The Andalucian Friend (45 page)

“Where did you get this?”

She gestured to the things on the coffee table.

“Hospital,” Mikhail replied.

Sophie loaded a syringe with thiopental. A low dose, she didn’t know how much she should use.

“You decide,” she said to Mikhail. “Either we operate on him without anesthetic, or I give him a small dose of this, but it’s risky.”

Klaus let out a whimper of pain.

“Give it to him,” Mikhail said.

Sophie pressed the poison into the man’s arm. Klaus’s pain vanished at once as he drifted off among the clouds. Jens came back with water and towels, together with what he had found in his poorly stocked bathroom cabinet.

Half an hour and a considerable quantity of blood later, Sophie had managed to pull the bullet out and stop the bleeding. The bullet had shredded the muscles in the arm, but the bone seemed to be intact. She cleaned the wound, sewed him together, doing whatever she could with the meager means at her disposal. Mikhail kept an eye on Klaus’s breathing.

“Thank you,” he said as she gathered up the things on the coffee table.

“This is only temporary, he needs proper care.”

She went off to the bathroom to wash. Jens caught Mikhail’s eye.

“We’ll leave as soon as he wakes up,” the Russian mumbled.

The men heard Sophie turn on a tap in the bathroom. Neither of them had anything to say.

“Are you hungry?”

Jens didn’t know why he asked. Mikhail nodded.

They ate a cold spread at the kitchen table. Mikhail sat leaning forward with his left arm around his plate, shoveling the food in with his right hand.

“What are you both doing here?” Jens asked.

Mikhail chewed, gestured toward Klaus on the sofa.

“I came to get him,” he said, chewed, then swallowed. “He woke up in the hospital yesterday and called me. I flew up.”

“What happened?”

Mikhail stretched.

“The police arrived, we had to get away …”

“Who shot him?”

“The police …”

Sophie came out into the kitchen and looked at Jens and Mikhail, who were eating in silence. She didn’t like what she saw.

“Is he going to have another go at Hector?”

Mikhail seemed to understand the question and shook his head. She kept her eye on the Russian as she said to Jens: “I want you to ask him for something.”

Carlos was out of breath.
He had come as soon as Hector called. Now he was standing in Hector’s bathroom looking at Leffe Rydbäck’s body as it lay crookedly hunched up in the bath. Hector was standing behind him.

“You need to cut him up into pieces and take him to the restaurant. Then grind him up in the mincer.”

Carlos had his arm over his mouth, the urge to vomit in his throat. Aron came up behind them with two paper bags in his hands, forced his way past and spread a towel out on the bathroom floor. He opened the paper bags and took out two handsaws, different sizes, and put them on the towel. He carried on with dishwashing gloves, a plastic apron, shower cap, vinegar essence, pruning shears, disinfectant, a roll of freezer bags, a circular saw with a freshly charged battery, protective goggles, a breathing mask, chlorine powder, a white plastic bucket, and a Steel Eagle hammer with a rubber handle. Finally Aron pulled out a vanilla-scented Magic Tree air freshener, ripped the plastic off, and hung it up on the shower head.

“You ought to get going before he starts to smell,” he said.

Carlos hesitated, then bent over and picked up the apron, shower cap, and dishwashing gloves and slowly began to put them on. Aron pulled a folding knife from his trouser pocket and opened it up. It had a ridged black handle and a short blade of air-hardened carbon steel.

“This is sharp,” he said, passing the knife to Carlos, handle first. “And throw up in the toilet, not the bucket,” Aron went on as he and Hector left the room.

Carlos was left standing in the hollow silence of the bathroom. Staring at Leffe Rydbäck in the bathtub. He took a few shallow breaths before sitting down on the side of the bath and taking hold of the corpse’s right hand. It was cold. He held the sharp knife blade against Rydbäck’s little finger and pressed. It was pretty easy, the finger shot off and bounced off the side of the bath. Carlos repeated the procedure on the thumb. Once he had worked out what he was doing the rest of the fingers came off quickly, then he moved on to the left hand.

