Little Star (14 page)

One morning in the middle
of October, when Lennart was in the garage putting the winter tyres on the car, Laila sat in the living room feeling despondent and restless at the same time. She tried playing a Lill-Babs song to cheer herself up, but it didn’t help.

There was a knot of anxiety in her stomach, an ominous feeling. She walked up and down the room, leaning on her crutch, but the feeling wouldn’t go. As if something had happened just now, something she ought to know about. Suddenly she got the idea it was something to do with the girl. As she limped towards the cellar, she became more and more convinced that she was right. Their poor foundling had taken the step from apathy to the final separation that is death.

She felt she should hurry. Perhaps it wasn’t too late.

She didn’t ground the crutch properly on the fifth step, and it slid away when she put her weight on it. She fell head first down the stairs, and when her head met the edge between the wall and the staircase, she heard rather than felt something crack in the back of her neck.

Steps. She could hear footsteps. Back and forth. Light, tiptoeing steps. Her entire back was a blue flame of pain, and she couldn’t move her head, couldn’t feel her fingers. She opened her eyes. The girl was standing next to her.

‘Little One,’ Laila wheezed. ‘Little One, help me. I think I’ve…had it.’

The girl looked her in the eye. Studied her. Looked her in the eye. Never before had the girl looked her in the eye for so long. She leaned down and looked even deeper, as if she were searching for something in or behind Laila’s eyes. The girl’s eyes enveloped Laila like two dark blue wells, and for a brief moment the pain disappeared.

In her confusion Laila thought:
She can heal. She can make me whole. She’s an angel.

Laila opened her trembling lips, ‘I’m here. Help me.’

The girl straightened up and said, ‘Can’t see it. Can’t see it.’

A shape that shouldn’t have been there flickered on the edge of Laila’s field of vision. A hammer. The girl was holding a hammer in her hand. Laila tried to scream. She could only manage a whimper.

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘What are you going to do what are you—’

‘Quiet,’ said the girl. ‘Open look.’

Then she struck Laila’s temple with the hammer. Once, twice, three times. Laila was no longer able to feel anything, her sight went and she was blind. Her hearing seemed to be drifting around the room, however, and she could hear the girl grunt in annoyance, footsteps walking away.

Laila no longer had any idea what was up or down, she was floating in a vacuum and only her hearing was keeping her alive, a fine thread that had come to breaking point.

She heard a clinking sound as the girl put something down on the floor. Her hearing guessed that it was nails, perhaps five of them. Then she felt something. A sharp point against her skin, someone took a deep breath and the last thing her hearing perceived was a harsh metallic clang and a crunching, cracking sound as her skull split open beneath the point of the nail.

Then there was silence as the process of opening up the skull continued.

One hour later Lennart came down to the cellar. He didn’t even have time to scream.

In some ways Jerry was
lucky that day, because he unconsciously established an alibi for himself. The wide-ranging police investigation that was to follow would probably have focused more closely on Jerry if he hadn’t decided on that particular day that he’d had enough of sitting around indoors, and spent several hours at the bowling alley.

He didn’t know anybody there, he just sat at a table and drank several cups of coffee, ate a couple of sandwiches and read the papers, distractedly watching the semi-useless players as they went after their strikes and spares. After that he went to the Co-op Forum store and spent half an hour hanging out in the media department, where he bought a few DVDs. At the cheap supermarket he stocked up, out of habit, on cans of ravioli and instant noodles. An impulse led him to Jysk, where he wandered around for a while and eventually bought a new pillow.

He couldn’t have arranged things better if it had been planned. A whole day when his activities could be confirmed by the staff in the bowling alley, checkout assistants and his printed receipts. This would actually end up being the police’s only grounds for suspicion: the fact that his alibi was almost
too
watertight for a recluse like Jerry. But they couldn’t really arrest him for that.

He went home and had a beer, then rang Lennart and Laila. No one answered, but it was possible to trace the call later, extending his documented afternoon activities by a further half hour. By that stage the bodies of his parents had grown so cold since the morning that he
couldn’t possibly have been the perpetrator.

He then had his final unplanned stroke of genius. He got on his motorbike and went to visit his sister.

There was some suspicion that he knew about body temperature, knew they had to be reported dead before too long had elapsed if the time of death were to be fixed within the period for which he had an alibi.

