Acts of Vanishing Read online

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you while…’

  ‘Not at all,’ Palmgren said. ‘I was the one who asked you to.’

  Velander ploughed on. ‘I have a question,’ he said. ‘I’ll be coming back to the office with two dripping-wet shoes and a bag of Danish pastries from 7-Eleven. Now, if I’m struck down with pneumonia tonight, and diabetes, will I be able to call that a workplace injury?’

  ‘You’re asking me whether this call is taking place while we’re on duty?’

  ‘Amongst other things, yes.’

  ‘In that case it might be worthwhile to check your private health insurance.’

  Velander unravelled the reply. ‘I’ve been on dates that were more direct than this conversation,’ he said eventually. And then, when Palmgren didn’t seem to have anything to add: ‘I don’t trust her either.’

  ‘I never said I didn’t trust her.’

  ‘I know. But someone had to make the first move.’

  It fell quiet again, and in that interval he wondered if he might have gone too far.

  ‘I’m not going to ask you to block her,’ Palmgren said at last. ‘Not to disobey her orders or anything like that. All I’m asking you to do is to report to me when anything crops up.’

  Velander nodded at no one in particular. Then he looked both ways down the empty, slush-filled avenue, and pushed the mic closer to his lips.

  ‘Status right now,’ he said, lowering his voice. He went on to give a concise account of everything that had happened in Palmgren’s absence, the listening silence growing deeper with each word. He hadn’t been gone more than a few hours, yet there had been time for another attack, a surge which had also knocked out a military airfield and killed Forester’s superior.

  ‘Like having your arteries on the outside,’ Palmgren said silently when Velander had finished. ‘And what do we know about William?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s still missing, wanted on suspicion of terror offences. The whole city is full of police units. They’ve got his flat, his wife’s flat, her job under surveillance. Not that anyone thinks he’s stupid enough to turn up there, but what choice do they have?’ Velander hesitated. ‘I don’t know if you already know this, but the last thing he did was to format his computer.’

  Judging by Palmgren’s silence, that was news to him.

  ‘What’s Forester saying?’

  ‘Exactly what you’d expect,’ said Velander. ‘That she won’t quit until they’ve found him, and that when they do, there’ll be none of the kid-gloves treatment like the last time. Wait.’ He crossed the street, hopping over slush-filled puddles. ‘The only thing that worries me,’ he said when he got to the other side, ‘is the wallet.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It was in his inside pocket when he got the coat back. Before you drove him to Sara.’

  Velander let the silence underline what he’d said. And when Palmgren finally answered, he did so with a snigger.

  ‘William has been working for the military for thirty years. Do they really think that he’s crazy enough to use his credit cards in this situation? Because if they do, they’re even dumber than I thought.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ said Velander. ‘Pretty much. But how long can he manage without money?’

  Velander was right, and they both knew it. Neither of them said as much, but the odds were against him. Sooner or later William would have to reveal himself.

  ‘I should go back in to Christina,’ Palmgren said to break silence. ‘Thanks for calling.’ He paused before adding: ‘And if you don’t feel comfortable with this, I want you to say so. Otherwise I would be most grateful if you could keep me up to speed with whatever Forester does while I’m not there.’

  Velander smiled as he answered: ‘I thought I was already doing that.’

  They had a whole city to keep under surveillance. And never mind that pretty much every available resource had been deployed on the search, they still would never be able to cover every square metre. Plus the fact that they were looking for a man who had worked for the military for over thirty years.

  Those were Major Cathryn Forester’s thoughts as she walked the last few yards back to the briefing room. Still, with each step, she felt her posture straightening, the strain around her eyes shifting from dejected and tired to focused and alert as she planned her next moves, which tasks she was going to delegate and how.

  Sure, Sandberg knew their patterns of thinking. He knew what to do to keep out of their way. That meant that their only chance was to wear him out, and the only way to do that was to keep working, steadily, everywhere, all the time, and she was determined to do that.

  As soon as she set foot back in the room, she would be taking back command. She wasn’t going to let herself relax, not for a second, until she was absolutely sure that they had him again.

  The next moment she stuck her head round the door, and all those thoughts vanished at once.

  The room was empty. Dotted around the table a few open laptops were whirring, neat piles of notes were placed carefully by chairs, and the coffee cups and water glasses were half full as though everyone had suddenly stood up and gone. For an instant she was gripped by a sort of indignant fear, a feeling of having been removed from position and barred from her own working group, and that they were all off somewhere else without having told her. It was absurd, she could see that, yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d lost control–or worse still, that her control had never been needed: the others were getting on with the job without her, and doing just fine.

  ‘Forester?’

  She spun around.

  The voice belonged to one of her own, a British colleague, a junior officer with cropped hair and a Scottish accent. He was now standing in the doorway, looking at her with a restless stare and body language that wanted nothing but to get moving.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, trying to retain her status but sensing that it wasn’t going that well. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘The JOC,’ said the Scot. ‘Down there. They’re waiting for you.’

  And then he said the thing that made her forget all the thoughts she’d just had.

