by Lars Kepler
“This is my son.” Raphael introduces them as if they were at a normal dinner party.
“Hello,” Axel says in his usual friendly way.
One of the men from the helicopter is now standing next to the bar. He’s throwing peanut shells towards a happy, ragged dog. His grey hair looks like metal and his glasses flash white.
“Nuts make him sick,” Peter remonstrates weakly.
“When our dinner is through, could you bring out your violin?” asks Raphael in a suddenly tired voice. “Our guest is interested in music.”
Peter nods. He is very pale. There is a sheen of sweat on his face and the rings around his eyes are almost violet.
Axel makes an attempt to smile.
“What kind of violin do you have?”
Peter shrugs. “It’s much too good for me. It’s an Amati that belonged to my mother. She was a musician.”
“An Amati?”
“Which one do you think is best?” Raphael breaks in. “Amati or Stradivarius?”
“It depends on who’s playing it,” Axel replies.
“You’re Swedish,” Raphael says. “There are four violins made by Stradivarius that now reside in Sweden. None of them were played by Paganini, however, and I imagine—”
“I believe you,” Axel says.
“I collect stringed instruments that can still remember how— No.” He interrupts himself. “Let me reformulate that … if these instruments are handled properly, you are able to hear the longing and sadness of a lost soul.”
“I see,” Axel says noncommittally.
“I make sure people can hear that sorrow when we sign a contract.” Raphael smiles without joy. “We gather together, we listen to music, we hear that unique, sorrowful voice, and then we sign the contract. Just in the air. Our desires and our nightmares become part of the contract … I call it a Paganini contract.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” Raphael smiles. “It is a contract even beyond death. You can never be released from it. Even a man who turns to suicide must understand his worst nightmare will still come true. I own it, but he reaps his nightmare.”
“What do you want me to say?” Axel asks.
“I’m just saying … consider this contract to be unbreakable. And I … how should I put it?” he asks, hesitating. “It would not help my business if you mistook me for a kind man.”
Raphael goes over to the huge television mounted on the wall. He takes a shining DVD from a pocket in his shorts, removes the cover, slides it into the player. Peter perches on the edge of the sofa. He looks around from under his brows at the other men in the room. He has very pale coloring and is fine-limbed, with a sensitive face that seems to show every emotion. His build does not resemble the broad, compact body of his father at all.
The picture flickers on the screen and then grey streaks fill it. Axel feels a gut-wrenching fear as he watches three people walking out of the door of a brick family home. He recognises two of them immediately: Detective Inspector Joona Linna and Saga Bauer. The third person is a woman with Latin American features.
Axel watches Joona Linna take out a mobile phone and make a call. He doesn’t seem to get an answer. The three people have closed, stern expressions as they get into a car and drive away.
The camera moves shakily towards the door. It’s pushed open, light disappears, and then the automatic viewfinder adjusts to the darkness. Two large suitcases stand in the hallway. The camera moves along to the kitchen, then to the left and down some stairs, through a tiled hallway, and finally into a room with a swimming pool. One woman in a bathing suit is lounging in a poolside chair and another, her hair in a stylish pageboy, stands and talks into a phone.
The camera pulls stealthily back and waits for the phone call to end, hidden until she finishes. Then it moves forward again. Footsteps are heard, and the woman with the phone turns her tired, unhappy face towards the camera and stiffens. An expression of naked fear crosses her face.
“I don’t really want to see any more of this, Pappa,” the son says in his gentle voice.
“Now, now, it’s just getting started!” Raphael replies, and the boy doesn’t move.
The TV goes dark for a minute because the camera has been turned off. The picture returns a moment later, jiggles, and stabilises as if the camera is now steady on a tripod. Both of the women are found sitting on the floor with their backs against the tiled wall. Pontus Salman faces them, sitting on a chair, but his body writhes and he breathes rapidly.
The time on the camera shows that the recording was made less than an hour ago. A man dressed in black with his face covered by a ski mask walks over to Veronique and forces her face towards the camera.
“Forgive me! Forgive me! Forgive me!” mocks Raphael in a squeaky voice from his seat on the sofa.
Axel looks at Raphael in amazement, just as Veronique Salman’s voice pipes up: “Forgive me! Forgive me! Forgive me!”
Her voice is shot through with terror.
“I had no idea!” mocks Raphael, and points at the television.
“I had no idea!” pleads Veronique. “I took the picture but I didn’t mean to harm anyone! I didn’t know how stupid I was being, I just thought that—”
“You have to choose,” the man in the ski mask says. “Who should I shoot in the knee? Your wife or your sister?”
“Please, don’t do this,” Pontus whispers.
“Who should I shoot?” the man repeats.
“My wife,” whispers Pontus. His voice is practically inaudible.
“Pontus, please!” His wife is pleading. “Please, don’t let him—”
Pontus begins to sob shrilly and piercingly.
“It’s going to hurt when I shoot her,” the man warns.
“Don’t let him shoot me!” screams Veronique, panicked.
“Do you want to change your mind? Should I shoot your sister instead?”
“No,” Pontus mumbles.
“Beg me to.”
“What did you say?” Pontus’s expression is that of a broken man.
