Stalker (18 page)

Jackie and Madeleine are sitting together on the sofa eating popcorn while Erik tries to play his étude.

Madeleine says he’s very good every time he makes a mistake. She’s tired and her yawns are getting bigger and bigger.

Jackie tries to explain the quaver rests and the rhythmic pattern, and gets up and puts her right hand on top of his.

She asks him to start from the twenty-second bar with his left hand, then she suddenly falls silent, goes back to her daughter, and listens to her breathing.

‘Could you manage to carry her to bed?’ she asks. ‘My elbow isn’t up to it.’

Erik gets up from the piano and picks the child up. Jackie walks ahead of them, opens the door to the girl’s room, turns the light out and pulls the covers back for Erik.

Erik carefully lays Madeleine down on her bed, and brushes the hair from her face.

Jackie tucks her daughter in and kisses her on the cheek, whispers something in her ear, and turns on the little pink nightlight on the bedside table.

Only now does Erik see that the walls of the child’s bedroom are covered in rude words, curses and obscenities.

Some of the words are written in childish scribble in chalk, misspelled, whereas others are written in more confident handwriting. Erik presumes Madeleine must have been doing this for several years. Her mother is the only person unable to see what she’s done.

‘What is it?’ Jackie says, noticing his silence.

‘Nothing,’ he says, closing the door gently behind him.

As they walk through the hall, Erik wonders if he should tell Jackie about what he saw, or just let it go.

‘Should I leave?’ Erik asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Jackie replies.

She holds out her hands and feels his face, stroking his cheeks and chin.

‘I’m just going to get some water,’ she says hoarsely, then goes into the kitchen and opens a cupboard.

He helps her, standing close to her, filling the glass and passing it to her. She drinks, and then he kisses her cool mouth before she has time to wipe her chin.

They embrace, she stands on tiptoe and they kiss each other deeply, foreheads bumping together.

Erik’s hands slide over her back and hips. The fabric of her skirt has a peculiar texture, and rustles like thin paper.

She pulls away slightly, turns her face and puts one hand on his chest.

‘We don’t have to,’ he says to her.

She shakes her head and puts her hand behind his neck again, pulls him to her, kisses his neck, fumbles with the buttons of his trousers, then stops herself.

‘Are the curtains closed?’ she whispers.

‘Yes.’

She goes to the door and listens for any sound in the corridor, then closes it carefully.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t do this here, not now.’

‘OK,’ he says.

She stands with her back to the draining board, one hand on the counter, her mouth half-open.

‘Can you see me?’ she asks, taking her dark glasses off.

‘Yes,’ Erik replies.

Her clothes are disordered, her blouse hanging outside her skirt, and her short hair is rather messed up.

‘Sorry, I’m being difficult.’

‘There’s no rush,’ Erik mumbles, and walks up to her, takes hold of her shoulders and kisses her again.

‘Let’s take our clothes off. Shall we?’ she whispers.

They get undressed in the kitchen, and Jackie starts talking slowly about a radio report she heard about the persecution of Christians in Iraq.

‘Now France is offering asylum to all of them,’ she smiles.

He unbuttons his trousers and looks at her as she lays item after item on the chair, and undoes her bra.

Completely naked, Erik goes and stands beside her, thinking that he feels oddly natural. He doesn’t even try to hold his stomach in.

Jackie’s teeth glisten in the faint light as she pulls her underpants down, wriggles her legs and lets them fall.

‘I’m not a shy person,’ she says quietly.

Her nipples are pale brown, and in the darkness she looks luminous. A marbled tracery of veins is faintly visible beneath her pale skin. Her dark pubic hair makes her inner thighs look fragile.

Erik takes her outstretched hand and kisses her. She backs into the chair and sits down. He leans forward, kisses her on the lips again, then kneels down and kisses her breasts and stomach. He pulls her carefully to the edge of the chair and parts her legs. Her folded clothes fall to the floor.

She’s already wet, and tastes of warm sugar to Erik. Her thighs quiver against his cheeks and her breathing grows heavier.

The salt cellar topples over on the table and rolls in a semi-circle.

She holds his head between her legs, gasping faster, the chair slides backwards and she slips gently on to the floor with a smile.

‘I’m not sure I’m any good at relationships,’ she says, resting the back of her head uncomfortably against the seat of the chair.

‘I’m just a pupil,’ he whispers.

She rolls over on to her stomach and starts to crawl under the table. He follows her and grabs hold of her behind just as she rolls on to her back.

She pulls him gently to her, between her thighs, hears him hit his head on the table and feels the heat of his bare skin against hers.

Jackie holds his back hard and gasps for breath as he slowly slides into her and then pauses.

‘Don’t stop,’ she whispers.

Her heart is pounding and the torrent of thoughts has finally fallen silent. She moves her hips, presses herself towards him and feels the silky heat from her crotch.

The hard floor disappears behind her, her thighs tremble and stretch, and Erik moves faster. She tenses her buttocks and toes and whimpers against his shoulder as her orgasm pulsates through her body.

