Inertia, page 29
Tears come again. I don’t even notice, but this time they are virtually gushing out. They wash over my cheeks and pour into my mouth. There is a sting when a tear settles by my raw nostril.
What the hell is going on?
My thoughts are like wild dogs, chasing each other aimlessly and fiercely without making me any wiser.
There must be a way out of this fucking house; after all it’s only a house, not a prison. I draw a deep breath and try to see the shit logically.
All windows on the ground floor have bars, so I can’t get out that way. The front door is locked with a hell of a lot of safety locks, so I can forget that too. The terrace doors are probably locked too, and even if they’re not I can’t climb down from there since the terrace is built over the cliff. Unless I want to risk falling sixty feet and being crushed against the rocks below, that is.
The top floor – that is the only alternative.
I can sneak up the stairs, go into my room, open the window and jump out. That should work, it’s not that high. Eleven, twelve feet tops and there is grass underneath, so I will land softly.
My legs tremble as I walk into the living room. Through the large windows I see the ocean stretch out in the dawn, like a giant leaden quilt reaching all the way to the horizon.
I take the stairs in five quick steps – the wrought-iron structure is solid and doesn’t emit any sounds to give me away.
The door to my room is open and I go in.
The bed is freshly made. The pillows are just as hotel-fluffy as they were when I arrived. My bag is gone and the wardrobe, which is ajar, is empty. There is a slight scent of pine tar soap in the air.
It is as if I was never even here, as if someone washed away every trace of me.
I go up to the window, open it and look down at the ground.
I feel a tug at the pit of my stomach – it’s higher up than I thought and here and there are rocks in the grass that I definitely don’t want to land on. Besides: Rachel’s room is directly under mine. If there is a thud, or I scream when I jump, she might wake up. So whatever happens, no matter how I fall, I have to be as quiet as a mouse.
I climb up carefully and sit in the window. Think about how to do this.
Shall I grab on to the windowsill with my hands, so that I hang straight down, and then let go?
No.
That would reduce the height of my fall, but I can’t choose where I land. The risk is high that I’ll end up too close to the wall, hit it, wake Rachel up and maybe that Olle guy, if he’s here now.
I decide to jump from a seated position and push off as far as I can so that I don’t end up too close to the building wall.
Then I close my eyes and send someone a thought, not sure who, not God in any case. I push off with my feet and hands and sail through the summer night. The ground hits me hard like a clenched fist, knocking the air out of me. A sharp pain in my ankle spreads through my entire leg and I have to summon every ounce of self-discipline to not scream out loud.
I sit in the grass and look at my foot, scared shitless that I’ll see broken bones poking out of my skin.
But my foot looks like it always does.
It has to be a sprain, I tell myself, and get up on all fours. I try to stand up, but the pain in my foot is too severe, so I begin to crawl through the grass towards the front of the house instead.
My left wrist hurts so much that I don’t dare put any weight on it.
I’m slow, far too slow, but neither my foot nor my hand is much use, so I have no choice but to make my way like a fucking one-year-old.
When I round the corner of the house the numbing heavy scent of roses from Rachel’s flower bed hits me. The delicate, dark red flowers with their thorny stems strive toward the lightening sky. There is a fine layer of dew on their petals.
I crawl around the flower bed and on to the gate in the fence.
Just another twenty yards.
My hands scrape against stones and pinecones in the grass. I have lost sensation in my knees, my foot throbs with pain.
In the distance the seagulls join the choir of birds.
Ten.
Hand, knee. Hand, knee.
I feel something slimy against my hand. When I look into the grass I see a crushed snail.
I keep going.
Five.
Hand, knee. Hand, knee.
The fence appears in front of me, from my perspective it feels as tall as a wall.
I support myself on the splintered boards, pull myself onto one leg and hold onto the gate.
A light falls across the ground. I turn around and look quickly at the house.
A light is on in Rachel’s room.
I try to open the gate, but can’t, it almost feels as if it is locked.
Fucking hell!
Noise is coming from the house; someone gives a shrill scream.
I think.
The fence is pretty high. If I hadn’t patched the hole I could have crawled through it now. If I hadn’t needed to look so bloody helpful to Rachel, I would’ve been free by now.
As if that made any difference.
What was I thinking, anyway? That I’d get to fuck her?
I look up at the fence and the realisation hits me: I’m the one who screwed on the bars and fixed the fence that is keeping me prisoner in this insane asylum.
You stupid fuck; you built your own prison.
And now?
There is only one option: I have to climb over the fence. Normally this would not have been a problem. But now, when both my foot and my hand hurt like hell, I don’t know if I am able to.
I grab onto the top of the fence with both hands and try to pull myself up. It shouldn’t be harder than doing a push-up, but my body is weak, so damn weak. My body is a hundred years old and would prefer to just lie down in the grass and die like an old elephant.
I hear a window open and hit the bars with a dull, metallic thud.
This will be my only chance. If I want to get out of here I need to get over the fence now.
I grab hold of the top again, look up at the sky and use all the strength I have. I pull until my back, shoulders and biceps feel like they are on fire with pain. Until I black out and the darkness pulls me down towards the cave again. Until the quills push through the skin on my arms and my nose becomes a beak.
