The Andalucian Friend (42 page)

That night she came to him.
She crept up next to him on the sofa where he had made a bed for himself, into his arms. She lay there for a while, letting herself be held. Then she pulled away and went back to her bed. Jens watched her go, tried to get back to sleep, but couldn’t. He got up, called Jonas at the hospital — he was watching over Albert, said everything was OK.

In the kitchen he lit a cigarette and smoked it out the window. His cell vibrated on the worktop, the screen showed a Moscow number.

“Yes?”

“Your friends have left for Sweden.” Risto’s voice sounded as untroubled as ever.

“To Stockholm?”

“Yes, they’re on their way …”

“When did they leave?”

“Don’t know. I’d guess at yesterday.”

“Fine, let them come. They’ll never find me.”

“They know your name …”

“They know my name’s Jens, that’s all.”

“You traveled to Prague under your real name … That first meeting with them …”

Jens remembered. He did that sometimes when there was nothing at stake.

“They got it from the hotel.”

“OK … Thanks, Risto.”

Jens ended the call and stood there thinking.

“Fuck … ,” he whispered quietly.

“What is it?”

He turned around. Sophie was standing there looking at him. He tried to give her a reassuring smile.

It was twenty past three in the morning
when Lars put the key in the rental car that was parked on Brahegatan.

He drove off through an apparently dead city, saw just a few people, most of them drunk. He was drunk himself, but that wasn’t something he bothered to consider. Hammered, wired —
encapsulated
— had become his general state of being.

He parked the car three blocks from his apartment, took the surveillance equipment out of the back, put it under his arm, and lumbered home.

In his office he transferred the files to his computer, put on the headphones, and listened to the sequence from Brahegatan where he himself had been present — he heard Gunilla ask him and Erik to go and see Carlos. The sound was bad, it didn’t quite reach the microphone. Footsteps on the floor, a door closing. His and Erik’s footsteps. Lars listened intently, then heard the unmistakable squeak of a marker on the whiteboard.

“Two topics for discussion
.
”
Gunilla’s voice.

Silence, then Gunilla’s voice again:
“Before we talk about the boy, I want us to go back to that night. Lars knows more than we thought. Erik’s trying to question him now
.
”

“Patricia Nordström, does he know about her?”

That was Anders’s voice. Lars wrote “Patricia Nordström” on a piece of paper.

“I don’t know, I don’t think so
.
”

“But she knew?”

“Yes,”
Gunilla said curtly.

She?
Lars tried to make sense of it all.

“Have they found her?”
Hasse asked.

“Yes, a girlfriend found her,”
Gunilla said.

“Cause of death?”

“Heart failure, just as we wanted
.
”

Lars wasn’t understanding any of this.

“No question marks?”
Anders said.

“No. No question marks … not yet.”

A cough from Hasse, and Gunilla went on:
“It’s important that he doesn’t find out anything right now. I’d rather get rid of him, but if he is holding something back, I’d rather have him here with us in ignorance
.
”

A few seconds of nothing, the sound of the pen on the board. Lars pressed his hands over the headphones, concentrating.

“We have to find the boy, bring him in again,”
Gunilla said.

Lars tried to understand — the boy?

“Why?”
Anders said.

“We need to pin Sophie down. I get the feeling she’s going to do something drastic soon. That mustn’t happen, not at this point
.
”

Gunilla’s voice sounded hollow.

Lars was thinking. The boy? … Albert! What did they want with him?

“Isn’t it the last day of school today?”
Hasse said.

Then unclear muttering from Anders and a quiet answer from Gunilla; he couldn’t make out the words. Then the sound of chairs scraping on the floor as Hasse and Anders stood up.

He switched off the equipment, trying to think about what he’d heard, trying to think about Albert. While he and Erik had gone off to see Carlos, Anders and Hasse had gone after Albert. Had they succeeded? And why? What did they want with the boy? Lars’s brain was working at top speed. Was there anything about Albert that stood out in the surveillance of Sophie? He closed his eyes, searching feverishly inside himself. A thin, indistinct memory drifted past, he tried to capture it. That didn’t work; it disappeared, but not entirely. Something had stuck … something small and fragile. He screwed up his eyes and went over to the computer, trying not to lose it, and typed in the search terms
Albert
,
Sophie
,
kitchen
. A mass of files showed up in the search window. Lars looked at the dates and started listening from the top of the list. There were conversations over breakfast, conversations over dinner, conversations during the day while Albert was doing his homework. There were conversations in the evenings, Sophie on the phone. Albert on the phone. And there were a lot of background noises that set off the voice-activated equipment only for it to shut down again shortly afterward. He listened through file after file, fast-forwarded, searched.
Shit
, there was something he remembered, he just couldn’t recall what … Something that only his subconscious had registered. And the more he listened, the weaker his indistinct recollection became.

