Killer's Island

by Anna Jansson

  “I’ll have a word with the social welfare officer, we’ll try to sort this out in the best possible way,” he said vaguely. Many times while working at the hospital he’d been amazed at the immense labors these women managed at home. Out of love they tended and took care of their men, night and day. Fed them, washed them, helped them go to the bathroom many times every night – an unsteady dance on four legs. Why? Well, because it had to work and there was no other way. At the hospital one relied on a mobile lift or the muscle power of two comparatively strong young people. How much money had she not already saved society by putting in all this voluntary labor? Then, when her reserves of strength started waning, society did not have the resources to help her.

  Anders glanced again at the window. In some strange way he felt observed by the people passing by outside.

  When Agnes Isomäki had left, clutching her prescription for a diuretic and medicine to reduce blood pressure, Anders stopped the clinic nurse in the corridor and asked her to set up an appointment with the social welfare officer. He explained the importance of it. The nurse sighed audibly. All of Anders Ahlström’s patients were very important. But there were another four doctors to attend to.

  Anders had arranged to meet Erika Lund for lunch at the Restaurant Trädgården at twelve-thirty. He’d sensed it would be difficult getting away, nonetheless he’d given in to her enthusiasm. Now he’d have to disappoint her. Judging by his earlier attempts at relationships, he wondered how long she’d be able to put up with it. Just then, his telephone started ringing.

  “Darling Anders, I can’t get away. Things have piled up. Can we do it another day?”

  “It’s fine.” He hoped his voice wouldn’t reveal his relief. Maybe she’d be more understanding of the nature of his work when she also had to put a hundred percent into hers.

  Anders drank a big glass of water to dampen the worst of his hunger pangs and decided to close his eyes for five minutes before asking in his next patient. He went into the staff room, where he found a couple of stale cookies and a biscuit which he brought back to his room. Whenever he allowed himself to feel, he realized he was dead beat. It was as if he could never quite get enough rest. Even when he got his eight hours’ worth he sometimes felt exhausted when he was getting up. Just as he’d put his legs up on a box of files and closed his eyes, he remembered he’d forgotten to take his smoke aversion pill. He reached for his briefcase and found the box straight away. He swallowed the pill down with a mouthful of water. If one holds a pen in one’s hand and goes into a slumber – then by the time one drops the pen and wakes up – it equates to a whole hour of sleep, according to current thinking. His colleague Sam Wettergren had said so in his talk on “The Importance of Sleep on Human Health.” Wettergren recommended a power nap at work.

  He was awakened by ill-tempered banging on the door. Although he felt he had only just closed his eyes, when he glanced at his watch he realized that over an hour had passed. So much for that falling pen waking him up. He surveyed the room morosely, where files and papers had scattered in an almighty mess, and the bookshelf had moved almost three feet so that it partially blocked the door.

  “Yes, come in,” he croaked in a hoarse voice, unable to take his eyes off the bookshelf. What had happened?

  The nurse’s face appeared in the chink of the door.

  “What are you doing? The waiting room is filled with patients!” She looked pale and annoyed. Everyone was working at full steam here. Anders rearranged the furniture.

  “Help me with the bookshelf,” he pleaded lamely, grabbing one corner to push it back into position.

  “You’re goddamn out of your mind,” said the nurse, but there was a hint of amusement in her eyes. “What the heck were you doing?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I really don’t know.” And at that moment he noticed his big window was wide open.

  CHAPTER 36

  AGNES ISOMÄKI RUSHED OUT of the health center so she could get to the pharmacy in Östercentrum before Gösta woke up. He usually messed about in the night, then slept like a dead man in the mornings. There was a line at the pharmacy and Agnes ended up next to a talkative woman named Mrs. Levide, who’d recently moved to Jungmansgatan and was lamenting the geographical locations of the health centers.

