The Rabbit Hunter Page 32

  ‘Leave me the fuck alone!’ Oscar screams.

  The lighter sparks again just as Joona reaches the other side and rams his lower arm into the side of Oscar’s neck, making his head jerk back and sending his glasses flying.

  They both crash into the wall and Joona drives one knee up into Oscar’s ribs, yanks him sideways, twists his own body in the other direction and flips him over his hip.

  Oscar crashes to the floor with a groan, opens his eyes and stares up at the roof in confusion.

  The bottle rolls over the edge and down into the water.

  Joona knows that time is running out as he drags the man away from the cupboard.

  ‘No, no, no,’ Oscar whimpers, trying to cling onto the floor.

  A lamp topples over, scattering broken glass across the floor. Joona drags Oscar behind him, slaps one of his handcuffs around the man’s wrist, and the other around a column in the wall.

  ‘Don’t kill me,’ Oscar gasps. ‘Please, listen, I’ll pay you …’

  Joona runs to the hole in the floor and jumps in. He plunges down into the cold water. His ears roar as bubbles surround him like the tail of a comet.

  His feet hit one of the chairs and slow his descent.

  He spins in the water, kicks his legs and swims down into the darkness.

  He can’t see anything, but knows he has to get past the floating debris.

  With one arm he tries to shove the heavy dining table away, then slides along one side of it and reaches the bottom.

  His heavy clothing slows his movements as he searches for the woman among the rough rocks on the seabed.

  He moves deeper down the slope, fumbling over the rotting remains of an old rowing boat.

  Joona blinks in the dark water and feels the cold hit his eyes.

  He swims further down.

  His hands slip across colonies of barnacles on one of the boathouse pillars. Suddenly a swaying light spreads down into the water.

  Jack is holding a lamp above the surface.

  Through the debris and bubbles Joona catches sight of the woman. She’s slid down the sloping rock towards deeper water, and is lying on her side, still bound to the chair.

  He kicks off and swims down towards her.

  She stares into his eyes, her white lips tightly closed as she holds her breath.

  He tugs at the chair, trying to push off from the rock with one foot to gain more momentum, but she is caught in the other chairs that have gathered around the base of the pillar.

  He draws his knife and quickly cuts through the tape around her ankles and begins to pull it off. She starts to panic, kicking out with her legs, and can no longer resist the urge to breathe.

  The pain as she inhales water into her lungs is instant. Her body jerks backwards as if she’s been hit hard, she tries to cough it up, but succeeds only in drawing more water into her lungs, and starts to cramp and convulse.

  Joona cuts the tape from her wrists and waist, working fast as she begins to spasm, blood blossoming from her mouth and nose. Joona lets go of the knife, pulls her free from the chair, kicks off with his legs and swims upward.

  Fending off the furniture that is drifting in the current, he kicks one last time and manages to get her face above the surface.

  She coughs and vomits water, gets some air into her lungs and coughs again.

  Jack is holding a burning oil-lamp above the hole in the floor.

  ‘The air ambulance is on its way,’ he calls down.

  With one arm around the woman’s waist Joona climbs up the ladder and lifts her up onto the edge. She crawls forward on her knees, coughing and gasping for air, sobs and then coughs again, spitting blood as they hear the sound of the helicopter approaching.

  ‘Take her, you can have her,’ Oscar whimpers to himself. ‘We’re through. I’ll stay here. I won’t say anything, I promise. I haven’t seen either of you.’

  Joona helps guide the young woman through the dark house and out onto the rocky hillside behind the house as the helicopter starts to descend. Jack follows them, holding his wounded arm with the other hand as his clothes flap around his body. His eyeliner is streaked across his face.

  78

  As soon as the helicopter has disappeared across the water, taking Jack and Caroline with it, Joona goes back into the house, grabs a towel from the bathroom and returns to the boathouse.

  Oscar von Creutz is sitting with his back to the wall. When he sees Joona come back he stops biting his thumbnail and tries to shuffle away.

