The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest Page 0,264

and he assumed that he would be forced to do away with a bothersome witness. Somewhere on the outskirts of Borås it came to him that he could use her in a different way. He turned south and found a desolate forest outside Seglora. He tied her up in a barn and left her there. He reckoned that she would be able to work her way loose within a few hours and then lead the police south in their hunt for him. And if she did not manage to free herself, and starved or froze to death in the barn, it did not matter, it was no concern of his.

Then he drove back to Borås and from there east towards Stockholm. He had driven straight to Svavelsjo, but he avoided the clubhouse itself. It was a drag that Lundin was in prison. He went instead to the home of the club's sergeant-at-arms, Hans-Åke Waltari. He said he was looking for a place to hide, which Waltari sorted out by sending him to Goransson, the club's treasurer. But he had stayed there only a few hours.

Niedermann had, theoretically, no money worries. He had left behind almost 200,000 kronor in Gosseberga, but he had access to considerably larger sums that had been deposited abroad. His problem was that he was short of actual cash. Goransson was responsible for Svavelsjo M.C.'s finances, and it had not been difficult for Niedermann to persuade him to take him to the cabinet in the barn where the cash was kept. Niedermann was in luck. He had been able to help himself to 800,000 kronor.

He seemed to remember that there had been a woman in the house too, but he had forgotten what he had done with her.

Goransson had also provided a car that the police were not yet looking for. Niedermann went north. He had a vague plan to make it on to one of the ferries at Kapellskar that would take him to Tallinn.

When he got to Kapellskar he sat in the car park for half an hour, studying the area. It was crawling with policemen.

He drove on aimlessly. He needed a place where he could lie low for a while. When he passed Norrtalje he remembered the old brickworks. He had not even thought about the place in more than a year, since the time when repairs had been under way. The brothers Harry and Atho Ranta were using the brickworks as a depot for goods moving to and from the Baltic ports, but they had both been out of the country for several weeks, ever since that journalist Svensson had started snooping around the whore trade. The brickworks would be empty.

He had driven Goransson's Saab into a shed behind the factory and gone inside. He had had to break open a door on the ground floor, and one of the first things he did was to create an emergency exit through a loose plywood board at one end of the ground floor. He later replaced the broken padlock. Then he had made himself at home in a cosy room on the upper floor.

A whole afternoon had passed before he heard the sounds coming through the walls. At first he thought these were his familiar phantoms. He sat alert and listened for almost an hour before he got up and went out to the workshop to listen more closely. At first he heard nothing, but he stood there patiently until he heard more scraping noises.

He found the key next to the sink.

Niedermann had seldom been as amazed as when he opened the door and found the two Russian whores. They were skin and bones. They seemed to have had no food for several weeks and had been living on tea and water since the last packet of rice had run out.

One of the girls was so exhausted that she could not get up from the bed. The other was in better shape. She spoke only Russian, but he knew enough of the language to understand that she was thanking God and him for saving them. She fell on her knees and threw her arms around his legs. He pushed her away, then left the room and locked the door behind him.

He had not known what to do with the whores. He heated up some soup from the cans he found in the kitchen and gave it to them while he thought. The weaker woman on the bed seemed to be getting some of her