He listens again, places the palm of his hand against the door, and pushes.
‘I couldn’t open it,’ he said to Rami. ‘It should have just swung open, but it wouldn’t move. They’d jammed it somehow. So I was locked inside the sauna, and the heater was clicking away... It was getting hotter and hotter.’
Jan saw street lights shimmering up ahead of him, and knew that he was on his way out of the forest.
He had been wandering around in a state of rising panic for forty-five minutes now, searching among the fir trees and even down by the lake, but he had found no trace of William. A five-year-old shouldn’t have been able to get this far, but then William could have gone in absolutely any direction.
Jan had lost control. He was tired, slightly angry, and increasingly desperate. Sometimes he thought the child was hiding from him, that he was standing behind a tree giggling to himself.
Why had William clambered out of the bunker? Didn’t he realize he was safer in there than out in the forest? He had plenty of food and drink, and he would have been locked in there for less than forty-eight hours. Then Jan would have let him go, whatever happened.
His plan. His carefully thought-out plan.
Jan stopped in the middle of the undergrowth. His shoes were soaking wet, he felt empty and exhausted.
Locked inside a bunker — with only a toy robot for company. Jan looked around him and suddenly felt how wrong the whole thing had been. It had to stop now. There had to be a happy ending.
He stood there for a long time on the edge of the forest, wondering what to do. He felt safe there because nobody could see him, but eventually he moved out from among the trees and headed down towards the street lights. This was a residential area with long rows of apartment blocks and large, asphalt-covered inner courtyards, all ready for the coming winter. There were lights showing in many of the windows, but the streets were deserted.
Jan walked along the nearest pavement, looking around all the time. He felt the urge to call out William’s name, but clamped his lips firmly together.
If I were five years old, he thought, and the glow of the street lights had lured me out of the forest, where would I go?
Home, of course. When you have been locked up and then you escape, you want to go home.
But Jan knew where William lived, and it was in a completely different part of Nordbro. It was unlikely that he would be able to find his way there.
A few hundred metres away there was a main road, and Jan made his way towards it. What he really wanted was to go home too, go home and go to bed, but then he would be leaving William. Not just leaving, but abandoning him.
Up ahead he could see a bus stop, with a few teenagers hanging around. On the same side of the road a family was out for a walk, a man and his two children going towards the town centre.
No, it wasn’t a family. As Jan got closer he could see that the smallest child was actually a dog, a long-legged poodle on a short lead. And the other... the other child was a little boy with fair hair.
The man holding the boy’s hand looked like his grandfather, a pensioner in a cap, ambling along between the boy and the poodle. The boy wasn’t wearing a hat, but he was dressed in a dark-blue padded jacket with white reflector strips.
Jan recognized it, and broke into a run.
‘William!’
His shout made the boy stop and look around. The man tugged at his hand, but the boy pulled away, wanting to stop and see who was calling his name.
Jan was out of breath by the time he reached them. He bent down. ‘Do you remember me, William?’
The boy looked at him without moving. Everything had stopped dead. The man holding William’s hand was staring at Jan in surprise, and even the poodle had turned around and was standing there motionless.
Then William nodded. ‘Lynx,’ he said, his voice slightly hoarse.
‘That’s right, William... I work at Lynx.’ Jan looked up at the man and tried to sound trustworthy and totally in control of himself. ‘My name is Jan Hauger, I work at William’s nursery. He’s been missing... We’ve been looking for him.’
‘Oh, right. I see. My name is Olsson.’ The man appeared to relax. He let go of William’s hand and pointed back down the road. ‘He just turned up here a little while ago, when Charlie and I were out for our walk. He seemed to be lost, so I said we’d go and look for his parents.’
Jan looked at William, who was staring at the ground. He seemed slightly listless, but healthy. Not undernourished. His left hand was clutching Roboman’s plastic arm.
‘Great,’ Jan said. ‘But they live quite a long way from here, so I think we’d better ring for some help.’
‘Help?’ said Olsson.
‘I think we need to ring the police. They’re looking for William.’
‘The police?’ The man looked worried, but Jan nodded and took out his mobile. He rang the emergency number, and waited.
The man started to move away with the poodle, but Jan held up his hand. ‘You and Charlie need to stay here,’ he said as firmly as possible. ‘I think they’re going to want to speak to you as well.’
Obviously. Jan was in no doubt about the man’s intentions towards William, but he knew the police would look at things very differently. As a thank you for taking care of William, Olsson would presumably be interrogated on suspicion of child abduction.
‘Emergency — which service do you require?’
‘Police,’ said Jan. ‘It’s about a missing boy — he’s been found.’
As he was waiting to be put through he looked down at William. Jan smiled at him, trying to look calm and reliable. He wanted to reach out and pat the boy on the head, but resisted the impulse.
‘All’s well that ends well,’ he said. ‘I think we’d better stay away from the forest in future.’
42
The rattling ascent in the old hospital lift takes an hour — or at least that’s how it feels to Jan. He holds the claustrophobia at bay by keeping his eyes closed and picturing Rami; he conjures up her face and remembers her eyes beneath that blonde fringe. She was the only one he could talk to about the Gang of Four.
But the floor and the walls are shaking, and he is constantly reminded of where he is. If one of the cogs were to break and the lift were to get stuck between floors... He doesn’t want to think about that. The drumbeats reverberate inside his head.
Suddenly the lift comes to an abrupt halt. Everything falls silent.
Jan switches off the Angel’s torch and reaches out to the door in front of him. At first it won’t move. The fear sinks its claws into him immediately, but then the door slowly gives way and slides open.
It stops after about forty or fifty centimetres; there is something heavy in the way. Jan peers out. There is a faint light, but all he can see is grey metal.
Slowly he begins to manoeuvre his way out. It feels as if he has woken up inside a coffin in a big house, just like Viveca in Rami’s book.
His upper body is out now, and he can see that there is a metal cupboard in the way. The room beyond it seems to be some kind of medical storeroom, with bandages and packs of tablets on the shelves. The light is coming in through a narrow pane of glass in the door.
There isn’t a sound.
Jan tentatively lowers his feet to the floor next to the cupboard, then he stands up and looks over at the exit. Three steps and he is there, reaching out his hand.
The door opens from the inside. He pulls it three or four centimetres towards him, feels fresh air come pouring in, and listens carefully. He still can’t hear a thing.