I didn't realize it then, but I'd almost got on to something with that train of thought. The train, however, was derailed when I reached the hotel. I was crossing the lobby to the lift when a voice said, 'Is that Mr Sellers?'
I looked round and he was walking towards me, grinning, apparently, as surprised as I was. Damn it, what was his name? Then I remembered. I said, 'This is a surprise, Mr Elliot. What are you doing here?'
`Just gonna ask you the same thing.' He laughed. 'Buy you a drink?'
As we walked towards the bar, I said, 'The odds against this are rather large.'
`Yeah. Good to see you. I'll say they're large, Mr Sellers. I thought you were staying in London.'
Ì thought you were going to Lapland.
`Still am. Question is when. My cameraman's been recalled, so I'm stuck.'
`But you were flying to Stockholm.'
`Yeah. Bell's Whisky, right?' I nodded and he, ordered.
`There's another cameraman been photographing the Norwegian Skerries or some such. He's due back in Gothenburg. Doesn't know I'm waiting, poor bastard. What brings you?'
I said, 'It's a bit difficult. You know!' One reporter-toanother talk, I'm on a story and I'm not telling you, so don't inquire.
`Hell. I don't work for the wire services!'
`There are people in the newspaper game,' I said, 'who don't let their left hands know what their right hands are doing.'
Òkay, okay. If it's that good. Skol !'
`Skol.'
I sipped the whisky, 'making myself smile at him but remembering Schmid counting on his fingers. Who'd be likely to be interested in things brought out of Russia? The Americans for one, and more-than most. I wondered whether Elliot really did work for National Geographic and probed gently as we talked, but he was technically sound and full of Charlie this and Fred that and how pleasant it always was to return from foreign fields to the manicured headquarters in the Maryland countryside. Whether he worked there or not, his cover was too good even to dent, so I stopped trying. He'd just said, 'How 'bout dinner tonight, John?' – by that time we'd reached the John and Harvey stage – when my name was paged over the hotel Tannoy. At the desk I was told there was a phone call for me and I went into the foyer kiosk to take it.
`Hello?'
`Mr Sellers. Mr John Sellers?' It was a man's voice, possibly a trace of accent.
`Yes.'
`You will be interested in a house at Storgatan forty-one, Gothenburg.'
Yes, there was a trace of accent. Swedish, I thought, at any rate Scandinavian. 'Why will I be interested? And who's speaking?'
`Storgatan forty-one,' he said, and hung up.
I replaced the receiver and went to fetch my raincoat from the bar. Elliot had gone and his glass was empty. I put on the coat, went out to look for a cab and there was Elliot on the steps. He smiled. 'Stuffy in there. Thought I'd get a breath of air.'
`Fine,' I said meaninglessly, staring angrily across at the empty taxi rank. I crossed the pavement and stood at the edge, looking up and down the road for a cruising cab.
`Drive you somewhere?' Elliot called. He was holding up his car keys invitingly. I hesitated. I didn't want him with me, but impatience was the dominant emotion at the time. 'All right. Thanks.'
He walked towards a blue Saab 99 parked just off the road and opened the door. 'Don't worry,' he said as I joined him. Ì'm not horning in on your big exclusive. Just bored; that'
s all. Where'd you wanna go?'
`Storgatan forty-one, wherever that is.'
He laughed. 'It's okay. There's a street guide in the pocket here. You look for it while I get-this thing moving.'
Storgatan was a dismal street off the main Gothenburg Moludan road, about three miles away, and we cruised slowly along it until I saw number forty-one. Most of the houses were empty and it was probably a demolition area. The house was old, or at least middleaged, one of a terrace, three stories high. I told Elliot to stop the car and walked back to the house.
There were eight or nine stone steps leading from the iron gate up to the front door and I went up them slowly, already aware that. Storgatan forty-one was empty. The windows were dirty and the only curtains were a couple of tatty rags hanging limply at one upstairs window. The paint of the door and the wooden front was more than peeling, it was almost peeled. The house was fast becoming derelict. Perhaps there wasn't much point in knocking at the door, but
I knocked anyway, as much from habit as anything else. The knock echoed hollowly : the unmistakable sound of an empty house.
I gave it a minute, then tried the door. Peeling and dirty it might be, but it was also strong and locked. There was an iron rail to the steps and I held on to it as I tried to peer into the ground floor window. All I could see through the grubby pane was old floorboards with a few bits of yellowish newspaper lying about.
`No luck?' Elliot called. He'd climbed out of the car and was leaning easily against it. Ì'll try the back,' I said. As I came down the steps I stopped to look in through the cellar window, but that room, too, was deserted; empty and filthy like the rest of the house. As an afterthought, I went back to the door and had a look at the locks, wondering whether they'd been used recently, but it was impossible to tell.
`Do I come along?' Elliot asked.
Ìf you like.' I was marching urgently down the street, wondering who'd sent me here and why. The house must hold something, and it must be something to do with Alsa's disappearance. Suddenly I felt bile rush into my throat at the thought of what the secret of Storgatan 41 might be.
The street at the rear was cobbled and the yards — nobody could call them gardens —
were full of broken-down outhouses and sour earth. From the rear, number forty-one looked even more dismally decayed than from the front.
`Realtor's dream,' Elliot said sardonically as I pushed open the bent, wooden gate. A few weeds were fighting their battle for survival in the hard-packed ground. I walked first to the cellar window, rubbed away some of the muck with my hand, and looked in. There was a chipped stone sink and a few rags hanging on nails on the walls. Nothing else. The back door, too, was locked and what I could see of the ground floor back room was simply a repeat of the front : dusty floorboards and old newspapers.
`How bad you want to get in?' Elliot asked.
`Badly enough.'
`Well, I reckon that window there's just waiting for a jack-knife blade.' He was pointing to the cellar window. Ànd I just happen to have the jack-knife. '
`Give it to me, then.'
The window was the sliding sash type, with a turner-bar securing the two halves. As Elliot had kindly pointed out, it was easy with the jack-knife. I poked the blade between the top of one frame and the bottom of the other and pushed. The bar turned. Now, would the window slide? The top half wouldn't move, but the bottom half did, with a bit of effort, creaking upward awkwardly. When I'd raised it, I held it carefully in case it crashed down again.
`Coming?'
Why not! What's a little burglarizing matter?'
Strangely enough I hadn't thought of the illegality; now he'd mentioned it, I didn't care anyway. `Coming?' I asked again.
`Sure. I'll take the weight while you go through.' A second later we were in the house. We looked at the cellars first but they were empty. So were the ground floor rooms. As I started up the worn, wooden stairs, Elliot asked, 'Just what do you plan to find?' There was no answer I could bear to make.
The first things I found were in what had been a bedroom. A few paper food bags lay crumpled in a corner with some plastic cups that still contained the dregs of coffee with the remains of a film of cream white on the surface. I'm not inexperienced in the matter of dirty cups and at a guess the liquid was no more than a day old. There was nothing else on the first floor.