Stalker

by Lars Kepler

  Ellinor raises her hands and looks down at her palms.

  ‘Dear God,’ she whispers, ‘the girl had just got home from Klockhammar School and there she was, standing there in her yellow raincoat looking at her mother. Anna’s face was crushed beyond recognition, there was blood everywhere, all over …’

  Her voice fails her again and she swallows, then continues slowly.

  ‘Memory is a strange thing,’ she says. ‘I know I heard a very high voice as I got closer through the rain, it was like a child talking … And then it started to burn, I saw a blue bubble enclose Anna, and the next moment I was lying in the wet grass in the ditch and the flames were spiralling around the whole car. The birch-tree alongside caught fire, and I—’

  ‘Who was driving?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it …’

  ‘The daughter,’ Joona says. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Nelly,’ the old woman replies, looking up at him with exhaustion etched on her face.

  119

  Joona tries to call Erik as he walks between the café tables towards Rocky.

  His phone is switched off.

  He dials Margot Silverman’s private number but there’s no answer, so he calls his former boss at the National Criminal Investigation Department, Carlos Eliasson, instead and leaves a short voicemail.

  Rocky is still sitting in the shade under the weeping birch, picking biscuit crumbs from his stomach. He’s taken his shoes and socks off and is wriggling his toes on the grass.

  ‘We have to go,’ Joona says when he reaches him.

  ‘Did you find the answers to your questions?’

  Joona carries on past Rocky and hurries down the steps towards the car park. He’s thinking that Peter didn’t keep volume twenty-four of his diary in the bureau with the others because its content was too shameful. And because of that, Nelly missed it when she destroyed the rest of them.

  Towards the end of the diary Peter describes how his daughter was sent to an old-fashioned girls’ boarding school.

  Joona stops in front of the stolen car and thinks that Nelly was fourteen when she started at Klockhammar School outside Örebro. She was at boarding school for six years. It’s possible that she didn’t see her parents at all during that time, but never let go of her fixation on her father.

  The feeling of loving and being rejected, of giving everything and having everything taken from you, led to her developing a serious personality disorder.

  She studied her mother, tried to be like her, to take her place.

  Rocky has got his shoes back on but is holding his socks in his hand as he comes down to the car park and opens the door.

  ‘Is the unclean preacher a woman?’ Joona asks.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Rocky replies, looking him in the eye.

  ‘Do you remember Nelly Brandt?’

  ‘No,’ he says, getting in the passenger seat.

  Joona removes the plastic covering the ignition cylinder, twines the red wires together, removes the tape from the brown starter wires and touches the ends together, causing a spark as the engine bursts into life.

  ‘I don’t know how much you remember from being hypnotised,’ Joona says as he drives. ‘But you talked about the first time you saw the unclean preacher … You met her at a funeral here in Sköldinge, but the person you described was the priest in the coffin, her father, Peter …’

  Rocky doesn’t answer, just stares blankly through the windscreen as their speed increases along the narrow road through the fields and forest.

  Joona thinks that the mother went to fetch her grown-up daughter from Klockhammar School and let her drive back.

  Her mother was sitting next to her, maybe took her seat belt off when they turned off the main road and drove up to the church.

  Nelly probably saw her father in the windows of the rectory as she suddenly put her foot down and drove straight into the wall.

  Perhaps her mother wasn’t dead, just badly hurt and trapped in the wreckage.

  In which case what Ellinor saw through the rain makes sense, Nelly fetched the car-jack from the boot and beat her mother in the face until she was dead.

  Perhaps she set light to the car in front of her father’s eyes.

  But after her mother’s death Nelly looked after him, isolated him from the world around him, keeping him to herself, and becoming everything for him.

  Her father lived another two years. Nelly kept him locked up and helpless, keeping him in a cage and making him dependent on morphine.

  She would let him out on Sundays and gave him sermons that she had written for the morning service.

  He was broken, a wreck, an addict.

