Spy Out the Land (5 page)

‘Your friends in Moscow.’

Gadlow exhaled deeply as the relief flooded through him. Thank God. Kolya had received the message, and delivered. He wondered how they planned to get him out? Submarine? He had a brief stabbing
memory of that first glimpse he’d had of the
Thule
from the beach in Tanjong Siang in 1945, and then the descent from its conning tower into the wardroom, the thick slabs of bread
and English beer laid out on a vast white tablecloth like manna from heaven after all the years in the jungle. Well, no English beer would be waiting for him in Moscow, but he could live with that
if he could only escape the jungle one more time.

He glanced behind him at the cluster of stalls. The bluestocking bitch from headquarters was pushing through the crowd and heading straight for him. He turned back to the servant.

‘What about my wife – when will she be able to join me?’

The boy gestured that they step away from the lanterns that lit the maze of stalls. Gadlow followed him through until they emerged into the unlit part of the garden. The boy placed his tray on
the grass and gestured at the slope, which led down to a wire fence. Gadlow nodded: there must be a way through to the street from there. He started negotiating down the slope using one hand to
steady himself.

The dart thudded into the back of Gadlow’s neck. He experienced a moment of realisation – the thought ‘Kolya’ flashed through his mind – before he grunted and fell
forward, his knees hitting the grass and then his forehead joining them. Udah Atnam rushed towards him. He plucked the dart from his neck and slid it back into his sleeve, then rolled the
man’s body into the bushes and started walking back up to the house.

Rachel emerged from the stalls, her heart pounding as she scanned the throng of guests milling around the garden. She had lost him again. She saw one of the waiters passing and
stepped forward to speak to him, but he wasn’t holding a tray and didn’t appear to understand what she was saying.

She glanced at her watch. They were going to miss the flight. What was the bastard playing at? She was about to return to the house to check there when she thought to look elsewhere in the
garden – there was a lower tier to it. And what was that . . . a slash of whiteness glowing in the darkness?

She tumbled down the slope, her legs numb as she reached the bushes bordering the road. Gadlow’s head was bent over his chest, as though he were sleeping. For a moment she thought he was
– he had become drunk and taken a nap in the bushes – but then she kneeled down and tilted his chin back and saw his eyes had rolled up into the skull.

Footsteps padded behind her, and she heard Eleanor’s contorted cry as she caught sight of him. Rachel would never forget that sound.

Udah Atnam walked at a brisk but steady pace through the kitchens. In the driveway, the chauffeurs were still smoking and talking among themselves. He passed them and walked through the gates,
where he climbed onto a parked Yamaha motorcycle. It was a job well done, he thought, and he had repaid the debt.

He placed his helmet on his head, fastened the strap, and turned the key in the ignition.

Friday, 20 June 1975, Stockholm, Sweden

A stream of notes travelled through the ventilation shafts of a small nightclub in the city’s old quarter and drifted onto the maze of narrow alleyways. Peter Voers, a
stout, crimson-nosed engineering salesman stumbling from a restaurant with colleagues, caught the notes on the air and recognised them at once: the opening bars of ‘Night Time Is the Right
Time’. Voers loved Ray Charles, and loved that song in particular. He couldn’t resist.

The others in the delegation were heading back to the hotel: six hours of discussion on international drill-bit standards followed by some heavy Swedish cuisine could make even the liveliest
executive drowsy. As they approached the turning that would lead them out of Gamla Stan, Voers announced that he fancied taking a stroll through the area and bid them goodnight. After a few
friendly exhortations not to get into too much trouble, he began walking in the direction of the music.

He suddenly felt well disposed to the world, buoyed by the shafts of sunshine still creeping over the tops of the buildings and the melody drifting through the air.

After a few minutes he was sure he had located the source of the trumpet in a small street called Trångsund. About halfway down, he found confirmation in a poster stuck to a
seventeenth-century buttress that read ‘Jazz & Blues’. He handed ten kronor to a young man at the door, and with a nod was let past into a narrow hallway. It took a few moments for
his ears to adjust to the abrupt rise in volume and his eyes to the enveloping darkness, and then he saw the flight of stairs and started descending. At the foot of it was a baize-covered door,
which he pushed open.