Hector was sitting
on the sofa with a newspaper. Aron was in an armchair. From the bathroom they could hear Carlos testing the circular saw like a teenager with a souped-up moped. Then the sound of the saw working through something thick. It eased off slightly, the engine idling, then picked up again. The saw fell silent, then came the sound of Carlos heaving and throwing up in the toilet. And then the whining sound of the saw again.

Time passed, Hector went on reading, Aron stared out into space. They were interrupted by steps on the spiral staircase that led down to the office. Aron stood up, drew his gun. The steps were slow without being heavy.

A woman in her fifties came up, looked at Hector, then at Aron and his raised pistol.

“You can put that away,” she said.

Aron lowered the gun, but kept it in his hand.

“I must apologize,” the woman said. “But you’d never have let me in if I’d rung on the door, so I had to make my own way in downstairs via your office.”

Gunilla held a finger up to her ear. The noise of the saw was coming through the wall.

“Are you doing some home improvements?”

She listened some more.

“Unless that could be Leffe Rydbäck, in the middle of being sawn up in the bathroom?”

Aron raised his gun again, but the woman seemed quite indifferent to it. She held out her ID.

“I’m a police officer. My name’s Gunilla Strandberg. Please, put the pistol away, people know I’m here.”

Aron hesitated and went over to the window. He looked down, then out, saw nothing.

“No, there’s no one there, it’s just me. I came to talk, but people know I’m here. If anything were to happen …” She gestured with her hand. “Well, you understand.”

Gunilla looked at Hector.

“I just want to talk,” she repeated in a low voice.

He folded the newspaper, indicated that she should sit down.

Gunilla sat down on one of the sofas. The sounds now coming from the bathroom were hard hammer blows to bones and flesh, and then the whining of the saw started up again. Hector inspected her.

“Do we know each other?” he asked.

“I know you, Hector Guzman. You don’t know me.”

Hector and Aron waited for more.

“And now you’re wondering why I’m here?”

Gunilla fixed her gaze on Hector.

“Out of sheer curiosity, I think,” she said.

Carlos was throwing up again. This time he shouted out as he vomited.

Gunilla waited until Carlos had finished.

“I’m curious about how much money you made from blackmailing Svante Carlgren, and from your dealings with Alfonse Ramirez, who I know is in town. … Just a rough idea, I mean?”

Hector was looking at her hard.

“What do you want?” he asked.

A curious look from Gunilla.

“I can see it on you,” he went on. “You want something, answers, possibly. Isn’t that what you police like most — answers?”

“No, I’ve already got the answers. And they don’t interest me at all.”

Hector looked at Aron, who in turn looked at Gunilla.

“So what do you want, then?” Hector asked.

“I want what you’ve got.”

“Sorry?”

“How much have you earned from Ramirez and Carlgren?” she asked again.

Hector didn’t answer.

“I want a share of that,” Gunilla said.

Now Hector understood.

“In exchange for what?”

“In exchange for a free hand for as long I’m in the police.”

The tears never came.
He was rolling paint over the wall. The notes, the deductions, the arrows … the whole context. Everything disappeared behind thick, white paint.

Sara had been in his apartment. She had seen the wall, she had figured something out. Then she had contacted Gunilla. She had been murdered. And soon they would murder him as well.

He had copied everything, both digitally and in hard copy. Two sets. One was secure in the safe deposit box at the bank. The other in the sports bag on the floor. He checked his pistol: full magazine, another in his jacket pocket. He usually carried it in a holster on his belt. Now he had it in a shoulder holster instead, he could feel the straps across his back and shoulders.

He looked around the office. The wall was as white as new-fallen snow, the room was tidy, nothing of any interest to anyone. He picked up the black sports bag from the floor. Took his laptop and the surveillance equipment and left the apartment.

Down in the street he headed toward the rental car. If he’d been paying attention, he might have seen the man sitting in a car a bit farther along. But he didn’t, he wasn’t paying attention … He was coming down, and was mainly focused on his own pain.

