The Bucket List Read online

  John had never seen his father so angry. The fact that Billy was actually part of John’s family—that they shared a mother—didn’t ever seem to have crossed his mind. But the letter had gone unanswered, nevertheless. John had backed down and tried to forget the whole thing.

  He thought about the cord sofa in the house outside Skoghall again. It had smelled of dried-up macaroni and slices of sausage from their dinners in front of the TV. Smells were strange—they could stick in the memory with a different level of intensity relative to pictures and voices. John had failed the boy who had sat next to him as they watched kids’ TV. Who cared whether Billy was guilty or innocent? Who cared what his father would have said? The fact remained that his brother needed him and he wasn’t there for him.

  14

  KARLSTAD, 2009

  “How can they just let him go?”

  Sissela looked at Heimer, who had just hung up after speaking to Primer.

  “As long as they can’t find Emelie, there’s no victim,” he said.

  “But what about the blood? Surely that proves she’s a victim of violence.” Heimer could see the frustration on his wife’s face, but at the same time he knew that the news was no surprise to either of them. Gorbachev and Primer had seemed resigned over the past week and had implied that the prosecutor was losing interest. Billy Nerman continued to issue denials under interrogation and his lawyer demanded that his client be either charged or released.

  “According to the prosecutor, it’s not enough,” he said. “A lawyer would claim that Emelie had sex with him of her own accord. Or that he just masturbated there.”

  “Is he still claiming not to know how the semen got there?”

  “Yes, apparently.”

  “The bastard can’t even come up with a lie.”

  It wasn’t often that Heimer heard his wife swear. The outburst was such a departure from her usually controlled way of expressing herself that she almost seemed like another person. At the same time, it made her human. Heimer realized it was in moments like this that he felt—if not love—tenderness toward his wife.

  “Darling, I don’t know any more than what Primer told me,” he said. “Call him yourself.”

  Heimer held out his phone, but Sissela shook her head.

  “Later—and I’ll speak with the prosecutor myself.”

  She went to Emelie’s room and he followed her. They sat down next to each other on their daughter’s bed. Heimer ran his hand over the white coverlet. The linen rustled slightly.

  He found himself thinking that they had once sat like this with Emelie between them, many years ago. She must have been in fourth or perhaps fifth grade. Their daughter had been chosen by the school body to lead its St. Lucia’s Day procession. Everyone had wanted her at the head of the line with the crown of candles atop her blonde hair. Everyone—except Emelie. She had been panic-stricken about the long verses she was expected to read aloud in front of the pupils and parents in the auditorium.

  Sissela had tried to bolster her confidence the night before the big event.

  “It’ll be fine. You and Dad can practice together,” she’d said, rushing off to another meeting.

  Heimer remembered how they had crammed those verses. He had helped her to write a cheat sheet, but it didn’t seem to matter how much she practiced. There was always a word that moved or got skipped.

  “You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” he had said, aware of what a trial it was for someone with dyslexia to read aloud in front of an audience.

  Emelie had crossed her arms and looked at him defiantly. As if what he had said was the strangest utterance she had ever heard. Of course she wanted to be the Lucia. The others had chosen her.

  Finally, she had managed to get through the verses without making any big mistakes. They were as close to finishing on a high note as they would ever be. He had hugged her good night and gone to turn on the TV.

  After the late news, he went to look in on her. He noticed the light creeping out through the narrow crack between the door and the threshold to her room. He had knocked on the door carefully and a moment later it went dark inside.

  “Are you okay, Emelie?” he had said.

  She hadn’t answered, but he heard quiet sobbing on the other side of the door. He had opened it and saw her lying with the duvet over her head. Heimer sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked his daughter’s back in the dark. The slender body shook with tears.

  He had turned the light back on. On the floor there were a pair of scissors and some coils of blonde hair.

  “What have you done?” he had said. His voice had sounded harsher than he’d intended and he’d immediately regretted it.

  Emelie had cried even harder under the duvet.

  “Sweetheart—it’s alright,” he’d said more softly, trying to pull the duvet from her face.

  She resisted with all her might.

  “I promise not to be angry,” he said.

  “ Really?” she sniffed.

  “Yes, really.”

  He had let go of the duvet so she didn’t feel pressured. Slowly, she pulled it down to reveal her face to him. It hadn’t been as bad as he had feared. Heimer had arrived in the nick of time, before she managed to hack away more than a few centimeters on one side.

  “I don’t want to be the Lucia,” she had said. “I thought if I cut my hair I wouldn’t have to be. Lucia has to have long hair.”

  He leaned forward and squeezed her wet cheeks.

  “You don’t have to cut your hair off for that. You just have to say no. But I don’t understand. I asked you if you wanted to be Lucia earlier and you said yes.”

  Emelie had begun to cry again and pulled the duvet back over her face.

  “Mom’s taken the day off to watch me tomorrow.”

  “Yes, but Mom doesn’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. I can tell her you’ve changed your mind.”