  “It’s just ridiculous. There’ll be three health centers lumped into one if Gråbo Health Center is moved. We already have both Visby North and Visby Southern in Korpenområdet, and if Gråbo moves there as well there’ll only be one big health center in Visby to choose between. Unless you opt for private healthcare, of course. For those of us who live in Gråbo, Korpen seems very remote. I wonder who came up with the idea?”

  Agnes hummed her concurrence, but her thoughts were elsewhere.

  “It ends up more expensive if people can’t walk to the health center but have to take a taxi,” the Levide lady continued, checking her number tag for at least the fourth time since Agnes got there. “Our whole society is going to the dogs. Where are we heading?”

  Agnes didn’t have so much to add to this, either. She had enough on her plate already with her personal miseries and felt no pressing need to add to these by dwelling on the problems of Gråbo.

  “At any moment you can be set upon or robbed or stabbed. It’s just too awful what happened this last month. The woman found murdered in the Botanical Gardens and the old man who was hanged. They don’t even think twice about attacking children or police. What lies in store for us now?”

  Agnes agreed. Nowadays she locked the front door with both locks. Both so that Gösta wouldn’t be able to slip out, and because she was afraid of the murderer. How many waking nights had she not spent, lately, standing behind the curtain and keeping a watch over the dark garden.

  “I’ve bought a color spray,” said the Levide woman, scrabbling about in her worn-out brown purse. “If someone attacks you, you just spray him right in the face. The paint doesn’t come off for a week. It can save lives, you know.”

  “Can I see? How does it work?” Agnes found herself curious.

  “You put your finger here… and then you press here. You can have one. I bought two.”

  Agnes thanked her and said she wanted to pay for it, but this was ruled out.

  “Be careful though so you don’t spray some ugly-looking man just because he asks you for directions or what the time is. Once you start thinking about being attacked, your trigger finger gets a bit shaky. You hear the slightest sound behind your back and.… ”

  The Levide woman’s turn was next and, soon after, Agnes’s number came up. She hardly had time to say thanks and goodbye.

  On her way home, her thoughts returned to Gösta and her granddaughter’s approaching wedding. Agnes would probably have to bring him along, there was no other possible solution. As long as he didn’t get chaotic in church. That was the moment you remembered your whole life. It had to be solemn and beautiful. Maybe she could sit outside on the bench with Gösta, at least she’d get to see the bride, and ClaraMaj might not notice they didn’t go inside. Then there would be the supper. The worst possible scenario would be if Gösta got it into his head to give a speech. In the old days he’d been a brilliant speaker at parties. Back then, people had listened to his subtler witticisms and applauded him. But in recent times he no longer held it all together, everything seemed to turn into these long, disjointed harangues, sometimes even with expletives and excruciating remarks. There was also the risk of him soiling himself, which had been happening more and more of late. When Agnes thought of it the tears rose up in her eyes and her nose started running. It was so humiliating for him, and for them both when she had to help him. He wanted to take care of himself, but when he tried the damage was even worse. It would probably be best for everyone if they stayed at home, thought Agnes. The thought of it made her weep heedlessly, because she wanted so badly to be there for the festivities.

  When she unlocked the front door he came to meet her with his pants on backward, his fly o
pen across his bottom, and his overcoat draped over his bare, skinny shoulders. A damaged milk cartoon lay on the floor bleeding to death and the tap was gushing. She hurried inside and turned off the water. Living with Gösta was worse than having toddlers in the house all over again, because he was so much bigger and stronger. The worry of him hurting himself or burning the house down or something else she hadn’t thought of yet and hence could not take preventive measures against, was constantly a torture to her. There was a sense of being captive, never being able to go out and visit a friend or have guests over. Sometimes it felt like being locked up in a tomb, waiting for death. You have to think about yourself, ClaraMaj used to say with a hint of reproach in her voice. You should go to the Canaries with a friend or start a dancing course. She was so naïve, her little girl. But maybe it was Agnes’s own fault that no one got involved, because she protected family and friends from seeing just how bad things had gotten with Gösta.

