The Black Path (22 page)

It wasn’t Måns. It was Maria Taube.

Maria Taube was still working for Måns. In another life, she and Rebecka had been colleagues.

“How are things?” asked Rebecka.

“Disastrous. We’re supposed to be coming up to the Riksgränsen resort to go skiing, the whole office. Hello! What sort of an idea is that? What’s wrong with going somewhere warm, sunbathing and drinking something with an umbrella in it? And I’m so unfit! Okay, so I can at least borrow my sister’s skiing gear, but I look like one of those new sausages they’re advertising: ‘now even thicker,’ you know the kind of thing. And last Christmas I thought, okay, after Christmas I’m going on a diet, and I thought I could lose a pound a week. And because I was going to go on a diet afterwards and get really, really slim, I went a bit mad over Christmas. Then all of a sudden it was New Year’s, then January came and went in the blink of an eye, and I thought, well, I’ll go on a diet in February, and if I lose two pounds a week…”

Rebecka was laughing.

“…and now there’s half a week left,” Maria Taube went on. “So do you think I can manage to lose twenty pounds in that time?”

“Boxers usually go and sit in the sauna.”

“Mmm, thanks for the tip. No, really. ‘Died in the sauna. Just managed to call
The Guinness Book of World Records.
’ What are you up to?”

“Right now or at work?”

“Right now and at work.”

“Right now I’m about to have dinner with my neighbor, and at work I’m doing a little bit of checking into Kallis Mining for the police.”

“Inna Wattrang?”

“Yes.”

Rebecka took a deep breath.

“By the way,” she said, “Måns e-mailed me to say I ought to come up and have a drink when you’re all up this way.”

“Oh, I think so too! Please say you’ll come!”

“Mmm…”

And what do I say now? thought Rebecka. Do you think I’m in with a chance there, or what?

“How is he?” she asked.

“Okay, I presume. There was a big hearing in that electricity company case last week. And it went well, so he’s quite human at the moment. Before that he was…well, everybody was just creeping past his door.”

“Apart from that? How’s everybody else?”

“How should I know? Nothing happens here. Oh yes, Sonja Berg got engaged last Saturday.”

Sonja Berg was the secretary who’d been with Meijer & Ditzinger the longest. She was divorced with grown-up children, and over the past year the firm had enjoyed watching her being seriously courted by a man whose top-of-the-range car and expensive watch matched those of the partners. He was an agent selling calendars and stationery. Sonja referred to him as her “traveling salesman with papier-mâché balls.”

“Ooh, tell me everything,” said Rebecka attentively.

“What can I say. Dinner at the French restaurant in the Grand Hotel. As for the size of the stone, well, you can imagine—she practically needed her arm in a sling. Are you coming up to the hotel?”

“Maybe.”

Maria Taube was good. She knew it wasn’t about her. But about Rebecka. They’d met twice since Rebecka had come out of hospital. It was when Rebecka was down in Stockholm selling her apartment. Maria had invited her round to dinner.

“I’ll just do something simple,” she’d said. “And if you don’t feel up to seeing people, or me, or if you just feel you want to stay at home and stub cigarettes out on your arms instead, just ring and cancel. That’s absolutely fine.”

Rebecka had laughed.

“You’re crazy, you’re not supposed to joke with me like that—I’m on the edge, you know! You have to be really, really nice and kind to me.”

They’d had dinner. And the evening before Rebecka went back up to Kiruna, they’d gone to Sturehof for a few drinks.

“You don’t fancy coming up to the office to say goodbye?” Maria had asked.

Rebecka had shaken her head. She was fine with Maria Taube. Things were always fine with her. But the idea of exposing herself to the entire office was totally out of the question. And she hadn’t wanted to meet Måns either, not in that state. The scar running from her lip to her nose was still so obvious. Red and shiny. Her top lip had been pulled up a fraction, so it looked as if she’d just taken a pinch of snuff, or as if she were slightly harelipped. They might operate on her, a decision hadn’t been taken yet. And she’d lost a lot of her hair.

“Promise me we’ll keep in touch,” Maria Taube had said, taking hold of both of Rebecka’s hands.

