Half an hour later they were sitting in the plane, after refueling and a peculiar check-in and security procedure in which none of their luggage was inspected. Sophie was sitting in a beige leather armchair opposite Hector, separated by the central aisle. The plane taxied out to the runway and set off. Sophie was pushed back into her chair by the force of the acceleration. They climbed steeply and suddenly they were up among the clouds and the plane leveled out. She looked down as Stockholm disappeared below her. Albert was down there. She was sitting in a plane flying away from him, nothing could possibly have felt any worse than that. The sense of guilt was absolute, total, cemented into her soul. She knew she would never be able to get rid of it. She had gotten him into this. She was directly responsible for what had happened to him. If she had behaved in a different way, then perhaps …
Sophie saw islands and water, she looked out at the sky—blue, as usual. She heard Hector unbuckle his seat belt, get up, and head toward the rear of the cabin. He came back with two glasses and two bottles of beer, she declined the offer. He sat down in his seat, not bothering to use the glass, and took a gulp from the bottle.
“We’ll be landing in Málaga, I’ll go with you to Dad’s, then I need to move on.”
“Where are you going?”
“Away … The police must have issued an international warrant by now. But you’ll be fine, Dad will take care of everything.”
“Take care of everything?”
Hector nodded.
“What does ‘everything’ mean?”
There was a pause before Hector answered.
“Everything. You’ll need to stay hidden until things have settled down. Dad will help you.…”
The plane hit some light turbulence, the pilot increased the thrust and climbed, but neither of them paid any attention.
“But I have to get home soon.…”
He said nothing to that, leaned against the window, deep in thought, puzzled, possibly worried. He was avoiding her, she could feel it, she understood. He was wrestling with the question of whether he could trust her. As was she. Wondering who she was, what her motives really were. Whether she could have done anything differently.
She looked at Hector again, he was still gazing out the window. She had seen that expression many times before, a concentration, an introversion that always seemed to rouse her curiosity. She had also seen it in him as a boy in the album he had shown her on the boat. Maybe that was what he really looked like. Maybe that was Hector?
She wanted to like him, but she didn’t dare, she had seen his madness.
25
The dead bodies still hadn’t been covered up. Tommy Jansson was standing in the middle of the restaurant. Two corpses in front of him and one in the kitchen, blood everywhere. Total carnage. Forensics was working frenetically, Anders Ask and a thickset man were sitting in silence on two chairs some distance away. Tommy recognized the thickset one. A rapid-response cop in the city center, if he remembered rightly. Tommy had told them to stay where they were and not move a muscle. They had refused to talk. Not a word. Anders Ask, what the hell was he doing here?
Tommy rubbed his ear with his knuckles.
“Who was first on the scene?” he asked the room in general.
Antonia Miller, a detective inspector who was standing nearby writing in her notebook, looked up.
“What did you say?”
“Who was first on the scene?”
The expression on her face suggested that he was disturbing her work.
“A patrol, I let them go half an hour ago.”
“And they found those two?” he said, pointing at Anders and Hasse. “Where?”
Antonia was writing in her notebook.
“In the office, back through the kitchen, tied to a radiator.”
“And what happened?”
She sighed, closed her notebook, and clicked the ballpoint pen.
“We got a call from someone in the building who had heard repeated banging sounds. The patrol arrived, saw the two bodies here in the restaurant, called it in, checked for signs of life, and secured the scene.”
“Then what?”
“They searched the whole place. Found the body in the kitchen, and then those two in the office, tied up,” Antonia said, gesturing toward Hasse and Anders with her thumb.
“The big one’s a fellow officer,” she went on, looking down in her notebook. “His name’s Hasse Berglund, he showed the patrol his badge, and they checked with regional control, it checks out.… The other one has no ID at all.”
Tommy looked around. Antonia opened her notebook again and went back to work.
Suddenly Anders’s cell phone rang, Anders looked at the screen, let it ring. Tommy went over, grabbed the phone from his hand, and pressed the green button.
