A Death in Sweden(15)

There was no doubting she was attractive. But even on the outside chance that she’d be interested, he had to concentrate his attentions on Jacques Fillon, on who he was and why he’d run all the way up here, on the reasons Brabham and his people had shown an interest.

In one way or another, Dan had bought into Patrick’s argument, that the truths buried in Fillon’s past might just provide the bargaining power to guarantee his own security. So that was the key, to focus on that. And besides, two days together in a cabin might be his idea of a fantasy scenario, but he somehow doubted that it would be Inger’s.





Chapter Nine


They drove directly to the dead man’s place. He’d been living the simple life, that had been the consensus, but it was an attractive red timber house in a private wooded setting, a separate garage, the whole place freshly painted and well maintained.

It wasn’t set out with the same attention to sightlines and security that Charlie’s place boasted, but then Fillon had been able to rely on something else. No one had known he was here, and here was a long way from almost anywhere else.

Per let them in and they walked from room to room around the house. It was clean and simply furnished, almost as if a magazine editor had wanted to create a classic Scandinavian interior. None of the rooms had a TV or computer. One room was lined with bookcases that were full, but there were no books lying around anywhere, no magazines or papers.

The kitchen was well stocked, but again, it was all tidy, hardly the stereotypical bachelor place. Both Dan’s place in Italy and the apartment in Paris probably looked more lived in than this, and that was saying something because he seemed to spend hardly any time in either.

Dan turned to Per, who’d walked into the kitchen after him, and said, “Did he have a cleaner?”

“A woman from the village came in once a week. We spoke to her, but she said there was never much cleaning to do. She said he liked to talk, maybe just to practice his Swedish. He wanted to be fluent.”

“And she knew him as Jacques Fillon?”

“Jack. People called him Jack.” He turned to Inger and added, “Nobody knew he was French.”

She nodded, and said, “We still don’t.”

Dan sat against the kitchen table, looking around the room, thinking over the house they’d just toured, trying to imagine himself inside the mind of the man who’d lived here. Even harder, he was trying to imagine himself living here, in this space, the hours of each new day yawning in front of him.

“What did he do here? How did he fill his days, his evenings, the winter nights? He’s been living up here for over ten years, but he doesn’t have a TV, doesn’t have a computer.”

“He has a lot of books,” suggested Inger.

“True, yet no book by his bedside, none left by a favorite chair.” He looked at Per and said, “Have you found out any more about where he went on the bus every day?”

“Nobody knows. And it’s only because of Siri and the regular driver that we know he took the bus every day. We can’t even find anyone who saw him on the bus coming home.”

Inger said, “Siri was the girl he saved.”

Dan nodded.

“What did he do?” This time the question was to himself, but Per looked on expectantly. Dan was trying to think of all the things that were missing, then said, “You searched the place, right, looking for another ID?”

“Yes, we searched, but as you can see, we put everything back where it was. There was no other ID, no passport.”

“Were there any guns?”

“No.” He laughed and said, “Not everyone up here’s a hunter.”

Dan smiled in response, but his thoughts were snagging all over the place. He noticed Inger didn’t smile, that she’d understood his question perfectly. It was all about the kind of scenario that might have brought Fillon up here. In one way or another, he had to have been on the run, and very few people on the run would ever get comfortable enough to be completely without a weapon. So where were they?

It was just one of the many things he couldn’t make sense of, and he still had a dozen unformed questions circling, none of which Per would have an answer for.

Inger ended the confusion anyway by stepping in and saying, “Okay, I think, Per, if you take us to our accommodation now, we can walk back here on our own later.”

“Sure, but you can call me any time you need a ride.” He looked a little bashful, and Dan guessed he’d already taken a shine to Inger.

She smiled in response, but not in a way that suggested she’d be returning the sentiment. Briefly, Dan sympathized with her—she had the sort of easy-going beauty that meant she probably spent a good part of her daily life dealing with the fanciful thoughts of male colleagues. He laughed to himself, then, not sure why he thought he was any different.

They left and Per locked the door and handed the key to Inger, but then looked at Dan, struck by a sudden thought.

“You asked what he did all the time. The postman, he didn’t come very often, just bills, you know, things like that, but he said normally Jack was in the garage.”

Dan looked across at the garage. It was open at the front and a pretty new-looking SUV was poking out.

“I can’t imagine that car needing much work.”

Per smiled and said, “I said exactly the same thing, but the garage is bigger than it looks from here. There’s a big old motorbike behind there, a real old wreck—he was always working on it, that’s what the postman said.”