The Secret Life of Mr Roos Read online

  I had a huge burden of pain to bear when I was your age, too, her mother had told her. But we can get over those things.

  How did you get over yours? Anna asked.

  Her mother hesitated. I had you, she said eventually.

  So you think I should make sure to get pregnant, on top of everything else? Anna wanted to know.

  Just you dare, her mother said, and the two of them laughed so loudly that the serving staff exchanged looks.

  It had felt good sitting there in that anonymous cafe, laughing at life in general, thought Anna. It had been a good moment. Simply giving all her troubles and the whole wretched state of affairs a big kick up the backside. Maybe that was the way to get one over on life for fucking things up? Maybe there was no better method than that?

  She’d been fifteen when she tried hash for the first time. For the past three years, once she’d decided to ditch upper secondary and found work in a kiosk, a cafe and a filling station instead, she’d been smoking it at least three times a week. And pretty much every day since she left home in February. In April she’d met Steffo and started dealing. He had contacts, he was six years older than her and had moved in with her in May. He’d also got hold of some of the harder stuff: amphetamines and morphine and ecstasy a couple of times. The smoking heroin was the last step, in a way. She’d used it four times and when the intensity of the trips made her cry, it was as if her tears were of pure blood.

  Or impure blood, to be more accurate.

  Her mother didn’t know much about Steffo, only that he existed. Anna had protected him from social services, and from the police, and she wondered where he’d got to since her mother went in and emptied the flat.

  But there was no shortage of places for someone like Steffo, she was sure. Beds for the night, as well, it was nothing she needed to worry about.

  And she hoped he had found another girl. Hoped it for her own sake. There were things about Steffo that scared her, scared her a lot, which was presumably why she had protected him.

  You’re mine, he had said. Never forget you’re Steffo’s now.

  He’d also said she ought to get his name tattooed on her leg, the inside of her thigh for preference, but she’d managed to talk him out of that bit. It’s a present, he declared, a present from me to you. Oh yes, she really hoped he’d found another girl.

  Thinking of Steffo reminded her of all the other questions, too. They were floating around just under her tears and she knew they were looking for answers the way a missing calf looks for its mother.

  Why? Why did you want to destroy my life? Why are you deliberately heading straight down to Hell? What’s the point, Anna?

  She asked herself, and everyone else asked too. Her mother. Social services. Auntie Majka. She had no answer. If there had been an answer, there’d have been no need for a question, she would think.

  It was a darkness. A darkness with an enormous force of attraction.

  Yes, a force stronger than herself, just like they talked about in their group therapy sessions.

  The first time she saw Elvafors she thought it looked like a picture out of a book of fairy tales. It stood beside a round lake with a carpet of lily pads. A grassy slope dotted with gnarled fruit trees ran up to the house, and around it the forest extended in all directions. The building was a charming old wooden place, yellow and white; eight small rooms upstairs, a kitchen and four larger ones downstairs. At right angles to it a smaller building used for the office and overnight accommodation for staff. Up on the forest margins another building: a little red house known as the first gate with a kitchen and combined bedroom and sitting room, for the two patients who had progressed furthest in their treatment. Patients who would soon move on to the last gate in Dalby and from there back into everyday life again.

  There were only women here. A supervisor named Sonja Svensson, half a dozen staff, several of them former addicts, and then the patients: young women who were to be saved from the shameful squalor and corruption of alcohol and drugs. Anna was admitted on the same day as an eighteen-year-old girl from Karlstad.

  They had come from all over the country, but mainly from central and western Sweden. By the end of the first morning she had learnt their names; it was a fundamental step in the therapeutic process, Sonia had explained, laughing her dry little laugh.

  How can we respect each other if we don’t know each other’s names?

  It was all about respect at Elvafors.

  At least on paper.

  Yet it was the lack of respect that eventually made Anna Gambowska decide to run away.

  Surely it was precisely that? she asked herself.

  Yes, it was. Precisely that.

  There was a set of simple rules at Elvafors. When she was admitted, Anna had to sign a piece of paper to confirm that she accepted these rules. The treatment was voluntary but it was paid for out of the social budgets of the local government authorities where they lived. If the centre proved unsuitable, it was of course better to give your place up to someone else in need.

  There was no shortage of people in need, heaven knows. The treatment normally lasted for between six months and a year, and the home welcomed continued contact after the patient was discharged. It wasn’t unusual for grateful clients to pay visits, Sonja Svensson told them on the very first day. Not unusual at all.

  The most important rule apart from that was to have as little contact with the outside world as possible. It was in the outside world that the girls – none of them older than twenty-three, so Anna found it hard to think of them as women – had taken their knocks, it was out there they had their dubious contacts and destructive networks. It was important to break the patterns, both internal and external. No mobile phones were permitted at Elvafors, but everyone was allowed a weekly telephone call – to a family number agreed in advance, usually to a parent. Relatives were welcome to get in touch, but were urged to take a fairly restrictive approach in the number of times they did so. In return, so-called family days were held twice a year.

  There were no computers or Internet at Elvafors, except in an inner room of the office, to which the patients had no access.