“Beg me nicely to shoot her.”
There’s a moment of silence and then Axel Riessen hears Pontus say, “Please be so kind as to … shoot my wife in the knee.”
“I’ll do both her knees, since you’ve been so polite,” the man says, and places the barrel of his pistol against Veronique’s knee.
“Please don’t let him do this!” she screams. “Please, Pontus!”
The man shoots. A short bang is heard. Veronique’s leg jumps. Blood spatters over the tiles. Veronique screams so loudly her voice breaks. He shoots again. The recoil makes the gun jerk. The second knee is hit and bends at an impossible angle.
Veronique screams again, hoarse and distant. Her body spasms in pain and blood begins to pour over the tile floor beneath her.
Pontus Salman has started to vomit and the man in the ski mask watches him in a wondering, dreamy gaze.
Veronique pulls herself to one side, panting, and she’s trying to reach her injured legs with her hands. The woman next to her appears to be in shock. Her face has turned green and her eyes are nothing but big black holes.
“Your sister is mentally ill, right?” the man asks curiously. “Do you think she even realises what’s going on?”
He pats Pontus on the head comfortingly. Then he says, “Do you want me to rape your sister or shoot your wife again?”
Pontus doesn’t answer. His eyes are rolling backwards. The man slaps him across the face.
“Answer me! You want me to shoot your wife again or rape your sister?”
Pontus Salman’s sister shakes her head.
“Rape her!” whispers Veronique between heavy breaths. “Please, please, Pontus. Tell him to rape her instead.”
“Rape her,” Pontus whispers.
“I didn’t hear you!”
“Rape my sister!”
“All right. Soon enough,” the man says.
Axel looks down at the floor between hi
s feet. He’s trying to close his ears to the wailing and the prayers and the raw, horrific screams. He tries to fill his mind with the music of Bach, tries to reach for spaces within his music, spaces filled with light and heavenly rays.
Finally there is no more sound. Axel looks up at the television. The women are both lying dead against the wall. He sees the man in the ski mask stand, panting, with a bloody knife in one hand and a gun in the other.
“You’ve reaped your nightmare—you may kill yourself now,” the man says, and throws the pistol down at Pontus’s feet as he walks out of the frame and around the camera.
105
the witness
Saga Bauer leaves Magdalena Ronander and steps back over the police tape. More curious onlookers have turned up as well as a van from Swedish Television. A uniformed officer is trying to part the crowd to allow an ambulance through.
Saga leaves all this behind her and walks up a stone pathway to someone’s garden and past a jasmine tree. She keeps walking faster and faster, then starts to run back to her car.
“The girl,” Joona had said on the phone. “You have to find the girl. There’s a girl who lives with Axel Riessen. He called her Beverly Andersson. Ask Robert, his brother. The girl’s about fifteen and you should be able to trace her.”
“How much longer do I have to get an arrest warrant?”
“Not long,” Joona had answered. “But you should make it in time.”
As Saga drives back towards Stockholm, she calls Robert Riessen, but there’s no answer. She calls the exchange at CID and asks for Anja, Joona’s assistant, the plump woman who had once won an Olympic medal in swimming and who delights in bright, shiny lipstick and nails painted in violent colours.
“Anja Larsson.” Saga hears the response after only one ring.
“Hi, I’m Saga Bauer at Säpo. We met recently at—”
“Yes, we did,” Anja says coolly.
“I need information about a young woman named Beverly Andersson who—”
“Can I bill Säpo for it?” Anja’s voice is frigid.
Saga snaps. “Do whatever the hell you want, as long as you get a damned number before—”
“I don’t care for your language, young lady.”
“Forget I asked.”
Saga swears and then honks at a car that hasn’t moved even though the light has turned green. She’s about to click her phone closed when Anja asks, “How old is she?”
“About fifteen.”
“There is no Beverly Andersson in that age group listed with any telephone registry. But the government does have her registered at the same address as her father, Evert Andersson.”
“Okay, I’ll call him, then. Can you text me the number?”
“I’ve already done it.”
“Thanks, Anja, thanks so much—please forgive me for being a bitch. I’m in such a hurry. I’m worried about Joona. I believe he might do something stupid without backup.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“Yes. He asked me to find the girl. I’ve never even met her, I don’t know … he trusts me to figure all this out, but I—”
“You call Beverly’s father and I’ll keep looking,” Anja says, and hangs up.
Saga swings onto the shoulder by Hjorthagen and parks to look at the number Anja sent her. The area code is for the province of Skåne. Maybe the town of Svalöv, she thinks as she presses the Call button.
106
the pappa
Evert Andersson sits in his pine-panelled kitchen in the middle of the province of Skåne and jumps when he hears the telephone ring. He’s just come in from disentangling a heifer from his neighbour’s barbedwire fence. It took more than an hour. Blood is on his hands, and he wipes them on his blue work clothes. When the phone rings, he doesn’t care to answer it. Not just because of the state of his hands but because he feels that there’s no one he’d really care to speak to. He leans forward, checks the ID display, and sees it’s a blocked number. Probably a salesman who’ll be hiding behind that. He lets the phone ring until it stops. Then it starts again. Evert Andersson takes another look at the display and finally picks up the phone: “Andersson.”
