by Kepler, Lars
She pushes her shoes off, leans back and rests her bare feet in his lap.
Gently he caresses her calf, the bruise from the new stirrup leather of her saddle, then up the inside of her thigh towards her groin. She lets it happen, not bothered by the fact that Marie is still in the room.
The flames are rising high in the huge fireplace. The heat is pulsating and her face feels so hot it’s almost burning.
Marie comes cautiously closer. Reidar looks at her. Her red hair has started to curl in the heat of the room. Her leopard-skin dress is creased and stained.
‘An admirer,’ Veronica says, holding the glass away from Reidar when he tries to reach it.
‘I love your books,’ Marie says.
‘Which books?’ he asks brusquely.
He gets up and fetches a fresh glass from the dresser and pours some wine. Marie misunderstands the gesture and holds out her hand to take it.
‘I presume you go to the toilet yourself when you want to have a piss,’ Reidar says, drinking the wine.
‘There’s no need—’
‘If you want wine, then drink some fucking wine,’ he interrupts in a loud voice.
Marie blushes and takes a deep breath. With her hand trembling she takes the bottle and pours herself a glass. Reidar sighs deeply, then says in a gentler tone of voice:
‘I think this vintage is one of the better years.’
Taking the bottle with him, he goes back to his seat.
Smiling, he watches as Marie sits down beside him, swirls the wine in her glass and tastes it.
Reidar laughs and refills her glass, looks her in the eye, then turns serious and kisses her on the lips.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
Reidar kisses Marie softly again. She moves her head away, but can’t help smiling. She drinks some wine, looks him in the eye, then leans over and kisses him.
He strokes the nape of her neck, under her hair, then moves his hand over her right shoulder and feels how the narrow strap of her dress has sunk into her skin.
She puts her glass down, kisses him again, and thinks that she’s mad as she lets him caress one of her breasts.
Reidar suppresses the urge to burst into tears, making his throat hurt, as he strokes her thigh under her dress, feeling her nicotine patch, and moves his hand round to her backside.
Marie pats his hand away when he tries to pull her underwear down, then stands up and wipes her mouth.
‘Maybe we should go back down and join the party again,’ she says, trying to sound neutral.
‘Yes,’ he says.
Veronica is sitting motionless on the sofa and doesn’t meet her enquiring gaze.
‘Are you both coming?’
Reidar shakes his head.
‘OK,’ Marie whispers and walks towards the door.
Her dress shimmers as she leaves the room. Reidar stares through the open doorway. The darkness looks like dirty velvet.
Veronica gets up and takes her glass from the table, and drinks. She has sweat patches under the arms of her dress.
‘You’re a bastard,’ she says.
‘I’m just trying to get the most out of life,’ he says quietly.
He catches her hand and presses it to his cheek, holding it there and looking into her sorrowful eyes.
11
The fire has gone out and the room is freezing cold when Reidar wakes up on the sofa. His eyes are stinging, and he thinks about his wife’s story about the Sandman. The man who throws sand in children’s eyes so that they fall asleep and sleep right through the night.
‘Shit,’ Reidar whispers, and sits up.
He’s naked, and has spilled wine over the leather upholstery. In the distance is the sound of an aeroplane. The morning light hits the dusty windows.
Reidar gets to his feet and sees Veronica lying curled up on the floor in front of the fireplace. She’s wrapped herself in the tablecloth. Somewhere in the forest a deer is calling. The party downstairs is still going on, but is more subdued now. Reidar grabs the half-full bottle of wine and leaves the room unsteadily. A headache is throbbing inside his skull as he starts to climb the creaking oak stairs to his bedroom. He stops on the landing, sighs, and goes back down again. Carefully he picks Veronica up and lays her on the sofa, covers her, then retrieves her glasses from the floor and puts them on the table.
Reidar Frost is sixty-two years old and the author of three international bestsellers, the so-called Sanctum series.
He moved from his house in Tyresö eight years ago, when he bought Råcksta Manor, outside Norrtälje. Two hundred hectares of forest, fields, stables and a fine paddock where he occasionally trains his five horses. Thirteen years ago Reidar Frost ended up alone in a way that shouldn’t happen to anyone. His son and daughter vanished without trace one night after they sneaked out to meet a friend. Mikael and Felicia’s bicycles were found on a footpath near Badholmen. Apart from one detective with a Finnish accent, everyone thought the children had been playing too close to the water and had drowned in Erstaviken.
The police stopped looking, even though no bodies were ever found. Reidar’s wife Roseanna couldn’t deal with him and her own loss. She moved in temporarily with her sister, asked for a divorce and used the money from the settlement to move abroad. A couple of months later she was found in her bath in a Paris hotel. She’d committed suicide. On the floor was a drawing Felicia had given her on Mother’s Day.
The children have been declared dead. Their names are engraved on a headstone that Reidar rarely visits. The same day they were declared dead, he invited his friends to a party, and ever since has taken care to keep going, the way you would keep a fire alight.
Reidar Frost is convinced he’s going to drink himself to death, but at the same time he knows he’d kill himself if he was left alone.
12
A goods train is thundering through the nocturnal winter landscape. The Traxx train is pulling almost three hundred metres of wagons behind it.
