Watching You

by Arne Dahl

  ‘Where’s the third house, William?’

  The clock clicks again. Now the pain pushes past all the other pain.

  ‘Why did you kill your aunt?’ Sam shouts.

  For the first time William looks at him with something like surprise.

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your aunt, Alicia Anger. Why did you kill her?’

  ‘Aunt Alice,’ William says dreamily. ‘She was kind. I didn’t even know she was alive. But I understand.’

  ‘What do you understand?’

  ‘How astonishingly slow you all were. I slipped up outside the school in Östermalm, with the van. I snatched the blonde one in daylight, when there were plenty of witnesses. It was time for you to start hunting me, to make it exciting. But nothing happened. So I let an old woman walking her dog see the van in Märsta. And nothing happened then either. Not until Molly showed up at Wiborg wanting a device to disrupt recording equipment. The context wasn’t quite clear, but if she wanted to hide something from the Security Service, it was probably something like this.’

  William gestures to one side, towards Molly’s smashed whiteboard. The silhouetted mountaineers are in pieces; Post-it notes are scattered across the floor.

  Then William leans over and studies the laptops more closely. The far window comes into view behind him. Sam sees something red through the blood running down into his eye. Through a smudge in the glass, where a sweaty hand cleared a peephole a quarter of a century earlier, a pair of eyes appear. The clock clicks again and the pain in his shoulders becomes more intense. But Sam refuses to scream.

  William straightens up; the window disappears.

  ‘I realised that Molly was doing something that wasn’t exactly by the book. So I programmed a little virus into the loop, mostly to cause a bit of trouble. The impact was considerably greater than I had anticipated.’

  William stands up and walks closer.

  ‘You’re going to break soon, Sam,’ he says, and smiles a proper William smile. ‘I want to watch it close up. I want to see the expression on your face when you realise not only that you’re dying, but that the seven perfectly innocent girls I’ve got to know so well in the course of the past few years will die too. Their shrill voices carried me to you. But now I’ve arrived. I don’t need them any more.’

  He stops at precisely the right distance and awaits the next tick of the clock.

  At precisely the right distance.

  Sam takes a deep breath, the deepest he has ever taken in his life. Then he yells with everything he has left: ‘Now!’

  The sounds are surprisingly muted. The world falls into slow motion.

  He sees the first bullet pump through William’s left foot, a second and third miss, the fourth shatters his right foot, a fifth disappears deep inside William’s body. When the sixth bullet flies up through the wooden floor he is no longer standing in the same place.

  William howls and throws himself towards the sleeping bag. He grabs hold of Molly’s blonde hair and pulls out a shot-up shop dummy. Then he yanks open the front door and disappears into the night.

  A drenched figure slips in through the door to the jetty just as the clock clicks again. Sam’s arms are pulled even further apart; pain now controls his being. Molly frees him from the contraption with a few slashes to the leather straps. As she cuts his legs loose she shouts: ‘Did I get him?’

  ‘Wounded,’ Sam says, rolling his shoulders. Everything seems to be in the right place. He grabs his Glock and rushes after the trail of blood into the pitch-blackness.

  The rain is howling; there are no leaves left on the trees. Even so, he can clearly hear the rustling song of the aspen trees. He can hear it even though he’s running, even though he’s running like he’s never run before, through the meadow grass that reaches up to his chest. The rustle of the aspen leaves is so oppressive, it feels like someone’s trying to get through from another time.

  The night feels viscous. Sam can feel how slowly he is moving. As if time isn’t quite real.

  The hair is no longer golden yellow, but it does slow down ahead of him. As the chalk-white head turns round, Sam knows he will never stop being astonished.

  He throws himself at William. William falls. They lie in a heap. It feels almost like they’re embracing.

  It’s as if all the blood has left William’s face, and through the growing pallor the scar tissue is becoming visible, almost pulsing across his face. Sam rolls off William and sees a far too large bloodstain spreading across the crotch of his light-coloured trousers, below the bulletproof vest, and down the trouser-legs.

