Watching You(50)

The door glides open. Light shoots into the absolute darkness of the boathouse. It falls across the interior, right into its depths. It streams past boat engines and life jackets, past stranded buoys and rusty anchors; it rolls past the eyes of mooring rings and hawsers and sails; it catches chains and cogs and cables that are no longer merely randomly scattered about the old boathouse but are actually joined together.

But none of that is important. Everything else vanishes when he realises what the narrow beam of light falls across. It’s a face.

It’s a girl’s face.

The patch of strong spring light seems to blind her. Her face twists from side to side; she pulls back from the light. For a long time she seems unable to see. Eventually she opens her eyes. They turn towards the door. And at that moment the other boy steps into the light. His friend’s blond fringe looks luminous in the sunlight, his whole head glowing. Then he turns sideways, and the light falls across his face at an angle, making it seem even more irregular and misshapen than usual. Then he reaches for the door and begins to pull it shut.

Outside on his rock he sees the girl’s eyes in the slowly narrowing light. They’re full of something he can’t understand. Is it happiness? Is it desire? Is it … terror?

Then she twists her head back and catches sight of him through the window. Their eyes meet. It’s a moment of peculiar contact. The look in her eyes changes, and he doesn’t understand what it is. He’s too young, too immature, too unprepared to understand it, but her eyes open wide, and only then does he see the tape covering her mouth. He sees her push at the tape with her tongue, and he sees something moving down her forehead. Only when the drop reaches her left eye does he realise that it’s blood, a drop of blood that’s trickled down from her hair. And only when her eye is completely red does he hear the heartrending scream through the tape. It makes him lose his footing, and, just as the other boy closes the door completely and darkness returns to the boathouse, he falls off the rock.

He gets to his feet. The heartrending scream is still echoing, and he can’t blame the fact that he’s hit his head or twisted his ankle, but he runs away.

He runs. As fast as his legs will carry him.

Once he’s built up speed through the chest-high grass, the scream stops abruptly.





22




Tuesday 27 October, 18.10

When Berger was roughly yanked to a sitting position on the hard bunk he had no idea what had woken him. A dream, perhaps, a memory, a message from the depths of his unconscious. Perhaps it was – on closer reflection – simply the fact that there were two men standing in his cell gripping his arms. When they got him to his feet his eyes were still flaring from the world of dreams. As they dragged him through the gloomy corridor he still couldn’t see straight. And as they strapped him into the metal chair in the interview room he had trouble fixing his gaze on Molly Blom. She was sitting in her place, with her elbows on the table, staring into his eyes. He looked at the table and tried not only to focus but also to see if anything had changed. It had. His eyes settled on his Rolex. The condensation was almost gone from the face now, the hands showed that the time was almost quarter past six; he just didn’t know if it was morning or evening. And beneath one of the many folders, Berger noticed a mobile sticking out, a white smartphone that he hadn’t seen before. He was on the point of commenting on it when Blom turned one of the two picture frames so that he was staring into the happy faces of two ten-year-old boys. The Arc de Triomphe rose up behind them.

Paris.

‘Marcus and Oscar,’ Molly Blom said.

‘But what …?’ Berger said, taken aback.

‘The photograph is from your desk in Police Headquarters,’ Blom interrupted. ‘It shows your twins, Marcus and Oscar. When did you last see them?’

‘Like hell am I going to answer questions like that.’

‘This is nothing compared to what you subjected me to.’

‘Not you. Nathalie Fredén. You aren’t Nathalie Fredén. And there was a purpose to that.’

‘And you don’t think there’s a purpose to this?’ Blom said.

‘Yes, to frame me, of all people, for a crime I haven’t committed. Me. The person who’s been hunting the Scum harder than anyone.’

‘You’re wrong there. And I promised you that this session would be different. It will be, Sam, and there’s no point in you pretending otherwise or trying to obstruct the proceedings. This fight is already lost. Do you understand?’

‘Because you have two “external resources” out there in the control room? Because they don’t have to obey the same laws as us? What are they going to do? Waterboard me? Is it really true that one of them’s called Roy? I don’t suppose the other’s called Roger?’

Blom gave Berger a long, disappointed look. In the end she shook her head. ‘We’ll start again. When did you last see Marcus and Oscar?’

‘How can that be even remotely relevant?’

‘When?’

‘Go to hell.’

‘When they were this old, or thereabouts?’

Blom pushed a printed photograph towards him. It was the one from his mobile. The one everything stemmed from. The fixed point, the pole star, the still point of the turning world.

‘Our experts have concluded that this is the most regularly used item in your entire mobile phone. You seem to keep going back to it.’