by Kepler, Lars
Saga was watching from the veranda when she drove up in an old estate car. She stopped behind the Jeep in the carport, got out, put a rucksack down on the ground, then opened the back of the car.
A tall woman in her thirties, Amanda was wearing a black cap over her strawberry-blonde hair, black hunting clothing, and heavy hiking boots with ankle supports and ski-boot fastenings.
She gave the two police dogs some water after the drive, and Saga went up to her.
‘You found us,’ she said, holding out her hand.
Amanda seemed shy, she averted her gaze a little too quickly, then introduced her dogs.
Billie, a Belgian sheepdog, specialised in finding dead bodies, picking up the smell of cadavers and dried blood. Her head was black, but her thick mane was almost reddish-blonde.
Ella, a black retriever, was trained to find people alive. She had been flown down to Italy after the most recent earthquake.
Saga crouched down and talked to Ella, hugging her and patting her behind the ears, and telling her she had to find her dad alive.
Ella stood still, listening, and wagging her tail.
Though she wasn’t wearing suitable clothing, Saga decided to go into the forest with Amanda and the dogs. She needed to be sure they didn’t miss anything when they got tired, that they didn’t miss any trace of a scent. They used their torches to light their way, letting the dogs decide which direction they should take.
It took them almost six hours to search the dense forest. Saga tore her jeans and kept catching her hair on jagged branches.
Amanda had superimposed a grid on a satellite map so that she could mark off the sections as they searched them.
They reached Björknäs without having found any trace of Valeria or Saga’s father.
By the time they got back to their vehicles, Saga had begun to feel the cold and the dogs were showing signs of fatigue; Ella had white froth at the corners of her mouth, though she still wagged her tail when Saga petted her, while Billie had seemed nervous, whimpering, and twitching her pointed ears as if eager to be away.
Now Saga turns the shower off and dries herself, puts plasters on the deepest cuts, puts on clean underwear, a pair of loose velour trousers and a washed-out T-shirt, then puts her shoulder holster and pistol back on.
She gets her protective vest and stuffs it into a canvas bag, along with a knife and several boxes of ammunition.
On the hall floor in front of the door she lays out her motorbike helmet, overalls and boots.
She needs to be ready if they find her dad. She needs to be ready to leap into action if they get any sort of tip-off, if anyone sees the Beaver or Jurek.
She opens her gun-cabinet, takes out a small Sig Sauer P290, checks that it’s loaded, feeds a bullet into the chamber, releases the safety catch and fastens it under the kitchen table with a piece of duct tape.
She puts the roll of tape down, then stops and forces herself to stand completely still.
She’s starting to act like Joona.
If anyone could see her now they’d think she was paranoid.
She needs to pull herself together and think clearly.
Pellerina is safe.
She repeats that several times to herself.
Pellerina is safe. And Saga is not going to give up until she’s found her dad.
It’s a terrible situation, but she can cope.
One day all this will be nothing but memories, she tells herself. Painful memories, but they’ll fade a bit more with each passing year.
She takes a wine-box out of the larder, pours herself a glass of red, looks at the trembling surface and takes a sip.
Saga sits down at the kitchen table, drinks some more, takes out the second-hand pay-as-you-go mobile and calls Pellerina, even though they’ve already spoken on the phone twice today. She hasn’t told her sister that the reason she hasn’t been to see her is because it’s too dangerous. She doesn’t want to scare Pellerina, but she knows that a single visit could give away her secret address.
She misses her sister badly, wishes she could cuddle and joke with her, but she can’t let herself give in.
‘Sabrina’s really nice,’ Pellerina says in her slightly breathless voice.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to sleep OK if she’s with you?’
‘Why can’t you be with me?’
‘I have to work.’
‘At night.’
‘Is that OK?’
‘I’m twelve now.’
‘I know, you’re a big girl.’
‘We can say goodnight if you’ve got to work,’ her sister says.
‘I’ve got time to talk a bit longer.’
‘It’s OK.’
‘Goodnight, Pellerina, I love you,’ she says.
‘Saga?’
‘Yes?’
‘I was thinking,’ she says quietly, then falls silent.
‘What are you thinking?’
‘Have I got to stay here so the clown girls don’t get me?’
50
Saga checks that her front door is locked, then puts her holster and pistol under the other pillow on her double bed.
It took her almost an hour to calm Pellerina down enough for them to be able to say goodnight.
First they talked about how the clown girls were only make-believe, then Saga steered the conversation onto the film Frozen, but just as she was about to end the call Pellerina started begging her to go and get her.
She could hear that her sister was still crying when they eventually ended the call.
Saga turns the light out, rolls over onto her side, and lays her head on the pillow.
She feels tiredness sweep through her body and closes her eyes, but then she starts thinking about her dad and her increased heart rate pulses in her ears.
This is his second night in a grave.
The temperature will fall below freezing, the ground will harden, the grass start to sparkle with frost.
She has to find her dad.
And then she has to find and kill Jurek. He’s hiding out there somewhere. She needs to lure him into the light and finish what she once started.
