Hunter

Jeanette Fleming is walking along close to the trucks in the direction she thinks the prostitute went. Closer to the edge of the forest it’s so dark between the vehicles that she has to hold her hands up to feel her way. The air reeks of diesel, and the lorries are radiating heat like sweating horses. She passes one cab with check-patterned blinds over the windows.

Jeanette suddenly sees the woman. She’s standing a short distance away, spitting on the ground as she knocks on one of the driver’s cabs. She leans heavily on the huge front wheel.

‘Where else have you worked?’ Jeanette asks when she catches up to her.

‘I used to work in really fancy places.’

‘Have you ever had any clients in Djursholm?’

‘I only take the best,’ the woman mumbles.

The cab door opens and a heavy man with glasses and a beard looks at them. He blows Jeanette a kiss, then looks impatiently at the other woman.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

‘I was just wondering if you’d like some company,’ she replies.

‘You’re too ugly,’ the man says, but doesn’t close the door.

‘No, I’m not,’ she replies. It’s obvious that the man is enjoying being cruel to her.

‘So what part of you isn’t ugly?’

The woman pulls her top up, showing her pale breasts.

‘And you expect to get paid for those?’ he says, but still beckons her into the cab with his head.

26

Jeanette watches the woman clamber up into the cab and close the door behind her. She waits for a while in the darkness, listening to the creak of the springs in the seats.

Headlights sweep the ground and the shadows quickly slide away. Laughter and muffled music reach her from the other end of the lorry park.

A drunk woman shrieks somewhere, her voice angry and hoarse.

Jeanette peers under the trailer. In the distance a cigarette falls to the ground in a cascade of sparks before someone stamps it out. She detects a movement from the other direction. It looks like someone’s crawling on all fours under the lorries, heading towards her. A shiver runs down her spine. Jeanette starts to walk towards the restaurant.

Another lorry is on its way into the car park, but stops with a squeal to let her pass. The brakes wheeze. A chain clanks as it sways beneath the vehicle. Jeanette can’t see the driver, but still walks across the road through the dazzling glare of its headlights.

She looks around as she gets close to the restaurant, but there’s no one following her.

Jeanette slows down a little and decides to take her torn tights off and wash the cut on her leg before she calls Saga.

She goes over to the bathroom, but all the cubicles are occupied. The blood has congealed around the wound and run down her calf.

The thin metal door of one of the toilets swings open and a woman with bleached blonde hair emerges. She’s clutching her phone to her ear and is yelling that she had a client, and that she can’t do everything at once.

The woman disappears down the hall, waving her arms angrily.

A handwritten sign saying ‘Out of order’ has been taped to the door, but Jeanette goes in anyway and locks it behind her.

It’s a disabled toilet, with thin metal walls. The white armrest is folded up, and there’s an illuminated red alarm button close to the floor.

She takes off her torn tights and throws them away. There are lots of used condoms in the bin. There’s wet toilet paper all over the floor and the walls are covered with graffiti.

Jeanette looks at herself in the mirror, takes her powder out of her purse and leans over the sink. She can hear someone in the cubicle next to her, moving around in the confined space.

She powders her face and notices that there’s a round hole in the wall between her and the next cubicle. Maybe that’s where the toilet-roll dispenser used to be. She puts her powder away again and turns around to see that the wall is moving slightly.

Someone is leaning against it from the other side.

There’s a rustling sound and a folded banknote falls onto the floor from the hole. The wall creaks. Jeanette is about to say something when a large penis appears, dangling through the hole in front of her.

The situation is so absurd that she can’t help smiling.

A memory of something she once read about a swingers’ club in France flashes into her head, about them having rooms like this.

The man on the other side thinks she’s a prostitute.

She stands there for a moment, and swallows hard. She stares at the penis, feeling her heart beating fast in her chest, then looks at the door to make sure it’s definitely locked.

Slowly she reaches out and takes hold of the warm, thick member.

Jeanette squeezes it gently and feels it stiffen and start to rise. She gently strokes back and forth, and then lets go of it.

She has no idea why she does it, but she leans forward and takes the penis in her mouth, sucks it tentatively, feeling it swell and get stiffer. She pauses for breath, puts her hand between her thighs, pulls her underwear down and steps out of it as she massages the erect penis.