After two and a half hours he hadn’t even listened to half of the files. Lars clicked on another one, listened once more, fast-forwarding through the silences. A fridge opened and closed, Sophie’s voice said
Albert
. Silence followed … And then the unmistakable sound of a slap.

Lars pressed lightly on the headphones, the sound became clearer, the details audible. Footsteps on the floor, someone standing up from a chair.

Lars listened.

“I haven’t done anything.”

Albert’s voice sounded muffled, as though he were pressing into his mother’s shoulder.

“It’s over now, they made a mistake.”

Lars didn’t remember this, he remembered hearing it, but didn’t remember it like this, not this way.

“But they had witnesses?! Rape? What kind of …”

Lars heard Sophie hushing him.

“Try to forget it now, sometimes it just happens. Everyone makes mistakes, even the police
.
”

There was silence again. Lars went on listening.

“He hit me.”

“What did you say?”

“The policeman in the car, he hit me in the face.”

There was a long, drawn-out silence in the headphones, the file came to an end. Lars stood up, gathered his thoughts, then wrote what he had just heard up on the wall. He worked feverishly until long into the night. The pieces of the puzzle were finally starting to fall into place.

As morning dawned
he was woken by a phone call. Gunilla wanted to meet him.

He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, found a personality that might work. He took it easy with the pills because he had, after all, been present when her brother died … That meant you were likely to be a bit off form.

“What happened?

She had her hands on her lap. It was warm, seventy-five degrees in the shade. They were sitting at an outdoor café on Östermalmstorg; she was restrained, as if she were bracing herself to hear something that might affect her emotionally. Lars looked down at the table, then up at Gunilla.

“We got there, Erik was doing the talking … suddenly he collapsed. …”

A breeze swept across the square, but brought no relief from the heat.

“How?”

“Does it matter?”

“Would I be asking otherwise?”

Lars began. “He said he couldn’t see properly. One arm started to tremble and shake. He said something incomprehensible, then he fell.”

“What did he say?”

“I didn’t hear.”

“What did you do?”

“I rushed over and checked his pulse.”

“And?”

“He was still alive, and I called for an ambulance.”

“Then what?”

“I sat down beside him.”

“Did he say anything, did you say anything?”

“He was unconscious, but I kept talking gently to him.”

“What did you say?”

“I said everything was going to be all right, that the ambulance was on its way, that there was no need for him to worry.”

Gunilla looked away, took a deep breath.

“Thank you.”

Lars didn’t respond.

“And the other man? Carlos, what did he do?”

“He got scared, went off into another room.”

“How far had you got in your conversation with him?”

“Not very far. Erik said he wanted results. We didn’t get any further …”

Gunilla looked at the people around them.

“It’s starting to come together now, the evidence is starting to mount up. We all need to concentrate on what we’re doing now. No mistakes.”

Lars took a sip of his glass of water.

“Has anything happened that I don’t know about?”

A sad look crossed her eyes, then she shook her head, apparently to herself.

“It’s terrible, Sophie’s son Albert was hit by a car yesterday … His back’s broken, he’s in intensive care, the whole thing’s just terrible.”

He wanted to scream. But instead he concentrated on staying calm. He thought about a tree slowly growing, about a stone being shaped by the sea … about anything that happened unbelievably calmly.

“Oh … Who did it?” he said, sounding precisely as unconcerned as he had hoped.

Gunilla shrugged her shoulders.

“Don’t know, it was an accident … hit and run.”

“That’s terrible. Anything else?”

He was trying to sound cold and professional.

“No, I don’t think so.”

Gunilla watched Lars
Vinge as he headed off toward Humlegårdsgatan. She thought that he had changed, that his previous uncertain and feeble attitude had turned into something else. Not more confident … Stiffer, quieter. He was introverted without being fretful, however that worked.

She let Lars go, took out her cell and quickly called Hasse Berglund.

“Would you mind cleaning up everything at the nurse’s house? Anders can tell you where the microphones are located. Everything needs to go, we mustn’t leave any trace at all.”

She ended the call, then spent a while just watching the people around her, finding them all interesting. She smiled toward a curly-haired boy in a white shirt and black trousers, who took a few seconds to realize that she wanted to pay.