by Karin Nordin
Small red buildings. Thatched roofs. A vegetable garden where two women in linen garments tended to the plants.
It didn’t take long for Kjeld to recognise the scene although he stared at it for almost a full minute in astonishment. It was so unexpected that his brain took longer to process what he was seeing. Once it did, however, the realisation of what he was looking at hit him.
In the turmoil of Sixten’s injury, Kjeld hadn’t had time to think about the woman Vidar had told him about. The one Jonny had been seen talking to, possibly in connection to Second Life. Tall. Chestnut hair. Conservatively dressed.
Henny was that woman. And she was at the commune.
Chapter 60
Despite Liam’s insistence that Bengt maintain a studio in the spare bedroom of their apartment or in a location closer to home, Bengt preferred the snug concrete-walled room he rented out of a converted church in the urban district of Älvsborg. While he didn’t have an inspiring view of the Rivö Fjord, there was a crisp coastal scent in the air that energised his desire to create and the light that streamed in through the stained-glass windows when the sun began to set gave the space a dusky, almost ethereal hue to it. He’d often experimented with those changing afternoon colours on his canvases, overlaying most of his paintings with varying shades of orange, yellow, and that frail shade of blue reflected from a cold winter morning.
Today, however, he didn’t have time to take advantage of that gloomy purple-grey that illuminated his messy workspace. In every other aspect of his life – Kjeld and art being the notable exceptions – Bengt was meticulous about order to an almost compulsive degree. He maintained a pristine household. Dustless surfaces, furniture arranged to the precise millimetre, nothing in the refrigerator within two days of the expiration date. But when it came to his art he let go of those orderly obsessions. The cold cement floors were stained in oils and acrylics. Rows of finished and unfinished canvases were stacked against an old wooden shelf that was scattered with brushes, paint tubes, crafting knives, and sketchpads.
At the centre of the room was a single easel holding up his current work in progress, a brown cloth draped over the canvas, denoting its incomplete state and protecting it from the multitudes of dust that fell from the rafters overnight. Pigeons always seemed to find their way in, despite his attempts to ward them off. On the wall opposite the stained-glass window was a hanging tarp that he used as a practice palette, testing out different colours and brush stroke techniques. In the bottom left corner were three handprints of various size and colour. Blue, green, and red. Him, Kjeld, and Tove.
‘Can I draw something, Papa?’ Tove asked, immediately making her way over to a small corner where she knew Bengt kept the charcoal pencils.
‘We don’t have time today, sweetheart. Papa has to take some pieces over to the gallery for an exhibition this weekend.’
‘Just one drawing?’
‘All right. Just one. But only on a blank piece of paper!’
Tove let out a whoop of excitement and began digging through a box of used sketchpads for one that had an empty page between its covers.
Bengt smiled. He wouldn’t necessarily wish an artist’s life on anyone, but it filled his heart with joy to see Tove express such an interest in anything creative. It almost made him feel whole. Of course, there was much more of Kjeld in her than there would ever be of him, but that didn’t make him feel any less about his ability to provide her with everything she needed to grow up to be a strong, independent woman. If anything, that only reassured him that she would.
For all of Kjeld’s faults he never failed to stand firmly on his own two feet, confident of who he was and the decisions he made. That confidence was one of the things that attracted Bengt to him in the first place. Bengt had never before met anyone so full of stubborn determination. As someone who’d always felt slightly moulded from the wallpaper, rarely commanding attention, it was an attractive quality. And might have remained so if that persistence of self hadn’t become so inflexible. Or if Kjeld had focused it on them instead of his work.
Had he made a mistake in staying over at Kjeld’s?
Bengt had no doubts about his feelings for Liam. Liam was everything he wanted in a partner. He was dependable, trustworthy, affectionate, and attentive. He had a respectable career and he cared deeply for people. He exuded a natural empathy that had brought Bengt to tears when they first met. Liam never missed a dinner or a date. He was supportive of Tove and treated her as if she were his own. On top of that he could hold an intelligent conversation about practically anything. He enjoyed entertaining friends, as Bengt did. And he had a charismatic charm that literally had the ability to make Bengt weak at the knees.
