Stalker (33 page)

The bulb hanging from the ceiling of the waste-storage room is broken. The floor is stained from leaking rubbish, and four bins reek of rancid food. The tattered remnants of a list of rules and regulations hangs off the wall. In the weak light from outside, Joona can see another door at the far end of the room.

‘Come on,’ he says to Erik.

He cautiously opens the door and peers into a small kitchen with a buckled draining board. Rhythmic thuds echo through the walls. The ceiling lamp is on but there’s no one about. On a table there’s a chopping board with a grease-stained paper bag, surrounded by crumbs and sugar crystals.

There are two closed wooden doors in the far wall. The first is locked, but the second one has no lock.

Joona tries the handle, and they walk slowly into an empty changing room. They can hear music through the walls.

The door to the bathroom is closed.

They walk cautiously across the concrete floor, past three shower cubicles, a mirrored make-up table, and a row of clothes lockers.

Someone flushes the toilet, and they hurry through the room and find themselves in a narrow corridor lined with ten doors. The small rooms off the corridor have no windows, and are furnished with thin beds with shiny plastic mattresses.

Behind a closed door someone is moaning mechanically.

The only light comes from strings of fairy lights draped across the ceiling. Little hearts and flowers illuminate the bare walls in weak, flickering colours.

The corridor leads to a large storeroom with foil-covered ventilation pipes running across the ceiling.

In the flashing lights from a stage they can make out some thirty men and maybe ten women. There are sofas and armchairs everywhere. Along one wall is a row of plastic-wrapped pallets full of furniture.

It’s so dark that it’s difficult to discern any faces.

The throbbing music keeps repeating one particular musical phrase, over and over again.

On the stage a naked woman is dancing round a vertical metal pole.

Joona and Erik walk forward carefully in the weak light. The room smells of damp clothes and wet hair.

They keep an eye out for Rocky’s bulky frame. He ought to be visible against the light of the stage if he stands up.

They know this is a gamble. Rocky may already have been here and left. But if he managed to get hold of any money, he’s probably bought some heroin, in which case he could well still be here in the Zone.

A drunk is trying to negotiate a price with a woman, and one of the guards appears quickly and says something that leaves the man nodding.

The music changes, blending seamlessly into a different rhythm. The woman on the stage squats down with her thighs spread wide on either side of the pole.

A guard is standing by the bar, gazing out at the room with a motionless face.

Joona sees a black German Shepherd moving among the furniture; it looks accustomed to being there as it eats something from the floor, sniffs and moves on.

A large man emerges from the corridor. He blows his nose and heads towards the bar. Joona moves aside and tries to keep an eye on him.

‘It’s not him,’ Erik says.

They stop by the wall not far from the stage. It’s almost dark, but the reflected glow from the lights rigged up on the ceiling is illuminating an assortment of shirts and faces.

Right in front of the stage sits a man in black-rimmed glasses on a red armchair with a label hanging from its arm. On the back of the man’s hand is a tattoo of a cross with a shining star at its centre.

On a low table two bottles are clinking together with the rhythm of the bass. There are very few drugs in sight. Someone is snorting cocaine, a couple more slip pills between their lips, but sex is clearly the main commodity being traded here.

A young woman in a black latex bikini and a studded collar comes over to Erik, smiles and says something he can’t make out. She runs a hand through her short blonde hair as she bats her eyelids at him. When he shakes his head she moves on to the next man.

A film is showing on a television screen behind the bar: an aggressive man is walking round a room, hitting doors and pulling drawers open. A woman is shoved into the room, turns and tries to open the door again. The man goes over to her, pulls her backwards by her hair, and hits her face so hard that she falls to the floor.

Just off to one side of Erik and Joona stands a man with a coarse face and fleshy forehead. The shoulders of his grey jacket are wet with rain.

‘Anatoly? I handed my money over when I was searched,’ he says in a gruff voice.

‘I know, welcome,’ says a voice that sounds adolescent.

Joona moves sideways and sees that the voice belongs to a tall and very young man with yellowish skin and dark rings under his eyes.

‘I was thinking of going to the room – can I buy two wraps of brown?’

‘You can buy whatever you like,’ the young man replies. ‘We’ve got some top quality from southern Helmand, the usual from Iran, Tramadol, or …’

Their conversation tails off as they move away between the sofas and people.

The dog trots after them and licks the young man’s hand. Joona falls in behind them, and sees them turn off to the right at the side of the stage.

Erik manages to stumble into a low lounge table. A beer bottle topples over and rolls onto the floor. He goes a different way, stands on a wet umbrella and carries on round a leather sofa.

The guard by the stage watches him walk.