She tries to breathe quietly. She thinks she’s going to stop. She can’t do something like this. She’s crazy. Her pulse is throbbing. She turns around and holds onto the cistern with one hand. Her legs are trembling as she stands on tiptoe, bends the penis down and lets it slide into her from behind. She gasps and looks over at the lock again. The metal wall creaks as Jeanette is pushed forward, and she clings onto the cistern and pushes her backside against the cool metal.

Saga is sitting opposite Tamara in one of the booths in the restaurant, waiting while she eats a plate of French fries with ketchup on the side. A streak of snot shimmers under her nose. Beneath them traffic passes by on the highway, white lights in one direction, red in the other.

‘How well do you know Sofia Stefansson?’ Saga asks.

Tamara shrugs, and drinks some of her milkshake through the straw, sucking her cheeks in. Her forehead turns white.

‘Brain-freeze,’ she gasps when she finally lets go of the straw.

She carefully dips the fries in the ketchup and eats, smiling softly to herself.

‘Who did you say you were again?’ she asks.

‘I’m a friend of Sofia’s,’ Saga says.

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Could she have faked working as a prostitute?’

‘Faked it? What the hell do you mean? We did a job together in a building’s rubbish collection room once … she got fucked up the ass … I don’t know if that counts as faking?’

Tamara’s face suddenly goes slack again, as if she were lost in some absorbing memory.

‘Why did you stop working as an escort in Stockholm?’ Saga asks.

‘You could go a long way too … I’ve got contacts, I used to be a lingerie model … just without the lingerie,’ Tamara says, and shakes with soundless laughter.

‘You once had a client out in Djursholm, a big house facing the water. He may have said his name was Wille,’ Saga says calmly.

‘Maybe,’ Tamara says, eating the fries with her mouth open.

‘Do you remember him?’ Saga asks.

‘No,’ Tamara yawns, then wipes her hands on her skirt and tips the contents of her bag onto the table.

A hairbrush, a roll of plastic bags, a stump of mascara, condoms and perfume from Victoria’s Secret roll out across the wax tablecloth. Saga notes that Tamara has three dark-brown glass ampules of Demerol, an extremely addictive opioid. Tamara presses a Valium from a blister-pack of ten pale blue pills, and washes it down with Pepsi.

Saga waits patiently until she has swept everything back into her bag again, then takes out a photograph of the Foreign Minister.

‘I don’t give a shit about him,’ Tamara says, then purses her lips.

‘Did he speak to anyone on the phone while you were there?’

‘Seriously. He was really stressed and drank a lot. He kept going on about how the cops ought to stand to attention … he said it, like, a hundred times.’

‘That the police ought to stand to attention?’

‘Yes … and that there was a guy with two faces who was after him.’

She drinks more Pepsi and shakes the cup, making the ice-cubes rattle.

‘In what way was the guy after him?’

‘I didn’t ask.’

Tamara dips two fries in ketchup and puts them in her mouth.

‘What did he mean, two faces?’

‘I don’t know. He was drunk. Maybe he meant that the guy had two sides,’ Tamara suggests.

‘What else did he say about this man?’

‘Nothing. It wasn’t important. It was just talk.’

‘Was he going to meet him?’

‘I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about that … I just wanted him to be happy, so I got him talking about all those paintings on the walls instead.’

‘Was he violent with you?’

‘He was a gentleman,’ she replies tersely.

Tamara picks up the bag of sweets from the table, stands up and weaves over towards the door. Saga has just gone after her when her phone rings. She looks at the screen and sees that it’s Janus.

‘Bauer.’

‘We’ve been through all the security footage from the Foreign Minister’s hard-drive … thirteen cameras, two months, almost twenty thousand hours of footage,’ Janus says.

‘Is there any sign of the killer? Doing reconnaissance or something?’

‘No, but someone else is very visible in one of the recordings – you need to see this. Call me when you reach the building and I’ll come down and let you in.’

Saga knows that Janus is bipolar, and she’s worried he’s having a manic episode, he must have stopped taking his medication for some reason.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ Saga asks.

‘Who cares?’ he replies quickly.

‘I need to get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she says gently.

‘Sleep,’ Janus repeats, then laughs loudly. ‘I’m fine, Saga, I’m just eager to make progress, same as you.’

She walks towards the car park, looking at the traffic below, and calls Jeanette.

Sofia appears to have been working as a prostitute, just as she said. She’s probably been telling the truth all along – and is in no way connected to the murder.

So why was she allowed to live? Saga asks herself as she stops in front of the car, all too aware that they still have no idea of what the murderer wants.

