The Quarry

45

Per got back to Casa Mörner an hour after midnight, once he had seen his father’s body transferred to a trolley and wheeled away by a porter.

The last thing one of the night nurses had done in Jerry’s room was to go over and open the window wide, the curtains fluttering as the cold night air swept in.

She turned to Per and gave him a brief, embarrassed smile. ‘I usually open the window when they’ve gone,’ she said. ‘To let the soul out.’

Per nodded. He looked over at the window and could almost see Jerry’s spirit drifting away through the night, like a shimmering silver ball outside the hospital. Would it sink down towards the ground, or float up to the stars?

He left Kalmar at half past midnight and drove slowly across the Öland bridge. As he drove north on the island he kept glancing in the rear-view mirror. A couple of times he saw headlights coming up behind him at high speed and gripped the wheel more tightly, but both cars overtook him.

Down by the quarry it was almost completely dark, with only a couple of outside lights showing over at the new houses. Per drove up to his little cottage, got out of the car and listened, but everywhere was quiet. The faint soughing of the wind, nothing else.

Then he heard the telephone ringing in the kitchen.

He began to walk slowly towards the house, and the phone continued to ring.

Markus Lukas, he thought. You’ve killed Bremer and now you’re hiding somewhere, wondering if you managed to kill my father.

He unlocked the door and followed the sound into the kitchen. He looked at the telephone for a few seconds, then picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’

No one spoke; all he could hear was an echoing sound, and rhythmic cries in the background.

It was a recording, Per realized, and he had heard it before. On Maundy Thursday someone had rung up and played exactly the same thing in the middle of the day.

And now he recognized what he was listening to — a girl crying out. It was the soundtrack from one of Jerry’s films.

He clutched the receiver tightly. ‘Talk to me,’ he said. ‘Why are you doing this?’

There was no answer — the soundtrack continued. He listened and closed his eyes. ‘You don’t need to play that... Jerry’s gone now,’ he went on. ‘You killed him.’

He held his breath and listened for some kind of response, but all he heard was the sound of the film for a few more seconds, then a click. The call was over.

He slowly replaced the receiver and saw his own pale face reflected in the kitchen window.

What was the message he had just been given? That this Markus Lukas intended to carry on? That he wasn’t just pursuing Jerry for what he’d done, whatever that might be, but the whole Mörner family? The sins of the father passed on to the children and grandchildren...

He got up and went back out into the night. To Ernst’s old workshop.

The trolls stared at him from the shelves lining the walls as he started to carry out Ernst’s tools. Hammers, saws, chisels, sledgehammers and wooden clubs — plenty of excellent weapons. Under the light outside the cottage, Per could see that many of the tools were blunt and worn, but some were sharp. There was a big axe for chopping wood that looked lethal. He raised it with both hands.

You want revenge? You just come here then. Come here and see if I’m prepared to pay for something my father did...

He took his weapons inside, locked the door and distributed them through the different rooms. He placed the axe next to his bed. Then he turned off the light and lay in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling and thinking of Markus Lukas, the man whose face was turned away.

Eventually he fell asleep.

Four hours later the rising sun woke him. He raised his head, blinked and saw the big axe within reach on the floor. It all came flooding back.

His father had been murdered and his daughter was seriously ill.

The world was cold and empty.

He lay in bed for an hour or so but couldn’t get back to sleep, and in the end he got up and had some breakfast. He looked at the telephone, but it remained silent.

After a while he picked up the receiver and made the necessary calls following the death of a relative: to a funeral director, to Jerry’s bank, and to the priest at the church where the funeral would take place.

Then he sat and stared out of the window, waiting for something to happen. But he had to occupy himself in the meantime. He took out his questionnaires.

He couldn’t work at the moment, of course, he just didn’t have the strength — so he started making up the answers. He filled in the forms himself, one after another. At first it was a slow process, but as time went by it became surprisingly easy to conjure up people who had seen an advert for a particular soap and were considering buying it. Some of them, like ‘Peter from Karlstad’ and ‘Christina from Uppsala’, were absolutely certain they would be making a purchase. They were convinced that this soap would give their life new meaning.

If Per hadn’t been feeling so bad, he would have laughed.

Making up his own answers was much quicker, too — in just a few hours he had done three days’ work. And his fear of Markus Lukas had begun to subside.

Afterwards he went into Jerry’s bedroom and looked around. His father hadn’t been there for long and had left few traces, not even his smell. A pair of scruffy flannel trousers was draped over the back of a chair, and Jerry’s briefcase was still lying on the bed.

Per went over and opened it. He had hoped there might be something important inside, but he found nothing but some pills for high blood pressure and two small spring-loaded hand grippers that Jerry had been given to help rebuild his strength after the stroke.

And the old copy of Babylon, of course.

He opened the magazine and looked at the photo sequences. But he wasn’t studying the young girls, just the man referred to in the caption as Markus Lukas, the man who never showed his face. In the pictures he looked about thirty; the magazine was twelve years old, so Markus Lukas must be in his forties now.

Per looked at the back of the man’s head and tried to imagine Markus Lukas behind the wheel of a car. Was this the man who had killed his father?

Suddenly he saw something he hadn’t noticed before: there was an arm sticking out in one of the pictures. It was pointing at the naked couple on the bed, and it was wearing two wristwatches. One gold, and one stainless steel.

It was Jerry’s arm. Per looked at it for a long time.

The telephone rang twice on Monday evening. The first call was from a reporter on an evening paper who had somehow found out that Jerry was dead and that Per was his son. He’d heard that Jerry had died in a car accident ‘in mysterious circumstances’, and asked a long series of questions, but Per refused to give him any answers.

‘Ring the police,’ was his only response.

‘Are you intending to take over?’ asked the reporter. ‘Are you going to run his porn empire from now on?’

‘There is no empire,’ said Per, and put the phone down.

The second call was from Marika.

‘How are you feeling, Per?’

It sounded as if she really wanted to know.

He sighed. ‘Oh, you know.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been spending much time with Nilla... Things will get better.’

Marika made no comment on that. ‘I’ve got some news,’ she said.

‘Good news or bad news?’

‘Good,’ she said, but she didn’t sound particularly optimistic. ‘A vascular surgeon from Lund has been in touch, a friend of Dr Stenhammar. Apparently he’s prepared to operate around Nilla’s aorta. He thinks it’s “a challenge”, so he wants to make an attempt.’

An attempt, thought Per, feeling a heavy, icy clump in his stomach.

‘Good,’ he said.

‘He can’t make any promises. Stenhammar said that several times.’

In some African countries children die like flies, thought Per. Like flies. It will be nothing more than a notice in the paper.

‘Are you worried?’

‘Of course I am, Marika.’

‘So am I, but, I mean, I’ve got Georg... Do you want Jesper to come and stay with you for a while?’

‘No,’ Per said quietly. ‘It’s best if he stays with you.’

He glanced at his reflection in the dark kitchen window, at his tired, frightened eyes, and he knew that Jesper couldn’t come back to the cottage. Not until the troll had been slain.