by Will Dean
I move and keep close to his tracks and walk from tree to tree using as much cover as I can. My left aid plays a little tune and then switches itself off. I’m down to one but I’ve got spare batteries and I can change them with my eyes closed in about twenty seconds flat. I’m getting bitten. I keep glancing down and finding big mosquitoes on my wrists. I can’t feel them at all, they’re experts, pumping anaesthetic into my system before my brain even registers them sucking. But I’m getting bumps now, red bumps on my hands and they’re beginning to itch. I want to scratch my neck. Two more gunshots, but they’re distant and from the direction of the house and the track. I think.
The trees are unending. Un-fucking-ending. It’s an ocean, a space-walk, a nightmare. Who planted all these? They’re so dense that the lower branches – the grey needleless dead ones – are almost touching each other. There is no sky today, just drizzle. And the animals are quiet. No birds and no rustling. But I know they’re all out there.
I need to pee and I need to eat and I need help. I need Tammy and Benny Björnmossen and the Karlstad cop with the Bluetooth earpiece, all here now, all locked and loaded. The ground’s so uneven; I’m just trying not to fall into a badger sett or off the edge of a slippery boulder. I see Hannes every now and again, camouflaged and broad as he steps through the birches. This is his habitat.
I look down to check the time but there’s a tick on my wrist. It’s further up my sleeve than the leather strap of my watch and its body is already half-full with blood. I look up to the sky, to Dad. Without stopping, I reach in and pinch the tick with my finger and thumbnail, and pull. It’s not what you’re supposed to do, I know that, but I can’t just leave it, can I? Its pale grey sack comes off in my fingers, my own blood smearing on my nails. I pull off a leg and then I see the fucker’s head burrow deeper into my skin. I scratch at it with a nail and make myself bleed but it is inside me now and it’s biting or whatever it does. I am not okay. It’s tunnelling. I can’t feel it exactly and I can’t reach it but I can see it.
My phone vibrates and I check the screen and it’s a text message from Lena. She says a forensic pathologist has found traces of coffee in both of Rikard Spritzik’s eye sockets. My lungs deflate. I stop walking. It’s Holmqvist. Those espresso scoops. It’s not Hannes. But, the frozen eyes. It is both of them? I call Lena but the call fails. No reception. They’re working together, Holmqvist and Hannes. Medusa twins.
I see Hannes sniffing the air and checking the ground. He’s running his fingers over the moss and the dirt beneath him. He’s hunting. He heads off in a slightly different direction, over a sharp rocky slope. I follow and my feet catch in exposed tree roots and in deep cracks filled with leaf mould and needles. I’m rubbing my skin continually now, scratching under the balaclava, trying to crush any bugs that might be eating my face. The Velcro strip on my coat sleeve is already a graveyard of wings and thoraxes and stings.
I get to the top of an incline, where a large spruce has fallen in an earlier storm. Its flat root system stands erect on the ground like a brown satellite dish, and it’s taller than I am. I clamber past it and the woods thicken. Brambles ping back at me and sweep up to catch my thighs. They’re animals, not plants. Their thorns are teeth and their wiry stems are muscle and cartilage and ligament. I’m starting to bleed from head to toe, from a hundred pinprick wounds. Bites and burrowed ticks and midges and fucking bramble thorns.
I take out my phone and look at it. I stand on tiptoe and wave it around and get one bar of reception. I call Thord on speed dial, but the call fails. I call 112, but the call fails. I come out of the brambles to a long clearing with birches scattered around and piles of rocks like someone once arranged them here for a reason. I can see Hannes in the centre of the space with his silvery hair and his strong back. He aims his rifle at something and tracks it as it heads deeper into the trees at the far end. I want to stop him. Then I remember the insignia on the butt of Hannes’s rifle. It wasn’t a shamrock or a clover, it was a club symbol. Hannes is the goddam King of Clubs. And then he lowers his gun and stands up and walks on like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
I don’t trek through the clearing, it feels too exposed. I skirt the edge of it, squelching through brown water and sphagnum moss as deep as my knees. There are ant nests. I’ve spotted at least four the size of dome tents. The forest floor is alive. I get to the far end of the clearing and see Hannes through the spruce trunks. The rain comes down thicker now and I’ve given up trying to swat away mosquitoes because there’s a constant cloud of them. They’re with me. I walk into the treeline and step on a splintered pine branch just like I’ve done a hundred times before. Except, this one snaps.
