Three Hours

by Anders Roslund, Börge Hellström, Börge Hellström

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

"The Swedes have a lock on hard-hitting crime novels... the latest in a string of superb procedurals written by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom."--Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times The explosive third novel in the Ewert Grens-Piet Hoffmann trilogy, which began with The New York Times bestseller Three Seconds. Stockholm, Sweden: Seventy-three refugees have been found dead, suffocated in a container at Varta harbor. Niamey, Niger: Ewert Grens arrives in a city he's never heard of, in search of a man he never thought he would see again. Piet Hoffmann has again got himself in too deep, infiltrating a West African trafficking ring. He thinks he has two weeks to extricate himself, but will learn that his life, and that of countless defenseless people, now hangs on his actions during three desperate hours.

Release date: September 3, 2019

Publisher: Quercus

Print pages: 400

Sample

SO BEAUTIFUL.

A white boat, typical of the archipelago, puffing smoke as it glided through the gentle waters of the Baltic Sea. Seagulls and terns trailing behind it, diving now and then into its foaming wake and flying off with their catch floundering in their beaks. This – a June morning with the sun warming his slightly wrinkled face – life didn’t get much better than this.

Ewert Grens was sitting on the same stone he sat on every Saturday morning.

A high and flat piece that time had carved and placed just right, which fitted a tall man, who was getting just a little older, perfectly.

His own seat close to the nursing home and what used to be her window. The one she stared out of day after day for almost thirty years at a life she couldn’t take part in. Their shared life. Now someone else was living in her room, and he didn’t even know who.

‘Superintendent Grens.’

He jumped slightly. That voice? The past.

‘One moment, Superintendent, I’ll come to you.’

Her name was Susann, and long ago she’d been the carer who looked after Anni. Later she became a doctor and a geriatric specialist. Now she was exiting the hospital’s new entrance, approaching him with long and energetic strides, until she stopped in front of him, obscuring his view.

‘The last time we talked you’d been sitting outside her window for twelve Saturday mornings in a row. I decided to let you be. But it’s been . . . could it be four years? And you’re still sitting here.’

‘I’ve stood up now and then.’

‘Do you remember what I told you last time? That you were hurting yourself. That you were making time for your grief, living for it, rather than with it. What you’re frightened of has already happened.’

‘I remember. Every word.’

‘You don’t seem to care.’

Ewert Grens did what he always did – glanced towards the window of a room where the lights were on. Anni would never have been awake this early. She liked to sleep late.

‘I know she’s not here any more.’

‘What I said, Superintendent, was that I didn’t want to see you here again.’

He stood up from his stone chair.

‘And I know you meant well when you said that.’

And smiled.

‘But I’ll keep sitting here. Every Saturday at dawn for the next four years.’

He left the young woman, who was so much wiser than he ever had been or would be, headed to his car, which stood alone in the small visitors’ parking lot, and turned just before opening his door.

‘Because it’s the only thing that keeps me sane.’

He shouted to her.

‘Do you understand?’

She looked at him, one hand on the steps that led up to the main entrance of the hospital, seemingly considering what to say. Then after a slight, but unmistakable, nod, she went back inside.

Grens drove across a still sleepy Lidingö, an island close to Stockholm, and reached the bridge where he always pulled over for one last long look at those glittering waters. He’d just lowered his window and been met by a lazy gust of wind when a call crackled out of the two-way radio on his dashboard.

‘Ewert?’

Wilson, his boss, who should know better than to disturb him right now.

‘Ewert, hello?’

He let him shout. This was a private moment.

‘Ewert, I tried to call you, but your phone is off. If you hear this, contact me. We just received an emergency call that I think you should check out.’

To the right of the radio stood a tape deck: one he’d spent weeks looking for after its predecessor had decided to play its final note. The market wasn’t exactly flooded with tape decks these days; some shop assistants weren’t even sure what they were. A scrap dealer just outside Strängnäs was his salvation. Two songs. That was how long he planned to sit here. That was how long he always sat here. Emergency or no.

The tears I cried for you could fill an ocean

Siw Malmkvist. A mixed tape of her repertoire. First her Swedish version of ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’, his all-time favourite, then ‘Today’s Teardrops’, a forgotten gem.

dry your eyes, little girl, dry your eyes, and we’re gonna see skies of blue

Her beautiful voice, singing in the sixties, calmed him, and the lyrics too, which the people in his life laughed at, but didn’t listen to, the nonsensical rhymes he no longer heard, just leaned on.

