The Silenced

David Sarac had surreptitiously googled sleeping pills. Taking into account his emaciated body and generally poor state of health, he had worked out that twenty pills would be enough for what he wanted to achieve. But with twenty-five there would be no doubt, so he had another three nights to struggle through. Three nights of lying curled up in bed, drifting in the indistinct borderland between sleep and wakefulness, while everything that had happened out on the island replayed in his head. Always in the same order. First the snow. Heavy flakes falling on a frozen forest. A silent, dark old house. Then a low bass note, a threatening rumble on the horizon, growing louder and louder as the winter thunder approaches. Then suddenly beams of light from headlights cutting through the trees. The sound of powerful engines, of gunfire and shouted orders. Flashes from gun barrels creating a ghostly shadow play as the howls of anger, pain, and terror grow ever louder.

The thunder keeps building in intensity in the background, swallowing up all other sound until it transforms into the roar of the flames consuming the old house. A rain of sparks flies through the night sky, and the stench of gunpowder, soot, and burning flesh makes his throat sting. Just when he thinks it’s all over, when he thinks he’s finally on his way out of the nightmare, he finds himself in the middle of it again. Feels the heat of the pressure wave as it knocks him flying. The bullet hitting him in the neck, filling his airways with liquid iron. The blood on the white ground. His own blood. That of others. All of it sucked up by the snow crystals around him, until he’s lying on his back in a sea of carmine red. He hears himself laugh. A shrill laugh that sounds more like a sob. His head falls back on the snow. The world slowly starts to dissolve at the edges. Curling up like a burning photograph until it fades to black.

All this is your fault, David, the voices whisper.

It was your plan. Your fault.

Then the film starts over again. Unless he’s lucky enough to wake up, that is. Wake up locked away in a nursing home in the middle of nowhere. “For your own good, David,” as the senior consultant had said during their first conversation.

But he didn’t complain, couldn’t see any reason to do so. In a few days he was planning to leave it all behind: the island of Skarpö, the nightmares, and this place.

He scratched at the red scar running across his neck. Caught at it with his nails until it started to sting. The whispers were right. He should have died out there in the snow along with the others. Should have drowned in his own blood. It would have been a fitting punishment for his sins. Some things were simply too broken to mend.

But instead, against all the odds, he had survived. Had made a mockery of the justice he had tried to implement. David Sarac, heroic police officer. The hero who had to be kept locked away in a secure unit for his own good. But what was the alternative? For him to tell the truth about what had happened out on Skarpö? The reason why all those men had died out there in the snow? That was hardly an option, either for him or his superiors. A public relations disaster that must be avoided at all costs. That was why he was where he was. Planning his own escape.

It had taken time to build up the stock of pills. The staff had been very vigilant during the first week. They followed their routines to the letter, forcing him to open his mouth and stick his tongue out every time he took a sleeping pill. He had been careful. Played along and gained their confidence. He couldn’t afford to fail. If just one of the caregivers started to suspect, he’d find himself in the suicide wing and his plan would be thwarted.

He glanced out through the window. Between the trees he could just make out the little lake in the distance. He had explored the park during a couple of short walks when he was still considering other options beside the pills. But the light and all the sensory impressions out there had been too sharp. They exhausted his broken brain and forced him to stagger back into the safety of the building. But at least he knew that there was a fence and a heavy metal gate by the jetty. Floodlights, alarms, and cameras too, just as there were along the high brick wall by the road, and the double fence facing the dark forest on the other side. Barriers he wouldn’t have to confront. Because now he had the pills. He closed his hand around the plastic bag. Moved the pills one by one through his fingers. Counted them again. Even numbers, odd numbers.

Odds and evens.

Sarac shivered and pulled the blanket up over his legs. In spite of the heat in the gloomy little room, his fingertips and the end of his nose were always cold. He looked down at the notepad on his lap and tried to put his thoughts into words. But as usual they wouldn’t play ball. The senior consultant had suggested that he try to write down what he felt, and that was his task in advance of his next therapy session. Of course he could ignore the whole thing, tell the psychologist to go to hell and shut himself away in his room the way a couple of the other patients did. But he was keen to go on acting compliant for a few more days.

Janus, he had written. Not much to offer, really, and certainly not the sort of thing he was thinking of telling anyone.

I owe everything.

Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.

The loop of music was back in his head again. The lyrics that had helped him unpick his stroke-damaged brain last Christmas. Helped him reveal his own secrets. And his sins.

Anxiety tightened its grip around his heart and lungs.

Debts I can’t escape till the day I die.

He put the pad down and took the bag of pills out of the pocket of his cardigan. Moved the tablets around again like pearls on a strand.

Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. Only three more performances to go. Then the film of his life would be over at last.

