The Chestnut Man

by Søren Sveistrup

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Well, you’re certainly not the first. I’ve watched quite a few visitors to her apartment, and I’m afraid you’re not her type. But don’t worry – I’ll tell her you said hi before I cut her throat.’

  Hess feels the petrol spill over him as Genz empties the jerrycan. It stings his eyes and the old and fresh wounds on his head, and he holds his breath until it stops pouring. He shakes his head to get the drops off, and when he opens his eyes Genz has removed his coveralls and flung the white bundle, the mask and the hairnet on to the floor. He’s standing in front of a white steel door at the end of the room, probably the one that leads to the concrete steps and the kitchen. In his hand he has a chestnut man, and as he holds Hess’s eye he strikes the head of the doll’s matchstick leg against a matchbox. It sparks. Once the flame is big enough, he throws the doll into the liquid on the floor and shuts the door behind him.

  120

  The back of the seat gives a loud crack and shifts forwards, creating a gap into the interior of the car. At long last Thulin can see light. She lies there a moment, sweaty and exhausted, her body in the boot and her head in the gap. She turns her face, and upwards to her right she can see through the rear side window: a narrow, vertical strip of light from the lamps in the yard tells her the car is parked just inside the barn.

  The lock had proved impossible to open. Instead she’d noticed the back wall starting to give when she braced with her knees, and she’d kept using the top of her back as a battering ram. Now she braces again, this time to push herself further on to the back seat. If she can find something to cut the gaffer tape around her hands and feet, then it isn’t too late. The silence from the house is unbearable, but if she can only get inside, maybe even find her gun, it will be two against one. And Hess isn’t stupid. If he’s made it down here to the farm, it must be because he’s discovered it was Genz all along, so he’d know to be careful. It is the last thought she has before she hears the sound of flames kindling with a snap. Like a sudden gust of wind inflating a sail to breaking point. It isn’t far from Thulin. Probably somewhere inside the house; maybe from the same place the screams came from, though they’ve long since gone quiet.

  Thulin holds her breath and listens. Yes, that’s fire rumbling, and she’s beginning to smell smoke. As she wriggles, trying to get her whole body on to the back seat, she racks her brains to work out what the fire means. Suddenly she remembers the two jerrycans on the table in the front room. She noticed them in a split second as she entered the room, but then her attention was diverted towards the wall, and Genz. But if fire is part of the scenario Genz has planned, then it bodes disaster for Hess. She shimmies her torso further on to the back seat, heaving her lower body round so that she is lying on her side. Using her elbows, she manages to sit up, and is about to reach for the door handle with her bound hands. In her mind she’s already found a tool to free herself so she can run into the house, but then she catches sight of him through the chink between the barn doors.

  He is coming out through the front door with one of the jerrycans in his hand, and he doesn’t stop pouring the liquid until he is at the bottom of the steps. Chucking the can back through the door, he lights the match and throws it before immediately turning to face the barn. He makes straight for her. Behind him she senses the fire spreading through the house with remorseless speed. By the time he reaches the doors, the flames in the windows have already reached the ceiling, and he is visible only in silhouette.

  Thulin flings herself behind the driver’s seat at the very moment both barn doors are tugged aside. The wild, flickering glow streams in, and she makes herself as small as possible. The front door opens, and through the seat she feels his weight against her cheek as he climbs inside. The key is inserted, the engine switched on, and as the car begins to move across the snowy yard, Thulin hears the first windows exploding in the heat.

  121

  Hess had long thought of death with indifference. Not because he hated life, but because existence was painful. He hadn’t sought help, nor had he gone to the few friends he’d had. He hadn’t taken the advice that had been given to him. Instead he’d fled. He’d run as fast as he could, the darkness chasing him, and sometimes it had worked. Small havens in foreign corners of Europe, where his mind gave itself over to new impressions and new challenges. But the darkness always returned. Along with the memories and the dead faces he gradually accumulated. He had no one, he was no one, and the debts he owed weren’t to the living, so if death did come it was no skin off his nose.

