The Andalucian Friend (54 page)

Lars had checked out of the hotel,
paying with some of Gunilla’s cash.

He left the city and arrived at Bergsjögården late in the evening. He was met by two people in their fifties, a man and a woman. Warm, safe, normal. He had been expecting something else, possibly the opposite.

They asked to go through his luggage and he let them.

Lars paid for a month of treatment with the remainder of Gunilla’s money, and the following morning he was sitting in a circle with eleven other men from various parts of the country, from different backgrounds, all different appearances. They introduced themselves with their first names and nervously explained why they were sitting there, they were all hooked on prescription medication or other types of drug. They were all scared and anxious about what lay ahead of them.

The first day was good. He got a sense that he was in the right place, that he was getting help. He spoke to a counselor that afternoon. It was a confidential conversation, at least from the counselor’s side. His name was Daniel, he had once been an insurance broker in Småland and got addicted to prescription drugs. He said he knew what Lars was going through, that Lars would get help if he was willing to change his life.

Lars didn’t understand much, but the overwhelming sensation was that he was in a good, humane place governed by a sort of collective common sense. A common sense that he wanted to get back.

The second day things felt harder, at least to start with. They were asked to write down the story of their own misuse of drugs, but his resistance faded when he heard the other men talk. It was open, sensitive, and honest.

Lars wrote so much that evening that his pen was red hot, and he started to feel free somehow, free and grateful. The more he wrote, the clearer the picture became, a picture that he felt he could put right. That life could possibly be different from now on, better.

He slept well that night, dreaming dreams that he recognized, and woke up looking forward to breakfast.

On the afternoon of the third day withdrawal and denial kicked in. Now Lars had forgotten the positive feeling. Daniel noticed and tried to get him back on track again. But Lars Vinge had a mocking smile glued to his face. Daniel and the other men at Bergsjögården had suddenly become his enemies. He compared himself to them. They were all idiots, members of a sect. He had nothing in common with any of them. They were weak, brainwashed, and could shove their higher power up their backsides. The desire to flee was banging and shouting inside him, and that night he escaped out of his bedroom window and found his way to the garage and his car. He was going to go home and lose himself in drugs for a few days, then he’d stop again, that wouldn’t be a problem. He knew where this place was now, and it wasn’t going to vanish. Besides, he had the right to do what he liked with his own life, didn’t he? It wasn’t like he was hurting anyone.

Lars got home
to the apartment and doped himself up with drink and all the pills he could find. His brain got sluggish and he crept around the floor looking for ants and other insects to have a chat with. He threw up in the sink, it was a nice, cleansing feeling. Then he swallowed loads of Hibernal. He knew what it was, chemical lobotomy. The pills worked just as they should. Lars sat on the floor staring out at nothing for ages, without even a hint of any feeling. He just sat there, Lars Vinge, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, expecting nothing. A great big nothing that didn’t contain anything at all. Then everything went black, as usual.

The next morning he woke up on the kitchen floor with a cold feeling between his legs. He felt with his hand; his jeans were wet and cold, yes, he had pissed himself.

His cell phone rang on the floor beside him, he reached out for it.

“Hello, boy.”

Tommy’s voice. Lars wiped the saliva from the corner of his mouth.

“Hello,” he said in a rough voice.

“Have you checked out?”

Lars tried to get his head straight.

“How did you know?”

“I keep an eye on my people, you should have said something, Lars. We take care of each other … You’re not alone, if that’s what you think. How are you feeling?”

Lars rubbed under his nose with his forefinger.

“I don’t know, OK, I think.”

“I’m coming ’round,” Tommy said.

Lars didn’t have time to object.

Tommy arrived half an hour later. He had food and drink with him, in the form of a length of sweet pastry and two cans of orangeade. They sat in the living room and talked candidly with each other, Lars in an armchair, Tommy on the sofa. Tommy said he thought Lars should try again, that the job wasn’t going to disappear, that as his boss he was in a position to pay for Lars’s treatment. Lars listened carefully. Tommy asked questions about Lars’s drug use, about which pills he took, how he got hold of them, which ones were strongest. Lars replied as best he could. Told the story of how he got addicted as a child, and how he lost all sense of direction when he started again with relatively harmless stuff. Tommy listened and shook his head.

