Marked for Life (13 page)

Mia glared at Jana as Jana pulled the thermos across the table.

Ola was still busy up by the ceiling and the rest of the group was silent, deep in their own thoughts.

Jana took a sip of coffee.

Ola broke the silence. “That's it. It should work now.”

He climbed down from the table and woke the computer up from sleep mode. The screen showed the image of the strange combinations of letters and numbers.

Jana looked up at the enlarged image. Her eyes opened wide, as her heart beat rapidly. She could hear a rushing sound in her ears; the room was rocking. She immediately recognized the first line. She had seen it before. In her dream. The one that recurred time after time.

VPXO410009.

“Right, I found these combinations in Hans Juhlén's computer. I've gone through every single folder and file and document on his hard drive and this document is the only one that looks weird. Hans Juhlén used these combinations for something several times and saved the document with the same name over and over. But I've no idea why. Nor do I know what the numbers and letters mean. Does anyone here have any ideas?”

They all shook their heads. Except Jana.

Ola went on: “I've searched online, but haven't gotten anywhere.”

Ola scratched his head on the outside of his cap again.

“Perhaps his secretary knows? Or his wife?”

“Henrik, check with Lena. Mia, you can ask Kerstin. Also check whether Yusef knows anything. We'll have to ask everybody. Right, Jana?” said Gunnar.

Jana was caught unawares.

“What?”

“What do you think?”

She forced herself to smile and answered:

“I agree. We'll keep at it.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

THE STEEL WAS
cold in her hand.

The girl swallowed and looked up at the man with the ugly scar standing in front of her.

They were in some sort of cellar. Usually it did service as an isolation cell. They were put there if they had failed some exercise or command, if they didn't finish their food or hadn't shown enough endurance when running. Sometimes simply because the older ones felt like it.

She had been locked up in there twice before. The first time she had misunderstood the routines and had gone to the toilet without permission. She was locked up in the room with no light for three days and was forced to defecate on the floor. The stench was as bad as in the container. That seemed to be the only thing she still remembered from the journey with her mother and father. The memory of them faded with every day that passed. But using a stone, she had carved their faces on the wall next to her bed. Hidden behind a small cupboard so no one else could see—but every evening she pushed the cupboard to one side and said good-night to her parents.

The second time the girl had been forced down into the isolation cell was when she had picked at the carvings on her neck. The man with the ugly scar had found the bloodstains on her sleeve and pulled her by her hair across the yard. Five days, that was how long she had to stay there that time. The first day she slept almost the entire time. The second day she thought about trying to escape; and the third day she had trained herself how to kick hard and attack with a knife. She had found a little piece of wood on the floor and used it as a knife. On the last two days she explored the room in all its darkness. She rarely left the rooms in which they trained so being down in the cellar was both unpleasant and exciting. In her curiosity she examined every object she could find. She particularly liked the old workbench that stretched along one wall, with its tin cans of paint and various plastic containers. The girl examined them all as best she could in the dim light. On the second wall were two shelves with cardboard boxes and newspapers. A rusty bicycle stood leaning against the wall under the stairs and a brown suitcase stood in front of that. An old door was propped up against the stair railing, with a stool next to it. The girl noted that nobody had moved anything since she had been there.

“It's time,” said the man with the ugly scar and gave her a gun. “Now is the time for you to prove to me that you deserve to be my daughter. The target is not the usual one.”

The man nodded to the woman who was standing against the wall on the top stair. She opened the door and let Minos in. He slowly walked down the steps and tried to accustom his eyes to the dark.

“This is your new target,” the man said to her.

When Minos heard those words, he stopped short on the stairs. In that same instant he forgot everything he had learned. Panic took over, and he tried to dart back up toward the door. But the woman who stood there pulled out her gun, pointed it at his head and forced him down the steps again.

Minos begged for mercy.

He threw himself at the man's feet and screamed.

The man kicked him away. “You're a loser. If you had done as you'd been told, you would be standing here instead of Ker. It is only the strongest who survives, and she is one of them.”

Minos's eyes rolled with fright. He was kneeling now on his bare knees and shaking.

The man went up to the girl and grabbed her hair and forced her head back. He pulled hard to show that he was serious, and looked her straight in the eye.

“Soon you'll be in complete darkness. So you will have to make use of your other senses. Do you understand?”

She understood. Her heart started pounding.

“Make me proud!” the man whispered.

The stairs creaked as the man and the woman climbed back up and left the cellar. When the door was shut, the girl held the gun tightly and immediately raised it.

The dark surrounded her. She didn't like it and her breathing became rapid. She wanted to scream but knew an echo would be the only reply. An empty echo. Her heart was thumping and the darkness began to voluntarily release its hold.

