Tommy felt like a drink. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, and there it was—happiness, transparent and reliable. A big bottle of gin from a shop on the German border. He took the bottle out and drank a few cautious mouthfuls, enough to turn the grayish tone of the world into something reminiscent of the way things used to be, a bit like when he was a child.
Tommy carried on reading. Fucking sailing boats the whole time. A swig of gin. Another sequence of names: Roger Lindgren. Herbie Hancock, the Blue Note Years…
An alarm went off somewhere in the back of Tommy’s head. He looked back and checked the previous name he’d just read, Roger Lindgren.
He leafed through Antonia’s list, running through it with his finger. Yep, there it was: Roger Lindgren.
Tommy found a pen and circled the name on both lists. Who the hell was Roger Lindgren? He checked on his computer but couldn’t find anything interesting.
He put the lists down side by side. Then he compared everything carefully and thoroughly. It took time, it took gin, and it took a lot of effort. When he was finished there were three common denominators between Miles Ingmarsson’s and Antonia Miller’s search histories.
Roger Lindgren.
Lars Vinge.
Safe-deposit boxes.
Fucking hell.
Tommy called every informant on the police payroll that he could think of.
“Roger Lindgren?”
“No idea.”
Four calls to four crooks before he got an answer.
“There’s a gyppo from Trångsund of that name. He’s a real asshole, if I remember correctly, cooks meth, hits women.”
“Where does he live?”
“Where he lives? How the fuck should I know?”
“Can you find out?”
“I’ll get back to you when I’ve got something.”
Twenty minutes later the phone rang.
“Roger Lindgren’s fucking a divorcée who works in the Cultural sector; she lives in Vasastan.”
“Whereabouts in Vasastan?”
“Hagagatan…”
Sophie was lying on her stomach, her binoculars aimed at a farm four or five hundred meters below her. Jens was lying beside her, taking photographs through a telephoto lens.
She could see movement. Several men outside the building. It was big. Old—150 years, perhaps—long and wide. Recently restored without looking modern, half-timbered. Some distance away was a brick stable block, and beyond that some white-fenced paddocks and a few horses.
“Can you see anything?” Jens asked.
She looked.
“Well, there’s a few men moving around outside the building.”
“Are they armed?”
“I can’t tell.”
Jens put the camera down, marked their position on a map spread out next to him, noted the distance to the farm, glanced up at the sun behind him and then back at the farm again, and made a note of the time and the position of the sun.
His cell phone buzzed and he passed it to Sophie, then went on writing.
“Nothing at the other farms, according to Mikhail,” she said.
“In which case he has to be here,” Jens said. “Come on, let’s head back.”
“We’re staying,” she said.
He stood up, shaking his head.
“No. We’re going back to the hotel. You can’t do anything here, not now.”
Sophie looked down at the farmhouse, where Albert might be. So close…
He held out his hand to Sophie. She took it reluctantly, and he helped her to her feet. They walked away, toward the car.
Sophie turned around several times. The idea that she was leaving her son, letting him down, weighed heavy on her. She’d lost count of the number of times she had felt like that.
The man was high and glassy-eyed when he opened the door of his apartment on Hagagatan, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt.
“Roger Lindgren?” Tommy asked.
“Who are you?”
His voice was far too high to belong to a tough guy.
“I’m a cop,” Tommy said, shoving Lindgren hard in the chest. Lindgren almost fell, but looked amused, as if he’d been beaten up so many times in his life that nothing really mattered anymore.
Tommy drew his service pistol and grabbed Lindgren’s collar, then dragged him into the living room and pushed him down onto a chair.
“Who are you?” Tommy asked.
“You just said my name,” Lindgren squeaked.
Tommy hit him over the head with his pistol.
Lindgren’s face shone with hatred and contorted pain.
“Who are you?” Tommy asked again. Another blow with the pistol. This time aimed at Lindgren’s ear and temple.
“My name’s Roger, and I…Tell me what you’re doing here!” He pressed one hand to the ear that had just been hit, and blood seeped out between his fingers.
“Antonia Miller?” Tommy said.
“What?”
“Antonia Miller? Have you had any contact with her?”
“No! Who the fuck is that?” Roger yelped, scared he was about to be hit again, which happened. This time on the hand that was protecting his ear.
“I don’t know who that is!” he cried.
“Miles Ingmarsson?”
Roger tried to defend himself.
“I’ve never heard of him!”
Another blow. Across his face this time. Hard as hell.
Lindgren tried to parry further blows. This wasn’t good. Tommy was getting a strong feeling that the guy really didn’t know.
He looked around the apartment.
“Do you live here?”
Roger’s nose was bleeding.
“Yes, from time to time.”
“What a fucking dump.”
“Thanks…”
“Why is your voice so high?” Tommy asked.
“Don’t know, it always has been.”
“You sound like a pathetic little girl.”