“Sounds like hell,” he said quietly.

Lars almost agreed.

“But we’ll get this sorted out,” Tommy said, and slapped his thigh with the palm of his hand, blinked, stood up, and went out to use the toilet.

Lars sat there alone, yawned, and stretched.

When Tommy returned he passed behind Lars. Lars was taken by surprise when the heavy blow hit him on the back of the neck. He was even more taken aback when Tommy caught both his hands, bent them back and pushed him down off the chair. Lars hit his face hard on the floor, with Tommy’s body on top of him. He tried to struggle but Tommy had the upper hand. Tommy was tough and strong, Lars hungover from the pills. It was an uneven fight. Lars protested, bewildered, but Tommy told him to shut up, then took a pair of handcuffs from his belt and put them around Lars’s wrists.

“What are you doing, what the hell have I done? Tommy?”

Tommy disappeared from the living room again. Lars was left lying flat on his stomach.

“Tommy!” he called. No answer. Lars listened, heard Tommy open the front door, heard it close again out in the hall. Had he left?

“Tommy? Don’t go!”

Lars lay there with his arms fastened behind his back, and tried to think. He rested his cheek against the cold floor.

“Tommy!” he called again after a while, and felt his own breath as it rebounded off the wooden floor.

Lars could hear little noises from the kitchen, it sounded like two people whispering. …

“Tommy, please! Can’t we talk?” Lars’s voice was weak. He lay there with his face on the floor. Time passed, he didn’t know how long, but suddenly he thought he could see the shape of someone out in the hall. It wasn’t Tommy, it was the shape of a woman. He screwed up his eyes and recognized her, Gunilla. … She was standing in the doorway of the living room, leaning against the frame with her handbag over her shoulder.

It began to dawn on him, something that his mind was hardly capable of daring to think. His breathing became labored and heavy. He sighed loudly several times, and coughed when the anxiety made his heart snag in his chest.

“What are you doing here?” he managed to say.

Tommy pushed past Gunilla and came back into the room. In his hands he had an automatic pistol with a long silencer attached to the barrel. Lars tried to cough out his fear of dying, pissed himself again, and tried to sit upright but couldn’t with his arms tied behind his back. Instead he made jerking movements over the hard, slippery floor, like a seal on dry land. He tried to reason with Tommy, but his terror made the words weak and incomprehensible. He tried to say something to Gunilla, tried to explain that this was going too far … that he wasn’t supposed to die now, that this was out of all proportion to what he had done. But she didn’t seem to hear or understand what he was trying to say.

Tommy stopped behind Lars, pulled him up into a sitting position, put the silencer a half inch from his right temple, and looked at Gunilla. She nodded. Lars tried to say something else. It came out as a shrill sound of air that smelled of dark anxiety and heartrending terror.

Tommy fired,
pop, bang
— the same sound as a loud puff of air. The bullet went right through Lars’s head and hit the living-room wall some distance away. A short stream of blood from Lars’s left temple, thin but with heavy pressure. Gunilla stared. Lars collapsed on the floor. Tommy backed away carefully, then went quickly to work. He crouched down, undid the handcuffs, wiped the floor where he had been standing.

Gunilla felt the
opposite from what she had expected. She thought she would feel some sort of pleasure at watching him die, some sort of relief, a liberating feeling after what he had done to Erik. But it didn’t feel like that. It just felt empty and sad. She had asked Tommy to finish Lars off in just this way, so that the last thing he saw was her, to make him realize that he could never beat her, that it was predetermined. Maybe he had realized that, maybe not, but either way she felt different from what she had expected. There was something tragic about the fact that Lars’s wretched and pathetic life should end so miserably. She was tired of everything to do with death.

