More Bitter Than Death (40 page)

I untie the rope, which is attached to a coat hook on the wall of the closet, bend down, and pick her tiny body up in my arms.

*   *   *

So light.

To think that a life weighs so little.

I’m surprised by this as I make my way back through the room toward the stairs. She doesn’t put up any resistance, doesn’t say anything, just leans her head against my shoulder as if she were asleep.

I carefully cover her eyes with my hand so she doesn’t have to see the body of the woman in the main attic room. She’s seen enough death and evil.

Through the floorboards I hear Tobias stomping around, clattering and cursing. I don’t know why he just brought me to Tilda so flippantly, but I fear the worst. Something is about to happen, something terrible. I carefully sit down on a pile of clothes, with Tilda still in my arms. I hear her breathing becoming more regular. I close my eyes, give in to the pain and the increasing dizziness.

Suddenly I hear something; it sounds like the walls are full of rats nibbling on the insulation. At the same time I notice a sharp odor, gasoline. The sound gets louder and suddenly I realize what’s going on.

It’s on fire. Tobias has set the house on fire.

Bluish-gray wisps of smoke push their way up through the old floorboards and I realize there’s not much time, all the wood furniture and boxes full of junk will only feed the flames.

It’s still dark in the stairwell, but the light from the attic is enough for me to see by as I hurry down. When I grab the door handle, it’s hot, and I recoil, wrap my scarf around my hand and try again. I push down on the hot handle, coughing from the smoke pouring in under the door. But it doesn’t open. I try again. And then I understand: the bang when he closed the door behind me, the clink I heard on my way up the stairs.

He locked the door.

With Tilda in my arms I rush back up into the tiny attic. I can clearly hear the fire below me, like a faint, drawn-out hiss. I can hear snapping, the sound of glass breaking. I hear the dog bark from somewhere, persistently and loudly.

The lone, black window stands out against the wood paneling ahead of me.

Very carefully, I set Tilda down on the floor in front of me. I wipe the windowpane clean with my shirt and look out. The snow is swirling around outside and makes it impossible for me to see anything. I unlock the window and push with all my weight until it pops open and the cold air steams in. I lean out and look down.

We’re maybe twenty feet up. At first I can’t see what’s below us: the snow is way too deep. Then I notice something down below. First I see only sharp
metal pieces sticking up out of the snow, but then I realize that it’s a pile of old bicycle frames.

It would be too dangerous to jump out here.

I see a lanky figure plodding through the snow, the dog following close behind.

“Tobias!” I shout. “You can’t leave us here! Do you understand?”

The figure pauses for a moment, turns around and looks at me. Then he turns back around again and keeps going, not in any hurry.

“Come back here, you asshole!”

He doesn’t react, just disappears into the snowfall.

I collapse onto the floor next to Tilda. Even with the window open, the cramped little room is starting to fill with smoke. Tilda coughs and I take her cold little hand in mine. I hear her mumbling something.

“What did you say, honey?”

“Mama,” she says. “I want my mama.”

I squeeze her hand again without responding and we sit there for a few seconds. Then I feel the kick. It’s so incredibly faint, as if a baby bird just did a somersault inside me, bouncing off the inside of my abdomen. I put my hand to my stomach and feel it again, clearer this time, another little kick. Another life.

And I know we have to get out of this damn house.

I look around the room again. Maybe I can make some kind of a rope out of old clothes and we can climb down?

“Wait here,” I say, and push myself up. I walk through the crowded room, picking up clothes from the floor. I avoid looking at the woman’s body slumped against the wall. Smoke seeps up through all the cracks. I can hear the fire roaring like a hungry beast below us.

I quickly tie the clothes together into a makeshift rope, attach it to one of the beams above the window and hang from it to test its strength. It breaks right away. A pair of jeans in the middle rips from my weight. The cloth is brittle after having lain around for countless years in this damp attic.

I take out the jeans from the makeshift rope and tie it back up again, then pull on it again to test its strength.

Rip.

The coat splits in two and dust swirls around in the air, mixing with the increasingly thick smoke.

“Damn it.”

Tears well up in my eyes. I don’t know if it’s because of the smoke or the situation. I sink down next to Tilda.

“Mama will be here soon,” I lie.

She doesn’t respond.

*   *   *

We sit still on the floor, listening to the windowpanes exploding downstairs.

Then I hear a voice from somewhere. At first I think the voice is coming from inside the house, but then I realize it’s coming from outside.

When I lean out the window, I see him down below, in the dense snowfall. He’s standing with his legs apart, looking up at the attic window.

“Help!” I scream. My plea comes out hoarse and weak, but he can still hear me.

He rushes over and I notice something familiar about the way he moves, his big strong body, his shaved head.

“Jump!” he hollers.

“I can’t! There’s a bunch of junk under the snow!”

I rack my brain and recall that I saw something by the front door before I came into the house. “A ladder!” I yell down to him. “There’s a ladder by the front door!”

Immediately he turns around and runs to the front of the house, disappearing into the snow. There’s a cracking sound behind us, as if the entire house was about to collapse. Suddenly the floor shudders beneath me and I almost lose my footing, because it feels like the floor is disappearing. But it doesn’t disappear; it just turns into a slope. Now the whole floor is slanted, as if we were standing on one side of a sailboat, and I’m forced to hold on to the window frame to keep from sliding away toward the stairs.