“Yes?” Tommy said in a low voice.
“What’s happened, are they still there?”
He recognized Gunilla’s voice, she sounded stressed.
“Hello, Gunilla.”
A moment’s silence. “Tommy?”
“What’s going on, Gunilla?”
“That’s what I’m wondering too.”
“I want you to come to the Trasten restaurant in Vasastan, I believe you know where it is.”
He ended the call and put the cell in his jacket pocket, giving Anders a “what are you going to do about that?” gesture. Then he took a walk around the scene. A bearded forensics officer was sitting beside one of the bodies.
“Hi, Classe,” Tommy said.
The forensics officer looked up and nodded.
Tommy went over to the bar, where he stopped and turned around to get an impression of the whole premises. He saw the shattered front door, the bodies, the bullet holes and shell casings on the floor—all marked out by the forensics team. Overturned furniture, people had left in a hurry. And in the middle of all this, completely silent, Berglund and Ask? Tommy looked at them, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.…
“You’re a couple of fucking idiots, you know that, don’t you?” he said loudly.
Hasse and Anders didn’t answer. Tommy glared at them for a while, muttered something else insulting, and went through into the kitchen.
On a chair in the middle of the floor sat a bloody man with a carving knife sticking out of his heart; he had no teeth left, his face was beaten to a pulp, and his right eye was hanging out. Tommy shuddered with distaste.
A female forensics officer with big biceps, whose name he couldn’t remember, was brushing for fingerprints on what looked like frozen food.
“We found this in the freezer,” the woman said, pointing at the meat.
“Oh?” he said, none the wiser, and saw the mass of plastic bags that had been pulled tightly over what he thought were frozen joints of meat. Some of them looked like fillets.
“So what is it?”
“Take a closer look,” she said.
He screwed up his eyes and leaned over, and saw part of a human arm, and a foot.
“Fucking hell! Whose are those?”
“No one here, at any rate, they’ve all still got their arms and legs.”
“Where did you find them?”
“In the freezer, like I said.”
What a fucking mess.
“So, four dead?” he said.
The woman put a finger to her chin and looked up at the ceiling.
“Hmm, let’s see, two out there, two here … Two plus two is four. Yes, you’re right, four dead!”
Tommy didn’t like irony or sarcasm, never had, couldn’t see the point. He went on into the office and sat down on the chair behind the desk. Waiting, thinking, stroking his cop’s mustache.
Half an hour later Gunilla was standing in front of him.
“Tell me,” he said.
She looked cold, cold and stiff.
“What do you want me to tell you? You can see for yourself what it looks like out there. We’ve been following Hector Guzman for a month. This is the result.”
“What’s Anders Ask doin
g here?”
“How do you mean?”
He looked at her wearily. Sometimes she was like a stubborn child.
“There are three bodies in this restaurant, four if we count the foot and arm we just found in the freezer. What the hell is Ask doing here?”
“He’s been working for me, on a freelance basis.”
“A freelance basis?”
“Yes.”
“Since when has anyone ever worked for the Swedish police on a freelance basis?”
“That feels like the least of the problems we should be talking about now, don’t you think, Tommy?”
He adjusted his position on the chair.
“Why won’t they talk to me?” he asked.
“Because that’s what we agreed.”
Tommy shook his head and pulled a face that told her to stop all that.
Gunilla looked down at the floor, then up again.
“We don’t know who’s lying out there. The dead men aren’t known to us.”
“What do Ask and the other one say?”
“Hasse Berglund was watching the restaurant; when the shooting started he called Anders, when they got in everyone was dead, and they were overpowered by Hector’s gang and tied up.”
Tommy thought for a moment.
“Where do you want to go from here?”
She smiled.
“Good, Tommy. I want to carry on as before, first we need to secure this place.”
“You’ll have to stay in the background. Antonia Miller is in charge of the murder investigation, you’ll have to work together, she’s lead investigator.”
Gunilla stood up.