  Joona thinks that they may have had fragments of normal life, it isn’t unusual that people who are held captive for a long period of time are allowed short periods of normal life with their captor. Perhaps they ate dinner together, sat on the sofa, watched particular television programmes.

  In the end he worked out how to lock his cage from the inside, and slept on the mattress.

  It’s possible that he died of an overdose, unless he just got ill.

  A large number of priests attended the funeral, some of them sitting in the pews while others assisted with the ceremony.

  One of those priests was Rocky Kyrklund from the parish of Salem.

  They’ve just driven past Flen, and a lake is shimmering silver and blue to the right of the car as Joona takes out his phone, brings up a list of staff at the Karolinska Institute and finds a photograph of Nelly.

  ‘Look at this picture,’ he says.

  Rocky takes the phone, holds the screen away from the daylight and then gasps for breath.

  ‘Stop!’ he roars. ‘Stop the car!’

  He opens the door as they’re speeding along, but it hits a railing and bounces back, and glass from the broken window flies into the car. The door is hanging loose, scraping along the tarmac. Joona pulls over to the verge and comes to a halt with two wheels up on the grass.

  A lorry blows its horn angrily behind them and passes so close that the ground shakes.

  Rocky walks out into the field beside the road, striding past the plastic-wrapped bales of hay lying scattered across the ground, stops, and holds his face in his hands.

  120

  Joona sits there with the engine running, picks his phone off the floor and tries to call Erik again. Rocky stands in the field with his face turned up towards the sky for a long while before returning to the car. He yanks the broken door off, tosses it in the ditch and gets back in his seat.

  ‘I remember her,’ he says without looking at Joona. ‘She had her head shaved, pale as candle-wax, she went to Klockhammar School … After the funeral I had sex with her on the floor of the hall in the rectory … it didn’t mean anything, we’d been talking and drinking coffee, and I was in no hurry to get home.’

  Joona says nothing, aware that even though the photograph triggered Rocky’s memory, the flood of information is finite. He could lose touch with his past again at any moment.

  ‘I remember it all,’ Rocky says dreamily. ‘She came looking for me in Salem, came to the services … She was just there, as part of my life, without me really realising how it had happened …’

  He drifts off in thought and pokes a cigarette out of the packet with trembling hands. His rough grey hair is frizzy and his thick eyebrows have tightened across the top of his nose.

  ‘I’m a priest,’ he says eventually. ‘But I’m also a man … I do things I might not always be proud of. I’m not boyfriend material, I’m clear about that, I’ve never been faithful or …’

  He falls silent again as if the strength of his memories has taken his breath away.

  ‘Sometimes I slept with her, sometimes she had to wait, I never promised her anything, I didn’t want her fucking sermons … I remember, it was always about me watching out for promiscuous women … “Her house is the way to hell” …’

  The car shakes as a bus drives past,
and Joona sees Rocky gaze out across the field and lake at the little cluster of trees in the distance.

  ‘When I told her I was fed up with her, she disappeared,’ he goes on. ‘But I understood that she was still creeping around outside the rectory … I opened the door and shouted into the darkness, telling her to leave me the fuck alone.’

  He stops talking again and Joona waits in silence so as not to pull Rocky out of his fragile reminiscences.

  ‘The following evening she came to the church with twenty capsules of white heroin and it all started again … it went fucking fast,’ he says, looking gloomily at Joona. ‘I was hooked as good as instantly. We shared needles, she followed me everywhere, talking about God, preaching, sank into squalor with me, wanted to be with me, wanted to be part of me.’ He shakes his head and rubs his face.

  ‘We hung out at the Zone, I didn’t care about all her preaching … it was mostly extreme interpretations of the Bible, proof that we should get married … a whole worldview in which a jealous God proved her right.’

  A trace of pain flashes in his eyes as he looks darkly at Joona.

  ‘I was drugged and stupid,’ he says. ‘I told her I loved Natalia. It wasn’t true, but I still said it.’

