The badger, p.28
The Badger, page 28
“Read the text,” said Annika. She breathed in sharply through her nose as if to keep her emotions within.
Martin scrolled through the notifications he had from Twitter, Facebook and a few other apps. Then he saw the text from Cecilia. His chest lurched. He had read it on his phone and knew what it said. Only now did he realise how wrongly it could be read. How Annika had read it.
He tried to smile, but by now his joy had been swallowed by the chasm in his chest. “You don’t understand, it…” he started to say. He didn’t get any further.
“Do you think I’m soft in the head?” said Annika. She articulated each word exactly. She was still composed. Far too calm. The knots in her neck were as taut as the strings on a violin. “Now I get why you’ve been working late every bloody night.”
“Annika, no,” he said. He fell rather than sat on the chair. His body was trembling. Not now, not like this. She had to understand. But he didn’t know what to say. The only words coming out of his mouth were the truth. “It’s not what you think.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say? So go on then, tell me. What am I thinking?”
Martin was silent. He had promised not to say anything about the Badger, but if he didn’t, Annika wouldn’t believe him. He shook his head and looked into her eyes.
“You just have to trust me,” he said. His voice barely reached her. “You don’t need to worry, everything’s going to be all right. I can’t tell you everything just yet, but I will soon.”
“You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”
Martin nodded. “Yes, but not like you think.”
“You disgust me,” said Annika. “Is that clear enough for you? She accuses me of murder and you go behind my back with her.”
“No. Darling, listen.”
“Don’t you call me that. I just can’t go there, do you even get that?” The tears were welling up in Annika’s eyes.
Martin was about to cry too. He held up his hands in supplication. “I looked her up when you were at your worst state. I just wanted to talk to someone. It was stupid, but I’m not cheating.”
“Is that so? But hey, I get it. She is cute. And she’s not the crazy one. Make the most of it while you’ve got the chance, I say.”
Her words cut him to the quick. He felt his tears burning his eyes and his voice becoming croaky. “I’m telling the truth,” he uttered thinly. He cradled his face in his hands and wept. He heard her quivering gasps as she did the same thing. “I promised I wasn’t going to say, but I’m going to anyway. You’re no longer a suspect. They’ve caught the Badger. Do you understand? It’s over, we can rebuild our lives.”
Annika stopped weeping. She sat back in her chair with her arms folded. “No,” she said.
“Love, it’s true. Just wait a few days.”
“It’s too late,” said Annika, turning her eyes away from him. “But you are right about one thing. It is over. We can rebuild our lives. Separately.”
Martin felt his tears pouring down his cheeks. “What do you mean?”
Annika nodded into the bedroom. “I’ve packed your bag. Take it and go.”
“Please, Annika, don’t do this. I love you.”
“I love you too. But I want you to leave now.”
74
FRIDAY 4 NOVEMBER
That can’t be allowed to happen. Can you help me? If I hold out my hand, will you take it?
Annika remained at the table while Martin collected his things. She was drinking up her wine in large gulps to resist any urge to spring to her feet and stop him. It was bland, only bitter as it went down.
She said nothing as Martin looked at her pleadingly from the hall. She sat in her chair, solid like a statue, until he finally left her. As the door closed she collapsed over the table, crying her eyes out. It felt as if life as she knew it had been yanked from under her feet.
When she went to top up her glass, she saw that the wine bottle on the table was empty. She stumbled out of her chair and opened another one. The screw cap rattled as she threw it into the sink. She put the bottle to her mouth and drank until there was no more air in her lungs. Gasping at the kitchen counter, bottle in one hand, her eyes covered with the other, she burst into tears again. By the end, she was drinking and crying in turns until the bottle was finished. She put it on the counter, managing to overturn it at the same time and then swayed out of the kitchen to head off to bed. She wanted to sleep all of the events of that evening away. She had an empty stomach and the alcohol was making her head spin. Maybe she would be stronger tomorrow, but right now she was simply seeking the empty solace of oblivion.
As she approached the stairs, she heard a whisper from the darkened entertainment room. She stopped and listened. Tensing, clenching and opening erratically, her hands seemed to be grasping for something to hold on to. The whispers ceased as soon as she tried to focus her hearing. There was silence again. Her eyes narrowed in anger and she took a step down the stairs. “If you want something, you’re going to have to speak up,” she called.
She stumbled to the bottom of the stairs and rocked unsteadily on her feet in the middle of the floor, looking around the room in the darkness. The trees seemed to be leaning over the house, like sinister creatures of the shadows.
“Right, here I am!” she called. Her voice bounced off the stone walls. “Want something, did you?”
The plastic housing the black screens on Martin’s desk was shining in the light coming down from the floor above. She strode over to the desk and took hold of one of the cables. The screens teetered sideways as she pulled. She grabbed one of them, held it over her head for a few seconds and then dropped it. The crash of glass and plastic on stone echoed around the room as the screen shattered against the clinker floor.
“Can’t you hear me? Here I am, come on and get me!”
