by C S Duffy
'I said no.'
There it was again. I leaned forward, pushed my phone towards her. 'Please just look one more time.'
'I think you should go. I can't help you. Maybe she was here that might, maybe she comes in every night to do battle with her liver. I have no idea. It is a pretty busy bar. I don't get time to memorise everybody who comes and goes.'
She finished her tiny speech and stared at me with an expression of fear and irritation that I suddenly realised was directed at me. Damnit. She wasn't harbouring some deep dark secret, she was just shy and resented being put on the spot.
I sighed in frustration. Though things had got better since the summer when I had been deeply grateful for the friendship of a serial killer because everyone else I encountered appeared to hate me on sight, I still often felt as though Swedish social cues were an enigma I might never be able to crack. I'd always prided myself on my ability to read people, to sense if they were friend or foe, lying or truthful. My job rather depended on it, after all, but it appeared that this particular talent ended at the Swedish border.
I belatedly realised that the girl was still staring at me, sending me 'go away' vibes so clear she might as well have unfurled a little go away sign from a trumpet and done a go away dance complete with high kicks. I turned to leave, then whirled back —
'Look, I'm really sorry if this is inconvenient to you, but a man died that night. A young man at the very beginning of his life. And not just him, nine people have died. Nine people with families and friends who loved them and miss them. And even if some of them didn't have anyone, even if one or two of them were arseholes nobody liked, they did not deserve to lose their lives, so if there is any, teeny-tiny chance that you could possibly know something that might help, why on earth would you not just look at the fucking picture again?'
The girl stared at me, her giant eyes even more deer-like to my headlights, then finally gave one more sullen shrug and held out her hand for my phone. She stared at the picture for a long time, a curious half-frown on her face I couldn't quite read.
'I have never seen her before,' she said at last, handing back my phone. 'I'm sorry.'
'No, it's okay. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have shouted.'
'But if you are wondering about the date of the guy who was killed that night, you will never find her. She does not exist.'
'Excuse me?'
'It was me.' She stared at the bar, refusing to meet my eye. 'I am an actress,' she said in a low voice. 'I trained at Dramaten, but I have not been able to get so much work, but — anyway, it doesn't matter. That is why I am going to New York. But a few weeks ago I saw an ad on a casting website for someone to improvise a phone call pretending to be an internet date. It was two thousand crowns to talk for an hour or two, and at the time, I believed the man on the call was an actor and it was being recorded for some kind of audio drama podcast.
'But then —' she sighed, picked at a bit of black nail polish that was peeling from her thumbnail. 'There was a short clip on the news the other evening, of the victim, Mattias Eklund, giving some speech or something to his school. I recognised his voice. It was him I spoke to for those two hours.'
33
'Darling this sounds fabulous, I'm loving it all,' said Kate around a mouthful of crisps. The familiar packet gave me a pang of homesickness as she balled it up and tossed it under her desk. You could get salt and vinegar crisps in Sweden, after a fashion, but nothing tastes like the ones you grew up with. 'Terribly sorry, bit hungover and a meeting ran through lunch so if I don't get copious amounts of salt, sugar and caffeine into my system, might die.'
'Please don't die on my account,' I grinned, taking a sip of my tea. Ordering a cup of tea in a Swedish coffee shop and getting anything that remotely resembled a British cup of tea was an exercise in futility and heartbreak, I'd discovered. However, through a bit of trial and error, I had come across a herbal one called Söderblandning, which, with no milk and a splodge of honey, turned out to be more than palatable.
I was in the café near Johan's flat with all the mismatched furniture where the newcomers group normally met. Today though, it was full of freelancers typing silently on laptops and one group crowded around a table in the centre who, judging by their running shoes and loud voices, were American tourists. They were oblivious to the death stares their lively chat was garnering.
My publisher had asked for a quick web call to catch up on how things were going with the book. I still had a while before I had to turn the first draft in, 'but with it being a live case, as it were,' Kate had explained, 'its nice to stay on top of how it's all going so that I'm prepared in case anything changes.
'What I really want to do quite soon,' she said now, opening a chocolate biscuit. 'Is start getting a bit of heat going, you know? Nothing too specific, just get it on the radar, start building anticipation.'
'But how are you going to do that when we don't know the story yet?' I asked.
'Just like I said. It's Scandi, there's murder and it's true. Job done, tickety boo. The fact it's live and ongoing just makes it all the more thrilling. In fact,' she added, tapping her chin thoughtfully as she chewed her chocolate biscuit. 'Playing up the element of you being in danger could really make it sing. You know, you don't know who the killer is but they know you, kind of thing. Sorry!' she grinned, apparently catching my expression. 'Quite sure you're not in any danger of course. You'd better not be, in fact, I don't have budget to hire another writer if you're not around to finish it.'
I laughed, a touch too merrily, as I thought of my open window. The night before, I'd half woken from a deep sleep sometime in the wee hours, and for an instant had thought that the window was open again. Goosebumps prickled over the back of my neck as I stared into the unrelenting darkness, afraid to move a muscle in case I disturbed the monster under my bed. Except, obviously, that there was no monster under my bed, because I was on an air mattress on the floor. And also, I was an adult.
