Lars Kepler 2-book Bundle (30 page)

They walk up the narrow staircase to the fifth floor, and as he is unlocking the door she begins to rummage in her bag for her phone. “I just need to call my father,” she says evasively.

He doesn’t reply, simply walks ahead of her into the terracotta hall and disappears down the passageway.

She stands there with her coat on, looking around. Photographs cover the walls, and a recess containing stuffed birds runs along just below the ceiling. Shulman returns before she has time to dial Kennet’s number.

“Simone,” he whispers. “Don’t you want to come in?”

She shakes her head.

“Just for a little while?”

“OK.” She keeps her coat on as she follows him into the living room.

“We’re adults,” he announces. “We can do what we like.” He pours two glasses of cognac, and they toast each other and drink.

“That was good,” she says quietly.

One wall is made entirely of glass. She moves across and looks out over the copper roofs of Södermalm and the dark reverse side of a neon advertising sign depicting a tube of toothpaste.

Shulman comes over, stands behind her, and puts his arms around her.

“Do you realise I’m crazy about you?” he whispers. “I have been right from the start.”

“Sim, I just don’t know … I don’t know what I’m doing,” Simone says.

“Do you always have to know what you’re doing?” asks Shulman, drawing her towards the bedroom.

She goes with him as if she has known all along that this would happen. She has wanted this to happen, and the only thing that held her back was the fact that she didn’t want to be like her mother. No, like Erik: a liar furtively dealing with phone calls and text messages. She has always thought of herself as having a natural barrier against infidelity. But now she has no sense of betrayal whatsoever. Shulman’s bedroom is dark. The walls are covered in something that looks like deep blue silk, the same fabric that has been used for long curtains covering the windows, and the spare, slanting midwinter light penetrates the fibres of the material like a fainter darkness.

With a trembling hand she unbuttons her coat and tosses it on the floor. Shulman removes all his clothes, and Simone’s eyes travel over his muscular shoulders and down the line of thick, curly dark hair that runs along his navel.

He studies her calmly. She begins to undress but is overwhelmed by a dizzying feeling of loneliness as she stands there before him. He lowers his eyes, moves closer, and kneels, his hair spreading over his shoulders. He traces a line over her hipbone with his finger.

He gently pushes her down onto the edge of the bed and begins to pull down her panties; she raises herself up, keeping her legs together, and feels them slip down and get stuck for a moment around one ankle. She leans back, closes her eyes, allows him to part her thighs, and feels his warm kisses on her stomach, over her hipbone and groin. She is panting, running her fingers through his long, thick hair. She wants Shulman inside her; the desire roars through her body like a storm, waves of darkness surging through her blood, pools of liquid heat flooding her, sucking and tickling, down towards her sex. He moves on top, and she hears herself sigh as he pushes inside her. He whispers something she cannot hear. When she pulls him towards her, she does so in a hunger for escape, for just one brief moment of calm.

She feels the weight of Sim’s toned body on top of her, she feels the physical pleasure, but the possibility of escape is gone, and she knows it. It is not attainable. She cannot stop thinking. She has to get home. She has to keep looking for Benjamin. She has to find him.

The day is bitterly cold, the sky open and blue. People are moving silently, lost in their own worlds. Tired children are on their way home from school. Kennet stops outside the 7-Eleven on the corner. There’s a special offer on coffee and a saffron Lucia bun. He goes inside, and as he joins the queue his cell phone rings. It’s Simone.

“Have you been out, Sixan?”

“I had to go to the gallery. Then I had a job to do.” She stops abruptly. “I just got your message, Dad.”

“Have you been asleep? You sound—”

“Yes. Yes, I slept for a little while.”

“Good,” says Kennet.

He meets the assistant’s tired eyes and points to the sign advertising the special offer.

“Have they traced Benjamin’s call?” asks Simone.

“I haven’t had a reply yet. This evening at the earliest, they said. I was just going to give them a ring now.”

The assistant is waiting for Kennet to choose which Lucia bun he would like, and he quickly points to the biggest one. She puts it in a bag, takes his crumpled twenty-kronor note, and waves in the direction of the coffee machine and cups. He nods, walks past the grill where the sausages are turning, and manages to extricate a cup from the dispenser while continuing his conversation with Simone.

