Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

Nelly gets to her feet and jabs with the knife. The point cuts into Jackie’s lower arm. She backs away instinctively and walks into the bucket that Nelly hit earlier, then steps quickly to the side with her heart thudding. Her arm is stinging with pain from the cut, and blood is dripping down into her hand. Adrenalin is coursing through her, making the hairs on her arms stand up and she shakes the blood from her hand, wipes it on her skirt, and takes a fresh grip on the spade.

She approaches as silently as she can. She can hear Nelly crouching down and jabbing with the knife, and can feel the dampness of her exhaled breath. Without a sound, Jackie circles her, then changes direction and strikes with all the strength she can muster. The blow is ferocious. The spade hits the back of Nelly’s head. Jackie hears her sigh and fall forward, without putting her hands out to break her fall.

She hits out again, and strikes Nelly across the head with a wet sound, and after that she doesn’t hear anything.

Jackie backs away, panting. Her hands are shaking and she listens, but can’t hear the sound of breathing. She approaches warily, pokes at Nelly with the spade, but her body is limp.

Jackie waits, hearing her own pulse thump in her ears. Then she jabs hard with the point of the spade, but there’s no reaction.

Jackie is breathing fitfully, and anguish washes over her. Her stomach churns. She puts the spade down and moves closer to Nelly, her legs shaking beneath her. The steaming warmth of the body rises up towards her. Carefully she leans over until she can feel Nelly’s back with her fingers. She’s wearing a raincoat, the rough fabric squeaks beneath her fingers.

Erik said she had the key round her neck.

Jackie feels tentatively up her back to her neck, and feels that Nelly’s hair is wet with warm blood.

Her fingers fumble clumsily inside Nelly’s collar, feeling along her sticky neck until she finds a chain and tugs at it, but it won’t come loose.

She needs to roll Nelly on to her back. She’s heavy, and Jackie has to use both hands, and push with one leg.

The body rolls over and Jackie ends up sitting astride it. With her fingers shaking, she undoes the first button at the neck of the raincoat, but stops when she hears a squelching sound, as if Nelly were moistening her mouth.

Jackie undoes another button, and thinks she can hear little clicks, as though Nelly were blinking her dry eyelids.

Fear pulses through her head and she tears Nelly’s dress open at the neck, grabs hold of the key on the chain, and starts to pull it over her bloody head.

Joona has been following the signs to Rimbo, but he leaves road 280 at Väsby and is heading towards Finsta when Margot calls to tell him that Jackie and her daughter aren’t in the flat at Lill-Jans plan. All the evidence suggests they’ve been abducted; there are traces of blood on the floor, all the way out into the stairwell. The door to the wardrobe has been smashed and on the wall inside the child had written ‘the lady talks funny’.

Joona repeats several times that they have to find the house near Finsta, that’s where she’s taken Jackie and Madeleine. Erik is probably already there in his cage, or will be very shortly.

‘Find the house — that’s the only thing that matters right now,’ Joona says before they end the call.

He’s passed plenty of farms in the darkness along the way, and has seen agricultural premises and sawmills with chimneys of varying sizes.

He’s driving fast along the black road, not letting himself think that it might be too late, that time has already run out.

He has to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

There are always questions to ask, answers still to find.

Nelly keeps repeating herself the whole time, returning to old patterns, he thinks.

There has to be a farm in Roslagen that Nelly somehow has access to.

The farm didn’t belong to her family, but her grandfather may have managed it, Joona reasons. He was also a priest, and the Swedish Church owns a great deal of land and forest, and a large number of properties.

As he drives, Joona tries to think through the case again and consider everything he had read and seen long before he knew that Nelly was the person Rocky called the unclean preacher.

Everyone makes mistakes.

He needs to find something that can connect a farm in Roslagen with the video featuring Jackie.

Joona thinks about the yellow raincoat, the narcotic substances, the collection of trophies, and the way she clearly marked the places she took them from on the bodies, then about her completely ignorant husband out in Bromma, her expensive clothes, hand cream, the jar of nutritional supplements, and then he picks up his phone and calls Nils Åhlén.

‘You’ve climbed up onto a very precarious branch,’ Åhlén says. ‘That escape from prison wasn’t exactly—’

‘It was necessary,’ Joona interrupts.

‘And now you want to ask me something,’ Åhlén says, and clears his throat.

‘Nelly takes iron pills,’ Joona says.

‘Maybe she suffers from anaemia,’ Åhlén replies.

‘How do you get anaemia?’

‘A thousand different ways... everything from cancer and kidney disease to pregnancy and menstruation.’

‘But Nelly takes iron hydroxide.’

‘Do you mean iron oxide-hydroxide?’

‘She’s got speckled hands,’ Joona says.

‘Freckles?’

‘Blacker... proper pigment change, and—’

‘Arsenic poisoning,’ Åhlén interrupts. ‘Iron oxide-hydroxide is used as an antidote to arsenic... and if she’s got dry, speckled hands, then...’

Joona stops listening when he finds himself thinking about one of the photographs he left on the floor of his hotel room.

A picture of a two-millimetre-long splinter that looks like a blue bird’s skull.

The fragment had been found on Sandra Lundgren’s floor. It looked ceramic, but actually consisted of glass, iron, sand and chamotte clay.

He drives past a big red barn, and thinks that the little bird’s skull was a tiny shard of slag, a by-product of glass production.

‘Glass,’ he whispers.

The ground around old glassworks is often contaminated with arsenic. They used to use great quantities of the poisonous semi-metal as a refining agent, to prevent bubbles and to homogenise the glass.

‘A glassworks,’ Joona says out loud. ‘They’re at a glassworks.’

‘That could fit,’ Nils Åhlén says, as if he had been following Joona’s internal thought process.

‘Are you sitting at your computer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Search for an old glassworks in the vicinity of Finsta.’

Joona is driving along beside a lake that shimmers in the darkness behind the trees and bushes as he hears Nils Åhlén hum while he taps at his keyboard.

‘No... all I’m getting is one that burned down in 1976, Solbacken glassworks in Rimbo, used to make sheet glass and mirrors... the land is owned by the Swedish Church, and—’

‘Send the address and coordinates to my phone,’ Joona interrupts. ‘And call Margot Silverman.’

Joona brakes sharply and turns hard right, locking the wheels. He puts the car into reverse, throwing up a shower of grit, veers backwards into the road, changes gear and puts his foot down again.

Gasping with pain, Erik pokes the copper pipe through the roof of the cage, uses one bar as a pivot and tries to prise the next one up. The lever is still a bit too short, even though he hangs off the end with the whole of his weight. There’s a crash as the pipe slides out. Erik falls to the floor, hitting his good arm against the mesh.

Breathing hard, he gets up and switches the torch on, and sees that he’s managed to bend the metal another few centimetres.