It strikes me that I ought to try to talk to him, figure out his intentions and, if possible, find an escape route, but my throat is tied up and my mouth is dry. I fold my hands under the table to keep them from shaking.
“How many meatballs would you like?”
The question is strangely friendly and his expression reveals nothing about his intentions.
“These are real meatballs, no bread crumbs and crap like that for filler, just one hundred percent ground beef and spices. Maybe egg, too—I don’t really know. Do you have to use egg?”
“What do you want from me?”
It is no more than a whisper, but I am certain that he hears me. He looks at me but does not answer. In the frying pan, the butter has started to sizzle, and he adds the meatballs one by one in silence.
“Here, you can open the wine.” He hands me a bottle of red wine and an opener.
“You do like red wine, don’t you?”
My fingers are numb as I take the bottle. I look at it as if I don’t understand what it is and rest it on my lap.
“What do you want?” I repeat, my voice steadier now.
“I am Christer Andersson. Good Lord, you still don’t get it do you, Siri?”
I look confused at his gangly figure as he stirs the meatballs at my stove. I still cannot fully take in this improbable appearance in my kitchen, and the wine I drank earlier makes me lethargic. So Christer is standing in my kitchen at one thirty on Christmas morning, frying meatballs. And I think—no, I know—that he is Sara’s murderer.
I shake my head in response to his question: No, I still don’t get it.
Christer sighs and turns toward me, a spatula in his hand.
“I’m Jenny’s dad. Jenny Andersson’s dad.”
The bottle slips from my grasp and splinters on the floor, wine splashes over my feet, but I feel nothing as I sit petrified on the chair. He is Jenny’s dad.
Long red hair, fingers constantly drumming against her thighs in time with inaudible melodies, milky-white skin covered with freckles, a skinny girl’s body dressed in jeans and a tight sweater with a leather strap around her neck.
Jenny Andersson—my patient who committed suicide. Her father found her with slashed wrists under an apple tree in the yard. And here he is now in my kitchen, frying meatballs. Suddenly, everything is painfully clear to me. He is avenging his daughter’s death. In his eyes, I am the guilty one.
“Is it starting to come back now? I guess maybe she was just one of many patients, one in the crowd. It’s not so easy to remember them all, perhaps?” He grins, but there is pain in his voice.
“Of course I remember Jenny,” I whisper, rubbing my shaking hands against each other under the table, above the Bordeaux-colored stain growing into a lake. On the blood-colored surface I can see my own reflection. Leaning forward, I huddle on the chair as if to instinctively signal physical submissiveness and thereby appease Christer’s wrath.
“So you also understand why I’m here? You killed my daughter with your carelessness and your incompetence.”
“Christer, I did not kill your daughter. Just as—”
Swoosh. The blow comes without warning and strikes me in the face. I can feel something warm running down my cheek, but I feel no pain, only shock and despair.
“Now you shut up, you damn psycho whore. You killed her. Do you get that? You KILLED her.”
Christer’s voice rises to a howl. He turns toward me and with a single sweeping motion he throws the cast-iron pan against the wall so that the meatballs fly across the room.
He is standing close to me. I can hear his breathing, which is strangely rattling, almost asthmatic. And the odor, the odor of his body. He smells of acrid sweat, like an animal. He sinks down in the chair across from me and remains sitting with his head buried in his hands, rocking slowly back and forth as he produces a whistling noise. It takes awhile before I realize that he really does have asthma.
“You killed her,” he mumbles, out of breath.
We sit in silence across from each other. The only sound in the room is the sizzling, bubbling noise from the ham in the oven and the ticking of the clock on the kitchen wall. Despite my groggy state, I realize that I have to get him to talk, I have to establish contact with him, make a bridge into his confused awareness, reach his rational self. Surely, he must have one?
“Sara…” I begin hesitantly.
Christer sobs, wipes his forehead and straightens up.
