by Lars Kepler
“She saved your daughter’s life,” Reine says.
Kennet taps gently on the door of Simone’s room, then pushes it open a little way. It’s dark inside. On a couch he can just make out something that could be his daughter.
“Sixan,” he says quietly.
“I’m here, Dad.”
“Do you want it this dark? Shall I put the light on?”
“I can’t cope, Dad,” she whispers. “I just can’t cope.”
Kennet sits down on the couch and puts his arms around his daughter. She starts crying, convulsive, agonised sobs.
“Once,” he whispers, rubbing her back, “when I was passing your nursery school in my patrol car, I saw you in the playground. You were standing with your face pressed to the fence, just crying: snot pouring from your nose, your face streaked and filthy, and the staff were doing nothing to console you. They were just standing there, chatting, totally indifferent.”
“What did you do?” This is a story Simone has heard many times, but she always asks.
“I stopped the car and went over to you.” He smiles to himself in the darkness. “You stopped crying right away, took my hand, and came with me.” He pauses. “Imagine if I could take you by the hand and take you home now.”
She nods, rests her head on his shoulder, and asks, “Have you heard anything about Sim?”
He strokes her cheek and wonders whether he should tell her the truth or not. The doctor has brusquely explained that Shulman was in a coma; he’d lost a lot of blood and it was unlikely he’d pull through.
“They don’t really know yet,” he says cautiously. “But—” He sighs. “It doesn’t look good, darling.”
She sobs. “I can’t cope, I can’t cope.”
“There, there … I’ve called Erik. He’s on his way.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
He pats her again.
“I really can’t cope any more,” Simone whispers.
“Don’t cry, little one.”
She cries even harder. At that moment the door opens and Erik switches on the light. He walks straight over, sits down on the other side of Simone, and says, “Thank God you’re safe.”
She presses her face into his chest. “Erik,” she says, half smothered in his overcoat.
He strokes her head. He looks very tired, but his eyes are clear and sharp. She thinks he smells of home; he smells of family.
“Erik,” Kennet says. “I have to tell you something very important. You too, Simone. I spoke to Aida not long ago.”
“Did she tell you anything?” asks Simone.
“I wanted to let them know we’d caught Wailord and the others,” says Kennet. “I didn’t want them to be afraid any longer.”
Erik looks at him with curiosity.
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you all about it when we have time, but—” Kennet takes a deep breath and says in a tired, harsh voice, “Someone contacted Benjamin a few days before he disappeared. Said she was his real mother, his biological mother.”
Simone pulls away from Erik and stares at Kennet. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand and asks, in a voice that is high and broken from weeping, “His real mother?”
Kennet nods. “Aida said this woman gave Benjamin money and helped him with his homework.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” whispers Simone.
“She even gave him a different name.”
Erik looks at Simone, then at Kennet, and asks him to continue.
“According to Aida, this woman claimed that his real name was Kasper.”
Simone sees Erik’s face stiffen, and the sudden rush of fear makes her feel wide awake. “What is it, Erik?”
“Kasper?” Erik asks. “She called him Kasper?”
“Yes,” Kennet confirms. “Aida didn’t want to say anything at first. She’d promised Benjamin that—”
He stops dead. Erik’s face has lost all its colour. He stands up, takes a couple of steps backwards, bumps into an armchair, and rushes from the room.
88
friday, december 18: morning
Erik runs downstairs to the hospital lobby, pushes through a group of teenagers bearing flowers and Mylar balloons, dashes across the dirty floor past an old man in a wheelchair, and out through the main exit. Dodging traffic, he runs across the street and vaults the low shrubbery planted along the perimeter of the visitors’ car park. The keys are already in his hand as he races along the line of grubby vehicles towards his car. He starts the engine and reverses out so violently that the side of his car scrapes the bumper of the car next to him.
His breathing is still uneven as he turns west. He drives as fast as he can, but as he approaches Edsberg School, a line of children appears, crossing the street. While he waits he takes out his mobile and calls Joona.
“It’s Lydia Everson,” he almost screams.
“Who?”
“Lydia has taken Benjamin!” he continues. “I told you about her. She’s the one who made the complaint against me.”
“We’ll check her out,” says Joona.
“I’m on my way.”
“Give me an address.”
“It’s a house on Tennisvägen in Rotebro. I can’t remember the number, but it’s a red house, quite big.”
“Wait for me somewhere in—”
“I’m going straight there.”
“Don’t rush in.”
“Benjamin will die if he doesn’t get his medication.”
“Wait for me.”
Erik ends the call, speeding up as he follows the railway line beside the long narrow lake. Recklessly, he overtakes another car by the yeast factory, passing on the right with inches to spare. As he turns off by the Co-op Forum supermarket, he feels his pulse pounding in his temples.
Not much has changed here. The pizzeria has been replaced by a sushi bar, and all the back gardens sport trampolines (they’re all the rage). He parks next to the same fir hedge as ten years ago, when he and the social worker were about to visit Lydia.
