by Mikaela Bley
She decided to continue down De Geersgatan along Tessin park. At Storskärsgatan, she caught sight of him and slowed down so he wouldn’t notice her. A few buildings down, he stopped in an entryway and started punching in the security code.
As soon as he disappeared inside, she pelted forward and caught hold of the door just before it closed.
Quietly, she closed the door behind her. She could hear him going up the stairs and then a key ring jangling on the second floor.
Ellen glanced at the tenant directory in the entry, but realised it was pointless as presumably he wouldn’t be listed under his real name.
There were two doors on the second floor. She rang at the one on the left twice before an elderly woman answered.
‘It’s just me and the cats here. I have no idea who lives in the building anymore. There are as many different people who have lived in the neighbouring apartment as there are months in the year. It’s completely impossible to recognise them. I think it’s the municipality that rents it. Would you like some jam biscuits?’
‘No, thanks. You haven’t seen a little girl here, have you?’
‘No, there are no children living in this building. I don’t really see too well, but I recognise children’s voices. There’s nothing that rings so nicely in your ears. Would you like some jam biscuits?’
Ellen thanked her and rang the bell next door. No one answered.
‘Hello,’ she called into the mail slot. ‘I’ve found a key that I think is yours.’
She heard a noise from inside the apartment, and the door slowly opened.
‘What kind of key?’ the man asked, sticking his wrinkled face through the narrow opening.
‘Hi. Can I come in? I need to talk with you.’
His small eyes opened wide. ‘Do I know you?’
‘No, but we’ve met, and I know what you’ve done.’ She bit her lip and tried to calm herself down. ‘I need to talk with you.’
Ellen barely had time to finish the sentence before he stepped backwards to shut the door.
‘Wait,’ she said, sticking her foot in the door. ‘Maybe I can help you.’
‘What makes you think I’m in need of help?’
‘Lycke,’ she called into the apartment, standing on tiptoe to see over him and into the hall.
‘What are you doing?’ he hissed, trying to shove her away, but Ellen resisted.
‘If you don’t let me in, I’ll scream even louder, and you don’t want to attract any attention, do you?’ Ellen said, trying to push open the door.
Suddenly, he stopped resisting and took a step back. Ellen almost fell into the apartment.
As he closed the door behind her, her legs suddenly felt weak and she hoped that he couldn’t see that she was shaking. Only now did she realise what she had gotten herself into. Everything had happened so fast. She felt her phone in her pocket, but remembered that the battery was dead. Even so, she took it out and pretended to look at something on it so he would see that she at least had one.
‘I’m the only one here,’ he said.
Ellen took a deep breath before moving past where he was standing, pressed against the wall with his hands behind his back.
‘Do you still go by Lars?’ she asked as she went into the dark, nineteen-thirties-era apartment.
He shook his head.
‘Do you remember me?’
‘No,’ he said, glaring at her.
There was hardly any furniture in the apartment. In one of the two rooms was an unmade camp bed with a thin mattress. Beside it was a glass of water and a roll of toilet paper. In one of the corners was a floor lamp. Ellen tried to turn on the ceiling light, but it didn’t work.
‘Do you live here?’ she said, knocking on the wall.
‘Yes. What do you actually want? If you don’t leave here, I’m calling the police.’
‘Do that,’ said Ellen, hoping they would hurry. ‘Maybe they’re already on their way,’ she added, to see his reaction.
But he stayed completely still, standing with his hands behind his back.
Ellen went into what was meant to be the living room, but which was now completely bare. There were only a few papers on the floor. She poked at the pile with her foot and saw that they were just newspapers.
It didn’t take her long to conclude that Lycke wasn’t there.
In the kitchen were the two grocery bags he’d been carrying.
Ellen turned the light in the ceiling fan on and picked up the bags on the counter.
‘O’boy? Why did you buy O’boy?’ she asked, holding up the container of powdered chocolate. She continued to root around in the bag and found a packet of Marie biscuits. ‘Isn’t this kid’s —’
‘I can eat what I like. Look, what do you want?’
Ellen turned around and was startled to find him standing close to her. The light in the ceiling fan blinked.
‘Who are you anyway?’ he said, fixing his small eyes on her.
Ellen looked around and started quietly snapping her fingers before she could bring herself to meet his gaze.
‘Don’t you recognise me? I’m a reporter from TV4. We met three years ago, in connection with your trial, and now I’m searching for a missing girl.’ She was talking much too fast, making it obvious how uncomfortable she was with the situation, regretting coming inside. No one knew she was here except the old lady with the jam biscuits in the apartment next door. She took her phone out of her pocket again and looked at it discreetly, hoping he wouldn’t see that the display was blank.
He took a step toward her and was now standing so close that she could smell his bad breath.
‘Then you ought to know that I don’t like girls.’
Ellen tried to remember, but she could only visualise a lot of different children. It didn’t matter if they were girls or boys. ‘They were kids.’
