It had become an implicitly understood task for him to take her messages when she was out, and she thanked him, and continued towards her office with a string of good mornings to the other staff.
It occurred to him that she looked somewhat more sombre than usual. But he forced himself to drop the thought. He didn’t know her, and he knew only too well that nothing good would come of an unrequited love for an older, phenomenally successful newspaper editor.
He returned to his screen. The report on the dead homeless man in Berlin. And with a quick push of a button the three lines of text vanished into the computer’s waste bin, and the tired young man turned his eyes to the next uninteresting piece of news.
Christina shut the door to her office, hung up her suede coat on the hook by the glass front wall and closed her eyes for a second. People could probably see her, but if they did, so be it. In a few minutes she’d be back on top again, quick-firing and full of initiative, and when the day was over nobody would even remember those couple of seconds anyway.
It had been a tough morning. And the morning had brought a close to a tough night. She’d seen her ex-husband on a stretcher, carried out into an ambulance, and perhaps it would have been more humane to climb into her car and drive after it. It would have been more humane to spend the morning on a plastic chair in a corridor, waiting for him to wake up, so that she might go and sit on another plastic chair next to his bed and talk and ask why and hear him say the same things over and over again.
But Christina had been humane for a long time. She’d been humane until she couldn’t take it, and then she’d been humane for a little while longer, and then it was enough. William was like a car she should’ve got rid of a long time ago – those were his own words – one that you drown in money and attention but that is irredeemably beyond saving and breaks in three new places for every two you fix. He couldn’t get better, because he didn’t want to get better. He’d lost his belief or verve or whatever it is that makes people do things with their life, and he’d almost taken Christina with him, until that one day, two years earlier, when she couldn’t take it any more and marched out of their apartment.
She hadn’t been back until today. Yes, he’d kept calling her, and yes, it wore her down every time she answered, but she managed to keep him at a distance and slowly, very slowly, she’d become herself again. Not because the sorrow was gone, but because she let it be there, along with everything else.
And that was how she wanted to keep it. She couldn’t afford to let him drag her into the darkness again. So instead of spending the day at the hospital, she’d called the paper and said that she wouldn’t be at her desk until after lunch.
She stayed out in the city for almost four hours. She tried to wind down the way that she always did: she turned off her phone, went to the big bookshop on Mäster Samuelsgatan, and selected a huge pile of newspapers and magazines in the section with imported titles, even though most of them were available for free at the office. Then she sat in the bar at the Grand Hotel, ordered an improbably expensive breakfast despite having no appetite, and sat there until everything that happened in the world made her own problems seem like small, unimportant distractions. When she was finished she took a walk in the November chill, through the entire city, and ended up back at her office on Kungsholmen.
She knew she would pay for it now. There would be thousands of questions from the staff, calls waiting to be made, articles that should already have been written. But now she would be prepared to deal with them.
She turned on her mobile phone. Scrolled through the mailbox on her computer while the phone spluttered into life.
And then, the news hit her from all directions at once.
At the same instant that the phone beeped to inform her she had thirty missed calls, she saw the four emails from the intern telling her that the hospital wanted her to call.
Even if her colleagues had forgotten that Christina Sandberg began the day by closing her eyes, none of them would forget how she ended it four minutes later. Rushing through the office, heart in mouth and with her phone in her hand.
William remained in his plane seat for at least ten minutes before he could bring himself to move for the first time. He listened for sounds, conversation, for the slightest sign or clue to help him work out where he was and in whose company.
But he didn’t find anything.
The only thing he heard was the slow whine of the engines and the moans from the plane’s joints as it collided with air pockets. No voices, no footsteps, no signs that there was anyone else on board but himself. Which, obviously, there had to be.
It occurred to him that he was getting hungry, and he tried to remember how long it had been since he last ate, but couldn’t. Firstly, he didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. Then there was the fact that he’d been on a drip at the hospital, which probably meant the sensation of hunger was delayed.
That was annoying in itself. It made it harder for him to tell what time it was, and if he knew that, he might have been able to work out where he was and where he was going.
He glanced up at the tiny panel above his seat. For a brief moment he considered pushing the little button with a stylised stewardess, but he decided it wouldn’t be a good idea and refrained. Instead he stood up, his back slightly bent even though the cabin was big enough to let him stand straight with a good few centimetres to spare, and in two quick steps he was at the door.
Hesitated. Considered his options.
The acoustic comfort made the plane’s background noise considerably lower than in a typical commercial aircraft, but it was still sufficient to drown the sound of his movements. If someone stood outside the door they probably wouldn’t have heard him get up and move towards it. In theory he would have a significant advantage, merely by virtue of surprise.
In reality, though, the element of surprise would vanish before he had time to use it. He was still groggy from all the chemicals he’d been carrying inside for the past twenty-four hours, and he was hardly in his prime to begin with. What he could have done in the past would be futile to even attempt today.
But he couldn’t just stand there.
He decided to open the door. Whatever was waiting outside it.
Put his hand on the handle. Felt the cold metal.
