When he heard the key in the lock, he felt such a surge of relief that he almost burst into tears. The night had felt interminable and the flat was very cold. The lovely frost patterns on the outsides of the windows were the only aesthetically appealing things in this drab, temporary home.
Ali was not feeling good. He had had stomach ache and diarrhoea for several days. The air in the flat was thick with cigarette smoke because none of the windows opened, and he sometimes found himself trying not to breathe in too often. He was also feeling the effects of prolonged insomnia. It had only taken a couple of sleepless nights for his senses to start feeling distorted by fatigue. Now, he forgot a thought before he had even finished thinking it, and sometimes felt he was asleep even though he was awake.
This was not the life he had paid for. Even if he had paid a good deal less than many other people.
He met them in the hall, wanting to show that he was glad to see them, even so.
It was early in the day, not much after nine-thirty.
It was the same woman who had met him at the bus station. She had a man with her. He was short and very blond. It was hard to assess his age, but he looked about sixty. Ali’s spirits fell. He had hoped for someone who spoke Arabic. To his surprise, the man opened his mouth and greeted him in his own language.
‘Salaam aleikum, Ali,’ he said softly. ‘How have you been getting on in this flat?’
Ali swallowed and cleared his throat several times. It was so long since he had had anyone to talk to.
‘It’s fine,’ he said, his voice scratchy.
He swallowed again and hoped they could not tell that he was lying. It would be a disaster if they thought he was being insolent. The very worst thing would be if they sent him home. That would put him and his family back to square one.
The man and woman went further into the flat and Ali trailed after them. They sat down in the living room. The woman put a few unopened packets of cigarettes on the coffee table and nodded to Ali. He smiled and tried to express his gratitude. He had had nothing to smoke all night, which had only increased the stress levels in his body.
‘Thank you,’ he whispered in Arabic. ‘Thank you.’
The fair-haired man said something to the woman and she laughed.
‘We hope you didn’t think we had deserted you,’ said the man, leaning back on the sofa with a troubled look. ‘It’s just that we have to leave a few days between visits, as I’m sure you understand.’
When Ali did not reply at once, the man added: ‘It was for your own sake, too, you know.’
Ali took the first drag at a cigarette, feeling the nicotine start to soothe him.
‘It was no problem at all,’ he said quickly, putting the cigarette to his mouth again. ‘I’ve been fine.’
The man nodded and looked reassured. The woman picked up the briefcase she had with her and put it on her knee. The lock flew open with a quiet click and she opened it.
‘We’ve come to discuss the final part of your payment for setting you up here in Sweden,’ the man said with authority. ‘So you can get your residence permit and bring your family over, start a new life. And so you can move to your new home, learn Swedish and look for a job.’
Ali nodded eagerly. He had been waiting for this ever since he got off the plane.
The woman passed him a plastic wallet with some papers in it.
‘This is the house in Enskede we thought you and your family could have,’ said the man, encouraging Ali to take out the papers. ‘We thought you might like to see it.’
The pictures showed an anonymous little house joined to some others. The house was white and the lawn in front was very green. There were curtains at the windows. Ali could not help smiling. His family would love living there.
‘Do you like it?’
Ali nodded. The man spoke Arabic well, better than many other foreigners Ali had encountered since the outbreak of the Iraq War. He wondered if he would be able to speak Swedish that well one day. The feeling of hope warmed his chest. Only those who did not make an effort risked losing everything.
The woman reached for the document wallet and Ali handed it back quickly.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked, shifting impatiently in the armchair.
His eyes were stinging with fatigue and hunger was making the pains in his stomach even worse.
The man smiled his warm smile again.
‘How much did you tell them, back home in Iraq?’
Ali sighed.
‘Not much. Just that you had a different sort of payment system from the other networks. That we paid less money and the rest was based on…’
He groped for the right words.
‘… favours on both sides.’
The man’s smile got even broader.
‘Exactly,’ he said in the most approving of tones, as if Ali had done something first rate. ‘Favours on both sides, that’s exactly it.’
He gave a little cough and his troubled look returned.
‘As I hope you realise, we’re doing this because we wish you and your countrymen well. But everything costs money. The house costs money, the false passport that got you here cost money. And remember, in our system, on no account must you apply for your residence permit yourself. We have contacts who see to all that for you.’
That was the very part of their arrangement that sounded so amazing and made Ali accept their very unusual terms: he was not to tell a single person, even his family, where he was going. Nor was he to say who his contacts were, prior to his departure. And he must swear on his honour that he had never been in Sweden before and did not know anyone there.
The first of these conditions was the only one that had really given Ali any trouble: not being able to tell his family anything. He had had to slip away from his marital home like a thief in the night, and set out on his trip to Europe and Sweden all alone. He had, however, broken the third condition. He did in fact have a friend in Sweden, in a town called Uppsala, and he had alerted that friend in the most unobtrusive of ways to his arrival. The friend was no doubt already waiting for him to get in touch, though he had explained it would be a while before they were free to meet.
The other refugee smugglers seemed to hold the men in their charge in contempt. They cost between five and ten times more, and their terms were downright miserable. There was no question of a residence permit with them, and Ali was very well aware of the prospects. The Swedish Migration Agency had initially granted permits to just about every asylum seeker from Iraq, but was now turning down seventy per cent of all applications. If you were turned down, then you could appeal, but it could take years before you got a final decision. And if you lost, you had to go underground to stop the authorities throwing you out.
He could imagine nothing worse. The very thought of being separated from his wife Nadia for that long made it difficult for him to breathe.
So he nodded eagerly to this man who spoke of favours on both sides and the need to finance his residence permit.
‘What is it you want me to do?’ he asked again.
The man observed Ali in silence for a long time. Then he leant forward and told Ali what he had to do.
Once upon a time, everything had all been very different. Alex Recht had been a new, young member of the police force and had soon established himself as one of the promising names. After just a few years in uniform he had been brought into the CID, and there he had stayed. He was usually pretty sure he was happy there.
The idea of putting him at the head of a special investigation group with a hand-picked team from the Stockholm Police had not been his. He had in fact been rather sceptical about the whole thing. He pictured a future in which huge, unwieldy investigations would land on his desk and there would never be enough people to deal with them, while between cases they would be twiddling their thumbs. He had been proved right, and that was still the position. After the summer’s wide-ranging investigation of Lillian Sebastiansson’s disappearance and murder, the flow of cases had been very uneven. The opening line was always the same: ‘Alex, could your group take a look at this?’