by Kepler, Lars
‘I hope you’re there now,’ the man says.
‘It’s really cold, I can’t feel my legs any more … I don’t think I can survive another night …’
‘That’s not our problem,’ the woman said, weighing the axe in her hands.
‘Did Jurek tell you to kill us?’
‘We’re just guarding you,’ the man replied.
‘We’re not supposed to talk to her,’ the teenage girl blurted.
‘I don’t want to frighten Pellerina,’ Valeria went on. ‘But she’s small, she’ll soon freeze to death – you understand that, don’t you?’
‘Lie back down,’ the man said, taking a step towards her and raising the rifle.
He was so close she could see the blond hairs on his arms.
‘I mean, you could take us up into the house, I’m so weak I probably can’t even stand up now … you could tie me up, you’re armed, after all—’
They threw a bag of food scraps into the coffin, forced the lid down again, and tightened the straps.
Valeria’s fingers were too weak to untie the knot, so she had to rip the bag open with her teeth.
She ate a little of the boiled potatoes and sausage and almost threw up, but concentrated on keeping the food down.
Her stomach warmed up and her thoughts drifted off in a very odd way, and she realised that the food was drugged, and that they were either sedating or killing her.
For a few moments she dreamed about a pink hummingbird and a beautiful Chinese tapestry moving in the wind before she jerked and opened her eyes in the darkness.
The seal around the lid of the coffin started to glow white and blue. She thought she could hear loose straps fall onto the dry earth beneath the house, the clatter of a winch.
In her drugged state, she thought that they were opening Pellerina’s coffin. She thought she could hear her crying as they lifted her up into the house.
Valeria has no idea how long she’s been unconscious.
It feels like at least a day.
Her head aches and her mouth is dry.
She realises that they drugged her so they could put more clothes on her. They must have believed her story about being an addict, and that Pellerina hadn’t burned anyone’s face.
Pellerina isn’t down here with her any more, maybe they’ve even let her go. Now Valeria has to try to save herself, try to turn her story against Jurek, get them to understand that he was using her.
80
Saga washes her face in the basin of one of the toilets of the Intensive Care Unit on the fourth floor of the Karolinska Hospital.
She tells herself once more that she needs to pull herself together. But the tears bubble up again and she sits down on the toilet seat and tries to breathe slowly.
‘I can do this,’ she whispers.
She had been round at the back of the industrial unit, kicking a pile of frozen autumn leaves and walking along the fence by the railway line when she heard Joona call out that he’d found something in a skip.
A train rattled past.
It was as if she’d fallen through the ice on a lake and was sinking through freezing water.
The weeds were swaying in the wind as dust and rubbish were swirled into the air.
The sudden fear was like an immense, all-encompassing tiredness.
A chance to give in, to lie down on the ground, and stop time.
Instead she’d clung to the low fence backing onto the railway embankment.
And when she heard Joona call out that one of them was still alive, she began to walk, as if through deep sand.
She didn’t notice her bag falling to the ground. It must have slid off her shoulder.
All she could think was that she should have let Jurek kill her.
It was all her fault.
Black crows were perched on the ground outside the premises of VVS Enterprises.
Saga turned the corner and stepped out into the road, saw the truck carrying the skip, and caught a glimpse of the driver through the windscreen.
Joona was shouting something, and Nathan turned towards her. She had seen her own terror reflected in his face. He’d walked towards her, holding his hands up to calm her, and stopped her from going any closer.
‘My sister,’ she mumbled, trying to get past him.
‘Please, wait, you have to—’
‘Who is it who’s still alive?’
‘I don’t know, the ambulance is on its way, and—’
‘Pellerina!’ she cried.
She thinks back to how Nathan held onto her, telling her she had to wait, then she ended up sitting in Joona’s car a few hundred metres away, shivering.
Three police cars and six ambulances arrived.
Their blue lights flew across the buildings and fences, casting quick shadows across the tarmac and bushes.
Through the car’s windscreen she watched the paramedics work.
At first the activity around the truck was frenetic and intense.
But everyone apart from the naked woman was dead. Saga could tell from the way they were handling the bodies.
There were three people standing in the skip, cutting the bin-bags open and lifting out body after body.
Saga tried to see if any of the bodies looked like a child’s, but she was too far away and her view was obscured. One ambulance reversed out, and uniformed officers cordoned off the area.
She only managed to catch a glimpse of one of the shattered bodies as they were lifted out of the skip and lined up on the ground. She saw a narrow leg hit the rusty edge of the skip, and a black bin-bag stuck to a thickset man’s back.
The first ambulance left the area, taking the woman away. She heard the sirens start to blare as it pulled out onto Järfallavägen.
Saga couldn’t tell if Valeria was among the dead, or if Pellerina’s naked body was lying at the far end of the row.
She opened the car door and got out. She didn’t want to go, but she had to.
It felt like she was wading through water, thick, blue, sluggish. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to make it.