  “No,” she had said from beneath a layer of down. “You can’t say anything. She’ll be mad that I cut my hair.”

  Heimer had felt tears welling up too. He brushed them away so that Emelie wouldn’t misunderstand and think he was upset because she had let him down.

  “Won’t you pull the duvet down so I can see you?” he had said.

  She did as he’d asked. Her eyes were red-rimmed and snot ran out of one of her nostrils down to her lip. The love he felt in that moment was unconditional.

  “I have an idea,” he had said, taking her face between his hands. “When Mom comes home tonight, we’ll say you have a fever and can’t be in the Lucia procession. Then we’ll stay at home tomorrow and watch movies. How does that sound?”

  If Heimer closed his eyes, he could still feel the weight of that slim body as she threw her arms around his neck as though she never wanted to let go.

  “What are you thinking about?” said Sissela, bringing him back from his reverie.

  Her hand sought his, but Heimer didn’t want to take it.

  “Emelie,” he said. “I’m thinking about Emelie.”

  15

  BALTIMORE, 2019

  John looked at Trevor, asleep in the adjacent bed. Trevor had only been awake for a little while, when the doctor had done her morning rounds. He’d replied monosyllabically to questions about his health and then pulled the blanket over his head again. No coarse jokes or rumbling laughter. None of what John had come to associate with Trevor was left, and he noticed how much he missed it.

  As soon as they were both well enough to leave the hospital, they would be moved to one of the Bureau’s safe houses. They would spend a number of months there preparing for the trial. But once that was over they would part ways and never be allowed to make contact with each other again. Brodwick explained how it worked. If the drug cartel did manage to find one of them, it wouldn’t be possible to extract from him where the other was by means of torture. It was the same model used by terrorists organized into autonomous cells.

  Trevor’s voice sounded
wheezy when he woke up.

  “Did I miss lunch?”

  “Afraid so,” John said. “Do you want me to call the nurse?”

  “Later maybe. Guess I haven’t got much appetite.”

  His friend hadn’t strung together this many words since his wife had visited. John didn’t know whether to turn the conversation to what had happened or to wait for another time. Trevor solved the problem for him.

  “Minette was my rock,” he said. “We’ve been together for almost fifteen years. Long before I got into this shit. She’s always been there—you know what I mean?”

  John nodded and saw Trevor reach for his wallet on the table next to him. He searched for a while and then passed a photograph to John. John accepted the photo but hesitated before looking at it. Trevor had already told him his wife’s name, and now he wanted to show him a picture of her. Brodwick wouldn’t like this. They were supposed to know as little as possible about each other. But refusing to look would be disrespectful to Trevor.

  “She’s beautiful,” John said, after looking at the woman smiling into the camera. She was sitting at an outdoor café, the light strong on her face.

  “A better wife than I ever dared hope for,” Trevor said, putting the photo back in his wallet. “I’ve had her here all the time, in a secret compartment.”

  John knew that despite the risk of the wrong people finding the photo, while Trevor did his job he needed to have it with him, close to his body, in a concealed place.

  “We’re going to become very lonely people, you and I. Neither one of us knows what it’s going to be like, living a life where we’re always watching our backs … where anyone might be out to kill us,” Trevor continued.

  John realized once again how little he had thought about life after the trial—how absorbed he’d been by his job as an infiltrator. All the focus had been on the big task at hand—providing the Bureau with what it needed to put Ganiru away. The risks had given him all the kicks he needed: a couple of bungee jumps a day without knowing whether the cord would hold. He both loved and hated it—mainlining adrenaline as if there were no tomorrow.

  “I need something to write on,” said Trevor, holding out his hand.

  John tore a sheet from his sketch pad and handed it over, together with a pencil from the case. Trevor wrote something and passed the paper back to him.

  https://secure.connection.com

  Username: unknown_325

  Password: BuckWickFord

  John understood immediately what it was.

  “As soon as I can get to a computer on a secured network, I’ll set up an account for you,” he said. “If you log in, you’ll find a contact in the address book. It’ll be me. I know we’re supposed to be in a safe house together for several months. But the Bureau might have other ideas and separate us tomorrow. Now you know how to get hold of me.”

  John didn’t know what to say. Brodwick had been crystal clear—no form of contact was permitted. All communication left digital footprints that could be traced. But a life in the shadows, always on guard, never being able to let anyone else in—there would be times when that got very tough.

  “Jesus, Trevor. I don’t know,” he said.

  The man stared at him. It was good to see him do that.

  “I just thought you might need a friend. Someone you don’t have to lie to about who you really are. I reckon it’ll do me some good anyway.”

  “It’s not about …”

  Trevor interrupted him. “I know, the rules say different. But if you do want to contact me later, at least there’s the option. What you choose to do is completely up to you.”

  John looked at the note with the login details again. The password puzzled him. BuckWickFord. What did Trevor mean by that? Then he understood. It was an anagram. When the letters were reordered they formed the pithy phrase: Fuck Brodwick.