But, for better or worse, Liam wasn’t Kjeld.
Bengt didn’t know what it was about Kjeld that made him so crazy. Kjeld was almost the antithesis of Liam. Unreliable, irresponsible, an atrocious sense of style. But when Bengt was in the same room as Kjeld his stomach did somersaults. When he caught that intense blue-grey gaze on him, it was as though all of his insides turned into butterflies trapped in a jar, fluttering to get out. Kjeld was unexpected and irrational as a lover. When it came to passion there was no calculation. No thinking. And Bengt’s attraction to him was similar. It had no sturdy basis in the logical world. It was like an elastic rope that tied them together. And the further Bengt tried to pull himself away, the more he just increased the tension and his desire to go back.
He had to stop thinking about him. If he continued in this way he’d end up at Kjeld’s flat again. And if he did that then there’d be no turning back.
Bengt pulled out an abstract canvas from one of the stacks against the wall and set it off to the side. Then he set aside another. He didn’t need too many pieces. Five or six should have been sufficient. But there was one in particular he was looking for. An oil landscape of three women walking along the rocky coast near the Älvsborg Fortress. Bengt didn’t do a lot of realistic landscapes or portraits because they required a lot of emotional energy from him. Those paintings always felt more personal and penetrating. And he was more harshly critical of them than his expressive abstract work. Consequently, they were also the pieces he was most proud of. And they always fetched the highest prices when they were featured in a gallery.
If only he could remember where he put it. He really needed to invest in a better system. On the outside he was the epitome of equanimity. On the inside he was chaos. Just like this studio.
‘Papa?’
‘Just a moment, darling. I’m looking for something important.’
‘P-papa?’
The stammer in Tove’s tone sent an involuntary shiver down Bengt’s spine. It was as though something primal had reached out to warn him, the hairs on the back of his neck instinctively standing on end. But the warning came too late.
The sharp sting of a needle piercing his neck caused him to recoil in the opposite direction, but from the corner of his eye he could see that the stranger’s gloved hand had already pushed down the syringe. He stumbled into the stack of paintings leaned up against the wall. He tripped, his right foot breaking through one of the canvases. He reached out for the wall to steady himself, but the room was spinning. The sensation in his hands numbed to a buzzy tingle.
He fell to the ground. His left knee jabbed hard into the concrete floor, but he hardly noticed the pain. Only the reverberation through the bone up to his hip. He blinked, his vision clouding.
‘Please,’ he begged, his voice strange in his own ears. ‘Please … Don’t hurt my daughter …’
He crawled towards Tove. She was a blurry mass in front of him, distinguishable only by the bright red of her hair, like a surrealist sunset.
‘Please …’
Bengt slumped onto his back.
The figure stood above him, blocking the polychromatic light from the stained-glass window. Bengt narrowed his eyes, but he couldn’t tell who it was. In the background he heard Tove screaming. She sounded far away.
So far away.
And then she was gone.
Chapter 61
Kjeld sat in traffic on the E45 southbound under the Partihallsförbindelsen motorway en route back to the city from the spot of land that housed Second Life Wellness Respite. Following Henny had proven to be another dead end. Once he’d driven into the area, he tried to locate her vehicle, but it didn’t appear to be anywhere. Her broadcast, which had been little more than a twenty-minute diatribe against the Gothenburg police on behalf of the residents of Second Life who, in her opinion, were “undoing systematic persecution by local authorities without evidence to support their harassment”, had ended not long before he arrived in the area.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t approach the commune via the main entrance now that he knew Olsen had the area under surveillance. Instead he tried to get a glimpse of the commune from some of the tiny back roads, but there were too many to follow them all. For his trouble he ended up driving circles around half of the Änggårdsbergen Nature Reserve to no avail. If he wanted to talk to Henny about her potential connection to Jonny he would have to do it another way and at another time.
