The Bucket List

by Peter Mohlin

  John nodded and didn’t have the heart to say that all he had drunk for years were Scottish single malts. It was a habit that had come with the money left by his father.

  “You should have seen Primer’s face when he had to let me go …”

  Billy laughed and managed to breathe in the smell of the whiskey so heavily he began to cough.

  “Oh wow,” he said. “I must’ve been inside so long I can’t handle hard liquor.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” John said, raising his glass.

  Billy reached across the table and the brothers were united in a toast.

  “There’s one thing I did think of while I was stewing in my cell thinking about how much I wanted to beat the shit out of you,” he said. “How did you know where to look for the girl? I assume you didn’t just grab a shovel and take your chances?”

  “A cell phone,” John replied cryptically.

  When both Billy and his mother looked at him blankly, he explained how his inquiries had led to him finding the body close to the old dump next to Hallerudsleden.

  “Not many people go walking around there,” Billy said.

  John readied himself for an onslaught of questions about where the investigation would go and whether the police had any new suspects. But to his surprise there were none. Tonight, his brother seemed happy with his company and the warmth of the contents of his glass.

  “Can you call Ring and Ride, Billy?”

  John glanced at their mother. She looked pale. Her cheeks, which had been blooming red, seemed to have lost their color.

  “Don’t you feel well, Mom?” said Billy, who had also noticed the change.

  “Nothing to worry about, I’m just a bit tired.”

  She smiled briefly, revealing a mouth in urgent need of dental work. Some of the teeth on her lower jaw were so worn down and discolored from cigarettes that they looked like small, dirty yellow stones sticking out of her gums.

  Billy ordered the minibus. Then he went into the hall and shouted upstairs.

  “Nicole, come down and say goodbye to Grandma.”

  John got up and went over to him.

  “She can’t find out who I am,” he said in a low voice.

  Billy smiled at him, happy that the brothers were once again sharing a secret.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll just say you’re an old friend from back in the day who’s moved back.”

  He took a few steps up, stumbled, and had to grab the bannister to avoid falling over.

  “Come down now,” he bellowed upstairs.

  A door opened and soon the girl appeared, sauntering along with her eyes on the tablet—headphones still attached to her ears like a protective membrane against the world. She had long since outgrown her t-shirt and her black trouser bottoms were covered in jam from the cake.

  “Billy, I need to go to the bathroom before I leave. If I wet myself again they’ve said they’ll stop taking me.”

  Their mother had rolled into the hall and was using her functioning arm to point between her legs. She had propped the wine box in between her thighs—she apparently intended to smuggle it into Gunnarskärsgården. Billy accompanied the intoxicated woman into the bathroom. John didn’t envy his brother, who would have to lift her out of her wheelchair onto the toilet and then back again once she had emptied her bladder.

  Nicole walked past him into the kitchen. She took a spoon from a drawer and shoveled what was left of the cake right off the plate into her mouth. John stifled the impulse to stop her. It wasn’t his job.

  When their mother returned to the kitchen after her visit to the bathroom, the girl took off her headphones and stood up. She went up to the wheelchair and leaned forward to hug her grandmother. John saw her shudder when her cheek touched the slack skin. The smell of her grandmother’s body must have stung her nose.

  “Grandma’s sweetheart,” said the woman, digging in a pocket with her good hand. She found a two hundred kronor note, which she handed to the girl.

  “What do you say?” Billy encouraged from the doorway leading into the hall.

  “Thank you,” Nicole said quietly, returning to the table and her headphones.

  Fifteen minutes later, the minibus pulled up outside. John moved instinctively away from the window into the living room to avoid being seen. It seemed to take Billy and the driver a while to get the wheelchair up the ramp and into the minibus. Eventually, John heard the rear doors close and the gravel crunch under the tires as it left.

  He went back into the kitchen and saw the whiskey glasses had been filled again.

  “You’ll stay to watch the match, won’t you?” said his brother, draining his in one go.

  It was still the same sofa that he and Billy had sat on so many times in childhood. The screen, on the other hand, had grown in comparison with the square brown box that had provided their entertainment back then. The TV screen was at least fifty inches and was showing the American football field and all its white lines in the highest possible resolution—every blade of grass was visible.

  “Jesus Christ! Not Latimer! Why are they bringing on that meathead?!” Billy shouted, spreading out his arms.

  The New York Giants were losing against the San Francisco 49ers—and John decided he shouldn’t delay his departure any longer. Given the speed with which the whiskey had gone down his brother’s throat, very soon it wouldn’t be possible to talk to him at all. But it didn’t feel right to raise the subject. This was clearly Billy’s idea of a reunion of brothers and he would probably be upset by John’s plans to leave Karlstad tonight.

  “How wide can he go?” Billy complained in response to a failed attempt at a field goal. “I don’t know what’s up with the Giants this year. It’s like they don’t want to win.”

  “Do you watch all the games?” said John.

  Billy grinned proudly and pointed at a blue-and-white cap on top of the bookcase.

  “Haven’t missed one in years. I really went nuts for the Giants after you and Dad left.”

