Motive X

by Stefan Ahnhem

  ‘What do you mean, my decisions?! The whole problem is I didn’t have a choice!’

  ‘You always have a choice. And you chose to pull up your hood and join them instead of coming to me.’

  ‘To you?’

  ‘Yes, to me! If you had done, we could have arrested them before they took another life.’

  ‘Who the fuck are you trying to fool?’ Theodor wrenched free of Fabian’s grasp. ‘As if I’ve ever been able to come to you for help.’

  Fabian took a few deep breaths in an attempt to regain a modicum of composure. ‘Maybe I’ve been naïve, but I’ve actually always felt you could come to me. And of course it hurts to be told I was wrong about that all this time. To be told how bad I’ve been at making you feel like I’m always there for you. But unlike you, at least I can accept that without feeling a need to blame everyone else. Those were my choices. If I could do it over, a lot of things would have been different, believe me. What I can control, though, are the choices I make now and in the future. And one of them is that I’ve decided to try to become a better dad who’s there for you. Maybe it’s too late. But better late than never. That’s why I’m nagging you about family dinner. That’s why I’m standing here now, even though you want nothing more than to throw me out of here and the stench is making me feel sick. I’ve also decided not to accept you sinking further and further into depression.’

  ‘When you’re depressed, you’re depressed.’ Theodor shrugged. ‘You can’t just choose for it to be over.’

  ‘No, but you can choose to handle it the right way, instead of pretending like nothing’s happening.’

  ‘What do you mean, the right way? There’s no right way in this fucking—’

  ‘There is, actually, and it starts with the truth!’

  Theodor was struggling with a growing lump in his throat. ‘And then what? After I tell them?’ he said in a voice so brittle it sounded like it was about to break. ‘Then what happens? What happens to me?’

  Fabian considered how to respond but never got the chance.

  ‘Theo, no one here has the answers, no one can tell you exactly what’s going to happen.’

  Fabian turned around and saw Sonja in the doorway.

  ‘What Dad’s trying to tell you is that there are no alternatives.’

  ‘But you said I didn’t have to if I didn’t want to. That it was up to me, if I—’

  ‘Yes, I know I said that. But I’ve thought about this for almost two days, and I’ve realized Dad’s right. Much as we might want to, we can’t pretend nothing happened. It’s going to haunt you until you face up to it, once and for all.’

  For the first time since Fabian could remember, he and Sonja were standing united. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it in silent gratitude.

  Theodor looked back and forth between them while he struggled with the lump in his throat. Silence fell. A silence that neither Fabian nor Sonja wanted to break by saying the wrong thing.

  The thoughts Theodor was struggling with seemed to hurt so badly he could fall apart any second. But instead, he dried his eyes and nodded. ‘Okay, then let’s do that,’ he said. ‘We’ll go tomorrow and have that dinner after I take a shower.’

  Fabian wanted to hug his son and say something encouraging about how it was all going to work out, but he only managed a smile and a nod.

  78

  Exhausted as she was when she went to bed, Lilja had been convinced she’d be wide awake the moment Hampus stuck his key in the lock and opened the front door. Then she would lie awake, listening to every step he took outside her bedroom door.

  Moving quietly wasn’t his strong suit. Especially after a wet night at Pallas. On those nights, he was more like a badger that had just found its way into the bins.

  But this time, she hadn’t woken up. Maybe she’d been too tired after all. Or maybe he’d been so incredibly careful not to wake her he’d actually succeeded. In that case, it was on account of his guilty conscience, and if she knew him at all, there would be no trace of that left once he’d sobered up.

  But… She was awake now. Wasn’t she? Or was she in fact still asleep?

  She reached for her phone on the bedside table to check the time but found she couldn’t get to it; it was as though someone had pulled the table away from the bed. Or was it just that her arm wasn’t moving? It was hard to say.

