The Nightmare

  “Forgive me! Forgive me! Forgive me!” mocks Raphael in a squeaky voice from his seat on the sofa.

  Axel looks at Raphael in amazement, just as Veronique Salman’s voice pipes up: “Forgive me! Forgive me! Forgive me!”

  Her voice is shot through with terror.

  “I had no idea!” mocks Raphael, and points at the television.

  “I had no idea!” pleads Veronique. “I took the picture but I didn’t mean to harm anyone! I didn’t know how stupid I was being, I just thought that—”

  “You have to choose,” the man in the ski mask says. “Who should I shoot in the knee? Your wife or your sister?”

  “Please, don’t do this,” Pontus whispers.

  “Who should I shoot?” the man repeats.

  “My wife,” whispers Pontus. His voice is practically inaudible.

  “Pontus, please!” His wife is pleading. “Please, don’t let him—”

  Pontus begins to sob shrilly and piercingly.

  “It’s going to hurt when I shoot her,” the man warns.

  “Don’t let him shoot me!” screams Veronique, panicked.

  “Do you want to change your mind? Should I shoot your sister instead?”

  “No,” Pontus mumbles.

  “Beg me to.”

  “What did you say?” Pontus’s expression is that of a broken man.

  “Beg me nicely to shoot her.”

  There’s a moment of silence and then Axel Riessen hears Pontus say, “Please be so kind as to … shoot my wife in the knee.”

  “I’ll do both her knees, since you’ve been so polite,” the man says, and places the barrel of his pistol against Veronique’s knee.

  “Please don’t let him do this!” she screams. “Please, Pontus!”

  The man shoots. A short bang is heard. Veronique’s leg jumps. Blood spatters over the tiles. Veronique screams so loudly her voice breaks. He shoots again. The recoil makes the gun jerk. The second knee is hit and bends at an impossible angle.

  Veronique screams again, hoarse and distant. Her body spasms in pain and blood begins to pour over the tile floor beneath her.

  Pontus Salman has started to vomit and the man in the ski mask watches him in a wondering, dreamy gaze.

  Veronique pulls herself to one side, panting, and she’s trying to reach her injured legs with her hands. The woman next to her appears to be in shock. Her face has turned green and her eyes are nothing but big black holes.

  “Your sister is mentally ill, right?” the man asks curiously. “Do you think she even realizes what’s going on?”

  He pats Pontus on the head comfortingly. Then he says, “Do you want me to rape your sister or shoot your wife again?”

  Pontus doesn’t answer. His eyes are rolling backward. The man slaps him across the face.

  “Answer me! You want me to shoot your wife again or rape your sister?”

  Pontus Salman’s sister shakes her head.

  “Rape her!” whispers Veronique between heavy breaths. “Please, please, Pontus. Tell him to rape her instead.”

  “Rape her,” Pontus whispers.

  “I didn’t hear you!”

  “Rape my sister!”

  “All right. Soon enough,” the man says.

  Axel looks down at the floor between his feet. He’s trying to close his ears to the wailing and the prayers and the raw, horrific screams. He tries to fill his mind with the music of Bach, tries to reach for spaces within his music, spaces filled with light and heavenly rays.

  Finally there is no more sound. Axel looks up at the television. The women are both lying dead against the wall. He sees the man in the ski mask stand, panting, with a bloody knife in one hand and a gun in the other.

  “You’ve reaped your nightmare—you may kill yourself now,” the man says, and throws the pistol down at Pontus’s feet as he walks out of the frame and around the camera.

  105

  the witness

  Saga Bauer leaves Magdalena Ronander and steps back over the police tape. More curious onlookers have turned up as well as a van from Swedish Television. A uniformed officer is trying to part the crowd to allow an ambulance through.

  Saga leaves all this behind her and walks up a stone pathway to someone’s garden and past a jasmine tree. She keeps walking faster and faster, then starts to run back to her car.

