Stalker

by Lars Kepler

  Through the gloom he sees her body swaying gently, her hands seem to be slipping through water. Her bare feet move over the brass pedals. She is sitting on the edge of the stool, and he can see her slender waist and the shadowy groove down the centre of her upright back.

  ‘Nam et si ambulavero in medio umbrae mortis,’ she murmurs to herself.

  He thinks she knows that he’s there, but she still plays to the end of the piece before turning towards him.

  ‘The neighbours have complained,’ she says quietly. ‘But I need to learn a fairly hard piece for a wedding tomorrow.’

  ‘It sounded wonderful.’

  ‘Go back to bed,’ she whispers.

  He returns to the bed and is just about to fall asleep when he finds himself thinking of Björn Kern. The police still don’t know that the dead woman was sitting with her hand to her ear. The thought snaps Erik awake when he realises that he could be hindering the police investigation.

  After an hour the music falls silent and Jackie comes back to the bedroom. It’s already light outside by the time he falls asleep again.

  In the morning the bed is empty. Erik goes to the bathroom, showers, then gets dressed. When he emerges he can hear Jackie and Madeleine in the kitchen.

  He walks in and gets a cup of coffee. Madeleine is eating breakfast cereal with milk and fresh raspberries.

  Jackie explains that she has to be in Adolf Fredrik Church in a little while to rehearse for the wedding.

  As soon as she leaves the kitchen to get changed, Madeleine puts her spoon down and turns towards Erik.

  ‘Mum says you carried me to bed,’ she says.

  ‘She asked me to help her.’

  ‘Was it dark in my room?’ she asks, looking at him with bottomless eyes.

  ‘I haven’t said anything to your mum … that would be better coming from you.’

  The girl shakes her head, and tears start to run down her cheeks.

  ‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ Erik says.

  ‘Mum will be really sad,’ she hiccoughs.

  ‘It’ll be all right.’

  ‘I don’t know why I have to ruin everything,’ she sobs.

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Yes I do, I can’t get rid of that,’ she says, wiping her cheeks.

  ‘I did far worse things …’

  ‘No,’ she sobs.

  ‘Maddy, it’s not a problem … Listen, now,’ he says. ‘We can … Why don’t you and I paint your walls?’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looks at him with a trembling chin and nods several times.

  ‘What colour would you like?’

  ‘Blue … blue, like Mum’s nightie,’ she smiles.

  ‘Is that light blue?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Jackie asks.

  She’s standing in the doorway, already dressed in her black skirt and jacket, a pale pink blouse, round sunglasses and pink lipstick.

  ‘Maddy thinks it’s time to repaint her room, and I said I’d be happy to help.’

  ‘OK,’ Jackie says, with a slightly bemused expression.

  48

  Margot sees Adam waiting for her in the underground garage of Police Headquarters. His T-shirt is bulging because of the bandage round his chest. She walks towards him, but has to stop when the baby pushes upwards. The plastic-covered trestle tables are covered with objects seized from Filip Cronstedt’s storeroom, lined up and numbered, ready for analysis.

  Another colleague approaches from the other direction, she hears him say something appreciative to Adam, then he carries on towards the lifts.

  Adam’s weary face, with its dark shadow of stubble, looks brittle in the harsh lighting.

  Behind him she can see that the work of cataloguing the vast amount of material seized is proceeding. On the first table lies a gilded bed-head, a wooden crate containing starched, folded linen, battered books and three pairs of trainers.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Margot asks when she reaches Adam.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he replies, putting his hand to his ribs. ‘My mind’s spinning, though, I keep seeing it all and thinking that I would have been dead if she’d angled the gun just a tiny bit more, three millimetres to the left.’

  ‘You should never have gone down there without backup.’

  ‘I made the decision that we had to go in … but I don’t think I really appreciated the state Joona was in – he collapsed on the floor and dropped his gun.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have been there anyway.’

