by Arne Dahl
‘Can you show us the cave, Sandra?’ Berger asked.
She nodded and they set off, heading into the forests of Värmland on narrowing roads. The increasingly heavy rain hammered on the car roof. They reached a hillier part of the forest, where waterlogged roads rolled up and down the hills. They nearly got stuck several times.
Eventually Sandra pointed straight ahead, towards a sign indicating a passing place.
‘That’s where the path starts,’ she said.
Blom drove the car halfway into the bushes next to the sign, where the muddy road was slightly wider. The front wheels span their way a few centimetres into the mud before she stopped.
‘It’s about five hundred metres in from here,’ Sandra said. ‘The path isn’t very obvious.’
‘It’s very wet out there,’ Blom said. ‘You stay in the car.’
‘Fuck that,’ Sandra said, and opened the door.
She led them along a track they would barely have noticed without her. The wet branches kept hitting them or dripping water. After just a dozen metres their clothes were soaked. The only consolation was that they couldn’t get any wetter.
After a while the terrain got more hilly. They were walking along the side of a fairly steep rock face where even the moss and algae seemed to have trouble finding a foothold. The rock face veered away from the track and they followed it. Eventually Sandra stopped and pointed. An improbable amount of mascara was running down her cheeks.
‘The bushes have grown a lot,’ she said.
They followed her finger. In one place the even growth along the base of the rock became irregular.
Sandra started to walk towards the uneven bushes. Blom put a hand on her shoulder, and Sandra turned round with a look of irritation.
‘Wait here,’ Blom said.
‘You can take cover under that pine,’ Berger said, gesturing towards a tall tree that he hoped was a pine.
With obvious reluctance, Sandra went and stood by the trunk of the pine as Blom and Berger set off. When Berger cast a quick glance back over his shoulder she looked like a ghost from Norse mythology. Her pale face was streaked with black, her big eyes wide open.
The bushes, whatever kind they were, were covered in thorns and in places were so tall that it was hard to imagine two young girls – on the run from a hostile world – managing to get through them. The bushes must have grown like mad in the past few years.
The question was whether someone had managed to get through, not half a decade ago, but about eight months ago. In the middle of February.
When Jonna Eriksson and Simon Lundberg vanished without trace from the face of the earth.
The fact that Berger was leading the way was more than Blom could bear. She made her own way through the thick undergrowth instead. When lightning flashed across the metallic sky Berger considered shouting back to Sandra, telling her to move away from the tree, but when the first clap of thunder rang out, heavy and deep, it struck him that she was probably far more confident in the wild than he was. Besides, it felt wrong to shout. Only when he could make out the opening to the cave did he realise why. It felt peculiarly occupied.
It was entirely possible that William Larsson was hiding in there with Ellen Savinger strapped to a huge clock mechanism.
As he drew his pistol, Berger saw that Blom, positioned further along in the undergrowth, already had hers out. By the time the next crack of lightning shot its branching pattern across the sky she had disappeared into the oddly hostile greenery. And when the thunder came – louder this time, right after the lightning – he realised that she was going to get there first. As if that mattered.
She was waiting for him by the entrance to the cave. It wasn’t much more than head-high, and rain-damaged spiders’ webs hung in front of the dark opening like a natural curtain. Faint chirping noises were coming from the gloom. The barely perceptible walls appeared to move slightly in the unsteady shadows. Berger raised his torch to get a closer look, but Blom grabbed his hand and pushed it down.
‘Not a good idea,’ she whispered.
Then she set off into the cave with the beam of her torch aimed carefully at the ground. Berger followed her, doing the same. The floor of the cave was covered with stones that had come loose from the roof over the years, sucked down inexorably by gravity. But there was something else as well. It looked like droppings of some sort. Small ones. Possibly rats’ droppings.
The narrow passageway went on for ten metres or so. Berger took care not to shine his torch up the walls. Then the cave opened out abruptly. They suddenly found themselves in a cavern. Dim light was filtering in through a hidden crack five metres above them. And the play of shadows suddenly became clear.