Now she heard Minos as he bumped into the bicycle. She assumed he had crawled in under the stairs. She tried to calm herself. Breathe deeply. She could manage this; she would conquer the darkness. She gained control of her breathing, inhaling slowly and deeply and exhaling through her nose. She concentrated and listened. Silence. Numbing silence.

The girl took one step forward, stopped and listened again. Then another step, and then one more. After three more steps she knew she would reach the staircase and would have to step to the side to get past them and reach the area where Minos was.

She stretched out her hand to feel the staircase railing and counted the steps in her head: One, two, three. Now she felt the cracked railing in her hand. After three more steps, she let go of the wooden rail and blindly felt for something with her hand in front of her. With her next step, she kicked the suitcase on the floor; the sound gave her a start. At the same time she heard Milos crawling up through the space near her. Pointing the gun in front of her, she followed his sound from right to left. But it disappeared just as quietly as it had come. The movement had made her breathe faster, and she closed her mouth again so she could listen. Where was he now? She slowly turned her head so that she could hear her target. She searched her memory. Could he be sitting under the workbench?

Or next to the shelves?

She stayed where she was, silent and not moving. Waited for a signal, a breath or a sense of movement from him. But all she could hear was silence.

She knew there was a risk she would be ambushed.

Perhaps Minos was already standing behind her back?

That thought made her turn around. Her brow became sweaty and her damp hands warmed the steel. She must do something. Couldn't just stand there waiting for him.

The earth floor was uneven and she put one foot forward to keep her balance. Let the other foot follow after.

Then she stood completely still again. Hesitating. One more step forward, then another. She turned to the right and the left, all the while with the gun pointing forwards. Her senses worked hard to compensate for her eyes.

She stretched out one hand in a sweeping movement and felt the hard surface of the bench. She knew it was two meters long and she felt her way alongside it with her hand. When she reached the end, she stopped.

Then she finally heard it.

A breath.

The signal.

She reacted instinctively and pointed the gun in the direction of the sound. And then she was hit by a hard blow across her arm. She lost her balance and concentration. A second blow was more painful, straight to her head, and she put up her arms to shield herself. She mustn't drop the gun.

Minos was close, dangerously close. His anger was dreadful. He hit out again. And again. The girl tried to keep her footing, to focus. When Minos tensed up for a final blow, she reacted. She threw a punch in the dark, and hit her mark. Minos grunted.

She hit out again. This time with the gun. The third time she hit his forehead and heard the heavy thud as he fell to the ground.

She put both hands on the gun and pointed it down to the floor.

Minos was whining. His voice felt cold as metal and cut like a knife through the darkness.

A sense of calm immediately settled over her. She felt strong, with a greater presence than ever. She was no longer afraid of the dark.

“Don't do it,” said Minos. “Please, don't do it. I'm your friend.”

“But I'm not yours,” said the girl and fired the gun.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

WHEN ERIK NORDLUND
went in through the main door to the police station, he hoped the meeting would take about ten minutes at most.

In the reception area he met with a whole crowd of people. Most of them were applying for passports.

The uniformed woman behind the counter recorded his name, picked up a phone and called Henrik Levin.

Within one minute, Henrik was down in reception.

“Detective Chief Inspector Henrik Levin. Hello. Thank you for coming.”

They shook hands and took the elevator up to the third floor, walked down a corridor and into the office.

“Coffee?”

“Yes, that would be nice.”

“Milk, sugar?”

“Sugar.”

“Meanwhile take a seat, I'll be back shortly.”

Erik sat down and looked around the area through the other side of the glass wall. About ten police were sitting at separate desks working away. Telephones were ringing, conversations were going on, photocopiers were buzzing and keyboards clicking. He had no instinct for desk work and suddenly felt a strong urge to get back to his duties in the forest.

He wondered whether he should hang up his warmly lined jacket, but decided not to, it would only be a short visit. Tell the policeman what he saw, and then leave.

In the distance he could see the chief inspector approaching with two cups of coffee. As he came into the room, a drawing taped onto the wall fluttered from the draft. A green ghost, drawn by a child. Erik immediately thought of his three grandchildren, who sent him drawings every week, squeezing them into an envelope that was far too small. They mainly drew suns and trees, flowers and boats. Or cars. But never ghosts.

He took the cup that Henrik offered him, and immediately sipped some coffee. The steaming liquid burned his throat.

The detective inspector sat down and pulled out a notepad. The first question he asked was about Erik's profession, and he talked about felling trees.

“Most trees have a natural fall direction.” Erik put his cup down and gesticulated. “And the direction of the fall is influenced by whether the tree leans to one side, the extent and form of its branches and the direction of the wind. A lot of snow and ice in the crown can easily weigh a ton, and can make it hard to judge which way the tree will fall, and this winter has been bloody cold.”

Henrik nodded in agreement. It had been an exceptionally cold winter and close to record snow depths in many parts of the country.

