“Start what?”
“I don’t know, they must have been worried about you.… Worried that you’d do something without thinking it through—after all, they’d threatened you. Sooner or later you were likely to do something.”
Sophie didn’t understand.
“But why now?”
Lars thought. “Something’s going on—”
“Tell us everything, right from the start,” Jens interrupted.
Lars looked up at Sophie and Jens, trying to think. He put his right hand down flat on the table, seemed to be trying to find a structure. Then he started to talk. First hesitantly and tentatively, but after a bit of confusion he pulled himself together, got onto the right track, and managed to stay on it. He described how he had been contacted by Gunilla Strandberg, how he had started working for her. How he had quickly forgotten the purpose of it. How he had watched Sophie, and about the microphones in her house, about his reports to Gunilla, about how he didn’t know the others had kidnapped Albert. How he didn’t know anything about anything, how he had been kept at arm’s length.
She thought it all felt unreal. There was the man who had been stalking her for weeks, telling them things that were beyond her comprehension. The idea that she was somehow in the center of something gradually dawned on her. He talked about people who had made her the starting point for a criminal investigation that didn’t seem to have any foundations. About the way Gunilla Strandberg worked and didn’t work, about the fact that the man she had met in the police station was Erik Strandberg, Gunilla’s brother, and about his sudden death. About their attempts to put pressure on other people around Hector, about an unhealthy obsession with making progress toward something. And about a clandestine detective—Anders Ask—and a thug—Hasse Berglund—and how the pair of them had gone after Albert.
Lars stopped talking, looked down at the table, and rubbed his finger on an invisible mark.
“You said you were starting to build up a picture.… What did that picture look like?” she asked.
“I don’t know.…” He scratched his forehead. “Our lives are in danger. Yours and mine, Sophie … Albert’s, but you’ve already realized that.”
He looked at Sophie and Jens.
“Was it you who put the note in my mailbox?” she asked.
He nodded.
“And you’ve been inside my house?”
Now he was staring at her.
“What?”
“Answer,” Jens said.
Lars lowered his head, shook it. Stared fixedly at the floor.
“No …,” he mumbled.
“No, what?”
“No, I’m not going to answer that,” he whispered.
Jens and Sophie looked at each other. This guy was seriously disturbed.
“The Saab, why did you set fire to it?” Jens asked.
“I was just starting to realize that there were a lot of things going on that I wasn’t part of at all.… When you came and took my ID and the rest of it, I started to get an idea. I took the surveillance equipment out … set fire to the car, told Gunilla all the equipment had gone up in smoke.”
“Why?”
Lars was drawing circles on the table with one finger of his right hand.
“I’ve started listening to them instead.”
“Who?” Jens asked.
“Gunilla, my colleagues.”
“Why?”
Lars stopped drawing circles.
“What did you say?” he asked, as if he’d suddenly forgotten everything he’d just been saying.
“Why did you start listening to your colleagues?” Jens said slowly, in a sharp tone of voice.
Lars’s memory came back and he swallowed.
“Because I realized that something was going on that I … that I was being kept out of.”
“What?” Jens asked.
“Just then everything was too messed up to make any sense out of … but I was right, at least.”
Jens and Sophie waited.
“They murdered my girlfriend.”
Lars almost whispered the words.
“Sorry?” Sophie said.
He looked up at her and Jens.
“They murdered Sara, my girlfriend.”
Mikhail was driving back into the city, Sophie and Jens were in the backseat.
“Fucking hell,” Jens whispered.
She could only agree. She was staring out of the window, looking at the steady stream of traffic driving past them.
Mikhail and Klaus had left, the good-byes had been short. There was a knock at the door. Jens looked at his watch.
“Mikhail must have forgotten something,” he muttered to himself.
He looked out through the peephole, expecting to see two men. But outside stood three men, three men of a different sort: hollow-eyed, tired, and staring all at the same time. Gosha with his shaved head, Vitaly with a bottle of liqueur in his hand, and Dmitry, eyes wide apart. Fuck. He’d calculated that they wouldn’t reach Stockholm before later that evening, and wasn’t expecting them before that. They must have driven nonstop.
Jens pulled away from the door and went into the kitchen. Sophie saw the look on his face.
“What is it?”
Jens hurried over to the kitchen window.
“What is it, Jens?”
“They’re here earlier than I expected.… We have to get away from here, now.”
There was a loud bang on the door.
“Who are they?”
Jens opened one of the kitchen windows. “Never mind that. Come on, we need to leave.”
“Let me say that you’re not here.”
“Trust me, you don’t want to do that.”
The banging on the door had turned into heavy thuds. The whole frame was shaking out in the hall. Jens pointed at the open window. Sophie wanted to come up with another option. The thudding became hard kicks. She could hear the Russians’ agitated voices. Jens climbed out the window, turned back, and held his hand out to her. She looked at him, looked at the hand, hesitating. Then she left the kitchen and disappeared back into the apartment.
“Sophie!” Jens hissed.
