Ларс Кеплер - The Rabbit Hunter

DJ goes to meet him, takes one glass and leads him back to the others.

Rex remains standing in the dining room and watches them go. His head is roaring, but he tells himself that he needs to stick it out, if only for one night. He’ll put up with it for a few more hours, then come up with an excuse so he and Sammy can go home first thing tomorrow morning.

He tries to convince himself that he’s doing this because it’s important. It’s a way for him to secure his financial future in case Sylvia ever gets so sick of him that she lets him go.

Like everyone at Ludviksberg, he must have treated plenty of people badly in his time. That was part and parcel of being privileged, but Rex could never accept the beating. He walked out of the school before breakfast the next day and he never went back.

‘OK, listen,’ DJ says, clapping his hands to get everyone’s attention. ‘The reindeer here are far more elusive than wild ones.’

Rex slowly walks back to join the men in the lounge as DJ goes through the rules.

‘I’ve been reindeer-hunting in Norway,’ Lawrence says in his deep voice. ‘We sat in a hide for eight hours and didn’t get a single clean shot.’

‘But here we’re stalking our prey,’ DJ reminds them. ‘You hunt in small teams, creep up on the reindeer, read the terrain, look for tracks. It’s fucking exciting... to get close enough you have to be absolutely silent, and know which direction the wind is blowing.’

‘And we have no backup plan,’ Rex jokes with a wide smile. ‘If none of us bring down a reindeer, I won’t have anything but potatoes to cook for dinner.’

Half an hour later DJ is standing on the broad steps of the deck handing out guns and ammunition.

‘The rifle I’ve chosen is a Remington 700 with a synthetic butt,’ he says, holding up a blue-green rifle with a black barrel.

‘Good weapon,’ Lawrence murmurs.

‘James, I have a left-handed one for you,’ DJ adds.

‘Thanks.’

‘It weighs 2.9 kilos, so you should all be OK,’ DJ smiles, then holds up a brown box. ‘We’re using .375 Holland & Holland, and you only get twenty rounds.’

He tosses the box to Rex.

‘So aim carefully.’

They take their equipment and start to walk around to the other side of the hotel. The sky is grey and unsettled, the air smells like rain, and a gusty wind is blowing through the low bushes.

DJ leads them along a path up the slope, and explains that it’s a forty-minute hike to the gates and the feeding grounds.

‘The whole enclosure is six hundred and eighty acres, and covers wooded valleys, bare hilltops, and a few small lakes, including Kratersjön, as well as some steep mountain cliffs towards the south, so you need to watch your step.’

The landscape is brown and the air fresh and full of moisture. It smells like forest, heather and wet leaves.

‘Having fun?’ Sammy asks, with a gentle but unmistakeable note of derision.

‘It’s just work,’ Rex replies. ‘But I’m happy you’re here.’

His son gives him a sideways glance.

‘You don’t seem very happy, Dad.’

‘I’ll tell you later.’

‘What?’

Rex is about to admit that he can’t handle this, that he wants to get away as soon as possible, when DJ falls in alongside them. He shows them how to load, demonstrates the single-stage trigger and the safety catch on the side.

‘How are you doing, Sammy?’ he asks with a smile.

‘Sorry, but I don’t get the point of shooting reindeer in an enclosure... I mean, they can’t go anywhere. It’s like the Hunger Games , but without the right to self-defence.’

‘I hear what you’re saying,’ DJ says patiently. ‘But at the same time, if you compare this with the meat industry, it couldn’t be more free-range. The enclosure covers more than three million square metres.’

Rex looks at James’s and Kent’s broad backs, the rifles over their shoulders. James turns around and hands him a silver hipflask. Rex takes it and passes it on without drinking.

‘How’s Anna doing? She was looking better when we saw her at the awards ceremony,’ Kent says.

‘She has her hair back, but they don’t think she’ll make it to winter,’ James replies. ‘My wife has cancer,’ he explains to Rex.

‘Do you have children?’

‘Yes... a boy who’s twenty, studying law at Harvard... and an afterthought, Elsa, she’s nine. She just wants to be with her mum all the time, nothing else.’

They climb diagonally up a hillside, and see that the landscape curves down into a deep valley. The view is spectacular.

‘So we’re all going to put our school uniforms on tomorrow, then?’ Lawrence jokes.

‘Oh God,’ Kent sighs.

‘Christ, all that church-going, and those Sunday dinners... we’d never have survived without microwave pizzas and nips of cognac.’

‘Or Wille, calling his family’s chauffeur and getting him to drive all the way from Stockholm with a case of champagne,’ Kent chuckles, then turns suddenly sombre.

‘I can’t believe he and Teddy are both dead,’ James says quietly.

Jeanette Fleming is standing next to a lilac bush, staring at rows of brown houses. The silver clip in her short hair glitters in the sunlight. She’s wearing a tight skirt and has a Glock 26 in a holster under her jacket.

In the distance she sees her plain-clothes colleagues from Stockholm Police ring the doorbell of the neglected house at the far end of the street.

The NOU have traced Sammy’s phone here.

Rex’s son could be the only person who knows where his father and the spree killer, David Jordan Andersen, are.

The officers wait a few moments before ringing again.

Some children bike by, and a woman in a burka walks past pulling a wheeled suitcase.

The door opens and Jeanette sees the officers say something to a figure in the hallway before going inside.

Her colleagues’ only task is to make sure the house is safe so Jeanette can conduct a brief interview with Sammy there.

Jeanette thinks about how pale her boss had looked when he came into her office after Anja Larsson demanded that he loan Jeanette to them as part of the ongoing collaboration between the two bodies.

She walks around the block of houses and stops at the back. Unlike the other yards, this one is overgrown and wild. She can see an old barbecue through the tall weeds, and there are rusted bicycle parts on the cracked stepping stones.

There’s no sign of movement behind the closed blinds.

Jeanette gets her lipstick out of her bag and touches up her make-up. She thinks about the fact that even though she is the best psychological interviewer in the country, she has very little understanding of her own behaviour.

She was on a job with Saga Bauer, at a service station southwest of Nyköping.

Jeanette still can’t understand what happened.

She hadn’t really believed people actually did that sort of thing.

It could have been tragic, it could have been comical, but her surprise and embarrassment had turned to genuine, unexpected, and inexplicable lust.

The anonymous copulation had taken a couple of minutes at most, and she didn’t have time to regret her actions before she felt him come. She was so surprised that she gasped ‘Stop!’ and pulled away, stumbling and hitting her knee on the floor. She’d rinsed her mouth and crotch, then sat back down on the toilet to let the semen trickle out of her.

For hours afterwards she felt mentally numb, and ever since she has been veering between feeling stupid and feeling oddly liberated.

Sometimes when she sees men out in the street, often older men, ugly and coarse, she is overwhelmed by shame and has to look away, her cheeks burning.