Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

‘Nelly,’ he asks tentatively, ‘how long are you thinking of keeping me locked up?’

She smiles at the floor, embarrassed, glances at her nails, then gives him an indulgent look.

‘Initially you’ll plead and maybe threaten me,’ she says. ‘You’ll promise all sorts of things... and soon you’ll try to manipulate me in different ways by saying you’re not planning to escape, that you only want to help me sweep the stairs.’

She adjusts her dress and looks at him in silence. After a while she crosses her legs and moves a little, so that the light from the torch brushes her cheek.

‘Nelly, I’m grateful to you for letting me stay here, but I don’t like the cellar, I don’t know why, that’s just the way it is,’ Erik says, but gets no response.

He looks at her and tries to remember how they first met.

She must have been somewhere in the vicinity when he was conducting his examination of Rocky, and then she applied for a job in his department.

How had she got it?

The head of personnel had committed suicide. That was just after she started.

Nelly was funny and easy-going, talkative, in a charming, self-deprecating way.

He went through a tough time when he got divorced from Simone. Particularly at night, all those long, sleepless hours. Nelly persuaded him to go back to using pills. She gave him Valium, Rohypnol, Sobril, Citodon — all the old pills he’d managed to kick several years before.

They drank and took their pills together, made fun of it. Now he can’t understand what he was thinking. They’d kissed, then ended up in bed together. She insisted on putting on a nightie that Simone had left behind, and he tried not to show how uncomfortable that made him feel.

Now he remembers something that happened very recently. It had been an unusually difficult day, one of his patients had been sectioned and put in a straitjacket, and he had spent hours with the relatives listening to their recriminations. Afterwards he was tired and it was so late that he decided to stay at the clinic and sleep on his bunk.

Nelly was there too, working overtime. She gave him a Rohypnol and then made them drinks out of medical spirit and Schweppes Russchian.

He must have taken too many drugs or drunk too much, because he’d slid rapidly into deep sleep.

He knows he slept for a long time, and very deeply, and that Nelly helped him get undressed before she went home.

But he dreamed that someone was kissing him, licking his closed lips and making him hold a cold glass ball, pressing it into his limp hand.

Through his drugged dream Nelly came back to him. Her tongue was pierced and she took his penis in her mouth. Then he dreamed that a deer came into his office, the same way Nelly had, and walked past his bunk to stand behind the floor lamp, raising its head and looking at him with bashful eyes.

Erik couldn’t sleep in the dream. Light filtered through his eyelashes and he could see Nelly. She was on her knees, pressing a cold, hard object into his hand. It was a small, brown, porcelain deer’s head.

Now she’s sitting there silently watching him with an impassive expression. As if she were waiting for his slow recuperation.

After a while she takes some neatly folded clothes out of a plastic bin-bag and puts them on her lap.

‘Are those clothes for me?’

‘Yes, sorry,’ she says, rolling them up and passing them to him through the mesh.

‘Thanks.’

He unfolds a pair of dirty jeans with muddy stains on the knees, and a washed-out T-shirt with the words Saab 39 Gripen printed across the chest. The clothes smell of sweat and damp, but Erik pulls off his tattered vest and gets changed very gingerly.

‘You’ve got a sweet little tummy,’ she says, and giggles.

‘Yes, haven’t I?’ he says quietly.

With a coquettish gesture she raises her chin and loosens the scarf covering her hair. Her blonde hair is stiff with blood. He forces himself to look her in the eye, not look away even though his heartbeat is speeding up with fear.

‘Nelly, we’re together,’ he says, swallowing hard. ‘We’ve always been together... but I’ve been waiting, because I thought you were with Martin.’

‘With Martin? But... you mustn’t think that meant anything,’ she says, blushing.

‘The two of you seemed happy.’

Her mouth turns serious and her lips tremble.

‘It’s just you and me,’ she says. ‘It’s always been us...’

He’s having trouble breathing, but tries to sound natural when he speaks.

‘I didn’t know if you regretted what happened, that time—’

‘Never,’ she whispers.

‘Me neither, I know I’ve done some silly things, but only because I felt abandoned.’

‘But—’

‘Because I’ve always felt we had a unique connection, Nelly. We always have had, the whole time.’

She wipes tears from her eyes and looks away. She rubs her nose with a trembling finger.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt you,’ she says quietly.

‘I wouldn’t say no to a couple of Morfin Medas,’ he says in a lighter tone.

‘OK.’ She nods quickly, wipes her face, then gets up and leaves.

As soon as Nelly reaches the kitchen and closes the door behind her, and puts the heavy bar across it, Erik begins yanking at the mesh. He pulls as hard as he can, and manages to bend it a couple of millimetres, but realises that it will never give way.

He kicks at it with his bare soles, feels the metal burn into the arches of his feet, and hears nothing but a solid thud from the cage. He shifts round desperately and tugs at the corner, seeking a weak point in the construction, pushes up at the roof, but there are no gaps anywhere, no loose welding joints. Then he lies down on his stomach, stretches out with his left hand until he can reach one of the wooden sticks with his fingertips. He rolls it closer until he’s able to get a grip on it and pull it into the cage. He moves to the other side of the cage, holds the stick out and can just reach the strap of Nelly’s Gucci handbag. Carefully he raises the stick, making the bag slide closer to him. He pants with pain whenever he has to put any pressure on his injured arm. It feel likes an eternity before he drags the bag over to the mesh. With shaking hands he hunts around for the keys to the padlock among Nelly’s gold-plated lipstick holders, travel hairspray and powder. In a side pocket he finds her mobile phone. Because he can only use one arm he puts the phone on the floor, leans over it and dials the SOS Alarm number.

‘SOS 112, what’s the nature of the emergency?’ a calm voice says.

‘Please listen... you need to try to trace this phone,’ Erik says in as loud a voice as he dare use. ‘I’ve been locked up in a cellar by a serial killer, you’ve got to come and—’

‘The reception’s very bad,’ the voice interrupts. ‘Can you move somewhere—’

‘The murderer’s name is Nelly Brandt, and I’m in the cellar of a yellow house on the way to Rimbo.’

‘I can’t hear anything now... Did you say you were in danger?’

‘This is serious, you’ve got to come,’ Erik explains, glancing quickly towards the staircase. ‘I’m in a yellow house on the way to Rimbo, there are fields all around and I saw ruined buildings on the site, an old factory with a tall chimney, and—’

The door to the kitchen rattles and Erik ends the call with trembling fingers, drops the phone on the floor but manages to pick it up and slip it back inside the bag. He hears Nelly coming down the steep steps and pushes the handbag back towards the table with the stick. It almost topples over and he has to nudge its lower side with the end of the stick. He stretches out as far as he can to slide the bag back in place.