Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

On the other side of the street is a black jeep. Nelly shades her face with one hand as she looks down towards the water.

Erik walks across the grass and steps across some low bushes, and is just emerging on to the pavement when Nelly catches sight of him. Her lips part as though she were suddenly frightened. Erik looks round for traffic, then walks straight across the road in his wet underpants. Nelly looks him quickly up and down, then lifts her chin as if they were about to have a perfectly ordinary discussion about patients.

‘Original, but quite sexy,’ she smiles, quickly opening the back door. ‘Get under the blanket.’

He huddles down on the floor behind the seat and pulls the red rug over himself. The sun-heated car smells of plastic and leather.

Erik hears Nelly get in the driver’s seat and close the door. She starts the engine and pulls away to the left, bumping off the kerb and then speeding up, and he slides back towards the seat.

‘We know Rocky was wrongly convicted of the murder of Rebecka Hansson, but—’

‘Not now, Nelly,’ he interrupts.

‘But do we know he’s innocent of these new murders? I mean... What if he’s started copying the murder he was convicted of... just to put the blame on you?’

‘It’s not him, I hypnotised him, he saw the preacher and...’

‘But couldn’t he just have divided himself into different characters? So that he’s the unclean preacher when commits the murders?’

Nelly falls silent and inserts a disc into the CD player. The car fills with Johnny Cash’s heavy voice: Wanted man in California, wanted man in Buffalo, wanted man in Kansas City, wanted man in Ohio... wanted man in Mississippi, wanted man in ol’ Cheyenne. Wherever you might look tonight, you might see this wanted man .

Erik lies there with the blanket on top of him, smelling the sand on the mats on the floor, and can’t help smiling at the fact that Nelly is trying to be funny at a time like this.

Rocky is asleep on the passenger seat next to Joona. His big head lolls to the side when the road bends. The landscape is sparsely populated and desolate, almost abandoned.

Joona is driving fast, thinking about the text message Lumi sent him earlier today. She wrote that she loves Paris, but misses their conversations up in Nattavaara.

Just beyond Flen the road and railway come together on two narrow strips of land. A long goods train thunders past next to the car, closer and closer. The brown trucks reflect off the water. The road and rails converge at an arrowhead, the train passes beneath them and then appears alongside again before dark pine forest comes between them.

The forest gradually grows thinner, and the landscape flattens into huge fields. Combine harvesters roll across the fields in clouds of dust, cutting off the stalks and separating wheat from chaff.

Sköldinge is on route 55, not far from Katrineholm. Joona turns off to the right and sees a few red houses through the trees, then the sandy-coloured church with its pointed spire, rising from the plain.

Sköldinge Church.

An ordinary Swedish church out in the countryside, dating back to the twelfth century, surrounded by rune stones.

The gravel crunches beneath the tyres as he pulls over and stops in front of the parish house.

Maybe they have found the serial killer now. The preacher from Rocky’s nightmarish memories. The old priest with rouged cheeks and arms full of needle tracks.

The church door is closed and the windows dark.

Joona pulls his Colt Combat from its holster and notices that the tape is dirty and has started to peel off. He usually wraps sports tape round the lower part of the butt so that his hand doesn’t slip if he finds himself in a drawn-out firefight.

He pulls out the magazine and checks that it’s full, presses it back in and feeds a bullet into the chamber even though he can’t really believe that the unclean preacher is just waiting for them inside the church.

Nothing is that simple.

The path has been raked, and the churchyard is well tended. The sun is filtering through the leaves of a huge oak.

The preacher is an extremely dangerous man, a serial killer who never rushes, who takes his time, who watches and plans, down to the last detail, until something else takes over and he turns into a wild animal.

His weakness is his arrogance, his narcissistic hunger.

Joona glances towards the church, then across the fields. He has two extra magazines of ordinary parabellum bullets in one pocket, and one magazine of fully jacketed ammunition in the other.

Even if the preacher isn’t here, he thinks, even if he’s never been here, this is the end of the road.

If he can’t find something here that can convince Margot, then it’s over, Erik will be found guilty even though he’s innocent, just like Rocky was found guilty years ago of murdering Rebecka Hansson.

And the serial killer will go free.

Today is the day everything gets decided. Erik can’t keep on running, he’s got nowhere left to go, the hunters will drive him out of the forest.

And he himself has broken an inmate out of jail, used violence against a prison officer, threatened his life.

Disa would have said he was just under-stimulated, that he needs to get back to work. It’s too late for that now, but he had no choice, in which case the consequences are irrelevant.

When Joona opens the door Rocky wakes up and looks at him with narrow, sleepy eyes.

‘Wait here,’ Joona says, and leaves the car.

Rocky gets out and spits on the ground, leans against the roof of the car and draws a line in the dirt with his hand.

‘Do you recognise where we are?’ Joona asks.

‘No,’ Rocky says, looking up at the church. ‘But that doesn’t mean anything.’

‘I want you to wait in the car,’ Joona repeats. ‘I don’t think the serial killer’s here, but it could still be a dangerous situation.’

‘I don’t give a shit,’ Rocky says bluntly.

He follows Joona between the graves. The air is fresh, as if it had just been raining. They pass a man in jeans and a T-shirt standing outside the porch, smoking and talking on his mobile.

The transition from bright sunlight leaves them almost completely blind when they walk into the darkness of the porch.

Joona moves quickly to one side, ready to draw his pistol.

He blinks and waits for his eyes to adapt before going in amongst the pews beneath the organ loft. Huge pillars hold up the roof and ornate frescos.

There’s a knocking sound, and a shadow flits across the walls.

There’s someone sitting in one of the front pews.

Joona stops Rocky, draws his gun and holds it hidden beside his hip.

A bird hits the window. It looks like a jackdaw that’s got caught in a piece of twine, and keeps hitting the window when it tries to fly off.

The door to the sacristy is ajar. On the wall is a hazy cross in a circle.

Joona slowly approaches the huddled figure from behind, and sees a wrinkled hand holding on to the back of the pew in front.

The bird hits the window again. The shrunken figure slowly turns its head towards the sound.

It’s an elderly Chinese woman.

Joona carries on past her, still concealing his gun, and looks at her from the side. Her face is downcast, impassive.

Beside the medieval font Mary sits like a child. Her wide, wooden dress falls in heavy folds around her feet.

At the centre of the altarpiece Christ hangs on the cross against a sky of gold, just as Rocky described it under hypnosis.

This was where he first met the unclean preacher, when the entire church was full of priests.

Now he’s back.

Rocky has stopped in the darkened doorway beneath the organ loft. The instrument’s pipes stick up above him like a row of quill pens.