by Lars Kepler
“Tell me, Erik: are you in pain?”
“I’m a doctor. I think I’m in a slightly better position to evaluate—”
“Oh, stop trying to fool me.”
“What do you mean?” he says.
“You’re an addict, Erik. We never have sex any more because you’re always zonked.”
“Maybe I don’t want to have sex with you,” he breaks in. “Why would I, when you’re so god-damn miserable with me all the time?”
The acrimony hangs in the air between them, nearly palpable. Is this really what saying the unsayable feels like? It should be more liberating, more profound; it should boil down to something more substantial.
“Then it is best if we separate,” she says.
“Fine.”
She can’t look at him; she just walks slowly out of the kitchen, feeling the tension and the pain in her throat, the tears springing to her eyes.
Benjamin has closed his bedroom door, and his music is so loud that the walls and doors are rattling. Simone locks herself in the bathroom, switches off the light, and weeps.
“Fucking hell!” she hears Erik yell from the hallway before the front door opens and shuts again.
30
friday, december 11: morning
It isn’t quite 7:00 a.m. when Joona Linna gets a call from Dr Daniella Richards. She explains that in her opinion Josef is now able to cope with a short interview.
As Joona gets into his car to drive to the hospital, he feels a dull ache in his elbow. He thinks back to the previous evening, how the blue light from the radio cars had swept over the façade of Sorab Ramadani’s apartment block near Tantolunden. The man with the boyish hair had been spitting blood and muttering thickly about his tongue as he was guided into the backseat of the patrol car. Ronny Alfredsson and his partner had been discovered in the shelter down in the basement of the apartment block. They had been threatened with knives and locked in and then the men had driven their patrol car to another building and left it in the visitors’ car park.
Joona had gone back inside, rung Sorab’s doorbell, and, speaking once again through the letter box, told him that his bodyguards had been arrested and that the door to his apartment would be broken down unless he opened it immediately.
After a moment, Sorab had let him in. He was a pale man, wearing his hair in a ponytail. He was anxious, his eyes darting around the room, but he asked Joona to take a seat on the blue leather sofa, offered him a cup of camomile tea, and apologised for his friends.
“I’m sorry about all this, really. I’ve been having some problems lately. Worried about my safety. That’s why I got myself some bodyguards.”
“What makes you worry about your safety?” asked Joona, sipping at the hot tea.
“Someone’s out to get me.” He stood up and peered out the window.
“Who?” asked Joona.
Sorab kept his back to Joona, and said tonelessly that he didn’t want to talk about it. “Do I have to?” he asked. “Don’t I have the right to remain silent?”
“You have the right to remain silent,” admitted Joona.
Sorab shrugged his shoulders. “There you go, then.”
“I might be able to help you if you talk to me,” Joona had ventured. “Has that occurred to you?”
“Thank you very much,” said Sorab, still facing the window.
“Is it Evelyn’s brother who—”
“No.”
“Wasn’t it Josef Ek who came here?”
“He’s not her brother.”
“Not her brother? Who is he, then?”
“How should I know? But he’s not her brother. He’s something else.”
After that, Sorab became cagey and nervous again, giving only the most evasive answers to Joona’s questions. When he left, Joona wondered what Josef had said to Sorab. What had he done? How had he managed to frighten him into revealing where Evelyn was?
Joona parks in front of the neurosurgical unit, walks through the main entrance, takes the lift to the fifth floor, continues through the corridor, greets the policeman on duty, and proceeds into Josef’s room. An attractive woman sits in the chair beside the bed. She looks at Joona with an expression he finds appealing as she rises to introduce herself:
“Lisbet Carlén,” she says. “I’m a social worker. I’ll be Josef’s advocate during the interview.”
“Excellent,” says Joona, shaking her hand.
“Are you leading the interrogation?” she asks with interest.
“Yes. Forgive me. My name is Joona Linna, and I’m from the National CID. We spoke on the telephone.”
At regular intervals there is a loud bubbling noise from the Bülow drainage tube connected to Josef’s punctured pleura. The drain replaces the pressure that is no longer-naturally present, enabling his lung to function.
Lisbet Carlén says quietly that the doctor has explained that Josef must lie absolutely still, because of the risk of new bleeds in the liver.
“I have no intention of putting his health at risk,” says Joona, placing the tape recorder on the table next to Josef’s face.
He gestures inquiringly at the recorder and Lisbet nods. He starts the machine and begins by describing the situation: It is Friday, 11th December, at 8:15 in the morning, and Josef Ek is being questioned to try to elicit information. He then lists the people present in the room.
“Hi,” says Joona.
Josef looks at him with heavy eyes.
“My name is Joona. I’m a detective.”
Josef closes his eyes.
“How are you feeling?”
The social worker looks out the window.
“Can you sleep with that thing bubbling away?” he asks.
Josef nods slowly.
“Do you know why I’m here?”
Josef opens his eyes. Joona waits, observing his face.
“There’s been an accident,” says Josef. “My whole family was in an accident.”
“Hasn’t anybody told you what’s happened?” asks Joona.
