The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  She was leaning up against the bar savouring the bitter strong aroma when her phone rang.

  His voice sounded different. The acoustics around him were strange. Hollow.

  ‘Better make this quick,’ he said.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m locked in a stall in the men’s room.’ She didn’t laugh at his crude tradecraft. ‘I didn’t want anyone overhearing me. This is strictly hush-hush, right? For your ears only. I’m serious. No matter what happens, you didn’t hear this from me. Do I have your word?’

  ‘You don’t even need to ask.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I’m serious, Frankie. This Anglemark guy. He ain’t what he seems. I mean he was the gay crusader, right? He was everyone’s image of the perfect LGBTQ knight, the wholesome gay politician with the model partner at his side. The kind of man it was easy to accept, who was a passionate advocate of children’s rights, especially vulnerable immigrant kids who’d come in with the most recent wave of asylum seekers. It was all a carefully manufactured image.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything. You need to discover this shit for yourself, Frankie. The guy was a sick fuck. All I’m going to do is point you in the right direction, the rest is up to you.’

  Frankie made writing gestures at the barista who took a pen from beside the cash register and passed it to her. She scribbled the address down on a folded napkin.

  ‘I’ll call you if I find anything in the emails,’ he promised.

  ‘I owe you,’ she said, staring at the address she had written down.

  ‘You do, more than you can possibly imagine. But I know you’re good for it.’

  The phone went dead. Frankie drained the small espresso in a single swallow. She felt a wave of guilt surge through her, hot with the coffee. They both knew she wasn’t good for it. She’d used him like she always used him, letting him try and flirt his way out of that paper bag he hyperventilated into because it made it easier for her to get what she wanted out of him. But he’d let her. That made him complicit, didn’t it?

  So why did she feel as dirty as she did?

  There was no way a Big Mac was going to pay off her debt if his tip came through. Maybe she’d have to stump up for extra fries.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Frankie grabbed a wild-game burger from the street vendor outside the espresso bar, eating as she walked. The fat juices ran down her chin. She used the napkin to clean herself up.

  She didn’t know what she expected to find at the address, but it promised to be incendiary.

  And that was enough to give her hope.

  She logged the address remotely, using an app on her phone that one of the tech boys had been developing. It was a long way from perfect but meant she didn’t have to keep rushing back to the office to catch up on mindless paperwork. She made no reference of what the address was, how it pertained to her investigation, or where she’d obtained it, just in case someone came looking. She knew she was acting like some paranoid Big-Brother-fearing conspiracy theorist, but so be it. When the prize behind Door Number Three was a grand conspiracy running from top to bottom through the government a little circumspection was smart. But procedure dictated a certain amount of breadcrumbs or their lack would be suspicious. It was a delicate balancing act.

  Like most police officers in Sweden she carried a Sig Saur P226, loaded with Speer Gold Dot hollowpoints. Rules required they carry one shot in the chamber to reduce the chance of accidental discharge in pressure situations. Very few officers ever discharged their weapons, with only twenty or so warning shots registered in any given twelve-month period. It wasn’t like on television. They weren’t gunning down suspects in street shootouts.

  The address was within walking distance, as so many were within the main islands of the city. Stockholm was built across fourteen islands with road and rail bridges spanning the waterways around them. Most commuters used the extensive subway system, as the main city centre was held hostage by a couple of main choking points that were the only way on and off the island. It was simply faster to use the trains than it was to try and drive anywhere, and given the medieval nature of parts of the town and the incredibly narrow cobbled streets parking was a bitch. Back in the seventies and eighties lots of the older Germanic buildings had been demolished in the name of progress, replaced with harsh brutal Functionalist blocks, but the roads themselves hadn’t been widened, and real estate was so precious no one wanted to waste it building car parks.

  It took Frankie a little more than twenty minutes to leave the prosperous financial district behind in favour of one of Stockholm’s less salubrious back alleys.

  The yellow-painted walls were broken up by iron-banded grilles over windows which were probably older than America. A year ago there had been trouble in this part of town with rough sleepers setting up a cardboard city. Footage of the police going in heavy handed to evict them, confiscating their mattresses and sleeping bags, had been all over social media. There had been another video, this time black balaclava-wearing football fans going on a rampage through the same cardboard city. They’d filmed themselves beating the immigrants huddled up on their pathetic mattresses and released the video to stir up anti-immigration fears, claiming the streets were unsafe. This was the kind of stuff that Jonas Anglemark had stood up against, decrying the casual fascism of these people.

  But that was her city now. It was on edge, just like the rest of Europe, with rapidly rising racist sentiments in the face of seemingly unending immigration, with the worst of them not understanding the basic difference between an immigrant and an asylum seeker.

  The whole idea that these people had gone through hell to get to the promised land and a new life only to be forced to live like rats made her feel sick.

