ALTHOUGH IT WAS STILL the first half of July, it was already growing dark earlier each day. It wasn’t noticeable enough to worry about yet, but it was just the right amount to remind a person that summer would soon be a distant memory.
Fabian Risk cut the engine and looked at the time: it was 10:13. His instructions were to park on Östhammarsgatan, a cross street of Motalagatan, where Torgny Sölmedal lived at number twenty- four. Fabian was now in Husensjö, a residential neighbourhood full of private homes, most of them from the first half of the twentieth century. He had heard the name mentioned throughout his childhood, but he’d never known anyone who lived there, so never had any reason to visit. This was his first time.
He turned his head to look down to the right, so the camera in the cap would register him picking up the folder from the passenger seat. His phone instantly vibrated with another text. But this time it wasn’t yet another order. Instead, it was a gift — a chance to act.
Where are you? What did you do to the camera?
“I’m here. I’m just locking the car,” he said, testing whether his suspicions were correct.
I assume you are aware of the danger of not following orders.
He quickly responded to the text: Almost there. Batteries might be dead. He took off the cap and placed it on the floor in front of the back seat. Then he opened the glove compartment to take out two Sig Sauer P228 magazines that were hidden under the car manual.
He really didn’t like to carry weapons at all, and did his utmost to avoid it. He had managed to never fire a shot at anyone. Contrary to what most people thought, that type of situation was very rare in his line of work. The last time he had been in such circumstances was the previous winter. He should have fired his weapon, but he hadn’t — he still couldn’t explain why. Two colleagues died and he was to blame. He could still vividly remember the sound of their screams. It was as if they had lost track of him when he moved back to Helsingborg and had only now caught his scent again, chasing after him like hyenas. The screams, snuffling and desperate, begging and pleading for their lives.
And with them came the memories of his colleagues being forced to their knees in the underground room. The captors had asked where he was, but received no response from his co-workers. They didn’t know how close he had been and that he could have made a difference with the weapon in his hand. But he couldn’t manage to pull the trigger.
He heard people shouting in English that they had come too far and seen too much. They raised their pistols toward his colleagues. Fabian took aim, he tried to shoot — to save them — but he couldn’t do it. The shots echoed. They collapsed onto the shiny new tiles, which turned red. The screams had stopped for a little while, but he could hear them again now — louder than ever.
Would he fail this time too?
Fabian smacked his own head in an attempt to force the memories away. He inserted one of the magazines into his pistol. He left the car with the keys in the ignition and walked along Östhammarsgatan toward Motalagatan, where he took a right and crossed the street to get to the side with the even-numbered houses. He walked up the sidewalk. After a few metres he tripped over an uneven spot on the pavement and nearly fell down headfirst.
“You have to watch out. It’s awfully bumpy around here,” said a man in sweatpants out walking his dog. Fabian forced himself to smile at the man, and realized that parts of the sidewalk had been repaved in a manner that left quite a few things to be desired.
“Yes, to say the least,” Fabian said, as he moved to keep walking.
“Don’t ask me why they insist on patching and repairing it. It looks like an intern did the work.”
Fabian felt his phone vibrate.
I’m not the one who’s running out of time.
“Last winter, Kerstin in number five fell down and broke her hip. If you add that to the cost, it would have been cheaper to just replace the whole thing.”
Fabian nodded dutifully and hurried on. He arrived at number twenty-six, where the yard was so overgrown it effectively blocked the entire view from the street. It was almost impossible to see the house behind all the plants. Sölmedal lived at number twenty-four, which was the opposite of the house next door and of Fabian’s expectations. It looked open and inviting, almost as if Sölmedal wanted surprise visitors. A low, white fence surrounded a neatly mowed lawn in front of the perfectly visible house; there was a garage on the right and a tall, thick hedge to the left.
Fabian couldn’t make sense of it. Could this really be where this guy lived? It was very open, with neighbours quite close on either side. The mailbox said T. SÖLMEDAL, and there were lights on in the window facing the street. He stopped and pretended to tie his shoe in order to form a clearer picture of his surroundings. He quickly realized that his first impression required some modification: the sense of inviting openness only applied to the front of the house itself — the rest of the lot was a different story. A fence and the tall hedge effectively kept anyone from peering in.
He stood up and kept walking, taking a left on Växjögatan. The lights were on in the first house on the left, and he could see shadows moving inside, likely a Friday night dinner with guests and a bottle of wine. The next house was dark and the driveway was glaringly empty. He walked alongside the house to the backyard, where there was a set of patio furniture arranged so rainwater would run off, as well as a barbecue that must have cost a month’s salary. Fabian walked diagonally across the lawn and arrived at a wall of rosebushes; he pulled his hands into the sleeves of his jacket, and used his arms to push aside the branches, forcing his way through the thorny wall.
He reached the very corner of Sölmedal’s lot. The house was larger than he had initially thought: there were several additions at the back, and it must have been twice as large as it had been originally. He snuck along the edge of the yard, hidden by the cover of darkness from the rosebushes, until he came to a storage shed. He could make out a lawn mower, a pair of cross-country skis, a few rolled-up rugs, and a pile of dentist’s equipment through a dirty window.
