Thursday 29 October, 07.02
They waited for it. It didn’t take long.
It started as a creeping change. The world raised itself laboriously out of the darkness, split in two, then the red dawn managed to separate above from below, sky from water. Out of the gap between them, colours seeped through and spread across the surface of the water.
They were standing out on the jetty after a couple of hours’ sleep. Berger was feeling his bandaged left palm, and could tell that Blom was watching him.
‘What happened after you ran away?’ she said. ‘Back then. Twenty-two years ago.’
Berger shook his head. ‘When I had run some way through the grass your screaming stopped. I didn’t even turn back then. I ran home with my tail between my legs, and I hid. Nothing should be quite as worrying as a teenager overplaying normality. But my parents didn’t notice a thing.’
‘And William?’
‘I just avoided him,’ Berger said. ‘For the rest of term. And I still didn’t know who you were. I never saw you clearly enough.’
‘Do you think he hated us?’ Blom asked.
Berger looked into the sun as it grew with unexpected speed. ‘To understand any of this you have to understand who William was. We’re talking about a mother and son who were forced to move from Huvudsta, Hässelby, Stuvsta, Bandhagen, because the son was being bullied so badly. He struggled through life with his lumpy face; he clung to his clocks even though all hell kept breaking loose around him. Eventually something snapped. It could have been that snowball you threw at the pocket watch he was showing me, it could have been something else.’
‘That snowball,’ Blom said. ‘I didn’t throw it.’
‘You were there, weren’t you?’ Berger said. ‘You were in that gang when it happened. He loved his clocks, and attacking them was like attacking the most precious thing in the world to him. He loved wristwatches, pocket watches, wall clocks, but now he was building the most difficult one of all: a tower clock. But without a tower. Just a boathouse. So he set about modifying his construction, so it could be used to take revenge. The fact that it ended up being you, Molly, was probably just a coincidence.’
‘Not any more. Nothing’s coincidental now.’
‘On a completely different level, maybe. When he showed me his clocks he wanted to be admired, judged for his talents not his face. He wanted to share something. Going through the things he went through, well … what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Yet anyone who becomes a murderer is as good as dead.’
‘You mean it’s suicide by proxy?’
‘Yes, he just doesn’t have the right make-up, I guess.’
‘And what would be the right make-up?’
‘I don’t know,’ Berger said. ‘Forgiveness isn’t my area of expertise.’
‘That would have been the only solution, you mean?’
‘Maybe. Learning from evil in order to understand it and be able to counteract it, both within yourself and out in the world. I’ve failed to do that.’
‘I didn’t forgive either,’ Blom said. ‘Does anyone, truly?’
‘But you did manage to go on.’
‘By acting my way through my life, yes.’
‘That feels like what we all do,’ Berger said with a snort. ‘When I was a son I played the part of a son. When I was a father I played the part of a father. I’ll play the part of an old man too. Hell, I’ll end up playing dead.’
‘But not a police officer?’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever played the part of a police officer, no. Have you?’
‘It’s the only role I’ve never played,’ Blom said.
They stood there for a while. The redness turned into morning light and spread relentlessly across Edsviken. Day had come.
‘That role will probably be over and done with soon,’ Berger said.
Blom nodded slowly; then in the end shook her head. She went back into the boathouse. Berger waited a while longer. Then he followed her.
Blom pulled on her tracksuit top and drank a protein drink as she looked through the previous day’s security footage. The screen was divided into four. Four rectangles displayed shots from around the boathouse, and nothing happening in any of them.
‘A quiet night,’ she said, zipping up her top.
She watched sceptically as he picked up his old jacket and slowly pulled it on.
‘We’re an odd couple,’ she declared, and walked out.
He caught up with her by the fence.
‘I’ll drive,’ she said.
He didn’t object: he had no great desire to drive a stolen 1994 Mazda with false plates all the way to Kristinehamn.
The rain held off, more or less, for the first 250 kilometres. They had just one significant exchange throughout the entire journey.
‘Tell me about mountain climbing,’ Berger said.
‘Mountain climbing?’ Blom said. The car wobbled on the irritating 90 km/h stretch near Örebro.
‘It seems to be your one real passion in life.’
‘You’re seriously suggesting we talk about our lives?’
He laughed. ‘Don’t bother, then. But it’s a bit uneven.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know you much better as Nathalie Fredén than as Molly Blom. Whereas you’ve already drilled pretty deep into Sam Berger’s boringly stable psyche.’
It looked as if the smooth forehead actually frowned, but it was probably a result of the sun suddenly breaking through the clouds.
‘Yes,’ she eventually said. ‘I like climbing.’