Erik wakes up in the darkness to the sound of gentle piano music. It sounds strangely muted, like a piano buried under the ground. At first he thinks he’s dreaming. He reaches out his hand but can’t feel Jackie. Moonlight filters through the fabric of the curtains, casting strange, long shadows across the room. With a shiver he creeps out of bed and into the flat. Jackie is sitting naked on the piano stool in the living room. She’s placed a thin blanket over the piano to muffle the sound.

Through the gloom he sees her body swaying gently, her hands seem to be slipping through water. Her bare feet move over the brass pedals. She is sitting on the edge of the stool, and he can see her slender waist and the shadowy groove down the centre of her upright back.

‘
Nam et si ambulavero in medio umbrae mortis
,’ she murmurs to herself.

He thinks she knows that he’s there, but she still plays to the end of the piece before turning towards him.

‘The neighbours have complained,’ she says quietly. ‘But I need to learn a fairly hard piece for a wedding tomorrow.’

‘It sounded wonderful.’

‘Go back to bed,’ she whispers.

He returns to the bed and is just about to fall asleep when he finds himself thinking of Björn Kern. The police still don’t know that the dead woman was sitting with her hand to her ear. The thought snaps Erik awake when he realises that he could be hindering the police investigation.

After an hour the music falls silent and Jackie comes back to the bedroom. It’s already light outside by the time he falls asleep again.

In the morning the bed is empty. Erik goes to the bathroom, showers, then gets dressed. When he emerges he can hear Jackie and Madeleine in the kitchen.

He walks in and gets a cup of coffee. Madeleine is eating breakfast cereal with milk and fresh raspberries.

Jackie explains that she has to be in Adolf Fredrik Church in a little while to rehearse for the wedding.

As soon as she leaves the kitchen to get changed, Madeleine puts her spoon down and turns towards Erik.

‘Mum says you carried me to bed,’ she says.

‘She asked me to help her.’

‘Was it dark in my room?’ she asks, looking at him with bottomless eyes.

‘I haven’t said anything to your mum … that would be better coming from you.’

The girl shakes her head, and tears start to run down her cheeks.

‘It’s not as bad as you think,’ Erik says.

‘Mum will be really sad,’ she hiccoughs.

‘It’ll be all right.’

‘I don’t know why I have to ruin everything,’ she sobs.

‘You don’t.’

‘Yes I do, I can’t get rid of that,’ she says, wiping her cheeks.

‘I did far worse things …’

‘No,’ she sobs.

‘Maddy, it’s not a problem … Listen, now,’ he says. ‘We can … Why don’t you and I paint your walls?’

‘Can you do that?’

‘Yes.’

She looks at him with a trembling chin and nods several times.

‘What colour would you like?’

‘Blue … blue, like Mum’s nightie,’ she smiles.

‘Is that light blue?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Jackie asks.

She’s standing in the doorway, already dressed in her black skirt and jacket, a pale pink blouse, round sunglasses and pink lipstick.

‘Maddy thinks it’s time to repaint her room, and I said I’d be happy to help.’

‘OK,’ Jackie says, with a slightly bemused expression.

Margot sees Adam waiting for her in the underground garage of Police Headquarters. His T-shirt is bulging because of the bandage round his chest. She walks towards him, but has to stop when the baby pushes upwards. The plastic-covered trestle tables are covered with objects seized from Filip Cronstedt’s storeroom, lined up and numbered, ready for analysis.

Another colleague approaches from the other direction, she hears him say something appreciative to Adam, then he carries on towards the lifts.

Adam’s weary face, with its dark shadow of stubble, looks brittle in the harsh lighting.

Behind him she can see that the work of cataloguing the vast amount of material seized is proceeding. On the first table lies a gilded bed-head, a wooden crate containing starched, folded linen, battered books and three pairs of trainers.

‘How are you feeling?’ Margot asks when she reaches Adam.

‘It’s nothing,’ he replies, putting his hand to his ribs. ‘My mind’s spinning, though, I keep seeing it all and thinking that I would have been dead if she’d angled the gun just a tiny bit more, three millimetres to the left.’

‘You should never have gone down there without backup.’

‘I made the decision that we had to go in … but I don’t think I really appreciated the state Joona was in – he collapsed on the floor and dropped his gun.’

‘He shouldn’t have been there anyway.’

‘It was a fuck up.’ He nods. ‘There’s going to be an internal inquiry … obviously, seeing as I was shot … but it will probably end up with the National Police-Related Crimes Unit, so we’ll need to talk that through.’

Margot looks at a faded school poster of the female anatomy. The eyes have been coloured in with blue chalk.

‘But without Joona, we’d never have caught Filip,’ she says.

‘I caught Filip, I was the one who did that. Joona was lying on the floor …’

The harsh glare from the fluorescent lights and magnifying lamps reflects off the plastic between the objects on the tables. Margot stops beside three video cameras with crushed lenses wrapped in ESD-proof packaging in a spacious cardboard box.

