Siren Song: A Different Scandinavian Crime Novel (10 page)

Lena wants to throw her papers at all of them. They do not need two patrols; they need twenty, a hundred, a regiment. They should have an army of volunteers. They need to search every square metre of the city until they find John, because there is no telling what he will do next, only that it will be bad.

“We might get lucky,” Lena says. “I need one more patrol to start looking around Brommaplan for Niklas. I don’t think he’s there, but we might find people who know him, or at least about him. Check with the security companies and make sure they get the photos. I’ll sort out the new warrant as soon as we’re done here.”

Lena pauses. “If anyone finds him,” she continues, “be careful. That goes for both men. As you heard, Niklas has an ugly history and may have access to weapons. As for John, just be prepared.”

Agnes waves at Lena from the doorway.

“Yes?” Lena asks.

“I had a call from John’s manager. He’s tried to get hold of John but only got to talk to his voicemail, so he called around to his team and started asking questions.”

Lena slaps the table with her notes. “But for fuck’s sake,” she shouts. “That’s exactly what I told him not to do. He’ll scare John into hiding.”

“I think he got worried,” Agnes says. “But there’s something else.”

“What?” Lena feels the adrenaline trickle into her blood. With luck, this is the lead she is hoping for.

“The manager has just talked to one of his staff,” Agnes says. “A man who was in one of their storage depots. The manager said that the conversation was odd.”

“Odd how?” Lena asks.

“According to the manager, the man sounded strange. And the man in question said he’d call the manager back.”

“Did he?” Lena asks.

“No. And now that man’s phone is switched off.”

A detail picks at Lena’s attention. “Agnes, you said ‘depot’. I thought John worked for an advertisement agency?”

“He does, of a sorts. I looked them up just before the meeting. They put up underground advertisements. Those big posters at the stations.”

Lena’s mouth goes dry.
Of course.
The
van. That jacket. The night shifts.

“Do you know if John’s got keys to the underground network?” Lena asks. “That would be a nightmare.” At any rate, John knows the tunnels inside out, including a hundred places where one could hide and stay hidden.

“I’ll find out.” Agnes reaches for her phone again.

“Where is this depot?” Lena asks.

“Kristineberg,” Agnes says. “I’ve got the address.”

“That’s John,” Lena says and snatches up her jacket. “It’s too close to Alvik to be a coincidence.” The trickle of adrenaline grows into a stream.

“I’ll arrange backup,” Gren calls after Lena as she runs out the door. “And Lena?” he shouts. “Call me. Keep me informed.”

*

John

John looks around the classroom in wonder.

A circle of easels holding small canvases take up most of the space. Boys and girls clad in blue vinyl aprons frown at their work while they dot and sweep with their brushes. Next to each easel is a small set of drawers brimming with wrinkled tubes and colours in plastic bottles. The air is heavy with thick oils, bitter acrylics and dry watercolours, underlain by dust and old plastic. In the ceiling are rows of pale, harsh strip lights.

Opposite the window through which he entered the room are shelves with folders, tattered books and rolled-up papers bound with string. On his left, in one end of the room, is a blackboard covered in scribble he cannot make out. In front of the blackboard stands a high podium in brown wood. A small desk lamp balances on the ledge of the stand.

There are no windows other than the one through which he has climbed. Strangely, there is no door either, although he is sure there should be one. One of the easels is unoccupied. John knows whose spot it is: the canvas is his, and it is waiting for him.

As he looks at the children, names and memories shoot through his mind too fast for him to grasp them. But he knows them. Even the whispers and the murmurs are familiar. A cold draft washes over him from the window behind him, and he turns around.

The cave outside the window is gone, replaced by his old school yard. Rusted basketball hoops, jungle gyms, wooden benches and naked trees growing out of the snow, precisely as he remembers them. Children in thick clothes mill around the area, shuffling restlessly, throwing snowballs or using their footprints to make giant letters in the snow. Water pouring onto the snow from a broken valve has created a track of polished ice, and the students take turns sliding into the grey haze that cloaks the far end of the school yard.

