Stalker (52 page)

Jackie isn’t entirely sure of the direction of the passageway. She turns and follows the wall backwards for a metre or so, listens, but can no longer hear Nelly. Her own breathing is so laboured that she has to hold one hand over her mouth in an effort to stay quiet.

Something rustles in front of her, down on the floor, moving slowly.

It’s only a rat.

Jackie stands completely still, breathing through her nose. She has no idea how to find her way out. Terror is preventing her from thinking, she’s too stressed to be able to interpret her surroundings correctly.

A short distance away from her something creaks. It sounds like a heavy door, or even an old mangle. She desperately wants to hide, curl up on the floor with her arms over her head, but she forces herself to go on.

Her feet crunch on stones, charred pieces of wood and drifts of sand and grit. The walls have collapsed in places, completely blocking the corridor, and she has to clamber over the heaps. Stones roll down the slope behind her, and fragments of glass break into smaller pieces.

Jackie hears air rushing through a small gap higher up, and keeps crawling, leaning on her hands. A broken plank scrapes her thigh and her feet slide across bricks and mortar.

There’s a rustling sound behind her and she climbs faster until she hits her head on the roof. She can feel the breeze on her face, but can’t locate the opening. She fumbles desperately in front of her with her hands, trying to push through stones tangled in metal wire, sweeping aside loose mortar, and then she finds the narrow gap. Jackie puts her fingers through a piece of chicken-wire and pulls. She manages to loosen a large stone, digs the hole a bit larger, and cuts her palm. She shuffles forward and tries to crawl through. Groaning, she manages to push one arm and her head through, stones tumble away on the other side of the hole and she forces her way through, kicking with her legs and panicking that she’s going to get stuck.

Jackie fumbles in front of her with her hand, trying to get a grip on anything to help her pull herself through the hole. She can’t hear Nelly behind her, has no idea if she’s scrambling up the heap of rumble with her knife raised.

Jackie feels a piece of tape with her hand and starts to pull herself through as she pushes as hard as she can with her legs. Chicken-wire and stones scratch her back, but she makes it out. Taking a load of grit with her, she shuffles down the other side, catches her foot on the edge of the hole, pulls, then pushes her foot back, angles it differently and finally it comes loose.

Jackie slides down the heap of rubble and reaches a floor. Without having any idea of where she is, she walks forward with her hands outstretched until she finds a wall, and begins to follow that instead.

The bricks are colder here, and she realises she must be getting closer to a way out. She turns a corner and finds herself in a larger room. The ceiling is much higher here, noises rise and spread out, like a gentle sea.

Jackie stops and rests for a moment, trying to catch her breath. She leans forward on her knees, her whole body shaking with exhaustion and shock.

She has to go on, she thinks. Has to find a way out.

With bleeding fingers she feels along the wall with her hand, then hears a metal door open with a creak some way off to the right.

Jackie crouches down and hopes she’s hidden behind something. She tries to breathe silently but her heart is pounding hard in her chest.

Nelly must have gone a different way, she thinks. Nelly knows the layout of the rooms, where the passageways lead.

The knife-wound is hurting much more now, it feels oddly stiff and she’s having trouble breathing. She can’t help letting out a quiet cough, and feels warm blood trickle down her back.

Still crouching, she moves slowly forward, and hits something that scrapes metallically. She lowers her hands and feels that it’s a spade.

‘Jackie,’ Nelly calls.

She stands up cautiously and carries on along the wall, clicks her tongue and realises that there’s an opening ahead on her left.

‘Jackie?’

The echo of Nelly’s voice hits the wall on the other side. Jackie stops to listen. All of a sudden she’s sure: Nelly shouted in the wrong direction.

She can’t see me, Jackie thinks.

It’s so dark in here that she can’t see me.

Nelly’s blind.

Moving slowly now, Jackie bends over, picks up a small stone and throws it away from her. It hits a wall, bounces on to the floor and hits something.

She stands still and hears Nelly move towards the sound.

Jackie returns to the spade and carefully picks it up. The blade scrapes the ground and Nelly stops, panting for breath.

‘I can hear you!’ Nelly says, with laughter in her voice.

Jackie moves closer and can smell her perfume. Step by step she puts her feet down on the floor and listens to the gentle crunch of the gravel.

Nelly moves backwards and walks into a bucket, which falls over with a clatter.

She can’t see me, but I can see her, Jackie thinks as she gets closer, listening to Nelly’s strained breathing and the smell of sweat through her perfume.

