‘Yes, we are,’ Malin says.
‘You’ve got to let me go with you.’
And Malin detects a lack of trust in Tove’s voice, and it strikes her that she’s heading out into the night, possibly putting herself in mortal danger, without sparing a thought for her daughter, and that she’d be motherless if anything happened. But Tove isn’t a child any more, she’s probably more grown up and sensible than I am.
‘Of course you’re coming with me,’ Malin says. ‘I’d never go and see him without you.’
Tove hangs up.
And Malin feels her anxieties about going to Hälsingland to see her brother fading away. Thanks to hearing Tove’s voice just now.
Tove sounded as if she doesn’t really care about where I am and what I’m doing. But of course she has her own life to live. Presumably she hasn’t got the energy to feign a load of feelings just to show how worried she is about her mum. She didn’t even seem to consider the possibility that I might be heading off on a dangerous job.
Another car comes towards them.
The driver leaves his lights on full beam, and Malin sees Zeke squint, but keeps her own eyes wide open.
Light.
Stronger light.
And then the solid dark of blindness.
And Malin feels it, knows they’re on the right track, they’re going to rescue the children.
They’re going to rescue Elena and Marko.
It can’t be too late.
Terror, have you made it your servant?
Josef Kurtzon stares out into the darkness of his cataracts. Knows that everything has reached its endgame, knows that life is a game that you must never stop playing.
Weakness, what can we do with that? With uncertainty?
I toy with it, he thinks, as a jolt of pain hits his airways and his body is racked with coughs that almost burst the lining of his lungs.
I’ve never stopped playing. The pleasure has always been on my side, just like it is now, on this night when everything is moving towards its dark conclusion.
The stuffed lizard hisses by his side. He pats it in his imagination, stroking its cold skin, and looks out into the darkness.
His blindness is a white blindness.
He isn’t afraid of the dark. He’s sought it his whole life, made it his own.
Josefina.
Leopold.
Henry.
The twin girls, Tuva and Mira.
The other children.
Tell me, has there ever been a more grandiose game?
He closes his blind eyes. Tries to imagine what is about to happen. Takes pleasure in what has been his life’s work.
58
It hadn’t worked.
They had turned on the lights in the room where they were holding the children, saw the fuzzy drawings they’d made on the walls, saw them open their eyes in utter terror, heard them scream, saw them hold their arms up, then hug each other, and the brothers had aimed their guns at them, but they hadn’t been able to shoot.
Henry and Leopold Kurtzon had yelled at each other. Their voices merging, impossible to tell apart.
‘Do it!’
‘Shoot!’
‘This is your job!’
‘Kill them, shoot for fuck’s sake!’ But neither of them had been able to pull the trigger.
Hiring someone to kill someone, to kill children, was an entirely different matter from killing someone yourself. Things that happened at a distance were strangely fictional. The reality was something else.
The children on their own inside the room. Silent. Somehow blind.
And Leopold and Henry had looked at the little bodies in the darkness, and then the brothers had started shouting again: ‘You’ve got to shoot. We can’t leave it like this.’
But then Henry had changed his tune, and said: ‘We have to let them live.’
‘We have to kill them,’ Leopold had screamed.
‘I can’t do it. You do it.’
‘If we don’t kill them, we’ll never be free of them.’
‘Look how scared and lonely they are!’
‘Then I’ll kill you.’
‘You can’t. You know you can’t. We’ll leave them here. We can’t abandon each other.’
And Leopold had looked at his brother, realised he was right, and then he had nodded, yes, we’ll leave the children here, who could have expected anything different, I’m backing down, the way I always have, I’m nothing.
The brothers had slammed the door shut, leaving the children alone in the room, then rushed up to the terrace, throwing their guns on the stone floor, and looked out at the dark garden, the black, almost still sea, and down at the outhouses containing the beasts. They could hear a strange banging on the door of one of the buildings, and desperation had started to creep up on them, and for a few moments they were transformed into nothing but survival instinct.
What do we do now, should we leave, should we leave them here, but where are we going, should we shoot ourselves, let the children live, or should we shoot them first, and then ourselves?
Questions that go around in circles.
Everything they thought they knew just a few moments ago, down in the basement, returns in the form of new questions, impossible to unravel.
No matter what they did, however much they might try to eradicate their own capacity for empathy, a tiny fragment remained, infuriating them.
That’s not who we are.
We are mathematics.
Rationality.
And the bomb ticking outside the room. The one they had had made for them in Bangkok, before the kidnapping in Phuket, powerful enough to blow the whole house into tiny fragments. The pilot of the charterplane had no idea that it was in their bags. Kidnapped children are one thing. But a bomb?
They had landed at Gävle Airport, and then brought the children here. Back then the brothers had been exhilarated: We can do this, it’s going to work.
They had more or less ignored the bomb for the past twenty-four hours, as if they couldn’t quite bring themselves to think about it. Somehow letting the threat of their own and the children’s impending death hang in the air.
