Stalker

by Lars Kepler

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  He moves sideways then turns back towards Nelly again, and sees that she’s picked up a heavy crowbar from the worktop.

  ‘Don’t you understand …? I’m innocent!’

  Erik backs away and bumps into the table, on top of which is a full washing-up bowl. The dirty water slops over the side and splashes on to the floor.

  Nelly moves quickly towards him and strikes. He blocks the blow with his lower arm, it hurts so much he almost passes out, and he stumbles backwards into the pale blue door of the pantry.

  She swings again but misses his head. Splinters fly from the edge of the door. He lurches to the side and manages to knock over a tray of empty jam-jars. They roll across the worktop and fall to the floor, scattering shards of broken glass.

  ‘Nelly, stop it!’ he gasps.

  His arm is probably broken, he’s having to support it with his other hand.

  Nelly has a look of intense concentration on her face as she pursues him. He throws his head back and she turns her body and strikes again. The crowbar misses his face and brushes past the tip of his nose. The back of his head hits an open cupboard door. He tries to get away but puts his foot down on a piece of broken glass just as she lashes out again.

  He blocks the powerful blow with his broken arm and shrieks with pain. His vision goes black for a moment and his legs give way. Erik falls to his knees. He stares at the filthy floor and the blood running down his injured arm.

  ‘Stop, just stop,’ he pleads, and tries to get up, but the next blow hits him on the temple.

  His head is knocked sideways. Everything goes quiet inside him, as though he had simply come to a stop.

  He fumbles for support with his hand.

  His field of vision contracts to a narrow tunnel, he sees the kitchen shrink as Nelly leans forward and smiles at him.

  Erik tries to stand up. He realises he must have trodden on more glass, because he feels the pain like a distant itch, far away, under his foot, down in the ground somewhere.

  He falls backwards, rolls on to his side, and lies there panting with his cheek against the floor.

  ‘Oh, God …’

  ‘And the just, upright man is laughed to scorn,’ she mutters. ‘But ask now the beasts …’

  Through his limited field of vision he sees Nelly open the door to the cellar and stick a wedge under it with her foot.

  He smells her perfume as she bends over, takes hold of him under his arms and drags him across the floor. He’s completely powerless, his feet just hang limp, leaving a trail of blood across the floor.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Erik pants.

  She pulls him towards the staircase, he tries to cling on to a cupboard but can’t hold on. Blood is trickling over his cheek and down his throat and neck. He tries to grab hold of the door frame but is too weak to resist.

  Nelly walks backwards down the stairs, dragging him into the darkness. His feet fall heavily with each step.

  He can barely see anything, just feels the pain shooting from his arm with each step down. Far above he can make out the glow of the torch. Then he loses consciousness.

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  When Erik opens his eyes in the darkness he notices the stench of old excrement and far gone decay. His right arm is excruciatingly painful and his head is throbbing with pain.

  He can’t see anything, and a scorching wave of panic crumbles his thoughts, scattering them across the flaring darkness. He can’t understand what’s happened, and his entire body feels tense, wary, ready for flight.

  All he really feels like doing is calling for help, but he forces himself to lie still and listen. The room is completely silent.

  Occasionally he hears a vague rumbling sound, like wind in a chimney.

  He carefully touches his wounded arm and discovers that it’s been wrapped in paper.

  Erik’s heart begins to beat faster.

  This is madness, he thinks.

  Nelly hit me, seriously hurt me, my arm is probably broken.

  When he tries to roll over, he can feel dried blood sticking his hair and cheek to the mattress.

  He raises his head and gasps with dizziness. His temple pounds as he forces himself up onto his knees.

  The effort makes Erik breathe hard through his nose, and he tries to listen again but can’t hear any movement, no sound of breathing apart from his own.

  He stares out into the darkness, blinks, but his eyes don’t get used to it.

  Unless I’ve gone blind, this room is entirely devoid of light, he thinks.

