Ларс Кеплер - The Rabbit Hunter

The Rabbit Hunter is planning to slice open Oscar’s stomach and pull his intestines out.

He wants each of them to have to confront his own death.

The purpose of the rhyme is to prepare them.

At the beginning, he wants them to hope that they might survive, despite all the pain and fear, so that they struggle desperately even as it slowly dawns on them that any future life will be very different from the one they’ve known.

They need to realise that they will be blind, or missing a limb, or paralysed.

They should go on fighting for their lives until the second stage, when they realise that there is no mercy, that this pain and fear are the last things they will ever experience.

The Rabbit Hunter takes no pleasure in their suffering, but he is filled with an elevated sense of justice — and then when they finally die, the world becomes completely still, like a winter landscape.

In the terminal he checks in using one of the automated machines, prints his boarding card, then follows the stream of people on board. The M/S Silja Symphony is more than two hundred metres long, with thirteen decks, and with its almost one thousand cabins, it carries more passengers than the Titanic did.

The Rabbit Hunter holds up his fake ID. He’s given the made-up last name ‘von Creutschen’ so that he ends up next to Oscar on the passenger list. He makes a note of Oscar’s cabin number from the screen, goes over to the map by the lifts, then goes downstairs to the staff quarters.

The Rabbit Hunter waits outside the staffroom. After a minute or so, a woman comes out. He catches the door, holds it open for her, and asks after Maria, to demonstrate that he has a valid reason for being there as he goes inside. He passes two men changing out of their street clothes, and says hello to a woman who is typing a message on her phone.

‘Do you have a master key-card?’ he asks.

‘I need mine,’ she replies without looking up.

‘I’ll get it back to you in no time,’ he says with a smile.

‘Ask Ramona,’ the woman replies, nodding towards the bathroom.

There’s a grey and pink imitation-leather gym bag on the bench outside the bathroom. He unzips it and searches through the clothes, running his hands over the bottom of the bag as the toilet flushes.

He quickly searches the two inside pockets as he hears her wash her hands and pull out some paper towels. He opens the two side pockets and finds Ramona’s ID and master key-card just as the lock on the door clicks.

As the door swings open he walks away calmly, card in his hand.

He’d allowed himself fifteen minutes to find a key-card, but it’s only taken five.

Not needing to use his crowbar will give him more time with Oscar in his cabin.

He carries his bag up the carpeted stairs, past decks housing the bars and restaurants, the avenue of tax-free shops, the hallways of meeting rooms, one-armed bandits and the casino.

The top deck, named after Mozart, is where the most exclusive suites are.

A drunk woman emerges from a cabin and stumbles towards him. She blocks the hallway with her arms, as if they are playing a game.

‘You look nice,’ she says with a giggle. ‘Do you want to come to my cabin and help me with...’

It’s as if something snaps in his head, he hears a crackling sound in one ear and reaches out for the wall for support as he remembers how he wept when he nailed up the remains of his latest kills around the door next to the rotting rabbits.

Now they’ll stay away, now they’ll stay away , he whispered.

The Rabbit Hunter merely smiles at the woman as he passes her. Sweat is running down his back and he finds himself thinking about the heat from the burning wheelchair.

He found the petrol in the tool-shed, and the matches in the kitchen, then he updated Nils Gilbert’s Facebook status with a suicide note.

He went out and poured petrol all over him, told him why he was going to die, and then tossed the lit match on his lap.

The heat made him back away as he listened to Gilbert’s growling roar and watched the contorting body through the flames for nineteen minutes.

The body shrank in on itself and turned black.

Everyone knew that Gilbert was lonely and depressed, and the police would never think of linking his suicide with the other deaths.

Now the Rabbit Hunter stops at the back of the ship, in front of the door leading to a suite bearing the peculiar name ‘Nannerl’. He hears voices behind him as he slips on a pair of vinyl gloves, goes into the suite using the master key-card, and closes the door silently behind him.

He puts his bag down on the floor and takes out a blood-smeared plastic bag from which he pulls out the leather strap with the ten rabbits’ ears fastened to it.

The Rabbit Hunter turns towards the mirror in the hall, puts the strap around his head and ties it at the back of his neck. With a familiar gesture he flicks some of the ears away from his face, then looks at his reflection, which fills him with cold power.

Now he’s a hunter again.

He pulls out one of his pay-as-you-go phones and sends the audio file to Oscar. He hears a smartphone beep in the bedroom, then the sound of the rhyme playing.

Oscar is probably alone, but the Rabbit Hunter still checks the bathroom just to be sure, then quickly makes sure the living room is empty.

He can see the oil-black water of the harbour through the streaked windows.

He pushes the bedroom door open and marches in.

A football match is muted on the television. A bluish-grey glow reflects off the walls of the room.

He realises at once that Oscar is hiding in the wardrobe, behind the white glass sliding door, and that he’s probably trying to call the police right now.

Everything is so mundane, yet simultaneously so strange when death comes calling.

There’s a glass of whisky on the bedside table.

He sees the dented table legs, the frayed bedspread, the dark marks on the carpet, and the smears on the mirror.

The Rabbit Hunter hears Oscar drop his phone. Oscar knows that the noise has given him away, but keeps hiding regardless because his brain is trying to tell him that the murderer might not have heard anything, that the murderer might not actually find him.

Some hangers clatter against each other inside the wardrobe.

The floor starts to vibrate as the ferry’s engines warm up.

The Rabbit Hunter waits a few seconds, then walks over and kicks the sliding glass door to pieces. He backs away instinctively as the fragments fall to the floor around Oscar von Creutz’s legs.

The middle-aged man slides to the floor in fear, and ends up crouching in the wardrobe staring up at him.

A flash of memory comes back to him, and he thinks about the rabbits’ terror when he checked the traps, turned the cages upside down, and grabbed them by their back legs.

‘Please, I can pay, I’ve got money, I swear, I—’

The Rabbit Hunter strides over and grabs one of Oscar’s legs, but he squirms and tries to get away, and the Rabbit Hunter loses his grip. He hits Oscar twice in the face, holds his arms back with one hand and grabs his leg again.

Oscar screams as the Rabbit Hunter pulls him out onto the floor and fastens his ankle to one leg of the bed with a zip tie.

‘I don’t want to!’ he roars.

Oscar lands a kick on the Rabbit Hunter’s upper arm, but he flips Oscar over, pushes him down on his side and locks his arms behind his back.

‘Listen, you don’t have to kill us,’ Oscar pants. ‘We were young, we didn’t understand, we—’

The Rabbit Hunter tapes his mouth shut and then takes a couple of steps back and stares at him for a while, watching him struggle to break free, watching him try to move his body even though the zip ties are cutting into his skin.