  She recognized the street; there had been a major raid here that led to the discovery of a slum landlord who was claiming aid to support several unaccompanied children, only to cram a dozen undocumented refugees into each room, charging them half of the money they managed to beg each day for the privilege of being there. Those who weren’t begging were being forced into prostitution, and more than half of the kids in that building already had drug problems. Every city had places like this; the kind that politicians pretended didn’t exist.

  Which made it interesting that Anglemark had spent any sort of time here. What kind of connection could he have to a place like this?

  There was a thick iron-banded oak door like something from a medieval castle between her and the answer to that question.

  At some point in the last few years the building had been divided into apartments. If the facade was anything to go by it was in a state of disrepair.

  A couple of crusty teenagers were perched on a low wall sharing a joint in plain sight. They were dressed like something out of the grunge era with layers of plaid and torn denim.

  Drugs were a hot-button topic in Sweden. It was only a decade since the public attitude to someone smoking a joint was up there with cheating on your taxes, and in Sweden cheating on your taxes was the crime of the century.

  Times changed, especially with the raft of asylum seekers who were used to a very different drug culture back home.

  It wasn’t Frankie’s job to bust the kids, so she let them get on with it.

  She checked the buzzers beside the door. The address Kalle had given was for a second-floor apartment. She checked the names beside each one, but none of them meant anything to her. Even so, she used her phone to take a photograph so she could cross-reference them later.

  The name of the occupant in the apartment she was looking for was Dahlberg. She pressed it and waited. There was no response. She thought about trying every button, but didn’t need to as the door opened in front of her and a twenty-something Middle Eastern man with thick black stubble and black stones for eyes pushed by her. She stepped through behind him.

  Motion sensors brought the light back to life as the door closed. There was a porthole-shaped window
on the landing at the top of the first flight of granite steps. There was no light beyond the first landing. She stood under the hanging wire, looking up at the coupling where the bulb should have been. Whoever owned the building wasn’t investing in the general upkeep. Thick layers of dust lay on the wooden banister. Pots of dried paint lined up beneath the window, hinting that maybe once upon a time someone actually cared. A cleaner hadn’t set foot in this place since at least New Year, she realized, seeing several streamers and party favours that had been trodden underfoot.

  She climbed to the second floor.

  There was no doorbell outside the Dahlberg apartment. She listened at the door. There were on obvious sounds coming from behind it. She heard a baby crying in the opposite apartment and someone shouting somewhere upstairs. Both things were very out of place for an apartment block in the city. Swedes weren’t social animals. They hid behind their doors and didn’t make a sound for fear of standing out. It was like the way they all dressed in uniforms of blacks and greys and avoided bright colours. No one wanted to be seen.

  Frankie was beginning to wonder if Kalle had sent her on a wild-goose chase, or if she’d somehow made a mistake with the address.

  She knocked again, this time much harder, and the door swung open slowly without resistance, which immediately set her instincts jangling. She reached for the Sig Saur, calling out, ‘Hello?’ as she went inside. ‘Armed police. I’m coming in,’ she said, loud enough for her voice to carry to every room in the small apartment.

  The last thing she wanted was to trigger some fight or flight response by surprising anyone inside.

  ‘Police,’ she called again, still standing on the threshold.

  The door opposite opened.

  A young girl of perhaps four or five years old peered out through the crack long enough to see Frankie flash her badge before closing it again.

  She’d been a cop for a long time and been in situations where she just had to trust her gut plenty of times. Something was off here.

  She stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind her with her heel.

  She didn’t want any nosy little girls following her inside.

  The ceiling was thin. The argument upstairs was louder in here than it had been out in the hallway. ‘Police,’ she called for a third time. ‘Don’t make any sudden movements. Stand in the middle of the room with your hands behind your head.’

  There was no answer.

  The moment she opened the door into the lounge she knew why.

  The body of the man lay sprawled out on the couch.

  His drug paraphernalia cluttered the coffee table. Rubber tubing was still tied off around his arm. The needle was on the carpet. She slipped the gun back into its underarm holster and took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket.

  Even through the latex his skin was icy to the touch.

  There was no trace of a pulse.

  The smell of vomit hung in the air, stale. It mixed with the stench of faeces where he’d evacuated his bowels in death. His chin was crusted yellow.

  Frankie stood up to distance herself from it.

  She needed to call it in.

  The fact she’d flashed the girl her badge would hopefully be enough to stop them forming a posse to deal with the intruder. Not that this felt like the kind of place where neighbours went the extra mile for each other.

  She made a call to the local station, putting it in their hands, and promised to stay on the scene until they arrived. They warned that it could take fifteen minutes before anyone got to her. ‘It’s not like the body is going anywhere,’ the dispatcher noted. It was that familiar callousness around drug deaths.

  But fifteen minutes would hopefully give her all the time she needed to work out who the dead man was and how he tied in to Jonas Anglemark.

  If there was something that linked him to the apartment.

  She took a look around.