  Now he remembers being dragged down a steep flight of steps into a cellar before he passed out.

  He holds his injured arm tightly to his body as he stands up, but before he manages to straighten up he hits his head on something.

  There’s a faint rattle of metal.

  Crouching, he creeps forward with his hand outstretched, but only walks two steps before he reaches some bars.

  Something wet pops beneath one of his feet.

  Erik tries to feel his way forward, following the mesh, and reaches a corner.

  It’s a cage.

  His heart thuds in his chest and he feels panic rising once more, his pulse thunders in his ears and it feels like he can’t breathe.

  He begins to understand. Everything that has happened to him slides apart, piece by piece, forming clear, isolated events – as if illuminated by ice-cold light.

  Erik keeps moving round, trampling on something that feels like a blanket. He feels along the mesh with his good hand, running his fingers along the thick bars, investigating the corners. They’ve been welded together. With his fingers he can feel the lumpy joints where the bars have been welded to the mesh on the floor and roof of the cage.

  Nelly, he thinks.

  Nelly has done all of it.

  Somehow she’s the person known as the unclean preacher. A serial killer, a stalker.

  Erik stands on the mattress and finds the hatch with his fingers. There’s a dull rattle as he pushes it, and the cage sways around him.

  He sticks his fingers out and feels the large padlock, twists and tries to pull it, but it soon becomes obvious that the lock can’t be forced, not even if he had a sturdy crowbar.

  Erik kneels down again and tries to breathe calmly. He leans on his left hand and closes his eyes in the darkness, when a sound makes him start. The door up in the kitchen is opening.

  Steps creak on the staircase and a patch of light grows steadily larger.

  Someone is coming down, holding a torch.

  He leans forward and sees the green dress around Nelly’s legs.

  The beam from the torch veers across the steps and wall, where a large patch of plaster has fallen off. The handrail is loose and pulls some more mortar off when she leans on it.

  Erik feels like he’s going to be sick.

  She killed Maria Carlsson, Sandra Lundgren, Susanna Kern and Katryna Youssef – completely innocent women that he happened to come into contact with.

  How can he possibly understand that Nelly did that? That she sat astride them and hacked at their faces and throats with a knife, long after they were dead?

  She’s reached the bottom now. The light sweeps past him and he sees that the cage is made of welded reinforcing mesh. He’s surrounded by rust-brown iron rods in a close grid-pattern. The heavy lock is made of brushed steel, sealing a hatch made of a double layer of mesh with welded hooks.

  Shadows slide across the walls of the cellar as she stops and looks at him.

  Her face is flushed with excitement and she’s panting for breath. Erik sees that his left hand is brown with rust from the mesh. His vest is torn, hanging in shreds around his waist.

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ Nelly says, pulling an office chair towards the cage. ‘I know, right now you’re trying to work out how it all fits together, but there’s no rush.’

  Without taking her eyes off him, she puts the torch down on an old kitchen table. Erik sees it light up the wall by t
he stairs, and is able to make out the rest of the room in its indirect light.

  Beside him is an old mattress. The striped fabric is stained with dark patches in the middle, as if someone had lain there for a long time.

  In the other corner is a faded plastic bucket full of murky water, next to a china plate with a washed-out floral pattern and a network of fine cracks.

  This must have been the cage Rocky spoke about.

  He was here for seven months before he managed to escape.

  He got out of the cage and stole a car in Finsta, only to crash and end up getting sentenced for Rebecka’s murder.

  In the shadows outside the cage Erik can see dead rats and a bundle of wooden sticks with sooty ends.

  Nelly’s black bag is under the table.

  Erik brushes his hair from his eyes, thinking that he has to talk to her, to make himself something more than just a victim for her.

  ‘Nelly,’ he says weakly. ‘What am I doing here?’

  ‘I’m protecting you,’ she says.

  He coughs and thinks that he needs to speak in his usual voice, has to sound like her colleague at the Karolinska, not sound afraid, dehumanised.

