The team stood four meters from the doors. Four galvanized lock poles went from top to bottom and a dockworker struggled to open the heavy padlock in the middle. In the end the lock gave way, and the dockworker immediately pulled open the doors. They were all expecting engine parts, bicycles, cartons, toys or something else that had been in the earlier containers. But in this one it was only darkness that met them.
Henrik Levin went forward to get a glimpse of the contents. He screwed up his eyes to be able to see better. He took another step and now stood with both feet on the edge.
Then he could see her. The girl. She looked at him with her eyes wide open. And she hugged her mother’s legs.
*
Jana Berzelius drove fast along the motorway in the Volvo. She had been forced to wait a couple of minutes before she ran to the car. But Danilo was nowhere to be seen.
She turned up the heater to full. The windscreen wipers cleared the slushy snow from the windscreen. The radio was turned off. The adrenaline had worn off and she leaned her head back with one hand on the steering wheel. She rested her injured arm on her thigh.
Suddenly her phone rang. She looked with suspicion at the display which showed that somebody was ringing from a hidden number. She hesitated a moment or two before deciding to answer it. Henrik Levin politely announced his name, then went on: “Gavril Bolanaki is dead.”
Jana didn’t say anything, so he continued: “The Security Service couldn’t get in touch with the policemen guarding the house. So they sent a special unit there and they found him dead. According to the first reports we’ve received, they shot each other, him and his son. But the policemen are dead too, so we don’t really know how it happened. It was evidently quite a bloodbath. The unit found three guns in the house. They also found a torn-open teddy bear so the guns must have been inside that.”
“Okay,” said Jana.
Henrik was silent for a few moments.
“I’m in the docks now,” he then said.
“Yes?”
“We found them. Ten families with children. They are all safe.”
“Good.”
“I hope it was the last one.”
“Me too.”
“The case against him is finished.”
“It is definitely finished,” she said, and then ended the call.
*
It was 18:59 when Jana raised her hand to knock on the mahogany door on the three-story detached house in Lind? in Norrk?ping. Then she changed her mind and rang the bell instead, letting the shrill tone signal her arrival. She took a step back and ran her fingers through her hair, still wet after her quick shower. In the windows the lamps with their cloth shades cast long shadows on the ground in front of her.
The door was slowly opened by a gray-haired man.
“Hello, Father,” said Jana, and remained standing in the porch a few moments. So he could look at her.
Then she smiled her practiced smile.
Nodded briefly.
And stepped inside the house.
*