Watching You(82)

The narrow passageway went on for ten metres or so. Berger took care not to shine his torch up the walls. Then the cave opened out abruptly. They suddenly found themselves in a cavern. Dim light was filtering in through a hidden crack five metres above them. And the play of shadows suddenly became clear.

The walls of the cave were covered with bats. They hung there, moving gently, as if they were breathing in a strange, jerky, collective rhythm.

But overwhelmingly the bats were swarming around a metre-high formation at the back of the cavern. And they weren’t just hanging there. They were moving, crawling, creeping across each other in a peculiar pattern. It was as if a relief in a Roman bath had come to life.

Berger heard himself groan. He glanced at Blom. She too was staring at the formation. Both torches were pointing at the floor, the only thing illuminating the bats was the daylight from the crack above.

‘On the count of three,’ Blom whispered. ‘Then we shine our torches right at it and take cover immediately, flat on the ground. OK?’

Something inside Berger understood instinctively. But he just stood there, completely bewildered. He heard himself whisper: ‘OK.’

Blom looked at him in the dim light. It was as if she was evaluating his mental state again.

Then she whispered: ‘One. Two. Three!’

The torch beams swept towards the teeming bats. Then everything switched to freeze-frame. As Berger threw himself on the ground he saw the bats lift off like a single mass, a flying manta ray. The chirping increased exponentially as he fell, and before Berger hit the ground the immense sweeping wing flew over their heads and out of the cave, presumably rising like a huge plume through the rain outside. Pain transmitted itself with unusual slowness from his knees to his brain as the object deserted by the bats became visible in the twin torch beams. A couple of the ancient creatures remained; one bat was clinging to one of the ribs, another was peering groggily from between the teeth of the almost stripped-bare skull.

The jaw moved; it looked like the skeleton was chewing on a bat.

‘Fucking hell,’ Berger said, getting to his feet.

The skeleton was crouched against the wall of the cave. Remnants of rotten, dried flesh clung to a few of the white bones. The bat freed itself from the skeleton’s mouth like an embodied scream and flew off in search of the others.

Berger reached for Blom’s hand in the gloom. It responded by grasping his. Hand in hand they went over to the huddled remains of a human body. In the quivering light of their torches the whole scene looked archaic, as if they were visiting the time of cave dwellers.

The skeleton really was crouching down, as if it were resting after a run with a mammoth.

In a loose circle around the skeleton lay the remains of clothes that had fallen off the body as its size diminished. A wallet was peeping out from beneath the drifts of bat droppings.

Blom freed her hand from Berger’s and pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. She extracted the wallet and, with trembling fingers, found an ID card.

Simon Lundberg’s.

They looked at the skeleton. Yes, it could be the remains of a fifteen-year-old boy.

They shone their torches around the rest of the cavern. There wasn’t a lot else to see.

‘No Jonna Eriksson,’ Berger concluded.

‘No,’ Blom said, moving her torch closer to the scraps of clothing around the skeleton. She picked them up, one by one, from the piles of droppings. Eventually a shimmering object was uncovered.

It wasn’t much more than a centimetre in diameter, had tiny teeth and was perfectly round.

It was a very small cog.





32




Thursday 29 October, 13.12

Molly Blom dozed off twice at the wheel on the drive home. Fortunately it happened in the fleeting moments when Sam Berger was in full command of his faculties. Beyond that, he wasn’t much help. His general condition couldn’t really be described as anything other that half-dead.

When they hurried back into the boathouse early that afternoon – after checking the security footage from the car park by the nearest row houses – they agreed it was time to get into their sleeping bags. Neither of them could be bothered to work out how long they had been awake over the past few days.

Berger removed a very small plastic bag from his pocket and wrote a few words on a label, which he stuck on the bag. Then he put it with the others beneath the watches in their box. The last thing he saw were the words Jonna Eriksson, cave.

‘Just a couple of hours,’ Blom said from her side of the bench, pulling off her tracksuit top. She unbuttoned her army trousers and stood for a moment.

Berger had, without really thinking about it, pulled off his top and was in the middle of removing his jeans. He stopped and met her sharp gaze.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Sooner or later I’m going to have to get in that bastard water. But first some sleep.’

‘I wasn’t reacting to your body odour,’ Blom said, pointing. ‘What happened to your arm?’

Berger felt the five-centimetre-wide indentation in his left arm. It was just as numb as always.

‘An old injury,’ he said, pulling his jeans off.

‘It looks like someone took a real bite out of you,’ Blom said.

But by then Berger had already lain down and fallen asleep.

The early summer that prevails in a desolate, grit-covered football pitch is strangely remorseless, no wind, the air laced with dust, the sun sharp and prickly. Sam sees a group of people at the other end of the pitch, by the far goal. He sees that they’re girls, lots of girls; he can hear their shrill voices but can’t make out any words. The emptiness above the dusty grit seems to filter out everything resembling language. Sam has become a different person; time has changed. It feels as if he’s aged a couple of years in just a few weeks. These days he avoids this sort of gathering. He can feel that he has become a loner. But there’s something about the unarticulated yelling that draws him in. Against all his instincts he is drawn in that direction, and sees the back of one girl after another. They’re wearing summery clothes, dresses, skirts, and the merciless sun makes their long hair shine in all manner of hues. The dust swirls around them, and as they move Sam can see that they aren’t alone. Behind them a taller head rises up. Anton’s, and it’s moving. It disappears behind the curtain of girls, reappears, still moving. Then the curtain parts a little more, and against the goalpost, tied to the post, stands a figure. Its long blond hair hangs like another curtain in front of the figure’s face. His trousers have been pulled down, the lower half of his body exposed.