She could hear the bathroom door beginning to lose its fight against the cleaver, so she forcefully kept flickering – on, off, on, off.
Finally, the couple with dinner guests reacted. She waved and gesticulated to try to indicate that she was in danger, but was met only by laughter and applause. Then she heard a loud crash from the hall as the bathroom door gave way. Without thinking, she overturned the jade plant in the big floor pot that had survived months without either light or water, and opened the window right above it.
Cold air immediately filled the room and gave her bare skin goosebumps. She grabbed the phone from the couch and hurried to the bedroom and, leaving the door ajar, she went into the closet.
In total darkness, she raised her healthy foot as high as she could and stuck it into one of the shoe holder compartments that was hanging on the inside of the door. To her surprise it held, and she managed to climb up into the piles of old knitting projects that had never been completed and forgotten clothes filled with holes from hungry carpet beetles.
She could hear Willumsen entering the living room, and could only hope that the overturned pot and rattling window would catch his attention. She pressed the green button on the phone, and held it against her ear, hoping for a miracle. The silence felt endless, but at last it came: a lifeline in the form of a dial tone mixed with a lot of crackling and interference. Just as she’d hoped, the neighbours above them still had their base station in the bedroom.
She entered the first of the two phone numbers she knew by heart, but didn’t need to hear more than ‘You’ve’ to be able to recite the rest in her mind: ‘Reached Carsten Røhmer. Unfortunately, I can’t talk right now.’ Obviously he was out for dinner or something. What had she expected? Normally she didn’t care when he didn’t answer, but this time she just wanted to cry. She whispered a message telling him to ask her colleagues to break into their apartment as soon as possible.
The other number she mostly remembered because it was so hard to forget. She couldn’t help it that it went to Jan Hesk of all people. She dialled his number as she heard Willumsen make his way into the bedroom.
‘Yes, this is Hesk.’
‘Hi, Jan, it’s me,’ she whispered as quietly as she could.
‘Huh? Hello?’
‘Jan, it’s me, Dunja. I can’t speak louder than—’
‘Dunja, is that you?’
‘Yes. You have to listen to me. I need your help,’ she said, and listened to the sound of the meat cleaver dragging against the wall right outside the closet.
‘The connection is really bad.’
‘Jan, you have to help me.’
‘What? I can’t hear you. There’s a hell of a lot of interference.’
‘I need your help and it’s urgent.’
‘Help? You need help?’
‘Yes, Benny Willumsen is in my home—’
‘Hello? You’re fading out. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘You should have thought about that before you stuck a knife in my back.’
‘No, Jan, wait—’
There was a click in her ear. She pressed the green button to dial 112, but didn’t have time before the door was torn open. She held her breath and tried to make her heartbeat quieter. It wasn’t clear whether he’d seen or heard her, but she could clearly hear his slow breathing and smell the pungent odour of burned hair. The seconds dragged by until he finally closed the door again. She breathed out a sigh of relief.
The phone suddenly started ringing in her hand. Three devastating rings sounded before she managed to turn it off, but by two the door was torn open again.
‘That’s what I suspected.’ She heard his voice as she tried to get away from his hands that were searching around on the shelf like two angry snake heads. But it was impossible, and soon they’d taken hold of her right shin.
Her legs had always been strong. Every year she had cycled no matter what the weather, and she’d always run between almost every class in school. But now her kicks were as useless as her screams for help. She was ripped down from the shelf and thrown over his shoulder like a freshly shot animal that would soon be slit open and butchered. She reached for something to hold on to, but couldn’t grab anything other than clothes and unfinished knitting.
She tried to wriggle loose, hit and bit him on the back, but he held her as if she was in a vice. He didn’t even seem to be exerting himself. Then he went over to the window and pulled the curtains. Only now did she realize that he too was naked, and judging by his back and butt muscles she didn’t stand a chance. He could basically do whatever he wanted with her.
‘And here I intended to make the suffering brief,’ he said, moving towards the bed.
Dunja had never killed anyone. It had always been the absolute last resort in her mind, if that. For as long as she could remember, she had been convinced that there was always another way, a technique where communication replaced guns and violence.
Now she knew better.
*
RIGHT BEFORE BENNY WILLUMSEN got to the bed he staggered and dropped the meat cleaver to the floor, as if he was about to lose his balance. He tried to continue, but stopped mid-step to prevent himself from falling.
At that moment, he caught sight of the tip sticking right through his left chest. It must have penetrated both his lung and heart, which was still pumping. Blood was gushing down his well-exercised stomach.
*
DUNJA DIDN’T KNOW EXACTLY how much damage she’d inflicted, so she turned the knitting needle around to cause as much internal injury as possible. He was still standing, but he wasn’t saying anything. She couldn’t tell if he even understood what was happening. Only once she had shoved yet another knitting needle between his ribs on the other side of the spine, puncturing his right lung, did he slowly sink down, like a horse lying down to die.
‘Why?’ She looked him in the eyes. ‘Why didn’t you kill me in Kävlinge when you had the chance?’
She got no response.
But the look in his eyes right before they died said more than enough.
It wasn’t him.