  ‘Why do you think I need protecting?’

  ‘Loads of reasons,’ she whispers with a smile.

  Some of her blonde hair has slipped out from her headscarf, and her thin dress has dark sweat stains under the arms and across her chest.

  She says she’s protecting me, he thinks. Nelly believes that she’s protecting me for loads of reasons.

  She hasn’t brought me here to kill me.

  Rocky sat in this cage, and wasn’t tortured or mutilated, but possibly chastised and beaten.

  Spiders’ webs full of flies and woodlice sway from the mesh down by the floor. He looks at the dark opening at the other end of the cage. The faint breeze across the floor is coming from the passageway.

  He needs to think.

  She was the person who set the police on him. She knew he would run, but that he wouldn’t have anywhere to go, and that sooner or later he’d turn to her of his own volition.

  He was the one who called her, begged to come out here.

  That was what she wanted, there was nothing coincidental about it, it all fits too well.

  She must have been preparing this for several years, she was probably watching him before she even started work at the Karolinska Hospital.

  She’s been stalking him.

  She’s been close to him for so long that she could predict every movement he would make, she’s been able to manipulate all the evidence to make him look guilty.

  Erik sees a spider slowly crawl across a dead rat. He thinks that his life has fallen apart and that he may well be stuck here until he dies.

  Because no one knows where he is.

  Joona is looking in the wrong place. Sköldinge Church is just a confused muddle of memories in Rocky’s brain.

  His family and friends and the rest of the world will remember him as a serial killer who vanished without trace.

  I’ve got to escape, Erik thinks. Even if the police catch me and a court sentences me to life imprisonment.

  126

  Nelly leans forward and looks at him with an expression he can’t read. Her pale eyes are like shining porcelain globes.

  ‘Nelly, you and I are both rational individuals,’ Erik says, aware of the quiver of fear in his voice. ‘We respect each other … and I understand that you didn’t mean to hurt me as badly as you did.’

  ‘It’s just such a pain when you don’t do what I say,’ she sighs.

  ‘I know it feels like a pain, but it’s like that for everyone, it’s part of life.’

  ‘OK, fine,’ she says blankly.

  She whispers something to herself and moves an object on the kitchen table. Sand falls on to a dusty sheet of glass, a small picture that’s leaning against the wall. It’s a framed contract of cooperation between Emmaboda Glassworks, Saint-Gobain, and Solbacken Glassworks.

  ‘My arm’s hurting badly, and my …’

  ‘Are you saying you need to go to hospital now?’ she asks derisively.

  ‘Yes, I need to get my arm X-rayed, and—’

  ‘I dare say you’ll be fine,’ she interrupts.

  ‘Not with an epidural hematoma,’ he says, touching the wound to his temple. ‘I could have arterial bleeding, here, between the dura mater and the inside of my skull.’

  She looks at him in astonishment, then laughs.

  ‘Bloody hell, that really is pathetic!’

  ‘I mean … I’m just saying that if I’m going to be happy here, you’re going to have to look after me, make sure I’m OK …’

  ‘I am, you’ve got everything you need.’

  Erik thinks that someone who’s capable of what Nelly has done has an insatiable emotional hunger, she’s desperately needy and can switch from devoted love to impassioned hatred in an instant.

  ‘Nelly,’ he asks tentatively, ‘how long are you thinking of keeping me locked up?’

  She smiles at the floor, embarrassed, glances at her nails, then gives him an indulgent look.

  ‘Initially you’ll plead and maybe threaten me,’ she says. ‘You’ll promise all sorts of things … and soon you’ll try to manipulate me in different ways by saying you’re not planning to escape, that you only want to help me sweep the stairs.’

  She adjusts her dress and looks at him in silence. After a while she crosses her legs and moves a little, so that the light from the torch brushes her cheek.

  ‘Nelly, I’m grateful to you for letting me stay here, but I don’t like the cellar, I don’t know why, that’s just the way it is,’ Erik says, but gets no response.