Hannes and his gun turn to face me.
47
I’m perfectly still and I have a knot in my throat. The dark eye of the rifle’s staring straight at me and I’m staring straight back. It’s like I’ve swallowed a lump of crusty bread without chewing it. I’m vulnerable – ridiculously, laughably, pathetically, vulnerable. I can’t move, but even if I could, I’ve got a sheathed knife and a phone with no reception and a steel wrench. I’ve got a catapult and a can of Tammy’s Canadian bear-spray that I’m not sure even works.
If I could stop breathing, I would. I’m that deer I saw from the car. I’m caught in time, paused by my own realisation of what’s about to happen. I’m facing a man I don’t really know, and I’m facing his rifle loaded with bullets nobody ever knew existed.
And then he turns slowly and sniffs the air and walks away in the same direction as before. I want to sprint away as fast as I can. I’m pretty quick. I’ll get lost, hopelessly lost, but I’ll be away from this unknown thing that I’m following, this unknown potential event. And anyway, I’m already lost.
I start walking again, the wrench gripped tight in my bite-covered fingers. My hand is shaking. I check my phone, I walk, I check again, I walk. The afternoon is drifting into early evening and the brown and green colours are dampening all around me. I make out owl boxes high up in the Scots pine trees. They look like baby coffins up there, baby coffins fixed half way up trees. Who put them up there? Miniature coffins in the forest canopy with little holes for owls to fly into, or for babies to stare out from.
My stomach’s not growling, it’s too tight and too hard for that. I pass little clumps of lingonberries and cloudberries growing in amongst the pine needles and birch leaf carpets. They glisten like wine gums, or more like midget gems really, little red and orange sweeties on the soft, green floor. I taste wine gums on my tongue. I taste them from memory and saliva floods my mouth from nowhere as the taste clarifies behind my front teeth. Artificial strawberry and artificial pear. I check my phone. Nothing. As soon as I get reception I’ll call this in.
He’s speeding up. The way Hannes moves through trees and over fallen branches and trunks is spellbinding. It’s elegant, like he’s water passing through a forest stream. I walk and scramble and do little semi-jogs to keep up, touching trees as I go.
I removed my left hearing aid a while back to stop it getting damp, no point risking it if the batteries need changing. So that ear’s open, unencumbered; it’s naked. I can feel the wet in that ear and the soundless touch of the breeze. My right ear’s screeching and whistling, the wind causing feedback. He stops. I can see him hiding behind a tree like he’s just been spotted. I move behind a birch to mirror him. My tree’s inadequate for the task, it’s half as broad as I am. It’s not white and clean, but grey and half rotten. Patchy bark spotted with lichen. He’s watching someone. Or something. But his gun’s down.
A mosquito flies into my left ear. I can’t hear it but it is vibrating and I feel its buzz and its bloodlust. I smack my ear with my left hand like I used to do sometimes as a child, as a frustrated six- or seven-year-old. Back then I wasn’t annoyed that I was deaf, I was annoyed I was pitied. Kids would give up trying to tell me stories when I asked them to repeat parts. No malice whatsoever, just easier to say, ‘I’ll explain it later,
gotta go,’ or ‘doesn’t matter, wasn’t that funny anyway.’ But it did matter, it always did. Still does.
I push myself closer to the birch, its papery bark curled and striated like dry winter skin. I don’t mind pressing my face against trees as it turns out, I seem to trust them. You know where you are with a tree. It’s what’s hiding behind the tree, what’s waiting up in the tree, what’s buried under the tree that’s the problem. It’s getting darker. The drizzle’s collecting in the branches, and dribbles of rainwater are finding paths down the trunk to the soil, some touching my lips or my eyebrows as they stream by. Hannes is bringing his gun up again now. A small part of me, the part that’s sometimes tempted to step over cliffs or spin the steering wheel on the motorway, yearns for him to shoot. I want to see him shoot that rifle and for it all to be over even though I don’t have a clue what he’s aiming at.
