The Other Son (21 page)

Albert woke up in a narrow bunk.

He looked around the room. The ceiling and walls were covered with soundproof rubber. There were no windows.

The room was sparsely furnished. Apart from the bed he was in, there was just a small table and a chair in the middle of the floor.

His wheelchair was beside the bed. Albert looked above his head, where there was a metal pole with a handle on a chain. It looked like they'd thought of everything.

The last thing he remembered was waking up in a car, and the man with the strange eyes had drugged him again, just like he had in the apartment on Norr Mälarstrand. A hard grip around his neck, the handkerchief against his nose and mouth, the strong, bitter smell. Albert had time to notice from the road signs that they were in Germany.

He heaved himself out of bed and into his wheelchair. There were two doors in the room, one of which was cut into the rubber and had no handle. The other one was an ordinary wooden door that led to a small bathroom, with a disabled-friendly toilet, basin, and shower.

He wheeled himself over to the door with no handle and tried to bang on it.

The hours ticked by. The lack of windows, of a horizon and any concept of time, made him anxious. And the room was so small.

Mom?
What had happened to his mom?

He felt panic growing. He just wanted to know where he was, to hear another person's voice. Anything at all…

Albert closed his eyes and tried to find a place inside himself, a calm place. But he couldn't.

The hours blurred together and he drifted between dream and reality as he sat in his wheelchair in one corner of the room. The feeling of panic was there the whole time. It just kept growing, and he found himself gasping for breath.

Albert started to shout, then scream. It made the panic worse. Albert stopped and sat still in his wheelchair, arms wrapped tightly around himself.

The sound was barely audible…something metallic. At first he thought it was in his mind, or some remnant from a dream. But it was there, just below him on the floor, halfway along one of the longer walls. A rattling sound, as if someone was running an object up and down a small grille—a high-pitched sound.

Albert lowered himself to the floor, listened, tried to identify where it was coming from, then pulled off some of the insulation and found a small ventilation hole at ground level. The sound became clearer. He put his mouth to the hole.

“Hello?”

The rattling continued. Albert called out again. Then it stopped. A voice, somewhat distant, words in German that Albert didn't understand.

“Who's that?” he asked in English.

A moment's silence. Then the voice replied in the same language.

“I'm Lothar, who are you?”

Albert relaxed a bit, the sound of another person's voice calmed his panic.

“I'm Albert. Are you locked up like me?”

“Yes,” Lothar replied.

“Why are we here?”

“I don't know. Where are you from, Albert?”

Albert got the impression that the voice belonged to a young man, perhaps someone his own age.

“From Sweden, Stockholm. I'm sixteen. How old are you, Lothar?”

“I'm seventeen, from Berlin.”

Albert lay there by the hole, trying to figure out his next question.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“I don't know, in Germany, I think. The south, maybe Bavaria.”

“Why do you think that?”

“The food they serve.”

“They?”

“Yes, whoever they are.”

“How long have you been here?”

“A few days. You?”

“I don't know, I just woke up. Have you met anyone, seen anyone?”

“No, they bring the food in when I'm asleep. I haven't seen or heard anyone.”

“What happened to you? How did you get here?”

“They killed my mom,” the voice said quietly.

Those words changed everything. The brief conversation with Lothar had made Albert forget how serious things were. Now the realization crashed back in on him with full force.

“They broke into our apartment. Killed her, drugged me, brought me here,” Lothar said.

Albert stared in front of him. She was dead. His mom was dead….

“Albert?”

“Yes,” he managed to say.

“What happened to you?”

“They broke into our apartment, drugged me.”

“Was anyone there with you?”

“My mom,” he said.

Antonia had two cases left to work on. They were hopeless—old and forgotten. There was nothing to investigate, and no suspect would ever be brought to trial. All the evidence had long since been cleared away or messed up.

The phone rang.

“Yes?”

“
Hi, this is Jerry Karlsson again.
”

“Hello, Jerry Karlsson,” she said, without having any idea of who the man was. He seemed to realize.

“
I had a call from you the other day. I work with probate cases.
”

“Probate?”