  ‘We’ve been looking for you everywhere. We’ve located William Sandberg.’

  28

  The room was bright, verging on white-out. There were some light­weight chairs in neutral colours, on the side tables small thickets of candles danced brightly, and hanging over the scene was the smell of sulphur from the safety matches that had lit them all. The walls were lined with thin white drapes, gently swaying in a non-existent draught, soothing like fluttering net curtains on a summer evening.

  Floating in the midst of it all was Sara. She lay on a bed in the centre of the room, weightless under the white sheet. Her hand was cool rather than cold, soft and human and almost just another hand, and beside the bed sat Christina Sandberg, squeezing it hard between her own palms.

  Maybe she’s just cold. That was the thought that stubbornly obsessed her, but also that she had to keep batting away because it wasn’t helping. Behind every strand of hope came the next wave of reality, each one stronger, blacker, harder than the one before.

  At the time, the road traffic accident had been just another news story, a lesser event in the shadow of the night’s big stories.

  ‘Ambulance involved,’ CW had called across the newsroom. ‘At least one death.’ And then: ‘Witness says it’s crawling with undercover police.’

  It was that last detail that had made Christina stop and pay attention. Accidents were local, ordinary, routine. Forget it. Especially on a night like this. Ambulance? Better. Spectacular and ironic–ambulances are supposed to save people, not end up involved in accidents themselves. But it was the part with undercover cops that really gave the story legs. It meant that there was something else lurking underneath, perhaps it might even have something to do with the power cut, and Christina had squeezed between cabinets and chairs to stand over CW’s desk and look at his screen.

/>   ‘Have we got any pictures?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by “picture”,’ came the response, and CW had tilted the screen to show her. There was a single photo, and it was basically pitch-black. There were blurry light sources here and there, in various colours, some headlights, the others presumably blue lights. And somewhere in the middle was her daughter–but she didn’t know that then.

  In the end, Christina had dismissed the picture with a shake of the head.

  ‘It doesn’t have any angle. We need faces, names, something tangible. We need something that connects us.’

  Now, afterwards, that was what tormented her above all, what made her hand sweat around Sara’s cold fingers, and forced her to close her eyes to ward off her thoughts.

  The thought that she asked for this herself.

  When Palmgren returned to the relatives’ room Christina had let go of Sara’s hand. She was sitting there on her light wooden chair, her hands resting in her lap and her empty stare fixed on the floor in front of her, beyond and into eternity. He stayed by the door, saying nothing, letting time pass through the room.

  ‘A little life,’ Christina said in a whisper. It was so thin he wasn’t even sure if she’d said it to him, not until she eventually lifted her eyes and they met his.

  ‘What was that?’ he said in reply.

  ‘She used to say that. A little life. Birds that flew into the living-room window. Flies lying on the windowsill after a summer’s day. The mice in the summer house when we removed them from the traps.’

  She paused, and he let her. ‘Sometimes she’d cry. Sometimes she was angry. She could sit there for hours just looking at the bodies, they were all little lives, she’d say, with little eyes and little hearts, and it would make her so frustrated, all these things that had come to be and developed and grown and then it would just end, for no reason.’

  It went quiet again. And in the silence, Palmgren saw Chris­tina’s eyes change. They went from grief to determination, forced their colour to the surface to avoid drowning deep down there.

  ‘Do you have it?’ she said eventually.

  Palmgren looked at her. It?

  ‘The CD,’ said Christina. ‘The computer. Did she have it on her?’

  That was not a question he’d been expecting. Not right now. And he hesitated, didn’t know what he ought to say, was allowed to say.

  ‘I realise that you need it,’ she said. ‘But she’s my daughter. If that CD can help me to understand…’

  She didn’t finish the sentence.

  ‘I don’t even know if I’m allowed to tell you this,’ Palmgren said eventually. ‘But no. She didn’t have anything on her when we found her.’

  Christina nodded silently.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ he said. It was as if she had finished grieving, at least for now, and the Christina Sandberg he was talking to now was the journalist, not the friend, the human being, the person. ‘Do you know anything I don’t?’ he asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Christina,’ he said. ‘I’m asking you. If you find anything, let me be the first to know.’

  ‘You’ve already asked me that,’ she replied, and they stayed that way, looking into each other’s eyes, until Christina pulled her coat towards her from the chair next to hers and stood up. She stopped by Sara’s face. A last, unavoidable, farewell, as though she was trying to etch the scene in her memory, to be certain that she would never, ever, be able to forget.

  She leant over. Stroked her cheek.

  ‘A little life,’ she said.

  Step by step, they made their way out of the relatives’ room. Several times they stopped along the way, first in the long, bright corridor, then again in the empty waiting room, then at the door that would return them to the main part of the hospital.

  There, finally, Christina could go no further.

  ‘I think I’ll stay here,’ she heard herself saying.

  It was as though the door in front of them was a frontier. Beyond it waited the rest of her life, a series of unknown days, all of which had in common the knowledge that she was the mother of a daughter who did not exist.