  ‘It was a fuck up.’ He nods. ‘There’s going to be an internal inquiry … obviously, seeing as I was shot … but it will probably end up with the National Police-Related Crimes Unit, so we’ll need to talk that through.’

  Margot looks at a faded school poster of the female anatomy. The eyes have been coloured in with blue chalk.

  ‘But without Joona, we’d never have caught Filip,’ she says.

  ‘I caught Filip, I was the one who did that. Joona was lying on the floor …’

  The harsh glare from the fluorescent lights and magnifying lamps reflects off the plastic between the objects on the tables. Margot stops beside three video cameras with crushed lenses wrapped in ESD-proof packaging in a spacious cardboard box.

  ‘Is anyone trying to match Filip’s cameras with the videos of the victims?’ she asks.

  ‘I presume so.’

  ‘But you haven’t found the tongue-stud or the rest of the deer?’

  ‘Give it time,’ Adam smiles. ‘This is just the material from the storeroom. There’s no rush, the important thing is that it’s over, that we’ve got him.’

  They pass a pile of hand-painted tin soldiers and Margot can’t help thinking that the rest of the little porcelain deer and the Saturn stud ought to be here, given that Filip was living in the storage facility at the time of the murders.

  ‘How sure are we that it’s him?’ she asks.

  ‘Filip’s in the operating theatre at the Karolinska, but as soon as he can talk we’ll get a confession out of him.’

  ‘Have you got anyone on guard there?’ she asks.

  ‘He was shot in the chest, one lung is wrecked, so I hardly think that’s necessary.’

  ‘Do it anyway.’

  There are about twenty polaroid photographs of young women with bare chests in a small plastic folder.

  ‘If it will calm you down, I’ll sort it out as soon as I get upstairs,’ Adam replies.

  ‘I spoke to Joona in the hospital, and he seems to think that Filip didn’t commit the murders, and—’

  ‘What the fuck?’ Adam interrupts with an irritated smile. ‘I let Joona come with me because I felt sorry for him – that was a mistake I’m not going to repeat. We can’t let him play at being a detective.’

  ‘I agree,’ she says quickly.

  ‘He messed up, and he’s not coming anywhere near this investigation again.’

  ‘I’m just trying to say that this feels too easy,’ Margot says calmly, carrying on along the tables.

  ‘Filip was on the point of confessing when he was shot. He said he’d been creeping about outside Maria Carlsson’s windows,’ Adam says, turning to her with a grin. ‘He’s got no alibi for the evenings of the murders, he’s extremely violent, paranoid, and completely obsessed with cameras and surveillance—’

  ‘I know, but …’

  ‘He’d locked himself away with two women, you should have been there, he had them tied up with steel wire.’

  Even though he is hollow-eyed and clearly short of sleep, there’s an underlying fire in his eyes, and his cheeks are flushed.

  Adam stops and catches his breath, leans his knuckles on the nearest table for a while with his eyes closed.

  The stress and exertions of the night come back to hit him like a heavy pendulum. He thinks about the ringing in his ears after the last shot, as blood trickled down his side and under the waist of his jeans before he managed to disarm o
ne of the sisters.

  He thinks of the huge dog that tried to rip him apart, and the orgy in the Birger Jarl Hotel, the unprotected sex with an unknown woman.

  Tears well up in his eyes as he thinks about how little control he has, how little he knows about himself.

  He suddenly feels an intense desire to go home to his wife, to curl up in his warm bed behind Katryna, to the smell of her hand cream and her ugly bed socks and the liver spots on her back that look almost like the Plough.

  Margot walks past an old-fashioned gramophone, and stops in front of some jewellery on a piece of cardboard. She gets out a pen and pokes through the tarnished silver rings, brooches, broken chains and crucifixes. She picks up a heart-shaped charm with her pen just as her mobile rings.

  Margot lets the heart fall back on to the cardboard, pulls out her phone and answers by giving her surname.

  Something in her voice makes Adam turn towards her.