“Yes… Sara,” he says, in a quiet but strangely calm voice. He seems to think a moment as he sits among the glass splinters, spilled red wine, and spoiled meatballs.
“Yes, poor, stupid Sara. Say what you want, but she is better off where she is now. Really nice-looking girl. actually, if you ignore her ravaged appearance, but, to be honest, she was totally nuts. Or, what do you think, Ms. Psychologist? Carving your arms with knives? Why does someone do that?”
“You killed her?”
“Whatever, she was dead long before I met her. I did her a favor.”
Christer leans across the kitchen table toward me and looks at me, no, he stares, with strangely steel-gray eyes that remind me of lead shot or metal buttons or the small, shiny bodies of silverfish as they helplessly try to crawl away from my dishrag on the bathroom floor. He reaches out and strokes my cheek, and I notice that his palm is colored red by my blood.
“Damn it, Siri, I’m sorry it turned out this way. What should I say, so much time has passed… such a long time since I started following you, then I started discovering things about you… so I’ve almost started to think I know you. I’ve almost started to like you. Do you understand? I know what you have for dinner, what you look like naked, that you drink too much, and that you’re having sex with that pathetic cop. Does that turn you on? Younger guys? Is that your thing? Do you want to feel superior? Is that why you became a therapist?”
I look right into his button eyes but say nothing. I am afraid of provoking him further, but he takes no notice of me and continues his tirade.
“You took my life from me. Do you know that?”
I still say nothing, let him talk. Explain. His voice is quiet as he continues, almost a whisper.
“My life was… perfect. I don’t think you can understand. Everything we had. Our life. When you killed Jenny, you didn’t just take her away from me, you took my whole life. Katarina, my wife, couldn’t deal with it… she left me. Met a new guy. A bloody gynecologist, would you believe it? A gynecologist is screwing my wife these days… Damn it. I got fired, the company bought me out. My friends withdrew, thought I’d gotten strange. It was so damn humiliating. And it was all your fault. But you were never punished, your life just continued. As if nothing had happened. That’s not right, I think you understand that.”
Christer looks at me with an empty gaze and continues. His voice is stronger now and his hands are no longer trembling. He suddenly looks determined.
“And now here we are in the end, although I didn’t want it to be this way. At the end of the road, so to speak.” Using a blue-striped dish towel, he wipes my blood from his hand with a look of distaste.
His movements are jerky. With manic determination he rubs his hand as if to get rid of every trace of me from his body. There is growing desperation in my chest; I have to get a conversation started with him. Before he feels forced to act, to do something rash.
“I think I deserve an answer to certain questions. I can understand… your feelings, but I still have to know what happened.”
Christer shrugs and looks at me indifferently.
“What do you want to know?”
“How did you meet Sara?”
“I’ve been following you a long time, Siri, longer than you think. And Sara, well, I found her through Marianne.”
“Through Marianne?”
“I knew that Marianne worked for you, so I picked her up at a bar. It was pathetically easy, by the way. It was a long time since anyone had paid her any attention, I guess.
”
He seems to think a moment, carefully brushes away a few crumbs from his shirt and scratches his red hair.
“I had no particular intentions with her. At the time, that is. Mostly I wanted to hear more about you, find out if you were still sabotaging people’s lives. And then… time passed. I got to know you through Marianne, in a way. And she was more than happy to tell me everything about her job. Sometimes I also followed you in the city—stood behind you at Söderhallarna, touched your hair as I went past you on the escalator, held open the door when you were going into the parking garage—but you never noticed. Once, I actually handed you your bag when you dropped it outside that disgusting place on Götgatan—what’s it called? Gröne Jägaren, that’s it. But you never saw me. It was as if I was completely invisible to you. Sometimes, I sat on the rocks outside here and kept you company while you knocked back wine like a damn alcoholic. And then, that thing with turning on all the lights… Listen, seriously speaking, it’s pretty pathetic that you’re afraid of the dark. You work with people’s fears. Or at least, that was how Marianne put it.”
