DURING THE SUMMER holidays, people were free to come and go from work more or less as they pleased without it causing any trouble, and Jan made sure that he took advantage of this on the odd occasion. Today was just such a day, since Sweden’s knockout match against Switzerland was due to kick off at four o’clock. He didn’t want to miss the prematch studio buildup, which was scheduled to start two hours before the game. And given there was barely anything to do at work there was little point in him sitting there twiddling his thumbs between lunch and the match. He stopped for his lunch break at half past eleven and headed home.
Gunilla was at the hospital, so he was able to settle down in peace and quiet at the computer and continue reading the summer serial while eating his sandwich. To begin with, he read without concentrating while his thoughts drifted off in all sorts of directions, but after just a few minutes he snapped to attention. There was something very familiar about the events being described. Jan decided to read it all again from the beginning.
This time he paid greater attention, and his sandwich lay untouched. Jan sweated profusely. It couldn’t be true. Someone had written a book that was being serialised in Gotlands Allehanda, in which a person who bore a distinct resemblance to Jan Hallin was depicted as a rapist. What was more, it was done with such credibility that as he read it he instinctively took the side of the other party.
But that was just the beginning.
It transpired that immediately after the rape, the car crash, which he had read about the day before, had happened. The serious accident in which the driver in one car died after great and prolonged suffering. And the other car, which had avoided any harm, was being driven by the rapist. Who—given the fact he had just raped a woman nearby—decided to leave the scene.
All these similarities with Jan’s own experience had to be coincidence. Yet his mouth was completely dry. Someone had woven together a believable and exciting story based on equal parts fact and fiction. There had been some details about the car accident in the local press, and the rape . . . Surely rapes took place on an almost daily basis? It didn’t take much in the way of imagination to cook up a tale like that.
This was a story, he persuaded himself. With certain themes that happened to have things in common with something he himself had experienced. There was a lot that was wrong about the character that was reminiscent of him: name, places, car make, profession, to name but a few. That was probably true of all the other characters too, so what was there to say that anything at all was really factual in this account?
Nothing, of course. It was nothing but pure fiction. A socio-realistic figment of the imagination. But he still had to admit that some parts of this serial were awfully close to the truth.
He had to go into the kitchen and drink a glass of water. And another. He splashed some water on his face too—it was so bloody hot in here. Then he went back into the study and sat down at the computer again. He took a deep breath and continued reading.
Large swathes of the text—including the passages about the alky scum on the benches—didn’t especially interest him, so he hastily skimmed through those. But there were other parts that engaged him far more, which he read with his heart in his mouth. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t stop reading. Jan downloaded issue after issue of the paper as he saw the story unfold on the screen in front of him with a rising sense of horror.
It turned out she was pregnant—the woman who had been raped. And she kept the child. Very soon, the man—the rapist, the hit-and-run driver—received a blackmail threat. A demand for the astonishing sum of six million kronor by way of support payments. How many people had received a letter like that? It didn’t exactly feel like the amount had been plucked out of thin air.
A knot formed in his stomach and it felt as though the air in the room had run out. He had to go to the window and open it wide. Breathe air into his lungs. Convince himself that any correlations between that bloody serial and real life were just coincidence. After a few minutes, he felt strong enough to withdraw from the window and sit back down at the desk.
He didn’t remain there for long—when he reached the bit about the hit-and-run driver realising that it was a passing acquaintance, a mechanic from his hunting club, who had witnessed the accident and therefore had to be the person who was blackmailing him for money, he was forced to rush into the kitchen and splash more water on his face.
And when shortly afterwards the hit-and-run driver cheerfully noted that the witness-slash-blackmailer had vanished from the face of the earth, it all got too much for Jan. He didn’t need to read any more to realise that the book was a crucifixion of himself. He was not only being identified as a rapist, a drunk driver, and guilty of a hit-and-run, which was bad enough, but also as a murderer.
The writer had even got inside his head and knew his reasoning. It seemed so improbable, but there was no room for doubt that someone out there had knowledge of all these details pertaining to Jan and his actions that day and in the period afterwards. How on earth that was possible was a mystery, but there was no doubt as to who she was. The mere thought of her left him furious.
Judging by his colleagues’ enthusiasm, this story had a lot of readers, and it would soon have even more. Because sooner or later someone was going to pick out Jan as the guilty man, and it was pretty likely the police would be brought in at the same time. But that hadn’t happened yet, and the serial hadn’t reached its conclusion.
He still had some time to get out of this. The football would have to wait.