The Black Path

by Asa Larsson

  An hour and a half later he’s standing in the men’s room sluicing the back of his neck with cold water. Time to pull himself together. He feels bloody terrible. He’s at Kiruna airport, that’s right. He hires a car and says to himself: “E10, traveling north.” He’ll get this sorted in no time. He needs something to get him back on track, get him back to the way he was.

  Morgan Douglas looks at Inna Wattrang. His feet are freezing. He’s been waiting for ages. Had started to get worried. Got the idea the car wouldn’t start when he’s ready to go back. But she’s here now. Looks just like the photo. Just about one meter seventy, around a hundred and forty pounds. There are no problems. She has the key to the house in her hand.

  He talks and gesticulates to distract attention from the fact that the steps he’s taking toward her are swift and long.

  In a second he’s reached her. He steps behind her back, sliding his left arm around her neck at the same time. He lifts her, just enough for the pain to make her stand on tiptoe.

  She feels as if her neck will break if she loses contact with the ground, so she stumbles backward after him, half hanging over his hip.

  He’s moving toward the door now. She registers the fact that she isn’t even getting in the way of his feet. He unlocks the door with his free hand. She hadn’t even noticed he’d taken the key from her.

  She thinks that he’s no more bothered by her than an old lady is by her purse. This is no madman, she realizes. This is no rapist.

  A pro, she thinks.

  He looks around the hallway and as he begins to walk toward the kitchen, still holding firmly on to her, he slips a little. The snow beneath his shoes has formed a sole of ice. But he regains his balance and pushes her down onto a chair. He stands behind her, the pressure on her throat increases and she can hear the sound of tape being torn off a roll.

  It happens incredibly quickly. He tapes her wrists to the arms of the chair and her feet to the legs. He doesn’t cut it or tear it, but runs the tape from one hand to the other, down to the feet in one long piece, then drops the roll on the floor when he’s finished.

  He comes to stand in front of her.

  “Please,” she says. “Do you want money? I have—”

  She doesn’t get any further. He hits her across the face. It’s like turning on a tap. Blood pours out of her nose, down her face and into her throat. She swallows over and over again.

  “When I ask a question, you answer. Otherwise you keep your mouth shut. Understand? And if you can’t manage that, I’ll put the tape over your mouth. Then you can try breathing through a bleeding nose.”

  She nods and swallows again. She can hear her heart pounding in her head.

  Morgan Douglas looks around. He would have killed her immediately if it hadn’t been part of the job to find out if she’d told anybody about…what was his name again, it was some German name, he thinks. It’s in the envelope.

  He needs to frighten her so she’ll talk. It’s easier to frighten women if you can show them pictures of their kids, but there were no pictures in the envelope. He should be able to scare her anyway. This shouldn’t take long.

  He rummages through the kitchen drawers, hunting for a knife, but can’t find one.

  He goes out into the hallway. There’s a lamp on the desk. He pulls out the plug and rips the cord from the lamp. He checks in the envelope to see what he was supposed to ask about. “Gerhart Sneyers,” it says. And “Uganda.”

  He drags her chair close to a socket.

  She watches him wide-eyed as he uses his teeth to open up the cord and remove the plastic sheath, then he separates the two copper wires and winds one around her ankle.

  He’s wearing ordinary shoes. As he bends down his trouser leg rides up, and Inna sees the marks on his ankle.

  “I’ve got top-notch coke in my purse,” she says.

  He stops.

  “Where is it?”

  “In the hallway.”

  He takes the purse into the bathroom. It’s mostly habit. He’s stood in hundreds of bathrooms and taken everything you can think of. When he lived in London they used to scare the little tarts, pretending to be undercover cops, pushing them up against a wall as they came from their dealers, taking their drugs and asking questions, always the same pattern: “did you see any weapons in there,” “how many of them are there,” pretending to be kind, letting them go with a “why are you doing this to yourself, get some help.” Then it was straight into the nearest bathroom to take the lot.

