Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

He’s standing still, irresolute. Like an apostate, he doesn’t look up at the altar, and just stares down at his big, empty hands.

The Chinese woman stands up and walks out.

Joona knocks on the door of the sacristy, nudges the door open slightly and peers into the gloom. A set of vestments is hanging ready, but the room looks empty.

Joona steps aside and looks into the gap between the hinges, sees the uneven stone wall, like billowing fabric.

He opens the door further and walks in, his pistol at his chest. He quickly looks round at the liturgical textiles. High above, pale daylight filters in through a deep alcove.

Joona crosses the floor to the toilet and opens the door, but there’s no one there. There’s a wristwatch on the shelf above the hand-basin.

He raises his pistol and opens the door to the wardrobe. Chasubles, cassocks and stoles hang side by side, different colours for different seasons of the religious calendar. Joona quickly pushes the clothes aside and looks towards the back of the wardrobe.

There’s something on the floor in one corner. A pile of magazines about sports cars.

Joona returns to the nave and walks past Rocky, who has sat down in one of the pews, and goes outside, where he asks the man by the door where the priest is.

‘That’s me,’ the man smiles, dropping his cigarette in the empty coffee mug by his feet.

‘I mean the other priest,’ Joona explains.

‘There’s only me here,’ he says.

Joona has already looked at his arms, they’re free of injection scars.

‘When were you ordained?’

‘I was ordained as a curate in Katrineholm, and four years ago I was appointed as the priest here,’ the man replies amiably.

‘Who was here before you?’

‘That was Rickard Magnusson... and before him, Erland Lodin and Peter Leer Jacobson, Mikael Friis and... I can’t remember.’

The man has cut his hand, there’s a grubby plaster across his palm.

‘This probably sounds like a strange question,’ Joona says. ‘But when would a church be full of priests... in the pews, like the congregation?’

‘When a priest is ordained, but that would be in a cathedral,’ the priest replies helpfully, picking his mug up off the ground.

‘But here?’ Joona persists. ‘Has this church ever been full of priests?’

‘That would be for a priest’s funeral... but that’s up to the family to decide, it depends who gets invited... there are no special rules for priests.’

‘Have you buried priests here?’

The man looks out across the headstones, the narrow paths and neatly trimmed bushes.

‘I know that Peter Leer Jacobson is buried here in the churchyard,’ he says quietly.

They go inside the porch, and the young priest’s arms get goose-bumps from the coolness of the stone.

‘When did he die?’ Joona asks.

‘Long before I got here. Fifteen years ago, maybe, I don’t know.’

‘Is there a record of who was here when he was buried?’

The man shakes his head and thinks for a moment.

‘No record, but his sister would know, she still lives in the widows’ home owned by the parish... He was a widower, and looked after her...’

Joona goes back inside the dimly lit church. Rocky is standing smoking beneath the medieval triumphal cross above the rood screen. Jesus and his entire emaciated body is dotted with red wounds, like an old heroin addict.

‘What does “ Ossa ipsius in pace ” mean?’ Joona asks.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘You said it under hypnosis.’

‘It means “his bones are at peace”,’ Rocky says in a rough voice.

‘You were describing a dead priest — that’s why he was wearing make-up.’

They walk quickly under the arch towards the door as Joona thinks about Rocky’s description of a funeral service with an open coffin. The deceased priest was made-up and dressed in a white cassock, but he wasn’t the unclean preacher. The funeral was simply the first time Rocky met him.

Beneath an ornate wrought-iron arch bearing the name ‘Fridhem’, a flight of stone steps leads up to the parish home for clergymen’s widows, where Peter Leer Jacobson’s older sister Ellinor was given permission to stay on after his death. Together with a younger woman from the Sköldinge village, she runs a café with a small exhibition about the village, and what life was like in bygone times for priests and their families.

Fridhem consists of three red cottages with white window frames and gables, open shutters and old-fashioned tiles on the roofs. The houses sit on three sides of a neat patch of lawn, with café tables beneath the weeping birch trees.

The two men enter the café and pass through a cramped room lined with framed black-and-white photographs. Joona glances along the pictures of buildings, teams of workers, priests’ families. Three glass cabinets contain mourning jewellery made of jet, letters, inventories and hymnbooks.

Inside the pleasant café Joona buys two cups of coffee and a plate of biscuits from an elderly women in a flowery apron. She looks nervously at Rocky, who doesn’t smile back when she tells them that the price includes a refill.

‘Excuse me,’ Joona says. ‘But you must be Ellinor? Peter Leer Jacobson’s sister?’

The woman gives him a quizzical nod. When Joona explains that they’ve just spoken to the new priest, who said so many nice things about her brother, her clear blue eyes fill with tears.

‘Peter was very, very popular,’ she says in a tremulous voice, then tries to catch her breath.

‘You must have been very proud of him,’ Joona smiles.

‘Yes, I was.’

In a rather touching gesture, she pulls her hands together over her stomach in an effort to calm down.

‘There’s something I was wondering,’ Joona goes on. ‘Did your brother have a particular colleague, someone he worked closely with?’

‘Yes... that would have been the rural dean in Katrineholm... and the vicars of Floda and Stora Malm... And I know he spent a lot of time in Lerbo Church towards the end.’

‘Did they see each other privately as well?’

‘My brother was a fine man,’ she says. ‘An honourable man, very well liked...’

Ellinor looks around the empty room, then walks round the counter and shows Joona a framed newspaper cutting from the King and Queen’s visit to Strängnäs.

‘Peter was chaplain at the jubilee service in the cathedral,’ she says in a proud voice. ‘The bishop thanked him afterwards, and—’

‘Show her your arms,’ Joona tells Rocky.

Without changing his expression at all, Rocky rolls up the sleeves of his top.

‘My brother was the orator at the diocesan meeting in Härnösand, and he—’

The old woman trails off when she sees Rocky’s ravaged arms, uneven and stained from hundreds of injection scars, dark with veins that have disintegrated from the ascorbic acid he’s used to dissolve the heroin.

‘He’s a priest too,’ Joona says without taking his eyes off her. ‘Anyone can get trapped.’

Ellinor’s wrinkled face turns pale and motionless. She sits down on the wooden bench with her hand over her mouth.

‘My brother changed after the accident... when his wife passed away,’ she says in a quiet voice. ‘Grief destroyed him, he withdrew from everyone... thought someone was following him, that everyone was spying on him.’

‘When was this?’

‘Sixteen years ago...’

‘What did your brother use to inject himself with?’

She looks at him with exhausted eyes.

‘On the boxes it said Morphine Epidural...’

The woman shakes her head and her old hands flutter restlessly over her apron.

‘I didn’t know anything... he was all alone in the end, not even his daughter could stand it, she looked after him for as long as she could, but now I understand why she couldn’t go on.’