“
The estates of people who've died.
”

She remembered.

“Lars Vinge?”

“
Yes, sweetie.
”

“And you've got something for me?”

“
Yes
.”

“Where? What?”

“
In the basement of the building I live in.
”

Jerry Karlsson had
trouble with his hips, and limped slightly on his right leg. He'd been retired for a few years now, his fair hair was almost yellow, and his thin face was adorned with a large, crooked nose. A sergeant in the Life Guards and a former lightweight boxer, he told her as they walked down the concrete corridor in a basement on Metargatan. He was friendly, cheerful.

“How long have you been doing this?”

“A few years. I'm always buying up estates and house clean-outs. Usually I sell them off at once, make a bit of profit in the process. But some people don't have anything. People are generally fairly poor, especially the dead.”

Antonia's and Jerry's steps echoed along the corridor.

“In cases like that I store the belongings until they've built up. Then I sell the entire contents of the store. If there's no interest, I donate the whole lot to charity once a year. You're in luck; all this old rubbish will be going soon, it's been here for six months. Nothing of value.”

He stopped at a metal door and pulled out a key ring worthy of a janitor.

“How about you, sweetie?” He found the right key with a practiced hand.

“Nothing special.”

Jerry turned the key in the lock and pulled the door open, gesturing for her to enter.

Antonia stepped into an enclosed room. The fluorescent light flickered and hummed for a moment before turning on properly. She saw a ton of different storage areas divided by wooden frames covered with chicken wire and by plastered walls.

The man limped through the labyrinth until eventually he stuck a key in one of the padlocks.

“This used to be two storage spaces, but I got rid of the dividing wall. After you,” he said, opening the mesh door.

She looked inside. The space was three meters by four in size, piled full of belongings from floor to ceiling.

“This is all Lars Vinge's?”

Jerry read a handwritten note.

“No, three different estates in this store, but only their loose effects, no furniture.”

“But one of them is Vinge's?”

Jerry glanced at the note again.

“Yes, according to my notes, that's the case. But there's no proper organization in here, so I don't know what was his.”

Antonia looked at the mountain in front of her. Boxes, plastic bags full to bursting. Clothes, books, paraphernalia, clutter, odd bits and pieces…

“OK, thanks. Can I just start looking?”

Jerry gave her the thumbs-up and left the basement.

Antonia stifled a sigh and looked around at the mess.

She pulled out a big moving crate. Clothes, women's clothes. She closed the lid again, sat down on it, and slowly began to go through everything in front of her. First she looked through the books; people sometimes tucked things inside them, notes, money. It was time-consuming, dusty. She felt through the clothes, looked through cutlery and kitchen equipment, moved two framed posters.

Behind them she found more moving crates, containing more clothes, books, and bed linen.

It was tiring work, made all the more difficult by her underlying belief that she wasn't going to find anything.

The hours rolled past, and she was drowning in clutter.

Antonia was struck by the fact that there was nothing personal. No letters or notes, no photographs, no mementos, nothing that gave any clue as to what sort of person Lars Vinge had been. Everything seemed to have been cleaned up.

After five hours Antonia had been through the whole of the storage room, bit by bit. She was tired, thirsty, and in need of a pee. The working day was long since over. She called Jerry on his cell phone, and he offered to let her use his loo upstairs.

She went up. Jerry offered her some fruit and something to drink, showed her his trophies from his boxing career, standing dusty on a top shelf in his living room. Then she went back to the basement and started again from scratch, carefully and methodically going through everything one more time.

Jerry was kind enough to show up with a flask of coffee and some store-bought buns, then limped off again.

It was past eleven in the evening when she heard a lovely sound. She had missed it before when she had pulled out all the front pockets of all the trousers she found. Before starting the second time she decided to shake all the clothes properly. It fell out of the back pocket of a pair of jeans…there was a flash as it flew weightlessly through the air, followed by a wonderful metallic tinkling sound as it hit the concrete floor, like the note from a tuning fork—an A, perhaps, in a strangely high octave.

Antonia looked at the key, then bent over and picked it up. Yes, she had been right. It was the key to a safe-deposit box.