNAL journeys, when she’s in a sort of hibernation, she feels neither pain nor fear, and hopes to be able to take some of her new-found spiritual strength back to earth with her.
She makes another attempt at the states of America. To begin with she could do all but four of them, then she learned them all, but now she’s lost four or five again.