The Game Trilogy

by Anders de la Motte

  But clearly Henke had survived, a day in hospital then he was okay.

  That at least was a relief.

  So where was he now?

  The rasta couldn’t enlighten her, and at this point in the conversation his addled brain seemed to have finally picked up the cop vibe and he quickly slammed the door on her.

  After a bit of thought she had at least managed to work out who was likely to know more. Manga Sandström, of course, Henke’s best friend since primary school.

  Didn’t he have a computer shop somewhere near Skanstull?

  A quick call to the Regional Communication Centre and she had the address and was on her way.

  Outside the shop she realized that things weren’t right. A blue and white strip of police cordon tape was dangling from a lamppost, and the window beside the door was broken, the hole patched, somewhat inadequately, by a security company’s tape. There was no mistaking the smell of smoke here either, as she opened the door and the Star Wars theme started to play. To judge by the chaos inside, they still had a lot of tidying up to do after the fire. She almost stumbled over a bucket full of filthy water that was standing beside the door. There were boxes everywhere and half of the shelves and racks towards the front of the shop were empty.

  The second suspicious complete mess in half an hour, hardly a coincidence, at least not if Henke was involved. The question was, what had he got himself mixed up in this time?

  Maybe Manga would be able to give her an answer?

  ‘Hello Rebecca!’ he said in a surprised tone of voice from behind some shelves.

  ‘Hi Manga, it’s been a while. Have you had visitors, or are you moving out?’

  They exchanged a clumsy hug. A nightshirt and an embroidered waistcoat, his taste in clothes, at least, had changed dramatically since they last met.

  ‘Just some kids,’ he muttered, and she could tell at once that he was lying. ‘Powder from the extinguisher all over everything, so the insurance company are making a fuss …’

  But it wasn’t just his feeble explanation that was making him blush.

  Manga had always had a bit of a crush on her, which was hardly a disadvantage given the reason for her visit today.

  ‘My name’s Farook Al-Hassan these days,’ he added, cheering up a bit. ‘I converted when I got married two years ago.’

  ‘Oh, you’re married? And there was me thinking we’d end up together,’ she laughed, and watched as he turned a fetching shade of bright red.

  So that explained the slightly odd clothes. Manga had gone and converted.

  Maybe it wasn’t so strange when she thought about it, he’d always seemed to be searching for something.

  The last time she saw him he’d been a militant vegan, and before that a local politician, unless it was the other way round …?

  Manga was a smart lad, but there’d always been something lost about him. She just hoped he’d found something that worked for him now.

  ‘Have you got children too?’ she asked, mainly out of politeness.

  ‘A boy, eight months, Mohammed.’

  He pulled out his wallet and she admired the miracle for the ten seconds that form demanded.

  ‘He looks like you, Ma … I mean, Farook,’ she said, with what she hoped was her friendliest smile. Get to the point, now, Normén!

  ‘Listen, I wanted to ask if you have any idea where Henke is?’

  ‘Er … what do you mean?’ Another feeble lie.

  ‘Well, I’ve been trying to call him but none of the numbers I’ve got seem to work, so I thought maybe you might know where he is?’

  He shook his head and did his best not to meet her gaze.

  ‘Sorry, I haven’t seen him for a while …’

  She frowned. Two fires, Henke missing and now thoroughly decent Manga lying to her face. Something was going on, and it was time that she found out what.

  But just as she was about to open her mouth, Manga interrupted her.

  ‘Listen, Rebecca, now that you’re here there’s something I’ve been wanting to say for ages.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said warily.

  She really didn’t have time for any latterday declarations of love, but on the other hand she needed his help now. Patience, Normén!

  ‘Well, Rebecca … I’ve always … I mean … oh, bugger …’

  He took a deep breath and seemed to pull himself together.

  ‘You and Dag, all that business that happened with HP … well, you know?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she replied neutrally.

  ‘Well … I’ve sort of always … wanted to apologize to you. Dag and I were cousins, of course, and, well, you met him through me, and …’

  He looked down at the counter. She suddenly felt sick. Probably the heat.

  ‘I mean,’ he sighed, making a last attempt, ‘I-I’ve always felt a b-bit guilty about it all,’ he stammered. ‘That it was sort of my fault, if you know what I mean?’

  He shot her a pleading look and she had absolutely no idea how to respond.

  ‘Dag was older than me, of course, and we weren’t exactly close, b-but I knew perfectly well what sort of person he was. There were rumours about him, that he could be violent and … that his dad left because Dag beat him up. I mean, there was a lot of talk, but I never dared say anything … to you, I mean.’

  He was looking down at the counter again.

  Rebecca took a deep breath.

  What did he expect her to say?

  The feeling of nausea was getting worse. The air in the shop was stuffy and her top was starting to stick to her. She needed to put a stop to this discussion and get the conversation back on track, and fast.

  ‘Listen, Manga,’ she said, as calmly as she could. ‘We all make our own decisions, you, me, Henke and Dag. Right or wrong, we made our choices and in the end we each have to take the consequences. I was the one who fell in love with Dag, it was my decision to move in with him, and I was the one who didn’t report him when things started to go wrong. It was my responsibility.’

