by Lars Kepler
Plastic sheets in the windows keep out the sun and present a strange green face to the street.
Nobody had been injured in the fire at Pontonjärgatan 47 because most people had been at work. The first call had come into Emergency Central at 11:05 a.m. Even though the Kungsholm fire station was relatively close by, the fire had been so fierce that four apartments were completely destroyed.
Joona mulls over his conversation with Fire Inspector Hassan Sükür. Sükür had said it was ‘strongly indicated’ that the fire had started in Lisbet Wirén’s apartment. She was Björn Almskog’s eighty-eight-year-old neighbour. She’d gone out to convert a small winning on a lottery ticket into two new tickets, and couldn’t remember if she’d left her iron on. The fire had spread rapidly, and all signs pointed back to her apartment and the iron on her ironing board.
Joona surveys all the blackened apartments on this level. Nothing is left of any of the furniture in the rooms except individual twisted metal fragments, parts of a refrigerator, a bed frame, a sooty bathtub.
Joona turns and walks back down. The walls and ceiling of the stairwell are smoke damaged. He stops at the police tape, turns, and looks back up at all the blackness.
As he bends to go under the plastic tape, he notices that the fire inspectors have dropped a few DUO bags, used for preserving volatile liquids, on the floor. He continues past the green-marble entrance hall and out the main door onto the street. As he heads towards the police station, he calls Hassan Sükür again. Hassan answers at once and turns down the background sound from his radio.
“Have you found traces of flammable liquids?” Joona asks. “You’d dropped some DUO bags on the floor and I was wondering—”
“Let me give you some facts. If you pour flammable liquid on something, that’s the first thing to burn—”
“I know, but it was—”
“I, on the other hand, I am one who always finds whatever there is to find,” Hassan continues. “It often runs into gaps between the floorboards or into the double floor, or the fibreglass, or the underside of the double floor, which might have survived the fire.”
“But not at this site,” Joona says as he continues walking down the hill on Handverkargatan.
“Nothing at all,” Hassan replies.
“But if you knew where traces of flammable liquid might collect, you might be able to avoid detection.”
“Of course … if I were a pyromaniac, I would never make a mistake like that,” Hassan says cheerfully.
“But in this case you’re sure the iron brought on this blaze?”
“Yes, it was an accident.”
“So,” Joona states, “case closed.”
20
the house
The darkness of night is giving way to morning, even in the forest. Penelope and Björn move back towards the beach together but angle farther south, away from the house where the party had been. Away from their pursuer.
As far from their pursuer as they can possibly go.
Spotting another house between the trees, they start to run again. It’s about half a kilometre away, maybe even a little less. They hear the roar of a helicopter overhead somewhere but the sound fades as it moves on.
Björn looks dizzy; Penelope fears he won’t be able to keep running much longer. His bare feet are raw.
A branch breaks behind them. Perhaps underneath a human boot.
Penelope begins to run as fast as she can through the forest.
As the trees thin out more, she can see the house again. It’s just a hundred metres away. Lights in the window reflect on the red paint of a parked Ford.
A hare leaps up and jumps away over moss and twigs.
Panting and terrified, Penelope and Björn run up the gravel driveway and clamber up the stairs to the house. They spring inside.
“Hello? We need help!” Penelope screams.
The house is warm from yesterday’s sunshine. Björn, bare-chested and white with cold, is limping and leaves tracks of blood on the floor as he limps in. Penelope hurries from room to room, but the house is empty. The people who live here probably attended last night’s party and are sleeping it off at the neighbours’, Penelope realises. She goes to the window and, hiding behind the curtains, peers outside. There’s no movement in the forest or over the lawn. Perhaps the man has lost their trail. Perhaps he’s still waiting at the other house. She returns to the hallway where Björn sits on the floor examining the open wounds on his feet.
“We have to find you a pair of shoes.”
He looks up at her as if he no longer understands human speech.
“It’s not over. You have to find something to put on your feet.”
Björn slowly begins to rummage in the closet and pulls out beach shoes, rubber boots, and old bags.
Penelope creeps past the windows in search of a phone. She looks on the hall table, in the briefcase by the sofa, in the bowl on the coffee table, and among the keys and papers on the kitchen counter.
She hears something outside. She freezes to listen.
Maybe it was nothing.
The first rays of the morning sun shine through the windows.
Crouching low, she hurries into the large bedroom, pulls open dresser drawers. Tucked among the underwear, she finds a framed photograph, a studio portrait of a man, a wife, and two teenage daughters. All the other drawers are empty. Penelope yanks opens the closet and pulls out a black hoodie for herself and an oversized sweater for Björn.
She hears the tap run in the kitchen and hurries there. Björn is leaning over the sink, cupping handfuls of water. He’s found a pair of worn-out sneakers a few sizes too large.
This is crazy, Penelope thinks. There must be people all around here; we have to find someone who can help us.
Penelope hands Björn the sweater when someone knocks on the door. Björn smiles, surprised, and pulls it on while mumbling something about their luck turning. Penelope wipes her hair back from her face, and is almost at the door when she sees the silhouette through the frosted glass.
