Андерс де ла Мотт – The Complete Game Trilogy: Game, Buzz, Bubble (страница 43)
ACME Telecom Services had their own website, a phone number and an email address for inquiries.
On the other hand, there was no terrestrial address, but that wasn’t so unusual, there were a lot of companies like that.
He went out again to take a closer look at the van. Still no-one in sight, but the engine felt fairly warm, so it couldn’t have been standing there for long.
So where was the driver?
He walked round the van, but was none the wiser. The rear-windows were tinted, and even though he cupped his hands round his eyes he still couldn’t see in. The driver’s cab was a bit easier.
A jacket on the front-seat, neon-yellow with loads of pockets, and when he looked closer he saw that something was sticking out from under it. An oblong silver object. And suddenly he realized what it was! A phone, of course, just like the one he’d left in the computer shop. Which could well mean that the bastards had found him!
He wandered round to get a better view of the mobile, but it was mostly covered by the jacket. He had to know for sure, and tugged hard on the door-handle.
Locked, obviously.
He glanced quickly around, then picked up a stone from a nearby flowerbed. He raised his arm to strike.
‘Hey, you, what do you think you’re doing!’
The man had appeared out of nowhere, a thickset fifty-something in overalls and an orange
Manual labourer, model 1A.
‘Nothing,’ HP muttered and let the stone slide down his leg. ‘Just wondered why you’re parked here?’
The man looked at him suspiciously.
‘Working for Telia, broken cable. Broadband’s out across half of Södermalm, haven’t you heard?’
‘No,’ HP muttered, moving slowly away from the van. ‘Okay, see you, then!’
The man shrugged in farewell, then went round the van and unlocked the rear door.
After poking about for a minute or so he emerged with a toolbox, cast a quick glance in HP’s direction, then carefully locked the door before disappearing between two cottages.
HP breathed a sigh of relief. The bloke seemed genuine, false alarm, in other words.
He was getting brainstorms in broad daylight.
Finally out in the fresh air! It may still have been boiling hot, but anything was better than that claustrophobic little computer shop.
She moved off on her bike breathing deeply, then pedalled hard and with the wind in her face she felt the nausea gradually subside as oxygenated blood started to circulate round her body. After just a hundred metres or so she was feeling considerably brighter.
She wasn’t really much the wiser after her conversation with Manga.
Once he’d finally given up his feeble attempts at excuses and agreed to tell the truth, he started by locking the shop door, turning the sign to Closed, then, just to make sure, pulled her right to the back of the shop.
Manga had never been one of the more courageous of Henke’s deadbeat friends, and certainly not one of the coolest, but unlike most of the others he was one of the few who was still left from the old gang.
Vesa had decided to climb up on top of some railway carriages out in Älvsjö when he was high as a kite, and fried himself to death. She remembered Jesus pretty well too, hadn’t he won loads of money and disappeared to Thailand? Yes, that was him. Henke had talked about going with him, but as usual it never got further than a lot of empty talk. The rest of the gang had drifted away. Anyway, Henke wasn’t exactly the sort of person whose company or reliability anyone would really miss.
But for some reason Manga had always stuck in there, even when things had been at their worst. He was the only one of the gang who showed up at the trial, and as far as Rebecca knew he was the only person apart from herself who had visited Henke in prison. One of the few who had cared.
Manga was okay, really, a decent bloke who meant well, and she felt a pang of conscience at having been forced to resort to interrogation tactics to get him to talk. But at least it had worked, and after making sure not once but twice that they really were alone, he had finally told her everything, or at least as much as he knew.
She was left wondering exactly what it was he had told her.
The whole story about a mysterious mobile phone that allocated assignments and a secret reality game with rewards and punishments sounded crazy, and her initial reaction was that Manga had fallen for yet another of Henke’s bullshit stories. But then he had shown her the video clips on the computer and everything had emerged in an entirely different light.
The business with the door, the car wheels and the royal cortège had been bad enough, but when she saw her own car slowly rolling off the Drottningholm road, it had all got too much for her.
Evidently Manga hadn’t known that she was sitting in the Volvo, because he’d hovered outside the toilet door worrying anxiously if she was okay. She only just managed to hold it together, splashing a bit of water on her face and blaming it all on the heat, which he had accepted without comment.
Once she had composed herself again she had asked to see Henke’s mobile phone, and when he reluctantly pulled it out of a locked cupboard she had quickly inspected it and then put it in her bag. For a moment it had looked like Manga was going to protest, but he thought better of it and let her take it without a word.
Before she left, he had also given her the address of Aunt Berit’s allotment cottage, and she was looking forward to a fresh, more detailed conversation with her brother in just a few minutes.
This time she was going to twist the little sod’s arm until he told her the truth about what was really going on!
She cruised through the traffic, crossed Ringvägen and was soon in amongst the trees of the park. She was feeling brighter, enjoying the cool shade. Manga had said it was about fifteen minutes’ walk from the shop, so five minutes or so by bike seemed about right.
When she turned into the road she had to swerve to avoid a white van pulling away at speed and roaring past her way too fast.
‘Bloody idiot!’ she thought as she struggled to keep her balance. For a moment she considered making a note of the number-plate, the speed limit here was actually only thirty. But she didn’t bother, it was far too hot to make the effort to feel properly upset, and besides, she hadn’t seen the whole number. Some sort of company van with a blue logo on the side.
At that moment she caught sight of Aunt Berit’s cottage.
She knocked on the door three times but there was no answer. Maybe he was asleep? It may have been well into the afternoon, but it would hardly surprise her if Henke was taking a little siesta.
She felt the handle and discovered that the door was unlocked, but for some reason she stopped in the doorway. She didn’t really know why, but something was making her feel uneasy. She examined the door more carefully and soon found what she was looking for. A small, almost invisible mark in the wood just above the lock. Admittedly, it could have been old, but a quick check of the step revealed some flakes of the right colour paint.
Someone had broken into the cottage, and recently. The question was, were they still in there?
Rebecca held her breath and listened for any sound from inside.
Quiet as the grave.
She stepped silently through the door and into a tiny hallway. The stench of cigarette smoke almost made her eyes water. She put her hand on the frame of the door to the kitchen and leaned round it quickly to get a look inside.
The movement was too fast for any attacker to have time to react, but still enough for her to register the contents of the room. She repeated the procedure with the little bedroom to the right of the hall.
The results were unambiguous, the cottage was empty.
Whoever had broken in was gone now, and it didn’t look like anything had been stolen. A laptop, screensaver on, stood untouched on the little kitchen table. There were a few dirty mugs and glasses here and there, most of them containing cigarette butts, and the little sink was overflowing with dirty dishes and empty food tins.
There was a shabby green sleeping-bag in a heap at one end of the rib-backed sofa, and a filthy t-shirt and a pair of tattered Cheap Monday jeans were hanging untidily over one of the two kitchen chairs.
Smoky, filthy and untidy: rather different to how Aunt Berit usually kept it, she imagined.
It looked like Manga had been telling the truth, all the signs were that Henke had taken up residence …
So, where was he now, and how long would he be gone? The best thing she could do was sit down on the little sofa and wait.
A quick trip up to Ringvägen to stock up on cigarettes and Gorby pies, that was the plan.
He ended up getting falafel and an ice-cream as well, because there wasn’t really any hurry. He’d almost made it back to the cottage when he saw the flashing blue lights.
Two patrol cars and an unmarked van with a trailer, all lined up in front of Auntie’s little cottage. The trailer looked weird, a bit like an outsized milk-churn with its lid open. One of the cops seems to be in a hell of a hurry to set up a police cordon at the end of the road, but as luck would have it, HP saw him first.