The Andalucian Friend (15 page)

Do the right thing, Gunilla had said during their conversation in the hospital.
Do the right thing
. With the subtext: tell them all about Hector Guzman, that’s the right thing to do. We’re on the right side, she had said, and he’s on the wrong side. Had Gunilla understood who Sophie was? Someone who couldn’t say no to a request from the police. A nurse — someone who wanted to do the right thing.

Sophie opened her eyes, the poet was still reciting his work. She looked at Hector, who was listening intently to the poet’s voice. She liked watching him when he looked like that, private, concentrating, impenetrable. Her eyes fell to her hands on her lap. No matter how she might want to look at it, contact with Hector was already established, the game was afoot. And what, according to Gunilla, ought to feel right really didn’t at all.

The Spaniard read, the orchestra played, the butterflies fluttered about, and tears started rolling down her cheeks. She found a handkerchief in her bag. Hector turned to look at her. Possibly thinking she was crying because of the intensity of the moment. She managed to smile as though she were embarrassed by her tears, then wiped them away and pretended to concentrate on the music and poetry again. She could feel him still looking at her.

When the poet finished everyone applauded. Hector stood up and showed everyone the bilingual book that his publishing company had produced in both Swedish and Spanish, telling them about it and thanking the poet for coming.

They headed toward
the garage, Hector walking slowly with his stick, one leg still in a cast.

“Beautiful? Lovely? Good?” he asked.

“All of those,” she said.

They stopped at a waiting taxi. He paid the driver to take her home. The door closed and the taxi drove off and she realized that she was smiling. She was rather scared of how much she liked being in his presence.

“Stocksund, please.”

The driver muttered something.

Her cell buzzed to let her know she had a message. She pulled it out of her bag and read:
Well done. Meet me at once in the multi-story garage on Regeringsgatan, 4th floor
, from an unknown number.

She read the message several times, debating with herself.

“Sorry, I’ve changed my mind. Regeringsgatan, please.”

For some reason the taxi driver sighed.

She took the
elevator up to the fourth floor of the garage. Gunilla was waiting for her in her car, and gestured to Sophie to get into the passenger seat.

“Thanks for coming.”

Gunilla started the car and pulled off.

“Was it nice? The Butterfly House?”

Sophie didn’t answer, and fastened her seat belt.

“We don’t follow him all the time, it’s called sporadic surveillance.”

They drove down the spiral ramp that took them to the exit onto Regeringsgatan. She was driving a fairly new Peugeot, and the seat was too far forward, too close to the steering wheel. It made her look like a little old lady. As usual, the traffic was heavy but Gunilla drove better and more safely than Sophie had feared when she saw the position of the seat.

“I realize that you must have done a lot of thinking since our conversation, and that your decision has been difficult.”

Music was playing quietly on the radio. Gunilla leaned over and switched it off.

“You’ve made the right decision, Sophie. If that means anything.”

She pulled out to pass a double-parked truck.

“You can help us do something good. Our work combined with your observations will help us get results … It will feel good, I promise you.”

Gunilla looked at Sophie. “What do you think?”

“It doesn’t feel like that right now.”

“What?”

“Good. It doesn’t feel good.”

“And that’s entirely natural,” Gunilla said quietly.

They got stuck in traffic. There was something unforced about Gunilla Strandberg, something grounded and normal. She had a calm about her, a calm that never let her get out of balance. The traffic eased and they pulled out onto Valhallavägen, heading toward Lidingö.

“I saw something in you when you came out of his room. I was sitting on a bench in the corridor. You didn’t notice me, but I noticed you.”

Sophie waited.

“I checked you out. A widow with one son, a nurse making ends meet with the inheritance from her husband. She seemed to live a fairly comfortable, quiet, retiring life. But perhaps meeting Hector Guzman has changed that?”

Sophie was feeling uncomfortable. Gunilla noticed.

“How does that feel?”

“What?”

“That I know that about you?”

The question surprised Sophie. She automatically replied with the opposite of what she was feeling. “It feels fine, it doesn’t matter.”

Gunilla drove on for a bit.

“I’m going to be honest with you, Sophie, otherwise this isn’t going to work. And that honesty includes explaining how I work, and what you can expect from me.”

“What I can expect from you?”