“Maybe a little,” he says faintly.
“He refuses to see a psychologist or a counsellor,” says the social worker.
Joona thinks about how different Josef’s voice was under hypnosis. Now it is suddenly fragile, almost non-existent, yet pensive.
“I think you know what’s happened.”
“You don’t have to answer that,” Lisbet Carlén says quickly.
“You’re fifteen years old now,” Joona goes on.
“Yes.”
“What did you do on your birthday?”
“Can’t remember,” says Josef.
“Did you get any presents?”
“I watched TV,” Josef replies.
“Did you go to see Evelyn?” Joona asks in a neutral tone.
“Yes.”
“At her apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Was she there?”
“Yes.” Silence. “No, she wasn’t,” says Josef hesitantly, changing his mind.
“Where was she, then?”
“At the cottage,” he replies.
“Is it nice there?”
“Not really … It’s cosy, I guess.”
“Was she happy to see you?”
“Who?”
“Evelyn.” Silence. “Did you take anything with you?”
“A cake.”
“A cake? Was it good?”
He nods.
“Did Evelyn like it?” Joona goes on.
“Only the best for Evelyn,” he says.
“Did she give you a present?”
“No.”
“But maybe she sang to you.”
“She didn’t want to give me my present,” he says, in an injured tone.
“Is that what she said?”
“Yes, she did,” he answers quickly.
“Why?” Silence. “Was she angry with you?” asks Joona.
He nods.
“Was she trying to get you to do something you didn’t want to do?” asks J
oona calmly.
“No, she—” Josef whispers the rest.
“I can’t hear you, Josef.”
He continues to whisper, and Joona leans close, trying to hear the words. “That fucking bastard!” Josef yells in his ear.
Joona jumps back and rubs his ear as he walks around the bed. He tries to smile.
Josef’s face is ash-grey. “I’m going to find that fucking hypnotist and bite his throat; I’m going to hunt him down, him and his—”
The social worker moves over to the bed quickly and tries to switch off the tape recorder. “Josef! You have the right to remain silent—”
“Keep out of this,” Joona interrupts.
She looks at him with an agitated expression and says in a trembling voice, “Before the interview began, you should have informed—”
“Wrong. There are no laws governing this kind of interrogation,” says Joona, raising his voice. “He has the right to remain silent, that’s true, but I am not obliged to inform him of that right.”
“In that case, I apologise.”
“No problem,” mumbles Joona, turning back to Josef. “Why are you angry with the hypnotist?”
“I don’t have to answer your questions,” says Josef, attempting to point at the social worker.
31
friday, december 11: morning
Erik runs down the stairs and through the door. He stops outside and feels the sweat cooling on his back. A chill is in the air; not far away, a man sleeps under a thick mound of blankets. After a moment of indecisiveness, he walks slowly up toward Odenplan and sits down on a bench outside the library. He feels sick with fear. How can he be so stupid, pushing Simone away because he feels hurt?
After a while, Erik gets up and sets off for home, stopping to buy bread at the stone oven bakery and a caffè macchiato for Simone. He hurries back and, not wanting to wait for the lift, jogs up the stairs, but as soon as he unlocks the door he realises the apartment is empty. With effort, Erik pushes aside the feeling of desolation the empty apartment fills him with. No matter what, he intends to prove to Simone that she can trust him. However long it takes, he will convince her once again. He thinks this, then drinks her coffee standing up in the kitchen; no sense letting it go to waste. It upsets his stomach, and he takes a Prilosec.
It is still only nine o’clock in the morning, and his shift at the hospital doesn’t start for several hours. He takes a book to the bedroom with him and lies on top of the unmade bed in his stockinged feet. But instead of reading, he starts to think about Josef Ek; he wonders if Joona Linna will be able to get anything out of him.
The apartment is silent, deserted. A gentle calm spreads through his stomach from the medication.
Nothing that is said under hypnosis can be used as evidence, but Erik knows Josef was telling the truth about having killed his family, even if the actual motive is invisible. He closes his eyes. Evelyn must have known her brother was dangerous from an early age. Over the years she learned to live with his inability to control his impulses, gauging the risk of inciting his violent rage against her desire to live normally and independently. The family as a whole would have dealt with his violence, gradually making hundreds of infinitesimal adjustments and compromises in an effort to live with his hostility and keep it at bay. But nothing discouraged his impulses: not discipline, not punishment, not appeasement. They never really appreciated the seriousness of the situation. His mother and father might have thought that his aggressive behaviour was simply because he was a boy. Possibly they blamed themselves for letting him play brutal video games or watch slasher films.
Evelyn had escaped as soon as she could, found a job and a place of her own, but she’d sensed the increasing threat and was suddenly so afraid that she hid herself away in her aunt’s cottage, carrying a gun to protect herself.
Had Josef threatened her?
Erik tries to imagine Evelyn’s fear in the darkness at night in the cottage, with the loaded gun by her bed. He thinks about what Joona Linna told him after interviewing her. What happened when Josef turned up with a cake? What did he want from her? How did she feel? Was it only then that she became afraid and got the gun? Was it after his visit that she began to live with the fear that he would kill her?
