His name was Vincent Baker, and he worked in a police station in one of Houston’s main districts. As far as I could recall, I hadn’t come across anyone by the name of Baker there. My thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the terrace-door. Lucy was standing inside the flat trying to get my attention. I responded by waving her out. Energetically, to make her realise I wanted her close.
‘Are you coming in soon?’
She padded out onto the terrace with bare feet. Lucy has the prettiest feet I’ve ever seen on a woman, no question.
‘In a moment,’ I said.
‘Did you find out anything useful?’
I replied truthfully: ‘Maybe.’
Witnesses. There couldn’t have been any witnesses, could there? We searched every corner of that alley. There hadn’t been anyone there. End of story.
Lucy shivered in the cool summer night.
‘I’m going to go as far away from here as I can when this is all over,’ she said.
‘Can I come too?’
She didn’t answer.
One of my phones rang. A different ringtone, a different phone. Boris’s phone.
‘Baby, I need to take this.’
She stayed where she was as I answered.
‘Martin.’
‘It’s me.’
‘Haven’t you gone yet?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything? You can actually make a fucking phone call from different places.’
‘You’re a wise man.’
Boris let out a deep sigh. He thought I was an idiot, and I didn’t try to correct him. No one has the strength to be the best all the time.
‘You asked me for a favour last time we spoke,’ he said.
A favour. A break-in that I didn’t have the nerve to carry out myself.
‘Hmm.’
‘How soon can you be at Tyson’s Bar? It’s in Solna.’
I hesitated. I wasn’t comfortable going to the same part of the city as the crime scene.
‘Twenty minutes, maybe,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Marie’s waiting for you there.’
‘Marie?’
‘She was the one who carried out the aforementioned favour. And she’ll be happy to tell you what she found.’
I broke out in a cold sweat. For some reason I’d imagined that the briefing would happen some other way.
‘So she did find something?’
‘We won’t know for sure until you hear what she found and decide if it’s of any use or not. But yes – I think she’s found something.’
I stood up.
‘Okay, I’ll be there in thirty minutes at most.’
‘You said twenty minutes.’
‘Maximum thirty.’
‘Marie isn’t a patient woman. She won’t wait a second longer.’
‘I’ll hurry. Thanks for your help.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
He hung up.
‘What’s happening now?’ Lucy said.
Was there ever going to be any time for rest and reflection? For just lazing about? For all the things I used to care about in my old life?
‘I need to go out,’ I said. ‘Apparently they found something in Rakel’s house.’
Trust is something that builds up over time. Or more quickly under very specific circumstances. A group of people who get trapped in the same lift together, for instance, start to trust each other relatively quickly if it turns out they’re going to be stuck together for a while.
With Boris it was a bit like being trapped in a lift. A lift that I admittedly got stuck in of my own volition. I did have a choice, after all. I could have turned him away when he came to my office, but I chose to let him in. I could have thrown him out when I realised what he needed help with. But I let him stay. Thereby creating a bond between us that I was unable to break later. A bond that came to involve a degree of accumulated trust. So when Boris sent me off to an obscure bar in Solna, I just got in my car and went there. Brum, brum – nothing odd about that at all.
‘Take care,’ Lucy said.
I was tired of that phrase. After all, it didn’t make any difference what I did. I was under constant threat of something bad happening.
The car rolled smoothly through the city. I played music far too loud. First Bruce Springsteen, then Iggy Pop. Music is the balm every soul needs to stay in shape. I’m trying to teach Belle things like that. Music’s important, books too. Anything that takes people to an alternative reality the way books and music do has to be a good thing.
I parked the car a few blocks from the bar where I was going to meet Boris’s friend Marie. I didn’t know what she looked like, but assumed it didn’t matter – she probably had a very good idea of who I was.
That turned out to be a correct assumption. The moment I walked into the bar, two things happened. Firstly a young woman sitting in a corner raised one hand discreetly. The second was that the bartender called out to me: ‘I’ve already taken last orders. We’re only open another half hour.’
‘Thanks, I know,’ I said.
Anyone who doesn’t want to be remembered shouldn’t stand out. Not wear ostentatious clothes, not be too noisy. Everything in that bar out in Solna was wrong. I was the only person wearing a shirt. No one else looked well-groomed. But it was too late to do anything about that by the time I’d opened the door and walked in.
The woman stood up as I approached.
‘Marie,’ she said, holding out her hand.
‘Martin,’ I said.
We sat down.
‘If you weren’t as important to Boris as you evidently are, I don’t think you’d be alive now,’ she said.
Matter-of-factly, as if she were commenting on the weather.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Shitty jobs like the one I did this evening are the sort of thing you do yourself or not at all. You need to be very clear about that.’
What the hell was she talking about?
‘I presume you knew what I was going to find when I got inside?’ she said.
I shook my head.
‘That was the whole point,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know what was inside the house. That’s why I wanted someone to get in and look around. I wanted to know if there was any sign that a child had been there.’
‘Any sign that a child had been there,’ she repeated, jerking her head.
She had long hair, pulled up into a tight ponytail. Her face was free of makeup. Her eyelashes were so pale they were almost transparent. Her nose covered in freckles. Eyes ice-blue. Intrigued, I tried to find some explanation for the fact that she had become part of Boris’s team. She didn’t look like anyone else I had seen around him. She wasn’t as rough round the edges, wasn’t as tough. But, on the other hand, my knowledge of Boris’s network was very limited.