  That’s how he’d felt, but it isn’t the emotion he is left with in the basement.

  When the door slammed behind Genz and the fire began to spread, he immediately crawled across to the bloodied instrument he’d seen lying on the floor behind Rosa Hartung. It was easy to guess what it had been used for, and with the diamond-blade teeth it only took him a moment to slice through the cable ties at his wrists. He also used the blade on the ties at his feet, and by the time the fire had reached halfway round the room – now heading towards Rosa – he’d grabbed his mobile phone and gun and staggered to his feet. Clouds of black smoke were already surging beneath the ceiling, and as he watched the flames encroach he unfastened the leather straps one by one as swiftly as he could. Just as the fire leapt from the floor on to the steel table, he managed to heave Rosa’s limp body aside and carry her into the corner where Genz hadn’t poured the petrol.

  But it is a brief respite. The fire has got its teeth into the fibreboard on the walls, and soon the ceiling too, and both he and Hartung have been doused in petrol. It’s a matter of seconds before it spreads to their corner, or before the temperature in the room gets so high they both spontaneously ignite. The only exit is the door through which Genz has vanished, but it’s impossible to open, the handle already so hot that the jacket Hess has taken off bursts into flames when he tries to use it to protect his skin. The black carpet of smoke near the ceiling is steadily thickening, but then he notices the small, coiling vortexes of smoke being sucked towards a joint in the fibreboard panels on the wall directly opposite. Snatching up the saw, he presses the diamond blades into the joint and uses it like a crowbar. At his first attempt he manages to break off a corner of the panel so that he can get his fingers round, and then he tugs at it until it snaps.

  Hess finds himself staring up at a basement window with two iron bars on the inside, and in the darkness outside the rear lights of a car sweep across the yard. He jerks and tears hopelessly at the bars, and as the car vanishes into the shadows the thought crosses Hess’s mind that this is when he is going to die. He turns towards the flames and Rosa Hartung, who is lying at his feet, and it is the stump at the end of her arm that gives him the idea. Grabbing the saw, he whirls back towards the window, and his first thought is that luckily the bars don’t look any thicker than the bones it has been used to cut. The blades slice through the first bar like a knife through butter, and after three more cuts the bars are gone. Hess unfastens the window and pushes it open.

  The skin burning on his back, he lifts Hartung on to the windowsill, hauls himself up and crawls past her. As he rolls backwards out of the window, dragging her with him, he feels the flames at his neck and in his clothing, but then he lands on his back in the wet snow outside the window.

  Coughing, he gets to his feet and begins to tow Rosa Hartung across the yard. His body feels like it’s on fire, and he wants to fling himself into the snow and cool himself off while he hacks up the rest of his lungs. But when he’s made it about twenty metres away from the burning farmhouse, he leans Hartung against a stone wall. Then he begins to run.

  122

  Everything inside Thulin is screaming for her to act. Curled up in the dark behind the driver’s seat, she pays attention to the speed and especially the motion of the car as she tries to recall the road through the forest, trying to gauge when Genz will be most distracted. The snow and murk ought to be on her side. Genz has to focus on the roa
d – it is black as ink, and there are at least five or ten centimetres of snow. She tries to work out her chances of overpowering him while her hands and feet are still bound, but every second she doesn’t do something is a waste of time. She needs to get back to the farm as soon as possible. Although she didn’t dare lift her head and glance through the window as the car left the barn and crossed the yard, she sensed the ferocity of the blaze.

