The badger, p.29
The Badger, page 29
“Am I to understand that you’re not intending to release my client?”
“Perfectly correctly. He’s staying here.”
Feeling weary, Bengt sat back in his chair. “You said they would release me if I owned up,” he said to his lawyer.
“Wait a minute,” said Leif. He looked at Cecilia again. “Are you serious? Do you really intend to keep my client detained a further twenty-four hours?”
“Yes. If you don’t like it, you can take it up with the prosecutor. We’re keeping him until the remand hearing, then we’ll see.”
Leif slammed his folder shut. “Then we’re done. I see no reason to continue the interview.”
“Please yourself!” said Cecilia. She looked at Bengt again. “But, Bengt, there’s just one more thing.”
“What?” said Bengt, sighing.
“The creatures you mentioned yesterday. About them sleeping in the ground, wasn’t that true either?”
Bengt squirmed on his chair.
Leif Cerwan laughed. “No. There are no such things, are there? Where did you get that one from?”
Bengt met Cecilia’s gaze. He challenged it, but said nothing.
77
SATURDAY 5 NOVEMBER
They don’t realise it themselves, but I know they are going to betray me, each in their own special way. They have to die before they carry out their duplicitous acts.
Annika woke up, her body drawn as taut as a bowstring. She turned around to give Martin a little shove. Her hand landed flatly on his side of the bed. She was alone. She blinked a few times, trying to recall how she ended up in bed. Everything that happened yesterday had been shunted aside by sleep and wine. But now the memories came pouring over her like cold rain. She had asked Martin to leave. He had cried, begging her to let him stay. She had stopped talking. She had avoided looking into his eyes, waiting for him to stop talking as well.
Until he finally did what she wanted and left her.
Beyond him slamming the door, her memory was blurred and unclear. She remembered drinking more wine than she cared to think about. Her head was throbbing where the wine was making itself felt in the form of a sharp pain. She twisted her way slowly out of the damp sheets and sat down on the edge of the bed. Outside, two magpies were jumping on the lawn. The roof of her mouth was dry and tasted as if she had been eating raw onion. Her sight was lagging behind her movements, like an older digital camera. The delay wasn’t enough to make her throw up, but enough to intensify her dizziness, making her move slowly and cautiously.
She shambled into the bathroom. Her muscles objected, aching as if after a far too intense workout. Her fingers were covered in cuts and grazes and her nails were broken. She stared at her hands for several minutes, without coming up with any idea of what might have happened, then she stepped into the shower. Hot water washed over her, turning the skin on her shoulders an angry red.
After she was done, she headed for the kitchen to force herself to have something to eat. She looked down the stairs to the floor below. Her heart jumped a beat as she saw a crack on the wall of the stairs, going along and just above the handrail. A little further down, it split in two, like a flash of lightning, frozen in the concrete. The wallpaper had cracked and curled up around it, resembling the skin on an open wound. Large lumps of plaster and blue-grey concrete had fallen off the wall and come to rest on the stairs.
Annika took a few steps down. Her bare feet, warm after her shower, left moist footprints on the wood which disappeared in a few seconds. Every now and then she could feel fragments of the plaster under the soles of her feet like pieces of grit.
She traced her hand along the crack. The rough stone surface nabbed at the tips of her fingers as if it wanted to hold on to her. Her heart was beating faster with every step down. At the bottom of the stairs, she stopped and took stock of the entertainment room. What she saw made her gasp. Martin’s desk had been thrown over and his computer screens were smashed across the stone floor. The sofa was on its side and the seat cushions tossed onto the floor, their covers spotted in grey dust. The wallpaper was in tatters where someone had tried to tear it off the wall. Shreds of wallpaper lay in piles on the floor. The wall behind was covered in cracks, gouges and dents. One of the windows at the back was cracked, but hadn’t shattered. By the wood burning stove, in a fan of broken glass from the open stove door, was a crowbar.
Annika looked at her hands again. They were trembling. Had she done this? She closed her eyes, trying to remember, but the wine had blotted out the night. Her skin prickled as she imagined hearing the blood-curdling scraping sounds that had kept her awake. In shock, she stumbled up the stairs again and into the kitchen. The sun, almost at its highest in the sky, was still barely able to reach above the rooftops. The magpies continued jumping around outside. Their shadows were throwing out streaky shapes across the damp grass.
“I’ll find you, you bastard,” she said to herself. Her blood was boiling with rage. She was going to show him for sure, do the same to him in the day that he was doing to her at night.
She changed into jeans and a warm sweater, then got down to work. She threw out all the spades, wrecking bars and pickaxes she could find in the shed and began tearing into the earth around the house. The soil was heavy, claggy and full of twigs and roots left by the bushes which Apelgren had allowed to grow right against the exterior of the house. Her muscles were aching from her exertion, her palms were sore, burning against the rough wooden handles of the tools. All the same, she was enjoying tearing up large chunks of the earth. The more she dug, the better she felt.
