The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  ‘What do you mean, preschool?’ she asked antagonistically.

  I had a feeling she would have treated me with the same antipathy if I had told her she’d won a million in the lottery. It wasn’t what I said that provoked irritation, but the fact that I was the one saying it. Me – a disgusting person, with an ugly face, so-so body, ridiculous haircut and out-of-date clothes. I radiate ‘loser’, exhale ‘loser’, look like a loser. And Carina Ahonen saw that the moment she opened the door. She could sense it before I even opened my mouth. This made me furious.

  ‘We went to the same preschool. In Katrineholm – Forest Hill.’

  ‘I don’t remember you.’

  ‘Do you remember anything at all from preschool?’

  ‘Sure, but not you.’

  The way she looked at my clothes and not at my face when she talked further underscored the contempt she felt for me. I could have killed her right then, but that would have been too merciful. I debated with myself about how to continue, but could not come up with anything other than that a little wine would be really nice.

  ‘Are you offering a glass?’ I asked.

  She was surprised, presumably by my pushiness. In any case, she stared at me incredulously for a few moments, then she shook her head and took down a wineglass from a cupboard, filled it halfway and placed it in front of me on the table. Then she sat down across from me and took a sip of her own wine.

  ‘Cheers,’ I said, raising the glass before I brought it to my mouth.

  She glared morosely out of the window.

  ‘Why so hostile?’ I asked.

  ‘What the hell do you really want?’

  ‘I’m just saying that we went to the same preschool. And so I dragged myself out here to the wilderness in the rain, and you can’t so much as spare a smile. Not particularly hospitable, if I may say so.’

  There was light coming from the oven door and I realized that was where the nice aroma was coming from. A plan began to sprout in my mind.

  ‘You weren’t exactly invited. Now tell me who you are.’

  From the back pocket of my jeans I pulled out the worn black-and-white photo from 1968, unfolded it and set it in front of her.

  ‘This is me,’ I said, pointing at where I sat cross-legged on the floor in the front row of children.

  Her face unexpectedly broke into a smile, and it did not take her long to find herself, in the top right-hand corner, right next to the teacher.

  ‘And there’s me,’ she said, happy now. ‘I’m not sure I have this picture.’

  ‘Do you recognize anyone else?’

  ‘I recognize her,’ she answered, her finger on the stomach of Ann-Kristin.

  ‘Dead,’ I said, taking a sip of wine.

  ‘Dead?’ asked Carina, with some alarm.

  ‘Ann-Kristin is dead,’ I repeated.

  ‘Her name was Ann-Kristin, yes. How did she die?’

  ‘She was strangled in her apartment last week. After being tortured. But she was a prostitute, so probably no one really cared that much about it.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Carina exclaimed, with an uncertain smile on her lips, but her eyes revealed the prurient interest this news aroused in her.

  She looked at me curiously and I smiled courteously back. I had brought out the worst in her.

  ‘This one then,’ I continued. ‘Do you recognize him?’

  I was showing her Hans. In the very front, in the middle. He was on one knee, grinning toothlessly into the camera. I emptied my wineglass in two quick gulps and Carina, who had thawed out considerably, did not take long to refill it while she tried to think of his name.

  ‘Valdenström, Vallenberg, Vannerberg … His name was Hans Vannerberg, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Bravo,’ I said. ‘He’s dead too.’

  ‘Him too? It feels awful when people your own age are starting to die, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not particularly, to be honest. It was worse when they were alive,’ I answered dryly.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked, without waiting for an answer. ‘So how did he die?’

  ‘Beaten to death with a kitchen chair. Nose broken and then “poof”, the bridge of his nose pushed right into the brain.’

  I demonstrated the procedure with my hands wrapped around the legs of a pretend chair.

  ‘You’re joking … Is it something contagious?’

  ‘In Miss Ingrid’s kitchen,’ I clarified, pointing to our old teacher.

  ‘No, stop fooling around! What happened? Is she dead too?’

  Schadenfreude glistened in her eyes and, giggling, she poured herself another glass of wine too.

  ‘No, she’s still alive.’

