The Quarry

50

It was just an ordinary weekend in the city when he reached Malmö. Cars crawling around the roundabouts, ferries setting sail for Denmark, people enjoying their leisure time as they walked by the water in the spring sunshine, pushing their baby buggies.

It had taken Per almost four hours to drive down from Kalmar. He reached the city centre at about three o’clock and parked a few blocks away from the central station, where the hourly parking charge was lower. Then he found his way to the back street where the Moulin Noir lay.

It wasn’t a place that went out of its way to advertise its presence; there was just a small, cracked sign above the entrance with the words MOULIN NOIR — SEX SHOP & NIGHT CLUB. The windows were painted black and protected with iron bars — Per guessed that the anti-porn lobby would sometimes gather here with placards and rotten eggs. But at the moment the entire street was deserted.

He stopped a few metres from the door, where a white handwritten notice proclaimed OVER 18s ONLY! Despite the fact that he didn’t know anyone in Malmö, he checked one more time to make sure nobody could see him.

Dirty old man, he thought. Then he straightened his back and went inside.

He found himself in a long, narrow shop, just as quiet and deserted as the street outside. The sharp, lemony smell of some kind of cleaning product hung in the air, but the vinyl floor still looked grubby. The shelves lining the walls were stocked with films and magazines wrapped in plastic, but there were no copies of Babylon or Gomorrah. The gap Jerry’s defunct magazines had left in the market had been filled long ago by his colleagues.

On the glass counter at the far side of the room stood an old metal till, and behind it a woman was sitting on a tall bar stool filing her nails. She was about thirty, dressed in a tight black dress and high, shiny leather boots. Her eyes were black with kohl and her hair was long, red and glossy, but it looked like a wig. Per assumed that most things were fake in this establishment.

Behind the counter was a staircase leading down to the cellar, with a beaded curtain at the bottom. Per could hear the thump of music and a woman’s long-drawn-out moans, but the tone was metallic and tinny, like a film soundtrack. It was almost exactly the same as the background noise he had heard on the telephone on two occasions, but he still didn’t know who had called, or why.

Per went over to the woman. She put down the nail file and smiled at him.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi there, darling. Would you like to go down into the den of debauchery?’

‘Maybe. How much is it?’

‘Five hundred.’

That was three hundred kronor more than Per had on him.

‘Five hundred,’ he said, ‘just to get in?’

‘Not just to get in, darling,’ said the woman, smiling even more broadly. ‘You get a big surprise down there!’

‘Do I indeed. And is it worth five hundred?’

She winked at him. ‘Men usually seem to think so.’

‘Have you worked here long?’

‘Quite a long time,’ she said. ‘Are you going to...’

‘How long?’

He was trying to ask questions in the same firm tone as Lars Marklund, the police officer.

The woman stopped smiling. ‘Six months. Are you going to pay?’

‘Who owns this place?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Some guys.’ She held out her hand with its long, red nails. ‘Five hundred, please.’

Per took out his wallet to keep her interested, but didn’t open it. ‘I’d like to speak to one of the owners.’

The woman didn’t respond.

Eventually he opened his wallet and took out the two hundred he had, along with a piece of paper. ‘Ring me!’ he wrote underneath his telephone number, and signed it ‘Per Mörner (Jerry Morner’s son)’.

He handed over the piece of paper and the two hundred-kronor notes. ‘These are for you,’ he said, ‘and you don’t even have to let me in. But give the note to one of the owners... the one who’s been here the longest.’

The woman took the money, but looked bored to death again. ‘I’ll see... I don’t know if he’s coming in tonight.’

‘Give it to him when he does come in,’ said Per. ‘Will you do that?’

‘Sure.’

She quickly tucked the money away, then folded his message and put it next to the till. Then she adjusted her position on the high stool, titivated her hair, and appeared to forget that Per existed.

He took one step to the side, listened to the music and glanced at the staircase. He thought about Regina again, and got the idea that she was waiting for him in the cellar. Perhaps Jerry and Bremer were sitting down there too, two corpses with a cigar between their lips and a hand on her thigh. All he had to do was pay, and he could go and have a look.

But he turned away and went back outside.

A room in a cheap hotel by the motorway to the north of the city was waiting for him, but first of all he drove over to Terränggatan. It was a sudden impulse — he just wanted to see where Hans Bremer had lived.

Terränggatan was a gloomy place even in the spring sunshine, he thought. Number 10 was a grey five-storey building on an equally grey, cracked street. An old van with a trailer was parked outside, half-full of packing cases.

