Game: A Thriller (28 page)

She knocked on the door three times but there was no answer. Maybe he was asleep? It may have been well into the afternoon, but it would hardly surprise her if Henke was taking a little siesta.

She felt the handle and discovered that the door was unlocked, but for some reason she stopped in the doorway. She didn’t really know why, but something was making her feel uneasy. She examined the door more carefully and soon found what she was looking for. A small, almost invisible mark in the wood just above the lock. Admittedly, it could have been old, but a quick check of the step revealed some flakes of the right color paint.

Someone had broken into the cottage, and recently. The question was, were they still there?

Rebecca held her breath and listened for any sound from inside.

Quiet as the grave.

She stepped silently through the door and into the hall. The stench of cigarette smoke and hash almost made her eyes water. She put her hand on the frame of the door to the kitchen and leaned around it quickly to get a look inside.

The movement was too fast for any attacker to have time to react, but still enough for her to register the contents of the room. She repeated the procedure with the little bedroom to the right of the hall.

The results were unambiguous; the cottage was empty.

Whoever had broken in was gone now, and it didn’t look like anything had been stolen. A laptop, screen saver on, stood untouched on the little kitchen table. There were a few dirty mugs and glasses here and there, most of them containing cigarette
butts, and the little sink was overflowing with dirty dishes and empty food tins.

There was a shabby green sleeping bag in a heap at one end of the rib-backed sofa, and a filthy T-shirt and a pair of tattered Cheap Monday jeans were hanging untidily over one of the two kitchen chairs.

Smoky, filthy, and untidy: rather different to how Aunt Berit usually kept it, she imagined.

It looked like Mange had been telling the truth; all the signs were that Henke had taken up residence . . .

So, where was he now, and how long would he be gone? The best thing she could do was sit down on the little sofa and wait.

♦  ♦  ♦

What the fu . . . ? !

A quick trip up to the Ring Road to stock up on cigarettes and Gorby pies, that was the plan.

He ended up getting falafel and an ice cream as well, because there wasn’t really any hurry. He’d almost made it back to the cottage when he saw the flashing blue lights.

Two patrol cars and an unmarked van with a trailer, all lined up in front of Auntie’s little cottage. The trailer looked weird, a bit like an outsized milk churn with its lid open. One of the cops seemed to be in a hell of a hurry to set up a police cordon at the end of the road, but as luck would have it, HP saw him first.

He stopped abruptly and turned in to one of the little side paths to find a good observation post.

A couple of minutes later he was sitting on top of a rocky outcrop surrounded by lilac bushes.

So what the hell was going on down there?

♦  ♦  ♦

For some reason she hadn’t just sat down.

Afterward she couldn’t really explain why, but it was as if the feeling that something was wrong wouldn’t let go of her.

It took just a few seconds before she realized what was troubling her. The sofa she had been about to sit down on was slightly out of position. She could clearly see the marks on the cork matting where the leg of the sofa usually sat, but now it was a few centimeters out. Okay, so the sofa was pretty old, but it was solid pine and to judge by the deep indentation in the floor it would take a fair bit of effort to shift it. So why had someone done so?

Instead of sitting down, she got down on her knees and looked underneath.

♦  ♦  ♦

He could see some of the cops talking with serious expressions, then another man showed up wearing a protective suit and a helmet that made him look like a green astronaut.

The man wobbled inside the cottage and the cops quickly moved to the far side of the cars; it looked almost like they were taking cover. After a couple of minutes the spaceman came out with some sort of object in his hands. He lurched toward the trailer and put whatever it was he was holding inside it.

Even though he was sitting some distance away, HP had no trouble noticing how relieved the cops looked when the lid closed.

♦  ♦  ♦

She didn’t really know what she had been expecting to find. But it was perfectly clear that the object under there wouldn’t
have been on her top-ten list of things she was likely to find, if anyone had asked her to come up with such a list.

A set of keys, some loose change, maybe a cell phone someone had dropped?

But not this . . .