  ‘I don’t think I’m quite ready yet.’

  ‘I’ve got a guest room, if you’d like.’

  She looked into Palmgren’s warm eyes. Wanted to say yes please, but just couldn’t.

  ‘I’ve got a guest room tomorrow too, and loads of nights after that. I’ve got a guest room whenever you need it.’

  She nodded quietly, a thanks and a no thanks at the same time, and with that the silence lifted. They could hear ambulances arriving, trolleys rolling, footsteps running, and distant voices in other corridors. Other people’s lives carrying on and being saved, events that did not affect them.

  ‘Will he be okay?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘William?’

  ‘Yes. Have they got this right? Has he done something?’

  ‘I think there’s somebody out there who would very much like to make it look that way.’

  ‘Who?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘It can’t just be about power cuts,’ Christina said eventually. ‘There’s more to it. Something bigger. Right?’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  For a second she felt herself hesitating. She could answer, of course she could. She could tell him about the CD she’d found in the brown Nissan, about Kaknäs Tower and about the conference in Warsaw. But something told her that in the end, it would still end up pointing at William, that she’d be doing him a disservice rather than a favour.

  ‘What do you know, Christina?’

  She looked him in the eye, felt him seeing straight through her.

  ‘I’m on your side.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So, if you do find anything… if you know anything at all…’

  They stayed standing there, looking into each other’s eyes, for a long time. She had just decided to tell him, when his phone vibrated between them.

  The call lasted less than a minute. Throughout, Christina stood motionless, watching Palmgren pacing the corridor, hunched over to prevent the conversation leaking out. She saw him listening, nodding, rubbing the bridge of his nose in frustration. Now and then an affirmative noise, but that was it: ‘Okay,’ he said. Then went quiet. ‘Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay.’

  She caught herself thinking that she couldn’t face another blow. They must not have caught him, she thought, and the thought took her by surprise. There was nothing wrong with William Sandberg. She had loved him, maybe she still did, and above all she was convinced that he wasn’t involved in what was going on. William was the victim of something, not the other way around.

  At last she heard Palmgren rounding off the call–‘Hurry back now,’ he said, ‘do as she says, don’t try and draw anything out’–and once that was said he hung up and looked Christina in the eye once more.

  ‘Was that about William?’ she asked.

  Palmgren hesitated. He walked towards her, his hands ahead of him, and stopped just short.

  ‘The idiot has just withdrawn five thousand krona from a cashpoint.’

  29

  Cathryn Forester perched on the edge of one of the chairs in the JOC, thinking of how much she loved living in the twenty-first century.

  One of Major Trottier’s most prominent characteristics had been his appreciation of technology. He was utterly convinced that our salvation lay in the very things that left others terrified–CCTV in public spaces, telephones that remember where you’ve been, invisible digital tracks that trail behind. And if there was one way to honour his memory, she thought, this would be it.

  They’d found seven active bank cards registered to William Sandberg. And even though it was the middle of the night, it hadn’t taken more than half an hour for the banks to set the necessary routines in motion. After that, they hadn’t had to wait long.

  She looked at the computer screen in front of her. William Sandberg had been careless. What surp
rised her was that it had come so quickly, even if that too probably had a natural explanation. Stress precipitates bad decisions. Desperation leads to mistakes. Not because people are careless or stupid, but because they feel they’re running out of options. In the end they reach the stage where they have to take a risk to keep going–and that’s when they start to lose.

  When Velander came back from his walk he was both wet and steaming hot. He had a 7-Eleven carrier bag in his hand and cheeks that were glowing puce, peering at her through glasses that kept steaming up for every second he spent in the room.

  ‘I was just…’ he panted. ‘I went to get… I needed… I came straight away.’

  Cathryn Forester couldn’t help but enjoy the situation. She got up from the desk and offered him a view of the webpage the card issuers had provided.

  ‘The call went out three minutes ago,’ she said while Velander was pulling off his coat and sitting down on the desk chair in a single movement. ‘One of the cards he hardly ever uses. As though he thought we’d have less of an eye on them.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Högbergsgatan.’

  ‘And what do you want me to do now?’

  Forester couldn’t help smiling. It was her first feeling of success for hours, so why shouldn’t she? Cocked her head, didn’t answer.

  ‘Should I cancel the cards?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she said. And then, off his look: ‘I don’t give a damn what he does with his money. As long as I know where he’s doing it.’

  If anyone had seen William Sandberg at the cashpoint on Högbergs­gatan, they would have seen a nervous man with a pen in his mouth and seven different bank cards lined up in front of him. No one did, though, and that was a part of the plan.

  He had walked over from Skinnarviks park, through the back streets of Mariaberget, first sheltered by the trees and then zigzagging his way through the narrowest, darkest alleys he could find. Any hint of an engine noise stopped him in his tracks. Each time he saw the beam of what might be a headlight he turned and headed in a new direction, and all the time he kept looking purposefully for one, single thing. It was a stupid plan, he knew that, but it was the only one that came to mind.