Four possible keys left. She inspected them carefully.
One of them was slightly crooked and looked too old, so she decided not to try it. But a couple of the others looked much more promising.
Neither of them worked, however, nor did her third choice.
She was just about to try the slightly crooked key when there was a faint noise from out in the vault. She started, and flew up to her feet, turned round and peered cautiously out into the corridor.
Empty, of course.
The door to the vault was motorised, and if it had opened there was no doubt at all that she would have heard it.
She went back to the locker and put the crooked key in the lock. It fitted, but she couldnt manage to turn it. After a couple of attempts she took it out.
Bloody hell!
Her guess about the bunch of keys looked like it had been wrong. Henke had probably hidden the key somewhere else entirely, so her best hope of opening the box was gone.
She could probably persuade the bank to drill it open eventually but, given the number of security procedures they had in place, that would be bound to take several months.
Which of course would give Stigsson and his team plenty of time to find out about the box.
So what was she going to do now?
The crooked key had at least fitted, so maybe it could be straightened?
She removed the key from the bunch, put it on the floor and put her heel on the bent part a couple of times. Then she picked it up again and looked at it carefully.
It was worth a last attempt, at least.
She put the key in the lock and carefully turned it.
The lock clicked and the little brass door opened.
The metal box inside surprised her. Not only because it was locked, with a combination dial on the front, but also because its colour and shape really didnt seem to belong in this exclusive, almost sterile bank vault. The box had probably been green once upon a time, but the paint had peeled badly. In a couple of places she could make out the remnants of yellow letters and numbers. And the thick tin was badly buckled in places, almost as if someone had tried to open it with force. Slowly she pulled the box from the compartment. It was seventy to eighty centimetres long, and much heavier than she had been expecting, but fortunately there was a handle at the back, enabling her to pick it up and carry it over towards one of the small cubicles without difficulty.
She closed the door carefully behind her, turned the little lock and then put the box in the middle of the desk.
The combination lock looked vaguely familiar. She had an idea she had actually seen something similar in a small police station that had a safe instead of a weapons room.
You started from zero, picked a number between one and a hundred, then back to zero, followed by the next number, until you had entered the right combination.
Three numbers apart from the zeros, that was usually the case. So what should she try?
Suddenly she heard the noise from out in the vault again and stiffened. This time it was clearer. A quick little squeak, like someone treading too quickly on a marble floor with a rubber-soled shoe.
She hadnt heard the vault door open, so someone must have been inside when she arrived.
Unless there was another entrance that she hadnt noticed … ?
She turned the lock, cautiously opened the door a crack and peered out into the corridor.
Is anyone there? she said quietly. No answer.
She waited a few seconds before carefully closing and locking the door.
If she was going to open the box, she had to focus on working out the combination.
She tried Henkes date of birth, but without success.
Then she tried Mums. No good.
If Henke had picked numbers out of thin air, she would have to find another way of opening the box.
It was far too large to go in her bag, and she wondered if she could just carry it out. Was that allowed?
She stood motionless for a few moments, and realized that she was listening out for sounds from the vault. But apart from the faint rumble of the air-conditioning, everything was quiet.
Suddenly she had an idea and tried a new combination of numbers. Zero, then nineteen, back to zero, then six, back to zero, seventy-five.
Slowly she moved the dial back towards zero. The lock made an audible click.
Henke had used her date of birth as the combination!
The box had a false bottom that divided it into two sections. In the top part she found a bundle of dollar-bills. Beside the money was a little pile of small booklets, held together by a thick brown rubber band. As she picked them up the dry rubber snapped and they spilled out across the table. It took her just a fraction of a second to realize what the variously coloured booklets were.
Foreign passports, most of them a few years old seeing as she didnt recognize them immediately.
She opened one of them and found herself staring at a grainy photograph of a fair-haired man with a moustache and dark-framed glasses. He reminded her of Henke. The hairline, the set of his eyes, and his prominent cheekbones.
John Earnest, born 1938 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, according to the details in the passport.
But that was impossible. In spite of the colour of his hair, the glasses and the moustache, she was quite certain. The man in the picture was her dad.
It took him almost a whole minute before he even dare touch the phone. His hands were shaking so much he could hardly get a grip on the metal.
He could feel the numbers with his fingertips, and didnt even need to turn the thing over to check.
1
2
8
Of course. Anything else would have been out of the question.
He put the phone down gently on the coffee table, then walked around the sofa. Then walked round it again …
The book was still on the floor. It had brought down a couple of serious dustballs with it from the top of the bookcase, but, just like the phone, the front cover was completely clean, which could mean only one thing. Both objects must have been left up there very recently.
He got the list of confiscated property from the kitchen. Five crumpled pages of A4, where each item seized from his flat by the cops was listed in pedantic detail. Halfway down the third page he found what he was looking for.
103. One book, The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger.
The message was perfectly clear. Someone had retrieved the book from wherever the cops had been storing it, and put it back in his flat together with the phone. Just as Erman had said, the Game was everywhere, and the book on his living-room floor proved that not even the Security Police were immune.
Fucking hell!
He slumped down on the sofa, staring at the phone on the coffee table as he ran his fingers through his hair.
Once, then several more times, harder. Strands of hair came loose and wound round his fingers, but he hardly noticed.
The phone could be a copy.
He had given his own to Manga, two years ago, and then Becca had picked it up and buried it away in the lost property office. Then he had found out that the phone was owned by ACME Telecom Services, so presumably it had found its way back to them.
ACME Telecom Services – a proud member of the PayTag Group …
He stopped tearing his hair, absentmindedly pulled the loose strands from his fingers, then reached for the phone.
Its surface felt cool as he held it up to the light and tilted it until he found what he was looking for. A couple of centimetre-long scratches in one corner of the glass screen, from the time he had been dangling off a brick wall in Birkastan, with a tattooed gorilla whose door he had just defaced with a little warning message doing his best to pull him down.
Like fuck was this a copy!
Hed known it the moment he caught sight of the phone on the floor. This really was his phone.
Even before she lifted the lid of the lower section, she had a good idea of what it contained.
It was the smell that alerted her. A bitter, oily smell that she recognized all too well.
She slowly lifted the lid. A black revolver with a narrow brown handle lay concealed in the lower compartment, and her heart instantly began to beat harder.
She resisted an immediate urge to pick the gun up. Instead she leaned forward and inspected the revolver as closely as she could. Unlike a lot of her colleagues, she wasnt particularly interested in guns. The police forces Sig Sauers and the compact assault rifles that were the Personal Protection Units backup weapon of choice were pretty much the only things she had ever fired. But compared to a pistol or an assault rifle, a revolver was a fairly simple weapon. A rotating cylinder in the middle that usually contained six bullets.
Handle, barrel, trigger and a large, visible hammer that could be drawn back with your thumb – that was basically it.
The stubby barrel made the gun look cruel, a bit like a bulldogs nose.
She carefully measured the diameter of the barrel with the end of her little finger. It was roughly the same as her own service pistol. Nine millimetres or thereabouts, but she had a feeling that the calibre of revolvers was usually measured in thousandths of an inch. She tried to work it out in her head, but didnt get very far.
There was a small reading lamp on the little table, and she switched it on and angled it so it shone down into the metal box.
Immediately above the cylinder she found some engraved lettering.
Cal .38, then a longer number, presumably the guns serial number. Obviously she ought to write it down. She dug out a pen and notepad from her bag. She double-checked carefully as she wrote the number twice, going back over the numbers and making them thicker merely to draw out the process. To have something to occupy her mind with.
But the respite was only temporary.
What the hell had she actually found here?