Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

Joona stops in front of the stolen car and thinks that Nelly was fourteen when she started at Klockhammar School outside Örebro. She was at boarding school for six years. It’s possible that she didn’t see her parents at all during that time, but never let go of her fixation on her father.

The feeling of loving and being rejected, of giving everything and having everything taken from you, led to her developing a serious personality disorder.

She studied her mother, tried to be like her, to take her place.

Rocky has got his shoes back on but is holding his socks in his hand as he comes down to the car park and opens the door.

‘Is the unclean preacher a woman?’ Joona asks.

‘I don’t think so,’ Rocky replies, looking him in the eye.

‘Do you remember Nelly Brandt?’

‘No,’ he says, getting in the passenger seat.

Joona removes the plastic covering the ignition cylinder, twines the red wires together, removes the tape from the brown starter wires and touches the ends together, causing a spark as the engine bursts into life.

‘I don’t know how much you remember from being hypnotised,’ Joona says as he drives. ‘But you talked about the first time you saw the unclean preacher... You met her at a funeral here in Sköldinge, but the person you described was the priest in the coffin, her father, Peter...’

Rocky doesn’t answer, just stares blankly through the windscreen as their speed increases along the narrow road through the fields and forest.

Joona thinks that the mother went to fetch her grown-up daughter from Klockhammar School and let her drive back.

Her mother was sitting next to her, maybe took her seat belt off when they turned off the main road and drove up to the church.

Nelly probably saw her father in the windows of the rectory as she suddenly put her foot down and drove straight into the wall.

Perhaps her mother wasn’t dead, just badly hurt and trapped in the wreckage.

In which case what Ellinor saw through the rain makes sense, Nelly fetched the car-jack from the boot and beat her mother in the face until she was dead.

Perhaps she set light to the car in front of her father’s eyes.

But after her mother’s death Nelly looked after him, isolated him from the world around him, keeping him to herself, and becoming everything for him.

Her father lived another two years. Nelly kept him locked up and helpless, keeping him in a cage and making him dependent on morphine.

She would let him out on Sundays and gave him sermons that she had written for the morning service.

He was broken, a wreck, an addict.

Joona thinks that they may have had fragments of normal life, it isn’t unusual that people who are held captive for a long period of time are allowed short periods of normal life with their captor. Perhaps they ate dinner together, sat on the sofa, watched particular television programmes.

In the end he worked out how to lock his cage from the inside, and slept on the mattress.

It’s possible that he died of an overdose, unless he just got ill.

A large number of priests attended the funeral, some of them sitting in the pews while others assisted with the ceremony.

One of those priests was Rocky Kyrklund from the parish of Salem.

They’ve just driven past Flen, and a lake is shimmering silver and blue to the right of the car as Joona takes out his phone, brings up a list of staff at the Karolinska Institute and finds a photograph of Nelly.

‘Look at this picture,’ he says.

Rocky takes the phone, holds the screen away from the daylight and then gasps for breath.

‘Stop!’ he roars. ‘Stop the car!’

He opens the door as they’re speeding along, but it hits a railing and bounces back, and glass from the broken window flies into the car. The door is hanging loose, scraping along the tarmac. Joona pulls over to the verge and comes to a halt with two wheels up on the grass.

A lorry blows its horn angrily behind them and passes so close that the ground shakes.

Rocky walks out into the field beside the road, striding past the plastic-wrapped bales of hay lying scattered across the ground, stops, and holds his face in his hands.

Joona sits there with the engine running, picks his phone off the floor and tries to call Erik again. Rocky stands in the field with his face turned up towards the sky for a long while before returning to the car. He yanks the broken door off, tosses it in the ditch and gets back in his seat.

‘I remember her,’ he says without looking at Joona. ‘She had her head shaved, pale as candle-wax, she went to Klockhammar School... After the funeral I had sex with her on the floor of the hall in the rectory... it didn’t mean anything, we’d been talking and drinking coffee, and I was in no hurry to get home.’

Joona says nothing, aware that even though the photograph triggered Rocky’s memory, the flood of information is finite. He could lose touch with his past again at any moment.

‘I remember it all,’ Rocky says dreamily. ‘She came looking for me in Salem, came to the services... She was just there, as part of my life, without me really realising how it had happened...’

He drifts off in thought and pokes a cigarette out of the packet with trembling hands. His rough grey hair is frizzy and his thick eyebrows have tightened across the top of his nose.

‘I’m a priest,’ he says eventually. ‘But I’m also a man... I do things I might not always be proud of. I’m not boyfriend material, I’m clear about that, I’ve never been faithful or...’

He falls silent again as if the strength of his memories has taken his breath away.

‘Sometimes I slept with her, sometimes she had to wait, I never promised her anything, I didn’t want her fucking sermons... I remember, it was always about me watching out for promiscuous women... “Her house is the way to hell”...’

The car shakes as a bus drives past, and Joona sees Rocky gaze out across the field and lake at the little cluster of trees in the distance.

‘When I told her I was fed up with her, she disappeared,’ he goes on. ‘But I understood that she was still creeping around outside the rectory... I opened the door and shouted into the darkness, telling her to leave me the fuck alone.’

He stops talking again and Joona waits in silence so as not to pull Rocky out of his fragile reminiscences.

‘The following evening she came to the church with twenty capsules of white heroin and it all started again... it went fucking fast,’ he says, looking gloomily at Joona. ‘I was hooked as good as instantly. We shared needles, she followed me everywhere, talking about God, preaching, sank into squalor with me, wanted to be with me, wanted to be part of me.’ He shakes his head and rubs his face.

‘We hung out at the Zone, I didn’t care about all her preaching... it was mostly extreme interpretations of the Bible, proof that we should get married... a whole worldview in which a jealous God proved her right.’

A trace of pain flashes in his eyes as he looks darkly at Joona.

‘I was drugged and stupid,’ he says. ‘I told her I loved Natalia. It wasn’t true, but I still said it.’

All the energy goes out of him and his chin sinks to his chest.

‘Natalia had such beautiful hands,’ he says, then falls silent.

His face is suddenly very pale and he looks out at the fields. His forehead is shiny with sweat, and a drop falls from his nose on to his chest.

‘You were talking about Natalia,’ Joona says after a while.

‘What?’

Rocky looks at him uncomprehendingly, leans out of the car and spits on the grass. A car pulling a trailer full of chopped wood drives past.

‘Nelly showed pictures of the people she was planning to kill,’ Joona goes on. ‘But Natalia had to die in front of you...’