  ‘Right in the cock, Sam,’ William hisses. ‘Just like before.’

  ‘Where’s the third house?’ Sam yells.

  ‘It’s full of death, Sam. Don’t forget the cogs.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  William’s breathing is rattling. The rain pours mercilessly on his whitening face.

  ‘I watched over them,’ William rattles. ‘I was the connection. It took its toll. I thought Anton would get rid of it, but that wasn’t enough. My knuckle marks were in the door.’

  ‘But you don’t want them to die,’ Sam cries. ‘You don’t want that, William. Nothing is their fault. You’ve got to know them. You don’t want to kill them. Not deep down.’

  William smiles weakly. Then he hisses: ‘It’s not a house, Sam. It’s the start of everything. Where I got my only friend.’

  Sam hears Molly race towards them with her gun raised. When she sees William she lowers it and says hoarsely: ‘Too much blood. It was the wrong ammunition.’

  William points at his crotch as it grows redder and redder, and whispers: ‘It’s you, Sam. You’ve never stopped whipping me.’

  Then he dies.

  William stares into his eyes. Sam has never seen such a black look in his whole life. Then there’s movement. It’s extremely slow. Sam sees it almost frame by frame. The long, blond hair lifts and is tossed back. The crooked, misshapen features emerge from below the hair, and out of that crookedness two rows of bared teeth emerge. They part. They approach Sam’s upper arm. He never feels the teeth penetrate his skin and then his flesh. He never hears the teeth meet, deep in his arm. He doesn’t hear it and he doesn’t feel it. And the pain radiating from his bicep doesn’t gain momentum before he sees the piece of flesh fall from William’s mouth, followed by a steady stream of blood. With distorted slowness the piece of flesh drifts down towards the dry grit of the football pitch. With a roar, Sam lifts the damp towel and goes on whipping. His vision goes dark, and he keeps whipping, lashing out over and over again until the blood runs freely.

  39

  Friday 30 October, 03.18

  They could already smell the bodies from the stairwell. It wasn’t strong, or at least not enough to rouse the neighbours. But the higher they climbed, the more Sam found himself in a different time.

  A time that didn’t smell of dead bodies.

  He was fifteen years old. The door to the flat was marked Larsson. Behind it waited a magical world of watches and clocks. There waited his good friend with the crooked face, the boy who with a gentle hand guided him into a world of perfectly attuned cogs, pinions, springs, shafts, weights and pendulums. A world where every second was a mystery.

  They had talked about how Switzerland became the centre of global clockmaking in the 1700s when the clockmakers of Paris, in their capacity as servants to the aristocracy, had to flee the French Revolution. And they had talked about the Antikythera mechanism, and how the Greeks had managed to create a mysteriously complex timepiece almost one hundred years before Christ.

  It was like a door opening in Sam’s brain, revealing an unknown world hidden inside the familiar everyday world, a better world that he may never have had access to without William. And it had happened behind the door which Sam, now more than twice the age he had been then, was standing front of. Molly caught up with him. She had her pistol drawn.

  It didn’t say Larsson on the letterbox, it said
Pachachi.

  The stench of bodies was stronger than before.

  Sam pulled out his lock-pick and inserted it as silently as he could. He looked at his hand. It was trembling badly. He glanced over towards Molly. She was pale, and shaking. They were both aware that some version of hell awaited behind the door to William’s childhood home. But there was no going back.

  This was it.

  They were in another universe, the real universe, where darkness reigned. All light was an illusion, a reassuring veneer of lies that allows us to live, gives us the strength to become adults. They were in a different era now, where barbarism still prevailed, where the chimaera of civilisation hadn’t yet broken through.

  They heard the click as the pick caught. Pistols raised, torches at the ready. The door opened.

  The air seemed to get sucked into the flat, as if the pressure in there were lower than in the world outside. And it was totally dark. The smell of bodies hit them like a wall. Sam looked quickly at the material around the door. He recognised it. Odour-isolating sealant. So that as little death as possible would seep out into the stairwell.

