The badger, p.23
The Badger, page 23
Meeting Martin had unleashed memories within her. Memories that had been preying on her mind ever since. Nevertheless, she had managed to keep them at bay, hiding them behind her jogging routines and endless Tinder dates. Now they were washing over her.
Somehow they had both lived almost eighteen years in the same area, gone to the same schools and shared the same circles, without ever meeting. When they finally did meet, it became clear that they shared the same longing for something other than their residential suburb in Östersund.
They had ended up at the same party by chance, on a veranda sharing a smoke. They had been out the back, looking across a snow-covered field, while inside the party was going on in the steaming heat without them. They had talked until they were both shivering with cold. It had been her suggestion they warmed each other up instead of going inside. She had fitted so nicely in his arms, inside his overly thin jacket. They were going to get out of Östersund together, as soon as high school was done.
Cecilia smiled at that particular memory. That half hour in the freezing cold was something she would take to her grave. Nothing could take it away from her, rich as it was with scents and emotions. His slightly too heavy aftershave, lingering tobacco smoke and the hint of teenage sweat on the inside of his jacket. Pounding hearts and overwhelming early love, threatening to burst out of their chests.
In those days, she had been a little too bold for her own good. Staying as healthy as she had done, despite all of her bad habits, amazed her, especially as she now rarely drank more than one beer a week and hadn’t smoked since she was twenty-six. No drugs either, not since the months she spent in Thailand and Australia. That kind of sorcery with the senses belonged to her past, there was nothing in it for her anymore. All of that had been replaced with training and work.
The intimacy she’d shared with Martin, she had replaced with integrity. She had had more short-lived relationships than she could count. No one had come as close as he did, and very likely no one would either. She didn’t let anyone into her life, not after how badly she had treated him. Every time she thought about it she felt ashamed, until she managed to forget about it again.
Winter turned to summer. They had sung songs to welcome the spring and run out on a school-leaver’s high. Summer vanished into unlimited freedom. The heat of the sun brought them ever closer, but as soon as autumn started looming, everything cooled off. They didn’t realise it themselves, but they were drifting apart. Martin had his computers. He already knew more than most, but wanted to learn more. He applied to universities and institutes and eventually got into Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. Cecilia had no such ambitions. She simply wanted to enjoy her freedom once her studies were over. She wanted to see the world, not read a load of boring books and sit in front of screens. She wanted to live, experience sights and sounds that were not to be found in Sweden. When Martin packed for his journey to Gothenburg, she packed too.
She filled her hiking backpack with everything she needed. It was on the floor of her room when they made love for the last time. He believed she was going to follow him to Gothenburg. But in her top pouch was her airline ticket to Bangkok, where she was going to start a journey of her own. She didn’t even know where to herself, but Gothenburg wasn’t part of the plan. She couldn’t tell him so, when he finally boarded the train, it was without her.
Cecilia shut her eyes tightly so she wouldn’t cry every time she thought about it. She couldn’t believe she had been so weak. She hadn’t uttered a whisper, hadn’t even replied to his text asking after her. She had just vanished into the world, away from him. Her shame over who she was at the time only came later. But she was no longer that same girl who had left Östersund. Not even the same woman who had gone to police training college and fought her way up the ranks. Today she was Cecilia Wreede, Detective Inspector, leader of the Badger unit.
Competent, but more cynical and disillusioned than she wanted to be.
She wiped her tears from her cheeks and picked up her mobile again. Her fingers tapped a reply on the illuminated keys on the screen.
Been really ages. I’ve got quite a bit on right now, but sure let’s talk.
That was the only choice she had. Anything else would have let him down yet again. She couldn’t live with that.
She closed Messenger, her finger hovering as usual above her Tinder app. But this time it didn’t feel right. She hesitated, then she turned off her screen.
59
TUESDAY 11 OCTOBER
Am I alone when I crawl in the earth around your house, or am I accompanied by the creatures you have roused with the progress of the mechanical diggers?
Annika woke to thuds and scrapes. She shivered, pulled the covers tighter to her body and tried to convince herself that it was only a dream. But the sounds didn’t stop. On the contrary, they sounded more and more distinct, as if they were coming from inside the house. Her arm slid up and covered her ears. But it wasn’t enough. The sounds were drawing increasingly near, like slow footsteps, only to then stop all at once. She felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. The feeling that someone was watching her. She pulled herself up and looked around the dark bedroom. There was no one there. The room was calm and quiet. Martin was lying with his back to her, on his side of the bed, near the edge. He turned around and looked at her, his eyes half open.
“What’s up?” he said, groggy with sleep. “Are you walking in your sleep again?”
She placed a hand on his arm. “I think I was just dreaming. You go to sleep.”
“Okay,” he said, turning around again.
Annika sat still in the darkness, catching her breath. The sweat on her arms cooled her skin now it was no longer covered. The tip of her nose was cold, despite the window being closed. She held it with her fingers for a while. She noticed a tickling between her toes. She moved them and felt something rolling over the top of her foot. She pulled the covers aside to see what it was.
