The Andalucian Friend

by Alexander Soderberg

  “Anders!” he called.

  Sophie stretched her hand across the carpet under Albert’s bed, feeling with her fingers. She got hold of the end of the old telescope and grabbed it like a baseball bat.

  “Anders!” he called again, turning his face away from her for a moment.

  Sophie hit him with all her strength. The telescope struck Hasse Berglund on the side of the head. The blow was so hard that he let go of her throat and toppled over on his side, temporarily confused and weakened. Sophie struggled loose, kicking the big man to free her right leg from under his body. She could hear quick steps from the stairs. Sophie scrambled to her feet, hearing Hasse muttering something behind her. From the corner of her eye she could see him regain his strength and start to turn toward her, reaching out an arm to grab her. She leaped up onto the desk and threw herself headfirst through the window. She managed to grab the rusty ladder with her right hand, slid a short distance, and tore a deep cut in the palm of her hand. Sophie lost her grip and fell backward helplessly for a second before landing on her back on the lawn. All the air went out of her and she lay there for a moment. Even though her whole body was telling her to lie still and get her breath back, she forced herself to get up on her feet. She hurried awkwardly over to her car, which was parked on the gravel drive in front of the house, managing to pull the key from her pocket as she ran. Her body ached painfully. Sophie unlocked the car with the remote. She just managed to get in behind the wheel and lock the doors when the men came rushing out of her kitchen door. The overweight one was bleeding from his ear. The other one looked boyish in spite of his age, dark, round deer’s eyes—just the way Dorota had described him.

  She turned the key. The car started. The boyish one drew a pistol and aimed it at her. The overweight one shouted at her to turn the engine off and get out of the vehicle.

  Sophie put the car in reverse and slammed the pedal to the floor. The tires sprayed gravel as the car shot through the gateposts. Sophie wrenched the wheel and lurched out onto the road. She went on reversing at high speed toward the parked Honda. The gears were shrieking at having to go backward so fast. She steeled herself for the impact. The Land Cruiser backed right into the front of the Honda; the collision was hard and brutal, she was thrown backward and hit her head on the seat, feeling dizzy for a moment. She changed gear and drove forward fast. A quick glance in the mirror, the front of the Honda was demolished.

  The men were standing in the middle of the road. Weapons drawn, aimed at her. She pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor, the automatic transmission downshifted. Sophie crouched below the dashboard for cover and headed straight for them. Anders and Hasse leaped out of the way.

  She headed into the multistory garage at the shopping center in Mörby, and parked on the top floor, where she locked the car and hurried out into the mall. Then she stopped, hesitant. Should she take the subway or head out to the buses? She thought quickly. The subway station in Mörby was the end of the line, there was only one way in and out. If the train didn’t come and the men were on their way, she’d have no hope of escape.

  She bought a ticket from the machine and hurried out to the bus stops, hiding in the waiting crowd of people, looking the whole while in the direction the buses came from, occasionally glancing back toward the main entrance to the mall, where she imagined the two policemen were going to rush out at her at any moment. Her heart was beating so hard that she thought it was going to burst through her chest.

  Then, at last … a large, red, articulated bus turned in toward her from the junction and stopped with a hiss in front of the waiting passengers. The number of the bus meant nothing to her, but she didn’t care. She moved with the line and got on board, showing her ticket to the driver, who waved her past. Sophie moved toward the back and sat in a vacant pair of seats, then leaned over and prayed that the bus would leave soon. But it didn’t, it stood there with its doors open, waiting for the scheduled departure time.

  Her breathing was getting harder, shallower. Panic was building and she had to summon up all her strength just to stay on the bus, not run off, even though her whole body was screaming at her to go.

  Finally the doors closed and the bus set off from Mörby. She could breathe out. It carried her toward Sollentuna. Sophie got off at Sjöberg, where she walked among the identical-looking houses and called for a taxi. It arrived fifteen minutes later, and she asked the driver to take her into the city center, Sergels torg.

  She paid cash, jumped out on Klarabergsgatan, and went down into the square. She disappeared into the crowd, made her way into the subway station, and caught a train to Slussen. There she changed platforms and took another train back to Gamla stan, and from there she headed off on foot toward Östermalm.

  He met her in the street, waiting outside his door. She didn’t cry, just let herself be embraced and rested her head on his shoulder.

  They took the elevator up to the top floor. He looked at her in the mirror, not knowing how to comfort her, or if he should even try. He didn’t know how to do that sort of thing, had no training in it, because that was pretty much what he’d spent his whole life avoiding. Now he wanted to be able to do it, now he wanted to know what to do to comfort her. But it was too late, he’d only mess things up if he tried.

  She asked for antiseptic. He gave her what he had. Sophie bandaged her bleeding hand and went into another room. He could hear her talking to her sister on the phone.

  Jens made food for her. She ate in silence, withdrawn, and he let her be.