“Mama!” Tilda cries out.

Without a moment to spare, I grab Tilda’s arm to stop her from sliding away. The little body that I carried so easily not long ago is now heavy as lead. With the last of my strength, I pull her back up to the window.

“You have to hold on here, do you understand?”

She looks at me, glassy-eyed, without responding, but obediently grabs on to the windowsill.

The cardboard boxes, bundles of newspapers and junk slide down the sloped floor into the fire. Out of the corner of my eye I see the woman’s body and the suitcases on either side of her slowly glide away and disappear into the flames with a sizzle.

Then he’s back. He moves several bicycle frames out of the way and props the ladder up against the façade. Without saying anything he starts climbing up. The first rung gives out under him and he falls backward onto the ground, cursing. He lies there on his back, looking at us hanging halfway out the window.

And that’s when I see who it is.

Henrik.

The nausea returns with a force I didn’t think was possible and I sink down onto my knees on the slanted floor in front of the window.

And suddenly I understand how it all fits together.

I realize why the car with the broken headlight was following us in the storm. Henrik was following Kattis, who he thinks killed Susanne and kidnapped Tilda.

Then suddenly he’s there outside the window, at the top of the ladder. His face is level with mine. His eyes are open wide, his arms outstretched.

“Pass me Tilda. I’ll carry her down first.”

“Henrik!” Tilda shouts and stretches those small arms out to him, but I hold her back. How do I know he’s planning to rescue her? I watched this man kill a woman right in front of me.

Henrik can tell what I’m thinking. He looks at me like I’m crazy.

“Oh my God, how could you think that?” he says. “Tilda’s like a daughter to me.”

There’s desperation in his eyes now. Yet another massive cracking sound comes from inside the house and the sloped floor becomes even steeper. Now I feel the heat radiating up from below as if we were atop an enormous oven. And I realize that’s exactly where we are.

“She’s all I have left. I love her, don’t you get that?” Henrik pleads.

Henrik and I look into each other’s eyes and I let his words sink in. After everything that’s happened, he loves her. Love again. What does that word mean, anyway? Can I trust him? What’s the alternative? Certain death in a burning house? A twenty-foot fall onto a heap of scrap metal?

I help Tilda up and through the window and he carefully receives her little body. He tells her to hold on tight around his neck, and then he climbs down.
I wait a few seconds and then start climbing out the window backwards, legs first. I ease myself down the teetering ladder, collapse onto the ground below, and lie there on my back in the freezing snow.

Breathing. I hear voices behind me in the storm.

Someone is crying. It’s Henrik. And the little girl is comforting him. Tilda tells him that everything will be okay, that he shouldn’t be scared, that she checked all over, and there aren’t any lions here.

Excerpt from the Forensic Psychiatry Report

The neuropsychological examination showed that Tobias Lundwall suffers from a moderate developmental disability. In practical terms this means that Lundwall’s behavior more closely resembles that of a child in the latency phase than that of an adult.

He has limited intellectual faculties, so his ability to engage in abstract reasoning and assimilate information is impaired. It is surprising that Lundwall’s disability was not detected sooner.

In addition, Lundwall has certain autistic tendencies, but they are not considered severe enough to merit an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. His psychiatric evaluation also revealed some antisocial, schizoid, and paranoid characteristics, but the patient does not meet enough of the diagnostic criteria for any of these disorders.

Nothing in his files suggests that Lundwall, despite his mild developmental disability, should have had a delusional conception of reality, an impaired ability to make judgments, or an inability to differentiate between right and wrong. Thus, despite the very brutal nature of the crime he committed, the patient cannot be said to be suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder and there is therefore no basis for sentencing Tobias Lundwall to forensic psychiatric care pursuant to Chapter 31, Section 3, of the Swedish Penal Code.

Antonio Waezlaw, MD, forensic psychiatrist

“Yowza!” Vijay says, eyeing my belly.

“Don’t say it!” I say, flashing him a warning look. He grins, exposing two perfect rows of white teeth, and then pats me lightly on my enormous belly with his right hand. He’s holding a cigarette in his left hand. He quickly puts it out in a vase of wilting flowers when he sees my glare.

“Sorry! There’s a hell of a lot of stuff you’re not supposed to do around pregnant women,” Vijay complains.

I carefully remove a stack of papers from the visitor’s chair and wipe the sweat off my forehead. Even though it’s only April, it’s been warm for a week now.

“How are you doing?” Vijay asks, cocking his head to the side, studying me as he plops down into his chair. It creaks. Then he puts his big feet up on his desk. His tennis shoes are green and orange and look like they’re straight out of the seventies. When he spins his chair around to put a few books, each one as thick as a brick, back on the shelf behind the desk, I see that his curly, gray-speckled hair is gathered into a little ponytail at the back of his neck.

“Good, I’m feeling good,” I say. “But I’m starting to get really sick of this.” I gently pat my belly, which is stretched taut, like an inflated beach ball inside Markus’s old denim shirt.

“When are you due again?” he asks.