Air-conditioning has chilled his car, but that’s not what makes Pontus Salman’s hands shake on the steering wheel. He’s already crossing the bridge to Lidingö Island. A ferry to Finland is leaving its dock and beyond Millesgården someone is burning leaves.
A few hours ago, he’d been in his tiny flat-bottomed rowing boat trying to hold a rifle barrel to his mouth. The metal taste is still on his tongue, and he can still hear the scraping sound it made against his teeth.
A woman in a straggly blue punk haircut was jogging onto the dock with the detective. She’d called him gently in her middle-aged voice to come closer. She had to tell him something important. She was wearing bright red lipstick. She’d brought him to a small grey room. He found out her name was Gunilla and she was a psychologist. She’d talked to him deeply about what he had intended to do when he rowed out onto the lake.
“Why do you want to die?” she’d asked plainly.
“I really don’t want to,” he’d answered truthfully, surprising her.
She was taken aback a moment and then they began to really talk. He’d answered all her questions and became more and more convinced that he did not want to die. He’d rather run and he began to plan where he could go. He’d just disappear and start a new life as someone else.
The car had crossed the bridge. Pontus Salman looks at his watch and feels tremendous relief that, by now, Veronique’s plane must have left Swedish airspace.
He’d told Veronique about French Polynesia and now he can fantasise: he sees her emerge from the airport carrying her light blue carry-on. She’s wearing a broad-brimmed hat, which she has to hold down in the breeze. Why couldn’t he escape, too?
The only thing he needs is his passport from his desk drawer.
I don’t want to die, Pontus Salman thinks as he watches traffic rush by.
He’d rowed out into the lake to flee having to reap his nightmare, but he just couldn’t pull the trigger.
I’ll take any plane at all, he thinks. Iceland, Japan, or Brazil. If Raphael Guidi really wants me dead, he’d have killed me already.
Pontus Salman drives up to his garage and gets out. He takes a deep breath to smell the warm stones under his feet, the car exhaust, the fresh smell of growing plants.
The street seems abandoned with everyone at work and even the children still in school for a few more days.
Pontus Salman unlocks the door and walks in. All the lights in the house are off and the curtains are drawn.
He has to go downstairs to get his passport from his office.
Once on the lower level, he pauses as he hears something strange, as if a wet blanket is being pulled across a tile floor.
“Veronique?” he asks in a strangled voice.
Pontus Salman can see light from the pool dapple against a white stone wall. With his heart racing, he slowly, silently, walks towards the pool.