It took her a few seconds to know what she was staring at, and why it was there; then she very slowly got to her feet, picked up the laptop, and exited the cottage.

She left the front door open.

♦  ♦  ♦

It wasn’t until he’d been sitting there for a few minutes that he recognized one of the cops. To start with he thought it was just another plainclothes officer. Khaki shorts with lots of pockets, an untucked short-sleeve shirt, baseball cap, sensible sneakers, and all the other things that were supposed to help them fit in.

But their cops’ posture and that way they had of moving their heads almost always gave them away.

He had been concentrating on the men around the trailer, and it wasn’t until the lid closed that he looked more closely at the rest of the gang and realized that the plainclothes cop was actually Becca. She was standing there talking to the man in the astronaut outfit.

What the fuck was she doing here?!

♦  ♦  ♦

“Definitely viable,” the bomb-disposal expert said. According to the patch on his suit, his name was Selander, and evidently he liked talking in clipped sentences.

“Two sticks of dynamex. Pressure trigger mounted under the sofa cushion. Sitting down would be enough. More than enough to blow the cottage sky-high. Damn lucky you had your wits about you, Normén . . .”

He paused to put in a dose of chewing tobacco.

“Won’t know for sure if it would definitely have gone off until we get it into the lab and take it apart,” he went on, this time slightly more expressively. “I’ll get back to you. I presume the Södermalm Crime Unit will be in charge? You said this was your brother’s cottage?”

“Something like that,” she muttered.

Her head was spinning. Flash grenades, chucking stones at police cars, and now a damn bomb!

What in the name of holy hell had Henke got himself caught up in?

“I daresay our colleagues in Crime will be pretty keen to have a word with him,” Selander concluded as he wiped the tobacco from his fingers on the bomb suit.

Rebecca just nodded in response.

Welcome to the club!
she thought.

REBECCA WAS EXHAUSTED
when she got home. She had spent most of the afternoon with the Södermalm Crime Unit telling them what had happened out in Tantolunden. Or rather the parts that she deemed suitable to reveal.

She didn’t mention her visit to see Mange or the video clips she had seen in the shop. It was fairly likely that the clips had something to do with the events out at the cottage, but before she’d had a chance to talk to Henke she didn’t really want to show them to her colleagues. She hadn’t missed the pointed silence that had fallen when Henke’s criminal record was mentioned.

Then the obligatory questions: Did her brother have any enemies? Did she know how he made a living? Did she know anything about the arson attack on his flat a week before?

She answered no to each of the questions, which was actually true. Well, almost, anyway.

She locked her cycle away in the basement and took the stairs up as usual.

Maybe it was because she was tired, or because she was deep in thought, but she didn’t notice that someone was waiting for her.

“Becca!”

She spun around and automatically raised her hands in front of her.

“Calm down, it’s only me, Henke!”

Of course it was only him.

She should have known. Where else was he going to go?

She muttered something, turned around, and unlocked the door of her flat before shepherding him in before her. She stopped inside the door for a couple of seconds, then locked all four locks.

But only once, and even though part of her was protesting wildly, that would have to do. She had no intention of giving him a demonstration of her compulsive behavior.

In the hall the answering machine was flashing to indicate another missed call. Number withheld, same as usual.

Henke had already made himself at home on the sofa in the living room.

“Got any coffee?”

She resisted, with some effort, a sudden urge to grab the nearest heavy object and smash his skull in. Fucking bloody idiot, creeping up on her like that! She didn’t even know he knew where she lived. When she’d been out searching half the city for him, and here he was all of a sudden, sitting on her sofa.

And what on earth did he look like?

Even more strung out than last time, with great bags under his eyes and nicotine yellow skin. Fingernails chewed almost to the quick, his hair all over the place, and utterly filthy too.

A smell of ingrained smoke and unwashed guy wafted up from her sofa, making her wrinkle her nose.

He was looking at her quizzically and she realized she hadn’t answered his question.