She swiped the second screen off the table, along with the keyboard, the mouse and the empty laptop stand. As the whole lot hit the floor with a cacophony, she followed it with her foot, stamping hard on the back of the screen. The ridged plastic burst with a satisfying crack, scattering fractured splinters in all directions. The pain shot through the sole of her foot. She fell backwards and stopped herself from going over by putting her hand on the chair. It didn’t stay put and she landed on the floor.
Her sock turned red. She was bleeding from the arch of her foot where a plastic splinter had gone in. She sat on the floor, staring at the devastation until the tears came back to her eyes once more. With her tears came an outpouring of emotions.
Rage. Sorrow. Disappointment. Hate.
She put her hands to her face, shaking and crying. Her head was pounding and reeling from far too much wine. She collapsed, lying on her side as she pressed her hands over her face to shut the world out. Then she heard them again. The whispers. Long, prolonged scraping sounds as if someone was dragging a rake against the concrete outside. Sometimes from one wall, sometimes from the other. From the floor beneath her. Next came a wave of vibrations through the floor. Something was thumping violently on the external wall close to her. The wallpaper by the stairs split open and the falling plaster behind showered across the staircase, all the way down to the floor.
Annika cried out and crawled into the foetal position on the cold basement floor.
75
WEDNESDAY 11 OCTOBER, SIX YEARS EARLIER
Before becoming the Badger, I had people around me. Some I would call friends.
Jan Apelgren woke up in the middle of the night. His whole body was trembling convulsively. His mouth, sticky and tasting metallic, stank of raw meat. He struggled to shake off the memory of what must have been a nightmare. It couldn’t be real, just couldn’t be.
His fingers were daubed in damp earth which was smeared over the lamp switch. The light was shining up along his arm, making him shrink back. It was covered in mud. As he moved, lumps of semi-dried earth spilled out of the bottom of the bed.
His bottom lip quivered. What have I done? he thought as he tore the covers away, exposing more earth in the bed. His entire body was blackened with muck. Earthworms and black insects were crawling among the creases in the bedclothes. He let out a frightened scream and stood up, propping himself against the wall to steady his balance.
Therese was lying on top of the covers on her side of the bed. She looked like she was sleeping soundly. But she was far too still, she wasn’t breathing or showing the slightest sign of life. Her semi-naked body was covered in a black slurry of mud and brownish-red, coagulated blood. Her eyes were staring blankly at the ceiling, her face contorted in a mask of terror. She had a large, gaping wound in one cheek going down to the jawbone, where white teeth were gleaming like pearls amid the shambles.
Jan collapsed into the foetal position along the wall. He covered his face with his hands, trying to dampen his panic with tears, but they wouldn’t come. He felt nothing. His absence of emotions was like a void where something else should have been. A conscience. Agony.
A soul?
By now there was only a consuming, empty darkness in its place. His heart was racing and he was breathing with difficulty. That was until he heard them. The whispers. They consoled him, attested that everything was all right. His heart slowed down. The scraping of claws against the exterior of the house gave him the strength to stand up again. They were there. He wasn’t alone anymore.
Black footprints were leading to the bed. His legs trembling, Jan walked around the bed, following them with his eyes. They were coming from outside the room, up from the basement stairs. He walked heavily behind them, down to the rooms below. All the while the whispers were tickling the hairs in his ear canal, encouraging him to continue. With every step, the scraping sounds on the external walls were getting firmer and faster, as if whatever was clawing outside was getting more and more excited.
The further down the stairs he went, the more frequent and thicker the lumps of earth on the floor. In some places there were beetles crawling around. Jan gave a shudder, yet he carried on along the trail of dirty footprints until he saw the door to the basement storeroom. The light from the ceiling lamp inside was spilling out of the doorway like an irregular rectangle. He swallowed a lump of tacky saliva and looked inside.
In the middle of the room, among storage boxes and Therese’s racks of floral summer dresses, was a gaping hole in the basement floor, surrounded by cracked clinker tiles, heaps of clayey soil and black insects. Worms were twisting and turning across the tiles as they searched in vain for a way down into the soil. The oilskin coat he had bought as a disguise for when he was spying on Therese was tossed onto one of the piles of earth. It looked frightful, streaked in sticky muck and bits of dead insects. He looked at the hole and then at his trembling hands. His nails were black and broken, his hands smeared in mud and blood. The hole was black, like a gaping gullet down into the underworld. Rising out of it came a musty stench of decay.
Jan collapsed onto his knees, his shoulder propped against the door frame. He couldn’t avert his eyes from the hole. It was drawing him in, forcing him nearer.
“No,” he snapped, time after time, his mouth unflinching. “No, no, no.”
He shook his head like a defiant three-year-old, yet he crept ever closer. In the end he got down on all fours, staring head on into the abyss. His eyes were smarting as his tears rinsed the grit away. Shaking as if with a fever, his muscles ached with fatigue as he battled against his own will. But he already knew he had lost.
Deep down he realised that the footprints he had been following were his own. That he had murdered his own wife, taken a bite out of her cheek and eaten a part of her. Him, no one else. He allowed the whispers to triumph, pulled his oilskin coat towards him and wrapped himself up in it. There was only one thing to do now. To embrace whatever was scraping on the concrete outside. They were his family now.