* * *

Julia Gabrielsson turned the wheel and changed lanes abruptly as she put her foot down and with satisfaction felt the car respond instantly. It hadn’t driven more than a couple of thousand kilometers and still had that new-car smell, which was obviously preferable to the odors that would become ingrained in the seats over time. Fast food, various bodily fluids, and, not least, tedium. She had worked out a long time ago that you had to push yourself forward on Mondays, when jobs that had come in over the weekend were allocated. That way you could get hold of a decent car so you didn’t have to drive about in one of the worn-out old patrol cars that were parked in the far corner. So she always got in at six o’clock on Monday mornings and raided the key cabinet before going down to the gym. She made sure she was back in time for the morning meeting at a quarter past eight, alert, fresh from the shower, eager to get to work, and with the key to the best car in her pocket, while her bleary-eyed colleagues were sipping their first cups of coffee and wishing it was still the weekend.

She liked cars, liked driving fast. Dad used to practice his J-turns and controlled slides with her in the works parking lot every winter once she turned thirteen, and she had beaten the crap out of all the guys on the emergency response driving course. One of the many advantages of being the daughter of a police officer. It was just a shame Dad couldn’t see her now.

She finished overtaking and pulled back into the right lane.

“How long have you been back in Sweden?” Julia took her eyes off the traffic for a few seconds. High time for a bit of mundane chat with the civilian. Get him to reveal who he was and, more importantly, what he was doing on her team, in her murder investigation.

“Three weeks, give or take,” Amante muttered distantly.

“UN or Foreign Office?”

Amante shook his head. “Europol. Lampedusa. An Italian island in the Mediterranean.”

“Yes, I know. Where all the refugee boats from North Africa end up.”

Underestimating her general knowledge was a black mark, a big one that more than swallowed up the feeble plusses he had managed to scrape together so far. But she thought she’d give him a chance to correct his mistake. Or commit another one so that she could comfortably and guiltlessly file him away in the box marked Dry Academics, Type 1A.

“So you worked on refugee issues?”

“Yep. For two years,” he said with an awkward little smile. He seemed to have realized that he’d come across as patronizing.

“And now you’re here with us.”

She paused, waiting for him to explain why. But Amante merely sat there without speaking. Clearly she was going to have to try a different tactic.

“We could certainly do with some fresh blood in the Violent Crime Unit.”

That was perfectly true. The head of the unit, Pärson, held his protective hand over the old Tic Tac guys. He let them drink their way surreptitiously toward retirement at the end of the corridor. Or toward a fatal heart attack. The old men blocked the paths of other people’s careers as successfully as they did their own arteries, so the division was roughly fifty-fifty.

“We’ve been on our knees since Skarpö,” she added.

Amante looked up. “I was out of the country. Missed most of that. There were a lot of fatalities, weren’t there? Two police officers?”

“Nine dead in total. And even more injured. Several different criminal gangs clashed out there, and three of our colleagues got in the way. We still don’t really know why.”

“Oh.” Amante looked out of the side window. He wasn’t taking any of the juicy bait she was dangling right in front of his nose. He seemed more interested in the buildings swishing past along Sankt Eriksgatan.

Strange. Pretty much every police officer Julia knew wanted to talk about Skarpö. Tried to get the details out of her, anything that, against all odds, hadn’t yet been dissected and analyzed in the media or on the internal gossip network. About the gangsters and officers who had died out there, and above all about David Sarac, the heroic police officer who had survived.

“So what do you think of Eva Swensk, then?” she said in an attempt to find a fresh topic of conversation. “Our new national police chief,” she added, in a poorly disguised imitation of his dry tone of voice.

Amante turned his head toward her. “Do you know her?”

The traffic ahead of them slowed down. Julia changed lanes again and accelerated past a few more cars before skillfully pulling back into a gap. She gained five car lengths by the maneuver.

“No, I can’t really claim I do. We’ve only met a few times. I listened to a couple of her talks when she was regional police chief. She’s got a reputation for being tough and efficient. But I was still a bit surprised when Stenberg gave her the job. I thought it was going to be yet another man.”

Or, to be more accurate, one particular man, she thought. For some reason Deputy Police Commissioner Oscar Wallin had lost the race to Eva Swensk. Wallin had done all the dirty work of the reorganization only to find himself unexpectedly—and to the delight of many—pushed aside when it was time for the minister of justice to appoint a new national police chief. She still wondered what had actually happened. But Wallin wasn’t the sort of man you called up for a chat, so she’d had to contain her curiosity. It had been several months since she last heard from him, which left her feeling slightly disappointed.

Wallin was one of the few police officers she regarded as a role model. Someone who, even though he was only four or five years older than she was, had managed to make a rapid ascent through the otherwise sluggish police hierarchy. She had hoped to be able to follow him up to the top. But instead she was sitting here, babysitting an inexperienced civilian.

“The minister of justice doesn’t seem afraid to try new tactics,” Amante said, breaking her train of thought. “Did you read the article in Dagens Nyheter last week? Stenberg’s on the offensive.”

Amante’s tone was a bit more engaged now, less robotic. This subject clearly interested him more than a straightforward massacre and a couple of dead officers.

“It’ll certainly be interesting to see how many of Stenberg’s ideas can actually be put into practice,” he went on. “Anonymous witnesses, expanded possibilities to use infiltration, amnesties, or reduced sentences for perpetrators who stand witness against their fellow criminals.”