  It had felt good talking to the doctor but at the same time it had been frightening. Gösta would be in despair if he were moved out of his home. In the day-to-day routine things were not always so terrible, and at certain times he even managed to pull himself together. But he could also grow unaccountably angry at times. There had been moments when Agnes feared he’d kill her, but she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. In fact, he had lost all self-restraint on a few occasions, and lashed out at her.

  Agnes turned the last few herring fillets in the frying pan and served them up on the dish.

  “Come on, Gösta, the food is ready.”

  “Delicious.” He sat down and smiled at her; his smile was warm and self-aware. “Delicious!” He helped himself to a decent spoonful of mashed potato and looked out of the window. “Looks like rain.”

  Agnes leaned forward so she could see the sky. Sure enough, the clouds were building up and there was rain hanging in the air. At times like this, things were calm and quiet. Agnes got a bad conscience about arranging to see the social welfare officer behind Gösta’s back. He turned on the radio just in time to catch the news, like he usually did, and she cleared the table and put the coffee on.

  “This last month a number of violent incidents have taken place. The police are interested in hearing from anyone who noticed something of interest on the nights of June twelfth and fifteenth, when a man in a dark cape was seen near the crime scenes. The man is about six feet, two inches tall and thinly built.”

  Gösta twisted nervously in the kitchen sofa. The graven voice and Agnes’s nervous facial expression worried him.

  “Where are you going?” she wondered, when he hurriedly shoved the table over to get past. He slapped her hand away, the hand reaching out to caress his back and still his fears. He stared at her; his gaze was wild and inconsolable.

  “I didn’t do it!” He threw the radio at the floor, so its plastic casing cracked.

  Agnes tried to appear calm, although she was trembling inside.

  “Come and sit down, let’s have some more coffee,” she said in her softest voice. But inside, her thoughts were whirling round, making her quite dizzy. “Come on, I’ll tell you what ClaraMaj has written about her preparations for the wedding.” Gösta loved his granddaughter and liked to hear what she’d been posting about it online. Agnes had never had any problems adapting to the new technology that had replaced the old letters written on paper. “Come and sit down, my dear heart.”

  “You shouldn’t fight with the police. She was a woman, and he was a child!” His eyes narrows and he put up his hands as if to defend himself.

  “What kind of nonsense are you saying?”

  “You mustn’t kick. I got scared. There were so many of them.” He stared, as if he could still see them as they had been in that moment. “I didn’t dare.” He burst into tears and was inconsolable.

  “You’ve been dreaming, my love. Come and sit down here with me. There’s nothing dangerous. Everything is fine. Peaceful and nice.”

  “I hid in a car. In the trunk. I was afraid. Didn’t know where I was. I saw the tall one. And the others. In a house. Where we got to.”

  “The way you talk. Shall I read what ClaraMaj has written now?”

  “I got the trunk open. Air. It wasn’t locked. I had to pee. It was by Norrgatt. They were nice at the café, they gave me hot coffee. They called you.”

  “That’s right. You must never run off like that again.”

  In the evening he fell asleep as usual in his armchair by the television. They’d seen an old movie starring Humphrey Bogart. Gösta couldn’t keep up with the storyline at all, nonetheless he enjoyed the familiar faces.

  She’d long since given up trying to get him to come to the bedroom at nights and get his clothes off. Better to let him sleep where he was, or he only got angry. In a few hours he’d wake up again and create a mess. Agnes went to check the front door. It was locked with both locks. She stared out into the garden, where she saw the rain dripping from the trees in the light cast by the garden lantern. Everything was peaceful. She put a chair in the kitchen doorway, so she’d hear the scraping sound and wake up if he tried to get out. The stove was in there, and the knives that he could hurt himself with, and the freezer where Agnes had amassed food for those days when he was extra difficult and she didn’t even dare leave the house for a quarter of an hour to do a bit of shopping. Not so long ago he left the freezer door open and they had to throw out hundreds of kronor‘s worth of food.