  John thought it was strange that his brother still referred to the man who had left him and never got in touch again as Dad. Billy hadn’t asked one single question about the old man and presumably didn’t even know he was dead.

  On the field, the Giants had finally managed to secure the ball again and launched a decent drive with only twenty yards to go.

  “She’s not got much going for her nowadays,” said Billy.

  “Mom, you mean?” said John, wondering where the conversation was going.

  “Yes, of course. You should have seen the lady in her prime. There were men left, right, and center falling all over her after you left. She was the belle of Värmland.”

  Billy explained that he had stopped sleeping in his own room and moved into their mother’s double bed after the separation. One night he had woken because there was an unfamiliar naked man moving next to him. Billy had lain still and pulled the duvet over his ears in an attempt to shut out the bastard’s groaning and his mother’s hushing.

  The morning after, their mother had left for work but the man had stayed in bed, snoring. Billy had been so scared he had crept out, locked the bedroom from outside, and gone to school. It had ended with the man kicking the door to pieces when he woke up and realized he was locked in an empty house. Their mother was angry and had stopped his pocket money until the carpenter was paid off.

  Billy laughed and filled their glasses again with what remained in the bottle. He didn’t seem to be looking for John’s sympathy—he just considered the story to be a comic childhood incident.

  While Billy had been in high school, their mother crashed badly and had been admitted to a psychiatric ward for a few months. After that she changed. She quit the hard liquor and stuck to wine. The men stopped turning up and at times she even painted.

  “Do you know who your biological father is?” John asked.

  “No, Mom’s never wanted to say. But I guess he was one of Dad’s friends. She always did like exotic guys.”r />
  Billy got up from the sofa so quickly that the whiskey splashed over the edge of his glass and began to run down the outside.

  “Now we’re talking!”

  He turned up the volume on the TV, filling the living room with the racket from the Giants’ home crowd. They had come to life, hoping the game might be turned around. At that moment, Nicole stuck her head around the door.

  “Dad, I’m hungry.”

  “There’s some fish fingers,” he said. “Do you want to bring the plate in here and sit with us?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “It’s too loud. I can hear it,” she said, pointing at her headphones, which were at that moment hanging around her neck.

  She had turned around to leave when Billy called out to her again.

  “Haven’t you forgotten something, Nicole?”

  She went over to the sofa, took the two hundred kronor note from her pocket, and put it on the table in front of him.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay, darling. I’m sorry it has to be like this. But living in this house costs money.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  The girl vanished into the kitchen and the money disappeared into Billy’s jeans pocket. Then he turned his attention back to the TV and what little whiskey there was left in his glass. He licked the rim to avoid missing any drops that had spilled over.

  John thought about the millions in his own bank account and how they’d ended up there. He wanted to help his brother financially, but it had to be done in a way that couldn’t be traced back to him or wrongly interpreted. Billy was broke enough to take small change from his own daughter, but also proud enough to turn down charity from his brother.

  “Do you think she’s fat?” Billy said, his eyes fixed on the game.

  John was surprised by the about-face.

  “Nicole? No, definitely not. What do you mean?”

  “She’s a bit plump, but that’s just how she is. I just don’t want them to bully her for that too.”

  “Are they mean to her at school?”

  “Hmm, well, I think she finds it tough sometimes. Hardly surprising, given who her dad is. But she doesn’t want to talk about it and I’m not really the kind of guy to get involved either.”

  John felt sad and angry all at once. The false accusations that had ruined Billy’s and their mother’s lives were harming the next generation too. The misery he saw everywhere in this house all stemmed from one thing: an unknown perpetrator had picked his brother as a scapegoat in order to get away himself.

  For Nicole, it wouldn’t help that her father was no longer suspected of rape and murder. Her classmates had already heard how their parents talked. They had learned that Nicole Nerman was a lesser person. You weren’t to go back to her house to play after school.

  Billy tried to refill his glass and looked at the bottle in disappointment when all that came out were a few solitary amber drops. He went into the kitchen and returned with two bottles of Budweiser and a bottle opener.

  “Did I miss anything?” he said, slurring his words.

  “The 49ers fumbled.”

  Billy’s face lit up. He turned the volume up a bit more before sitting down on the sofa. Or flopping onto it. The springs under the cushions creaked under the weight of his clumsy movements. His eyes were clouded and John could see that his brother was struggling to keep up with the game. The curses and celebratory cries no longer correlated with what was happening on the field.

  John went to the bathroom for a piss and when he returned Billy had drifted off. He had his head resting on the arm of the sofa. He was covered with a brown duvet with feathers coming out of a hole in it. Nicole had come out of the kitchen and was sitting next to him, still staring at her tablet. She must have been the one who turned off the TV and put the duvet over him.

  John remained standing in the doorway looking at her without her seeing him. The girl wasn’t very old. It was really Billy who ought to be putting her to bed, not vice versa.

  He cleared his throat loudly enough for her to hear it through her headphones. She jumped and looked up from her tablet.

  “I thought you’d left,” she said, taking her headphones off.

