Watching You(39)

Time passed. He felt her eyes drill into his downturned head.

Then he looked up again and said with studied calm: ‘One beautiful day nearly a quarter of a century ago, a young girl went up to the hayloft of the farm where she lived with her parents. She’d rigged up a pitchfork so that it was pointing straight up, firmly anchored between the floorboards. Calmly and methodically she made her way up the steep ladder to the hayloft, and instead of jumping into the hay and bursting out laughing, she jumped straight onto the pitchfork. The doctors concluded that she lived another half an hour.’

Fredén’s gaze didn’t flinch at all, her face showed no emotion.

Berger went on: ‘The farm was outside Ume?, the girl was ten years old, and her name was Nathalie Fredén. She simply didn’t want to be alive any more.’

He looked down again, at the floor, looked deep down. Rage was building up inside him, red hot, white hot. He stood up quickly, grabbed hold of the laptop, heard it crunch between his fingers, felt the scabs on his right knuckles crack, lurched across the table and roared in a voice he hadn’t heard for years: ‘Who the hell are you really?’

She was no longer looking at him. Her gaze was steady, but focused elsewhere. Berger heard Deer talking soothingly in his ear, and he tore the earpiece out.

Then he saw what Nathalie Fredén was looking at. A glowing red light. Their eyes met briefly. The air between them was toxic.

He threw his right hand out towards the switch. Blood spattered the wall. The little red light went out.

Nathalie Fredén leaned towards him and snarled: ‘Trust me, you don’t want to know who I am.’

The door from the control room opened. Deer and Allan rushed in. Berger picked up the laptop and sent it crashing against the wall. Its keys shot across the interview room.

‘Take this piece of shit down to the cells,’ Berger yelled. ‘Total isolation, no contact with anyone. Now!’

Then he stormed out. He landed with a thud on his desk chair. Sat still in the darkness. Staring into space.

Soon he felt a light hand on his shoulder. After the initial irritation the hand connected directly with his heart, took hold of it, calmed it.

‘I feel the same, Sam,’ Deer said. ‘She’s bloody clever.’

‘Far too clever, for fuck’s sake,’ Berger snapped. ‘She’s a fucking professional. That’s the missing piece.’

He stood up. Realisations shot wordlessly through him.

‘Stay here,’ he said, and walked out. He ran through corridors and down stairs. Completely out of breath he ran through the media room and opened the door to Syl’s cubbyhole. Five-year-old Moira was sleeping just as peacefully as she had been before – she didn’t seem to have moved in her bed fashioned from a reclined office chair – but her mother looked different. Syl looked pale, her thin hair hanging in clumps, and she seemed to have been waiting for him for a long time.

‘You bastard,’ she said.

‘Wiborg Supplies Ltd,’ he said. ‘What the hell is it?’

‘It’s … not good.’

‘I bloody well knew I’d heard it before somewhere. The Security Service?’

‘I don’t know if it is the Security Service, but it’s where the Security Service’s agents get their material. They’ve got everything. And by that I mean everything.’

‘Even bicycles made by a mediocre brand like Rex. The Security Service’s fucking undercover agents. Fuck!’

Syl nodded and looked shaken. ‘When I made my way in through a hidden back door I found a whole series of anomalies. I presume that’s to do with the fact that the Security Service split from the Police Authority on 1 January. The whole set-up seemed rather chaotic. The whole network’s security was pretty weak, and I was able to work my way back through time.’

‘Anomalies?’

‘First and foremost a list,’ Syl said quietly. ‘Just a few clicks away. Clicks that probably mean the end of my career. Or worse …’

‘Come on, Syl. A list?’

‘The identities of their agents. Divided into “internal resources” and “external resources”.’

‘What the hell?’ Berger exclaimed. ‘They’ve got a list? What sort of amateur crap is that?’

‘Christ … I think I was sufficiently camouflaged,’ Syl groaned, glancing in terror at her sleeping daughter. ‘I must have been sufficiently camouflaged. There can’t be any footprints. There can’t be.’

Berger breathed out. Looked around. Saw nothing. Didn’t even see Moira in the stretched-out office chair. Definitely didn’t see that she had opened her eyes and was looking at him as if he were something from a nightmare.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK, calm down, Syl, take a few deep breaths and all that sort of thing. We’ll have to make the best of the situation. Have you got that bloody Botox list here?’

‘What? What are you on about now?’

‘Botox. The list of clients who’ve had Botox injections to treat migraines. That’s the only thing that can’t be fake. No wrinkles on her forehead. No one could fake that.’

‘OK. Yes, it’s here. What exactly do you want?’

‘Cross-check the Botox list with the list of agents.’