Lazarus

by Kepler, Lars

  There are blankets folded neatly over the arms of the chairs, and the glass table is clean and bare.

  Joona lowers the binoculars and looks at Nathan. His face looks sombre, his nose red with cold.

  ‘Nothing?’ Nathan says with a shiver.

  ‘No,’ Joona says, then realises what it was that was unsettling him.

  It wasn’t anything he saw, but something that was missing from the picture. An ordinary middle-class family with two children, and there wasn’t a single Christmas decoration in sight on 12 December. No Advent candelabra or stars in the windows, no strings of lights, no decorations in the garden.

  The police car has driven right up to the house in Mindal and parked in the snow-covered drive.

  Saga and the two officers are sitting in the car, looking at the house.

  The snow is falling more heavily now.

  Through one window they can see a girl wearing headphones, doing her homework.

  The snow on the drive is untouched. No vehicles have come or gone since the snow started falling.

  One door of the double garage is open. Saga can make out a golf-buggy, a few sun-bleached cushions for garden furniture, a huge barbeque, a lawnmower and a spade with a rusty handle.

  The radio crackles and Joona’s voice breaks the silence.

  He and Nathan are in position at the back of the house. They can’t see anyone, and there’s nothing remarkable except the absence of any Christmas decorations. They’re staying hidden in the forest, but are ready to go in through the back door if necessary.

  Saga gets out of the car with the two uniformed officers. Ingrid starts to cough as she breathes the cold air into her lungs.

  ‘OK?’ Jim asks quietly.

  She nods and the three of them walk towards the house. Through the window they see a man removing shiny cutlery from a dishwasher.

  He’s wearing a pastel-blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

  They stop in front of the door, stamp the snow from their shoes, then ring the doorbell.

  Saga moves aside, puts her hand in her pocket, and takes hold of her pistol.

  The breath is like smoke around their mouths.

  Her face is stinging with cold.

  They hear footsteps inside as someone approaches the door.

  Saga reminds herself that Jurek or the Beaver could be inside the house, and that Pellerina and Valeria could be buried in the garden or in the forest behind the house.

  The lock clicks and the door is opened by the man from the kitchen. He looks tanned, has a blond moustache, and tired rings under his eyes.

  He’s standing on the white marble floor in his socks. Behind him a broad staircase leads up to the second storey and down to the basement.

  ‘Tommy Nordin?’ Saga asks.

  ‘Yes,’ he replies, looking at her quizzically.

  ‘We’ve had a report about a disturbance.’

  ‘A disturbance?’

  ‘We need to come in and talk to you and your wife.’

  ‘But there haven’t been any disturbances here,’ the man says slowly.

  ‘All the same, we need to talk to you, seeing as we received a report,’ Saga says.

  The girl who had been sitting at the kitchen table comes out into the hall. Her movements are strangely drowsy. She’s taken her headphones off. Her straight blonde hair is hanging beside her cheeks, and she’s drawn in her eyebrows and applied make-up to cover the spots on her chin. Her lips are thin and she’s dressed in jeans, white socks, and a Hollister polo-shirt with a dirty collar.

  ‘Ask Mimmi,’ the man says, nodding towards the girl. ‘Ask her … Anna-Lena and I have split up, I haven’t seen her in the past two months, she’s moved to Solna with our son.’

  ‘So it’s just the two of you living here?’

  ‘Yes,’ the father replies.

  ‘Then you won’t mind us coming and taking a look around,’ Jim says.

  ‘Don’t you need a warrant from a prosecutor to do that?’

  ‘No,’ Saga replies curtly.

  ‘We can question and arrest someone without a permit,’ Ingrid explains.

  ‘That sounds like a threat,’ the man says, stepping aside so they can go in.

  82

  In the hall Saga unbuttons her jacket so she can quickly reach the pistol in her shoulder holster.

  She blows on her cold fingers as she looks over at the staircase.

