David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

Deep down Hanna knew the answer. It was hubris brought on by alcohol. It was the promise of a part in a new detective series on T.V.4 which had boosted his confidence still further. But most of all it was August. Westman found the boy creepy and weird, even though to Hanna that was incomprehensible. How could anyone detest August?

He sat on the floor with his puzzles and did not bother anyone. Yet he had that strange look which was turned inwards rather than outwards, which usually made people smile and say that the boy must have a rich inner life, but which got under Westman’s skin.

“Jesus, Hanna! He’s looking straight through me,” he would burst out.

“But you say that he’s just an idiot.”

“He is an idiot, but there’s something funny about him all the same. I think he hates me.”

That was nonsense, nothing more. August did not even look at Westman or at anyone else for that matter, and he surely did not have it in him to hate anybody. The world out there disturbed him and he was happiest inside his own bubble. But Westman in his drunken ravings believed that the boy was plotting something, and that must have been the reason he let August and the money slip out of their lives. Pathetic. That at least was how Hanna had interpreted it. But now, as she stood there by the sink smoking her cigarette so furiously and nervously that she got tobacco on her tongue, she wondered if there had not been something in it after all. Maybe August did hate Westman. Maybe he did want to punish him for all the punches he had taken, and maybe... Hanna closed her eyes and bit her lip... the boy hated her too.

She had started having these feelings of self-loathing ever since, at night, she was overcome by an almost unbearable sense of longing and wondered whether she and Westman might not actually have damaged August.

It was not the fact that August had filled in the right answers to the numerical sequences. That sort of thing did not particularly impress a man like Balder. No, it was something he saw lying next to the numbers. At first sight it looked like a photograph or a painting, but it was in fact a drawing, an exact representation of the traffic light on Hornsgatan which they had passed the other evening. It was exquisitely captured, in the minutest detail, with a sort of mathematical precision.

There was a glow to it. No-one had taught August anything at all about three-dimensional drawing or how an artist works with shadow and light, yet he seemed to have a perfect mastery of the techniques. The red eye of the traffic light flashed towards them and Hornsgatan’s autumn darkness closed around it, and in the middle of the street you could see the man whom Balder had noticed and vaguely recognized. The man’s head was cut off above the eyebrows. He looked frightened or at least uncomfortable and troubled, as if August had disconcerted him, and he was walking unsteadily, though goodness knows how the boy had managed to capture that.

“My God,” Balder said. “Did you do this?”

August neither nodded nor shook his head but looked over towards the window, and Balder had the strangest feeling that his life would never be the same again.

Hanna Balder needed to do some shopping. The refrigerator was empty. Lasse could come home at any moment and he would not be happy if there was not even a beer for him. But the weather outside looked ghastly so she put it off, and instead she sat in the kitchen smoking, even though it was bad for her skin and bad in general.

She scrolled through her contacts two, three times, in the hope that a new name would come up. But of course there were only the same old people, and they were all tired of her. Against her better judgement she called Mia. Mia was her agent and once upon a time they had been best friends and dreamed of conquering the world together. These days Hanna was Mia’s guilty conscience and she had lost count of all her excuses. “It’s not easy for an actress to grow older, blah, blah.” Why not just say it straight out?: “You look worn out, Hanna. The public doesn’t love you any more.”

But Mia did not answer and that was probably just as well. The conversation would not have done either of them any good. Hanna could not help looking into August’s room just to feel that stinging sense of loss which made her realize that she had failed in her life’s most important mission — motherhood. In some perverse way she took comfort in her self-pity, and she was standing there wondering whether she shouldn’t go out and get some beer after all when the telephone rang.

It was Frans. She made a face. All day she had been tempted — but did not dare — to call him to say that she wanted August back, not just because she missed the boy, still less because she thought her son would be better off with her. It was simply in order to avoid a disaster.

Lasse wanted to get the child support again. God knows what would happen , she thought, if he were to turn up in Saltsjöbaden to claim his rights . He might even drag August out of the house, scare him out of his wits and beat Frans to a pulp. She would have to warn him. But when she picked up and tried to say that to Frans, it was impossible to get a word in edgeways. He just went on and on about some strange story which was apparently “totally fantastic and completely amazing” and all that sort of thing.

“I’m sorry, Frans, I don’t understand. What are you talking about?” she said.

“August is a savant. He’s a genius.”

“Have you gone mad?”

“Quite the opposite, my love, I’ve come to my senses at last. You have to get over here, yes, really, right now! I think it’s the only way. You won’t be able to understand otherwise. I’ll pay for the taxi. I promise, you’ll flip out. He must have a photographic memory, you see? And in some incomprehensible way he must have picked up the secrets of perspective drawing all by himself. It’s so beautiful, Hanna, so precise. It shines with a light from another world.”

“What shines?”

“His traffic light. Weren’t you listening? The one we passed the other evening — he’s been drawing a whole series of perfect pictures of it, actually more than perfect...”

“More than...”

“Well, how can I put it? He hasn’t just copied it, Hanna, not just captured it exactly, he’s also added something, an artistic dimension. There’s such a strange fervour in what he’s done, and paradoxically enough also something mathematical, as if he even has some understanding of axonometry.”

“Axo...?”

“Never mind! You have to come here and see,” he said, and gradually she began to understand.

Out of the blue August had started to draw like a virtuoso, or so Frans claimed, and that would of course be fantastic if it were true. But the sad thing was that Hanna was still not happy, and at first she could not understand why. Then it dawned on her. It was because it had happened at Frans’ house. The fact was, the boy had been living with her and Lasse for years and absolutely nothing like this had happened. He had sat there with his puzzles and building blocks and not uttered a word, just having those unpleasant fits when he screamed with that piercing voice and thrashed backwards and forwards. Now, hey presto, a few weeks with Pappa and he was a genius.

It was too much. Not that she was not happy for August. But still, it hurt, and the worst thing was: she was not as surprised as she should have been. On the contrary, it felt as if she had almost seen it coming; not that the boy would draw accurate reproductions of traffic lights, but that there was something more beneath the surface.