Lars Kepler - The Nightmare

“Not long,” Joona had answered. “But you should make it in time.”

As Saga drives back toward Stockholm, she calls Robert Riessen, but there’s no answer. She calls the exchange at CID and asks for Anja, Joona’s assistant, the plump woman who had once won an Olympic medal in swimming and who delights in bright, shiny lipstick and nails painted in violent colors.

“Anja Larsson.” Saga hears the response after only one ring.

“Hi, I’m Saga Bauer at Sapo. We met recently at-”

“Yes, we did,” Anja says coolly.

“I need information about a young woman named Beverly Andersson who-”

“Can I bill Sapo for it?” Anja’s voice is frigid.

Saga snaps. “Do whatever the hell you want, as long as you get a damned number before-”

“I don’t care for your language, young lady.”

“Forget I asked.”

Saga swears and then honks at a car that hasn’t moved even though the light has turned green. She’s about to click her phone closed when Anja asks, “How old is she?”

“About fifteen.”

“There is no Beverly Andersson in that age group listed with any telephone registry. But the government does have her registered at the same address as her father, Evert Andersson.”

“Okay, I’ll call him, then. Can you text me the number?”

“I’ve already done it.”

“Thanks, Anja, thanks so much-please forgive me for being a bitch. I’m in such a hurry. I’m worried about Joona. I believe he might do something stupid without backup.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Yes. He asked me to find the girl. I’ve never even met her, I don’t know… he trusts me to figure all this out, but I-”

“You call Beverly’s father and I’ll keep looking,” Anja says, and hangs up.

Saga swings onto the shoulder by Hjorthagen and parks to look at the number Anja sent her. The area code is for the province of Skane. Maybe the town of Svalov, she thinks as she presses the Call button.

Evert Andersson sits in his pine-paneled kitchen in the middle of the province of Skane and jumps when he hears the telephone ring. He’s just come in from disentangling a heifer from his neighbor’s barbed-wire fence. It took more than an hour. Blood is on his hands, and he wipes them on his blue work clothes. When the phone rings, he doesn’t care to answer it. Not just because of the state of his hands but because he feels that there’s no one he’d really care to speak to. He leans forward, checks the ID display, and sees it’s a blocked number. Probably a salesman who’ll be hiding behind that. He lets the phone ring until it stops. Then it starts again. Evert Andersson takes another look at the display and finally picks up the phone: “Andersson.”

“Hello, I’m Saga Bauer.” Evert hears an abrupt female voice. “I’m a police officer with Sapo. I’m looking for your daughter, Beverly Andersson.”

“What’s happened?”

“Nothing. She has done nothing wrong, but she has some very important information we need.”

“And now she’s just taken off?” he asks weakly.

“Do you have her phone number?” Saga asks. Evert’s slow thoughts revert to the time he’d once hoped his daughter would take over the farm after him. She would carry on tradition, she’d live in his house, she’d work in his barn, his buildings, his fields. She’d walk through the gardens that her mother had planted, wearing rubber boots like his in the mud, growing thick around the middle as her mother had done, wearing a long coat with her hair in a braid down her back.

But even as a small child, Beverly had something odd about her, which he sensed and feared.

As she’d grown, she became more and more different, as if she’d sprung, an alien, from him and from her mother. Once she’d walked into the barn when she was eight or nine years old. She sat in an empty pen using an upturned bucket as a stool and then just sang to herself with her eyes closed. She’d lost herself in the sound of her own voice. He’d thought it his duty to yell at her to shut up and stop making a fool of herself, but there was this whole air about her that bewildered him. He marked that incident as the moment he knew he would never understand her. So he could no longer talk to her. Whenever he wanted to say something, the words died away.

When her mother died, the silence on the farm was complete.

Beverly began to ramble around the countryside and would be gone for hours or even an entire day. The police had to bring her home after she’d wandered so far she didn’t know where she was. She’d go with anyone if they spoke kindly to her.

“I don’t have anything to say to her, so why would I have her phone number?” he replies in his strict, stubborn Skane dialect.

“Are you absolutely sure-”

“You city folk from Stockholm don’t understand this stuff.” He cuts her off vehemently and hangs up.

He looks at his fingers on the receiver: the blood smearing his knuckles, the dirt under his fingernails, embedded in his cuticles, in every crack and surface. He walks over to his green armchair and slowly sits down. He picks up the shiny TV supplement to the newspaper and begins to read. This evening there’s going to be a show about the program host Ossian Wallenberg, who died recently. Evert drops the newspaper and is surprised to find tears in his eyes. He remembers that Beverly used to sit beside him and they’d both laugh at the silly nonsense on Golden Friday.

Saga Bauer swears aloud, shuts her eyes, and pounds the steering wheel a few times. She tells herself that she has to pull herself together and get going before it’s too late, when the phone rings.

“Hi, it’s me again,” Anja says. “I’m putting you through to Herbert Saxeus at Saint Maria Hjarta Hospital.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Saxeus had Beverly Andersson as a patient for two years there.”

“Thanks, that was-”

Anja has already put Saga through to the other line.

Saga waits as the signals go through. She remembers Saint Maria Hjarta, located east of Stockholm in Torsby.

“Herbert speaking,” a warm voice says in her ear.

“Hi, my name is Saga Bauer and I’m a police officer, an investigator, from Sapo. I need to reach a girl named Beverly Andersson who was one of your patients, I understand.”

There’s a pause on the line.

“Is she all right?” asks the doctor.

“That’s what I need to know. I have to speak to her,” Saga says quickly. “And it’s urgent.”

“She lives in the house of Axel Riessen, who… well, he has informal guardianship.”

“So is she still there?” Saga asks, while turning the key in the ignition. She starts to pull onto the highway.

“Axel Riessen is giving her a room until she finds something of her own,” he replies. “She’s only fifteen, but it would be a mistake to force her to live at home.”

The traffic is steady and Saga drives as fast as she can.

“May I ask what Beverly was treated for?” she asks.

“I don’t know if that’s helpful, but as a doctor I would say that she has a serious personality disorder, which we call Cluster B.”

“What does that mean?”

“Not much,” Herbert Saxeus says. “But if you ask me as a fellow human being, I’d say that physically Beverly is completely healthy, healthier than most… It’s a cliche, I know, but she’s not the one who’s sick.”

“No, she lives in a sick world.”

“That’s right.” He sighs.

Saga thanks him for his time, ends the call, and turns onto Valhallavagen. The seat against her back is sticky from sweat. Her phone rings and she hits the gas to get through the yellow light by the Olympic Stadium before she picks up the call.