“Hello, I’m Saga Bauer.” Evert hears an abrupt female voice. “I’m a police officer with Säpo. I’m looking for your daughter, Beverly Andersson.”
“What’s happened?”
“Nothing. She has done nothing wrong, but she has some very important information we need.”
“And now she’s just taken off?” he asks weakly.
“Do you have her phone number?” Saga asks. Evert’s slow thoughts revert to the time he’d once hoped his daughter would take over the farm after him. She would carry on tradition, she’d live in his house, she’d work in his barn, his buildings, his fields. She’d walk through the gardens that her mother had planted, wearing rubber boots like his in the mud, growing thick around the middle as her mother had done, wearing a long coat with her hair in a plait down her back.
But even as a small child, Beverly had something odd about her, which he sensed and feared.
As she’d grown, she became more and more different, as if she’d sprung, an alien, from him and from her mother. Once she’d walked into the barn when she was eight or nine years old. She sat in an empty pen using an upturned bucket as a stool and then just sang to herself with her eyes closed. She’d lost herself in the sound of her own voice. He’d thought it his duty to yell at her to shut up and stop making a fool of herself, but there was this whole air about her that bewildered him. He marked that incident as the moment he knew he would never understand her. So he could no longer talk to her. Whenever he wanted to say something, the words died away.
When her mother died, the silence on the farm was complete.
Beverly began to ramble around the countryside and would be gone for hours or even an entire day. The police had to bring her home after she’d wandered so far she didn’t know where she was. She’d go with anyone if they spoke kindly to her.
“I don’t have anything to say to her, so why would I have her phone number?” he replies in his strict, stubborn Skåne dialect.
“Are you absolutely sure—”
“You city folk from Stockholm don’t understand this stuff.” He cuts her off vehemently and hangs up.
He looks at his fingers on the receiver: the blood smearing his knuckles, the dirt under his fingernails, embedded in his cuticles, in every crack and surface. He walks over to his green armchair and slowly sits down. He picks up the shiny TV supplement to the newspaper and begins to read. This evening there’s going to be a show about the programme host Ossian Wallenberg, who died recently. Evert drops the newspaper and is surprised to find tears in his eyes. He remembers that Beverly used to sit beside him and they’d both laugh at the silly nonsense on Golden Friday.
107
the empty room
Saga Bauer swears aloud, shuts her eyes, and pounds the steering wheel a few times. She tells herself that she has to pull herself together and get going before it’s too late, when the phone rings.
“Hi, it’s me again,” Anja says. “I’m putting you through to Herbert Saxéus at Saint Maria Hjärta Hospital.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Saxéus had Beverly Andersson as a patient for two years there.”
“Thanks, that was—”
Anja has already put Saga through to the other line.
Saga waits as the signals go through. She remembers Saint Maria Hjärta, located east of Stockholm in Torsby.
“Herbert speaking,” a warm voice says in her ear.
“Hi, my name is Saga Bauer and I’m a police officer, an investigator, from Säpo. I need to reach a girl named Beverly Andersson who was one of your patients, I understand.”
There’s a pause on the line.
“Is she all right?” asks the doctor.
“That’s what I need to know. I have to speak to her,” Saga says quickly. “And it’s urgent.”
“Sh
e lives in the house of Axel Riessen, who … well, he has informal guardianship.”
“So is she still there?” Saga asks, while turning the key in the ignition. She starts to pull onto the motorway.
“Axel Riessen is giving her a room until she finds something of her own,” he replies. “She’s only fifteen, but it would be a mistake to force her to live at home.”
The traffic is steady and Saga drives as fast as she can.
“May I ask what Beverly was treated for?” she asks.
“I don’t know if that’s helpful, but as a doctor I would say that she has a serious personality disorder, which we call Cluster B.”
“What does that mean?”
“Not much,” Herbert Saxéus says. “But if you ask me as a fellow human being, I’d say that physically Beverly is completely healthy, healthier than most … It’s a cliché, I know, but she’s not the one who’s sick.”
“No, she lives in a sick world.”
“That’s right.” He sighs.
Saga thanks him for his time, ends the call, and turns onto Valhallavägen. The seat against her back is sticky from sweat. Her phone rings and she hits the gas to get through the amber lights by the Olympic Stadium before she picks up the call.
“I thought I would try to talk to Beverly’s father as well,” Anja says. “He is a pleasant man, but he’s had a rough day with an injured cow. He had to comfort it, he says. His family has always lived on the same farm. Now he’s the only one left. We chatted about The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and then he found some letters that Beverly had written to him. He hadn’t even opened them. Can you believe that man? So stubborn! Beverly’s telephone number was in every single letter.”
Saga Bauer thanks Anja profusely and calls Beverly’s number. She’s already pulling to a stop in front of the Riessen house while the signal goes to Beverly Andersson’s mobile phone.
One beep after another disappears into the darkness of space. The sun shines through a little dust in the air in front of the church. Saga feels her body tense with determination. There’s little time left. Joona will be on his own when he goes against Raphael Guidi.