A young woman with round, pockmarked cheeks is sitting astride a man in a leather vest. He twines a lock of her dark hair around his index finger as he talks on his phone.

In the darkness Joona can no longer see the young man who was dealing heroin. There are too many people everywhere now. He looks round and sees the black dog slip through a swaying beaded curtain. The beads settle long enough to form the Mona Lisa’s face briefly before they part again and a young woman with bare breasts and a pair of tight leather trousers walks out.

The small beads tinkle as Erik and Joona pass through the Mona Lisa. The air is suddenly thick with sweet smoke, sweat and dirty clothes. All over the coarsely polished cement floor are worn and battered sofas and armchairs. The music from the stage is still audible, but only as the thud of the heavy bass.

Semi-naked people are sitting on the sofas or on the floor itself. Most of them look as though they’re asleep, while others move lethargically.

They’re all moving with ghostly slowness, drifting through the realm of the stoned.

They walk past a middle-aged woman sitting on a stained sofa with no cushions. She’s wearing jeans that are too big for her and a flesh-coloured bra.

Her face is thin and focused as she holds her lighter under a crumpled piece of tinfoil and then hurriedly inhales the smoke through a small plastic straw. A slender curl of smoke twines up towards the corrugated metal roof.

The cement floor is littered with cigarette butts, sweet wrappers, plastic bottles, syringes, condoms, empty packs of pills and a bundle of fabric samples.

Through the smoke Joona can see the man named Anatoly sitting with the new guest on a sofa that’s been sliced open, its stuffing hanging out.

Joona and Erik weave through the furniture.

A skinny man in his seventies is sitting on a stained flowery sofa with two young women.

On the floor behind it a man lies unconscious in just his underpants and white socks. He looks almost like a child, but his eyes and cheeks are sunken. The syringe is gone, leaving the needle with its little plastic end sticking out of a vein in the back of his hand. On an armchair beside him sits a woman with an apathetic expression on her face. After a while she bends forward and pulls the needle from his hand, but drops it on the floor.

Joona sees a guard dragging a man who has thrown up, and can’t help thinking that this place is the complete opposite of the rich kids’ saturnalias.

No wishes come true in the Zone. Here there are only prisoners and slaves, and the money only flows in one direction. Everyone is alone in their addiction, drained of all they have until they die.

He glances behind him and sees Anatoly stand up and walk through the room. The black dog follows him.

A fat man in camouflage trousers and a black jacket pushes away a woman in pink underwear and high heels. She goes back and tries to kiss his hands as she begs him for a fix. The man is impatient, tells her to pull herself together, that she hasn’t earned enough.

‘I can’t, they hurt me, they—’

‘Shut up, I don’t give a fuck – you need to do three more customers,’ he says.

‘But, darling, I don’t feel good, I need—’

She tries to stroke his cheek, but he grabs hold of her hand, pulls her little finger and bends it sharply backwards. It happens so quickly that at first the woman doesn’t seem to realise what’s going on. She stares wide-eyed at her broken finger.

A man with a salt-and-pepper moustache walks over to them, exchanges a few words with the other man, then pulls the sobbing woman through the room towards the curtain. She stumbles and loses a shoe, then he hits her and she falls over, dragging a standard lamp down with her.

Joona and Erik move out of the way.

The man drags the woman to her feet, and the lamp rolls away and shines straight into the face of a large bearded man.

It’s Rocky Kyrklund.

He’s sitting completely naked in a red armchair, asleep. His head is leaning forward and his beard looks like it has grown into the hair on his chest. He’s injected himself in his right leg, and dark blood is trickling down his ankle.

Rocky isn’t alone. Beside him, on a sofa bed with no mattress, sits a woman with bleached-blonde hair, wearing a brown bra. Her pale blue panties are on the floor next to her. A plaster is hanging half off her knee.

She holds a lighter under a sooty spoon, and stares with glassy eyes at the small bubbles forming in the water. She licks her lips as she waits for the powder to dissolve, leaving the spoon full of pale yellow liquid.

Erik steps over a footstool and walks over to them, smelling the insipid aroma of heroin and hot metal as he comes to a halt.

‘Rocky?’ Erik says in a low voice.

Rocky slowly raises his head. His eyelids are heavy, his pupils like pinpricks of black ink.

‘Judas Iscariot,’ he mumbles when he sees Erik.

‘Yes,’ Erik says.

Rocky smiles happily and slowly closes his eyes. The woman beside him puts a ball of cotton-wool in the solution, holds her syringe on top of it and sucks up the solution, then attaches a needle to the syringe.

Joona notices that the man in camouflage trousers is sitting on a chair outside the staffroom again, looking at his phone. At the other end of the room the man with the grey moustache disappears through the beaded curtain with the woman.

