Trapped, page 56
Vincent was standing lifeless above her. He had slumped over with his forehead and knees against the glass, but the confined space was holding him upright. She had seen him flailing around in wild panic when his air ran out. He’d come close to kicking her in the head. While he’d been kicking and pounding he must have found a lever or button that emptied the tank.
But they still needed to get out of the bloody thing. She didn’t know whether Vincent was dead, but he definitely would be very soon if she didn’t give him immediate resuscitation. He had said the glass couldn’t be broken. But shame on anyone who gave in. She took off a shoe and began to strike the heel repeatedly against the glass. She ensured that each blow struck the exact same point. It took fifteen hard blows. He was right, it would have been impossible to do it in water. When the glass shattered she protected herself reflexively with her arms. Vincent fell forward but her body was in the way and stopped him from landing headlong with his face among the shards of glass.
She climbed out of the water tank, pulled Vincent away and carefully laid him out on a glass-free area of the floor. He was lighter than he looked. Or perhaps she had got stronger. She looked at him. The mentalist. She was the one who had dragged him into all of this. Because Kenneth had got Anna to suggest it to her. She had swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker. Then Vincent’s sister had almost killed her, and now Vincent himself might be dead. She wasn’t going to let him get away with it. The water had probably washed away all the bacteria from him by this stage. She raised his neck to open the airway, took a deep breath and put her mouth to his.
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Vincent was still too exhausted to help her. He was lying on his back, gasping for air. Mina had no idea where Jane and Kenneth were, or when they were coming back. It surprised her that they hadn’t stayed to watch her and Vincent die, but perhaps they didn’t feel they had to. They thought they had achieved their goal and perhaps that was enough. Now it was just a question of whether they had fled or whether they were still nearby.
She tried to think clearly.
Her brain was in acute flight mode and she had to fight her desire to run away. Partly, it was that she couldn’t leave Vincent. She had saved his life. According to some old Chinese proverb, that meant she was now responsible for him. There was also the fact that, if she ran, she might end up running straight into the arms of Jane and Kenneth.
She looked around, fighting off the nausea triggered by the rotten, sweet stench still filling the air. She had to call for help. Which meant she had to get hold of a phone. Kenneth had thrown hers out of the van window – it was smashed into a thousand pieces far away from here. They’d probably taken Vincent’s too, but if they hadn’t taken it with them then it was surely around here somewhere. She searched the workshop bench, which was the only piece of furniture in the room, but found nothing.
‘Vincent,’ she coaxed, turning towards him.
He was still lying on his back, his eyes rolled up so that the whites were visible. His breathing was shallow and stuttering and he seemed to be struggling to regain consciousness.
‘Vincent!’ she said more firmly. ‘Did you see where they put your phone? It’s not here on the bench and I can’t find it. Might they have taken it with them?’
She felt hope sinking in her breast. Of course they had.
But Vincent laboriously raised his right arm and pointed towards the corner of the room. There was a large container standing there. The kind you filled with rubbish and then paid someone to cart it away. She hadn’t even noticed it; a container summoned far too many emotions around dirt that could never be washed away for her to want to take in its existence. But Vincent continued pointing.
She reluctantly went over to the container. The rotten smell got stronger the closer she got. The contents of her stomach came up her throat, acidly burning her mouth before returning in the other direction. Panic gripped her more tightly with each step she took. She didn’t want to see what was in the container. Didn’t even want to brush past it. She didn’t want to be in the same room as the container.
She turned around and looked pleadingly at Vincent. She saw that he was trying to talk, but still didn’t have the strength. Instead he raised his hand again and pointed for a third time at the container. Bloody hell. Bloody, bloody hell.
She thought she heard something outside. She stood stock-still to listen, but could hear nothing but silence. No one was coming to help them. It was up to her.
The container was tall – too tall. There was no way she’d be able to get up to look in it by herself. She looked around. The ladder leaning against the water tank had fallen down when she had smashed the glass. It was now wet and slippery, as well as covered in glass. Unusable. Standing against the far wall was another ladder. It looked much older, as if it hadn’t been used in many years, but at least it wasn’t glittering with shards of glass. She went over to the old ladder after another longing glance towards the door.
The ladder was covered in spiders’ webs. Not just webs, she spotted with distaste. Spiders. Loads of small spiders were crawling over the ladder and clambering around the intricate webs. She found a few centimetres that weren’t as festooned with sticky white threads, and full of horror and disgust she grabbed hold of that part of the ladder. When she pulled it away from the wall, she discovered the source of all the little spiders. A big, fat, hairy mother spider that had been sitting on the back of the wooden frame strolled straight across Mina’s hand.
She screamed out loud. She couldn’t stop herself. The scream echoed between the walls and she felt her heart pounding with terror as she stared towards the door. Had they heard? Would Jane and Kenneth come back now and discover that she and Vincent hadn’t died in the water tank?
But there was nothing.
No one.
Silence.
