She can see that he calls Mats for as many minutes as he calls her, and that hurts. He sends fewer messages to Daniel than to Chloë and Elisabeth. These are facts; she can’t avoid these truths, but they are painful.
‘Have you got a minute?’
Mikael sticks his head round the door. She quickly minimises what she is working on and turns in her chair.
He wants to discuss the leak. What should they do? Stockholm told them to do nothing, but during the morning they have been able to trace calls between Jonathan Green and the British Head of Middle East operations in London, Robert Davenport. Metadata, naturally. They know that Green is in London and certain sources state that an operation called Hercules has been given the go-ahead . . .
Mikael falls silent.
She understands. The Brits are pushing on with the operation that the leak was warning them about. The one involving the House.
‘Are we still contributing to British reconnaissance in Syria?’
‘We’re not, but Stockholm is. The National Defence Radio Establishment is providing London with some Russian military communications from across northern Syria.’
‘So what do you think?’
They ought to keep an eye on Hercules, says Mikael, adding drily that they should probably inform Stockholm if it transpires that Sweden is contributing to an operation involving torture. He sighs. ‘No one is altogether sure what the Brits are up to,’ he says.
He is right, but she doesn’t have the energy to deal with his reasoning right now, although he doesn’t notice this. She hums and haws as he talks about analysing British intentions. Perhaps he ought to try speaking with Stockholm anyway. He could give it a try, at deputy level, he suggests.
‘No,’ she says briskly. ‘I’ll handle any contact like that.’
She sighs and thinks about what Gustav said to her. Stockholm will be carrying out a check on her family. Perhaps it has already begun; she wonders what they can see if that is the case. A family in crisis, presumably.
‘Are you okay?’
She smiles quickly to counteract the resolute expression that is making Mikael look so puzzled. She is just tired, she explains. There’s a lot going on with the kids.
‘If there’s too much on your plate just let me know.’
He smiles at her, and perhaps he is being considerate, but she can’t help hearing a certain degree of calculation in his gentle tone. She knows he wants to be Head. And why should he make contact with Stockholm? she thinks – that’s her responsibility. Perhaps he senses an opportunity to make himself more visible to the bosses in Stockholm. Perhaps he is hoping for close dialogue with Roland Hamrén or another chief in Stockholm who can offer him a leg up in his career. She needs him out of the office, he is too forward.
‘Perhaps we could talk about this in a while?’
The question makes him start.
Then, finally, she is once again alone.
After working for a few hours on Fredrik’s email, she doesn’t know what to think. She has combed through them, using the usual analysis programs, but the result is not at all what she expected. Not a single email, not a single line has enabled her to discern an affair. There are no keywords hinting at anything more than flirting, no obvious sexual allusions and no patterns in how he maintains contact with the women to suggest that any of them are anything more than friends and colleagues.
She is certain that Rasmus wasn’t lying to her. She knows her son: he saw Fredrik with another woman.
She dials an internal number.
‘Anne, could you come in.’
A woman with a dark pageboy haircut appears shortly afterwards and closes the door behind her. Anne is one of the new recruits, a sharp young expert specialising in the analysis of mobile traffic. ‘Here,’ she says to her, handing over a note with Fredrik’s number. Could she speak to a technician and do a thorough examination of this mobile?
Anne glances at the note.
‘Make sure you get everything.’
The woman nods.
‘What are we looking for?’
‘Intimate relationships.’
Throughout the morning, she manages to retain control over her finely calibrated facial muscles. She chairs a meeting discussing next year’s budget. She gives no hint of what is going on. But then it is as if she were struck down by grief. She can’t do it any more; she gets up and reaches for her coat.
It is a relief to get home; she practically collapses onto the sofa. Just for a while, she thinks as she closes her eyes.
It is raining.
But she has been woken by a different sound. Voices, from one of the rooms.
She has just managed to sit up when the basement door flies open. A girl with short dark hair bounds barefoot into the hall. She is half naked, wearing only a bra and pants.
She stares at the giggling, dishevelled creature reaching out a hand and shouting down the stairs. A moment later Daniel appears, his upper torso bare. They kiss each other ravenously.
She doesn’t know where to look, it is too intimate. He is already a young man with another woman, she feels embarrassed to see him like that.
They don’t notice her at first. Then it is as if her body were broadcasting its presence and makes them look up. The girl lets out a shrill cry and huddles up with her arms over her chest, while Daniel merely stares at her in amazement.
‘You’re home.’
‘Yes, I’m home.’
The girl’s face is burning red and she looks like she wants to become invisible. She is familiar – is it one of Petra’s daughters? Daniel has slept with her – she can’t stop the thought.
‘This is Julia,’ says Daniel flatly. ‘My girlfriend. Julia, my mother.’
‘Hello, Julia.’
The girl mumbles a hello.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I don’t know. Do I have to?’