Lars drove the car through the city. The traffic was light, summer vacation had started. He parked on Brahegatan, a block from the police station. He put the surveillance equipment on his lap, checked that it was getting a signal from the microphone up in the room. He moved it into the trunk and left the car with the bag and laptop in his hands.

Lars walked with his head down, crossed Karlavägen, then the small park running down the middle of the road, heading toward Stureplan.

He was nudged in the side from the left. A light nudge, he looked up, a large man was walking beside him.

“Walk with me,” the man said in English, with an Eastern European accent.

Lars went cold and reached for his service weapon.

The man showed the pistol in his right hand. And gestured for Lars to give him his gun. Everything happened quickly, suddenly the big man had Lars’s pistol in his jacket pocket and was steering him across the road to a car parked over by the pavement. Mikhail pulled open the back door and shoved Lars into the backseat.

“Lie still and keep your mouth shut,” Jens said from behind the wheel.

They pulled out into the traffic.

“Who are you?”

The big man punched him in the face.

The room was terrible. Like a cabin on a boat,
with a constant rushing sound from the highway up above, in spite of the soundproof windows.

Once Jens and Mikhail had left she had got in a taxi and headed south along the Essinge Highway and out onto the E4, toward the southern suburbs. The motel was beside the highway in Midsommarkransen. There was no reception desk, just a lobby where you checked in using your credit card — Jens had given her one.

She sat down on the bed and waited. Maybe it was more of a bunk than a bed, hard and unyielding. She kept calling Jane. Jane always had the same answer:
No change
. Sophie noticed her reflection in the mirror above the fixed desk. She saw a sad, exhausted figure — and looked away.

After what seemed like an eternity there was a knock on the door. Sophie got up and went over to open it. Jens pushed Lars Vinge inside, and the door slid closed by itself behind them.

Lars Vinge was lost. He didn’t know where he was. She looked at him, he looked sick, weak and pale, dark rings under his eyes — emaciated, somehow. His nose had been bleeding, he had dried blood in his nostrils. Jens gestured for him to sit down. Lars found a chair by the table, that too screwed to the wall.

“Can I have something to drink?” His voice was quiet.

“No,” Jens said.

Lars rubbed his eyes.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Jens asked.

Lars didn’t answer, instead he just stared at Sophie and started to smile. He smiled as if they were old friends, old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. The smiling made her feel uneasy.

She’d only seen him very fleetingly before. Now she realized what sort of man he was. She didn’t like him. Lars Vinge exuded a peculiar mixture of low self-esteem and unwarranted self-confidence. He was unstable, unpleasant … and scared.

“But you didn’t have to do this,” he said.

“Why not?”

He was looking at Sophie the whole time, his left leg was twitching unconsciously.

“You didn’t have to capture me like this … I was going to get in touch with you soon anyway …”

“What for?” Sophie asked.

He looked down at the table.

“I’m so sorry, I heard about Albert. How is he?”

“Tell us what you know,” Jens said.

A long silence followed.

“Gunilla wanted Anders and Hasse to pick him up.”

“Why?” asked Sophie.

“I don’t know. Something was going on. They wanted a hold over you, Sophie, they said, they wanted to make sure you weren’t going to start anything.”

“Start what?”

“I don’t know, they must have been worried about you … Worried that you’d do something without thinking it through — after all, they’d threatened you. Sooner or later you were likely to do something.”

Sophie didn’t understand.

“But why now?”

Lars thought.

“Something’s going on — ”

“Tell us everything, right from the start,” Jens interrupted.

Lars looked up at Sophie and Jens, trying to think. He put his right hand down flat on the table, seemed to be trying to find a structure. Then he started to talk. First hesitantly and tentatively, but after a bit of confusion he pulled himself together, got onto the right track, and managed to stay on it. He described how he had been contacted by Gunilla Strandberg, how he had started working for her. How he had quickly forgotten the purpose of it. How he had watched Sophie, and about the microphones in her house, about his reports to Gunilla, about how he didn’t know the others had kidnapped Albert. How he didn’t know anything about anything, how he had been kept at arm’s length.