Saga has just entered deep sleep when she dreams that a rough hand is stroking her cheek.
It belongs to her mum, who’s grown old. When Saga realises that she’s still alive, she feels full of an intense gratitude.
She tries to explain how happy she is.
Her mum stares at her, shakes her head, walks backwards through the room, hits her back against the window, and manages to get tangled up in the cord of the blind.
Saga jerks awake and opens her eyes. It’s dark in the bedroom. She’s only been asleep for an hour.
She blinks and tries to figure out what woke her up. Her phone is charging, and its screen is dark.
She’s just telling herself that she needs to get back to sleep when she sees the thin figure sitting on the chair next to the window.
She starts to wonder if it’s her dad, then fear takes over, and adrenalin surges through her nervous system.
She realises who it is.
Her heart is pounding as she slips her hand under the other pillow, but her pistol is no longer there.
‘Little siren, always lethal,’ the man on the chair says.
It’s a voice she’ll never be able to forget, a voice she’s heard so many times in her nightmares.
The chair creaks as he leans over to one side, turns the standard lamp on, and looks at her.
‘And still just as beautiful,’ he goes on.
Jurek Walter’s pale eyes and wrinkled face are turned towards her.
He’s sitting up straight with her pistol and holster in his lap. He has a deep scar running across one cheek, and part of his ear is missing. He’s wearing a check shirt and the shiny plastic of his prosthetic hand looks like that of a small doll compared to his rough right hand.
Keeping her movements unhurried, Saga sits up in bed. Her heart is beating so fast that her breathing is ragged.
She knows she has to calm down, knows she has to play along until she can get to the pistol in the kitchen.
‘I thought I’d killed you that time,’ he says. ‘But I was in a hurry, I was sloppy.’
‘I thought I’d killed you,’ she replies, and swallows hard.
‘You very nearly did.’
‘Yes, I’ve read what Cornelia did,’ Saga says, breathing through her nose. ‘But I don’t understand why you’re putting yourself through all this, you could have gone to hospital, got proper care, avoided the pain.’
‘Pain doesn’t frighten me, it’s part of life,’ he says calmly.
‘But when will you be finished, when will all this be over?’ she asks, a shiver running down her spine as his pale eyes focus on her again.
‘Over?’ he repeats. ‘I live to restore order … and I’m inexhaustible, I was robbed, and that created a hole that needs to be filled.’
‘I understand,’ she replies, almost silently.
‘I had to survive … Joona took my brother from me, and I assume you realise that I’m going to take everything away from him.’
At the thought of that he seems almost to smile for a few seconds. The pattern of wrinkles deepens like a mesh spreading across his face.
She considers his remark, about thinking he’d killed her. It’s true, he hit her extremely hard, so hard that she passed out, but she’s sure he didn’t think he’d killed her.
For some reason he let her live.
And for some reason, he wants her to believe that that was a mistake.
She has to remind herself that Jurek lies all the time. Whether you believe the lies or see through them, you fall into the trap regardless.
Her only hope is to focus on finding some way of getting to the kitchen with enough of a head start to reach the pistol.
‘You still run your finger along your left eyebrow when you think,’ he says.
‘Good memory,’ Saga says, lowering her hand.
‘Do you know, I noticed that you were looking at me through your eyelids when I came into the bedroom … If you’d woken up then, you’d have had your Glock in your hand—’
Jurek breaks off, stands up and walks calmly over to the gun-cabinet, where he locks the pistol away.
‘It’s fascinating, isn’t it, the little evolutionary detail of our eyelids?’ he goes on, turning to face her once more. ‘We can see changes in the light when we’ve got our eyes closed, movement, silhouettes … and the brain registers sensory perceptions in our sleep.’
Saga turns her face away so as not to reveal how agitated she feels. She tells herself not to lose control now, she needs to stay calm, but she can’t understand how he knows her secrets.
When she was small, she often had trouble getting to sleep; of a night she would lie awake, listening and registering the slightest movement through her eyelids.
Whenever she thought she saw something, she would open her eyes and check her bedroom.
She’s never told anyone about this compulsive behaviour, not even a boyfriend, and she’s never written about it in any diary.
Almost all children have compulsive thoughts, but what makes the memory of this one so painful is that she later realised it was connected to genuine survival. When her mum had her manic episodes, she used to imagine all sorts of things, seeing enemies everywhere and getting aggressive.
Saga needed to wake up if her mum crept into her room in the night, so she could calm her down.
Saga knows Jurek’s trying to provoke her. She needs to focus, keep the conversation going, not let him trick her.
He wants her to believe that he can see right through her.
But of course he can’t.
She needs to think.
Maybe she told him that bit about eyelids when she was in the high-security unit, when she was drugged.
She was given Trilafon and Cipramil, as well as intravenous injections of Stesolid, and Haldol Depot directly into her muscles.
The strong medication must have affected her judgement and caused lapses in her memory.
That’s the only logical explanation, she thinks, and meets his gaze again. His pale eyes are observing her as if he’s trying to determine what effect his words have had on her.