‘I always imagine that undercover officers would relax by doing something that didn’t remind them of work. Crocheting, maybe? Growing geraniums?’
‘You think climbing reminds me of work?’
‘Doesn’t it? Aren’t they both about precision and control on the brink of the abyss?’
‘In some ways,’ she conceded. ‘But when I’m dangling there with nature stretching out to infinity, the only thing I feel is a vast, overwhelming sense of freedom.’
He nodded. ‘I’m scared of heights,’ Berger said. ‘And I don’t really trust myself. I might get a sudden impulse and just let go.’
‘Tell me about the watches.’
He smiled. ‘The watches make me calm. There’s something remarkable about the way all those tiny cogs interact. I enter a different world and recharge my strength. Time is always the same there. Calm and straightforward. Because of the complexity.’
‘Oddly enough, it sounds a bit like mountain climbing,’ Blom said.
‘Mountain climbing with a safety net,’ Berger said.
They were silent the rest of the way to Kristinehamn.
At one corner of Södra Torget a moody-looking girl was sitting in the worsening rain. Her tattoos were clearly visible through her far-too-thin clothes. As she peered inside the car she looked extremely suspicious.
‘Sandra,’ Berger said.
‘Hmm,’ the girl said. ‘Who’s she?’
Blom held up her fake police ID. ‘Jump in the back.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Sandra said. ‘Isn’t that what Jonna and Simon did?’
‘Weren’t you in Australia then?’ Berger said. ‘Don’t worry, we are police officers. And we only want to talk to you. On the phone yesterday you said something about a secret hideout …?’
Sandra let out a deep sigh and got in the back seat. Blom drove off slowly and parked nearby.
‘Our cave,’ Sandra said. ‘It was our secret place when we were younger. I don’t know for sure if she ever showed it to Simon.’
‘You were close when you were younger?’ Blom said.
‘Yes,’ Sandra said. ‘We lived with the same foster family for a couple of years. The cave was where we used to hide from the world. Then Jonna was moved on and we didn’t see each other so much. I’ve only met Simon a couple of times.’
‘Do you think she’s likely to have shown Simon the cave?’
Sandra nodded. ‘I think that’s where they escaped to, every so often,’ Sandra said. ‘When there was too much shit going on. Like we used to.’
‘Have you been there recently?’
‘I’ve only just got back from Australia. I was away for nearly a year. And before that it had probably been a couple of years. I don’t run away any more.’
‘Can you show us the cave, Sandra?’ Berger asked.
She nodded and they set off, heading into the forests of Värmland on narrowing roads. The increasingly heavy rain hammered on the car roof. They reached a hillier part of the forest, where waterlogged roads rolled up and down the hills. They nearly got stuck several times.
Eventually Sandra pointed straight ahead, towards a sign indicating a passing place.
‘That’s where the path starts,’ she said.
Blom drove the car halfway into the bushes next to the sign, where the muddy road was slightly wider. The front wheels span their way a few centimetres into the mud before she stopped.
‘It’s about five hundred metres in from here,’ Sandra said. ‘The path isn’t very obvious.’
‘It’s very wet out there,’ Blom said. ‘You stay in the car.’
‘Fuck that,’ Sandra said, and opened the door.
She led them along a track they would barely have noticed without her. The wet branches kept hitting them or dripping water. After just a dozen metres their clothes were soaked. The only consolation was that they couldn’t get any wetter.
After a while the terrain got more hilly. They were walking along the side of a fairly steep rock face where even the moss and algae seemed to have trouble finding a foothold. The rock face veered away from the track and they followed it. Eventually Sandra stopped and pointed. An improbable amount of mascara was running down her cheeks.
‘The bushes have grown a lot,’ she said.
They followed her finger. In one place the even growth along the base of the rock became irregular.
Sandra started to walk towards the uneven bushes. Blom put a hand on her shoulder, and Sandra turned round with a look of irritation.
‘Wait here,’ Blom said.
‘You can take cover under that pine,’ Berger said, gesturing towards a tall tree that he hoped was a pine.
With obvious reluctance, Sandra went and stood by the trunk of the pine as Blom and Berger set off. When Berger cast a quick glance back over his shoulder she looked like a ghost from Norse mythology. Her pale face was streaked with black, her big eyes wide open.
The bushes, whatever kind they were, were covered in thorns and in places were so tall that it was hard to imagine two young girls – on the run from a hostile world – managing to get through them. The bushes must have grown like mad in the past few years.
The question was whether someone had managed to get through, not half a decade ago, but about eight months ago. In the middle of February.
When Jonna Eriksson and Simon Lundberg vanished without trace from the face of the earth.