And they had. Maria Taube rang from time to time. Rebecka was always pleased when that happened, but never rang herself. And that seemed to be okay. Maria didn’t stop calling because it was Rebecka’s turn.

Rebecka ended the conversation and ran back down to the boiler room. Sivving had just placed the food on the table.

They ate, allowing the food to silence them.

She thought about Måns Wenngren. The way his laugh sounded. How slender his hips were. How curly his dark hair was. How blue his eyes were.

If she’d been a babe, someone who wasn’t socially crippled and crazy, she’d have taken him by storm a long time ago.

I’d never choose anyone else, she thought.

She wanted to go up and meet him. But what would she wear? Her wardrobe was full of smart suits for work. But this called for something else. Jeans, of course. She’d have to buy some new ones. And what would she wear with them? She’d have to get her hair cut too.

She carried on thinking about it all after she’d gone to bed that night.

It mustn’t look as if I’ve made an effort, she thought. But it has to look good. I want him to like what he sees.

W
EDNESDAY
M
ARCH
19, 2005

A
s usual, Anna-Maria Mella was woken by Gustav kicking her in the back.

She looked at the clock. Ten to six. It would soon be time to get up. She pulled him close, nuzzling his hair. Gustav turned to her. He was awake.

“Hello, Mummy,” he said.

On the other side of the boy, Robert grunted and pulled the covers over his head in a vain attempt to steal a few extra minutes’ sleep.

“Hello, little one,” said Anna-Maria, completely besotted.

How could anybody be so cute? She stroked his soft hair. She kissed him on the forehead and the lips.

“I love you,” she said. “You’re the best thing in the whole wide world.”

He stroked her hair in return. Then he suddenly looked very serious, and patted the area around her eyes very carefully; he said anxiously, “Mummy, your face is all cracked.”

From beneath the covers on the far side of the bed came a muffled shout of laughter, and she could see Robert’s body heaving up and down.

Anna-Maria tried to kick her husband, but it was difficult with Gustav between them like a protective wall.

At that moment, her telephone rang.

It was Inspector Fred Olsson.

“Did I wake you?” he asked.

“No, I’ve already had quite a wake-up call,” laughed Anna-Maria, still trying to kick Robert while Gustav tried to burrow his way in under the covers on Robert’s side.

Robert had tucked them under his body, and was resisting with all his might.

“You did say you wanted bad news straightaway.”

“No, no,” laughed Anna-Maria, jumping out of bed. “I never said that, and besides I’ve already had some seriously bad news this morning.”

“What on earth’s going on there?” asked Fred Olsson. “Are you having a party, or something? Anyway, listen to this: the guy with the light-colored overcoat…”

“John McNamara.”

“John McNamara. He doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean, he doesn’t exist?”

“There’s a fax here for you from the British police. The John McNamara who hired a car at Kiruna airport died eighteen months ago in Iraq.”

“I’m on my way,” said Anna-Maria. “Shit!”

She pulled on her clothes and patted the moving covers to say goodbye.

At quarter to seven, Mauri Kallis’s security chief, Mikael Wiik, was driving up the avenue of lime trees to Regla. It took an hour to drive from Kungsholmen to Regla. This particular morning he’d got up at four-thirty because he had a breakfast meeting with Mauri Kallis. But he wasn’t complaining. Early mornings were nothing to him. And besides: the Merc he was driving was new. He’d taken his partner to the Maldives for New Year’s.

Two hundred meters from the first iron gate, he passed Mauri’s wife, Ebba, on a black horse. He slowed down in plenty of time, and gave her a friendly wave. Ebba waved back. In the rearview mirror he saw the horse take a few little dancing steps when the gates were opened; the car hadn’t frightened him.

Bloody horses, he thought as he drove through the second gate. They never know what’s really dangerous. Sometimes they rear up just because there’s a stick lying across the track that wasn’t there yesterday.

Mauri Kallis was already in the dining room. A pile of newspapers beside his coffee cup: two Swedish, the rest foreign.

Mikael Wiik said good morning and helped himself to coffee and a croissant. He’d had a proper breakfast before he left home. He wasn’t the type to sit there shoveling down porridge in front of his employer.