He was in a state of calm as he crawled down into the narrow passage and disappeared below ground.
76
SATURDAY 5 NOVEMBER
As I write this, my thoughts go to those who once stood by my side.
Bengt Johansson looked at Cecilia over the top of a cardboard cup. The smell of coffee was reaching her from the other side of the interview table, along with the acrid odour of nervous sweat.
Cecilia focused on the smell of the coffee. She knew it had a burnt taste, with an undertone of wet paper, that it was too hot when it came out of the vending machine and that it cooled too quickly once inside those thin cups. But it did smell good.
The early morning sun was filtering through the low-hanging clouds, washing the room in grey, like an old film noir. Outside, the rain was hanging in the air.
There were four people in the room. She was sitting on one side with Jonas. His notebook was poised, as usual. On the other side was Bengt and his lawyer, Leif Cerwan. Cecilia had come across almost all of the defence lawyers in the city when she was on the violent crimes squad, before she was swallowed up by the Badger unit. They were a bunch of oddballs in her opinion, the whole lot of them. As far as it went, Leif Cerwan was competent, but a genuine bore. Just as grey as the sky outside.
“Well, I met Bengt Johansson yesterday, as you may know,” said Leif. “We discussed the charges.”
“Then your client understands the seriousness of the situation?”
“Absolutely.” Leif placed a pair of half-moon reading glasses on the tip of his nose and flicked through a folder.
“And he is clear about the charges?” Cecilia met Bengt’s gaze. “Five counts of murder.”
“I am innocent,” said Bengt.
Cecilia shook her head. “We have plenty of evidence that puts you inside all of the victims’ houses, including DNA from the last one.”
Bengt nodded. “You certainly do. Because I did go inside the houses. I am guilty of that.”
Cecilia raised her eyebrows.
“As I say, I have spoken to my client,” said Leif, turning towards Bengt Johansson. “Do you want to tell them what you told me yesterday?”
Bengt looked down into his coffee cup. “I wasn’t telling the truth before.”
“But you are now?” asked Jonas.
“Yes. I still didn’t kill anyone. But I did do other stuff.”
Cecilia’s head felt like a helium balloon wanting to lift off from her shoulders. “What did you do?” she said, blinking to keep her dizziness at bay.
“The things in the basement. I stole them when I was working there.”
“Hold on,” said Cecilia. “Explain what you mean.”
Bengt snuffled. He closed his eyes, holding back his tears. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I can’t help it. I know I shouldn’t, but I go into the houses anyway. I just have a little look around. And I take something home with me, just a little something.” Bengt turned to Leif Cerwan.
“What Bengt is trying to say is that he suffers from a mild case of kleptomania. He goes into the houses when no one’s looking, goes through the customer’s things and takes things home with him. For his collection.”
Cecilia stared at Bengt, her jaw dropping. It felt as if the floor was going to open up and swallow her.
“It’s just bits and bobs, nothing of any value,” said Bengt. “But I can’t help it.”
“As you understand, it isn’t anything my client is proud of, but he does have an official diagnosis which I can provide. His illness has made it difficult for him to hold down permanent employment. Of course, stealing from customers is nothing we condone.”
Cecilia felt herself involuntarily holding on to the edge of the table. The room was about to turn on its head.
“Indeed,” said Jonas. “But just so I get this straight. In other words, you’re admitting that you break in?”
Bengt nodded. “Yes. I’m a thief. I collect stuff. But I haven’t murdered anyone.”
Cecilia’s grip on the table slipped. She was feeling sick and interrupted Bengt as he was in mid-flow. “We need five,” she said and stumbled out into the corridor without waiting for Jonas. As soon as she came out, she propped her back against the wall. She tilted her head backwards and was breathing in, long and deeply.
“How are you doing?” asked Jonas.
“This can’t be true,” she said. “We’ve got him. It is the Badger sitting in there. I’m absolutely sure of it. Tell me I’m right.”
“I don’t know anymore,” said Jonas. “We’ve really only got souvenirs to go on, not much more in the shape of forensic evidence. I’m afraid his story holds together.”
“Knock holes in it,” said Cecilia. “It must be him.”
Jonas placed his hand on her shoulder. “Look. I want it to be him just as much as you do, but I don’t think it is. None of us wants to lock up the wrong man. Do we?”
“Of course not,” said Cecilia. She avoided looking him in the eye. “Just say we can hold him overnight. If he’s in custody, we can keep an eye on him. You know what day it is today, don’t you? If he is innocent, the Badger striking again tonight will give him the best alibi in the world. But if nothing happens, it’s got to be him.”
“I don’t like it, but you’re right,” said Jonas. “The remand hearing is tomorrow. We can justify keeping him until then.”
They went back to the interview room. Jonas stood at the door and Cecilia sat down at the table.
“You understand this is new information to us?”
“We do,” said Leif.
“You remain a murder suspect,” said Cecilia. “What you’ve said now doesn’t change that fact.”
“I don’t see you have a basis for anything other than theft of personal property at most,” said Leif. “Hardly enough for murder.”
Cecilia looked at him coldly. “The remand hearing’s tomorrow. The judge will decide.”
