The Other Son (33 page)

The sun had risen by the time Miles made his way to the road, and there wasn't much traffic. He waved his left hand and stuck his thumb up, and eventually got a lift with a Pentecostal pastor with no cell phone who thought God was cool.

“He isn't at all,” Miles said, seeing as he'd just met Him.

“You look like you could do with a hospital.” The pastor smiled.

“No, that can wait. What I need first is a phone.”

Forest and fields. Signs with strange place names, little wooden houses with obsessively neat gardens with no fences. This was a world Miles didn't recognize.

He got out in a hamlet with no name.

“God bless you,” the pastor said.

“And you,” Miles said.

He found a roadside café. A smell of fried food, friendly atmosphere. “I need to borrow a phone,” he said to the woman behind the counter. She lent him her cell phone, an old one with buttons.

“How are you doing, dear?” she asked.

He knew he looked terrible, assaulted, broken hand, dead and resurrected, filthy, and in a wretched state generally.

“I'll survive, thanks.”

“Your hand?” She pointed to his limp right hand.

“It's broken, I think, but not to worry.”

She was about to say something else, but Miles stepped aside and called Antonia Miller. Her voicemail clicked in immediately.

“Disappear and go underground,” he said, then hung up.

Then he called his brother, Ian—a congenitally unfaithful bastard with a secret fuck pad in Birkastan that he used whenever he wasn't at home playing daddy and loving husband out in Åkersberga.

“I need the apartment, your secret one,” Miles said.

He hadn't spoken to his younger brother for a very long time. He was soon reminded why.

“
I don't know, it's not convenient right now.
”

“Ian, I'll call your wife and kids.”

“
Piss off and go to bed, Miles.
” It was like he was twelve again, perhaps he always had been.

But before Miles could say anything, Ian backed down in the face of the threat.

“
I'll unlock it and leave the keys on the kitchen table, but you'd better not break anything.
”

Miles ended the call, then handed the phone back to the kind woman. She passed him a bandage from the first-aid box.

“Wrap it up for now, and make sure you get to a doctor.”

Miles took the bandage. He was so grateful he could have kissed her.

Miles traveled by
bus, commuter train, and underground. He was returning to reality and Stockholm at the same time. He tried to remain calm, but it didn't work.

He bought a new pay-as-you-go cell phone from a newsstand, and hurried to Birkastan.

The fuck pad was a two-room apartment, registered to a company that was owned by a friend of Ian's. Evidently they shared it. The friend was in the telecom business, and was keen on young girls. Miles had no idea what Ian was keen on, and didn't want to know.

Miles was surprised by the furnishings. The apartment was very tastefully laid out. That wasn't thanks to Ian, he knew that much. And at a guess, it wasn't the telecom pedophile, either. Perhaps it had been bought already furnished.

On the coffee table there was an old Chianti bottle with a candle in it, and an eternity of wax had run down and solidified in the woven basket that covered half the bottle.

He sat down on the sofa, a big velvet thing. It was supposed to look old but was new. And expensive.

He searched for Antonia Miller's home number on his new phone. She didn't have one. He tried to find someone related to her. He called people named Miller, but no one knew her. Perhaps she wasn't even still alive.

He searched his memory. The man in her kitchen popped into his head. With the Dalarna accent, with the football T-shirt….Real Madrid…

What was his name?
Ulf.

Miles had seen him at blue-light events, he'd been a patrol cop for years. Then he got promoted and went into surveillance. Miles didn't know anyone in Surveillance. He didn't really know anyone at all. He dialed the number of the internal police exchange.

A male voice answered.

“Surveillance, please,” Miles said.

“Putting you through,” the voice said.

The line bleeped a few times. Then another voice, female this time, who answered by giving the department number.

“Uffe?” Miles said.

“
Sorry?
”

“I'd like to speak to Uffe….”

“
Uffe who?
” She sounded annoyed.

“Yes, what is his surname? Big guy, from Dalarna, I think. Arrived at Surveillance a couple of years ago, used to be in a patrol car…”

“
Oh, I know who you mean. But no one calls him Uffe. He's just Ulf. His surname's Lange.
”

The call was put through, then redirected, and the tone changed—presumably he was being put through to Ulf's cell phone. It was switched off.

Voicemail clicked in, and a preprogrammed voice said: “
The person you are calling is not available. Press 1 to leave a message, hold to be transferred to the operator.
”

Miles held the phone in front of him and pressed the number 1. There was a beep, and Miles gambled everything on one throw.

“Antonia Miller?” His voice sounded rusty, as if he hadn't spoken all day.

Silent a moment too long. He went on.

“Hello from the worst cop on the force. In all categories.”

Miles gave his new cell phone number, then ended the call.

Ten minutes later his phone rang. Antonia sounded agitated.

“Are we safe on this line?” he asked.

“
I don't know, I think so.
”

“Where are you?”

She seemed to hesitate.

“
Staying with a friend.
”

“Are you safe there?”

“
Yes. But I don't know how long for; there's a warrant out for me.
”

“What for?”

