The Game Trilogy (26 page)

As if there were actually something wrong with her.

Bloody hell, it was easy to be wise in hindsight …

Henke, on the other hand, had been fairly noisy and lively when he was little. He liked playing wild games which would sometimes take their toll on the furniture,
and that sort of thing didn’t go down well with Dad, especially not if he’d already had his after-work drink … Sometimes the belt would come out, and Dad wasn’t the sort to hold back. He’d hit over and over again, even though she and Mum begged him to stop. Until one of them got between him and Henke, to protect him, to put a stop to it all.

She remembered the hospital all too well. The look in the eyes of the doctors and nurses, and how she had held Dad’s hand tight.

His feigned calm:

‘No, Doctor, Henrik just fell downstairs. Our little lad’s very accident-prone …’

She bit her lower lip unconsciously.

You had to be quick, get Henke out of the way before the situation slid out of control. Keep Dad and her little brother in a good mood so that everything at home ran smoothly. Though Mum had tried her best, at least to start with, the illness grew to demand more of her attention, and she hadn’t been able to try anymore, or perhaps didn’t even want to. Dad had finally started to see her. However odd it sounded, maybe it was the drink and the self-pity that finally brought Mum and Dad closer together. Gave them a mutual interest, something they could share? As time passed it was left more and more to Rebecca to maintain the balance at home. Always being on the alert, constantly ready to step in, almost like at work. At first, trying to protect Henke from Dad, then, later on, from himself as well.

Henke. The truancy, his gang, the dope-smoking, all of that must have been some sort of revenge, at least to start with. Later on it was probably just an excuse not to give a damn about the rest of the world …

Rebecca didn’t bother trying to separate the pages that
had stuck together, so on the next page she looked at more than ten years had passed. She had just graduated from high school and was sitting at a heavily laden table in their old flat.

She and Dag were smiling at the camera, in the first flush of teenage love. He had his arm round her shoulders and she was leaning awkwardly, and possibly too closely, into his broad chest. It almost looked as if he was holding her captive.

She looked happy, overjoyed even, in her student cap and white summer dress. Even though it was only six months or so since they had met, the engagement ring sparkled on her finger. It could be a retrospective construct, but if she looked closely enough she imagined she could see that her smile wasn’t quite reaching her eyes. As if her joy in that picture was just a façade.

The next photograph showed the other people at the table. Mum, hollow-eyed and emaciated as usual. Henke and Manga, Dag’s mother and Nilla, and a couple of her own friends whose names she could hardly remember now. They were all smiling and waving at the camera, which she must have been holding. A cheery greeting from an apparently happy past.

‘Now we’ll all smile and wave. Hello, Rebecca!’

‘Hello,’ she found herself muttering, suddenly feeling sad.

When that picture was taken it couldn’t have been more than a year since Dad had gone to Spain for a conference and came home in a coffin. And ten months afterwards the cancer would have finished with Mum and she would have joined him in the Garden of Remembrance. But before that Dag would get himself killed and Henke would end up in prison.

And her?

Well, as Manga had said, she hardly got away unscathed either …

But none of that was visible in the photograph in the album. In that frozen moment the future was still bright. Only her own nineteen-year-old eyes seemed to suggest anything different.

She slammed the album shut and tossed it into one of the boxes of books, then tried to shake off the unsettling feeling. Only the clothes closet was left now, then she could call the removal firm and get shot of it all. The estate agent was coming the following week to value the flat, then in a couple of weeks or so it would doubtless have sold and the cavalry could stand down at last.

She opened the door and saw to her relief that the little room was almost empty.

That wasn’t actually altogether surprising, seeing as most of the clothes seemed to have been in various heaps around the flat.

There were a few boxes on a shelf at the back of the room and she took a couple of steps forward to pull them down. On the way her foot landed on a striped piece of cloth on the floor. She fished it up and was about to throw it towards the bin-bag when she realized what it was.

Henke’s old gym bag, the one he made in sewing-class. It was still neatly marked with his name and phone number, but the inside of the bag was sticky with some sort of oil. She wondered what he’d had inside it.

She thought for a couple of seconds, then put it in one of the bags of clothing she’d decided to keep. Henke probably had some sort of sentimental attachment to the bag, so it could have a few months’ reprieve. She was actually fairly doubtful that he would ever come back, and even if he did he was hardly likely to want his old things. She’d
give him six months, then she’d let the whole lot go to auction, including the photograph album.

