Buzz: A Thriller Read online

  “No, no. The online forum, of course.”

  “Oh, you mean that gossip site? Well, I looked at it a couple of times when it first started and everyone was talking about it, but that was a while ago. Mostly a load of whining police officers and aspiring officers, I seem to remember. Not really my thing . . .”

  She closed her gym bag and got ready to leave.

  “Maybe you should take another look.”

  There was something in the tone of Nina Brandt’s voice that made her stop.

  “What for?”

  Nina pulled a face.

  “Because I think they’ve started writing about you . . .”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Sorry about this, Mr. Pettersson,” Aziz said a few minutes later when they were back in HP’s cell. “Sergeant Moussad and I belong to different departments of the police force, as well as different schools of thought, you could say. He had no right to subject you to that sort of treatment.”

  HP nodded apathetically as he tugged at his wet clothes to release them from his body.

  His brain was working in overdrive, but there was no avoiding the acrid smell of piss from his overalls, and he glanced at Aziz to see if the detective had noticed it.

  “We’re getting some dry clothes for you, and you can have a warm shower if you like.”

  HP went on with his glassy nodding.

  A shower!

  A warm fucking shower and a few minutes to do a bit of thinking . . .

  “But first we just need to sort out a few things,” Aziz said in a businesslike tone of voice, pushing a sheet of lined paper and a pen over to HP’s side of the table.

  “Please, write down how you know Mrs. Argos and everything that happened in the Bedouin camp. As soon as that’s done you’ll get the chance to have a wash and change clothes.”

  HP was still nodding. His hand was shaking so much that the pen drew little squiggles on the paper before he managed to get it under control.

  8

  REDRUM?

  Pillars of Society forum

  Posted: 13 November, 08:11

  By: MayBey

  Who can be imagined to have committed a crime? Everyone.

  So everyone is a suspect.

  This post has 41 comments

  “WE HAVE A big problem, Mr. Pettersson.”

  No fucking kidding—talk about understatement of the year! During the past twenty-four hours, HP had been through all the stages of crisis, more than once.

  Denial, despair, panic, shitting himself, apathy, and then straight to jail without passing Go.

  This simply couldn’t be true!

  No matter how his overheated brain tried to handle it, he still couldn’t get past a few hard facts.

  Everything was real, goddamn real—quite literally.

  Anna Argos was missing, swallowed up by the desert night. And, according to the cops, he was the prime suspect.

  He still had little more than fragmentary memories of that evening. Which wasn’t actually that surprising; the combo of beer, dope, and car sickness had presumably all been too much for his already exhausted brain.

  “Like I say, a big problem, Mr. Pettersson,” Aziz repeated, interrupting his thoughts.

  HP looked up and met the detective’s worried gaze.

  “We’ve matched the blood we found on your shirt with DNA we found in Mrs. Argos’s hotel room, and a couple of hours ago the helicopter found some remains about five kilometers from the camp. Mostly bloodstained clothing and fragments of skin. The birds and desert foxes have all done their worst, sadly. We’ve seen it happen many times before with people who’ve got lost out there, but the preliminary results match Mrs. Argos’s profile.”

  He gestured vaguely to the world beyond the walls.

  “For the time being we don’t know if the body was driven there, or if these are just fragments moved there by animals. So we are continuing the search, both close to the camp as well as farther away.”

  He leaned over the table.

  “Naturally, the whole thing could have been a tragic accident. An argument in a secluded place, a few moments of rage with terrible consequences. Perhaps Mrs. Argos was merely wounded, in spite of the amount of blood. Left there on the assumption that she would be able to get help? But instead, in her bewildered state, she went in the wrong direction—straight out into the desert . . .”

  The detective gave HP a long look.

  “If that was the case, I daresay the judge would show some sympathy.”

  He paused, and seemed to be waiting for a response.

  HP was trying in vain to control the maelstrom in his head.

  There was an explanation to all this, he was sure of that. A perfectly natural explanation that would prove that he was innocent. Purely theoretically, he might very well have wandered about the camp—decided to get rid of that stupid T-shirt and rescue his expensive Thai silk shirt from the garbage. A few vomit stains were hardly the sort of thing that was going to bother you when you were stoned . . .

  But then what?

  The murderer had obviously gone into the toilets. Tried to wash off the blood as quickly as possible, and found his shirt in the trash.

  It sounded pretty damned unlikely, but stranger things had happened.

  He fast-forwarded through this scenario one more time, just to be on the safe side. Flimsy—but not unthinkable.

  Even so, he still couldn’t stop one unpleasant thought from leaking out.

  What if Aziz was right?!

  For a while back there in the camp he really had felt like strangling Anna Argos—squeezing her neck tight and choking that arrogant blasted smirk from her face . . .

  “B-but what about the others? Vincent and his gang?”

  He could hear how shaky his voice sounded.

  Almost as if he had already guessed what the detective was going to say.

  “Ah yes, I had almost forgotten the mysterious Frenchman . . .”

  Aziz put on his reading glasses and leafed through the folder in front of him.