  They stood in the cramped hallway, trying to breathe the right way, the way they had been trained. As if training could fend off such extreme darkness.

  From beyond the stench, Sam’s childhood came back to him. He remembered every corner, every nook of the flat. The corridor to the left led to the kitchen and one of the bedrooms, the longer corridor to the right to the other bedroom and the living room. That was where William’s bedroom was, the unusually large but windowless room where two teenagers had sat fiddling with their clocks and watches. Their tiny cog wheels.

  William’s dying words: ‘Don’t forget the cogs.’

  They read the question in each other’s eyes.

  Who was dead?

  Which of the seven teenage girls would never have a chance to grow up?

  William’s dying words: ‘It’s full of death.’

  Sam suddenly noticed something pinned to one wall of the hall. When he shone his torch at it he realised that it was a watch. He recognised a tiny scratch in the glass.

  It was his Patek Philippe 2508 Calatrava.

  Ignoring it, he nodded to the left, towards the corridor that led to the kitchen and one bedroom. They took a room each.

  Sam quickly ascertained that the little bedroom was empty. He noted odour-isolating material around the bedroom door again. The electronic equipment on the desk indicated that this had been William’s most recent headquarters. There were bound to be a fair few answers in those computers.

  He turned and met Molly’s gaze. It was glassy as she nodded towards the kitchen. He left the bedroom and joined her.

  At the kitchen table sat two people. They might have been engaged in a conversation, just taking a short break. They were both young men, and they had been dead a long time. The flesh had begun to fall off them, and the parts that hadn’t completely dried out were crawling with maggots.

  Sam heard himself groan.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ he said.

  Molly was holding a handkerchief so tightly to her nose that Sam almost didn’t hear what she said. ‘Two young men with beards and loose-fitting clothes.’

  ‘Brother and friend back from IS?’

  She shrugged. They walked out, through the hall and past the front door. The corridor was much longer than he remembered. It was as if they were navigating a body. From somewhere far ahead shimmered an almost guttering source of light. It was as if the gloomy corridor’s walls were closing in on them, contracting and getting ready to propel them into a time that had long since been lost.

  As if time was ever lost.

  When they reached the living room they realised where the light was coming from. There was another door, one that was simultaneously familiar and unknown to Sam. He recognised all too well the mark in the veneered surface of the door, four impressions, from the knuckles of a fist. The door to William’s childhood room had always looked like that.

  But it definitely hadn’t given off its own light.

  They went over to it.

  ‘Fluorescent paint,’ Molly said.

  Sam inspected the door. It had evidently been reinforced, and there was no keyhole, just a lock that looked electronic. Beside the door sat a small box containing what appeared to be a microphone.

  ‘I think it’s rigged,’ Molly said, peering at the lock.

  ‘Explosives?’ Sam asked as he went on inspecting the box.

  ‘Definite possibility. We can’t risk shooting our way in. And the lock can’t be picked. It looks like it’s sound-activated,’ Molly said, pointing at the box.

  ‘What sound?’ Sam said.

  They saw the same realisation reflected in each other’s faces.

  ‘Get it,’ Sam said, and started to shrug off his rucksack.

  He sat down on the sofa, took out his old watch box, opened the gilded catch, lifted out the velvet-lined compartment with the four watches and started to remove the tiny plastic bags from the tray at the bottom. He was still shaking his head when Molly returned with his Patek Philippe 2508 Calatrava. He took it, placed it on the living room table and took out his magnifying glass, tweezers and case opener from his rucksack.

  ‘Light,’ he said.

  Molly shone her torch at the table. ‘I just hope we’ve found all the cogs.’

