Going Loco (21 page)

‘Jago?’

‘Hi, Stefan,’ said Jago, muffled. ‘I can explain.’

‘Jago, you shouldn’t be here! It’s very dangerous.’

‘Jesus, you’re telling me.’

Belinda’s husband peered across the room, and saw Ingrid groping her way to the bottom of the stairs. Evidently, she was unable to see anything yet. She stumbled, and her husband caught her, but then instantly let her go again. Stefan was in agony. He loved his wife, and had missed her painfully. But he couldn’t bear for her to see his disfigured face, or touch his scaly body.

‘Ingrid! I thought I’d never see you again,’ Stefan repeated.

‘Stefan, let me hold you! I thought Lucky George would be here, not you! Birgit saw Lucky George! I will kill him if I see him, for what he did to you!’

Stefan gulped audibly.

‘Are you all right?’ said Ingrid. ‘Can’t we put a light on?’

She reached for the switch, while across the room, Jago and Belinda’s husband both spasmed with alarm, clutching each other.

‘No current,’ Stefan said. ‘Not for years.’

The pair in the corner slumped with relief.

‘We must get out of here. We will be found,’ said Ingrid.

‘I’m tired, Ingrid. I have been living like a dead person. Since they took you, my life has been so terrible, so empty!’

‘Really? No little Stefans, then? No Belinda?’

‘What?’

Ingrid’s tone had changed. They all noticed it.

‘It’s just that I heard some things. I heard you made little Stefans without me.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Belinda’s husband watched with horror as Ingrid started to survey the room. Her eyes must be getting accustomed to the dark. She wasn’t picking out details, but she was seeing shapes. On all fours, she had edged her way to a table with old, rusty instruments on it.

‘I’m not mad,’ she told Stefan. She was nearer now.

‘Of course you’re not.’

‘I mean, I’m not stupid.’ She picked up a scalpel and twiddled it, so that the blade found the only glimmer of light in the room. ‘How was London? How was Belinda?’

‘I haven’t been in London. I’ve been here. In Malmö. Going out after dark, stealing food and candles. An odd dabble in vivisection my only entertainment. Waiting, waiting for you. Dead and alive. And I have to tell you, Ingrid. Now we’re back together again, I’d like to move to somewhere a bit more interesting to be dead in. Like Belgium.’

‘Ha.’

Hauling herself vertical, Ingrid sat on the mouldy bed and started to cry.

‘I trusted you, Stefan. I believed you loved me. You remember how happy I always was?’

There was an awkward pause.

‘Well, I seem to remember—’

‘I was
happy,
Stefan!’

‘Of course, my dear. I remember.’

‘And now you are happy with somebody else, and you make little Stefans.’

‘No!’

‘Yes! I know all about Stefan Johansson’s high life in London with the Ferrari!’

‘I deny it. I can explain!’

The tension in the room was as thick as the darkness. Belinda’s husband had started to tremble, and Jago was hyperventilating. So it was a spectacularly bad moment for Jago’s phone to ring. Especially as he had programmed it to play
The Ride
of
the Valkyries.

‘What’s that?’ screamed Ingrid, as the electronic Wagner trilled with unseemly volume.

‘Oh God,’ said Stefan.

Jago stood up in the dark and, with a mumbled ‘Sorry, sorry – God, isn’t this always happening?’ wrestled frantically with the inside pockets of his coat, while the Swedes both watched him open-mouthed.

‘Ripley, you’re OK!’ shouted the voice from the earpiece. ‘I knew you would be.’

It was Tanner. Two hours after he’d seen Jago struck by a picture-frame in the Möllevången, he had allowed conscience to prick him at last – as his star blazed in the Fleet Street firmament at home, and Jericho Jones boarded a private jet at Sturup. For in the interim, Tanner had saved the day for the Effort, and was extremely pleased with himself. Sitting on the steps of the ghastly statue’s plain granite plinth, he was attempting to get his bearings.

‘Tanner, I’m going to kill you,’ said Jago, and hung up.

‘Ripley!’ said Tanner, but the phone had gone dead. He tapped it against his leg.

Jago realized both the Swedes were still peering in his direction. He swallowed, and resolved to tough it out. ‘I’ll call him back,’ he confided in a whisper, dropping his blanket neatly over Belinda’s husband. He started to walk nonchalantly towards the stairs, on legs that wobbled. ‘Mobile phones,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘Big industry here in Sweden, yes? Taxi guy told me. Nice to meet you, Ingrid.’

