by C S Duffy
She loved the flash of respect she saw in men's eyes when she told them what she did for a living. Then there would be the inevitable quip about how she could handcuff them if she wanted, but if they were really cute she would forgive it. The truth she hadn't admitted to anyone yet, even herself, however, was that the police force had turned out to be a lot more work and less fun than she had envisioned, and she was probably no more than two or three more shifts like this away from quitting.
That would annoy her parents, who would remind her she couldn't live at home rent-free even if she wasn't working, and warn her she had better not get up to her old tricks again of going dancing and staying out all hours with men they didn't even know. Gabriella rolled her eyes at the very thought of the conversation, then, keeping half an eye on the door behind which Ola Andersson lay dead to the world, she snuck half way up the corridor to the vending machine.
She really wasn't supposed to leave her post without informing hospital security who would come and relieve her officially, but for heaven's sake it was only a few metres, and the guy was unconscious. What exactly was going to happen in the thirty seconds it would take her to buy yet another bag of chips? This was the other problem with boring shifts, Gabriella thought ruefully as she wandered back. A few more shifts like this and she'd be sweating salt and vinegar.
'There you are, quick — he is speaking and I think a police officer needs to hear this.' The nurse turned and ran towards the room, and Gabriella dropped her chips in her haste to grab the little notebook she was supposed to use to log anything official.
A weary looking Indian doctor was shining a light in Ola Andersson's eyes as he wriggled like Gabriella's cat when she tried to give him medicine.
'Get away, get away from me —' he was muttering in a hoarse voice. They must have already taken the intubation tube out. Shit — how long had she dawdled at the vending machine? She'd only sent three texts.
'What was he saying?' she snapped with what she hoped sounded like authority.
'Something about a woman?'
'Ola — can you hear me? I am officer Gabriella Martinez. What do you want to say about a woman?'
'She told me — told me it was her.'
'Who told you? Lotta Berglund?'
'No!' he shouted. 'She is the killer. She said so.'
'Somebody else told you that Lotta Berglund was the killer?'
'Makes sense. Why else would she be such a bitch?'
'Who? Who told you?'
He smirked suddenly. 'My first.' His face twitched as though he was trying to laugh but his face had forgotten how. 'Perks of being a ski instructor.'
43
Johan snipped through the mesh wire and yanked open a hole big enough for he and I to climb into Mia's attic. Swedish apartment building attics are divided up amongst residents in sort of mesh wire cages, so everyone has a few cubic metres each to store their junk. The police had searched Mia's months earlier, but we had to do something. There might just be something that only someone who knew Mia as well as Johan did would understand the significance of.
That, and I suspected Johan was keeping me busy to keep my mind off things. Nadja had promised to text me when they arrested Casey Donnantuoro. Though my phone was on its loudest setting, I couldn't help but double check it every three seconds. So far, nothing.
And even that was better than thinking about why Mia had wanted me in her apartment. To keep an eye on me? Had she been listening in on me? I kept thinking over every conversation I'd had in the flat, every blether with my mum about rubbish, every sweet nothing with Johan, catch ups with Kate, Henrik, Marty MacDonald in Boston. It must have been her that opened my window that night, her who had been standing in the doorway the night I'd thought I had a nightmare.
Icy terror slithered around me, squeezed me tight at the thought, but she hadn't hurt me. She had had access to me, fast asleep, more or less every night for more than three months. So what the hell did she want with me?
The attic was impeccably neat, with everything divided into storage boxes of the appropriate size and labelled. Johan was flicking through a box of school yearbooks.
'That is Karin Söderström,' he told me, pointing to a picture of a shy looking teenager standing at the edge of a group. 'The school librarian. Mia was one too.'
'Mia was a school librarian?' I tried to smile but I knew my voice was shrill. 'She's not predictable, I'll give her that.'
'What name did she give you as the landlady?'
I opened my phone to dig out the original email correspondence.
'Here it is,' I said finally. 'Sigrid Johansson. I remember thinking it was a sign because there was a Johan in it.'
He smiled briefly. 'That is her aunt, I think. There is something not quite right about her mind. I don't know the details, but she lives in some sort of residence which Mia pays for. Mia's mother died when she was a baby.'
He rummaged in a box of photograph albums and pulled one out. 'Somewhere in here there should be — '
He handed me the album, pointed to a photograph of a teenaged Mia with a lady with long white hair. I frowned. I'd seen her before. Don't you want to be safe? The woman addressing the group. The vigilantes.
'That's it —' I said, my heart racing as it started to fall in to place. 'The profiler was right. This is Mia's next kill. High profile, showing off her power. The victim is Lotta Bergland.'
44
Dumb and stupid. Everybody was dumb and stupid, and so, finally was Casey Donnantuoro. For the first time in his life he had made a mistake and now he was going to pay.
The wind shrieked in and out of the old building as a wild storm blew in from the Baltic Sea. Casey Donnantuoro crouched in the cellar beneath his wife's family's sommarstuga and waited for the moment he was going to be blown to kingdom come. He could see maggots, roaches, scuttling back and forth across the ceiling, then he remembered that it was too dark to see anything. The maggots and roaches were in his mind. Maybe they would eat him before the police got him.
