The Stonecutter (44 page)

‘Or else we already have the murderer in custody,’ said Annika, nodding toward the jail.

Patrik smiled. ‘Or else we already have the murderer in custody. Well, I don’t have time to hang around here, I have to go talk to a man about a jacket …’

‘Lots of luck,’ Annika shouted after him.

‘Dan! Dan!’ Erica yelled. She could hear the panic in her voice, and it just made her more upset. She frantically rummaged through the covers in the stroller, as if her daughter had somehow been able to hide in a corner. But the stroller was empty.

‘What is it?’ said Dan, who came running, with an anxious look on his face. ‘What’s happened?’

Erica tried to explain, but her tongue felt thick and clumsy, and she couldn’t get any words out. Instead she pointed with a trembling hand at the stroller, and Dan hurried to look inside. She saw the realization hit him like the blow of a hammer.

‘Where’s Maja? Is she gone? Where’s …?’ He didn’t finish his sentence but looked about wildly. Erica was hanging on to him, panic-stricken. Now the words gushed out of her.

‘We have to find her! Where’s my daughter? Where’s Maja? Where is she?’

‘Shh, there, there. We’ll find her. Don’t worry, we’ll find her.’ Dan swallowed his own panic so he could reassure Erica. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. ‘Now we have to stay calm. I’ll go out and look for her. You call the police. It’ll be all right.’

Erica felt her chest heaving, but she did as he said. A cold wind blew into the house because Dan had left the front door open, but that didn’t bother her. She felt nothing other than paralyzing panic. She couldn’t remember where she’d put the telephone and stood for several moments staring helplessly at the furniture. Finally she just ran round and round the living room rummaging under pillows and tossing things aside. At last she found it, in the middle of the living room coffee table. She flung herself over to it and with stiff fingers punched in the number of the station. Then she heard Dan’s voice outside.

‘Erica, Erica, I found her!’

She dropped the phone and rushed to the front door, heading for his voice. Shoeless, she ran down the steps and out into the driveway. The wet and the cold went right through to her skin, but she didn’t care. She saw Dan running toward her from the front of the house, carrying something red in his arms. A terrific wail rose up and Erica felt relief wash over her like a storm swell. Maja was screaming, she was alive.

Erica ran the final few feet and grabbed Maja from Dan’s arms. Sobbing, she hugged her daughter close for a second before she went down on her knees, lay Maja on the ground, and tore open her red overalls to examine her. She looked unhurt, although she was now screaming to high heaven, flailing her arms and legs. Still kneeling, Erica lifted her daughter up and pressed her tight, letting tears of relief mix with the falling rain.

‘Come on, let’s get her inside. You’ll both be soaked,’ said Dan gently as he helped Erica to her feet. Without loosening her grip on the baby, she followed him up the steps and into the house. The relief she felt was physical in a way that she never could have imagined. It was as though she’d lost a part of her body that was now re-attached. She was still sobbing, and Dan patted her reassuringly on the shoulder.

‘Where did you find her?’ she managed to say.

‘She was lying on the ground in front of the house.’

Only now did they both seem to understand that someone must have put Maja there. For some reason this person had taken her out of the stroller, sneaked round the house, and placed the sleeping baby on the ground. Erica began to sob again with rising panic.

‘Shh … it’s over now,’ said Dan. ‘We found her and she looks fine. But we’d better phone the police. You didn’t have time to call them, did you?’

Erica shook her head.

‘We have to call Patrik,’ she said. ‘Can you do it? I never want to let her go again.’ She hugged Maja tight. But now she noticed something she’d missed before, a black stain that spread across the front of Dan’s sweater. She held Maja out so she could examine her too.

‘What is this stuff?’ she said. ‘All this black stuff?’

Dan glanced at the dirty overalls but said only, ‘What’s Patrik’s number?’

In a shaky voice Erica told him the number of Patrik’s mobile and watched as Dan punched it in. A hard lump of fear had formed in her stomach.