In the driver’s cab sits Erik Johnsson. His hand is resting on the control. The noise from the engine and the rails is rhythmic and monotonous.
The snow seems to be rushing out of a tunnel of light formed by the two headlights. The rest is darkness.
As the train emerges from the broad curve around Vårsta, Erik Johnsson increases speed again.
He’s thinking that the snow is so bad that he’s going to have to stop at Hallsberg, if not before, to check the braking distance.
Far off in the haze two deer scamper off the rails and away across the white fields. They move through the snow with magical ease, and disappear into the night.
As the train approaches the long Igelsta Bridge, Erik thinks back to when Sissela sometimes used to accompany him on journeys. They would kiss in each tunnel and on every bridge. These days she refuses to miss a single yoga lesson.
He brakes gently, passes Hall and heads out across the high bridge. It feels like flying. The snow is swirling and twisting in the headlights, removing any sense of up and down.
The train is already in the middle of the bridge, high above the ice of Hallsfjärden, when Erik Johnsson sees a flickering shadow through the haze. There’s someone on the track. Erik sounds the horn and sees the figure take a long step to the right, onto the other track.
The train is approaching very fast. For half a second the man is caught in the light of the headlamps. He blinks. A young man with a dead face. His clothes are trembling on his skinny frame, and then he’s gone.
Erik isn’t conscious of the fact that he’s applied the brakes and that the whole train is slowing down. There’s a rumbling sound and the screech of metal, and he isn’t sure if he ran over the young man.
He’s shaking, and can feel adrenalin coursing through his body as he calls SOS Alarm.
‘I’m a train driver, I’ve just passed someone on the Igelsta Bridge … he was in the middle of the tracks, but I don’t think I hit him …’
‘Is anyone injured?’ the
operator asks.
‘I don’t think I hit him, I only saw him for a few seconds.’
‘Where exactly did you see him?’
‘In the middle of the Igelsta Bridge.’
‘On the tracks?’
‘There’s nothing but tracks up here, it’s a fucking railway bridge …’
‘Was he standing still, or was he walking in a particular direction?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘My colleague is just alerting the police and ambulance in Södertälje. We’ll have to stop all rail traffic over the bridge.’
13
The emergency control room immediately dispatches police cars to both ends of the long bridge. Just nine minutes later the first car pulls off the Nyköping road with its lights flashing and makes its way up the narrow gravel track alongside Sydgatan. The road leads steeply upwards, and hasn’t been ploughed, and loose snow swirls up over the bonnet and windscreen.
The policemen leave the car at the end of the bridge and set out along the tracks with their torches on. It isn’t easy walking along the railway line. Cars are passing far below them on the motorway. The four railway tracks narrow to two, and stretch out across the industrial estates of Björkudden and the frozen inlet.
The first officer stops and points. Someone has clearly walked along the right-hand track ahead of them. The shaky beams of their torches illuminate some almost eradicated footprints and a few traces of blood.
They shine their torches into the distance, but there’s no one on the bridge as far as they can see. The lights of the harbour below make the snow between the tracks look like smoke from a fire.
Now the second police car reaches the other end of the deep ravine, more than two kilometres away.
The tyres thunder as Police Constable Jasim Muhammed pulls up alongside the railway line. His partner, Fredrik Mosskin, has just contacted their colleagues on the bridge over the radio.
The wind is making so much noise in the microphone that it’s almost impossible to hear the voice, but it’s clear that someone was walking across the railway bridge very recently.
The car stops and the headlights illuminate a steep rock face. Fredrik ends the call and stares blankly ahead of him.
‘What’s happening?’ Jasim asks.
‘Looks like he’s heading this way.’
‘What did they say about blood? Was there much blood?’
‘I didn’t hear.’
‘Let’s go and look,’ Jasim says, opening his door.
The blue lights play upon the snow-covered branches of the pine trees.
‘The ambulance is on its way,’ Fredrik says.
There’s no crust on the snow and Jasim sinks in up to his knees. He pulls out his torch and shines it towards the tracks. Fredrik is slipping on the verge, but keeps climbing.
‘What sort of animal has an extra arsehole in the middle of its back?’ Jasim asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Fredrik mutters.
There’s so much snow in the air that they can’t see the glow of their colleagues’ torches on the other side of the bridge.
‘A police horse,’ Jasim says.
‘What the …?’
‘That’s what my mother-in-law told the kids.’ Jasim grins, and heads up onto the bridge.
There are no footprints in the snow. Either the man is still on the bridge, or he’s jumped. The cables above them are whistling eerily. The ground beneath them falls away steeply.
The lights of Hall Prison are glowing through the haze, lit up like an underwater city.
Fredrik tries to contact their colleagues, but the radio just crackles.
They head slowly further out across the bridge. Fredrik is walking behind Jasim, a torch in his hand. Jasim can see his own shadow moving across the ground, swaying oddly from side to side.
It’s strange that their colleagues from the other side of the bridge aren’t visible.
When they are out above the frozen inlet the wind from the sea is bitter. Snow is blowing into their eyes. Their cheeks feel numb with cold.
