Gieger

by Gustaf Skördeman

  Sara couldn’t help being prejudiced against the entertainment industry. Celebrities, booze, drugs, young girls, sex. Given his position of power, Martin could naturally have as much of it as he liked. That was why she’d forced him to have photos of her and the kids on his desk at work. At first it had placated her. Everyone could see he was a family man.

  Then she was ashamed for using the kids as a weapon in marking her territory.

  Then she began to wonder whether he actually had the pictures on display when she wasn’t there.

  But tonight he wasn’t working. Tonight he was rehearsing with his band CEO Speedwagon. Four blokes in management who thought they were clever. All of them were well on the way to fifty, but refused to drop the rocker dreams. They had extortionately expensive guitars but no audience – and the only gigs they played were when they persuaded their colleagues to book the band for staff parties. It was usually only once per company – apart from Martin’s own company, where no one dared speak up when the same, tired old dadrock got played at the seventh party in a row. At least he let Sara make fun of his rocker dreams. That was something.

  But sometimes they got in the way of more important things. If he’d been at home now, they might have been able to get Ebba to listen to the two of them together.

  She turned the television on to have something else to think about, but it didn’t help. She put the Prodigy on Martin’s expensive stereo from McIntosh and connected his fancy headphones from Audeze. Not even ‘Invaders Must Die’ pumping into her ears made all the thoughts about her kids, her husband and murder victims go away.

  She lay down on her side and curled up. For a change, she thought about her life now, as it was happening. About how things were going for her daughter, her son, herself and Martin.

  Should she change jobs?

  If she couldn’t hack it any longer, was she of any use to the exploited girls?

  Did it help them if she gave the johns and pimps a beating – scared them, got those around them to understand what they were up to?

  Her thoughts ran on, long after the album had finished.

  15

  Warfarin, atenolol, simvastatin, amlodipine, ramipril. Agneta couldn’t remember the names of the others.

  A small pellet.

  Blue, yellow, mud-coloured and white. For heart inflammation, diabetes and the pain in her legs.

  Synjardy was a diuretic, which wasn’t a problem right now – but she would have to avoid it later. And a slow-acting paracetamol for her knees and joints because of the arthritis.

  She could still feel the pain from the bike ride cutting into her legs like knives. It was always worst a few hours after exertion.

  Should she take a bigger dose?

  No, she was far too afraid of side-effects.

  She hated getting old, but she hadn’t liked being young either – so it didn’t help to dream of going backwards. She could only grit her teeth. She unscrewed the cap of the water bottle to help her swallow the pills.

  The heat had her sweating buckets. And that was in addition to the insulin and the fluttering in her chest. She would have laughed at all of it, if it hadn’t involved so many lives.

  So far, the journey had gone fine. The car had started without any problems once the battery was charged. There had been very little air in the tyres, but Agneta had fixed that at the petrol station in Träkvista. At the nearest supermarket, she’d bought more food and drink. Sunglasses and a cap were a good disguise – more than adequate provided no one was actively looking for her.

  And she’d swallowed all her pills. Now things felt as if they were under control.

  Getting around by car was completely different from cycling. The journey was almost peaceful. For a while, she’d forgotten both what was ahead of her and what was behind her.

  From Brommaplan she needed to drive along Ulvsundaleden. It was quicker that way, she thought. What was more, she could avoid the congestion charging zone that began on the other side of the Tranebergsbron bridge. It hurt a little when she thought about how close to home she was going to be as she passed.

  ‘Home.’

  Not any longer.

  Had it ever been home? Or just a posting?

  Now the car was her home. A comforting old Volvo. She’d been given a thorough training in how to fix the most common faults, but she really hoped she wouldn’t need to open the bonnet.

  Her handler had sorted out the car back then, while she’d arranged the barn. She hadn’t told anyone, not even him, of its location. Agneta had always been convinced that one had to be just as careful with one’s paymasters as one was with one’s opponents.