He glowers sulkily at her. The abrupt tone is so unlike her beautiful, guitar-playing Daniel. It hurts her; she has a right to know who is coming and going in their home.
They stand silently before her, embarrassed but still defiant.
‘Julia would like her earring back.’
At first she doesn’t understand. The one in the car?
Daniel nods. Yes, the pearl earring.
‘Have you been in our car?’
He doesn’t answer. But she can tell she has guessed correctly, because the girl becomes slightly redder and sighs anxiously.
‘You drove it.’
‘Yes, but only round the block.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ she roars. ‘You don’t have a driving licence. You could have run someone over – in a bloody Security Service car, you brat,’ but she doesn’t add the final bit.
‘But nothing happened.’
She has no intention of even gracing such an idiotic statement with a response. Without saying a word, she gets up and fetches the pearl earring from where she left it in the bathroom cabinet. So it was nothing more than that, she thinks to herself. She can hear them whispering to each other, but when she returns they immediately stop and gaze at her downheartedly. ‘Here,’ she says, handing the jewellery to the girl.
Daniel is sulking in the basement after she called him an idiot for driving her car without permission. As for her, she is wandering around the ground floor and is angry. What is happening? Daniel takes his girlfriend on a bloody joyride in the Section’s car and Fredrik is sleeping around and lying to her – no fucking way is he in Copenhagen today, she thinks to herself. She wishes the pearl earring had belonged to the other woman and that she had found it a couple of weeks ago so that Rasmus could have avoided having to be the bearer of his father’s rotten lies. She is tempted to line up Fredrik and Daniel and hold an interrogation that lasts until every untruth has been dissected.
And where is Rasmus? He ought to be back from school. Perhaps he is at a friend’s house?
‘Do you know where Rasmus is?’ she shouts into the basement, only to be met with injured silence.
Is it only her who wants a family? It feels like they are against her. Perhaps Fredrik and the boys have quietly agreed to leave their small community and leave her as the only one under the illusion that they belong together – it wouldn’t surprise her.
She calls Rasmus but his phone is off.
They can all go to hell, she thinks to herself.
The rain has eased off as she walks to the car. She decides to go for a drive – just out to the fields, perhaps she’ll take a walk. She glides through the suburban streets and on to Waterloo. She knows there was something she was meant to remember, but she has no idea what. It is only when she has parked the car and started walking, and reached the middle of the fields, that it hits her. She stops and emits a loud shout.
The school playground is deserted. Large puddles have emerged from the asphalt as she hurries towards the school. It closed more than two hours ago; perhaps he’s taken the train home with one of his classmates.
But there, sitting on a bench, is Rasmus.
‘Darling, I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I forgot.’
He doesn’t return the embrace and looks at her dejectedly.
‘Sorry,’ she repeats, as the terrible mother she is. She completely forgot the new routine she had agreed with the teacher.
‘Why didn’t you call?’
He despondently shrugs his shoulders. ‘Mobile died.’
She can’t bear that he has been sitting here alone for several hours waiting and that it is her fault. He could have gone round to one of his friends’, she says, putting an arm around him.
Then he looks at her and seethes: ‘So it’s my fault?’ The teacher said he wasn’t allowed to go home with the others and he promised. She promised to pick him up.
The rain patters onto her head as she walks behind him towards the car, the shame dripping down her.
She opens her eyes.
The evening was subdued, none of them had the energy to talk properly to the others. She had a bath and fell asleep due to gloomy exhaustion. But now she is wide awake.
An idea has taken hold of her and will no longer fit into her dream, so it wakes her. She quickly gets up and puts on her dressing gown.
The night air is chilly and raw after the rain. She hurries down to the car, standing there glittering with rain.
The ice-cold surfaces inside the car make her shiver. Sitting in the front seat she turns on the satnav. She has to click around for a bit until she finds the log. Here are the last fifty journeys made by the car, neatly listed with coordinates and time stamps. Why didn’t she think of this sooner? The information was there all along, literally under her nose. The car records all movements, every metre, with exact time stamps. Every route is tracked using GPS and inscribed as a blood-red line on a map. The metadata of daily life.
She quickly finds Daniel’s little outing, down the street and over to the square, around the houses and back again.
Fredrik’s trips are also here.
She slowly goes through the car’s latest routes. She feels calm and focused now. She can see the journey to and from the supermarket on Saturday neatly recorded, and is struck by the fact that she used exactly the same route both the Saturday before and the Saturday before that. She can see their morning drives to school and work. In the last week they have made twenty-five trips in the car. She thinks they often do things carelessly and without planning, but this shows their lives to be more regular and predictable. They move through their daily lives with few deviations.
But now she is searching for deviations.
When she reaches last Wednesday she finds one. Just before five in the afternoon, the car drove from Fredrik’s office north of Brussels to a location in the city centre. The journey took just under half an hour. Then the car was parked there for more than three hours. It then departed from that location at twenty to nine in the evening and came home.
