Babylon Page 9

  Torsen could write a fucking book about everything that had happened since then. He still carried the marks of it; marks on his skin and marks deep inside. It was stupid of Knud to think he could ring up after years of silence, just like that – ‘A little job for me, for old times’ sake’ – coldly counting on Torsen’s help.

  Knud had hardly any contacts left. What he did have was attitude. It shone through his mates-from-the-old-days chat. As if he had just touched a pile of shit, Knud had discreetly wiped his hand on his trousers after shaking Torsen’s hand.

  What bothered Torsen was the companion Knud had forced on him. Young, moody, annoying. He had a crazed look in his eyes, as if he was on something. He was off-hand and way too mouthy.

  ‘Just like you in the old days,’ Knud had said, but that was bullshit.

  Before his body let him down and the bigger jobs dried up, Torsen had always known how important it was to cover your tracks.

  ‘Fucking idiot,’ he hissed as the lad blundered inside, running a hand through his spiky hair. Shedding two or three hairs on the carpet, no doubt.

  Torsen swayed in the doorway as he pulled on his gloves. He wasn’t a hundred per cent today, definitely not. But so far, the job seemed straightforward. In and out. There was no one home. They’d parked the car a few streets away. They knew what they were looking for. They wouldn’t have the usual hassle of several journeys to the car.

  The lad was a risk. But he hadn’t a clue what was going on, beyond the fact that he would get a few thousand for a quick job. He knew they were in a house in Sweden where some guy had hidden a number of items Knud wanted to get his hands on. And Knud had been very specific: Don’t touch anything else. Don’t waste time on mobile phones or any of that crap. Get in, pick up the stuff, get out.

  Torsen felt slightly better. He resisted the urge to give the lad a slap. The more methodically they went to work, the quicker they would find what they had come for.

  Then he would need a fix. And a lie down.

  ‘I’ll take the attic. You take the cellar.’

  ‘Aye aye.’

  Aye aye. Still, he was in no state to do the job on his own. It was age, it was the dope, it was the other thing clawing at his body. Of course he could go to the doctor about the other thing, but he’d never liked doctors. Doctors did tests and discovered things that didn’t belong in the human body. He had a feeling that he was beyond the point of no return. It was only a matter of time until he had done his last job, conned his last punter. In some strange way, he was almost relieved.

  The attic was a dusty hellhole. His body ached even though he’d taken his pills. The boy should have been the one crawling around up here, but Torsen couldn’t trust him to be thorough.

  If he had wanted to hide something important, would he have chosen the attic? Perhaps in the alcoves below the sloping roof, behind boxes of junk. Or in the utility room, behind the tumble drier. Maybe under the fridge. No, not under the fridge, that was too much of a cliché. In the air-con system. Or stitched inside a piece of furniture. No, they would slice open every single thing in the house.

  Torsen didn’t know why he lost control. It might have been his bitterness at being saddled with a twenty-two-year-old. Or the fact that he was beginning to think Knud had got it wrong, that they were wasting their time searching every nook and cranny of the house. Or it might have been his treacherous body, the fact that he lacked that extra bit of strength. But, whatever the cause, he abandoned his systematic approach and fell into a desperate frenzy, smashing open the stud wall and hurling the contents of the wardrobe onto the floor.

  When he finally found what he was looking for, it was only one item, hidden in a box behind the books on a shelf in the bedroom. A clay figure. He weighed it in his hand.

  His rage subsiding, he searched the attic and upstairs one more time. Went through the kitchen and the living room again, the hallway and the downstairs bedroom. The cellar this time. In his peripheral vision he could see that the lad was a little calmer, as if his own carelessness had been subdued by seeing someone else who was equally reckless – or perhaps he was just afraid. Torsen was having an attack of the shakes and he felt as if he was using up the last of his strength. When they finally came to a standstill, it looked as though a hurricane had passed through the house. There was a pervasive smell of desperation secreted through their skin. They had been in there for hours.

  As a car backed onto the drive next door and the outside lights came on, Torsen’s bloodshot eyes met the lad’s suspicious gaze. He thought: Got to keep the lad quiet, he won’t like the idea that we’ve been conned, he’s already getting ideas. They wordlessly established that the job was over. It was time to go.

  17

  Istanbul, September 2007

  The area between the Hagia Sophia and Sultan Ahmed Camii could have offered coolness and shade, with its fountain and neatly clipped trees. But all the spots in the shade had been taken. Henrik had at least managed to find a vacant place among the hundred square, backless benches in front of the Blue Mosque. He sat down to rest his aching feet, grimacing with pain as he pulled off his Converse trainers to expose the burst, fleshy blisters on his heels. It was the heat that made the body vulnerable. His feet weren’t the only part suffering. For the first two days his stomach had been unsettled – along with some of the others, he had found it difficult to adjust to the strongly flavoured food and the sweet Turkish wine. They had been constantly on the lookout for the nearest public toilet, joking amongst themselves: Here we go again.