  Either way, both her wrists and ankles hurt, and her mouth of all places. As though she were tied up, but she wasn’t. At least, not as far as she could make out. And what was that smell? It was so overpowering she was starting to feel dizzy and was finding it increasingly difficult to focus her eyes.

  That must have been what had woken her. What the fuck was he up to? She didn’t understand and tried to get up but couldn’t; it was as if something was holding her down.

  Then she heard laughing. Or maybe it was more like snickering and whispering. And that hissing sound. Yes… What the fuck. Suddenly, she understood.

  It was the smell of spray paint.

  But why?

  She tried again to sit up but only managed to lift her head a little. That was enough, however, to see that Hampus and two of his mates were busy spraying a giant swastika across one of the bedroom walls. She yelled at them to stop, but only indistinct mumbling came out.

  One of the two other blokes turned around and pointed at her. ‘Look, she’s awake.’

  Hampus turned around with a spray can in one hand and laughed so hard the snus under his lip slid down his teeth. ‘Hey, babes! Daddy’s home.’ He nodded towards the swastika. ‘Like it? Looks good, doesn’t it? I figured, what the hell, might as well go all in, then we’ll see how fast the house sells.’

  ‘Hampus, where’s the bog?’ one of the others asked.

  ‘Are you blind? Right there in the corner, obviously,’ Hampus replied and resumed spraying red paint while his mate laughingly unzipped his trousers, walked over to a corner and started pissing so hard it spattered the walls.

  Was he high or what was this? She tried to yell at them again to stop, but the only thing that came out of her mouth was saliva.

  ‘I’m sorry, did I hear a squeak from over there?’ Hampus turned to her again and put a hand behind his ear. ‘Hm, I guess not. You’re usually so good at talking back and spewing politically correct arguments until you get exactly what you want. But you’re not so cocky now, are you? Not the big bad detective now. You know what? You’re almost kind of cute, lying there, mumbling, wondering what the fuck’s going on.’ He stepped on to the bed and straddled her. ‘You think you can get rid of me, just like that? That all you have to do is write some letter and then you’re out? Let me tell you, it’s not quite that easy. Because no matter how badly you want to fuck that Fabian Risk or whatever his name is—’ He shook the spray can, threw off her duvet… ‘—you belong to me!’… and started spraying her pyjamas. First two red circles around each breast, then a dot in the middle of each one. ‘Aren’t you the one who’s always refusing to wear make-up? Apart from when you’ve been taught a lesson, of course. Look how pretty she looks with a bit of paint.’ Hampus kept spraying lower.

  She tried to break free, but could only watch as he sprayed a belly button, a thinner waist and hips extending on to the bedcover.

  ‘Blimey, you actually look pretty fit. Hey, come over here and have a look.’ He drew a vagina between her legs.

  One of the other men came up behind her head. ‘Wow, she looks well up for it.’ He leaned over her and squeezed her spray-painted breasts so hard it hurt.

  Hampus tossed the spray can aside. ‘Almost makes you want to have some real fun.’ He grabbed her pyjama top and ripped it open; she could hear the buttons hit the floor.

  She’d given up her attempts to scream and was instead squeezing her eyes shut in the hope that the nightmare would end. It didn’t. Instead, she felt him tear off her pyjama bottoms and stroke the inside of her thigh. This isn’t happening, was the only thought she could manage.

  Ham
pus had a dark side, she knew that, but this was something else. This just couldn’t be true. But when she felt him pushing a finger into her, she realized hope was futile.

  ‘She’s waking up,’ said a voice that sounded neither like Hampus nor either of the others, and she finally pieced it together. ‘Should we give her another dose?’

  She’d been dreaming. It wasn’t Hampus and his mates. She was waking up now, only to realize that the reality she was in was, if possible, even worse.

  ‘No, why?’ said another voice. ‘We’re practically done.’