  There are no lights on upstairs or down in the basement.

  Ingrid is leaning against the wall with one hand as she wipes her shoes on the doormat.

  There’s a sudden clatter as Jim accidentally knocks into a long-handled broom.

  There are dust and hairs caught in its head.

  They follow the father into a large, open-plan kitchen. The dining room is separated from the kitchen by a full-length white screen.

  ‘We do have a home-cinema system that can be quite loud,’ the father says, running his tongue over his front teeth.

  The girl says nothing, just walks slowly back to the island unit and sits down on the barstool in front of her schoolbooks again.

  Saga can’t help thinking that Joona’s right. Even though the parents have separated, it’s odd that they haven’t put up any Christmas decorations in the kitchen or dining room.

  It feels as if time has stood still in here.

  There are white orchids in the window.

  The snow-covered golf course is visible through the trees.

  A frosted-glass door leads through to the living room, and there’s a half-open wooden door leading to a corridor.

  ‘Would you like coffee?’ the man asks.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Saga replies.

  The thin screen between the kitchen and dining room is semi-transparent, and sways gently in the slightest draught.

  The man carries on emptying the dishwasher, lining up the clean glasses on the worktop.

  ‘Could you leave that for the time being?’ Saga says.

  He turns and looks at her with a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows.

  ‘Have you had any visitors recently?’ she asks.

  ‘What do you mean by visitors?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  He scratches the top of one arm, then goes on emptying the dishwasher.

  Saga watches him, changes position and sees that he’s broken out in a sweat.

  ‘No visitors?’

  She moves the screen aside with her hand and walks into the dining room, past a large table with a stone top, then turns back towards Tommy Nordin again.

  ‘If it wasn’t a domestic row, what was it?’ Saga says, addressing her words to the screen.

  ‘Like I said, we were probably watching a film,’ the father says.

  Through the screen, the kitchen looks like it’s covered in thick fog. Saga sees the girl glance unhappily at her father.

  ‘Every day?’ Saga asks.

  ‘It varies.’

  ‘Which days this week?’

  Ingrid straightens up and sticks her chest out beneath her uniform, and Jim is standing with one hand on his holster watching the man.

  Saga goes over to one of the windows overlooking the snow-covered garden. Flakes are still falling, only to be swallowed up by the existing whiteness. The branches of the fir trees are weighed down. She leans closer to the pane and feels the cold through the glass. A trail of dark footprints leads from the entrance, round the garage and over to a snow-covered playhouse.

  Her heart starts to beat faster.

  What have they been doing in the playhouse?

  The number of footprints indicates that they’ve been there several times.

  She goes back into the kitchen, round the island unit, and feels her hand trembling as she puts it down on the marble top.

  Very cautiously, she slips her other hand inside her jacket and takes hold of her pistol.

  From this position she can cover both father and daughter, as well as the entrances to the living room, corridor and hal
l.

  ‘When did you stop using the playhouse?’ Saga asks the girl.

  ‘Don’t know,’ she replies quietly, and goes on staring at her books.

  ‘After the first summer?’ Saga suggests.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl nods, without looking at Saga.

  ‘So what do you keep in there?’ Saga asks the girl.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Look outside,’ Saga says. ‘There are deep footprints in the snow.’

  The girl doesn’t look, just keeps her eyes trained on her books.

  ‘The neighbours have two little girls, they sometimes use it,’ she whispers.

  ‘In the winter?’ Saga says, letting go of the pistol.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl says, still not looking at Saga.

  ‘Hasn’t this gone on long enough, now?’ the man says, rubbing the back of his neck hard.

  ‘Soon,’ Jim says amiably.

  ‘You can start by showing my colleague your bedroom,’ Saga says.

  ‘Look, I’m really not happy with this … this is an invasion of privacy, I haven’t done anything.’

  The girl lowers her head slightly and covers her ears, but seems to realise what she’s doing and puts her hands back down on the worktop.

