The Steel Spring (6 page)

In the middle of the roadblock a big, crudely painted sign announced: INFECTION RISK – HELP STATION 4KM – FOLLOW ROUTE 73. Under the words was a painted arrow, pointing to the right. Jensen saw the roadblock so late that he only just had time to stop. Some earlier motorist had not been so lucky, for he saw the crushed wreck of a little car jammed between the big lorries.

He backed away from the abandoned lorries and turned down the slip road leading off the motorway. He passed a few more signs directing people to the help station, but soon turned off route 73 on to a narrow back road.

Inspector Jensen was entirely at home in the area, but it still took him a couple of hours to find a back way into the estate where he lived. The torrential rain made observation impossible. He parked in his usual place. Took with him the pistol,
the torch and the patrol car log, which was where it should be, in the compartment under the driving seat. He locked the car, took the suitcase out of the boot and went up to his flat. Neither the lift nor the stairwell lighting was working. Nor were the lights in the flat.

There wasn’t a sound in the entire building.

He switched on the torch and looked round. Everything seemed untouched.

On the floor just inside the door lay four messages, obviously posted through the letterbox. Two of them were printed, the others run off on a duplicating machine.

The moment he bent down to pick them up, the torch went out. He shook it several times, to no avail. He didn’t have another one, nor any alternative way of getting light.

He looked at the luminous hands on his watch. It was five past midnight. His mission was already entering its second day.

It was pitch dark in the flat. He felt his way over to the bed, took off his hat, coat, jacket, tie and shirt.

Jensen was extremely tired. He had been travelling for many hours.

The raw, damp cold in the room indicated that the heating was not working either.

He lay on his back in the bed and wrapped himself in the blanket. Turned on his side and pulled up his knees.

In the far distance he could hear sirens.

He wondered if the couple in the ambulance had fitted in their quickie.

Jensen was wide awake the moment he opened his eyes. Grey dawn light was filtering into the room. His first thoughts were that he had ruined his best overcoat and that he wanted a wash. He got up and went to the bathroom. There was no water in the taps. The toilet did work, however. Once.

He stroked the stubble on his chin with the tips of his fingers. Since he only had an electric razor, there wasn’t much he could do.

Jensen went back to the bedroom, took the rest of his clothes off, took out some clean socks and underwear. Plus a new white shirt. He dressed quickly but carefully, and combed his hair in front of the mirror.

He was hungry and cold and went out to the kitchen, but the refrigerator was empty. He had emptied it three months earlier and set it to defrost. In the wardrobe he had two bottles of spirits hidden behind his police caps on the top shelf but he did not feel like drinking alcohol. He went through the kitchen cupboards systematically and found a jar of honey. It was all he had to eat, and since the alcohol was all he had to drink, he fetched one of the bottles from the wardrobe and poured about ten centilitres into a tumbler. He drank it in gulps, accompanied by about a third of the jar of honey.

Then he went into the bedroom and got his binoculars out of the chest of drawers. Took up position by the window and
started scanning the area. The rain had eased off but it was misty and hard to see much. He trained the binoculars on the apartment block opposite, adjusted the focus and ran his eyes along the rows of windows. Everything looked completely normal, but there were no lights on anywhere and it took him a long time to detect any signs of activity. Finally he saw a curtain move at a window on the seventh floor, and just after that, he saw a face. It was a woman. Almost immediately a man also came into view behind the windowpane. Their faces looked pale and strange. Perhaps it was because of the distance or the poor visibility. They looked out for only a couple of seconds, then vanished. No further movement was to be seen in the flat. Jensen measured the position of the window with his eye and calculated the position of the room in relation to the front entrance door. Staircase C, seventh floor, first door on the left.

He continued his inspection, and gradually noticed a few other details to indicate that the block was lived in. Blurred little movements, the twitch of a curtain, reflections in the windows. At a guess, there were people in maybe a third of the flats.

He heard a faint engine sound and when he pointed the binoculars the other way he saw a bus being driven along the motorway. It was coming from the direction of the city. As far as he could see, there were no passengers aboard, but the mist made it very hard to be certain. Right after the bus, he glimpsed two other vehicles going by. Presumably ambulances with their sirens and emergency lights turned off.

Jensen put the binoculars down on the window ledge, went through to the bedroom and got his overcoat. Studied the rip, which was a good twenty centimetres long, folded up the garment and put it on the hall table. He selected a different
coat from the wardrobe and hung it in the hall. Then he picked up the sheets of duplicated paper from the hall carpet and put them on his bedside table along with the logbook of the patrol car.