In Lars’s apartment in Gothenburg, they had found over twelve thousand pornographic images of children and almost two hundred videos on a hard drive. Lars and his companions were arrested after the Swedish police had received information from German police about the network.
‘Lycke,’ Ellen called out one last time to reassure herself that she wasn’t there. She braced herself and slipped past him out to the hall and opened the door to the bathroom, pulling back the shower curtain.
‘Where are you hiding her?’ she asked Lars, who now went by a different name she wasn’t interested in knowing.
‘Get out.’ He went to the front door and opened it. ‘I can report you for unlawful entry. Get out of here before this turns bad.’
Ellen did as he said. Lycke was not in the apartment.
Once out on the street, she felt completely empty. She walked slowly back to Fältöversten and her car without caring whether she got wet from the rain. She had acted carelessly. She thought about what could have happened, about the children from Lars’s trial, about his shabby apartment, about Lycke.
When she got to where she’d left her car, she looked around. The car wasn’t there. Wasn’t this where I parked it? she thought. Maybe she’d parked it on the other side of the shopping centre. She tried to remember. She’d been in such a hurry. Had she lost her mind completely?
Then she heard something moving nearby. She looked around, but couldn’t see anything. She decided she must have been imagining things. Her nerves were in tatters. It seemed like the slightest little sound made her jump.
Again she heard something. Ellen whirled around, looking down toward Karlaplan and then toward Valhallavägen.
Had he followed her?
ELLEN
11.15 P.M.
‘Where have you been?’
Ellen whirled around, and saw Jimmy coming toward her.
‘Are you completely out of your mind? You scared the life out of me!’ she said.
&nbs
p; ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Don’t you think I’m the one who should ask you what you’re doing here? And why you parked your car outside the garage?’
‘What?’
‘The tow-truck people have been trying to get hold of you. They finally called the office because you had our parking permit on the dashboard. No one could reach you. Why was your phone turned off?’
‘Battery’s dead. Where’s my car?’
‘Because we couldn’t get hold of you, it got towed. People couldn’t get their cars out of the garage.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘No, you can pick it up tomorrow. Where have you been?’
‘I got worried …’ She tried to take in what he’d been saying, but just felt more confused than ever.
‘Come on, I’ll drive you home,’ Jimmy said, pressing a button on his key so that the car in front of her started to blink. ‘Jump in.’
Ellen did as he said without arguing. She was much too shaken up to protest.
They drove down Strandvägen, passing the Grand Hotel and then the palace on Skeppsbron without saying a word to each other.
‘Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?’ she asked when he stopped outside her building.
‘Another time.’
‘That was a joke.’ She opened the door.
‘Wait, I want to say something.’ He grabbed her arm, stopping her from getting out of the car. ‘I feel like we need to talk. You know that last night —’
‘Let it go, Jimmy. That’s old news,’ she said, pulling away. Closing the car door, she hurried up to the entry to her building. She entered the security code and glanced over her shoulder before going in. Jimmy was still sitting in the car.
Ellen got into the elevator, turned the key, and went up to the top floor.
The building was from the seventeenth century and was owned by her grandmother. The elevator went all the way up into her apartment, and sometimes she received unexpected visits from the neighbours. But she knew them all well; they were all part of the von Blaten family. They rented out the ground floor to a small bakery that made the best pastries in the whole city.
The elevator doors opened and she stepped out into the big room. The apartment was mostly one large, open space, except for the two bedrooms and the bathroom. To the right was the kitchen, in the middle was the living room, and at the far end toward the pier was the office area. The apartment was at a slight slant, the building’s facade tilting backward severely because of the ground having settled.
She went over to the window and looked down at Skeppsbron. Jimmy was gone.
For a long time, she’d wished that he would explain himself, and she now regretted that she hadn’t let him finish that sentence. But what was there to say, really? she thought, tossing off her leather jacket and kicking off her shoes. She hadn’t changed clothes or showered since yesterday morning.
She went over to the bedroom and on through to the bathroom. She pulled off her clothes, tossing them in a heap on the floor. As soon as her feet touched the warm bathroom tiles, she felt her body begin to slowly relax. She turned on the shower, put the pressure on high and the water so hot she almost scalded herself.
After showering, she wrapped herself in her big bathrobe and went out into the kitchen to put on water for some tea. As luck would have it, she had gone shopping on Thursday. Butter, cheese, half a loaf of sourdough bread, and a big tub of raw-food ice cream.
She set everything down on the kitchen counter and made herself some sandwiches while the tea was steeping in the black-and-white porcelain cup.
With Ellen, everything was in black and white. She liked straight lines and strong contrasts. Maybe it was to balance out her own messiness, or else it was a reaction to the flowery wallpaper and antique furniture of every conceivable colour that she’d been surrounded by while growing up in Örelo.