27

There is a large white house with a pale thatched roof on Ceder Street outside Helsingborg. This early in the morning the surrounding parkland is draped in grey mist, but yellow light is shining from the ground-floor windows.

Nils Gilbert wakes with a start. He must have dozed off in his wheelchair. His face feels hot and his heart is pounding. The sun hasn’t risen above the treetops, and the house and park are heavily shaded.

The gloomy garden resembles the realm of the dead.

He tries to see if Ali has arrived, if he’s taken the wheelbarrow and shovel from the shed.

Just as Nils rolls over to the kitchen door to let in some fresh air, he hears an odd scraping noise. It sounds like it’s coming from the large living room. It must be the cat trying to get out.

‘Lizzy?’

The sound stops abruptly. He listens for a while, then leans back.

His hands start to shake on the armrests of the wheelchair. His legs twitch and bounce in a meaningless dance.

He hid the signs of Parkinson’s for as long as he could: the stiffness in one arm, the foot that dragged ever so slightly, the way his handwriting changed until it was so small that even he couldn’t read the microscopic scrawl.

He didn’t want Eva to notice anything.

And then she died, three years ago.

Eva had complained about being tired for several weeks.

It was a Saturday, and she had just come home from Väla with lots of heavy grocery bags. She was having trouble breathing and her chest felt tight. She said that she was probably coming down with a real stinker of a cold.

By the time she sat down on the sofa, sweat was dripping down her cheeks.

She lay down, and was already dead by the time he asked if she wanted him to turn the television on.

So now it’s just him and fat Lizzy.

He can go weeks without talking to anyone. Sometimes he worries that his voice has disappeared.

One of the few people he sees at all is the girl who looks after the pool. She walks around in jeans and a gold-coloured bikini top, and seems very uncomfortable when he tries to talk to her.

The first time he attempted to say anything to her she looked at him like he was ninety years old or had a serious mental illness.

The people who bring his food are always in a rush. They barely get his signature before hurrying away. And the physiotherapist, an angry, large-breasted woman, just does her job. She gives him curt commands and pretends not to hear his attempts to make conversation.

Only the Iranian man from the garden-maintenance company has any time for him. Ali sometimes comes in for a cup of coffee.

It’s really for his sake that Nils keeps the pool open, but he still hasn’t plucked up the courage to ask if he’d like a swim.

Ali works hard, and often gets sweaty.

Nils knows that he books him far too often, which is why the garden looks the way it does, with precisely clipped shrubs and hedges, leafy archways and perfectly swept paths.

It’s quiet. It’s always so quiet here.

Nils shivers and pushes himself over to the jukebox.

He bought it when he was twenty years old: a genuine Seeburg, made by the Swedish Sjöberg company.

He used to change the singles from time to time. He would make new labels on his typewriter and slip them in under the glass top.

He inserts the coin into the slot, hears it rattle down and activate the mechanism before rolling out into the tray again.

He’s used the same coin all these years.

He taps the buttons for C7 with his shaking hand. The machine whirrs as the record is placed on the turntable.

Nils rolls away as the fast drum intro to ‘Stargazer’ starts to play. He is thrown back in time to when he saw Rainbow live at the Concert Hall in Stockholm in the late 1970s.

The band were over an hour late starting, but when Dio walked on and started to sing ‘Kill the King’, the audience moved as one towards the stage.

Nils goes over to the big windows. Every afternoon he lowers the shades on the west-facing windows to protect his paintings from the strong light.

Through the nylon gauze the window looks even darker and greyer.

To Ali, this whole place must look like a tragic manifestation of the absence of children and grandchildren.

Nils knows that the house is ridiculously showy, that the park is overblown, and that no one ever uses the pool.

His company produces advanced electronics for radar and electronic guidance systems. He’s had good government contacts and has been able to export dual-use products for almost twenty years now.

His arms suddenly shiver.

Over the loud music he thinks he can hear a small child chanting a nursery rhyme.

He turns the wheelchair and makes his way out into the hall.

The voice is coming from the abandoned upper floor. He rolls over to the staircase that he hasn’t climbed in many years, and sees that the door to the bedroom at the top is standing ajar.

The music from the jukebox stops. There’s a clicking sound as the single is slotted back into place among the others, and then silence descends.

Nils started to be afraid of the dark six months ago, after having a nightmare about his wife. She came back from the dead, but could only stand upright because she was impaled on a rough wooden post that ran between her legs, right through her body and neck, and out through her head.

She was angry that he hadn’t done anything to help her, that he hadn’t called for an ambulance.