His phone buzzed in his pocket again. But this time it wasn’t a text — it was a call from Irene Lilja, which meant she had regained consciousness. Tuvesson and the others would soon find out what had happened. He let his voicemail pick up and kept moving along the back of the shed. Once he reached the corner, he judged the distance to the house to be about five metres.
Five metres across the lawn with no cover.
His adrenaline was pumping as if he were about to run a hundred-metre sprint. He had no idea what awaited him and his mind was hesitating. But his body had made its decision, and he had no choice but to follow it across the lawn, up to the wall of the house, and around the next corner, where a set of steps led up to a terrace with a few deck chairs. Fabian drew his weapon and cocked it before he went up the stairs.
By the time he reached the terrace, his heart was beating so loudly that he could hear the blood pumping through his veins. The sound reminded him that he was still alive — that he could still make a difference. He took a few steps toward a sliding glass door; he could see right into the living room because the lights were on. There was a grand piano in the middle of the room. A bookcase that reminded him of the one in his parents’ home took up a whole wall. At the other end of the room was a corner sofa in front of a large flat-screen TV, and...
He heard a sound — one as unobtrusive as it was life-changing: a barely audible little creak. Anything could have made that sound, except in this particular situation. Fabian whirled around toward the deck chairs.
“Fashionably late I’ve heard of, but is it fashionable to come sneaking around the back? That’s new.”
“Where’s my son? I just want him back.” Fabian aimed his pistol at the shadow that was rising from the chair and pulling some type of gun with a silencer on him.
“I suggest we go inside before the coffee gets cold.”
“What the hell have you done with my son?”
“We’ll get to that. Like I said, there are a few other things we have to work out right now, and I’m not the one who slowed us down.” He approached Fabian with his free hand in front of him. “So I suggest we try to keep all of this civilized. Give me your gun. You can have it back when we’re finished.”
Fabian hesitated; he couldn’t take his eyes off the man in the darkness in front of him. Had he seen him before or was this the first time? Had they really been in the same class, or was that all just a game?
“Anyway, you don’t want to shoot me before you find out where little Theodor is.”
He didn’t recognize the man. Or did he? Maybe it was just too dark. It felt like this was the first time they’d met, but at the same time something seemed familiar, like déjà vu.
He gave up trying to remember, handed his pistol over, and let himself be led into the living room. Wagner’s The Valkyrie was playing in the background. They walked through a few hallways into a kitchen, where a table was set with two mugs, a French press, and a plate of cookies.
“Have a seat.”
Fabian forced himself to sit on one of the chairs, although his whole body was screaming at him to attack the man, beat his head against the table, and force him to confess where he had hidden Theodor.
Torgny Sölmedal sat on the chair across from Fabian, placed his gun in his lap, and began to slowly lower the plunger through the coffee. “I’m sure you’re wondering why.”
“I’m not wondering anything. All I want is for you to let Theodor go. He has nothing to do with this.”
“Not that it’s my main motive, but by taking the lives of several of our classmates I have helped make the world just a little bit better, which is a minor, positive side effect we should all rejoice in.” He smiled as he continued to press the grounds to the bottom of the carafe.
“My son! Where is he?”
“When I started mapping everyone out, I was pretty much disgusted by how unintelligent they were. You might think I’m exaggerating, but take that car ride with Jörgen, for example. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. I swear, an amoeba would have a higher IQ.”
The plunger finally reached the bottom, and he poured the coffee into the mugs.
Fabian struggled not to break down as he studied Torgny Sölmedal’s face in the light. He could see why no one had recognized him. His face was so ordinary and anonymous that there was no particular feature to remember him by: his nose, cheeks, mouth, eyes — all of them just looked normal, down to the tiniest detail.
“Go ahead and look at me: nothing will stand out in your memory. If we passed each other on Kullagatan in a week, you wouldn’t recognize me.”
Fabian realized that he was probably telling the truth, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t important now. He took out the folder of fingerprints and placed it on the table. His sweaty hands left a number of dark spots on the folder. “Here are your prints. Now I want my son.”
Torgny Sölmedal didn’t even look at it. “Milk?”
“Can you explain to me what my children have to do with this?”
“Milk, or no milk?”
“Answer me!” Fabian struck the table with his fist and coffee splashed out of the mugs.
Torgny Sölmedal shot him a look and wiped up the mess with a floral napkin. “I’ll take that as no milk.” He handed the black coffee over to Fabian and took a cookie. “Unfortunately — and I really do mean that — you’ve arrived too late. As I told you all along, I didn’t know how long the oxygen would last, but hindsight is twenty-twenty, and I have to admit that it lasted longer than I expected: forty-six hours and thirty-three minutes isn’t bad for such a cramped space. He gave up at seventeen minutes past ten.” He pushed a tablet across the table; it showed the same image Fabian had seen earlier. The only difference was that Theodor was lying perfectly still now.
Not even his chest was moving.