“You spoke to Nicky yesterday?” she says.

“He’s a very nice kid,” he says.

“Did you find out anything about Wailord?”

“Quite a lot.”

“Like what?”

“Hang on a minute.”

Kennet removes the steaming coffee cup from the machine, snaps on a lid, and takes it and the bag containing the bun over to one of the small round plastic tables.

“Are you still there?” he asks, sitting down on a wobbly chair.

“Yes.”

“I think this is about a group of kids who are shaking Nicky down for his money and telling him they’re Pokémon characters.”

Kennet notices a man with tousled hair pushing an oversize buggy. A big girl in a pink snowsuit—too old to be pushed, Kennet thinks—reclines inside, sucking on a dummy with a tired smile on her face.

“Does this have anything to do with Benjamin?”

“The Pokémon boys? I don’t know. Maybe he tried to stop them,” says Kennet.

“We need to talk to Aida,” Simone says resolutely.

“After school, I thought.”

“What do we do now?”

“I’ve actually got an address,” says Kennet.

“For what?”

“The sea.”

“The sea?”

“That’s all I know.” He takes a sip of the coffee, breaks off a piece of the Lucia bun, and pops it in his mouth.

“Where is the sea?”

“Close to the Frihamnen,” says Kennet as he chews, “out on Loudden.”

“Can I come with you?”

“Are you ready?”

“Give me ten minutes.”

Gathering up his coffee and the rest of his bun, Kennet heads out into the very cold afternoon to pick up his car by the hospital. A cyclist darts through traffic, slaloming in between the cars. As he stops at the crossing, Kennet feels as if he has overlooked something important, as if he has seen something crucial but failed to interpret it. The traffic thunders past. He can hear a rescue vehicle somewhere in the distance. He takes a sip of coffee and watches a woman waiting on the other side of the road, her dog trembling on the end of a short leash. A truck passes just in front of him, and the ground shakes with its considerable weight. He hears someone giggling and has just registered that it doesn’t sound genuine when he feels a hard shove in his back. He takes several steps out into the road to avoid losing his balance, turns, and sees a ten-year-old girl looking at him, her eyes open wide. She must be the one who pushed me, he just has time to think. There’s no one else there. At the same moment, he hears the screech of brakes and feels an incomprehensible force hurl itself at him. Something like a gigantic hammer knocks his legs out from under him. There is a cracking sound at the back of his neck. All at once his body is soft and faraway, in free fall, and then there is darkness.

Erik Maria Bark is sitting at the desk in his office. A pale light finds its way in through the window that faces the empty inner courtyard. A take-away container holds the remains of a salad, and a warm two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola sits next to the desk lamp with its pink shade. Erik is studying a printout of the photo Aida sent to Benjamin. Despite having looked at it dozens of times, he cannot grasp what the subject of the picture really is.

He considers calling Simone and having her read out Aida’s message and Benjamin’s reply word for word, but then tells himself that Simone doesn’t need to hear from him at this point. He can’t understand why he was so nasty, why he told her he was having an affair with Daniella. Perhaps it was only because he longed to be forgiven by Simone while she found it so easy to distrust him.

Suddenly he hears Benjamin’s voice in his mind once again, calling from the boot of the car. Erik takes a pink capsule out of the wooden box and washes it down with the Coke. His hand has started to shake so much that he has difficulty replacing the bottle on the desk.

Benjamin was trying so hard to be grown up, not to sound afraid. But the boy must be terrified, thinks Erik, shut in the boot of a car in the dark.

How long can it take for Kennet to trace the call? Erik is irritated with himself for handing the job over to the old man, but if his father-in-law can find Benjamin, nothing else is of any importance.

He picks up the phone. He needs to call the police and get them to hurry it up. He must find out if they’ve traced the call, if they have any suspects yet. When he calls and explains why he’s calling, he’s put through to the wrong extension. He has to call again. He’s hoping to speak to Joona Linna but is put through to a detective named Fredrik Stensund, who confirms that he is involved in the preliminary investigation into the disappearance of Benjamin Bark. He is very understanding and says he has teenage children himself.