She stops abruptly and observes the shadowy form in the windowpane. Her hand no longer reaches out to open the door. She knows that stance; that head and shoulders. That’s the man in black.
All the air rushes from her lungs. She backs towards the kitchen slowly, her body tense and ready to run. Staring at the glass pane, she can see the blurred outline of a face—a face with a small chin. She feels dizzy, stumbles backwards over bags and boots, and reaches to steady herself against the wall.
She finds Björn next to her, holding a carving knife with a wide blade. His cheeks are pale and his mouth is half open. He’s staring at the pane of glass, too. Penelope backs into a table as the door handle slowly turns down. Suddenly she races into the bathroom, blasts on the water, and yells loudly, “Come in! Door’s open!”
Björn jumps and his pulse pounds in his head. He holds the knife out in front, ready to attack, when he sees the door handle ease back up. Their pursuer has let go. The silhouette disappears. A few seconds later, they hear footsteps crunching on the gravel path around the house. Björn looks stiffly to the right. Penelope emerges from the bathroom and Björn points to the window in the TV room. They move away into the kitchen as the man crosses the wooden deck. The footsteps reach the veranda door. Penelope tries to put herself in the killer’s head. Are the angle and the light enough to show the shoes tossed out of the closet and Björn’s bloody footprints? The wooden deck creaks again near the back stairs. Björn and Penelope creep along the floor and then roll right next to the wall underneath the window. They try to lie still and breathe silently. They can hear that the man has reached the kitchen window, can hear his hands touch the windowsill. They realise he’s peering inside.
In the reflection of the window in the oven door, Penelope can see him look from side to side. If he stares at the oven, she thinks, he’ll see them too.
The face in the window disappears and they hear steps on the wooden deck yet again. This time, the
steps are continuing along the paved path towards the front of the house. As the front door is opened, Björn dashes to the kitchen. He quietly sets the knife on the counter as he turns the key in the lock, pushes the door open, and rushes out.
Penelope follows at his heels. They’re running through the garden in the cool morning air, across the lawn, past the compost pile and into the forest. Fear forces Penelope to keep up her stride as it lashes the panic in her chest. She ducks underneath thick branches and leaps over low bushes and rocks. Soon she hears Björn’s panting beside her. And behind them, she senses their pursuer: a man attached to them like a dark shadow.
He’s following them to kill them.
She remembers a book she read. A woman from Rwanda was telling how she’d managed to survive the genocide by hiding in the woods and running every day. She ran the entire time the killings were going on. Her former friends and neighbours were hunting her with machetes. We imitated the antelopes, she’d written. We who survived in the jungle lived by imitating the flight of the antelopes from their hunters. We ran in unexpected ways, split apart and kept changing directions to confuse our pursuers.
Penelope knows that she and Björn should be smarter. They’re running without a plan, which will help their pursuer but not them. She and Björn are not clever. They want to go home, they want to find help, they want to contact the police. Their pursuer knows all this. He understands them and knows they want to find safety in the company of other humans or find a way to reach the mainland.
Penelope snags her shorts on a branch and rips a hole in them. She staggers a few steps but keeps going. She feels the pain as a burning loop around her leg.
They must not stop. She tastes blood in her mouth. Björn stumbles through a thicket. They have to circle a muddy, water-filled gap left by an uprooted tree.
In her flight next to Björn, a memory springs up unbidden. She had been as frightened then as she is now. It was in Darfur. She remembers the look in people’s eyes. Some eyes showed people so traumatised they could not go on. Others refused to give up the fight and kept going. What should have been children came to Kubbum one night. They held loaded guns. She would never forget the fear she felt that night.
21
the security service
The main office of Sweden’s Security Service, Säpo, is on the fourth floor of the National Police Board headquarters. Its main entrance is on Polhemsgatan. The room smells of dust and warm lightbulbs, and pale light falls into the room from a small window facing the courtyard. A whistle can be heard from the exercise yard of the jail, located on the roof of the building. The head of the department of security is Verner Zandén. He’s a tall man with a pointed nose, coal-black eyes, and a deep bass voice. He sits now on a chair behind his desk with his legs wide apart, and he’s holding up a calming hand. Standing in this unusually depressing room is a young woman named Saga Bauer. She’s an investigator and her group’s antiterrorism expert. Saga Bauer is just twenty-five years old. Stripes of green, yellow, and red cloth are braided into her long blonde hair. She looks like a wood sprite standing in the stream of light in a dark forest. She carries a large-calibre pistol in a shoulder holster under her unzipped exercise hoodie. NARVA BOXING CLUB has been printed on it.
“I’ve led this entire effort for more than a year,” she’s pleading. “I’ve been on stakeout for twenty-four hours at a time—”
“This is something entirely different,” her boss says with a smile.
“Please, please … You can’t just bypass me again!”
“Who says I’m doing that? A technician from CID is seriously wounded and an investigator has been attacked. That apartment could have exploded and—”
“I know. I need to get over there now—”
“I’ve already sent Göran Stone.”
“Göran Stone? I’ve been here for three years and I haven’t closed a case yet! This is my field of expertise! Göran knows nothing at all about—”
“He did a good job with the underground tunnel case.”