The apartment’s three rooms had been carefully renovated when Ellen moved in. She had chosen to keep the building’s old charm, with white beams in the ceiling. The floors were painted white and the walls likewise. The kitchen cabinets were black, to her mother’s great dismay, but what did that matter? She never came to visit anyway. The only colourful things were the books and magazines. There was no balcony, but the bay windows were deep and low, so you could sit by them and look out over Skeppsbron and Blasieholmen. Ellen had spread out pillows and sheepskins, and many a glass of wine had been consumed there.
She took the plate of sandwiches, and the teacup in her other hand, and went over to the bookcase framing the two windows. She tripped on a jacket that had been tossed on the floor and swore when the hot tea spilled over her hand. When it came to unimportant items like clothes and accessories, she was not that orderly.
On the bookcase, however, everything was in order. Her books weren’t sorted in alphabetical order or by colour, as some liked to do. They were organised by categories of crime.
There was literature on various murders all around the world and from long ago. There were books about autopsies. About how to make perpetrator profiles. Newspaper clippings. Everything.
She had quite a bit on her computer, too, but most of it she had printed out and filed in binders. Now, her hard disks were mostly filled with film material.
She’d had the bookcase custom built. It covered the whole wall all the way up to the ceiling’s edge, and she’d had a tall wooden ladder installed that reached up to the highest shelves.
‘The bookcase of death,’ Philip called it. Once, when he’d been really drunk, he’d taken out a book and read a passage about a woman who had killed her husband. In detail. After that, he told her, he hadn’t slept for several weeks and had developed wrinkles around his eyes.
Ellen smiled to herself, thinking of how open Philip was when they talked.
In front of the bookcase was her desk. Nothing traditional — it was an old bench she’d found when they were renovating the smithy at Örelo. She’d brought it to Stockholm and had a glass tabletop made to even out the surface.
She set the cup down on the desk, and took a bite of the cheese sandwich before also setting the plate down.
One evening a few years ago, Philip had asked Ellen which murders she thought were the most awful. Her top-five list. He’d always had a hard time understanding her interest in it, and thought that perhaps it was like listing the five best mascaras. Although then he’d realised that was a bad comparison because you’d have to consider what kind of eyelashes the person in question had and the purpose of the make-up and so on.
His question for Ellen was much easier to answer, he thought. But she didn’t agree. There were so many awful cases that it was hard to rank them. So she listed the first cases that came to mind.
‘Christine Schürrer, the German woman who killed two small children in Arboga in 2008. Niina Äikiä, who tortured and killed her ten-year-old son Bobby, who was mildly developmentally disabled, in Gothenburg in 2005. Irma Grese, the Nazi prison guard in the concentration camps. Myra Hindley, who assaulted, tortured, and murdered children and teenagers in Manchester in the mid 1960s. Diane Downs, 1983, Arizona. Shot her three children to get closer to her boyfriend.’
‘My God. So sick. And you know the years, too,’ Philip said.
They were each sitting in a bay window, sipping red wine as they looked out over the Franska bukten pier.
‘Why are there only women on your list? No men. No gay guys either, for that matter.’
Ellen took a sip of wine and thought about it. He was right, there had been only women on her list. That wasn’t something she’d noticed before. She silently went through the list again, contemplating.
‘Because they’re so awful. Because it makes it so much worse. Imagine that German woman. Can’t you see her in your mind?’
‘Sure. Ugl
y.’
‘She killed two small, innocent children out of jealousy. How could anyone do that? I just can’t understand it.’
‘Me neither. She must’ve been completely crazy.’
‘No, she wasn’t. Or, at least, it wasn’t determined that she suffered from any mental problem.’
‘So she was just incredibly evil then. But there must be lots of men who’ve committed similar crimes — and why, for example, do you have only one female prison guard from the concentration camps? Do you think she was any worse than the male guards?’
After some reflection, she nodded.
‘Why is that? I don’t get it. I mean, I do agree, women shouldn’t commit murder. It doesn’t suit them. But still,’ he continued.
It was right there in front of her, in black-and-white, and it occurred to her how fraught the topic was. It was considered more awful when a woman committed murder. It went against every notion of how a woman should be. If a female murderer was involved, you were forced to conclude that the woman was absolutely evil. Or totally insane. You had to say this, so as not to lose all faith in humanity. There were not the same high expectations placed on men.
As she recalled their conversation that evening, something occurred to her.
She climbed halfway up the ladder and looked at the ‘children’ shelf. She took out several books that she thought might contain what she was after. She also pulled out a binder of newspaper clippings.
Before setting down the pile of books, she pushed aside the newspapers and receipts and all the other bits of rubbish on the desk. She sat down, then turned on the lamp, shaped like a submachine gun with a black lampshade.
It took about an hour to find what she’d been searching for, in a book titled Suffer the Little Children. Ellen rubbed her eyes, trying to push aside the weariness she felt.
South Carolina, USA, 1994. FBI agent Gregg McGroy tells about a phantom kidnapping. A mother and her daughter are on their way to a shopping centre when the mother suddenly gets stomach pains and runs back up to their apartment, leaving the child on the street.