  Suddenly Thulin feels the car slow down. It is as though it is beginning a broad curve, and all the muscles in her body tense. She realizes they must have reached the long bend roughly halfway to the main road. She sits up abruptly, determinedly lifting her bound hands and hurling them towards the driver’s seat like a noose. The eyes in the rear-view mirror, which is faintly illuminated by the dashboard lights, see her too quickly. It’s as if he is prepared, and his hand parries with a hard blow that forces her arms back. When she tries again he lets go of the pedals and steering wheel and turns towards her, and she feels the punches rain down on to her head. At last the car rolls to a standstill, the engine idling while she lies unmoving on the back seat, gasping for air through her nostril.

  ‘To your credit, you were the only one on the murder squad I really felt I needed to keep an eye on. Of course, that means I know everything about you. Including your scent when you’ve been exerting yourself and sweating like a little pig. Are you all right?’

  His question makes no sense. He’s known all along she was there, and when he slips a knife into the gaffer tape over her mouth, she thinks for a moment he’s going to thrust it in. Instead he cuts a slit in the tape so that she can finally loosen it with her bound hands and inhale.

  ‘Where are they? What have you done with them?’

  ‘You know that already.’

  Thulin is still lying on the back seat, panting for air and picturing the burning farm.

  ‘Hess didn’t seem all that keen on breathing, actually. He asked me to say hi, by the way, before I slit your throat. If that’s any consolation.’

  Thulin shuts her eyes. There is too much stacked against her, and she feels the tears begin to flow. She cries for Hess and for Rosa Hartung, but especially for Le, who is at home and has done nothing wrong.

  ‘The Hartung girl. That was you too …?’

  ‘Yes. It was necessary.’

  ‘But why …?’

  Her voice is thin and fragile, and she hates it. For a moment there is silence. She hears a deep exhalation of breath, and when she turns her eyes towards his silhouette it’s as though he is staring pensively out into the dark. Then he shakes off his reverie and turns his shadowed face towards her.

  ‘It’s a long story. And I’m busy, and you need to sleep.’

  The hand holding the knife begins to move, and she throws up her hands in front of her.

  ‘Geeeeeeeeeeenz … !’

  The cry tears through the silence, but she doesn’t recognize the hoarse voice. It comes at a distance, as though from the depths of the woods or some place far beneath. Genz tenses, then whirls at lightning speed towards the cry. She can’t see his face, but it looks like he’s staring disbelievingly at something. Thulin struggles into a seated position so she can see out through the windscreen towards the end of the beam of light across the road. And then she understands why.

  123

  His chest is about to burst, and his heart slams against his aching ribs like a hammer. Into the air before him his breath tumbles from his mouth in white, arrhythmic clouds, and his arms shake in the cold as he tries to aim his gun at the car in front of him. It’s a good seventy-five metres away, and Hess is standing in the middle of the road at the edge of the headlights’ beam, exactly where moments earlier he’d come lurching out of the coal-black forest like the living dead.

  The first stretch through the forest was lit by the burning farm behind him. The flames cast a wild radiance after him, and he ran in the same direction as the trees’ long shadows. Remembering that the road from the farm wasn’t straight, but instead formed an arc like a gigantic letter C before it met the main road, he’d hoped to cut through and get there before the car. But as soon as he’d run deeper into the woods, the light of the flames had grown fainter. The snow’s luminosity helped a little, but as the forest closed around him he was running virtually blind. There was darkness everywhere, although the contours of the trees were a blacker shade, and he decided to stick to one direction no matter what obstacles he met. Several times he pitched forward into the snow, until at last he had no sense of where to run. At that very moment he glimpsed a weak light far to his left. The light had been in front of him, far in front, and it was still moving. Abruptly, however, it had slowed, and by the time he finally made it to the road the car was behind him, engine idling, lights still on.

  Hess doesn’t know why the car has stopped, and he doesn’t care. Genz is somewhere behind the windscreen, and Hess isn’t about to move now. He is standing doggedly in the middle of the road, his gun pointed straight ahead while the wind whistles softly in the trees, when he hears the unreal sound of a ringing phone. It dawns on him that it’s his own. Staring at the car, he notices the faint light of a screen on the driver’s side. Hesitantly, he takes his phone from his pocket, still keeping his eyes on the car.