  “The girl,” Joona had said on the phone. “You have to find the girl. There’s a girl who lives with Axel Riessen. He called her Beverly Andersson. Ask Robert, his brother. The girl’s about fifteen and you should be able to trace her.”

  “How much longer do I have to get an arrest warrant?”

  “Not long,” Joona had answered. “But you should make it in time.”

  As Saga drives back toward Stockholm, she calls Robert Riessen, but there’s no answer. She calls the exchange at CID and asks for Anja, Joona’s assistant, the plump woman who had once won an Olympic medal in swimming and who delights in bright, shiny lipstick and nails painted in violent colors.

  “Anja Larsson.” Saga hears the response after only one ring.

  “Hi, I’m Saga Bauer at Säpo. We met recently at—”

  “Yes, we did,” Anja says coolly.

  “I need information about a young woman named Beverly Andersson who—”

  “Can I bill Säpo for it?” Anja’s voice is frigid.

  Saga snaps. “Do whatever the hell you want, as long as you get a damned number before—”

  “I don’t care for your language, young lady.”

  “Forget I asked.”

  Saga swears and then honks at a car that hasn’t moved even though the light has turned green. She’s about to click her phone closed when Anja asks, “How old is she?”

  “About fifteen.”

  “There is no Beverly Andersson in that age group listed with any telephone registry. But the government does have her registered at the same address as her father, Evert Andersson.”

  “Okay, I’ll call him, then. Can you text me the number?”

  “I’ve already done it.”

  “Thanks, Anja, thanks so much—please forgive me for being a bitch. I’m in such a hurry. I’m worried about Joona. I believe he might do something stupid without backup.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  “Yes. He asked me to find the girl. I’ve never even met her, I don’t know … he trusts me to figure all this out, but I—”

  “You call Beverly’s father and I’ll keep looking,” Anja says, and hangs up.

  Saga swings onto the shoulder by Hjorthagen and parks to look at the number Anja sent her. The area code is for the province of Skåne. Maybe the town of Svalöv, she thinks as she presses the Call button.

  106

  the pappa

  Evert Andersson sits in his pine-paneled kitchen in the middle of the province of Skåne and jumps when he hears the telephone ring. He’s just come in from disentangling a heifer from his neighbor’s barbed-wire fence. It took more than an hour. Blood is on his hands, and he wipes them on his blue work clothes. When the phone rings, he doesn’t care to answer it. Not just because of the state of his hands but because he feels that there’s no one he’d really care to speak to. He leans forward, checks the ID display, and sees it’s a blocked number. Probably a salesman who’ll be hiding behind that. He lets the phone ring until it stops. Then it starts again. Evert Andersson takes another look at the display and finally picks up the phone: “Andersson.”

  “Hello, I’m Saga Bauer.” Evert hears an abrupt female voice. “I’m a police officer with Säpo. I’m looking for your daughter, Beverly Andersson.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing. She has done nothing wrong, but she has some very important information we need.”

  “And now she’s just taken off?” he asks weakly.

  “Do you have her phone number?” Saga asks. Evert’s slow thoughts revert to the time he’d once hoped his daughter would take over the farm after him. She would carry on
tradition, she’d live in his house, she’d work in his barn, his buildings, his fields. She’d walk through the gardens that her mother had planted, wearing rubber boots like his in the mud, growing thick around the middle as her mother had done, wearing a long coat with her hair in a braid down her back.

  But even as a small child, Beverly had something odd about her, which he sensed and feared.

  As she’d grown, she became more and more different, as if she’d sprung, an alien, from him and from her mother. Once she’d walked into the barn when she was eight or nine years old. She sat in an empty pen using an upturned bucket as a stool and then just sang to herself with her eyes closed. She’d lost herself in the sound of her own voice. He’d thought it his duty to yell at her to shut up and stop making a fool of herself, but there was this whole air about her that bewildered him. He marked that incident as the moment he knew he would never understand her. So he could no longer talk to her. Whenever he wanted to say something, the words died away.

