by Lars Kepler
“This is a safe apartment; you’ve got a police guard,” says Joona reassuringly. “No one is allowed to give out information about you or search for information about you; the prosecutor has made that decision. You’re safe now, Evelyn.”
“As long as I stay in here, maybe,” she says. “But I’m going to have to come out sometime. And Josef is good at waiting.”
She goes over to the window, looks out, and sits down on the sofa.
“Where could Josef be hiding?” asks Joona.
“You think I know something.”
“Do you?” asks Erik.
“Are you going to hypnotise me?”
“No.” He smiles in surprise.
She is not wearing make-up, and her eyes look vulnerable and unprotected as she scrutinises him.
“You can if you want to,” she says, looking down quickly.
The apartment consists of nothing more than a bedroom with a wide bed, two armchairs, and a television set, a bathroom with a shower cubicle, and a kitchen with an eating area. The windows are made of bulletproof glass, and the walls are painted throughout in a calm yellow colour.
Erik looks around and follows her into the kitchen. “Nice little place,” he says.
Evelyn shrugs her shoulders. She is wearing a red sweater and a pair of faded jeans. Her hair is carelessly caught up in a ponytail. “They’re bringing a few of my things today,” she says.
“That’s good,” says Erik. “People usually feel better when—”
“Better? What do you know about what would make me feel better?”
“I’ve worked with—”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t give a shit about that, I don’t want to talk to psychologists and counsellors.”
“I’m not here in that capacity.”
“So why are you here?”
“To try to find Josef.”
She turns to him and says curtly, “He isn’t here.”
Without knowing why, Erik decides not to say anything about Benjamin. “Listen to me, Evelyn,” he says quietly. “I need your help to map out Josef’s circle of acquaintances.”
Her eyes are shiny, almost feverish. “All right,” she replies, with something resembling a small smile.
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
Her eyes darken and her mouth tenses. “Apart from me, you mean?”
“Yes.”
She shakes her head.
“Who does he hang out with?”
“He doesn’t hang out with anybody,” she says.
“Classmates?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “He’s never had any friends, as far as I know.”
“If he needed help with something, who would he turn to?”
“I don’t know … Sometimes he talks to the drunks behind the off licence.”
“Do you know their names, who they are?”
“One of them has a tattoo on his hand.”
“What does it look like?”
“I can’t remember … A fish, I think.” She stands up and goes over to the window again.
Erik looks at her. The daylight strikes her young face; he can see a blue vein beating in her slender throat. “Could he be staying with one of them?”
She shrugs her shoulders vaguely. “Maybe.”
“Do you think he is?”
“No.”
“So what do you think, then?”
“I think he’s going to find me before you find him.”
Erik looks at her, as she stands with her forehead resting against the window-pane, and wonders if he should press her any further. There is something about her toneless voice, her lack of trust, that tells him she has long had a unique insight into her brother and has abandoned any hope of finding someone to share it with.
“Evelyn? What does Josef want?”
“I can’t talk about that.”
“Does he want to kill me?”
“I don’t know.”
“But what do you think?”
She takes a deep breath, and her voice is hoarse and tired when she answers. “If he thinks you’ve come between him and me, if he’s jealous, then yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Kill you.”
“Try, you mean?”
Evelyn licks her lips, turns to face him, then looks down. Erik wants to repeat his question, but nothing comes out. Suddenly there is a knock on the door. Evelyn looks at Joona and Erik, a terrified expression on her face, and backs into the kitchen.
The knocking comes again. Joona walks over, looks through the peephole, and admits two police officers. One of them is carrying a cardboard box.
“I think we found everything on the list,” he says. “Where do you want this?”
“Anywhere,” says Evelyn faintly, emerging from the kitchen.
“Would you sign here?”
He holds out a delivery receipt, and Evelyn signs it. Joona locks the door behind them when they leave. Evelyn hurries over to the door, checks that he’s locked it properly, and turns to face them.
“I asked if I could have some things from home.”
“Yes, you told us.”
Evelyn crouches down, pulls off the brown sticky tape, and opens the box. She takes out a silver money box in the shape of a rabbit and a framed picture of a guardian angel, but suddenly stops.
“My photo album,” she says, and Erik sees that her mouth has begun to tremble.
“Evelyn?”
“I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t say anything about it.”
She opens the album to the first page, revealing a large school photo of herself at about fourteen. She is wearing braces on her teeth and smiling shyly. Her skin glows; her hair is cut very short.
Evelyn turns the page, and a folded piece of paper falls out and lands on the floor. She picks it up, turns it over, and her face flushes deep red. “He’s at home,” she whispers, passing it to Erik.
He smooths out the paper, and he and Joona read it together:
I own you, you belong only to me, I’m going to kill the others, it’s your fault, I’m going to kill that fucking hypnotist and you will help me to do it, you will, you are going to show me where he lives, you are going to show me where you fuck and party, and then I will kill him and you will watch while I do it, then you will wash your cunt with plenty of soap and I will fuck you a hundred times, because then we will be even and we will start again just the two of us.
