The Andalucian Friend

by Alexander Soderberg

  “I don’t know,” she said, trying to find him in the crowd. But Lars Vinge had vanished.

  The wall. The confusion of pictures, names, arrows, notes. Complete chaos. He let his breathing calm down. Concentrated on the pictures of Sophie. He backed away, saw a flicker of a connection; he wanted to reach out and touch it, but lost it and … Fuck!

  Lars wrote on the wall: Man 35–40, Swedish, armed, calm. He drew an arrow to Sophie. He backed away again, looked, tried to remember. Did he recognize the voice of the man in the car? His eyes slid to the photograph of the man Sophie had met on Strandvägen. Thoughts were bouncing around inside his head. Time flowed onward, his concentration wavered. His reasoning refused to stay with him.

  Lars went into the bathroom, prepared a new dose. This time he thought he’d managed to mix a painkiller cocktail. He gulped down the pills, looked at himself in the mirror, lazily humming “New York, New York.” Lars was pale, saggy, and he had little yellow spots around his mouth—he liked what he saw.

  The wall again, Lars carried on working, looking, searching. He scratched at his spots, his legs were in constant motion, he was grinding his teeth like some fucking ruminating elk. Was there some pattern that he wasn’t seeing? A code embedded in everything he had written on the wall? Had he subconsciously created a code containing the answer to everything he didn’t understand? Maybe that was it.… The divine answer to everything? Maybe it was there, amid the chaos on the wall? Maybe there were other answers too? Lars could feel his drug-fueled intelligence racing. Then it stopped. As if Ingo Johansson had stepped out of the picture leaning against the wall, taken a step forward, and hit him with a heavy right hook to the face.

  Lars sat down on the chair, his neck hanging, unable to think or even move. He was mentally knocked out, his brain sluggish with painkillers. He was drooling from the side of his mouth. He stared down at his legs, saw the grass stains on the knees of his jeans … like when he was a little boy! Lars laughed at the thought, grass stains on his knees! The dose had been too high. Tiredness made its way through his neck and shoulders and out into his body, his chest, stomach, legs, feet—to every corner of Lars Vinge. He slid off the chair and ended up on his knees, then fell forward and put his hands out to stop himself. His wrists and lower arms hurt as he landed.

  He saw a single cable that wasn’t attached to anything beneath the desk. Lars stared at the cable. It suggested a number of associations that flickered past.

  He topped up with Ketogan and benzo … and something else as well. A decent enough overdose. But the dose didn’t give him what he was looking for. Instead it felt as though something outside him was exerting great pressure on him, at least that was how he experienced it. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, he was heavier than the mass of an exploding star. And then Ingo popped up again. This time he made some Gothenburg joke, jabbed from the left, feinted, and followed up with a heavy right uppercut. Everything went black.

  The phone was ringing, dragging him back from a dense, soundless darkness. Lars looked at the time, he must have been gone for many long hours. The phone rang again. It was persistent and discordant. He got up on his knees. The phone was shrieking now. Leaning on the desk, he got to his feet and walked unsteadily over the wooden floor. The base of his spine and his knees were aching.

  “Hello?”

  “Lars Vinge?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Gunnel Nordin, I’m calling from Lyckoslanten Care Home. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your mother passed away this morning.”

  “Oh … That’s a shame.”

  Lars hung up and went out into the kitchen without knowing why. Maybe he was looking for something. The phone rang again. He looked around, hoping that this would help him remember what it was he needed. The phone kept ringing. He looked up at the ceiling, then down at the floor, then all around him, turning 360 degrees. The phone went on ringing. No, he couldn’t remember what he was looking for, although his brain was racing.

  The ringing carried on. He picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m calling from Lyckoslanten again. Gunnel Nordin …”

  “Yes?”

  Lars glanced down at his feet.

  “I don’t know if you understood what I just told you.”

  “Yes, you told me Mom died.”

  His cheek was itching, as if he’d been bitten by a gnat. Irritated, he scratched hard with his fingernails.

  “Do you want to come over? See her before they take her away?”

  He looked at his nails, there was a bit of blood on them.

  “No, no, that’s fine, take her away.”

  Gunnel Nordin was silent for a moment.

  “I’m afraid I must ask you to come and finalize a few things, sign some papers, collect Rosie’s belongings. Can you come sometime this week?”

  “Yes … that ought to be OK.”

  Lars was still wandering about, looking for something.

  “There’s one more thing I should tell you.…”

  “Yes?”

  “Rosie … your mom took her own life.…”

  “Oh … OK.”

  He hung up again. What the hell was it he was looking for?

  Lars opened the fridge, and the chill that hit him felt pleasant. He stood there for a long time, it sounded louder this time. He stared at the condensing unit right at the back, listening to the way it clicked.

  The phone started shrieking again, boring into him, shredding his peace of mind. He heard himself scream, a scream from the abyss, full of fury that seemed to come from the deep.

  “Yes?”

  “Lars, what happened yesterday?”

  Gunilla’s voice.

  “Yesterday? Nothing, as far as I know.”

  “Your car’s gone up in flames.”