  ‘More, more!’ Carina Ahonen cried enthusiastically. ‘Tell me more! I want to know all the details.’

  Her earlier frostiness was now gone, and it occurred to me forty years too late the simplest way to people’s hearts.

  ‘Lise-Lott,’ I said. ‘Do you recognize her?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so,’ Carina answered, shaking her head. ‘But wait … Don’t tell me she’s the mother of two in Katrineholm who was drowned in a footbath a few days ago!’

  ‘Bingo,’ I said.

  She suddenly turned her eyes to me with an inquisitive, slightly guarded look.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ she asked carefully. ‘Are you a police officer or something? Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘No, I’m not a police officer,’ I answered. ‘I know all this because I’m the one who killed them.’

  She stared sceptically at me for a few moments and then suddenly she started to laugh. Imagine that – someone who’s taken so long to give me the slightest smile suddenly just laughs at everything I say!

  ‘You joker,’ she chuckled, giving me a friendly thump on the back.

  Quick as a lizard I grabbed hold of her wrist, stood up and pulled her arm up behind her back in what is known as a shoulder lock (thanks again, Hans, for the good tip). She let out a scream and I reached quickly for the kitchen knife on the cutting board. With the knife against her throat, I was able to shove her over to the refrigerator. Its mirrored door was exactly what I needed.

  ‘You still don’t remember me?’ I asked threateningly.

  ‘No, I … Well, maybe …’

  ‘That’s what’s so funny. Imagine if you’d recognized me. Imagine if, at some point, you’d thought about how things had turned out for that poor child you constantly tormented. Then maybe this evening would have ended differently.’

  She was breathing heavily now and her body suddenly started to shake, as if she had a chill. Her voice had become shrill, on the verge of screeching.

  ‘I did not torment you! I never hit you!’

  ‘There are many ways to torment a small child. You chose the simplest. You led the audience, the cheering section. Without your encouraging shouts and your scornful smiles, the terror would not have had a breeding ground. You weren’t the one holding the axe, but you were the one who decided who would be beheaded. You were the one who set the pace and provided the tone, what was right and what was wrong. You were the one who decided that I was the ugliest and most disgusting little kid who ever set foot on this earth, and that mark could never be washed away, Carina. That’s how it works in a little town like Katrineholm. You’ve barely taken your first steps before a sugary-sweet, little power-abuser like you shows up and puts you at the bottom of the social status ladder. If you ever dare try to climb up a rung, you’re immediately kicked down by the lackeys on the next rung up. And at the very top there you sit, directing us all, out of everyone’s reach. You could have let me be. If you didn’t like me, you could have been content with that. But you just had to spread your venom and let everyone know what a miserable specimen I was. You had to enhance your own excellence by showing the other children my – just my – imperfection. And why I was the chosen one I still don’t understand, to this day. I don’t really know who I am either – or who I could have been, if
you and your ilk hadn’t crushed the little me that once was sprouting in a small, soft, innocent child’s body. And you destroyed it, you beat it black and blue and you punched holes in it and made it hard and rough. You bent its straight back. You not only destroyed my childhood, you took my whole life from me. What you did then – what you did, Carina – was to destroy a person’s life. You sentenced me to a life without friends, a life without pleasure, a life in complete isolation. That is a serious act, don’t you get it? Neither one of us has a life to look forward to now. But what separates us is that you have a life to look back on, while I have nothing. All because of you.’

  She was staring at me in the mirror with big, wide-open, blue eyes, and I felt her pulse pounding in her wrist. I was struck by the sudden desire to disfigure this beautiful woman before I killed her.

  ‘I … I realize now how wrong I was,’ she tried ingratiatingly.

  ‘Unfortunately, it’s a little too late to wake up now,’ I said, as I let go of her arm and instead took a firm grip on the blonde hair falling over her shoulders.

  I sawed through the hair on the back of her head with the carving knife, and when I was finished, and her head was hanging forward as the last strand of hair was removed from her scalp, I quickly moved the knife back against her throat. The sharp blade paralysed her and she did not dare move. Panting rapidly, she looked at the image of herself in the refrigerator with tear-filled eyes.