  The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the bastard painful truth, she thought bitterly. Okay, enough of that!

  ‘Getting back to Henke, I was wondering …’

  ‘But you don’t get it!’ he interrupted in a shaky voice. ‘HP told me he was thinking of killing him. That he was thinking of killing Dag! He told me what the bastard had done to you and how much he hated him. And I, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t try to stop him, I didn’t tell anyone, and then it all went to hell. Dag dead, HP in prison, and you …’

  He stopped and looked at her sadly.

  ‘You didn’t get away scot-free either, Rebecca.’

  He fell silent and she gave him a few seconds to pull himself together. Mind you, she needed the pause just as much herself. Waves of nausea were washing over her with full force now and she had to close her eyes for a few seconds to get her gag-reflex under control.

  ‘The only person who got out in one piece was me,’ he went on. ‘For me life just carried on almost as if nothing had happened. If I’d just opened my mouth, told s-someone what HP was going on about, then maybe everything would have been different? I could at least have told him to cool it. But I didn’t. I don’t really know why I didn’t. All I know is that I could have done more to stop it happening. Much more!’

  He fell silent again and seemed to be studying a random section of the cork matting.

  Bloody hell, this conversation was nothing like what she’d expected.

  Suddenly the sounds of all the computers and gadgets combined into one single enervating, piercing note that seemed to penetrate her head and nail her brain to the inside of her skull.

  She screwed up her eyes, swallowed a couple of times and, when she’d regained control of her body, pushed her way past Manga and into the little cubbyhole she’d glimpsed behind the bead-curtain.

  Lukewarm water from a dirty glass. Long, restorative gulps that rinsed all unwelcome thoughts away. Pull yourself together, for God’s sa
ke, Normén!

  Even if Manga seemed to be in desperate need of a confessional, she certainly hadn’t come here for anything like this. Chewing it all over and wallowing in the past. The really sick thing was that she only had to say a few words and she could absolve him from some of his sins. Tell him who the real murderer was. But something told her that the truth wouldn’t set either of them free, and certainly not her.

  Better to return to the present, focus on the task at hand and get out of here. If she could just get hold of Henke, things would sort themselves out, she was convinced of that, without really knowing why.

  She refilled the glass and put in on the counter beside Manga. He seemed to have used her absence to pull himself together. His eyes still looked a bit red, but his face was more or less back to its usual colour.

  He drank in silence.

  ‘I can see the way you’re thinking, Manga, but I honestly don’t think anyone could have stopped things from happening,’ she said slowly. ‘It just turned out the way it did, and we all have to try to move on. At least that’s what I’ve tried to do.’

  She could hear how false her words sounded, but Manga nodded in agreement.

  ‘Of course, you’re right,’ he said curtly. ‘It feels good to have got it out, anyway, after all this time. Sorry about the tears.’

  He smiled forlornly and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his shirt.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’ll stay between us.’

  He smiled again, more relaxed this time, and she took the opportunity to change the subject.

  ‘Look, are you really sure you haven’t seen Henke?’

  Another shake of the head.

  ‘No, not really …’

  She fixed him with her cop’s stare, reluctantly, and it worked instantly.

  ‘What do you mean, not really, Manga? Have you, or haven’t you seen him?’

  Her voice had suddenly lost all its previous softness. It felt a bit mean to apply interrogation tactics now, especially after his emotional outburst, but she didn’t actually have any choice. She had to get hold of Henke, and didn’t have time for any more distractions.

  ‘Not for a few days,’ he muttered morosely, staring at the floor, and as far as she could tell that was probably the truth. She looked round and sniffed at the smell of smoke.

  ‘Listen, those kids who set fire to your shop …’

  She said it very slowly, fixing him with her stare. He wriggled like a worm on a hook, but she had no intention of letting him get away.

  ‘Is it the same kids who set fire to Henke’s flat?’

  ‘Yes … er, I mean no, or rather …’

  His eyes were flitting about, and he suddenly didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.

  ‘Oh, Magnus …’ she said in her gentlest voice and she leaned over the counter.

  She waited until he met her gaze again:

  ‘What’s my idiot brother dragged you into this time?’

  14

  White bear

  Okay, he’d just have to accept the truth – he’d got the whole thing on the brain.

  Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, Gene Hackman’s character, Brill, in Enemy of the State, that’s what he was turning into. The obsessive, the lone lunatic, the conspiracy nutter who lived his life in discussion forums and saw intrigues round every fucking corner. He might as well get his own homepage, a cottage in the woods and a wall covered in newspaper cuttings, then everything would be perfect!

  True, that idea about the Palme murder was maybe a bit far-fetched, but on the other hand as a theory it was no crazier or worse than any of the other so-called lines of inquiry. Kurds, the ‘baseball’ police squad, his wife Lisbet, or a drunk acting on his own?

  All aboard the Crazy Train!

  Doors closing, next stop Looneyville!