  Radio and TV were provided though, at least some of the channels.

  In the first two months, no leave of absence was granted, and if it was agreed to later, the patient and at least one family member took joint responsibility.

  All the cooking, washing-up, cleaning and other household chores were done by the patients themselves. At least twice a week they were taken on outings together, usually to the nearest town of Dalby, eighteen kilometres away. Bowling, swimming or cafe visits were usually on the programme.

  Elvafors was remote, and that was no coincidence. When Sonja Svensson set up the home thirteen years earlier, the geographical location had been her top priority.

  No disruptive civilization. No dangers. No connections.

  As for the actual treatment, it rested on four cornerstones: openness, good comradeship, help to self-help and the twelve-step programme. After breakfast they all gathered in the big room, sat on chairs in a circle and basically talked about how they were feeling. It took the time it took. Then it was time for individual analysis tasks and then they spent a bit of time on the twelve-step programme.

  After lunch there would be activities, either an outing or something at the home. On Tuesdays and Fridays a psychologist visited for one-to-one sessions. Sometimes Sonja Svensson also called in her flock for private conversations.

  Then dinner, with the work it took to prepare and clear up afterwards, and finally another circle session around ten to discuss negative and positive experiences of the day.

  But there was still plenty of time for other things. For being yourself. Reading or writing or watching TV. There was a piano, and Anna had brought her guitar. There was never any question of communal singing, though. None of the other girls seemed particularly musical, but a number of them liked hearing Anna play and she usually had one or two of them sitting in her
room for a while.

  At least in the early days.

  Once her week of weeping was over, a sort of calm initially descended. She liked the regular, stress-free pace of the home. Comparing notes with the other girls also seemed worthwhile, if a little intimidating. She soon realized that when it came to harsh and horrible experiences in life, she was something of a novice. Four of them, so half the group, had been through this kind of therapy before. Marit from Gothenburg, already on her fourth course of treatment, was in the habit of saying she couldn’t cry any more. That did seem to be the case; she liked laughing and had a loud, boisterous laugh, but it never reached her eyes. It wasn’t at all like the laugh Anna and her mother had enjoyed in that cafe.

  Two of the others, Turid and Ebba, had been prostitutes, even though they weren’t yet twenty, and Marit had been regularly and secretly abused by her stepfather ever since she was twelve.

  But, as Sonja Svensson and the rest of the staff were at pains to emphasize, looking back was easy, the trick was to look forward.

  While Anna was preparing the salad for dinner one evening, she also heard a more cynical view of the home from Maria, the eldest and most hardened of them all.

  They make money out of us, you know that, don’t you? she said, glancing over her shoulder to check they couldn’t be overheard. Social services pay a thousand a day for each one of us! Sonja and her fella have got over a million stashed in the bank.

  Could that really be the case? Maria wasn’t known for saying nice things, but perhaps she was right on this subject? This is my last bit of rest, she would declare when none of the staff were listening. When I get out of here I’m going to drug myself up and be dead in two weeks flat, it’ll be fucking lovely.

  She was twenty-three.

  Anna made various other observations too, it was unavoidable.

  That she seemed to be an odd fish in this world, too, for example. As she always had been. None of the other girls read books. And when she told Ludmilla, who was twenty and from Borås, that she wrote poems, Ludmilla suddenly lost it and called her a fucking cow, just trying to make herself seem special.

  She brought it up at the morning meeting the next day. Explained that she’d been upset by what Ludmilla said, after which they all sat there on their hard chairs trading insults for nearly an hour. Sonja Svensson wasn’t with them; instead they were in the hands of a woman called Karin, who tried ineffectually to calm things down.

  Afterwards it didn’t feel as if anything much had been resolved and the next day she was called in for a private chat with Sonja Svensson.

  There’s no need to bury your nose in a book all day, Sonja said. You’ve got to make an effort to fit in.

  But I like reading, Anna had explained.

  That’s part of your wider set of problems, came the answer. You withdraw. Guitar and poetry and all that stuff. Tomorrow we’re playing football in the sports hall at Dalby school, you need more of that kind of thing in your life.

  She’d laughed her dry laugh and sent Anna out of her office.

  What did she mean by that, Anna had wondered. Was she serious? What was wrong with music? Poetry and books couldn’t be any kind of problem, surely?

  From that day on she was always careful to shut the door of her room. When she was playing the guitar or writing or lying on the bed to read. So she didn’t disturb anybody or come across as stuck-up. But clearly that wasn’t the right approach because one evening when they got back from swimming in Dalby Sonja informed her she had taken the guitar and locked it in the office.

  You can manage without it for a week, she said. It’ll do you good.

  At the meeting the next morning, Anna said having her guitar confiscated made her feel really upset and indignant. Sonja Svensson didn’t give any of the other girls a chance to comment; she just said this wasn’t the time to discuss the matter and moved on to the other girls and how they were feeling.