Small clumps of dry, black earth.
She scowled and rubbed her feet together out of one side of the bed. The soles of her feet were cold. It felt wrong, but she couldn’t think why. For a while she wondered if she had been walking in her sleep at all. Her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth and she decided to go and get something to drink. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and placed her feet on the floor. The floor felt bitty, as if it was covered in small pieces of grit. Annika turned on her phone torch to look. She shone the light across the floor, without knowing what she expected to find.
There were footprints on the floor, damp ones left by dirty, bare feet that were going from the hall up to her bed. There were small clumps of earth in certain places, more and more of them the further along she looked. The footprints had accumulated next to each other nearest the bed. As if someone had been standing there, watching her sleep.
Annika held her hand to her mouth so as not to scream. She didn’t want to wake Martin, he would only think she was walking in her sleep again. Or that she was going mad. But she knew what she saw. Someone had gone into the bedroom and stood at her bed. But where had that person then gone?
Nausea was slowly rising in the back of her throat. There were no footprints going out from the room, just those coming in. Whoever had been here must still be around. She closed her eyes, trying to breathe for a few seconds, then she peered beneath the bed. Holding her phone with a trembling hand, she shone the light underneath to look. But there was no one there. Just dust and one of Martin’s socks. The red and blue one with stripes he had been looking for. Annika felt her breathing becoming easier. There was no crazed killer under her bed, at least.
She gathered her thoughts by straightening out her hair with her fingers, twirling it and placing it over her shoulder as she tried to think. Even though she had established that no one was in the bedroom, she needed to know how the footprints had got there. She got out of bed and followed them into the hall. The further away she went from the bed, the more the earth was spread out among them. She could see impressions of toes in the damp marks on the floor. Her head felt heavy with sleep, woozy with worry. In the harshness of the LED light, everything felt strange. As she shone her mobile torch up the staircase, the trellis by the stairs cast long streaky shadows towards the living room. The gilded titles on the book spines were shining on the bookcase.
The footprints had travelled up the stairs from the lower floor.
Realising what this meant sent her heartbeat racing. Her aching head was throbbing. Whoever left those footprints behind had come up from downstairs. From the entertainment room, or even worse: from the basement.
The echo of the scraping sounds which had just woken her up were now making her knees buckle and she collapsed to the floor, paralysed with terror.
It just couldn’t be. After all, Martin and Annika were alone in the house.
Or were they?
60
WEDNESDAY 11 NOVEMBER, SIX YEARS EARLIER
You choose what to believe. Either they exist, or it’s me just wanting to scare you a bit. The only thing I can guarantee is real are the murders.
Jan Apelgren felt trickles of rainwater tickling his scalp. He was leaning on the backrest of a bench by the River Säve, looking over the bushes towards the yellow light from the main entrance to the company headquarters of SKF. The wood was wet and slimy against his palms and he was feeling equally slippery and miserable.
He shouldn’t be standing there, like a menacing shadow in the autumn rain, swathed in an oilskin coat he had bought second hand. He ought to be at home, writing. He ought to believe that his wife wasn’t deceiving him. But he didn’t and he hated himself for it. So he was standing there instead, waiting for Therese to appear from work. She was going to meet some friends for dinner, she had said. He was going to follow her to see where she was actually going.
The past few weeks had been lost to an illusion of routine. Days went by, slowly. Most of the time he would stare at his screen, not writing. Sometimes he ended up reading writer forums on Facebook for hours on end without interacting. All the time it was the same questions, from more or less the same people doing all they could to be visible. “What do you guys think about this blurb?” “How should I publish my book?” “This is the opening to my first book, do you want to read more?” Some slightly more established writers cross-posted the same thing to several forums. “Doesn’t the cover of my latest book look great?”
Jan despised their optimism. There he was instead, his dream of being a writer having soured into a gloomy nightmare, waiting for an opportunity to expose his wife for being unfaithful. He had sunk that low.
One day the excavation company had been there, completing the pit around the rest of the house. The digger, with its diesel engine, had been revving up and down, making sounds that reminded Jan of the ferocious roars of a mechanical dinosaur. When the bucket on the digger had dragged against the wall, his body would writhe until the engine was switched off and silence reigned again. But no one had yet come to complete the rest of the work. Outside, their garden looked worse than before.
In the evenings he would drink far too much. Most of the time he would have started drinking by lunch. The scrapings still came each night, but they would lessen when he placed the palm of his hand against the wallpaper. It was a silent communication with the unknown on the other side of the wall. Until the whispers began. They were not as sharp-edged as the scraping sounds, more pleasant as well as more terrifying. Subtle, yet intrusively close. They lured him, encouraged him, growing in strength when he looked at Therese. Her sleeping body seemed increasingly like a piece of meat beside him in bed. The whispers encouraged him to see her as such, not as a human being.
Yet, he wanted to give her one last chance. If she was telling the truth, if she was still being faithful to him, he might be able to resist the whispers. Or at least stop listening to them.