Turned it. Carefully. No resistance. It wasn’t locked, and he slowly twisted it ninety degrees and then there was a click and the door swung open.
To his surprise, there was nobody there. No guns, no guards, nobody telling him to stay where he was until he was called for. Instead, he stepped over the threshold, paused, and looked around him. A narrow corridor ran along the port side of the plane’s fuselage, just as he’d thought, lined by the same oval windows as in his own little room. The floor was fitted with a plush carpet that must have cost a fortune, and the walls were furnished in fireproof artificial leather. A few metres further along, the corridor opened out into a more conventional cabin with at least twenty more seats, each as luxurious as his own but organised in pairs on either side of the aisle.
If William had expected a dramatic reaction to his entrance, he had to accept that he wasn’t getting one.
At the front of the cabin by the closed cockpit door, two men were seated. One of them had his back to William and made no attempt to turn around, while the one sitting opposite looked up, met William’s eyes, and that was it.
William recognised him immediately. Suit, shaved head, a military gravity on a boyish face. He was one of the two who had been waiting outside his room at the hospital, the one who had been holding the expensive-looking fountain pen and forced it into William’s neck with a crisp, mechanical click, and it hadn’t been until that moment that William realised it wasn’t in fact a pen. That had been his last thought before waking up here.
The injector man nodded his head briefly, a mute signal to William to tell him he’d been noticed, and then he turned his close-cropped head to William’s right. Behind the corner of the panel wall betw
een the main cabin and William’s own sat the man who had spoken to him at the hospital. He put down his newspaper – German, William noted as he stuffed it into the seat pocket in front of him – and got up. Not threatening, but not very friendly either. A smile on his face, but it was more a mechanical process than a sign of human feelings.
‘Awake?’ he said.
William gave him a wry look back, as if to say that the answer should be pretty self-evident. If he couldn’t beat them physically he could at least fight them with sarcasm.
The man moved out into the aisle, positioned himself in front of William, his muscular body slightly bent under the roof of the cabin – he was about two metres tall, William realised, an impressive bull neck fighting its way out of the loosely buttoned shirt – and William stood still, waiting for whatever would happen next. He was prepared for two things. Either the man would ask him to sit down with the others or they would order him back into his private cabin and tell him to keep quiet.
Neither happened.
‘There are toiletries in the cabinet in your cabin,’ the bull neck said. ‘If you want to freshen up a bit.’
‘For what?’ William asked.
The man avoided the question as if he hadn’t heard it. ‘The bathroom is right at the back.’
Okay then. William nodded in thanks. The situation was not exactly hostile, but not too welcoming either.
‘I take it that if I ask where we’re going you’re not going to answer that either, right?’ he said.
‘I’m very sorry.’
‘So you keep saying. You should talk to someone about that.’
He said it with a smile, but the man in front of him showed no signs of being amused. Nor angry. Nor sorry, even though he said he was. His stare was fixed, summoning and quite dull.
‘At the back?’ William asked without really wondering. And the bull neck nodded in reply.
It took less than half an hour for Christina to travel from Kungsholmen back to Kaptensgatan, despite it being the middle of the afternoon rush. She had pressed the nervous cab driver into running at least two red lights, and under his own initiative he’d taken a shortcut across a pavement, and now she was back outside the door of her old apartment for the second time that day.
She had her phone in her hand, still warm from being pressed against her ear for the duration of the journey, sometimes shouting, sometimes lecturing as if the person she was talking to was a child and as if she herself was a parent with very limited patience.
‘How on earth do you lose a grown man?’ she’d said at one point, catching the driver’s bemused eyes in the rear-view mirror. ‘You lose things! Information! Sometimes kids! But you damn well don’t lose a patient who’s just tried to commit suicide!’
But that was exactly what they had done.
They had searched the whole hospital, gathered all the staff, tried to question witnesses. But nobody had any idea how, why or even when William Sandberg vanished from the Karolinska University Hospital. They were still going through footage from the few security cameras the hospital had been allowed to install, and so far William seemed to be as absent from the security team’s hard disk as he was from the face of the Earth.
Christina’s face was exasperatedly red by the time she turned off her phone, and for once it wasn’t because of the heat from the battery. She was angry. The world was full of idiots. Her cab driver was one of them, but she still rounded up when she paid – risking your licence had to be worth something, she thought – and she ran up the stairs, convinced that he’d tried again. And convinced that this time he’d succeeded.
The first thing she noticed when she entered what once had been her own apartment was the facial expression of the middle-aged policeman who showed her in. He had hair growth that seemed unable to decide whether it was a beard or the product of sloppy shaving, and in the middle of the scrub his mouth kept gasping for air, or trying to find words, or perhaps both. But while his mouth searched for the right thing to say, his eyes already spoke to her. ‘We’re sorry,’ they said. ‘We’re sorry, but there’s bad news.’
‘Is he dead?’ she asked.
It came so abruptly that she surprised herself. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to ask how he was? Or at least ‘Is he alive’? But deep down she was already so certain she couldn’t imagine anything else.