He falls silent and looks searchingly at me, as if he is curious about me for the first time during our strange conversation.
“And then…” I ask in a whisper.
“The rest was no problem. Marianne had access to the case records and the patients’ addresses. Sometimes, she brought your notes home to write up a clean copy. I’ve read every damn patient record on Sara. Besides, Marianne talked about her quite often. I think she felt sorry for her, but goodness, she felt sorry for everyone! Stray dogs, children in the Third World, whales, and God knows what else. She felt compassion for the whole damn world.”
“Why Sara?”
Christer shrugs and crushes a meatball with his shoe.
“Why not? Marianne always thought you cared about her a lot for some reason. That you worked so hard to rehabilitate her. I just got curious. It wasn’t a… plan to start with, it kind of… developed. It took on a life of its own. Until I took control, decided to guide developments in the direction I wanted.”
He suddenly looks triumphant, like a naughty boy. A disobedient little boy with dead, gray button eyes. I think about Vijay’s words, of his description of a middle-aged man, well established in society. Why didn’t Vijay say how I should talk to him, how to get him to stop, what buttons to push?
“Sara told me everything about your therapy, and what she didn’t tell me was in the records Marianne brought home. So it was easy… easy to write the suicide note, easy to get hold of Charlotte Mimer’s address. And sure, I was the one who planted the photo and the book about taxidermy on Peter Carlsson. I thought about tipping off the cops about him as well, but they got there first, you might say…”
“And the blood on my lawn? The dog?”
“That was a mistake. I was forced. Forced to silence them.”
“What do you mean, silence?”
Christer pinches his lips together and refuses to answer.
“I really don’t understand… Don’t you realize that you’ve destroyed the lives of a lot of innocent people?”
“Do you think I enjoyed it, or something?”
Christer yells hoarsely. “I was forced to do it. For her sake… Forced to see that justice was done. That was the only way, the only way to get… some kind of peace.”
He lowers his voice to a whisper. “It wasn’t a pleasure. Maybe I enjoyed that thing with the DUI. More like a practical joke. Don’t you think?”
“But Marianne? Was that you? Did you have anything to do with her accident?”
Christer sighs and for a moment buries his head in his hands.
“She thought she was so damn smart, she thought she had figured out how it all hung together. Found all my papers about Sara. She wanted to see you… to tell you about me. I couldn’t let her do that…”
Christer pauses and looks at me.
“I didn’t want to hurt Marianne. She’s good, she took care of me, actually.”
He falls silent for a brief moment and suddenly looks sad.
“But you realize how this has to end, don’t you? There is one type of justice, and that’s the kind you administer yourself.”
He holds out his hands, which still carry traces of my blood, as if to show that they are what will administer this justice. In my belly, the seed of terror is growing to a glowing ball. He intends to kill me, that’s obvious, that’s what justice means for him.
My death is his justice.
And I will soon have no more questions to ask, no circumstances that must be clarified, no pretexts for maintaining the conversation. How great is the probability that someone will come here at this time of night? Markus is working. Aina is celebrating with her mother. Everyone thinks I’m sleeping safely in the apartment on Kungsholmen with the lights on. That Sara’s murderer is sitting locked in a cell at the Kronoberg jail. My escape routes are limited. From the kitchen, I can reach the living room, and through that, my bedroom. There is a door to the bedroom, but it doesn’t have a lock. Perhaps there’s a way to block it.
“It’s probably done now,” I say, nodding toward the oven, where a thin, black film of burnt bread crumbs and mustard is starting to form on the ham and an odor of burnt meat has started to seep out.
Christer looks confused but gets up anyway, turns toward the oven, and picks up the oven mitt to take out the ham.
This is my chance, the best I am going to get. As Christer opens the oven and takes hold of the roasting pan, I get up, give him a forceful shove in the back, and run. It is not a particularly well-thought-out plan. I rush through the living room toward the bedroom. Behind me, I can hear Christer yell something, but it is as if my brain cannot understand the words, cannot decode their meaning.