As he looks at the house from inside the car, he can almost feel his presence there ten years earlier. He remembers there were no signs of a child, no toys in the garden, nothing to indicate that Lydia was a mother. On the other hand, they hadn’t really looked around the house. They had only gone down the steps to the cellar and back up again, and then Lydia had rushed after him with the knife in her hand. He remembers how she looked when she drew the blade across her throat without taking her eyes off him.
Leaving the key in the ignition, he abandons the car without even closing the door behind him and rushes up the slope. He opens the gate and goes into the garden. Patches of damp snow lie amid the tall yellow grass. Icicles sparkle beneath the broken guttering. The same hanging baskets full of dead plants swing by the door.
He tries the door, but it is locked. He looks under the doormat; a few wood-lice scuttle away from the wet rectangle on the concrete steps. No key. He gropes under the wooden hand-rail: no key there, either. He walks round to the back of the house, picks up an edging stone from the flower bed, and hurls it at the patio door. The outer pane shatters, and the stone thuds back onto the grass. He picks it up and throws it again, harder this time, knocking out the entire window. He unlocks the door and walks into a bedroom where the walls are covered with pictures of angels and the Indian guru Sai Baba.
“Benjamin,” he yells. “Benjamin!”
89
friday, december 18: morning
Erik calls to his son in spite of the fact that he can see the place is deserted; everything is dark and still in the house, with a closed-in smell of dust and old fabric. He moves quickly into the hall, opens the door leading down to the cellar, and is met by a powerful stench, a heavy smell of ash, charred wood, and burnt rubber. He races down the steps, trips, bangs into the wall with his shoulder, and regains his balance. The lights are not working, but enough sunlight comes from a high window to see that there’s been a fire down here. Cinders crunch beneath his fee
t. Much of the room is black with soot, but some items of furniture appear to be intact. The table with its tiled surface is just slightly sooty, while the scented candles on the tray have melted, blending into a multicoloured pool of solid wax. Erik finds his way to the door leading into the other room. It hangs loosely from its hinges, and the inside of the door is completely blackened.
“Benjamin,” he says, his voice full of fear.
Ash whirls up in his face and he blinks, his eyes smarting. In the middle of the floor are the remains of what looks like a cage, big enough to hold a person.
“Erik,” a voice calls from upstairs.
He stops and listens. The walls creak. Burnt fragments of ceiling tiles drop to the floor. He moves slowly towards the stairs. In the distance he can hear a dog barking.
“Erik!”
It’s Joona’s voice. He’s inside the house. Erik goes up the stairs. Joona looks at him, his expression anxious.
“What happened?”
“There’s been a fire in the cellar,” Erik replies.
“Nothing else?”
Erik gestures vaguely towards the stairs. “The remains of a cage.”
“I brought a dog with me.”
Joona moves quickly along the hall and opens the front door. He waves in the uniformed dog handler, a woman whose dark hair is braided thickly. The black Labrador, its coat groomed to a glossy sheen, walks obediently to heel. The handler nods to Erik, then crouches down in front of the dog and talks to him. The animal moves eagerly through the house, sniffing constantly, breathing quickly, seeking all the time. The dog’s stomach moves as he pants, systematically searching each room. Erik suddenly feels as if he’s going to throw up and leaves the house. Two police officers are chatting beside a police minibus. He goes through the gate, heads towards his car, then stops and takes out the little box with the parrot and the native. He stands there with it in his hands; then he goes over to a sewer grate and tips the contents down between the bars. His forehead covered in a cold sweat, he moistens his lips as if he is about to say something after a long silence, but then he drops the box too and hears the splash as it hits the surface of the water.
When he returns to the garden, Joona is standing outside the house. He meets Erik’s gaze, and shakes his head. Erik goes inside. The dog handler is on her knees, patting the Labrador and scratching the loose skin behind his ears.
“Have you been down to the basement?” asks Erik.
“Of course,” she replies, without looking at him.
“Into the inner room?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps all the ash is preventing the dog from picking up the scent.”
“Rocky can find a corpse underwater, at a depth of two hundred feet,” she says.
“And what about the living?”
“If there was anything here, Rocky would have found it.”
“But you haven’t been outside yet,” says Joona, who has followed Erik inside.
“I didn’t know we were supposed to,” says the dog handler.
“Yes,” Joona answers tersely.
She shrugs her shoulders and gets to her feet.
“Come on then,” she says to the Labrador in a deep, thick voice. “Shall we go outside and have a look? Shall we go and have a look?”
Erik goes with them. The black dog moves rapidly back and forth across the overgrown lawn, sniffing around the rain barrel, where an opaque layer of ice has formed on the surface, searching among the old fruit trees. The sky is dark and cloudy. Erik notices that the neighbour has switched on Christmas lights strung in a tree. The air is bitterly cold. Joona remains close to the handler and the dog, pointing in a particular direction from time to time. Erik follows them around the back of the house. Suddenly he recognises the mound at the far end of the garden. That’s the place in the picture, he thinks. The photograph Aida sent to Benjamin before he disappeared. Erik is breathing heavily. The dog sniffs around the compost, moves over to the mound and sniffs it, pants, trots all the way around it, sniffs among the low bushes and at the back of the brown fence, comes back, trots around a leaf basket, and goes over to a small herb garden. Wooden labels with seed packets attached to them show what has been planted in the various rows. The black Labrador whines uneasily and then lies down in the middle of the little plot. He flattens himself completely on the wet, freshly dug earth. The dog’s body is shaking with excitement, and the handler’s expression is one of deep sadness as she praises him. Joona turns on his heel, runs back, and stands in front of Erik, refusing to let him go over to the plot. Erik has no idea what he screams, what he tries to do, but Joona moves him away from the spot and out of the garden.
