troublesome drunk, escorted by two sturdy uniformed officers, took up most of the available space in front of the duty-officer’s glass cubicle.
Friday nights, all the drinking and fighting, had doubtless been useful experience, but she didn’t exactly miss it …
One of the uniformed officers nodded in acknowledgement as she passed and she returned the greeting. On the way out to the lift she could hear his police-radio crackle into life:
‘Control to all units!
Patrol cars to Hamngatan and the NK department store …’
Nothing happened. Not that he knew exactly what he’d been expecting, but still? Surely there should have been some sort of response. After the dramatic build-up, surely some flashing warning lights or wailing sirens was the least he could expect? People running along the corridor, maybe some angry banging on the door.
But this …? A whole load of nothing.
Disappointed, big time.
He waited another minute or so, then left the room dejectedly, slouching down the stairs, and it wasn’t until he crossed the street and made it as far as the trees in Kungsträdgården that he slowly began to get it.
‘… just stopped,’ someone was saying in surprise to another passerby, pointing up at the building that HP had just come out of.
‘Isn’t it usually lit up as well?’ he heard a couple of voices ask.
Then he saw people holding up their mobiles, and soon there was a mass of people taking pictures. He looked up in the same direction, high up above the copper roof, to see what had caught their interest, and instantly his disappointment was blown away and replaced by an entirely new, indescribable feeling that he had never come anywhere close to before.
His heart was doing backward double somersaults inside his chest. His feet almost left the ground and he felt his jeans tighten over his crotch.
This was so totally fucking brilliant! Talk about mission accomplished!
The huge, illuminated NK clock, which had rotated high above the city for fifty years almost without interruption, was dark and still.
The hands of the shadowy clock-face were pointing at seven o’clock precisely. And he understood the Game Master’s words: ‘the clock will stop on your old life’. A new age had just begun!
Sometimes, usually when she was dreaming, she could still see his face in front of her, the way it looked the very last time their eyes met. First the fury, then surprise, and finally the terror in his eyes when he realized what was happening – that he was about to die.
She always relived the moment as a film running in ever slower slow motion. The way he hung there almost weightless between heaven and earth, between life and death, while his arms moved slowly in circles, flailing, initially to regain his balance, then to grab at salvation. But for a short while physics seemed to have made an exception and allowed him to balance on the edge even though he ought to have fallen already. As if the law of gravity had suspended itself long enough for Rebecca to have time to see the terror and accusation in his eyes. She on the floor, just a metre or so from his feet, close enough to be able to reach, to stretch out a hand to rescue him.
Like so many times before the sequence of events slowed until at last everything was entirely still, almost like someone had pressed a pause button. And for a single intense moment it was actually there, for real, the chance for her to reach out her hand and try to undo what had been done. Save him. If she wanted to.
But even though she tried to convince herself that she loved him, that she regretted it and certainly didn’t wish him any harm, it didn’t help. Because deep down inside her, in a place that reason couldn’t reach, either awake or dreaming, she still wanted – even though more than thirteen years had passed since that night – nothing more than for him to fall. That his face should be smashed beyond recognition, that his arms and legs be broken like matchsticks, and his hands, the soft hands that she had loved and feared more than anything else in the whole world, crushed to bloody fragments against the solid ground far below.
And at the moment when the hatred once again broke free inside her, someone pressed play and her wishes came true.
Often that was when she woke up, at the moment when he disappeared from sight, and she avoided having to hear the sound of his body hitting the ground five floors below.
But not always.
Not today.
The muffled, soft sound was still echoing in her ears as she gulped down a quick breakfast by the kitchen sink. It was almost drowned out by the sound of traffic as she cycled fast along Rålambsvägen, but was still echoing weakly at the back of her mind as she made the mountain bike jump the curb on Drottningholmsvägen, and still hadn’t vanished completely by the time she pulled up breathless beside the guard’s box by the cellar entrance at Fridhemsplan.
She stopped at the barrier, showed her police badge to the guard inside the box, who waved her past absent-mindedly, evidently more interested in the mobile phone he was fiddling with instead of concentrating on his job.
Yet another incompetent idiot, she thought angrily before she rolled down through the tunnel beneath the Kronoberg complex, its cool darkness effectively shutting off the outside world and all of its sounds.
‘Come on, put a bit of effort in, for God’s sake! This isn’t a housewives’ exercise-class!’
Sweat was pouring from the six bodyguards. Five men, one woman. Down on the floor, ten push-ups, quickly up on your feet again, ready, kick, punch, punch. Then down again. Twenty sit-ups and back up into position again. Ten reps in total, then switch with your partner. A firm grip round the waist, kick, punch, punch.
Her sparring partner was strong and his blows almost penetrated the padded shield in Rebecca’s arms.
Bang, bang, bang.
Three more, then change again.
The self-defence instructor was living up to his name today. Peter Pain hadn’t got his nickname simply because he was British.
The first training class for the rookies in the Alpha group. Evidently Vahtola had requested a serious session to challenge the newcomers to her group. Rebecca could see their boss watching them from the glass passageway above the self-defence room.
Approximately forty-five minutes had passed and the tempo had been relentless so far. Even though they were all in good shape, more than one of them was starting to flag.
‘Okay, stop, gather round.’
Peter Pain beckoned them all over. There was a collective sigh of relief and Rebecca noticed to her delight that several of her male colleagues had to rest their hands on their knees to catch their breath. She was tired, but not as tired as the biggest of the men.
‘That’s
