The Rabbit Hunter

98

Jeanette Fleming is standing next to a lilac bush, staring at rows of brown houses. The silver clip in her short hair glitters in the sunlight. She’s wearing a tight skirt and has a Glock 26 in a holster under her jacket.

In the distance she sees her plain-clothes colleagues from Stockholm Police ring the doorbell of the neglected house at the far end of the street.

The NOU have traced Sammy’s phone here.

Rex’s son could be the only person who knows where his father and the spree killer, David Jordan Andersen, are.

The officers wait a few moments before ringing again.

Some children bike by, and a woman in a burka walks past pulling a wheeled suitcase.

The door opens and Jeanette sees the officers say something to a figure in the hallway before going inside.

Her colleagues’ only task is to make sure the house is safe so Jeanette can conduct a brief interview with Sammy there.

Jeanette thinks about how pale her boss had looked when he came into her office after Anja Larsson demanded that he loan Jeanette to them as part of the ongoing collaboration between the two bodies.

She walks around the block of houses and stops at the back. Unlike the other yards, this one is overgrown and wild. She can see an old barbecue through the tall weeds, and there are rusted bicycle parts on the cracked stepping stones.

There’s no sign of movement behind the closed blinds.

Jeanette gets her lipstick out of her bag and touches up her make-up. She thinks about the fact that even though she is the best psychological interviewer in the country, she has very little understanding of her own behaviour.

She was on a job with Saga Bauer, at a service station southwest of Nyköping.

Jeanette still can’t understand what happened.

She hadn’t really believed people actually did that sort of thing.

It could have been tragic, it could have been comical, but her surprise and embarrassment had turned to genuine, unexpected, and inexplicable lust.

The anonymous copulation had taken a couple of minutes at most, and she didn’t have time to regret her actions before she felt him come. She was so surprised that she gasped ‘Stop!’ and pulled away, stumbling and hitting her knee on the floor. She’d rinsed her mouth and crotch, then sat back down on the toilet to let the semen trickle out of her.

For hours afterwards she felt mentally numb, and ever since she has been veering between feeling stupid and feeling oddly liberated.

Sometimes when she sees men out in the street, often older men, ugly and coarse, she is overwhelmed by shame and has to look away, her cheeks burning.

But morally it’s really no worse than meeting someone in a bar and ending up in bed with them, no worse than a silly sexual fantasy, a meaningless fuck.

She’s asked herself if she subconsciously did it to punish her prudish ex-husband, who was even worried about her masturbating, or her sister, who was so reckless and promiscuous as a teenager but who is now the perfect little wife.

In truth, she thinks she needed to do it for her own sake, to redefine her view of herself. She did it because it was possible, and because the transgressive act just happened to turn her on at the time.

Ever since then she has been expecting to start feeling bad, to be punished somehow, but it wasn’t until yesterday that her anxieties caught up with her.

The day before yesterday she had a physical at work, as she does every year. They run blood pressure, blood samples, ECG, TSH — then twenty-four hours later she can log in and check her results.

The doctor would only comment if any of the results was abnormal.

Jeanette hadn’t actually thought about it until then, but she suddenly found herself panicking. When she was sitting in front of her computer about to log in, she felt utterly terrified that she might have been infected with HIV.

Her ears were roaring.

The list of results on the screen was incomprehensible.

When she saw that the medical officer had written a comment, her field of vision contracted with fear.

She’d gone to the bathroom to rinse her face with cold water before she could return to the screen.

There was nothing about HIV.

The only comment the doctor had made was that the hCG levels in her blood indicated that she was pregnant.

It still hasn’t properly sunk in.

She spent eight years waiting for her husband to get around to thinking about having children, and then he walked out on her. After a long series of failed dates she decided to apply for artificial insemination. Two weeks ago she received a final refusal from the health service, and now she’s pregnant.

Jeanette is still smiling when she gets the call from inside the house.