'Casey, please come out.’
A woman? They got a freaking chick cop to try to negotiate with him?
‘You are not in any danger. Please keep calm, and walk slowly up the stairs. You will not be hurt.'
Casey laughed and laughed. Not in any danger? He had killed four goddamned people including a freaking cop. He pumped their bodies full of embalming fluid and he posed them in the city to give people nightmares. The second he showed his head above those stairs, they were going to blow it right off.
Which is how it was always going to be. He knew that. He accepted it. He wasn't afraid of dying. He never had been. He'd thought about doing it himself, a bunch of times. He used to play with his dad's guns in the basement in Lawrence, Massachusetts, sometimes letting a loaded one drop just to see what would happen. He'd climb out his bedroom window onto the sloped roof of his family's three storey colonial and just sit there, dangling ever closer to the edge until some neighbourhood girls started to shriek and then he'd laugh. He even once drank the contents of a test tube in a high school chemistry class, and couldn't stop cracking up at the teacher's terror, even while his throat burned and he felt like his eyes would pop out.
But none of those times, did he die, so he figured he was supposed to be alive. Then he started to figure there must be a purpose. He had to know something he was supposed to share with the world. Except nobody would ever listen to him because he was a loser.
Until the night he followed Jason Winslow. He never knew why he followed people. He just did it sometimes. Girls, guys. Old people, kids. Who cared. They were all the same. But he followed Jason Winslow as he walked his date home, and when Jason Winslow kissed her good night, Casey started to feel a little weird.
She was pretty. The kind of girl Casey never even really got to see up close. The kind of girl that moved away as soon as she saw Casey coming. He'd seen them on TV though, he knew what they were like. Shiny hair you could grab a fistful off, tight asses. Lips Cas
ey always figured had to taste like strawberries or cherries or something from that glossy stuff they put on them. Lips that Jason Winslow got to taste, while Casey just imagined.
It wasn't like it was the first time Casey discovered that guys like Jason Winslow got access to a kind of life that Casey would always be denied, but for some reason that was the night he was done putting up with it. It was also the night he had a little vial in his pocket that he'd taken from the morgue.
When he slipped it into his pocket, he'd vaguely thought he might drink it himself. It had been a while since he tested his own mortality. But when Jason Winslow left the girl and started to walk down the street, all cocky like he owned the world — and no wonder, Casey had seen exactly what he had just gotten to squeeze under the girl's sweater — Casey decided it was time he tested someone else's mortality.
And man, it was fuckin' messy. Jason Winslow was a big guy, and he didn't die easy. Casey had thought a little about looking for work as an executioner in prisons, but if they were all this hard work then he was out. He was incapacitated quickly enough, but that fuckin' heart would not stop beating for most of the night. Casey had injected him with a lot more than he ever meant to before he finally felt his pulse weaken and die and he was so exhausted he could hardly even enjoy the triumph. That was when he realised he wasn't done having fun with Jason Winslow.
He’d gotten a lot better at it since then.
Over a lot of cities. He didn’t always pose them out in the snow, but he liked to when he could. He’d never been good at building snowmen as a kid, they always seemed to crumble and kind of collapse before he was even done making them, but his ice statues never crumbled or collapsed. He liked them. They made him happy. All the news headlines and groups of crazies freaking out all over the city all because of him, It had been a trip. It had been worth it.
Even if it was over now.
Before he could lose his nerve, Casey scrabbled from his hiding place and raced up the stairs, bracing himself for the shower of bullets.
‘Okay I’m glad you decided to come up. Can you get on your knees, please?’
What? Where was his shower of bullets? Did this bit just say please? To him?
‘Just stay calm, everything will be okay. Are you hurt?’
‘No I’m not freaking hurt!’ Casey yelled, and his voice went that high pitched way it always did when he was upset. Kids laughed at him, his mom beat him for sounding like a girl. And these assholes just stood calmly watching him in silence.
‘Shoot me!’ he screamed. ‘Shoot me!’
‘There is no reason for us to shoot you. We are seven people and you are one. You pose no threat to us. Please get on your knees and put your hands in the air.’
Somehow Casey found himself obeying. After a moment, he felt the cool metal of handcuffs and then he was pulled, gently but firmly to his feet and walked to a waiting cop car. It was the biggest anti-climax of his life.
45
‘The group — Anki said they were going to take action after another murder. Henrik is the next murder. They are going to kill Lotta.’
I hissed urgently over my shoulder as I clattered down the stairs from the attic back to my flat — Mia’s flat, with Johan right behind me. My bloody phone battery was at 2% so I grabbed my charger to plug it in before scrolling to Nadja’s number.
‘This whole thing has been some kind of — I don’t even know, play, to prove that she is cleverer than all of us.’
‘I should have known,’ Johan said quietly, with a bitter smile. ‘Mia never liked to lose.’
