After almost twenty years she was starting to doubt it was ever going to happen.
As she swung out onto the Nyn?shamn road she heard a worrying rattle somewhere down by the left front wheel. Even though she was an imbecile when it came to cars, it was obvious that something was wrong with their old Audi and that she was going to have to get it fixed again soon. From past experience she knew it wouldn’t be cheap, even if the Serbian mechanic she went to out at Bolidenplan was both reliable and competitively priced.
The day before, she had emptied their savings account to pay the latest instalment of the mortgage, something that happened every three months with sadistic punctuality. She hoped she would be able to get the car fixed on credit. That had worked before.
Jeanette’s jacket pocket started to vibrate violently, as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony almost drove her off the road and onto the pavement.
‘Yep, Kihlberg here.’
‘Hi, Jan, we’ve got something out at the Thorildsplan metro,’ replied the voice of her colleague Jens Hurtig. ‘We need to get there at once. Where are you?’ There was a loud screech on the line, and she held the phone away from her ear to protect her hearing.
She hated being called Jan, and could feel herself getting annoyed. It had started off as a joke at a staff party three years earlier, but since then the nickname had spread through the whole of the police headquarters on Kungsholmen.
‘I’m in ?rsta, heading onto the Essinge bypass. What’s happened?’
‘They’ve found a young dead male in some bushes by the metro station, near the teacher-training college, and Billing wants you there as soon as possible. He sounded pretty agitated. Everything points to murder.’
Jeanette Kihlberg could hear the rattle getting worse, and wondered if she ought to pull over and call a tow truck, then get a lift into town.
‘If this bastard car holds together I’ll be there in five, ten minutes. I want you there as well.’ The car lurched, and Jeanette pulled into the right-hand lane just in case.
‘OK, I’ll get going – I’ll probably be there before you.’
A dead man’s body found in some bushes sounded to Jeanette like a fight that had got out of hand. It would probably end up as a manslaughter charge.
Murder, she thought, as the steering wheel juddered, is a woman killed in her own home by her jealous husband after she tells him she wants a divorce.
More often than not, anyway.
But the fact was that times had changed, and what she had once learned at police training college was now not only open to question, but just plain wrong. Working methods had changed, and policing was in many respects much harder today than it had been twenty years ago.
Jeanette remembered the first time she was out on the beat, around normal people. How the public would offer to help, even had confidence in the police. The only reason anyone reports a crime today, she thought, is that the insurance companies demand it. Not because people have any expectation of the crime being solved.
But what had she been expecting when she quit her social-work course and decided to join the police? The opportunity to make a difference? To help people? That was what she told her dad when she proudly showed him her letter of acceptance. Yes, that was it. She wanted to be the sort of person who stood between people who did bad things and people who had bad things done to them. She wanted to be a real person.
And that was what being in the police meant.
She had spent her whole childhood listening in awe as her father and grandfather talked about their work in the police. No matter whether it was Midsummer or Good Friday, conversation around the dining table would always revert to ruthless bank robbers, good-natured pickpockets and clever con men. Anecdotes and memories from the darker side of life.
Just as the smell of the Christmas ham used to conjure up a whole roomful of expectation, the men’s talk in the living room provided a backdrop of security.
She smiled at the memory of her grandfather’s lack of interest and scepticism about new technological tools. Nowadays handcuffs had been replaced by self-locking plastic ties, to make things easier. He had once told her that DNA analysis was just a passing fad.
Police work was about making a difference, she thought. Not about making things easier. And their work had to adapt to keep pace with changes in society.
Being in the police means that you want to help, that you care. It’s not about sitting in an armoured police van, staring out helplessly through tinted windows.
The airport
HAD BEEN AS grey and as cold as the winter’s morning. He arrived on Air China in a country he had never heard of before. He knew that several hundred children before him had made the same journey, and like them he had a well-rehearsed story to tell the border police at passport control.
Without hesitating over a single syllable he delivered the story he had spent months repeating until he knew it by heart.
During the construction of one of the big Olympic venues he had got work carrying bricks and mortar. His uncle, a poor labourer, organised somewhere for him to live, but when his uncle was badly injured and ended up in hospital he had no one to look after him. His parents were dead and he had no brothers or sisters or other relatives he could turn to.
In his interview with the border police he explained how he and his uncle had been treated like slaves, in circumstances that could only be compared to apartheid. He told them how he had spent five months working on the construction site, but had never dared hope he might ever become an equal citizen of the city.
According to the old hukou system, he was registered in his home village far away from the city, and therefore had almost no rights at all in the place where he lived and worked.
That was why he had been forced to make his way to Sweden, where his only remaining relative lived. He didn’t know where, but according to his uncle they had promised to get in touch with him as soon as he arrived.
He came to this new country with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, a mobile phone and fifty American dollars. The mobile’s contact list was empty, and there were no texts or pictures that could reveal anything about him.
In actual fact, it was new and completely unused.
What he didn’t reveal to the police was the telephone number he had written down on a scrap of paper hidden in his left shoe. A number he was going to call as soon as he had escaped from the camp.
The country he had come to wasn’t like China at all. Everything was so clean and empty. When the interview was over and he was being led by two policemen through the deserted corridors of the airport, he wondered if this was what Europe looked like.