  He put on the leather sandals which he had just bought from a street trader. They were well made and looked good, although they did press slightly on his big toe when he slipped them on his feet – if it wasn’t one thing, it was another. But they were still his best bet; the heels of the trainers were stiff with dried blood. He perched them on top of an overflowing bin, and immediately a boy appeared from nowhere and grabbed them, clutching them defiantly to his stomach as he disappeared into the crowd.

  The trader, whose goods were spread out on a blanket in front of him, spun around as if he had eyes in the back of his head. He gesticulated wildly, shouting at the boy.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Henrik said. ‘I’d thrown them away.’

  He took his water bottle out of his shoulder bag, in case it was dehydration that was making everything flicker in front of his eyes. He had learnt to drink water with his raki now; in the beginning he had refused. As it comes, he had said the first evening; he never drank water with red wine, nor put ice in his whisky. The waiters had smiled condescendingly. No doubt they knew all about the iron band that would slowly tighten around his head in a few hours’ time.

  It was the worst hangover Henrik had ever endured. The only thing that helped was a quick hair of the dog in the hotel lobby before the others came down. He consoled himself with the thought that he was on holiday; he was usually much more careful when it came to spirits.

  Henrik emptied the bottle thirstily. A young woman immediately appeared by his side. She was strikingly beautiful, dressed in a sequinned shawl that dazzled when it caught the sun. She was holding out bottles of water in different sizes. He didn’t even need to get up; he simply picked a couple of coins out of his wallet.

  ‘You American?’

  The usual polite phrases to butter him up, giving the impression that she actually cared who he was and where he came from.

  ‘No, no, absolutely not. I’m from Sweden. A town called Göteborg, Gothenburg.’

  As soon as he had paid, she lost interest in him. He watched her disappear into the crowd, her thin body stooped under the weight of the water. Anyone could disappear into that throng and never be seen again.

  He gazed over towards Alemdar Caddesi, looking for Ann-Marie; if she finished early at the museum she would come that way. He couldn’t see her sky-blue suit anywhere. His stomach somersaulted at the thought of her.

  Henrik knew that if he went to look for her at the Museum of Archa
eology, he would find the upstanding, learned professional who had been the object of his admiration for so long. He felt a tremor of doubt: perhaps he had imagined the moments they had shared.

  He pushed his doubt aside. The nights had been real, they had belonged to them.

  Their days were spent as a group. Annelie fell in love with the old, handwritten books and the objects made of stone, wood, metal and ceramics, in particular the hand-woven kelims. They were determined to take home some examples of Turkish handicrafts. Even though Henrik wasn’t exactly a fan of shopping, he had gone with them to the Egyptian market and had been amazed by the array of goods on offer. He had pottered among mounds of piled-up herbs and spices, but then he reached his limit. When the others went on to the Grand Bazaar, he had returned to the Archaeological Museum on his own. He loved its collections and the building that housed them. He wandered through the echoing exhibition halls more or less alone, gazing at the three-thousand-year-old remains of buildings and Roman sarcophagi. He spent hours sitting in the inner courtyard, enjoying being surrounded by ancient Greek columns and statues. The feel of the museum particularly appealed to him. In contrast to its Swedish equivalent, the institution seemed completely lacking in educational aims. There was no sense of curation; the artefacts were displayed in no particular order and only occasionally had the sparse lines of text been translated from Turkish.

  At this time of day the historic Sultan Ahmed was packed with people. Henrik amused himself for a while trying to guess the nationality of those who were clearly tourists. Towards evening the crowds would thin out. There were many mosques in this area, which made the nightlife quieter, and revellers tended to disappear by midnight. But you only needed to go down to the harbour or Eminönus Square, or cross Galata Bridge, and the night seemed young at any time.

  Henrik wondered whether to go back to the museum. Or should he go and look for Ann-Marie? God, no. He must never get clingy. And it was important to show that he respected her work.

  They had dedicated three whole days to the collections before exploring the rest of the city. They had travelled by boat across the Bosphorus to the Asiatic side, to its promenade and holes in the walls serving raki or hot, sweet tea in tinted glasses. And then back to the European side. The city silhouettes on both sides of the water, scrambling up the hillsides, looked as if they were carrying thirty metres of smog, like a dark-grey mist covering the buildings, the domes of the mosques, the pointed minarets, palace towers and pinnacles.

  Late at night, when the others had headed back to the hotel – Axel Donner was usually the last to throw in the towel – Henrik and Ann-Marie would stay out. They were both night owls, egging each other on until the first light of dawn crept over the city like a gentle caress, before the traffic made their eardrums tremble and the heat arrived. Before the first call to prayer echoed across the rooftops. The nights had followed a quickly established ritual. They would start off at a courtyard restaurant high up in a narrow street behind the Hagia Sophia, with its lights shining on their laps. Or they would go to the place opposite, a more modest bar with kelim-covered sofas, tucked below the high wall of the Topkapi Palace park. A number of artists wearing paint-spattered white coats frequented the courtyard next door, their abstract paintings hung up to dry in the sun.

  The first evening they talked about art and architecture, drawing on what they had seen that day. But it wasn’t long before they were teasing out a deeper connection. Gradually, they shed the inhibitions of being teacher and pupil. The city was instrumental in this. It pulled and tugged in every direction, refusing to respect boundaries, refusing to keep itself in check.