‘Ewert? Pick up . . .’

The radio again, Wilson again.

‘. . . dammit!’

Siw Malmkvist was done singing. His break on the bridge, and his morning on the stone in what had once been Anni’s world had all given him the strength to make it through another day, another week.

So he picked up.

‘Grens here.’

‘Ewert, where the hell have you—’

‘Like I said, Grens here.’

Erik Wilson fell silent, Grens could hear him clearing his throat, as if trying to collect himself, to change his tone.

‘Ewert, I want you to head to Söder Hospital immediately. No need to stop by the station. Just go straight to their morgue.’

Grens had left Lidingö Bridge and was now driving on the Northern Link, it was much easier to circle around the inner city than to drive through it.

‘Morgue?’

‘The mortuary technician found a corpse there about half an hour ago. A dead male.’

‘Sounds reasonable enough. That’s why they’re there. Death, I mean. Was that all?’

‘She has one dead man too many.’

‘No riddles, Wilson.’

‘One corpse too many.’

‘Still not following.’

‘When the mortuary technician arrived shortly after six this morning and made her first visit to cold storage she had a feeling like something was off. On her second visit this feeling continued to grow, so she counted the corpses. There were seventeen in cold storage when she went home yesterday. Five more had died in the hospital in the interim. There should have been twenty-two bodies.’

‘And?’

‘Twenty-three. Twenty-three bodies, no matter how many times she counts them.’

Detective Superintendent Grens pulled his car into the access lane, sped up.

‘One of those bodies shouldn’t be there, Ewert. There’s a corpse with no paper trail, no registration. A dead man with no identification, no history. He doesn’t exist.’

SÖDER HOSPITAL’S ACCIDENT and emergency had patients all along its walls, every chair occupied, and also stretchers with the injured who couldn’t fit into the already packed exam rooms. It was that kind of morning. A few shootings and assaults and a pile-up on the South Link. Ewert Grens should have entered through the main entrance, but he parked by the ambulances near the unloading ramp purely out of habit. He’d used one of these operating rooms as a temporary command centre the last time there was an emergency inside the morgue – when a trafficked and desperate prostitute had rigged the whole place with explosives and taken a doctor and his medical students hostage. He hurried through the same corridors, but with a different feeling. Back then, death was an immediate threat. Today, death had arrived already, deposited itself here.

One corpse too many.

One dead man too many.

‘Good morning.’

The mortuary technician, a woman in her fifties, was waiting for him outside the heavy steel door of the morgue, as promised. Her whole presence radiated a kind of grounded curiosity. Her mouth was curved in a soft smile. Grens didn’t understand how a person who spent her time carving up dead people could be so full of life.

‘Laura – I was the one who called this in.’

A white lab coat, a plastic apron like an extra layer of skin, a mask dangling around her neck, and, after pulling off a pair of plastic gloves, a hand stretched out in greeting.

‘Don’t worry, I’m still fairly clean, today’s first post-mortem will have to wait.’

Grens took her hand, and then she waved for him to follow her into a narrow passageway, passing the office and the archive, and then into the main mortuary area.

‘Just a regular morning. A cup of coffee – or a couple of cups if I’m being honest – while I went through the paperwork, then I started to prepare my new patients for transfer to their storage compartments. Patients, I call them that. Corpse or body, it just doesn’t sound right.’

She opened the door to the much larger space behind the mortuary hall. Cold storage. Glaring overhead lights and a temperature of eight degrees according to the thermometer above the work counters. The storage racks she was referring to were stainless steel, and each one had twelve compartments, divided into three rows, and wheels that made it easy to roll them over to the white-tiled walls.

‘Three older men, one young woman, and one six-year-old child. Those were my new patients, according to the referrals. I lifted them over one at a time. There’s a machine we use, sort of a small crane, so we don’t strain our backs.’

An odd scent.

It had become more noticeable since leaving the mortuary area.

Meat. That’s what it smelled like.

‘A completely normal morning – until then. When I started moving them over, I realised . . . I had too many. Patients, that is.’

