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Bloody hell, this conversation was nothing like what she’d expected.
Suddenly the sounds of all the computers and gadgets combined into one single enervating, piercing note that seemed to penetrate her head and nail her brain to the inside of her skull.
She screwed up her eyes, swallowed a couple of times and, when she’d regained control of her body, pushed her way past Manga and into the little cubbyhole she’d glimpsed behind the bead-curtain.
Lukewarm water from a dirty glass. Long, restorative gulps that rinsed all unwelcome thoughts away. Pull yourself together, for God’s sake, Normén!
Even if Manga seemed to be in desperate need of a confessional, she certainly hadn’t come here for anything like this. Chewing it all over and wallowing in the past. The really sick thing was that she only had to say a few words and she could absolve him from some of his sins. Tell him who the real murderer was. But something told her that the truth wouldn’t set either of them free, and certainly not her.
Better to return to the present, focus on the task at hand and get out of here. If she could just get hold of Henke, things would sort themselves out, she was convinced of that, without really knowing why.
She refilled the glass and put in on the counter beside Manga. He seemed to have used her absence to pull himself together. His eyes still looked a bit red, but his face was more or less back to its usual colour.
He drank in silence.
‘I can see the way you’re thinking, Manga, but I honestly don’t think anyone could have stopped things from happening,’ she said slowly. ‘It just turned out the way it did, and we all have to try to move on. At least that’s what I’ve tried to do.’
She could hear how false her words sounded, but Manga nodded in agreement.
‘Of course, you’re right,’ he said curtly. ‘It feels good to have got it out, anyway, after all this time. Sorry about the tears.’
He smiled forlornly and wiped his nose with the sleeve of his shirt.
‘Don’t worry, it’ll stay between us.’
He smiled again, more relaxed this time, and she took the opportunity to change the subject.
‘Look, are you really sure you haven’t seen Henke?’
Another shake of the head.
‘No, not really …’
She fixed him with her cop’s stare, reluctantly, and it worked instantly.
‘What do you mean, not really, Manga? Have you, or haven’t you seen him?’
Her voice had suddenly lost all its previous softness. It felt a bit mean to apply interrogation tactics now, especially after his emotional outburst, but she didn’t actually have any choice. She had to get hold of Henke, and didn’t have time for any more distractions.
‘Not for a few days,’ he muttered morosely, staring at the floor, and as far as she could tell that was probably the truth. She looked round and sniffed at the smell of smoke.
‘Listen, those kids who set fire to your shop …’
She said it very slowly, fixing him with her stare. He wriggled like a worm on a hook, but she had no intention of letting him get away.
‘Is it the same kids who set fire to Henke’s flat?’
‘Yes … er, I mean no, or rather …’
His eyes were flitting about, and he suddenly didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands.
‘Oh, Magnus …’ she said in her gentlest voice and she leaned over the counter.
She waited until he met her gaze again:
‘What’s my idiot brother dragged you into this time?’
14 (#ulink_e0569f50-caa1-5ba0-af77-11afcb82be30)
White bear (#ulink_e0569f50-caa1-5ba0-af77-11afcb82be30)
Okay, he’d just have to accept the truth – he’d got the whole thing on the brain.
Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, Gene Hackman’s character, Brill, in Enemy of the State, that’s what he was turning into. The obsessive, the lone lunatic, the conspiracy nutter who lived his life in discussion forums and saw intrigues round every fucking corner. He might as well get his own homepage, a cottage in the woods and a wall covered in newspaper cuttings, then everything would be perfect!
True, that idea about the Palme murder was maybe a bit far-fetched, but on the other hand as a theory it was no crazier or worse than any of the other so-called lines of inquiry. Kurds, the ‘baseball’ police squad, his wife Lisbet, or a drunk acting on his own?
All aboard the Crazy Train!
Doors closing, next stop Looneyville!
There was a vast flock of weirdo theories out there in cyberspace, like shrieking harpies, each one crazier than the last. So why not his?
Just think about it!
