Chain of Events Read online

  Born in 1969 outside Göteborg on the Swedish west coast, Fredrik T. Olsson spent most of his childhood writing, acting and producing plays. Refusing to grow up, this is pretty much what he has kept doing since. A full-time screenwriter for film and television since 1995, Fredrik has written scripts in genres ranging from comedy to thrillers, as well as developing, showrunning and head-writing original material for various Swedish networks. He is also a standup comedian and makes occasional contributions as a director.

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Sphere

  978-0-7515-5338-3

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Fredrik T. Olsson 2014

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Translation copyright © Dominic Hinde 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  SPHERE

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Chain of Events

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  COPYRIGHT

  PART 1: Base Four

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  PART 2: Plague

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  PART 3: Scenario Zero

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  PART 4: Fire

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  They say writing books is a lonely job. Truth to be told, it isn’t. It’s just what people around me gradually start wishing it were.

  As always, the more important the text, the smaller the type. So here’s my warmest gratitude, expressed in the most illegible of fonts.

  Wilhelm Behrman for telling me to write this book.

  Bettina Bruun for standing the fact that I did.

  Skelle, My and Nevas just because.

  Mum and dad and sister for never asking when I’m going to get a real job. I guess by now that ship has sailed for good.

  Calle Marthin for an enthusiasm I hadn’t expected.

  Jonas and Agnes and Céline and Julie at Partners in Stories for an adventure I hadn’t been able to come up with myself.

  Helene and Katarina and Klara and Isabella and everyone else at Wahlström & Widstrand for warm guidance in a new landscape.

  And not least Mats Almegård for the Christmas buffet. You’re next, goddammit.

  Finally, my warmest thanks to everyone who read and asked me clever questions. Bettina, of course. Wille, incessantly. Kerstin Almegård, Birgitta Wännström, Jerk Malmsten, Fredrick Tallroth.

  Without the lot of you this hadn’t been half as much fun.

  Which is true about many other things as well.

  PART 1

  Base Four

  Nothing would ever make me keep a diary.

  Things happen. Time passes. Life begins and goes on and ends, and nothing in all the meaninglessness becomes better just because you write it down and look at it afterwards. One day, everything is going to be over, and if there’s one thing I know it’s that when the soil thuds on to the wooden lid above me there won’t be a soul who wants to read what I did some Monday in March.

  Nothing would make me keep a diary.

  Except for one thing.

  The realisation that soon there won’t be anyone around to read it.

  Tuesday 25 November.

  There’s snow in the air.

  And fear in everyone’s eyes.

  1

  The man they shot in the alley died too late.

  He was a bit over thirty, dressed in jeans, shirt and a windcheater. Far too little for the time of year, but he was reasonably clean and reasonably well fed – that’s what they had promised him and that’s what he had got.

  But nobody had told him what would happen next. And here he was.

  He had come to a halt between the stone walls right behind the old post office, breathless, thin grey wisps appearing and dissipating in the darkness before him. A restrained panic over the metal gate that sealed the end of the side street – it had been a conscious gamble and now he stood there with nowhere to go and with the sound of the three men in reflective vests getting closer and closer behind him.

  In actual fact, he had still been alive when the news reached the European newspapers a quarter of an hour earlier, buried in the stream of agency reports. Three short lines about a man found dead in the centre of Berlin, shortly after four o’clock on Thursday morning. They didn’t explicitly say he was homeless and on drugs, but that was the impression you got between the lines and it was fully intentional. If you’re going to lie you’re better off telling the truth.

  At best, the news might find its way into the morning papers in a side column with other bits of non-news. That would be more than enough – it was one of many safety measures and it probably wasn’t even necessary. An explanation, just in case anyone saw them as they lifted the lifeless body in the darkness, carried it to the waiting ambulance, shut the back door with a smooth clunk and drove away into the fine freezing rain with the requisite spinning blue lights.

  Not to a hospital.

  Then again, there was nothing a hospital would have been able to do.