  There was a smell of formaldehyde in the room. Gunilla was standing there looking down at her dead brother. Erik Strandberg was lying on one of the mortuary’s shiny metal trolleys, it was as if he was asleep. She felt like waking him up, telling him it was time to go to work now, that this was going to be an ordinary day, then they’d have dinner somewhere, discuss the case, talk about all the things they always did.

  What do you do when you see your brother for the last time? Do you try to find something to remember? Do you try to remember something you’ve forgotten? Outside the hospital she sat in her car looking out through the windshield without registering what she was seeing. The scream came. She screamed from the depths of her body until the air in her lungs ran out. Then came the tears, and then the grief, rolling through her consciousness like great gusts of wind. The pain felt like it was going to suffocate her; she felt alone, a vast feeling of abandonment that refused to let go. It was joined by a shapeless sense of impotence. And from that feeling an image gradually emerged, an image that showed that her total isolation had put her in a position in life where she had nothing to lose.

  Then she was done. She opened the window to let in some air, took a few cautious breaths, and wiped her eyes and the makeup that had run down her face. She put her makeup on again in the mirror of the sun visor, sat herself up, took a deep breath, started the car, and drove off.

  That night she came to him. She crept up next to him on the sofa where he had made a bed for himself, into his arms. She lay there for a while, letting herself be held. Then she pulled away and went back to her bed. Jens watched her go, tried to get back to sleep, but couldn’t. He got up, called Jonas at the hospital—he was watching over Albert, said everything was OK.

  In the kitchen he lit a cigarette and smoked it out the window. His cell vibrated on the counter, the screen showed a Moscow number.

  “Yes?”

  “Your friends have left for Sweden.” Risto’s voice sounded as untroubled as ever.

  “To Stockholm?”

  “Yes, they’re on their way.…”

  “When did they leave?”

  “Don’t know. I’d guess at yesterday.”

  “Fine, let them come. They’ll never find me.”

  “They know your name.…”

  “They know my name’s Jens, that’s all.”

  “You traveled to Prague under your real name.… That first meeting with them …”

  Jens remembered. He did th
at sometimes when there was nothing at stake.

  “They got it from the hotel.”

  “OK … Thanks, Risto.”

  Jens ended the call and stood there thinking.

  “Fuck …,” he whispered quietly.

  “What is it?”

  He turned around. Sophie was standing there looking at him. He tried to give her a reassuring smile.

  It was twenty past three in the morning when Lars put the key in the rental car that was parked on Brahegatan.

  He drove off through an apparently dead city, saw just a few people, most of them drunk. He was drunk himself, but that wasn’t something he bothered to consider. Hammered, wired—encapsulated—had become his general state of being.

  He parked the car three blocks from his apartment, took the surveillance equipment out of the back, put it under his arm, and lumbered home.

  In his office he transferred the files to his computer, put on the headphones, and listened to the sequence from Brahegatan where he himself had been present—he heard Gunilla ask him and Erik to go and see Carlos. The sound was bad, it didn’t quite reach the microphone. Footsteps on the floor, a door closing. His and Erik’s footsteps. Lars listened intently, then heard the unmistakable squeak of a marker on the bulletin board.

  “Two topics for discussion.” Gunilla’s voice.

  Silence, then Gunilla’s voice again: “Before we talk about the boy, I want us to go back to that night. Lars knows more than we thought. Erik’s trying to question him now.”

  “Patricia Nordström, does he know about her?”

  That was Anders’s voice. Lars wrote “Patricia Nordström” on a piece of paper.

  “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

  “But she knew?”

  “Yes,” Gunilla said curtly.

  “She?” Lars tried to make sense of it all.

  “Have they found her?” Hasse asked.

  “Yes, a girlfriend found her,” Gunilla said.

  “Cause of death?”

  “Heart failure, just as we wanted.”

  Lars wasn’t understanding any of this.

  “No question marks?” Anders said.

  “No. No question marks … not yet.”

  A cough from Hasse, and Gunilla went on: “It’s important that he doesn’t find out anything right now. I’d like to get rid of him, but if he is holding something back, I’d rather have him here with us in ignorance.”

  A few seconds of nothing, the sound of the pen on the board. Lars pressed his hands over the headphones, concentrating.

  “We have to find the boy, bring him in again,” Gunilla said.

  Lars tried to understand—the boy?

  “Why?” Anders said.

  “We need to pin Sophie down. I get the feeling she’s going to do something drastic soon. That mustn’t happen, not at this point.”

  Gunilla’s voice sounded hollow.

  Lars was thinking. The boy? … Albert! What did they want with him?

  “Isn’t it the last day of school today?” Hasse said.

  Then unclear muttering from Anders and a quiet answer from Gunilla; he couldn’t make out the words. Then the sound of chairs scraping on the floor as Hasse and Anders stood up.