‘Your sister was hiding behind the curtain,’ he said. ‘I realised that afterwards … very good, you’ve trained her well.’
‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.
‘Do you really want to know?’
51
Saga pushes the covers back, lowers her feet to the floor and stands up. She doesn’t have to play by his rules.
‘Sit still,’ he says.
All she can think about is getting to the kitchen, snatching the pistol from under the table, and shooting him in both thighs.
And once he’s lying on the floor, she’ll shoot him in his good arm.
Which would render him all but harmless.
She’ll put him in the bath and let him bleed until he tells her what she wants to know. He’ll talk, and as soon as she finds out where her dad is, she’ll kill him.
‘I just want some water,’ she mutters, and turns towards the door.
She knows what Joona said: don’t wait, kill Jurek instantly, as soon as you get the chance. He’d have said that the likelihood of finding her dad alive would only shrink if she listened to Jurek, even if she did have the advantage.
Jurek gets up from the chair as she walks across the bedroom. She can feel his eyes following her, lingering on her face, neck, the plasters on her arms.
‘Stay here,’ he says.
She turns towards him, scratches her stomach and looks him in the eye.
‘I’m not going to try to escape,’ she smiles, then carries on into the hall with no urgency.
She hears him follow her, but can’t figure out how big her head start is. The light from the standard lamp shows her shadow sliding across the wall, closely followed by his.
Without stopping, she nudges the bedroom door and carries on towards the kitchen.
As she emerges into the hall she realises that Jurek is right behind her. He’s not going to let her go to the kitchen on her own.
She glances at the closed front door, and the clothes and helmet on the floor.
Perhaps she could run away from him and grab the gun.
She hesitates, because the kitchen door is closed, and the moment is gone. When she passes the dresser with her keys and some scented candles on top of it, she can hear his breathing behind her.
Without any hurry, she opens the door to the kitchen, turns the light on and walks over to the sink without looking at the table.
Jurek watches her as she waits for the water to run cold. She fills a glass, then turns to face him and drinks.
His check flannel shirt is hanging down over the narrow prosthetic hand, whereas the right sleeve is pushed up to the elbow. His time as a soldier and his work as a mechanic made him tough, she thinks, looking at the oddly coarse hand, the muscles and thick veins beneath the wrinkled skin of his lower arm.
When she casts a quick glance at the table, she sees that one of the chairs is in an unfortunate position. She’ll have to shove it out of the way to reach the gun.
Saga drinks some more, then gestures towards the table with the damp glass in her hand.
‘Shall we sit down instead?’
‘No.’
The pistol weighs so little that it only took one strip of tape to fasten it. That will save her vital seconds. Because even if she tears the tape off with the pistol, it won’t get in the way when she shoots.
Jurek goes over to the counter and takes a glass from the wall cupboard. She moves a little further away, a few steps closer to the table.
The moment she hears the tap run she walks quickly and silently towards the hidden weapon. She puts the glass down, shoves the chair aside with one hand and reaches under the table with the other. Just as she’s about to grasp the gun he shoves her, pushing her forward with great force
.
She tumbles over two chairs and hits the wall with her shoulder blade, sinks to one knee, tries to get to her feet and fumbles across the table for support.
The glass container full of cornflakes falls to the floor and shatters.
He yanks her hard by the hair, brings the prosthetic down on her ear so hard that she collapses sideways, sending one chair flying as she tries to stay on her feet.
Her whole head is ringing from the blow.
He lashes out again, and Saga jerks her head out of the way and hits him in the face with a right hook.
His hand grabs her neck and starts to squeeze her throat. He pulls her towards him and hits her across the cheek and neck with the hard prosthesis, making her vision flare.
He’s acting without any sign of fury, just cold efficiency.
Blood is running down her cheek from a cut in one eyebrow.
He jerks her sideways by the neck and hits her again, she tries to protect herself with her hand but can feel her legs starting to buckle.
He strikes her head again, and she falls, hitting her temple on the wooden floor.
A rush of emptiness sweeps through her.
Her toes are tingling.
She blinks but can’t see anything.
On some level she realises that he’s dragging her by the hair back to the bedroom.
Jurek sits her in the chair by the window, pulls off his belt, wraps it round her neck and ties it to the back of the chair.
She can’t breathe.
She can make out Jurek standing in front of her, not moving, just watching her. The prosthesis has come loose in the struggle and is hanging from its straps and the shirt.
Saga tries to insert her fingers under the belt to stretch it. She’s struggling to get air into her lungs, kicking out with her legs, trying to topple the chair but all she can do is bang it against the wall.
Her field of vision contracts and she sees flickering images of Pellerina against a white sky before he suddenly loosens the belt around her neck.
She coughs and gasps for breath, leaning forward over her knees as she spits bloody saliva onto the floor.
‘Sit up,’ he says calmly.
She straightens up, coughs again. Her face and neck are throbbing with pain. Jurek is standing by her bookcase, pulling the duct tape from the little pistol with his mouth.