  When her mother died, the silence on the farm was complete.

  Beverly began to ramble around the countryside and would be gone for hours or even an entire day. The police had to bring her home after she’d wandered so far she didn’t know where she was. She’d go with anyone if they spoke kindly to her.

  “I don’t have anything to say to her, so why would I have her phone number?” he replies in his strict, stubborn Skåne dialect.

  “Are you absolutely sure—”

  “You city folk from Stockholm don’t understand this stuff.” He cuts her off vehemently and hangs up.

  He looks at his fingers on the receiver: the blood smearing his knuckles, the dirt under his fingernails, embedded in his cuticles, in every crack and surface. He walks over to his green armchair and slowly sits down. He picks up the shiny TV supplement to the newspaper and begins to read. This evening there’s going to be a show about the program host Ossian Wallenberg, who died recently. Evert drops the newspaper and is surprised to find tears in his eyes. He remembers that Beverly used to sit beside him and they’d both laugh at the silly nonsense on Golden Friday.

  107

  the empty room

  Saga Bauer swears aloud, shuts her eyes, and pounds the steering wheel a few times. She tells herself that she has to pull herself together and get going before it’s too late, when the phone rings.

  “Hi, it’s me again,” Anja says. “I’m putting you through to Herbert Saxéus at Saint Maria Hjärta Hospital.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “Saxéus had Beverly Andersson as a patient for two years there.”

  “Thanks, that was—”

  Anja has already put Saga through to the other line.

  Saga waits as the signals go through. She remembers Saint Maria Hjärta, located east of Stockholm in Torsby.

  “Herbert speaking,” a warm voice says in her ear.

  “Hi, my name is Saga Bauer and I’m a police officer, an investigator, from Säpo. I need to reach a girl named Beverly Andersson who was one of your patients, I understand.”

  There’s a pause on the line.

  “Is she all right?” asks the doctor.

  “That’s what I need to know. I have to speak to her,” Saga says quickly. “And it’s urgent.”

  “She lives in the house of Axel Riessen, who … well, he has informal guardianship.”

  “So is she still there?” Saga asks, while turning the key in the ignition. She starts to pull onto the highway.

  “Axel Riessen is giving her a room until she finds something of her own,” he replies. “She’s only fifteen, but it would be a mistake to force her to live at home.”

  The traffic is steady and Saga drives as fast as she can.

  “May I ask what Beverly was treated for?” she asks.

  “I don’t know if that’s helpful, but as a doctor I would say that she has a serious personality disorder, which we call Cluster B.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Not much,” Herbert Saxéus says. “But if you ask me as a fellow human being, I’d say that physically Beverly is completely healthy, healthier than most … It’s a cliché, I know, but she’s not the one who’s sick.”

  “No, she lives in a sick world.”

  “That’s right.” He sighs.

  Saga thanks him for his time, ends the call, and turns onto Valhallavägen. The seat against her back is sticky from sweat. Her phone rings and she hits the gas to get through the yellow light by the Olympic Stadium before she picks up the call.

  “I thought I would try to talk to Beverly’s father as well,” Anja says. “He is a pleasant man, but he’s had a rough day with an injured cow. He had to comfort it, he says. His family has always lived on the same farm. Now he’s the only one left. We chatted about The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and then he found some letters that Beverly had written to him. He hadn’t even opened them. Can you believe that man? So stubborn! Beverly’s telephone number was in every single letter.”

  Saga Bauer thanks Anja profusely and calls Beverly’s number. She’s already pulling to a stop in front of the Riessen house while the signal goes to Beverly Andersson’s cell phone.

  One beep after another disappears into the darkness of space. The sun shines through a little dust in the air in front of the church. Saga feels her body tense with determination. There’s little time left. Joona will be on his own when he goes against Raphael Guidi.

  With the phone still to her ear, she walks up to Robert Riessen’s door and rings the bell. Suddenly someone picks up on the other end of the phone line. Saga can hear a slight rustling.

