The Rabbit Hunter Read online

  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.

  99

  Jeanette adjusts the pistol at the small of her back as she walks up to the battered house. The younger of the two police officers opens it before she has time to ring the bell and ushers her into the hall.

  ‘Sammy isn’t here. It’s just his phone,’ he says.

  Jeanette steps over a pair of split boots and follows the officer along the hallway. There are framed canvases leaning against the wall, and a roll of blank canvas lying on the floor.

  The kitchen smells like cat food and urine. The sink is full of dirty dishes and the linoleum floor is cluttered with bags of wine bottles.

  From a hook in the ceiling hangs something that’s evidently supposed to be a piece of art: a dozen tiny children’s shoes in a red mesh cage.

  A young woman wearing nothing but a pair of lilac tracksuit bottoms is sitting on one of the chairs. Both of her nipples are pierced and she has a tattoo of a greyish-black sun over her navel.

  She has dark rings under her eyes, a red rash on her forehead, and one of her wrists is in a cast.

  On the floor in front of her lies a man on his stomach with his arms cuffed behind his back.

  ‘Can we lose the handcuffs?’ Jeanette asks.

  One of the officers leans over the prone man:

  ‘Are you going to stay calm now?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, yes,’ the man on the floor groans. ‘I already said so.’

  The officer crouches down, rests one knee on the small of his back and removes the cuffs.

  ‘Sit down,’ Jeanette says.

  The man gets up from the floor and rubs his wrists. He’s bare-chested as well, and skinny. He’s dressed in a pair of low-cut jeans, and his dark pubic hair is visible over the top of them. His face is attractive, but prematurely aged. He looks at her blankly, as if he has a bad hangover.

  ‘Sit down,’ she repeats.

  ‘What the fuck’s your problem?’ he asks, but sits down across from her.

  There’s a black smartphone in the middle of the table.

  ‘Is that Sammy’s phone?’ Jeanette asks.

  The man looks at the phone as if he’s just noticed it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

  ‘What’s it doing here?’

  ‘He must have forgotten it.’

  ‘When?’

  The man shrugs and pretends to think.

  ‘Yesterday.’

  The man, whose name is Nicolas Barowski, smiles to himself and scratches his stomach.

  ‘What’s the code?’ Jeanette asks after a pause.

  ‘Don’t know,’ he says.

  Jeanette looks up at the cage of children’s shoes hanging from the ceiling.

  ‘You’re an artist?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies curtly.

  ‘Is he any good?’ she asks the girl as a joke.

  ‘He’s the real deal,’ she replies, raising her chin.

  ‘Who gives a shit … I don’t see any difference between my art and Czech porn about group sex,’ Nico says seriously.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Jeanette replies.

  ‘I’d rather be in a bunch of porn than paint with oils,’ he says, and leans towards her.

  ‘Does that shock you?’ the girl says, giggling.

  ‘Should it?’ Jeanette says.

  ‘Art isn’t nice,’ Nico goes on. ‘It’s dirty, perverse—’

  ‘No, now you’re going too far,’ Jeanette interrupts with feigned concern.

  Nico smiles broadly, nods, and holds her gaze in a flirtatious way.

  ‘Where’s Sammy now?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t
know, and I don’t care,’ he replies without looking away.

  ‘He’s more in love with Sammy than he is with me,’ the girl says, brushing something from one of her nipples.

  Jeanette walks over to an iPhone plugged in on the floor. She unplugs it, looks at the picture of Andy Warhol on the case, and turns to Nico.

  ‘What’s your code?’

  ‘That’s private,’ he replies, scratching his crotch.

  ‘Then I’ll ask Apple for help,’ she jokes.

  ‘Ziggy,’ he replies, not understanding the joke.

  He sits slumped with one hand between his legs and looks at her as she unlocks his phone and checks the log. The most recent text is from Rex’s phone.

  ‘Rex Müller sent you fourteen hearts this morning?’

  ‘No,’ he grins.

  ‘Did Rex call you yesterday?’

  ‘No,’ Nico says, and looks at his nails.