  Who was the car registered to? She had no idea. It wasn’t registered to her, and it couldn’t be in the name of her handler. Back when it had been obtained, foreign citizens hadn’t been permitted to own cars in Sweden. But maybe he had false Swedish identities? It was definitely out of the question for him to have used his real name. All of a sudden she was curious about her handler’s identity – perhaps because now that Stellan was dead, this person was the one who’d been part of her life for the longest, even if they hadn’t been in contact for more than a quarter of a century. Despite that, the car was a physical connection between them. But whose was it?

  Did the owner even know that he or she owned it? If Agneta passed a tollbooth, who would receive the bill in the post?

  Curiosity got the better of her.

  She got out her mobile, wrote KOA879 in a text message and sent it off to the Swedish Transport Agency helpline. The answer came back straight away.

  The car was not deregistered. It was registered to one Lennart Hagman in Sollentuna.

  A collaborator, or utterly unaware?

  Or a completely fake identity?

  It didn’t really matter.

  Not now.

  She slowly pulled out of the supermarket car park and then indicated right, heading for the Tappströmsbron bridge, Lovön and Bromma.

  Behind her, a young man in the green uniform of the supermarket emerged from the shop with a couple of newspaper placards. ‘People in Ekerö earn the most’ and ‘The best box wine for midsummer’ were swapped for the new headline.

  STELLAN BROMAN DEAD – MURDERED AT HOME

  16

  Martin got home at around nine o’clock. It was early for a rehearsal evening, and he didn’t seem all that drunk either. He propped his beloved guitar against the sofa and came over to give Sara a kiss.

  ‘Are the kids at home?’ he asked.

  ‘Olle’s in his room. Ebba is at a pimps and hoes party.’

  Sara looked at Martin to see how he would react.

  He didn’t.

  ‘Pimps and hoes,’ she said again, once he’d cast himself onto the sofa in front of the television and reached for the remote. He stopped and turned his head towards Sara.

  ‘We definitely didn’t have that, back in my day.’

  ‘But, Martin, can’t you hear what I’m saying? Our daughter’s at a party where everyone thinks it’s fun to dress up like prostitutes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you know what my job entails?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  He was frozen to the spot with the remote in his hand.

  ‘You don’t see any issues with teenagers dressing up like pimps and hoes and thinking it’s a lot of fun?’

  ‘No, it’s not great, I suppose. The reality is brutal.’

  ‘How fortunate that you’ve listened to me and can repeat everything I say.’

  ‘What? I’m not just repeating. I think it’s awful. I don’t know how you hack it. But you do a great job. Without you, the girls would be completely at the mercy of those perverted bastards.’

  ‘This isn’t about me, this is about society as a whole. About the fact that our daughter and her friends are helping to spread an image of prostitution that allows this shit to carry on. And that they’re getting the wrong impression. Who knows, perhaps someone at the party ge
ts the idea that selling sex seems pretty cool – maybe it’d be a good way to earn some extra cash. After all, sex is fun. And they start doing it and they ruin their lives. Martin, what if your daughter were to think like that? That selling sex didn’t seem so bad?’

  ‘No. Not Ebba.’

  ‘But someone else, then? Is that better?’

  ‘OK,’ said Martin, putting the remote control down. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘End the sex trade.’

  He sighed. Then he straightened up and turned towards Sara.

  ‘About Ebba. Do you want me to talk to her?’

  He placed his hand on Sara’s and looked her right in the eyes.

  ‘Do you think it’ll help?’ she said.

  ‘Christ knows. But you’re angry. You think I’ve done something wrong.’

  Sara pulled her hand away from Martin’s.

  ‘Not you. Don’t be so self-absorbed. It’s the whole world there’s something wrong with. And I hate that our kids are soon going to head out into that world and we can’t protect them.’

  ‘I agree with you. It’s awful.’

