Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

Joona and Erik move out of the way.

The man drags the woman to her feet, and the lamp rolls away and shines straight into the face of a large bearded man.

It’s Rocky Kyrklund.

He’s sitting completely naked in a red armchair, asleep. His head is leaning forward and his beard looks like it has grown into the hair on his chest. He’s injected himself in his right leg, and dark blood is trickling down his ankle.

Rocky isn’t alone. Beside him, on a sofa bed with no mattress, sits a woman with bleached-blonde hair, wearing a brown bra. Her pale blue panties are on the floor next to her. A plaster is hanging half off her knee.

She holds a lighter under a sooty spoon, and stares with glassy eyes at the small bubbles forming in the water. She licks her lips as she waits for the powder to dissolve, leaving the spoon full of pale yellow liquid.

Erik steps over a footstool and walks over to them, smelling the insipid aroma of heroin and hot metal as he comes to a halt.

‘Rocky?’ Erik says in a low voice.

Rocky slowly raises his head. His eyelids are heavy, his pupils like pinpricks of black ink.

‘Judas Iscariot,’ he mumbles when he sees Erik.

‘Yes,’ Erik says.

Rocky smiles happily and slowly closes his eyes. The woman beside him puts a ball of cotton-wool in the solution, holds her syringe on top of it and sucks up the solution, then attaches a needle to the syringe.

Joona notices that the man in camouflage trousers is sitting on a chair outside the staffroom again, looking at his phone. At the other end of the room the man with the grey moustache disappears through the beaded curtain with the woman.

‘Do you remember telling me about the unclean preacher?’ Erik asks, squatting down in front of Rocky.

Rocky opens his tired eyes and shakes his head.

‘Is that supposed to be me? The preacher?’

‘I don’t think so. I think you meant someone else,’ Erik says. ‘You talked about a man in make-up with scarred veins.’

Next to them the woman uses her briefs as a tourniquet round her arm, tightening them as hard as she can by twisting a pen through them a couple of times.

‘Do you remember him killing a woman here at the Zone?’

‘No,’ Rocky grins.

‘She was known as Tina, but her real name was Natalia,’ Erik goes on.

‘Yes, that... that was him, that was the preacher,’ Rocky mutters.

The woman on the sofa bed looks for a vein in the usual places, a soft spot without too many scars.

‘I need to know... are we talking about a real preacher, a priest?’

Rocky nods and closes his eyes.

‘Which church?’ Erik asks.

Rocky whispers to himself and Erik leans forward until he can smell his rancid breath.

‘The preacher is jealous... just like God,’ he whispers.

The woman inserts the needle and a drop of blood mixes with the yellow liquid before she injects it. With nimble fingers she undoes the tourniquet and lets out a long groan as the kick washes through her. Erik watches her stretch her legs, tense her ankles, then relax as her body goes completely soft.

‘We believe the preacher has murdered at least five women, and we need a name, a parish, or an address,’ Erik says.

‘What are you saying?’ Rocky mutters, closing his eyes again.

‘You were going to tell me about the preacher,’ Erik persists. ‘I need a name, or—’

‘Stop banging on,’ the woman says, lying back against Rocky’s hairy thigh.

‘Say hello to Ying,’ Rocky murmurs, stroking her head clumsily.

While Erik tries to get Rocky to remember, Joona is keeping an eye on the room. The fat man in the camouflage trousers gets up from the chair outside the staffroom and peers out across the room. Joona watches him put his phone in his pocket and set off through the sofas. He stops by one man who’s lying with his eyes closed, a lit cigarette between his lips, then returns to his place.

‘You want me to tell you things,’ Rocky says. ‘But all I remember from purgatory is that I was sitting in a little monkey cage... and there were long wooden poles with glowing ends—’

‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Ying interrupts with a hoarse laugh.

‘I howled, tried to get away, tried to protect myself with my food bowl... blah, blah, blah,’ he smiles.

‘Seriously, though,’ Erik says in a louder voice. ‘I won’t disturb you any more, if you can just tell me something that will help us find him.’

It looks as though Rocky’s dozed off. His mouth slips open a few millimetres and a string of saliva dribbles into his beard.

The man with the grey moustache comes back from the other side of the room. The curtain sways behind him, letting a yellow glow into the room before the Mona Lisa’s face reforms.

‘We can’t stay here much longer,’ Joona tells Erik.

Ying tries to put her briefs on but they catch between her toes and she leans back and rests with her eyes shut.

‘My brain is mush,’ Rocky mumbles. ‘You need to...’

‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Ying says.

‘Give me a name,’ Erik persists.

‘You’re probably going to have to hypnotise me if...’

‘Can you stand up?’ Erik asks. ‘Let me help you.’

Joona sees the fat man in the camouflage trousers get up from his chair again. He’s speaking on his phone as he sets off towards them.

The woman in the studded collar is standing in the doorway leading to the stage, holding the curtain open. She seems to be hesitating about whether to come in or not.

Behind her Joona can see a tall figure in a yellow oilskin coat. The sort fishermen used to wear.

At first he doesn’t understand how he knows that he’s staring at the preacher, but his mind suddenly brings a moment from the past into sharp focus.

‘Erik,’ Joona says quietly. ‘The preacher is here, he’s standing over there by the curtain, in a yellow raincoat.’

The woman in the studded collar waves to someone and stumbles into the room. The beads of the curtain swing back and sway in front of the yellow figure.

And now Joona remembers how Filip Cronstedt described the man who was filming Maria Carlsson.

The last thing he heard before he collapsed in the storeroom was that the thin man with the camera was wearing yellow oilskins, like the fishermen in Lofoten.

Joona starts walking, but the man in the camouflage trousers steps round the flowery sofa and stops him.

‘I have to ask you and your friend to come with me,’ he says.

‘Erik,’ Joona says. ‘You saw him, didn’t you? Over there by the curtain. That’s the preacher. You have to follow him, try to get a look at his face.’

‘This club is for members only,’ the man says.

‘We were thinking of buying a sofa,’ Joona says, as he sees Erik hurry away towards the curtain.

The fat man shouts at him to stop, but Erik carries on, weaving quickly between the sofas. The man yells at Joona to move out of the way. An armchair gets shoved backwards, making a scraping sound on the floor.

‘ Pydään anteeksi ,’ Joona says in Finnish, stopping him again.

The man brushes Joona’s hand away, steps back and pulls out a projectile taser.

‘ Nyt se pian sattuu ,’ Joona goes on with a smile.

He takes a step forward, sliding out of the line of fire, pushes the taser aside with his hand and kicks the man in the knee, making his leg buckle. The man gasps and two projectiles with spiral wires slam into the back of a sofa. Joona twists the taser out of the man’s hand and hits him in the collarbone with it, then wraps the wires round his neck and pulls. The man collapses to the floor, rolls over and tries to get up again. Joona forces him back down with his foot, winds the wires round his hand and pulls them tighter until the man loses consciousness and slumps to the floor.