Watching You(55)
‘But you must have got further than that. Otherwise you wouldn’t have written it down.’
‘Think about where it started. But our time’s up. I can tell they’re starting to wonder over in the control room.’
‘So what the hell happens now?’ Berger asked.
‘I honestly don’t know,’ Blom said. ‘It’s possible that you are actually William Larsson’s accomplice. You were very close. Perhaps you are just being remote-controlled by your master, Sam Berger. You were his only real friend. But we have to stop now. Sit still.’
Her hand slipped beneath the file again.
Just before she clicked the white remote control Sam Berger said: ‘I became a cop because I had a guilty conscience.’
She smiled grimly; the red light on the recording apparatus flickered. Then Molly Blom said, loudly and clearly: ‘OK, this is getting us nowhere. We’ll take a break.’
23
Tuesday 27 October, 18.43
Molly Blom watched him being taken away. When Roy and Kent dragged Sam Berger out she wondered what had disappeared with them. Her career?
She pulled the fake mobile phone towards her and dropped it into her bag with a silent prayer that it had worked. Everything from Wiborg Supplies Ltd always worked. That was the whole point.
She looked at her real mobile phone. The day was completely out of joint. It was almost seven o’clock. Molly Blom had a feeling she wasn’t going to get any sleep that night either. But on the other hand she was used to that; she’d arranged her life around it. She compensated for her irregular professional life with an extremely disciplined private life.
What mattered right now was re-establishing a degree of control. Order and structure. She had laid it all on the table for Berger, but there wasn’t much chance of him saying anything, partly because he had enough of his own to hide, and partly because he was in fact locked up. It looked like everything hinged on Molly Blom.
No, don’t go there. Not now. Don’t fall into that pit. Not until it was clear what the next step would be.
And of course that was precisely the pit she fell into.
Life. She had tried so hard to suppress it. Suppress everything. She had tried to pretend everything was normal, that her past was completely unremarkable. It had worked well: the end of the school year, then Year 9, without William Larsson, without gorgeous Samuel Berger, the embodiment of betrayal. Everything was fine, good grades, nice-enough friends, good parents, nothing out of the ordinary.
At the time, she had no idea where they had gone next, either William or Sam. They just disappeared.
She remained seated in the interview room off the top-secret passageway, buried deep within Police Headquarters. She opened her laptop and stared at the screen. She went through the case, both the official and unofficial versions, and found nothing that she didn’t already know.
Instead the past came back with inexorable force.
She had told Berger the truth: from the moment he snuck away from the boathouse she hadn’t been able to trust anyone in the whole world.
There was only one person to trust. Herself. Everything depended on Molly Blom. No one else would help her succeed in life. There was nothing to fall back on.
Except herself.
Her life became a miracle of control and self-control. She played the part of a successful person. She did it so well that she realised she had a genuine talent for playing roles. In Year 9 she started acting, most likely to keep her real self at a distance, and when she took a gamble and applied to the Royal Dramatic Theatre’s vocational school after finishing her studies she was accepted, and was one of their youngest students ever. She appeared in some short films, student projects; she played a couple of the biggest female theatrical roles, Ophelia and Masha, during her final term. Everyone predicted a bright future for her. And she loved the theatre. But other forces had begun to take over. Playing roles was no longer enough, the result was never anything that bore any resemblance to justice. And justice was what she wanted in life, tangible justice. It was becoming increasingly clear what she wanted to do: she wanted to join the police. She wanted to protect the world from every imaginable type of William Larsson. And Sam Berger too, for that matter.
She wanted to protect the world from injustice.
It didn’t take long at Police Academy for her to realise that that wasn’t quite what was on offer. Police Academy promised something very practical: the ability to arrest suspects, catch crooks, but there was far too little about moral labyrinths.
Yet for the first time since the boathouse she wasn’t playing a role. She was a police officer. She was a trainee police officer, then a police officer; she went on courses; she specialised and became a detective inspector. She was given a number of indications that her theatrical background made her highly attractive to the Security Service, and it didn’t take long for her to be recruited personally by August Steen and transformed into the perfect undercover agent. By this point she had been doing the job for almost a decade. And it was obviously taking its toll.
Time passed at that lonely interview-room table. She had been awake for so long; she had played Nathalie Fredén for so long. That really had taken its toll. And it was as if time had caught up with her, grabbed hold of her, and she fell asleep in front of her computer, her face slumped onto the keyboard.
When she saw, much later, the immense document that her sleeping head had written, she wondered for a moment if it had sprung from the depths of her unconscious.