  Margot will always remember this moment, the way they were standing in the bright light among Filip’s possessions, and how her heartbeat drowned out absolutely everything else for a few moments.

  ‘What is it?’ Adam says.

  She stares at him, she can’t talk, her throat is so dry, and she realises that her jaw is trembling.

  ‘A film,’ she hisses. ‘We’ve received another film.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Adam swears, and starts running towards the lifts.

  ‘Call the hospital!’ Margot gasps as they hurry past the tables towards the lifts. ‘Check if Filip’s escaped.’

  Adam presses the lift-button, then clutches his phone to his ear as she catches up with him. The machinery rumbles slowly. She’s moved too quickly and her pelvis is burning.

  Adam holds the phone to his ear and shakes his head in her direction.

  ‘Has he gone?’ she gasps.

  ‘No answer,’ he says anxiously.

  The lift stops two floors up and Margot presses the button again, whispering angry curses to herself.

  Finally someone picks up at the hospital. A sluggish voice tells Adam that he’s reached the Intensive Care Unit.

  ‘My name is Adam Youssef, I’m a detective with the National Criminal Investigation Department, and I need to know if one of your patients, Filip Cronstedt, is still with you.’

  ‘Filip Cronstedt,’ the man at the other end says.

  ‘Listen, you have to listen,’ Adam pleads, and realises how incoherent he sounds. ‘I want you to go and see him and check that he’s there.’

  The man sighs, as though he were indulging some sort of ridiculous whim, but Adam hears him put the phone down on his desk and walk away.

  ‘He’s gone to check,’ Adam tells Margot.

  ‘Make sure they confirm his identity,’ she says, as the lift doors close behind them.

  They shuffle about like caged animals as they’re sucked up inside the building. Adam’s shoulder crumples a poster advertising a concert by the police choir.

  ‘Filip Cronstedt is still sedated,’ the slow voice finally tells Adam.

  ‘Filip’s sedated,’ Adam repeats.

  49

  Adam runs down the corridor ahead of Margot. Filip Cronstedt was given emergency sedation when he was brought into A&E early that morning, and has been kept like that ever since.

  The real serial killer is still on the loose.

  Margot follows Adam into their office and sees the treetops of Kronoberg Park in the pale sunlight through the small windows.

  ‘Have we got a copy?’

  ‘It looks like it,’ he replies.

  Margot is gasping for breath as she sinks onto the second chair in front of the computer while Adam clicks the video file. The base of her spine is stinging and she leans back, her shirt pulling up over her bulging stomach.

  ‘The film has been online for two minutes,’ he whispers, and starts the media-player.

  The camera is moving quickly through the outer fringes of a bird cherry. The leaves obscure the view for a moment, then a bedroom window appears on the screen, with condensation along the bottom.

  The garden is shady, but the white sky shimmers in the windowsill.

  The camera moves backwards again when a woman dressed in her underwear comes into the room. She hangs a white towel with old hair-dye stains over the back of a chair, then stops and leans one hand against the wall.

  ‘One minute left,’ Adam says.

  The room fills with soft light from the lamp in the ceiling. They can make out fingerprints on the mirror, and a slightly tilted framed poster from the Picasso exhibition at Moderna Museet.

  The camera moves to one side, and now they can both see a reddish-brown porcelain deer on the bedside table.

  ‘The deer,’ Margot pants, leaning towards the screen as her plait falls over her shoulder.

  The snapped deer’s head that Susanna Kern was clutching in her hand must have come from an ornament exactly like that one.

  The woman in the bedroom is holding one hand to her mouth, and walks slowly over to the bedside table, opens the drawer and takes something out of it. Her face is more visible in the glow of the bedside lamp. She has pale eyebrows and a straight nose, but her eyes are hidden behind the reflection in her dark-framed glasses, and her mouth is relaxed. Her bra is red and worn, and her underpants white, with some sort of sanitary pad. She rubs something over one of her thighs and then takes out a small, white stick and presses it to her muscle.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Adam asks.