You will never pull this off. You may as well give up.
But I get up. I pull it off.
I end up hanging off the fence, like a sock left to dry, panting and unable to move even an inch.
Slowly I land in my body again.
The front door opens and I can hear heavy steps on the stairs.
With one last enormous effort I heave myself over the fence and fall headlong down onto the other side.
My cheek hits the ground and I feel crunching in my shoulder, but I don’t care anymore. All I can think about is how to get to Igor’s bike which is parked next to the road.
I manage to stand up and begin to run. My foot hurts like hell, but the fear is worse than the pain.
I hear steps on the gravel path, then there’s the clinking of keys and the squeak as the gate swings open. But in the same instant I straddle the bike and fumble the wires for the ignition.
I will make it!
There is no chance anyone will catch up with me on the bike. Not even by car.
The steps approach from behind as I start the bike with a roar. I let go of the ignition and feel the thrill in my chest – that intoxicating feeling of freedom and triumph, of having cheated death itself.
The bike jerks, flies away from its spot by the pine, but stops mid-air, as if it were a duck that had just been shot.
And me, I keep going.
I fly headlong over the handlebars and land on the gravel path with a bang. The taste of blood spreads in my mouth and I spit out gravel, or is it teeth?
I don’t know.
I don’t know anything anymore.
But my brain wants answers. My brain keeps working even though my body is completely fucking out of it.
I remember the vials of Fentanyl that I stole out of the medicine cabinet. Remember the dull clink when I took them out of my backpack and threw them into the foaming waves. Above all I remember replacing the contents of three of the bottles with water and putting them back in the cabinet.
Is that why I woke up? Did someone keep me drugged until tonight?
Until I was given water instead of drugs?
Was it the man I heard, the one from Southern Sweden who Rachel was arguing with?
I recall her words:
. . . if you so much as touch a hair on his head I will call the police unless you leave my house NOW, do you hear me?
The darkness pulls at me, carefully this time, almost benevolently. Tempts with its promise of freedom from pain and fear.
But I don’t want to. Not yet.
I need to understand. There is so much I have to understand, like for instance, why I am lying here on the road and not sitting on the bike on my way back to Stockholm.
The darkness pulls at me. My field of vision is shrinking, fading away. The throbbing pain is receding.
I search with my gaze, let it sweep across the motorbike that lies smoking on its side in the tall grass by my feet.
And I see.
I see something red wrapped around the back wheel and the pine like a long snake.
The big, red bike lock I bought for Rachel.
P A R T V
In the Valley of the Shadow of Death
The waters surrounded me, even to my soul;
the deep closed around me;
Weeds were wrapped around my head.
I went down to the moorings of the mountains;
the earth with its bars closed behind me forever.
Jonah 2: 5-6
Manfred
I
arrive at the station in a taxi just after midnight, still a bit tipsy after my liquid dinner with Martin and Afsaneh earlier in the evening, but it doesn’t matter. I feel expectant and my steps across the dewy grass are lighter than they have been in a long time when I make a shortcut through the park.
Malin is in the small conference room where we have gathered all the information about the investigation. The photos of Johannes Ahonen and Victor Carlgren are hanging on the whiteboard. Next to them someone has taped up the poem and written in large letters:
THE LAMB = RACHEL, THE DOVE = JONAS, THE LION = OLLE BERG
Next to this hangs the mugshot of Olle Berg. His gaze into the camera seems empty.
‘How are you doing?’ Malin asks.
‘I’m OK,’ I answer. ‘Tell me, where did we find Olle Berg?’
‘Somewhere in the archipelago,’ Malin says. ‘Letit has all the information. He’ll be here soon to brief us. I think he worked all evening.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned. I thought Letit went home at five every day to air his polyester shirt.’
Malin flashes a crooked smile.
‘Actually, I didn’t go home either,’ she says. ‘I’m sort of trying to construct a hypothesis on how this happened, but I just can’t.’
I shrug. ‘Why complicate it? Berg killed Johannes Ahonen, Victor Carlgren and the unknown victim.’
Malin clasps her hands at the back of her neck and looks at the ceiling.
‘That’s too easy,’ she says.
‘It usually is easy.’
‘But why?’
‘Who the hell knows?’ I say. ‘Likely drug-related, like everything else these days.’
But Malin, whose gaze is still pinned to the ceiling, does not seem convinced.
‘Victor Carlgren doesn’t exactly appear to have been a junkie.’
‘His sister told us his friends had bought drugs from someone named Måns or Malte,’ I say. ‘It had to have been Malte Lindén.’
Malin shakes her head slowly.
‘That connection is very weak, you know that too. And who is victim number three? The guy with the weird bite.’
‘Probably another junkie,’ I say and hear how certain I sound, even though I’m not actually all that convinced.
Malin squirms in her seat and sighs. Scrunches up a small piece of paper into a ball and throws it into the bin over by the door.
The ball lands on the floor next to the bin, but Malin remains seated with a deep furrow in her forehead.