  “My car?”

  “The Saab out in Stocksund, it went up in a fire last night.”

  “How?”

  “We don’t know. Witnesses say it exploded. When did you go home?”

  “About eleven.”

  “And the equipment?”

  “Left in the Saab. Where’s the car now?”

  “It’s been taken away, to the Täby Police Compound. They’re going to take a look at it, but you know how long that takes.”

  He didn’t know.

  “Who could have done this, Lars?”

  Lars acted bewildered.

  “No idea … Hooligans, kids … I don’t know, Gunilla.”

  “How much recorded material did we lose?”

  “Nothing of any value, I’ve been sending you everything, after all.”

  Gunilla stayed on the line for a moment, then hung up.

  Jens wanted to go on sleeping but the sound of the phone ringing wouldn’t let up. He reached for the receiver, knocking his old alarm clock onto the floor. He just managed to see the position of the hour hand, which, together with the sunlight filtering through the curtains, suggested that it was the middle of the day.

  “Hello …”

  “Did I wake you?”

  “No, no, I was up.”

  “Can we talk?”

  Jens tried to put everything back in place inside his head. “Are you calling from the phone I gave you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hang up, I’ll call you back.”

  He threw off the thick white duvet and put his foot down on the soft carpet. His bedroom was as light as the inside of a cumulus cloud. White everywhere, except for one painting, which was a muted deep red: a Mark Rothko copy that he was very fond of. Jens stretched, stood up, and walked out of the room. He was wearing nothing but his ivory cotton boxer shorts, big and loose, with buttons, handmade in Turkey. He had bought twenty pairs from the tailor. In his opinion they were the best clothes he had ever bought.

  He continued into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and fished out a new SIM card, tore off the plastic, and inserted it under the battery in his cell phone, then called Sophie.


  “A car was burned out here last night,” she said as soon she answered.

  He was still slightly groggy from sleep. “Burned out? How?”

  “I was woken by an explosion at about half past twelve. Albert and I went out, there was a car on fire, a Saab. Then the fire department turned up to put it out.”

  “A Saab?”

  “Yes.”

  “How odd.”

  “That’s putting it mildly.… Is this anything to do with you?”

  “No.”

  Jens thought back through the evening. “I was there a few hours before. But you know that, I told you.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was a man sitting in the Saab, a police officer. I was going to creep up on him and take some pictures. It was all supposed to happen without anyone noticing anything. That was the plan.”

  “But?”

  “But plans rarely work out the way you want them to.”

  “So?”

  “I saw Hector in your kitchen. Then Aron came walking up the road. He was heading straight for the man in the Saab.”

  Sophie waited.

  “So I had to get rid of the policeman. If Aron had become suspicious of him, and found the surveillance equipment in the car—well, you can figure out the rest.”

  “What happened?”

  “I jumped in the Saab and forced him to drive off.”

  “Then what?”

  “I got out a few blocks away and made my way back into the city.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes, that’s all. I got his name,” Jens said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Lars Vinge.”

  “What does he look like?”

  Jens went out into the hall, took out Lars Vinge’s ID card, put it on the hall table, took a picture with no flash, and sent it over to her.

  They were silent at both ends of the line. He could hear her breathing, then her phone beeped.

  “That’s him. I saw him last night, he was in the crowd watching as the car burned.”

  Her response surprised him.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. And he was the one driving the Volvo the night Hector went missing. I’ve seen him somewhere else, too.… I’m not sure where, maybe on Djurgården. Did he see you?”

  “No, I stayed hidden behind the driver’s seat.” Jens thought. “He must have set fire to the car himself.”

  “What for?”

  “Maybe he felt a bit stupid once I’d taken his things.”

  “What did you take?”

  “His phone, wallet, and the magazine of his gun … and the car keys. All the things he cared about.”

  “What happens now, Jens?”

  He could hear how worried she was.

  “Are the police more dangerous now?” she said.

  “We might be lucky.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He’s trying to keep this quiet, Officer Lars. Not telling anyone, maybe he feels ashamed. And that’s why he set fire to the car.”

  “Or maybe not,” she said quietly. “What if your actions have made everything worse, especially for Albert? Have you thought about that?”

  “Yes, I have. But I weighed that up against you getting found out by Aron and Hector. That would have been worse.”

  He could hear steps outside.

  “What are you doing today?” he found himself asking. He regretted it the moment he said it.

  “I’m going to work.”

  He tried to find something else to say, but failed.

  “Good-bye, Sophie.”

  She ended the call.

  19

  Sara had been waiting in a café across the road, sitting where she had a view of the door and could see when Lars came out. Her eyes followed him as he walked off down the street. She thought he looked different somehow, he seemed oddly stiff—as if he were ill.

  Sara waited until he had disappeared from sight. Then she got up, went out onto the sidewalk, looked quickly in both directions, then crossed Swedenborgsgatan. In the elevator she took off her sunglasses and looked at her reflection. The bruise from when he had hit her covered her whole right eye. Some of the blue was turning almost green now. She looked terrible.

