CELL 8 Read Online Free PDF Page B

way, has nowhere near the experience required to be a detective inspector.”
    He should hang up, he should sing what he had to sing. The sun had just risen and Stockholm was waking up on the right side of the bed, it was his time, his ritual, his fucking right not to have to deal with idiots.
    “That’s the way it goes. When you’re not quick enough.”
    A train passed underneath him, the sound echoing off the bridge and drowning out the voice on the phone. He didn’t mind.
    “I can’t hear you.”
    The voice tried again.
    “You can’t employ Hermansson. I’ve got another candidate. Someone who’s qualified.”
    Ewert Grens was about to start singing again.
    “There you go. Too late. I signed all the necessary papers yesterday evening. As I realized that you’d stick your oar in.”
    He snapped the phone shut and put it back in his inside pocket.
    He continued on his way, cleared his throat—he would sing the whole song from the beginning again.
    Ten minutes later he opened the heavy door at the main entrance on Kungsholmgatan.
    The lunatics were already there.
    A line waiting for the morning’s reports. Every Monday the same, full house, the curse of the weekend. He looked at them, most of them tired; the apartment had been burgled while they were at the cabin, a car stolen from a parking lot, a shop window smashed and the display taken. He walked over toward the corridor and locked door, behind which lay the stairs to his office, a couple of floors up and a few doors down from the coffee machine. He was just about to punch in the code and go through when he saw a man lying on the sofa farthest away. A line number clutched in his hand, his face twisted and crooked, coagulated blood trailing from one ear. The sound of his voice unclear, as if slurring his words, a language that Grens was sure was Finnish.
    Blood had been coming out of her ears.
    A step closer. The prostrate man reeked of alcohol and the smell was so rank that Grens stopped abruptly.
    It was his face. Something wasn’t right.
    Grens breathed through his mouth. Two steps forward and then he bent over him.
    The man was heavily bruised.
    His pupils were different sizes. One small, the other dilated.
    The eyes, he saw them in front of him, her head in his lap.
    He hadn’t known, not then.
    He went quickly over to the registration desk. A short exchange, Grens waved his arms around and the young policeman stood up, hurried behind the detective superintendent over to the drunk man who’d arrived half an hour earlier in a taxi and had just lain there on the sofa ever since.
    “Get a patrol car to drive him to the ER—neurology—at the Karolinska Hospital! Now!”
    Ewert Grens was furious as he jabbed the air with his finger.
    “Severe head injuries. Different-sized pupils. Blood draining from the ears. Slurred speech.”
    He wondered if it was too late.
    “Everything points to a brain hemorrhage.”
    He, if anyone, should know. That it might be too late. That you couldn’t always ensure recovery from a serious head injury.
    He had lived with that knowledge for more than twenty-five years.
    “Have you registered his complaint?”
    “Yes.”
    He was searching for the young policeman’s name badge, made it obvious that he was looking straight at it; made eye contact again.
    “Give it to me.”
    Ewert Grens opened the security door and walked down the corridor, past the rows of silent, waiting offices.
    A person had just been bleeding from his ears, had looked at him with different-sized pupils.
    That was all he had seen.
    That was all he was able to see.
    He could not possibly know that this single act of violence was linked to a murder and was the continuation of a process that had started many years ago, far away; it would prove to be the most extraordinary criminal investigation he had ever come across.

    A BRIGHT LIGHT SHONE FROM ONE OF THE UPSTAIRS WINDOWS. IF ANYONE had been walking along Mern Riffe Drive just then and looked up at the