Should they set the bomb off? Only another hour or so to go before the timer needs to be reset again.
‘We’re leaving now,’ Leopold had yelled.
‘Shouldn’t we let the kids go anyway?’ Henry had said.
‘We have to kill them.’
‘That’s what Father would do, isn’t it?’
And they had gone back down to the basement again, opened all the doors, pulled the children out, and dragged them up to the living room.
First they had checked the timer on the bomb, and put it back a bit, to give themselves some more time. Now that the sea was so calm, they would surely be able to make their way across the Baltic to Estonia.
The children had been silent.
Not even the three-year-old had made a sound, and maybe they were beyond fear, beyond life even before they died.
They stank when the brothers brought them out. Their bodies were covered in ingrained brown dirt, and they looked more like animals than small people.
‘Shouldn’t we take them with us?’ Henry had asked. ‘Use them as hostages?’
‘Any benefit would be outweighed by the fact that they’d slow us down, and if the police catch us we’ll spend a lifetime in prison,’ Leopold had replied, and Henry had realised that his brother was right. They had to do what they had to do.
The brothers had each sat down with one of the children in their laps, hugging them to calm them down. And then they had aimed their pistols at the children’s temples.
59
They turned off to the right, down towards the sea, which should be just a few kilometres away to the east.
Empty country cottages in among the trees. They pass a sign pointing to an old summer camp for children, fifteen kilometres away.
Their satnav is pointing them in the right direction.
&
nbsp; Their movement into the darkness is being registered on the colourful screen lighting up the interior of the car.
‘What do you reckon, then?’ Zeke asks. ‘Are they going to be there?’
Malin can feel the cold pistol against her chest. Says: ‘I don’t know, but it feels right.’
They drive past what should be the last house before number 37, the house that doesn’t exist, yet apparently does.
The headlights shine into the forest, the vegetation thickens, becomes almost tropical, but surely there can’t be palm trees here?
No: pine trees, firs, dense clusters of pitch-black ferns, and the sense of being in an ancient forest is tangible, then overwhelming, and they drive a few more kilometres before the road reaches the sea. It’s lighter here, and Zeke switches off the headlights to conceal their arrival, just in case anyone is looking out for them.
They drive around a headland, then into a small inlet, heading slowly along the uneven gravel track, and then the island rises up in front of them, and the tall fir trees surrounding the main house that they can just make out deep within the woods become the turrets and towers of an imaginary castle.
Lights in the windows.
Someone’s there.
The brothers?
The children?
Human beings, imposing themselves on nature.
Tearing out the vegetation, setting down their roots, then recreating the greenery they’ve destroyed in order to live in close proximity to monsters.
There’s something about this place. The vibrations the island is emitting.
No one should have settled here.
Nature should have been left in peace.
Malin and Zeke have parked some two hundred metres from the bridge leading to the island. Have crept up to the two-metre-high gate, surrounded by barbed wire.
Malin peers into the darkness, looking for surveillance cameras, but there aren’t any there.
No signs on the gate. No letterbox. Nothing to suggest who or what is hiding out on the island.
She can hear Zeke’s breathing beside her. Heavy, almost rattling, and if breathing can sound angry, then Zeke’s does now.
‘Bloody hell,’ he says. ‘What a fucking place, do you feel it, Malin? It’s like the sea itself smells sulphurous, not salty and fresh, but sulphurous.’
‘It feels humid as well,’ Malin says. ‘And warmer than it should do, doesn’t it? As if the spring night is somehow warmer here.’
The clock in the car had said a quarter to one as they left it at the edge of the forest.
No sign of anyone out on the island.
No one.
Her pistol.
Am I going to have to use it? Malin wonders.
Maybe. The children are here. The brothers. I can feel it, and Malin and Zeke haven’t discussed what to do, but without saying a word Zeke takes off his jacket and throws it over the barbed wire on top of the gate.
‘Do you think the fabric’s enough to cover the wire?’
Malin shakes her head, aware that they can’t stay here by the gate, exposed, they have to move on.
‘But we can’t shoot the lock off.’
‘Fuck it,’ Zeke says, then swings himself up onto the gate, grabs his jacket, and he’s lucky, there are no spikes where he puts his fingers, then he’s over.
Malin follows his example.
Manages to avoid the barbed wire, and they press on, across the bridge, towards the large house on the island, it looks like a huge sugarlump that someone has rammed into a steep rockface.
A jetty.
A large motorboat rocking, pale against the dark water.
Is there rain in the air? The sky above them is dark, no stars.
Outhouses to one side of the main house. One door is open, and is that the sound of scratching coming from the oblong buildings?
They run across the bridge, then they’re on the other side, on the island, Malin moving soundlessly behind Zeke, who’s drawn his pistol and tucked himself behind a tree trunk, and she sees something coming towards them, a large, slithering creature, and she feels like screaming, and sees Zeke switch on the pocket torch she saw him tuck into his belt before they left the car.