  Now he’s hunting through Inna Wattrang’s Prada purse like an anteater who’s found a termite stack. He pushes her cell phone in his pocket. That’s from habit too, take everything that’s easy to sell. Then he finds three small white packages. His heart jumps with relief and joy. Fine, pure snow. He lays out two lines on her hand mirror and takes the whole lot, no point in saving any. Two seconds, and he’s in top form again.

  He stands there in front of the mirror feeling calm, his brain razor sharp.

  Back into the kitchen. She’s sitting there trying to free her hands from the tape. It’s impossible, of course. Who does she think he is? Some amateur? He pushes the plug into the socket. But just as he’s about to ask her if she’s told anybody what she knows, he slips. The snow from both her shoes and his has melted. The water has made the floor slippery.

  He falls hard. His legs fly up in the air. He has time to think about the water and the live cable, and he flounders like a fish as he tries to get back on his feet, terrified of electrocuting himself.

  Inna Wattrang bursts out laughing. She might actually be crying, but it comes out like hysterical laughter. She laughs, and she can’t stop. The tears are pouring down her face.

  It just looked so funny when he suddenly fell, as if somebody had pulled a rug from underneath his feet. And the way he scrabbled about, trying to get up. It’s pure slapstick. Absolutely priceless. She laughs. She’s hysterical. It’s nice to be hysterical. She escapes from her fear into insanity. Into mad laughter.

  He’s frightened. And that makes him furious. He gets up feeling like a fool. And she’s laughing. There’s only one thought in his head: he’s going to shut her up. He picks up the cord and pushes it against her throat. The circuit runs right through her body, down to her ankle. The laughter stops immediately, her head jerks forward, her fingers spread, he presses and presses, he’s going to shut her up. And when he takes the cord away, her head carries on jerking back and forth. Her hands clench and open, clench and open. And then she throws up on her sweater.

  “Stop it,” he says, because he hasn’t had time to ask about that Sneyers guy yet.

  The chair falls over. He jumps out of the way. He can see the whites of her eyes, her jaws are working and working and it takes a few seconds before he realizes she’s chewing her own tongue to pieces.

  “Stop it!” he yells, kicking her in the stomach as she’s lying there.

  But she doesn’t stop, and then he realizes it’s time to put an end to this. He’ll just have to report back that she hadn’t told anybody.

  Into the living room. The fireplace. There’s an iron spit over the hearth. He runs and fetches it. When he gets back she’s still lying on her back taped to the chair, twitching. He stabs her through the heart with the spit.

  She dies immediately. But her muscles continue to contract.

  He looks around, with a vague feeling that this hasn’t gone too well. The instructions were that it should look like an opportunist attack. No suspicion that she might have known the perpetrator. She wasn’t supposed to be found in the house.

  This was unfortunate, but in no way a catastrophe. The kitchen isn’t too much of a mess, and the rest of the house is completely untouched. He can sort this out. He looks at the clock. Still plenty of time. It’ll soon be dark outside. He looks out of the window. He sees a dog running loose. He’s seen several here. If he leaves her outside somewhere, one of them will find her. And that could mean the police would be looking for him before t
he plane’s taken off. But he’s bound to come up with something…Down on the ice are those little houses on runners. He can carry her down to one of those when it’s dark. By the time they find her, he’ll be far away.

  She’s stopped moving.

  Only now does he find the knives. They’re hanging from a magnetic strip by the side of the stove. Good. That means he can cut her free.

  Once darkness has fallen, Douglas Morgan carries Inna Wattrang down to an ark on the ice. The snowmobile tracks are solid and easy to walk on. The ark is easy to open. He places her on a bunk inside. In his pocket he has a flashlight he found in a cupboard. He places a coverlet over the body. When he shines the light on his shoulder, he notices a red mark on the shoulder of his light-colored coat. He takes the coat off, and when he lifts the trapdoor in the floor, he realizes it’s covering a hole in the ice; there’s just a thin crust of ice covering the water, and he can easily break that. He pushes the coat down into the hole; it’ll float away beneath the ice.

