‘No windows,’ I say, when I realise.
‘Great, isn’t it?’
‘So do you live here now?’
Grim laughs, as though it’s an absurd question, but it isn’t. The only absurd thing here is that no one has seen as much as a hair off his head for a year and a half and then, suddenly one autumn evening, he’s here again, talking about a five-year-old murder.
‘It was like this,’ he says.
He had to get out of Sweden. He doesn’t want to tell me how he did it, and I don’t really know why he had to.
He made his way through Denmark to Germany, then spent the summer laying low in a little town south of Berlin. He enjoyed his freedom and kept his nose clean, not even crossing the street on red unless everyone around him did; then he went with the flow to avoid sticking out. Someone too well behaved is just as conspicuous as a severe delinquent. For those on the run, it’s all about being as visible as everyone else, because that way you don’t get seen. That worked for a while, but then in the autumn the local drugs squad raided the block where Grim was holed up. Despite it being nothing to do with him, it was enough to scare him away and get his thoughts ticking.
He had enjoyed his freedom. That raid made him feel like a little rat. A rat who ended up in Munich, then Warsaw, Amsterdam, and finally Copenhagen. False documents all the way. By this point, it had been a year and three months since he’d escaped from St Göran’s, and something was wrong.
‘You can’t stay on the run forever,’ he says. ‘It will send you round the bend. If I’ve learnt one thing, it’s that. I would never have thought that way five years ago. I don’t know, though, I’m the fucking wrong side of thirty-five and I’ll be forty in a few years. Something about the passage of time has made me … Oh, I don’t fucking know. Everything’s started to feel different.’
‘So you came back.’
A weak smile, impossible to decipher.
‘I came back.’
Aiding and abetting, I think to myself again. That’s what this is. That’s what I’m guilty of, unless I do something about it.
‘I’m trying …’ He laughs. ‘I’m trying to sort my life out. What little is left of it. If possible.’ He slumps back into the chair. ‘And that’s tied to Angelica Reyes.’
‘How?’
‘If we’re going to be able to talk about that, you’re going to have to have looked at the files.’
I take a deep breath, as if readying myself, but it sounds more like a sigh.
‘What if I tell you that I have started looking at them then?’
A new smile spreads its way across Grim’s lips.
‘I knew it.’
‘So tell me.’
‘Why didn’t you want to admit that you’d started?’
I stand up from the mattress.
‘I’m not up for this, Grim.’
‘Eh?’
‘This … whatever this is. The game, the sport. Friendship, if that’s what we have, is so tightly bound up with loyalty, and you are constantly testing my loyalty. I test yours, too, I’m the same, I know that. But I can’t be arsed. If you’re not planning to tell me what it’s all about, then I’ll be off.’
I can’t say that without looking away, like giving my brother an ultimatum. He’s the only one who understands me, and I’m at risk of losing him. Perhaps hearing this feels the same way for him, but I’ve got no choice. It can’t go on the way it always has.
I look down at him. I sense a vulnerability he’d never normally exhibit.
‘Have you started looking at the case?’
‘Yes, I told you.’
‘Well in that case you ought to find me in the files,’ he says. ‘I don’t know where exactly, or what the information points to. I might not be referred to by name, not my own, but I’m sure I’m in there. And when they — or you — find me, it will probably look like I did it. But it wasn’t me. I don’t want you to think it was.’
It’s always so complicated — trying to work out whether Grim’s telling the truth or not. He has spent long periods living as someone else, which leaves its mark on a person, makes him perfectly at ease with suppressing the truth. Identifying one of his lies takes something else, a sort of hunch.
Sirens wail, very close by. The sound forces its way through the walls and makes Grim go stiff. He opens one of the desk drawers and pulls out the knife.
‘I think we should have a look.’
‘Where?’
He grabs the bottle and points the knife blade at the ceiling.
14
Above Stockholm, the winds are sharper. The city extends like a rug of lights in every direction. To the north, the black shimmering waters of Lake Mälaren, to the south, the dome of the Globe Arena glows orange, and beyond that I can almost make out the concrete housing estates on the outskirts of the city.
We’ve come up through a hole in the roof, and with the bottle in one hand and the knife in the other, Grim is cautiously approaching the edge. Down on the street, the blue lights flash quickly and clearly, and the sirens bounce between the frontages, mixing with the background hum of the traffic.
‘What is it?’
‘A road accident, I think.’
He puts the knife down and takes a swig from the bottle. The wind catches his hair and our clothes. We sit down on a ledge. He hands me the bottle, and I drink some whisky, more greedily than before, perhaps because of the cold. Something’s not right here. Something doesn’t add up.
‘You came back because you couldn’t face being on the run anymore,’ I say. ‘And the first thing you do is to start asking questions about Angelica Reyes. Why? I just can’t get my head round it.’
Grim pulls the zip on his jacket right up, stuffs his hands in his pocket, and pushes his chin against his chest. Aside from that, he doesn’t seem bothered by the weather, like he’s well used to the cold. Perhaps that’s from his time on the streets, as an addict, just one of the many things that I’ve never asked him about.
