A young woman emerged, smiling at Efraim as she held the door open for him. He smiled back and quickly stepped inside. Allowed the door to close behind him.
The noise was unexpectedly loud.
Efraim set off up the stairs. If he had read the plaque by the door correctly, the office of Samson Security AB was on the third floor.
Samson.
Her new surname. It suited her; she had always admired the lion for its strength and invincibility.
Efraim took two steps at a time. Increased his speed, reducing the distance between them. If she was in the apartment, of course, which he thought unlikely.
But oh, how he wished she was.
Then he was standing outside her door. He rang the bell and waited. No one came. He rang the bell again. Waited again.
She obviously wasn’t there.
He took out the necessary equipment to open the door, and in seconds he was in the hallway. He smiled in the darkness. Anyone who knew anything about locks would realise immediately that this couldn’t possibly be a company that specialised in security.
He didn’t switch on the main light; instead he went over to the windows behind the desks to see if they had curtains. Indeed they did; she hadn’t missed that detail. You had to be able to turn on the light without anyone being able to see it from outside.
Efraim was virtually certain that no one was following him, but just in case he’d got it wrong, he wanted to make sure he minimised any possible damage.
Once the curtains were drawn, he switched on the desk lamp. He glanced around the room. Took in the sparse furnishings and thought that with such an unimpressive facade he would be surprised if she’d managed to attract a single client.
There was a computer on one of the desks. Presumably the police hadn’t had a warrant to remove it.
Efraim started it up and went through the files on the bookshelf while he waited. Empty. He laughed out loud, then sat down and grew serious, reminding himself that he didn’t have much time. Because he had one more job to do before he went to bed.
He was going to pay Fredrika Bergman a visit.
Make sure she understood the importance of not getting mixed up in things that had nothing to do with her.
Every war claimed its victims.
As far as Efraim was concerned, no war had been more significant than the one in which he was engaged right now. And he was ready to do whatever it took to emerge victorious from the conflict.
The computer turned out to be just as easily accessible as everything else in the room. No password was required. He clicked his way around the system. The police would probably have needed some time to realise how empty the document files were, if they had opened them, because everything was written in Hebrew.
There was no internet connection.
No word processing program.
It was rare that anyone made such an effort to embrace the minimalist approach.
He moved over to the document handling program. To his surprise he found an ordinary text file there.
Efraim felt as if he had suddenly developed tunnel vision when he read the name of the file.
‘To Samson’.
He knew that this time he was the lion.
He didn’t hesitate; he had to see what she had written. He opened the document, read the short lines she had left behind in the empty office.
I have seen the girl
I know who she looks like.
You said you suffered as much as I did.
But that’s impossible.
You went on to have two more children.
Congratulations.
Efraim couldn’t take his eyes off the screen. He read the words over and over again.
She had seen the girl.
Realised she was his.
But I didn’t know.
Efraim read the message one last time, then deleted the file. She hadn’t written one word about Polly, who had disappeared. Just his two newly discovered daughters.
As he left the building on Torsgatan, he thought about what that meant.
It was only when he was back in his hotel that he realised what she was telling him.
The knowledge made him go weak at the knees; he had to sit down on one of the sofas in the lobby.
Not only had Efraim deprived her of the victim she had selected.
He had also provided her with two new ones.
Sometimes Mikael Lundell thought that Eden lived in a parallel universe.
One which bore no relation to his or anyone else’s.
‘Pack a bag and get a cab.’
They had two children, one of whom suffered from a number of allergies. You couldn’t just pack a bag and take off. You had to plan, work things out.
This time Mikael had got it all wrong. He had abandoned the cooking and started packing, which had been a mistake. The girls were hungry, and they were also starting to get tired, while Mikael himself was so furious he felt like standing in the middle of the floor and screaming.
Why was there never any peace and quiet?
Why did Eden constantly come up with new ways of stressing out her family?
Tops and trousers, underwear and pyjamas. Comfort blankets and toys.
A furious yell from the kitchen sent him hurtling through the apartment.
Dani was sitting on the floor sobbing hysterically. Her sister was standing next to her, patting her on the head. Blood was pouring from Dani’s forehead.
‘She fell over,’ her sister said, pointing to the angular edges of the table leg.
Mikael picked her up, as always astonished at how light she was, even though she had been alive for such a long time.
He examined the cut on her head. Did it need stitches? No. Had she knocked out any teeth? No.
‘Does your head hurt?’
Dani howled something that might have been a yes.
‘Do you feel sick?’
Apparently not. He carried her to the bathroom where he had started packing a toilet bag. He cleaned the cut, found a plaster with a bear on it. When Dani had calmed down, Mikael carried her back to the kitchen. Both girls were obviously tired, and kept glancing over at the stove; Daddy had promised to cook their favourite tea.
Fuck Eden and her whims and fancies.
‘Okay girls, guess what we’re going to do?’
Two expectant little faces.
‘We’re going to order pizza and eat it here before we leave. What do you think about that?’
Their eyes lit up. Mikael picked up the phone; he had no intention of leaving the apartment until the girls had food in their stomachs.
Half an hour later, the pizzas still hadn’t arrived. Mikael called the restaurant again, and was told the pizzas had been sent out.
‘But they’re not here,’ he said, unable to hide the irritation in his voice.
He threw down the phone and went back into the kitchen.
‘I’m sorry everything’s such a mess,’ he said to the girls. ‘Daddy will fix us something to eat.’
He took some mince out of the fridge. They would have spaghetti Bolognese as planned, and if Eden had a problem with that, she could bloody well come home from work.
Yet another alibi had cracked like a window pane hit by a stone. This time it was Gideon Eisenberg’s.
Getting hold of someone with access to the bank’s database of clients and visitors wasn’t easy, particularly at seven o’clock in the evening.
‘I don’t care how they do it,’ Alex Recht bellowed. ‘This is an emergency. We need that information.’
Eventually they managed to contact an administrator who was still on the premises and was able to access the list of clients. She then called Alex personally to confirm that Gideon Eisenberg had indeed had a meeting with a deputy manager at the bank between two thirty and four thirty the previous Wednesday, just as he had said.
‘Do you know whether the meeting actually took place, or whether it was just booked in?’ Alex wanted to know.
‘You mean could it have been postponed?’
‘Yes.’