Jackie can clearly sense Nelly’s billowing presence, hear the movement of the knife through the air, and sense the movement of her feet as she backs away another couple of steps.

She knows I’m here, but she can’t see me, Jackie thinks again. She squeezes the handle of the spade, cautiously adjusts her grip, clicks with her tongue, and knows at once where the wall is, and where Nelly is standing.

Nelly is panting and stabbing quickly in different directions. The knife hits nothing but air and she stops.

She listens, her anxiety audible in her breathing.

Jackie approaches silently, feeling the heat radiating from Nelly’s body. She follows the movements of the knife, then takes a step forward and strikes hard with the spade.

The heavy blade hits Nelly on the cheek with a short clang. Her head jerks sideways and she collapses onto her hip.

She roars with pain.

Jackie walks round her, listening to every movement, every breath.

Nelly is whimpering to herself and tries to stand up. Jackie strikes again, but the spade passes close to Nelly’s head, the metal merely pushing through her hair.

Nelly gets to her feet and jabs with the knife. The point cuts into Jackie’s lower arm. She backs away instinctively and walks into the bucket that Nelly hit earlier, then steps quickly to the side with her heart thudding. Her arm is stinging with pain from the cut, and blood is dripping down into her hand. Adrenalin is coursing through her, making the hairs on her arms stand up and she shakes the blood from her hand, wipes it on her skirt, and takes a fresh grip on the spade.

She approaches as silently as she can. She can hear Nelly crouching down and jabbing with the knife, and can feel the dampness of her exhaled breath. Without a sound, Jackie circles her, then changes direction and strikes with all the strength she can muster. The blow is ferocious. The spade hits the back of Nelly’s head. Jackie hears her sigh and fall forward, without putting her hands out to break her fall.

She hits out again, and strikes Nelly across the head with a wet sound, and after that she doesn’t hear anything.

Jackie backs away, panting. Her hands are shaking and she listens, but can’t hear the sound of breathing. She approaches warily, pokes at Nelly with the spade, but her body is limp.

Jackie waits, hearing her own pulse thump in her ears. Then she jabs hard with the point of the spade, but there’s no reaction.

Jackie is breathing fitfully, and anguish washes over her. Her stomach churns. She puts the spade down and moves closer to Nelly, her legs shaking beneath her. The steaming warmth of the body rises up towards her. Carefully she leans over until she can feel Nelly’s back with her fingers. She’s wearing a raincoat, the rough fabric squeaks beneath her fingers.

Erik said she had the key round her neck.

Jackie feels tentatively up her back to her neck, and feels that Nelly’s hair is wet with warm blood.

Her fingers fumble clumsily inside Nelly’s collar, feeling along her sticky neck until she finds a chain and tugs at it, but it won’t come loose.

She needs to roll Nelly on to her back. She’s heavy, and Jackie has to use both hands, and push with one leg.

The body rolls over and Jackie ends up sitting astride it. With her fingers shaking, she undoes the first button at the neck of the raincoat, but stops when she hears a squelching sound, as if Nelly were moistening her mouth.

Jackie undoes another button, and thinks she can hear little clicks, as though Nelly were blinking her dry eyelids.

Fear pulses through her head and she tears Nelly’s dress open at the neck, grabs hold of the key on the chain, and starts to pull it over her bloody head.

Joona has been following the signs to Rimbo, but he leaves road 280 at Väsby and is heading towards Finsta when Margot calls to tell him that Jackie and her daughter aren’t in the flat at Lill-Jans plan. All the evidence suggests they’ve been abducted; there are traces of blood on the floor, all the way out into the stairwell. The door to the wardrobe has been smashed and on the wall inside the child had written ‘the lady talks funny’.

Joona repeats several times that they have to find the house near Finsta, that’s where she’s taken Jackie and Madeleine. Erik is probably already there in his cage, or will be very shortly.

‘Find the house – that’s the only thing that matters right now,’ Joona says before they end the call.

He’s passed plenty of farms in the darkness along the way, and has seen agricultural premises and sawmills with chimneys of varying sizes.

He’s driving fast along the black road, not letting himself think that it might be too late, that time has already run out.

He has to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

There are always questions to ask, answers still to find.

Nelly keeps repeating herself the whole time, returning to old patterns, he thinks.

There has to be a farm in Roslagen that Nelly somehow has access to.