  The room was furnished better than she had expected. It wasn’t expensive stuff, but it was decent IKEA starter-home furniture. She had been in similar apartments where every piece of furniture was on its last legs. Most of the stuff in here looked almost new. There were a few signs of age and wear, hence the almost, but it was better than some of her own stuff. The pictures were tasteful, the walls a soft shade of blue, the rugs plush beneath her feet, and the hardwood floor oiled and polished. This wasn’t the home of a junkie despite evidence to the contrary lying on the sofa.

  The first thing she noticed was a lack of photographs. There were no personal flourishes beyond a few dog-eared paperbacks on the bookcase. The spines marked them all as bestsellers, all in their Swedish translations rather than the original languages. She checked the fridge. There were no plastic containers with body parts inside. There were two bottles of imported beer and a carton of milk that had passed its expiry date. There was nothing else in the way of sustenance inside, so maybe this wasn’t the kind of apartment where someone lived, but rather somewhere they crashed from time to time when they were in the city.

  The bathroom was no more personal. There were a few expensive toiletries with designer labels, but they were all near empty. The shower mat was bone dry.

  She tried the first bedroom. The bed was unmade, the sheets sweated into the outline of the last sleeper. There were obvious semen stains on the fabric – large irregular discoloured circles. There were a lot of them, like a weird living Kandinsky collage. Sweat stains made a poor man’s Turin shroud out of the pillow case. There was plenty of evidence of sex and sweat and very little else. She found a couple of changes of clothes in the wardrobe. Like the furniture it wasn’t designer stuff, but it was good-quality functional material. Again though, there was nothing personal in here.

  She went through to the smaller second bedroom. It was being used as a study, and instead of a bed there was a beautiful leather-inlaid desk and a desk chair that probably cost a month’s salary.

  She settled into the chair and tried to imagine Anglemark using this place as his refuge, a bolt hole away from the public eye. But why would he need one?

  Frankie tried the drawers.

  There was a desk diary in the first drawer she opened. Most of the pages were blank, but a few had the initial B beside the date. She riffled through the pages, stopping on the day Anglemark had died. A card had been slipped between the pages. She knew what it said before she picked it up: Memini Bonn. And an address and time halfway across town. It was proof positive that Anglemark was tied to Tournard and Dooley. That same imprecation, remember Bonn, presumably in Latin because that was the language of the Catholic Church.

  But how did Kalle know about this place? What went on here that it was even on the hacker’s radar?

  And how did the dead man fit in?

  Or more accurately, dead men. Both Anglemark and the corpse on the couch had reason to be here on their last days.

  Frankie was beginning to think she knew the answer.

  She slipped the card into an envelope she found in the second drawer and put it in her pocket, returning the diary to the drawer.

  After a quick glance at her watch she guessed she had maybe five or six minutes before the beat cops arrived. If there was anything else to be found it needed to be found quickly.

  Using her phone Frankie took as many shots of the apartment as she could, not sure what she was looking for in them but not wanting to risk missing the obvious.

  But it was the corpse that warranted most her attention. She realized what it was that bugged her about the dead man’s pose. There was no way that he could have been comfortable reclining like that, even if he was stoned. And in death it just looked unnatural. There was a half-drunk bottle of whiskey, cap off, and the classic tableau of aluminium foil, cotton-wool balls, tarnished spoon for cooking the drug, and the lighter with which to cook it, and of course the hypodermic on the floor.

  Frankie took half a dozen more shots of the table and the stuff on it, and then some of the dead man.

  It was only a
s she knelt to get a decent shot of the vein damage in his arm that she realized he was much younger than she had originally thought.

  Death could age a corpse, making it appear more wasted than it had been in life.

  She checked his pockets and found a wallet that identified him as one Björn Dahlberg and listed a date of birth in this millennium. She couldn’t believe he was barely eighteen, but the ID looked legit. She would have guessed him at closer to thirty. Mid-thirties even.

  Things were beginning to fall into place. Dahlberg’s name on the buzzer added a layer of anonymity for Anglemark. There was no way the teenager could afford a place this central, no matter how shitty it was, it was still prime real estate. Kalle’s comment about Anglemark being a bastard made sense. Here was a man who had it all. Who was a paragon of virtue in the gay community. Someone who presented that perfect face for the new Sweden, an open caring society, a place where race, creed, colour, and sexuality didn’t matter because everyone was equal. Everyone bled red, the rest didn’t matter. He was good. Better than good. He put himself out there as the best of them.

  The insult levelled so often at politicians couldn’t have been truer in his case. He was a two-faced liar, and this was his secret place, his second face. When he wasn’t campaigning for those vulnerable kids and fighting for the rights of those asylum children, he was fucking around behind his partner’s back with some young drug-addled twink he kept as a toy.

  She shook her head, not wanting to believe the reason behind his murder could be as banal as that.

  It was disappointing.

  She’d expected more from him.

  Something gnawed at the back of her brain.

  It was too neat. Like it had been served up to her. Anglemark had done his best to keep this place a secret and to be fair had done a damned good job of hiding it as far as legal searches and official records went, but a hacktivist like Kalle Lindholm had not just known of its existence, but what went on within its four walls, and its address, too.