60

BANG! THE SOUND of one tin of ravioli hitting another rang in Lilja’s ears, even though she’d used the stuffing from the pillow to make earplugs.

Bang! At first, she’d missed her target several times, hitting either the hand holding the screwdriver she’d found in a drawer or nothing at all. Bang! But she wasn’t missing now. She was like a machine running on autopilot.

She closed her eyes – it made no difference anyway – and raised the tin behind her like a javelin before thrusting it with all her might against the other tin, which she had emptied and placed over the handle of the screwdriver. Bang!

Several hours had passed since the world went dark. Time was racing by as if it couldn’t get to the point where Milwokh would start his diabolical game soon enough. Bang!

And then there was the darkness. The claustrophobically suffocating darkness that kept pressing in closer. It was even darker than a winter night with a sleep mask and blackout curtains, and she honestly didn’t know how much longer she was going to be able to hold on to her sanity.

That frightened her more than anything. The prospect of eventually collapsing in a sobbing heap on the floor, unable to do anything but curl up in the foetal position and shake uncontrollably. If it came to that, it would all be over. With her down for the count, Milwokh would be free to act, and long before the others would figure out what he was planning, it would be too late. Bang!

She still hadn’t got over the murder of Ester Landgren, the innocent little girl who at six had already survived more than anyone should have to go through in a lifetime. She hadn’t discussed it with anyone else in the team and, in a way, it was only now she realized it fully herself. But the anger she felt at Ester Landgren’s fate made her willing to go to any lengths to stop him.

Pontus Milwokh. It had to be him. And yet she couldn’t quite believe it. That he had returned to his flat was one of the most unexpected developments in this case where everything was unexpected. For a perpetrator to return to the scene of a crime was a relatively common occurrence, but going back to his own home, his hideout, after it had been discovered by police, was completely bizarre.

She’d screamed at him to stop, but the thick nails had kept punching through the back of the wardrobe in a never-ending stream, and once the nail gun fell silent, the electric screwdriver had taken over, then a circular saw had revved up, cutting through one plank of wood after another.

Two hours it had taken him to turn his hideout into a prison cell with no way in or out. Then silence had fallen and a minute later he’d turned off the main circuit breaker and everything had gone black. The computer, the harsh overhead light. Everything. Bang!

Once it had sunk in that she couldn’t get out, panic had made her scream at the top of her lungs, and, hoping that a neighbour might hear her, she hadn’t stopped until her vocal cords gave up.

It was only then that she’d managed to get a grip on herself and once her breathing had returned to normal, she’d been able to formulate a plan of action. Bang!

This was the third tin of ravioli she’d gone through. She’d broken the other two hitting the handle of the screwdriver directly, and each time, tomato sauce had exploded all over her. At least she didn’t have to look at herself in the dark. Bang!

The first thing she’d done was rip a strip of fabric from the sheet on the bed and wrap it around her left hand to stop the bleeding from the nail. It was only at that point, after she’d finally managed to calm down, that the pain had begun to make itself known in earnest. A sharp, burning pain that radiated through her hand and up her forearm.

Then she’d fumbled around in the dark and concluded that both the wardrobe and the wall facing the bedroom were perforated with so many nails and screws it would take her weeks, if not a month, to open up a hole big enough to squeeze out. A smaller hole to try to reach an outlet would be pointless since the power was off in the entire flat. That was why she’d turned instead to the wall Milwokh’s secret room shared with her own flat.

Just above the skirting board, she’d found an electrical socket and with the help of the screwdriver, she’d loosened the screws and pulled the entire thing out of the wall. That had created an inch-deep recess in the wall, and by sticking her hand in, she’d been able to determine that the core of the wall consisted of bricks. She’d focused her attention on the mortar between them, and with the screwdriver it had proved relatively easy to hack deeper and deeper into the wall.

At least at first. But what should have taken no more than an hour had turned into an interminable struggle. When her right hand started to bleed from rubbing against the edges of the tin, she’d wrapped that in fabric, too.

But she was at the end of her tether. Despite her tireless banging and all the mortar she’d been able to remove, the brick inside the wall was refusing to budge. She was sure there was an explanation for that, but she was too tired to think. Too tired to carry on forever and strike at the screwdriver with every ounce of strength she could muster for the five hundred thousandth time.

The tin burst in her hand. Even though she’d put one of the broken tins over the screwdriver, she was once again spattered with ravioli, and this time something snapped inside her. Something that made her throw down the tin and furiously attack the wall with nothing but the screwdriver.

The wrappings around her hands came undone and her wounds opened as they rubbed against the ridged surface of the handle, which was becoming slick with blood. The pain was almost unbearable, but still nothing compared to the frustration of all those wasted hours. All her pain and her increasingly desperate struggle. Neither would stop Milwokh.