The farm didn’t belong to her family, but her grandfather may have managed it, Joona reasons. He was also a priest, and the Swedish Church owns a great deal of land and forest, and a large number of properties.

As he drives, Joona tries to think through the case again and consider everything he had read and seen long before he knew that Nelly was the person Rocky called the unclean preacher.

Everyone makes mistakes.

He needs to find something that can connect a farm in Roslagen with the video featuring Jackie.

Joona thinks about the yellow raincoat, the narcotic substances, the collection of trophies, and the way she clearly marked the places she took them from on the bodies, then about her completely ignorant husband out in Bromma, her expensive clothes, hand cream, the jar of nutritional supplements, and then he picks up his phone and calls Nils Åhlén.

‘You’ve climbed up onto a very precarious branch,’ Åhlén says. ‘That escape from prison wasn’t exactly—’

‘It was necessary,’ Joona interrupts.

‘And now you want to ask me something,’ Åhlén says, and clears his throat.

‘Nelly takes iron pills,’ Joona says.

‘Maybe she suffers from anaemia,’ Åhlén replies.

‘How do you get anaemia?’

‘A thousand different ways … everything from cancer and kidney disease to pregnancy and menstruation.’

‘But Nelly takes iron hydroxide.’

‘Do you mean iron oxide-hydroxide?’

‘She’s got speckled hands,’ Joona says.

‘Freckles?’

‘Blacker … proper pigment change, and—’

‘Arsenic poisoning,’ Åhlén interrupts. ‘Iron oxide-hydroxide is used as an antidote to arsenic … and if she’s got dry, speckled hands, then …’

Joona stops listening when he finds himself thinking about one of the photographs he left on the floor of his hotel room.

A picture of a two-millimetre-long splinter that looks like a blue bird’s skull.

The fragment had been found on Sandra Lundgren’s floor. It looked ceramic, but actually consisted of glass, iron, sand and chamotte clay.

He drives past a big red barn, and thinks that the little bird’s skull was a tiny shard of slag, a by-product of glass production.

‘Glass,’ he whispers.

The ground around old glassworks is often contaminated with arsenic. They used to use great quantities of the poisonous semi-metal as a refining agent, to prevent bubbles and to homogenise the glass.

‘A glassworks,’ Joona says out loud. ‘They’re at a glassworks.’

‘That could fit,’ Nils Åhlén says, as if he had been following Joona’s internal thought process.

‘Are you sitting at your computer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Search for an old glassworks in the vicinity of Finsta.’

Joona is driving along beside a lake that shimmers in the darkness behind the trees and bushes as he hears Nils Åhlén hum while he taps at his keyboard.

‘No … all I’m getting is one that burned down in 1976, Solbacken glassworks in Rimbo, used to make sheet glass and mirrors … the land is owned by the Swedish Church, and—’

‘Send the address and coordinates to my phone,’ Joona interrupts. ‘And call Margot Silverman.’

Joona brakes sharply and turns hard right, locking the wheels. He puts the car into reverse, throwing up a shower of grit, veers backwards into the road, changes gear and puts his foot down again.

Gasping with pain, Erik pokes the copper pipe through the roof of the cage, uses one bar as a pivot and tries to prise the next one up. The lever is still a bit too short, even though he hangs off the end with the whole of his weight. There’s a crash as the pipe slides out. Erik falls to the floor, hitting his good arm against the mesh.

Breathing hard, he gets up and switches the torch on, and sees that he’s managed to bend the metal another few centimetres.

He listens out for noises from the tunnels, but he hasn’t heard anything since Nelly chased after Jackie.

Erik has scanned the cellar with the torch, but hasn’t been able to find a better tool than the length of copper pipe he managed to drag towards the cage.

The welded joints of the cage are all solid and carefully made, but with the help of the pipe he’s succeeded in bending one of the bars in the roof to the point where he’s starting to believe it might be possible to break it. It could take hours, days, even, but it isn’t completely impossible.

He pushes the pipe through the mesh in the roof, then stops.

Shuffling steps are approaching along the passageway. Erik pulls the pipe back and hides it under the mattress, picks up the torch and listens. There’s someone there, he heard right, there are footsteps approaching.

He switches the light off and thinks that he has to play along, no matter what happens. He hasn’t got a choice, it would be far too easy for Nelly to kill him in the cage.

He waits in total silence, listening to the crunching footsteps and the sound of breathing in the room outside the cage.