Her heart still pounding, she picked up the ladder and carried it over to the container. Her whole body was itchy from her scalp to her feet, and she pictured her entire body covered in tiny spider babies that would almost certainly lay their eggs under her skin or something equally awful.
She thought about a YouTube video that Ruben had once shown her out of some perverted need to disgust her just for the hell of it. It had been about the botfly, a South American insect that laid eggs under the skin that then hatched into larvae. In the video, you saw someone pull a big, floundering larva out of the scalp of another person.
She’d had to fight off the urge to be sick, determined not to give Ruben the satisfaction. Somehow she had mastered her revulsion. Just as she was doing now, with all the willpower she was able to summon.
She carefully set down the ladder by the container and tried to make as little sound as possible when the wood hit the metal. Several of the small spiders had come with it during the move and skittered around anxiously when the webs came loose in various places.
But Mina was barely thinking about the webs any longer. The smell was unbearable when she stood this close to the container. Tears formed in her eyes and the stench stung her nostrils. No matter what it was, something that smelled like that must definitely be filling the air with bacteria and microorganisms that were now swarming around her, past her, over her. Inside her.
She forced herself to focus on the task at hand – the goal. When she glanced at Vincent, she saw that he had managed to sit upright with his head hanging between his knees. He began to sob. Then the rest of the water he had swallowed came up and he vomited onto the floor.
She could feel her mouth filling with bile again. She swallowed and swallowed. She couldn’t throw up now, not again. If she did, she wouldn’t manage to do what she had to. Throwing up was the absolute worst thing she could imagine. Worse than botfly. Seeing all the disgusting things that were inside her, the thought of which she spent every waking moment suppressing, always gave her a total panic attack. Once was more than enough. During flu season, she sanitized three times more often than usual, and swallowed ten whole white peppercorns every day just to be sure. While the thing with the peppercorns wasn’t actually scientifically proven in any way, her mother had always done that and Mina had avoided stomach bugs for the last decade.
Three bars up the ladder. The crown of her head was level with the edge of the container. She couldn’t see what was in there yet. But the smell had, if possible, become even stronger and ranker. She pulled up the collar of her top over her nose as an inadequate shield. A few baby spiders ran over the back of her hand, but compared with the heavy, rotten stench she was able to ignore that.
One more step up.
Another one – and she peered over the edge.
The container was full of cadavers.
Minks.
Thousands of dead minks were staring up at her in varying degrees of decomposition. And they were moving. She knew why. The cadavers were filled with so many gases, worms and sticky flies that they made the dead flesh move. She couldn’t stop herself but instead leaned to one side and allowed the breakfast cereal she hadn’t brought up last time to splatter onto the concrete floor.
Tears began to flow. Her heart was beating in her chest in triple time, and she could feel the palms of her hands clammy with sweat. The panic attack threatened to take over completely, but she knew that if she let in that feeling even for a millisecond she wouldn’t be able to hold it together any longer.
She looked over to Vincent. He looked more stable. He was sitting up and looking at her, with a little more colour in his cheeks. Perhaps he’d be up to walking? Perhaps they should just leave and take the chance that Kenneth and Jane had fled and were far away?
But she knew they couldn’t. It would be a while before Vincent could move quickly and he wouldn’t be able to offer any resistance at all if they needed to defend themselves.
They needed backup.
She needed the phone.
She put one foot on the edge of the container. She tried to ignore the gaseous, rotting animal corpses below her. She refused to think about the millions of carrion insects and flies’ eggs. Instead, she desperately summoned up images of rainbows and unicorns, summer meadows and cute kittens.
Then she jumped.
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When the Norrtälje police arrived, they found Mina and Vincent on the workshop floor. Mina had used the hose running to the glass box to rinse herself off as best she could, but clumps of blood and animal remains that she didn’t even want to think about were still stuck in her hair. As soon as she got hold of something sharp, she was going to cut off the lot.
Her clothes were lying in a corner, ruined forever. She had torn them off, shrieking loudly. But at least she had found Vincent’s phone, sticky with blood. And it had worked. As soon as she had finished the call she’d thrown it to the floor in disgust and drenched it with the hose.
Vincent hadn’t said anything about that. Instead, he’d given her his clothes. They were far too large and soaked through, but at least they were free from spiders, worms and animal guts. Vincent was sitting there in his underwear. A pair of Björn Borgs in a Hawaiian print, she couldn’t help noticing.
Norrtälje had sent two officers, both women. When they saw Mina and Vincent, one of them turned around in the doorway.
‘We need blankets!’ she shouted to someone in the yard. ‘Quickly!’
‘We received a call from here,’ said the other policewoman. ‘And just after that, one from the police in Stockholm.’
She crouched beside Mina with an anxious look.
‘Yes, it was me who called from here,’ said Mina, snuffling. ‘You got here really quickly.’
‘You called?’ said the officer, looking surprised. ‘I thought the voice sounded much older. Stockholm were rather confused, but according to the person I spoke to there, there are meant to be two dead bodies. Something about a hate crime and a suicide. And a letter. Do you know anything about that?’
Mina didn’t know what to say. She looked at Vincent.
