Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

Erik tries to feel his way forward, following the mesh, and reaches a corner.

It’s a cage.

His heart thuds in his chest and he feels panic rising once more, his pulse thunders in his ears and it feels like he can’t breathe.

He begins to understand. Everything that has happened to him slides apart, piece by piece, forming clear, isolated events — as if illuminated by ice-cold light.

Erik keeps moving round, trampling on something that feels like a blanket. He feels along the mesh with his good hand, running his fingers along the thick bars, investigating the corners. They’ve been welded together. With his fingers he can feel the lumpy joints where the bars have been welded to the mesh on the floor and roof of the cage.

Nelly, he thinks.

Nelly has done all of it.

Somehow she’s the person known as the unclean preacher. A serial killer, a stalker.

Erik stands on the mattress and finds the hatch with his fingers. There’s a dull rattle as he pushes it, and the cage sways around him.

He sticks his fingers out and feels the large padlock, twists and tries to pull it, but it soon becomes obvious that the lock can’t be forced, not even if he had a sturdy crowbar.

Erik kneels down again and tries to breathe calmly. He leans on his left hand and closes his eyes in the darkness, when a sound makes him start. The door up in the kitchen is opening.

Steps creak on the staircase and a patch of light grows steadily larger.

Someone is coming down, holding a torch.

He leans forward and sees the green dress around Nelly’s legs.

The beam from the torch veers across the steps and wall, where a large patch of plaster has fallen off. The handrail is loose and pulls some more mortar off when she leans on it.

Erik feels like he’s going to be sick.

She killed Maria Carlsson, Sandra Lundgren, Susanna Kern and Katryna Youssef — completely innocent women that he happened to come into contact with.

How can he possibly understand that Nelly did that? That she sat astride them and hacked at their faces and throats with a knife, long after they were dead?

She’s reached the bottom now. The light sweeps past him and he sees that the cage is made of welded reinforcing mesh. He’s surrounded by rust-brown iron rods in a close grid-pattern. The heavy lock is made of brushed steel, sealing a hatch made of a double layer of mesh with welded hooks.

Shadows slide across the walls of the cellar as she stops and looks at him.

Her face is flushed with excitement and she’s panting for breath. Erik sees that his left hand is brown with rust from the mesh. His vest is torn, hanging in shreds around his waist.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Nelly says, pulling an office chair towards the cage. ‘I know, right now you’re trying to work out how it all fits together, but there’s no rush.’

Without taking her eyes off him, she puts the torch down on an old kitchen table. Erik sees it light up the wall by the stairs, and is able to make out the rest of the room in its indirect light.

Beside him is an old mattress. The striped fabric is stained with dark patches in the middle, as if someone had lain there for a long time.

In the other corner is a faded plastic bucket full of murky water, next to a china plate with a washed-out floral pattern and a network of fine cracks.

This must have been the cage Rocky spoke about.

He was here for seven months before he managed to escape.

He got out of the cage and stole a car in Finsta, only to crash and end up getting sentenced for Rebecka’s murder.

In the shadows outside the cage Erik can see dead rats and a bundle of wooden sticks with sooty ends.

Nelly’s black bag is under the table.

Erik brushes his hair from his eyes, thinking that he has to talk to her, to make himself something more than just a victim for her.

‘Nelly,’ he says weakly. ‘What am I doing here?’

‘I’m protecting you,’ she says.

He coughs and thinks that he needs to speak in his usual voice, has to sound like her colleague at the Karolinska, not sound afraid, dehumanised.

‘Why do you think I need protecting?’

‘Loads of reasons,’ she whispers with a smile.

Some of her blonde hair has slipped out from her headscarf, and her thin dress has dark sweat stains under the arms and across her chest.

She says she’s protecting me, he thinks. Nelly believes that she’s protecting me for loads of reasons.

She hasn’t brought me here to kill me.

Rocky sat in this cage, and wasn’t tortured or mutilated, but possibly chastised and beaten.

Spiders’ webs full of flies and woodlice sway from the mesh down by the floor. He looks at the dark opening at the other end of the cage. The faint breeze across the floor is coming from the passageway.

He needs to think.

She was the person who set the police on him. She knew he would run, but that he wouldn’t have anywhere to go, and that sooner or later he’d turn to her of his own volition.

He was the one who called her, begged to come out here.

That was what she wanted, there was nothing coincidental about it, it all fits too well.

She must have been preparing this for several years, she was probably watching him before she even started work at the Karolinska Hospital.

She’s been stalking him.

She’s been close to him for so long that she could predict every movement he would make, she’s been able to manipulate all the evidence to make him look guilty.

Erik sees a spider slowly crawl across a dead rat. He thinks that his life has fallen apart and that he may well be stuck here until he dies.

Because no one knows where he is.

Joona is looking in the wrong place. Sköldinge Church is just a confused muddle of memories in Rocky’s brain.

His family and friends and the rest of the world will remember him as a serial killer who vanished without trace.

I’ve got to escape, Erik thinks. Even if the police catch me and a court sentences me to life imprisonment.

Nelly leans forward and looks at him with an expression he can’t read. Her pale eyes are like shining porcelain globes.

‘Nelly, you and I are both rational individuals,’ Erik says, aware of the quiver of fear in his voice. ‘We respect each other... and I understand that you didn’t mean to hurt me as badly as you did.’

‘It’s just such a pain when you don’t do what I say,’ she sighs.

‘I know it feels like a pain, but it’s like that for everyone, it’s part of life.’

‘OK, fine,’ she says blankly.

She whispers something to herself and moves an object on the kitchen table. Sand falls on to a dusty sheet of glass, a small picture that’s leaning against the wall. It’s a framed contract of cooperation between Emmaboda Glassworks, Saint-Gobain, and Solbacken Glassworks.

‘My arm’s hurting badly, and my...’

‘Are you saying you need to go to hospital now?’ she asks derisively.

‘Yes, I need to get my arm X-rayed, and—’

‘I dare say you’ll be fine,’ she interrupts.

‘Not with an epidural hematoma,’ he says, touching the wound to his temple. ‘I could have arterial bleeding, here, between the dura mater and the inside of my skull.’

She looks at him in astonishment, then laughs.

‘Bloody hell, that really is pathetic!’

‘I mean... I’m just saying that if I’m going to be happy here, you’re going to have to look after me, make sure I’m OK...’

‘I am, you’ve got everything you need.’

Erik thinks that someone who’s capable of what Nelly has done has an insatiable emotional hunger, she’s desperately needy and can switch from devoted love to impassioned hatred in an instant.