The creature’s red eyes burn in the night.
Its yellow teeth gleam.
Its striped body glistens.
She throws herself behind Zeke, and can feel how scared they both are.
A lizard.
A huge, live lizard with a black and yellow body, skin that looks impregnable.
And then another one, and the creatures hiss at them. Hungry prehistoric lizards. The brothers are here, Malin is sure of it now, and the animals move to attack them, and Zeke shines the torch right into the eyes of the largest lizard, and Malin wants to scream and run, but they stay where they are, stay silent, and Zeke moves the torch quickly, and a miracle happens.
The creatures’ bodies quiver.
Turn around.
And they head off into the darkness. Find somewhere to lie in wait. Wait for the next opportunity to tear someone or something to pieces.
The torch goes out.
Malin and Zeke look at each other in the darkness.
Shake their heads, before Zeke gestures towards the house and they set off.
The brothers are sitting on the sofa in the larger of the villa’s living rooms. Exhausted.
They’ve gathered their things, taken out the case with the money, and are grabbing a few minutes’ rest before making their way down to the boat by the jetty.
They need to get going now.
The bomb.
It ought to go off more or less as they get on the boat. In ten minutes.
Not with a bang, but a whimper, Leopold thinks.
They’ve closed the heavy white curtains, turned out the lights, and darkness has taken hold of the room.
They’ve put their pistols down. They’re shimmering blackly on the glass tabletop. They sit in silence, not talking to each other.
They listen to the room.
Was that something moving out in the garden just now? Have the lizards managed to gnaw their way out? God knows, they’ve tried.
And that light the brothers thought they could see has gone. Maybe it was never there?
They discussed whether to call their father, tell him everything, but is he even still alive? Or has the cancer taken him at last?
What have we done?
Who are we?
What are we?
They weren’t able to shoot in the end. Unable to do what they had forced someone else to do.
While they had thought they were united in decisiveness, all they found was indecision, then a deep, all-enveloping sense of shame.
They had put the children back in the room. Now they’ll be blown up along with the rest of the house. Buried among the rubble.
Then there’s a muffled thud from the terrace, and the brothers stand up at the same moment, go over to the glass wall and push the curtain aside.
The lizard is almost two metres long from nose to tail, and it shines darkly as it forces its body across the white stone of the terrace. It must have clambered up the rockface and somehow found its way onto the terrace.
It catches sight of them through the glass. Stops, turns its head towards them, then it opens its jaws, and they can almost smell the stench of the creature’s empty stomach, hear its claws scratching against the stone.
The creature remains motionless.
Stares at them with a dead look in its yellow eyes, and for a moment the brothers think it’s their father’s pet, the beast that used to scratch at the door of the cellar out on Lidingö, but they know that animal’s dead, was stuffed years ago, that its open jaws are now an empty gesture rather than any real danger or cause for alarm.
The animals in their cages. In order to get their hands on this place, they had to have them. But here at the house, on the loose, dangerous – they’re not supposed to be here.
‘Fuck off!’ Leop
old yells.
‘Go away,’ Henry whispers.
And the monster crawls away, heaving its bulk over the edge of the terrace and down into the wilderness of the garden below.
Then it’s gone, but at that moment Leopold Kurtzon sees a shadow, faintly picked out in the light from the windows.
The shadow of someone moving across the terrace. Isn’t it?
But he can’t see anyone. Has Father died and come back as a ghost? Is everything too late now? Is it too late to run? And the bomb. There can’t be more than a few minutes before it goes off. We have to get out of here.
Get them now.
Kill them.
Wipe our horrible uncles and all that they bear within them from the face of the earth.
Complete our vengeance, Malin Fors, as you now approach the horror.
The core of cruelty.
The evil of evils, that which takes over when evil’s attempts at dissembling come to an end, the evil created when children are abandoned to their pain.
But don’t let yourself be content with that.
After you’ve destroyed them, dig downwards, dig out the truth.
Dig out the children, the goodness in yourself.
But kill our real mummy’s brothers, Malin. Kill them, they’re cruel, kill them for our sake, for Mummy’s, for Daddy’s.
Of course, perhaps they are to be pitied, but everyone has a responsibility towards all children, all people.
And be quick, Malin.
Because even if we’re envious of the captive boy and girl, we want them to carry on living.
The clock is ticking. Time will soon run out. Hurry, Malin, hurry!
‘They’re coming,’ Leopold Kurtzon whispers to his brother, ‘they’re coming. It must be the police.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Henry Kurtzon asks, nodding, aware that the animal-keeper would never enter their domain without ringing at the door first. And the gate on the bridge is locked.
It must be the police. Or someone else who wants to catch them.
Leopold whispers: ‘We carry on to the end, just as we planned. We shoot our way out, then we head straight down to the boat.’
And Henry follows him as they creep deeper into the room, pick up their pistols, take the safety catches off
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