‘You know you met her, right?’ he says. ‘One night, a long time ago.’
‘Angelica Reyes?’
‘She wasn’t very old at the time, maybe ten or eleven. It was after a summer party, a gig at the youth centre. We were on our way home, and we saw her waiting for a bus.’
‘The one that nearly got run over?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was that her?’
‘That was Angelica Reyes.’
Two headlights appear round a corner, tyres squealing until they get a firm grip on the tarmac. The girl is stepping out onto the road, headphones on — big ball-shaped ones. Me and Grim rush over and throw her out of the way.
I’m sixteen and we’re drunk, but not in as bad a state as the driver of the car. As the vehicle careens on through Salem, its tail-lights bounce like two red blobs in the darkness. The girl’s long dark hair falls in waves around her shoulders. Her headphones have fallen off and are resting awkwardly around her neck. She’s tiny, a child, but she’s done her best to disguise that fact with her clothes and her makeup. It half works. Her face is symmetrical and beautiful, her features well-defined. Her eyes are wide open and they shimmer in the cold light of the bus shelter.
An ignominious moment. Two kids, stinking of Russian vodka and weed, have just saved a child’s life.
‘Are you okay?’ Grim asks.
The girl’s cheeks flush red and she looks at Grim as though he’s just asked her to kiss him.
‘Good, thanks.’
I ask if she’s getting the bus. She says she is.
‘Where do you live?’ Grim asks.
‘Hallunda.’
‘What are you doing here then?’
She scowls.
‘My friend has just moved out here.’
‘And you’re going home on your own?’
/>
The girl looks down at her shoes, mumbles something about her friend’s dad who was supposed to give her a lift but couldn’t because his car broke down. Then he fell asleep on the sofa.
The young Angelica Reyes looks up, cockily.
‘But I can take care of myself.’
I get nervous, worried that someone might see us standing here talking to a child. We’d get loads of shit for that.
‘We’re going,’ I say.
Grim turns to the girl.
‘Do you know how to get there? Hallunda’s a fair old trek.’
She rolls her eyes and puts her headphones back on, but her cheeks stay red. We leave her at the bus stop, and by the time we get back to our block I’ve almost forgotten all about her. It’s one summer night of many, almost twenty years ago.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I remember.’
I give him back the bottle. Below us, the sirens have fallen silent, but before long new ones can be heard in the distance. An ambulance, approaching from the west.
‘How do you know that was her?’
‘We bumped into each other every now and then, over the years. We didn’t know each other, that’s not what I mean, but it is a pretty small world.’
‘So you were acquainted with each other.’
‘I wouldn’t call it that.’
‘So what would you call it then? Is this why you’re saying that you turn up in the investigation?’
‘Think about it now. What’s my name? John Grimberg. What’s the next letter of the alphabet after J?’
‘K.’
‘And after G?’
‘H.’
‘There you go. K and H.’
I just stare at him, flummoxed at first.
The pieces of the puzzle come together in my head. It’s only a matter of hours since I saw the name.
‘Karl Hamberg,’ I say. ‘K.H.’
‘Born March ’81,’ says Grim. ‘I can’t remember the date anymore. He was registered at an address out in Hässelby. Divorced parents, no siblings. He was self-employed, a tradesman. I never bothered with any more detail than that. He was just a thin shell, nothing more. Someone I used in emergencies.’
‘You were there. You were at Angelica Reyes’ apartment that night.’
‘See what I mean? It looks like I did it.’
Is he the one that did it? After looking at the material from 2010, it’s pretty obvious that the man in the stairwell is linked to the crime. Could it be him? I’m not sure I want to know.
I reach for the bottle, unscrew the cap, and take a big gulp.
‘My job,’ Grim says, ‘what I was supposed to do, I mean, was to make her disappear.’
‘On whose instructions?’
‘Hers. She was the one who wanted it.’
And just like that, almost everything pertaining to Angelica Reyes has changed altogether.
15
She contacted him, thinking his name was Karl Hamberg, but realised who he was as soon as they met up. They both remembered that near miss in Salem. Angelica asked Grim if she’d ever thanked him. For saving her life, that is.
That connection between them made him feel uneasy.
‘And yet you went along with it anyway,’ I say.
‘She said that she could pay.’
Grim was short of money, and had had the Fraud Squad sniffing around for a while, so that he’d had to abandon several of the shells he’d used. He was desperate — in that world, everyone gets desperate, sooner or later — so he said yes.
He asked a few questions, did a bit of reconnaissance and a handful of background checks. He took photos of Angelica and her everyday life. That sounds like pretty comprehensive gathering of information, but it wasn’t, not compared to his usual approach. Nor did he see any reason to do any more than that — a prostitute wanted to pay to become invisible, to disappear. Fine. Why? She had her reasons, surely. They always do. The fact that he knew of her was no barrier; not many things are if times are sufficiently hard.
