40

The rain came lashing down.

He could not remember when he had last driven in such foul weather. Of course it had rained hundreds of times on all his commuter runs between Kymlinge and Svartö, but this was something else. The fury of the elements, that was the phrase, wasn’t it? And the precipitation seemed to be coming from all directions at once, not just from the angry sky; the lorries – one of which they were currently stuck behind – were sending up cascades of dirty water from the soaking road surface.

And this even though they were travelling at low speed, no more than fifty to sixty kilometres an hour. Don’t they have mudflaps? thought Valdemar Roos, turning his windscreen wipers to their fastest setting. There I was thinking they’d achieved at least some degree of civilization down here.

It was impossible to make out the number plates of the filthy vehicles but he assumed they must come from somewhere in southern Europe. Or eastern, maybe, but they certainly weren’t Scandinavian or German. There was no point trying to overtake them, either, because visibility in his rear-view mirror was so poor that it would have been far too risky. Every now and then some crazy Mercedes came swishing past in the outside lane, sending a cascade over him from the other side, too; no, there was nothing for it but to stay up the arse of this monster truck. If that was the technical term. He liked the phrase, anyway. It would make a good book title: Up the Arse of a Monster Truck: My Motorway Memories.

Jesus, was his next thought. What is all this crap? I need a break. My eyes aren’t focusing properly, either, and these road conditions are well nigh lethal. He had decided some time back to pull in at the next services or petrol station, but twenty minutes had passed and he hadn’t come to any. It was typical; whatever you were looking for always kept its distance, that was a truth he’d learnt as a child. If I count to 128, he decided – it was one of his favourite numbers, although he could no longer remember why – and if I can’t even find a lay-by, because a pee wouldn’t come amiss either, then I shall just have to overtake this monster after all, do or die.

And all these thoughts, this halting but never-ending supply of words, as empty of life as they were of real content and meaning, flocking in his head like doomed stray birds, had no other purpose than to keep the abyss and the panic at bay. He knew this, and it felt constantly as if a flood of tears was dammed up inside him, behind his brow bone, behind the rampart of words, yes, right there, waiting to break out, nothing could be clearer.

But I don’t want to give way, he thought. I am not going to give way.

Anna was asleep in the back seat. He checked the time and saw they had been on the road for over four hours. Apart from a short spell when they set off she had been asleep the whole time; she had tossed and turned uneasily a couple of times, probably dreaming, but in the main she had seemed peaceful. If she can just sleep, he thought, she’ll get well. There’s no better doctor than good, revitalizing sleep. And anyway, what alternatives do we have?

What alternatives indeed? Taking her to a hospital would be tantamount to giving up. That was the plain fact of the matter; naturally they wouldn’t be seen anywhere without showing their ID and saying something about their circumstances, and then . . . well then mills would start to turn, no, grind was the word, mills would start to grind, and sooner or later, somehow or other, it would come out that they were on the run and wanted for murder in Sweden.

No, thought Ante Valdemar Roos, and realized he had well and truly abandoned counting to 128, because you can’t think and count at the same time . . . no, that alternative simply wasn’t an option. She’ll get well, she’ll get well. It’s just a question of sleep and care and love, and I’ll make sure she has all those.

The best care in the world, but I wish . . .

‘Well, what is it I wish?’ he mumbled almost inaudibly to himself, just as the south- or east-European lorry sluiced yet more water over his windscreen, momentarily reducing his visibility to zero.

Stupid question. He wished she would open her eyes, of course. Look at him, smile at him in that slightly impish way she’d had when they were still at Lograna, before disaster struck. Say she felt much better, tell him about her life, about Grandma’s ducks or her remarkable Uncle Pavel or anything at all, and . . . that she was hungry.

That would be a good sign. If she felt like something to eat. She’d barely eaten anything for two days now; he’d made sure she had enough liquid, but that was basically all. Water and juice and a couple of cans of Coca-Cola; he’d heard that this dubious fizzy drink was beneficial for various things, stomach ache and screws that had rusted in place and assorted other complaints, but he wasn’t entirely convinced.

But what if . . . what if she didn’t get better?

Well, there was an emergency plan. Plan B, the last resort.

It had been swishing around in his head for a while now. Like a jellyfish washed in by the waves, which he didn’t want to bring ashore or to study too closely. But it was floating there, dismal and transparent. As it had been since that morning, to be precise, when she fell out of bed and scared the living daylights out of him. But he was damned if he was going to acknowledge its presence.