  ‘And they don’t want to be protected. They want to make it on their own. I know it’s perfectly natural, but I hate it. They’ll run into loads of idiots. When they’re applying for jobs, when they go to the pub, when they go travelling. They’ve no idea how dreadful people can be. And it doesn’t have to be murderers and rapists. The very thought of anyone even being unpleasant towards one of my children gets my adrenaline pumping.’

  ‘Mmm . . .’

  They fell silent. She was getting nowhere. Perhaps he didn’t feel the same.

  ‘Put the television on,’ said Sara, noting that Martin was quick to do as she said. The giant screen came on and he clicked to his favourite channel.

  Sport.

  Dear God.

  Sara lay down at the far end of the sofa and tried to filter her thoughts. On the television, there were three commentators making different guesses about what was going to happen in some tedious football league, and how long some boring player would be injured for. Martin was listening attentively.

  Sara looked at her husband and wondered exactly what it was about him that she’d fallen for once upon a time.

  He’d been the best-looking, most popular guy in school – so in one regard he’d been a catch. She’d won. A girl from Vällingby had got the most popular boy in Bromma. Dirty Dancing in reverse. But when they got together, they were no longer going to school. Sara had won, but after the fact. And what do you do with the prize once you’ve won it? What use is a trophy? It was like pulling a whopper of a pike into the boat after several hours’ struggle, only to realise you actually fancied a salad.

  He was still good looking. Very good looking, in fact, in a boyish way. Tall, dark eyes, charming smile. But it was as if somehow that charm was too boyish. He hadn’t aged mentally, if Sara were to be completely honest. It was all unkempt hair, playing in a band and beer with the lads. Charming in a twenty-year-old, a little sad when it was a forty-six-year-old.

  What did she actually share with Martin these days? The kids. No common interests, no sex life to speak of. Martin had said that when Sara let off steam by shouting about how disgusting all men were, he felt disgusting too. He couldn’t understand that she needed to experience some good sex as a counterbalance after all the crap she saw on the streets and in those anonymous brothels.

  Sara didn’t want them to just be parents or friends. They were supposed to be a bloody couple, too. Who slept together. Who wanted to sleep together.

  Martin claimed she’d become increasingly angry, and that didn’t really leave him wanting to proposition her, he said. But in Sara’s eyes, those were two completely different things. Of course she got angry. It was easy to say that you weren’t going to bring work home with you – implementing it in practice was harder.

  Sara noted that it was getting dark outside. A moment later she was asleep.

  17

  ‘Halbstark!’

  They were off again, the Swedes. Completely hammered by night, followed by long lie-ins so that all the agenda items in the morning had to be postponed and Tomcat was forced to come up with rubbish excuses on behalf of everyone who’d been stood up by them. Towards afternoon they would arrive on unsteady legs, shaky. But a swig of Bitburger would have them raring to go.

  They had been staying with him for a week – two students from the Södermanlands-Nerikes nation in Uppsala, one of the many historical students associations at the town’s university, hosted by their sister nation Burschenschaft Arminia in the German town of Marburg. A two-metre-tall military-looking type with a shaved head and tired eyes, and a lean, hysterical joker with lots of product in his hair.

  When they eventually made it out of bed towards afternoon, they usually wanted to hang out in the Kneipe and knock back a few beers, which always ended badly. They’d organised such a wild booze-up in the old skittle alley in the basement that it might not be possible to renovate it.

  They’d demanded to be allowed to try academic fencing and had posted the photos on social media, which had resulted in the Chair telling Tomcat off and saying that he’d ruined the good reputation of the student nation.

  And they’d gone down to the biker club Bremsspur wearing their student caps, so that the police had been obliged to come and calm things down. While the Swedes laughed and joked.

  The icing on the cake had been when they’d given an incomprehensible speech at the spring gala in broken German mixed with English and Swedish. Something about youth, hospitality and Lebensraum, seasoned with all the foul words in German they’d learned over the course of the week. The members of the alumni club hadn’t understood who these two were or what they were doing there, but they’d politely responded to the toast once the speakers were done. And then watched as the Swedes swiped a bottle of Sekt each and smashed the bottles on the stone floor.