The window wasn't open, of course, I had just imagined it in that hazy state between sleep and consciousness. Little nerves darted in my guts as I strained my ears, tried desperately to identify what had woken me, what had made me tense up with fear. A chilling sense that I wasn't alone.
A bad dream. Obviously. In the light of day it was laughable. I couldn't remember anything of the dream, but it must have been a whopper, I'd thought in the morning, rolling my eyes at myself for being such a plonker.
'Your budget is safe with me,' I grinned. 'There is no denying the killer has gone quiet since Lotta Berglund disappeared, and the police have now discovered that the first victim, Anna Essen, was also on her way to meet an internet date. She was really secretive about being on a dating app, maybe because she was semi internet famous herself, so she had an unregistered burner phone for it that they've only just found.'
'Interesting. Those things are like bloody menus to predators,' Kate said, shaking her head. 'I've just found out that my fifteen year old daughter wants to go on them, and I told her not on my watch, my darling. You'll sneak into a club and snog the first spotty youth to grind up against you, like a normal teenager, thank you very much.'
'They've put calls out to try to discover if a male actor was hired to pretend to be her date, but no one has come forward so far,' I added. 'The girl I met in the bar had no idea who hired her. The whole thing done by email and bank transfer and they've had no luck yet tracing any communications she had. Dummy servers and all that.'
I'd set up a couple of profiles on the dating app that Anna Essen and Mattias Eklund had used, one a woman looking for men and another a man looking for women. I wasn't really expecting to come across a profile picture with crazy eyes and a bio asking how good you were at musical statues, but I swiped through whenever I got a chance. It had been a good couple of weeks since Mattias Ekland's death; if the killer was still at large, they must have been getting antsy by now.
So far, all I had encountered was so many torso shots from men and duck faces
from women that I wondered if the app's tagline was I have abs and you have lips. Let's fall in love! I'd come across one photo of a guy with a paper bag on his head and a somewhat pious little blurb underneath imploring women not to judge him by his looks. Which was all fine and good, but the nature of apps is that that the only information they therefore had about him was the fact that he used paper and not plastic. Call me shallow, but I'd like a little more to go on when choosing a romantic partner. There was also one guy whose profile picture was a toy frog, which I'd hesitated on a moment, lip curling a tiny bit with distaste. There was something gross about using what was presumably your child's toy to pick up women. A moment later, something had made me want to look at the frog again, but it turns out that once you've swiped someone away, they are forever gone.
'This killer, whoever they are, is good at what they do,' I said now, snapping my thoughts back to the meeting with Kate. 'That's the only thing that links these two murders to the earlier ones. They're like, I don't know, a great white shark or something, they way they kill and cover up their tracks so flawlessly.'
'I've seen great whites kill on holiday in South Africa, and there's nothing subtle about it at all, my darling. Bloody sea was red for miles around, it seemed.'
'Bad reference,' I smiled, 'though I'm sure I've heard some nature documentary refer to great whites as killing machines.'
'Yes, I do know what you mean,' Kate said. Someone handed her a cup of tea and she flashed a grateful smile over the monitor.
'What I wouldn't do for a British cup of tea right now,' I grinned mournfully. 'I've run out of teabags and my mum keeps forgetting to post more.'
'I'll post you some,' Kate promised. 'Can't expect a writer to exist on anything less than a constant drip of caffeine.'
'I'm not sure about announcing anything yet,' I blurted, before I could lose my nerve. 'I just — could you give me a little more time? I just have this sense that there's — I don't know. Something big I'm missing, or misunderstanding. I'm sorry, I could be wrong, I just —'
'Tell you what,' said Kate. 'There's a book fair coming up in three weeks. I'd like to say something about this then. How does that sound?'
'Three weeks is fine,' I said, affecting a confidence I didn't feel. 'I'll definitely be on the right track by then.'
34
Lotta Bergland opened her eyes and horror rushed over her like a tidal wave. A scream caught in her throat and for a moment she thought it would choke her. She sat up, wracked with a coughing fit as she fought to breathe through the terror before it drowned her.
This happened every time she opened her eyes. For the first few days, she had carefully scratched her arm with the rusty edge of the metal bed frame every time she woke up. Gritting her teeth against the pain, she'd reminded herself over and over that she didn't need to draw blood. She would be rescued long before the shallow scratches healed. It was just a little ritual that would help ground her, keep her connected with reality, with the passage of time, stop her from losing her mind.
She now had no idea how long she had been held in the pitch darkness for. After she had scratched herself all the way up to the elbow, she had run her fingers over the tiny cuts, feeling the tiny scabs here and there from when she had accidentally cut too deep. She had counted seventeen scratches. But that wasn't possible. She couldn't have been here for seventeen days.
She couldn't have lasted that long on a few sips of stale water and knäckbröd that had gone soft and very possibly mouldy. She was aching, she felt nauseated with fear and exhaustion and disorientation, and her head had pounded now for as long as she could remember, but she did not feel truly malnourished or even dehydrated. She had passed a few hours trying to recall as much as she could from a pre-med class she had taken as an undergrad before deciding that dealing with laymen's attempts to describe their symptoms on a daily basis would drive her out of her mind.