  When he gets back to the house, he cleans up. Whistling as he wipes the kitchen floor. He throws her laptop, the bundle of tape, the floorcloth and the spit into a plastic carrier bag, which he takes with him in the car.

  On the road between Abisko and Kiruna he pulls over by the verge. Gets out of the car. The wind has got up. It’s bloody freezing. He takes a step toward the forest to throw away the bag containing the laptop and all the rest of the stuff. Immediately he sinks into the deep snow, almost up to his waist. He hurls the bag in the general direction of the forest. The snowdrifts will cover it. It will probably never be found.

  He also throws away her cell phone, which is in his pocket. What the hell was he thinking of, bringing it with him?

  It’s all he can do to clamber out of the ditch. Crawls back to the car, doing his best to brush off the snow.

  The job is done. This is one hell of a cold country.

  Rebecka Martinsson had gone into the office for a little while after she’d taken Alf Björnfot home. When she got back to her own house, Boxer had attacked her as soon as she stepped into the hallway, sinking her needle-sharp claws into Rebecka’s expensive sheer Wolford tights. She’d quickly pulled on jeans and an old shirt. At nine-thirty she rang Anna-Maria Mella.

  “Did I wake you?” she asked.

  “No, no,” Anna-Maria assured her. “I’m lying here in a nice clean hotel bed, dreaming of tomorrow morning’s breakfast.”

  “What is it with women and hotel breakfasts? Scrambled egg, cheap sausages and Danish. I just don’t get it.”

  “Move in with my husband and kids for a few days, then you’ll get it. Has something happened?”

  Anna-Maria sat up and switched on the bedside light. Rebecka told her about the conversation with Sven Israelsson. About Quebec Invest selling their shares in Northern Explore. About the fact that it seemed as if the Kallis Mining group had been bled dry of money in order to finance military activity in Uganda.

  “Can you prove it?” asked Anna-Maria.

  “Not yet. But I’m ninety-nine percent sure I’m right.”

  “Okay, is there anything that will give us enough for an arrest or a search warrant? Or something I can wave about that will get us into Regla? Sven-Erik and I were there today, and they turned us away at the gates. They said Diddi Wattrang was in Canada. But I think he’s at home, lying low. I want to ask him about the conversation he had with Inna the night before she was murdered.”

  “Diddi Wattrang is under suspicion of serious insider dealing. You can ask Alf Björnfot if you can arrest him; he’s in charge of the investigation.”

  Anna-Maria jumped out of bed and began to pull on her jeans, the phone clamped between her ear and her shoulder.

  “I’ll do that,” she said. “And I’ll damned well go there now.”

  “Take it easy,” said Rebecka.

  “What for?” snapped Anna-Maria. “They’ve really annoyed me now.”

  As soon as Rebecka had hung up following her conversation with Anna-Maria Mella, the phone rang again. It was Maria Taube.

  “Hi,” said Rebecka. “Have you all arrived?”

  “God, yes! Can’t you hear? We might not be that brilliant on skis, but we know what to do in a bar!”

  “I see, so Måns feels right at home then!”

  “I should say so. He’s parked himself right next to the bartender, and Malin Norell is hanging round his neck. So I should think he’s feeling pretty good.”

  A cold fist clutched at Rebecka’s heart.

  She made an effort to keep her voice cheerful. Cheerful and normal. Cheerful and casual. Only interested out of politeness.

  “Malin Norell,” she said. “Who’s she?”

  “Deals with company law. Moved over from Winge’s eighteen months ago. She’s a bit older than us, thirty-seven or -eight, something like that. Divorced. Six-year-old daughter. I think there was something going on between her and Måns just after she started, but I don’t know…Are you coming up tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow? No, I…there’s just so much going on at work right now…and I’m not feeling too good…I think I might be getting a cold.”