  ‘Soon as we’ve taken a look around, we’ll leave you in peace,’ Jim says.

  Saga thinks she can hear knocking through the walls. She holds her breath and listens, but it’s all quiet again. Maybe it was just snow falling from the roof.

  The father dries his hands on a check-patterned tea-towel, then tosses it on the counter and walks towards the hall.

  His dark blue socks are so worn that his white heels are visible through them.

  Jim glances at Ingrid, then follows the man out of the kitchen. The two men’s footsteps echo into the kitchen as they go upstairs.

  The girl hasn’t turned the page of her book once. She’s still staring at the opening page about Sweden’s years as a great power.

  ‘Your name’s Miriam?’ Saga says.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and swallows hard. ‘Everyone calls me Mimmi.’

  ‘And you’re at high school?’

  ‘First year.’

  Ingrid has walked over to the frosted door leading to the living room.

  ‘What subjects?’ Saga asks.

  ‘Soc … social sciences.’

  ‘Did you hear those thuds?’

  The girl shakes her head and Saga notices that she’s got grubby plasters on her thumbs.

  ‘What year do they say Sweden first became a great power?’ Saga asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Which century?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ the girl mumbles and closes the book.

  ‘Do you remember if you’ve had any visitors in the past week?’ Saga goes on.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she says in a monotone.

  ‘Mimmi,’ Saga says, taking a step closer to her. ‘I’m a superintendent in the police, and I can tell that something’s happened here.’

  The girl’s been biting her pen, the end is chewed and squashed. She carries on staring at the table.

  ‘What’s happened here?’ Saga persists.

  ‘Nothing,’ Mimmi whispers to herself.

  ‘Why haven’t you got any Christmas decorations up?’ Ingrid asks amiably.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why haven’t you got any Advent stars, or gingerbread biscuits?’

  The girl shakes her head as if the question was annoying and irrelevant.

  Saga wonders if they’re a perfectly ordinary family that hasn’t yet been drawn into Jurek’s world, a family who are blissfully unaware that one of the constellation’s stars is located right where their house is.

  But at the same time it’s obvious that they’re hiding something. Both father and daughter have a look of raging panic in their eyes.

  ‘Can you show me your room?’ she says.

  ‘It’s in there,’ the girl says, pointing at the door leading to the corridor.

  ‘Show me.’

  The girl gets to her feet without a word.

  ‘Who is it who plays golf?’ Ingrid asks as they set off.

  ‘The whole family, but I do a bit of extra work coaching kids.’

  Saga and Ingrid follow the girl through the door to the corridor. The passageway is fairly long and ends at a bathroom. A thin line of LED-lights runs along the bottom of the left-hand wall.

  Two doors lead to the children’s rooms. According to the signs, the first is Axel’s, the second Mimmi’s.

  The floor outside the boy’s room is ice-cold. A sign saying ‘No entry’ has been taped to the door beneath the sign.

  Saga gestures to Ingrid to stay in the corridor while she goes into Mimmi’s room with her.

  They pass the small door of a closet under the stairs leading to the upper floor. The girl automatically closes the door as she passes it.

  On the wall above the unmade bed is a poster of a very thin David Bowie holding up a thick book with a black star on it, like some evangelical priest.

  There’s a box of sleeping pills on the bedside table.

  In the corner, on the back of a chair, hangs a Halloween mask, some sort of zombie: a bloody skull jutting out from a man’s torn mouth.

  ‘So you’ve passed the princess stage,’ Saga says.

  ‘Yes,’ the girl replies.

  It sounds as if someone’s banging on a door a long way away.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Saga says, looking at her.

  ‘No,’ the girl says slowly.

  Saga looks towards the window. Large snowflakes are falling through the light radiating from the room.

  ‘And just you and your dad live here?’

  The girl doesn’t answer, merely prods the repulsive mask absentmindedly.