  He looks at her and tries to remember how they first met.

  She must have been somewhere in the vicinity when he was conducting his examination of Rocky, and then she applied for a job in his department.

  How had she got it?

  The head of personnel had committed suicide. That was just after she started.

  Nelly was funny and easy-going, talkative, in a charming, self-deprecating way.

  He went through a tough time when he got divorced from Simone. Particularly at night, all those long, sleepless hours. Nelly persuaded him to go back to using pills. She gave him Valium, Rohypnol, Sobril, Citodon – all the old pills he’d managed to kick several years before.

  They drank and took their pills together, made fun of it. Now he can’t understand what he was thinking. They’d kissed, then ended up in bed together. She insisted on putting on a nightie that Simone had left behind, and he tried not to show how uncomfortable that made him feel.

  Now he remembers something that happened very recently. It had been an unusually difficult day, one of his patients had been sectioned and put in a straitjacket, and he had spent hours with the relatives listening to their recriminations. Afterwards he was tired and it was so late that he decided to stay at the clinic and sleep on his bunk.

  Nelly was there too, working overtime. She gave him a Rohypnol and then made them drinks out of medical spirit and Schweppes Russchian.

  He must have taken too many drugs or drunk too much, because he’d slid rapidly into deep sleep.

  He knows he slept for a long time, and very deeply, and that Nelly helped him get undressed before she went home.

  But he dreamed that someone was kissing him, licking his closed lips and making him hold a cold glass ball, pressing it into his limp hand.

  Through his drugged dream Nelly came back to him. Her tongue was pierced and she took his penis in her mouth. Then he dreamed that a deer came into his office, the same way Nelly had, and walked past his bunk to stand behind the floor lamp, raising its head and looking at him with bashful eyes.

  Erik couldn’t sleep in the dream. Light filtered through his eyelashes and he could see Nelly. She was on her knees, pressing a cold, hard object into his hand. It was a small, brown, porcelain deer’s head.

  Now she’s sitting t
here silently watching him with an impassive expression. As if she were waiting for his slow recuperation.

  After a while she takes some neatly folded clothes out of a plastic bin-bag and puts them on her lap.

  ‘Are those clothes for me?’

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ she says, rolling them up and passing them to him through the mesh.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He unfolds a pair of dirty jeans with muddy stains on the knees, and a washed-out T-shirt with the words Saab 39 Gripen printed across the chest. The clothes smell of sweat and damp, but Erik pulls off his tattered vest and gets changed very gingerly.

  ‘You’ve got a sweet little tummy,’ she says, and giggles.

  ‘Yes, haven’t I?’ he says quietly.

  With a coquettish gesture she raises her chin and loosens the scarf covering her hair. Her blonde hair is stiff with blood. He forces himself to look her in the eye, not look away even though his heartbeat is speeding up with fear.

  ‘Nelly, we’re together,’ he says, swallowing hard. ‘We’ve always been together … but I’ve been waiting, because I thought you were with Martin.’

  ‘With Martin? But … you mustn’t think that meant anything,’ she says, blushing.

  ‘The two of you seemed happy.’

  Her mouth turns serious and her lips tremble.

  ‘It’s just you and me,’ she says. ‘It’s always been us …’

  He’s having trouble breathing, but tries to sound natural when he speaks.

  ‘I didn’t know if you regretted what happened, that time—’

  ‘Never,’ she whispers.

  ‘Me neither, I know I’ve done some silly things, but only because I felt abandoned.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Because I’ve always felt we had a unique connection, Nelly. We always have had, the whole time.’

  She wipes tears from her eyes and looks away. She rubs her nose with a trembling finger.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ she says quietly.

  ‘I wouldn’t say no to a couple of Morfin Medas,’ he says in a lighter tone.

  ‘OK.’ She nods quickly, wipes her face, then gets up and leaves.

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