  “Beverly?” Saga asks. “Is that you?”

  Saga can hear breathing.

  “Answer me, Beverly,” Saga says in the gentlest voice she can muster. “Where are you?”

  “I—”

  “What did you say, Beverly? What did you say? I can’t hear you.”

  “I can’t come out yet,” the girl whispers, and hangs up.

  Robert Riessen is silent and pale. He leaves Saga in Beverly Andersson’s room and asks her to lock up when she’s done. The room doesn’t look lived-in. There are just some white clothes in the wardrobe and a pair of rubber boots, a field jacket, and a cell-phone charger.

  Saga locks Beverly’s room as she leaves and goes into Axel Riessen’s rooms. She tries to understand what Joona meant and how this girl could be important. She walks through the drawing rooms, salons, and the peaceful library. The door to Axel Riessen’s bedroom is slightly ajar. Saga steps over the thick Chinese carpet, past the bed, and into the adjoining bathroom. She returns to the bedroom. Something is making her edgy. There’s a nervous energy in the room. Saga puts one hand over her Glock in her shoulder holster. There’s a whiskey glass on the table with the drooping remains of a dandelion.

  The dust floats slowly in the sunlight in a room almost vibrating with silence. Her heart jumps when a branch from a tree outside scrapes against the window.

  She walks over to the unmade bed and considers the two pillows and the disarray of the bedding.

  Saga thinks that she might be hearing steps in the library and turns to leave when a hand grabs her ankle. Someone is under the bed. She twists loose, falls backward, and draws her gun in one motion while, inadvertently, she knocks over the table with the dandelion.

  Saga rolls to her knees and aims, but then lowers her gun again.

  The girl peers out of the darkness under the bed. Her eyes are wide open and frightened. Saga replaces her gun in the holster and sighs deeply.

  “You’re shining,” Beverly says.

  “Are you Beverly?” Saga whispers.

  “May I come out now?”

  “Yes, I promise, you may come out,” Saga says.

  “Has it been an hour? Axel told me to wait a whole hour.”

  “It’s been more than an hour, Beverly.”

  Saga helps her stand up. The girl wears only underwear and is a bit stiff after lying in the same cramped position fo
r so long. Her hair is very short, and her arms are covered with ink drawings and letters.

  “What are you doing under Axel Riessen’s bed?” Saga asks, keeping her voice calm.

  “He’s my best friend,” Beverly answers as she pulls on a pair of jeans.

  “I believe that he’s in danger—please tell me what you know.”

  Beverly pauses, holding on to her T-shirt. Her face flushes red and tears fill her eyes.

  “I haven’t done—”

  Beverly’s lower lip starts to tremble.

  “Take it easy,” Saga says, trying to keep the tension from her voice. “Start from the beginning.”

  “I was in bed when Axel came in,” Beverly says in a weak voice. “I knew something bad was happening. He looked white. I thought he was mad because I’d gotten a lift. I’m not supposed to hitchhike.”

  She pauses and turns her head away.

  “Please go on, Beverly, we’re almost out of time.”

  Beverly whispers, “Sorry.” She wipes her face with her T-shirt. Her eyes are damp and the end of her nose is red.

  “Axel ran into the room,” Beverly says when she’s collected herself. “He told me to get under the bed and hide for an entire hour and then he ran out again to the library and I don’t know … I just saw their legs, but two guys came after him. They did something awful to him. He yelled and they threw him on the floor and wrapped him in white plastic and then they carried him outside. Everything happened so fast. I didn’t see their faces … I’m not sure they’re even human beings.”

  “Just a second,” Saga says. She pulls out her phone. “You have to come with me and tell your story to a man named Jens Svanehjälm.”

  Saga calls Carlos. Her hands shake.

  “We have a witness! She saw Axel Riessen being kidnapped! We have a witness!” she repeats. “She saw Axel Riessen overpowered and taken away, and that should be enough.”

  Saga and Beverly look at each other while Saga listens to Carlos’s reaction.