The steel rack closest to them had eight occupied compartments and four empty. Motionless bodies wrapped in white sheets, each with a small red name tag attached to the middle.

‘I counted them three times. But no matter what, when I compared my notes to the computer, they didn’t match up. There was always one too many. So I pulled them all out like this, and checked their name tags, then their faces, then – when it became necessary – their identifying characteristics.’

She smiled again, and a smile in that environment, under those circumstances, should have seemed morbid or even insane. But not her smile. Ewert Grens was standing next to a person who tried to convey calm, who realised a guest here rarely felt comfortable; and she succeeded. Her smile was warm and sincere and made him relax. He was used to visiting morgues – a detective in a big city has to be – and usually he masked his discomfort by touching things, like grabbing hold of a foot, while saying something funny or sarcastic. There was no need today. She pulled out a drawer from the steel chamber, the one at the bottom far right, which held a white bundle the size of a man, and he followed her lead by staying calm.

‘This is where we keep the patients who have yet to be autopsied. I was preparing to remove their organs, so the pathologists could find cause of death.

‘Here. This is the patient who isn’t my patient. This is the body that didn’t add up.’

She pulled the white sheet aside. And there he lay. Dark skin with a change in the pigmentation on the throat that was visible despite the lack of movement or life. Short hair and fairly skinny, around thirty. Or so Grens guessed. Death plays tricks with age.

‘Naked, just like the others. Wrapped in a white sheet, just like the others. Even a red name tag with something unreadable on it has been attached. But there’s no trace of him in our records. No registration. And he wasn’t on this rack last night. I didn’t do a count before I left, but I’m sure of it. This is my job. I care about these patients too much. I treat these patients with the same care as the nurses and doctors upstairs treat the living.’

The mortuary technician, Laura, gently laid her hand on Ewert Grens’s arm. Perhaps to emphasise how important this was to her. Perhaps worrying about not understanding what she was actually seeing. Or maybe this too was how she made her visitors feel calm. Whatever the reason, Grens let her keep it there, despite the fact that he usually avoided such contact.

Just the two of them, in a room that belonged to the dead. And it almost felt good.

‘Has this ever happened before?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘An unidentified body?’

‘Never.’

He leaned over the unseeing face, carefully pulled back the sheet, exposing a naked body.

Undamaged. On the surface.

An apparently healthy person with no external signs of violence. Ewert Grens’s eyes scanned a room that felt as cold as it looked.

Who are you?

Why did you die?

And how the hell did you end up here?

WHAT A STRANGE MORNING.

It had started out so fine, on his rock outside Anni’s old window, and ended with him following an unknown dead man from one morgue to another. This morning’s emergency call was now an official investigation, which would continue at Forensic Medicine in Solna.

An hour later, Ewert Grens was standing near a bright lamp, which shone directly onto a gleaming metal gurney and the body of a still nameless young man.

‘Widespread livor mortis. Full onset of rigor mortis. But the pupillary constrictor clearly reacts to light. And here, Ewert . . .’

Ludvig Errfors – the coroner who was one of the few colleagues Grens had come to rely on over the years – thrust a needle into the eye, through the pupil, filled the syringe and emptied the contents into a test tube.

‘. . . when I measure the potassium content of the vitreous humour, I can see it’s gone up. I’d say . . . just over a day. Twenty-five, maybe thirty hours. That’s when he filled his lungs for the last time.’

Grens felt calmness be replaced by restlessness and agitation.

‘When he died doesn’t tell me shit about who he is.’

‘The whites of both his eyes and the inside of his eyelids reveal small haemorrhages.’

‘And?’

‘He suffocated, Ewert.’

‘How he died still doesn’t tell me shit about who he is.’

Then the agitation and restlessness turned to the anger that always lay in wait, and he left the gurney and the bright light and began pacing back and forth across a room that smelled even more like meat than the last one. He slammed his fist on a trolley cart that was as gleaming as everything else, and a metallic sound echoed round and round.

‘Dammit, Errfors – give me something that can help me identify him! Where is he from? Who is he?’

The medical examiner was still bent over the lifeless face, as unconcerned as he had been before, neither surprised nor afraid. They’d examined a couple of hundred bodies together and he knew that the detective’s fear of his own death turned into aggression in here: a not uncommon reaction, two sides of the same emotion.