  “What we’ve managed to ascertain is that you and Mrs. Argos arrived at the camp together. You were seen eating dinner at the same table, and later during the evening a witness saw you arguing beside the opening in the fence, close to the toilets. The witness describes the argument as physical, and also claims that Mrs. Argos looked terrified.”

  He paused to turn the page and HP gulped a couple of times in an attempt to moisten his bone-dry throat.

  “Your French traveling companions had unfortunately left the camp by the time we arrived, but we spoke to them the following day at their hotel. They all agree that you were angry about Mrs. Argos making fun of your ‘accident’ in the car, and that she later—possibly as a result of this—seemed to prefer other people’s company to yours.”

  He turned the page and went on.

  “Admittedly, the Frenchmen confirm your story about having met them in India, but they claim that getting together in Dubai and going on the desert safari were your idea.”

  The detective paused and glanced at HP over the frame of his glasses.

  It took several seconds for HP to absorb the information.

  “B-but, the whole thing was their idea; Vincent called me at the hotel, they picked us up. Ask the drivers, they’ll know!”

  “Unfortunately we haven’t been able to reach the drivers, Emir and Bashid. According to their boss, this isn’t unusual. They’re paid by the hour and go home to their families in Yemen during the low season. According to him, the cars were booked from your hotel in the name of Sinclair, and one of the credit cards we found in your wallet was used to confirm the booking. A MasterCard in the name of a Jerome Sinclair.

  “Jerome Vincent Sinclair . . .”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Welcome to the Pillars of Society—we’re the ones holding all the crap up!

  In actual fact the idea was neither particularly remarkable, nor terribly new. A discussion forum open to all sorts of complaint
s, gossip, and cocksure claims—with the possible exception that this one seemed to be aimed at police officers, or at least to people in uniform. Which of course felt really original and groundbreaking . . .

  But after reading a few of the posts she began to realize why this particular forum had got people talking. One of the most regular contributors, someone calling themselves MayBey, was good—very good, in fact. Unlike the other posters, he or she didn’t moan about faulty equipment or the quality of the latest crop of recruits. The language MayBey chose to use was unusual, short sentences containing a lot of dark humor, instead of the bloated posts full of the officialese so beloved of most Swedish police officers.

  Caught three joy riders tonight. Chase lasted almost twenty minutes.

  Three hooligans ditched the car at Junksta junction. Dog good for a change—picked up the trail at once. We got all three under a tree ten minutes later!

  Big relief!

  Then four hours at the station getting them booked in and interviewed. So far, so good. Duty Prosecutor Turnstile only needed a single minute. And then they were all free again.

  All our work down the drain while he rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Only wish I could sleep as soundly as that . . .

  Every police officer had experienced a car chase like that, and MayBey—whoever he or she was—had managed to capture the whole thing in just a few lines. The excitement of the chase, relief at the arrests, the drawn-out paperwork, and then anger when the louts were let go.

  There were fifty-eight comments to the post, five times more than most other contributors got, and they all shared MayBey’s frustration.

  The other thing that made the post interesting was the recognition factor. The Junksta junction could very well be the Hjulsta junction, and she knew that there was a prosecutor in the district whose name meant roughly the same as “turnstile.”

  Out of curiosity she went onto the Stockholm Police website, but couldn’t find any report of anything matching the description on the forum. So what did that mean?

  Nothing really.

  MayBey could be from another district, or else he or she could be describing an old incident. But for some reason Rebecca was still fairly sure that the post referred to Stockholm.

  She could certainly recognize the caricatures in MayBey’s older posts. Police Chief Teflon, whose white shirt never picked up any stains. Superintendent Spineless, who always managed to be unavailable when there were difficult decisions to be made. Detective Inspector Birkenscholl, who shuffled around the corridors fully occupied with trying to avoid doing any work.

  She was sure she’d worked with all of them—but, on the other hand, she probably wasn’t alone in that . . .

  But it was the latest post from MayBey that really caught her interest . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The detective was looking at him as if he was expecting a reaction, but for once HP didn’t know what to say. He tried desperately to conjure up a picture of Vincent in his mind, but for some reason the man’s features seemed suddenly unclear—almost hazy.

  He opened and closed his mouth but failed to get a single sensible word out.

  “We’ve been very thorough, Mr. Pettersson. Murders are rare here in Dubai, so for that reason we’re looking under every stone. My men have checked all the fingerprints we’ve been able to find, both in the car and on the table you ate at, and we’ve found prints belonging to you, Mrs. Argos, and all the others in your party. We’ve even contacted the police authorities in your respective home countries, but everyone involved has a clean record. Everyone except you, Mr. Pettersson . . .”

  Aziz gave HP another long look over his bundle of papers.

  “All the prints match up, there are none unaccounted for. In other words, there’s no trace of this so-called Vincent . . .”

  Another look to match his tone of voice, but HP hardly noticed.

  Now that he came to think about it, he couldn’t actually remember Vincent ever saying anything about himself.

  One day when he had been sitting in a bar feeling pretty fucking depressed, the Frenchman had just appeared.

  Offering him beer and a smoke, someone to talk to who made him feel a bit better.