Erik pictures Evelyn as she appeared on the day he met her at the cottage: a young woman in a silver-coloured down vest, a grey knitted sweater, scruffy jeans, and running shoes. She is walking through the trees, her ponytail swinging; her face is open, childlike. She carries the shotgun lazily, dragging it along the ground, bouncing it gently over the blueberry bushes and moss as the sun filters down through the branches of the pine trees.
Suddenly Erik realises something crucial. If Evelyn had been afraid, if the gun had been to defend herself against Josef, she would have carried it differently. Erik recalls that her knees were wet, and dark patches of earth clung to her jeans.
She went out into the forest with the gun to kill herself, he thinks. She knelt on the moss and placed the barrel in her mouth, but she changed her mind; she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
When he’d spied her on the edge of the trees, she was on her way back to the cottage, on her way back to the alternative from which she had wanted to escape.
Erik picks up the phone and calls Joona.
“Erik? I was going to call you, but there’s been so much—”
“It doesn’t matter,” says Erik. “Listen, I’ve got—”
“I just want to say how sorry I am about all this business with the media. I promise to track down the leak when things calm down.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I feel guilty, because I was the one who persuaded you to do it.”
“I made my own decision. I don’t blame anyone else.”
“Personally, even though we’re not allowed to say so at the moment, I still think hypnotising Josef was the right thing to do. It could well have saved Evelyn’s life.”
“That’s what I’m calling about,” says Erik. “A thought occurred to me. Have you got a minute?”
Erik can hear the sound of a chair scraping against the floor and then an exhalation as Joona sits. “OK,” he says. “Go on.”
“When we were out at Värmdö and I spotted Evelyn from the car, I saw her walking among the trees, heading for the cabin, dragging her shotgun in the bushes.”
“Yes?”
“Is that the way to carry a gun if you’re afraid someone might surprise you, might be coming to kill you?”
“No,” replies Joona.
“I think she’d gone out into the forest to kill herself,” says Erik. “The knees of her jeans were wet. She’d probably been kneeling on the damp moss with the gun pointing at her forehead or her chest, but then she changed her mind and couldn’t go through with it. That’s what I think.”
Erik stops speaking. He can hear Joona breathing heavily at the other end of the line. A car alarm starts screeching down on the street.
“Thank you,” says Joona. “I’ll go and have a chat with her.”
32
friday, december 11: afternoon
The interview with Evelyn is to be conducted in one of the offices in the custody suite. In order to make the dreary room slightly more inviting, someone has placed a red tin of Christmas gingerbread biscuits on the table, and electric holiday candles from IKEA glow in the windows. Evelyn and her solicitor are already seated when Joona begins the recording.
“I know these questions may be difficult for you, Evelyn,” he says quietly, “but I would be grateful if you would answer them anyway, as best you can.”
Evelyn does not reply but looks down at her knees.
“Because I don’t think it’s in your best interests to remain silent,” he adds gently.
She does not react but keeps her eyes firmly fixed on her knees. The solicitor, a middle-aged man with shadows of stubble on his face, gazes expressionlessly at Joona.
“Are you ready to begin, Evelyn?” Joona asks.
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She shakes her head. He waits. After a while she raises her chin and meets his eyes.
“You went out into the forest with the gun to kill yourself, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” she whispers.
“I’m glad you didn’t go through with it.”
“I’m not.”
“Is this the first time you’ve tried to commit suicide?”
“No.”
“Before this occasion?”
She nods.
“But not before Josef turned up with the cake?”
“No.”
“What did he say to you, when he came?”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“About what? About what he said?”
Evelyn straightens up in the chair, and her mouth narrows. “I don’t remember,” she says, almost inaudibly. “I’m sure it wasn’t anything special.”
“You were going to shoot yourself, Evelyn,” Joona reminds her.
She stands up, goes over to the window, switches the electric candles off and on absently, walks back to her chair, and sits down with her arms folded over her stomach.
“Can’t you just leave me in peace?”
“Is that what you really want?”
She nods without looking at him.
“Do you need a break?” asks her solicitor.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with Josef,” Evelyn says quietly. “There’s something wrong inside his head. When he used to fight, when he was little, he would hit too hard. He wasn’t just angry, like little boys get. He was trying to hurt you. He was dangerous. He destroyed all my things. I couldn’t keep anything.”
Her mouth trembles.
“When he was eight … When he was eight, he came on to me. He wanted us to kiss each other. Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad, but I didn’t want to, and he kept insisting. I was scared of him. He did weird things. He would sneak into my room at night when I was sleeping and bite me and make me bleed. I started to hit back. I was still stronger than he was.”
She wipes away the tears rolling down her cheeks.
“It got worse. He wanted to see my breasts. He tried to get in the bath with me. He said he’d—if I didn’t do what he said—he said he’d hurt Buster.” She pauses for a moment to wipe away more tears. “He killed my dog and threw it off an overpass!” She leaps to her feet and moves to the window again. “He must have been about twelve when he—”