The fact that Berger was leading the way was more than Blom could bear. She made her own way through the thick undergrowth instead. When lightning flashed across the metallic sky Berger considered shouting back to Sandra, telling her to move away from the tree, but when the first clap of thunder rang out, heavy and deep, it struck him that she was probably far more confident in the wild than he was. Besides, it felt wrong to shout. Only when he could make out the opening to the cave did he realise why. It felt peculiarly occupied.
It was entirely possible that William Larsson was hiding in there with Ellen Savinger strapped to a huge clock mechanism.
As he drew his pistol, Berger saw that Blom, positioned further along in the undergrowth, already had hers out. By the time the next crack of lightning shot its branching pattern across the sky she had disappeared into the oddly hostile greenery. And when the thunder came – louder this time, right after the lightning – he realised that she was going to get there first. As if that mattered.
She was waiting for him by the entrance to the cave. It wasn’t much more than head-high, and rain-damaged spiders’ webs hung in front of the dark opening like a natural curtain. Faint chirping noises were coming from the gloom. The barely perceptible walls appeared to move slightly in the unsteady shadows. Berger raised his torch to get a closer look, but Blom grabbed his hand and pushed it down.
‘Not a good idea,’ she whispered.
Then she set off into the cave with the beam of her torch aimed carefully at the ground. Berger followed her, doing the same. The floor of the cave was covered with stones that had come loose from the roof over the years, sucked down inexorably by gravity. But there was something else as well. It looked like droppings of some sort. Small ones. Possibly rats’ droppings.
The narrow passageway went on for ten metres or so. Berger took care not to shine his torch up the walls. Then the cave opened out abruptly. They suddenly found themselves in a cavern. Dim light was filtering in through a hidden crack five metres above them. And the play of shadows suddenly became clear.
The walls of the cave were covered with bats. They hung there, moving gently, as if they were breathing in a strange, jerky, collective rhythm.
But overwhelmingly the bats were swarming around a metre-high formation at the back of the cavern. And they weren’t just hanging there. They were moving, crawling, creeping across each other in a peculiar pattern. It was as if a relief in a Roman bath had come to life.
Berger heard himself groan. He glanced at Blom. She too was staring at the formation. Both torches were pointing at the floor, the only thing illuminating the bats was the daylight from the crack above.
‘On the count of three,’ Blom whispered. ‘Then we shine our torches right at it and take cover immediately, flat on the ground. OK?’
Something inside Berger understood instinctively. But he just stood there, completely bewildered. He heard himself whisper: ‘OK.’
Blom looked at him in the dim light. It was as if she was evaluating his mental state again.
Then she whispered: ‘One. Two. Three!’
The torch beams swept towards the teeming bats. Then everything switched to freeze-frame. As Berger threw himself on the ground he saw the bats lift off like a single mass, a flying manta ray. The chirping increased exponentially as he fell, and before Berger hit the ground the immense sweeping wing flew over their heads and out of the cave, presumably rising like a huge plume through the rain outside. Pain transmitted itself with unusual slowness from his knees to his brain as the object deserted by the bats became visible in the twin torch beams. A couple of the ancient creatures remained; one bat was clinging to one of the ribs, another was peering groggily from between the teeth of the almost stripped-bare skull.
The jaw moved; it looked like the skeleton was chewing on a bat.
‘Fucking hell,’ Berger said, getting to his feet.
The skeleton was crouched against the wall of the cave. Remnants of rotten, dried flesh clung to a few of the white bones. The bat freed itself from the skeleton’s mouth like an embodied scream and flew off in search of the others.
Berger reached for Blom’s hand in the gloom. It responded by grasping his. Hand in hand they went over to the huddled remains of a human body. In the quivering light of their torches the whole scene looked archaic, as if they were visiting the time of cave dwellers.
The skeleton really was crouching down, as if it were resting after a run with a mammoth.
In a loose circle around the skeleton lay the remains of clothes that had fallen off the body as its size diminished. A wallet was peeping out from beneath the drifts of bat droppings.
Blom freed her hand from Berger’s and pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. She extracted the wallet and, with trembling fingers, found an ID card.
Simon Lundberg’s.
They looked at the skeleton. Yes, it could be the remains of a fifteen-year-old boy.
They shone their torches around the rest of the cavern. There wasn’t a lot else to see.
‘No Jonna Eriksson,’ Berger concluded.
‘No,’ Blom said, moving her torch closer to the scraps of clothing around the skeleton. She picked them up, one by one, from the piles of droppings. Eventually a shimmering object was uncovered.
It wasn’t much more than a centimetre in diameter, had tiny teeth and was perfectly round.
It was a very small cog.