Which made her all the more surprised when the policeman finally spoke.
‘We don’t know,’ he said.
‘Don’t know?’ she asked.
No answer.
‘Is he here?’
Again, the policeman didn’t answer. Instead he looked anxiously at his feet for a moment. Behind him, Christina could see his colleagues moving about the apartment, occasional camera flashes from a room out of sight.
The man hesitated. Didn’t like asking his next question, but he had to.
‘Have you had problems in your relationship?’
‘We separated two years ago. I think that counts as a problem.’
The mouth inside the beard didn’t know whether to smile at her sarcasm or to lament the situation, so it turned to what it knew best and gasped for air again.
‘Where is he?’ she repeated.
He took a step to the side. Nodded down the hallway. ‘We believe he decided to run away.’
It took a second for her to grasp what he’d said. Run away?
With a few brisk steps she hurried in the direction he’d pointed. She passed through the long pantry, past the living room and the library, the exact same route she’d taken countless mornings in her previous life, wearing only a dressing gown or towel, sometimes not even that. Happily ignorant of the fact that one day she’d be rushing through the same corridors to explain to the police in William’s study that a man with no desire to live wasn’t very likely to just ‘run away’.
But when she entered the room she stopped.
She met the gaze of two police officers – perhaps forensics, she didn’t really know – both standing by William’s desk. She looked around. She hadn’t been in there since their divorce, but just like the police she was immediately aware that something was missing. Or, rather, everything.
Along the long wall to the right of the door ran a writing desk, placed in front of the deep windows with a view over the roofs and chimneys of Östermalm, its bay windows and its roof terraces and its outdoor furniture that probably wasn’t worth a third of what they cost. To the right of the desk stood a cabinet, and inside it was a mounting rack for hard disks and devices, plugged in to a network router in the middle.
At least that’s what should have been inside the cabinet.
Instead, it hung open, and the racks were empty, just like the desk. Yellowed patches showed where two giant flat-screen monitors had stood until recently, and on both sides of the window were the shelves where he’d kept his extensive library of books on codes and statistics and chaos and all of the other things she’d stopped asking him about ages ago. Now the shelves stared emptily back at her. Everything was gone.
She shook her head. A decisive shake. A no.
And the policemen looked at her, waiting for her to explain what she meant.
‘It’s a burglary,’ she said.
The two from forensics didn’t say anything. But they looked at each other as if they knew something she didn’t.
‘He hasn’t run away,’ she said. There was a touch of desperation in her voice, and she heard it herself, pausing for a second to emphasise how inconceivable it was that they hadn’t reached the same conclusion. ‘He has nowhere to go, he’s got nothing for him anywhere, I know that, I spoke to him yesterday evening! Why in heaven’s name would someone like that just run away?’
They still said nothing, merely looked sympathetically at her before moving their gaze to something behind her back. It was the policeman with the facial scrub. She hadn’t heard him come in, but now he stood there and worked his mouth like a stranded fish while everyone waited for him to speak.
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‘Why, we do not know,’ he said, as if the fact itself was irrefutable. And then he tilted his head to say, ‘Come.’
She let him guide her through an apartment that she knew better than him, all the way into what had once been her and William’s bedroom. Everything was the same, the smell of the walls and the floor and the fabrics, and before she could stop it she was overcome by memories she didn’t know she even had. From when they sold their house in the suburbs. When they moved into the city, because that was where they liked to be. When they were finally going to have a life of their own again.
If only they’d known.
The bed was made and everything was tidy, and the man with the non-beard continued further into the room, throwing a glance behind him to make sure she was following. Stopped in front of what used to be their wardrobe. Pulled open the sliding doors and looked at her in a way that implied he didn’t have to say anything more.
He didn’t.
The wardrobe was empty.
All of William’s jackets and suits, his well-ironed shirts, everything was gone. The shelves of underwear, the shoes. She had to admit it. It did appear as if they were right. It was just that she knew they weren’t.
‘Less than twenty-four hours ago my former husband tried to take his own life,’ she said. ‘And you seriously think he has suddenly decided to pack up the kitchen sink and run away?’
‘According to the neighbour across the hall two men from a removal company were here and carried out a couple of crates shortly after twelve.’
‘Removal men, or men with shirts with a removal company logo?’
‘What do you mean?’
She let the question go unanswered. If she didn’t give him an answer he would have to work it out for himself, and it was always a better strategy to make people think rather than supply them with the solution. Especially since she didn’t really have one.
Instead, she left him standing in silence, turned round and walked out of the bedroom.
She allowed herself a walk through the entire apartment. The kitchen, the dining room, the guest room – the damned guest room, she walked right past it without allowing herself to think back – and continued out into the living room. The place was well furnished, almost pedantically so, still bearing the hallmarks of the expensive taste they’d developed during their time together. Most of it looked exactly as it did before she moved out, and if she hadn’t known him so well, she would have been surprised at his ability to keep his home in good condition despite his own decline.
Chain of Events Page 3