Copenhagen Noir

Rörsjöparken is empty. The pond in the middle of the park is filled with rainwater and garbage. The benches were moved inside the municipal storage buildings at the beginning of September. A siren cuts through the morning as the fog comes rolling in from Öresund. In the last few years the population has grown more and more quickly. At the same time, organized violent crime has become rampant in the city. We cluster together. Everything’s about ownership. The alternative being: to be owned. Between these poles we are tossed about, like balls in a pinball game, more or less out of control, at the mercy of the times we live in, of our desires.

Morning arrives. Pale gray, it comes like a swollen wave, at first silently, then with all its violent power. So much happens when a town wakes up, so much it’s not possible to catch, to describe, no matter how hard you try. Birds take off into the sky, light flickers on the water in the canal, traffic becomes heavier. All these sounds, all the sudden feelings. Life is suddenly in the balance: to jump or not, shoot up or not, sleep in or not. The big and the small, it’s all caught in a whirl of hope and despair.

There’s light and there’s darkness, the dry and that which is still damp. On this day, Christian Westin sits in the basement storage room belonging to his mother’s apartment at Allhemsgatan number 7. Westin has now been awake for seven days straight and the demons are getting closer and closer. They breathe and hiss in the dark basement. Westin’s mother usually comes down to check on him at some point during the day. There’s very little left of what was once the man Christian Westin. He’s quickly transforming into a chemical monster. Today he’s going to collapse in epileptic spasms and repeatedly beat his head against the cold basement floor. That’s to be expected, nothing out of the ordinary. At the edge of one of the larger and more spectacular investigations in Sweden, his name is going to appear momentarily in public when one of his knives is found near a crime scene and it is thought, or rather hoped, that Westin might be involved. It would have been the easiest explanation. But this is not to be. Nothing is as simple as you hope. The morning is like an arrow, shot into space at random.

And death, too, might seem this way.

On this early morning, while the sky slowly deepens and brightens, the gray growing slightly grayer, a woman will be murdered. She will be thrown into the backseat of a large sedan and transported to a place she hasn’t visited for quite a while-the outer edges of the housing ghetto Västra Hamnen. The last time here, she was in a professional capacity. And one might say that now she’s also here acting that role. She plays her part, even in death. She died somewhere else and the murderer has brought her to a one-way street out here in Kirseberg where he parks next to Sven-Olle’s car service. Alongside the construction sites, there are trailers where the company houses their employees: Poles, Latvians, Germans. The illegal workforce imported from surrounding countries is big business, worth millions. But as with everything else-it’s within the pyramid where power figurings and transformation take place, where undeclared, almost invisible money is laundered.

It was all about time.

Fragments of time, dark oceans of time. Time by the drop, time like water-filled underground cavities. Time that curses and time that liberates, that heals and tears apart. All that must be changed, all that holds the eternal.

There’s a time to love. A time to die.

Everything existed side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

The housing areas in and near the center of the city were being pushed further and further out toward the suburbs, while the inner core of the city was becoming populated by the wealthy and the homeless, all those who were free to move across boundaries. Everything was a question of time. He who owned his time, also owned his life-Gisela Eriksson often thought that what she really had to offer the anonymous police authorities in Malmø was her pound of flesh. She gave them her time, a part of her life, the only thing she could never get back. Within her, like rings in a tree, was all the time she’d experienced in her childhood, her youth, her early middle age. All time was in motion, sloshing back and forth. Whatever she’d experienced, whatever she’d thought or done, could all be used. There was a creative element to the job that she could not deny, and it was probably what made her stay. She was able to come up with solutions, not merely formulate problems.