  There was a vast flock of weirdo theories out there in cyberspace, like shrieking harpies, each one crazier than the last. So why not his?

  Just think about it!

  How else could you fuck up the largest police investigation in the world so spectacularly? Forgetting all common police sense, breaking any number of laws and rules by appointing an amateur to lead both the police work and the preliminary legal investigation? And, as if that wasn’t enough, setting up a Social Democrat political stooge with his own miniature version of the security police to run a parallel investigation directly sanctioned by the Justice Minister …

  The whole thing was a cascade of peculiarities, and the case threw up loads of questions to which there were no logical solutions, exactly as Erman had warned him. There just weren’t any good explanations, or at least none that were better than the one he was beginning to accept more and more.

  Besides, he could think of another political murder where, even though the killer had been caught, the case was a good match for the profile ‘single perpetrator with no good motive’. Not to mention the so-called Laser Man back in the early nineties. There was something methodical about the progress of his criminal career, something that made you think of computer games. As if he had been working his way through different stages of difficulty, taking greater and greater risks. Almost as if he was clambering up some sort of league-table …

  According to the clips HP found on the Swedish Television website, the culprit had blown the money he took from his victims in a German casino, so he evidently liked gambling. Was he actually a player, in two senses of the word? It made perfect sense, but at the same time it sounded completely insane! What about the Kennedy assassination? The sinking of the Estonia? 9/11?

  Yes, he’d got it all on the brain.

  Big time!

  He was scouring the news websites several times an hour, and even though they were mostly about Sweden’s presidency of the EU, he imagined he could see signs of the Game everywhere.

  A well-known financier who had vanished into thin air, a load of dynamite that had gone missing from a secure store, a petty-criminal in Portugal who suddenly got it into his head to blow up an empty luxury yacht, and himself with it …

  It was all out there, if you only knew what you were looking for. Things that couldn’t be explained, no matter which way you approached them. That’s to say, if the explanation wasn’t the fact that Erman was right. That the whole thing was just a huge fucking Game!

  I’ve opened your eyes and now you can see …

  The weirdest thing was that he could see how crazy it sounded. But he still couldn’t let it go. ‘An awareness of illness doesn’t mean you’re well,’ as one of his mum’s alcoholic friends used to say.

  There was a lot in that! But unlike the idiots out there, he had actually been caught up in it himself. An inside man, just like Brill. He knew that the Game existed, he had seen with his own eyes what they were capable of doing, or – to be more accurate – getting other people to do …

  It was actually the manipulation that stung most.

  The way they’d pressed his buttons and got him to play along willingly. Humiliating him just for the fun of it, then dropping him quicker than a flask of Russian thallium. But also the fact that he’d actually enjoyed being the centre of attention, getting loads of cred. For the first time ever, a team player, part of something bigger than himself, even one of the stars of the team.

  Christ, he’d loved the kick from that! Loved it so fucking much that on one level he still couldn’t help dreaming, in spite of all the shit that had happened, that he could get back in the limelight … he’d do pretty much anything. Like some mangy dog that was so desperate for approval even after it had been beaten by its master that it was willing to shag more legs – any legs – to get another pat on the head. One question itched like a massive great scab and no matter how he tried, he couldn’t help picking at it: if he’d known that Becca was in the cop-car that evening, that she would be or could have been injured by the stone he was going to drop from the bridge, would it have made any difference?

  He honestly didn’t know.

  Even now,
after so many hours thinking, he still couldn’t answer that bastard question with a simple Yes or No.

  Totally fucking sick!

  It had taken a day or so to work out the deal with the flash-grenade attack on the horse-guards’ cortège. Who would get any pleasure from some bolting horses and a pair of shitty royal underpants? Obviously it could just have been that they wanted to test him or get some cool pictures. But then he read about a break-in at a gentlemen’s outfitters on Östermalm, and how it had been preceded by a false bomb threat. An attaché case with the word bomb in white paint on the side, left outside the Iranian Embassy, and suddenly half the police force were over on Lidingö and thus out of the game. And that’s where he got the idea.

  After checking on the police’s own website, he found what he was looking for. At the same time as Kungsträdgården was filling up with galloping horses and all available police units, including the helicopter which was sent to circle above the city centre, someone had stolen a container-load of Viagra from a company out in the western suburbs. They had coolly driven past security with a truck, waving what had looked like the right documentation, then calmly hooked up to the container and driven off with it, without having to worry about being pursued by the police helicopter before they had time to unload the pills, because HP had seen to that.

  So had he been a decoy, sent out to lure the dogs into sniffing around in the wrong place?

  ‘Look up the word Game and you’ll see what I mean!’ Erman had said, and halfway down the page Wiktionary backed up his theory.

  – Distraction or Diversion

  He could perfectly well have been both! And suddenly all those weird occurrences assumed yet another crazy dimension. Diversionary tactics, decoys and smokescreens, all to get the authorities and the general public to look in the wrong direction?

  In that case, what was the main event, what were the things they didn’t want to show, and who was behind them?

  The Freemasons?

  The WHO?

  The Bilderberg Group?