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the fracture in my zygomatic bone that ‘The Mallet’ Sundström gave me in 1922.
    ‘You think I’m afraid of goons, you bastards?’
    It doesn’t sound convincing. My mouth is well oiled with schnapps and the words come slithering out in any old way they like. The younger policeman in the passenger seat turns round quickly. The first baton blow comes in from the side. I pull my face back. The second attempt is also directed at my head. From above, this time. The baton thumps against the ceiling. The shoulder is the only possibility. I throw my head and body to the left, let the blow roll down towards my elbow. The jacket they’ve hung over my shoulders glides off. The pain is bracing, sharpening the senses.
    ‘Take it easy!’ the policeman at the wheel yells at his colleague. He purses his mouth under the moustache.
    I laugh, cough, and laugh again. ‘I could drink twice as much and still be quicker than you, you bloody swine!’
    It’s true. With my hands free I could go fifteen rounds against him without taking a single punch. The greenhorn’s baton moves a little, but he manages to control himself.
    We go across the bridge to Kungsholmen and turn abruptly to the left. A girl is watching her reflection in a window, the hem ofher skirt under her coat stiffened with the dirt of Fleminggatan. The Strand is showing a film starring Harold Lloyd.
    What the hell do the goons want? I turned the kid onto his side in Bellevue, surely he can’t have choked on his own blood? Or frozen to death? And I didn’t go in so bloody hard when I was collecting the bicycles. In the end, whatever it’s about, it’s bad news for Kvisten.
    I watch the greenhorn relaxing his jaw slightly in the passenger seat. The other goon, the one without a chin, who’s driving, starts whistling ‘A Sailor’s Grave’. I snort. I’ll eat my hat if we’re not heading for Kronoberg, where the goons have their headquarters.
    By a wood pile along one of Fleminggatan’s walls, a boy is holding a run-over rat by the tail, swinging it menacingly at his friends. The grey-black rat sways slowly back and forth like a sooty, rain-soaked flag. When the boy notices me looking, his eyes flash devilishly, and the dead rat is flung against my side window.
    ‘Damned whelps!’ hisses the ginger-haired goon as the boys make a run for it.
    A thick string of blood crawls across the window like a red caterpillar.
     
    They leave me sitting barefoot in the piss-stinking cell for a good while before they come to get me. Two different constables put me in handcuffs, this time in front of my body. I have to walk with my arms hooked into theirs, and my hands on my waistband to hold them up, because they took my braces as soon as I got here. I limp along without making any trouble.
    My body, my head and my knee are all aching from the earlier rough treatment. A decent-sized swelling simmers below my left eye. My head is throbbing. The sharp scents of the cell seemto have impregnated my shirt and trousers. Several times I am almost overwhelmed by the impulse to vomit, and I tighten my sore muscles when the policemen’s grip on my arms grows more insistent.
    We go sideways through the doorway into the tobacco-reeking interrogation room. Without removing my handcuffs, they put me on a little wooden chair in front of a table. The room is not much bigger than the corner of a boxing ring. It has no windows. I have a feeling I’ve been here before. The constables walk out.
    I need a cigar. My thoughts gnaw at me despite my thumping head. It has to be the boy. Surely he couldn’t have frozen to death in the park? Anyway, I didn’t leave any fingerprints in the sports car, and the rain should have taken care of footprints.
    The door opens behind my back. An elderly man with a moustache the colour of a certain kind of driftwood pinches the front creases of his trousers and takes a seat on the other side of the table. The waxed tips of his moustache point upwards, in the