Whoever it was in Kävlinge it wasn’t Benny Willumsen.
I woke up in a corridor. There were wounded people everywhere screaming in pain. I didn’t understand what was going on. But when a nurse came by I realized that the hands in the mist did not belong to my old friends at all. Instead it was some of your people who had rescued me. I stopped the nurse and asked about you and described your blue eyes.
Her scream for help came out of nowhere. She must have recognized my Israeli accent, and soon her colleagues were there, spitting and hitting me. I wanted to explain, but I didn’t get a chance. There was so much hate. I tried to get out of the bed to get away from there, but I fell. Or else someone pulled me down. I couldn’t do anything other than curl up and pray to God that their blows and kicks would stop.
Then the doctor came. I think her name was Basimaa. She helped me get out through a back door. She said that she knew who you were and told me you had worked together at the same small hospital in Einabus. She knew your name and which village you lived in.
Aisha Shahin from Imatin, the most beautiful of names.
You exist, and you were so much more than just a dream.
65
‘SÖDERLEDEN OR SKEPPSBRON?’ THE taxi driver tried to make eye contact in the rear-view mirror.
‘Skeppsbron,’ Fabian answered from the back seat, his eyes locked on the phone. Somewhere in this device he would find Niva’s so-called present. She hadn’t wanted to reveal anything more than that.
‘Just so you know, that’s going to take longer.’
‘I’m in no hurry,’ said Fabian without taking his eyes off his cell phone screen.
‘I see, you don’t take the freeway on principle. In a way, I agree that it’s ugly and should be buried – if money’s not an issue, that is. Believe it or not, I actually protested against the third railway line. Al
though that was before I started driving. Now that I’m behind the wheel all day I can clearly see how politicians have literally run all of Stockholm’s infrastructure into the shitter. Do you agree?’
Fabian didn’t answer. Instead he asked the driver to turn up the radio, which coincidentally happened to be playing The National’s ‘Fake Empire’ just as they were passing the palace. The driver stopped talking and turned up the volume so that Matt Berninger’s baritone voice filled the cab. Fabian looked up from the phone and saw some teenagers running as if their life depended on it before disappearing into one of the alleys.
He thought about Theodor, perhaps because the teens were dressed in bomber jackets and hoodies similar to what he would wear. Theodor had been talking about hoodies ad nauseam the past year. Finally, he’d saved up enough to buy one for himself after Fabian and Sonja had said no, arguing that it was gang wear. No matter how fashionable, it was asking for trouble.
Sonja had started talking more and more about how Stockholm had become hard, and had expressed worry about whether it was the right place for their kids to grow up. It had definitely got worse compared to when he’d moved there in the late eighties. At that time skinheads were the biggest threat. But as long as you knew where they hung out, the most you ever had to do was make a detour. Today, dangers were lurking everywhere and if they did nothing there was a pretty high risk that Theodor would end up in just that kind of gang in only a few years.
He looked out over the frozen water towards the af Chapman – the illuminated ship that was docked at Skeppsholmen and was presumably the world’s best-located youth hostel. Right after the drums in ‘Fake Empire’ started up, they passed the Slussen roundabout, and the driver turned down the volume and tried to make eye contact in the rear-view mirror again. ‘I saw you looking at the ship at Skeppsholmen. Not all Stockholmers know that the af Chapman is actually a hostel. You know, there are showers at the bow of the boat, so you can stand there as God created you and wash yourself with a view of the royal palace. That’s not bad at all, don’t you think?’
Fabian didn’t hear a word of what he was saying. He’d just found what he was looking for on his phone. It was an email link that had ended up in the trash because the sender was unknown. I was wrong was the subject line.
He pressed on the link, and a sound file started playing. He quickly put in his headphones.
‘It’s me. Do you have a moment?’ Fabian could tell immediately that the voice belonged to Herman Edelman.
‘Not really. I’ll be sitting in question time in just a few hours and I haven’t had time to prepare. Can I call you this afternoon instead?’ The other voice belonged to Carl-Eric Grimås. Only now did Fabian realize exactly what Niva’s present really was.
‘Preferably not.’ A stressed sigh was heard. ‘Carl, this is for your sake.’
‘I know, but—’
‘It will be quick, and the more you know about what’s happening, the better prepared you’ll be to deal with it.’
‘Let me shut the door.’
Just as Fabian had suspected. The NDRI had the Minister for Justice’s cell phone under surveillance, and Niva had somehow managed to find the conversation he’d had with Herman Edelman hours before he was murdered.
‘Don’t tell me this is about that damned leak again.’
‘Unfortunately it is.’
‘In other words, the document is still missing.’
‘No, but—’
‘I knew it. This is exactly what I was worried about. I could feel it. I never would have agreed to go along—’
‘But, Carl, listen now—’
‘Dammit, all I’ve been doing is listening! I thought we were done with all of this.’
‘I thought so, too. But the problem won’t go away just because you’ve stuck your head in the sand.’
‘I know, but what I don’t understand is how it can be my problem at all. It’s Gidon Hass who’s violated his procedures, and therefore it’s his job to resolve it.’