Yet there it was, nonetheless. Like some subterranean secret passage.

He pushed it aside; they hadn’t reached that point. Nor would they, not for a long time to come. What’s all this about jellyfish? he thought. Secret passages? What a load of bullshit.

Only an emergency solution if . . . if she didn’t get better, basically.

Plan B.

Despite the slow speed of the traffic, he almost missed the turning, but at the last instant he signalled right and turned off for the services. The car park was full of wet cars and he saw that it looked like all other motorway services the world over. Or all over Europe, at least; he couldn’t honestly say he had any conception of the rest of the world.

He parked as close to the entrance to the cafe as he could, switched off the engine and checked Anna was still sound asleep in the back seat. He adjusted her blanket, gently stroked her cheek and left the car.

Although he ran the twenty or thirty metres to the entrance, he still got drenched. He stood in the coffee queue behind two young girls who were chattering enthusiastically to one another in a language he didn’t recognize. They were Anna’s age, maybe a bit younger; how I wish Anna could sound that enthusiastic, he thought. Good God, don’t let the dam burst while I’m here in this queue.

The dam? he thought. What dam? What am I talking about? I’m making no sense to myself any more.

But as he sat at a red plastic table by the wall, right next to the toilets, he started worrying whether he’d locked the car or not. He presumed he had – it was one of those automatic moves, those familiar little actions you’d performed so many times that your brain no longer needed to get involved. Your hand and the car key were enough.

But it wouldn’t be good news if he had locked it. If Anna started shifting about in the back seat she could set off the alarm, and the car would start honking and flashing and drawing attention to itself. They didn’t need any attention just at the moment, thought Ante Valdemar Roos. In fact, if they were really unlucky, it could prove disastrous.

For a few seconds he was poised to get up and go out into the rain to check, but in the end he didn’t. Would it be that much better to leave her in an unlocked car? Anybody at all could open one of the back doors and abduct her. She could be a defenceless victim of – what was it called – trafficking?

The devil and the deep blue sea then, thought Ante Valdemar Roos. Car locked or unlocked, they were both equally bad.

No, he corrected himself. Of course they weren’t. Anna being abducted was much worse than her setting off the car alarm, of course.

But there was still no need to hang around in this noisy and tedious roadside diner, he decided. He bolted down the last of his cheese and ham sandwich, finished his coffee and went to the gents. Must go while I’m here, he thought, this is a different sort of dam that might just burst. And I don’t particularly want to stand in the rain at the side of the road.

And as he was peeing into the smelly metal trough, that day’s aphorism came into his mind.

The worst that can happen to a person is to lose his memory at a petrol station in a foreign land.

Perhaps that sounded a bit too categorical, he thought, and rephrased it slightly:

It is no fun to lose one’s memory at a petrol station in a foreign land.

Then he shivered for some reason, perhaps because of his wet clothes. Or perhaps it was the aphorism. He hurried out of the service station and ran over to the car.

It was gone.

For a few sodden seconds he was sure he was going to pass out.

Or die.

The wet tarmac under his feet felt as if it was starting to dissolve, or perhaps he himself was starting to dissolve, and when the process was complete, whichever of them it was, he would be sucked into a swirling black maelstrom and down into the depths of the earth forever. Like pee in a urinal, exit Valdemar Roos, missed and grieved for by no one, what a fucking way to end . . .

But as the seconds passed, a thin ray of reflective thought found its way into his brain and he realized what had happened. He had dashed off in the wrong direction. It was as simple as that: he had cut across to the right rather than the left when he came out of the cafe.

How thick can anyone be? thought Valdemar Roos, and just as he caught sight of the car, parked on the very spot where he now registered he had left it, he realized the expression was borrowed from Wilma. How thick can anyone be? That was exactly what she would say to him seven times a week, rolling her eyes and looking as if she wondered where her mother had dredged him up from, this repulsive old man, and had the bad taste to marry him into the bargain.

Well, Wilma dear, that’s one annoyance I’ve freed you from, at any rate.

He had in fact locked the car, but Anna appeared not to have moved in her bed on the back seat. She had not set the alarm off, anyway. Once he had climbed into the driver’s seat and pulled the door shut, he reached back to feel her forehead.