One after another, people were coming out of the building. Some alone, others in groups. Everyone was walking away from work with a sense of purpose, on their way to other things. He looked at them as if they were an alien species. Then Therese came out. It pulled at his heart when he saw her. She was in the same clothes as she had been that morning. A sober grey suit over a sky blue blouse. She buttoned her coat as she walked to the tram, her heels click-clacking as they tapped the tarmac.
Jan drew his oilskin coat tighter to his body. It had a musty odour of damp and body heat. He doubted she would recognise him, not in the darkness and with his dark green coat on. All the same, he hesitated several seconds before following her. He entered her carriage as far away from her as it was possible to go without losing sight of her. It was fuggy inside, full of people and the smell of wet dog. The tram screeched and clattered its way to Drottningtorget via the express line beside the railway. Therese stepped off and hurried across the square to Hotel Post, went up the wide staircase from the bar to the restaurant.
Jan’s heart sank like a stone as she greeted three other women with laughter and big hugs. They were waiting for her at a table. He took a few steps back to keep his cover. His legs would barely carry him, so he stumbled up to a bar and signalled for a beer.
He was a waste of space. He sipped his beer, fighting back the tears that were welling up. He had been wrong, she hadn’t been lying to him. But despite his sense of shame, it all felt better now. The doubt he had been living with for so long was lifting out of him. His anguish was mixed with relief as he covertly observed Therese and her friends talking and laughing across the room. He realised that he recognised two of them, though he didn’t recall their names. They had been at their house several times.
He smiled, feeling his chest swell. At first he didn’t know what it was, then he remembered his feeling of love, the one which had once drawn him to Therese. He left his beer untouched and stood up to leave when yet another person joined the party. A man, dressed in a dark suit. Jan felt his heart beating uneasily and sank down onto his bar stool again. Therese stood up and gave him a close embrace, then she presented him to the others. What is going on? thought Jan. Before even noticing it himself, he had easily knocked back half of his beer. It inflamed the rage that was bubbling inside him, like petrol on a fire.
The man was standing in a power-pose, his back towards him, as Therese gathered up her coat and bag. Leaving her friends behind, she followed him towards the stairs down to the reception. Jan stayed where he was until they had gone past, worried about being discovered. The three women at the table were talking discreetly, their heads hardly apart. They were looking alternately anxious and giggly, as if the secrets they were exchanging were titillating their imagination.
Jan followed his wife and the unknown man as quickly as he could down the stairs. They were walking so closely to each other that their shoulders collided with each step. Their fingers were intertwined between their hips. They made no attempt to hide their attraction. Instead it came across to Jan as if they wanted to show it off to the world. They were like loved-up teenagers who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
His blood was boiling with hate. It flashed before his eyes. He wanted to run up and land a punch on the man’s jaw. In his mind’s eye he pictured a bloody tooth rattling across the stone floor, the man holding his mouth to stop the blood flow from Jan’s fist. But he kept out of sight, remembered the whispers and kept a cool head. Now wasn’t the right time.
Therese and the man disappeared into a lift. Jan saw them starting to kiss even before the doors slid shut.
His chin quivered. His hands were making tightly clenched fists and his nails were digging painfully into his palms. When he came out of the hotel, he drew in a jerky breath of rain sodden air. His head was spinning and his stomach was doing somersaults. He hated himself for being right after all. She was deceiving him as he thought, was cheating on him with other men without even making a secret of it to her girlfriends. How the hell could she? And how the hell could they simply sit there and smile as she showed off her lover? Why didn’t anyone say something to him? No one was on his side.
Everybody was betraying him.
They would have to pay for it soon enough.
61
TUESDAY 11 OCTOBER
Have you deceived and lied, or are you safe in the knowledge that you’re not the one I’m looking for?
“Sweetheart, what’s up?”
Annika was sitting with her legs up against her chest and her back against the wall panelling. She didn’t know how long she had been sitting like that. This time she had shifted her gaze from the stairs to Martin. His hair was a mess after his sleep. She was hugging her phone against her chest but didn’t answer.
Martin looked at the footprints. He frowned and squatted beside her. “Hey, what are you doing? Aren’t you sleeping?”
Annika’s heart felt like a trapped bird behind her ribs. “Whose footprints are they?” she said in a low voice. “Are there any more in the house?”
Martin shook his head. “No.”
“How do you know? What if they broke in downstairs?”
“How would they get past the home security system without the intruder alarm going off?” He paused and gave a sigh. “It’s the middle of the night. Can’t we talk about this tomorrow?”
“Is it you?” said Annika. The words hurt her, but she couldn’t stop them. “Because it’s not me, and if it isn’t anyone else, it must be you.”
“Annika…”
“I fell asleep before you did. What were you actually doing when I was sleeping?”
“I was working,” said Martin. “For far too long, I know. But I was at my desk down there the whole time until I went to bed.” He nodded towards the stairs. “There’s no one there. Otherwise I’d have seen something, wouldn’t I?”