‘Those pamphlets in your kitchen — Johan —’
Nadja wasn’t answering. She must be still pursuing Casey Donnantuoro. What should I do now? Was this something I could call the usual emergency number with?
‘Krister,’ he said. ‘Krister has joined the group. I was not happy about it, but I thought maybe, hopefully it would help him a little. Give him a place to channel his anger. Ellie — he is with them tonight. Something is happening tonight.’
‘Did he join because of Mia?’
Johan shook his head. ‘I am certain he doesn’t know. He talked about it all to me the night you went out to get pizza. He is not a good liar. He went to their meetings to try to get over Mia. Shit. Vad fan, Krister,’ he muttered under his breath.
‘Call him,’ I said. ‘Warn him. As soon asI get through to Nadja — though what’s the point? We have no idea where they are, where Lotta is.’
‘Wait —’ Johan said. ‘We have an app that shows us where the other’s phone is. It’s from a trip we took years ago, but I don’t think we ever disconnected — yes.’ Johan frowned. ‘He is in one of the old disused factories at Hammarby. They are all condemned.’
‘That must be where they’re holding her. Let’s go. I’ll keep calling Nadja.’
We both ran for the door —
‘Johan, how are we going to get there? It’s rush hour, the traffic will be bumper to bumper.’
‘I have an idea,’ he said.
46
Lotta Berglund stirred from a deep sleep and for a moment she thought she was drowning. Her voice was hoarse as she fought for breath, every cell in her body felt limp and weak, her lungs too exhausted to expand no matter how hard she tried. The fever had come, finally, and it had not been the relief she had hoped for.
The darkness was still complete, but Lotta was used to that now. She had almost forgotten what light was like. The thought of being able to see anything beyond the end of her nose terrified her.
So this is what it is like to die, she thought. She didn’t feel too badly. The exhaustion, the sensation of being drained of every last scrap of energy, was strangely pleasant. Relaxing. All the terror was gone, her adrenaline spent.
There was no torturing herself with decisions of whether to fight or run when they came for her. The prospect of doing either was laughable. She would simply lie here and wait until it was over.
People talked of what they would regret on their deathbeds. The general consensus was that no one would ever wish they had done more work, but Lotta did. She wished she had had that breakthrough. She wished she had gritted her teeth and kept with the Boston project.
She wished she had never ranted about it the first night she got back to Sweden in that bar. It wasn’t the sort of place Lotta would ever have gone into normally. She had lived in Stockholm her entire life without setting foot on Stureplan. But when the plane landed, Lotta was still as angry as she had been when it took off, so she took the Arlanda Express to Stockholm’s Central Station and then walked and walked until the glow of a candle on a table inside a restaurant caught her eye and she walked in to sit near it.
They didn’t want her there. She wasn’t dressed like the women there, with their tight jeans and high heels and artfully tousled curls. Also, none of them carried a gigantic, battered, suitcase. The hostess, or whatever you called it, came over, all fake smiles, and asked Lotta if she would like a menu. No, she would not like a menu, thank you, but also she declined to leave, just yet.
So then another woman came over. A manager? Who knows. Tall and blonde and perfect like all the others, but this one listened to Lotta. Lotta poured out the whole story and the woman seemed sympathetic, fascinated. She asked so many questions, and Lotta was too tired and heartsick to care.
Until a few weeks ago. Lotta had been travelling so much over the past six months or so, attending a conference in Denver, guest lecturing at the University of Cape Town, even fitting in a few days’ hiking in Iceland, that she hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to the news in Sweden. But on the plane back from South Africa, she flicked through the online version of a Swedish newspaper and came across a long article about the Södermalm Murders that were revealed last summer.
Lotta instantly knew what drug had been used. She just had to find the woman she had spoken to that night. And then she had woken up here.
Lotta finally realised what had woken her. Voices. Footsteps. Cl
anking.
They were coming for her, but when they opened the door, she was pleased to note that she didn’t feel an ounce of gratitude. She had been right about Stockholm Syndrome.
47
They have her. I don’t even have to wait for someone to tell me, I can hear it from here. The excited chatter, the surge of anticipation.
It is a palpable thing. We like to talk of emotions as though they don’t truly exist, as though they are imaginary and can be changed at will. But emotions are electrical impulses just like any other. Each fires into the atmosphere and makes its little mark regardless of whether the feeling was direct or confused, healthy or destructive. Or created entirely by me.
If Lotta has worked it out, she will think it’s because she threatened to expose me. She posed on several noticeboards she must have deduced I frequented, cryptic references to our meeting and suggesting that if I did not give her an explanation she would go to the police. But she posed no threat to me. Ellie already told them it was me, and yet here I am.
The circumstances of my life have changed, but the facade of normality was never going to last forever. For months, even before Ellie arrived, I felt my true self trying to burst out. Liv was worried about me. She thought I was unhappy with Krister as she had been with Johan. When she held my hand and promised she would support me whatever I chose to do, it took everything in me not to laugh in her face. I laughed in the end, though. Her face as she understood what was happening milliseconds before she died is a delicious memory I have held to myself ever since.