  Even though she didn’t really want to look, she opened her eyes, and it was in fact not Hampus straddling her, pulling out his finger to sniff it. It was Adolf Hitler, or someone wearing a Hitler mask. Someone with a beard and long hair who was dressed in a tattered denim waistcoat, showing the Terminator tattoo that reached all the way up his neck.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ said the other Hitler mask who was leaning over her, squeezing her breast with a hand that was missing a middle finger. ‘Isn’t it about time to pop this Jewish cunt’s cherry?’

  ‘Almost, but not quite,’ said a third man outside her field of vision. ‘We have to leave something to look forward to.’

  ‘Be seeing you.’ The man straddling her climbed off the bed, laughing all the while, and left with the others.

  Lilja stayed where she was, not daring to do anything other than look around at the spray-painted swastikas on her walls.

  79

  While waiting for Theodor to come down after his shower, the lasagne went back in the oven and Fabian sat in the kitchen with Sonja and Matilda, chatting idly. Every once in a while, Sonja laughed at something Matilda said, and occasionally he tried to put on a smile, too. But he found it difficult; it mostly felt like an uncomfortable rictus.

  In a way, he should be relieved. Sonja and he were finally on the same page and together they’d knocked some sense into Theodor. There was no doubt that going over to Helsingør and contacting the Danish prosecutor was the right thing to do. But his concern about what would happen after that was still there like a festering ulcer. Also, it had been almost fifteen minutes, and he didn’t know anyone who showered as quickly as Theodor.

  ‘I’m going to see how he’s doing.’ He stood up and left the table. ‘Why don’t you start?’

  ‘No, let’s wait until we’re all here,’ Sonja said, topping up her wineglass.

  When he reached the upper landing, he walked up to the closed bathroom door and listened to the sound of running water coming from inside.

  Was this in fact what had caused his concern? He hadn’t considered it before, but even so he didn’t feel surprised in the slightest. The shower was on, but the sound of it made the floor vanish from underneath him.

  Was it his fault? Had he pushed too hard? Or had Theodor been right, was it too late? Unanswerable questions bombarded him while he dug a coin out of his pocket and with trembling hands managed to turn the lock and open the bathroom door. Maybe they should have taken Sonja’s advice and pretended nothing had happened.

  Freezing cold water that hadn’t made it down the half-clogged drain and had instead overflowed and flooded the bathroom floor soaked his socks. But that was the least of his concerns as he stuck his head in the jet, turned the tap off and hurried over to the open window.

  It was too long a drop to jump. Theodor had probably shimmied down the drainpipe right next to the window. Where he’d gone after that was, however, a question with virtually endless possible answers.

  The door to the garden shed stood ajar, which suggested he’d taken his bike. Which in turn meant he’d already made it far enough that it would be hard to find him if he didn’t want to be found. That insight drained his legs of strength and he had to lean against the washbasin not to lose his balance.

  But this wasn’t the time to fall apart. That was the last thing he could afford to do right now. With each minute that slipped through his fingers, his son got another third of a mile away. Grief and soul-searching would have to wait if he wanted to have any chance at all.

  He hurried out of the bathroom and down the stairs. ‘Theo’s run away,’ he called out to the others. ‘You’ll have to eat without me. I’ll call when I know anything.’ Sonja shouted something after him, but he didn’t have time to hear what it was before he was out of the door and on his way across the street.

  His hands were shaking so hard he had to use both to get the key into the ignition and turn it, still without any clue as to which direction to go.

  Theodor had no friends he could just pedal over to without warning. Sadly, he only seemed to have made one good friend since they moved here. In other words, there was no point wasting time in their own neighbourhood or the area around the school.

  Going south towards the city centre seemed the most obvious choice. But that assumed there was someone he could meet up with there. Otherwise, the train or ferries to Denmark could be his goal.

  But fleeing the country cost money and required some kind of plan, and Theodor had neither. This wasn’t a premeditated getaway. It was an emotional reaction. To the panic and fear of what awaited him in that courtroom. In fact, if there was one place in the world he wouldn’t want to go to right now, it was probably Denmark.