  So who was Jerome Sinclair? His wallet was full of different credit cards—different characters who had helped him manage his nomadic, sleepwalking life. He could only remember a few of them:

  Jim Shooter

  Will Parcher

  Tyler Durden

  He had picked most of the names as a joke—at least that was what he told himself. A gang of made-up imaginary friends from film history. People who had never existed outside of the minds of characters in films.

  He seemed to have a vague memory of Jerome Sinclair as a series of embossed letters on a plastic card.

  Were Jerome and Vincent one and the same person?

  Someone who didn’t exist outside his own head?

  The detective put his papers down and leaned across the table.

  “Let me summarize the situation, Mr. Pettersson. You—with a previous conviction for murder—enter the country on a false passport. You meet Mrs. Argos at the hotel, pick her up, and then arrange a desert safari together with some fleeting acquaintances. She, however, scornfully rejects your advances, which quite understandably makes you angry. Because of course you were the one who arranged everything, possibly even for her sake, and now she rejects you. Sometime that evening Mrs. Argos disappears, and you are found badly affected by drugs and with her blood all over your shirt.

  “And your only defense is to blame a mysterious man whose existence nothing and no one else can prove.”

  He paused briefly to let his words sink in.

  “Like I said, murder is extremely rare here in Dubai, possibly because all murderers are punished hard. Very hard, Mr. Pettersson . . .”

  Another pause, so that HP didn’t miss what he was saying.

  “But if the defendant cooperates, the judge is usually sympathetic. Your life is very much in your own hands, so I would ask you to think very carefully before you answer my next question.”

  A third pause, entirely unnecessary this time.

  “Did you kill Mrs. Argos?”

  HP’s head was filled with flickering screen dumps—all of them containing different information, all of it damned alarming.

  Had his tortured brain finally started making things up?

  Blink

  Showing him things that didn’t exist?

  Blink

  Mixing up fantasy and reality?

  Blink

  Yes?

  Blink

  No?

  Freaking hell!!!

  He screwed his eyes shut and covered his face with his hands to stop the flashing in his head. But the images carried on flickering across his retinas.

  Shooter

  Parcher

  Durden

  All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!

  Redrum, redrum, redrum . . .

  Could he really have beaten up a bitchy bird? Given her what she had coming?

  Shit, he’d even fantasized about how it would feel . . .

  Time to decide.

  Red or blue?

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The world’s best Bodyguard, Regina Righteous, seems to be having a few problems. Looks like she got sunstroke down in Africa and saw something that wasn’t there.

  Or is there another reason why she was hallucinating? Maybe because she’s been suspended? Does anyone out there know?

  This post has 17 comments

  Regina Righteous. Great name. Just as Nina had said, it wasn’t exactly hard to work out who they were talking about . . .

  And seventeen comments as well, pretty much all of them negative.

  What else do you expect from Internal Investigations?

  That’s what happens when you have quotas for women . . .

  She was damned difficult even at the Academy

  Probably took to
o many tranquilizers. WBUP, for sure . . .

  She had to google that last comment. WBUP—Will Break Under Pressure. So this was how the rest of the world saw her. Someone who couldn’t handle pressure . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “N-no,” he croaked, and cleared his throat again.

  “No, I didn’t,” he went on, slightly steadier this time, almost as though he were trying to convince himself.

  Aziz let out a deep sigh. He gathered his papers, stood up, then knocked twice on the steel door.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you anymore, Mr. Pettersson,” Aziz said, almost sadly.

  He stepped aside as Moussad and four sweaty guard orcs squeezed into the room.

  A moment later they were on him.

  He was yelling, lashing out in panic, and actually managed to land a couple of decent punches before the orcs got him down on the floor.

  He was going to die, he got that now. Either Scarface and his gang were going to drown him, or, more likely—he’d end up confessing everything. And would be sentenced to death by some shady judge and dragged out into the desert for a shot in the back of the neck, for which his sister would be sent the bill. Followed by eternal membership of the Association of Morons, along with Dag and Dad!

  Hello, my name is Henrik, and I am a lady killer!

  He was finished—screwed—toast!

  Suddenly a synapse in his terrified brain made a connection.

  “W-wait!” he yelled at Aziz, just as they were about to carry him out.

  “Wait, for God’s sake, I know where to find evidence of Vincent. Just give me . . .”

  Moussad whacked him in the side of the head to shut him up, but it didn’t keep him quiet for long. He had his fingers on a life raft and wasn’t about to let go.

  “One of my trouser pockets, a gold cigarette lighter. It’s his. Vincent’s. Check it for fingerprints, DNA, whatever you damned well like . . .”

  Another blow, this time hard enough for him to taste blood in his mouth. He heard Aziz fire off some sentences in Arabic at the guards, then Moussad, who seemed to be giving contradictory orders.

  The sweaty orcs around him shuffled uncomfortably and exchanged glances as if they were unsure of what to do. Both of their commanding officers rattled off new orders. Still no reaction. HP managed to twist his head and could see Moussad and Aziz facing off against each other—just a few centimeters apart.