Erik went on in an enthusiastic voice: “The basis of safe tree felling is the width of the holding wood, the bit between your front wedge and your back cut. This is the ‘hinge,' and if your hinge is too wide it will be a heavy and clumsy fall. But if the hinge is too narrow that's even worse because it might give way and then the tree would fall out of control. You can really hurt yourself if you don't do it properly. You can't mess around with nature. Bang!” Erik clapped his hands together. “You can end up under a tree trunk with a broken leg or worse. One of my coworkers was knocked out by a birch that splintered. He was out cold for several minutes before we managed to bring him back to consciousness.”

Erik picked up the cup and took another sip of coffee.

Henrik then began to steer the conversation toward what was important.

“You saw a van?”

“Yes.”

“On Sunday?”

“Yes, at about eight in the evening.”

“You're sure about that? And the time too?”

“Yep.”

“According to Gabriel and Hanna, who visited you yesterday, you said it was an Opel. Is that correct?”

“Yep, to be sure.”

“And you are quite certain that it was an Opel?”

“Absolutely. I've owned one myself. See!”

Erik unhooked a bunch of keys from his belt and showed Henrik a metal key ring with a symbol.

“Opel. And I've got one of these too.” Erik picked out a Volvo symbol from the bunch, that too in metal.

Henrik nodded.

“Where did you see it? The Opel?”

“On the road outside my house. It was going very fast.”

“If I get a map, can you point out exactly where you saw the van and which direction it was traveling in?”

“Of course.”

Henrik Levin went off for a few moments and came back with a map that he unfolded on the desk.

Erik took a marker, looked for his house on the map and put a red cross and arrow on the road shown by a brown line.

“This is where I saw it. Right here. And it was heading for the coast.”

“Thank you. Did you catch a glimpse of the driver?”

“No. I was blinded by the headlights. I couldn't see anything except the color of the van.”

“License plate?”

“I couldn't see that either.”

“Did you notice any other vehicle?”

“No. At that time of day the road is usually empty. Except for the occasional truck.”

Henrik fell silent. The man in front of him seemed credible. He was wearing red work clothes and an orange over-the-jacket fluorescent vest.

Henrik folded the map and picked up a pile of printouts of pictures of Opel vans.

“I know you can't remember which model of van it was, but I want you to look through these pictures and see if there is anything that reminds you of the van you saw.”

“But I didn't see...”

“I know, but look at the pictures and take your time. Give it the time it needs.”

Erik sighed. He unzipped his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair.

It wasn't going to be a quick visit.

* * *

Jana Berzelius was still feeling slightly nauseous. She rested her head in her hands and tried to gather her thoughts. She was shaken.

The lettering on the boy's neck had affected her in a way she had never previously experienced. She knew what the name meant. But that he should have just that particular name, that wasn't possible.

It couldn't happen.

It wasn't allowed to happen.

She sat on the edge of her Hästens bed. The room suddenly felt small. Shrinking. Stifling.

She tried again to gather her thoughts but realized she was in a state of mental paralysis. Her brain refused to function. When she finally made her way to the kitchen, her hands shook. A glass of water didn't make things better. And nothing in the fridge could help. The nausea was too strong and Jana dismissed the idea of having something to eat. Instead she turned on the espresso machine.

With the cup in her hand, she went back into the bedroom and sat on the bed again. She put the cup on the bedside table, opened the cupboard underneath and took out one of the black notebooks she had there. She slowly looked through her notes, at the images and symbols she saw in her dreams. Arrows, circles and letters of the alphabet in neat rows. Here and there a drawing. Some of them were dated; the very first date noted under a sketch of a face was September 22, 1991. She was nine years old and for therapeutic reasons had been encouraged to keep notes about her recurring dreams. She had told her parents of these experiences, about her horribly realistic dreams, but her mother and father, Karl and Margaretha Berzelius, had thought they were far too imaginative. Her brain was playing a trick on her. They had brought her to a psychologist to help her to get past the “phase,” as they put it.

But nothing helped. The dreams continued to trouble her so much that she tried everything she could to stay awake. The never-ending anxiety, with difficulty breathing and sense of despair that she felt was breaking her down. When her parents said good-night in the evening, she had immediately opened her eyes again and thought about how she could stay awake all night long. She liked games in the dark and she often passed the time by galloping with her fingers across the covers and bunching up the filling in the duvet into small obstacles that her fingers could jump over.

She also moved around inside the room, in the dark, or sat in the deep window bay and looked out over the garden. She stretched up to be as tall as possible in the three-meter-high room, or crouched down making herself as small as possible under the wide bed. The psychologist had told her she should let things take their time, and that the dreams would eventually disappear.

But they didn't.

They only got worse.