  All the energy goes out of him and his chin sinks to his chest.

  ‘Natalia had such beautiful hands,’ he says, then falls silent.

  His face is suddenly very pale and he looks out at the fields. His forehead is shiny with sweat, and a drop falls from his nose on to his chest.

  ‘You were talking about Natalia,’ Joona says after a while.

  ‘What?’

  Rocky looks at him uncomprehendingly, leans out of the car and spits on the grass. A car pulling a trailer full of chopped wood drives past.

  ‘Nelly showed pictures of the people she was planning to kill,’ Joona goes on. ‘But Natalia had to die in front of you …’

  Rocky shakes his head.

  ‘All I know is that God lost me somewhere along the way, and didn’t bother to go back and look,’ he mutters hoarsely.

  Joona doesn’t say anything more. He takes his phone out and calls Erik’s number again, but still can’t get through.

  He calls Margot but gives up after ten rings.

  Now he knows who the preacher is, but he can’t prove anything, and he’s got nothing to give the police. There’s a chance that Margot might listen to him, but he may well have gone too far when he broke Rocky out of jail.

  Joona tries to understand why Nelly has been stalking Erik. They’re only colleagues, and Nelly is married to Martin Brandt. It must have been going on for years, and it isn’t going to end well.

  121

  Grit flies up behind them as they set off again. The car fills with a thunderous, jolting wind.

  As Joona pushes the car as hard as it will go, he tries to get a picture of the serial killer clear in his mind. After they had sex following her father’s funeral, Nelly transferred her affections to Rocky. She stalked him, followed him, made herself part of his life, tried to control him with drugs, and killed the women who threatened their union. She created an impossible life for Rocky by making sure he was the main suspect for the murder of Rebecka Hansson. In the end she kept him in a cage, was supplying him with heroin and thought she owned him completely, when he managed to escape. He stole a car in Finsta and crashed on his way to Arlanda. The accident left him with serious brain damage, he lost all appeal to her and ended up being sentenced to secure psychiatric care.

  Maybe Nelly caught sight of Erik when he was called in as an expert witness during Rocky Kyrklund’s trial.

  Joona shudders at the thought that Nelly probably started stalking Erik as long ago as that, slowly and systematically getting closer to him.

  She studied and got her qualifications, got a job at the same place as him, married Martin and supported Erik during his separation from Simone.

  After the divorce her assumption of ownership grew stronger, and she started to keep watch on him, couldn’t bear any sign of competition, and became pathologically jealous. She probably wanted him to choose her of his own accord, that he would have eyes for no one but her, but when that didn’t happen something snapped inside her and she had to act in order to stop herself falling apart.

  When Erik embarked on an affair with Maria Carlsson, she probably thought everything would be fine if she could just get rid of her rival.

  A stalker always develops a relationship with their victim in their imagination, a relationship that they convince themselves is real and reciprocated.

  In her head Nelly may have believed that she was married to Erik, and when she saw him betraying her with Maria Carlsson, attracted by Sandra Lundgren, flirting with Susanna Kern and maybe just smiling at Katryna Youssef, a vicious beast woke up.

  Joona turns off towards Malmköping, stops in the car park outside Lindholm’s Floor and Building Services and switches to a better car.

  They’re driving along the E20 motorway at 190 kilometres an hour when Margot calls from her private phone.

  ‘There’s a warrant out for your arrest, did you know that?’ she asks.

  ‘I know, but …’

  ‘You’re going to end up in prison for this,’ she cuts him off.

  ‘It was worth it,’ he replies quietly.

  A few seconds of silence follow.

  ‘Now I realise why you’re a better detective than me,’ Margot says in a subdued voice.

  Joona overtakes a black Corvette on the inside and pulls out again just in time to overtake an articulated lorry with a mustard-yellow trailer.