‘Africa.’

‘Africa is quite big.’

‘Far west, Ewert, and far north. But not on the coast of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean.’

The agitated detective started to raise his hand for a second blow – this time his target was a stack of plastic aprons – but froze as Errfors prised open the dead man’s mouth and pointed towards a row of white teeth in the upper jaw.

‘Do you see? Those spots on the enamel? Fluorosis. He grew up in an area where the groundwater contained extremely high levels of fluoride.’

Grens got closer. White dots on white teeth. Large ones. Everywhere.

‘Fluoride which in principle is good for teeth, builds up – eventually damages the enamel.’

‘High levels of fluoride can be found everywhere.’

‘Not that high. And if we look at the rest then we have . . .’

The medical examiner tapped each tooth lightly with a metal instrument.

‘. . . strong, healthy teeth. Until you get here.’

Two canines. Which were far from white.

‘We usually say that they’ve been “burned to the ground”. So badly decayed that they’re beyond saving. If he’d gone to a dentist, they would have had to pull them out. But he hasn’t been to a dentist. Ever.’

He pushed the jaws back together again, which also seemed to require all his might.

‘I’ve seen it in several autopsies of people who grew up in Africa. Amazing teeth despite non-existent dental care. And at the same time, serious damage to a few of them. That, in combination with the fluorosis – the white spots on the enamel – and, of course, his appearance, point to West Africa, or perhaps Central Africa.’

Ewert Grens stood beside the medical examiner longer than might have been justified while the body was slowly dismantled. There wasn’t much more information to be found here now. He had probable cause – suffocation. Probable time – twenty-five hours ago. And probable origin – West Africa. But it was difficult to leave the dead man’s face. In other investigations he’d sometimes felt the deceased staring back at him. But that wasn’t the case now. No, now what he felt was a kind of responsibility to the young man who’d been hidden in a morgue under a false name. And while he lingered on that face, which couldn’t answer the question of who it belonged to or how it came to be here, Grens realised something. There’s a price to be paid for taking a person’s life, but there isn’t much risk in taking their death. It shouldn’t be like that. It was his responsibility to give this young man his death back.

The Institute of Forensic Medicine lay only a few kilometres from the Northern Cemetery, and on his way back to the inner city and the police station, Grens made a stop at the place he used to hate with all his heart.

Frightened of what had already happened.

This was where he wouldn’t dare to go. But did so now. To the grave that was one of thirty thousand, located in something called Block 19B, and bearing the number 603. A simple white cross and a brass plate with her name engraved on it. Anni Grens. He cleared away the leaves, watered the rosebush and the heather and the two plants that bloomed in dense bunches and that were called Life-Everlasting in Swedish. He sat on a park bench staring at the grass, his thoughts on that face on the cold mortuary table. Was someone missing that young man the way Grens missed his wife? And did that young man have someone to miss him as Anni would have missed her husband?

The unexpectedly heavy traffic of the early morning had slackened, and it took just a few minutes to drive from the cemetery to Kungsholmen, where Grens found a parking spot just outside the Kronoberg police station.

His first stop in the investigative department corridor was at the vending machine and button 38 – coffee, black, two cups. He downed one of them immediately, refilled it, and went on to his next destination, Mariana Hermansson’s doorway.

‘Good morning.’

He rarely stepped inside. That’s just how it was. The much younger woman – who he was proud to have hired, who he sometimes considered the daughter he’d never had, though she didn’t know it – had built her own barrier of integrity, and it stood at her door.

‘There are no matches for his description on the Swedish Wanted List, Ewert. I also checked with Copenhagen, Helsinki and Oslo. No success.’

He’d called them both on his way from the hospital to the medical examiner – Mariana was already at work, a stack of twenty cases or more in front of her, and Sven had just left the breakfast table and his wife Anita and son Jonas.

It was to his doorway that Grens headed next.

‘Sven?’

The only colleagues he could stand. The only colleagues who could stand him.

‘I dropped by C-House and Interpol on my way here, Ewert, like you asked me to.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. No dental or fingerprints. He’s not wanted by any police authorities in the world.’

