Free The Other Son by Alexander Söderberg Page B

large, and unreal.
    Six months earlier, in a apartment on Södermalm, Tommy was with two colleagues, Gunilla Strandberg and Lars Vinge. Tommy had shot them both. Vinge hadn’t been much of a problem; he was a wretched little man, a nobody who’d run himself into the ground. The “suicide shot” to his temple had felt almost like an act of mercy. Gunilla had been worse. A friend, a colleague, an ally. She was the one who had paid in the money that had been in those accounts. Gunilla had been corrupt for years. Together with her brother Erik, she had embezzled money from the cases they worked on. Tommy had had no idea. He had been tipped off by Lars Vinge, who wanted justice and some advantage to his career in exchange for the revelation. The old Tommy had thought that sounded reasonable. But Gunilla approached him with a counteroffer….He should have dismissed it as the solid, honest cop he had always been. The new Tommy was born there and then, when he realized that the money she was offering him could change things, primarily Monica’s illness.
    And when the new Tommy was born, the old one died. It happened fast. And the new Tommy started to think. It had been unavoidable; they would never have been able to share the spoils. He knew her, he knew his new self. The appeal of a new arrangement seldom lasted very long.
    It wasn’t about the money, more about fear, his own warped fear. He had realized it with the passage of time. His fear of Monica disappearing. What the hell was he going to do without her? Who would look after him when he got old? Who would make sure the girls didn’t marry idiots? Who the hell was going to do the cooking? And buy his clothes? Who was going to be sociable when people came over? Who was he going to talk to after work so he didn’t find himself in an eternity of silence? Monica was his lifeline, in every conceivable sense.
    So when he found out about the money, he saw his chance. The pair of them, Gunilla and Lars Vinge, died in Lars’s apartment, and Tommy made it look like a personal dispute: Vinge shot Gunilla, then himself. He took the money she had accumulated over the years, and set about his mission at once. Tommy contacted researchers and specialist doctors in the USA, France, Japan…everywhere people were conducting research into ALS. They all said the same thing: no medication, no cure. But financial help would at least speed up the eventual discovery of drugs that could delay the illness, and at best find an actual cure. Tommy took this on board and began the laborious task of withdrawing all the millions from the bank accounts and sending them anonymously to organizations all over the world. His working life was now constructed around his frantic efforts to plug any holes that might end up linking him to the murders of Gunilla Strandberg and Lars Vinge.
    Tommy leaned forward and stared at the amounts on the bank statements. There wasn’t much left now. Half a million kronor in cash buried out in the garden behind the shed. One and a half million in Africa, just over a million in the Middle East. And those banks had negative interest rates. They charged for hiding the money. The rate was based upon an index of dictatorships. The fewer dictatorships there were in the world, the higher the negative interest was, more or less. And the interest was mounting. Soon the money would all be gone….
    Tommy could feel a slight pressure on his chest and took shallow breaths, rubbing his face with his hands, letting his palms cover his eyes like blinkers. Darkness. He breathed slowly and the darkness was dark, fucking dark. Was this where Monica was heading?
    There was a knocking sound on the ceiling. Monica’s crutch on the floor up above. She needed help to get to the bathroom.

The woman’s backside was at eye level. The G-string was barely visible. She was holding the pole with her right hand and leaning forward. Their eyes met, upside down. Miles Ingmarsson looked away.
    There