  “Sorry if I scared you,” he said. “I was just in the bathroom.”

  He sat down in the armchair next to the sofa and smiled at her.

  “I think you should probably go to bed and sleep as well,” he said.

  Billy turned on the sofa and grunted a few times. Then his breathing became more regular again and the blanket rose and fell in time with his loud snores.

  John touched his shoulder and shook him gently.

  “Billy, you need to wake up.”

  The girl looked at the visitor and almost imperceptibly shook her head.

  “He won’t wake up now,” she said.

  There was a part of John who wanted to hug her. Put down the screen and whisper that another life was possible. Later on. When she got older and could make her own decisions. But it wasn’t up to him to look after Nicole. The girl was fragile and he didn’t know what her reaction would be.

  “I have to go now,” he said, and she nodded in return.

  During the short walk to the car, he felt the anger return. Someone was responsible for this—and the fact that the bastard might be a police officer didn’t improve matters. Was he really going to get in the car? Enter Berlin into the GPS and never look back?

  He kicked a pebble across the gravel and heard it bounce into the shallow ditch, startling an animal in the darkness. Whatever decision he made would be the wrong one. If he just left, the image of Nicole on the brown cord sofa with her sleeping father next to her would haunt him for all eternity. They both had a right to find out who had done this to them. But if John stayed in Karlstad, his own life would have to take a back seat again—and that wasn’t part of the plan.

  In short: he needed time to think.

  The cloying taste of the whiskey grew acrid in his mouth and he regretted letting Billy refill his glass. He was tired and frankly too drunk to drive the Chrysler. But that was exactly what he was going to do. Not south on the highway, though—back to the hotel instead. With a little luck, his old room would still be available.

  32

  Heimer really had no desire to eat at AckWe. But he would sometimes meet Sissela there at lunchtime, and after what had happened at the police station he didn’t want to say no. The skin on his knuckles was still sore and hadn’t healed completely after the assault on Primer’s plasterboard wall.

  He knew that his wife took pride in eating in the staff canteen together with everyone else at the corporate office. She loved to talk in the business press about how she always made sure at least once a week to take her tray and ask to sit at one of the tables. The routine presumably scared the living daylights out of the employees, who might at any given moment have the top boss appearing unannounced at their lunch table.

  The canteen was on the ground floor of the headquarters that Allan Bjurwall had commissioned in the mid-seventies next to the old factory. Heimer struggled to find redeeming features in his father-in-law, but he had to admit that he’d dared to carve out his own path. All of the major architectural firms of the time had submitted proposals for the new office—but Allan had selected an unknown agency from Oslo. The Norwegians had designed a five-story building whose whole façade was covered in weathering steel—long before the rust-colored surface came into fashion. It was an inspired choice that created a design rapport between the brick-built factory and the new rusty-looking office.

  Sissela walked ahead of him with her tray through the minimalist canteen, photos from AckWe fashion shoots adorning its walls. Eventually, she found a table with a view of the lawn by the parking area.

  “Hope I didn’t ruin your plans for today,” she said, sniffing the chicken curry casserole appreciatively.

  “Definitely not,” said Heimer, thinking about the run he had been planning to do before lunch. Now he
would have to digest the food and wouldn’t be able to head out until two at the earliest. But it was worth it. Sissela was in a good mood, which was a rarity in recent times, when their conversations had mostly covered his lack of impulse control.

  Heimer looked at the line of diners. A familiar face was paying the cashier before heading for his table. It was Hugo Aglin—the director of finance.

  “Heimer, old boy. It’s been a while,” he said, standing by the table.

  “Yes, I suppose I last saw you in Majorca.”

  “That must be right. The tan is all gone by now, sadly.”

  “You had time to sunbathe?” said Sissela. ‘The program must not have been busy enough.”

  Hugo laughed and asked whether he could join them.

  “Have a seat,” Heimer said, pulling out one of the empty chairs.

  They were still talking about the retreat when Sissela’s phone rang. She got up and took the call over in the lounge area. After a minute or so, she returned with her hand over the microphone.

  “I’m so sorry, but something has come up. You stay here, guys, and finish your lunch in peace.”

  Heimer received a kiss on the cheek before she vanished upstairs with the phone glued to her ear. He was actually relieved she’d left them. With Sissela at the table, conversation almost always shifted to the company. When she left, it was easier to talk about other, more stimulating subjects. Hugo was knowledgeable about both wine and architecture, but this time the finance director changed the topic to Emelie and the impending funeral. This wasn’t especially strange. He and Hugo often discussed serious things at the dinners that were part of life at AckWe—without being particularly in each other’s confidences.

  “It must open up a lot of wounds to have to go through all this again,” he said. “But don’t let it ruin what you and Sissela have built. What’s happened has happened and you can never do anything about that, can you? But the stuff that’s ahead you can influence—and that’s what you have to focus on.”

  Heimer’s first thought was that this must’ve come from a self-help book Hugo once read. But then he realized where the line of argument was coming from. He recognized the reasoning. The encouragement to move on. To not get stuck in the past. To look forward, not back.