Dan turned to Per, who’d walked into the kitchen after him, and said, “Did he have a cleaner?”
“A woman from the village came in once a week. We spoke to her, but she said there was never much cleaning to do. She said he liked to talk, maybe just to practice his Swedish. He wanted to be fluent.”
“And she knew him as Jacques Fillon?”
“Jack. People called him Jack.” He turned to Inger and added, “Nobody knew he was French.”
She nodded, and said, “We still don’t.”
Dan sat against the kitchen table, looking around the room, thinking over the house they’d just toured, trying to imagine himself inside the mind of the man who’d lived here. Even harder, he was trying to imagine himself living here, in this space, the hours of each new day yawning in front of him.
“What did he do here? How did he fill his days, his evenings, the winter nights? He’s been living up here for over ten years, but he doesn’t have a TV, doesn’t have a computer.”
“He has a lot of books,” suggested Inger.
“True, yet no book by his bedside, none left by a favorite chair.” He looked at Per and said, “Have you found out any more about where he went on the bus every day?”
“Nobody knows. And it’s only because of Siri and the regular driver that we know he took the bus every day. We can’t even find anyone who saw him on the bus coming home.”
Inger said, “Siri was the girl he saved.”
Dan nodded.
“What did he do?” This time the question was to himself, but Per looked on expectantly. Dan was trying to think of all the things that were missing, then said, “You searched the place, right, looking for another ID?”
“Yes, we searched, but as you can see, we put everything back where it was. There was no other ID, no passport.”
“Were there any guns?”
“No.” He laughed and said, “Not everyone up here’s a hunter.”
Dan smiled in response, but his thoughts were snagging all over the place. He noticed Inger didn’t smile, that she’d understood his question perfectly. It was all about the kind of scenario that might have brought Fillon up here. In one way or another, he had to have been on the run, and very few people on the run would ever get comfortable enough to be completely without a weapon. So where were they?
It was just one of the many things he couldn’t make sense of, and he still had a dozen unformed questions circling, none of which Per would have an answer for.
Inger ended the confusion anyway by stepping in and saying, “Okay, I think, Per, if you take us to our accommodation now, we can walk back here on our own later.”
“Sure, but you can call me any time you need a ride.” He looked a little bashful, and Dan guessed he’d already taken a shine to Inger.
She smiled in response, but not in a way that suggested she’d be returning the sentiment. Briefly, Dan sympathized with her—she had the sort of easy-going beauty that meant she probably spent a good part of her daily life dealing with the fanciful thoughts of male colleagues. He laughed to himself, then, not sure why he thought he was any different.
They left and Per locked the door and handed the key to Inger, but then looked at Dan, struck by a sudden thought.
“You asked what he did all the time. The postman, he didn’t come very often, just bills, you know, things like that, but he said normally Jack was in the garage.”
Dan looked across at the garage. It was open at the front and a pretty new-looking SUV was poking out.
“I can’t imagine that car needing much work.”
Per smiled and said, “I said exactly the same thing, but the garage is bigger than it looks from here. There’s a big old motorbike behind there, a real old wreck—he was always working on it, that’s what the postman said.”
“Okay, thanks.” For want of something else to say, he added, “I’ll take a look at it later.”
What he was actually thinking as they climbed into the car and drove back onto the road was that this had been a half-life lived here, a half-life curtailed by that bus crash.
Yes, the man who hadn’t been Jacques Fillon had come here for a reason, escaped for a reason, was a person of interest to the CIA for any number of reasons, but this, the last twelve years, had not been a life. It had probably been as depressingly dull and limited as it looked on the surface.
The man had lived with barely any human interaction, no apparent connection with the outside world, and his days had been spent visiting a nearby town or tinkering with an old wreck of a bike. Dan didn’t want that to be the sum of it, but he knew all too well that it most likely was.