  Sam grimaced, held the case opener against the watch and took off the back. He held the magnifying glass to the exposed innards. The perfectly coordinated constellation of tiny, interacting cogs and pinions always lowered his pulse dramatically. But not this time. He sat there, assaulted by the grotesque stench of dead bodies in the terrible flat, knowing young lives were at stake, and tried to stop his hands shaking. He opened bag after bag and tipped out all the little cogs. Cogs from the flats in Kristinehamn and Västerås, from the house in Märsta, from the bat-filled cave in Värmland, from the mouth of the mannequin and from the house in Bålsta. And there was nothing to say that those were all the cogs.

  Nothing but Sam’s knowledge of the inner workings of watches, learned in that very flat a quarter of a century earlier. And it was telling him that there were precisely six cogs missing.

  Molly was walking about the flat with her pistol drawn, radiating impatience.

  ‘How did he get in and out?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘What?’ Sam said.

  ‘If he stole your watch and dissected it, then obviously it couldn’t be used. Couldn’t he have used just any watch with that microphone?’

  ‘Every model has a unique tick,’ Sam said, carefully nudging the rotor aside so he could insert the first cog.

  ‘So how did he do it?’

  ‘He must have had a 2508 of his own,’ Sam said. ‘There aren’t that many of them about.’

  ‘Isn’t it here, then? Somewhere inside the flat?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Sam said. ‘This is my test. William knew there was a risk that we’d outsmart him. This was plan B. If he died, he could still test me.’

  ‘I’m going to have a look for it anyway,’ Molly said, and walked off.

  ‘Feel free,’ Sam said, to no one. ‘Maybe one of the bodies is sitting on it.’

  A disconcerting amount of time passed. He tried to remember everything he had ever learned, everything William had ever taught him. He was making slow progress. The tweezers kept slipping. His hands were still shaking, but not so badly. It was as if a paradoxical calm settled around him. The self-winding watch’s incomparable treatment of time helped him find his way back to himself. Cog after cog slotted into place. After an indefinite period Molly came back, having failed in her mission.

  ‘His watch collection is somewhere else,’ Sam said. ‘Probably in Lebanon.’

  He only had the last cog left now. It was actually making sense. There was only one space left inside the watch.

  The tweezers held up the cog from the house in Märsta against the light of the torch. There was still a risk that h
e had inserted things wrongly.

  He lowered the minuscule cog towards the interior of the watch. It slotted into place with a small click. He looked at the mechanism. Nothing was moving; there was nothing to suggest that his work was done.

  He replaced the back and began to shake the watch. If it was working, the rotor would activate the self-winding mechanism. He shook it for thirty seconds; his pulled shoulder stung like fire. Then he held the watch to his ear.

  At first he could hear absolutely nothing. The silence of death. The echoing stillness of failure.

  Then the ticking started. He breathed out, hard, and when he breathed in, just as hard, he was hit by the hideous, cloying stench of death again.

  He stood up. Molly watched him. They walked together towards the fluorescent door. Sam looked at the watch, gave it a quick kiss, then held it up to the small box containing the microphone.

  The seconds scraped past with infinite slowness.

  Nothing happened.

  Then they heard a click in the lock mechanism and the door slid slowly, slowly open, revealing absolute darkness.

  Sure enough, there was a sizeable quantity of explosives attached to the door. Enough to have blown the flat sky-high if they’d tried to shoot their way in.

  They both shone their torches into the room. What followed was a sequence of impressions. First they saw the ceiling, the walls, the floor, all of them covered by something thick and puffy. Sam just had time to think soundproofing before the next impression. The structure was reminiscent of the cellars in Märsta and Bålsta. There was no doubt that what lay concealed behind the fluorescent door was a labyrinth.

  The third impression was a smell. A distinctly rancid smell hit them, and actually replaced the smell of dead bodies. The labyrinth did not exude a stench of death.

  Impression number four was a sound.

  A gentle moan was coming from a mattress on the floor of the first room. A tube from a drip stand led under the covers.

  Molly stopped breathing. She crouched down beside the mattress. Slowly she pulled the covers back, and found herself looking into the eyes of a dark-haired young woman.