The place was a brick-lined cellar packed with punters, most of whom were seated at small tables circling the stage. He made his way to the bar, glancing around to make sure nobody had followed
him in from the street – no one had. The bar was staffed by a willowy blonde in skin-tight jeans and a beaded kaftan. Voers ordered a beer, paid the exorbitant sum for it, and found a spare
table with a decent view of the stage.

The band had launched into another Charles number, a rendition of ‘Drown in My Own Tears’ played at a slightly faster pace than usual. They were a tight outfit: the lanky trumpeter,
whose playing had pulled him in here, was in perfect lock with the drummer and bassist, both young men sporting sprouts of beard beneath their lower lips, while the singer, a silver-haired Swede
wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a floppy beret, pounded a baby grand and sang his heart out in a creditable imitation of Charles’ style.

But Voers was drawn most to the two backing singers at the rear of the stage, who were harmonising as well as he remembered from the record: unsurprising, perhaps, as both were
munts.
He smiled at the way his mind had leaped to the word, which he never used these days: his colleagues wouldn’t understand it.

He had never liked the word himself, but had used it profusely in the old days to allay suspicions he was weak. Voers regarded blacks as inferior, but saw no contradiction in his love of rhythm
and blues, nor in his attraction to black women. That they could sing powerfully and were often physically beautiful was undeniable – but that didn’t mean they knew how to run a
country, or that he wanted to hand over his to them. He had once made a joke on the subject to a couple of colleagues, but they hadn’t appreciated it and some of the others in the unit had
for a time openly questioned his commitment and principles as a result. So he had joined in their little games and used their sad names for the blacks. But he knew that he was above all that: his
distaste was political, not personal.

He took a draught of his beer and savoured the coolness as it travelled down his throat, then turned his attention back to the singers. One of them was a little too plump for his taste, and her
mouth overly rouged, but the other was stunning, with a perfectly oval face, almond-shaped eyes, and hips moving sinuously in time to the beat. Voers licked his lips as he took her in. He noticed
that she had a mole just below her left eye, which reminded him of a young girl long ago, crouching in the darkness of a farm outside Bulawayo, her eyes widening as she realised what he meant to do
to her . . . He froze as the realisation seized him. She didn’t simply resemble that girl.

She
was
her
.

He scrabbled around the table for some kind of leaflet or programme, but there was just a small card with the name of the group – ‘Jan Karlssons Orkester’ – and no
further information. At the bar, the waitress was serving another customer, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to draw any attention to himself.

He took another swig of his beer and looked at the stage again. Could he be mistaken? A trick of the light? No, it was definitely her. The same high cheekbones, now a little more refined, the
same shape of the lips and nose, the long neck. He lifted his hand to his face and felt the small indentation beneath his chin where she had caught him with her kick all those years ago before
fleeing into the night. She had been a strikingly attractive seventeen-year-old. That meant she would be twenty-seven now. She had become a beautiful woman.

The next realisation came not as a freezing moment, but as a warm glow that spread through his stomach. There wasn’t simply an opportunity to exact revenge here. If he was careful, and if
he was clever, this was a prize. But as soon as the thought had lodged in his mind, a cautionary note sounded. Not too fast. He needed more information than this. His table suddenly seemed far too
close to the stage: he couldn’t run the risk of her seeing him. As soon as the song ended, he found one a little further away and ordered another beer. It was a waiting game now.

Claire arrived home at just before two o’clock. Everything was quiet in the building, just the humming of a washing machine in the communal basement below – no
doubt there would be a stern note from Fru Wallén on someone’s door tomorrow morning.