“I’ll keep you informed,” she said quietly, then left the office. Tommy listened to her footsteps as she disappeared.
“Gunilla!”
She stopped.
“Yes?”
Tommy was picking at a mark on the desk with his thumbnail.
“Anders Ask is your responsibility, I don’t know anything about him.”
She didn’t answer.
Gunilla made her way through the kitchen, deliberately not looking at the dead body on the chair, and went out into the restaurant, walking along the marked-out path toward the front door. She saw the two other unknown men lying dead on the floor. Gunilla lifted the police cordon tape blocking the door and stepped out into the street.
Anders and Hasse were waiting beside Hasse’s car.
“We’re not talking here.”
The Hotel Diplomat was bathed in sunshine. Lars Vinge had checked in around dinnertime under a false name.
The hotel was too fancy for him, no one would think of looking for him there. White sheets, down pillows, a view across the water of Nybroviken, a flag fluttering outside his window; the bathroom was like a dream, but Lars couldn’t summon up the slightest enthusiasm at experiencing this level of luxury for once in his life. His energy was absorbed by two things: his attempts to suppress his own craving for Ketogan, as real as hunger to a starving man, and his relentless effort to understand everything that was going on.
He had made his way to Brahegatan that afternoon and had removed the surveillance equipment from the rental car. It had been dangerous; he had been far too close to Gunilla and the others, but anything he did right now was risky, even showing his face in daylight.
The surveillance equipment was on the double bed, together with the things he had stolen from Gunilla’s safe. He had counted the money, two bundles of thousand-kronor notes, fifty in each. The gun was a Makarov, an old communist-era Russian pistol with its serial number rubbed off—for emergencies. Lars checked it: the magazine was full, eight bullets, he put it down on the bed beside him. Then two plastic folders, fairly thin, twenty or so sheets of A4 in each, then the thick official ledger and the black notebook. He read the notebook first, it contained a whole bunch of comments and thoughts, small writing in pencil. It was messy, as if Gunilla had written whatever had occurred to her, as if she was arguing with herself, as if she was writing her way to some sort of understanding. He read, trying to find a pattern, but couldn’t make any sense of it and put it aside. He looked at the thick ledger and started to leaf through it, page after page about Hector Guzman. Lars read about a smuggling route from Paraguay to Europe, about murders, about the blackmail of some manager at Ericsson, about contacts in all corners of the world. There were pictures, reports of interviews, evidence. It told a story that stretched all the way back to the ’70s. It contained everything about Hector and Adalberto Guzman’s affairs.… There was enough evidence to convict the men ten times over in a courtroom. Hector Guzman would be behind bars for an eternity.
Lars kept turning the pages, and the more he saw, the more puzzled he became. There were also amounts jotted in the margin in ink—large amounts, eight digits, as if Gunilla had been trying to work something out. Lars was beginning to understand everything and nothing.…
He put the ledger to one side and went back to the notebook, tried once more to understand the reasoning. It was difficult, it was complicated, but the more he concentrated, the more things fell into place. He read about Sophie; it said that she was the key, that she would lead the way, that she was beautiful, that she was Hector’s dream woman, the woman he could never have. And more of the same, suppositions from Gunilla about Sophie’s inner characteristics. Lars didn’t agree with her, Gunilla had misjudged Sophie.… There were also musings about how Gunilla thought Sophie might act and react in different situations. Gunilla was probably right there, she was working along lines that had never even occurred to Lars. It was complicated, but he thought he was starting to understand what Gunilla was after.… Lars turned a few more pages, and read something he was obliged to read over and over again.
Lars is burdened by guilt. The words “burdened by guilt” were underlined. He’s malleable. This too was elaborately worked out, as though Gunilla had been exerting her intellect to the utmost in order to understand him. The picture that emerged as Lars read about himself became slightly clearer. He meant nothing to Gunilla, he was to take the blame if anything in the plan went wrong.… What plan?
Lars took a few deep breaths … turned a few pages at random. Tommy can see how perplexed I am. Tommy? … Tommy Jansson in National Crime?