  Inside the ambulance, three men sat in silence, hoping they had made it in time.

  They hadn’t.

  2

  It didn’t take more than a few seconds for the police to force the elegant double doors to the stairwell, smash the lead-lined windows and unbolt the lock from the inside.

  The real obstacle was the metal gate that came next. It was security-proofed, heavy and probably extremely expensive, it was closed and locked and the only thing that stopped them from coming to the aid of the middle-aged man who was reported to be in the apartment.

  If he was even still alive.

  The call had come in to the Norrmalm division in the early morning, and quite a bit of time had passed while the switchboard tried to establish that the woman making it was reliable, sober and that the call wasn’t a hoax. Did she know the man? Yes, she did. Could he be somewhere else? No, that’s impossible. When did she last see him? Not long ago, they’d spoken on the phone yesterday evening and he’d been mellow and calm and made small talk a
bout this and that. And that scared her – when he complained, she knew where she was with him, but here he was putting on a brave face, trying to sound positive, and she just couldn’t put her finger on why. And when she called him this morning and there was no answer, the realisation came as a stab from inside. This time, he’d gone through with it.

  The woman had been articulate and precise, and when the switchboard operator eventually accepted her story, he alerted both the police and the ambulance service and went on to his next call.

  As soon as the first patrol made it to the scene they knew the woman had been right.

  The doors were locked. Inside, they could see the closed security door as a smudged pattern through the door’s stained glass. And somewhere even further inside a radio was playing classical music, the sound mixing with the gurgling of water pouring into an over-full bathtub.

  And that was an extremely bad sign.

  Two steps further down in the elegant stairwell stood Christina Sandberg, staring straight through the black painted steel mesh ringing the lift shaft, eyes pinned to every movement over by the door to what had once been her own apartment.

  Yellow, burning flakes of metal rained down from the locksmith’s angle grinder as it ate through the security door, the one she had resisted installing for so long, until finally she was forced to accept it after the night when everything changed.

  They put it in to protect them. And today he might die because of it. If she hadn’t been so terribly, uneasily worried she would have been extremely, tremendously angry.

  Behind the locksmith, four policemen were restlessly treading water waiting for something to do, and behind them stood two equally impatient paramedics. At first they’d been calling out to him – ‘William,’ they shouted, ‘William Sandberg!’ – but they didn’t get any answer and eventually they gave up, slipped into silence and let the angle grinder do its job.

  And all Christina could do was to watch.

  She’d been the last one at the scene. She had thrown on a pair of jeans and a suede coat, tucked her discreet blonde curls into a ponytail and jumped into the car despite having found a perfect parking spot and despite having promised herself not to move it again until the weekend.

  By then, she’d tried to call him several times, the first time as soon as she got up, then on her way to the shower, and then once more before she even had time to dry her hair. It was after that that she called the emergency services, and it had taken them ages to realise what she already knew. What, in fact, she had known deep inside from the moment she woke up, but had tried to push away the same way she did the guilty conscience that always came when they talked.

  She hated herself for still keeping in contact with him. He had taken it much harder than her, not because her sorrow was any less but because he was the one who allowed himself to feel it, and despite two years of discussing and reasoning and going over the whys and the maybes and the what ifs, nothing ever seemed to change. She had been given the honour of bearing both their sorrows, plus an extra helping of guilt because she felt that the distribution wasn’t fair.

  But there you go. Life wasn’t fair.

  If it were, she wouldn’t be standing here now.

  Eventually, the security door gave way and the police and paramedics streamed into the apartment ahead of her.

  And then, time ceased to function.

  Their backs disappeared into the long hallway and the emptiness they left behind just went on and on and refused to end. After an unbearable length of seconds or minutes or years she could hear the music turned off, and then the water, and then everything was completely silent and that’s how it remained.

  Until, finally, they came back out.