Joona had been standing to one side of the paramedics. He didn’t see her coming. She tried to read his face.
He looked sad, focused.
Saga walked up to the cordon. One of the uniformed officers recognised her and let her through.
She heard herself thank him, and carried on, stopping a few steps away from the bodies, bloody and horribly pale.
Neither Pellerina nor Valeria were among the dead.
She’d had to check several times.
The body at the far end was a young man in his twenties, with green eyes and dark hair. His throat had been cut, and his face and one side of his head had been badly beaten.
Saga had staggered and reached out to the fence for support, then walked off through the weeds, back to the road, where she stood for a while with her hands resting on the bonnet of one of the police cars. She remembers seeing her face hazily reflected in the white paint, and thinking that she really ought to go back and help. When she turned round, the paramedics were lifting the naked man onto a stretcher.
She sank into a crouch with her back against the front wheel of the police car, covered her face and wept with relief and gratitude that Pellerina wasn’t among the dead.
Eventually Joona came over and sat on the ground beside her. He had brought a blanket from the ambulance which he wrapped round her.
‘I thought she was one of the bodies,’ she said, wiping her tears away with both hands.
‘It’s OK to feel relieved, even if other people have suffered.’
‘I know, it’s just that … This isn’t like me, but I just can’t … I can’t bear the thought of anyone hurting her,’ she said, and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. ‘Pellerina is the wisest, most wonderful—’
‘We’re going to find her.’
‘What’s the plan now?’ Saga asked, trying to pull herself together.
‘If they can save the woman�
��s life, I need to talk to her,’ Joona had told her. ‘And after that I’m going to the summerhouse where Pollux’s other hand is located.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, but didn’t move when he stood up.
‘You don’t have to, you know.’
Saga rinses her face in the basin again, then dries herself off with paper towels and walks out of the hospital toilet. As she makes her way down the corridor she thinks about all the other people – parents, children, wives, boyfriends, and siblings of the dead people in the skip – who would be getting terrible news that day. This time she has been given a reprieve, she can still hope for a happy ending.
The unconscious woman has been identified as Emilia Torn. She was driven to the Intensive Care Unit at the Karolinska Hospital, where the decision was taken to sedate her. Both her arms and one leg are broken, she has severe trauma to the back of her skull, she’s been bitten in the neck, cut across the stomach, and has lost a lot of blood.
Joona comes running over with a set of protective clothing in his hands just as the doctor is about to go into the operating theatre.
‘Wait,’ he says. ‘I need to know if there’s any chance of talking to the patient. I’m a police officer, and—’
‘Then you know how this works,’ the doctor interrupts.
‘There are more lives at stake.’
‘She’s already been sedated, and is about to be anaesthetised properly so—’
‘I was the one who found her, I only need a couple of minutes,’ Joona interrupts, pulling on the protective tunic.
‘I can’t let you impede our work,’ the doctor says. ‘But you can have a try before we intubate.’
They go into the operating theatre where the staff are busy preparing. An anaesthesiologist is disinfecting the woman’s groin at the top of the leg that isn’t broken, then inserts a catheter into the vein.
The woman’s face is pale and yellowish, her skin already sweaty from the morphine. Some of her red hair is stuck to her cheek with congealed blood. Her broken arms are mottled with internal bleeding.
‘Emilia? Can you hear me?’
‘What?’ she replies, almost inaudibly.
‘Was there a child in the building, a little girl?’ he asks.
‘No,’ she whispers.
‘Think, was there a little girl with Down Syndrome?’
‘I don’t understand, he killed Ralf … he stamped on his face, then cut the guys’ throats, then attacked me and—’
‘Who did? Who did this?’
‘The producer, he just went crazy, he—’
‘Do you know his name?’
‘Auscultate heart and lungs,’ the doctor says, looking at the carbon-dioxide monitor.
‘Do you know how I can get hold of the producer?’
‘Who the fuck are you, anyway?’ she murmurs.
‘My name is Joona Linna, I’m a superintendent at—’
‘It’s all about you,’ she says in an uneven voice.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He kept shouting, saying you’d be trodden into the dirt, that you’d—’
Her body starts to shake and she coughs up blood over her chin and chest. Joona steps back to get out of the way of the team of doctors and nurses. He leaves the room, pulls off the protective clothing, then hurries along the corridor to the waiting room.
Saga and Nathan are sitting next to each other on one of the sofas, staring at their phones. Saga’s face is tense, her eyes bloodshot.
‘It doesn’t look like Pellerina was there,’ Joona says.
Saga nods to herself, then puts her phone away, and meets his gaze. Nathan moves the pile of brochures from the low table and spreads out the map with the constellation of Gemini drawn on it.
‘Seven locations left,’ he says. ‘Presumably we start with the other hand, the summerhouse?’
‘Maybe we’ve been thinking about this wrong,’ Joona says.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I’m convinced we’re going to find something there, but this is personal for Jurek, he said he wants to trample me into the dirt.’