  And now they were on a tour – because the students in the Arminia nation took care of their guests. Tomcat and Peter had borrowed Peter’s dad’s car, and in the CD player was an old album by the punk legends Die Toten Hosen – Never Mind the Hosen – Here’s Die Roten Rosen. A record made for fun, in which Die Toten Hosen did funny punk covers of old German folk songs. The Swedes had put it on straightaway and played it without interruption throughout the trip, screeching along with the songs.

  The stench of their hangovers mixed with the smell of freshly opened beers. A third day stuck in a car with two idiots, Tomcat – alias Thomas – thought to himself.

  The military-looking one just talked about concentration camps, how Rommel had actually been a first-class soldier and that the manufacturer of the ovens had been Topf & Söhne. Not that interesting if you weren’t . . . an idiot.

  After visits to other affiliated Burschenschaft student unions in Heidelberg and Bonn, they’d visited a vineyard in Trier, and now they were on their way to Tomcat’s home town of Hattenbach, because when he’d planned the trip he’d thought they might appreciate meeting normal young German people. After this week, it was apparent to him that his guests would either be bored to tears or drive the whole village mad – but it was too late to change the plan now. Tomcat’s mother was busy preparing dinner for them. It would be years before she forgave Thomas for the oafs that were approaching her table. And as if the Swedes’ drunken bravado wasn’t enough, they’d started to make jokes about the name Hattenbach as soon as they had heard it. Apparently the beginning of the name meant ‘hat’ in Swedish, and ‘being in the hat’ could signify being drunk. Judging by the Swedes’ hysterical laughter, this was the funniest thing ever said on the planet, but Tomcat saw nothing amusing in it whatsoever.

  Worst of all was the tone-deaf bellowing in broken German to the song about how all girls want to kiss.

  ‘No more,’ said Tomcat in English, turning off the CD player.

  Dear God. He was hung over, too. He’d been ferrying these pissed Swedes ar
ound for a week, apologising to the Burschenschaft old boys, who were all doctors and CEOs and ministers. And he’d seen his chances of getting a job through Arminia’s network of contacts go up in smoke right in front of his eyes.

  Everyone seemed to think the whole spectacle was his fault.

  And all he’d done was volunteer when Arminia heard it was going to have two visitors from its sister nation in Sweden. He hadn’t chosen who was coming.

  Now his temples were pounding.

  Just one more night. Then back to the beautiful castle on the hill in Marburg for a farewell dinner, and then they would go home.

  Tomcat would sleep for a fortnight.

  At least.

  He didn’t give a shit about his exam next Thursday. He hadn’t had a single spare moment to study in the last week. He had to be grateful that it hadn’t caused lasting psychological damage. His studies didn’t matter at this stage; all that counted was survival.

  ‘Play “Halbstark” again!’ hair-gel-guy bawled.

  ‘No,’ said Tomcat. ‘No more Hosen.’

  But if he’d been hoping for some peace and quiet, he was disappointed, because in that same moment the Swedes began to screech Arminia’s song instead.

  ‘Do you know,’ said the two-metre-tall one, leaning forward towards Tomcat and Peter in the front seats, ‘in Swedish, Heimat sounds like hajmat – shark food.’

  When the chap let out a booming, moronic laugh, Tomcat wanted to die.

  And he did.

  There was only a couple of kilometres left to go to Hattenbach when the road exploded beneath the four hung over students. The blast shook the ground, burst eardrums and was audible from kilometres away.

  Peter’s dad’s car was blown apart, and the four bodies were shredded to pieces – inexorably and brutally, as if by a careless butcher. Their skin was burned and lacerated by the wave of pressure and the heat. Fingers, toes and facial features were completely erased.