Evelyn pulls down the blinds and stands with her arms tightly wrapped around her body. Erik places the letter on the table and gets to his feet.
Josef is back home, he thinks quickly. He must be. If he could put the photo album and the letter in the box, he must be there.
“Where else would he go?” she replies quietly.
Joona is already on his mobile phone in the kitchen, speaking to the duty officer at Central Control.
“Evelyn, the police have been conducting an exhaustive investigation at the house for almost a week now. Do you know how Josef could hide from them there?”
“The cellar,” replies Evelyn, looking up.
“What about the cellar?”
“There’s a … special room down there.”
“He’s down in the cellar,” Erik shouts in the direction of the kitchen.
On the other end of the phone, Joona can hear the slow rattle of a keyboard.
“The suspect is presumed to be in the cellar,” says Joona.
“Just hang on,” says the duty officer. “I have to—”
“This is extremely urgent.”
After a pause, the duty officer says calmly, “We sent a car to the same address two minutes ago.”
“What? To Gärdesvägen eight in Tumba?”
“Yes. The neighbours called to say there was someone inside the house.”
52
sunday, december 13 (feast of st lucia): morning
Kennet Sträng stops and listens before slowly moving over to the staircase. He points his pistol at the floor, holding i
t close to his body. Daylight comes into the passageway from the kitchen. Simone follows her father, thinking that the murdered family’s house reminds her of the house where she and Erik lived when Benjamin was little.
There is a creaking sound from somewhere, the floor or deep inside the walls.
“Is it Josef?” whispers Simone.
The torch, house plans, and crowbar she balances are heavy and awkward. Her hands feel numb.
The house is completely silent now. The creaking and the muted banging have stopped.
Kennet jerks his head at her. He wants them to go down into the cellar. Every muscle in her body is telling her it’s a mistake, but she nods.
According to the plans, the best area for a hiding place is definitely the cellar. Kennet marked the drawings with a pen, showing how the wall of the section that houses the old boiler could be extended, creating a virtually invisible room. The other space Kennet marked on the plans was the innermost attic.
The cellar entrance is next to the staircase leading upstairs; it’s a narrow opening in the wall, with no door. There are still small hinges on the wall where a child safety gate had been attached. The iron steps leading down into the cellar look almost home-made; the welds are large and untidy, and the steps are covered in thick grey felt.
When Kennet clicks the light switch, nothing happens; he tries again, but the bulb has blown.
“Stay here,” he says, in a low voice.
Simone feels a stab of pure terror. A heavy, dusty smell that makes her think of the stifling air inside a highway tunnel surges up from below.
“Give me the torch,” he says, holding out his hand.
Slowly Simone passes it over to her father. He smiles, takes the torch, switches it on, and sets off cautiously down the steps.
“Hello?” Kennet calls gruffly. “Josef? I need to speak to you.”
Not a sound comes from the cellar. Not a clatter, not a breath.
Simone clutches the crowbar and waits.
The beam of the torch illuminates little more than the walls and the ceiling of the staircase. The dense darkness below is untouched. Kennet continues down the stairs, the beam picking out individual objects: a white plastic bag, the reflector strip on an old buggy, the glass of a framed movie poster.
“I think I can help you,” calls Kennet, more quietly this time.
He reaches the bottom, sweeping the torch around to make sure no one is rushing out of a hiding place. The slanting beam moves across the floor and walls, jumping over objects close by and casting sloping, swinging shadows. Kennet begins again, searching the room calmly and systematically with the shaft of light.
Simone sets off down the steps, the metal construction clanging dully beneath her feet.
“There’s no one here,” says Kennet matter-of-factly.
“So what did we hear, then? It was definitely something,” she says.
Daylight seeps in through a dirty window just below the ceiling. Their eyes are growing accustomed to the dim light. The cellar is full of bicycles of various sizes, a buggy, sledges, skis, and a bread machine, Christmas decorations, rolls of wallpaper, and a stepladder spattered with white paint. On a box someone has written in a thick black felt-tip pen, Josef’s comics.
A tapping noise comes from the ceiling, and Simone looks over at the stairs and then at her father. He doesn’t seem to hear the sound. He walks slowly toward a door at the far end of the room. Simone bumps into a rocking horse. Kennet opens the door and glances into a utility room containing a battered washing machine and dryer and an old-fashioned wringer. Next to a geothermal pump, a grubby curtain hangs in front of a large cupboard.
“Nobody here,” he says, turning to Simone.
She looks at him, seeing the grubby curtain behind him at the same time. It is completely motionless yet at the same time somehow alive.
“Simone?”
There is a damp mark on the fabric, a small oval, as if made by a mouth.
“Open up the plans,” says Kennet.
It seems to Simone that the damp oval suddenly caves inwards. “Dad,” she whispers.
“What?” he replies, leaning against the door post as he puts his pistol back in his shoulder holster and scratches his head.
