Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

She was alive, but Stefan was dead. She had seen the photographs and read what little had been reported about the evening when her life was thrown off course.

‘Are you taking your pills like you should?’ her mum asks gently, and Sandra realises that she must have stopped talking again.

‘Leave it, Mum, I can’t talk now,’ she says.

‘But you’ll come this evening?’ her mum says quickly, unable to conceal her concern.

‘I don’t know,’ Sandra replies, sitting on the bed and screwing her eyes as tightly shut as she can.

‘It would be lovely if you did. I’ll come and get you, and if you change your mind I can take you back whenever you want.’

‘We’ll talk later on,’ Sandra says, and ends the call.

She puts the phone down on the bedside table, next to her blood-sugar monitor.

Outside the window the verdant foliage of the bushes is swaying about.

Sandra takes off the dressing-gown and lays it on the bed, pulls on her jeans and opens the chest of drawers. The broken deer is lying beside the pile of neatly folded clothes. The funny thing is that the little head has disappeared. She takes off her glasses and pulls on a clean T-shirt. Once again she feels like she’s being watched, and glances at the broken blinds, the shadowy garden, the leaves moving in the wind.

She hears a thud from the hall and jumps. It’s probably just more adverts, despite the sign on the door. She picks up the phone to call her mum back and apologise, and try to explain that she’s actually happy, but that being happy dredges up a load of sadness too.

She goes out into the kitchen again, looks at the letter on the table and walks over to the worktop to cut herself another slice of cake, but the knife isn’t there.

She has time to think that her medication has made her confused, that she must have put the knife down in the bathroom or bedroom, when someone dressed in yellow comes towards her from the hall with long strides.

Sandra just stands still, this can’t be happening.

She doesn’t manage to say a word, just hold her left hand up to protect herself.

The knife comes from above, and hits her in the chest.

Her legs collapse and the knife is jerked out as she falls backwards and sits down hard on the floor. She hits her head against the table, dislodging the candle from its holder, and it rolls over the edge.

Sandra feels hot blood pulsing down over her stomach. She has a terrible pain deep inside her chest, it feels like her heart is shaking.

Sandra just sits there, unable to move, unable to understand, when she feels a blow to her head, then a terrible pain in her cheek. She falls backwards and loses consciousness. Everything becomes dark and warm, she can hear burbling water, then a burning pain in her lungs. She comes round and starts coughing up blood, stares up at the ceiling for a few seconds, feels the blade of the knife moving about inside her chest.

Her heart quivers a few times, then stops. It all goes quiet, it feels as if she’s wading out into warm water. A silver-grey river that’s flowing gently on into the night.

The police have only had the third film for eighty minutes when the emergency call centre receives a phone call from a woman who says in a monotone that her daughter has been murdered.

The time is quarter to five when Margot parks her Lincoln Towncar in front of the fluttering tape of the police cordon.

The policeman who went inside to see if the victim could be saved is sitting on the step of the neighbouring doorway. His face is grey, and there’s a dark look in his eyes. A paramedic puts a blanket round his shoulders and checks his blood pressure as Adam talks to him. The woman who found her daughter is in hospital with her sister. Margot makes a mental note to go and talk to her later, once the tranquillisers have softened the burning layer of pain and shock.

While Margot was driving to Hägersten she’d called Joona at the hospital to tell him about the third murder. He sounded very tired, but listened to everything she told him, and for some strange reason that made her feel calmer.

Margot passes the inner cordon and enters the hallway of the block of flats. Floodlights illuminate the stairwell, reflecting off the glass covering the list of residents’ names.

Margot pulls on some shoe-protectors and carries on past the forensics officers who are setting out stepping-plates in silence.

She stops in the harsh glare of the floodlights. The metal clicks as it heats up. The smell of warm blood and urine is overpowering and acrid. A forensics officer is filming the room according to a set procedure. On the linoleum floor sits a woman with an utterly ravaged face, her chest split open. Her glasses have fallen off into the pool of blood beside the table.

She’s lying with her hand over her left breast. Her soft skin shimmers pearly white beneath her blood-blackened hand.

She has evidently been placed in that position after death, but it doesn’t look particularly sexual.

Margot stands there for a few moments, looking at the devastating scene, at the display of brutality, the blood sprayed out by a stabbing knife, the arterial spatter on the smooth door of a kitchen cupboard, and the smeared blood left by the victim’s struggle and the spasmodic jerking of her body.

They know far too little about the second murder, but this one seems to follow the pattern of the first exactly. The level of brutality is inconceivable, and appears to extend far beyond the moment of death.

Once the fury of the attack subsided, the body was arranged slightly before being left at the scene of the murder.

In the first case the victim’s fingers had been inserted into her mouth, and this time her hand is covering her breast.

Margot steps aside to make way for one of the forensic officers who is laying out boards on the floor.

With her hand on her protruding stomach, she carries on into the bedroom and looks down into the open drawer at the porcelain deer, chestnut-brown, except for the break where the head should be. After a while she returns to the victim.

She stares once again at the carefully staged arrangement of the hand on her chest, and a thought flits through her head and vanishes.

There’s something she recognises.

Margot stands for a while and thinks before leaving the flat and going back to her car. She starts the engine and holds one hand on the wheel and the other on her stomach, moves it down to counter the baby’s rapid movements with her fingertips, the small nudges from the other side, from the beginning.

She tries to make herself more comfortable, but the steering wheel presses against her stomach.

What is it I can’t quite remember? she thinks. It could have been five years ago, in a different police district, but I definitely read something.

Something about the hands, or the deer.

She can’t help thinking that she won’t get any sleep tonight if she doesn’t work out what it is.

Margot turns into Polhemsgatan and pulls up beside the rock face.

Her phone rings and Margot sees the picture of Jenny in her cowboy hat from Tucson on the screen.

‘National Crime,’ Margot answers.

‘I need to report a crime,’ Jenny says.

‘If it’s urgent you should call 112,’ she says, parking more neatly. ‘But otherwise—’

‘This is about a crime against public decency,’ Jenny interrupts.

‘Can you be a bit more specific?’ Margot asks, opening the car door.

‘If you come here, I can show you...’

Margot has to take the phone from her ear as she gets out of the car and locks it.

‘Sorry, what did you say?’

‘I just called to find out where you’d got to,’ Jenny says in a different tone of voice.