But he brings it down slowly and adjusts his footwork. My neck itches like chicken pox. Gunshots. I hear three in succession, then a break of a minute or so, then two more. Five bullets discharged. Not close to here, but somewhere in Utgard forest. It could be Bengt. Or the police. Or an unknown hunter bringing down a calf elk and then its mother. That’s something Lena told me about hunters, they never shoot the mother first, they never leave a child without its parent, not even for a minute between shots. The kid gets it first, never the adult.
Hannes is just waiting there by that Scots pine and he’s completely focussed. I try to maintain the same kind of unwavering concentration on him but peripheral movements snatch at my gaze. I notice a blackbird in a spruce tree skittering from branch to branch like a busybody, and then I think I see a mouse, but it could just be leaves moving in the damp murk.
I’m standing perfectly still behind this birch and the bugs seem so fucking appreciative. I have mosquitoes and midges slipping inside my jacket like boys’ hands at a cinema. I’ve counted three ticks on me including the one now living in the subcutaneous layers of my wrist. And that’s just the things I can see. My mind flashes words and I swat them away like I want to do with these damn bugs. Leeches. Centipedes. Woodlice. I’m not afraid of spiders but there’s one abseiling down from fuck-knows-where on an invisible thread so I back up and let it pass me by. It’s lime green or even brighter, not huge, but lime-fucking-green, so it must be poisonous, right? It’s warning predators with its colouring because that’s what we all learnt in school.
Hannes is bringing his rifle up and resting the barrel against the trunk, his elbow cocked into a triangle, his feet planted well apart. My focus is zooming in and out. I see an ant walk across my hand. I’m breathing as quietly as I can and then I notice red toadstools behind Hannes and then he lowers his gun and he walks away towards a hunting tower at the far end of the clearing. I stay where I am and watch him climb up the ladder of the rough pine tower with his rifle over one shoulder and a coil of rope over the other. I can’t see him any more but I know he’s up there.
Gunshot. A piercing boom travels to my one functional hearing aid. It’s much louder than any shot I’ve ever heard. Very close. It’s harsh and scraping and metallic and it is right here. Birds I never noticed before squawk and flap and rush away from the nearby trees. Something just died. I don’t know how I know this but I do. The air has changed around me.
I step through dung and my boots squelch and then I step through moss and it’s deep and clean and soft as candyfloss. I’m walking more slowly and making sure Hannes can’t see me. I wonder how far away the edge of the forest is because I have no idea whatsoever if I’m in the middle of Utgard or near the end. There’s a fly or a mosquito or something inside my balaclava and it’s buzzing its last, desperate buzz to escape and I just let it be.
The clearing is perhaps ten metres wide but it’s as long as a football pitch. I’m closer to the hunting tower now, a little shack built up in a birch tree. The tree itself is split above the ground, three separate trunks growing up from one root. The tower looks like a big pallet resting maybe four metres up on the three trunks. There are a few horizontal planks higher up acting as guard rails, and a makeshift roof made from corrugated plastic. I’m behind a decent pine and I must be close to invisible here in my mask. I stare at the tower and then I see something move beneath it. No, behind it, on the far side, there’s someone else here. The air is sickly with fresh rot. I swallow. There’s another hunter here. I stay behind the tree and my mask is partially covering my eye but someone is walking towards the tower now. And he’s bold, he is not afraid. Looks younger than Hannes. Looks like David Holmqvist.
I move slowly, hidden five trees deep, into the woods. I have a partial view through the trunks to the hunting tower, and in between me and it are a scattering of hedgehog mushrooms. They’re not glowing in the sun like you see in the tourist magazines, and they’re not perfect either. These ones are big and spongy and days past their best, and they’re probably riddled with worms but I’m transfixed anyway. Me, then mushrooms, then Ghostwriter looking up at an elk hunting tower. Is Holmqvist in the game? He’s rich enough. Is he Spades? Diamonds? Do they play in that second guest room? He’s climbing the rough pine ladder up to the pallet platform. He’s dressed all in black. I’m hungry, my stomach loosening a little now that the gun’s been fired, and it wasn’t so bad after all. Right? Hannes and Holmqvist. The Medusas.
