“She just said that you’d been dismissed with immediate effect.”
He met her gaze for a moment, then looked away again.
“Something about ill-considered behavior that had put the company at risk. That you had therefore lost the confidence of those in charge . . .”
“You don’t buy that, do you?” She fixed her eyes on him.
“No, of course not . . .”
“You don’t sound very convincing . . .”
“Stop it, Becca, I actually tried to defend you. I said what a hard time you’d been having lately, with the sleeping pills and all that . . .”
“You said
what?!
”
He held his hands up in front of him.
“Nothing, just that you’d been having trouble sleeping. That’s true, isn’t it. Lack of sleep can have a serious effect on people’s judgment . . .”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this . . .” She covered her face with her hands for a moment.
“Well, I was only trying to help . . .” he muttered.
She took a couple of deep breaths and resisted saying the first thing that popped into her head, then the second as well.
“I have to empty my desk straightaway,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Then I’m going to contact a lawyer. They’re not going to get away with this.” She glanced at her watch.
“We can talk more at home.”
“Erm.”
He seemed to be plucking up courage all of a sudden.
“I mean, Becca, I like the company. A lot, actually. I’ve been here pretty much from the start, and now that PayTag has pumped money in . . .”
He looked her in the eye. For a few moments neither of them said anything.
“To be honest, Becca, you and me, it hasn’t been working for a long while. Not since . . .”
She opened her mouth to say something, to cut him off with some biting remark.
But instead she stood there in silence.
“Now or in two months’ time, the result will still be the same, so why drag it out . . . ?”
He shrugged.
The lump of ice she had had in her chest all morning suddenly felt twice the size. She wanted to protest, scream at him that he was wrong, that he was an idiot. That all this could be fixed . . .
But instead she slowly turned around. Then gave him a weary look over one shoulder.
She left the room, closing the door carefully behind her.
♦ ♦ ♦
Her things fit in a plastic bag.
A couple of files with her pay stubs, employment contract, and various other formal papers. The old police cap that she’d kept hanging on the wall, along with a couple of framed photographs from the time she was training to become a bodyguard. She threw in the trash the potted plant Micke had given her when she started, then changed her mind and put it back on the windowsill.
All of her guards were out on jobs, and the office staff had long since gone home. She picked up the bag and headed downstairs.
First to the vault, where she locked her gun away, then she emptied her locker. All that remained was leaving her keys and pass card in the personnel department’s pigeonhole. But instead of going back upstairs, she went onto the street through the basement door and started to walk off toward the subway station.
She felt in her pockets for her travel card and found it in her inside pocket. But when she pulled it out the business card that Uncle Tage had given her outside the flat came with it. A rectangle of thick white card with a large royal coat of arms in gold, red, and blue on one side of it.
COLONEL ANDRÉ PELLAS
Office of the Marshal of the Realm
Royal Household
Followed by a telephone number and an email address, but, oddly enough, no cell phone number.
Then, on the back, written in blue pen:
070—43 05 06
/ Uncle T.
For some reason the short message put her in a slightly better mood.
♦ ♦ ♦
He followed the brick wall for a while until he came to an opening.
Even though the place hadn’t been a prison for more than
thirty years, the old institutional buildings still looked really creepy, especially now, in the middle of the night. There was an Arkham Asylum vibe that was hard to shake off. The large, walled gravel yard he was standing in had once been the prison courtyard. Somewhere way ahead he could hear music mixed with the sound of traffic on the Western Bridge high above.
A few weary streetlamps in the parking lot over in one corner had company from a couple of lights in the windows of the low buildings straight ahead, which was where the music seemed to be coming from.
But all the windows of the huge building to his right were dark, and when he walked up to the door he discovered why.
The youth hostel is closed for refurbishment.
See you again in the autumn!
Shit! He’d been looking forward to a shower and a night in a proper bed.
But he wasn’t entirely out of luck. He’d spotted a portacabin and a couple of toolsheds at one end of the building, and when he went around the building he found a temporary plywood door.
Two metal catches and a simple padlock were all there was to keep trespassers out, and he forced them open easily with the help of a brick.
Inside the door was a pitch-black corridor that smelled of brick dust, but at least his trusty lighter gave him a bit of light.
A few meters in he reached the large cell block. It looked almost exactly the way he had imagined.
The faint light of the summer night was falling through the skylights high up in the roof. It had to be twenty meters high. In between were several open landings lined with cell doors.
To the right was a metal staircase, and he briefly considered climbing up to look for a bed straightaway. Then he realized that he really did have to clean himself up first.
His stomach was still cramping, and in spite of the involuntary bath he could still smell the shit in his trousers. In other words, a shower was priority number one.
He carried on through the ground floor, holding the lighter high enough to get a better idea of where he was.
Obviously the building was now a youth hostel. But they had retained the prison atmosphere, and in the darkness that feeling was intensified many times over. Hundreds, presumably thousands of poor bastards must have done time here over the years.
Cramped cells, thick stone walls, heavy bars over the windows. Hard labor six days a week on a meager diet of bread and water.
Fuck, this was a long way from his own experience of prison, and that had been bad enough . . .
A sudden sound made him jump. A metallic clang from somewhere in the darkness off to his right.
He stopped for a moment, trying to move the lighter so he could see better. But the room was far too large and the flickering patch of light was quickly swallowed up by the thick darkness.
He gulped and couldn’t help shuddering. Hardly surprising, really, seeing as the place really was fucking creepy, and given that he was soaked through and had shat himself.
The sound must have come from a fuse box, something like that.
Just to be on the safe side he waited another minute, but everything was quiet.
Time to find that shower . . .
A couple of meters away he could just make out the shape of a metal sign sticking out from one of the thick walls. He raised the light to read what it said:
Washroom
Yes!