“I have to know,” says Erik, his voice trembling.
Joona nods. “The dog has indicated that there’s a human corpse in the ground.”
Erik feels his entire body give way. He sinks down onto the pavement. When he sees the police officers climb out of the bus carrying spades, he closes his eyes.
Erik Maria Bark sits alone in Joona Linna’s car, looking through the windscreen. Black, sprawling branches against a dark winter sky. His mouth is dry, his head aches, and his face and scalp are itchy. He whispers something to himself, gets out of the car, climbs over the police tape cordoning off the area, and walks around the house through the tall, frosty grass. Joona is watching the uniformed officers with the shovels. They work in dogged silence, their movements almost mechanical. The whole of the small plot has been dug up. It is now only a large rectangular hole. Beside it is a plastic sheet on which muddy scraps of clothing and fragments of bone have been placed. The sound of the shovels continues, metal strikes rock, the digging stops, and the officers straighten up. Erik slowly moves closer, his footsteps heavy and reluctant. Joona turns and smiles with the whole of his tired face.
“What is it?” Erik whispers.
Joona comes to meet him, looks Erik straight in the eye, and says, “It isn’t Benjamin.”
“It isn’t?”
“The body has been here for at least ten years.”
Erik thinks for a moment. “Is it a child?”
Joona’s face darkens. “Five years old, perhaps,” he says.
“So Lydia had a son after all,” says Erik with a shudder.
90
saturday, december 19: morning
Wet, heavy snow is falling, and a dog scurries back and forth in a rest area next door to police headquarters, barking excitedly at the snow, leaping happily among the flakes, snapping at the air and shaking itself. The sight of the animal makes Erik’s heart contract. He has forgotten what it’s like to simply exist. He’s forgotten what it’s like not to think constantly about a life without Benjamin.
He feels sick and his hands are shaking. He hasn’t taken a single pill for almost twenty-four hours, and he didn’t sleep at all last night.
As he walks towards the main entrance, he thinks about the old decorative woven patterns Simone had once showed him at an exhibition of women’s craft. They had been like images of the sky on days like this: cloudy, dense, grey, and fluffy.
Simone waits in the corridor outside the interview room. When she catches sight of Erik, she comes to meet him and takes his hands. For some reason he is grateful for the gesture. She looks pale and composed.
“You didn’t have to come,” she whispers.
“Kennet said you wanted me here.”
She nods almost imperceptibly. “I’m just so …” She pauses and clears her throat. “I’ve been so angry with you,” she says calmly. Her eyes are moist, red-rimmed.
“I know, Simone.”
“At least you’ve got your pills,” she says acidly. She turns away and stares out the window. Erik looks at her slender figure, her arms hugging her upper body. A cold draft leaks through the air vents under the window.
The door of the interview room opens, and a stocky woman in uniform calls to them. “You can come in now.” She smiles gently; her lips are glossy pink. “My name is Anja Lars
son,” she says to Erik and Simone. “I’ll be taking your statement.” The woman holds out a well-manicured hand. Her nails are long, painted red with sparkly tips. “I thought it was sort of Christmassy,” she says cheerfully.
“Nice,” Simone says distractedly.
Joona Linna is already sitting in the room. His jacket is on the back of the chair. His blond hair is tousled and looks unwashed. He hasn’t shaved. As they sit down opposite him, he gives Erik a serious, thoughtful look.
Simone clears her throat quietly and takes a sip from her glass of water. When she puts it down, she brushes against Erik’s hand. Their eyes meet, and her lips form a silent sorry.
Anja Larsson places the digital tape recorder on the table between them, presses RECORD, checks that the red light is showing, and then briefly states the time and date and lists those present in the room. Then she pauses, tilts her head to one side, and says in a bright, friendly voice, “OK, Simone, we’d like to hear what happened in your apartment the evening before last.”
Simone nods, looks at Erik, and lowers her eyes.
“I … I was at home—” She stops.
“Were you alone?” asks Anja Larsson.
Simone shakes her head. “Sim Shulman was with me,” she says, her tone neutral.
Joona makes a note on his pad.
“Can you tell us how you think Josef and Evelyn Ek got into the apartment?” asks Anja Larsson.
“I don’t really know, because I was in the shower,” Simone says slowly, and for a moment her face flushes bright red. The colour disappears almost immediately but leaves a warm glow on her cheeks.
“I was in the shower and Sim shouted to me that there was someone at the door … No, wait, he shouted that my phone was ringing.”
Anja Larsson repeats. “You were in the shower and you heard Sim Shulman shout that your phone was ringing.”
“Yes,” Simone whispers. “I told him to answer it.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“But he did answer it?”
“I think so, I’m almost sure he did.”