They were passing a truck in the inside lane, and it let out a loud hissing noise as it changed gears.

“I’m a widow as well, although my husband died many years ago now.”

Sophie glanced at her.

“I know that your father’s dead as well. So are my parents. I know how it feels, I recognize the emptiness that never really goes, the feeling of loneliness …”

They were crossing the long bridge out to Lidingö, with motorboats and yachts on the glittering water below them.

“And that loneliness contains something that I’ve never understood, a little hint of shame.”

Gunilla’s words hit home heavily inside Sophie. She kept her eyes on the view.

“Do you know what I mean, Sophie?”

Sophie didn’t want to answer, then nodded.

“Where does that come from?” Gunilla went on. “I mean, what is it?”

Sophie’s eyes were glued to the world outside.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

They sat in silence for the rest of the journey.

They turned into a maze of little roads, and Gunilla made her way through them with ease, eventually pulling onto a gravel track that led to a little wooden house in the middle of a grove of trees.

“This is where I live,” she said.

Sophie looked at the house, it reminded her of a summer cottage.

Gunilla showed her around the garden, pointing out her peonies and roses. Told her their names and how she’d got them, how they behaved in different soil, at different times of the year. How she kept them free from various diseases and pests, how she was genuinely affected by their well-being. Sophie was left in no doubt about Gunilla’s genuine interest, it was fascinating.

They passed an arbor and Gunilla invited Sophie to sit down on a white wooden chair. Gunilla sat down opposite with a file on her lap, Sophie couldn’t remember if she had been carrying it the whole time.

Gunilla was about to say something but changed her mind. She handed the file to Sophie.

“I’ll get us something to drink. Take a look at this in the meantime.”

Gunilla got up and went off toward the house. Sophie watched her go, then opened the file.

The first thing she saw was a report of a murder investigation that had been translated into Swedish from Spanish. Hector’s name appeared on every other line.

Sophie kept looking through the file, leafing past other official documents. They were followed by a number of translated documents about other murders. She read a bit more. They went right back to the ’80s. Each document had two photographs attached to one side. One was a picture of the corpse, the other a picture of the murder victim when they were still alive. She leafed through the cases, looking at the pictures of the victims. A dead man lying on the floor in a pool of blood. A man shot inside a car, his head hanging at an odd angle. A man in a suit hanging from a noose in a tree in a forest. The bloated body of a naked man in a bathtub. Sophie went back through the file, looking past the photographs of the crime scenes and staring instead at the family photographs. Men with their wives and children. Different settings, mostly vacation snaps, but a few pictures of dinners, barbecues, Christmas parties. The men were happy, the children were happy, the women were happy … But the men were dead. Murdered.

She turned a page and saw an enlarged photograph of Hector, he was staring out straight at her and she stared back.

Sophie closed the file and tried to take some deep breaths, but found that she couldn’t.

Sonya Alizadeh was on all fours
on the large double bed. Svante Carlgren was taking her from behind. He was many years older, and many years uglier. Sonya faked an orgasm, screaming into the pillow. Svante felt a surge of pride.

He really preferred more elaborate things but today he was in a hurry, they only had half an hour before his lunchtime meeting. He liked sneaking away for a fuck every now and then. Sonya was his sexual fantasy, possibly even better than a fantasy. Her long black hair, her quiet, mysterious attitude and of course her breasts, which in his opinion sat perfectly on her nicely curvaceous body.

He had met her a year before when he was attending a theatre premiere with his wife. They had bumped into each other during the intermission by the Champagne table, and she had spilled Champagne on his trousers. His wife had gone out to the car to get a cardigan, she was always cold. All that bloody freezing got on his nerves.

Svante and Sonya had gotten to talking after the mishap, before his wife returned, and when they separated she gave him her phone number, offering to pay to have his trousers dry-cleaned. He said that was out of the question, and she said he could call anyway if he felt like it. Those words had made Svante go weak at the knees for a moment. Never before had a woman been as candid as Sonya, never before had a woman of her caliber made contact. She was sexy, she was an animal. She didn’t ask for much, apart from an agreed fee — she was perfect. And he had noticed that she found him interesting, just as he himself did, he saw himself as one of the elite, one of the big boys.

