Ларс Кеплер - The Rabbit Hunter

‘The same eyes?’

‘Yes.’

‘You had a child,’ Saga whispers, and a shiver runs down her spine when she realises that the child is the unknown factor that Joona had been talking about.

‘I had a child,’ Grace repeats quietly.

‘And you think that Rex is the father?’ Saga asks, shaking her head.

‘I know he is,’ she replies, brushing away a tear. ‘But I didn’t tell Mum and Dad... I spent three weeks in the hospital, and said I’d been hit by a truck, and that all I wanted was to come back to Chicago...’

She wobbles again and puts her hand to her mouth.

‘I... I should probably lie down,’ she whispers to herself.

‘I’ll help you,’ Saga says, guiding her slowly across the floor.

‘Thanks,’ she says, and sinks onto the bed, lies down on her side and closes her eyes.

‘Did you give birth alone?’

‘When I realised it was time, I went out to the barn so I didn’t make a mess,’ she says, blinking tiredly. ‘They say I became psychotic, but to me it was reality... I hid myself away in order to survive.’

‘And the child?’

‘Mum and Dad used to come some weekends, and when they did he would have to take care of himself, I used to hide him in a cot... because I had to be indoors, sit at the table, sleep in my bed.’

Grace reaches to open the drawer in the bedside table. She puts her hand in and closes her eyes for a few moments, gathering her strength before pulling out a framed photograph and handing it to Saga.

In the picture a young man with a shaved head is squinting at the camera. He’s wearing sand-coloured combat fatigues, and a bulletproof vest and is holding an MK12 by his side.

He’s the unknown factor in the rape.

The man in the picture has burned his cheeks and nose in the sun.

On his shoulder is an oval black and yellow badge, bearing an eagle, an anchor, a trident, a flintlock pistol, and the words ‘Seal Team Three’.

The Seals.

‘Is this your son?’

‘Jordan,’ she whispers with her eyes closed.

‘Does Rex know about him?’

‘What?’ Grace gasps, and tries to sit up.

‘Does he know you gave birth to a child, and that he’s the father?’

‘No, he must never know,’ she says, and her mouth and chin start to tremble so much that she has trouble speaking. ‘He has nothing to do with Jordan. He raped me, that’s all. He must never meet Jordan, he must never look at him... that would be awful...’

She sinks back onto the bed, puts both hands over her face, shakes her head and then lies still.

‘But what if he wasn’t there?’ Saga starts to say, but breaks off when she realises that Grace is asleep.

Saga tries to wake her, but it’s impossible. She sits down on the edge of the bed, checks her pulse, and listens to her regular breathing.

DJ sits down heavily in one of the armchairs in the foyer and leans back against the headrest. The rain is drumming on the windows and roof. On the table in front of him lie three of the five hunting rifles.

His heart is beating far too fast and his body is twitching spasmodically. His neck tenses, as if someone were holding it tightly. His narcolepsy threatens to overwhelm him.

He’s destroyed all the phones, the wireless router and every computer in the hotel.

He’s trying to think strategically, keeps asking himself if there are any other preparations he needs to make, but his thoughts devolve into peculiar fantasies each time.

DJ was planning on finishing them all off inside the enclosure, but only managed to get rid of one of them because of the storm.

He had stood in front of the deep ravine, watching the rain sweep in towards the valley.

Over the course of nineteen minutes, Kent Wrangel had begged for his life something like a hundred times, and had sworn he was innocent almost as often.

DJ hadn’t wounded him particularly badly, just stuck his hunting knife into his stomach, just above his pubic bone, then held his shaking body upright on the edge of the deep ravine.

He stood there with the knife in Kent’s stomach, explaining why this was happening.

Kent gasped for breath as his gut filled up with blood.

DJ had tilted the sharp blade of the knife upward, and whenever Kent got tired or slumped to the ground slightly, the knife cut higher into his guts.

Towards the end Kent had been in agony. One knee almost buckled several times, and the knife had slid up diagonally towards his ribs.

Blood filled his boots and started to overflow.

‘And now the kite string breaks,’ DJ said, pulling the knife out, looking Kent in the eye and shoving him in the chest with both hands, out over the edge.

DJ wipes his mouth, glances over towards the hallway leading to the hotel rooms, and starts to remove the cartridges from the rifles. He opens the duffle bag on the floor in front of his feet and drops the ammunition into the compartment next to the underwear.

It’s time to bring this to a conclusion.

First Lawrence, or possibly James, and then, last of all, Rex.

Maybe he’ll have time to kill one of them before all hell breaks loose, before the screaming starts and they start running.

But fear has never saved the rabbits.

He knows that their panic follows simple patterns.

His hands tremble slightly as he fits the silencer to his pistol, inserts a fresh magazine, and puts it back in the bag, next to the short-handled axe.

If they don’t come out soon, he’ll have to start going from room to room.

He takes out his black SOCP dagger, wipes the grease from the blade, and checks the cutting edge.

His mother was left pregnant after the rape, but it probably wasn’t until he was born that her psychosis really hit her.

She was only nineteen years old, and must have been horribly lonely and frightened.

DJ doesn’t remember his early years, but now knows that she gave birth to him alone, and kept his existence a secret. She hid him out in the barn. His first memory is of lying under a blanket, freezing, eating beans from a tin.

He has no idea how old he was then.

Throughout his childhood her chaotic psyche became part of his life, part of his perception of reality.

His maternal grandparents didn’t move home for good until Lyndon White Holland’s long stint as ambassador to Sweden came to an end.

DJ was almost nine when his grandfather found him in the barn.

At the time he spoke a mixture of Swedish and English, and hadn’t really understood that he was a human being.

It took time to get used to his new circumstances.

His mother was looked after at home. She was kept heavily medicated and spent most of her time in bed with the curtains drawn.

Sometimes she got frightened and started screaming, and sometimes she hit him for leaving the door open.

Sometimes he told her about the rabbits they had shot that day.

Sometimes they would sit on the floor next to the bed together, singing her nursery rhyme until she fell asleep.

A year or so later he recorded the whole rhyme for her on a cassette tape so she could listen to it if she felt anxious.

His mum never wanted to talk about his dad, but once, when he was thirteen and her medication had just been changed, she told him about Rex.

It was the only time that happened during his childhood, and he can still remember those few sentences by heart. As a child, he clung to every little word, building whole worlds of hope around what she had said.

He had learned that they had been in love, and had to meet in secret, like Romeo and Juliet, before she came back to Chicago.

DJ couldn’t understand why he didn’t go with her.

She replied that Rex didn’t want children, and that she had promised not to get pregnant.