I shut the bedroom door with a slam so forceful that a candleholder on the shelf above the bed falls down. It is caught gently by the comforter, as I press all of my weight against the door and inspect the few pieces of furniture in the room. The only thing that has weight and size to speak of is the bed. I bend forward and try to pull the bed from its place by the wall over toward the door, blocking it with my body at the same time.
BANG!
Christer crashes against the door with his entire weight and I am unable to keep it completely closed. The door opens an inch or two and he manages to push his foot into the crack before I regain control and push back.
“Bloody psychologist whore. Let me in!”
Christer’s yelling rings in my ears. He is close now, so close that I can smell his intermittent breath and hear the whistling sound from his cramped air passages through the crack in the door.
“Let me in, otherwise I’ll KILL you.”
But I know it’s just the opposite. If he comes in, then he will kill me. It would be easy, as easy as a dog crushing a small rodent with a single crunching bite. I am so small, so thin. I can’t resist him physically, which he obviously knows, and I don’t think I can outwit him either. So I do the only thing I can: press back with all my strength so that his foot is crushed by the door. Christer screams, and for a moment the pressure from the other side of the door ceases.
My fingers are sweating so much I have a hard time bracing effectively against the door. I slide and slip on the smooth floor. I take a chance and wipe one palm against my pant leg for a moment. Then, BANG! With terrifying force, Christer forces the door open—he must have taken a running start from out in the living room—throwing me backward against the bed, which is only halfway pulled away from the wall. I lie there like a cockroach on my back, helpless, without an escape route.
Christer comes slowly toward me. He is grimacing with pain and massaging his shoulder.
Then he is on top of me.
Quite calmly, he straddles my waist, and with a quick move he locks my arms with his knees. He is breathing heavily. And the odor, Christer’s odor, that unpleasant, acrid stench of sweat, suddenly envelops me. I feel nauseated. Perhaps it’s his weight agains
t my abdomen, perhaps the stench, but I turn my head to the side and throw up on one of the blue pillows. I feel the warm vomit as it makes its way down along my neck toward my back.
“Oh, shit,” says Christer, looking away in disgust.
It strikes me that he probably can’t stand bodily fluids. Blood, sperm, vomit. He moves down along my thin body until he is sitting on my thighs, at a safe distance from the vomit.
“Oh, shit,” he repeats, looking at his hands as if to check whether he has gotten dirty.
“You know I wasn’t the one who killed Jenny, don’t you?”
I don’t know why I say that. I simply feel incredibly tired. I can’t bear to lie any longer. I want to put an end to this torture.
His eyes watch me and he squeezes harder with his knees so that my arms ache from my elbows to my wrists from the pressure.
“I wasn’t the one who killed Jenny, Christer. It was you. Your need to control and your overprotective ways suffocated her. Can’t you see?”
“Shut up!”
The blow comes quickly and unexpectedly. It hits me right across the cheek, but it doesn’t hurt. There is something slack and uninvolved about it. Like a slap doled out to a child for the sake of appearances by a parent.
“Shut up,” he repeats, quieter this time.
He leans forward, and for a moment I think he intends to kiss me, but he lays his head against my chest and I can tell that he is crying.
“I never meant to do her any harm.”
Christer continues his monologue, with words drowned in sobbing and inaudible grunting. For a second, he releases the iron grip he has on me with his knees. His body is shaking in convulsions of sobs.
Christer’s pain is so strong, so physical. For a moment I believe that it is being transmitted through his body and moving on to me in soft streams. I think again about Stefan, how inconceivable it is that he is gone. I think about the grinding, gnawing sorrow that will not let go. And I understand Christer. In the middle of my nightmare, lying on my back in my bedroom with Christer’s head against my chest and my sweater damp with vomit, red wine, and his tears, a sudden wave of sympathy comes over me. I know how it feels to lose someone you love, and how painful it is when there is no answer for the reason why.
Some Kind of Peace: A Novel Page 27
