A Death in Sweden(33)

The café was in a part of the city he wasn’t familiar with, and he wondered if it was near her office or where she lived. Inger was already there when he arrived, sitting at a table in the corner. He joined her, they exchanged a formal kiss and she ordered coffee.

While they waited for it to arrive, she said, “Patrick told me about Jack Redford. It’s incredible.”

“I guess it is,” said Dan, even though he didn’t think the new revelations were any more incredible than what they’d discovered for themselves.

“I have something for you too.” She reached down into her bag and took out an envelope, saying as she placed it on the table, “That’s the man who came from Berlin to look around Redford’s house.”

Dan picked up the envelope and pulled the picture out enough to look at it—a capture from a security camera at the airport by the look of it. It was a guy of around thirty, but nobody he recognized.

“Do you have a name?”

“Alex Robertson.”

“Robertson or Robinson?”

“Sorry, you’re right, Alex Robinson. You’ve heard of him?”

Dan nodded and looked at the picture more closely. He wished he could take something from it, but he was just an average-looking guy in a suit, almost suspiciously clean-cut—he probably got mistaken for a Mormon missionary.

Dan slipped the picture back into the envelope and said, “I understand you’re staying involved with this in some way.”

“Especially now.” She looked around the coffee shop, a few of the other tables occupied, and said, “I hope you don’t mind me accompanying you tomorrow. More as an observer, though we feel it does involve us, particularly after what happened on Skeppsholmen.”

Dan smiled. So Brabham’s attempt to have Patrick killed in Stockholm was being seen by the Swedish Security Service as a legitimate reason for their involvement. He couldn’t blame them for that, and it hardly mattered that it had probably all resulted from Redford sticking a pin in the map—if he’d hit upon some other wilderness Dan would probably be having this conversation with an officer from another country’s intelligence service.

“What makes you think I’m going anywhere tomorrow?”

“It’s too late today and, as beautiful as my city is, I don’t think you want to stay any longer. I’m guessing Paris?”

“Flying to Paris, then the train to Limoges.”

“Oh.” She clearly understood what that meant, that he intended to speak with Sabine’s parents first. She almost seemed to have second thoughts, as if imagining how charged that meeting might be.

“Changed your mind?”

“No, but . . .” She hesitated, then said, “I think you’d call it in at the deep end.”

He nodded, and they stopped talking for a moment because the coffee arrived.

Once they were left alone again, she said, “I heard the full story about what happened earlier today.” She was smiling slightly.

“What of it?”

“You didn’t kill him.”

He smiled too now and said, “I keep surprising you, don’t I?” She didn’t say anything but seemed to acknowledge that he had a point. “I haven’t had time to think it through, but Matty would’ve been under a lot of pressure—we all are—and that’s why he made the wrong decision on this. I’m guessing it’s also why he hesitated before pulling the trigger, which is what gave me the edge. But we’ve got some history, Matty Hellstr?m and me, and he’s a decent guy. He’s separated, I think, but he has a wife and two small kids. It’d take a lot more than what happened today for me to kill him.”

She sat staring at him for a good few seconds, then seemed to snap out of it and reached down for her coffee.

Finally, after putting the cup back down, she said, “Well, I still think you did the right thing, and it would have been easy for anyone, even someone without your history, to do . . . the wrong thing in that situation.”

He stared back at her, directly into her eyes, and he could tell she found it unsettling in some way.

“I’m not a bad person.”

“I know that now and, yes, I’m surprised by that because . . . Well, you’ve done some really bad things, horrible things.”

“I know.”

When she realized he wasn’t going to say anything more, she said, “How do you live with that?”

He shook his head.

“Truth is I just do. I get paid, I do the job I’m paid to do. I’ve killed some people, I’ve handed people over to be killed, or tortured, or imprisoned, but the targets are never exactly innocents themselves.”

Even as he said it, though, he thought of Ramon Martinez, torn away from his family—Dan had been well paid for tracking him down, but he wasn’t certain he’d been paid enough to justify it, and he couldn’t help but think of the boy, wondering who would take him to school each morning now.

With what seemed an uncanny change of subject, as if she’d been reading his thoughts, Inger sounded curious as she said, “Have you never been tempted to settle down, have children?”

He looked back at her. It had been the one thing in his life he’d found hardest to talk about, even with his closest friends, and yet for some reason he wanted to tell her, and it seemed the easiest and most natural thing in the world to do so. He wasn’t sure why he felt so comfortable around her, why he felt able to share thoughts he’d hardly dared acknowledge himself, but he did all the same.