After studying economics in Gothenburg, Svante Carlgren had joined Volvo during the years when Gyllenhammar was in charge, but when the great man resigned and moved to London, Svante moved to Stockholm instead and worked his way up in Ericsson, the telecom company. The firm was so large that only a very few people had a good overview of how it all worked. Svante was one of them. The only thing he was missing was the occasional mention in one of the business papers, getting some sort of public recognition for his work, but he was also aware that the day that happened would be the day when his sphere of influence began to shrink. He made do instead with the appreciation he was shown by his colleagues, and sometimes getting to join in with the big boys, even flying on the company jet.

As usual, Sonya had offered him cocaine before they went to bed. He thought the drug was fantastic, it made him feel fit, alert, and self-aware in a way that was completely new to him. In all of his sixty-four years he had never taken any drugs, but the combination of cocaine and energetic sex with Sonya was such a heady mix that nothing could make him abstain from it.

Sonya was talking dirty, the way he liked so much, he whimpered as he came, and she said how
biiiig
he was again.

Svante left the money on the bedside table, along with a silver and gold bracelet. Svante had long since realized that women liked getting presents, he knew pretty much everything about the way women worked.

Sonya said good-bye at the door in her silk dressing gown, smiling appreciatively at the bracelet that she had put on her right wrist. She said she didn’t want him to go. He replied that he had to, that his work and responsibilities were greater and more important than she could possibly understand. He pinched her cheek and headed downstairs. She could hear him whistling something tuneless before he vanished out the front door.

She let her smile fade, went into the bedroom, switched off the video and sound-recording equipment behind the mirror, and tore the sheets from the bed. She squeezed them into a black garbage bag, the way she always did after seeing a man, then dropped the tasteless bracelet in as well and left the bag by the door of the apartment.

In the bathroom she stuck her fingers down her throat and threw up in the toilet, then rinsed with mouthwash and brushed her teeth carefully. Then she took a shower and washed off as much of Svante Carlgren as she could.

When Sonya was clean she dried herself carefully with a fresh towel and rubbed her skin with various lotions for different parts of her body. She couldn’t smell him at all once she was finished. All the while she was careful not to look at herself in the bathroom mirror, it would be several days before she could do that again.

Sonya now had eight hours’ worth of material showing Svante Carlgren taking cocaine, her whipping him, his shouting perverse crap. Showing him with a rubber ball in his mouth, showing him pretending to be a handyman, a slave, or head of Ericsson.

He had asked for a meeting with Gunilla,
but she had said it would have to wait. He had called her voice mail and asked for some feedback on his surveillance at least, on the analysis of Sophie that he had been sending her. She hadn’t replied. Then he had e-mailed her. A long, well-formulated e-mail in which he reminded her that when they had first met she had said she appreciated his analytical skills, so how was she thinking of using them? No response to that, either.

Lars was boiling over in his isolation as he thought about the way he was being treated. He had only asked for a conversation, no more, no less. He went over it again and again, having long discussions with her in his head where he explained that he wasn’t just anyone, he wasn’t made for sitting in a van for days on end.

Gunilla was sitting at her desk when he walked into the office; she was talking quietly on the phone, met his gaze, and gestured to him to wait. Eva and Erik weren’t there. Lars pulled out an old, low-backed office chair on wheels from Eva’s desk and sat down to wait patiently for Gunilla to finish her conversation.

A few minutes later she hung up and turned toward him.

“I don’t appreciate getting that sort of e-mail or phone message from you, Lars.”

“Surely I have to be able to express the way I feel?” His reply sounded feeble.

“Why?” she asked.

He had no answer to that and wove his fingers together, dropping her gaze.

“What do you want, Lars?” she asked.

He looked down at his hands. “What I wrote in the e-mail, what I said in my message.” He looked up. “What we talked about when you gave me the job. That I can do other things. I can help Eva with analysis, possible scenarios and approaches, I can work on profiling … Well, anything.”

He was stressed and nervous. She calm and observant.

“If that were the case I would have contacted you.”

Lars nodded reluctantly. Gunilla adjusted her position on her chair. A heavy silence filled the room.

“Can I ask you something, Lars?”

Lars waited.

“Why did you join the police?”

“Because I wanted to.”

His answer came out far too quickly. She showed that she thought the same and gave him a second chance.

“Because … Well, it was a long time ago. I wanted to help.”