And after yet another two weeks of dramatic nights, her father had thought about whether they should start giving her medicine. He wanted to solve her silly ideas once and for all. Sleep was one of our primary needs, and any idiot at all could do it.

He had finally taken her along to the hospital and a doctor had given him a jar of sleeping pills.

The effect of the sleeping pills was short-lived, and unfortunately the side effects were serious. Jana lost her appetite as well as her concentration, and finally her teacher, in a confidential conversation with her mother, had said that Jana had fallen asleep in two lessons. She also said that it was completely hopeless to try to have a discussion with the girl. If they asked her to solve a mathematical formula, she would simply mumble in reply. Considering the educational ambitions that Karl and Margaretha had for their daughter, they really must do something about it. And straightaway.

Jana found the drowsiness terrible. She couldn't think straight and she did everything in slow motion. So it was a victory when they stopped the medication. Since Jana never wanted to visit a hospital again to talk to a psychologist, she lied to her parents and told them that the dreams had disappeared. Even the psychologist had been fooled. Instead she clenched her teeth. Every evening she trained how to smile in front of the mirror. She masked her own personality by copying the gestures of others, their body language and their facial expressions. She learned the social game and its rules.

Pleased with the improvement, Karl Berzelius had patted her on the head and believed there was hope for her. With the lie about everything now being fine, she never needed to worry again about having to visit analysts.

But she dreamed.

Every night.

* * *

The keys clinked against the letterbox when Mia Bolander unlocked it. She took the pile of letters and quickly browsed through them. Only bills. Mia sighed and relocked the box, ran quickly up the stairs to her flat on the second floor. Her steps echoed in the stairwell. The door to her flat creaked. In the hall, she opened a drawer and put the letters on top of the pile of unopened bills. She locked the door, pulled off her boots and threw her jacket onto the floor.

It was seven o'clock. They would be getting together at Harry's in an hour.

Mia went straight into the bedroom and got undressed. She picked out a dress she had bought at the Christmas sales three winters ago.

It would have to do, she thought.

Then she went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. With a grim look on her face, she noted that there was no booze left. She looked at her watch again. The liquor store was closed. Oh, fuck!

She quelled an impulse to go down to the supermarket and buy the low alcohol beer. Instead she searched through all the cleaning material under the sink, in the cupboard with the cups and saucers and among the vases. She even opened her microwave in the hope of finding something. In the end, in the pantry behind a loaf of bread in a plastic bag she found one can of Carlsberg. It had already passed its best-before date, but only by a month or so and in the lack of anything else it would have to do. She opened the can and drank straight out of it with her mouth around the edge to stop the froth from dripping onto the floor. Sour and cardboardy.

Mia wrinkled her nose, wiped her mouth with her naked arm and went into the bathroom. She twisted her hair into a ponytail and took another gulp of the beer, then decided to put on some heavy makeup. Two shades of blue eye shadow and black mascara. With the stiff rouge brush she chased the last of the powder left in the compact. She worked up a dark tone under her cheekbone and liked the way it narrowed her face.

She picked up the can of beer and went into the living room to wait. Forty minutes to go.

Suddenly she thought about money. Today was the nineteenth. Almost a week before she got paid again. Yesterday she had seven hundred left in her account. But that was before she went out.

And how much did she spend during the evening? Two hundred?

Entrance, a couple of beers, a kebab.

Perhaps three hundred?

She resolutely got up from the sofa, drank the last of the beer and set the empty can down. She put on a pair of shoes from the hallway, picked up her jacket and went downstairs to the lobby.

The cold wind stung Mia's bare legs as she walked in the dark past the blocks of apartment buildings. She could have taken the tram, but she saved over twenty kronor by walking. From where she lived at Sandbyhov, it was only a fifteen-minute walk to the center.

Her stomach was rumbling as she passed the Golden Grillbar. She read the signs outside. Hamburger plate, sausage with bread, chips...

She cut across the double tramlines. At the corner of Breda Vägen and Haga Gatan she found an ATM. She checked her balance and saw that she had only three hundred and fifty kronor. She had spent more than she thought yesterday. She'd have to go easy this evening. Just one more beer. Perhaps two, at the most. Then she'd have some money left over for tomorrow.
Otherwise I'll have to borrow from somebody
, Mia thought.
As usual
.

She crumpled the ATM printout and threw it on the ground and continued to walk toward the center.

* * *

The notebook had two hundred pages. But that was only the first. In her bedside table there were twenty-six more. One year of dreams in each. Jana turned to the final page, to a drawing she had done when she was young. It showed a knife with the edge of the blade colored red.

Jana closed the book and stared out of the window with a thoughtful gaze. Then she opened the book again and turned to a page with a combination of letters and numbers. VPX0410009. That was the exact same combination that Ola Söderström had shown her. Had shown the team.