‘Do you remember telling me about the unclean preacher?’ Erik asks, squatting down in front of Rocky.

Rocky opens his tired eyes and shakes his head.

‘Is that supposed to be me? The preacher?’

‘I don’t think so. I think you meant someone else,’ Erik says. ‘You talked about a man in make-up with scarred veins.’

Next to them the woman uses her briefs as a tourniquet round her arm, tightening them as hard as she can by twisting a pen through them a couple of times.

‘Do you remember him killing a woman here at the Zone?’

‘No,’ Rocky grins.

‘She was known as Tina, but her real name was Natalia,’ Erik goes on.

‘Yes, that … that was him, that was the preacher,’ Rocky mutters.

The woman on the sofa bed looks for a vein in the usual places, a soft spot without too many scars.

‘I need to know … are we talking about a real preacher, a priest?’

Rocky nods and closes his eyes.

‘Which church?’ Erik asks.

Rocky whispers to himself and Erik leans forward until he can smell his rancid breath.

‘The preacher is jealous … just like God,’ he whispers.

The woman inserts the needle and a drop of blood mixes with the yellow liquid before she injects it. With nimble fingers she undoes the tourniquet and lets out a long groan as the kick washes through her. Erik watches her stretch her legs, tense her ankles, then relax as her body goes completely soft.

‘We believe the preacher has murdered at least five women, and we need a name, a parish, or an address,’ Erik says.

‘What are you saying?’ Rocky mutters, closing his eyes again.

‘You were going to tell me about the preacher,’ Erik persists. ‘I need a name, or—’

‘Stop banging on,’ the woman says, lying back against Rocky’s hairy thigh.

‘Say hello to Ying,’ Rocky murmurs, stroking her head clumsily.

While Erik tries to get Rocky to remember, Joona is keeping an eye on the room. The fat man in the camouflage trousers gets up from the chair outside the staffroom and peers out across the room. Joona watches him put his phone in his pocket and set off through the sofas. He stops by one man who’s lying with his eyes closed, a lit cigarette between his lips, then returns to his place.

‘You want me to tell you things,’ Rocky says. ‘But all I remember from purgatory is that I was sitting in a little monkey cage … and there were long wooden poles with glowing ends—’

‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Ying interrupts with a hoarse laugh.

‘I howled, tried to get away, tried to protect myself with my food bowl … blah, blah, blah,’ he smiles.

‘Seriously, though,’ Erik says in a louder voice. ‘I won’t disturb you any more, if you can just tell me something that will help us find him.’

It looks as though Rocky’s dozed off. His mouth slips open a few millimetres and a string of saliva dribbles into his beard.

The man with the grey moustache comes back from the other side of the room. The curtain sways behind him, letting a yellow glow into the room before the Mona Lisa’s face reforms.

‘We can’t stay here much longer,’ Joona tells Erik.

Ying tries to put her briefs on but they catch between her toes and she leans back and rests with her eyes shut.

‘My brain is mush,’ Rocky mumbles. ‘You need to …’

‘Blah, blah, blah,’ Ying says.

‘Give me a name,’ Erik persists.

‘You’re probably going to have to hypnotise me if …’

‘Can you stand up?’ Erik asks. ‘Let me help you.’

Joona sees the fat man in the camouflage trousers get up from his chair again. He’s speaking on his phone as he sets off towards them.

The woman in the studded collar is standing in the doorway leading to the stage, holding the curtain open. She seems to be hesitating about whether to come in or not.

Behind her Joona can see a tall figure in a yellow oilskin coat. The sort fishermen used to wear.

At first he doesn’t understand how he knows that he’s staring at the preacher, but his mind suddenly brings a moment from the past into sharp focus.

‘Erik,’ Joona says quietly. ‘The preacher is here, he’s standing over there by the curtain, in a yellow raincoat.’

The woman in the studded collar waves to someone and stumbles into the room. The beads of the curtain swing back and sway in front of the yellow figure.

And now Joona remembers how Filip Cronstedt described the man who was filming Maria Carlsson.

The last thing he heard before he collapsed in the storeroom was that the thin man with the camera was wearing yellow oilskins, like the fishermen in Lofoten.

Joona starts walking, but the man in the camouflage trousers steps round the flowery sofa and stops him.

‘I have to ask you and your friend to come with me,’ he says.

‘Erik,’ Joona says. ‘You saw him, didn’t you? Over there by the curtain. That’s the preacher. You have to follow him, try to get a look at his face.’

‘This club is for members only,’ the man says.

‘We were thinking of buying a sofa,’ Joona says, as he sees Erik hurry away towards the curtain.