A foot came through the wood of the front door, the agitated voices could be heard more clearly now. She came back with her handbag, took his hand, and stepped up onto the window ledge. The sound of wood being kicked out of the door merged with the men’s shouts and yells as they made their way into the apartment.
She clambered out onto the narrow ledge. It was clad with worn, beaten tin. The wind was gusting. She clung on to the edges of the attic windows adorning the top part of the façade. It was a long way down to the street and the tin was slippery. She glanced down. The cars looked small enough for the view to give her an instant fear of dying. She looked toward Jens, but that made her feel just as giddy. The sky above her felt far too large.
“We need to get farther away. Be careful, little steps,” he whispered, and began moving off to the left.
Sophie followed him. She could hear voices from inside the apartment as the Russians wandered between the rooms. Dmitry was screeching angrily, then something got broken, and the men started shouting accusations at one another. She was sweating, shaking. Her fear of heights was rising inside her like a fierce sense of nausea. Jens turned toward her and saw how terrified she was.
“Just a few more steps. You can do it,” he said calmly.
They moved slowly toward the next apartment. The façade changed, they were moving onto another building. Jens stopped, trying to think of a way to proceed. The ledge got even narrower, it sloped downward, and there was nothing to hold on to, just slippery tin with a few raised edges for the three yards ahead of them before they reached the next window. She stared, it looked impossible. Jens tried it out, clinging to one of the ridges with one hand, there wasn’t much to hold on to, their fingers would have to do all the work.
“I can’t,” she said.
Her heart was pounding in her chest. Her throat was d
ry, she couldn’t swallow.
Jens changed his grip, slid one foot along, clinging to the ridge in the tin.
“We have to get to the next apartment.”
“No, I can’t,” she pleaded.
Fear of dying was pressing in on her. She just wanted to sit down and wait for someone to come and get her.
With one swift movement Jens moved onto the next building. He was standing with his feet on the narrow ledge, clinging to the ridges in the tin plating. He held still for a moment to see if the technique was going to work. She stared at him. What he was about to do looked impossible. She could never do it. She looked down. Her breathing was shallow, and tears began trickling down her cheeks.
“You’re crazy, you hear?” she said.
He saw her tears, the state she was in, took another step, keeping his body tight against the façade of the building, shuffling along with his feet, his knuckles white. Jens stopped and took a deep breath. When he had regained his composure he took a few more little steps. He had covered two yards and was getting closer to the next window. But not close enough to be able to reach it.
Finally he made it to the attic window. Jens stopped and clung on tightly as he concentrated, swung his leg out, and kicked as hard as he could to break the glass. Once the window was broken, he had to crouch down to open the catch from the inside. He let go with his right hand and carefully bent his legs, stuck his hand in, opened the window, and climbed inside. Everything seemed to happen in one long, considered movement.
He vanished for a couple of seconds before reappearing. This time he was sitting hunched on the windowsill, reaching as far as he could in her direction. That might give her one yard’s grace, but what good was that? She straightened up, and the wind tugged at her. He waved her toward him.
“Come on, now.”
She wanted to breathe in more air but she was so terrified that she could only take shallow breaths. Her heart was pounding so hard that it seemed to be absorbing all the oxygen in her body. Sophie breathed out, but the lump in her throat was still there.
“You can do it, just hold on tight with your hands,” he said.
She started to hyperventilate and tears began to fall once more.
“Now!” Jens said, beckoning with his hand.
Sophie realized that she only had one option: to do what he had done, find some sort of grip and heave herself up with one leg.
“Sophie!” he hissed.
The Russians were yelling inside the kitchen. She blinked away her tears, swallowed the lump in her throat, and did it all in one movement. She grabbed hold of the protruding joint in the tin plating, and stood there with her back toward certain death. It felt like it would only take one little gust of wind and she would fall. She took a step to the left. The ledge beneath her sloped downward. She clung on tight, her fingers were white. She got ready to switch her grip to take the next step and grab the third ridge in the tin. Sophie flung out her arm, got hold of the ridge, and took a quick step to the left. Her foot started to slide, and her grip on the tin slipped. She screamed as she lost her hold.
She felt his hand grab her hair, then an arm around her neck. For a second everything went black.
They crashed down onto the floor and ended up lying on broken glass. Sophie couldn’t move. She was lying on top of Jens. His eyes were wide open, his forehead wet with sweat. They looked into each other’s eyes.
“You did it,” he said.
He got up, pulling her with him. They hurried through the apartment, she was high on adrenaline. Jens gestured to her to stop in the hall. He called a number on his cell, then said that now he was the one who needed help. After a short conversation he ended the call and was about to make his way out into the stairwell when he realized that the door was locked from the outside.
“Start looking!” he told her.
They started searching the hall, Sophie looking through the outdoor clothes hanging up there, Jens checking the drawers of a low chest beneath a large mirror. He found nothing, neither did she. He checked in another cupboard, she looked in the drawers again, as if she didn’t trust him to do it properly. Sophie glanced around the hall, along the walls, along the floor, the door frame, above the fuse box.… There, a hook, one solitary key. She reached for it, caught it, tried it in the lock. She turned it—click—the door opened.
