The Postcard Killers (28 page)

Mats Duvall looked skeptical. “That’s just speculation,” he said. “There’s nothing to
prove
that they’d choose that particular route, or even that mode of transport. We don’t know anything for certain.”

Dessie watched Jacob stand up. He was making an effort not to attack anything, or anyone.

“You’ve got to reinforce the border crossings in the north,” he said. “What’s the name of that river right on the border? The Torne River?”

“We can’t allocate manpower simply on the strength of guesswork,” Mats Duvall said, closing up his electronic gadget, a sign that the conversation was over.

At that, Jacob stormed out of the room, closely followed by Dessie.

“
Jacob
…,” she began, taking hold of his arm. “Stop. Look at me.”

He spun around, standing right next to her.

“The Swedish police are never going to catch them,” he said in a low voice. “I can’t let them get away again. I can’t do that!”

Dessie looked into his eyes.

“No,” she said. “You can’t.”

“When’s the next flight to Haparanda?” Jacob asked.

She took out her cell and called the twenty-four-hour travel desk at
Aftonposten
.

The closest airport was in Luleå, and the last flight that evening was an SAS plane, leaving Arlanda at 9:10.

She looked at her watch.

It was nine o’clock exactly.

The airport was forty-five kilometers away.

The first plane the next morning was a Norwegian Air Shuttle, due to leave at 6:55.

“We can be in Luleå at 8:20,” Dessie said. “Then we have to rent a car and drive up to the border. It’s another hundred and thirty kilometers away.”

Jacob stared at her.

“Do you know any police up there? Or some customs officer who can keep an eye on things until we get there?”

“No,” she said, “but I can call Robert. He lives in Kalix. It’s a forty-five-minute drive from the border.”

“Robert?”

She smiled, a smile that was almost a grimace.

“My criminal cousin. The big one who protected me when I was a kid. And even now.”

Jacob ran his fingers through his hair and paced quickly around the coffee machine.

“How long would it take to drive up there?” he asked. “If we leave now.”

She looked at her watch again.

“If we go for it, and the road isn’t full of trailers and lumber trucks, we’ll be there by six.”

He slapped the wall with his hand, nearly putting a hole in it.

“That’s not good enough,” he said.

“If Robert keeps an eye on things, they won’t get through,” she said. “A blue Mercedes, registration TKG two-nine-seven, wasn’t it?”

He looked at her, fire in his eyes.

“Have you got access to a car?”

“No,” she said, “but I’ve got a bicycle.”

She waved her American Express card.

“We’ll rent one, you idiot.”

Chapter 127

Thursday, June 24
Norrland, Sweden

IT WAS PAST ONE o’clock in the morning when Dessie sailed past the town of Utansjö. She had driven almost five hundred kilometers and needed to get petrol, drink coffee, and go to the bathroom. Not in that order actually.

She glanced at Jacob in the reclined seat next to her as he slept the comatose sleep of the jet-lagged. The diesel would last until they got to the twenty-four-hour truck stop in Docksta, but she had a much better idea.

It would mean a slight detour, but it might be worth the trouble.

She reached the turning to Lunde, hesitated just for a second, and then headed left along Route 90.

The car’s rhythm changed and the very poor road surface made Jacob stir.

“What the hell…?” he said, confused, as he sat up straight. “Are we there?”

He looked around, astonished, at the early dawn light. Mist was lying in thin veils on the water, black fir trees reached up to the heavens, several deer fled across the fields.

“We’re exactly halfway to Haparanda,” Dessie said. “Those are reindeer, by the way.”

He looked at his watch.

“This whole midnight sun thing is pretty fucked up,” he said, shaking his watch. “And the reindeer, too. Where’s Santa?”

Dessie slowed the car and pointed ahead.

“See that?” she said. “Wästerlunds Bakery. I lost my virginity in the parking lot around the back.”

This nugget of information woke him up properly.

“So these are your old stomping grounds? Interesting. You’re really a hick.”

“Until I was seventeen. I spent a year at Ådal high school in Kramfors, then went to New Zealand as an exchange student. I ended up staying there nine years.”

