‘The ladder leads up to the garden behind the house,’ he goes on, as if to take their attention away from the closed door. ‘You might have noticed –’
‘The drain cover?’ Hurtig interrupts him. ‘I was standing on top of it less than half an hour ago.’
‘True,’ the unit head replies, ‘but if we’d opened the cover from the outside we’d only have seen mesh over a dark hole.’
She turns to Hurtig and the unit head, who are standing listlessly outside the steel door. ‘I’m going to open it,’ she says. ‘Why is it closed, anyway?’
The head of the response unit just shakes his head and takes a deep breath. ‘What the hell are we dealing with here?’ he says slowly. ‘What kind of sick bastard are we after?’
‘We know his name is Viggo Dürer,’ Hurtig replies. ‘And we have a rough idea of what he looks like, but we have no idea of what sort of person he is –’
‘Whoever did this isn’t a person,’ the unit head interrupts. ‘This is something else altogether.’
They look at one another but say nothing. The only sounds are the wind hitting the garage roof and the other police officers moving around up in the garden.
Something has scared these men so much that they’re not sure about showing us what they’ve found, Jeanette thinks, and feels suddenly hesitant. She thinks of her hellish experience at National Crime that afternoon.
Hurtig gives the door a light nudge.
‘There’s a light switch to the right of the door,’ the unit head says. ‘There’s fluorescent lighting in there, unfortunately.’ Then he turns away, and the steel door slowly slides open.
In the belief that hesitation and reflection are just a waste of time, Jeanette switches the light on at once and takes a step inside. In a fraction of a second her brain makes a long sequence of instinctive decisions that lead her to take an entirely rational view of what’s inside the room.
First she registers everything she sees, and once she’s done that she’s going to shut the door and leave the rest to Ivo Andri?.
Time stops for her.
She registers that Ulrika Wendin isn’t in the room, and that no other living person is either. She also registers that there are two large extractor fans mounted on each of the end walls, and that there are four thin steel cables running across the room.
She registers what’s hanging from the cables, and what’s standing on the floor in the middle of the room.
Then she shuts the door.
Hurtig has backed away a few steps and is now leaning against the concrete wall with his hands in his pockets, staring down at the floor. Jeanette can see his jaw moving, as if he were chewing on something, and she feels sorry for him. The head of the response unit turns round again as he hears the door close. He breathes out and rubs his forehead, but says nothing.
When Ivo Andri? arrives with the forensics unit, Jeanette and Hurtig look at their young, untroubled faces with melancholy sympathy. Even if the assistants will only be dealing with the anteroom of Dürer’s museum, the room with the newspaper cuttings, old toys and scraps of paper, they’ll still have to see the unnameable horrors in the drying room.
Now wearing plastic gloves, Jeanette and Hurtig take a first look at the vast quantity of documents, and after a while it’s as if they’ve come to a tacit agreement not to discuss what they saw in the other room. They know what’s in there, and in the fullness of time Ivo Andri? will give them answers. That’s enough.
Sofia had been right again, Jeanette thinks. A retrospective exhibition of castrations, or a loss of sexual belonging. Well, why not?
She’s experiencing the same heavy tiredness she felt after sitting in front of the screen in National Crime, and forces herself to look for signs of light. One is that there’s still hope that Ulrika Wendin is alive, and that hope gives Jeanette strength.
They’re photographing the material and making a rough catalogue of what it contains. The more thorough examination will be done later, and not by them, so it’s important not to forget their first impressions, when their awareness of what they’re seeing is still relatively uncontaminated.
At first glance, the main categories appear to be cuttings from newspapers and magazines, photographs, handwritten documents, everything from small notes to long letters, as well as artefacts, primarily toys. There’s another category for copies of articles and extracts from books. How much of it is personal memories or documentation of criminal activity is in most cases impossible to determine. Among the photographs are Polaroids of Samuel Bai, whom she can easily recognise by the RUF scars on his chest.
The bottles and jars on the shelf in the room will obviously be examined by the forensics team, and Jeanette wastes no time on them. She has a rough idea of what they contain. Formalin, formaldehyde and similar substances and chemicals used for embalming.
Nor do she and Hurtig touch the dog cages and the small drain in the middle of the room, even if they can’t help glancing in that direction occasionally.
The work proceeds quickly and with a degree of detachment towards what they’re seeing. That’s why Hurtig barely reacts when he finds an illustrated description of the tools used for embalming, and recognises the implements he found in the kitchen drawer up in the house. Pliers, a saw, tweezers, and lastly a wooden stick with a hook at the end.
They find several newspaper clippings about the three boys at Thorildsplan, Danvikstull and Svartsj?landet, but there don’t appear to be any clippings about the boy who was found a few days ago down in Norra Hammarbyhamnen.
What’s striking is that the majority of the clips are from Soviet or Ukrainian newspapers. It’s hard to work out what the articles are about because neither Jeanette nor Hurtig can read Cyrillic, and because almost all of them lack illustrations. They’re marked with dates, in a range running from the early 1960s to fairly recently, the summer of 2008. The articles will have to be scanned and sent to Iwan Lowynsky at the Ukrainian security police.
Jeanette soon decides to break off her work with the material, and agrees with Hurtig that they’ve got enough for the time being, and that the overall picture will become clear later.
Just one more thing, she thinks.
She’s standing in front of the low cupboard with the toy monkeys, looking at a photograph attached to the middle of the wall with a drawing pin. There’s something about the picture that she recognises. It conjures up memories of the films at National Crime, and the person she saw in them looks very similar to the one in the photograph. The man in the picture is sitting on the veranda in front of a house. Probably Viggo Dürer, but there’s also something familiar about the house.
She takes the picture down from the wall, and sits on the floor with it still in her hand as she looks at Hurtig with eyes that she presumes must look bloodshot and tired.
‘Do you want to go back to the office?’ she asks.