Needless to say, no such thoughts were in Jerry’s mind as he drove out to his parents’ house through the darkness. There were no thoughts in his mind at all. It was good to be out on the bike. The forward movement of his body replaced the circular movement of his thoughts, going round and round inside his head.

He drove right up to the porch steps, noticing that the light wasn’t on in the kitchen. However, he could just see a glimmer of light behind the blanket at the cellar window. He went up the steps and knocked. No one came. He tried the handle, and found that the door wasn’t locked.

‘Hello?’ he shouted as he walked into the hallway, but there was no answer. ‘Anyone home?’

He hung his leather jacket on Lennart’s homemade coat rack, which in his opinion was a bit kitsch, and took a stroll around the house. He couldn’t understand it. Since the occasion many years ago when he and Theres had checked out Bowie, he didn’t think his parents had ever left her alone.

Have they taken her with them?

But the garage door was shut, which meant the car was still inside. Without giving the matter any more thought, he went and turned on the cellar stair light. He stopped with his hand on the switch and listened. The door was ajar, and he could hear some kind of motor coming from down below. He pulled the door open.

He managed five steps before he collapsed on the stairs, before his brain registered what his eyes were seeing. His windpipe contracted and it was impossible to breathe.

Lennart and Laila, what ought to be Lennart and Laila judging
by their clothes, were lying next to one another at the bottom of the staircase. The whole floor was covered in blood. Strewn around in the blood were a number of different tools. Hammers, saws, chisels.

Their heads were mush. Pieces of skull with short or long clumps of hair still attached lay scattered all over the floor, lumps of brain matter were stuck to the walls, and all that was left above Lennart’s shoulders was a piece of spine sticking up with a grubby bit of skull still attached. The rest of his head lay crushed and spread all over the floor and the walls.

Theres was kneeling in the blood next to what remained of Laila’s head, which was slightly more than in the case of Lennart. In her hand she held her drill; the battery was so run down that the bit was hardly rotating at all. With the last scrap of power left in the machine she was busy boring her way in behind Laila’s ear. A little pearl earring in Laila’s earlobe vibrated as the drill laboriously worked its way through the bone. Theres struggled and tugged, changed the direction of the drill and managed to pull it out, wiped the blood from her eyes and reached for the saw.

Jerry was on the point of passing out through lack of oxygen, and he managed to draw a panting breath. Theres turned her head in the direction of the sound, looked at his feet. A strange calm descended over Jerry. He was not afraid, and even though what he was seeing was obviously horrific, it was just like a picture, something to register:
what I am seeing is horrific.

Somewhere deep inside he had sensed that things would end up like this, one way or another. That it would all end badly. Now it had happened, and even if it couldn’t have been any worse, at least it had happened. There was nothing to add. This was just how the world was. Nothing new, even if the details were disgusting.

‘Theres,’ he said, his voice almost steady. ‘Sis. What the fuck have you done? Why have you done this?’

Theres lowered the saw and her eyes slid from Laila to Lennart, over the bits of their heads strewn all around her.

‘Love,’ she said. ‘Not there.’

She was born on November
8, 1992, one of the last babies delivered in the maternity unit at Österyd. The unit was in the process of being moved to the central location in Rimsta, and they had already started packing. Only one midwife and a trainee were on duty.

Fortunately it was an easy delivery. Maria Svensson was admitted at 14:42. One hour and twenty minutes later, the child was born. The father, Göran Svensson, waited outside the room as usual. That’s what he had done when their other two children were born, and that’s what he did this time. As he waited he flicked through a few copies of a magazine,
Året Runt.

Just after four o’clock the midwife emerged and informed him that he had been blessed with a perfect daughter. Göran abandoned the article on breeding rabbits he had been reading and went in to see his wife.

As he walked into the room he made the mistake of looking around. A number of bloodstained compresses had been tossed aside into a metal dish, and Göran was hit by a wave of nausea before he managed to look away. The combination of a sterile environment and bodily fluids revolted him. That was why he could never be present at a birth.

He pulled himself together and went over to kiss his wife’s sweaty brow. The child was lying on her chest, a wrinkled red lump. It was incomprehensible that it would turn into a person. He ran his finger over the child’s damp head. He knew what was expected of him.

‘Did it go OK?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Maria. ‘But I think I’m going to need a few stitches.’

Göran nodded and looked out of the window. It was almost completely dark outside, wet snowflakes licking the glass. He was a father of three now. Two boys and a girl. He knew Maria had wanted a girl, and it didn’t make any difference to him. So everything had turned out for the best. His eyes followed a trickle of liquid running down the window pane.