Roger wiped his nose and didn’t bother to respond to Tommy’s remark.
“What’s your connection to Miles Ingmarsson and Antonia Miller?”
“I don’t know who they are.”
Tommy was annoyed. He sniffed the air. Something acrid, strong, chemical.
“What’s that smell?”
“Nothing.”
Tommy glared angrily at Roger.
“That’s a fucking stupid answer.”
He dragged Roger up and pushed him ahead, holding the pistol against his back.
A closed door.
“Open it,” Tommy said.
Tommy jabbed the barrel of the pistol hard in his back. Roger did as he’d been told.
Behind the door, a plastic curtain. Behind the curtain, a kitchen. The chemical smell was stronger. Darkened windows, heat lamps, equipment. A deluxe meth kitchen.
“I don’t know what this is,” Roger said without sounding very convincing.
“I can understand that,” Tommy said. “What with it being your kitchen and everything. How the hell would you know?”
“It’s not my kitchen.”
“Whose is it, then?”
“The girl I live with.”
“But if I had to guess…amphetamine?”
“Looks like it,” Roger said.
Tommy thought for a moment.
“Is this the reason?…” Tommy mused out loud, and looked at the meth kitchen.
“The reason for what?”
Tommy abandoned his theory. It must be something else that’s got Miles and Antonia on Roger’s trail.
“OK. Here’s what we do, Roger. This sort of thing carries a whole lot of years. I want you to call me at once the minute you hear from Miles Ingmarsson or Antonia Miller.”
Roger nodded eagerly.
“You do understand how much fucking power I’ve got, don’t you?” Tommy said, scratching his cheek with the tip of the barrel of the pistol.
Mikhail was sitting at the desk in the hotel ro
om, on top of which lay screw-cutting equipment, heat-insulating tape, wire, and bullets.
He attached a homemade silencer to the barrel of the pistol, held the weapon up, and weighed it in his hand.
“I’ll have to get in close,” he muttered to Jens, who was looking through the pictures on his camera.
“We’ll aim for the main entrance,” Jens said.
They sat there planning for a good hour. Sophie listened with half an ear to the men’s discussions as she tried to calculate their chances of success. That was something neither Jens nor Mikhail seemed willing to do. Maybe that was the difference between her and them, their antipathy toward caution and reflection.
Sophie and Jens left Mikhail’s room and walked back down the corridor toward their own rooms.
“Will it work?” she asked Jens.
“That’s a very big question,” he replied.
They walked down the corridor.
“We just need to get into the house quickly, gain the upper hand,” he went on reassuringly.
“What can I do?”
They stopped outside Jens’s door. He put his key card into the slot and the little light glowed green. He pushed the heavy door open.
“Nothing. If it were up to me, I’d lock you in your room until this was over.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
“I’m worried,” he said.
“About what?”
“About you,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’m not going to be able to protect you all the time tomorrow.”
“Have I asked you to?” she said.
He didn’t answer, and she regretted saying it.
“You always do that,” she said. “Protect me. And I’m very grateful.”
“You’re worth protecting,” he said quietly.
Sophie looked at Jens carefully as he stood there holding the door to his room open. She had known him so long. Since her late teens, when a summer in the Stockholm archipelago had been the start of a romance between them. The first romance that had really meant anything to her. Maybe it was love she had felt then. Everything had been so different. They had thrown themselves into love with beautiful ease and great seriousness, full of faith in a secure, safe future that made everything seem solid, permanent. Eternal, maybe. But that future was long since gone. They split up at the end of the summer. He just vanished. She had been badly hurt, and the scars were still there. Every injury she had ever suffered was like that. They never healed.
“Do you still recognize me from years ago, Jens?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
“Am I a different person from when we met the first time?” she went on.
He slowly shook his head.
“No, you’re not.”
“Why do you think that is?”
He tried to read her.
“You’re the person you are now because you have to be. Stop worrying,” he said.
She looked at the floor, then up at him. Instead of turning away and going to her own room, she walked past him into his room and turned around inside. Jens let the door swing closed behind him and walked over to her. She made a tentative gesture, nudging his hand. Jens pulled her to him and they kissed.
Jens was gentle, she remembered that. Sensitive. It had surprised her at the time, when they were young. Gentleness and caution, together with an emotional self-confidence, had made their time together special then. It was the same now, a lifetime later. She let herself drown in the feeling.
They undressed each other and were suddenly lying naked in bed. Sophie sat astride him. She groaned as he whispered in her ear, turning her around. He knew what he was doing. Sophie let go of all defenses and inhibitions, let herself be carried up and away from the world, into a dimension she had only experienced a few times in her life. It was lit up, the light warm and all-encompassing, and its energy was focused, stronger and more beautiful than anything….The warmth and light merged into one as she reached her climax. Her eyes almost rolled as she experienced la petite mort and she gasped with pleasure. She held him close, tightly.
Don’t go….
Then she came back down to Earth again….