“Thank you, Tommy,” she said in a low voice.

He looked at her.

“How does it feel?”

She didn’t answer. Tommy stood up, the cuffs in one hand, the pistol in the other, and met her gaze.

“I miss Erik,” she said quietly.

Tommy sighed. Their eyes stayed on each other’s. He raised the pistol. Didn’t need to aim, just squeezed the trigger. And again, the same hard, short puffing sound from the gun, the recoil that jolted the silencer up about fifteen degrees. The bullet hit the right side of Gunilla’s forehead.

She stood motionless for a few moments. As if she had been so shocked that the force of her surprise kept her alive for a short while before her legs buckled beneath her. She fell where she had been standing, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Her eyes stared crookedly up at the ceiling as blood seeped from the hole in her forehead.

Tommy was breathing heavily, his heart beating hard, his mouth was dry and he struggled against feelings that were trying to get out. He tried to compose himself and suppress everything. He was muttering quietly to himself about what he was going to do, what he had memorized that he needed to do, nothing could be left to chance. Tommy looked at Gunilla, then at Lars. Just two dead objects, he told himself.

Tommy unscrewed the silencer and put it in his pocket, then put the gun on the floor, took a Q-tip out of a plastic bag in his pocket and rubbed it gently above the trigger where there were invisible traces of powder. He dabbed the powdered Q-tip on Lars’s right hand, between the thumb and forefinger. Tommy planted the pistol in Lars’s hand, checking how it ought to be positioned in light of Lars Vinge’s
suicide shot
. He left the handcuffs in Lars’s bedroom. The forensics team would find tiny, almost invisible chafe marks on his wrists, so a pair of handcuffs in the bedroom would lead them to the conclusion that everyone leaps to when they see handcuffs in a bedroom.

Crouching beside Gunilla’s body he went through her handbag, searching for the slightest sign of anything to do with the case or investigation. He was fairly certain she wouldn’t have anything like that on her, she was just as careful as he was, but he felt obliged to check anyway.

He had contacted her after going through all the material he had been given by Lars in Mariatorget. He hadn’t made any big deal out of it, just said he knew what she and Erik had been up to, and that he wanted a piece of the cake. And because she knew him, she had merely asked how much. Erik’s half would be enough, wouldn’t it?
OK,
he had replied.

After a self-confident Lars Vinge had told her at the funeral that he let her brother die, she added an extra clause to the contract, saying she wanted to determine how Lars should die. That hadn’t been much of a problem. It was with great sadness that he had shot her. Sadness because he felt a kinship with Gunilla. But it couldn’t be helped. Tommy knew Gunilla, she’d demand his share back at some later point, that was just what she was like. He would have been looking over his shoulder the whole time. But the main reason was that he had seen the sums of money on the papers he had received from Lars. Then he realized something that he couldn’t ignore. His wife, Monica. Money saves lives. … With all this, maybe he’d be able to buy her some care, prolong her life, maybe cure her ALS. Then there was a third aspect, which was small but oh-so-important. A vague feeling that he traced back to two-weak-beers-in-the-fridge-for-when-you-want-to-get-drunk. A sense of deficit. Otherwise he might as well let it all go. All or nothing. And when he had gotten the sports bag from Lars in Mariatorget and went through the material at home that same evening, he saw a surplus. A surplus, safely at arm’s length. And it was at that moment that the path had become clear. Crystal clear.

Eva Castroneves had been stationed in Liechtenstein, as a kind of sleeping resource charged with taking care of the money from Guzman. But she had been given another task when that had all gone to hell. After a conversation with Gunilla she had transferred money to a dummy account that Tommy could access as he pleased. Now Tommy was planning to contact Castroneves and tell her to transfer Gunilla’s share of the money to him as well, and to keep ten percent for herself. If she made a fuss, he’d contact Interpol, who would hunt her to the ends of the earth. He had an entire sports bag full of evidence in which her name cropped up on every other page. Eva Castroneves wouldn’t cause any trouble. He was sure of that.