  He switched off the equipment, trying to think about what he’d heard, trying to think about Albert. While he and Erik had gone off to see Carlos, Anders and Hasse had gone after Albert. Had they succeeded? And why? What did they want with the boy? Lars’s brain was working at top speed. Was there anything about Albert that stood out in the surveillance of Sophie? He closed his eyes, searching feverishly inside himself. A thin, indistinct memory drifted past, he tried to capture it. That didn’t work; it disappeared, but not entirely. Something had stuck … something small and fragile. He screwed up his eyes and went over to the computer, trying not to lose it, and typed in the search terms Albert, Sophie, kitchen. A mass of files showed up in the search window. Lars looked at the dates and started listening from the top of the list. There were conversations over breakfast, conversations over dinner, conversations during the day while Albert was doing his homework. There were conversations in the evenings, Sophie on the phone. Albert on the phone. And there were a lot of background noises that set off the voice-activated equipment only for it to shut down again shortly afterward. He listened through file after file, fast-forwarded, searched. Shit, there was something he remembered, he just couldn’t recall what.… Something that only his subconscious had registered. And the more he listened, the weaker his indistinct recollection became.

  After two and a half hours he hadn’t even listened to half of the files. Lars clicked on another one, listened once more, fast-forwarding through the silences. A fridge opened and closed, Sophie’s voice said Albert. Silence followed … and then the unmistakable sound of a slap.

  Lars pressed lightly on the headphones, the sound became clearer, the details audible. Footsteps on the floor, someone standing up from a chair.

  Lars listened.

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  Albert’s voice sounded muffled, as though he were pressing into his mother’s shoulder.

  “It’s over now, they made a mistake.”

  Lars didn’t remember this, he remembered hearing it, but didn’t remember it like this, not this way.

  “But they had witnesses?! Rape? What kind of—”

  Lars heard Sophie hushing him.

  “Try to forget it now, sometimes it just happens. Everyone makes mistakes, even the police.”

  There was silence again. Lars went on listening.

  “He hit me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The policeman in the car, he hit me in the face.”

  There was a long, drawn-out silence in the headphones, the file came to an end. Lars stood up, gathered his thoughts, then wrote what he had just heard up on the wall. He worked feverishly until long into the night. The pieces of the puzzle were finally starting to fall into place.

  As morning dawned he was woken by a phone call. Gunilla wanted to meet him.

  He stared at himself in the bathroom mirror, found a personality that might work. He took it easy with the drugs because he had, after all, been present when her brother died.… That meant you were likely to be a bit off form.

  “What happened?”

  She had her hands in her lap. It was warm, seventy-five degrees in the shade. They were sitting at an outdoor café on Östermalmstorg; she was restrained, as if she were bracing herself to hear something that might affect her emotionally. Lars looked down at the table, then up at Gunilla.

  “We got there, Erik was doing the talking … suddenly he collapsed.…”

  A breeze swept across the square, but brought no relief from the heat.

  “How?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Would I be asking otherwise?”

  Lars began. “He said he couldn’t see properly. One arm started to tremble and shake. He said something incomprehensible, then he fell.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I didn’t hear.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I rushed over and checked his pulse.”

  “And?”

  “He was still alive, and I called for an ambulance.”

  “Then what?”

  “I sat down beside him.”

  “Did he say anything, did you say anything?”

  “He was unconscious, but I kept talking gently to him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said everything was going to be all right, that the ambulance was on its way, that there was no need for him to worry.”

  Gunilla looked away, took a deep breath.

  “Thank you.”

  Lars didn’t respond.

  “And the other man? Carlos, what did he do?”

  “He got scared, went off into another room.”

  “How far had you got in your conversation with him?”

  “Not very far. Erik
said he wanted results. We didn’t get any further.…”

  Gunilla looked at the people around them.

  “It’s starting to come together now, the evidence is starting to mount up. We all need to concentrate on what we’re doing now. No mistakes.”

  Lars took a sip of his glass of water.

  “Has anything happened that I don’t know about?”

  A sad look crossed her eyes, then she shook her head, apparently to herself.

  “It’s terrible, Sophie’s son, Albert, was hit by a car yesterday.… His back’s broken, he’s in intensive care, the whole thing’s just terrible.”

  He wanted to scream. But instead he concentrated on staying calm. He thought about a tree slowly growing, about a stone being shaped by the sea … about anything that happened unbelievably calmly.

  “Oh … Who did it?” he said, sounding precisely as unconcerned as he had hoped.

  Gunilla shrugged her shoulders.

  “Don’t know, it was an accident … hit and run.”

  “That’s terrible. Anything else?”

  He was trying to sound cold and professional.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Gunilla watched Lars Vinge as he headed off toward Humlegårdsgatan. She thought that he had changed, that his previous uncertain and feeble attitude had turned into something else. Not more confident … but stiffer, quieter. He was introverted without being fretful, however that worked.

  She let Lars go, took out her cell, and quickly called Hasse Berglund.

  “Would you mind cleaning up everything at the nurse’s house? Anders can tell you where the microphones are located. Everything needs to go, we mustn’t leave any trace at all.”

  She ended the call, then spent a while just watching the people around her, finding them all interesting. She smiled toward a curly-haired boy in a white shirt and black trousers, who took a few seconds to realize that she wanted to pay her bill.