Bubble: A Thriller (8 page)

She tried again, slower this time.

Another bleep, and this time the lock began to whirr.

Calm now, Normén!

She stepped inside a small reception area. A short distance behind the counter sat an older, slightly fat man with a bowl cut. A television screen affixed to the wall was showing a horse race, and the man made an irritated face when he was obliged to look away from it.

“Hi, Sune,” she said, with exaggerated bonhomie.

“No, no, you stay where you are, I’ll be okay on my own,” she went on when the man made a halfhearted attempt to stand up.

“Just need to double-check some stuff we seized last week.”

“Good,” the overweight man muttered, letting his heavy frame sink back into his chair. “Don’t forget to sign your-self in . . .”

He waved his hand toward the counter as he turned his attention back to the television screen.

Rebecca pulled the register over and scrawled something illegible in place of her name.

“Done!”

Without looking away from the screen, Sunesson raised
one hand and pressed a button on top of his desk. The door to Rebecca’s right buzzed and a few moments later she found herself in a large storeroom filled with racks of metal shelving.

It was several years since she had last been there, and she took a few tentative steps forward as she tried to get her bearings. The smell was exactly the same as she remembered, cool air mixed with cardboard and whitewashed concrete. A few meters away against one wall was a standard-issue computer and she hurried over to it.

She took out Runeberg’s pass card and inserted it into the little box beside the keyboard. Then she quickly typed in Runeberg’s user ID and password.

The hourglass on the screen rotated and then the database opened up.

Henrik Pettersson,
she typed into the search box for names, then added his date of birth in the next box.

She pressed Search and the hourglass rotated once, then twice.

Rebecca looked around, but she was alone in the large room.

She could hear the sound of Sunesson’s television in the distance. The hourglass vanished and was replaced by a line of text.

Case number K3429302-12, Section 5, Row 47, shelf 23-25.

The store was actually larger than she remembered, and it took her a couple of minutes to work out where to go.

The main aisle ran along one of the outer walls, with various smaller passageways leading off into the different sections.

Section 5 was at the far end of the store, where the light was much dimmer than it was closer to the entrance.

Only every other fluorescent lamp was lit, and she guessed there would be a switch somewhere to correct that, but she didn’t have time to look for it.

The racks of shelving all around her stretched up to the ceiling, and they were almost all loaded with brown cardboard boxes that seemed to soak up the already dim light.

On the floor were pallets laden with things that were too big to fit on the shelves, and as she walked toward the right section she had to walk past items of furniture, rolls of cable, and part of what looked like a bronze sculpture.

Four of the boxes on shelf 23 were marked with the right case number. She pulled down the one closest to her and opened the lid.

The box was full of books and films, which explained why it was so heavy. She closed it and put it back on the shelf.

The next box turned out to contain exactly the same sort of thing, but the third looked more promising. A few files, random documents, and, at the bottom—bingo!

A large bunch of keys, fifty or so, just as the case register had said.

They had got rid of almost all Dad’s belongings after his death, but Mom had been adamant about keeping the keys.

You never know when you might need a key, so we’ll keep those . . .

Presumably that was the reason Henke had clung to them.

Half of the keys were so old that the metal had started to decay, others were bent and worn with use, but when she looked more closely she saw that there were at least five or six keys for bicycle locks, and a couple that looked like they belonged to mopeds or motorbikes, so—just as she had hoped—
it looked like Henke had gone on adding to the collection . . .

So what did the key to a safe-deposit box look like?

A sudden noise interrupted her thoughts. Someone had opened the door to the storeroom.

Problems?
Don’t give up, we can help you!
070-931151

The note was stuck right over the keyhole. The wording was the same as before. Probably the same note, which suggested his neighbor had worked out where it came from. But right now he really didn’t care.

His brain was working in top gear. He had wandered around half of Södermalm trying to digest what he had seen.

If what had happened at Slussen wasn’t just his imagination, if what he had seen
had
been real, then wasn’t everything he had experienced over the past two years . . . well, what?

Fucking hell!

His headache from earlier that morning kicked into overdrive and made him pinch the bridge of his nose in reflex. He tore down the note and pulled the keys to the flat from his pocket.

A noise off to his left made him jump and he stood there with the key in the lock. His heart was practically beating a hole in his chest, forcing him to take a few deep breaths to lower his heart rate. Damn, he was twitchy!

Nice and easy now . . .

He glanced cautiously at his neighbor’s door. The sound had come from there, he was sure of that, in fact he even recognized it from the previous day. A security chain rattling against the inside of a door. A chain didn’t start to swing of its
own accord, so someone must have managed to nudge it. His new neighbor was heading out.

For reasons he couldn’t explain, his need to know who his new neighbor was felt much stronger today than it did yesterday, so he waited a few more seconds, all the while staring at his neighbor’s door. But nothing happened. The door remained closed.

He was just about to turn away when he thought he saw movement through the peephole. A vague shift from light to dark, as if someone had put his eye to the hole. And suddenly he was sure someone was standing on the other side of the door.

Watching him . . .

He quickly turned the key in the lock, forced open his crooked front door, and slammed it quickly behind him.

♦  ♦  ♦

She held her breath as she listened in the direction of the door. She thought she could hear footsteps in the distance. Even if it was just lard-ass Sunesson shuffling along in his Birkenstocks, she didn’t feel like letting him know which case she was poking around in. She quickly dropped the bunch of keys in her bag and closed the box again. The steps were approaching along the main passageway.

Hard heels on the concrete floor. A pair of proper shoes, unlike Sunesson’s sandals or a beat officer’s boots. Not many people in Police Headquarters wore shoes like that, and whoever this was, she felt no great desire to bump into him. But the only way out was along that main passageway . . .