These children are his friends. Or they had been; they are all long gone, spread far and wide by the winds of adulthood, and they would have aged. But here they are before him, stomping through droves of snow. His old classmates, preserved in a copy of his old school, hidden behind a façade inside a cave that–

He presses his eyes shut and slowly opens them again, knowing that he must roll with what he sees. Otherwise his sanity, or whatever is left of it, will wither away in seconds. For now, he must pretend that this is real. Push on and up. That is all that matters.

Two girls in knitted hats walk past outside the window. One of them glances into the room, meets his eyes, and smiles. The girls whisper to each other, giggle behind their mittens, and walk on.

The girl who smiled is Miriam. Another Miriam, younger than the woman who guided him here. Impossible but undeniable. He is about to bang his fist on the window when someone behind him smacks him on the back of his head. Startled, John spins around.

“Stop it,” a thin, nervous boy with an Asian complexion hisses. “Get back to your easel. Lennart is pissed off today. Maybe he looked in a mirror.”

“I wish everyone would stop hitting me,” John mumbles and looks at the unused canvas. It is as white as starch, untouched and unblemished. Looking closer, he realises that the surface is impossibly flawless; its whiteness is more an idea of a hue than a possible texture.

The teacher is coming closer. John does not have to turn around to know; he feels the man’s presence like a stifling cloud. Sweat makes John’s clothes stick to his skin. Surprised, he looks down at his haggard clothes; he had not been this hot and uncomfortable a moment ago.

“You’ve got to draw something,” the boy whispers.

“Draw what?” John looks between his unused canvas and the teacher.

“Anything,” the boy urges. “Just something to keep him happy. A house or a table. You know what he wants.”

John’s memories crystallize and become clearer: This is how these classes had been. Draw something, make an effort, but never excel. Do not shine or you will attract interest, and that was bad. You did not want Lennart’s attention. Staying quiet means staying unhurt. Fear fills the room like a fog, but underneath it is another feeling. An importance, some undefined ambition, larger than everything else.

But while it definitely is his old classroom, some details are wrong. The canvases are too small, the brushes too frayed. The mist in the school yard is much too dense, and the air is thicker than it should be. And he is sure there should be a door in one of the walls. There had to be. The room itself feels sentient and evasive, as if it is trying to change whenever he does not look.

He glances at the easel next to him: Five white vertical lines on solid black. The girl – Sara, or Clara? – who is painting the lines looks sideways at him and makes a worried face. Her thin blonde hair is tied up in a messy bun, and her cheeks are flushed with uneasiness.

“I’m hopeless,” she says, her voice hushed. “I couldn’t make the lines bend even if I wanted to.”

Unsure what to say, John turns back to his canvas. Lennart will be annoyed unless John makes an effort. And you do not want to annoy Lennart.

He takes a brush from the drawers and inspects its threadbare and crooked tip. It will not work; neat strokes require clean, undamaged brushes. This brush will leave muddled blotches and uneven lines. As he studies the worn tool, he senses a missing insight. Some form of knowledge gained but lost. But not permanently, the thought hovers close, just out of reach.

Shaking his head, he dips the brush in a pot of brown paint and draws a line. Lines are good; simple and plain. A beginning and an end, both clear in sight, under control. Different from everything else he knows.

A new line follows, then another. Soon the work envelops him in a calm that allows for reflection, and for the first time since the awakening on the ice, he can analyse what is going on, even question his own senses.

Impossibilities crowd his mind, so he deals with the most urgent.

Where the hell am I?

I have no idea,
he thinks, answering his own question
. Dreaming. Insane. Dying. Trapped in someone’s joke.

The subject is a dead end. He dips the brush again and starts over.

How can Miriam be out in the school yard? She never followed me through the door.

If I’m mad, anything is possible. Maybe it’s just someone who looked like her.

No. It’s more. The hat, the mittens. The smile.

Maybe she found a way in.

So why didn’t she say hi? She saw me.

The lines on the canvas multiply. Lost in thought, he adds black and grey, deepening shadows and soaking the texture in subtle layers. He pushes his brush hard into the canvas.

Why am I trying to make sense of this when everything else is chaos? Am I grasping for straws?

Why not? One straw, however frail and strange, would be nice.

Is Miriam that straw?

She is all I know. She is–

John clenches the brush so hard it almost breaks in half. He knows who Miriam is. He turns to go back to the window, to call her name, but his path is blocked by the teacher.