Jacob looked at her.

“Your weird English accent,” he said. “I’ve been trying to place it. Why New Zealand?”

She glanced over at him.

“It was as far away as I could get… from being a hick. See that? There’s the memorial to the workers who were shot by the military in nineteen thirty-one. Remember our talk,
fascist?
”

She pointed to a sculpture of a horse and a running man that was just visible down by the water.

They drove up onto Sandö Bridge, and Jacob peered down at the river below.

“When it was built, this was the longest single-span concrete bridge in the world. I had to cross it every day to get to school.”

“Lucky you,” Jacob said.

“It scared me every single time, every day, twice a day. The bridge collapsed once, killing eighteen people. The most forgotten tragedy of the last century, because it happened on the afternoon of August thirty-first, nineteen thirty-nine.”

“The day before the Second World War broke out,” Jacob said. “I have a good memory for history, too. Where are we actually going?”

“Past Klockestrand,” she said. “It’s not far now.”

She slowed down and turned off to the right, onto a narrow dirt road.

“I thought we might need some expert help,” she said, driving up to a huge wooden building in a state of more or less complete ruin.

“What the hell is this place? The House on Haunted Hill?”

“Welcome to my childhood home,” Dessie said, switching the engine off.

Chapter 128

THERE WAS A FAINT light coming from a window on the ground floor, the sort of blue light that an old television set gives off.

Dessie wondered how many of her family were there. The house was a base for her uncles, the few who were still alive, and for a number of her cousins.

“Will anyone be awake at this time of day?” Jacob asked.

“Granddad,” Dessie said. “He usually sleeps during the day. At night he watches old black-and-white films that he downloads illegally from the Net. Are you coming in with me?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Jacob said, climbing out of the car.

The held each other’s hand as they walked up to the huge building.

The structure was an old-style farmhouse, with four chimneys, two floors, and a loft tall enough to stand up in. The red iron-oxide paint had peeled off decades ago and the wooden walls shone a grayish white in the early light.

Dessie opened the outside door without knocking and kicked off her shoes.

Apart from the sound from the television, the house was quiet. If anyone was here besides Granddad, they were sound asleep.

Her grandfather was sitting in his usual armchair, watching a film with Ingrid Bergman in it.

“Granddad?”

The old man turned around and took a quick look at her.

Then he went right back to the television screen.

“Drag åta dörn för moija,”
he said.

Dessie shut the outside door.

“This is Jacob, Granddad,” she said, walking toward him, still holding Jacob by the hand.

Her grandfather hadn’t aged much, she thought. Maybe it was because his hair had been white for as long as she could remember, and his face had always had the same miserable scowl. He didn’t seem the least bit surprised to see her in his living room for the first time since her mother’s funeral. Instead, he just glowered suspiciously at Jacob.

“Vo jär häjna för ein?”

“Jacob mostly does rough work,” Dessie said, taking the remote and turning off the television.

Then she sat down on the table directly in front of the old man.

“Granddad, I want to ask you something. If I’m on the run from the police and haven’t got any money and want to hide out in Finland, what should I do?”

Chapter 129

THE OLD MAN’S EYES twinkled. He cast a quick, approving look at Jacob, straightened up in his armchair, and regarded Dessie with new interest.

“Vo håva jä djårt?”

“What language is that?” Jacob asked, bewildered. “It doesn’t sound like any Swedish I’ve heard.”

“Pitemål,”
Dessie said. “It’s an almost extinct dialect from where he grew up. It’s further from Swedish than either Danish or Norwegian. This farm belonged to my maternal grandmother’s family. No one around here really understands him.”

She turned to her grandfather again.

“No,” she said, “we haven’t done anything bad. Not yet, anyway. I’m just wondering, purely hypothetically.”

“Sko jä håva nalta å ita?”

“Yes, please,” Dessie said. “Coffee would be good, and a sandwich, if you’ve got any cheese.”

The old man stood up and staggered off toward the kitchen. Dessie took the opportunity to go out into the gloom of the hall and crawl in under the stairs, where the only toilet in the house was situated.