The name BREMER was still there at the entrance to 10B, and the door was open. The lock appeared to be broken.

There was an unpleasant smell in the echoing stairwell, as if someone had poured sour milk all over the floor. Per went up to the second floor. The door with Bremer’s name on it was ajar, and he could hear banging and crashing from inside.

He opened the door and was assailed by an even nastier smell.

‘Hello?’ he called.

‘What do you want?’ a voice said wearily.

A middle-aged, grey-haired woman was standing in the kitchen doorway watching him, her arms folded. Behind her a teenage boy wearing his baseball cap back to front was busy disconnecting an old TV and tying up the cables.

Per’s head was suddenly empty — what did he actually want?

‘Hi, I just thought I’d call in,’ he said. ‘I was a... a friend of Hans.’

The woman looked even more worn out. ‘Oh? One of his drinking buddies, were you?’

‘No,’ said Per, and decided to stop lying. ‘Actually, we weren’t friends, but he used to work with my father. And I was in the area, so I thought I’d just come and see where he lived.’

The woman didn’t appear to be listening to his explanations. She didn’t invite him in, but turned and disappeared into the apartment, so he followed her and asked, ‘Were you his wife? If so, may I offer my—’

‘Hans never married,’ the woman interrupted him. ‘I’m Ingrid, his younger sister. New tenants are moving in at the end of the month, so we’re just clearing the place out.’

There wasn’t much to clear out, Per thought as he walked through the narrow hallway. There was no bed in the bedroom, just a mattress, and the yellow-painted walls were bare. Bremer seemed to have put all his time and energy into producing films and magazines with Jerry, and none into interior design.

His sister had gone into the kitchen and was packing cutlery and pans into a box. The kitchen was just as empty as the bedroom: a rickety table and two chairs over by the window, and a few postcards on the fridge, faded by the sun. There was no sign of any films or magazines — nothing that might have given away what Bremer did.

‘Since you’re here...’

He looked up to see Ingrid pointing at him.

‘... you might as well give me a hand to empty the cupboards,’ she said. ‘Is that OK?’

‘Well, no, I really ought to...’

‘You can stay for a little while, surely? Then you can help Simon with the boxes.’

So Per found himself standing on a chair, gathering up plates and piling them in boxes. Up and down, up and down.

When he picked up a stack of soup bowls from the bottom shelf, he caught sight of a piece of yellow paper behind them. It was a little Post-it note that had presumably dried out and fallen off the inside of the cupboard door. There were four telephone numbers in shaky handwriting in pencil, each with a name in front of it:

The first number was Bremer’s sister’s, no doubt. One of the others should have been Jerry’s, but he didn’t recognize any of them.

‘Finished?’ said Ingrid behind him.

‘Nearly.’

He slipped the note in his pocket and went back to the crockery.

When he had finished in the kitchen, he started carrying boxes downstairs, and it turned out there was actually quite a lot of stuff in the apartment. It took almost an hour to get everything out.

Bremer’s sister didn’t say much while they were working, and neither did Per.

‘Do you know how your brother died?’ he asked when they had finished and were standing out in the street in the sunshine.

Ingrid wiped her brow. ‘The police said there was a fire... He’d gone to meet some dodgy character, and the house burnt down.’

‘Was there a quarrel?’

‘A quarrel? I don’t think so. I imagine they were sitting around smoking and drinking... That’s what Hans usually did.’

A small-time gangster, with a finger in lots of different pies — that was how the police had described Hans Bremer to Per. ‘But... did he have any enemies?’

Bremer’s sister shook her head. ‘The police asked me the same question... No, he didn’t have any enemies. But people did take advantage of him, I know that.’

‘In what way?’

‘He lent people money, he was always ready to help out... Hans was too kind, and he had no real friends, only drinking buddies. If you don’t have any friends, you can’t have any enemies, can you?’

Per wasn’t at all sure about that, but he simply asked, ‘Was one of his friends called Markus Lukas?’

‘Markus Lukas? Not as far as I know.’

‘I heard that Hans and Markus Lukas worked together... Your brother worked hard, didn’t he?’

Ingrid shook her head again. ‘Hans worked as little as possible. He always said he had plenty of money, but nothing ever came of it.’

Per nodded. He realized Bremer’s sister hadn’t had a clue what her brother did; he had lied to her.

Silence and lies. Business as usual when you were dealing with Jerry.