Watching You(86)

‘Professional, yet still utterly mad,’ Blom said. ‘You’d have to be utterly mad to exact such an elaborate revenge on your old tormentor.’

‘He was sixteen years old, physically and mentally wrecked after years of the worst bullying you can imagine. Over the next twenty years he became some sort of professional torturer. How?’

‘This is all hypothetical,’ Blom said. ‘We’re fumbling in the dark. You don’t necessarily need training to excel at torture.’

‘You mean he was just a natural?’

‘I don’t know. Driven by a relentless desire for vengeance?’

‘I don’t buy that,’ Berger said, pointing towards the figure in the wheelchair ten metres away. ‘You’ve seen Anton, Molly. That was done by a man who’s tortured people before, probably on a regular basis. He’s been trained in either the criminal or military world, and I think what we’re looking at here strengthens the hypothesis that there really was a father called Nils Gundersen who was a mercenary in “some ruddy Arab country”. We need to find him.’

Blom looked troubled.

‘I don’t know,’ she said hesitantly. ‘But I’m worried that it’s time for a serious conversation …’

‘MISS?’

‘It’s not that simple …’

‘For fuck’s sake, just grab the bull by the horns,’ Berger said. ‘I promise not to listen.’

‘I need more than that,’ Blom said, taking her phone out. ‘You need to be out of earshot.’

While Blom went round the corner Berger walked around the day room. He counted fifteen people absorbed in absolute inactivity scattered around the room. The television was still on, showing a football match with no sound; no one seemed to be watching it. It was as if time had stopped, as if he was in a small gap in the violently rushing flow of time. As if a cog had fallen out of the clock.

Over by the window sat the figure in his wheelchair. The unseeing eyes stared out at the miserable apartment blocks, and he was lolling in a position that would probably leave him completely bedridden within a couple of years.

Berger crouched down beside him. ‘Anton?’

Anton Bergmark turned to look at him. Something resembling consciousness returned to his watery eyes. ‘Fuck, you really hit him.’

Berger jerked back.

‘What did you say, Anton?’ he said.

But the man in the wheelchair had already disappeared off somewhere.

Berger stood up and stroked Anton’s head gently. He saw his reflection in the window, streaked with rain, dissolving. It wasn’t that different from Anton’s.

Then he wandered the corridors, his mind elsewhere. On an isolated sofa Molly Blom was sitting with her laptop on her knees.

She was staring at the screen and said without looking up: ‘Well, that went better than expected.’

‘MISS remembered you with great fondness?’ Berger suggested.

She ignored him. ‘MISS actually has a Nils Gundersen in their register. Wanted internationally for various types of war crime. Born 1948. Norwegian citizen up to the millennium, when he became a Lebanese citizen. Said to live in the city of Jbeil, better known as Byblos.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Berger said.

‘Gundersen became an officer in the Norwegian army at the age of twenty-two, rose quickly through the ranks, then went off to the Foreign Legion in 1973 at the age of twenty-five. Disappeared two years later, abruptly, illegal desertion. Probably recruited as a mercenary by one of the many factions involved in the Lebanese Civil War at the time. Cropped up in a news report from Beirut around Christmas ’76, in a tank. Right tangle of foreign and domestic interest groups: the USA was involved, along with Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq. And the Lebanese factions were Sunni, Shiite, Palestinian, Druze and Maronite. MISS doesn’t know which group Gundersen fought for. Because he was a wanted man, they paid attention to his subsequent trips to Europe. The general conclusion is that he was recruiting, and his presence was documented in ten European cities or so between ’76 and ’84. One of the first was Stockholm.’

‘Wow,’ Berger said. ‘1976?’

‘Gundersen never stayed long in the same place. Only afterwards was it confirmed that he had actually been in Stockholm for a little less than a week in the middle of April 1976. And William Larsson was born more or less exactly nine months later, on Monday 17 January.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Berger said.

‘That still doesn’t prove anything,’ Blom said. ‘And there’s no photographic evidence of the visit either. But there is this.’

Blom turned the computer round. The screen displayed a whole series of pictures. She clicked on the first, a fairly grainy portrait of a stocky, bearded, weather-beaten man in his fifties. He looked like he was walking through a bazaar.

‘According to MISS, this is the last known picture of Nils Gundersen,’ Blom said. ‘Taken by the CIA in Marrakesh. He was only identified when he was already long gone. At that point he was already wanted for war crimes in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq.’

‘The CIA,’ Berger said coolly.

Blom clicked through a number of pictures of an increasingly young Gundersen in various settings. They got more and more warlike.

‘Yes,’ Blom said, pointing at the screen. ‘Gundersen on the side of the Iraqis in the first Gulf War. Operation Desert Storm.’