  That evening she had a phone call from her mother. So as not to worry her, Anna didn’t bring up the guitar incident. She just said everything was OK, she was feeling better and better, and she was in the middle of writing a long letter to Marek. Her mother said her brother had got his bike after all, but that she wasn’t feeling great because her knees had started playing up again. She might have to go off sick, and if there was one thing she hated it was having to take time off sick.

  That night Anna lay awake for several hours and cried a new sort of tears. At first she couldn’t work out what was new about them, other than that they didn’t feel the same as usual.

  But then she understood.

  She wasn’t crying for herself and her poor ragged soul, she was weeping for the world.

  For the state of things generally. For life itself, the blinkered outlooks, the stupidity and lack of compassion – and for guitars that were shut up against their wills in rank-smelling offices because they were part of someone’s wider set of problems.

  Not everything about Elvafors was bad, and Sonja Svensson had no doubt set the whole thing up with good intentions, Anna could see that. But the more distance she put between herself and the drugs, the more obviously the cracks showed. No one on the staff had any professional training; they were all former addicts or friends of Sonja’s. Two of them were even related to her in some way. No dissent was tolerated; on issues of treatment it was always Sonja who knew best. Of course she always made things sound as if they were in your own best interests and as if everyone was part of the decision-making process. But that was far from the case; it was Sonja who decided and everything had to be done as a group. If you didn’t want to join in – didn’t feel like watching that reality TV show or playing that game of ludo – it was considered abnormal behaviour and an indication of relapse. Not into addiction, perhaps, but into the patterns that could lead to it, which consequently had to be broken. It was terrorization by majority, thought Anna, but presumably that couldn’t have been the original intention.

  And a thousand kronor per person per day? Eight thousand every twenty-four hours, which would grow into an enormous sum in just a few weeks. The programme couldn’t possibly cost the home that much, so maybe there was some truth in what Maria had said, after all?

  In August, Ludmilla absconded while on weekend leave of absence. A few days later Sonja reported that she had been found naked and unconscious in a ditch on the southern outskirts of Stockholm. She had been raped and had taken an overdose, and her condition was critical.

  Sonja told them this at the meeting after dinner. There was something in her voice as she said it. In the details. Anna looked round at the other speechless girls and wondered if they had detected it too.

  That little hint of . . . well, what was it? Satisfaction?

  But the others just looked shocked and scared.

  She felt the same way herself, and that was presumably the point.

  The point? she asked herself as she lay in her bed fifteen minutes later. What was the damn point?

  And that was the evening when it first came home to her that she didn’t want to be there any more.

  4

  Coming out of the branch of Swedbank on Södra torg in Kymlinge late on Thursday afternoon, Ante Valdemar Roos was momentarily blinded by the sun, and he took this as a sign. He was in synch with the powers above, his life was bubbling like a newly opened bottle of champagne, and he felt he could have danced across the square.

  Or at the very least made one of those elegant leaps into the air and clicked his heels together, like that woman on TV whose name he had forgotten. Bloody hell, he thought. I haven’t felt this full of life since . . . well, since when? He did not know.

  Since he had proposed to Lisen and she had accepted, maybe? Though she was already pregnant so her answer wasn’t that surprising when it came down to it.

  But when he counted newborn Greger’s toes, found that there were ten and that the boy was in all likelihood completely healthy, well, that had been a great and powerful moment. He had felt t
hat same fizzing sensation in his body back then.

  The same zest for life. The same urge to steam ahead and get things done.

  It had all gone without a hitch. He now had 2,100,000 kronor in a brand new account. On the twenty-fifth of every month there would be an automatic transfer from there to his ordinary current account of 18,270 kronor, the exact sum that normally came in from Wrigman’s Electrical after tax at source had been taken off. If he just let it run, it would last for 120 months, not counting the interest that would accrue.

  Ten years. Christ almighty.

  But he wasn’t intending to let it run for that long. Not really. In a few years’ time he would start to draw his rightful and hard-earned pension. Alice wouldn’t suspect a thing. Wouldn’t have the foggiest idea. She had her own card for his account, and as long as the money flowed in at its usual pace, there wouldn’t be the least call for her to check on anything. She didn’t know any of his work colleagues and he couldn’t remember ever being on the phone to any of them from home. Not in all the time he and Alice had had the same number, which was maybe a bit odd.

  And he never rang from work, nor did she call him there. Possibly one or other of the daughters had on occasion needed to reach him in work time, but always on his mobile. He had once shown Alice where the factory was, when they happened to be passing, but that was all. The girls would never find their way there, even with map in hand. He smiled and strode straight past the shop that had sold him his pools coupon without going in. Good luck, you poor sods, he thought. It’s all about being patient.

  So the way he’d planned it, one of his millions would stay untouched. It ought to last until he started drawing his pension. At sixty-three or sixty-four, that would be about right. Or maybe sixty-five if the fancy took him; he was feeling so alive at this moment that he could easily reach a hundred.

  But as for the other million, he was going to splash out. Very quietly, discretion guaranteed.

  And he knew how he was going to use it; it hadn’t taken much soul-searching before he came to that decision. Scarcely any, but there would be time for that in due course. First he had to deal with Walter Wrigman.