Each time the spade went in was a moment of euphoria. The earth went blacker the deeper she dug, until it became too compact for her to manage to lift. Then she would start somewhere else, over and over again. Muck splattered all around her, staining her clothes, arms and face. Lumps were sticking in her hair and she was leaving heaps of soil behind her like large vole holes. When her strength finally waned, she sat down on the edge of one of her holes, staring at the exterior of the house while the last light of the sun disappeared behind the neighbouring properties. Her breathing was forming clouds of steam as she got her breath back. She was outside the bedroom, around the side. The basement wall was uncovered, just over half a meter down. An earwig was crawling its way up.
Then it struck her. There shouldn’t be a basement wall there. The bedroom was an addition after all. Or that’s what Emma Sieverts had said anyway. Here she should just be looking at more earth beneath the base wall. Yet she was staring at an external wall of clayey concrete. Why was that? How was that possible?
Annika’s heart was racing. Once again she grabbed the tools. She struggled on, deeper and deeper down through the clayey earth along the wall. The hard work was making her wheezy and her muscles burn. She didn’t stop until she could taste blood in her mouth, but by then she had dug deep enough to expose the drainage pipes. She dropped the spade and ran her hand over the damp exterior.
The concrete wall that wasn’t supposed to be there was concealing something from her. She had to know what. And she knew who she was going to ask.
78
SATURDAY 5 NOVEMBER
The creatures led me to one of them last night. I observed her through the window as she was watching television in the living room.
“I don’t know if this is a particularly good idea,” said Cecilia.
Martin shook his head. “No,” he said. “It isn’t. But who else am I going to talk to?”
After Annika had thrown him out, he had driven around aimlessly for a couple of hours, all the way to Alingsås, and turned back. He had eaten at an all-night McDonald’s in Partille. It was bland, just salty like his own tears. But it had satisfied his raging hunger. In the end he drove to his work and slept as best he could in the staff medical room. For a while he considered going to his parents, but he couldn’t face phoning them yet. They were too far away, still in Östersund. He needed someone there and now.
Like Cecilia. By now he was sitting at her kitchen table holding a cup of tea, wondering if he shouldn’t just get up and go again.
“I know it’s tough,” said Cecilia. The wrinkle between her eyebrows grew deeper as she looked at him. “But you have to talk to her.”
“I went past the house this afternoon,” said Martin. He shook his head and shut his eyes tight so he wouldn’t start crying. “I thought I should give it a try. But I just got more worried. The garden was covered in piles of earth.”
“Piles of earth?”
“Yes. I don’t know what she’s up to, but she has been digging large holes in the lawn. There were spades and crap all over the place.”
“God. She needs help.”
His tears were welling up so intensely there was no stopping them now. He put his hands in front of his face and let them flow. “Yes,” he said in a breath. “I don’t know what to do, she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
Cecilia leaned forwards. “You can’t help her,” she said, attempting to catch Martin’s gaze. “She needs professional help. Do you see?”
He shook his head. “I said we should never have bought that sodding house.”
“Well it’s not the house’s fault, is it? It is just a house.”
Martin’s eyes met Cecilia’s as she looked at him, full of questions. “Do you know who we bought it from?”
“No. Why?”
“We bought it from the estate of that deceased author. You know, the one who wrote the book Annika published in the spring. Jan Apelgren.”
“You’re joking?” said Cecilia. She couldn’t help but smile. “Right, now I get it.”
Martin drank some of his tea. It had cooled down and tasted dry. “I don’t know what to do. I’m just tired.”
Cecilia nodded. “I’d like to help you, but you do know you can’t stay here?”
Martin would have been lying to himself if he hadn’t been hoping she was going to offer him a space on the sofa, at least for a night. He didn’t want to be alone. But he knew it was a bad idea. Annika was already convinced that he and Cecilia were something more than just friends. No point in adding grist to her mill.
“The medical room at work just isn’t calling me,” he said.
“Can’t you check into a hotel? Or phone a friend?” Cecilia placed a hand on his. She looked at him softly. “There must be someone?”
Martin’s brain wasn’t up to speed. He didn’t know which of his friends he could ask to stay with. He had several he knew back home in Östersund who would help him in the blink of an eye. In Gothenburg, there weren’t so many.
“The cost of a hotel adds up over time,” he said.
“It may just take one more night. By then she might be willing to listen to you.”
Martin nodded. “I miss her,” he said quietly. “I know it sounds kind of crazy after just one day, but there you go.”
“I do understand,” said Cecilia. She drew back her hand and looked at her watch. “It’s getting late,” she said. “It’s probably best if you head off now.”
79
SATURDAY 5 NOVEMBER
She had a chequered blanket over her knees, occasionally sipping a cup of tea.
The rain drops running down the window pane turned the tail lights on Martin’s car into two indistinct red spots. She watched them drive off until his car disappeared past the house next door. Their tea cups had been left on the kitchen table. She poured out any remaining cold tea and placed them in the dishwasher. Then she sat down on the sofa in the living room and listened to the silence. Her fingers wanted to check out Tinder, but she couldn’t bring herself to pick up her phone.
Tonight she would find out if the Badger was still at large or whether they had caught him. She was feeling like a small child the night before Christmas, barely able to sit still. She was happy she had made contact with Martin again, after all those years, but at the same time felt guilty for involuntarily becoming mixed up in his broken marriage.