A life begins.

A child had been born on this day. His child. The only thing he wished for now was a little more happiness. Sometimes he would pray to God for this very thing:
give me a greater capacity to feel happiness.
But his prayer was rarely answered.

A miracle had taken place in this room, just a few minutes ago. He knew that. But he couldn’t make himself
feel
it. The trickle of liquid reached the bottom of the window and Göran turned back to his wife, smiling. What he felt was a faint satisfaction, a certain sense of relief. It was done. It was over for this time.

‘Teresa, then,’ he said. ‘Happy with that?’

Maria nodded. ‘Yes, Teresa.’

It had been decided long ago. Tomas if it was a boy, Teresa if it was a girl. Good names. Reliable names. Arvid, Olof and Teresa. Their little trio. He stroked Maria’s cheek and started to cry without knowing why. Because of the image of the wet snow against the window of a warmly lit room where a child had been born. Because there was a secret he would never be part of.

When the nurse came in to do Maria’s stitches, he left the room.

Teresa was fourteen months old
when she started daycare. Lollo, the childminder, had five other children to look after and Teresa was the youngest. It was a problem-free induction. After only four days Maria was able to leave her daughter for the whole day and go back to work full-time at Österyd Pets.

Göran had been forced to start work at the state-run liquor outlet in Rimsta when the Österyd branch closed down. The most noticeable change was that it took him half an hour longer to get to and from work every morning and afternoon, so he was rarely able to pick the children up from the childminder, which he missed.

However, he had managed to negotiate one early shift each week, on a Wednesday, and he usually made sure he at least picked Teresa up. Despite the fact that it was Maria who had most wanted a girl, Teresa turned more to her father, and he couldn’t deny that he felt something special for her.

The boys were lively, as boys ought to be. Teresa was significantly quieter and more secretive, and Göran appreciated that. She was the child who was most like him. Her first word was ‘Daddy’ and her second was ‘no’, stated very firmly: ‘No!’

Do you want this? No!

Can I help you with…? No!

Can Daddy borrow the crayon? No!

She fetched things for herself, she handed things over when she felt like it, but she rarely allowed herself to be influenced by the questions
or expectations of others. Göran liked that. She had a will of her own, small as she was.

Sometimes at work he had to bite his tongue to stop himself coming out with the first word that sprang to mind these days.

‘Could you fetch a pallet of beer, Göran?’

‘No!’

…which was not what he said, of course. But he would have liked to.

At this stage Arvid was five and Olof seven. They weren’t particularly interested in their little sister, but they put up with her. Teresa didn’t make much noise except when someone tried to get her to do something she didn’t want to do. Then it was No! and No! again, until she very occasionally had a complete temper tantrum. She had a limit, and when she was pushed beyond that limit, she was horrendous.

Her favourite soft toy was a little green snake they had bought at Kolmården; she called it Bambam. One day when Teresa was eighteen months old, Arvid started teasing her, trying to take the snake off her by pulling its tail.

Teresa clung to the snake’s head and said, ‘Avvi, no!’, but Arvid carried on pulling. Teresa resisted with all her might and ended up tipping over forwards as she clutched the head and screamed, ‘Avvi, no-no!’ Arvid gave the snake a tug and it flew out of Teresa’s hands as she lay on the floor shaking with rage.

Arvid waved the snake in front of her face, but when she didn’t even reach out to try and take it, he got bored and threw it back to her. She cradled the snake in her arms, whispering, ‘Bambam…’ with tears in her voice.

So far, so good. Arvid forgot about his sister and started rummaging around under the bed for a bucket of Lego. But with a grudge-bearing capacity unusual in such a small child, Teresa hauled herself to her feet and toddled over to the shelf by her bed, where she picked up a glass snowdome with an angel inside.

A blizzard whirled up around the angel as Teresa went over to
Arvid and waited by his side until he sat up. Then she slammed it against his head. The globe broke and cut open both Teresa’s hand and Arvid’s temple. When Maria heard the screams and came running into the room, she found Arvid lying in a pool of water, blood and bits of plastic, yelling along with Teresa, whose hand was bleeding quite badly.

Arvid’s summary of the incident was, ‘I took her snake and she hit me over the head.’ He omitted the detail that at least a minute had passed between the two events. Perhaps he had forgotten, perhaps he didn’t see it as being of any significance.