by Lars Kepler
Absolutely nothing happens. Shulman’s stomach continues to rise and fall regularly and mechanically with the help of the respirator.
“Should we leave?” Simone asks, after a while.
“Wait,” Erik whispers.
His watch ticks slowly. On the windowsill, a petal drifts down from a flower, making a faint rustling sound as it reaches the floor. A few raindrops land on the windowpane. They can hear a woman laughing somewhere in a room far away.
A strange sighing is coming from inside Shulman’s body, like a gentle breeze blowing through a half-open window.
Simone can feel the sweat from her armpits trickling down her body. She has a sense of claustrophobia, as if she is trapped in this situation. She wants to run out of the room, but she can’t take her eyes off Shulman’s throat. Perhaps she is imagining it, but suddenly she thinks that the artery in his neck is pulsing more quickly. Erik is breathing heavily and as he leans over Shulman, she can see that he seems nervous, biting his lower lip and looking at his watch again. The respirator continues its steady metallic sighing. Someone walks past the door. The wheels of a trolley squeak and then the room is quiet once again. The only sound comes from the machine’s rhythmic work.
Suddenly they hear a faint scratching noise. Simone leans closer and sees Shulman’s index finger moving over the smooth surface of the sheet. She feels her pulse speed up, and is just about to say something to Erik when Shulman opens his eyes. He stares straight at her with an odd expression. His mouth widens in a frightened grimace. His tongue moves laboriously, and saliva trickles down his chin.
“It’s me, Sim. It’s me,” she says, taking his hand in hers. “I’m going to ask you some really important questions.”
Shulman’s fingers tremble. His eyes focus on her, then suddenly roll back; his mouth stretches, and the veins at his temples throb frantically.
“You answered my phone when Benjamin called, do you remember that?”
With Shulman’s electrodes attached to his own chest, Erik can see on the monitor that his heart rate is increasing. Shulman’s feet are vibrating under the sheet.
“Sim, can you hear me?” she asks. “It’s Simone. Can you hear me, Sim?”
His eyes roll down again, but immediately slide to the side. Rapid steps can be heard in the corridor outside the door, and a woman shouts something.
“You answered my phone,” she repeats.
He nods weakly.
“It was my son,” she goes on. “It was Benjamin who called.”
His feet begin to shake again, his eyes roll back, and his tongue flops out of his mouth.
“What did Benjamin say?”
Shulman swallows, works his jaw slowly. His eyes close.
“Sim? What did he say?”
He shakes his head.
“Didn’t he say anything?”
“Not …” Shulman wheezes.
“What did you say?”
“Not Benjamin,” he says, almost inaudibly.
“Didn’t he say anything?”
“Not him,” Shulman says. His voice is high, frightened.
“What?”
“Ussi?”
“What are you saying?” she asks.
“Ussi called.” Shulman’s mouth trembles.
Simone looks at Erik, baffled.
“Where was he?” Erik asks, looking intently at Shulman. “Ask him where Jussi was.”
“Where was he?” Simone asks. “Do you know where Jussi was?”
“At home,” replies Shulman in his high voice.
“Was Benjamin there too?”
Shulman’s head flops to one side, his mouth goes slack, and his chin crumples. Simone looks anxiously at Erik; she doesn’t know what to do.
“Was Lydia there?” Erik asks.
Shulman looks up, but his eyes slip to the side. Erik nudges Simone: You ask him.
“Was Lydia there?” Simone asks.
Shulman nods.
“Did Jussi say anything about …” Simone pauses as Shulman begins to whimper. Tears come to her eyes, and she strokes him gently on the cheek.
Suddenly his eyes snap into focus and he looks directly at her. “What’s happened?” he asks, with complete clarity, and then slumps into a coma once again.
93
saturday, december 19: afternoon
Anja walks into Joona Linna’s office and silently hands him a manila folder and a glass of mulled wine. He looks up at her round, pink face. For once she looks completely serious.
“They’ve identified the child,” she explains.
“Thanks.”
There are two things he loathes, he thinks, looking at the folder. One is having to give up on a case, walking away from unidentified bodies, unsolved rapes, robberies, cases of abuse and murder. And the other thing he loathes, although in a completely different way, is when these unsolved cases are finally solved, because when the old questions are answered, it is seldom in the way one would wish.
He begins to read. The body of the child found in Lydia Everson’s garden was that of a boy. He was five years old when he was killed. The cause of death is thought to be a fractured skull caused by a blunt object. In addition, a number of healed and partially healed injuries have been found, indicating repeated abuse of a serious nature. Beatings, the forensic pathologist has suggested. Abuse so serious that it caused broken bones and cracks in the skeleton. The back and the arms, especially, seem to have been the focus of violence using heavy objects. In addition, several symptoms of malnutrition on the skeleton suggest that the child was starving.
Joona looks out the window for a little while. He can’t get used to this, and he has told himself that the day he does get used to it, he’ll give up his job as a detective. He runs a hand through his thick hair, swallows hard, and returns to his reading.