Nobody knows a man like his bodyguard, he thought as he sat down. He knew Mauri Kallis was faithful to his wife, if you disregarded the occasions when his business associates provided girls as a kind of digestif, so to speak. Or when Kallis himself was doing the providing, knowing that was what would get the fish to take the bait. But that was part of the job, and didn’t count.

Kallis didn’t drink much either. Mikael Wiik suspected more of that sort of thing had gone on with Kallis and Inna and Diddi Wattrang in the past. And it was true that during the two years Wiik had been working for him, he’d had the odd drink with Inna—and one or two other things as well. But at work—no. When it came to working dinners or pub crawls, it was part of Mikael Wiik’s job to have a word with (and pay) bartenders and the staff who were waiting on the tables to make sure Mauri Kallis was discreetly served alcohol-free drinks, and apple juice instead of whisky.

Mauri Kallis stayed in hotels with excellent sports facilities when he was away on business, and liked to work out in the hotel gym early in the morning. He preferred fish to meat. He read biographies and factual books, not novels.

“Inna’s funeral,” Mauri Kallis said to Mikael Wiik. “I was thinking of asking Ebba to organize it, so perhaps you and she could get together on that. We can’t postpone the meeting with Gerhart Sneyers, he’s flying in from Belgium or Indonesia the day after tomorrow, so we’ll have a small dinner party then and hold the meeting on Saturday morning. Several people from the African Mining Trust will be there, you’ll have a list tomorrow afternoon at the latest. They’re traveling with their own security people, of course, but, well, you know how things are…”

I know, thought Mikael Wiik. The gentlemen on their way to Regla were well guarded and paranoid. And some of them had good reason to feel that way.

Gerhart Sneyers, for example. He owned both mining and oil companies. Chairman of the African Mining Trust, an association of foreign company owners in Africa.

Mikael Wiik could remember Mauri’s first meeting with Gerhart Sneyers. Mauri and Inna had flown to Miami just to meet him. Mauri had been nervous. Mikael had never seen him like that.

“How do I look?” he’d asked Inna. “I could change my tie. Or should I leave it off altogether?”

Inna had stopped him from going back up to his room.

“You look just perfect,” she’d assured him. “And don’t forget: it’s Sneyers who’s asked for this meeting. He’s the one who should be nervous about you. All you can do is…”

“…sit back and listen,” Mauri had said, as if he’d learned it by heart.

They’d met in the foyer of the Avalon. Gerhart Sneyers was a well-preserved man in his fifties. His thick red hair peppered with gray. An attractive face, in a masculine, craggy way. White skin covered in freckles. He shook hands with Inna first, like a gentleman, then Mauri Kallis. The bodyguards were ignored; they nodded almost imperceptibly at one another, professional colleagues in spite of everything.

Sneyers had two guys guarding him. They were wearing sunglasses and suits, and looked like Mafiosi. Mikael Wiik felt like a country boy in his mint green jacket and cap. His internal defense mechanism was up and running with disparaging thoughts about the other two.

Fatso, he thought about one of the bodyguards. He’d never manage more than a hundred meters. And he wouldn’t even do that in a decent time.

Sniveling puppy, he thought about the other one.

They walked down Ocean Drive, the whole party, on the way to a boat Gerhart Sneyers had hired. The wind was rustling in the palm trees, yet it was still so hot they were all sweating. The puppy kept on losing concentration the whole time, grinning suggestively at the bodybuilders jogging along the beach to burn fat, their shorts tucked up into their asses to get a nice even suntan.

The boat was a Fairline Squadron, a 74-footer, a double bed on deck, double Caterpillar engines and a top speed of 33 knots.

“It’s what the celebrities want,” said the puppy in his broken English, looking meaningfully at the double bed.

“It’s not exactly meant for sunbathing,” he went on.

Mauri, Inna and Gerhart Sneyers had disappeared below deck. Mikael Wiik made his excuses and followed them.

When he got down below he positioned himself just inside the doorway.

Gerhart Sneyers was just saying something, but paused briefly as Mikael Wiik slid in. Just long enough to give Mauri time to send him out. But Mauri said nothing, just gave Gerhart a look to indicate that he should carry on.

A demonstration of strength, thought Mikael Wiik. Mauri decides who’s here and who isn’t. Gerhart is alone, Mauri has Inna and Mikael with him.