‘It might seem that way, but if he doesn’t succeed, it will end up with you whether you like it or not.’
Grimås emitted a demonstrative sigh.
‘From what I understand, there’s a lot to indicate that it’s someone internal, who has access to keys and codes. The problem is that they haven’t been able to find anyone without—’
‘What do you mean, “internal”? Are you suggesting that someone on your own staff would—’
‘Carl, I have no idea. The only thing I know is that the investigation is in full swing right now.’
‘Okay, I’ll call them.’
‘That’s the last thing you should do. Let them take care of it. I just wanted to keep you informed of everything. And if you haven’t already done so, you should tell your chief of staff so that she can prepare some damage control in the event that the affair leaks out.’
‘Damage control? You mean resign before the whole party is dragged down? As if that’s going to help.’
‘Let’s not make too big a deal out of all of this. There is still a chance that—’
‘Herman, you know just as well as I do that it’s only a matter of time before this is on the front page of every paper. And when that happens, everything I’ve done for this country will end up in the trash. That’s the plain truth. Now I have to go.’
‘I’ll be in touch if anything else comes up.’
‘Okay. And listen, by the way… Thanks.’
‘No problem.’
They both hung up, and the audio file ended. Fabian took out his headphones and tried to understand what the call had been about. Someone had got their hands on information they shouldn’t have, that much was clear, something that put Grimås in such a bad light that it risked toppling the government. And only a minute or two after the conversation he’d phoned the Israeli Embassy. Was that what Edelman had advised against?
Fabian knew that about ten years ago, during the first few years after his wife died, Edelman had thought seriously about moving to Israel. At the time, he certainly had close contacts at the Israeli Embassy. Presumably, he must have known Rafael Fischer, Adam Fischer’s late father and the ambassador to Israel. Was that a connection? Or just a coincidence? And who was Gidon Hass? Either way, it sounded like a document of some kind had gone missing from the Israeli Embassy. But what bearing could that have on the murder that happened just a few hours after the phone call? Fabian couldn’t figure anything out, except that Herman Edelman, his own boss, obviously knew considerably more than he was letting on.
‘We’ve arrived,’ said the driver, stopping on Fatbursgatan outside the front door.
Fabian reached for his wallet, but stopped himself as he glanced up at the apartment with dark windows. He should be tired and longing to crawl into bed and close his eyes. The past two days had felt like a whole week. Not to mention, he’d been drinking. But that didn’t matter right now. The driver was wrong.
They hadn’t arrived at all.
66
SOFIE LEANDER HAD HAD no doubt whatsoever that the rescuers were in the building, even though she’d accepted three days ago that her chances of survival were zero. The police had located her and she would finally get an explanation for why she’d been kept waiting and alive for so long.
But she’d been wrong – so disastrously wrong.
The police hadn’t found her. She bit her lip hard to try and stop the thoughts that were on an endless loop, trying to make sense of it all. But she didn’t understand anything other than that her last hope of survival had been crushed. It was a naïve faith that she actually hadn’t dared take seriously: the belief that it was over after all. She had hoped that once again she would be able to experience the warming rays of the sun against her face, taste a perfectly balanced cup of really good coffee and feel the security of curling up tightly in her husband’s arms. But her hope relied on the presumption that her husband had been in contact with the police.
Now she knew better.
<
br /> This acknowledgement had been one of the most painful experiences she’d ever had. It felt like a big, deep flesh wound just starting to heal was being torn open again. She’d recognized exactly how it would end the entire time, but there had been a small part of her that could not stop believing and hoping. Maybe her husband had been working so hard on his new project that he didn’t realize that she was gone. Maybe he was talking to the police right now?
She’d always been a believer, but only now could she truly understand why religion was so popular and why it would never be possible to take it from people. It didn’t matter how much logic or reason refuted it, a believer would never abandon their conviction – the pain was simply too great.
She wavered between two extremes: the belief in a rosy future where everything would work out in the end, and a longing to fade into nothing, to rot and treat the maggots to a feast. Both options were attractive, perhaps mostly because nothing could be worse than what she was being subjected to right now.
She needed to act and was less concerned with the repercussions. She couldn’t keep on like this, but what were her choices? She’d heard about how people could lift cars to rescue their children, especially women whose desperation pumped so much adrenaline into their bodies that they had what could almost be described as superpowers. But she had no child and no car to crush it to death. All she had was desperation, which she had in limitless quantities.
The feeding tube started up again, ready to pump the sickly-sweet sludge into her mouth and down her oesophagus. She was being forced down on this table, somewhere in the middle of the hell between life and death.
She tried to turn her face away, but the hose followed and filled her mouth. She steeled herself against the pain from the straps and resisted with her whole body, first in one direction and then the other, while the sludge worked its way further down and stimulated her gag reflex.
Then she felt it. It might not have moved more than a millimetre or so. She couldn’t say with certainty, but it was definitely something new, which was enough to give her the energy to continue tensing every muscle in her body to the left and then the right. Now she was sure: the table was moving. She swallowed a few gulps of the batter to get energy while she continued trying to rock the table.
The Ninth Grave Page 27
