Watching You(94)

They looked at each other. Blood from the scratches on their faces merged with the water dripping from their hair. Their chalk-white faces gaunt and exhausted.

‘They each had a cell,’ Berger said. ‘Before he killed them they each had a cell.’

‘He hasn’t killed them,’ Blom said in a voice Berger didn’t recognise. ‘He’s kept them alive, some of them for years. He’s been pumping them full of that sedative, unsurprisingly forbidden in the West, for a very long time. He’s been collecting them.’

Berger stared at her. There wasn’t just rainwater running down her face. She was crying too.

It was the first time he had seen Molly Blom cry openly.

He wondered if there would be another.

He closed his eyes. The world suddenly looked very different. Suddenly there was much more at stake, and it all depended on them. On Sam Berger and Molly Blom.

They held seven lives in their hands.

They rushed upstairs to the hall, and saw the perverse glare of the floodlights through the open front door. They could breathe again. They held onto each other, clutching each other’s upper arms. Almost hugging.

‘Fucking hell,’ Berger said. ‘Fuck. He’s kept them alive. He’s been waiting for us.’

‘He was found out in M?rsta,’ Blom said. ‘And in turn he must have found the woman with the dog who saw his Statoil van. He cleaned out the M?rsta house, emptied it completely, removed the doors, cleaned the whole place with the utmost precision. Then he drove all the girls here, all seven of them. He’s been waiting for us. And he’s just driven off with them in the van. There must be another way out of here, one that’s not on the map.’

And suddenly Berger could see everything with absolute clarity.

‘The Ramans do everything in threes,’ he said.

Blom just stared at him.

‘William’s favourite book,’ Berger explained. ‘Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Rendezvous with Rama.’

‘OK,’ Blom said, looking like she was having trouble keeping it together. ‘So what are you saying?’

‘There’s a third house,’ Berger said. ‘A triplet house.’

Then he punched the wall with his fist.

The wounds on his right knuckles cracked wide open. Blood spattered the walls.

He didn’t give a shit. Didn’t give a shit about anything. Anything at all.

Apart from one thing.

Rescuing not one but seven girls.

The dreadful glare of the floodlights reached into the hall. He stepped out onto the porch. He shot the floodlights, one after the other, until his pistol merely clicked. He imagined he could see some of the light lingering. He stepped down from the porch and saw the front of the house shimmering, as if from some innate light.

As if painted with fluorescent paint.

He rushed back into the house. Threw himself up the stairs to the floor above. He found himself in a workshop. He saw a number of hammers of various shapes and sizes, then moulds for casting knife blades, saw a wall perforated with knife marks, and a carpenter’s bench scarred by heavy hammer blows.

‘Scum,’ Berger said through his teeth. ‘Fucking bastard scum.’

Blom nodded. Tears were trickling down her cheeks.

They were in the very centre of evil.

Berger rushed towards the next door. Behind it was a smaller room containing a bed with dirty yellow sheets. An L-shaped desk in the corner bore the impressions of computer equipment.

This was where William Larsson had sat and planned everything.

‘Something’s glowing,’ Blom said.

Berger nodded. A very faint light seemed to be coming from below, beneath the desk. Berger yanked the desk away from the wall. A night light was plugged directly into the wall.

They crouched down.

A piece of paper had been nailed to the wall next to the dim bulb. And on the nail hung a tiny cog.

And on the sheet of paper was a message, apparently scrawled in blood.

It said: I’m coming for you soon.

The message ended with a smiley face.

On closer inspection, the lower part of the sheet was tucked into an envelope. Blom pulled it off and stood up. Berger got to his feet beside her. His hand was still dripping blood.

Her hands trembling, Blom opened the envelope carefully, ever so carefully, and pulled out a photograph.

It was a photograph of a building that seemed to glow with its own inner light.

It was a photograph of the boathouse.





IV





37




Friday 30 October, 01.29

Blood streamed out into the icy cold water. It formed small tributaries that eventually flowed into a blurred delta before being swallowed up by the seas of the world. Or at least left the light, an illuminated circle in the great expanse of water.

Berger switched off his torch and pulled his hand from Edsviken. He could feel the cold making the open blood vessels of his knuckles gradually contract.

Time had passed. They had looked through every pixel of security footage before approaching the boathouse with extreme caution. There was no one there.

But they knew that William Larsson would come.

That he might come at any time.

Berger shook his head, as if to invigorate his sluggish brain cells, and looked out across the inlet, which, in its own very modest way, was attached to the world’s oceans.