“You worry all night when they’re out, you know you have to let go, but—”

“Benjamin is not out partying,” Erik says firmly.

“No, we have had certain information which contradicts—”

“He’s been kidnapped.”

“I understand how you must be feeling—”

“But the search for my son is obviously not a priority,” Erik retorts.

There is a silence; Stensund takes several deep breaths before continuing. “I am taking what you say very seriously, and I can promise you that we are doing our best.”

“Make sure you trace the call, then,” says Erik.

“We’re working on that right now,” replies Stensund, sounding less amenable.

“Please,” Erik begs, a weak conclusion.

He sits there with the phone in his hand. They have to trace the call, he thinks. We have to have a location, a circle on a map, a direction; that’s all we have to go on. The only thing Benjamin could say was that he heard a voice.

As if it were coming from under a blanket, thinks Erik, but he isn’t sure if he’s remembering correctly. Did Benjamin really say he’d heard a voice, a mushy voice? Perhaps it was just a murmur, a sound that reminded him of a voice, without words, without meaning. Erik rubs a hand over his mouth, looks at the photograph, his eyes sweeping across the overgrown grass, the hedge, the back of the fence, the plastic basket, all enhanced, distorted by the photographer’s powerful flash. He can’t see anything new. What’s in that basket? When he leans back and closes his eyes, the image remains: the hedge and the brown fence flash in shades of pink and the yellowish-green hillock is dark blue, slowly drifting. Like a piece of fabric against a night sky, Erik thinks, and at the same moment he realises that Benjamin told him that the mushy voice had said something about a house, a haunted house.

He opens his eyes and gets to his feet. How could he have forgotten?
That
was what Benjamin said before the car stopped.

As he pulls on his coat he tries to remember where he has seen haunted houses, the kind you see in horror films. There aren’t that many. He recalls one north of Stockholm, over the ridge, past the collective, down to Lake Mälaren. Before you reach the ship mound at Runsa stronghold, the building is on the left-hand side, facing the water. A kind of miniature castle built of wood, with towers, verandas, and over-the-top ornamentation.

Erik leaves his office and walks quickly along the corridor, trying to remember the trip. Benjamin had been in the car with them. They had looked at the ship barrow, one of the largest Viking burial sites in Sweden. They stood in the middle of the ellipse, large grey stones in green grass. It was late summer and very hot. Erik remembers the stillness of the air and the butterflies fluttering over the gravel in the parking lot as they got into the hot car and set off for home with the windows down.

In the lift down to his car, Erik remembers that after a few miles he pulled over to the side of the road, stopped, pointed at the building, and jokingly asked Benjamin if he would like to live there.

“Where?”

“In the haunted house,” he had said, but he no longer recalls Benjamin’s response.

The sun is already setting; the slanting light flashes on the frozen puddles in the neurosurgical unit visitors’ car park, and the gravel on the asphalt crunches under his tyres as he heads for the main exit. Erik realises it is unlikely that Benjamin was referring to this particular haunted house, but it isn’t impossible. He heads north as dwindling light blurs the contours of the world and blinks to help himself see better. Only when the shades of blue begin to dominate does his brain understand that it is actually getting dark.

Half an hour later he is approaching the haunted house. He has tried to get hold of Kennet four times to see if he has managed to trace Benjamin’s call, but Kennet has not answered his phone and Erik has not left a message.

Above the vast lake the sky still retains a faint glow, while the forest is completely black. He drives slowly along the narrow road into the small community that has gradually grown up around the water. The headlights pick out spanking new homes, small summer cottages, and comfortable houses from the turn of the century. Rounding a curve, they sweep across a tricycle left behind in a driveway. He slows down and sees the silhouette of the haunted house behind a tall hedge. He drives past a few more houses and then parks on the side of the road. Getting out of the car, he sets off back down the road on foot; as quietly as possible he opens the garden gate of a house made of dark brick, padding across the lawn and around the back. A cable is whipping against a flagpole. Erik climbs over the fence into the next garden and walks past a swimming pool with a creaking plastic cover. The big windows of the low villa facing the lake are in darkness, and the stone terrace is covered with sodden leaves. Erik speeds up; he senses the haunted house on the other side of the fir hedge and pushes his way through.