Kjeld turned up the volume on the radio when the DJ broke through the nonstop classic rock lunch hour to provide a traffic update. A turned-over semitruck was slowing traffic to a standstill from the next highway interchange all the way back to five miles behind Kjeld. The radio host said the accident could delay traffic into the city by more than forty-five minutes. But Kjeld didn’t need to hear that to know it was true. The mob of automobiles packed around him hadn’t moved in almost twenty minutes.
Kjeld turned off the ignition and placed the vehicle in park in order to give his foot a break and stared out the window. The sky was packed full of dark rain clouds, threatening a downpour at any moment. A gentle sprinkle of rain fell against the windscreen. It looked cold, but inside the car was warm. Kjeld watched as automobiles, unaware of the immobile queue beneath them, crossed the interchange above, slowly backing up from the on ramp.
He canted his gaze upward and felt his fingers clench around the steering wheel. His heart lurched into his throat as he thought back to that day sixteen years ago. The day Emma Hassan jumped out of his car and fell to her death on the opposite leg of the highway, not more than twenty-five metres from where Kjeld’s car currently sat stuck in traffic.
Nils was driving, as he often did early on in their partnership. It would be three years of them working together, side by side, before Nils loosened up and allowed Kjeld the opportunity to take the wheel. When they were first assigned together, Kjeld assumed Nils’s pretentiousness about driving was a control thing. A power play meant to show Kjeld, the rookie detective, who was in charge. Later Kjeld would learn that Nils simply enjoyed the act of driving. He once described it as an opportunity for reflection. Some people had their most illuminating thoughts in the shower. Nils had his in the car.
Years later Kjeld would cringe at what some of those thoughts might have been.
‘Let me out of this fucking car! This is a violation of my rights!’ Emma yelled from the back seat. She pounded her fist against the plastic barrier separating the front two seats from the back.
Kjeld turned in his seat to look at her. ‘You were caught at school with a gun in your backpack. By my count that’s at least two illegal acts. And since we have reason to believe that gun may have been used in a murder, that gives us more than enough right to take you down to the station.’
‘I’m a minor.’
‘And your parents have been notified that they can pick you up at the station. Just as soon as you answer a few questions about Emil Hermansson.’
‘I don’t know anything about him.’
Nils peered at her through the rear-view mirror. ‘We know you were with him when he killed his business partner.’
‘It’s not that we think you were intentionally involved,’ Kjeld said. ‘Nor do we want to charge you with possession of a weapon. We know you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We just need your statement to make sure Emil goes away to prison for murder.’
Emma kicked the back of Kjeld’s seat. ‘I’m not a fucking rat! I’m not talking to the pigs.’
‘You really should be careful who you talk to like that,’ Nils said, his tone placid but stern. ‘It could get you in trouble one day.’
‘Fuck you, pig.’
The highway separated and Nils followed the path of the interchange towards the city centre, back towards the main police station. Directly over the E45, however, traffic backed up to a stop.
Kjeld sighed. ‘Why is this stretch of highway always blocked when you’re in a hurry? Should I put a call into the station and let them know we’ll be a little late?’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Nils said. ‘Emil isn’t going anywhere. Let him sweat a little.’
‘What about the girl’s parents?’
‘They’ll be there when we arrive. Don’t worry so much, Kjeld. It’s not good for you.’
Kjeld slouched back, turning his gaze out the side window. Emma kicked the back of his seat again, hitting him right in the kidney. A small jab of pain dulled his lower back and he glanced back at her. ‘Cut it out.’
She stopped and Kjeld stretched upward to try to see beyond the vehicles in front of them. ‘I wonder how long it’s going to be.’
‘Do you have somewhere you need to be?’
‘No, I just don’t like sitting still for too long.’
‘You should cut back on the coffee. It makes you anxious.’
Kjeld laughed. ‘Sure, if you want me sleeping during our shifts.’
Click.