Next, three doors down to his own office, where he set both mugs on the rickety coffee table next to a corduroy sofa that had once been dark brown and striped. A tape deck stood on the shelf between the binders of completed investigations and the books about police ethics, which kept on arriving even though he never read them. He had just put on Siw Malmkvist’s ‘Tweedle Dee’ and sat down on the sofa, which was much too soft for his heavy body, when a face appeared at his door. One as wrinkled as Grens’s own. Nils Krantz, the forensic technician, who’d worked here as long as Grens.

‘Do you have a minute, Ewert?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Two minutes and . . .?’

‘Two minutes and forty-five seconds.’

Krantz left the doorway and sat down in the visitor’s chair on the other side of the coffee table. Waiting. The amount of time it would take for Siw Malmkvist to finish her song. He’d argued with the detective in the past about how ludicrous it was to delay urgent police business until an old song faded out, but he’d learned to let it be. It saved time in the long run.

Tweedle-deedeli-dee.

Ewert Grens stretched out on the sofa, then turned to his visitor.

‘Her very first recording. Ever. Did you know that?’

‘I want you to sit up, Ewert. It’s easier to read.’

The forensic technician had entered the room with a piece of paper in his hand.

Now he put it on the coffee table, pushed it over to Grens.

‘I made my first inspection of the body at Forensic Medicine. Trying to speed things up. You’ll get the DNA test at earliest tonight, more likely tomorrow. But I saw something. Something that didn’t add up.’

Krantz pulled his reading glasses from his chest pocket and handed them to Grens.

‘There. Fifth line. I found obvious, even extensive traces of the same substance in several places. In the dead man’s hair. On the skin of his face. On his hands. His back and his shins. That is to say, surfaces that would not have been covered by the clothes he was wearing at time of death, before someone undressed him and wrapped him up.’

The forensic technician’s index finger was a little crooked, but it was possible to follow all the way to a word underlined in black marker.

Ammonium phosphate.

Grens shrugged.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Powder extinguisher.’

‘Powder . . . extinguisher?’

‘Ammonium phosphate is the most effective ingredient – and one of the most common – in extinguishers. It puts out fires by cooling them.’

‘Now I’m even more lost. Fires? Burned bodies usually look a lot worse than that.’

The forensic technician held out his hand, waited until Grens took off the reading glasses and handed them back.

‘That’s what doesn’t make sense – his body doesn’t show the slightest signs of being in the vicinity of a fire.’

Then Krantz hurried off to the next investigation, like always, like they all were, and Ewert Grens lay back on his corduroy sofa and listened to music from another era. Listened and thought. About morgues – and how they’d been a part of his life since his very first murder case as a newly commissioned police officer. But still he’d never investigated a body that shouldn’t be there.

A body that made its way there apparently on its own.

Who had no name or story.

Who seemed to be nobody at all.

‘EWERT GRENS?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Is this Detective Superintendent Ewert Grens?’

‘Depends on who’s calling.’

Grens had been lying down when he answered. A quarter to five. He looked out the window at the dawn light.

‘What’s this about? Who is this?’

‘Laura. I was the one who . . .’

‘I know who Laura is.’

He sat up in the shapeless corduroy sofa. He’d slept over, something his young colleagues liked to call the cliché. They didn’t have a fucking clue. Ewert Grens could never be accused of being a cliché for sleeping in his office when an investigation forced him to stay late – he’d invented that move! It was everyone else who’d plagiarised it, they were the clichés. An original can never be a cliché.

‘I know who you are. I remember you smiled.’

‘What?’

‘You . . . yes, you smiled. A nice smile, too. The kind that made me forget I was surrounded by bodies about to be dissected.’

‘In that case would you consider coming here right now? Despite the early hour.’

‘Here?’

‘To the morgue. It’s happened again. I have one dead patient too many.’

Driving through Stockholm as church bells rang out five o’clock could be an unbelievably beautiful experience. And it was that kind of morning. Grens enjoyed the view from Väster Bridge, didn’t need to slow down once on Hornsgatan or Ringvägen, and even Söder Hospital – which frankly was no great work of art or architecture – seemed inviting with the morning sun turning its upper floors gold. He parked next to the ambulances near the A&E entrance like last time, hurried through the same tired corridors, though now no injured patients lined the walls. It had been a quiet night.

