The Rabbit Hunter

30

David Jordan kicks his shoes off. He’s on the phone with the director of programming for news and social affairs at TV4.

The director is explaining that he’s putting together a long item about the Foreign Minister for the ten p.m. news.

DJ heads into the house and walks to the dining room. Light reflecting off the choppy sea floods in through the windows.

‘Did you know that Rex Müller and the Foreign Minister were old friends?’ DJ asks.

‘Really?’

‘And I think... well, I know that Rex would be happy to contribute if you wanted a personal angle,’ he says, his eyes wandering over the rocks down towards the jetty.

‘That would be great.’

‘I’ll tell him to give you a call.’

‘Yes, as soon as possible, please,’ the director says.

Waves are breaking over the jetty. The boat is straining at its ropes, its fenders bouncing against the water.

When they hang up DJ sends Rex a text telling him that the director of programming took the bait, but that he should wait forty minutes before calling so as not to appear too eager.

DJ has already composed a number of posts for Rex to use on social media. He’s fairly confident that those posts, combined with the television interview, will be enough to prevent a scandal. If people do find out that Rex pissed into the Foreign Minister’s swimming pool, they’ll interpret his action as a final prank between old friends. Rex will say that he’s sure the Foreign Minister must have burst out laughing when he looked at the security-camera footage before his morning swim.

DJ stays by the window. Thoughts are running through his mind. He’s taken care of Rex’s problem, and now it’s time to get to grips with his own. A lot of things have happened in his life recently that he can’t talk to anyone about.

Rex would listen, of course, but DJ’s job is to help Rex, not burden him with his own worries.

DJ goes into the kitchen and stops in front of the black leather folder on the marble counter, thinking that he should at least look at its contents before making a decision.

The waves below are lit up like molten glass.

David Jordan reaches out and tries to open the catch of the folder with his right hand, but can’t do it. It’s too stiff. His fingers don’t seem to have any strength. An immense tiredness settles over him. His neck can barely manage to hold his head up.

He fumbles weakly in his pockets, finds the little tub of Modiodal, and tips the pills onto the counter. He lets go of the empty container, which rolls onto the floor as he puts one pill on his tongue and swallows.

He can no longer close his mouth, but feels the tablet slip down his throat. Very gently he tries to lie down, and ends up on his side. He closes his eyes, but can still see the light through his eyelids.

He wakes up on the floor half an hour later.

David Jordan has suffered from narcolepsy and cataplexy for seven years. Whenever he gets upset or scared, he loses control of certain muscles and falls asleep.

According to his doctor, the disorder — which is inherited — was probably triggered by strep throat, even if he prefers to say that it’s because he was part of some secret experiment when he was in the military.

He sits up. His mouth feels completely dry. He leans on the floor with both hands, gets to his feet, head throbbing, and gazes out at the sea.

He tries to gather his thoughts before looking at the leather folder again.

His hands are shaking as he opens it and pulls out the contents.

He leafs through the information about Carl-Erik Ritter. His heart is beating so hard that his ears roar as he stares at the photograph.

He tries to find some sort of inner calm, and concentrates on reading.

After a while he has to put the documents down, go over to the cupboard and pour himself a glass of Macallan.

DJ drinks it, then refills the glass.

He’s thinking about his mother, and closes his eyes tightly to hold back the tears.

He isn’t a good son. He works too hard and doesn’t visit her nearly enough.

She’s ill, he knows that, but he still has difficulty accepting her dark moods.

He feels ashamed that his visits always make him feel so awful.

Most of the time she doesn’t say a word to him, doesn’t even look at him, just lies there in bed staring out of the window.

Throughout David Jordan’s childhood his mother received treatment for depression, delusions and self-destructive behaviour. A year ago he had her moved to an exclusive clinic that specialises in long-term psychiatric care.

There her depression is being treated as a side-effect of chronic PTSD. Her medication and therapy have been drastically adjusted.

The last time he visited she was no longer lying passively in bed. She took the flowers he had brought and put them in a vase with shaking hands. The illness and various medications have made his mother look very old.

They sat at a small table in her room drinking tea from cups with deep saucers, and eating ginger biscuits.

She kept repeating that she should have cooked him a proper meal, and each time he replied that he’d already eaten.

A film of raindrops covered the little window.

Her eyes were timid and embarrassed, and her hand fluttered anxiously over the buttons of her cardigan when he asked how she was, if the new medication was better.

‘I know I haven’t been a good mother,’ she said.

‘Yes, you have.’

He knew it was because of the altered medication, but this was the first time in many years that his mother had spoken directly to him.

She looked at him and explained in an almost scripted way that her suicide attempts when he was young were a reaction to trauma.

‘Have you started to talk to your therapist about the accident?’ he asked.

‘Accident?’ she repeated with a smile.

‘Mum, you know you’re not well, and sometimes you weren’t able to take care of me, so I went to live with Grandma.’

Slowly she put her cup down on the saucer, then told him about the horrific rape.

She described the whole sequence of events in a subdued voice.

The fragments of memory were sometimes chillingly precise, and sometimes she sounded almost delusional.

But suddenly everything made sense to David Jordan.

His mother never let him see her naked when he was little, but he still managed to catch glimpses of the scars on her thighs and her damaged breasts.

‘I never reported it,’ she whispered.

‘But...’

He remembers how she sat there with her thin hand over her mouth, sobbing, then whispered the name Carl-Erik Ritter.

His cheeks flushed. He tried to say something, but suffered his worst ever attack of narcolepsy.

DJ woke up on the floor to find his mother patting his cheek. He almost couldn’t believe it.

He had spent his entire adult life being disappointed in his mother for not fighting harder against her depression.

A car crash can be a terrible thing, but she had survived, after all. She got out OK.

Now he could see how fragile she was. Her aged body was still frightened, still flinched instinctively, always expecting violence and pain.

Some times were better than others, and sometimes they lived almost normally, but then she would fall into a deep hole, and it had been impossible for her to take care of him.

He feels so incredibly sorry for his mother.

Even though he knows there’s no point, he has tracked down Carl-Erik Ritter in order to be able to look into his eyes. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe DJ doesn’t even need to ask Ritter if he ever thinks about what he did, if he has any idea of the suffering he caused.

While Carl-Erik Ritter’s life went on, the rape condemned his mother to a life of recurrent depression and multiple suicide attempts.

Ritter might deny everything. The event is buried deep in the past, and the statute of limitations on the crime has long since passed. But DJ can still tell him that he knows what happened.

Since Ritter has nothing to fear legally he may even be prepared to talk.

He turns over the picture and looks at the face again.

David Jordan knows that the meeting probably won’t grant him any relief, but he can’t stop thinking about it. He needs to face his mother’s attacker.