‘The feet, you mean?’ Nathan says, looking up at Joona.
They bend over the map again and scrutinise it. The star marking Pollux’s left foot is in the middle of a road in Södertälje. But his right foot is located on a detached house north of Nykvarn.
81
While they were at the hospital the storm swept in across Stockholm, bringing huge amounts of snow and lowering the temperature still further.
Joona is driving fast through the heavy snow along the E20, heading towards Nykvarn. The snow has already settled between the lanes and along the verge.
Saga checks her pistol, then inserts the magazine.
Joona changes lane and overtakes a lorry on the wrong side.
A cloud of dirty snow flies up onto the bonnet and windscreen.
According to the property registry, the house that Pollux is standing on is owned by a middle-aged couple with two children.
Tommy and Anna-Lena Nordin run their own business, recruiting staff for other companies. Their daughter Miriam is fifteen, and goes to the high school in Tälje, and their son Axel is eight, and attends Björkesta School in Nykvarn.
Joona accelerates and the noise inside the car gets louder.
As they’re approaching the Almnäs junction, Joona sees a flashing blue light in the rear-view mirror. He slows down and pulls over to the side of the road.
In the back seat Nathan smiles, cradling his semiautomatic rifle on his lap.
The police car stops behind them, the front doors open and two uniformed officers get out. The female officer rolls towards them, breasts thrust out, while the man unfastens his holster.
They’ve stopped a dirty BMW that was doing 180 kilometres an hour. They already know that the car is registered to a man who has been given an unconditional discharge from prison, and they’re about to discover that the three people sitting in the car are heavily armed.
Considering the circumstances, it really didn’t take Ingrid and Jim of the Södertälje Police long to re-evaluate the situation.
At first Joona was reluctant to accept their offer of help, because they had no idea how dangerous the operation could turn out to be.
‘They’re experienced officers,’ Nathan said. ‘And we’ve been promised backup as soon as we’ve got proof of where Jurek is … We need their help to get inside the house.’
So now Saga is sitting in the back seat of the police car, going through the details of the operation with the two officers.
They’re following Joona’s BMW along the old Strängnäs road.
Snow flies up behind the two cars.
Ingrid and Jim have a thermos of coffee and a bag of saffron Lucia buns on the console between them.
They’re driving past the broad expanse of Vidbynäs Golf Club with its snow-covered bunkers and greens as Saga goes on sketching out possible scenarios.
‘The most dangerous possibility is that Jurek and the Beaver have taken over the house and are waiting inside, heavily armed, for us to show up,’ she says.
The police car almost slides as it turns right at Turinge Church and follows Joona’s BMW along a narrow road.
‘As long as we don’t have to do the triathlon,’ Jim says in a thick rural accent.
‘Nothing’s worse than the triathlon,’ Ingrid replies, in the same accent.
They laugh, then apologise and explain that they sometimes pretend to be Sture and Sten, two old men from Skaraborg.
‘They can’t stand physical exercise,’ Ingrid says with a smile.
‘We invented them when we started training for the triathlon together,’ Jim explains. ‘We’ve been at it for four years now, coaching each other …’
‘And now Sture and Sten are terrified, because we’ve signed up to do a full-length triathlon in the French Alps.’
‘Nothing’s worse than the triathlon,’ he says.
‘S
orry, we’re very silly,’ Ingrid laughs.
‘Well, we’re not that silly,’ Jim says, in his exaggerated accent.
They have to drive round the whole golf course to get to the house in Mindal. Beyond the manor house there are no further tyre-tracks in the snow. Bright orange poles mark the edges of the road to stop anyone driving into the ditches or fields.
Joona and Nathan pull over to the side of the road. The snow crunches as the tyres compact it before finally coming to a halt.
As soon as the police car and Saga have gone past, they get out of the car, step over the ditch and head up into the forest to make their way round to the back of the house without being seen.
It’s almost twenty degrees below freezing and the cold is stinging their faces and making their eyes water.
The snow is nowhere near as deep among the trees, and is littered with fallen pine-needles and cones.
As they walk, Joona scans the ground for any air-pipes, disturbed soil and bare ground.
A few snowflakes drift down through the trees.
After fifteen minutes they catch sight of the back of the house between the trees. They carry on cautiously before stopping at the edge of the forest.
The thick snow has blanketed the landscape in a deafening silence.
The house is modern, fairly large, two storeys with a black-panelled roof and grey façade.
Nothing about it suggests violence and death.
The snow on the lawn at the back of the house is untouched, gently undulating over flowerbeds and garden furniture.
Joona takes out his binoculars and starts to check the windows, one after the other. The curtains upstairs are all drawn.
He takes his time, but can’t see any sign of movement, no shadows.
Everything is quiet, but there’s something unsettling that he can’t put his finger on.
He moves down with the binoculars and sees that drifts of snow have built up against the veranda doors on the ground floor. Through the frosty glass he can make out a conservatory containing a sofa, two armchairs and a polished cement fireplace.