The days ran into one another. She never called Erica back, never did anything about her plan to escape. She couldn’t. Anna’s feeling of impotence was paralyzing. Nothing she said or did escaped Lucas’s fierce watch. He was keeping track of her every step, listening to every word.

The violence had increased too. Now he openly enjoyed seeing her pain and humiliation. He took what he wanted, when he wanted, and God help her if she protested or resisted. Not that she would even think of it now. It was obvious that there was something terribly wrong with his mind. All barriers were gone, and there was an evil light in his eyes; she understood instinctively that if she wanted to survive she needed to go along with his demands.

Emotionally, she had shut down completely, except when she thought about the children. That was what pained her the most. They were no longer allowed to go to day-care, and now spent their days in the same shadow existence as she did. Listless and clinging, they watched her with dead eyes, and it felt like an accusation. They were right to blame her: it was all her fault. She should have protected them. She should have kept Lucas out of their lives, precisely as she had intended. But a single instant of fear had made her give in. She allowed herself to be convinced that she was going back to him for the children’s sake, for their safety. Instead she had surrendered to her own cowardice. She always took what seemed the path of least resistance, at least at first glance. But this time she had gravely misjudged her options. She had chosen the narrowest, trickiest, and most perilous path available, and she had compelled her children to come along.

Sometimes she dreamed about killing him. She knew by now that that’s how it must inevitably end: with one of them dead. Occasionally, during the long hours of the night when she lay awake, unable to relax enough to escape into sleep, she would watch him as he slept next to her. She fantasized about the way a kitchen knife could slip into his flesh and sever the fragile thread that bound him to life. Or she would feel the rope cutting into her hands as she looped it round his neck and pulled, hard.

But it went no further than her imagination. Something inside her, maybe an inherent cowardice, kept her lying still in bed while dark thoughts ricocheted around her skull.

Sometimes she pictured Erica’s baby before her in the night. The little girl she had not yet seen. She envied the child. She would be getting the same warmth, the same care that Anna herself had received from Erica when they were growing up, more as mother and daughter than as sisters. But back then she hadn’t appreciated Erica. She had felt suffocated and inferior. The bitterness that she felt from their mother’s lack of love had apparently hardened her heart against everything her sister had tried to give her. Anna sincerely hoped that Maja would be better able to accept the enormous ocean of love that she knew Erica was capable of giving. Especially for her Erica’s sake. Despite their difference in age and the distance that separated them, Anna was coming to understand her older sister better and better. She knew that if there was anyone who was in desperate need of having her love reciprocated, it was Erica. It was ironic that Anna had always considered Erica so strong, but now that she herself was at her weakest, she understood her sister’s real vulnerability. Erica lived her life scared to death that everyone would see what their mother had seen, what had made her feel as if her two daughters were unworthy of love. If only Anna had one more chance, she would throw her arms around Erica and thank her for all those years of unconditional love. Thank her for the concern, for the scoldings, for the worried look in her eyes when she thought that Anna was on the wrong track. Thank her for everything that had previously made Anna feel suffocated and constricted. How ironic. She hadn’t really known what it felt like to be suffocated and truly constricted. Not until now.

The sound of the key in the lock made her jump. The children, playing silently on the floor, also paused with alarm and looked up at their mother.

Anna got up and went to meet him.

Schwarzenegger gazed down at him with concern through his dark sunglasses. The Terminator. If only Sebastian had been like him. Cool. Tough. A machine without the ability to feel.

Sebastian stared up at the poster as he lay on his bed. He could still hear Rune’s phony voice of concern. That tone of smarmy, feigned caring. The only thing he actually worried about was what people would say about
him.
What was it he had said?

‘I’ve heard some terrible accusations made against Kaj. I have a hard time believing that it’s anything but pure slander, but I still have to ask the question: Did he on any occasion behave in an inappropriate manner towards you or any of the other boys? Peeked at you in the shower, or anything like that?’

Upset as he was by the conversation, Sebastian had had to laugh to himself at Rune’s naïveté. ‘Peeked at you in the shower?’ That wouldn’t have been so bad. It was the other thing that he couldn’t live with. Not now, when everything was going to come out. He had an idea how things like that worked. They took their pictures and saved them and traded them, but no matter how well they hid them, they would all come out now.