“Help with what?”

“What?”

“What did you want to help to do?”

He rubbed the corner of his mouth. A telephone started to ring on a desk some distance away. He looked over at it. She didn’t move a muscle, the look in her eyes was waiting for his answer.

“Well, society, helping the weak,” he said, and regretted it again. Gunilla looked at him critically. Lars could feel he was splashing about in deep water.

“Helping the weak?” she asked quietly, almost with distaste.

He took the chance to repair the mess he’d just made. “I wanted to be part of something bigger.”

His voice sounded more honest now.

She nodded almost imperceptibly for him to go on.

Lars thought. “And because I wanted to make a difference. It might sound silly, but that was what it felt like.”

“It doesn’t sound silly. And you do, anyway.”

He looked up.

“You are part of something bigger … and you do make a difference, I just wish that you could see that yourself.”

He waited.

“We’re a group. We work the way people do in a group, everyone does their best to contribute. I’m not always happy with my role in it, I’d change places with you several times each week if I could. But this is the way it is. We do the jobs we have, Lars.”

She let a few moments pass.

“If you want to carry on working here with us, then you have to be clear about that. I’m being honest with you, and I expect you to be honest in return.”

“I want to work here,” he said, and swallowed.

“I can help you to move on, if you like?”

He didn’t understand.

“If you stop working here, that doesn’t mean that you have to go back to Husby or the Western District, I could try to help you to get somewhere else, something better?”

He shook his head. “No, no … I want to carry on here.”

She looked at him hard. “So carry on.”

Gunilla didn’t smile that little smile the way she usually did at the end of a meeting, instead she just looked at him, letting him understand that this was something else. Lars gathered his thoughts, stood up, and began to walk toward the door.

“Lars.”

He turned around in the doorway. She was reading a sheet of paper.

“Don’t do this again.”

Her voice was low.

“Sorry,” he said hoarsely.

She was still looking at the document.

“Stop apologizing.”

He was on his way out the door.

“Wait a moment,” she said.

She opened a drawer, pulled out a car key, and held it out to him.

“Erik said you need to switch cars, back to the Volvo, it’s parked out in the street.”

Lars went over to her, took the key to the Volvo from her hand, and left the office.

He was driving
the car through the city at random, feeling that he had been emotionally raped. Lars tried to think, tried to feel, tried to see where he was going …
Nada
.

He needed to talk to someone, he knew exactly who: the woman who never listened. He turned the car around over the median.

Rosie was sitting
in the corner of the sofa watching television in her dressing gown. She always sat there. Lars had brought a bunch of flowers that he’d pinched outside the old-people’s home. The nurses in Lyckoslanten used to leave the senile patients’ flowers in the same place, because otherwise they’d eat them.

Rosie didn’t belong to the Alzheimer’s gang, she was one of the younger residents in the home with her seventy-two years, part of the group that had just given up.

“Hello, Mom.”

Rosie looked at Lars, then turned back to the television again.

The room was warm, Rosie had a window open slightly. He looked at his mom and noticed that her collarbone was damp with sweat. The volume on the television was turned up loud. That wasn’t because her hearing was bad, it was because she couldn’t understand what they were saying. She was anxious by nature, Rosie Vinge. As was Lars, he guessed she must have infected him early in life. Her anxiety had always been there, but when Lennart died it shifted into a complete terror of life. She had kept herself shut away in the apartment, scared of the immigrants moving in, afraid of the noises coming from the fridge, afraid that there’d be a fire if she left the lights on for too long, afraid of the dark if you turned the lights out.

He hadn’t known what to do with her, for a while he contemplated just forgetting all about her, letting her rot away inside the apartment, but his conscience got the better of him and he put her in the old-people’s home eight years ago. The staff stuffed her full of tranquilizers and she had been there ever since, in her bubble, watching afternoon television.

“How are you?”

He asked the same question each time he went. She smiled in reply, as if he would understand what the smile meant, which he didn’t. He looked at the sorry scene for a while before going out into the little kitchen, boiling some water and making himself a cup of instant coffee.

“Do you want coffee, Mom?”

She didn’t answer, she never did.

He took the cup into the living room and sat down on the sofa beside her. The television was showing a quiz program where you had to call in with the answer, and the host was young and awkward. They sat there in silence, mother and son.