  Joona walks over and looks at the trapdoors and the empty pulleys in the roof.

  The ropes run through the pulleys, so you can gently remove the crossbar beneath the floor and lower the two trapdoors, allowing you to get to your boat.

  ‘Please, don’t do it, you don’t have to do it,’ the man pleads, trying in vain to pull his hand through the cuff.

  ‘My name is Joona Linna. I’m a detective with the Swedish National Operational Unit.’

  ‘Really?’ he mutters confusedly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he says, and bites his nail again. ‘This is sick. What the fuck do you want? What are you doing here?’

  Joona walks around the edge of the hole, past the drop to the water, stops in front of the trembling man, and waits until their eyes meet.

  ‘You’re suspected of kidnapping, attempted murder and grievous bodily harm,’ he says calmly.

  ‘That’s all bullshit. I have the right to defend myself,’ Oscar hisses, and looks down at the floor again. ‘What the fuck do you want with me? I don’t get it …’

  He stops speaking and sits for a while with his free hand over his face, breathing hard.

  ‘Tell me about the Rabbit Hole,’ Joona says.

  ‘I want to talk to a lawyer first.’

  ‘Anything that happened back then has passed the statute of limitations.’

  ‘Really? Doesn’t feel like it,’ Oscar says.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Joona says darkly.

  ‘I need protection.’

  ‘Why?’ Joona asks, picking up Oscar’s glasses from the floor.

  ‘Someone’s hunting us, killing us, one by one, like rabbits.’

  ‘You’ve heard the nursery rhyme?’

  ‘Have I already said all this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not paranoid. I can tell you everything. I know who it is … I swear, it’s a student from Ludviksberg. He hates us. He’s like a demon, he’s waited thirty years before making his move.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘If you really are a police officer, you have to stop him.’

  ‘Give me a name,’ Joona says, handing him his glasses.

  ‘You don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can prove it all,’ Oscar says, putting his glasses back on. ‘It makes sense if you realise who we were … a small gang who ruled that school. We were like gods. You asked about the Rabbit Hole … it was a pavilion that belonged to the Order of the Crusebjörn Knights, dating back to the court of Fredrik I, blah, blah, blah. We knew all that, but we really didn’t give a shit, it was just one of a thousand little privileges that went with our status. We’d go to the Rabbit Hole to get drunk and sleep with the best-looking girls in school.’

  Oscar smiles sardonically to himself and wipes his upper lip before he goes on.

  ‘It was a different world in there. We used to watch porn and we swapped the portrait of Prince Eugen for a poster of NATO’s Evolution Squadron because they had a Playboy bunny as their logo.’

  ‘But you burned the pavilion down,’ Joona says gently.

  Oscar bites his thumbnail and stares into space.

  ‘You say someone’s hunting and killing you,’ Joona goes on. ‘Does that have anything to do with the fire?’

  ‘The fire?’ Oscar says, as if he’s just woken up.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is totally fucking real,’ he says, rubbing his face with his free han
d. ‘People are dying, I’m not just imagining it …’

  ‘I’m leaving now,’ Joona says.

  ‘Please, wait … I’m just trying to explain everything so you believe me when I give you the name,’ he says anxiously. ‘There was this guy in class, his name was Rex. We thought he was a total loser, but he was always hanging around, wanting to be part of the gang, getting beer for us, doing our homework … I have a very clear memory of a rainy summer’s day when we were smoking behind the main building – there were some bricked-up cellar steps where we used to go – and Rex was hanging around, and said he was going out with a girl named Grace. Wille knew who she was and looked interested, he wanted to know more, and got Rex to boast about having sex with her in the meadow behind the school. It was all a bit pathetic, but Wille enjoyed teasing him. Then just a few hours later he was talking to Grace and telling her that Rex had joined the club and that she could become a member too seeing as they were together. I don’t really know what he said, but the idea was that Rex had organised a secret party for her that night. Most of the students weren’t allowed out after eight o’clock, but the groundskeeper used to help us, and he unlocked the boarding house and brought her over to the Rabbit Hole.’