It wouldn’t take more than a morning, then it would be all over school. The girls would stare at him, pointing and giggling. The boys would make jokes about queers and make stupid hand gestures as he walked by. Nobody would care what it was actually like for him. No one would see how big the hole in his chest was.

He turned his head a bit to the left and looked at the poster of Clint as Dirty Harry. He should have had a pistol like that. Or even better, a submachine gun. Then he could have done it the way those guys in the States did it. Run into the school in a long black coat and mow down everyone he saw. Especially the cool ones, who were going to treat him the worst. But he knew it was nothing but a crazy idea. It wasn’t in his nature to hurt anyone. It wasn’t their fault, really. He had only himself to blame, and it was only himself he wanted to hurt. He could have put a stop to it, of course. Had he ever said no? Not in so many words. Somehow he’d hoped that Kaj would see how unhappy he was, how much he was hurting him, and stop of his own accord.

Everything had been so complicated. Because a part of him had liked Kaj, who had seemed so great at first. Sebastian had gotten a fatherly feeling from him, the feeling he never got from Rune. He’d been able to talk to Kaj. About school, about girls, about Mamma and about Rune, and Kaj had put his arm round him and listened. It was only after a while that things had gotten so screwed up.

It was quiet in the house. Rune had gone off to work, pleased and satisfied by the news, that all the accusations against Kaj were utterly groundless. He would probably sit in the lunchroom today and loudly complain about how the police made unfounded accusations.

Sebastian got up off the bed and prepared to leave. He stopped in the doorway and turned round. He looked at each and every one of his heroes and gave them a curt nod, as if in greeting. Clint, Sly, Arnold, Jean-Claude, and Dolph. The ones who were everything he was not.

For a moment he thought he saw them nod back.

The adrenaline was still pumping after the encounter with his father, and Niclas felt sufficiently belligerent to take on the next person with whom he had a score to settle.

As he drove down Galärbacken, he saw Jeanette puttering in her shop, busily preparing to stay open on All Saints’ Day. He parked the car and went inside. For the first time since they’d met, he felt no tingle in his loins when he saw her. He felt only a sour, metallic distaste, both for himself and for her.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

Jeanette turned round and gave Niclas a cold look when he slammed the door behind him, making the ‘Open’ sign flutter.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She turned her back to him and continued unpacking a box of knick-knacks for the shelves.

‘You certainly do. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You’ve been to the police and told them some cops-and-robbers story about how I forced you to lie and give me an alibi. How fucking low can you sink? Is it revenge, or do you just enjoy making trouble? What the hell were you thinking? I lost my daughter a week ago. Can’t you understand that I don’t want to keep going behind my wife’s back anymore?’

‘You promised me,’ said Jeanette with flashing eyes. ‘You promised that we’d be together, that you’d divorce Charlotte, that we’d have kids together. You promised me a hell of a lot, Niclas.’

‘So, why the fuck do you think I did that? Because you loved hearing it. Because you willingly spread your legs when you heard those promises about a ring and a future. Because I wanted to have a little fun with you in bed once in a while. I can’t believe you’re so fucking dumb that you believed me. You know the game as well as I do. You’ve had your share of married men before, I’m sure,’ he said rudely, watching her flinch at each word, as if he’d slapped her. But he didn’t care. He’d already crossed the line and had no desire to be sensitive or kind. Now he was only going to offer the pure, unadulterated truth, and after what she’d done, she deserved to hear it.

‘You fucking pig,’ said Jeanette, reaching for one of the objects she was unpacking. In the next instant a porcelain lighthouse whistled towards his head, but it missed and hit the display window instead. With a deafening crash the pane shattered and big chunks of glass came sliding down. The silence that followed was so complete that it echoed off the walls. Like two combatants, they stared at each other, chests heaving with rage. Then Niclas turned on his heel and walked calmly out of the shop. The only sound was the glass crunching under his shoes.