Lars Kepler - Hunter

Jeanette suddenly sees the woman. She’s standing a short distance away, spitting on the ground as she knocks on one of the driver’s cabs. She leans heavily on the huge front wheel.

‘Where else have you worked?’ Jeanette asks when she catches up to her.

‘I used to work in really fancy places.’

‘Have you ever had any clients in Djursholm?’

‘I only take the best,’ the woman mumbles.

The cab door opens and a heavy man with glasses and a beard looks at them. He blows Jeanette a kiss, then looks impatiently at the other woman.

‘What do you want?’ he asks.

‘I was just wondering if you’d like some company,’ she replies.

‘You’re too ugly,’ the man says, but doesn’t close the door.

‘No, I’m not,’ she replies. It’s obvious that the man is enjoying being cruel to her.

‘So what part of you isn’t ugly?’

The woman pulls her top up, showing her pale breasts.

‘And you expect to get paid for those?’ he says, but still beckons her into the cab with his head.

Jeanette watches the woman clamber up into the cab and close the door behind her. She waits for a while in the darkness, listening to the creak of the springs in the seats.

Headlights sweep the ground and the shadows quickly slide away. Laughter and muffled music reach her from the other end of the lorry park.

A drunk woman shrieks somewhere, her voice angry and hoarse.

Jeanette peers under the trailer. In the distance a cigarette falls to the ground in a cascade of sparks before someone stamps it out. She detects a movement from the other direction. It looks like someone’s crawling on all fours under the lorries, heading towards her. A shiver runs down her spine. Jeanette starts to walk towards the restaurant.

Another lorry is on its way into the car park, but stops with a squeal to let her pass. The brakes wheeze. A chain clanks as it sways beneath the vehicle. Jeanette can’t see the driver, but still walks across the road through the dazzling glare of its headlights.

She looks around as she gets close to the restaurant, but there’s no one following her.

Jeanette slows down a little and decides to take her torn tights off and wash the cut on her leg before she calls Saga.

She goes over to the bathroom, but all the cubicles are occupied. The blood has congealed around the wound and run down her calf.

The thin metal door of one of the toilets swings open and a woman with bleached blonde hair emerges. She’s clutching her phone to her ear and is yelling that she had a client, and that she can’t do everything at once.

The woman disappears down the hall, waving her arms angrily.

A handwritten sign saying ‘Out of order’ has been taped to the door, but Jeanette goes in anyway and locks it behind her.

It’s a disabled toilet, with thin metal walls. The white armrest is folded up, and there’s an illuminated red alarm button close to the floor.

She takes off her torn tights and throws them away. There are lots of used condoms in the bin. There’s wet toilet paper all over the floor and the walls are covered with graffiti.

Jeanette looks at herself in the mirror, takes her powder out of her purse and leans over the sink. She can hear someone in the cubicle next to her, moving around in the confined space.

She powders her face and notices that there’s a round hole in the wall between her and the next cubicle. Maybe that’s where the toilet-roll dispenser used to be. She puts her powder away again and turns around to see that the wall is moving slightly.

Someone is leaning against it from the other side.

There’s a rustling sound and a folded banknote falls onto the floor from the hole. The wall creaks. Jeanette is about to say something when a large penis appears, dangling through the hole in front of her.

The situation is so absurd that she can’t help smiling.

A memory of something she once read about a swingers’ club in France flashes into her head, about them having rooms like this.

The man on the other side thinks she’s a prostitute.

She stands there for a moment, and swallows hard. She stares at the penis, feeling her heart beating fast in her chest, then looks at the door to make sure it’s definitely locked.

Slowly she reaches out and takes hold of the warm, thick member.

Jeanette squeezes it gently and feels it stiffen and start to rise. She gently strokes back and forth, and then lets go of it.

She has no idea why she does it, but she leans forward and takes the penis in her mouth, sucks it tentatively, feeling it swell and get stiffer. She pauses for breath, puts her hand between her thighs, pulls her underwear down and steps out of it as she massages the erect penis.

She tries to breathe quietly. She thinks she’s going to stop. She can’t do something like this. She’s crazy. Her pulse is throbbing. She turns around and holds onto the cistern with one hand. Her legs are trembling as she stands on tiptoe, bends the penis down and lets it slide into her from behind. She gasps and looks over at the lock again. The metal wall creaks as Jeanette is pushed forward, and she clings onto the cistern and pushes her backside against the cool metal.

Saga is sitting opposite Tamara in one of the booths in the restaurant, waiting while she eats a plate of French fries with ketchup on the side. A streak of snot shimmers under her nose. Beneath them traffic passes by on the highway, white lights in one direction, red in the other.

‘How well do you know Sofia Stefansson?’ Saga asks.

Tamara shrugs, and drinks some of her milkshake through the straw, sucking her cheeks in. Her forehead turns white.

‘Brain-freeze,’ she gasps when she finally lets go of the straw.

She carefully dips the fries in the ketchup and eats, smiling softly to herself.

‘Who did you say you were again?’ she asks.

‘I’m a friend of Sofia’s,’ Saga says.

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Could she have faked working as a prostitute?’

‘Faked it? What the hell do you mean? We did a job together in a building’s rubbish collection room once … she got fucked up the ass … I don’t know if that counts as faking?’

Tamara’s face suddenly goes slack again, as if she were lost in some absorbing memory.

‘Why did you stop working as an escort in Stockholm?’ Saga asks.

‘You could go a long way too … I’ve got contacts, I used to be a lingerie model … just without the lingerie,’ Tamara says, and shakes with soundless laughter.

‘You once had a client out in Djursholm, a big house facing the water. He may have said his name was Wille,’ Saga says calmly.

‘Maybe,’ Tamara says, eating the fries with her mouth open.

‘Do you remember him?’ Saga asks.

‘No,’ Tamara yawns, then wipes her hands on her skirt and tips the contents of her bag onto the table.

A hairbrush, a roll of plastic bags, a stump of mascara, condoms and perfume from Victoria’s Secret roll out across the wax tablecloth. Saga notes that Tamara has three dark-brown glass ampules of Demerol, an extremely addictive opioid. Tamara presses a Valium from a blister-pack of ten pale blue pills, and washes it down with Pepsi.

Saga waits patiently until she has swept everything back into her bag again, then takes out a photograph of the Foreign Minister.

‘I don’t give a shit about him,’ Tamara says, then purses her lips.

‘Did he speak to anyone on the phone while you were there?’

‘Seriously. He was really stressed and drank a lot. He kept going on about how the cops ought to stand to attention … he said it, like, a hundred times.’

‘That the police ought to stand to attention?’

‘Yes … and that there was a guy with two faces who was after him.’