I check my phone. No reception and 7% battery. I try to fit the wrench into my coat pocket because I’m tired of carrying it around but it won’t fit even if I stretch the material. A crow squawks some-where behind me. I briefly get one bar on the phone, and then it goes. I move the phone up to my eye level to see if I can get the reception back and that’s when the body falls out of the hunting tower.
48
The body hardly makes a noise as it hits the moss. It’s like a silent movie. The body’s just there. I’m not sure if I saw it fall or if I just saw it land. It bounced a little. It’s face-down in deep moss and I think it’s Hannes. I think Holmqvist pushed him.
He climbs down the ladder of the hunting tower. He’s wearing black. Something tight. He arrives at the bottom of the rough pine ladder and turns towards me for the first time. He’s wearing Lycra covered with green marks. He pulls off his cap. It’s not Holmqvist.
It’s Frida. It’s Frida. My friend.
I can’t get my breath.
Frida?
I’m staring at her and I’m numb. My legs feel weak and my brain’s a mess, I can’t form thoughts. What happened? Frida found out about Daisy and followed him home and stalked him and then this? She found Hannes’s ice-cube tray slowly defrosting on the chest freezer? God, I don’t want to think about what that ice-cube tray looks like now with those dozen eyes coming back to life in that damp little hut.
Hannes moves. His head moves just a fraction, and Frida bends down to look at him. He’s facing away from me and the moss is too deep for me to be able to see much. I can make out hair and the hump of a shoulder and his hip and one edge of a boot. Frida stands and looks down at him and she’s perfectly still. And so am I, completely motionless as I watch her watch him.
The noises of the forest muffle and crackle as my last hearing aid malfunctions in the drizzle. I watch Frida start rolling Hannes over. He’s bleeding from a chest wound. He’s been shot. Frida shot him? That was the bang. She shot him from the other side of the clearing, from deep in the trees on the other side of the hunting tower. I see Frida heave and push Hannes towards me. She’s rolling him and I can see his face. He’s looking straight at me. I freeze but in a second he’s over onto his back and facing up at his wife.
My malfunctioning aid switches itself off without even a warning beep. I remove it and push it down deep into my bra because that’s the best place to dry it out.
My ears are naked. I’m staring at a wife staring at her husband about a million fucking kilometres from anything good. I don’t know which way is north or which way is south. Gavrik could be anywhere from here; the police could be a kilometre away or twenty
kilometres away. I think Hannes is dead. He looks dead. There are two rifles leaning up against the elk tower birch. His and hers. My phone has no reception and 6% battery. I need to do something, but I don’t know what. How did I get this so wrong? I can read people, that’s my job, I’m good at it. How did I not read her? Maybe I should creep away to find reception but is there any reception in Utgard forest? I’ll call Thord. Will his phone work at Bengt’s place? And is he still there? Must be. There’s five ton of crap in that house to sort through so they must still be in Mossen village.
I pull my backpack open and slowly take out my camera.
I’m six trees deep from the edge of the clearing. I know I can’t use my flash but I don’t even want Frida to see my lens reflect her way. I don’t want to move fast and I don’t want to step on a twig or breathe too loud. I want to take a photo silently and then retreat slowly and then run like hell. But it’s not so easy to judge how well I’m being silent when I can’t hear anything.
There is blood on Hannes’s hunting jacket. Chest wound. The blood looks like a black reflective stain in this light. Frida’s still standing over him and looking at him and maybe she’s praying or maybe she’s just taking it all in. Very slowly, I bring my camera up to my eye. It takes maybe three minutes for me to move it forty centimetres. I check the flash is off. I take a burst of photos, my eye trained on Frida’s face, half waiting for it to snap round and snarl at me. But she stays still. It’s fine. I get my images and I’m getting my story. All of it. I pull the camera down to my backpack just as slowly as I raised it. I’m okay. Frida’s unzipping a small pocket on her sleeve – one designed for joggers to store a phone or an iPod. She unzips it and I see something metal glint in the moonlight.
She wouldn’t. Fuck, I can’t watch this. She’s holding a small knife tight in her hand. She’s going to take his eyes now and I cannot watch this. Crouching on all fours, I take a slow step back. I can’t see where I’m stepping, and I hate that, but I need to keep looking forward and keep moving back. She’s still holding the knife and she hasn’t leant down yet. I will take ten, maybe twenty big paces back, and then turn and run.