‘Erik?’ Jackie whispers.

‘You have to get away from here,’ Erik whispers quickly.

He switches the torch on and sees that Jackie is standing a metre away from him. Her face is dirty and bloody, she’s gasping for breath and seems to be in a very bad way.

‘Nelly’s dead,’ Jackie says. ‘I killed her.’

‘Are you hurt?’

She doesn’t answer, takes a couple of steps towards him, reaches the mesh and sticks her hand in. He strokes her fingers and shines the light up at her to look at her injuries.

‘Can you manage to get out and fetch help?’ he asks, stroking the hair from her blood-streaked face.

‘I’ve got the key,’ she says, and coughs weakly.

She leans against the cage, pulls the chain over her head and gives him the key.

‘I killed her,’ she gasps, and sinks to the floor. ‘I killed another human being …’

‘It was self-defence,’ Erik says.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispers, and her face dissolves into tears. ‘It’s impossible to know …’

Erik reaches his hand out beside the hatch, puts the key into the padlock, turns its and hears the click as the loop slides out of the casing.

He climbs out with the torch in his hand, and hugs Jackie on the floor. Her breathing is erratic and shallow.

‘Let me look at the wound to your back,’ he whispers.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ she says. ‘I need to get home to Maddy, just give me a few moments …’

Erik shines the torch at the peeling walls, the table and shelf.

‘I think the door to the kitchen is locked, but I’ll go up and check,’ he says.

‘OK,’ Jackie nods, and makes another attempt to stand up.

‘Stay where you are,’ Erik says, and heads up the steep steps.

On the brown, anti-slip linoleum there are bloody boot-prints. He gets up to the heavy metal door, jerks the handle down and pulls and pushes the door, but it’s locked.

He yanks the handle and looks round with the torch to see if the key’s on a hook anywhere, but can’t find anything and goes back down to Jackie. She’s managed to rise from the floor, leaning on the mesh of the cage with one hand.

‘The door’s locked,’ Erik confirms. ‘We’ll have to get out through the tunnels.’

‘OK,’ she replies in a quiet voice.

‘I think she killed the police officers who came,’ he says. ‘They will come and find us, but we have no idea how long that’s going to take, and you need to get to hospital straight away.’

‘We walk,’ she pants.

‘You can do it,’ Erik says, putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘I’ve got a torch, I can see where we’re going.’

He leads her into the passageway, round an armchair and a small padded footstool. Some old window frames are leaning against the wall and dusty light bulbs sit in yellowed sockets.

They cross another passageway with steep steps leading downwards, and pass a toppled cupboard, treading carefully across the broken glass.

In the light of the torch and with Erik’s help, getting through is straightforward, and they emerge into a large room with long tin washbasins, rows of taps, and cubicles with crumbling plaster.

On the ceiling there are empty strip lights with no coverings. The cables are just hanging down. A large trough full of soil stands in the middle of the floor. Rust has eaten through the green metal of the trough, and the stick that Jackie used to guide herself is lying on the floor beside it.

They carry on through the room into a corridor lined with dented clothes lockers. There’s a water-pipe attached to the ceiling, but one end has come loose and is hanging down like a spear, curving under its own weight.

Erik shines the torch along the narrow passageway. The walls have collapsed and parts of the ceiling have fallen in, the passage is full of bricks, grit and wood, all the way up to the ceiling.

Erik opens a door and they carry on along a different tunnel, turn right, go through a rounded arch and are suddenly out in the fresh air.

They’re standing in a large room, and a sharp wind is blowing. The roof has gone, and the tall chimney is visible against the dark sky. The light of the torch shimmers off a huge metal extractor hood. The tiled floor is dirty and cracked.

Tall weeds are growing through an aluminium ladder lying on the ground in front of a huge oven. Erik barely has any strength left in his injured arm, but he manages to lift the ladder and pull it free of the weeds. He shoves some fallen bricks and gravel aside with his foot and props the ladder up against the wall.

He helps Jackie to climb up, and follows right behind her. She slips and he drops the torch when he catches her. It clatters down between the rungs, hits the ground and goes out abruptly.

The pain in his arm is throbbing as though it’s trapped in a piece of machinery by the time they emerge into the tall grass growing around the ruins. Jackie is leaning hard against Erik as they make their way through thistles and low bushes. An empty police car is parked up, its headlights shining straight at the yellow house. They walk past it, across the rough yard and out onto the track, away from the house.