“
Don't know, a load of fabricated crap, it was issued yesterday. But that doesn't matter. I'm blown, I can't be seen in public.
”

“Get a taxi and come here, can you do that?”

“
Yes.
”

“Use one of the smaller companies, the ones that don't take pictures of their customers,” he said. “One more thing…”

“
What?
”

“Maybe you'd better warn Ulf, I don't know.”

“
I already have,
” Antonia said.

Miles told her the right street but the wrong house number.

He wandered restlessly round the apartment for a few minutes, then he went and stood by the living-room window, carefully nudged the closed curtain aside, and looked down at the street.

Twenty minutes later Antonia arrived in a taxi. She got out and walked to a door on the opposite side of the street. Then she stopped and got a cell phone out of her pocket. Miles looked around. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. Someone or something that shouldn't be there, perhaps. The street was dead, apart from an elderly lady who was patiently waiting for a terrier that appeared to be suffering from constipation.

His phone vibrated in his hand. Her number on the screen. He looked at her down in the street before answering.

“The door opposite, third floor,” Miles said, then gave her the door code and the name on the door.

The doorbell rang out in the hall. It was a two-tone, ding-dong model that sounded almost pleasant.

Miles paid particular attention to the distorted extremities of the peephole—nothing. He undid both locks, opened the door, let her in, then shut and locked the door just as quickly.

She was white as a sheet. She looked at him, his facial injuries and his bandaged hand. But she said nothing and walked into the apartment with the sports bag in her hand.

Antonia sat down on the sofa, and in a few quick sentences told him about Tommy breaking into her apartment. Miles told her about his and Ove's attempt to murder him.

Tommy…

“Dear God, Miles,” she said.

He was standing leaning against the doorpost.

“I thought you were dead,” he said.

“I'm not. Where's Tommy now?” she asked.

“Looking for you, I guess.”

She looked hard at him.

“And he thinks you're dead?”

Miles nodded.

“And Roger Lindgren?”

“Dead,” Miles said.

“How?”

“I killed him.”

Antonia tried to figure out Miles's feelings from those bald words. He preempted her.

“That was when Tommy turned up. He's been watching us. He asked about the safe-deposit box, about Lars Vinge.”

They both looked at the bag on her lap.

“Have you found anything?” he asked.

Antonia unzipped the bag and took out the big folder. She stuck her hand in and pulled out a bundle of papers, the printed photographs, and dropped it all on the coffee table.

Miles left the doorway and sat down in an armchair in front of the coffee table, leaned over, and saw a woman in her forties on a bicycle. Then working in a garden, walking out of the main entrance of Danderyd Hospital, standing in the window of a villa looking straight at him. Lots more photographs of her in various situations. All taken with a telephoto lens.

“She was under surveillance,” he muttered.

He leafed through the pictures.

“So who is she?”

“Her name is Sophie Brinkmann,” Antonia said.

Miles studied the pictures.

“Her name cropped up in the Trasten investigation,” Antonia went on. “She's a nurse, she looked after Hector Guzman when he was in the hospital after a hit-and-run incident.”

Miles looked up.

“Oh?” he said, curious.

“I met her briefly, asked her a few questions, but she didn't know anything. I wasn't expecting that either…”

“But?” Miles said.

“No buts. Apart from these pictures, the bag contained a bunch of audio files.”

“Audio files of what?”

“I haven't really had time to go through them all properly. But they're surveillance recordings.”

“Who of?”

Antonia pointed to the pictures of Sophie.

“Why was she being bugged?”

“I don't know.”

Miles picked up the pile and leafed through the other pictures. He saw Gunilla Strandberg, Lars Vinge, and Gunilla's brother, Erik Strandberg, a bearded man in his sixties, flushed and blood-pressure red. Then Hector Guzman and Aron Geisler. Then a photograph taken from a distance. He looked at it closely and saw a blond man sitting on a bench. Another picture, the man had turned his head and Miles could see his face.

“That's him,” Miles said.

“Who?” Antonia asked.

Miles held the picture up to her.

“The Mexico man.”

“What?”

“It's him, the man I picked up from Arlanda, the one who was freed.”

Miles looked at the man who had saved his life after the car crash. He wiped his face with his left hand. He put the heap of pictures on the coffee table.

“Who knows?” she asked.

“Tommy knows,” he replied.

“Apart from Tommy?”

Miles looked across the table, as did Antonia. An excessive amount of information about the nurse, Sophie Brinkmann—so many pictures, pictures, pictures…and so many recordings.

“We've got to get hold of her.”

They got to work. Sophie Brinkmann didn't exist anywhere. No address, nothing. She no longer worked as a nurse, seemed to have no connections anywhere. A complete absence of social contacts, even on the Internet.

They left the apartment. It was cold and dark, and snow crunched beneath their shoes as they walked a few blocks before Miles flagged down a taxi that drove them out toward the tony suburbs to the north of the city. Eighteen minutes later they pulled up outside Sophie Brinkmann's villa in Stocksund, where Antonia had met her six months ago. It was a wooden house, painted yellow, well maintained. It was rather quaint. There was a warm glow from inside.