  John laughed quietly and looked at his friend, who saw that the penny had dropped. The grin on his face made him look like a schoolboy who had just come up with the perfect prank.

  Two cheese sandwiches later, Trevor was asleep again and John opened the laptop. The Swedish police investigation had completely sucked him in. He realized that he would soon be just as dependent on it as he was on the painkilling morphine.

  He read about where the investigation had gone after Billy Nerman’s release. The police had put surveillance on him in the hope that he would lead them to Emelie. It had been fruitless, apart from the surveillance team saving the kid from some angry Karlstad locals who’d decided to take the law into their own hands with knives and crowbars.

  John didn’t know whether there was a Swedish equivalent of the American expression “no body, no crime.” Regardless, the principle was most definitely applicable in this instance. If Emelie wasn’t found, it would be hard to charge Billy Nerman.

  There were voices in the corridor and John looked up from the screen. Through the glass he saw the policeman outside get up from his chair. The man spoke to someone and then the burly silhouette was replaced by a slimmer version. Shift change, John thought to himself as he checked the time. By this point, he knew the guard rotation schedule.

  When the voices died down, he put the laptop on the nightstand. The handwritten letter from his mother was still in the bottom drawer. John hadn’t touched it since he had opened the envelope and seen the first few sentences, but now it was calling to him—as if his mother would no longer accept his excuses for not reading it. He reached for the letter and steeled himself for its contents.

  John!

  This time you have to come home.

  They say in the papers that they’re going to bring in your brother again. He didn’t do anything to that girl. I know it. But they think they’re better than us. We’re just dirt on the sole of their shoe. They’ll never listen to us.

  Billy won’t be able to handle it. Not again. Neither will I. I’m dying, John. I don’t have much time left—that’s what they say, the people who know these things.

  Dear boy of mine, please come back to us and help your brother. You didn’t come the last time I wrote. But this time you must. This won’t end well—I can feel it in my bones.

  I’m sending you one of those things you can stick in the computer. The lawyer who helped me last time made it for no extra charge. He probably felt sorry for me.

  Hugs from your mother.

  John read the letter several times. There were no tearful digressions, just bald statements about the situation as it stood. It was a direct approach that he understood.

  I’m dying, John, his mother had written.

  Apparently she was sick. She didn’t say what was wrong, but there was no doubt that it was serious. He didn’t believe in God or fate, yet he had to admit that this cry for help came at a time when he was receptive. He had been given a second chance and this time he was going to take it.

  In his head, he made two rules for his time in Sweden. The first was that he would find out the truth about his brother. Not the version that a contemptuous police force had predetermined. But also not the one that a mother who loved her son wanted to see. The Truth. With a capital T. Come what may. Everyone had to take responsibility for their actions. That applied to his half brother too.

  The second rule was a time limit. Brodwick had been right when he said that all it would take for the Nigerians to pick up his scent was for one person to mention his Swedish mother. He had three months. If he hadn’t managed to cast any light on Billy’s innocence or guilt by then, he would leave the country. Swedish passports were handy like that. It meant he could live anywhere in the European Union. He had never been to Berlin, Rome, or Paris. All three appealed to him and it might be safest to rotate. Spend a few months in each place before changing location—at least in the early years.

  But his fantasies of being a flâneur in the capitals of Europe would have to wait. First he had a job to do—and he was going to do it to the best of his ability.

  That much he owed to his famil
y on the other side of the ocean.

  PART 2

  2019

  16

  Of all the seats on the plane, John had been assigned the one with a faulty screen. The flight attendant informed him that unfortunately the plane was fully booked and that he’d have to make do without in-flight entertainment.

  “We’ll take extra good care of you,” she said, hurrying on down the aisle to escape the dissatisfied passenger.

  Seven hours in an uncomfortable seat wasn’t something he was looking forward to. If he had been paying, he would have opted for business class, but it was one of the Bureau’s shell companies that had booked the tickets, which had meant there was no room for extravagance.

  He reclined the seat the small distance that was possible and reflected on what had happened over the past few months: his time at the Bureau safe house outside Baltimore, the heavily guarded trial, and finally the successful convictions. John had made eye contact with one of Ganiru’s henchmen in the courtroom when the jury foreman had said the word “guilty.” The hatred in the man’s eyes had blazed. He’d shaped his hand into a pistol and fired a symbolic bullet into John’s head. The message was unambiguous. John was a dead man.

  Later that day, he and Trevor had celebrated with a Godfather marathon. It had been their last night together in the secret hideout. When John had woken the next morning, his friend’s room was empty.

  The flight attendant was back. John asked for a water and a beer. He turned down the offer of the vintage champagne that was usually only served on the other side of the curtain, in business class. He couldn’t be bought that easily. He got out the document Brodwick had given him after the trial and read it again—not that he needed to, but just to send his thoughts in a different direction.