Laura stood waiting for him outside the heavy door to the morgue. The same warm smile made him straighten up, put a spring in his step. He knew now that her smile wasn’t calculated, or pasted on.

‘You started early today.’

‘I couldn’t sleep. And at first I thought it was because I knew I had a big day ahead of me, that I’d need to prep and open a couple more patients than usual. There were delays yesterday – the extra body and your visit and all the questions from the hospital management.’

She nodded at him, asked him to follow her, and they walked through the narrow passage that led to the mortuary and the cold storage.

‘But that wasn’t why. It was . . . well, a feeling.’

‘A feeling?’

‘Yes, I don’t really know. I can’t really explain it, but somehow I just knew it was going to happen again.’

Laura was no longer smiling.

‘Or rather, Superintendent, it had already happened again.’

She continued to the same steel rack the young man had been hiding inside, places for twelve bodies in twelve equal-sized drawers.

‘I counted – those who lie in here, and those in the other rack. Even though I almost didn’t need to.’

She pulled out one of the metal drawers at the far left, in the middle row.

‘I just knew there would be an extra body.’

Wrapped in a sheet, just like the young man, and just like the others.

A red name tag fastened near the middle of the body, scribbled on as indecipherably as yesterday morning.

‘And here is how she looks.’

Still eight degrees.

The thermometer was just hanging there and Grens couldn’t stop himself from reading it.

‘She hasn’t been referred here either. Not by me or any of my colleagues at the hospital. But she’s lying here as if . . . as if someone wanted her properly cared for – do you know what I mean? She also has no name or background. And she’s painfully young. Even though death has taken her colour, her presence – it’s still possible to see how beautiful she was.’

Ewert Grens looked at the naked body, exposed as the mortuary technician loosened and pulled down the sheet. They belonged together. The young woman in front of him now and the young man in front of him yesterday. Skin colour, hair colour, facial shape. Both completely undamaged on the outside. Both deprived of their lives as well as their death.

Someone got rid of you, too.

Somebody has dragged or carried you through the steel door, past the office and archive room and post-mortem room to put you here in cold storage.

Somebody took a sheet from that pile over there, wrapped you up, grabbed a tag from the plastic box on the wall and attached it to you without writing down your name.

Somebody hid you here where you belong, with a strange kind of thoughtfulness, made the effort to see you treated as you should be – and at the same time threw you away like you were nothing more than a piece of trash, hoping you’d disappear for ever.

‘Laura – I want you to write down the names of anyone who might have a key here.’

‘You got that yesterday.’

‘Yes. And I want a new one today that’s even longer. And then my two closest colleagues and I will interview everyone on that list. Even if we’ve already done so. And after you’ve given me that list I want to sit down with you in your office, and I want you to tell me again what your day is like, and how you make an incision from ear to ear and how you uncover the ribs, and how you drink your coffee, and what happens when it’s delivered here, and how often you take a call and how sound moves in different rooms. Every detail that you think might be unnecessary, or mundane, or uninteresting. Because in twenty years of this work you have never seen anything like this, and in forty years of investigating murders I’ve never seen anything like this either, so we’re going to need to ask questions and think in way we’ve never done before. If we’re going to help a young man and a young woman get their deaths back.’

Laura covered the lifeless body and pushed it back into the rectangular steel compartment where it would be stored until – just like the body yesterday – it formally became part of an investigation and therefore had to be moved, examined, and treated as evidence.

Grens remained standing where he was for the time being, close, trying to catch the mortuary technician’s eyes.

Waiting it out.

And when she turned around, he saw her smile was gone – the unexplainable had become so much larger.

IT WAS A bit chilly on his feet.

Ewert Grens sat on the balcony of his penthouse apartment looking out over Sveavägen. Midnight, but still not completely dark, early summer in the far north made the hours kinder. He’d come out here barefoot with a glass of water, looking for some fresh air, and stayed, sank down into a wooden folding chair.

He spent more of his nights at home, no longer afraid that lying down in bed meant falling into a black hole. But tonight it was impossible to sleep. Just like the mortuary technician Laura, he had a feeling he couldn’t quite explain. Her feeling had led her to a dead body. His own feeling was about entrances. Exits. How could somebody get a corpse into the morgue without anyone noticing? And how the hell did they do it again?

He, Sven and Mariana had watched