She gently lifted the box back into place on the shelf.

The steps were slowly getting closer, steady, almost military.

She looked around and took a few quick steps farther down the aisle. One of the bottom shelves on the same side was empty, and on the spur of the moment, she crouched down and crept into it.

The footsteps were close now, but a large box on a pallet blocked the line of sight to the corridor. All she had to do was wait until the person had gone past and then creep out as quietly as possible.

Suddenly the footsteps stopped. Rebecca huddled up even more and held her breath.

Then the person carried on walking, but much slower now. It took her a couple of seconds to realize where the person was going. Down the passageway she was in!

She pressed against the side of the large box on the pallet. There were still several shelves between her and the far end of the passageway. If the person was heading toward one of them, she was bound to be seen.

Shit, it had been a really stupid idea to try to hide. She should have just brazened it out, saying hello and pretending everything was fine.

What the hell was she supposed to say now?

Hello, yes, I just crawled in to see what things look like from down here.

The steps were getting closer, just a few meters left now.

She would have to climb out, that would be slightly more normal than being found crouching at the back of one of the shelves. Her heart was pounding in her chest.

She took a deep breath and shifted her bodyweight forward. She had to play this calm, as natural as possible.

The steps suddenly stopped. She heard boxes moving, then someone clearing his throat.

A man, no doubt about that, and just a meter or so away.

Rebecca tilted her head, leaned forward, and cautiously peeped around the edge of the box.

Shit!

She pulled her head back quick as a flash. A pair of dark trousers belonging to a suit, matching black shoes; that was pretty much all she had seen. Yet she was still quite sure. The man standing in the passageway was Stigsson. He was standing in front of the boxes she had just been looking at.

She heard him lift one of them, then the thud as he put it on the floor.

The lid came off with a dry rustle, then muffled noises, as if he was rooting around in the box.

A sudden pain in her left calf made her flinch involuntarily. Damn, the uncomfortable position had made her leg start to cramp. The pain was getting worse and spreading upward. When it reached her thigh she had to bite her lip to stop herself from groaning. Stigsson was still rummaging about in the box.

She tried to shift her weight to let some blood through to her tormented muscles, but lost her balance instead and fell against the side of the box.

The noises from the passageway stopped.

The pain in her leg was getting worse and she bit her lip so hard that she could taste blood.

Stigsson cleared his throat again.

Her back was slowly slipping down the cardboard box and she pressed her working leg against the floor to stay upright. But it was impossible to keep her balance. Her body was slowly sliding toward the edge of the box, closer and closer to the passageway.

In just a few seconds she would tumble out and land at his feet.

Suddenly she heard the sound of a box being shoved back onto the shelf. The footsteps like the crack of a whip, and for a moment she thought her heart had stopped.

Then she realized that the noise was getting quieter, and she spent the last of her strength trying to stay upright. Just as the storeroom door slammed shut she fell flat onto the concrete floor.

HE HAD SPENT
three mornings in a row with his ass parked on that fucking bench. Starting half an hour before the time of the first sighting, and continuing for an hour afterward. He had his hood up, his cap pulled down over his face, and, just to be on the safe side, a cheap pair of sunglasses perched on his nose. All to make sure he couldn’t be seen.

But, just like the previous two days, he’d failed to see anything, and now the whole project was starting to feel more stupid than was strictly reasonable. As his ass slowly went numb, he realized how ridiculously he was behaving. He had considerably more important problems than a possible doppelgänger wandering about Södermalmstorg, and—just like his PlayStation, or jerking off—this whole project was yet another way of avoiding coming to grips with the real issue.

Erman was dead; he had died in the fire in his cottage almost two years ago, when the Game finally caught up with him. The poor guy had definitely wandered the wrong side of the fine line between clear-sighted genius and total wacko
madness, but in spite of that he had certainly been very useful. Opening HP’s eyes and getting him to see what the Game was really about. And not just its most superficial and singularly unappealing levels: the Ants keeping watch, digging out information, and recruiting suitable Players to carry out the various tasks. Then the betting, while the tasks were filmed and broadcast live online for Internet gamblers.

No, what Erman had told him, combined with his own experiences, also had made him understand the considerably darker aspects of the Game, and what it was really capable of. No matter what the guy’s mental state might have been, HP still owed the lunatic backwoodsman quite a bit, and even if he had tried to convince himself that Erman’s death wasn’t really his fault, his excuses all rang pretty hollow. It was more than likely his own guilty conscience and lack of sleep, spiced up with a bit of general-purpose paranoia, that had got him seeing ghosts in broad daylight.

There was no other explanation.

Or rather,
there simply couldn’t be any other explanation,
he corrected himself as he kicked off his sneakers and lay down on the sofa.

He landed on something hard, and after a few acrobatic maneuvers interspersed with a lot of swearing, he managed to dig out the remote control from behind his back and zapped through a range of dreary daytime television programs.

On the coffee table he found a half-empty box of Marlboros. He lit one and tried to direct the column of smoke toward the lamp hook in the ceiling.

That was when he noticed it. High up, on top of his Billy bookcase, it was lying there like a little black box. A solitary, abandoned book.

From where he was lying, all he could see was a bit of the
spine, so presumably you wouldn’t see any of it if you were standing in front of the bookcase, which would explain why the cops had missed it.

He twisted his head and squinted as he tried to work out what book it was, but the writing was too small. It was definitely a library book, though; he could see the white classification letters at the bottom of the spine. Three letters, probably
Hce
—
Foreign Fiction
 . . .

So the cops had missed an item of stolen property right in front of their noses, and instead filled their boxes with perfectly legitimate porn and dog-eared paperbacks.