The Nemesis Program

Chapter Thirty-Four

The sun had been up a long time when Ben awoke to find himself still on the bed, fully clothed, with Roberta’s hair tickling his face and her arm draped over his shoulder. Without waking her, he delicately lifted the arm off him and rose to peer out of the window. It was almost 7 a.m. and the village was coming to life.

An hour later, true to his word despite the heavy night’s drinking, Dolph turned up outside in his delivery lorry and honked the horn. By then, Ben and Roberta were downstairs, revitalised with black coffee and waiting for him.

As they clambered into the cab, Dolph greeted them with a grin and a thumbs-up, and the lorry rumbled off. The road was long and meandering, and carried them northwards through beautiful birch woods and over misty mountain passes. Along the way, Ben showed Dolph the address that had been on Claudine’s letter to Daniel, saying that this was an old friend he hadn’t seen in a long time and to whom he was thinking of paying a visit.

‘Your friend live in a hole in the ground, huh?’ Dolph asked, amused. When Ben asked what he meant, the lorry driver explained that the words ‘Hand om’ on the second line meant ‘care of’ in Swedish. The address was in fact that of the local post office, while it appeared that Herr Lund had none of his own, or at least none that he wanted to reveal.

‘No worry, I drop you right there,’ Dolph said, saying that their route passed through the place on the way to his delivery drop. ‘You find your friend, no problems.’

The hamlet lay deep in the forests of the Pieljekaise National Park and centred on a cobbled square overlooked by a store, a tiny café and the quaint wooden post office to which Claudine’s letter had been sent. Dolph dropped them off in the square and waved cheerfully from his window as he rumbled off in a cloud of diesel smoke.

The post office was completely quiet except for the ticking of a large wooden clock on the wall, and smelled of beeswax and brass polish. Standing at the old-fashioned counter, a skinny middle-aged woman with glasses on a chain around her neck and her steely hair scraped back into a bun was efficiently sorting piles of mail and other documents. There was no computer in sight. On the wall behind her were rows of neatly alphabetised pigeon-holes, some of them with letters and small packages inside. She looked up as Ben and Roberta walked in.

‘Best you handle this,’ Roberta whispered to him. ‘I have no idea what to say.’

After establishing that she could understand English, and in fact prided herself on her ability to speak it, Ben told her that he was trying to make contact with an old friend, Herr Daniel Lund, who lived in these parts but for whom he only had this address. The postmistress assessed the two of them with a sharp eye. Ben’s face was open and earnest. Roberta leaned on the counter and smiled sweetly. Deciding the two foreigners could be trusted, the postmistress said, ‘Herr Lund come here in person to collect his mail each week. Where he live, it is too difficult for the deliveries to reach.’

‘Out in the sticks, eh? Dan always did like his privacy,’ Ben said, putting on a hearty smile. ‘Do you know how we might be able to find him?’

The postmistress shook her head. ‘Jag vet inte. I do not know. But … one moment, please.’ Something seemed to have occurred to her. She turned away from the counter and ran a finger along the rows of pigeon-holes to the inlaid brass letter L. There were a number of mailing envelopes inside. She drew them carefully out, checked them one by one and replaced them exactly as she’d found them. Then, looking thoughtful, she darted over to a half-open door, put her head through the gap and spoke a few words in Swedish. A man’s voice rumbled a casual reply from inside. The postmistress returned to the counter, looking pleased with herself. ‘You are in the luck,’ she said to Ben. ‘Herr Lund has post to collect and my husband thinks he comes here this afternoon.’

‘That’s great news,’ Ben said cheerfully. ‘It’s been so long since I’ve seen him. We were at college together. Tell me, does he still have the long hair and the beard? Everyone used to tease him about it.’

The postmistress pointed to her chin. ‘A beard he had? And long hairs? No, no.’ She laughed. ‘You will see he has much changed, then. He is … how do you say? Nothing left here.’

‘Bald?’

‘Yes, yes, very bald, like a stone.’

‘Poor guy,’ Ben said. ‘I suppose time catches up with us all eventually. He must be forty, forty-two now.’

‘So young?’ the postmistress replied, looking shocked. ‘To me he seem older. Fifty? Or more. But the winters here in Lapland, they have bad effect on people.’

After some more chatter, Ben and Roberta thanked her for her help and left the post office. ‘Nice work, Sherlock,’ Roberta said as they stepped outside into the fresh breeze. ‘What now?’

Ben pointed across the street at the little café. ‘Now we sit tight and wait for a fifty-year-old bald guy to show up.’

The café was as quiet as the post office, and they had their pick of the tables. The one they took was near enough to the window overlooking the square to be able to watch the post office entrance without being too easily spotted from outside.

‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ Ben said. ‘He’ll be dressed roughly, like someone living in deep country, and driving something with off-road capability.’

Roberta raised an eyebrow. ‘Round here, that should narrow it down to about eighty per cent of the population. Assuming the right guy shows up, what do we do, collar him in the post office and introduce ourselves?’

‘And have him freak out, run off and never be seen again?’ Ben shook his head. ‘I think we should get him to take us back to his place. It sounds as if there’ll be plenty of privacy there.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be amenable to that.’

‘He won’t have a lot of choice,’ Ben said.

The waitress came with a steaming pot of coffee. Roberta sipped some of the thin, stewed brew and made a face. ‘Yeech. I don’t know if I can take drinking this for the next several hours.’

‘You’ll just have to man up and take what comes.’

‘Don’t tell me. You’ve staked out in much worse places.’

‘You wouldn’t want to know.’

‘You’re probably right about that.’

As they soldiered through their second pot of coffee, around eleven in the morning, they saw the postmistress exit the doorway across the street and walk briskly off into the distance carrying a shopping bag. ‘That’s good,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t come back for a while.’

‘Why’s that good?’

‘Because with her out of the way, if Daniel shows up he won’t be told anything about his dear old college friend who was looking for him. I was a little worried about that, but I’m making this up as I go.’

The coffee held out a little longer, then with midday upon them they ordered some lunch. Ben had a pot of simple broth with a kind of flatbread called Gàhkko, while Roberta finally decided on a dish of sautéed reindeer and instantly regretted her choice. ‘I’m eating Rudolf,’ she groaned, picking desultorily at the dark meat.

‘Santa will soon find another friend,’ Ben said.

‘Oh boy, you’re really all heart, aren’t you?’

But before Roberta had the chance to decide whether to finish her food, a beaten-up Land Rover long-wheelbase pickup came growling up the road outside and parked in the narrow side street a few yards from the post office entrance. Its all-terrain wheels and sides were covered in dried dirt and it had ancillary lighting and wire mesh guards over the headlamps. The windows were filmed with dust, preventing them from getting a good look at the driver.

‘You reckon it’s our guy?’ Roberta murmured. Ben was watching keenly. He said nothing.

The driver’s door opened and a man climbed down from the cab, crossed the narrow pavement to the post office and disappeared inside. He was alone, wearing boots, khaki trousers and a lightweight hunter’s jacket. Solid in build. Florid in complexion. Somewhere in his early fifties.

‘And bald like a stone,’ Roberta said.