They took the stairs down to the street in long strides, Jens held the heavy wooden door open for her. They ran to his rental car and jumped in.
Just as he swung out onto the road Dmitry came running out the door of the next building. Jens put his foot down and drove off at speed. Dmitry and his friends ran toward their car.
Sophie pulled out her phone and made a call.
“Hello … It’s me.”
“So I hear.”
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer at once, possibly surprised at her direct question. “Nothing much.”
“Can we meet?”
“When?”
“Now?”
He was silent again.
“This is all rather sudden. I’m at the restaurant,” he said.
She ended the call. Jens was weaving through the traffic.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“No …,” she said quietly.
“Why do you want to go there?”
“Have we got a choice?”
“There’s always a choice.”
“That’s the only place we can get any protection,” she said.
Jens looked in the rearview mirror, couldn’t see Dmitry’s car.
Hasse was sitting in his car, parked outside Trasten, glowering lazily at the world around him. He had been given clear instructions. Wait outside the restaurant, don’t react to anything. Aron Geisler might come out and contact him, or possibly a man named Ernst Lundwall. Hasse was to go with the flow, go back in with them. Once he was inside, the plan was that he should call her, tell her what was going on, what the men were saying to him. But primarily this was about watching the transfer of money. Gunilla would keep an eye on things from her end, and when everything was done he was to shoot Hector Guzman and Aron if he got the chance, make it look like self-defense, then—case closed.
Anders was wandering around the city at random, looking for Sophie and Lars; there was a bounty on their heads now, Sophie in particular. She had to be gotten rid of, which was a bit sad.… Or not, he wasn’t sure what he felt anymore. The murder of Lars’s tree-hugging girlfriend had fundamentally altered him, switched something off, removed something else. But he had also been struck by a vast sense of guilt. It was there the whole time. And he wanted to kill again so that killing became a habit. Then perhaps the guilt would even itself out.
A car drove past Hasse and he followed it with his eyes, it found a space farther up the street and pulled in. A man jumped out, waited for the woman to get out of the passenger side. It took a few seconds for Hasse to realize who it was. After all, he’d only seen her very briefly last time, from behind, when he was about to strangle her. They disappeared inside the restaurant.
He called Anders on his cell. Anders got excited, told him to wait, lie low, said he was on his way.
Then another car drove past and parked farther up the street, a car with Russian plates, but Hasse didn’t react to that. Hasse was instead preparing to kill two birds with one stone, or possibly three. He checked his gun, took the safety catch off, made sure there was a bullet in the chamber.
The restaurant was closed. Hector was sitting at a table with Aron, Ernst Lundwall, and Alfonse Ramirez. The table was now their workplace. Alfonse was sitting in front of a Wi-Fi laptop, Ernst was going through a mass of documents, Hector and Aron were doing calculations on a sheet of paper. They were all drinking coffee except for Alfonse, who was drinking wine.
Hector looked almost startled when he saw Sophie come in together with Jens. He was about to say something but Sophie interrupted him.
“We have to talk.”
Hector stood up and indicated that they should sit down a bit farther away.
He held out a chair for her. She sat down, and he sat opposite and looked at her, waiting for her to begin.
Sophie took a deep breath, glanced quickly at Jens, who had sat down on his own at another table, then at Ernst and Aron and the stranger, who all seemed occupied with their work.
“Am I interrupting?” she asked.
Hector shook his head, and gestured hastily toward Jens.
“What’s he doing here?”
Everything felt so wrong, she wished it could be different.
“We can deal with that later,” she said, collecting herself and trying to find a way to begin. Sophie put her hands in her lap and prepared herself for what might turn out to be her own suicide.
“My son, Albert, is in the hospital. He was run over, his back’s broken.”
Hector looked momentarily horrified and was about to ask something when she held her hand up.
She started again.
“About a month ago I was contacted by …”
She didn’t get any further than that. The door of the restaurant flew open with a bang and was left hanging from one hinge.
“Jeans!”
The voice was loud. Dmitry marched into the restaurant with a revolver hanging from his hand. Behind him came Gosha with a heavy cudgel, then Vitaly with a pistol. Dmitry spotted Jens.
“Missed me?”
Jens looked at Dmitry with distaste. Hector and Aron exchanged a glance, as if they were trying to figure out who these men were.
“What do you want?” Jens asked.
Dmitry pointed toward himself with the pistol, trying to look surprised.
“What I want? Doesn’t matter … because now I’m here and … it’s been a long fucking journey and I’ve been looking forward to shooting you, over and over again.”
Sophie could see Jens tapping at his cell under the table. She glanced cautiously around the room. Aron was sitting still, the stranger was rocking gently on his chair, taking careful sips from his glass of wine. Ernst Lundwall was staring down at the table. And Hector … he was sitting there quite still, smiling reassuringly at her.
Jens stood up, Sophie saw him slip his cell into his pocket in the same motion.
The Andalucian Friend Page 37