When she took down the last box something fell and landed on her foot. It was fairly heavy and she had to do a one-legged war-dance out into the bedroom before she shook off enough of the pain to go back into the closet.

It turned out to be a little wooden box, probably made in Henke’s woodwork class. His initials had been neatly engraved on the top in black. There was no lock, but the wood must have swollen because she couldn’t get it open.

She shook her find and got a metallic rattle in response, but the sound wasn’t exciting enough to make her go and get something to open it with. She put it alongside the photograph album in one of the boxes.

When she had finished and was washing her hands in the kitchen sink, her mobile phone rang.

‘Hi, it’s Micke!’

‘Hello!’

She realized that her voice sounded happier than she had intended.

‘How … how are things?’

‘Good.’

She probably ought to be annoyed.

He had said he’d call, but that was last week. Much to her indignation, she had noticed that she was actually waiting for him to phone. But now that he had phoned, she couldn’t manage to keep her tone of voice quite as cool as she had planned. Because she was actually happy to hear his voice.

‘Do you feel like meeting up?’

He sounded happy, almost exhilarated.

‘Somewhere in the city?’ he added before she had time to answer.

‘Sure,’ she said neutrally.

‘Good, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Sturekatten at five, if that sounds okay?’

‘Sure,’ she repeated. ‘Five is good.’

‘Okay, see you then, bye!’

‘Bye,’ she said, and clicked to end the call.

What was all that about?

Something I need to talk to you about
…? It sounded so innocent. Like it was nothing important. But they didn’t share idle small-talk, or anything else for that matter apart from their physical relationship. So that was probably what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to finish with her. She’d already guessed that he had someone else. Maybe he’d decided once and for all to give it a go with the other woman? Dump the one who only showed up when she wanted to fuck? That sounded logical. Really she shouldn’t feel bothered.

But there was something else that was starting to get to her. Someone had started calling her landline from a withheld number, letting the phone ring but always hanging up without leaving a message when the answer machine clicked in. For a while she had thought it was Micke calling, and not having the sense to leave a message. She had almost started to get annoyed with him until she recalled that she had never given him her home phone number, just her mobile.

The calls had been sporadic to start with, but in recent days they were coming more often. As if someone really wanted to get hold of her, to tell her something important. Unless there was some other motive?

What bothered her most was that the caller always managed to pick times when she was at work.

First she thought it was coincidence, then, as the calls mounted up, she realized that there was a pattern. As if
her absence was a precondition for the calls, and that the lack of any message was a message in itself.

But when she thought about it a bit more, it really wasn’t that strange. She actually knew perfectly well who was behind it. And that the other woman had no intention of letting her get away.

He needed help, that much was crystal clear. The question was just what sort of help?

Okay, so he knew a few lads in the house-breaking branch, but there was a hell of a difference between using a crowbar to break open someone’s porch door and paying an undetected home-visit to the Game. Camera surveillance, a passcard system, a fulltime guard, and there were guaranteed to be alarms throughout the building.

Serious shit!

So who could help with something like that?

Well, he could cross that bridge a bit later.

To start with he had to do some research, dig out the plans and any other useful details that might be buried away in various registers and databases. And for a job like that, there was really only one obvious candidate.

Manga the Carpet-Seller, of course, who else?

Contacting him was fairly low-risk. Manga was totally paranoid when it came to internet security.

He’d written letters and calls-to-arms against FRA and IPRED, and had even got involved in that silly political party. All the clichés about integrity sounded a bit weak coming from a bunch of latte-liberals who spent all their days googling, blogging, tweeting and facebooking, only to go and swipe their supermarket loyalty cards so they didn’t miss out on a five-kronor discount on organic macaroni and unbleached sodding toilet paper.

This offer has been specially selected just for you!
Yeah, right!

So that was what all that integrity was worth.

Why not just say it like it was?

Everything should be free – it’s all about the fucking money!

He’d have no trouble voting for a party with a campaign slogan like that! But the real bonus was that Manga’s electronic communications, just like his own these days, were guaranteed to be free from Big Brothers, regardless of which family they happened to come from.

He rolled out of the petrol station and headed off towards Tensta. After cruising around for a few minutes with his laptop on his knees he found what he was looking for. An unprotected wireless network with a decent signal. Just park up and log in, thank you very much.

He waited a minute or so, and was just thinking of lighting a cig when the screen flickered.