The walls of the cave were covered with bats. They hung there, moving gently, as if they were breathing in a strange, jerky, collective rhythm.
But overwhelmingly the bats were swarming around a metre-high formation at the back of the cavern. And they weren’t just hanging there. They were moving, crawling, creeping across each other in a peculiar pattern. It was as if a relief in a Roman bath had come to life.
Berger heard himself groan. He glanced at Blom. She too was staring at the formation. Both torches were pointing at the floor, the only thing illuminating the bats was the daylight from the crack above.
‘On the count of three,’ Blom whispered. ‘Then we shine our torches right at it and take cover immediately, flat on the ground. OK?’
Something inside Berger understood instinctively. But he just stood there, completely bewildered. He heard himself whisper: ‘OK.’
Blom looked at him in the dim light. It was as if she was evaluating his mental state again.
Then she whispered: ‘One. Two. Three!’
The torch beams swept towards the teeming bats. Then everything switched to freeze-frame. As Berger threw himself on the ground he saw the bats lift off like a single mass, a flying manta ray. The chirping increased exponentially as he fell, and before Berger hit the ground the immense sweeping wing flew over their heads and out of the cave, presumably rising like a huge plume through the rain outside. Pain transmitted itself with unusual slowness from his knees to his brain as the object deserted by the bats became visible in the twin torch beams. A couple of the ancient creatures remained; one bat was clinging to one of the ribs, another was peering groggily from between the teeth of the almost stripped-bare skull.
The jaw moved; it looked like the skeleton was chewing on a bat.
‘Fucking hell,’ Berger said, getting to his feet.
The skeleton was crouched against the wall of the cave. Remnants of rotten, dried flesh clung to a few of the white bones. The bat freed itself from the skeleton’s mouth like an embodied scream and flew off in search of the others.
Berger reached for Blom’s hand in the gloom. It responded by grasping his. Hand in hand they went over to the huddled remains of a human body. In the quivering light of their torches the whole scene looked archaic, as if they were visiting the time of cave dwellers.
The skeleton really was crouching down, as if it were resting after a run with a mammoth.
In a loose circle around the skeleton lay the remains of clothes that had fallen off the body as its size diminished. A wallet was peeping out from beneath the drifts of bat droppings.
Blom freed her hand from Berger’s and pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. She extracted the wallet and, with trembling fingers, found an ID card.
Simon Lundberg’s.
They looked at the skeleton. Yes, it could be the remains of a fifteen-year-old boy.
They shone their torches around the rest of the cavern. There wasn’t a lot else to see.
‘No Jonna Eriksson,’ Berger concluded.
‘No,’ Blom said, moving her torch closer to the scraps of clothing around the skeleton. She picked them up, one by one, from the piles of droppings. Eventually a shimmering object was uncovered.
It wasn’t much more than a centimetre in diameter, had tiny teeth
and was perfectly round.
It was a very small cog.
32
Thursday 29 October, 13.12
Molly Blom dozed off twice at the wheel on the drive home. Fortunately it happened in the fleeting moments when Sam Berger was in full command of his faculties. Beyond that, he wasn’t much help. His general condition couldn’t really be described as anything other that half-dead.
When they hurried back into the boathouse early that afternoon – after checking the security footage from the car park by the nearest row houses – they agreed it was time to get into their sleeping bags. Neither of them could be bothered to work out how long they had been awake over the past few days.
Berger removed a very small plastic bag from his pocket and wrote a few words on a label, which he stuck on the bag. Then he put it with the others beneath the watches in their box. The last thing he saw were the words Jonna Eriksson, cave.
‘Just a couple of hours,’ Blom said from her side of the bench, pulling off her tracksuit top. She unbuttoned her army trousers and stood for a moment.
Berger had, without really thinking about it, pulled off his top and was in the middle of removing his jeans. He stopped and met her sharp gaze.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later I’m going to have to get in that bastard water. But first some sleep.’