  ‘That’s an insulin injection.’

  The woman holds a swab against her thigh and screws her eyes shut for a moment, then opens them again. She leans forward to put the syringe back in the drawer, and manages to catch the little deer, knocking it over. Small fragments fly up in the sharp lighting as the head snaps off and falls to the floor.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Adam whispers.

  With a weary look on her face the woman bends over and picks up the porcelain head, puts it on the bedside table, then goes round the bed towards the steamed-up window. Something makes her stop and peer out, searching the darkness beyond.

  The camera moves slowly backwards, and some leaves brush over the lens.

  The woman looks worried. She puts out her hand, takes hold of the cord of the blinds and loosens the catch by tugging it to the side. The slats slide down, but end up crooked and she pulls the cord and lets them fall again, then gives up. Through the damaged blinds she can be seen turning back towards the room and scratching her right buttock before the film suddenly comes to an end.

  ‘OK, I’m a bit tired,’ Adam says in an unsteady voice, and stands up. ‘But this is crazy – isn’t it?’

  ‘So what do we do? Watch the film again?’

  Her phone buzzes on the desk, Margot turns it over and sees that it’s one of the forensics team.

  ‘What have you got?’ Margot says as soon she answers.

  ‘Same thing, impossible to trace either the film or the link.’

  ‘So we’re waiting for someone to find the body,’ Margot says, and ends the call.

  ‘She’s maybe one metre seventy tall, weighs less than sixty kilos,’ Adam says. ‘Her hair is probably dark blonde when it’s dry.’

  ‘She’s got type-1 diabetes, went to see the Picasso exhibition last autumn, single, regularly colours her hair,’ Margot adds in a monotone.

  ‘Broken blinds,’ Adam says, printing out a large colour picture where the whole of the woman’s face is illuminated.

  He goes over to the wall and pins the photograph up as high as he can. A solitary picture, no name, no location.

  ‘Victim number three,’ he says weakly.

  To the left of the photograph are pictures of the first two victims, stills taken from the YouTube clips. The difference is that below those two first pictures are names and photographs of the murder scenes, as well as reports from the forensic analysis of the scenes and the post-mortems.

  Maria Carlsson and Susanna Kern.

 
Multiple stab and knife-wounds to their faces, necks and chests, severing their aortas, lungs and hearts.

  50

  Sandra Lundgren leaves the bedroom, and feels a shiver run down her spine, as if someone were watching her from behind.

  She tightens the belt of her dressing-gown, which is so long it reaches the floor. Her medication leaves her feeling drowsy long into the day. She goes into the kitchen, opens the fridge and takes out the remains of the chocolate cake and puts it on the worktop.

  She adjusts her glasses and her dressing-gown falls open again, uncovering her stomach and sagging underwear. She shivers, pulls the wide-bladed knife from the block, cuts a small slice of cake and puts it in her mouth without bothering to get a spoon.

  She’s started using Stefan’s striped dressing-gown even though it actually makes her feel sad. But she likes the way it weighs upon her breasts, its drooping shoulders, the threads hanging off the sleeves.

  Beside the candleholder on the drop-leaf table is the letter from Södertörn University College. She looks at it again, even though she’s already read it thirty times. She’s on the reserve list for creative writing. Her mum helped her fill in the application. Back then she didn’t feel up to doing it herself, but her mother knew how much it would mean to her to be accepted onto the course.

  She cried in the spring when she was told she hadn’t got a place. That was probably a bit of an overreaction. Nothing had really changed, after all. She would just carry on with her fourth term on the career-counselling programme instead.

  She doesn’t know how long the letter had been lying there among all the old post on the hall floor, but she’s read it now, and it’s sitting on the kitchen table.

  She decides to phone her mum and tell her the news.

  Sandra glances at the window and sees two men walking towards Vinterviken on the other side of the road. She lives on the ground floor, but still hasn’t got used to the fact that people sometimes stop and look right in through her windows.