The child has been identified. His name was Johan Samuelsson, and he had been reported missing thirteen years ago. According to her statement the mother, Isabella, had been in the garden with her son when the phone rang inside the house. She had not taken the boy with her when she went to answer, and at some point during the twenty or thirty seconds it took her to pick up the receiver, establish that there was no one there, and hang up again, the child had disappeared.
Johan was two years old at the time.
He was five years old when he was killed.
His remains then lay in Lydia Everson’s garden for ten years.
The smell of the mulled wine is suddenly nauseating. Joona gets up and pushes his office window open. He looks down at the inner courtyard, the sprawling branches of the trees over by the custody area, the shining wet asphalt.
Lydia had the child with her for three years, he thinks. Three years of keeping a secret. Three years of abuse, starvation, and fear.
“Are you all right, Joona?” asks Anja, popping her head around the door.
“I’m going to go and speak to the parents,” he says.
“I’m sure someone else can do that.”
“No. This is my case,” says Joona. “I’ll go.”
“I understand.”
“Could you find some addresses for me in the meantime?”
“No problem.”
“I’d like to know every place Lydia Everson has lived for the past thirteen years.” His heart is heavy as he pulls on his fur hat and overcoat and sets off to tell Isabella and Joakim Samuelsson that their son has been found dead.
Anja calls him as he’s driving out of the city.
“That was quick,” he says, trying to sound cheerful but failing.
“This is my job after all, darling,” chirrups Anja.
He hears her take a deep breath and he thinks of the two pictures of Johan in the folder. In one he’s dressed in a policeman’s uniform, laughing out loud, his hair standing on end. And in the other: a collection of bones laid out on a metal table, neatly labelled with numbers.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” he mutters to himself.
“Hey!”
“Sorry, Anja, it was another driver.”
“All right, all right. But I don’t want to hear that kind of language.”
“No, I know,” he says wearily, incapable of joining in the banter.
Anja finally seems to realise that he isn’t in the mood for jokes and says neutrally, “The house where Johan Samuelsson’s remains were found is Lydia Everson’s mother’s place. She grew up there, and that’s always been her only address.”
“Any family? Parents? Brothers and sisters?”
“Wait, I’m just checking it now … It doesn’t look like it. There’s no record of her father, and her mother’s dead. It doesn’t even look as if Lydia was in her care for very long.”
“Brothers and sisters?” Joona asks again.
“No,” says Anja, leafing through papers. “Sorry, yes,” she calls out. “She had a little brother, but he seems to have died at an early age.”
“How old was Lydia at the time?”
“She was ten.”
“So she’s always lived in that house?”
“No, that’s not exactly what I said. She has lived elsewhere—on several occasions, in fact.”
“Where?” Joona asks patiently.
“Ulleråker, Ulleråker, Ulleråker Psychiatric Clinic.”
“Three stays.”
“That’s what it says.”
“There are pieces missing,” Joona remarks quietly to himself.
“What are you saying?”
“There are too many pieces missing,” he answers. “I can’t make sense of it, and now I have to try to explain to two parents why Lydia took their child.”
94
saturday, december 19: afternoon
Joona has turned onto the little street where Johan Samuelsson’s parents still live. He spots their place at once, an eighteenth-century house painted Falun red, with a saddle roof. A shabby playhouse stands in the garden. Beyond the Samuelssons’ hilly plot it is just possible to glimpse the black, heavy water of the Baltic Sea.
“I have to go, Anja.”
He pulls his car into a raked gravel drive neatly edged with cobblestones and runs his hands over his face before getting out. He walks up to the door and rings the bell, waits, rings again. Eventually he hears someone shouting inside.
“Coming!”
The lock rattles and a teenage girl pushes open the door. Her eyes are heavily made up with kohl, and she has dyed her hair purple.
“Hey,” she says.
“My name is Joona Linna,” he says. “I’m from the National CID. Are your parents at home?”
The girl nods and turns to shout to them. But a middle-aged woman is already standing in the hallway, staring at Joona. “Amanda,” she says in a frightened voice, “ask him … ask him what he wants.”
Joona shakes his head. “I’d prefer not to say on the doorstep what I came to say,” he says. “May I come in?”
“Yes,” whispers the mother.
Joona steps inside and closes the door. He looks at the girl, whose lower lip has begun to tremble. Then he looks at Isabella Samuelsson. Her hands are pressed to her breast, and her face is deathly pale.
Joona takes a deep breath and explains quietly. “I’m so very, very sorry. We’ve found Johan’s remains.”
The mother presses her clenched fist to her mouth, making a faint whimpering sound. She leans on the wall but slips and sinks to the floor.
“Dad!” yells Amanda. “Dad!”
A man comes running down the stairs. When he sees his wife weeping on the floor, he slows down. It’s as if every vestige of colour disappears from his face. He looks at his wife, his daughter, then Joona. “It’s Johan,” is all he says.
“We’ve found his remains,” says Joona, his voice subdued.
They sit in the living room. The girl puts her arm around her mother, who is weeping inconsolably. The father still seems strangely calm. Joona has seen it before, these men—and sometimes women, though this is less common—who show very little reaction, who continue to talk and ask questions, whose voices take on a peculiarly vacant tone as they ask about the details. Joona knows this is not indifference but a battle, a desperate attempt to put off the moment when the pain comes.