  Henrik told Ann-Marie about the stirrings he had felt on the way from the airport. As their yellow taxi zig-zagged among hundreds of others, with thousands of cars revving their engines and sounding their horns. There were traffic jams as far as the eye could see, the smog was suffocating, making his eyes smart and his lungs burn, and Henrik had thought: I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, just as he had thought on his way into Cairo. As he had thought on his way into Bombay and Bangkok, New Mexico and countless other cities. He had been terrified at first, then exhilarated. And after that, he wanted nothing else other than to be in the city, to be nowhere else for the rest of his life.

  Ann-Marie had smiled at the fact that they were so alike. And that it had taken them so long to find out.

  18

  Gothenburg

  ‘What were we talking about?’ asked Karin Beckman.

  ‘Rebecca’s employer.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Tell replied. ‘She said Rebecca used to work with patients, short-term therapy and so on, but that she was barred from direct contact when the offences against her ex-boyfriend came to light. If I understand correctly, it was some kind of compromise allowing her to keep working there after she’d completed her punishment. At the moment she has some kind of administrative role. I also discovered that our new chief constable is a bureaucrat right to his fingertips, an absolute master at digging out sensitive information. Thanks to him, I’ve been in touch with a psychiatrist who saw Rebecca back then. From what he said, I could easily imagine that . . .’

  She fell silent suddenly to concentrate on the traffic, muttering about the one-way system. A man battled his way across the crossing with a Monkshood plant in an ornate pot. They watched him in silence as they waited for the lights to change.

  ‘I still think it’s peculiar that she’s trusted to work in a place where they’re dealing with people’s psychiatric problems, given her history . . .’

  ‘Admin duties could just mean she spends all day writing invoices,’ Beckman replied. ‘And, to be fair, it appears that her aggression is linked to whatever man she happens to be living with, or at least to people with whom she has a close relationship. She’s not a danger to the public. And if you’ve completed your punishment, surely you deserve a second chance, don’t you?’

  ‘I take your point. But is that argument ever going to be watertight? Can a person be aggressive, extremely aggressive I mean, to one particular person or in one situation, and behave completely normally to everyone else? In my opinion, if you’re crazy in that way you’re a liability. A time bomb. Surely all it would take would be for someone to piss you off one day when you’ve got out of bed on the wrong side?’

  The corner of Beckman’s mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.

  ‘Hmm . . . No, actually, I think that a person could function perfectly normally and do their job and have friends but still lose it over and over again in one specific context. After all, it’s not particularly unusual to have hang-ups about infidelity. It’s only human.’

  ‘And what’s behind it? In the case of Rebecca Nykvist?’

  He opened his door to help as Beckman tried to squeeze their Hyundai into a parking space which looked smaller than the car itself.

  ‘Shall we?’

  The letterbox was marked Samuelsson-Nykvist. But Samuelsson wouldn’t be coming back and Nykvist might not see her front door for a while, Beckman thought, with a sudden, surprising feeling of melancholy. She had no relationship with Rebecca Nykvist. Or her problems. She thought back to her earlier conversation with Tell.

  ‘You asked what’s behind it? Well, I don’t really know, but it could be that any situation that evokes a fear of abandonment acts as a trigger. Her aggression is a survival instinct.’

  The lupins on either side of the path made her think of Österlen, where her family used to have a summer cottage. Just imagine lying down in the flowers and forgetting everything else.

  She was getting annoyed with Tell, who was now on the street, chatting on his mobile. She didn’t usually get annoyed with Tell and she wasn’t usually tired. There was a connection. The tiredness meant that she was constantly on edge and she was conscious of the fact; it made her uncharacteristically cheerful until her defences came crashing down, when she would shout at people who let a door close in her face, were walking their dogs without a lead, o
r who simply happened to be nearby. She felt unreliable.

  She shoved a handful of peanuts into her mouth and blinked away a tear as she swallowed too soon and felt the sharp nuts scratching her throat. She shouldn’t be too hard on herself, she thought. She had just ended a ten-year relationship that had been anything but restful, and she had yet to develop a new routine as a working single mother. She really didn’t want to think about her feelings. But she knew deep down that the separation was for the best, and that was all she could focus on for the present.

  When you were young, you thought breaking up would get easier. Perhaps it did, in a way. After all, she was a master of suppressing her emotions. She simply put certain matters to one side, tackling them when there was the time and space to do so. And it was only four weeks since she had left Göran. Four weeks, that was no time at all. She wasn’t stupid; she realised that at some point she would have to face up to the grief. But not today.

  Then she noticed something. She raised her arm and gestured to Tell without turning around.

  ‘Tell! Come here!’

  She heard him end the call.

  ‘The door. It’s unlocked. Or has someone broken in?’

  Beckman withdrew her hand instinctively and fumbled in her bag for latex gloves and shoe protectors.

  ‘You can never be too careful . . .’

  ‘There’s no reason for the door to be open,’ Tell agreed, automatically lowering his voice. ‘When Rebecca was brought in for questioning she must have known that it could be some time before she came home. Be careful until we’re sure the house is empty.’