  The ceiling creaks and Saga assumes that Jim and the girl’s father are on their way back downstairs.

  ‘Sit down on the bed,’ she says.

  The mattress springs protest as the girl obeys. The bottoms of her white socks are filthy.

  ‘Mimmi … you know you’re going to have to tell me what’s happened,’ Saga says seriously.

  ‘It would probably be better if I died,’ the girl whispers.

  83

  Ingrid is standing in the corridor, listening as Saga talks calmly to the girl in her bedroom. It seems to her that this family has been badly damaged by the divorce, all their happiness has gone.

  Ingrid looks hesitantly at the door to Axel’s room. She isn’t sure if the superintendent meant for her to go in there, or just wait.

  Dust is drifting along the floor of the corridor, lit up by the white glow of the LEDs.

  She presses the handle down and goes into the boy’s room.

  It’s dark and cold.

  She can hear a faint scraping, rasping sound.

  There are large model aeroplanes hanging from the ceiling on nylon threads.

  Through the wall Ingrid can hear Saga Bauer talking to the daughter.

  There’s a strong smell of rotting flowers in the air.

  She steps further in. Her uniform creaks with her body’s movements.

  The window is wide open, letting the ice-cold wind in. The catch is rattling with the gusts and the curtains are billowing.

  Several sheets of paper have blown off the desk.

  Something’s terribly wrong.

  The aeroplanes swing in a fresh gust, and the door to the corridor slams shut. The wardrobe creaks.

  Ingrid looks at a poster of the superhero, Wonder Woman, with her shield on her back, as she walks further into the room.

  A boy is lying on the bed, staring up at her with reddish-brown eyes.

  He’s almost entirely covered with flowers.

  His face is covered with black burn marks, and his greenish torso is swollen with gas.

  He must have been dead for a week, maybe longer.

  ‘Bauer, you need to see this,’ Ingrid calls out loudly.


  The curtain billows again, then sinks back.

  From the corner of her eye Ingrid sees the wardrobe door open. A chill runs down her spine, she turns and just has time to see the hard expression on the woman’s face before the axe hits her in the head. The back of Ingrid’s head thuds into the wall with the superhero poster. The thick blade has penetrated so deeply into her brain that everything goes dark and silent. She doesn’t even notice as her legs buckle beneath her and she ends up lying on her back with her neck against the wall at an unnaturally sharp angle as blood gushes onto the floor.

  After saying it might be better if she was dead, the girl clams up entirely. She stops answering questions and sits there tight-lipped with her head bowed. When Saga hears her colleague call her, she tells Mimmi to stay where she is and wait until she comes back.

  ‘Promise not to move,’ Saga says.

  She hears a loud thud against the wall, and the pin-board above Mimmi’s desk shakes.

  Mimmi stares at Saga with a look of horror in her eyes, then clamps both hands over her ears.

  Saga goes out into the corridor, but Ingrid isn’t there. She looks towards the kitchen, then notices that the door to the boy’s bedroom is open slightly.

  ‘Ingrid,’ she says quietly.

  Saga moves closer and feels the cold wind from the dark room, hesitates, then steps into it. The curtains are fluttering in front of the open window, snow is swirling in, and petals are drifting across the floor.

  Behind the heavy scent of hyacinths is the stench of death.

  It isn’t a conscious perception, but it makes her more wary.

  A pale reflection slips across one wall.

  Saga takes another step into the room and simultaneously notices the axe swinging towards her from one side.

  All her years of boxing have taught her to judge the direction of the blow correctly. She instinctively lowers her head and slips backwards and off to one side. The blade of the axe misses her face and slices into the plasterboard, before coming to rest on an internal beam.

  Saga stumbles out into the corridor before the woman has time to pull the axe loose. She reaches out to the wall to keep her balance and backs away as she draws her Glock from its holster.

  Aiming the pistol at the door, she retreats a bit further and glances quickly over her shoulder.

  There’s no one behind her.