  Sara unlocked the door with her keys and stepped inside the apartment. There was a pile of unopened mail by her feet, and a chair full of saucepans in the middle of the hall floor. There was a stale, musty smell.

  She went into the office, it was dark and messy. An unmade mattress on the floor. The sheet had somehow ended up in the middle of the wooden floor. A stained pillow with no pillowcase, a blanket lying beside the mattress. Plates with remnants of old food, glasses, bits of paper towels … My god.

  And all the work? A chaos of papers and pictures everywhere. And the wall, covered in manic notes. Sara took a deep breath, pulled out a chair and sat down, and just looked at the mess. A wave of sadness suddenly washed over her, sadness that the man she had been so fond of had lost his grip. That this was his life now. Sadness at the sheer … collapse. But the sorrow was short-lived, she wanted to feel sympathy but couldn’t—instead she felt hatred, she hated him for what he had done to her. Sara looked at the photograph of a woman named Sophie, then a picture of a man who was evidently named Hector. More names, more pictures, Gunilla, Anders, Hasse, Albert, Aron … and a man without a name; he was sitting on a bench by the water, it looked like Strandvägen. Sara let her eyes roam over the wall, not understanding any of it. And the words! Words everywhere, words written in small writing wherever there was space, some scribbled out—manically scribbled out. Some of it was in big, looping letters, as if he had written it in different moods.

  She switched on his computer. She’d known the password for ages, from back when they shared the machine. She pressed Enter. While she was waiting for it to start up she opened the desk drawers. Messy, no apparent logic. In the bottom drawer she found a folder that someone had drawn a flower on. She opened it. Printouts of photographs on A4 paper. A whole folder full of pictures of the same woman. She turned and looked at the wall … Sophie. Sara leafed through the folder. Hundreds of pictures of Sophie in various situations. Sophie cycling, Sophie in the kitchen, the picture taken from outside. Sophie walking, Sophie working in the garden. Sophie going through the entrance to a big building, possibly a hospital … Sophie driving a car and … Sophie asleep. What the …? A close-up of her sleeping face. The picture must have been taken in her bedroom, from close quarters. This is really sick, this is obsessive.

  She kept on going through the drawers and found a pair of silk panties; they weren’t hers, they were some expensive label. She put them back and found a notepad. She opened it up and leafed through it. Poems … Lars’s appalling handwriting. Awful poems, flowery language: summer meadow … thirsting for the well of the deepest love … Your beautiful hair blowing warmth over the evils of the world … You and I, Sophie, against the world …

  Sara stared at them with a feeling of disgust. The computer had finished loading. The desktop was full of folders with dates below them. She opened one of them. The folder was packed with audio files. She clicked on the first one and sound started coming from the computer’s speakers. Sara listened; to start with it was mostly just background noise, then after a while she heard steps on a wooden floor, a door opening somewhere, time passed, a television was switched on and the female anchor’s voice—she recognized it—could be heard in the distance. She left the file running, playing the nondescript sounds, and stood up to look at the faces on the wall.

  She knew Gunilla was Lars’s boss, but the others? Anders and Hasse might be colleagues.

  Everything spread out from Sophie. She followed the lines, read Lars’s notes. A pattern started to emerge.

  “Albert, come on, food’s ready!”

  Sara started, the voice was coming from the computer, it was clear, sounded close to her. Sara listened as someone took plates out of a cupboard, was that Sophie?
Silence followed, then the file ended. She went over to the computer, selected another file, and heard a telephone conversation, Sophie talking to someone she knew, laughing, asking questions. The conversation was gossip, it sounded like Sophie was talking to a girlfriend about someone who’d made a fool of themselves at a party. Sara clicked on a different file. Sophie questioning a boy about World War II, he knew the answers to all the questions except for one about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. She looked at a picture of a teenage boy on the wall, Albert. He looked confident, alert, and happy. She clicked on another file, music from a stereo somewhere. Another file, Albert eating sandwiches with a friend, a succession of sick jokes and bursts of laughter. Then another file. Nothing but background noise again, then something that sounded like a slap. A conversation between the boy and Sophie. She heard the words rape, witnesses, police. Sara listened intently, then listened again—five times to the same clip. Oh my God …

  She copied as many of the audio files as she could onto a USB memory stick. She took a camera from her pocket and photographed the wall, the pictures, the poems.…

  She copied everything she could before she left.

  He had picked up his V70 again. It was standing where he had left it a week earlier, in a garage out in Aspudden.

  Lars skidded to a halt outside Lyckoslanten Care Home. He had been driving faster than he had realized, and had to brake sharply when he realized. Unaware of speed driving through the city? He slid over the grit-covered road, and managed to stop the Volvo just before it hit a parked car. Two youths walking past gave him the thumbs-up. Lars hesitated too long. A thumbs-up in response would have been too late.

  He found a nurse inside the care home, told her who he was, and that he was there to go through his mother’s belongings. The nurse nodded and said she’d unlock the door for him. He followed her, she had a big backside, he couldn’t take his eyes off it. The nurse unlocked Rosie’s room and Lars stepped inside.

  “Come down to reception when you’re done, we need your signature on a couple of forms.”