  Agnes stretched out on the sofa and tucked her purse under the pillow so he wouldn’t be able to get his hands on the keys. At best she’d get a couple of hours of sleep. She needed all the rest she could get now that she’d been forced into a morning appointment at the doctor’s. Other days she tried to adapt her sleep patterns to his. As she lay there listening to his regular, calm breathing, she wondered if he would have done the same thing for her? Would he have taken care of her in the same way? She wasn’t sure at all about that.

  In her dream she stepped right through a windowpane. It was the front window of a needlework shop. She was embarrassed, trying to explain to the people gathering round how it had happened, how she hadn’t seen the door and therefore walked straight through the window, although obviously she hadn’t intended to steal anything. That’s when she realized she was naked. She tried to cover herself up with her purse and arms. The windowpane carried on breaking up in big white shards like strips of bed sheets. That’s when she woke up. In the faint light of the garden lantern she saw Gösta, still slumbering in his chair. Yet there was a sound of steps in the bedroom facing onto the veranda. No, she was not imagining it. She was wide awake now. Agnes sat very still in the sofa, clutching the can of spray paint in her hand. Slowly the door opened, with a screeching sound. Gösta also woke up. His most lucid moments were just after he’d been sleeping. Before Agnes had time to react, Gösta leaned forward with a bread knife in his hand. She should have locked the knives away.

  Seeing people embrace each other always created anxiety. The feeling of touching and being touched was so strongly associated with unease. When he’d seen them through the window holding one another, he’d wanted to kill them both. The action was more about ownership than anything else. Is death really a punishment if one isn’t aware of dying? Obviously not. To be punished one has to feel fear and realize the horror of no longer having a choice. The degradation is only complete if someone can see it.

  Just like his mother he suffered from the curse of a photographic memory. To never be able to forget. She had chosen to dull herself with drugs. He drugged himself on the feeling of power. But if he killed the one he wanted to punish most of all he would find out the answer to the question he still had not dared ask. The question about the world’s frightening lack of logic and tactics, the incomprehensible fact that someone would voluntarily – without any personal gain – sacrifice himself for the sake of another.

  By now it must be obvious to him who was behind all this. First, it would come as a whimsical thought and then,
once it had acquired some weight, the rest would fall into place and hell would be a fact from there on.

  CHAPTER 37

  WHEN AGNES ISOMÄKI FINISHED her account, Maria Wern fetched her chief so he could also hear what she had to say.

  Tomas Hartman sat immersed in a memorandum from their superiors.

  New guidelines, new rules about improved transparency to the general public.

  “Can you come to my office for a bit?” Maria’s face was excited.

  Hartman immediately realized this was important. He stood up and followed her.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We have that witness here from the lethal assault. I recognized him at once, the man in the overcoat and cap. It was him! But that’s not why they came.”

  “So I’ll get Arvidsson to question him right away. Is he here yet?”

  Maria stopped, shrugged, and looked at him. “I don’t know if he’s come in yet. But we have to do it now. Can’t you do it? It’s not very straight-forward. The old man is senile, I only more or less pieced the whole thing together with the help of his wife. An outline, but it wouldn’t hold water in a court of law. If I understood it right, he actually hid in the trunk of the murderer’s car. Don’t ask me how he got there, he doesn’t even know himself. The best he can do is remember where the murderer parked. It was somewhere close to the Norrgatt’s Bakery by the roundabout close to the hospital. He may be able to remember what sort of car it was.”

  “Well I’ll be.…”

  “There’s more. Someone broke into their home last night. The wife contacted the police but by the time they got there the intruder had fled. A man in loose-fitting ankle-length clothes. Together they managed to drive him away. Agnes Isomäki had a color-spray, she thinks she may have hit him with it on the leg of his pants as he was exiting through the veranda door. The man, Gösta, lunged at him with a bread knife but missed.”