Fredrik had the car that day. She remembers him complaining the week before about how much he had on his plate at work, yet he left the office early. And he didn’t drive home but went somewhere in central Brussels, near Grote Markt.
Perhaps they have friends who live there, she posits. Or maybe it was a client meeting. But what kind of client? It’s so miserable, so dirty, she already knows what this is. She pulls a pen out of the glovebox and writes down the coordinates and times on the palm of her hand.
She continues to go through the log, her fingers trembling.
The Friday before, the day Rasmus said he saw Fredrik with another woman, she finds yet another deviation. Fredrik drove them to school and then to the place in Brussels where he usually drops her off. But instead of continuing north to the financial district, he then turned around and drove home. She scrolls on through the log: the same thing the most recent Friday.
And that evening they went to the embassy reception.
The windscreen has steamed up, like a compassionate shield. She turns off the satnav and tries to control a dull rage.
She gets out of the car. It is still dark. There is a thick blanket of cloud above the house, but beyond it she can perceive a paler blue tone shimmering in the air, the hint of a new day. She can’t change what has happened, it is the future she must be victorious over. She pulls her dressing gown tight around her; the chilly morning air is making her thoughts take a more distinctive form.
In the warmth of the hallway she stops when she catches sight of her coat hanging beside Fredrik’s. He is lying to her, and he is also lying about the mobile. She is certain that she didn’t put her phone in his coat pocket.
On Wednesday, Fredrik left the office early. But she remembers clearly how he complained that he had to work late that day. Instead, in the early afternoon he drove to the city centre. Sitting at the kitchen table with her mobile, she looks up the coordinates for that location.
A hotel.
Lies, as well as the art of discovering them, are something she is the master of. She can feel the contours of deceit.
11
Jonathan’s mobile rings twice before falling silent. He knows the signal; he has been waiting for it. He quickly packs and a little while later he steps out into the hotel’s underground car park. A car rapidly flashes its headlights.
He gathers his thoughts, everything in him focusing on what awaits him. There is a freedom in getting to work: the avoidance of private life with all its emotions and difficult relationships, becoming instead part of an organisation.
The two men in the front seats greet him without introducing themselves. They are handlers, logisticians.
They drive him north through London in a long unbroken silence before hurrying him into a ground-floor flat in Lambeth, near the Imperial War Museum. The flat is big and dark, and exudes dust and worn elegance. No one lives here. He thinks it must be part of the estate of an old, eccentric woman who lived alone for her final decades.
Once inside the flat, the handlers relax. They lumber around checking everything works – heating, water – and they put some food in the fridge. He knows the procedure and gives them his mobile and watches them take out the SIM card and battery and put everything in a bag before handing him a new phone. It is clean and encrypted, says one of the handlers. And probably bugged, he reflects to himself. The other one explains the usual rules of conduct and he listens politely – he knows them, but the rule is that they must always be said. Don’t leave the flat, don’t call outsiders, in an emergency just call the number saved on the mobile.
The pipes are whistling. Around him there is a normal working day taking place. He taps the pipes gently. ‘Be careful,’ says one of the handlers. ‘And please stay away from the windows,’ says t
he other. ‘Don’t make a racket. Rest instead.’ He says that he knows all of this, but they merely nod. He will receive more information shortly.
‘Grandma will be here soon,’ says one of them.
Then they leave. He sinks into a shabby dark plush armchair.
A little while later a woman in a suit arrives. They exchange greetings; she is Grandma – the coordinator. She looks at him curiously, as if assessing whether he seems ready.
He knows the procedures, but he is still nervous because he is unpractised. Daily life at the embassy has left him untrained.
Grandma places a garment carrier over the back of a chair. It is time.
He changes in the adjacent room. It feels like shedding his skin. It is a form of liberation – right now he doesn’t want to be himself. Checked shirt, brown chinos, burgundy tie and tweed jacket. He examines himself in the mirror on the wall. There he sees a man with short reddish-brown hair and a pale, nondescript face.
He tries a smile. No, he thinks, too broad – he looks like a salesman. He smiles again. This time it is better, the face has a softer, milder expression.
He could very well be an academic. An ordinary man with an ordinary life. He takes a step closer and sees a chilly severity in the gaze. It is too tense, too vigilant. He closes his eyes. Then he opens them again and looks at himself as if he were a man who sees the best in everyone. Who wants the best. Who listens. The face has to be open, he has to make Vermeer feel safe. Is this a man radiating assurance? Warmth?
His eyes are softer now, the features more receptive.
One might see him as a caring person. A therapist, perhaps. That’s good.
Grandma gets up from a chair and looks him over with a frown. ‘Stand still,’ she says. He stands in the centre of the room and lets her look at him, as if he were a mannequin. She evaluates him with a practised eye, loosening his tie slightly, putting two pens in the breast pocket of his jacket and then nodding.
The Silent War Page 12