The Game Trilogy (24 page)

Her head is completely empty, her body incapable of all movement, even a millimetre, and so her mouth stays silent too.

‘Was that it?’ the police officer opposite her says. ‘Was he the one who pushed your partner off the balcony?’

But she can’t answer.

And she still isn’t crying.

‘Go on then!’ the man in front of him jeers.

His breath is like a pillar of smoke from his scornful, smiling mouth.

‘Pull the trigger, if you dare!’

The red mark from the laser sight trembles on the man’s broad chest. All he has to do is squeeze the trigger, and the bullet will do the rest.

But he hesitates. In the background the church bells are ringing louder and louder. Somehow he seems to have shrunk, become shorter, smaller, almost as if he were changing into a child. The pistol is getting heavier and heavier and soon he won’t be able to hold it anymore.

‘Henrik,’ the woman at the man’s side says quietly, and she has to lean over to get eye contact with him.

‘You don’t have to do this. I’ll be okay anyway.’

Her voice is calm and friendly, so familiar and comforting. Then she smiles at him, that gentle smile he’s loved for as long as he can remember, and there’s a lump in his throat. It’s forcing its way to his larynx and into his mouth. Tears burn through his eyelids and he hears the man chuckle.

‘I knew you wouldn’t dare!’ he mocks. ‘A worthless little shit like you isn’t capable of anything. Not even taking care of your family.’

He puts his arms round the woman’s shoulders and
pulls her to him. She does nothing to stop him and just lets herself be embraced. She stands there quite still, stuck to his side.

In his grasp.

‘I’ll be okay anyway,’ her voice whispers inside his head, but he knows she’s wrong.

And the look in her eyes agrees with him.

Then the man is someone else. Changes again, right in front of his eyes. Into someone older, even more dangerous. And suddenly he feels his little boy’s willy shrivel up and almost disappear inside his pants.

But just as he catches sight of the belt in the man’s free hand, at the very moment he sees how it all fits together and his index finger squeezes the trigger to blow him away, send the bastard back to hell once and for all – the gun turns into something else entirely.

The bells have turned to thunder inside his head.

Drowning out all sound and swallowing the whole world.

It’s as if every church in Stockholm has suddenly joined in the ringing and is making the ground shake beneath his feet. It is the 28th of February 1986, the Prime Minister of Sweden has just been murdered. And the world will never be the same …

‘Fire, fire!’ he hears someone cry as he races up the steep steps towards Malmskillnadsgatan a few seconds later.

In his jacket pocket he can feel an old spanner bouncing about.

HP woke up gently. He opened his eyes slowly and knew straight away from the smell that he wasn’t at home. There was a smell of food. Warm, cooked food, not from some takeaway or kiosk, but proper home-cooked food. Sweet!

‘Oh, so you’re awake!’ She stuck her head into the living room and seemed almost pleased to see him.

‘Food will be ready in a couple of minutes, if you want to freshen up first.’

He nodded and wandered off towards the bathroom.

When he returned she was ladling out a helping of sausage and mash for him.

Proper mash, made from real potatoes, not powder. He hadn’t had that for … well, he could actually remember how long it had been.

It was pretty damn good as well, and he ate ravenously. She waited until he had finished his first portion and was no longer completely starving.

‘I was over at the cottage,’ she said neutrally.

‘I know!’ he said between chews. ‘I saw you from a distance but didn’t really feel like introducing myself to your colleagues,’ he explained when he saw the quizzical look on her face. ‘Was it a real bomb?’

She looked at him searchingly for a few seconds. There were a lot of things you could say about Henke, a hell of a lot, actually, but he wasn’t stupid. That was actually the main problem.

Smart, but lazy. Clever, but indolent. Bright, but lacking ambition.

She should have realized it wouldn’t be that easy to pin him down.

‘Looks like it,’ she said shortly. ‘According to Forensics there was enough dynamex in it to turn Auntie’s cottage into kindling. It was under the sofa, by the way, with a pressure-sensitive detonator, but perhaps you already know that as well?’