How else could you fuck up the largest police investigation in the world so spectacularly? Forgetting all common police sense, breaking any number of laws and rules by appointing an amateur to lead both the police work and the preliminary legal investigation? And, as if that wasn’t enough, setting up a Social Democrat political stooge with his own miniature version of the security police to run a parallel investigation directly sanctioned by the Justice Minister …
The whole thing was a cascade of peculiarities, and the case threw up loads of questions to which there were no logical solutions, exactly as Erman had warned him. There just weren’t any good explanations, or at least none that were better than the one he was beginning to accept more and more.
Besides, he could think of another political murder where, even though the killer had been caught, the case was a good match for the profile ‘single perpetrator with no good motive’. Not to mention the so-called Laser Man back in the early nineties. There was something methodical about the progress of his criminal career, something that made you think of computer games. As if he had been working his way through different stages of difficulty, taking greater and greater risks. Almost as if he was clambering up some sort of league-table …
According to the clips HP found on the Swedish Television website, the culprit had blown the money he took from his victims in a German casino, so he evidently liked gambling. Was he actually a player, in two senses of the word? It made perfect sense, but at the same time it sounded completely insane! What about the Kennedy assassination? The sinking of the Estonia? 9/11?
Yes, he’d got it all on the brain.
Big time!
He was scouring the news websites several times an hour, and even though they were mostly about Sweden’s presidency of the EU, he imagined he could see signs of the Game everywhere.
A well-known financier who had vanished into thin air, a load of dynamite that had gone missing from a secure store, a petty-criminal in Portugal who suddenly got it into his head to blow up an empty luxury yacht, and himself with it …
It was all out there, if you only knew what you were looking for. Things that couldn’t be explained, no matter which way you approached them. That’s to say, if the explanation wasn’t the fact that Erman was right. That the whole thing was just a huge fucking Game!
I’ve opened your eyes and now you can see …
The weirdest thing was that he could see how crazy it sounded. But he still couldn’t let it go. ‘An awareness of illness doesn’t mean you’re well,’ as one of his mum’s alcoholic friends used to say.
There was a lot in that! But unlike the idiots out there, he had actually been caught up in it himself. An inside man, just like Brill. He knew that the Game existed, he had seen with his own eyes what they were capable of doing, or – to be more accurate – getting other people to do …
It was actually the manipulation that stung most.
The way they’d pressed his buttons and got him to play along willingly. Humiliating him just for the fun of it, then dropping him quicker than a flask of Russian thallium. But also the fact that he’d actually enjoyed being the centre of attention, getting loads of cred. For the first time ever, a team player, part of something bigger than himself, even one of the stars of the team.
Christ, he’d loved the kick from that! Loved it so fucking much that on one level he still couldn’t help dreaming, in spite of all the shit that had happened, that he could get back in the limelight … he’d do pretty much anything. Like some mangy dog that was so desperate for approval even after it had been beaten by its master that it was willing to shag more legs – any legs – to get another pat on the head. One question itched like a massive great scab and no matter how he tried, he couldn’t help picking at it: if he’d known that Becca was in the cop-car that evening, that she would be or could have been injured by the stone he was going to drop from the bridge, would it have made any difference?
He honestly didn’t know.
Even now, after so many hours thinking, he still couldn’t answer that bastard question with a simple Yes or No.
Totally fucking sick!
It had taken a day or so to work out the deal with the flash-grenade attack on the horse-guards’ cortège. Who would get any pleasure from some bolting horses and a pair of shitty royal underpants? Obviously it could just have been that they wanted to test him or get some cool pictures. But then he read about a break-in at a gentlemen’s outfitters on Östermalm, and how it had been preceded by a false bomb threat. An attaché case with the word bomb in white paint on the side, left outside the Iranian Embassy, and suddenly half the police force were over on Lidingö and thus out of the game. And that’s where he got the idea.
After checking on the police’s own website, he found what he was looking for. At the same time as Kungsträdgården was filling up with galloping horses and all available police units, including the helicopter which was sent to circle above the city centre, someone had stolen a container-load of Viagra from a company out in the western suburbs. They had coolly driven past security with a truck, waving what had looked like the right documentation, then calmly hooked up to the container and driven off with it, without having to worry about being pursued by the police helicopter before they had time to unload the pills, because HP had seen to that.
So had he been a decoy, sent out to lure the dogs into sniffing around in the wrong place?