Ingrid pounced, but her ankle betrayed her. Jago had never
moved so quickly in his life. He reached the stairs and was gone.

‘Stefan, who was that, please?’

‘Just some guy,’ Stefan explained, lamely. ‘Guy with a phone. I found him here. He’s gone now.’

‘Anyone else back there?’ asked Ingrid. ‘The Malmö Meerkats? Lucky George?’

‘No, no.’

But Ingrid did not believe him. She started to grope around. She fingered the blanket that covered Belinda’s husband, so close that he could smell her.

‘Why are there no candles down here, Stefan?’ she asked. ‘Is it because – all those years ago, me and Lucky George?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was all his idea, you know. To make babies. I never wanted anyone but you.’

‘Mm.’

There was a long pause, while Belinda’s husband sat rigidly still and prayed to the god of luck genes. He tried to imagine himself one of those human statues in shopping centres, painted all over in blue or gold. He imagined the Woolworth’s and the children in football shirts trying to annoy him, and the smell of frying onions wafting from a van.

It can’t have worked, however.

‘Stefan,’ said Ingrid at last, twitching the blanket, ‘I can hear breathing. I know there is somebody here.’

Turning up outside the apartment and meeting Leon and Jago, Tanner was disappointed by his reception.

‘You stupid little transvestite bastard!’ yelled Jago, who had just emerged from the building. ‘I could have been killed
down there! I could have been fucking killed! Where the fuck have you been?’

Tanner sighed. The excitability of journalists was beginning to annoy him. ‘Actually, you’ll be very impressed when you know. I was persuading Jericho Jones to return to sport. Got an exclusive for the Effort. Took longer than I expected, that’s all. The editor said you should call, by the way,’ Tanner added, smoothing his jacket, which Jago had grabbed by the lapels. ‘Something about Lambeth Palace going bananas.’

‘What? I don’t believe this. There’s a mad bitch with a knife down there, and you’re talking about the Archbishop of Canterbury?’

Leon intervened. ‘Ingrid? Is Ingrid all right?’

‘You know Ingrid?’ Jago swung round to look at him. He hadn’t registered Leon’s presence before. He was confused. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Well, I carried her here from the hospital. She was hurt.’

Jago gave him a long, incredulous look. ‘Listen. Leon. That your name?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, Leon, fuck off. One minute you’re the most boring dinner guest I ever met, and the next you’re helping a psycho on the worst night of my life. You’re fired!’

‘I’m fired already.’

‘Well, you’re fired again! But you’re going to help me first, OK? And as for that smug son-of-a-bitch – Where did he go?’

Leon looked around. They both did. Tanner had disappeared. At the doorway of the sauna opposite, there appeared to be a commotion – people in uniforms spilling out into the night air, as if gasping for breath. For a few seconds, Leon and Jago ran in all directions, looking for Tanner, until it occurred to them that, for some unaccountable reason, he had chosen to go inside.

‘Help!’ Jago yelled. ‘For fuck’s sake, somebody help!’ And the people from the sauna came running.

What Belinda’s husband always said afterwards was that he heard the merest scuffle and that was it. Before Leon, Jago, Birgit and a herd of rather light-headed security men could hammer down those stairs with their torches and loudhailers, Ingrid had lunged fatally for Stefan with her knife. That’s what he told everybody, anyway. But there was more to it than that. Much more.

‘I can hear breathing, Stefan,’ Ingrid had repeated, tugging at the blanket. Belinda’s husband closed his eyes. It was all over. He would never see Belinda again, or work ‘under the cosh’ into a conversation. It struck him as terribly sad, suddenly, that Belinda would never know he wasn’t Swedish. She would never sing ‘Angeleyes’ to him again, or be disabused about the Söderbergs.

But as Ingrid pulled the blanket (‘I think I just see if Lucky George—’) a curious thing happened.

‘It’s all true!’ yelled Stefan.

‘What?’ said Ingrid. She dropped the blanket.

‘It’s all true! I’m so sorry, Ingrid. I went to London. Yes, I did. I always hated Malmö, it’s so cold and boring! And I always hated you!’

‘Stefan, how could you?’

Belinda’s husband felt his bowels turn to water. What was Stefan doing? What was he saying? He had been devoted to Ingrid all his life. He loved Malmö. This was suicide!

‘And I’ve been married for three years to a beautiful woman called Belinda,’ Stefan continued. ‘And we’ve got two little Stefans, and lots of money and—’ Stefan’s ingenuity was beginning to flag ‘—and we didn’t even go to the Carl Larsson
retrospective when it came through, and the car is still running very well indeed and –
aargh!’

