Андерс де ла Мотт – The Complete Game Trilogy: Game, Buzz, Bubble (страница 44)
He stopped abruptly and turned into one of the little side-paths to find a good observation post.
A couple of minutes later he was sitting on top of a rocky outcrop surrounded by lilac bushes.
So what the hell was going on down there?
For some reason she hadn’t just sat down.
Afterwards she couldn’t really explain why, but the feeling that something was wrong wouldn’t let go of her.
It took a few seconds before she realized what was troubling her. The sofa was slightly out of position. She could clearly see the marks on the cork matting where the leg of the sofa usually sat, but now it was a few centimetres out. Okay, so the sofa was pretty old, but it was solid pine and to judge by the deep indentation in the floor it would take a fair bit of effort to shift it. So why had someone done so?
Instead of sitting down, she got down on her knees and looked underneath.
He could see some of the cops talking with serious expressions, then another bloke showed up wearing a protective suit and a helmet that made him look like a green astronaut.
The starman wobbled inside the cottage and the cops quickly moved to the far side of the cars, it looked almost like they were taking cover. After a couple of minutes the spaceman came out with some sort of object in his hands. He lurched towards the trailer and put whatever it was he was holding inside it.
Even though he was sitting some distance away, HP had no trouble noticing how relieved the cops looked when the lid of the trailer was closed.
She didn’t really know what she had been expecting to find. But it was clear that the object under there wouldn’t have been on her top-ten list of things she was likely to find, if anyone had asked her to come up with such a list.
A set of keys, some loose change, maybe a mobile phone someone had dropped?
But not this …
It took her a few seconds to realize what she was staring at, and why it was there, then she very slowly got to her feet, picked up the laptop and left the cottage.
She left the front door open.
It wasn’t until he’d been sitting there for a few minutes that he recognized one of the cops. To start with he thought it was just another plain-clothed officer. Khaki shorts with lots of pockets, an untucked short-sleeved shirt, baseball cap, sensible trainers and all the other things that were supposed to help them fit in.
But their cops’ posture and that way they had of moving their heads almost always gave them away.
He had been concentrating on the blokes round the trailer, and it wasn’t until the lid closed that he looked more closely at the rest of the gang and realized that the plain-clothed cop was actually Becca. She was standing there talking to the bloke in the astronaut outfit.
What the fuck was she doing here?
‘Definitely viable,’ the bomb-disposal expert said. According to the tag on his suit, his name was Selander, and evidently he liked talking in clipped sentences.
‘Two sticks of dynamex. Pressure trigger mounted under the sofa cushion. Sitting down would be enough. More than enough to blow the cottage sky-high. Bloody lucky you had your wits about you, Normén …’
He paused to put in a dose of chewing tobacco.
‘Won’t know for sure if it would definitely have gone off until we get it into the lab and take it apart,’ he went on, this time slightly more expressively. ‘I’ll get back to you. I presume the Södermalm Crime Unit will be in charge? You said this was your brother’s cottage?’
‘Something like that,’ she muttered.
Her head was spinning. Flash-grenades, chucking stones at police cars, and now a bloody bomb!
What in the name of holy hell had Henke got himself caught up in?
‘I daresay our colleagues in crime will be pretty keen to have a word with him,’ Selander concluded as he wiped his fingers on the bomb-suit, smearing it with bits of tobacco.
Rebecca just nodded in response.
Welcome to the club! she thought.
Rebecca was exhausted when she got home. She had spent most of the afternoon with the Södermalm Crime Unit telling them what had happened out in Tantolunden. Or rather the parts that she deemed suitable to reveal.
She didn’t mention her visit to see Manga, or the video clips she had seen in the shop. It was fairly likely that the clips had something to do with events out at the cottage, but before she’d had a chance to talk to Henke she didn’t really want to show them to her colleagues. She hadn’t missed the pointed silence that had fallen when Henke’s criminal record was mentioned.
Then the obligatory questions: did her brother have any enemies? Did she know how he made a living? Did she know anything about the arson attack on his flat a week before?
She answered no to each of the questions, which was actually true. Well, almost, anyway.
She locked her bicycle away in the basement and took the stairs up as usual.
Maybe it was because she was tired, or because she was deep in thought, but she didn’t notice that someone was waiting for her.
‘Becca!’
She spun round and automatically raised her hands in front of her.
‘Calm down, it’s only me, Henke!’
Of course it was only him.
She should have realized. Where else was he going to go?
She muttered something, turned round and unlocked the door of her flat before shepherding him in ahead of her. She stopped inside the door for a couple of seconds, then locked all four locks.
But only once, and even though part of her was protesting wildly that would have to do. She had no intention of giving him a demonstration of her compulsive behaviour.
In the hall the answer phone was flashing to indicate another missed call. Number withheld, same as usual.
Henke had already made himself at home on the sofa in the living room.
‘Got any coffee?’
She resisted, with some effort, a sudden urge to grab the nearest heavy object and smash his skull in. Fucking bloody idiot, creeping up on her like that! She didn’t even know he knew where she lived. When she’d been out searching half the city for him, and here he was all of a sudden, sitting on her sofa.
And what on earth did he look like?
Even more strung out than last time, with great bags under his eyes and nicotine yellow skin. Fingernails chewed almost to the quick, his hair all over the place, and utterly filthy too.
A smell of ingrained smoke and unwashed male wafted up from her sofa, making her wrinkle her nose.
He was looking at her quizzically and she realized she hadn’t answered his question.
‘Sure,’ she snapped and went out into the kitchen.
‘You can clean yourself up in the meantime, the bathroom’s off the hall,’ she called from the kitchen as she sorted out the machine.
But when she came back a few minutes later with a tray of coffee, he was asleep.
She sighed, poured herself a cup and decided, after a bit of thought, to let him sleep. He looked like he could do with it.
A surprising feeling of tenderness came over her and she couldn’t help giving his cheek a quick stroke. He was still her little brother, after all, her little Henke. Okay, so he was an immature idiot and a first-rate trouble-magnet, but that hadn’t always been the case. Once it had been the two of them against the world. And through all the shit, they had always had each other.
But that was a long time ago. Things changed, whether you liked it or not.
She drank the last of the cup, leaned her head back against the sofa and closed her eyes.
She had realized from the noise he was making in the hall when he got in. The way he slammed the front door, the way he jangled his keys as he kicked off his shoes. She tried to warn Henke but he had his back to her, sitting on one of the folding chairs out on the balcony, smoking. Henke and Dag sometimes used to share a cig out there, even though Dag claimed he’d given up. Smoking didn’t fit in with his exercise regime and all that crap. Yet he still hung about out there all the time, leaning over the railing, and not just when Henke was visiting. From the balcony he could keep an eye on the backyard, as well as the carpark where the BMW was.
On good days they got on pretty well, Dag and Henke. They could stand out there chatting, almost like they were friends. She liked days like that, they made her feel as if she had a proper family.
But this definitely wasn’t going to be one of those days, she’d realized that the moment the front door slammed shut.
‘Hello!’
His voice was ice-cold, almost emotionless, but she had no difficulty picking up the anger bubbling beneath it.
‘Is everything okay?’ she said as quietly and calmly as she could.
He just snorted in reply.