‘Jane and Kenneth rang the police before they left,’ he said apologetically. ‘There wasn’t time to mention it.’
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They passed the exit for Arlanda Airport and carried on north. After Arlanda, the traffic always thinned out. Right now they were almost alone on the motorway. But she knew that it would get busier the closer to Uppsala they got. Christer had been in touch while Julia was in the car and said that the police were on the lookout for Vincent but that it had been passed to the police in Norrtälje. It was no longer their case. She didn’t need to come in.
Christer had added far too knowingly that he obviously had no idea why she was at home, but perhaps she had something more important to be doing, today of all days. She had called Torkel and turned around straight away, grateful that her colleagues at police headquarters were the worst people in the world at keeping secrets.
She squeezed his hand on the wheel. He squeezed back without taking his eyes off the road.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For putting up with me. Fuck these hormones.’
‘Hey, you’re the hotshot detective,’ he said, smiling. ‘You had a tough choice to make today. I’m sorry I didn’t make it any easier for you. But there’s one thing you should know.’
He took his gaze off the road for a second to look her in the eyes.
‘I love you. And I think you made the right choice. We would have had more chances to have kids. But what kind of father would I be if I didn’t let you protect someone already out there, a person who is someone else’s child? Sorry I was so stupid.’
‘It’s OK,’ she said, putting her hand on his thigh. ‘I didn’t pick you for your intellect, you know.’
Torkel burst into laughter and she laughed with him. The laughter felt like a dam bursting. Tensions that had been simmering for months, ever since she had once again started hormone treatment, finally left her body. And Torkel seemed to feel the same way. They were heading for something new. Together. She wound down the side window to let in the chill September air. The wind resistance whirled around her face and hair. It felt boisterous, playful. She smiled and closed her eyes. The wind was full of life.
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Vincent hadn’t shown up for the press conference. Mina could understand that. The media had leapt onto the news of his connection to the murders with the same fervour displayed by piranhas encountering a dead cow in a river. It was in everyone’s best interest that he kept out of the way.
Julia stepped up onto the podium. Some of the details had already leaked, the media having mixed up unconnected fragments of the truth with what the journalists had added from their own imaginations. ‘A possible scenario’ as they liked to call it.
The hubbub began to quieten down and everyone’s gazes turned expectantly towards Julia. Mina was standing at the side of the stage, concealed behind a drape. Even she hadn’t been able to escape the press. She couldn’t understand where they’d got hold of the pictures. She’d always been careful to stay out of the public eye and didn’t even like standing in front of the camera in her personal life. Nevertheless, they’d managed to dig up some old black and white photo in which she looked dreadful – taken at some raid where she wasn’t even aware of the photographer’s presence.
‘We still haven’t located the murderers, but they have been identified as Jane Boman and Kenneth Bengtsson. As members of the press corps have already noted, Jane is the sister of the mentalist Vincent Walder.’
‘How long has Vincent known that the perpetrator was his sister?’
One of the most forward reporters from Expressen asked the question straight up.
‘Please ensure you raise your hand and wait to be called on,’ said Julia curtly. ‘It’ll be chaos otherwise.’
It was only now that Mina noted that the commissioner of police in Stockholm, Julia’s father, was standing at the back of the room watching his daughter on the podium. He looked proud. Mina knew that Julia and the team were a complicated issue for him, so his proud expression raised Mina’s spirits. Julia deserved his approval.
‘But to answer your question,’ said Julia. ‘Vincent was not aware that it was his sister until he and our colleague Mina Dabiri were taken hostage.’
‘Why? What was the motive?’
The same reporter again, and once again without raising his hand. Mina could see that Julia’s patience was about to run out.
‘Please raise your hand. It’s true that the motive is tied to the incident that you’ve pulled apart and put back together again in the press in recent days. I’m referring to the accident that occurred during Vincent and Jane’s childhood. Their mother, Gabriella Boman, died in tragic circumstances and for various reasons Jane held Vincent responsible for that, as well as the course that Jane’s life took after the accident.’
Another reporter waved their hand in the air.
‘Why the illusion theme? Isn’t it a bit unnecessarily complicated?’
‘What can I say? My experience is that murderers aren’t always rational when it comes to methods. As I said, the reason behind the murders and the way they were carried out are linked to the circumstances around Gabriella Boman’s death.’
‘Is Daniel Bargabriel’s death connected to this in any way?’
‘Daniel’s death is not tied to this case beyond the fact that he knew two of the victims. On the other hand, I am able to tell you that we have today taken into custody two of the perpetrators we believe were involved in Daniel’s death and we expect charges to be filed by the prosecutor shortly.’
Mina felt a pang of sorrow for the young man who had died as a result of Jane’s lust for revenge, even if it wasn’t Jane who had killed him. It was so unnecessary. So much waste. But hopefully, Sweden’s Future would be hit hard by the scandal, which would see them sink like a stone in the next elections.
Julia continued to field an onslaught of heated questions. Mina slowly withdrew, letting Julia’s voice – the one with all the answers – fade into the background.
