Stalker

48

Margot sees Adam waiting for her in the underground garage of Police Headquarters. His T-shirt is bulging because of the bandage round his chest. She walks towards him, but has to stop when the baby pushes upwards. The plastic-covered trestle tables are covered with objects seized from Filip Cronstedt’s storeroom, lined up and numbered, ready for analysis.

Another colleague approaches from the other direction, she hears him say something appreciative to Adam, then he carries on towards the lifts.

Adam’s weary face, with its dark shadow of stubble, looks brittle in the harsh lighting.

Behind him she can see that the work of cataloguing the vast amount of material seized is proceeding. On the first table lies a gilded bed-head, a wooden crate containing starched, folded linen, battered books and three pairs of trainers.

‘How are you feeling?’ Margot asks when she reaches Adam.

‘It’s nothing,’ he replies, putting his hand to his ribs. ‘My mind’s spinning, though, I keep seeing it all and thinking that I would have been dead if she’d angled the gun just a tiny bit more, three millimetres to the left.’

‘You should never have gone down there without backup.’

‘I made the decision that we had to go in… but I don’t think I really appreciated the state Joona was in – he collapsed on the floor and dropped his gun.’

‘He shouldn’t have been there anyway.’

‘It was a fuck up.’ He nods. ‘There’s going to be an internal inquiry… obviously, seeing as I was shot… but it will probably end up with the National Police-Related Crimes Unit, so we’ll need to talk that through.’

Margot looks at a faded school poster of the female anatomy. The eyes have been coloured in with blue chalk.

‘But without Joona, we’d never have caught Filip,’ she says.

‘I caught Filip, I was the one who did that. Joona was lying on the floor…’

The harsh glare from the fluorescent lights and magnifying lamps reflects off the plastic between the objects on the tables. Margot stops beside three video cameras with crushed lenses wrapped in ESD-proof packaging in a spacious cardboard box.

‘Is anyone trying to match Filip’s cameras with the videos of the victims?’ she asks.

‘I presume so.’

‘But you haven’t found the tongue-stud or the rest of the deer?’

‘Give it time,’ Adam smiles. ‘This is just the material from the storeroom. There’s no rush, the important thing is that it’s over, that we’ve got him.’

They pass a pile of hand-painted tin soldiers and Margot can’t help thinking that the rest of the little porcelain deer and the Saturn stud ought to be here, given that Filip was living in the storage facility at the time of the murders.

‘How sure are we that it’s him?’ she asks.

‘Filip’s in the operating theatre at the Karolinska, but as soon as he can talk we’ll get a confession out of him.’

‘Have you got anyone on guard there?’ she asks.

‘He was shot in the chest, one lung is wrecked, so I hardly think that’s necessary.’

‘Do it anyway.’

There are about twenty polaroid photographs of young women with bare chests in a small plastic folder.

‘If it will calm you down, I’ll sort it out as soon as I get upstairs,’ Adam replies.

‘I spoke to Joona in the hospital, and he seems to think that Filip didn’t commit the murders, and-’

‘What the fuck?’ Adam interrupts with an irritated smile. ‘I let Joona come with me because I felt sorry for him – that was a mistake I’m not going to repeat. We can’t let him play at being a detective.’

‘I agree,’ she says quickly.

‘He messed up, and he’s not coming anywhere near this investigation again.’

‘I’m just trying to say that this feels too easy,’ Margot says calmly, carrying on along the tables.

‘Filip was on the point of confessing when he was shot. He said he’d been creeping about outside Maria Carlsson’s windows,’ Adam says, turning to her with a grin. ‘He’s got no alibi for the evenings of the murders, he’s extremely violent, paranoid, and completely obsessed with cameras and surveillance-’

‘I know, but…’

‘He’d locked himself away with two women, you should have been there, he had them tied up with steel wire.’

Even though he is hollow-eyed and clearly short of sleep, there’s an underlying fire in his eyes, and his cheeks are flushed.

Adam stops and catches his breath, leans his knuckles on the nearest table for a while with his eyes closed.

The stress and exertions of the night come back to hit him like a heavy pendulum. He thinks about the ringing in his ears after the last shot, as blood trickled down his side and under the waist of his jeans before he managed to disarm one of the sisters.

He thinks of the huge dog that tried to rip him apart, and the orgy in the Birger Jarl Hotel, the unprotected sex with an unknown woman.

Tears well up in his eyes as he thinks about how little control he has, how little he knows about himself.

He suddenly feels an intense desire to go home to his wife, to curl up in his warm bed behind Katryna, to the smell of her hand cream and her ugly bed socks and the liver spots on her back that look almost like the Plough.

Margot walks past an old-fashioned gramophone, and stops in front of some jewellery on a piece of cardboard. She gets out a pen and pokes through the tarnished silver rings, brooches, broken chains and crucifixes. She picks up a heart-shaped charm with her pen just as her mobile rings.

Margot lets the heart fall back on to the cardboard, pulls out her phone and answers by giving her surname.

Something in her voice makes Adam turn towards her.

Margot will always remember this moment, the way they were standing in the bright light among Filip’s possessions, and how her heartbeat drowned out absolutely everything else for a few moments.

‘What is it?’ Adam says.

She stares at him, she can’t talk, her throat is so dry, and she realises that her jaw is trembling.

‘A film,’ she hisses. ‘We’ve received another film.’

‘Fuck,’ Adam swears, and starts running towards the lifts.

‘Call the hospital!’ Margot gasps as they hurry past the tables towards the lifts. ‘Check if Filip’s escaped.’

Adam presses the lift-button, then clutches his phone to his ear as she catches up with him. The machinery rumbles slowly. She’s moved too quickly and her pelvis is burning.

Adam holds the phone to his ear and shakes his head in her direction.

‘Has he gone?’ she gasps.

‘No answer,’ he says anxiously.

The lift stops two floors up and Margot presses the button again, whispering angry curses to herself.

Finally someone picks up at the hospital. A sluggish voice tells Adam that he’s reached the Intensive Care Unit.

‘My name is Adam Youssef, I’m a detective with the National Criminal Investigation Department, and I need to know if one of your patients, Filip Cronstedt, is still with you.’

‘Filip Cronstedt,’ the man at the other end says.

‘Listen, you have to listen,’ Adam pleads, and realises how incoherent he sounds. ‘I want you to go and see him and check that he’s there.’

The man sighs, as though he were indulging some sort of ridiculous whim, but Adam hears him put the phone down on his desk and walk away.

‘He’s gone to check,’ Adam tells Margot.

‘Make sure they confirm his identity,’ she says, as the lift doors close behind them.

They shuffle about like caged animals as they’re sucked up inside the building. Adam’s shoulder crumples a poster advertising a concert by the police choir.

‘Filip Cronstedt is still sedated,’ the slow voice finally tells Adam.

‘Filip’s sedated,’ Adam repeats.