It sounded like a tooth cracking. A barely perceptible little click, that was all. But to Lilja, the sound was something new. Something that could change everything.

She put the screwdriver down and wiped her hands on her trousers. Then she stuck her hand into the hole and let her fingertips explore the edges of the immovable brick. Unfortunately, it felt much the same as before. True, quite a lot of the mortar around it was gone, but she didn’t find the explanation for the sound she’d heard until she ran her fingers over the surface of the brick.

The crack was probably thinner than a hair, but even so, using her fingernail, she could clearly feel it zigzag down through the brick. She tried to grab the edges of the brick, but it was as stuck as it had been before she began.

She grabbed the screwdriver again, placed the tip of it in the middle of the brick and with her free hand reached for yet another tin of ravioli from the stash under the bed and struck the handle again. This time it was a small tap rather than a great big swing. It was all that was needed to split the brick in two, and the screwdriver suddenly sank into it as though it had turned into butter.

She stuck her hand into the hole and could feel that the brick had split open far enough for her to be able to push her fingertips into the break. And one half of the brick was finally loose and could be pulled out without much difficulty. The other half, however, was still stuck and after another thirty minutes of fruitless work, she gave up. Apparently, the weight of the entire building rested on it.

She found the cord to the extension lead under the desk and pushed the plug into the hole she’d made. Then she tried to stick her right hand in after it, but no matter how hard she shoved, there wasn’t room.

She slumped onto the floor and considered just closing her eyes and letting exhaustion take over. No one could say she hadn’t tried. She’d probably be asleep in seconds, and maybe she’d dream of something wonderful while the rest of the team figured out where she was.

She might have, in her previous life. A life full of naive wishful thinking in which she had shared a bed with Hampus, unaware of who he was, and would never have considered setting fire to a neo-Nazi clubhouse. A life in which she’d long since given up and was instead focusing all her energy on licking her wounds, waiting and hoping that somehow, things would change for the better.

But that life didn’t exist any more. That Irene didn’t exist. She realized that now. The process had begun weeks ago and her old self had slowly faded away, growing ever more diffuse and vague. It had been a painful process, and she’d felt more confused than ever before. But now she could see who she had become. Here, on the grubby floor in the pitch dark, she could finally see it, clear as day.

She let her hands examine one another. A minute or two later, she’d settled on the left. It was already injured from the nail, and she depended on it less than her right. And so she got to her feet, found the bed and pulled it out from the wall.

Once the bed was in position against the far wall, she lay down on her stomach, placed both feet against the edge of the bed to brace and pushed her left hand into the hole as far as it would go. She was strong, she knew that. But strong wasn’t enough. Not by a mile. She needed to go beyond that, into uncharted territory, to the kind of primal strength it took to lift up a car if her daughter were trapped under it.

She didn’t have a daughter. But she did have Ester Landgren, and the thought of her made Lilja push so hard with her legs her hand moved a millimetre deeper. She didn’t know if she could push any harder, but she had no choice, so she kept going until she heard something break inside her hand.

A devastating, indescribable pain shot out from her hand to the rest of her body as the knuckles of her fingers were crushed against each other. It felt like her broken hand was on fire. Even so, it wasn’t the pain she would remember, but the crunching sound of cartilage and bone.

She took a short break and tried to gauge how her hand was doing. If she really tried, she could still wiggle her middle and forefinger as well as her thumb, but she had no contact whatsoever with her ring and little fingers, and maybe from this day forward they would simply dangle there like two dead relics, reminding her of this moment.

She was now able to fold her hand over, knuckles and all, like a deboned chicken, and strangely, doing so didn’t increase her pain. It was probably maxed out. Or maybe the endorphins had finally begun to sand down the sharpest edges, because her hand was beginning to feel more and more like an amorphous lump, which finally broke through the hole.

She was through. She was really through.

She focused on breathing for a few seconds and then explored the small space between the brick wall and her own bedroom wall. She judged it to be about an inch. There was a wooden board almost immediately to her left, and the extension lead plug was waiting right next to her hand. Straight ahead, she could feel old insulation that could easily be pushed aside.

She’d been hoping the inside of her own wall would consist of old reed-reinforced plaster. Instead, it was some kind of modern plasterboard, probably installed at some point during the nineties. Luckily, the screwdriver had perforated it enough for her to pick off pieces with her thumb and forefinger.

Once the hole was big enough for the daylight from her own bedroom to start trickling in, she momentarily forgot about the pain and let out a shriek of joy that came out as a dry hiss.

It wasn’t too difficult to wiggle the plug through the hole into her bedroom, and her hand after it, and once she’d pushed her whole forearm through, she was able to not only bend it but also to locate the outlet and insert the plug, which turned both the desk lamp and the computer back on.