MemoRandom: A Thriller by Anders de La Motte Page A

Sarac felt Molnar being pushed aside, then an oxygen mask was placed over his nose and mouth. Everything started to blur and the room became a mass of pain and colors.
    “. . . a severe migraine attack, but we can’t rule out a further hemorrhage,” Dr. Vestman’s voice said. “We need to get him back to Intensive Care.”
    The bed started to roll, a peculiar feeling. Various figures hovered above him, slipping in and out of his clouded field ofvision. White coats, green ones. Faces covered by masks. He thought he could hear a voice. A whisper, close to his right ear, so faint he could hardly hear it.
    Protect the secret, David. You promised!
    The voice blurred into the background. And fell silent.
    After that . . .
    Nothing.

EIGHT
    It’s all about attitude, Jesper Stenberg thinks. If you just have the right attitude and focus on the right things, you can get through pretty much any challenge.
    He had a framed quotation by Robert Kennedy on the wall. A moving-in gift that Karolina had persuaded the caretakers to put up immediately above the huge desk, just in time for his first day at the department.
    No society can function without a democratically controlled, fair, measured, and powerful justice system. Bobby Kennedy hadn’t hesitated to do what was required of him. He didn’t let himself get distracted by political intrigues. Instead he focused on doing as much good as he could for society. He had aimed at a higher goal.
    Stenberg thought he had made a similar choice. Either he was someone who had driven his fragile lover to suicide, or he was someone who was no longer subjected to the warped whims of a demonstrably sick person. Someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    Sophie’s suicide had been unavoidable. If it hadn’t been for the happy pills, it would probably have happened a long time ago, without affecting him. But instead she had chosen to kill herself in a fiendishly calculated way, literally trying to take him down with her. A frontal attack on him, his family, and their shared future. The measures he had taken were therefore no more than a form of self-defense. Sophie had tried to destroy him, but he had withstood the attack, even if it had taken almost all of his strength of will.
    He had reversed back down into the garage with Sophie’s body on the hood of his car. He had done his utmost not to meet her gaze on the other side of the shattered windshield. He parked in the darkest corner of the garage and covered the hood with a tarpaulin he took off a sports car that had been covered up for the winter. Then he had forced himself to leave the scene calmly, resisting the temptation to run for his life.
    He had made the call half an hour later. It took him three attempts before his fingers managed to find the right number in the phone book. Then he had followed instructions, getting a taxi home and disposing of all his clothes, before downing half a bottle of whiskey and falling asleep on the sofa.
    During the days that followed he had felt okay, but the nights were worse. As soon as he shut his eyes Sophie’s shattered face appeared in his head. Staring at him with an accusing look in her eyes, making him wake up with a scream. He had blamed everything on his new job, and the tension of recent weeks. As usual, Karolina was a rock. She listened and comforted him, made him chamomile tea and left her self-help magazines on the kitchen table. It was in one of them he had read that the more the brain got stuck in a particular track, the harder it was to break out of. In other words, you had to make a conscious choice about how you wanted to think about things, and what thoughts you no longer wanted to entertain. And, just a couple of days later, once the shock had subsided, he had decided what thoughts he wanted to have. After that, the nightmares had almost disappeared altogether.
    The police investigation had actually made him stronger. He had read every last line but