‘Look up the word Game and you’ll see what I mean!’ Erman had said, and halfway down the page Wiktionary backed up his theory.
– Distraction or Diversion
He could perfectly well have been both! And suddenly all those weird occurrences assumed yet another crazy dimension. Diversionary tactics, decoys and smokescreens, all to get the authorities and the general public to look in the wrong direction?
In that case, what was the main event, what were the things they didn’t want to show, and who was behind them?
The Freemasons?
The WHO?
The Bilderberg Group?
Or was he taking it too far …? Was his brain messing with him, showing him things that didn’t actually exist just because he wanted to see them?
Was the Game really as advanced as Erman had claimed, or was it all just for fun? Something they did just because they could? A game, basically? Just a way of passing the fucking time!
All these questions were starting to drive him mad. His head ached like it was going to burst from all the junk flying around up there. He couldn’t even come up with a single damn paracetamol, he’d long since hunted through all Auntie’s drawers and cupboards.
He lit a cigarette, one of the last few. A deep drag, then out floated all the tensions along with the smoke.
Phew …!
Meditation by Marlboro.
Almost always worked.
So what was he going to do now?
That was the million dollar question. He hadn’t left the cottage for several days, and had hardly even eaten anything. He’d just been smoking, scanning the internet, and picking away at that huge fucking mental scab. Manga had looked in briefly and topped up the essential supplies of fags and cans of army-ration bean soup, but he’d had the sense not to ask any questions, which was just as well, seeing as he wouldn’t have got any answers.
HP could have killed for a spliff, but his stash was long since used up. Since the grass ran out he’d tried to find other ways of easing his anxiety. He’d wanked so much that he had friction burns on his cock, then in the end he took a cautious walk round the allotments to try to reboot his brain with a bit of fresh air.
That was when he discovered the van.
The car was rolling in slow motion, twisting on its own axis before its front end hit the ground. Then it flew up again, rear end towards the sky, did a complete roll before landing on its roof and disappearing out of shot.
The next film sequence showed a smoking wreck, but by that point she was already bent double over Manga’s filthy little toilet.
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ screamed a little voice inside her throbbing head as she threw up most of an undigested chicken salad.
What in the name of hell was going on?
A white van with a blue logo, parked a bit further down the narrow track. ACME Telecom Services Ltd.
Seriously?
ACME – just like every dodgy company in cinema history, from Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner onwards! It was a bit too obvious.
Okay, so there was a telecom distribution box and a manhole alongside the van, but so far he hadn’t seen a soul anywhere near it. And there didn’t seem to be any work going on, so what was the van doing there, parked in the middle of Tantolunden?
He went back inside the cottage and looked up the number on the licence-plate, but all he got was a car-hire company out in Solna.
ACME Telecom Services had their own website, a phone number and an email address for inquiries. ACME Telecom Services – A proud member of the PayTag Group.
On the other hand, there was no terrestrial address, but that wasn’t so unusual, there were a lot of companies like that. Feel free to contact us by email or telephone. A good way of avoiding difficult customers.
He went out again to take a closer look at the van. Still no-one in sight, but the engine felt fairly warm, so it couldn’t have been standing there for long.
So where was the driver?
He walked round the van, but was none the wiser. The rear-windows were tinted, and even though he cupped his hands round his eyes he still couldn’t see in. The driver’s cab was a bit easier.
A jacket on the front-seat, neon-yellow with loads of pockets, and when he looked closer he saw that something was sticking out from under it. An oblong silver object. And suddenly he realized what it was! A phone, of course, just like the one he’d left in the computer shop. Which could well mean that the bastards had found him!
He wandered round to get a better view of the mobile, but it was mostly covered by the jacket. He had to know for sure, and tugged hard on the door-handle.
Locked, obviously.
He glanced quickly around, then picked up a stone from a nearby flowerbed. He raised his arm to strike.
‘Hey, you, what do you think you’re doing!’
The man had appeared out of nowhere, a thickset fifty-something in overalls and an orange Bob the Builder helmet.
Manual labourer, model 1A.
‘Nothing,’ HP muttered and let the stone slide down his leg. ‘Just wondered why you’re parked here?’
The man looked at him suspiciously.