  A cold night wind blows through the hole in the floor. The doors bang against the edge of the drop.

  ‘I think about it every day,’ Oscar whispers. ‘The fact that … that she’d made such an effort to look nice, and was so ridiculously happy about everything, blushing and talking about Rex, thinking he was about to show up, but he was locked up in the stables.’

  Oscar’s thin mouth stretches into something that’s supposed to be a smile, but his eyes are dark.

  ‘Wille locked Rex in and told him that Grace was his now, that it was just the way things went.’

  He shakes his head slowly. The wind sweeps across the roof of the building, making the windows rattle.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t think I want to say any more,’ he whispers.

  ‘How old were you when this happened?’

  ‘Nineteen,’ he replies.

  ‘So you can’t blame anyone else,’ Joona says.

  ‘I’m not, but Wille liked humiliating people,’ Oscar goes on quietly. ‘He liked to make them squirm, make them feel ashamed, but this, what happened when Grace realised she’d been drugged, it was so … the hell he kicked off, the things he got us to do … we were drunk, I don’t even want to think about who did what. Some of us were shouting, others were like animals. I refused, but everyone had to do it, they wanted everyone to do it, so they put a sort of crown of rabbits’ ears on me and I did it. I don’t know how, but I did it, it was there inside me after all. I was so fucking scared, but I did it … they even got the fucking groundskeeper to do it with her before he carried her out.’

  ‘Absalon Ratjen?’

  He nods, then sits there motionless, staring into space for a while before he goes on.

  ‘Afterwards, when we let Rex out of the stables, Wille told him he’d had sex with Grace. He made up lots of crap about what the two of them had done, and how much she’d liked it. I just felt numb. I was empty, my soul had been sucked out and all I could think about was getting away from the school, and I started to walk. But when I reached the outdoor swimming pool, just before the bridge, I made up my mind to go back and set fire to the pavilion.’

  ‘You got expelled.’

  ‘I’m not telling you this to get some sort of forgiveness. What I did was wrong, I know that, but I don’t want to die,’ Oscar says. ‘Christ, all I want is for you to believe me when I say Rex Müller is the one hunting us down.’

  ‘You seem very sure.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘But you thought I was the murderer just now?’ Joona says.

  ‘Rex has money. He doesn’t need to get his hands dirty unless he wants to.’

  ‘You’re sure Rex was locked up while the rape was taking place?’

  ‘I helped do it … and I helped let him out afterwards,’ he replies heavily.

  Joona pulls his damp phone from his inside pocket, looks at the blank screen and realises that it’s ruined.

  The victims’ nineteen minutes of suffering must correspond with how long the rape took.

  Rex was locked inside the stables. All the other boys took part, but someone other than Grace was inside the Rabbit Hole.

  ‘You said everyone joined in,’ Joona says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that isn’t entirely true, is it?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Oscar mumbles.

  ‘Was there a witness?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who saw you?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘I need the names of everyone who was in the Rabbit Hole,’ Joona says.

  ‘Not from me,’ Oscar says.

  ‘I need to make sure they get protection.’

  ‘But I don’t want them to get protection,’ Oscar replies, looking at Joona with empty eyes.

  79

  Valeria is walking down towards the greenhouses. It’s cool, and she wraps her worn cardigan more tightly around her. She’s thinking about asking Micke to help her with the frame of the new polytunnel. She loves her nursery: the fresh air, the racks of seedlings, the rows of plants and trees.

  But today her chest feels empty.

  She knows she should transplant her cuttings into pots, but can’t summon up the enthusiasm.

  She closes the glass door behind her, moves some buckets out of the way and sits down on the metal stool and stares out into space. When Micke opens the door she jumps and gets up.

  ‘Hi, Mum,’ he says, holding up a bottle of champagne in a gift-bag.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ she says bitterly.