Dehydration would kick in first, of course.
Increased thirst. She certainly had that, but she would feel thirsty after just a few hours with less water than usual, so that was no cause for concern.
Dry mouth. Similarly, she had experienced dry mouth after running in warm weather. Nothing to worry about.
Tired or sleepy. She was certainly sleeping a lot, but that could also be down to decreased serotonin production from being in the darkness for so long.
Headache. She had that, but again there could be several possible reasons for this.
Dry skin. Lotta had always been prone to oily skin and had suffered from debilitating acne as a teenager. She had often wondered if she would have had the opportunity to develop better social skills had she not spent her teenage years hiding her face from everyone. Regardless, it was not particularly dry now.
Extreme dizziness or lightheadedness. Not extreme.
Rapid heart rate. No more than terror would account for.
Fever. Definitely not. She would almost welcome fever. There must be some kind of heating source in this building, whatever it was, as she would have died from a night, possibly two at most, of outdoor temperatures. However it certainly was not a cosily insulated and central heated residence, and she was aching partly from curling in the foetal position as much as possible in an instinctive effort to protect her internal organs from the chill.
She could not, therefore, have been without a reasonable amount of water for more than two or three days. That was when she realised she must have been dosing on and off and scratching herself several times throughout each day. So she she had no means of knowing how much time had passed.
The abyss of terror rose up and she forced herself to sing out loud to beat it back before it could claim her. She had no idea until now that she knew so many songs. Ridiculous pop songs she must have heard from colleagues' radios over the years. Midsummer drinking songs. Nursery rhymes half-remembered from long ago daycare.
Every once in a while she forced herself to get out of the bed and carefully feel her way around the room. She was reminded of an old black and white film she had seen once in which an actress walked around a room, touching the curtains of the four poster bed, the tapestries on the walls, the carved wooden furniture. When asked why, she explained that in the future she would live in this room a great deal in her memory.
Lotta sincerely hoped that she would never again return to this room in her memory or in any other way. She was searching for some clue that would give a hint as to where she was, what sort of building. Whether there was a door that could somehow be forced open. A window or a vent that could be screamed through.
A weapon.
She could only hope that she might get the opportunity to use a weapon.
She had never believed in Stockholm Syndrome before, but she was fairly sure that should a human being ever open the door, she would fall to her knees and worship them. Whoever they were. Whatever they planned to do to her.
Her throat started to close up again as torturous images flashed at her of things they might do to her. Would that be better or worse than being locked in here forever to slowly die? Her breathing shortened, became shallow, desperate, as she reminded — or perhaps instructed — herself, over and over, that she would lose consciousness from dehydration long before she lost her mind from being buried alive.
Ola must have noticed her absence, she thought desperately as she closed her eyes and tried to count her breaths. Her few acquaintances from work may well still be assuming that she had just decided to work from home for a few days. Her family knew not to expect to hear from her for weeks at a time. This was one way to learn a lesson about maintaining a social life outside of work, she thought, and a harsh bark of laughter that didn't sound anything like her, shattered the silence.
But she and Ola had been sleeping together long enough that he wouldn't expect she would just drop contact with no warning, she hoped. She had reminded him many times not to count on her, not to expect anything from her, but even if he assumed himself dumped, he wouldn't just accept
that. He would show up at her apartment building and bang incessantly on the door until her neighbours complained, or march through her office shouting for her. Then someone — Anki, maybe — would confront him, tell him to go home, but somehow in the ensuing conversation it would be established that no one had seen her in several days and then maybe, hopefully, someone would raise the alarm.
She knew she was not supposed to enjoy Ola's bullying ways. She had listened in to enough of her female colleague's conversations to be fully aware that a an acceptable romantic partner was expected to respect boundaries, admire independence. But after so many years of — admittedly self-imposed, but still — isolation from any real human entanglement, the way that Ola declared his possession of her thrilled her.
And now she could only pray that it would save her.
At the thought that he might have taken her at her word, might believe that she had simply dropped him and so she would be left here to rot forever, the terror rose up and this time she couldn't beat it back.
She closed her eyes and sang desperately into the darkness.
Ja må hon leva, ja må hon leva, ja må hon leva uti hundrade år.
Yes, may she live for a hundred years. Or at least another hundred hours, Lotta thought ruefully. Just long enough for Ola to raise the alarm.
35
Tove Svensson's mother lived in a small, neat house at the edge of a suburb in Northern Stockholm. I stood by the patio doors and stared out at the wild afternoon as Maria brewed coffee for us both. It was lashing down with rain on top of snow, which was a level of weather misery I had never even considered. I'd waded through ankle-deep slush from the train station, and now my boots and socks were steaming on Maria's bathroom radiator.
'Here is a pair of socks you can wear for now,' Maria said softly, handing me a thick pair of hand-knitted, bright red socks. Something about them was so cheerful, so assured of happy Christmases and cosy winter evenings, so at odds with the haunted woman who scuttled back to the kitchen as the coffee maker beeped that I felt a wave of melancholy sweep over me.