‘Stop!’ Belinda’s husband yelled. He threw his blanket over Ingrid’s head and circled her with his arms. But he was too late. As he held the hooded, wriggling Ingrid, he was obliged to watch once again as his namesake Stefan Johansson expired in this bloody nasty basement in Malmö.

‘No!’ he cried. With a pang of grief and shame, Belinda’s husband noticed that Stefan had laid down his kitchen knife in the dark. As Ingrid ran to attack him, he had made no effort to defend himself.

Tanner was watching in disbelief from the stairs.

‘You!’ said Belinda’s husband. ‘Go away. This is all your fault.’ But Tanner didn’t move, because he couldn’t. Upstairs cacophonous people were approaching, swapping instructions in Swedish, and trying to switch the lights on.

Ingrid wriggled, but he held her tight under the blanket. Stefan hadn’t wanted her to see the state he was in, and now she never would.

In his final moments, Stefan reached out a scaly hand towards Belinda’s husband. As he remembered it afterwards, it was like a blessing, an apostolic succession of Stefanhood.

‘You are Stefan now,’ he whispered. ‘Make more Stefans, for my sake!’ And then, just as Birgit and the others came running with their lights and noise, he gagged, and his eyes rolled, and he died.

They arrested Leon for aiding Ingrid’s escape, but then let him go. Tanner’s story made the last edition, while Jago made his peace with the Archbishop of Canterbury by offering him a weekly ontological spot on the puzzles page. Leon asked Tanner politely about his encounter with Jericho Jones, but
found it hard to bear. All his life, Leon’s father had fantasized about sharing a flat with Roger Bannister or telling Gary Player he should try wearing black. Leon had always hoped to make that dream come true. And now Tanner had simply bumped into Jericho Jones on a windy night in Malmö, and was deciding when to take up the offer of the trip to meet the folks in Cincinnati.

‘I was running off to call the police, of course,’ said Tanner. ‘But there he was, looking up at that awful statue. What could I do? The editor had asked me to save the day. Jerry made them stop the car when he saw it.’

‘Jerry?’

‘Mm. He said the figures straining to hold up the boulder reminded him of life at the top in basketball. He cried, actually. I mentioned it in the piece.’

‘I should think so.’

‘Yes. Cried on my shoulder. But I simply told him he should pull himself together, and in the end he saw my point. He’s a great fan of the sarong, incidentally. Offered to model one for the Effort. It could have been anyone who gave him the courage to carry on, obviously. But funny how it was me.’

Meanwhile, in the basement, Belinda’s husband sat for hours on his old bed, feeling bereft, lonely and shaky. He had been an inch from death when Stefan had intervened and drawn Ingrid’s wrath away from him. What should he make of Stefan’s bizarre sacrifice? Should he admire it or deplore it? Did it set him free, or obligate him for the rest of his life? And how could he ever share it with the woman he loved?

Jago put his arm around him, but found that even in this extreme situation, his unreconstructed maleness prevented him from going for the full hug. So he converted the gesture at the last minute into a matey shove at the back of the neck. ‘Stefan? You OK?’

Belinda’s husband smiled grimly at the appellation, but didn’t contradict it.

‘I’ve got to tell you,’ said Jago. ‘I got this all wrong. I had no idea. I thought you were a clone.’

‘What? That’s a bit far-fetched, Jago.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I got carried away. I had no idea it would be something straightforward like you taking the identity of a Swedish guy who cut chunks off you.’

‘He loved me, you know.’

‘Yeah? It really looked like it. I hope no one ever loves me that much.’

‘We were very close.’

‘There’s such a thing as too close.’

Jago helped him to stand up.

‘Promise me you’ll never tell anybody about this.’

Jago pulled a face. This was too tough a promise to make. ‘I’m only human, Stefan! Jesus!’

‘Please, Jago. I left all this behind. Belinda thinks this kind of thing only happens in books. She thinks doubles are some sort of literary convention! And it was your fault it all happened. That boy you sent to spy on me? Why did you do that? When I think of the things I’ve done for you. The times I supplied you with names of Swedes!’

Jago felt like a heel. ‘OK,’ he agreed, softly.

‘What?’

‘I said OK. I won’t tell anybody. I’ll go nuts, but I won’t tell anybody.’

They sat together on the bed, Stefan still hugging the blanket. He sniffed it. It smelt of surgical spirit, reindeer sandwich, rat poison and ancient mould. In short, in a funny old way, it smelt of home.