10

The first email had arrived in the middle of the night. Outside, it was still November. A definite wintry chill had arrived from somewhere, taking Sweden by surprise the way it did every year, as predictable as the self-assessment tax return but equally impossible to remember. William Sandberg had made his way past abandoned cars, hazard lights blinking, their summer tyres unable to find grip in the thin layer of polished snow. He’d spent a whole night walking in the snowfall, silence settling around him as echoes disappeared between flakes, swarms of sparkling dots moving like insects in the wind. He was wet and freezing cold, and throughout he had forced himself not to feel any of it. Just as he always did it, night after night after night.

It had been staring out at him when he got home in the small hours of the morning, demanding his attention. Just an email, nothing more. A single message in an otherwise completely empty inbox, marked as a thick blue band across half his screen. Visible from across the room even as he came through the door.

Before long, his lungs were screaming inside his chest, reminding him that he had just stopped breathing. It was as though he was experiencing a sense of elation and a falling all at once, and at first he didn’t recognise the feeling. Was it a heart attack? Was it hunger?

It was hope.

This, he’d allowed himself to think, was the moment he’d been waiting for. What else could it be? And he had ended up standing in the doorway of his study, with the parquet flooring creaking beneath his feet as though quietly protesting against the law of gravity, with snow swirling past the window like a badly tuned television. Not daring to go inside, wanting to keep the hope alive for as long as he could.

The email address was one he hadn’t used for years. He’d kept it because it was associated with memories, and it had remained untouched for years, because those memories were painful. At least that was partly why. Partly, it was also because grown-ups have grown-up email addresses: combinations of first and surnames, something that fosters trust, that’s serious, anything but this. Not AMBERLANGS.

He’d simply hadn’t had any use for it. If Sandberg communicated via email at all, he did so at work. And even if he knew that the computers in his home office were invisible to the outside world, hidden behind Virtual Private Networks and basically impossible to access from elsewhere, his trustworthiness would not be improved by asking people to contact him via a non-existent word on a free mailhost.

It wasn’t until his life started falling apart that he’d logged on again. Much to his surprise, the account was still there, and that somehow gave him a sense of security, as though it was meant to be, even though looking for meaning was something he couldn’t resent more. But his hope and his longing outweighed his good sense, and so that became the address he had chosen to give out to the ones he met on his nightly rambles. Morning after morning he had come home hoping to find something in the inbox, hoping that one among all those lonely, frozen people he’d met might have had something to tell him.

That was the simple truth. They were the only ones who knew about that address. No one else should have been able to email him there. But then again, nothing in William’s life was as it should be any longer.

Eventually he had dared to approach the computer.

In an instant, he felt the hope replaced by something else.

He was tired, off-kilter and unbearably alone, and maybe it was that, or the darkness and the silence that made everything grow out of proportion. For Christ’s sake, it was just an email. Yet still he could feel an icy chill spreading inside him, as though someone had opened a trapdoor in his groin.

What the hell was this?

He reread the text on his screen. On the left, where the sender should have been, was nothing. Underneath that was the subject field, also blank. Still, what ramped up his unease was the text in the message window on the right-hand side.

Contact me. I need your help.

Nothing more. No name, no subject, barely any content. Just an order, or maybe a plea, hard to know which. And he stood there for several minutes, paralysed, his heart pounding hard. It was as if the email itself was a sign, an omen of something bad, something unstoppable that was just about to take place.

In a way, he was right. But how was he to know?

In the end he’d forced himself to shrug it off. He’d taken a shower, donned clean clothes and made some coffee. Things he’d made habits of, because you must have habits. He’d sat at the kitchen table, with the newspaper open in front of him but without reading, and had gradually convinced himself that the email was just a mistake and had been meant for someone else. It was strange, sure, but it was trivial and meant nothing, and in the end he’d gone back to the computer and deleted it from his inbox.

Two days later, another email had arrived. Contact me. The same instruction, waiting in the morning gloom. But this time with an extra concise line beneath the first.

Please.

He spent hours trying to trace the sender. The ‘from’ box was empty, but technically it comprised a blank space. It was hiding a Hotmail address, and the name attached to the account was ROSETTA1998, but that was as far as it was possible to get. That combination of letters and numbers didn’t exist anywhere. He found no references, not as an email address, not as a term in any other context.

He split the email into its component parts. He searched the email’s headers and concealed information, switched the letters around, ran it through various encryption software for analysis, tried to locate some other meaning. Not necessarily because he thought it would help, but he’d been doing it professionally for so long that he did it automatically, almost without thinking.

And just as he’d thought, it led nowhere. The message contained neither more nor less than what was visible–whoever had sent it didn’t want to be traced. The question was why? Who asks for help without saying who they are?

Eventually he had sat down at the computer and written a reply. Just as brief, just as monotonal, just as cold. Who’s this?

Silence followed: no new emails–not that day, nor the next, or the day after. And the unease had waned and turned to exasperation, and then the exasperation to apathy, the same apathy of eternal darkness and meaninglessness as life itself. He had allowed himself to forget about it.

Three days later, Sandberg had arrived home in the half-light of morning, as he did every day. He was exhausted, he had talked to people in tunnels and shacks, had asked and pleaded but with no reply.

And there, in his inbox, was a new message, same sender.

Stockholm Central Station, Arlanda Airport Express, third of December, 4pm precisely.

This time he didn’t refrain. His fingers hammered the keyboard, as though the rage and fear and exasperation would come across the harder he typed. He asked who the fuck it was contacting him, how they’d got hold of his address, and above all why on earth William would go anywhere to meet anyone who he had never met and didn’t know what they wanted.

But no more emails arrived. No one got back to him. For the second time, the unease left him–but what refused to go was the hope. The hope that someone would have something to tell him after all.

Three weeks later he arrived at Stockholm’s Central in a yellow taxi, walked through the great hall to the northern platforms, and was knocked down by three discreet men.

‘I don’t understand,’ the woman opposite said once William had gone quiet. ‘Who did you think you were going to meet?’

He avoided their eyes as he answered.

‘Someone,’ he said. ‘Anyone.’

When Forester’s gaze made it clear that wasn’t answer enough, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let the words pour out in a long, toneless stream. Quiet and objective, as though this was actually about someone else.

‘I haven’t slept a whole night since I don’t know when.’ Wrong. He corrected himself. ‘I don’t know when was in August. The third. A Friday.’

He looked between his two interrogators, felt their eyes, took care to avoid them.

‘That was the last time I spoke to my daughter. That was the day I found her gear, and that she swore never to speak to us again, and ever since then I’ve been stuffing myself with sleeping pills and tablets and hoping it will work–every fucking night for four months. But sleep never comes. In the end I go out looking, not because I think I’ll find her, but because it’s the only way I can keep myself from falling apart.’

He told them about his nightly rambles, about the people he talked to, people he had always known existed but who he had always avoided, pretended not to see. People who slept in ditches and alleyways, in the damp and the cold, or who didn’t sleep at all, just like him. The ones who sit on the streets, outside shops and in the entrances to the metro, the ones who would look at him, pleading for help.

Now he was the one pleading with them.

‘I tell myself that one day, in the end, there must be someone who knows. Who has met her, seen her, heard something. Someone who has something to tell me.’

He sat there in stillness.

‘And then,’ he said, ‘the email arrived. My mistake was that I allowed myself to hope.’