‘So why was Ahonen’s DNA under Carlgren’s nails?’ she asks.
‘They probably got in a fight before Ahonen went and got himself beaten to death by Olle Berg.’
‘Hmm,’ Malin says. ‘Skin under the nails. When would you scratch someone? Other than during sex, that is.’
‘Speak for yourself. I don’t scratch my bedmates. But generally speaking I would say people do that when they’re at a disadvantage. When everything has gone to hell. When someone has their hands around your neck, or has buried a knife halfway into your stomach. When you can’t breathe and are bleeding out.’
Malin stretches a bit so that her belly pokes out.
‘The victims’ injuries,’ she continues. ‘The high-impact violence inflicted post-mortem. They had broken almost every bloody bone that can be broken. What the hell did Berg do to them?’
‘Maybe they were hit by a boat when they were in the water. The forensic pathologist did say—’
Malin interrupts me: ‘All three of them? Seems unlikely. And why did so much time pass between the murders, or the deaths, if they weren’t murdered? If this was a reckoning in the crime world, surely they would have died at the same time?’
‘Not necessarily,’ I say.
Steps approach in the corridor and Letit shows up in the doorway. He has some papers in one hand, the other is resting on his hip with the thumb inside the waist of his shiny, worn trousers with crooked pleats. The shirt is unbuttoned at the neck, revealing a grey tuft of hair.
He sinks onto the chair next to Malin without saying hi.
I look at Malin who is wearing a pair of worn maternity jeans and a T-shirt that must have been white once upon a time, but which is now grey like dishwater in good used condition.
People just don’t want to look good anymore, I think. They want to look interesting, dangerous or perhaps rebellious. They want to look like they’ve travelled the world, smoked weed all night, or are coming to work straight from the brothel.
I look down at my discreetly patterned suit trousers and the well-polished shoes sticking out beneath my protruding belly.
Letit clears his throat. ‘Olle “Bullen” Berg was located on a campsite just west of Stuvskär,’ he says. ‘He bought food for 340 kronor there yesterday.’
‘And how do we know this? Malin asks.
‘The bank got in touch,’ Letit says quietly. ‘He used his credit card at 15.36 yesterday. Note that this was the first time he’s used it since disappearing. And we’re lucky. The shop he went to has a surveillance camera. They caught him on film. Our colleagues from Haninge were there and picked it up.’
Letit slides over three blurry black-and-white pictures of a man in a cap and sunglasses. In the first he is entering through a door. In the next he is standing in front of a counter on which food items are displayed. He is leaning against the counter with his left hand while signing the receipt with his right. The third image looks identical to the second, other than the clerk having moved.
I clear my throat. ‘Nice work.’
Letit nods. ‘I mean, this is a bit of a special interest. Film, that is,’ he says, there is a dreamy aspect to his voice which hints that there is a lot I don’t know about him.
Then he furrows his brow. ‘There’s one thing that is strange. It takes him a very long time to sign that receipt.’
‘What?’ Malin asks, leaning over the printouts.
‘Look at the time stamps.’
‘I don’t follow,’ Malin says, shaking her head.
‘Olle is in the exact same position, with the pen against the receipt, in the second and third image,’ Letit says quietly.
‘And?’ Malin asks.
‘The pictures are thirty seconds apart. Not even the slow fuckers at the lost property office take thirty seconds to sign a receipt. And I have gone over the original recording with the technicians, there’s nothing wrong with the time stamp.’
Letit’s eyes gleam behind the heavy lids and I recall the time he helped a colleague go through the video of the car explosions. How he was immediately transformed from grumpy old man into a sharp analyst.
I don’t doubt that he knows this like the back of his hand.
‘How do you interpret this?’ I ask him.
He shakes his head slightly, scratching his beard.
‘Hmm. That’s a hard one . . . that’s what she said.’
Malin shoots me a disgusted look.
‘Perhaps he was distracted by something in the shop,’ Letit says thoughtfully.
We consider the grainy images in silence.
‘You can’t see his face,’ I say.
Letit nods.
‘True. But the man in the shop recognised him. He’s apparently well-known there. Or infamous, rather. He lives in a tent just outside the campsite, which they obviously don’t like. They also said he’d never used a card there before and didn’t know the PIN, so he had to present ID. And guess what?’
I shrug at the rhetorical question.
Letit lowers his voice, pulling out one of his toothpicks. ‘He’s still there. The stupid fucker is still in his tent. All we need to do is go there and nab him.’
*
Malin and I drive toward Stuvskär. In the grey van a couple of hundred yards ahead of us are Letit and four guys from the Reinforced Regional Task Force, the unit formerly known as the SWAT team.
I follow them at a distance while trying to prepare mentally for the strike. Malin and I are going to wait by the cars while Letit and the guys from the regional task force arrest Olle Berg. It is probably not necessary to assign five people the task of arresting one camping man, but we aren’t taking any risks.
‘It’s fine by me if you have a cigarette,’ Malin says, glancing at the pack wedged between the seats. ‘As long as you open the window.’
‘I don’t smoke,’ I say.