‘I wasn’t reacting to your body odour,’ Blom said, pointing. ‘What happened to your arm?’
Berger felt the five-centimetre-wide indentation in his left arm. It was just as numb as always.
‘An old injury,’ he said, pulling his jeans off.
‘It looks like someone took a real bite out of you,’ Blom said.
But by then Berger had already lain down and fallen asleep.
The early summer that prevails in a desolate, grit-covered football pitch is strangely remorseless, no wind, the air laced with dust, the sun sharp and prickly. Sam sees a group of people at the other end of the pitch, by the far goal. He sees that they’re girls, lots of girls; he can hear their shrill voices but can’t make out any words. The emptiness above the dusty grit seems to filter out everything resembling language. Sam has become a different person; time has changed. It feels as if he’s aged a couple of years in just a few weeks. These days he avoids this sort of gathering. He can feel that he has become a loner. But there’s something about the unarticulated yelling that draws him in. Against all his instincts he is drawn in that direction, and sees the back of one girl after another. They’re wearing summery clothes, dresses, skirts, and the merciless sun makes their long hair shine in all manner of hues. The dust swirls around them, and as they move Sam can see that they aren’t alone. Behind them a taller head rises up. Anton’s, and it’s moving. It disappears behind the curtain of girls, reappears, still moving. Then the curtain parts a little more, and against the goalpost, tied to the post, stands a figure. Its long blond hair hangs like another curtain in front of the figure’s face. His trousers have been pulled down, the lower half of his body exposed.
Then Anton sees Sam. He smiles his typical Anton grin and calls out, ‘Well hello there! Come and say hi to your friend!’
Sam would rather have turned on his heel and fled before William saw him, but it’s too late now. All Sam can think as he moves through the curtain of girls is: It’s almost the summer holidays. All this crap will soon be over. But it isn’t over for Anton. Not by a long shot. He passes something to Sam, and it takes a few moments before Sam realises that it’s a towel, a damp towel.
‘Whip him!’
And only then does Sam see how badly William’s been whipped. And he suddenly sees the boathouse before him; he sees the girl’s tongue push at the duct tape, hears her wild screaming that cuts off abruptly after he takes off like a frightened rabbit through the grass that reaches up to his chest. And he whips and lashes out, and he sees William’s body shrink with pain, but not a sound emerges from his lips. He looks up for the first time and meets Sam’s gaze.
Sam goes closer, is standing very close now, and whispers: ‘That was for the boathouse, you fucking lunatic.’
Unknown forces propelled Sam into a sitting position. He stared blindly across the boathouse until his vision returned. And in his field of vision was Molly Blom. She took a photograph from the printer and held it up in front of him. It showed Simon Lundberg’s crouching skeleton.
‘It’s me he’s after,’ Berger said groggily.
Blom stuck the photograph to the whiteboard and looked at him. But she didn’t say anything.
Berger stood up, climbed out of the sleeping bag and went on: ‘He hates me more than I remembered. I’d sanitised my memories.’
‘That’s how we survive,’ Blom said. ‘What did you dream?’
Blom was wearing her army trousers and tracksuit top again. But she looked slightly different. Berger ignored the impression and stumbled over towards the whiteboard. He stood there, looking at the pictures of William Larsson’s victims.
‘Were you there at the goalposts?’ he asked.
Blom went on looking at him with penetrating intensity. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said.
‘William was tied to the post,’ he said. ‘It was after the boathouse, early summer. There was gang of girls. Were you one of them?’
Blom shook her head.
‘I kept to myself as much as I could until the end of term,’ she said.
‘I think the rest of your friends were there,’ Berger said. ‘And I whipped his cock. With a damp towel.’
‘William?’
‘Yes. Bloody hell.’
For the first time he met her gaze. There was a hint of sympathy in there.
He wasn’t sure he wanted her sympathy.
Then she nodded, as if to break the silence, once and for all, and gestured towards Berger’s largely naked body.
‘Go and have a wash,’ she said. ‘There’s shampoo out there.’