  ‘What can I do?’ she sobbed in desperation.

  ‘It’s too late to do anything now. I do and you feel. How ugly you’ve become,’ I smiled, but she did not reply. ‘What’s in the oven?’

  ‘A moose steak,’ she answered, and the tears running down her face left black marks of mascara on her cheeks.

  ‘A moose steak? Oh, thanks! And to think how hungry I am. Shall we take a look at the steak?’

  I shoved her ahead of me over to the oven.

  ‘Open the oven now.’

  She carefully cracked open the oven door and let the steam issue out from the narrow opening before she opened it all the way. In the oven was a long pan on a grill at chest height, and I forced her head into the oven with brute force. The edge of the long pan struck her nose and cheeks, and the oven grill ended up on her chin. It sizzled as the hot metal burned the thin, sensitive skin on her face, but the unpleasant sound was quickly smothered by a frightful howl that made the windowpanes in the kitchen rattle. She managed to get her head out of the oven from pure reflex, but in her shaken condition, and with the increasing pain from the burns, she could do nothing but hysterically stamp her feet, holding her hands in front of her mangled face, screaming out her torment.

  I took a step back and witnessed the drama in fascination for a few moments. Then, as I approached her with the knife in my hand, she simply struck out wildly around her, without seeming to care about the consequences. She forced me to cut her on the forearm. When she noticed that she was bleeding she calmed down a little. I put my arm around her throat and once again dragged the wriggling creature to the refrigerator’s mirrored door. I forced her to look at her disfigured face, and she wept in desperation at the sight of the two broad, parallel burn marks.

  ‘That wasn’t pretty,’ I said in a smooth voice. ‘Not pretty at all. You do realize you are an ugly person, don’t you?’

  For a few moments of indecision, I seriously considered leaving her like that, just for the joy of knowing she would be a very unhappy, and presumably also terrified person for the rest of her life. Finally, however, I listened to reason and decided to go on with my work.

  ‘Imagine having to live with such a handicap,’ I said philosophically. ‘Having to put up with people’s curious, maybe even disgusted looks every time you set foot outside your door. Hear their giggling, see in the corner of your eye how they can’t help but turn around to stare at you. Feel how they point and whisper behind your back. And the children, not to mention the innocent children, how they openly discuss and question your appearance. No, listen, Carina, that’s not something you would wish on your worst enemy. Or what do you say?’

  Carina Ahonen said nothing, simply stood shaking and gasping for air, with her hands before her eyes. The burns were too painful to be touched.

  ‘It’s better that we end this now, so I can eat. You can be grateful, Carina, that the torment was so brief.’

  Without hesitating, I quickly made a deep cut with the carving knife across her throat. A fountain of blood sprayed in an arching, deep-red pattern of drops over our mirror image on the refrigerator, and she sank, lifeless, down on to the oak parquet floor. Finally, it was quiet and peaceful.

  I presume that I wasn’t fully responsible for my actions, but I went over to the stove and checked with a fork whether the potatoes were done. They were, so I put some potatoes on a plate, took the marvellously sweet-smelling moose steak out of the oven and carved a big, juicy, pink slice. In the refrigerator I found a fresh salad to go with it, and then I sat down at the kitchen table, drank what was left of the wine and enjoyed Carina Ahonen’s Friday dinner. Without so much as casting a glance at the recently so lively person on the kitchen floor.

  I now feel, to an even greater degree than before, that basically I am not a physical person. In reality, I’m not at all suited for physical activity, which I’ve always known, and I’m not a particularly suitable executioner either. The murder of Hans was in many ways a disappointment, but still the beginning of something big. The murder of Ann-Kristin might well be considered the high point of my career, and that’s the murder I prefer to think back on. But afterwards, I felt very strongly that I couldn’t bear to carry on with that sort of thing any more. Killing is one thing, torture another. It’s too physical somehow. Chinese water torture might be something, but I’m impatient too. I want results, and besides, there’s always the risk that someone will show up.