There is a sudden creaking noise. She wheels and sees that the rocking horse is still moving.
“What is it, Sixan?”
Kennet takes the plans from her and lays them on a rolled-up mattress; he shines the torch on the drawing and turns it around. He looks up, glances back at the plans, and goes over to a brick wall where an old dismantled bunk bed stands beside a wardrobe containing bright yellow life jackets. A chisel, various saws, and clamps hang from hooks on a precisely marked tool board. The space next to the hammer is empty; there’s an outline for a big axe, but the axe itself is gone.
Kennet measures the wall and the ceiling with his eyes, leans over, and taps on the wall behind the bed.
“What is it?” asks Simone.
“This wall must be at least ten years old.”
“Is there anything behind it?”
“Yes, quite a big space,” he replies.
“How do you get in?”
Kennet shines the light on the wall again, then on the floor next to the dismantled bed. Shadows slide around the cellar.
“Shine it there again,” says Simone.
When Kennet aims the beam at the floor next to the wardrobe, she can see that something scraping countless times along the floor has worn an arc into the concrete.
“Behind the wardrobe,” she says.
“Hold the torch,” says Kennet, drawing his pistol again.
Suddenly, from behind the wardrobe, they clearly hear the sound of someone moving slowly and carefully. Simone’s pulse increases to a violent throbbing. There’s someone there, she thinks. Oh my God! She wants to call out Benjamin! but doesn’t dare.
Kennet gestures to her to move back. She is just about to speak when a loud bang explodes on the floor above. Wood is shattering, splintering. Simone drops the torch and they are plunged back into darkness. Rapid steps thunder across the floor, there is a clattering across the ceiling, and dazzling beams of light sweep down the iron staircase and flood the cellar like high waves.
“Get down on the floor,” a man yells hysterically. “Down on the floor!”
Simone is frozen to the spot.
“Lie down,” rasps Kennet.
“Shut your mouth!” someone yells.
“Down, down!”
Simone doesn’t realise the men are talking to her until she feels a powerful blow in the stomach that forces her to her knees.
“Down on the floor, I said!”
She tries to get air, coughing and gasping for breath. The intense beams of light continue to sweep through the cellar. Black figures pull at her, drag her up the narrow staircase. Her hands are locked behind her back. Struggling to walk, she slips and hits her cheek on the sharp metal handrail.
She tries to turn her head but someone is holding her firmly, breathing fast and pushing her roughly against the wall next to the cellar door.
53
sunday, december 13 (feast of st lucia): morning
Simone blinks blindly in the daylight, but it’s difficult to focus. A number of figures seem to be staring at her. Fragments of a conversation further away reach her, and she recognises her father’s terse, stringent tone. It’s his voice that makes her think of the smell of coffee when she was getting ready for school, with the morning news on the radio.
Only now does she realise that it is the police who have stormed the house. A neighbour must have seen the light from Kennet’s flashlight and called them.
A cop, about twenty-five, yet with lines and blue circles beneath his eyes, is looking at her with a strained expression. His head is shaved, revealing a bumpy skull. He rubs the back of his neck with his hand.
“Name?” he demands coldly.
“Simone Bark,” she says, her voice still unsteady. “I’
m here with my father—”
“I want your name, not your life story,” the man says rudely.
“Take it easy, Ragnar,” says one of his colleagues.
“You’re a fucking parasite,” he goes on, turning to Simone. “But that’s just my opinion of people who get off looking at blood.”
He snorts and turns away. Her father is speaking in an even tone, and he sounds very tired. She sees one of the officers walking away with his wallet.
“Excuse me,” says Simone to a female officer. “We heard someone down in the—”
“Shut up,” says the woman.
“My son is—”
“Shut up, I said. Tape her mouth. I want her mouth taped.”
The officer with the shaved head takes out a roll of broad tape, but he stops when the front door opens and a tall blond man with sharp grey eyes walks in.
“Joona Linna, National CID,” he says, in his singsong lilt. “What have you got?”
“Two suspects,” replies the female officer.
Joona looks at Kennet and Simone. “I’ll take it from here,” he says. “This is a mistake.”
Two dimples suddenly appear in Joona’s cheeks as he tells them to release the suspects. The female officer goes over to Kennet and removes the handcuffs, apologises, and exchanges a few words with him, her ears bright red. The officer with the shaved head stands in front of Simone, rocking back on his heels and staring at her.
“Let her go,” says Joona.
“They resisted violently and I injured my thumb,” he says.
“Are you intending to arrest them?” asks Joona.
“Yes.”
“Kennet Sträng and his daughter?”
“I don’t give a shit who they are,” the officer says aggressively.
“Ragnar,” his colleague says again, in an attempt to quiet him, “take it easy. He’s one of us.”
“It’s illegal to enter the scene of a crime—”
“Just calm down,” says Joona firmly.
“But am I wrong?” he asks.
Kennet has come over, but says nothing.
“Am I wrong?” asks Ragnar again.
“We’ll talk about this later,” replies Joona.
“Why not now?”
