LITMIR.BIZ

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splashing a bit of water on her face and blaming it all on the heat, which he had accepted without comment.

      Once she had composed herself again she had asked to see Henke’s mobile phone, and when he reluctantly pulled it out of a locked cupboard she had quickly inspected it and then put it in her bag. For a moment it had looked like Manga was going to protest, but he thought better of it and let her take it without a word.

      Before she left, he had also given her the address of Aunt Berit’s allotment cottage, and she was looking forward to a fresh, more detailed conversation with her brother in just a few minutes.

      This time she was going to twist the little sod’s arm until he told her the truth about what was really going on!

      She cruised through the traffic, crossed Ringvägen and was soon in amongst the trees of the park. She was feeling brighter, enjoying the cool shade. Manga had said it was about fifteen minutes’ walk from the shop, so five minutes or so by bike seemed about right.

      When she turned into the road she had to swerve to avoid a white van pulling away at speed and roaring past her way too fast.

      ‘Bloody idiot!’ she thought as she struggled to keep her balance. For a moment she considered making a note of the number-plate, the speed limit here was actually only thirty. But she didn’t bother, it was far too hot to make the effort to feel properly upset, and besides, she hadn’t seen the whole number. Some sort of company van with a blue logo on the side.

      At that moment she caught sight of Aunt Berit’s cottage.

      She knocked on the door three times but there was no answer. Maybe he was asleep? It may have been well into the afternoon, but it would hardly surprise her if Henke was taking a little siesta.

      She felt the handle and discovered that the door was unlocked, but for some reason she stopped in the doorway. She didn’t really know why, but something was making her feel uneasy. She examined the door more carefully and soon found what she was looking for. A small, almost invisible mark in the wood just above the lock. Admittedly, it could have been old, but a quick check of the step revealed some flakes of the right colour paint.

      Someone had broken into the cottage, and recently. The question was, were they still in there?

      Rebecca held her breath and listened for any sound from inside.

      Quiet as the grave.

      She stepped silently through the door and into a tiny hallway. The stench of cigarette smoke almost made her eyes water. She put her hand on the frame of the door to the kitchen and leaned round it quickly to get a look inside.

      The movement was too fast for any attacker to have time to react, but still enough for her to register the contents of the room. She repeated the procedure with the little bedroom to the right of the hall.

      The results were unambiguous, the cottage was empty.

      Whoever had broken in was gone now, and it didn’t look like anything had been stolen. A laptop, screensaver on, stood untouched on the little kitchen table. There were a few dirty mugs and glasses here and there, most of them containing cigarette butts, and the little sink was overflowing with dirty dishes and empty food tins.

      There was a shabby green sleeping-bag in a heap at one end of the rib-backed sofa, and a filthy t-shirt and a pair of tattered Cheap Monday jeans were hanging untidily over one of the two kitchen chairs.

      Smoky, filthy and untidy: rather different to how Aunt Berit usually kept it, she imagined.

      It looked like Manga had been telling the truth, all the signs were that Henke had taken up residence …

      So, where was he now, and how long would he be gone? The best thing she could do was sit down on the little sofa and wait.

       What the fu …?

      A quick trip up to Ringvägen to stock up on cigarettes and Gorby pies, that was the plan.

      He ended up getting falafel and an ice-cream as well, because there wasn’t really any hurry. He’d almost made it back to the cottage when he saw the flashing blue lights.

      Two patrol cars and an unmarked van with a trailer, all lined up in front of Auntie’s little cottage. The trailer looked weird, a bit like an outsized milk-churn with its lid open. One of the cops seems to be in a hell of a hurry to set up a police cordon at the end of the road, but as luck would have it, HP saw him first.

      He stopped abruptly and turned into one of the little side-paths to find a good observation post.

      A couple of minutes later he was sitting on top of a rocky outcrop surrounded by lilac bushes.

      So what the hell was going on down there?

      For some reason she hadn’t just sat down.

      Afterwards she couldn’t really explain why, but the feeling that something was wrong wouldn’t let go of her.

      It took a few seconds before she realized what was troubling her. The sofa was slightly out of position. She could clearly see the marks on the cork matting where the leg of the sofa usually sat, but now it was a few centimetres out. Okay, so the sofa was pretty old, but it was solid pine and to judge by the deep indentation in the floor it would take a fair bit of effort to shift it. So why had someone done so?

      Instead of sitting down, she got down on her knees and looked underneath.

      He could see some of the cops talking with serious expressions, then another bloke showed up wearing a protective suit and a helmet that made him look like a green astronaut.

      The starman wobbled inside the cottage and the cops quickly moved to the far side of the cars, it looked almost like they were taking cover. After a couple of minutes the spaceman came out with some sort of object in his hands. He lurched towards the trailer and put whatever it was he was holding inside it.

      Even though he was sitting some distance away, HP had no trouble noticing how relieved the cops looked when the lid of the trailer was closed.

      She didn’t really know what she had been expecting to find. But it was clear that the object under there wouldn’t have been on her top-ten list of things she was likely to find, if anyone had asked her to come up with such a list.

      A set of keys, some loose change, maybe a mobile phone someone had dropped?

      But not this …

      It took her a few seconds to realize what she was staring at, and why it was there, then she very slowly got to her feet, picked up the laptop and left the cottage.

      She left the front door open.

      It wasn’t until he’d been sitting there for a few minutes that he recognized one of the cops. To start with he thought it was just another plain-clothed officer. Khaki shorts with lots of pockets, an untucked short-sleeved shirt, baseball cap, sensible trainers and all the other things that were supposed to help them fit in.

      But their cops’ posture and that way they had of moving their heads almost always gave them away.

      He had been concentrating on the blokes round the trailer, and it wasn’t until the lid closed that he looked more closely at the rest of the gang and realized that the plain-clothed cop was actually Becca. She was standing there talking to the bloke in the astronaut outfit.

      What the fuck was she doing here?

      ‘Definitely viable,’ the bomb-disposal expert said. According to the tag on his suit, his name was Selander, and evidently he liked talking in clipped sentences.

      ‘Two sticks of dynamex. Pressure trigger mounted under the sofa cushion. Sitting down would be enough. More than enough to blow the cottage sky-high. Bloody lucky you had your wits about you, Normén …’

      He paused to put in a dose of chewing tobacco.

      ‘Won’t know for sure if it would definitely have gone off until we get it into the lab and take it apart,’ he went on, this time slightly more expressively. ‘I’ll

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