“Sure,” she snapped and went out into the kitchen.

“You can clean yourself up in the meantime, the bathroom’s off the hall,” she called from the kitchen as she took care of the machine.

But when she came back a few minutes later with a tray of coffee, he was asleep.

She sighed, poured herself a cup, and decided, after a bit of thought, to let him sleep. He looked like he could do with it.

A surprising feeling of tenderness came over her and she couldn’t help giving his cheek a quick stroke. He was still her little brother, after all, her little Henke. Okay, so he was an immature idiot and a first-rate trouble magnet, but that hadn’t always been the case. Once it had been the two of them against the world. And through all the shit, they had always had each other.

But that was a long time ago. Things changed, whether you liked it or not.

She drank the last of the cup, leaned her head back against the sofa, and closed her eyes.

♦  ♦  ♦

She had understood from the noise he was making in the hall when he got in. The way he slammed the front door, the way he jangled his keys as he kicked off his shoes. She tried to warn Henke, but he had his back to her, sitting on one of the folding chairs out on the balcony, smoking. Henke and Dag sometimes used to share a cig out there, even though Dag claimed he’d given up. Smoking didn’t fit in with his exercise regime and all that crap. Yet he still hung about out there all the time, leaning over the railing, and not just when Henke was visiting. From the balcony he could keep an
eye on the backyard, as well as the carpark where the BMW was.

On good days they got on pretty well, Dag and Henke. They could stand out there chatting, almost like they were friends. She liked days like that; they made her feel as if she had a proper family.

But this definitely wasn’t going to be one of those days, she’d known that the moment the front door slammed shut.

“Hello!”

His voice was ice-cold, almost emotionless, but she had no difficulty picking up the anger bubbling beneath it.

“Is everything okay?” she said as quietly and calmly as she could.

He just snorted in reply.

“Is there any food?”

“Fish gratin, it’s in the oven. Henke and I have already eaten.”

Another snort. This didn’t bode well, she knew from experience. At a guess, something had gone wrong at work, a troublesome customer, an order that had got lost, or his boss stirring things up. It didn’t usually take very much.

“So how long is your useless brother going to exploit my hospitality this time?” he muttered through gritted teeth a bit later, nodding toward Henke, who was still out on the balcony.

“Just a couple of days,” she said as neutrally as she could. “Things are a bit tricky at home with Mom and everything. He needed to get away for a bit.”

A third snort, this time more scornful.

“A bit tricky . . .” he muttered as he shoveled a spoonful of the gratin into his mouth. “Your mother’s just a pathetic alcoholic,” he declared between chews. “Get her into a home so you
can have a bit of peace and quiet, then we won’t have that little crook hanging about around here all the time.”

She was on her way to getting angry and he saw it. A happy grin spread over his face.

“Oh, so you’re cross I said something nasty about poor, innocent little Henke?” he added in that patronizing childish voice she hated. He’d gone straight for her weak point and she had to make an effort not to rise to the bait.

“Henke’s just been a bit unlucky,” she said with forced calm. “He hasn’t always had it so easy, and besides, he’s my little brother.”

“Easy?!” Dag had suddenly gone red in the face, and he flew up from his chair.

This was the row he had been looking for ever since he opened the door, and now he was getting what he wanted.

“You talk about easy, but what fucking problems has your worthless brother ever had, eh? My dad wasn’t exactly a saint either. He used to beat the crap out of me every other day until I learned to hit back. The bastard walked out when I was fifteen, but look at me!” He gestured toward his chest with his thumb. “I didn’t end up a fucking criminal! I’ve worked since I was sixteen, hauled my way up the ladder, paid my taxes, and looked after myself, and for what? So I can support someone like him?”

His mouth was spraying little bits of saliva and food, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“What’s up?”

Henke was peering in from the balcony. She tried to signal to him to take it easy, not provoke Dag, just let him burn himself out, then everything would calm down. But he didn’t seem to get it. Anyway, Dag wasn’t about to let him get away lightly this time.