Then he sat down and started to read. First the logbook. He skipped forward to the day he had left the country and then went quickly through, glancing at every page. To begin with he found nothing unusual or startling. The six policemen who used the car had worked in pairs in three shifts, and signed the notes with their service numbers. These were the same numbers as were embossed on their police badges, which they were obliged to wear on the left-hand side of their uniform jackets, where they would be fully visible. This rule applied to all uniformed officers with the exception of those in positions of command. The six constables’ numbers were: 80, 315, 104, 405, 103 and 601. As was customary, they were divided up so that a younger officer, with a higher service number, was paired with an older and more experienced colleague. There were basically only three types of entry in the log. The arrest of drunks, traffic accidents, and suicides or attempted suicides.

Jensen found the first alarming entry on the page dated 30 September. Number eighty who had been keeping the log between 4 p.m. and midnight had noted the following:

16.46 ordr km 9 s mwy dem 2 arr tkn 9 dist 19.05 pce rstrd rtn stn

So at fourteen minutes to five that day, the patrol car had been ordered to kilometre marker number nine on the southern motorway to police a demonstration. Two people had been arrested and taken to the Ninth District police station. It had taken until 19.05, that is to say over two hours from the time
the order was given, for peace to be restored and the car to return to its base.

Kilometre marker nine was very close to the city centre. It was extremely surprising for a police car to be sent there all the way from the airport.

Jensen began scrutinising the log more carefully and with greater interest. Over the week that followed there were two similar entries, and after that the frequency increased sharply, while entries about the arrest of drunks became fewer and fewer. They clearly hadn’t had any spare time for dealing with alcoholics.

Suicide cases, which at the start of the log had featured at a rate of two or three a week, appeared only sporadically.

As the patrol’s duties became more sensational in nature, the officers had abandoned the usual cryptic abbreviations in their reports and went over to short entries in more or less standard prose. The log entries started getting more slapdash and less precise. Words like disturbances, scuffles and riots appeared on every page. They had clearly been summoned to the city centre and its environs on a daily basis. On the page for 2 November there was an entry of just six words:

Serious disturbances. Shots fired. Military assistance
.

Exactly three weeks before, the phrase
patient transport
, later shortened to
pt trs
, was used for the first time. That meant the regular ambulance service could no longer cope with serious cases of illness and had had to ask the police to step in. After that, there were several patient transports every day.

Then the phrase suddenly disappeared. Others appeared in its place. The centre, the district hospital, the main hospital. Time after time. From the twenty-fifth onwards, officer 405
had kept the log single-handed. Jensen studied the remaining pages. The twenty-fifth had been a Monday.

That was the last entry in the car’s logbook. It was five days old. Jensen went back and read the entries for the previous month through again. Then he shut the log and laid it aside.

There was the distant wail of a siren. The sound came nearer. He went over to the window, put the binoculars to his eyes and trained them on the motorway. The visibility was as poor as ever; the rain seemed to be getting heavier again. About thirty seconds elapsed and then an ambulance loomed out of the mist. It was not going particularly fast, but its flashing light was on. Fifty metres behind it came a grey bus, presumably the one he had seen earlier. And after that came another ambulance.

It looked as though the bus was crammed with people. The convoy was heading north, towards the city.

He turned the binoculars rapidly to the windows in the apartment block next door, where he had seen the two faces a short while before. Detected a slight movement in a curtain, as if someone had pulled it a few centimetres to one side to view the road.

He went back to his bedside table, read the four notes that had come through the door and arranged them in chronological order.

The first read:

The announcement was dated the fifteenth of November and signed by the Minister for Public Health.

The next announcement was from the same authority and had been sent a week later, on the twenty-first of November. It read:

The other two communications differed in significant ways from the Public Health Ministry’s exhortations. The paper was of a different kind and size. They were not printed but had been run off on a duplicating machine. Their tone was also different. Neither was dated, but by cross-referring to the entries in the patrol car logbook Jensen thought he could establish that the first had been sent on the previous Wednesday, i.e. the twenty-seventh of November. The text was brief and blunt:

The announcement was clearly local. It was signed by someone who contented himself with just a title: Head District Consultant.

Jensen heard vehicle engines, went to the window and snatched up the binoculars. Three military trucks were moving north on the motorway. They appeared to be heavily laden. The backs were covered in tarpaulin.

He looked at the clock. One minute to eight. Went back to read the other duplicated announcement.

This communication was also undated, and signed by the Head District Consultant.

Jensen unpacked his case.

He put the two handguns next to each other on the bed and stood contemplating them.

The service pistol that he had taken from the police car was the better weapon, a 9 millimetre modified Parabellum. The Beretta, on the other hand, was lighter and less bulky.