He shook his head as he shovelled in another mouthful. Dynamex, that’s the stuff they used on building sites. Good old dynamite in a modern form.

The same stuff he’d read about on the internet, after it went missing from a weapon-store out in Fisksätra. The bit about a pressure-sensitive detonator also sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. Almost like something you’d see at the cinema. Just like everything else that had happened.

As if his whole life had turned into some sort of weird film.

‘I’ve spoken to Manga,’ she said, changing tactic.

That had more of an effect.

He stopped chewing and looked at her anxiously.

‘And?’

‘He told me everything,’ she said, holding his gaze.

The shift was immediate, from cocky little brother to frightened little rabbit in the space of a couple of seconds.

‘And he also showed me some nice video clips from a phone you left with him.’

His face had turned white and his fork fell to his plate with a clatter.

‘Becca, I …’

‘Yes?’

She looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to go on.

But nothing came.

Instead he buried his head in his hands and slumped across the table. It actually sounded like he was crying. All of a sudden she didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t bargained for this particular scenario. She hadn’t seen him cry since …

Well, since that evening when the police showed up. Back then he had shaken her, tried to get her out of her state of shock and talk to him. Tears of frustration then. Anger, impotence maybe, but not fear.

Not like now. He looked so vulnerable, so small.

Carefully she put her arms round his shoulders.

‘There, there, Henke, don’t worry,’ she said in her gentlest voice, just like she used to when they were kids and he woke up scared from the noise on the other side of the bedroom door.

‘It’s all going to be all right,’ she whispered, stroking his hair.

Henke had showered and used her ladyshave to get rid of the worst of the stubble, and was now wearing some of her gym clothes while his own were soaking in Y3 detergent in the kitchen sink.

It was surprising what some food, basic hygiene and a bit of sympathy could do, she thought as they sat curled up on her sofa. Once her initial anger had faded away, it actually felt nice having him there, hearing his voice and knowing he was okay.

He had filled in the gaps in Manga’s story. How he found the phone, the assignments, the mocked-up arrest and everything that had followed since he was kicked out of this peculiar Game.

They made slow progress to start with, but as time went on he picked up the pace so much that in the end the words were firing out of his mouth, almost too fast for her to follow them.

The whole thing sounded pretty odd, which was probably the understatement of the year …

Fake police, madmen in the forest, planes, arson and bombs – it was all a bit difficult to take in, to put it mildly. Then, on top of all that, a secret gambling set-up where people could place bets and order assassinations at the same time.

When he started rambling about Palme’s murder, 9/11 and the fire in Katarina Church, she had to stop him.

This was just too much!

All his usual bullshit stories paled against this collection. Could he even hear how crazy he sounded? But, on the other hand, she could hardly ignore the tangible evidence proving that at least some of what he was saying had actually happened.

The phone, the video clips, the fires and the bomb were clearly all real. She had seen them herself, or evidence of them.

It was quite obvious that he was in trouble, and it was undeniable that someone was trying to hurt him. But where was the dividing line between reality and fantasy?

He sounded like one of the radiation-obsessed crazies who used to phone the police in the middle of the night.

People who wanted to report that NASA was using television sets to watch the whole world, and that the king was actually a robot working for the CIA.

The only similarity with all the scrapes Henke had got himself into before was the question of guilt. None of it was his fault, obviously, he was just a victim of unfortunate circumstances. He’d got into a bit of trouble, that’s all. Soon that stone at Lindhagensplan would have thrown itself off the bridge …

‘So what are you planning to do next?’ She tried to keep her voice neutral.

He took a deep breath, then sighed.

‘I haven’t got many options left, really. The flat’s going to be ready soon, but fuck knows if I’ve got the balls to live there anymore. The cottage is buggered now, and I can’t stay with Manga. So I was thinking of leaving, ditching all this shit and moving somewhere else. Somewhere they can’t find me. Thailand maybe, Jesus is already out there, of course, if you remember him?’