When she got back, the old man had prepared some bread and cheese and had boiled water for instant coffee. He was sitting with his hands clasped on the wax tablecloth, his eyes squinting as he mulled over Dessie’s question.

“Å djööm sä i Finland,”
he said.
“Hä gå et…”

Dessie nodded and took a bite of the sweet bread and Port Salut.

Then she interpreted simultaneously for Jacob so he could follow.

Hiding in Finland wouldn’t work. The Finnish police were far more effective, and brutal, than the Swedes. Any Finns on the run came over to Sweden as quickly as they could.

But if you absolutely had to get to Finland, that was no problem, as long as you had a freshly stolen car, of course.

Anyone could cross the Torne River wherever they liked. There were bridges in Haparanda, Övertorneå, Pello, Kolari, Muonio, and Karesuando. Each had its advantages and disadvantages. Haparanda was the biggest and slowest, but the guards there were the laziest, so you might not get questioned. Kolari was the least used and fastest, but you were more likely to be noticed there. You had to choose your route in Morjärv — north toward Överkalix or south to Haparanda. Then you just had to aim straight for Russia as quickly as you could.

“Russia?” Jacob said. “How far away is that?”

“Jä nögges tjöör över Kuusamo, hä jär som rättjest…”

“Three hundred kilometers,” Dessie said.

“Christ,” Jacob said. “That’s nothing. Manhattan to the end of Long Island.”

According to Dessie’s grandfather, it was hard to get into Russia, and it always had been.

In his day, the no-man’s-land along the border had been mined with explosives, but they were all gone now. Nowadays it was the most remote boundary of the European Union. It was tricky but not impossible.

The biggest problem wasn’t getting out of the EU, but into Russia. You had to leave the car and then walk across, maybe just north of Tammela. There was a main road on the other side of the border that would take you to Petrozavodsk, and from there to St. Petersburg.

Dessie and Jacob sat in silence until the old man had finished.

Then he stood up, put the coffee cups on the draining board, and wandered off toward the television again.

“Stäng åta dörn för moija då jä gå,”
he said.

“We have to shut the door to stop the midges from getting in when we leave,” Dessie said. “I think he likes you.”

Chapter 130

THEY FILLED THE CAR with diesel from the farm’s illegal agricultural tank.

Then Jacob took the wheel.

“Where am I going?”

“Straight on until you see ‘Suomi Finland’ on the signs,” Dessie said, putting the seat back down and stretching out.

He aimed north and emerged onto the main road again.

If the Rudolphs managed to reach Russia, he’d never see them again, that much he was sure of. Anyone with a lot of money could buy protection there, and anyone without it could disappear among the country’s homeless millions.

He stiffened his grip on the wheel and pressed the accelerator. His head still felt groggy from his long nap. The car was small and sluggish, with a weirdly noisy engine. He’d never driven a diesel before.

The landscape glided past and it really was astonishingly beautiful. Craggy cliffs falling to the sea. Blue peaks rising to the north. The road wound its way along the coast, getting ever narrower and more twisted and scenic.

He was on his way toward the end of the world. The Rudolphs were on their way there, too.

Dessie’s cell phone started to ring on the dashboard.

He glanced at the woman beside him. She was fast asleep, mouth open in a narrow line.

Jacob grabbed the phone and said, “Yeah?”

“We’ve found the left-luggage locker,” Gabriella said. “It was in the basement of the Central Station. You were right. Both of you were.”

He clenched his fist in triumph.

“It contained everything you suspected: light shoes, brown wig, coat, trousers, sunglasses, Polaroid camera, a couple of packs of film, pens, stamps, postcards, eyedrops, and a really sharp stiletto knife, as well as some other stuff.”

She fell silent.

“What?” Jacob said. “What else was there?”

His raised voice woke Dessie, and she sat herself up beside him.

“We found the passports and wallets of all the murder victims — apart from Copenhagen and Athens and Salzburg.”

He braked and stopped the car by a twenty-four-hour café. He was searching for words but couldn’t find any.