It was cold and wet. Well, OK, he thought, I assume that’s better than dry and hot. She mumbled something and shifted position, but did not wake. He tucked her in again, started the car and backed out carefully from the cramped parking space. He headed out of the services to rejoin the motorway.

But he had only covered a hundred metres when he realized something was amiss. The car was behaving oddly. There was a problem with the front right wheel, and he had to steer hard to the left to keep the car going straight. It was jolting and bumping slightly, too, and he soon worked out what was wrong.

A puncture.

Jesus wept, thought Ante Valdemar Roos. Modern cars don’t get punctures.

In the rain.

In a foreign land. On the run.

He hadn’t got as far as the motorway but was still on the gently curving slip road from the service station. He pulled as far over to the right as he could, switched on the warning lights and stopped.

He felt the floodwaters lapping once and then twice against his dam, but gritted his teeth and tried to remember when he had last had a puncture.

Thirty years ago, he reckoned. Twenty-five at least. Long before he met Alice, anyway. Long before he started at Wrigman’s Electrical.

Modern cars don’t get punctures.

Then he had one of those thought sequences he had been prone to when he was ten years old or thereabouts. He remembered them coming in for a lot of use after his father hanged himself.

If I reverse the car and go back into the cafe – ran this thought sequence – and sit down at the same table, that red one over by the wall, and pretend this hasn’t happened – pretend I haven’t even left the table or peed in the smelly trough or left the building or turned the wrong way to get back to the car – well, then it will be in perfect working order when I pull away. No puncture, and for something like that to happen twice in one day simply isn’t possible.

He sat there for quite a while, weighing up this alternative, but in the end he abandoned it. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, he thought. He felt Anna’s forehead again – it was still cold and wet – and rummaged in the glove compartment for the instruction manual.

The slip road was wide enough for him to stay where he was. Especially as the problem was with the front right wheel, so he would be tucked away in the protection of the car as he worked.

But he had no protection from the rain. The whole damned process must have taken him half an hour: extracting the spare wheel from the boot, finding the jack and the wrench, getting the stiff wheel nuts to budge (Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, he thought as he tugged with all his might), removing the punctured wheel and fixing the new one in place, and all the while, all the while, it kept on raining.

But he carried out the task with a kind of stoical, mechanical calm. Step by step, operation by operation, wheel nut by wheel nut. Once he thought he heard Anna call out from inside the car, but he decided it must just be his imagination and did not go over to check. The cars leaving the services drove past him at intervals, some of them flashing their lights at him but most not, and it was just as he had got the car back down on four wheels and worked the jack loose that he realized a police car had stopped right behind him. The blue light on its roof was flashing and a policeman in a greenish uniform was approaching him with a greenish umbrella.

He straightened up, still with the jack in his hand, and it struck him that he had never before seen a policeman with an umbrella.

‘Do you have a problem?’ the policeman asked him in English.

Valdemar assumed he had seen that the car was Swedish and answered, also in English, that he had had a problem but that he had now fixed it.

‘Can I see your driving licence?’ asked the policeman. ‘Parking is not allowed here.’

Valdemar tried to sound friendly but firm and told him shit happens and the licence was in the car. The policeman asked him to get it. He sounded unnecessarily stern, Valdemar thought. Stern and bossy and full of himself. A real pig.

‘Fucking awful weather to get a puncture in,’ said Valdemar, to lighten the mood a little.

The policeman did not reply. He nodded to him to go and find the licence. Valdemar opened the passenger-side door and reached in to get his licence. As the light came on in the car, the policeman took two steps closer and looked in.

‘What is wrong with the girl?’ he asked.

‘Nothing is wrong with the girl,’ said Valdemar. ‘She’s asleep.’

But when he glanced her way he saw that she was at a strange angle halfway to the floor, and that there really did seem to be something wrong. Her face was twisted upwards, she looked sweaty and pallid and had something at the corners of her mouth that Valdemar could not make out. Little bubbles of some kind, perhaps it was just saliva. And one of her legs was twitching.

‘Come out of the car,’ said the policeman. ‘Put your hands on the roof and don’t move.’

As he said it he took a radio from his breast pocket and pressed some buttons. Valdemar backed out of the passenger seat and noticed he still had the folded jack in his hand.

He thought for maybe half a second before bringing the metal object down with full force on the policeman’s head.

A minute later they were out on the motorway again.