They gasped for breath as he stroked her body.
Lying next to Jens as the waves of pleasure died away, she briefly felt that she should stay there, close to him, just being human for a while. Taking comfort, feeling trust and a sense of belonging…and happiness. That she should volunteer something of herself, maybe even joke about something while they were lying there like that, because she had used to be that sort of person, the sort who could make jokes. And everything would have been so ordinary, so easy….
But this was dangerous. The only option, when Albert’s life was in danger, was to remain cold and focused. And to do that she had to be numb and hold anything emotional at a distance. She had to be emotionally shut off. She had made that decision.
Sophie got out of bed and began to get dressed.
Jens lay on his back, propped up on a pillow, and watched her.
“You can stay if you like,” he said.
“Thanks, Jens,” she said quietly, then walked out, along the corridor, to her own room.
There Sophie sat on the bed, listening to the traffic, feeling strangely calm and focused.
—
At three o’clock her alarm rang.
She changed clothes. Took off what she was wearing and put on the clothes she had laid out on the bed—trousers and a sweater, both black and tightly fitting.
She brushed her teeth in the bathroom. Then she washed her hands in ice-cold water, holding them there for a long time but feeling no pain.
Sophie tied her hair up in a ponytail, pulled on a jacket and did it up tightly, then left the room. She was on her own in the elevator all the way down to the garage.
Jens and Mikhail were waiting for her by the car, dressed in muted black clothing.
She got in the backseat. They drove out of the hotel. There was moisture in the air, and the glow of the streetlamps turned them into burning suns as the mist settled on the windshield. The windshield-wipers brought the world back into focus again.
Jens turned round.
“Did you get any sleep?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Mikhail drove out of the city.
—
They walked across a field in single file. The moon was shining, and fog covered the countryside like a blanket.
Ahead of them a forest rose up. Imposing, quiet, dark, and threatening. They walked in among the trees, and all sound shrank.
They stopped in a clearing and listened for anything that shouldn’t be there.
Mikhail pointed to himself, then toward the farm, whose outside lights were glowing faintly in the distance, and walked slowly away from them. He was holding the pistol with the homemade silencer in his hand.
Jens’s eyes were vibrant. She could see he was enjoying himself. Nervous, scared, anxious. But he was on familiar territory. He was in his element.
Jens glanced at the time.
“See you soon,” he whispered, then padded off like a soldier heading to war—which, in a way, he was, albeit with no weapon in his hand.
He didn’t look back.
—
Sophie walked through the forest until she reached the lookout point where she was to stop and wait. It was close to the farm, and she lay down on her stomach, with a view of the farmhouse and the surrounding area. She saw Jens creep over to the barn and go inside. She tried to find Mikhail, but couldn’t see him. Several minutes passed and nothing happened; the whole place seemed deserted.
A movement in the distance. Mikhail. He was standing with his back to her, half-hidden behind a tree, his modified gun in his hand.
He made his way toward the building and up onto the veranda, then crouched beneath a window. Jens ran over and sat down next to him. They took their tools from their jacket pockets, stood up, and set to work quietly
and methodically on the hinges of one of the windows, and quickly lifted it out and put it down on the veranda.
Mikhail leaped in, closely followed by Jens. They vanished from sight. Three coughing sounds. Three seconds of nothing, then the same again.
This time the silence felt bizarre. She waited.
Were they dead now? Had Hanke’s men been waiting for them?
Someone appeared in the large doorway.
Mikhail waved to her.
—
She walked into a large, dark-wood-paneled hallway, with a big wooden chandelier hanging from the ceiling, a broad staircase sweeping up around the walls. On the stairs lay a dead man in an odd position, blood on his chest and face. Toward the other end of the room there was a second body.
Sophie stopped. Jens came down the main staircase with a small semiautomatic in his hand. Mikhail appeared from the living room—he, too, had swapped his pistol for the same sort of weapon Jens was holding.
“No one here,” Jens said.
“Not anymore,” Mikhail added.
“The basement.” Sophie gestured, and headed toward a half-open door and a flight of steps leading downward.
The basement was one single room made of smooth cement, ten meters square. In the middle of the room was a large, square, concrete construction, like a building within a building, a building inside a room: no windows, bars, a steel door.
They looked at it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“A protective shelter,” Mikhail replied.
“Is there anyone inside?”
He didn’t answer.
“Can we get in?” she went on.
“No.”
There were cameras fixed to the ceiling, pointing at them.
“I don’t like this,” Jens said. “We could get trapped down here.”
But Sophie wasn’t listening. She went over to the cube, stopped, and knocked on the metal door. It sounded muffled. She thudded three times with her fist, then waited. Nothing. She beat on the door, hard.
“Albert!” she cried.
A hand on her shoulder, Jens’s voice.
“It’s time to leave, Sophie.”
“No, we wait until they come out,” she said.
The Other Son Page 19