Then he saw what was different about her. Her hair was still wet.
He stood under the protruding roof for a while, looking out at the curtain of rain shrouding the whole of Edsviken. Then he let out a deep sigh, snatched up the bottle of shampoo from the railing and took three steps down the ladder until a stabbing pain spread up through his body from his big toe. Then he jumped in. The water came up to his navel. As if in a flash of lightning it was like he could see his brain, every minuscule activity in any given moment. He lowered the rest of his body under the water and felt through the paralysing cold – more clearly than ever – that William wanted something from them. He wanted to talk to them. He wanted to tell a story. And that story ended with a great deal of pain and a great deal of death.
Death as a full stop.
But then his lungs told him a different story, about having to get out of the icy cold, and as he broke the surface a different name was in his mind. And a realisation. As he washed he tried to get the meandering impulses in his brain to pin the realisation down.
A few minutes later he stormed inside, wrapped in a towel, and called out: ‘Anton.’
Blom was standing looking at the seven victims. He saw her quickly brush a tear from her eye before turning towards him.
‘What?’
‘Anton,’ he repeated. ‘Worst bully in the class. Do you remember him?’
‘I wasn’t in your class, as you know. I was in Year 8 when you were in Year 9.’
‘But you remember the Lucia celebration? When they glued the Lucia crown to William’s hair?’
He watched as she was transported back in time through years that she really didn’t want to revisit.
‘Yes, I remember,’ she said. ‘It was three Year 9s.’
‘Anton, Micke and Freddan,’ Berger said. ‘Anton was the one who told William to sing.’
‘Ah. “Come on then, sing, for fuck’s sake, don’t be shy.”’
‘Word for word, no less,’ Berger said.
‘I remember far too much,’ Blom said. ‘What about Ant
on?’
‘He was the one who tied William to the goalpost and pulled his trousers down, and then got the girls there somehow, to watch his humiliation.’
‘And he asked you to join in?’
‘I saw red,’ Berger said. ‘Maybe I was whipping myself, deep down. Trying to whip the cowardice out.’
‘In a way that was even more cowardly.’
‘I know,’ Berger said quietly. ‘But if William has come back to Helenelund, if this is all about taking revenge for the injustices of childhood in a really sick way, would he leave Anton untouched?’
‘Ah,’ Blom said. ‘Can you find him?’
‘I’ll try,’ Berger said, throwing himself at his laptop.
He had a name, he had a year of birth, he even had a vague idea of when his birthday was. It didn’t take long to find Anton Bergmark.
‘Plumber,’ Berger said. ‘Stayed in Sollentuna. Worked in his dad’s business for ten years. Took over from him. Called himself managing director. Then declared unfit for work.’
‘Unfit for work?’ Blom said. ‘When?’
‘Almost three years ago. Took early retirement six months later.’
‘That’s quite a change. From managing director to unfit for work to early retirement in the space of six months. The obvious interpretation is substance abuse of some kind.’
‘Too many business dinners with cocaine dessert?’ Berger said. ‘Not out of the question. The business fell apart, went bankrupt. Divorced from his second wife not long before. She got custody of the three children, one of whom wasn’t even hers but Anton’s from his first marriage.’
‘Restraining order?’
‘Can’t find anything like that. But there’s an address.’
‘Let me guess,’ Blom said. ‘A rehab centre?’
‘The Svalan Care Home,’ Berger said. ‘In the centre of Sollentuna.’
They began to sense that things weren’t quite right when they were on their way in. The Svalan Care Home occupied a couple of floors in one of the huge blocks on Malmvägen in Sollentuna, and the walls of the long corridor were adorned with rather too many cross-stitched samplers with phrases like My home is my castle and East, west, home is best to signify a rehab centre for addicts. When the first wheelchair rolled out and a woman who had to be in her late nineties greeted them with the words ‘Ah, the Elfenben couple! Is it already time to empty the latrines?’ that sense only grew stronger. A nurse appeared with a quizzical look on her face, and Berger held up his ID.