“How did you find him?” the mother whispers, between bouts of weeping. “Where was he?”
“We were looking for another child at the home of a person suspected of kidnapping,” says Joona. “Our dog picked up the scent and led us to a spot in the garden.”
“In the garden?”
Joona swallows. “Johan has been buried there for ten years, according to the forensic pathologist.”
Joakim Samuelsson looks up. “Ten years?” He shakes his head. “It’s thirteen years since Johan disappeared,” he whispers.
Joona nods, feeling utterly drained as he explains. “We have reason to believe that the person who took your child held him captive—” He looks down, making an enormous effort to sound calm when he looks up again. “Johan was held captive for three years,” he goes on. “Before the perpetrator killed him. He was five when he died.”
At this point the father’s face breaks. His iron-hard façade is shattered into countless fragments, like a thin pane of glass. It is very painful to watch. His face crumples and tears begin to pour down his cheeks. Rough, dreadful sobs rend the air.
Joona looks around the room at the framed photographs on the walls. Recognises the picture from the folder of little two-year-old Johan in his police uniform. Sees a confirmation photo of the girl. A picture of the parents, laughing and holding up a newborn baby. He swallows and waits. It isn’t over yet.
“There’s one more thing I have to ask you,” he says, after giving them a moment to compose themselves. “I have to ask if you’ve ever heard of a woman named Lydia Everson.”
The mother shakes her head in confusion. The father blinks a couple of times, then says quickly, “No, never.”
Amanda whispers, “Is she … is she the one who took my brother?”
Joona looks at her, his expression serious. “We believe so.”
When he gets up, his palms are wet with perspiration and he can feel the sweat trickling down the sides of his body.
“My condolences,” he says. “I really am very, very sorry.” He places his card on the table in front of them, along with the telephone numbers of a counsellor and a support group. “Call me if you think of anything, or if you just want to talk.”
He is on his way out when the father suddenly gets to his feet. “Wait … I have to know. Have you caught her? Have you caught her yet?”
Joona clamps his jaws together. “No, we haven’t caught her yet. But we’re on her trail. We’ll have her soon, I promise.”
He calls Anja as soon as he gets in the car. She answers immediately. “Did it go well?”
“It never goes well,” Joona replies steadily.
There is a brief silence at the other end of the phone.
“Did you want anything in particular?” Anja asks hesitantly.
“Yes,” says Joona.
“You do know it’s Saturday.”
“The father is lying,” Joona goes on. “He knows Lydia. He said he’d never heard of her, but he was lying.”
“How do you know he was lying?”
“Something about his eyes when I asked. I’m right about this.”
“I believe you. You’re always right, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.”
“And if we doubt you, we have to put up with you saying, ‘What did I tell you?’”
Joona smiles to himself. “You’ve come to know me well, Anja.”
“Did you want to tell me anything else, apart from the fact that you were right?”
“Yes, I’m going over to Ulleråker.”
“Now? You know it’s our Christmas dinner tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Joona,” Anja says chidingly. “It’s our staff Christmas party, dinner at Skansen. You can’t have forgotten?”
“Do I have to come?” asks Joona.
“Yes, you do,” Anja replies firmly. “And you’re sitting next to me.”
“As long as you don’t get carried away after a few drinks.”
“You can cope.”
“If you will be an angel and ring Ulleråker, make sure there’ll be someone there I can talk to about Lydia, you can do more or less whatever you like with me,” says Joona.
“Oh my God, in that case I’m already on it,” says Anja cheerfully, hanging up.
95
saturday, december 19: afternoon
The psychiatric clinic at Ulleråker is one of a very few still in operation in Sweden, the result of huge cuts in allocations for psychiatric care that took place in the 1990s. A complex of pale buildings set amid dark groves of trees, fields, and gardens once tended by patients, and with its own cemetery, the hospital is a world unto itself. Joona passes through an old-fashioned porte–cochère at the entrance and pulls up before the main building, an elegant old structure topped by a clock tower set directly in the centre of the complex.
Anja has done a good job as usual. When Joona walks in through the main entrance, he can see from the expression of the girl on reception that he is expected.
“Joona Linna?”
He nods and shows his ID.
“Dr Langfeldt is waiting for you. Up the stairs, first room on the right along the hall.”
Joona thanks her and begins to climb the wide stone staircase. He can hear thuds, shouts, the sound of a television coming from somewhere in the distance. There is a smell of cigarette smoke. Outside, the clinic is surrounded by an ornamental garden that resembles a churchyard, the bushes blackened and bowed down by the rain, trellises damaged by dampness with spindly climbers clinging to them. It looks gloomy, Joona thinks. A place like this isn’t really aimed at recovery, it’s a place for containment. He reaches the landing and looks around. To the left, through a glass door, is a long, narrow corridor. He wonders briefly where he has seen it before, then realises it’s an almost identical copy of the holding cells at Kronoberg: rows of locked doors with metal handles. An elderly woman in a long dress emerges from one of the doors. She stares at him through the glass. Joona nods to her, then opens the door leading to the other corridor. It smells strongly of bleach and antiseptic.