Saga swallows hard and then she replies, “That was also my case. I found the link to—”
“But it got dangerous and I still believe I made the right call.”
Saga’s cheeks turn red. She struggles to collect herself. “I can do this. This is what I’ve been trained for—”
“Yes, but I’ve made a different call.”
Verner sighs and props his feet up on the waste-paper basket next to his desk.
“You know my record. Affirmative action had nothing to do with my being accepted here,” Saga says, as calmly as she’s able. “I wasn’t part of a quota. I was top of my class in all the tests. I was best at sharpshooting. I have investigated two hundred and ten different—”
“I just don’t want anything to happen to you,” Verner says softly, and his coal-black blue eyes meet hers.
“But I’m not a doll, I’m not a princess, or some elf!”
“But you are so … so …”
Verner lifts his hands helplessly.
“All right, what the hell, let’s do it. You be the lead preliminary investigator. But Göran Stone is part of it and I want him to keep an eye on you.”
“Thanks,” she says, relieved.
“But this is a big deal. Remember that,” he warns. “Penelope Fernandez’s sister has been killed execution-style and Penelope is missing—”
“And we’ve noted increased activity among the left-wing extremist groups,” Saga says. “We want to know if the Revolutionary Front is behind the theft of explosives in Vaxholm.”
“The most important thing is if there is an immediate threat,” Verner emphasises.
“Right now the radicals are sounding more threatening,” Saga continues, a little too eagerly. “I’ve just been in contact with Dante Larsson at Military Intelligence and Security, and he says there will probably be acts of sabotage this summer.”
“Right now just concentrate on Penelope Fernandez,” Verner demands.
“Of course,” Saga answers swiftly. “Of course.”
“The technical investigation might be a cooperative effort between the National Criminal Investigation Department and us, but, basically, keep them out of it.”
Saga nods and waits a moment before she asks one last question.
“I want to bring this investigation to its conclusion. It’s important to me because—”
“Right now, you’re in the saddle,” he says. “But at this moment we don’t know where it’s leading or where it will end. We don’t even know how it began.”
22
the incomprehensible
Along Rekylgatan in the town of Västerås, there’s a shiny white apartment building. The people in the area enjoy being close to Lillhagen School, the football fields and tennis courts.
A young man is leaving from Door 11. He’s carrying a motorcycle helmet. His name is Stefan Bergkvist and he’s almost seventeen years old. He attends an automotive vocational school and lives with his mother and her partner. He has long blond hair and sports a silver ring in his lower lip. He’s wearing a black T-shirt, saggy jeans ripped at the cuffs from being walked on, and skate shoes.
In no hurry, he saunters to the car park. He hangs his helmet on the bar of his motocross cycle and slowly drives down the street next to the building. He continues alongside the double train track, then underneath the Norrleden viaduct and into a large industrial area. He finally stops near a construction shed covered in silver-and-blue graffiti.
Stefan and his friends like to meet here. They compete on their own motocross track that they built along the train-track embankment. They drive over various sidings and then circle back along Terminal Road. They started coming here after they stumbled upon a key to the construction shed buried in thistles by the back wall. The shed hadn’t been touched for ten years or more, forgotten after all the renovation work.
Stefan climbs off his motorcycle, retrieves the hidden key, and unlocks the padlock underneath its cap.
He pushes aside the steel boom and shoves open the wooden door to the shed, closing the door behind him. He checks the time on his phone and sees that his mother has called. He doesn’t realise that he’s under surveillance from across the train tracks. A sixty-year-old man idles near a Dumpster that belongs to a nearby industrial building. He’s wearing a grey suede jacket and light brown trousers.
Stefan walks over to the small kitchen and picks up a bag of chips lying in the sink. He pours the last crumbs into his palm and licks them up.
Light enters the shed from two windows covered with bars. The glass is dirty.
Stefan is waiting for his friends. He flips through an old magazine found among others scattered on a drawing table. On the front cover, a headline screams: JUST THINK! PEOPLE PAY ME TO LICK MY PUSSY!
The man in the suede jacket saunters from his spot and passes the high lattice poles with their looping electric lines. He crosses the brown grass on the embankment and walks over its double train tracks. He continues until he reaches Stefan’s motorcycle. He releases the kickstand and quietly wheels the motorcycle to the front.
He glances around once before he lays the motorcycle on its side and shoves it with his foot until it blocks the door. He opens the gas tank and lets the petrol run out. It leaks underneath the shed.
Stefan is still flipping through the magazine. He looks at the faded photos of women in jail. A blonde woman is sitting with her legs open, showing her pussy to a jailer. Stefan is immersed in the picture until he’s interrupted by a rustling sound outside. He thinks he hears someone walking around and closes the magazine quickly.
The man in the suede jacket has pulled out the red petrol can stashed by the boys in the brush next to the shed. He now begins to empty it all around the perimeter. Only when he reaches the back does he hear the shouts from within. The boy is banging on the door and is trying to get it open. He hears the boy’s footsteps before the boy’s face appears at one of the dirty windows.