He wrote Tommy’s name on a sheet of paper.
Lars plugged the surveillance equipment into a socket, put the headphones on, and lowered the volume. Scratchy, quiet noises that didn’t mean anything. The voice activation was sensitive, it reacted to most things, a door slamming somewhere, a car alarm going off in the street, someone walking down the corridor outside the room.
He waited, listened, his right foot twitching impatiently. The sound of the door to the room opening. He looked at the time on the surveillance equipment—four hours ago—footsteps and voices that he recognized. Gunilla, Anders, and Hasse, chairs being pulled across the floor. Gunilla’s voice was strained, she was talking about the break-in, then Hasse muttered something in a low voice. Lars concentrated, it was about Trasten, that Hasse had been waiting for a chance to go in, that Sophie had turned up with an unknown man, that three unknown men, probably Russians, had gone into the restaurant. The sound quality was poor, maybe because of the air-conditioning struggling to supply cool air. Lars pressed the headphones to his ears: just more inaudible talking from Hasse, then, after a while, it got clearer.
“Then what?” Gunilla’s voice.
“There were two men lying dead on the floor when we went in. The third member of the group was the one who was found dead in the kitchen. The German from the hospital and the big Russian were in the restaurant.”
“And Sophie? Where was she?”
“In the same room.”
“And Ramirez has left the country?”
“Yes.”
Lars heard a sigh from Gunilla.
“And the money? The transfer?”
There were several seconds of heavy silence. Anders cleared his throat: “I tried, but Hector was bein
g unreasonable.”
“What do you mean, ‘unreasonable’?”
“He said that things had changed as the result of the shooting and the dead bodies.…”
“And Carlos … the owner? Where’s he?”
No answer.
“Aron?”
“No.”
“That lawyer? The one who looks after everything, Lundwall?”
“Don’t know.” Anders was whispering.
“What did you say to Antonia Miller and Tommy?”
Lars wrote “Antonia Miller” on his sheet of paper.
“Nothing,” Hasse said.
Lars paused the equipment and got up from the bed, went over to his laptop on the desk, logged in, went online, and tapped in the address of one of the daily papers. A big photograph of Trasten. He read the article, nothing of interest, police reluctant to say anything, unconfirmed sources suggest three people dead. He moved on to the evening tabloids. SLAUGHTER was the headline on one of them, UNDERWORLD SHOOT-OUT on the other. Same thing there, no information, just unconfirmed reports of three dead.
Lars shut the laptop, looking in front of him. He realized they were going to try to murder him, that he had a price on his head now. He felt scared in a way that he didn’t recognize; the fear led to one feeling, which led to another, which led to a third—terror and panic were the main ingredients, and this mixture revived the little devil that stuck pins in his soul, shouting at him to take some medication … for God’s sake! And all the while, behind that: the pain, the physical pain that sent little cramps throughout his body … cramps that twisted and squeezed Lars Vinge’s entire nervous system.
He took a bar of chocolate from the minibar, then walked aimlessly around the room, eating and taking deep breaths. The chocolate didn’t taste of chocolate, it tasted of sugar and fat. He ate it anyway, the sugar helped the withdrawal cravings for all of twelve seconds.
Lars stopped at the window and looked out across the water of Nybroviken. He saw the bench where Sophie and Jens had sat talking. Where he had photographed them from his position over on Skeppargatan. It felt like another life. What had he realized since then?
One of the Vaxholm boats sounded its whistle three times and backed away from the quayside. His thoughts were somewhere else, on some other level, deep down where he couldn’t reach them. Lars went back to the bed and started again. He read through the thick ledger, looked through the files, read through the notes. A mass of numbers, maybe amounts—big ones, millions. He went through all the documents, a bank with a French-sounding name based in Liechtenstein. Huge amounts. Lars kept going, more figures. The account-holder’s name wasn’t on the withdrawal slip, just a number.
The Andalucian Friend: A Novel Page 40