Ларс Кеплер - The Rabbit Hunter

She closes the glass door behind her, moves some buckets out of the way and sits down on the metal stool and stares out into space. When Micke opens the door she jumps and gets up.

‘Hi, Mum,’ he says, holding up a bottle of champagne in a gift-bag.

‘It didn’t work,’ she says bitterly.

‘What didn’t work?’

She turns away and starts to remove dead leaves from a sugar plum just to give her hands something to do.

‘He leads a different kind of life,’ she says.

‘But I thought...’

He trails off, and she turns to look at him again with a sigh. It still surprises her that he’s an adult. Time froze when she was locked up in prison, and her sons somehow remained five and seven years old in her head. They will forever be two little boys in their pyjamas who love it when she chases and tickles them.

‘Mum... he seems to make you happy.’

‘He’ll never stop being a policeman.’

‘That doesn’t matter, does it?’ Micke says. ‘I mean, you’re not really in a position to dictate how people should live their lives...’

‘You don’t understand... while he was in prison I didn’t have to feel ashamed of the way I turned out.’

‘Has he made you feel ashamed?’

She nods, but suddenly isn’t sure if it’s true. An unpleasant chill blossoms in her chest.

‘What exactly happened, Mum?’ Micke asks, carefully putting the bottle of champagne down on the floor.

Valeria whispers that maybe she should call and talk to him. She leaves the greenhouse, wiping tears from her cheeks, and tries to stay calm, but still finds herself walking faster. She pulls her boots off in the hallway and hurries into her bedroom, picks up her phone and calls him.

She gets put through to Joona’s voicemail. She hears the short bleep and takes a deep breath.

‘I need a police officer to come and arrest me for being so stupid,’ she says, then ends the call.

A sob rises in her throat and her eyes fill with tears. She sits down on the bed and covers her face with both hands.

The Rabbit Hunter leaves the car on a forest track, slings his bag over his shoulder and walks to the guest marina at Malma Kvarn, where he selects an older model Silver Fox with a powerful engine. He climbs on board, breaks open the ignition cover, connects the cable from the starter engine to the one from the battery, and immediately hears a dull rumble.

Thirty metres away, a family are unloading a sailing boat. The youngest children are standing on the pier looking very tired in their red life jackets.

Clouds sail across the sky.

The Rabbit Hunter unties the boat and steers out through the sound.

The wind is strong out on the open water and he has to take care to steer into the largest of the waves. The radio crackles as he tries to find the right frequency, and he hears fragments of a coastguard conversation about a rescue operation.

The Rabbit Hunter steers towards Munkön, in order to make his way through the outer archipelago to reach Bullerön.

A wave hits the windshield and the water runs down the glass just as he manages to pick up the coastguard’s message over the radio.

There seems to have been some sort of accident.

The air ambulance has reached Södermalm Hospital.

The aluminium hull shudders as the bow hits the waves, then he hears that the police have arrested a man on Bullerön and have him on board coastguard vessel 311.

In order to hear better the Rabbit Hunter pulls the cables apart, stopping the engine.

The man has been arrested for attempted murder and kidnapping, and is being taken to Kronoberg Prison in Stockholm.

It’s Oscar, they’ve taken him.

The Rabbit Hunter thinks of a grey rabbit changing direction as it runs, its paws kicking up a cloud of dust.

He sinks onto the deck and covers his ears with his hands.

Oscar got rich from hedge-fund money and other people’s retirement accounts — and, many years ago, he raped a girl with his friends. He kicked her, put on a pair of white rabbit’s ears and a bowtie, then raped her a second time with a bottle.

The boat is rolling hard on the waves, and he has to cling on to stop himself from pitching over.

He can’t understand how the police managed to trace Oscar so quickly. It’s simply not possible.

Oscar is getting away, like a rabbit darting into its hole.

He had been so sure he would succeed.

It was like following a rabbit with myxomatosis, the disease that covers them in sores around their nose and eyes, blinds them, and makes them so weak that in the end you can just walk up and kill them by standing on them.

He doesn’t want to think about it, but his brain conjures up images of him as a boy rinsing the slaughterhouse bench and tiled floor with a hose — the blood and viscera swirling down into the drain.

There’s a sudden bang and he falls sideways, gets up and realises that he’s drifted onto some rocks. A large wave foams over the railing, and he hits his head on the steel frame of the windshield before regaining his balance.

He fumbles with the cables again and there’s a spark. He does it once more, and the engine comes to life.

The boat lurches sideways. Water splashes in around his legs, and the hull buckles against the rocks, shedding dark-blue flakes of paint.

He puts the boat in reverse and it floats reluctantly backward. The rocks scrape a silver groove along the painted side before the boat comes to a halt again.

He screams so loud that his voice breaks.

The next wave rolls in and pushes the boat forward with a shriek of metal, and white spray fills the air. He powers up the engine as the water turns and lifts the boat from the rocks. Moving backwards, he turns and steers back towards Värmdö again.

Tomorrow he will be waiting outside Police Headquarters until the custody hearing is complete. If Oscar is released on bail, he’ll try to flee the country, either by car or boat. But everything will be far more complicated if he’s remanded in custody until his court date.

The Chicago FBI is headquartered in a shimmering glass complex in a drab part of the city.

Saga is sitting with a Commissioner Lowe, in a conference room with a wall to wall blue and yellow carpet.

Saga has apologised and explained that she didn’t see anyone waiting for her at the airport, and that she assumed they would be meeting up after her visit to the treatment centre.

Since her visit to the rehab centre Saga has called Joona more than ten times, but his phone has been switched off.

It’s evening now, and the office is almost empty. A detective from Washington comes into the conference room and puts her bag down on the table. The short woman with black eyes and plaited hair has a deep furrow across her brow.

‘Special Agent López,’ she says in English, without a trace of a smile.

‘Saga Bauer.’

They shake hands and López unbuttons her jacket.

‘Our acting Defence Secretary was murdered in Sweden because you and your colleagues did such a terrible job.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Saga says.

‘What can you tell me about the terrorists?’ López asks, leaning back in her chair.

‘Speaking personally, I don’t think we’re dealing with terrorists. But obviously we’re following all possible lines of inquiry.’

López raises her eyebrows sceptically.

‘Such as coming here?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you find?’

‘It’s way above my pay-grade to determine the extent to which I can share information—’

‘I don’t give a damn about that,’ López interrupts.

‘I need to speak to my boss,’ Saga says.

‘Go ahead.’