Rebecca nodded but said nothing.

‘I can probably find a way of making some money once
I get there, and the flat would raise a bit of money if I sold it.’

He gave her his little brother look and tilted his head to one side. She’d long since worked out where this conversation was heading.

‘But I could do with a bit of start-up capital to get me going …’

Here we go, she thought.

The patented solution to all his problems. This time the mess he’d got himself into looked far worse than usual, but the punchline was the same as ever.

He needed money, and as always she was the one who was expected to cough up. Little Henke had got into trouble and some nasty people were trying to get him, so now he needed money so he could run away and hide.

The worst thing was that no matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t come up with a better solution. Obviously she could suggest that they go to the police together, that he should take responsibility for what he had done and help to put it all right. But she already knew what the answer would be, and even if he took her advice, against all expectation, she doubted if her colleagues would be any help. Sure, they’d be quick to arrest and charge him with Lindhagensplan and Kungsträdgården, so they could say they’d solved that summer’s most talked about crimes. But any more in-depth investigation into the underlying causes would be put on ice the moment Henke started with his radiation-lunatic stuff. And he’d be blamed for it all – he’d be the lone perpetrator, and even if it wasn’t entirely undeserved, she couldn’t just watch while he was sent to prison again.

His proposed solution was, under the circumstances, the best one on offer.

‘How much?’ she sighed.

Obviously he shouldn’t have told her. Partly because he was breaking that bastard rule again, but that particular reason was fairly easy to rationalize away. In practice he had already been punished for telling her when they torched his flat, and that time he hadn’t actually done it.

In other words, they owed him one. Quid pro quo, so to speak.

The more serious reason for staying quiet was that he could hear how crazy it all sounded now that he was telling someone else. The conclusions he had reached out in the cottage, which had seemed so solid when he went through them on his own, now sounded like something out of the
X-Files
, and when he’d finished talking his sister wasn’t the only one in the room with doubts about his sanity.

He should have kept quiet, just talked about the things she already knew and kept the rest to himself.

The end result was the same, after all.

He was in trouble, and needed to get away, this time much further than Tantolunden. Disappear off the map, basically, some place where no-one could find him, but where he could still have a decent life.

But that sort of vanishing act took money, and he didn’t have any. So he was left standing there, cap in hand as usual. His sister would cough up, she always did. They even joked about it sometimes:
Cavalry to the rescue!

But for some reason it didn’t feel quite as easy about taking her money this time.

It wasn’t right, somehow …

But he still did it. Spent the night on her sofa, then went with her to the bank the next day.

A night’s sleep and some more decent food had done him good, and he felt much brighter than he had during the previous evening’s tearful outburst.

It was still a bit embarrassing, but what the fuck …

Bodyguards must get paid pretty well, if she had that much in her account …

He got twenty-seven thousand in cash, and was left with twenty-three once he’d bought a few clothes and a new pay-as-you-go mobile in the shops around Hötorget. Then a quick call to Lufthansa.

Ein return ticket to Frankfurt for an Andreas Pettersson? Kein problem, mein herr!

Seeing as his passport very handily didn’t say which of his first names he used, there wouldn’t be any problem picking the ticket up at Arlanda.

It was the first time he’d ever had any use for his middle name. Anyone checking the passenger lists wouldn’t find him, at least not straight away. They’d probably start by looking for single tickets booked in the name he usually used, so Andreas wouldn’t be picked up first time round.

By then he’d already be in Frankfurt, with a whole load of airlines and destinations to pick from. If he felt like it he could even skip the flight and catch the train to some other airport instead. Cross the border into Holland or Belgium, maybe. The Germans were pretty fucking hot when it came to trains, and cash left no trail.

Are you sure you want to exit?

Hell yeah!

He was sitting on the airport bus with his newly purchased cabin luggage by his feet. Apart from the laptop it contained a pair of jeans, some underwear and toiletries, but that was more or less it. He was travelling light, essentials only, he could pick up the rest when he got there.