  The murder of Lise-Lott was a real flop. The stupid cow didn’t understand a thing and you couldn’t really expect her to either. She did get to suffer for quite a while, but I doubt whether she even knew who I was. And now – now here I sit with blood on my hands again. This time in both the figurative and literal sense.

  I was nervous about this, I have to admit. Before, I acted according to my heart, but this time my heart was not really in it. Putting Carina Ahonen to death was a purely logical decision, based on certain philosophical assumptions I made. Namely, that fawning, passivity and Schadenfreude are associated with evil. She always fawned on those who were the driving force in the physical abuse, and praised them for their actions; with her passive presence she took an active part in the terror, and her Schadenfreude reflected her drive to injure and wound others. Besides, she was the one who established the norm for all that was important: appearance, behaviour, vocabulary, interests. Power radiated silently from her, and a wrinkle of dissatisfaction on her sweet little doll’s face sent the soldiers out to attack anyone who defied the unspoken rules formed behind her glistening corkscrew curls. Such a person is evil without a doubt, isn’t she? And thus does not deserve to live. Yet I wasn’t able to mobilize any real hatred before I began the task I had set myself. No, no feelings at all really, except possibly a small measure of old contempt.

  Only a few weeks ago the very thought of killing a person on such flimsy grounds – nay, on any grounds at all – would have been completely foreign to me, but today it’s an everyday event. It’s time to stop now, before I become so blasé that boredom gets the upper hand.

  Friday Evening

  It was almost seven when Sjöberg got home on Friday, wet, miserable and late. Since Thursday morning he had only seen his wife in a sleeping state, and he had not seen the children at all. He did not even have time to take off his wet trousers before he was ordered to put the little boys to bed. The girls rampaged around his legs in their eagerness to tell him about things that had happened during the day, and Jonathan screamed while Sjöberg changed Christoffer’s nappy. The disappointment at the day’s failures d
isappeared temporarily somewhere in his mind under a compact layer of stress and irritation at the children’s loud voices. Twenty minutes later, when the girls were sitting in front of the DVD player eating popcorn, the twins, full of whole-grain porridge, were babbling in their cots, Simon was sitting in front of his computer and Åsa was in the shower, he finally had time to remove his soaked trousers. Then the doorbell rang and, half-undressed, he had to run over to the entry phone to let the babysitter into the building. The door to the bathroom was locked, so he couldn’t get at his bathrobe and instead had to wriggle unwillingly back into his wet trousers.

  The babysitter was the sixteen-year-old half-sister of Simon’s friend Johan, from one building down, who was there every other weekend. Her name was Anna, and she was a reliable girl with a mind of her own. The kids liked her a lot. There was also the added security of knowing there was help available in the neighbouring building if anything were to happen.

  This was the first time they were leaving the twins at home with Anna as babysitter, but problems were unlikely, since the boys usually slept through the night. The girls rushed out into the hall when they heard the doorbell, and threw themselves into Anna’s arms when Sjöberg let her in. Then he went back to the bedroom to freshen up and change quickly, before it was time to go down to the street to the pre-arranged taxi. Not until they were buckled in on the backseat and had pointed the taxi driver in the right direction was there time for Sjöberg and his wife to have a moment for each other.

  When you saw them next to each other, there was no doubt that Lasse was Åsa’s brother. Both were tall and slender, even if Lasse, who was a few years older than Åsa, had the beginning of a beer belly, which he tried to conceal by means of tunic shirts and loose-fitting sweaters. Both of them were also true blondes and had similar greenish, almost cat-like eyes. Sjöberg’s sister-in-law, Mia, on the other hand, was dark, short and a little plump, with a marvellously contagious laugh. They had no children, and though they loved kids and were the best babysitters you could imagine, Åsa was convinced that they were childless by choice, even if she had never dared to bring up the question with either of them. Sjöberg was more doubtful, but yielded to his wife’s presumed knowledge of her own brother. Lasse was an interior designer, which was definitely not reflected in their own, rather carelessly arranged home, and Mia worked as a manager at an IT company. They travelled a lot and this was Åsa’s main argument that their childlessness was by choice.