She took the lift upstairs and quietly unlocked the front door, then slipped her shoes off and walked into the living room. Erik was asleep on the sofa, the left side of his face lolling on one
of the cushions, a reading lamp next to him highlighting the flecks of silver in his beard. She leaned over and kissed him gently on the lips and he woke with a start. For an instant, fear
registered in his eyes, and then they softened and he kissed her back.

‘He’s asleep.’

‘What about—’

He placed a finger to her lips. ‘He was an angel. And he ate and drank like a little king.’

She smiled.

‘Let me just check on him.’

She tiptoed across the living room and carefully opened the door to the small bedroom. A glow lamp hung over a wooden cot, inside of which a three-year-old boy was curled up in the foetal
position, a thumb lodged firmly in his mouth.

She remembered how wildly he had been running around the same room a few hours earlier and smiled, relieved. One of Janne’s backing girls had been taken sick at the last minute, and he had
asked her to fill in for her. The opportunity had been too good to miss, but she had been stupidly torn about leaving the house for the evening. She hadn’t been away from Ben for more than a
few hours since his birth, and it had almost become a superstition for her: she had an irrational and almost paralysing fear that something terrible would happen to him the moment she turned her
back, and began imagining all kinds of nightmare scenarios: his falling through a window, or being burned in the kitchen, or stumbling headfirst against a pair of scissors.

But once she was away from the flat, she had managed to hold the panic at bay. She had never told Erik about her singing, and had instinctively felt he wouldn’t understand why she would
want to do it again, so she had instead told him she wanted to meet up with an old friend who needed comforting after a messy break-up. A white lie. Not the only one she had told him, either.

Still, it had been worth it. It had been exhilarating to bask in the heat of the stage again, Per’s trumpet blaring beside her, performing for an audience like she had done when she had
first arrived in Stockholm, before Erik and before Ben. She had almost forgotten what the city looked like, as her life had been reduced to attending Ben’s every need, especially as Erik
worked night shifts twice a week. The two of them and this flat had become her bubble of existence, and when she’d walked into the club for the rehearsal she had momentarily felt like a
visitor from another planet.

‘How’s Marta?’

Erik had come into the room and placed his arms around her waist. He rested his chin on her shoulder, staring down at their child.

She snapped out of her thoughts and turned to him. ‘Oh, you know . . . she’s Marta. She’ll be fine.’

Erik was friendly, if a little remote, with her friends, but he had made no secret of the fact he found Marta Österberg insufferably self-absorbed. She worked for a local refugee
organisation, which was where Claire had met her, but Erik thought she and her boyfriend were
bourgeois
playing at being radicals, which was harsh if not entirely untrue. Claire
hadn’t thought he was likely to check up on her, but she’d called Marta and warned her of their ‘meeting’ just in case. ‘We went for a drink after dinner,’ she
added, suddenly conscious of the need to bolster the story – Janne had insisted on a celebratory round in the green room afterwards.

Erik smiled. ‘Yes, I can smell it on you. Red wine?’

She nodded, and craned her neck up at him. ‘I might even be a little drunk.’

‘Oh, really?’

He leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. She drew away, flushed, and glanced back down at the cot. Ben was still fast asleep, his tiny chest gently rising and falling beneath the woollen
blanket. She turned back to Erik.

‘Are you trying to take advantage of me, Herr Johansson?’ she said, her expression deadpan.

He gave her a mock-serious look and stretched out his hand. She followed him into their bedroom and drew the curtains, then stepped over to the bed and placed a hand inside his shirt, feeling
the warmth of his chest.

In the street below, Voers considered his next move. Once the Ray Charles set had ended, he had waited outside the club until he had seen the girl – as he still thought
of her – emerge from the artists’ entrance.

He had been worried she might drive home or take a taxi, but instead she had walked to the nearby Slussen underground station: the network ran until three o’clock. He had followed at a
discreet distance and bought a single ticket. It had been several years since he’d tailed anyone, but there had been a throng of young people making their way home to the suburbs after a
night on the town, which had given him a lot of cover. He had stood at the far end of the carriage with his back facing her, watching her through the warped reflection of an advertisement for a
modern art exhibition.