♦ ♦ ♦
She put her bags down inside the door and went into the living room without switching the light on.
It smelled dank.
Last winter they had talked about whether she should get rid of her flat. Micke’s two-room flat was both bigger and closer to the city center, and with the money they made from the sale they’d be able to buy the one-room flat next door and knock through.
But she had procrastinated and avoided the subject long enough for the neighboring flat to be sold. Maybe she’d already had a suspicion that it wasn’t going to work out, and that she was going to need a backup plan.
She opened the window and let in some cool night air. Then she tipped out all the belongings she had picked up from his place onto the bed.
A failed relationship, boiled down to a toothbrush, a few crumpled clothes, a couple of dog-eared books, and few other random possessions.
Fired and dumped on the same day. Nice work, Normén . . .
Weirdly, losing her job hurt more. Getting fired was somehow the ultimate failure. She and Micke had been on the slide for a very long time, he had actually been right about that. There were reasons why she had preferred the time when they were dating without any fuss, then later when she was going behind his back and seeing Tobbe Lundh. All the security and
predictability that most other people seemed to crave made her skin crawl. Kept her awake at night.
And the happy pills hadn’t been much help.
Over the past few months she had tried to find new ways of handling her restlessness. More time in the gym and the firing range, and, most of all, more work. Loads of work.
But that had all just been a way of postponing the inevitable. She simply wasn’t in love with Micke anymore, and maybe she never had been.
Not properly . . .
A shame, because he was a nice guy, really nice.
But if she looked in the rearview mirror, nice guys didn’t really seem to be her thing. According to convention, she was now supposed to shut herself away in her flat, put on her dressing gown, eat rocky road straight from the tub, and fast-forward through ten seasons of some American sitcom.
But what she felt was mostly just weary disappointment mixed with a few spoonfuls of relief. Besides, she didn’t have time to feel sorry for herself.
The safe-deposit box, Uncle Tage/André Pellas, and everything she had seen up in Henke’s flat—the whole lot was probably connected somehow, and she needed to work out how.
She opened the bathroom cabinet, found the right box, and took her evening medication.
Then she got the business card out of her pocket and fetched her phone.
♦ ♦ ♦
The pills, the wet pack of cigarettes, the lighter, the key to his flat, and a roll of soaking-wet notes from his secret stash . . .
He lined the objects up on the windowsill in the spa
cious shower room. The tiles on the walls reflected some of the light from outside, enough for him to get his bearings without the lighter. In one jacket pocket he found the pay-as-you-go cell phone he had been given by the gang in the vet’s clinic.
Shit, he thought he’d ditched it in the park.
But so what, the cheap plastic gadget was full of water now and bound to be stone-dead.
He turned on the shower and to his surprise discovered that there was hot water. After rinsing off the worst of the dirt and mess, he moved on to cleaning his clothes.
His underpants were ruined, there was no point even trying to rescue them. But he scrubbed his jeans hard on the rough floor until most of the shit was gone.
The jacket and T-shirt were easier, and he draped everything across some hooks in the corner of the room to dry. When he was finished he sat on the floor as the water continued to rain down on him.
He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. The spiral of thoughts in his head began to slow down.
Spinning sloooower
and
sloooooooweeer . . .
♦ ♦ ♦
“You were very easy to find . . .”
The voice came out of nowhere.
He flinched, hitting his head on the tiles, making him dizzy.
Then he tried to stagger to his feet as his heart raced and his brain tried to work out where he was and who the hell had crept up on him while he was asleep.
“Not very impressive, is he?”
The man’s voice again, evidently addressing someone else. HP squinted at the door where the voices seemed to be coming from.
Instinctively he moved his hands to cover his crotch. The gruff voice sounded familiar.
Two shadowy figures emerged from the darkness and he took a step back.
“Here, we brought some new clothes . . .”
He definitely recognized that voice.
It was Nora, the vet. She dropped a gym bag on the floor beside him.
For one terrible moment he thought it was stripy, made in needlework class when he was at school, and had his phone number on it. But when he touched it he found to his relief that this bag was made of nylon.
“Th-thanks,” he managed to stammer.
“Get dressed quickly, we have to go!” the man muttered, and now HP had no trouble placing the voice.
Biffalo Bull from the vet’s, Jeff or whatever his name was.
“What the fuck are you doing here . . . ?” he spluttered, but neither of them answered. “How did you find . . . ?”
He broke off.
“It was the phone, wasn’t it?”
“Good guess, Einstein!” Jeff grinned.
“We have to get out of here, HP, right now,” Nora said. “Every cop in the country is looking for you. If anyone in the main building works out that there are people in here . . .”
“Okay, okay.” He quickly pulled on the pants, tracksuit bottoms, T-shirt, and hooded jacket.
Everything fit perfectly, even the sneakers.
As if they knew exactly what size he was.
“You still look pretty rough, are you taking the pills?” Nora asked.
“Mmm,” he murmured. “But I must have eaten something dodgy. I’ve had the shits really fucking bad.”
She went past him to the windowsill and picked up the pills.
“Okay, I’ll give you a few more in case you threw up the last lot . . .”
He put the rest of his things in his pockets and gave his damp clothes one last look.
“Okay, I’m done. Thanks for your help!”
“Right, let’s get going.” Jeff pointed at the door.
“Sorry, don’t know if you’d listened to your messages, but I’m not interested in getting involved. Not my cup of tea . . .”
Neither of them moved.
“Listen, mate,” Jeff said in a tone of voice that was anything but friendly. “That wasn’t a request . . .”
He took a firm grasp of HP’s right bicep and gestured to Nora to lead the way.
He waited a moment until she was a few meters away.