“What have we here?” Lennart asks in a cold voice.

*

Snow crunches under John’s shoes as he crosses the frozen strait.

A carpet of perfect white covers the metre-thick ice, temporarily bridging the fringe of the inner city with jetties along the suburban shorelines. John has swapped his old jacket for the one he took from the depot, crisp and clean, smelling of artificial lavender. His bag bounces against his back as he walks.

On his right, the strait broadens and splits to several frozen channels. On his left is the bridge, a looming arc behind the curtain of snow. The lights of the passing trains are too feeble to reach John. Even the street lights’ glow is too weak to illuminate the strait. Down here, he is invisible, veiled by the snow.

He heads for Alvik again, although he has no intention to enter any station again tonight. Walking is safer. The cameras in the train cars caught him bloodied and armed. People will be looking for him, hoping to snare him and lock him in. Question, secure, and restrain. He cannot allow that to happen yet.

The map in his mind dictates his course. The chain of events stretches on into the distance, but the next link is clear, and there is time. Morning is hours away.

John reaches the far side of the strait and enters the suburbs. He walks down empty walkways and roads, zigzags between roadwork machines and follows a path that curves up and west, around the blocks and away from Alvik.

His walk takes him past three underground stations surrounded by large houses and low blocks of flats in yellow brick. After he has left Alvik behind him, he follows the road towards Brommaplan.

Half an hour later, John reaches the gas station where he bought his shoes. The traffic has calmed; only the occasional car crawls past through the snow. Snowploughs rumble on nearby roads.

He continues to the bus stops near the underground train and looks around. A few commuters brave the weather and wait outside, but most stay in the warmth of the station hall and rush to their buses as they emerge out of the blizzard. A police car is parked at an angle just outside the doors.

John’s hands are numb. His face is stiff, his feet sluggish. He must find shelter for the night. Tomorrow the printed image will help him find his target, and then he needs to be alert, ready to use his last strength to reset the scales. All Molly’s suffering will be visited upon the one who caused her pain. All her fear, hurt, and damage.

Keeping his face turned down, he crosses the area, walks past a hotel and continues in behind a row of shops that separate the residential blocks from traffic. Ploughs have pushed snow off the street and onto the sidewalk, leaving pedestrians with a slippery path littered with cigarette packs and dog faeces.

At the end of the street are the stairs he ran up and down earlier that night. He uses them again and soon trudges past the first red-brick flats of Abrahamsberg.

He pauses at the top and looks around. No ploughs have made their way here yet. Every street is buried in a knee-deep blanket of snow. Swells reach halfway up to roofs of cars parked along the sidewalks. Looking along the street, he makes sure no one is watching him, and lowers his heavy bag to the ground.

Inside it are several tools from the toolbox at the storage depot, including an electric drill, a short crowbar, a blowtorch, pliers, and screwdrivers. They will be useful, but they are heavy; carrying them this far has exhausted him.

Minutes pass while John stands still and waits.

A front door opens farther down the street. Yellow light spills out past a man in a grey coat, pausing on the doorstep to put on his gloves. The man looks up and walks out, shuffling through the snow, away from John. Behind him, the front door swings back, grating against sand and ice.

John grabs his bag and runs towards the door. A moment before it will close, he puts his hand in the gap and pulls the door open, then stumbles in and closes the door behind him.

He moves to the side and stands still, looking around and listening.

Narrow stairs curve up and down from the entrance landing. Pale green walls, lime green ceiling, black iron railings. Three storeys, two flats on each floor. The stairs leading down end at a basement door. Water hums in pipes. The distant booms of a video game echo around him. Someone sneezes.

John unzips his bag, takes out his knife, and rams the hilt into the plastic light switch on the wall. The plastic splinters and clatters to the floor. He punches it again and shatters its circuits, then uses his feet to sweep the splinters down the stairs. No one will be able to switch the light on again tonight, and the shadows near the basement door are thick enough to hide him.

After a quick look out through the door to make sure there is no one outside, he walks down to the basement door, sits back in a corner, and sets the alarm on his wristwatch. It is time to rest and recover.

His next task will require all the strength he has.

*