The bloody pole reached all the way to the floor, and Eva was forced to walk with a strange, bow-legged gait as she came after him.

Nils puts his hands on his lap. They’re twitching and shaking, darting about in exaggerated gestures.

When they are still again he tightens the strap around his waist that prevents him from sliding out of the chair.

He rolls into the living room and looks around. Everything looks the way it always does. The chandelier, the Persian rugs, the marble table and the empire-style sofa and armchairs that Eva brought from her childhood home.

The phone is no longer on the table.

Sometimes Eva’s presence in the house is so real that he thinks her older sister has a spare key and is creeping around like in some Scooby-Doo cartoon in order to scare him.

He sets off towards the kitchen again, then thinks he sees something out of the corner of his eye. He quickly turns his head and imagines he sees a face in the antique mirror, before realising that it’s just a blemish in the glass.

‘Lizzy?’ he calls out weakly.

One of the kitchen drawers clatters, and then he hears footsteps on the floor. He stops, his heart pounding, turns the chair and imagines the blood running down the pole between Eva’s legs.

He presses on silently, rolling towards the big double doors, the wheels making a faint sticky sound on the hardwood floor.

Now Eva is walking bowlegged through the kitchen. The pole is scraping across the slate floor, leaving a trail of blood before catching on the threshold to the dining room.

The stupid nursery rhyme starts up again.

The radio in the kitchen must be switched on.

The footrest of the wheelchair hits the back door with a gentle clunk.

He looks towards the closed door to the dining room.

His hands are shaking, and the stiffness in his neck makes it hard for him to lean forward and press the button controlling the shades.

With a whirr, the grey nylon fabric glides up like a theatre curtain, and the garden gradually brightens.

The garden furniture is set out. There are pine needles gathering in the folds of the cushions. The lights around the pool aren’t switched on, but mist is rising gently from the water.

As soon as the shade has risen enough, he’ll be able to open the door and go outside.

He’s decided to wait outside for Ali, ask him to look through the house. He’ll admit that he’s scared of the dark, that he leaves the lights on all night, and maybe pay him extra to stay longer.

He turns the key in the lock with shaking hands. The lock clicks and he tugs the handle and nudges the door open.

He reverses, looks over towards the dining room and sees the door slowly open.

He rolls into the patio door as hard as he can. It swings open and he catches a glimpse of a figure approaching him from behind.

Nils hears heavy footsteps as he rolls out onto the deck and feels the cool air on his face.

‘Ali, is that you?’ he calls in a frightened voice as he rolls forward. ‘Ali!’

The garden is quiet. The tool-shed is locked. The morning mist is drifting above the ground.

He tries to turn the wheelchair, but one of the tyres is caught in the crack between two slabs. Nils can hardly breathe. He tries to stop himself from shaking by pressing his hands into his armpits.

Someone is approaching him from the house and he looks back over his shoulder.

A masked man, carrying a black bag in his hand. He’s walking straight towards him, disguised as an executioner.

Nils tugs at the wheels to pull himself free.

He’s about to shout for Ali again when cold liquid drenches his head, running through his hair, down his neck, over his face and chest.

It takes just a couple of seconds for him to realise that it’s petrol.

What he thought was a black bag is actually the lawnmower’s petrol tank.

‘Please, wait, I’ve got lots of money … I promise, I can transfer all of it,’ he gasps, coughing from the fumes.

The masked man walks around and tips the last of the petrol over Nils’s chest, then drops the empty container on the ground in front of the wheelchair.

‘God, please … I’ll do anything …’

The man takes out a box of matches and says some incomprehensible words. Nils is hysterical, and he can’t make sense of what the man is saying.

‘Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it …’

He tries to loosen the strap over his thighs, but it’s tangled and is now too tight to take off. His hands jerk as he tugs at it. The man calmly lights a match and tosses it onto his lap.

There’s a rush of air, and a sucking sound, like a parachute opening.

His pyjamas and hair burst into flames.

And through the blue glare he sees the masked man back away from the heat.

The childish nursery rhyme rolls through his head as the storm rages around him. He can’t get any air into his lungs. It’s as if he’s drowning, and then he feels absolute, all-encompassing pain.

He could never have imagined anything so excruciating.

He leans forwards in the foetal position and hears a metallic crackling sound, as if from a great distance, as the wheelchair starts to buckle in the heat.

Nils has time to think that it sounds like the jukebox is searching for a new disc before he loses consciousness.

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