Stalker

120

Joona sits there with the engine running, picks his phone off the floor and tries to call Erik again. Rocky stands in the field with his face turned up towards the sky for a long while before returning to the car. He yanks the broken door off, tosses it in the ditch and gets back in his seat.

‘I remember her,’ he says without looking at Joona. ‘She had her head shaved, pale as candle-wax, she went to Klockhammar School… After the funeral I had sex with her on the floor of the hall in the rectory… it didn’t mean anything, we’d been talking and drinking coffee, and I was in no hurry to get home.’

Joona says nothing, aware that even though the photograph triggered Rocky’s memory, the flood of information is finite. He could lose touch with his past again at any moment.

‘I remember it all,’ Rocky says dreamily. ‘She came looking for me in Salem, came to the services… She was just there, as part of my life, without me really realising how it had happened…’

He drifts off in thought and pokes a cigarette out of the packet with trembling hands. His rough grey hair is frizzy and his thick eyebrows have tightened across the top of his nose.

‘I’m a priest,’ he says eventually. ‘But I’m also a man… I do things I might not always be proud of. I’m not boyfriend material, I’m clear about that, I’ve never been faithful or…’

He falls silent again as if the strength of his memories has taken his breath away.

‘Sometimes I slept with her, sometimes she had to wait, I never promised her anything, I didn’t want her fucking sermons… I remember, it was always about me watching out for promiscuous women… “Her house is the way to hell”…’

The car shakes as a bus drives past, and Joona sees Rocky gaze out across the field and lake at the little cluster of trees in the distance.

‘When I told her I was fed up with her, she disappeared,’ he goes on. ‘But I understood that she was still creeping around outside the rectory… I opened the door and shouted into the darkness, telling her to leave me the fuck alone.’

He stops talking again and Joona waits in silence so as not to pull Rocky out of his fragile reminiscences.

‘The following evening she came to the church with twenty capsules of white heroin and it all started again… it went fucking fast,’ he says, looking gloomily at Joona. ‘I was hooked as good as instantly. We shared needles, she followed me everywhere, talking about God, preaching, sank into squalor with me, wanted to be with me, wanted to be part of me.’ He shakes his head and rubs his face.

‘We hung out at the Zone, I didn’t care about all her preaching… it was mostly extreme interpretations of the Bible, proof that we should get married… a whole worldview in which a jealous God proved her right.’

A trace of pain flashes in his eyes as he looks darkly at Joona.

‘I was drugged and stupid,’ he says. ‘I told her I loved Natalia. It wasn’t true, but I still said it.’

All the energy goes out of him and his chin sinks to his chest.

‘Natalia had such beautiful hands,’ he says, then falls silent.

His face is suddenly very pale and he looks out at the fields. His forehead is shiny with sweat, and a drop falls from his nose on to his chest.

‘You were talking about Natalia,’ Joona says after a while.

‘What?’

Rocky looks at him uncomprehendingly, leans out of the car and spits on the grass. A car pulling a trailer full of chopped wood drives past.

‘Nelly showed pictures of the people she was planning to kill,’ Joona goes on. ‘But Natalia had to die in front of you…’

Rocky shakes his head.

‘All I know is that God lost me somewhere along the way, and didn’t bother to go back and look,’ he mutters hoarsely.

Joona doesn’t say anything more. He takes his phone out and calls Erik’s number again, but still can’t get through.

He calls Margot but gives up after ten rings.

Now he knows who the preacher is, but he can’t prove anything, and he’s got nothing to give the police. There’s a chance that Margot might listen to him, but he may well have gone too far when he broke Rocky out of jail.

Joona tries to understand why Nelly has been stalking Erik. They’re only colleagues, and Nelly is married to Martin Brandt. It must have been going on for years, and it isn’t going to end well.