  ‘What didn’t work?’

  She turns away and starts to remove dead leaves from a sugar plum just to give her hands something to do.

  ‘He leads a different kind of life,’ she says.

  ‘But I thought …’

  He trails off, and she turns to look at him again with a sigh. It still surprises her that he’s an adult. Time froze when she was locked up in prison, and her sons somehow remained five and seven years old in her head. They will forever be two little boys in their pyjamas who love it when she chases and tickles them.

  ‘Mum … he seems to make you happy.’

  ‘He’ll never stop being a policeman.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, does it?’ Micke says. ‘I mean, you’re not really in a position to dictate how people should live their lives …’

  ‘You don’t understand … while he was in prison I didn’t have to feel ashamed of the way I turned out.’

  ‘Has he made you feel ashamed?’

  She nods, but suddenly isn’t sure if it’s true. An unpleasant chill blossoms in her chest.

  ‘What exactly happened, Mum?’ Micke asks, carefully putting the bottle of champagne down on the floor.

  Valeria whispers that maybe she should call and talk to him. She leaves the greenhouse, wiping tears from her cheeks, and tries to stay calm, but still finds herself walking faster. She pulls her boots off in the hallway and hurries into her bedroom, picks up her phone and calls him.

  She gets put through to Joona’s voicemail. She hears the short bleep and takes a deep breath.

  ‘I need a police officer to come and arrest me for being so stupid,’ she says, then ends the call.

  A sob rises in her throat and her eyes fill with tears. She sits down on the bed and covers her face with both hands.

  80

  The Rabbit Hunter leaves the car on a forest track, slings his bag over his shoulder and walks to the guest marina at Malma Kvarn, where he selects an older model Silver Fox with a powerful engine. He climbs on board, breaks open the ignition cover, connects the cable from the starter engine to the one from the battery, and immediately hears a dull rumble.

  Thirty metres away, a family are unloading a sailing boat. The youngest children are standing
on the pier looking very tired in their red life jackets.

  Clouds sail across the sky.

  The Rabbit Hunter unties the boat and steers out through the sound.

  The wind is strong out on the open water and he has to take care to steer into the largest of the waves. The radio crackles as he tries to find the right frequency, and he hears fragments of a coastguard conversation about a rescue operation.

  The Rabbit Hunter steers towards Munkön, in order to make his way through the outer archipelago to reach Bullerön.

  A wave hits the windshield and the water runs down the glass just as he manages to pick up the coastguard’s message over the radio.

  There seems to have been some sort of accident.

  The air ambulance has reached Södermalm Hospital.

  The aluminium hull shudders as the bow hits the waves, then he hears that the police have arrested a man on Bullerön and have him on board coastguard vessel 311.

  In order to hear better the Rabbit Hunter pulls the cables apart, stopping the engine.

  The man has been arrested for attempted murder and kidnapping, and is being taken to Kronoberg Prison in Stockholm.

  It’s Oscar, they’ve taken him.

  The Rabbit Hunter thinks of a grey rabbit changing direction as it runs, its paws kicking up a cloud of dust.

  He sinks onto the deck and covers his ears with his hands.

  Oscar got rich from hedge-fund money and other people’s retirement accounts – and, many years ago, he raped a girl with his friends. He kicked her, put on a pair of white rabbit’s ears and a bowtie, then raped her a second time with a bottle.

  The boat is rolling hard on the waves, and he has to cling on to stop himself from pitching over.

  He can’t understand how the police managed to trace Oscar so quickly. It’s simply not possible.

  Oscar is getting away, like a rabbit darting into its hole.

  He had been so sure he would succeed.

  It was like following a rabbit with myxomatosis, the disease that covers them in sores around their nose and eyes, blinds them, and makes them so weak that in the end you can just walk up and kill them by standing on them.

  He doesn’t want to think about it, but his brain conjures up images of him as a boy rinsing the slaughterhouse bench and tiled floor with a hose – the blood and viscera swirling down into the drain.