  She swore to herself. Two lies is always one too many. You should only have one excuse if you’re trying to lie your way out of something.

  “Oh no, that’s terrible,” said Maria. “I was really looking forward to seeing you.”

  Rebecka nodded. She had to finish this conversation. Now.

  “See you,” she managed to get out.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Maria, suddenly sounding worried. “Has something happened?”

  “No, no. It’s okay…I just…”

  Rebecka stopped. Her throat was hurting. There was a lump there, getting in the way of the words.

  “We’ll talk more another time,” she whispered. “I’ll call you.”

  “No, wait,” said Maria Taube. “Rebecka?”

  But she got no reply. Rebecka had hung up.

  Rebecka was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She was looking at the scar that ran between her lip and her nose.

  “What were you thinking?” she said to herself. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  Måns Wenngren was sitting in the bar of the Riksgränsen Hotel. Malin Norell was sitting next to him. He’d just said something and she’d laughed and her hand had landed on his knee, then she’d pulled it back. A brief sign. She was his if he wanted her.

  He really wished he did want her. Malin Norell was pretty and smart and funny. When she’d started working with the firm, she’d made her interest very clear. And he’d allowed himself to be captured, to be chosen. It had worked for a little while. They’d celebrated New Year’s in Barcelona together.

  But he’d been thinking about Rebecka the whole time. Rebecka had been discharged from the hospital. When she was in there he’d phoned, but she hadn’t wanted to speak to him. And during his short relationship with Malin Norell, he’d thought that was for the best. He’d thought that Rebecka was too complicated, too depressed, too much like bloody hard work.

  But he’d been thinking about her the whole time. While he and Malin were celebrating New Year’s in Barcelona, he’d called Rebecka. Taken the opportunity when Malin had gone out for a while.

  Malin was fantastic. She hadn’t cried or played hell when their relationship ended. He’d come up with a few excuses. And she’d left him in peace.

  And she was there if he wanted her. Her hand had landed on his knee.

  But Rebecka was coming tomorrow.

  The firm were really meant to have gone to Åre. But he’d made sure it was the Riksgränsen resort instead.

  He thought about Rebecka the whole time. He couldn’t help it.

  “Help me,” said Diddi to the nanny.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table looking completely lost as she picked up the broken cough medicine bottle from the floor, threw the pieces in the trash can and wiped the floor with kitchen roll.

  He real
ized he was just an old guy in her eyes. She was so wrong, but how could he make her see that?

  “Maybe you ought to go back to bed,” she said.

  He shook his head. Shook it because he was starting to hear voices inside it. They weren’t imaginary voices, nor fantasies, but memories. The memory of his own voice, shrill and urgent. Breathless and upset. And the memory of the soft but firm voice of an African woman. The Ugandan Minister for Industry.

  He hated Mauri. Hated that smug little shit. He knew Mauri had killed Inna. He’d realized it straightaway. What could he do? He couldn’t prove it. And even if he could turn Mauri in for financial misdemeanors, he himself was in it up to his neck as well. Mauri had been clever enough to make sure of that. And Diddi also had a family to take into account.

  He had nowhere to go. That had been the most powerful feeling when Inna died. Sure, there was grief. But mostly the panic-stricken feeling that he couldn’t get out. The Estonia on her way down. All the exits are blocked, the world tilts on its side and the water rushes in.

  He’d partied for three days. He’d run from one bar to the next, one person to the next, one party to the next. The realization hot on his heels. The realization that Inna was dead.

  He was beginning to remember more and more about those days.

  “I can’t avenge you,” he’d said to the dead Inna. Even though he’d thought of a thousand ways to kill and torture Mauri, he’d known he’d never be able to do it. “I’m just a waste of space,” he’d said to her.

  But now he was beginning to remember something in particular. It began with the voice of the Ugandan Minister for Industry.

  He’d wanted to get to Mauri. And he’d done something insane. And very dangerous.

  He’d called the Ugandan Minister for Industry. It must have been yesterday. Or was it?