  ‘So Sammy called you from his dad’s phone,’ Jeanette says. ‘What did he say? You talked for six minutes.’

  Nico lets out a deep sigh.

  ‘He was upset … about lots of things, and he said he had to go on a trip with his dad.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He must have said,’ Jeanette persists, searching the kitchen cabinets for a clean glass.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was he upset because you stole his phone?’

  Nico squirms and scratches his forehead.

  ‘That too … but he said his dad was trying to turn him straight by making him shoot reindeer in a cage.’

  ‘They were going hunting together?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nico says wearily.

  ‘Do they do that often? Go hunting together?’

  ‘They don’t know each other. His dad’s an idiot, he’s never given a damn about him.’

  Jeanette tips the cigarette butts out of a glass and cleans it.

  ‘What else did he say?’ she asks.

  Nico leans back in his chair, purses his lips and looks at her.

  ‘Nothing, just the usual,’ he replies. ‘He said he missed me, that he was thinking about me all the time.’

  She puts her finger under the tap, then fills the glass and drinks, fills it again, and turns the tap off.

  ‘You can stay and watch while I have sex with Filippa,’ he says softly, touching the girl’s left breast.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t have time right now,’ Jeanette smiles, then picks Sammy’s mobile phone up and walks out.

  100

  They stop at a stone bench just inside the gates of the enclosure. DJ pours coffee from a flask, hands out the steaming mugs and smiles at the men.

  Now he has the last four in a cage, ready for slaughter.

  It’s going to require a degree of care when he kills the first one, so the others don’t try to run.

  Towards the end it won’t matter if they figure out what’s going on and start to panic.

  They will all bleed and scream, and feel death creep up and stare at them, until it’s finally time.

  ‘We’ll split into two teams, in two zones,’ he explains. ‘Team one will be made up of me, James and Kent … and we’ll stick to zone one. Lawrence, Rex and Sammy will be team two, in zone two. Everyone OK with that?’

  He hands out maps to the two teams, goes through the geographic boundaries, permitted shooting angles and safety regulations.

  ‘We’ll break off at five a.m. precisely, and disarm our rifles. No more shots can be fired after that, even if that’s the first time you see a reindeer. We’ll wait ten minutes, then gather here before going back to the hotel together … and don’t worry about tonight’s meal,’ he adds. ‘Rex has promised to make the best hamburgers on the planet.’

  ‘We’ve got plenty of ground fillet steak,’ Rex says.

  DJ looks at them, takes a sip of coffee and thinks about how he’s going to lead Kent and James across the bare stretch of ground and split them up among the rocky crags. His plan is to end up on the same side of the rocks as Kent, then they’ll head up the path towards the ravine and rest there before going into the valley.

  Kent’s in worse shape than the rest of them. He’s overweight and suffers from high blood pressure. While they’re resting he’ll congratulate him on his recent appointment as Chancellor of Justice, draw his hunting knife, slice open the lower part of his fat gut, make him stand at the edge of the cliff and tell him that he’s going to push him off in precisely nineteen minutes. He’ll still be conscious, so he’ll experience the fall.

  The men study the maps and point at the landscape and hilltops. Rex puts his rifle down on the bench and walks off, steps over the ditch and stops in the undergrowth facing the fence to pee.

  ‘If you bring down an animal, make sure it’s dead, then break off and mark the location on the map,’ DJ says. ‘The biggest stags in here weigh a hundred and sixty kilos, and have got huge antlers.’

  ‘I am so up for this,’ Kent says.

  Sammy blows on his coffee, drinks some and wipes the lipstick off his mug with his thumb.

  ‘Didn’t you get a rifle?’ Lawrence asks, looking over at him.

  ‘I don’t want one. I don’t understand how anyone can think it’s fun to kill an animal,’ Sammy replies, looking down at the ground.

  ‘It’s called hunting,’ Kent says. ‘People have been doing for quite a while …’

  ‘And real men like it,’ Sammy concludes, turning towards DJ. ‘They like killing, they like guns and rare meat – what could possibly be wrong with that?’

  ‘Can someone give this little poof a slap?’ Kent says with a smile.

