Stalker

119

Joona tries to call Erik as he walks between the café tables towards Rocky.

His phone is switched off.

He dials Margot Silverman’s private number but there’s no answer, so he calls his former boss at the National Criminal Investigation Department, Carlos Eliasson, instead and leaves a short voicemail.

Rocky is still sitting in the shade under the weeping birch, picking biscuit crumbs from his stomach. He’s taken his shoes and socks off and is wriggling his toes on the grass.

‘We have to go,’ Joona says when he reaches him.

‘Did you find the answers to your questions?’

Joona carries on past Rocky and hurries down the steps towards the car park. He’s thinking that Peter didn’t keep volume twenty-four of his diary in the bureau with the others because its content was too shameful. And because of that, Nelly missed it when she destroyed the rest of them.

Towards the end of the diary Peter describes how his daughter was sent to an old-fashioned girls’ boarding school.

Joona stops in front of the stolen car and thinks that Nelly was fourteen when she started at Klockhammar School outside Örebro. She was at boarding school for six years. It’s possible that she didn’t see her parents at all during that time, but never let go of her fixation on her father.

The feeling of loving and being rejected, of giving everything and having everything taken from you, led to her developing a serious personality disorder.

She studied her mother, tried to be like her, to take her place.

Rocky has got his shoes back on but is holding his socks in his hand as he comes down to the car park and opens the door.

‘Is the unclean preacher a woman?’ Joona asks.

‘I don’t think so,’ Rocky replies, looking him in the eye.

‘Do you remember Nelly Brandt?’

‘No,’ he says, getting in the passenger seat.

Joona removes the plastic covering the ignition cylinder, twines the red wires together, removes the tape from the brown starter wires and touches the ends together, causing a spark as the engine bursts into life.

‘I don’t know how much you remember from being hypnotised,’ Joona says as he drives. ‘But you talked about the first time you saw the unclean preacher… You met her at a funeral here in Sköldinge, but the person you described was the priest in the coffin, her father, Peter…’

Rocky doesn’t answer, just stares blankly through the windscreen as their speed increases along the narrow road through the fields and forest.

Joona thinks that the mother went to fetch her grown-up daughter from Klockhammar School and let her drive back.

Her mother was sitting next to her, maybe took her seat belt off when they turned off the main road and drove up to the church.

Nelly probably saw her father in the windows of the rectory as she suddenly put her foot down and drove straight into the wall.

Perhaps her mother wasn’t dead, just badly hurt and trapped in the wreckage.

In which case what Ellinor saw through the rain makes sense, Nelly fetched the car-jack from the boot and beat her mother in the face until she was dead.

Perhaps she set light to the car in front of her father’s eyes.

But after her mother’s death Nelly looked after him, isolated him from the world around him, keeping him to herself, and becoming everything for him.

Her father lived another two years. Nelly kept him locked up and helpless, keeping him in a cage and making him dependent on morphine.

She would let him out on Sundays and gave him sermons that she had written for the morning service.

He was broken, a wreck, an addict.

Joona thinks that they may have had fragments of normal life, it isn’t unusual that people who are held captive for a long period of time are allowed short periods of normal life with their captor. Perhaps they ate dinner together, sat on the sofa, watched particular television programmes.

In the end he worked out how to lock his cage from the inside, and slept on the mattress.

It’s possible that he died of an overdose, unless he just got ill.

A large number of priests attended the funeral, some of them sitting in the pews while others assisted with the ceremony.

One of those priests was Rocky Kyrklund from the parish of Salem.

They’ve just driven past Flen, and a lake is shimmering silver and blue to the right of the car as Joona takes out his phone, brings up a list of staff at the Karolinska Institute and finds a photograph of Nelly.

‘Look at this picture,’ he says.

Rocky takes the phone, holds the screen away from the daylight and then gasps for breath.

‘Stop!’ he roars. ‘Stop the car!’

He opens the door as they’re speeding along, but it hits a railing and bounces back, and glass from the broken window flies into the car. The door is hanging loose, scraping along the tarmac. Joona pulls over to the verge and comes to a halt with two wheels up on the grass.

A lorry blows its horn angrily behind them and passes so close that the ground shakes.

Rocky walks out into the field beside the road, striding past the plastic-wrapped bales of hay lying scattered across the ground, stops, and holds his face in his hands.