Watching You(56)

She had no idea how long she had been asleep when her mobile began to shout at her. Half-asleep, she couldn’t remember having set the alarm clock.

She hadn’t.

It was ringing. Unknown number. As always.

All calls of any importance came from unknown numbers. The story of her life.

She woke up, quickly, as ever. Ever ready.

‘How’s it going?’ asked a voice that she’d recognise anywhere. It ran like a thread through her life. But it was also slightly alarming that the head of the Security Service’s Intelligence Unit was calling her in the middle of the night. It was the middle of the night, wasn’t it?

‘We’re moving in the right direction, August,’ she said tentatively.

‘Good to hear it,’ August Steen said. ‘Can you come up to my office for a bit, Molly?’

‘Are you in the building?’ Blom couldn’t help sounding surprised.

‘There’s quite a lot happening on other fronts,’ Steen said. ‘I’m not here for your sake, if that’s what you’re thinking. But I’d like a briefing, if it’s not too much to ask.’

‘On my way,’ she said, standing up and wishing she could still frown. She stopped and thought for half a minute. Then she packed away everything from the table. She stopped abruptly with her hand in her bag. The fake smartphone had caught her attention. She took it out and looked at it, then put it in the back pocket of her black sweatpants, tossed her bag over her shoulder and headed out into the corridor via the control room. Kent was sitting there immersed in the recordings of the interview.

‘Where’s Roy?’ she asked.

‘He’s gone to the toilet,’ Kent said, pausing the film. ‘We didn’t want to wake you.’

‘OK. Tell him we’re taking a break for a couple of hours. You look pretty wiped out too.’

Kent gave her a quick glance, nodded curtly and went back to the recording.

Molly Blom wasn’t at all happy about that look. She took a right in the corridor instead of a left and soon reached a different lift. Before it came to a halt she slid her hand into her back pocket, pushed one of the lift’s ceiling panels aside and placed the fake mobile phone inside. She slipped the panel back before the lift had climbed up into the public realm of Police Headquarters. Then she started the process of coding her way forward, closer and closer to the absolute centre of power.

The leadership area seemed completely empty until she entered the last corridor. There she saw a figure sweep into one of the toilets. All she could see of the figure as the door closed was a wrist bearing a large diver’s watch.

Too much fell into place too quickly. She was good at infiltration, used to taking quick, improvised decisions, and a strategy had already begun to form. It was almost ready by the time she knocked on the door marked with Steen’s name and position, and heard the cold whirr of the lock.

August Steen looked up from his computer, impassive, clicked his mouse, pushed his reading glasses up onto his forehead and looked at her.

Molly Blom said: ‘Considering that there’s quite a lot happening on other fronts the corridors are surprisingly empty. And you’ve got toothpaste at the corner of your mouth.’

Steen wiped the left side of his mouth instinctively.

‘Right,’ she said.

He wrinkled his nose and cast a sharp glance at her. Then he wiped the right side of his mouth.

There was no toothpaste there.

‘So, you rushed over here,’ she said. ‘What for?’

‘I felt that we needed to talk,’ August Steen said.

‘About what?’

‘About the most recent session. You pushed Berger hard.’

‘I thought that was the point.’

‘“I’m sure they’d love to come back to their serial-killer father” was perhaps a little extreme …’

‘You didn’t rush here all the way from ?ppelviken at this time of night because of a clumsy choice of words, August.’

‘Very true, Molly,’ Steen said, watching her carefully. ‘I rushed here because something seems to have disturbed our recording equipment. And that sort of thing disturbs me as well. Possibly even more, actually. We are, after all, the Security Service. If someone disturbs our equipment, that’s a definite threat to the security of the realm.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I have to acknowledge that the long staring contest at the end of the session was ingenious. Absolute silence. What was it you said? “Now we’re just going to sit here and stare at each other until you tell the truth, you pathetic piece of shit. I don’t care if it takes half an hour.” Then the two of you really do sit there for more than ten minutes and just stare at each other. And then you conclude with the phrase “OK, this is getting us nowhere. We’ll take a break.” Splendid. Now he knows that there are no limits to our patience.’

‘Why do I detect a note of sarcasm in your voice?’

‘Because this happened,’ Steen said, turning his screen. He clicked the mouse and fixed his gaze on Blom’s face, which was lit by the glow of the monitor.

What she saw was a fairly long clip of her and Berger sitting and staring at each other. A minute and a half passed, then the picture jumped, and Berger and Blom’s body language was suddenly very different, considerably more active. Voices emerged from the computer.