  Based on that reasoning, Fabian decided to go in the opposite direction, towards Pålsö, while he fought to suppress the thoughts that had been gnawing at him for the past few hours and were now threatening to overwhelm him.

  He took a right on Johan Banérs Gata and then a left on to Romares Väg with Pålsjö Forest on his left.

  He didn’t even believe in the supernatural. That there were spirits on the other side with the ability to see the future, and that all you needed to communicate with them was a board with letters on it. For him, the future had always simply been the result of various chain reactions in which one consequence led to another.

  Without any real thought as to why, he turned left on to Christer Boijes Väg at the roundabout and continued past the crematorium with its moat and into Pålsjö Forest, whose dense foliage effectively blacked out the bright summer night.

  Even so, he found he couldn’t dismiss Matilda’s concern. It was real, there was no question. She’d clearly felt it a month ago but hadn’t been able to tell them before being shot in the stomach and collapsing on the floor. When she woke up in the hospital after all those surgeries, it was the first thing she’d wanted to talk about.

  If she had survived, who in the family was going to die?

  The bike path ran alongside the road on the right, further into the trees, but he saw neither a bike light nor anything else to suggest he was on the right track.

  Science, logic, common sense told him he should dismiss it. But much as he wanted to, he couldn’t ignore the theme that had run through Theodor’s whole life from his first school years all the way to the present.

  Everything required to explain and understand was there, in hindsight. All the actions and consequences that over the years had colluded to paint him so far into a corner he could no longer see the way out.

  Supernatural or not. What difference did it make?

  If someone had asked Fabian, he wouldn’t have been able to give a good explanation. There were no sound arguments or rational reasons for suddenly slamming the brakes so hard the tyres screeched, making a U-turn and going back a few hundred feet before turning right on to the gravel path and continuing straight into the forest. All he knew was that he’d taken a wrong turn but that he was now on the right path.

  He drove down towards the Pålsjö Pavilion, a café that despite its impossible location in the middle of the woods was routinely filled to capacity with waffle-munching customers the moment the sun peeked out. He’d been there three times with Theodor and every time they’d had to wait for a table. Now it was empty and deserted. No customers. No staff. No Theodor.

  And yet he didn’t hesitate for a moment. It was as though he knew, despite there being no w
ay of knowing.

  Fifty yards later, he turned left, and after another few hundred yards he reached the pedestrian bridge crossing the train tracks.

  It was as deserted as the café. The night had filled the cutting with so much mist the two tracks that ran past thirty feet below were impossible to see. He couldn’t even see the other end of the bridge. Everything was shrouded; he only spotted Theodor’s bike on the ground when he reached the middle of the bridge.

  He’d found the place, but was he too late? While Theodor had cycled straight here along the extension of Pålsjögatan, he’d taken the long way round, circling half the forest.

  ‘Theodor?’ he shouted into the mist. ‘Theodor, are you there?’

  But the only reply was the echo of his own desperate voice, which subsided and grew increasingly diffuse and unclear the further away it retreated. It was as though he was listening to his own grief at the realization that his worst fears had become reality.

  Something moved behind him. He turned around to see better, but with the dense mist all he could make out was a movement in the shadows. But there was something there. Something hovering in the air five or ten feet out from the bridge proper.

  He walked up to the railing, which had been augmented with a tall fence whose top two feet angled outward to make it difficult for people who wanted to end things. That had clearly not deterred his son. Because there he was, or rather, there was his shadow.

  It was only when he looked down and saw the metal wing jutting out above the tracks from the middle of the bridge that he started piecing it together. His son was perched at the tip of the wing, which didn’t look strong enough to support a full-grown person. Clearly Theodor was light enough, however, despite his recent weight gain.

  The mist cleared for a moment and Fabian could see him sitting there, dangling his feet, waiting for the next train.

  ‘Theodor,’ he said, trying hard not to let fear shade his voice. ‘Theodor, sweetheart. Why don’t you come here so we can talk about it instead?’