  ‘Our forensics team have found strands of Erik’s hair in Sandra Lundgren’s bath, we’ve already got his fingerprints on the deer’s head, he’s connected to all the victims, he’s got thousands of hours of video-recordings in his basement, and—’

  ‘It’s too much,’ Joona says.

  ‘And the analysis of the blood in Erik’s car showed that it was Susanna Kern’s … and now it’s getting too much even for me,’ she says heavily.

  ‘Good,’ Joona says.

  ‘Erik’s a doctor … this doesn’t make sense, because all four murders show clear signs of forensic awareness … And someone like that doesn’t end up with blood in their own car … Someone left those traces of blood on the back seat to frame him.’

  ‘You’ve met the real killer,’ Joona says.

  ‘Is it Nestor?’

  ‘It’s Nelly Brandt … she’s the preacher.’

  ‘You sound sure,’ Margot says.

  ‘It’s Erik she’s after, he’s the one she’s been stalking, the victims are just rivals in her own head.’

  ‘If you’re certain about this, I’ll get an operation organised at once,’ Margot says. ‘We’ll hit her home and workplace at the same time.’

  Joona drives on towards Stockholm as he thinks of how Nelly has stalked Erik for years, mapping the lives of any women he showed an interest in, trying to understand what they had that she couldn’t offer. She saw them flashing their jewellery, their painted lips, beautiful nails, and wanted to take that away from them, punish them, and then emphasise their bare ears or ugly hands.

  But when that wasn’t enough she tried to take the whole world away from him. Like Artemis with her hounds, she organised a hunt, Joona thinks. She’s a skilful huntress, she isolates her prey, wounds it, and harries it towards capture until there’s only one way out.

  Her intention was for Erik to realise that everything pointed at him, and go on the run before the police caught him. Everyone would shun him, until in the end he turned to the only person who was still prepared to let him in.

  If he hasn’t been caught by the police by now, he must have sought protection from Nelly.

  122

  Jackie is feeling restless. She goes out into the kitchen and thinks about getting something to eat, even though she isn’t really hungry.

  Maybe she should just have a quiet sit down and drink a cup of tea.

&n
bsp; She feels across the worktop with her hand, along the tiles, past the big mortar, and finds the pot of tealeaves with the little glass knob.

  Her hands stop.

  She feels her way back to the stone mortar.

  The heavy pestle isn’t resting in the bowl like it usually is.

  Jackie runs her fingers across the whole worktop but can’t find it, and thinks that she’ll have to ask Maddy about it once things between them have calmed down a bit.

  She stifles a yawn and fills the kettle with water.

  During the days following her row with Erik, Maddy kept saying that Erik was sad and that he’d never want to come back to them now. Maddy tried to explain that she forgets loads of things, and embarked on a long description of how she’d forgotten keys and notes and football boots.

  Jackie has tried to explain that she isn’t angry any more, that it isn’t anyone’s fault when things don’t work out between two grown-ups. But then the media witch-hunt started.

  Jackie hasn’t told her daughter why she’s keeping her home from school. She’s postponed all her lessons with her pupils and has cancelled all her work as an organist.

  To help the days pass and to stop herself thinking so much, she’s been spending all her waking hours at the piano, practising scales and finger exercises until she feels ill and her elbows hurt so much that she has to take painkillers.

  Obviously she hasn’t told her daughter what they’re saying about Erik on the news.

  She’d never be able to understand it.

  Jackie can’t understand it herself.

  She doesn’t listen to the television any more, can’t bear to hear the speculation, the wallowing in pain and grief.

  Maddy has stopped talking about Erik now, but she’s still very subdued. She’s been watching children’s programmes for younger children, and Jackie has a feeling she’s gone back to sucking her thumb.

  Jackie feels a lump of anxiety in her stomach when she thinks about how she lost patience with Maddy when she didn’t want to play the piano today. She told her she was acting like a baby, and Maddy started to cry and shouted back that she was never going to help with anything ever again.