  They avoided looking into her eyes as they ducked around the tight corners, out of the hallway, through the small passageway past the lift. A sharp turn towards the spiral staircase without bumping into the expensive, frescoed walls, and then down, down, quickly but carefully, slowly but no time to waste.

  Christina Sandberg pressed herself against the steel mesh to let the stretcher past, down towards the ambulance parked on the pavement outside.

  Under the plastic oxygen mask lay the man she once called her husband.

  William Sandberg didn’t really want to die.

  Or to put it correctly: it wasn’t his first choice.

  He would rather live and be healthy, have a passable life, learn to forget, find a reason to wash his clothes and wake up every morning to put them on, and then to go out and do something that mattered to someone.

  He didn’t even need to have all of that. A couple of things would do. All he wished for was a reason to stop thinking about the things that hurt. And when he never got one, the next alternative on the list was to put an end to it all.

  That obviously hadn’t gone too well, either.

  ‘How’re you feeling?’ asked the young nurse standing before him.

  He was half-sitting in the crisp, over-washed bedclothes, made up in the classic way with the sheet folded over the edge of a yellow hospital blanket, as if the healthcare system still refused to accept the existence of the duvet.

  He looked at her. Tried to not show how the pain from the poisons in his body still bothered him.

  ‘Worse than you would like,’ he said. ‘Better than I had planned.’

  It made her smile, and that surprised him. She probably wasn’t any older than twenty-five, blonde and quite pretty. Or perhaps that was just the result of the soft light from the window behind her.

  ‘Seems it wasn’t your time after all,’ she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact, almost conversational, and that surprised him too.

  ‘There’ll be plenty more chances,’ he replied.

  ‘Very good,’ she said. ‘Always be positive.’

  Her smile was perfectly balanced: big enough to punctuate the irony, but sufficiently checked not to undermine the humour, and he suddenly found himself unable to come up with an answer. He was hit by an unpleasant feeling that the conversation was over and that she had won.

  For several minutes he lay in silence and watched her work around the room. Efficient movements, a set schedule: drip to be changed, dosage to be regulated, details to be noted and checked against the patient record. A quiet efficiency. And he finally began to wonder if he’d misread her, and whether she had actually joked with him at all.

  By then, her tasks were finished. She adjusted his sheets without making any discernible difference, and then stopped on her way out.

  ‘Don’t try anything stupid while I’m away,’ she said. ‘As long as you’re in here, it is just going to mean a lot of extra work for both you and us.’

  She winked a friendly goodbye, vanished out into the corridor and let the door close after her.

  In his bed, William couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable. Not because there was any reason to. All he knew was that he was uncomfortable. Why? Because she hadn’t used the expected maternal tone, the one he’d already decided to be annoyed by? Or because her pithy comments were so unexpected that he’d allowed himself to feel challenged, almost amused?

  No.

  It took him a second, and then he knew.

  He closed his eyes.

  It was the tone. The tone was exactly the same.

  Everything was exactly what she would have said.

  Suddenly he wasn’t bothered by the humming pain in his body any more – be it salt deficiency or dehydration or too much of some alien substance the pills had left in his tired, fifty-five-year-old body, all in vain and now destined to be broken down – nor by the searing wounds healing under the bandages they’d wrapped around his wrists. Instead, what tortured him was something else. It was that feeling again, the one that always, always came back to him, the one that attacked him with double strength if he ever managed to forget it, and that had finally made him go into the bathroom the evening before and finally decide to do it.

  Just because he hadn’t been able to see the signs.
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  There was no other way to express it, ironic as it was.

  Him. Unable to interpret the signs.

  The hell with it.

  He should have asked her for something to calm him down when she was still here. A painkiller. Or diazepam. Or a bullet to his head if she could provide that, but she probably couldn’t.

  He was back in the same place as the previous evening: the endless fall through that dark passage, the destructive longing to hit the bottom and hopefully smash himself to death, getting rid of the thoughts that always managed to control him. Thoughts that deliberately seemed to allow him brief moments of hope, only to return with full force just to show him who’s in charge.