‘Is anyone trying to match Filip’s cameras with the videos of the victims?’ she asks.

‘I presume so.’

‘But you haven’t found the tongue-stud or the rest of the deer?’

‘Give it time,’ Adam smiles. ‘This is just the material from the storeroom. There’s no rush, the important thing is that it’s over, that we’ve got him.’

They pass a pile of hand-painted tin soldiers and Margot can’t help thinking that the rest of the little porcelain deer and the Saturn stud ought to be here, given that Filip was living in the storage facility at the time of the murders.

‘How sure are we that it’s him?’ she asks.

‘Filip’s in the operating theatre at the Karolinska, but as soon as he can talk we’ll get a confession out of him.’

‘Have you got anyone on guard there?’ she asks.

‘He was shot in the chest, one lung is wrecked, so I hardly think that’s necessary.’

‘Do it anyway.’

There are about twenty polaroid photographs of young women with bare chests in a small plastic folder.

‘If it will calm you down, I’ll sort it out as soon as I get upstairs,’ Adam replies.

‘I spoke to Joona in the hospital, and he seems to think that Filip didn’t commit the murders, and—’

‘What the fuck?’ Adam interrupts with an irritated smile. ‘I let Joona come with me because I felt sorry for him – that was a mistake I’m not going to repeat. We can’t let him play at being a detective.’

‘I agree,’ she says quickly.

‘He messed up, and he’s not coming anywhere near this investigation again.’

‘I’m just trying to say that this feels too easy,’ Margot says calmly, carrying on along the tables.

‘Filip was on the point of confessing when he was shot. He said he’d been creeping about outside Maria Carlsson’s windows,’ Adam says, turning to her with a grin. ‘He’s got no alibi for the evenings of the murders, he’s extremely violent, paranoid, and completely obsessed with cameras and surveillance—’

‘I know, but …’

‘He’d locked himself away with two women, you should have been there, he had them tied up with steel wire.’

Even though he is hollow-eyed and clearly short of sleep, there’s an underlying fire in his eyes, and his cheeks are flushed.

Adam stops and catches his breath, leans his knuckles on the nearest table for a while with his eyes closed.

The stress and exertions of the night come back to hit him like a heavy pendulum. He thinks about the ringing in his ears after the last shot, as blood trickled down his side and under the waist of his jeans before he managed to disarm one of the sisters.

He thinks of the huge dog that tried to rip him apart, and the orgy in the Birger Jarl Hotel, the unprotected sex with an unknown woman.

Tears well up in his eyes as he thinks about how little control he has, how little he knows about himself.

He suddenly feels an intense desire to go home to his wife, to curl up in his warm bed behind Katryna, to the smell of her hand cream and her ugly bed socks and the liver spots on her back that look almost like the Plough.

Margot walks past an old-fashioned gramophone, and stops in front of some jewellery on a piece of cardboard. She gets out a pen and pokes through the tarnished silver rings, brooches, broken chains and crucifixes. She picks up a heart-shaped charm with her pen just as her mobile rings.

Margot lets the heart fall back on to the cardboard, pulls out her phone and answers by giving her surname.

Something in her voice makes Adam turn towards her.

Margot will always remember this moment, the way they were standing in the bright light among Filip’s possessions, and how her heartbeat drowned out absolutely everything else for a few moments.

‘What is it?’ Adam says.

She stares at him, she can’t talk, her throat is so dry, and she realises that her jaw is trembling.

‘A film,’ she hisses. ‘We’ve received another film.’

‘Fuck,’ Adam swears, and starts running towards the lifts.

‘Call the hospital!’ Margot gasps as they hurry past the tables towards the lifts. ‘Check if Filip’s escaped.’

Adam presses the lift-button, then clutches his phone to his ear as she catches up with him. The machinery rumbles slowly. She’s moved too quickly and her pelvis is burning.

Adam holds the phone to his ear and shakes his head in her direction.

‘Has he gone?’ she gasps.

‘No answer,’ he says anxiously.

The lift stops two floors up and Margot presses the button again, whispering angry curses to herself.

Finally someone picks up at the hospital. A sluggish voice tells Adam that he’s reached the Intensive Care Unit.

‘My name is Adam Youssef, I’m a detective with the National Criminal Investigation Department, and I need to know if one of your patients, Filip Cronstedt, is still with you.’

‘Filip Cronstedt,’ the man at the other end says.

‘Listen, you have to listen,’ Adam pleads, and realises how incoherent he sounds. ‘I want you to go and see him and check that he’s there.’

The man sighs, as though he were indulging some sort of ridiculous whim, but Adam hears him put the phone down on his desk and walk away.

‘He’s gone to check,’ Adam tells Margot.

‘Make sure they confirm his identity,’ she says, as the lift doors close behind them.

They shuffle about like caged animals as they’re sucked up inside the building. Adam’s shoulder crumples a poster advertising a concert by the police choir.

‘Filip Cronstedt is still sedated,’ the slow voice finally tells Adam.

‘Filip’s sedated,’ Adam repeats.