Neither she nor Martin had done anything wrong, yet they had caused so much damage. It didn’t feel fair. She groaned and got ready for bed and shortly after she was pulling the covers over her head, trying to relax. She tossed and turned as she tried to get some shut-eye, but it was futile. She must have managed to drift off in the end anyway, as a buzzing disturbed her slumber and woke her up, making her open her eyes. Her mobile had lit up on the bedside table. With each vibration it moved a few millimetres sideways. Its resonance was amplified by the table acting as a sound box.
“Cecilia?” said the voice down the line as she answered. “You’ve got to come.”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Jonas. I’m already on my way over, meet me at the door in five. The Badger’s struck again.”
Cecilia flew out of bed, suddenly wide awake. “That’s impossible. We’ve got him in custody.”
“We’ve got the wrong man, Cissi. I’ll tell you in the car.”
Cecilia opened the door of Jonas’s grey Škoda and jumped in. She hadn’t had time for any make-up, merely putting her hair up in a simple ponytail. No one would care, she knew that, but she felt grubby after such a short sleep.
Jonas pulled away towards the main road. The wiper blades were moving rhythmically across the windscreen in the pouring rain, drowning out the sound of the engine.
“The alarm was raised two hours ago,” he said. “Fire alarm, actually. But the emergency control room could see from the camera that something wasn’t quite right so they sent security along just in case. The security guard gave us the call.”
Cecilia was staring right ahead, straight into the lights of an oncoming car. It was a conscious act of will which prevented her from crying out in anger. Bollocks! They had got him. She refused to believe it. Her breathing got sharper with each passing second.
“Fuck it!” she said, slamming her hand on the instrument panel.
“Relax,” said Jonas. “I get it, we’re back to square one. Though you don’t need to slaughter my car because of it.”
“Sorry,” said Cecilia. She looked out of the side window, chewing on the nail of her index finger until they arrived.
The house was a modest detached property from the early 1970s, like most of the others the Badger would go for. The blue lights from the waiting patrol cars streamed in through the windows of Jonas’s vehicle. He got out and talked to the uniformed officers while Cecilia composed herself for what she was going to have to witness inside.
You never get used to it, her mentor at police training had said. Remember that and things will get a little easier at least. Cecilia hadn’t really understood what she meant. Of course you get accustomed to it. And that was exactly what she had done. For a while she had even felt indifferent to all of the grisly things she had been witness to. But she understood her mentor now. Her words had never carried more weight.
Cecilia was never going to get used to what was awaiting her inside. She stared at the flashing lights illuminating the boom on the digger that was parked on the lawn in sparks of blue. Its outline was casting flickering shadows on a group of trees. The branches were swaying and swishing in the wind. The whole picture was a ghostlike scene.
Jonas gave her a torch. “The lights have gone inside,” he said. “The excavation company evidently happened to cut off the mains power digging the pit this afternoon.”
Cecilia nodded. When she stepped out of the car she saw the work in progress. Large heaps of excavated material had been deposited across the grass. A deep trench was going around the house like a moat. A simple gangway of wooden planks clamped together was laid from the edge of the trench up to the door. She stopped halfway across it, shining her torch along the exposed exterior. Several longitudinal, sweeping marks were arched like bows across the concrete wall. They made Cecilia stop and study them. The shapes were too narrow and were facing the wrong direction to have been made by the digger. Four parallel snags, as if someone had swept across the exposed concrete with their nails. Or sharp claws. Cecilia shuddered as she thought about the creatures in Apelgren’s book. Were these the signs that Bengt had been talking about? Problem exteriors? The creatures lying dormant in the earth who must not be roused?
Cecilia shook her head and followed Jonas into the house.
The hall was cramped and a grey cat carrier was behind the door. There was a smell of smoke, as is someone had lit a fire and hadn’t opened the flue. Maybe that’s what had set the fire alarm off. Cecilia coughed and resisted the urge to pull her sweater to her mouth. They didn’t bother to examine upstairs. Forensics would go through everything later. Jonas nodded to the staircase without saying a word. They knew where the actual discoveries were going to be made.
The stairs creaked under Cecilia’s feet. She could hear the beating from her own heart as she followed Jonas down.
“Ah, shit,” said Jonas, with one foot in the entertainment room.
“What’s up?” she said.
“Nothing, really. It looks like it always does,” he said dryly. “But that bloody smell of smoke. Yuck. It’s worse down here.”
“Get a grip.” But she agreed. The smell stung her nasal cavity and reminded her of her grandfather’s tar flavoured Finnish liquorice pastilles.
She stood beside Jonas and studied the room. There was a fireplace against one wall. The flames had gone out, but the pile of charred firewood littering the floor explained the fire alarm. The ceiling was flecked in soot. All of the fittings were smashed to pieces and spread across the floor. The basement walls were covered in cracks and were skirted with plaster. Anyone might think that the excavation company had been doing its best to pull the house down. It was always like that, Cecilia noted coldly.
It was clear where the crime had taken place looking at the amount of blood in the fabric sofa, which had been torn apart. The stuffing and material, which had once been light grey, were now reddish brown with uneven blood stains.