Kjeld knew immediately that it was the door handle being tugged and the door pushed open, but in that brief moment his rational mind refused to acknowledge it. The door couldn’t be opened. It had been locked. Kjeld himself had made sure of that. And yet, he heard the sound, he knew the passenger door on the driver’s side was being opened, and he knew Emma was getting out of the car.
The events that happened next were so quick Kjeld didn’t have time to think.
Nils yelled something just as Kjeld scrambled out of the car. Emma was already zigzagging through the stopped vehicles, heading towards the median at the centre of the highway. Kjeld followed after, shouting at her to stop. Cars honked at him as he weaved through traffic.
By the time he reached the concrete barrier separating the two different directions of traffic, Emma had already climbed over it. The vehicles speeding off in the opposite direction weren’t in the same standstill as the branch of traffic heading towards the city. Cars and semis sped past without regard for a sixteen-year-old girl who’d suddenly bolted into traffic.
Panic propelled Kjeld forward. He leapt atop the concrete median but was held back from crossing because of an influx of automobiles. They whirred past him. He checked for an opening, stepped forward and then pulled back quickly as a motorcycle whizzed by.
Dammit.
He glanced up and saw Emma darting between the vehicles. Motorists laid on the horns, filling the air with a persistent blare.
Kjeld saw an opening, heard a shout behind him, and jumped onto the road. He was halfway across the first lane when it happened.
Emma was mere feet away from the edge of the highway, practically within reach of that thin strip of road opposite the rumble strip, when a truck roared around the curve of the on ramp. Kjeld caught a glimpse of the driver’s expression the second before he hit Emma head on. It was a look he’d never forget. Sheer terror packed in an infinitesimal nanosecond. Enough time for the driver’s mind to recognise this would be a moment that would forever change his life. Not enough time to react.
Emma’s body flung up in the air like a ragdoll, her arms and legs limp, her hair jerking loose of her ponytail. The truck swerved into the median, crashing the front end into the barrier. Another crunch. The air bags deployed at the exact second that Emma’s body hit the low guardrail, which acted as an extra buoy against veh
icles hurling over the overhang in bad weather. A thunk. And then her body fell over the railing and down into the oncoming traffic on the freeway.
Kjeld raced to the guardrail and glanced over the edge. Emma’s body lay mangled and distorted almost fifty feet below.
A horn blared from the vehicle behind him and Kjeld jolted out of his own thoughts. Traffic had started moving again. Heart pounding, he turned the key in the ignition and rolled forward. Once traffic picked up he put the car in drive and accelerated. A moment later he drove over the exact spot where Emma’s body had landed. The pathologist on duty at the time couldn’t offer Kjeld or the family any reassurance that she’d died on impact with the truck. It was possible, but it was also likely that she’d survived being hit and was conscious as her body went into freefall over the edge of the highway.
Kjeld never forgot the look on Emma’s mother’s face. Pure uncontrollable agony. Kjeld had still been in a strange state of delayed shock when he was pulled into an interview room to give a statement. His memory of chasing Emma across the highway seemed slow and fragmentary in his mind. It was as though he’d witnessed it from someone else’s perspective. But his memory of the moments before were clear. He’d locked the back doors. He knew he had.
He must have.
But if he had, how had she gotten out?
His gaze caught a glimpse of the centre lane and for a split second he imagined her body there and almost swerved to miss it. Then he dug his nails deeper into the wheel and pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator, speeding up to pass the spot before he saw her again.
Chapter 62
Kjeld had just pulled his car into an empty space in front of his apartment when he saw the dozens of missed calls on his phone. Esme, Axel, Rhodin. His heart nearly stopped in his chest. He was halfway through the first voicemail before he was pulling out of the space and speeding back to the main road. It should have been a twenty-minute drive with traffic from the station to Bengt’s studio in Älvsborg, but Kjeld made it there in twelve. When he arrived, he barrelled his way through the officers in front of the renovated church, but it was Esme who stopped him from entering Bengt’s studio by physically blocking the doorway.