He arranged the ID documents and arrived there at the agreed time — at midnight on the twelfth of October — to push them through her letterbox. That was what he usually did.
When he got there, the door was open.
Yes, alarm bells should’ve rung, he knows that, he should’ve got straight out of there, but because it was Angelica, well … Fuck.
He walked over and opened the door a little wider, took a step or perhaps a few inside the apartment, he doesn’t remember those details. He saw her lying there in the bed.
Then he rushed down the stairs as fast as his legs would carry him.
‘And you called the police.’
‘I shouldn’t have done that either, but seeing her lying there like that was so fucking … I thought about her, you know, the girl we met that night in Salem. The girl with the big headphones, who nearly got run over by a pisshead. Something inside me just wouldn’t … I had to do it. Yes, I did it, anonymously, as soon as I got out onto the street.’ Grim looks at the bottle, which is still in my hand. He reaches for it and takes a swig, before getting to his feet. ‘I shouldn’t have done it. After that, I went even further under the radar.’ He looks out across the city. ‘Shall we head back down?’
‘Why did she contact you?’ I say. ‘Why did she want to disappear?’
‘She was scared. I think someone was threatening her. “Somebody’s out to get me,” was what she said.’
‘Right. And? Why was someone out to get her?’
Grim shakes his head.
‘That’s what she said. But I think …’ He hesitates, opening the hatch in the roof. The loft space appears like a big black hole. ‘I think she knew something, or perhaps she’d got hold of something she shouldn’t have got hold of.’
‘What makes you say that?’
Grim shrugs, smiles weakly.
‘A feeling.’
Angelica Reyes was going to disappear. She was being threatened. Somebody was out to get her. There may be fragments in the preliminary investigation that point to that, notes in the margin that Birck and I haven’t had time to digest, but I doubt it. Levin would never have allowed something like that to stay in the margins.
That’s if it’s even true. If Grim’s telling the truth.
‘How are things out in Salem, by the way?’ he asks once we’re back behind the locked door to his hideaway.
The bottle in his hand is now half-full, and he puts it down on the table.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Just wondering.’
‘You’re trying to change the subject.’
‘No.’
There’s a pleasant swaying sensation in my neck. The whisky’s gone to my head, and it feels like warm, wet cotton wool.
‘I’m hardly ever there.’
‘But your mum, and your brother, is everything alright with them?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just wondering,’ he repeats.
I’m not sure it’s quite that simple. There’s almost always something lurking between the lines when Grim asks a question, but on this occasion I can’t make out what it might be.
‘They’re fine. Nothing much has changed.’
‘And your dad?’
‘As I said, nothing much has changed.’
‘Alzheimer’s. Fuck.’ He looks at me. ‘Have I offered my condolences?’
‘He’s not dead.’
‘I didn’t say he was. But is that what it feels like?’
‘As if he’s dead?’
‘Yes.’
No, it doesn’t. He’s disappearing before my eyes. Evaporating into thin air. That’s what it feels like.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I say.
‘I’m trying to show that I care.’
‘When did Angelica Reyes contact you?’
‘I do actually care about you, Leo, even if you don’t believe it. Even though it might not seem that way.’
‘When,’ I repeat, ‘did she contact you?’
He looks at me for some time. Sighs. Gives up.
‘Two weeks earlier, something like that. End of September. She wanted new ID documents and she could pay. But I’ve told you that?’
‘What else did she say?’
‘I did actually ask why, even though I wouldn’t normally. There was something about her that … Maybe it was because I recognised her. That’s when she told me that someone was out to get her, someone who wasn’t going to give up. That it was her only way out.’
‘A boyfriend?’
‘When it comes to women, it nearly always is. But no. I don’t think it was this time. Angelica didn’t have a boyfriend — I knew that much — and by the sound of it, she had a pretty good relationship with her ex.’
‘So,’ I say, recalling Birck’s theory, ‘a punter then.’
‘I should think so.’
It must have had something to do with information. She must’ve known something, or seen something, or heard someone talking. There’s a whole myriad of possibilities. Could that memory stick be the answer? Maybe I should have another look at those pictures. No, both the stick and its contents were examined by technicians and declared untouched. It must be something else, but what?
‘You say that you were there, then, when Angelica Reyes was murdered. Five years ago. What significance does it have now? You said that you were trying to sort your life out and that it’s tied up with her. In what way?’
Grim unbuttons his jacket and turns around. His posture slouches.
‘This is where it gets a bit tricky.’
Grim left the murder alone, even though it really got to him. He’d liked Angelica.
From a distance, he watched the police investigation and the search for a suspect peter out. That was a relief somehow. He had been there. Observant eyes might’ve noticed him. If the investigation had been nearing success, then he could’ve been in trouble despite his innocence — it would be difficult to explain it all away. That’s before you even got to his business: a counterfeiter and a con man suspected of murder is soon out of work. He assumed that the police knew that someone was after her; that sort of thing tends to emerge during an investigation.
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