Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

‘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.

Adam runs down the corridor ahead of Margot. Filip Cronstedt was given emergency sedation when he was brought into A&E early that morning, and has been kept like that ever since.

The real serial killer is still on the loose.

Margot follows Adam into their office and sees the treetops of Kronoberg Park in the pale sunlight through the small windows.

‘Have we got a copy?’

‘It looks like it,’ he replies.

Margot is gasping for breath as she sinks onto the second chair in front of the computer while Adam clicks the video file. The base of her spine is stinging and she leans back, her shirt pulling up over her bulging stomach.

‘The film has been online for two minutes,’ he whispers, and starts the media-player.

The camera is moving quickly through the outer fringes of a bird cherry. The leaves obscure the view for a moment, then a bedroom window appears on the screen, with condensation along the bottom.

The garden is shady, but the white sky shimmers in the windowsill.

The camera moves backwards again when a woman dressed in her underwear comes into the room. She hangs a white towel with old hair-dye stains over the back of a chair, then stops and leans one hand against the wall.

‘One minute left,’ Adam says.

The room fills with soft light from the lamp in the ceiling. They can make out fingerprints on the mirror, and a slightly tilted framed poster from the Picasso exhibition at Moderna Museet.

The camera moves to one side, and now they can both see a reddish-brown porcelain deer on the bedside table.

‘The deer,’ Margot pants, leaning towards the screen as her plait falls over her shoulder.

The snapped deer’s head that Susanna Kern was clutching in her hand must have come from an ornament exactly like that one.

The woman in the bedroom is holding one hand to her mouth, and walks slowly over to the bedside table, opens the drawer and takes something out of it. Her face is more visible in the glow of the bedside lamp. She has pale eyebrows and a straight nose, but her eyes are hidden behind the reflection in her dark-framed glasses, and her mouth is relaxed. Her bra is red and worn, and her underpants white, with some sort of sanitary pad. She rubs something over one of her thighs and then takes out a small, white stick and presses it to her muscle.

‘What’s she doing?’ Adam asks.

‘That’s an insulin injection.’

The woman holds a swab against her thigh and screws her eyes shut for a moment, then opens them again. She leans forward to put the syringe back in the drawer, and manages to catch the little deer, knocking it over. Small fragments fly up in the sharp lighting as the head snaps off and falls to the floor.

‘What the hell is this?’ Adam whispers.

With a weary look on her face the woman bends over and picks up the porcelain head, puts it on the bedside table, then goes round the bed towards the steamed-up window. Something makes her stop and peer out, searching the darkness beyond.

The camera moves slowly backwards, and some leaves brush over the lens.

The woman looks worried. She puts out her hand, takes hold of the cord of the blinds and loosens the catch by tugging it to the side. The slats slide down, but end up crooked and she pulls the cord and lets them fall again, then gives up. Through the damaged blinds she can be seen turning back towards the room and scratching her right buttock before the film suddenly comes to an end.

‘OK, I’m a bit tired,’ Adam says in an unsteady voice, and stands up. ‘But this is crazy — isn’t it?’