Jasim screws up his eyes to look across the bridge. It disappears into swirling darkness. Suddenly he sees something at the edge of the light from the torch. A tall stick-figure with no head.
Jasim stumbles and reaches his hand out towards the low railing, and sees the snow fall fifty metres onto the ice.
His torch hits something and goes out.
His heart is beating hard and Jasim peers forward again, but can no longer see the figure.
Fredrik calls him back and he turns round. His partner is pointing at him, but it’s impossible to hear what he’s saying. He looks scared, and starts to fumble with the holster of his pistol, and Jasim realises that he’s trying to warn him, that he was pointing at someone behind his back.
He turns round and gasps for breath.
Someone is crawling along the track straight towards him. Jasim backs away and tries to draw his pistol. The figure gets to its feet and sways. It’s a young man. He’s staring at the policemen with empty eyes. His bearded face is thin, his cheekbones sharp. He’s swaying and seems to be having trouble breathing.
‘Half of me is still underground,’ he pants.
‘Are you injured?’
‘Who?’
The young man coughs and falls to his knees again.
‘What’s he saying?’ Fredrik asks, with one hand on his holstered service weapon.
‘Are you injured?’ Jasim asks again.
‘I don’t know, I can’t feel anything, I …’
‘Please, come with me.’
Jasim helps him up and sees that his right hand is covered with red ice.
‘I’m only half … The Sandman has taken … he’s taken half …’
14
The doors of the ambulance bay of Södermalm Hospital close. A red-cheeked auxiliary nurse helps the paramedics remove the stretcher and wheel it towards the emergency room.
‘We can’t find anything to identify him by, nothing …’
The patient is handed over to the triage nurse and taken into one of the treatment rooms. After checking his vital signs the nurse identifies the patient as triage-level orange, the second highest level, extremely urgent.
Four minutes later Dr Irma Goodwin comes into the treatment room and the nurse gives her a quick briefing:
‘Airways free, no acute trauma … but he’s got poor saturation, fever, signs of concussion and weak circulation.’
The doctor looks at the charts and goes over to the skinny man. His clothes have been cut open. His bony ribcage rises and falls with his rapid breathing.
‘Still no name?’
‘No.’
‘Give him oxygen.’
The young man lies with his eyelids closed and trembling as the nurse puts an oxygen mask on him.
He looks strangely malnourished, but there are no visible needle marks on his body. Irma has never seen anyone so white. The nurse checks his temperature from his ear again.
‘Thirty-nine point nine.’
Irma Goodwin ticks the tests she wants taken from the patient, then looks at him again. His chest rattles as he coughs weakly and opens his eyes briefly.
‘I don’t want to, I don’t want to,’ he whispers frantically. ‘I’ve got to go home, I’ve got to, I’ve got to …’
‘Where do you live? Can you tell me where you live?’
‘Which … which one of us?’ he asks, and gulps hard.
‘He’s delirious,’ the nurse says quietly.
‘Have you got any pain?’
‘Yes,’ he replies with a confused smile.
‘Can you tell me …’
‘No, no, no, no, she’s screaming inside me, I can’t bear it, I can’t, I …’
His eyes roll back, he coughs, and mutters something about porcelain fingers, then lies there gasping for breath.
Irma Goodwin decides to give the patient a Neurobion injection, antipyretics and an intravenous antibiotic, Benzylpenicillin, u
ntil the test results come back.
She leaves the treatment room and walks down the corridor, rubbing the place where her wedding ring sat for eighteen years until she flushed it down the toilet. Her husband had betrayed her for far too long for her to forgive him. It no longer hurts, but it still feels like a shame, a waste of their shared future. She wonders about phoning her daughter even though it’s late. Since the divorce she’s been much more anxious than before, and calls Mia far too often.
Through the door ahead of her she can hear the staff nurse talking on the phone. An ambulance is on its way in from a priority call. A serious RTA. The staff nurse is putting together an emergency team and calling a surgeon.
Irma Goodwin stops and goes back to the room containing the unidentified patient. The red-cheeked auxiliary nurse is helping the other nurse to clean a bleeding wound in the man’s thigh. It looks like the young man had run straight into a sharp branch.
Irma Goodwin stops in the doorway.
‘Add some Macrolide to the antibiotics,’ she says decisively. ‘One gram of Erythromycin, intravenous.’
The nurse looks up.
‘You think he’s got Legionnaires’ disease?’ she asks in surprise.
‘Let’s see what the test—’
Irma Goodwin falls silent as the patient’s body starts to jerk. She looks at his white face and sees him slowly open his eyes.
‘I’ve got to get home,’ he whispers. ‘My name is Mikael Kohler-Frost, and I’ve got to get home …’
‘Mikael Kohler-Frost,’ Irma says. ‘You’re in Södermalm Hospital, and—’
‘She’s screaming, all the time!’
Irma leaves the treatment room and half-runs to her office. She closes the door behind her, puts on her reading glasses, sits down at her computer and logs in. She can’t find him in the health service database and tries the national population register instead.
She finds him there.
Irma Goodwin unconsciously rubs the empty place on her ring finger and rereads the information about the patient in the emergency room.