  DJ looks at Rex, who is walking back through the weeds.

  He has no idea that he’s one of the prey in the enclosure.

  So far Carl-Erik Ritter is the only one who has been at all problematic, like a wounded rabbit retreating into its burrow.

  When DJ found out that Ritter was dying from liver cancer, he’d been forced to rethink his plans.

  He had to prioritise Ritter to make sure he didn’t die of natural causes before he could get to him.

  The accelerated plan involved finding him in the bar and luring him outside to the Axelsberg underground. DJ had driven up from Skåne early that morning and maybe he wasn’t concentrating enough. He hadn’t counted on being attacked in the square. He had to improvise to make it look like an accident. He shoved him into the window, breaking the glass with the back of his head, then turned him around and pushed his neck onto the sharp edge, slicing through his carotid artery.

  Even though he tried to hold the wound together, Ritter still bled out quicker than expected. He only took fifteen minutes to die. He was getting away too easy. Maybe that was why DJ cut his lip open with the knife before he lost consciousness.

  ‘OK, let’s get going,’ DJ says, shaking his mug. ‘The sky looks pretty dark off to the east, and there’s a chance we might get a bit of bad weather this evening. Kent and James, you come with me, we’ve got a little further to walk than the others.’

  101

  Once Rex’s group have climbed a little higher they can clearly see the vegetation below them, and how the forest thins out up the slopes and then stops altogether.

  The bog arcs between Rákkasláhku and Lulip Guokkil. The entire valley is like the prow of a huge ship pointing towards Torneträsk.

  Sammy pulls out his binoculars and looks around.

  Lawrence is holding the map, leading the group down into the valley, towards zone two. The range includes part of the bog and the eastern slopes, and stretches above the treeline to the subalpine heathland and across to the ravine.

  Everything is suddenly very quiet.

  The only sounds are the clatter of their equipment, their feet hitting the ground, and the wind blowing through the leaves.

  The muddy path is covered with the footprints of previous hunters. Clumps of lingon twigs brush against their boots.

  ‘How’s it g
oing?’ Rex asks, and Sammy shrugs in response.

  Between the white stems of the birch trees the light is the colour of porcelain. The valley is like a vast room, a hall of pillars with a canopy of billowing cloth.

  ‘Do you know how deep the snow gets here in the winter?’

  ‘No,’ Sammy replies quietly.

  ‘Two and a half metres,’ Rex says. ‘Look at the trees … all the trunks are much whiter up to two and a half metres off the ground …’

  When he doesn’t get any response from Sammy, he goes on in an exaggeratedly pedagogical tone:

  ‘And that’s because the black lichen that grows on the bark can’t survive underneath the winter snow.’

  ‘Please, can you two try to keep quiet,’ Lawrence asks, turning towards them.

  ‘Sorry,’ Rex smiles.

  ‘I want to do some hunting, even if you don’t. That’s why I’m here.’

  They walk through a patch of crowberry scrub and emerge into a brighter glade.

  ‘I barely even know how a hunting rifle works,’ Rex tells Sammy. ‘I got my licence when I was thirty and I still haven’t quite figured it out … You have to pull the bolt back somehow when you insert more cartridges.’

  Lawrence stops and raises his hands.

  ‘Let’s split up,’ he says, and points at the map. ‘I go down into the valley, and you two continue along the path … or up that side.’

  ‘OK,’ Rex replies, looking along the path towards the side of the mountain.

  ‘You can only fire in that direction … and I’ll fire that way,’ Lawrence says, pointing.

  ‘Of course,’ Rex replies.

  Lawrence nods to them, steps off the path and heads off down the slope through the trees.

  ‘I’ve ended up stuck in a cage full of angry apes,’ Rex mutters, fastening his knife to his belt.

  They walk along the path for a while, and start to head diagonally up the mountainside. After half a kilometre they stop beside a boulder. It’s like a tower-block of slate, deposited here when the glaciers retreated.

  They stand with their backs to the rock-face, and drink some water.

  Rex puts on his reading glasses, unfolds the map and studies it for a while before he gets his bearings.