Bubble(17)

Uncle Tage went on staring at her, but this time she didnt look away. Instead she lowered her chin slightly and maintained eye-contact.

Five seconds.

Ten  …

Okay, he eventually sighed, holding up his hands. Theres another part of the story. Something I was hoping I wouldnt have to tell you  …  We worked together on a special  …  project, I suppose you would call it, he went on. Something rather controversial, which meant that we had to be extremely careful. Thats why we didnt use our own staff, but brought in freelancers like your father. People without any official connection to the project, but who were still unwaveringly loyal  …

And who you could afford to lose if anything went wrong  … ?

That sounds rather cynical  …

But its true, isnt it?

He shrugged.

Your father was well aware of the rules of the game. He knew how it worked. Anyway, this project was given high priority for a number of years, and we had access to almost unlimited resources. Then suddenly everything changed, political support was withdrawn and the budget was cut drastically. But we carried on with our work nonetheless, just more discreetly. Everyone involved in the project was convinced of its importance for national security. And we also had a degree of support from some of our former sponsors, which enabled us to carry on well into the 1980s. But eventually one of our most faithful friends abandoned us, someone who had previously been our biggest supporter. Our little unit was shut down for good, the offices closed and the remaining staff reallocated elsewhere. In conjunction with this I left the service altogether. Since then I have worked for the private sector  …

And Dad, what happened to him?

Your father was never formally employed, there was no contract, and thus no obligations  …

He shook his head.

It wasnt right, considering how faithfully he had served our cause  …  Of course there were others like him, people who also ended up out in the cold without so much as a word of thanks. But Im afraid Erland was the one who took it hardest. That was the second time he had been expelled, cast out of somewhere he felt he belonged  …

He paused to drink the rest of his mineral water.

When was this? What year?

The late 1980s, youd have been, what, eleven or twelve years old then  … ?

She took a deep breath and then slowly let it out. Her right hand had finally calmed down enough for her to dare to put it back on the table.

Do you remember much from that time, Rebecca?

Well, er  …  she said, her voice catching, and she cleared her throat. Not much, really.

But that wasnt entirely true. She remembered some things well. Far too well.

He didnt wake up until it was almost evening, which wasnt actually that odd. It had been four oclock by the time he went to bed.

He had been sitting against that fucking wall listening, trying to pick up the slightest detail of the conversations that seemed to be going on in there. Hour after hour of indistinct muttering, with only random words audible.

By now his notepad was full of things he thought he had heard, but they left him none the wiser.

The words gluten, labyrinth and carer had recurred several times but, just like all the other words, it was impossible to piece them together into anything resembling a coherent context.

He dragged himself up into a sitting position, scratched his beard, then under his arms and his balls. Then he pulled one of the longer butts out of the ashtray on the bedside table and fumbled for his lighter. This whole situation was on the verge of slipping out of his hands. He had no plan, no defence at all, the cops were breathing down his neck and, to cap it all, he was under constant surveillance.
 
 

 

He hadnt spoken to Becca for several weeks, months even, which was actually no bad thing. If he stayed away from her, then she ought to be safe. The only problem was that he felt so fucking lonely!

Hed tried to get hold of Manga, but the sodding little rug-hugger wasnt answering his phone and the computer shop had been boarded up since winter when his little work experience lads got locked up. Okay, so he could have gone out to Farsta and knocked on the door of Mangas flat, but that felt like far too ambitious a project. Anyway, besides the fact that he really didnt feel like leaving the flat, he had no desire at all to bump into Mangas lawfully wretched other half, Betul the Bitch  …

He found an old box of matches in one of the kitchen drawers and, with some difficulty, managed to light the cigarette butt.

But even the fag wasnt enough to improve his mood.

He ought to be starving, it had been hours since his last micro-bombed gourmet feast. But he had no appetite at all.

Just as he slumped onto the sofa his phone began to ring in the bedroom. He briefly considered not bothering to answer it.

But whoever was calling seemed keen to get hold of him, because it went on ringing.

He guessed it was Becca, and suddenly felt his mood brighten. He thought he might abandon his principles and answer this time, just a short conversation so he could hear her voice. That would hardly do too much damage.

He struggled laboriously up from the sofa and stumbled back into the bedroom. Hed got about halfway when he realized what was wrong. The ringtone was right, but the problem was that hed switched his Nokia off once the cops had let go of him. Hed taken the battery out and put the phone in one of the kitchen drawers.

So it wasnt that phone that was ringing.

He speeded up and lurched round the doorframe into the bedroom.

The phone was still ringing, but the tone seemed to change, and suddenly sounded louder, sharper. Like a razorblade against his eardrums. It took him a couple of seconds to identify where the sound was coming from. The pile of newspapers on the bedside table, beside the ashtray hed just searched for butts. He tipped the whole lot onto the bedroom floor. He saw the silvery phone slide across the parquet floor, halfway under the bed. For a moment his heart seemed to have stopped.

The phone had been dead, switched off  –  he was absolutely certain of that!

He had even tried to bring it back to life the other night, just to make sure. Why the hell hadnt he simply destroyed it, smashed it with a hammer and thrown the pieces in the bin?

The screen was flashing and the vibrations were making the phone move, almost as if it were a living creature hiding under his bed.

HP felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The phone had almost spun round one hundred and eighty degrees, and he couldnt take his eyes off it.

Obviously he shouldnt answer, there were at least a thousand logical reasons why not.

WRONG! Ten thousand!

But, even so, he still sank to his knees and reached slowly under the bed. He was trying in vain to stop his hand trembling. His fingers brushed against it, slowly closing around the rectangular metal object  …

Hello? he croaked.

There was silence on the line, and for a few moments he thought the person at the other end had hung up.

Then he heard music. In the distance, and he pressed the phone hard against his ear to try to work out what it was. Organ music, like a church.

It took him a few more seconds to work out what he was listening to.

The wedding march.





9





Guns, guards and gates  …




She still didnt know what to think. The whole of Uncle Tages story obviously sounded completely unbelievable, and if it had come from anyone else she would immediately have dismissed it as utter rubbish.

But right now his story was the only explanation she had. And in a lot of ways it fitted very well. It explained both the photograph and the fake passports, and also cast a certain light over other things, not least the bitterness that seemed to have consumed her dad from within, turning him into a different person, a person it was increasingly difficult to like. And she really had tried. Doing all she could to please him, longing for the smallest sign of approval  …

But there were still far too many gaps in the story. According to Uncle Tage, Dad had been dismissed sometime in the mid-eighties. But as far as she knew he had gone on working, still going off on his business trips for almost another ten years before he finally came home from Spain in a coffin.

She hadnt asked Uncle Tage about that, hadnt raised any of the details surrounding Dads death. Nor, in spite of his prompting, had she said anything about the revolver in the safe deposit box.

But the more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that he already knew about it. And that it was actually the gun he was most anxious to get hold of.

That was also why she wanted to wait before asking any more questions, at least until shed had time to check out his story. Put a bit more meat on the bones.

But, if she was honest, her reluctance was probably just as much to do with the fact that she was worried about the answers.

Or that her brain was already full of other, considerably more pressing matters. Like the weird circumstances of Henkes arrest and Mark Blacks impending visit, now only four days away.

And she hadnt been able to stop thinking about that van that had been following them. She had just found the response from the Highways Agency in her pigeon-hole. The van was a rental vehicle registered to a new company set up out in the western suburbs. Groundstone Ltd, a standard name allocated whenever the person registering a new business hadnt supplied a company name. The address was a post office box, just like thousands of other businesses. Altogether, the information in the letter didnt really help either to dismiss or reinforce her suspicions.