‘When did you start smoking? So, I have a plan for how to find the eighth guest.’
Kaja stared at him.
Bellman sighed. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me how, darling?’
‘How?’
‘By using the same strategy as he does.’
‘Which is?’
‘Focusing on an innocent person.’
‘Isn’t that the strategy you always use?’
Mikael Bellman looked up sharply. Something was beginning to dawn on him. Something about being an alpha male.
He explained the plan to her. Told her how he would entice the man out.
Afterwards, he was shaking from cold and anger. He didn’t know what made him angrier. The fact that she didn’t respond with either a negative or a positive comment. Or that she sat there smoking, to all outward signs completely untouched by the case. Didn’t she understand that his career, his moves, in these very critical days would be decisive for her future as well? If she couldn’t count on being the next fru Bellman, she could at least rise through the ranks under his auspices, provided that she was loyal and continued to deliver. Or perhaps his anger was a result of the question she had asked. It had been about him. The other one. The old, doddery alpha male.
She had asked about opium. Asked if he really would have used it, if Hole had not ceded to his demand that he should accept the responsibility for Leike’s arrest.
‘Of course,’ Bellman said, trying to see her face, but it was too dark. ‘Why shouldn’t I have? He had smuggled drugs.’
‘I’m not thinking of him. I’m thinking of whether you would have brought discredit on the police force.’
He shook his head. ‘We can’t let ourselves be corrupted by that sort of consideration.’
Her laughter sounded dry as it met the dense night cold. ‘You indisputably corrupted him.’
‘He’s corruptible,’ Bellman said, draining the bottle in one swig. ‘That’s the difference between him and me. Now, Kaja, are you trying to tell me something?’
She opened her mouth. Wanted to say it. Should have said it. But at that moment his mobile rang. She saw him clutch his pocket as he did what he usually did, formed his lips into a pout. Which did not signify a kiss, but that she should shut up. In case it was his wife, his boss or anyone else he didn’t want to know that he came here to fuck a Crime Squad officer who gave him all the information he needed to outmanoeuvre the unit competing for murder investigations. To hell with Mikael Bellman. To hell with Kaja Solness. And above all to hell with . . .
‘He’s gone,’ Mikael Bellman said, putting the phone back in his pocket.
‘Who?’
‘Tony Leike.’
51
Letter
Hi Tony,
You’ve been wondering who I could be for a long time now. So long that I think it may be time I revealed my hand. I was at the cabin in Håvass that night, but you didn’t see me. No one saw me, I was as invisible as a ghost. But you know me. Know me all too well. And now I’m coming to get you. The only person who can stop me now is you. Everyone else is dead. There’s just you and me left, Tony. Is your heart beating a bit faster now? Does your hand grope for a knife? Do you slash blindly through the dark, dizzy with terror that your life will be taken from you?
52
Visit
SOMETHING HAD WOKEN HIM. A SOUND. THERE WERE HARDLY any sounds out here, none he didn’t know anyway, and those didn’t wake him. He got up, placed the soles of his feet on the cold floor and peered through the window. His terrain. Some called it a deserted wasteland, whatever that meant. Because it was never deserted here, there was always something. Like now. An animal? Or could it be him? The ghost? There was something outside, that was for certain. He looked at the door. It was locked and bolted on the inside. The rifle was in the storehouse. He shivered in the thick, red flannel shirt he wore both day and night up here. The sitting room was so empty. It was so empty out there. So empty in the world. But it wasn’t deserted. There were the two of them, the two of them who were left.
Harry was dreaming. About a lift with teeth, about a woman with a cocktail stick between cochineal-red lips, a clown with his smiling head under his arm, a bride dressed in white at the altar with a snowman, a star drawn in the dust of a TV screen, a one-armed girl on a diving board in Bangkok, the sweet smell of urinal blocks, the outline of a human body on the inside of a blue plastic waterbed, a compressor drill and blood spurting into his face, hot and death-bringing. Alcohol had acted as a cross, garlic and holy water against ghosts, but tonight there had been a full moon and a virgin’s blood, and now they came swarming from the darkest corners and deepest graves and tossed him between them in their dance, fiercer and wilder than ever, to the cardiac rhythms of mortal fear and the incessant shrill fire alarm here in hell. Then there was sudden silence. Complete silence. It was here again. It filled his mouth. He couldn’t breathe. It was cold and pitch black and he was unable to move, he . . .