  The voice is cold and toneless.

  ‘Where is Hartung?’

  Hess can see the outline of a figure behind the wheel. The question reminds him that Rosa Hartung’s torture is the only thing that really matters to Genz, and he tries to get his breathing under control so he sounds as calm as possible.

  ‘She’s fine. She’s sitting in the yard, waiting for you to tell her what happened to her daughter.’

  ‘You’re lying. You never managed to get her out.’

  ‘That saw you made cuts more than bone. A good Forensics tech would have thought of that before he left it behind. Don’t you think?’

  There is silence on the other end. Hess knows Genz would be spooling through the interior of the basement and what had happened there, weighing up the truth of his words, and for an instant he fears Genz will drive back to the farm, even though the police are on their way.

  ‘Tell her I’ll be back to pay her a visit some other day. Move, I’ve got Thulin.’

  ‘Couldn’t give a fuck. Get out of the car and lie down on the ground with your arms at your sides.’

  Silence.

  ‘Genz, get out of the car!’

  Hess aims at the car and the only point of focus he can see inside it. But the glowing screen behind the wheel vanishes, and the line goes dead. At first Hess isn’t sure what that means. But then the car growls. The engine revs violently, as though the accelerator has been slammed to the floor. The wheels whirr in the snow, and the exhaust fumes billow in the red glow of the tail lights, but then the tyres find purchase and the car shoots forwards.

  Hess flings the phone aside and aims. The car is headed straight for him, picking up speed with every metre. He fires one shot, then another, then a third. The first five shots he fires at the radiator, but nothing happens, and his shaking hands tell him why. He tries again, clutching the grip in both hands, firing again and again, his confidence dwindling. It is as though the car is protected by an invisible shield, and when it’s about thirty metres away he realizes he risks hitting Thulin, if she’s inside. His finger stiffens on the trigger. Standing on the road with his pistol raised, he hears the roar of the engine, but his trigger finger still doesn’t stir. It occurs to him he is about to be hit – there is no time now to fling himself aside. At the last moment he glimpses a movement behind the windscreen, and the car jerks off course. He feels the warmth of the bonnet as the car hurtles past his right hip, and when he turns around he sees it fly across the road. There is an explosion of sound. Metal crumples, glass shatters, the noise of the engine elevates to a shrill, strident frequency, and the car horn starts to blare. Two tangled figures are thrown through the windscreen and into the trees like helpless dolls. It looks like they’re
holding each other tightly as they twirl in the air, but then they slip out of each other’s grasp, and one continues its arc while the other strikes the trees with a thud and becomes one with the darkness.

  Hess runs. The bonnet is wrapped around a tree stump, but the headlights are still on, and the figure in the big tree is the first thing he sees. The thick, crooked branch jutting through his chest. Legs trembling in the empty air beneath him. When he sees Hess, his expression focuses.

  ‘Help … me …’

  ‘Where is Kristine Hartung?’

  The wide eyes are fixed on Hess.

  ‘Genz, answer me.’

  Then life fades. He is hanging close to the trunk, fused almost with the tree, his head lolling and his arms at his sides like one of his dolls. As Hess glances desperately around, calling for Thulin, he feels the chestnuts crunching in the snow beneath his feet.

  TUESDAY 3 NOVEMBER

  * * *

  124

  The little convoy of three cars drive down the ramp and leave the ferry terminal as the sun begins to rise. Rostock is cold and windy. The convoy sets off towards its destination, a few hours away. Hess sits behind the wheel of the last car, and although he can’t foresee the outcome of the trip, it feels nice to get away. Over the past few days the prevailing mood at the police station and its various departments has been one of dismay, as people hurriedly washed their hands of the situation; but on the autobahn the November sun is shining, and he can safely switch on the radio without being press-ganged into the domestic mudslinging and scapegoat-hunting.