Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

‘Adam, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

‘What for?’ he asks stiffly, opening the car door.

‘Sit down,’ she says.

But he gets out of the car and stops in front of her, with a peculiar feeling of being completely weightless.

‘Is it Katryna?’ he asks. ‘Just tell me. Is she hurt?’

‘Katryna’s dead.’

‘I saw her in the doorway, I saw her...’

‘Adam,’ she pleads.

‘Are you sure? Have you spoken to the paramedics?’

She hugs him, but he pulls free, takes a step back, and sees some heavy blackberries swaying on a thin branch.

‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ she says again.

‘You’re sure she’s dead? I mean, the ambulance... what’s the ambulance doing here if she’s...?’

‘Katryna will stay here until the forensic examination of the scene is complete.’

‘Is she in the hall? Can you tell me where she is?’

‘In the boiler room, she must have hidden in the boiler room.’

Adam looks at her and the pain in his thigh is suddenly throbbing, all-encompassing. He watches all the police officers leave the house and gather for a debriefing over by the command vehicle.

A flash of insight passes through his mind. His wife was almost safe, but he shot the police officer who was on his way out with her.

‘I shot a colleague,’ he says.

‘Don’t think about that now... you’re sleeping at mine tonight, I’ll call the boss.’

She tries to take hold of his arm but he turns away.

‘I need to be alone... sorry, I...’

The helicopter is hovering a short distance away, over the sports ground, it looks like.

‘Did they get the preacher?’ he asks.

‘Adam, we’re going to get him, he’s in the area, we’re deploying everything we’ve got, absolutely everything.’

He nods a few times, then turns away again.

‘Just give me a moment,’ he whispers, takes a few steps and picks at the branch of a bush.

‘You have to stay here,’ Margot says.

Adam looks at her for a few seconds, then begins to wander slowly out into the garden. He’s holding his face, pretending to try to absorb what she’s said, but he knows he needs to see Katryna, because he doesn’t believe them, it can’t be true, it isn’t true, Katryna has nothing to do with this.

Adam starts walking round the house. The green hose is lying in the unmown grass. A swarm of gnats is visible in the shimmering blue light. It gets darker when he reaches the back of the house.

Adam sees himself as a black silhouette in the red dome of the round barbeque. He goes round the corner and sees that the cellar door is open. The rope has been cut. He goes inside. The lights are all on down there.

He can hear people walking about upstairs. A forensics officer is laying out walking plates.

Adam takes another step in, and that’s when he sees Katryna in the cold neon light of the boiler room. She’s sitting leaning against the boiler, and there’s blood everywhere, on her sweatpants, her vest, the floor. Her hair is tucked behind one ear, but most of her face is gone, hacked off. Dark blood glints across the whole of her ribcage, and her left hand appears to be squeezing the fingers of her right hand.

Adam staggers backwards, hears the sound of his own breathing, knocks over a packet of washing powder, stumbles over his own wellington boots, and emerges into the garden again.

He’s gasping for breath, but can’t get enough air into his lungs, and starts poking at his mouth.

Nothing is comprehensible any more.

The alarm was sounded half an hour ago, and now everything is irrevocable.

Adam turns to walk back and is just passing the compost heap when he hears a branch creak in the forest. An officer comes round the corner of the house and calls for him, but he carries on in amongst the trees, following the sound of someone moving in there.

Behind him the floodlights are switched on, flooding his home and garden with light. The trunks of the trees shine grey, as if they were covered by a layer of ash. As if he were in an underground forest.

Twenty metres in stands a man, looking at him. Their eyes meet between the gently glowing stems, and it takes Adam a few seconds to realise who the man in front of him is.

The psychiatrist, Erik Maria Bark.

It’s like a lightning flash in his head when he realises everything. Awareness hits him like an axe striking a block of wood.

Adam reaches down and pulls the little pistol from his ankle. There’s a rasping sound as the velcro comes loose. He feeds a bullet into the chamber, raises the pistol and fires.

The shot hits the top of a branch in front of Erik’s face and is deflected, splinters fly up and he sees the psychiatrist flinch.

His hand is shaking, he tries to aim lower, the psychiatrist moves backwards and he fires again. The shot simply disappears, as dark branches sway between the two of them.

He sees the psychiatrist run, crouching down, then slide down a slope and vanish behind a thick tree trunk. Adam follows, but he can no longer see him. He runs straight into some fir branches. Police officers who have heard his shots come running from the garden and the entire edge of the forest is suddenly full of bright light.

‘Put your gun down!’ someone calls out. ‘Adam, put your gun down!’

Adam turns round and raises his arms.

‘The killer’s still in the forest!’ he gasps. ‘It’s the hypnotist, it’s the fucking hypnotist!’

Erik takes a deep breath and stares up at the night sky and dark treetops. He must have passed out after he fell. His back is hurting badly. He knows he scraped himself as he slid down the slope.

He stands up and reaches his hand out to the wet rock face. He can smell moss and ferns, and looks up to see the glow of bright lights flickering through the trees above.

He crouches down and pushes his way through the undergrowth, holding a branch out of the way and moving away from the slope.

The distant sound of dogs barking merges with the clattering noise of an approaching helicopter.

Erik followed the preacher down a narrow path, but it grew so dark as the trees became thicker that he lost track of him. He stood for a while and listened, but heard nothing more than the wind through the branches high above him. In the end he decided to go back to the car and wait there, when sirens from a number of emergency vehicles all seemed to converge somewhere on the road on the far side of the woodland.

He began to walk in that direction instead, thinking that Joona must have put the police on the right track, that they may even have caught the preacher.

The forest was overgrown and rocky, and it took him time to make his way through in the dark, but after a while he could make out flashing blue-grey lights between the trees, and suddenly he was standing in front of Adam Youssef from the National Criminal Investigation Department.

Adam looked me in the eyes and fired, Erik thinks as he runs down a slope. What’s happened? What happened at the Zone after I left?

Loose stones slide under his feet and he almost falls, grabs a branch with his hand and cuts himself on something. He feels his palm grow wet with blood and stops, gasping, trying to calm his breathing as he hears the helicopter above the treetops again.

Do they think he’s involved in the murders because he didn’t tell the whole truth about knowing the victims?

Erik thinks about how he lied to the police, how he withheld Rocky’s alibi and kept quiet about what Björn said under hypnosis.

The helicopter hovers above the forest, searching with spotlights, getting closer and closer. He needs to hide. Branches rustle, treetops sway, leaves come loose and swirl through the air.