She thought it all felt unreal. There was the man who had been stalking her for weeks, telling them things that were beyond her comprehension. The idea that she was somehow in the center of something gradually dawned on her. He talked about people who had made her the starting point for a criminal investigation that didn’t seem to have any foundations. About the way Gunilla Strandberg worked and didn’t work, about the fact that the man she had met in the police station was Erik Strandberg, Gunilla’s brother, and about his sudden death. About their attempts to put pressure on other people around Hector, about an unhealthy obsession with making progress toward something. And about a clandestine detective — Anders Ask, and a thug — Hasse Berglund, and how the pair of them had gone after Albert.

Lars stopped talking, looked down at the table and rubbed his finger on an invisible mark.

“You said you were starting to build up a picture … what did that picture look like?” she asked.

“I don’t know …” He scratched his forehead. “Our lives are in danger. Yours and mine, Sophie … Albert’s, but you’ve already realized that.”

He looked at Sophie and Jens.

“Was it you who wrote the note in my mailbox?” she asked.

He nodded.

“And you’ve been inside my house?”

Now he was staring at her.

“What?”

“Answer,” Jens said.

Lars lowered his head, shook it. Stared fixedly at the floor.

“No … ,” he mumbled.

“No, what?”

“No, I’m not going to answer that,” he whispered.

Jens and Sophie looked at each other. This guy was seriously disturbed.

“The Saab, why did you set fire to it?” Jens asked.

“I was just starting to realize that there were a lot of things going on that I wasn’t part of at all … When you came and took my ID and the rest of it, I started to get an idea. I took the surveillance equipment out … set fire to the car, told Gunilla all the equipment had gone up in smoke.”

“Why?”

Lars was drawing circles on the table with one finger of his right hand.

“I’ve started listening to them instead.”

“Who?” Jens asked.

“Gunilla, my colleagues.”

“Why?”

Lars stopped drawing circles.

“What did you say?” he asked, as if he’d suddenly forgotten everything he’d just been saying.

“Why did you start listening to your colleagues?” Jens said slowly, in a sharp tone of voice.

Lars’s memory came back and he swallowed.

“Because I realized that something was going on that I … that I was being kept out of.”

“What?” Jens asked.

“Just then everything was too messed up to make any sense out of … but I was right, at least.”

Jens and Sophie waited.

“They murdered my girlfriend.”

Lars almost whispered the words.

“Sorry?” Sophie said.

He looked up at her and Jens.

“They murdered Sara, my girlfriend.”

Mikhail was driving
back into the city, Sophie and Jens were in the backseat.

“Fucking hell,” Jens whispered.

She could only agree. She was staring out of the window, looking at the steady stream of traffic driving past them.

Mikhail and Klaus had left,
the good-byes had been short. There was a ring at the door. Jens looked at his watch.

“Mikhail must have forgotten something,” he muttered to himself.

He looked out through the peephole, expecting to see two men. But outside stood three men, three men of a different sort: hollow-eyed, tired, and staring all at the same time. Gosha with his shaved head, Vitaly with a bottle of liqueur in his hand, Dmitry, eyes wide apart.
Fuck
. He’d calculated that they wouldn’t reach Stockholm before later that evening, and wasn’t expecting them before that. They must have driven nonstop.

Jens pulled away from the door and went into the kitchen. Sophie saw the look on his face.

“What is it?”

Jens hurried over to the kitchen window.

“What is it, Jens?”

“They’re here earlier than I expected … We have to get away from here, now.”

There was a loud bang on the door.

“Who are they?”

Jens opened one of the kitchen windows. “Never mind that. Come on, we need to leave.”

“Let me say that you’re not here.”

“Trust me, you don’t want to do that.”

The banging on the door had turned into heavy thuds. The whole frame was shaking out in the hall. Jens pointed at the open window. Sophie wanted to come up with another option. The thudding became hard kicks. She could hear the Russians’ agitated voices. Jens climbed out the window, turned back, and held his hand out to her. She looked at him, looked at the hand, hesitating. Then she left the kitchen and disappeared back into the apartment.