‘Okay, let’s start there,’ she said. ‘With any sign of children.’
She took a mobile out of her handbag. She focused hard on the screen and tapped it several times.
‘Here,’ she said, handing me the phone. ‘This is one of two indications that a child has been there.’
I looked at the screen. It showed a photograph of a packet of medication. Stesolid – rectal solution for the treatment of various types of cramp.
‘What’s that got to do with children?’ I said.
‘Enlarge the image,’ she said curtly.
I did as she said. The picture grew larger and no longer fitted the small screen. I moved my finger around, looking at the image of the packet. Then I saw it. I read silently to myself:
Instructions:
Children 5–12kg (approx. 3 mths–2 yrs): 5mg.
Children over 12kg (approx. 2 yrs and over): 10mg.
Adults: 10mg.
The penultimate line had been underlined.
‘Did the child in question have epilepsy or some other illness that causes cramping?’ Marie said.
‘No idea,’ I said.
But it was something I would try to find out as quickly as possible. Mio had been four years old when he went missing. It didn’t necessarily have to be epilepsy; it could have been febrile convulsions. Belle had that once when she was two. I thought she was going to die in front of my eyes. The memory of the panic I felt at the time made me hand the mobile back quickly.
‘There was no name on the pack?’ I said.
‘I’m afraid not. It had been torn off.’
‘And the name of the doctor who wrote the prescription?’
‘On the same label as the name, so that’s gone as well. There were only two doses left in the box. It was on its own in the bathroom cabinet.’
‘What else did you find?’ I said, trying to hide the impatience in my voice. ‘You said there were two things to suggest that a child had been in the house?’
She touched her phone again.
‘These,’ she said, showing me another picture.
It was a pair of yellow wellington boots.
I immediately remembered what the woman calling herself Susanne, the one who worked at Mio’s preschool, had said. She had stood in the window and watched him being led away. The yard had been poorly lit. But in the light of the streetlamps she had recognised his yellow wellington boots.
My heart began to beat faster. For the first time I was beyond vague theories and dubious witness statements. This was firm evidence that reinforced what I had been told by a witness who hadn’t even wanted to give me her real name.
‘Size?’ I said.
‘Twenty-six. I found them right at the back of a wardrobe.’
One size bigger than Belle.
‘What was the rest of the house like? Did it look like anyone lived there?’
Marie nodded.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘There was dirty laundry in the basket, rubbish under the sink. It didn’t smell, so it can’t have been there for long.’
Even so, the house had been deserted when I was there at lunchtime. And at the time of the break-in.
‘Were there both men’s and women’s clothes in the house?’
‘All the clothes I saw were marked in women’s sizes. There were several pairs of high-heels in the wardrobe.’
‘No children’s clothes?’
‘Not a thing. Unless you count the boots.’
I glanced discreetly at the time. I was keen not to stay too long.
‘You’ve got no idea what a huge help you’ve been,’ I said. ‘I’ll let Boris know that you’re to be properly recompensed for your work. I . . .’
‘We’re not finished yet.’
She said it very quietly, but also very clearly.
‘Do you remember what I said when you first arrived?’
Of course I did, even if I’d chosen to ignore it.
‘You mentioned something about shitty jobs,’ I said.
And that I should have been dead, but I didn’t repeat that.
‘Did anyone know you were planning to break into the house?’ Marie said. ‘Be honest.’
For a moment I wondered if she was armed, but she had both hands on the table. Her nails were cut short, no varnish.
‘No one at all,’ I said. ‘Only Boris.’
Not even Lucy, I thought to myself.
‘It’s impossible to break into a house without leaving some form of evidence,’ Marie said. ‘So I chose to do a pretty clumsy break-in. The damage was pretty severe, I wanted it to look amateurish.’
‘Okay,’ I said, mostly for the sake of saying something.
I wouldn’t have thought of that, which was stupid, I realised. It was much better if the break-in looked like it had been committed by a junkie.
‘Whereas for obvious reasons I didn’t want to leave any evidence that could be traced back to me,’ Marie said. ‘The police will probably react to that. The fact that someone made such a clumsy break-in but was then smart enough not to leave any fingerprints, strands of hair or anything else stupid.
She shrugged her shoulders and I nodded silently to show I was following what she said.
‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘I did my best and it went pretty well. If you don’t count the fucking unpleasant surprise that was waiting for me in the living room.’
I stared to squirm involuntarily on my chair.
‘Okay.’
She leaned forward. I swear, I could have counted every last damn freckle on her nose.
‘No, Martin. Not okay.’
I threw my arms out in an unnecessarily expansive gesture.
‘Just tell me what went wrong, for fuck’s sake!’
Marie picked her mobile up one last time. She held it close to my face.
‘Anyone you recognise?’
Instinctively I threw myself backwards away from the mobile. Because on the screen was a picture of Elias Krom’s pale face. A long incision ran across his throat, gaping red towards the camera.
Elias was dead.
All of a sudden I felt horribly alone.
And inside my head a new thought took shape: if everyone I’d met and collaborated with had died because they knew too much, why was I still alive?
What was it that I still hadn’t understood?