The Viper (40 page)

She got up from the bed and walked barefoot out to the garage.

Not one more day, not one more minute.

She immediately spotted the hatchet. It looked like it had never been used. The handle in light-colored wood, the red-painted head, didn’t have a single scratch. The gleaming blade covered by a leather cover was razor sharp. Frighteningly sharp. She put the little leather cover back on and fastened the strap that held it in place.

She slipped back into the house, tiptoed silently down the stairs.

He lay in the bath, his Japanese bath, facing the wall. He lay there stretched out after having fucked and beaten her. He had folded a towel into a pillow and rested his neck against the stone edge of the bathtub.

He didn’t hear her coming. Only when she was standing right over him did he react and lazily turn his head.

She struck him, full of rage. Struck to set herself free. But she also struck to punish. She wanted to punish herself for all the years that had passed.

Three blows. Straight from above with all her might. As hard as she could. Three blows. It went so quickly that she didn’t notice that he was dead already after the first hit.

61.

The windows rattled as the lighthouse was buffeted by the wind gusts. It was cold in there, colder than it ought to be, he thought, as if the air in the old lighthouse had been still for too long. Shut in, dead air. Colder than it should have been.

He wouldn’t be staying out here till the end of the day, that much he realized. The police were standing down there, just outside the open door. It was as if they were right on top of him. He could almost feel their breath when they shouted their questions.

He couldn’t understand why they didn’t just come in and get him. Wasn’t that what the police did? Not these ones maybe. No doubt they’ve got special units for that. Ones that didn’t ask any questions, just came in and took you away. Maybe they were already on their way over. Or were they just going to stand here all night? The two of them down there, and him up here. They hadn’t even asked if they could come in. He was happy about that. He didn’t want them in there. Sooner or later, one way or the other, he had to finish this. That much he knew. But first he had to explain. He had started, tried, but it was as if they didn’t really want to listen. He could explain how everything was connected, how one thing had led to another, but it was as if they weren’t interested in the context.

“So your father was lying in the bathtub down in the basement?” he heard Sara Oskarsson’s voice echo through the lighthouse.

“Yes,” he said, “he was lying in the bath. That was where he was killed.”

He had stood there in the back entrance and pieced everything together. But this wasn’t just some made-up story, that was what they didn’t seem to understand. It was only something that he could understand because he was there and because he heard what he heard, right there in the house where he grew up in Levide. He had grown up with Stefania, Elin, Mother, and Father, and Father’s cousin who got kicked to death by a horse, and the island, and the
Adventure
. He could get it all to make sense. The police down there, on the other hand, hadn’t even heard of him or his family before three weeks ago.

Stubbornly they asked the wrong questions.

62.

Blood. For the rest of her life she would dream about blood. She couldn’t imagine that she would be seeing anything but blood, regardless of whether her eyes were open or closed. Whether she was asleep or awake.

She sat on the top step of the basement stairs. Her shoulders ached and her right hand hurt like it was cramping up. Wasn’t it a little swollen compared to the left one?

How could what just a few short hours ago had felt like a deliverance now feel like the end of everything? “Who am I?” she had asked herself accusingly, because she hadn’t seized the moment to change her life, because she hadn’t made better use of the opportunity that fate had presented her with.

But who was she now?

She had been so strong when she’d raised the ax to deliver the blow. She had earned the right to do it. She was driven by something that was bigger than she was. She was strong. She would save herself. There was no doubt.

Now it was all over, gone. She tried to cling to the notion that she had been justified somehow. He had earned his death. Day by day, year by year, he had gradually tightened something inside her to the breaking point. Now it had snapped. She wanted to think that way, but it wasn’t easy. She wanted to think that it was him, not her.

When Anders came they had first moved around each other like two caged animals without being able to say anything intelligible. They had circled, paced, reached for each other, but in the crushing gravity of the situation there was no place for tenderness.

After over an hour, Anders had told her to go into the bedroom and shut the door. She hadn’t been able to, wanted to know, had clung on to him. Then all of a sudden Anders had broken free, taken her into the bedroom.

It’s better that you not know anything, he had said. Then he had shut the door. You stay here, he had said.

She had sat there on the edge of the bed, heard him go up and down the stairs and then out to the garage, not much more than that. And yet she had been on tenterhooks and had listened. She hadn’t wanted to, but couldn’t do otherwise.

She had sat there on the edge of the bed where Arvid had taken her just a few hours before. Where he had beaten her. The same hand that had touched her between her legs and struck her in the face, right on her cheekbone. He had hit her with the back of his hand. It had probably hurt, because he delivered the next blow with a closed fist. It had connected with her temple and was harder, as if the pain in his hand was also her fault, as if it had been added to the thing that was already driving him.

He had taken her hard and suddenly, more as if out of some kind of compulsion than desire. The intercourse had been just as irrational as the beating that followed. She hadn’t felt the slightest shiver run through her body. Everything was gone. Once upon a time, she had lusted after him beyond all else. She had been prepared to go to any lengths to get him, just to be able to touch his body again, just one more time. Weak-kneed, dizzy, and distraught, ready to do anything. And now there was nothing left, not so much as a distant echo. Just thinking about it felt foreign to her.

She had no idea how much time had passed when Anders pulled open the door. She looked at him, stared at him with big, questioning eyes. It’s better that you not know anything, he had said again. He was going to drive off and he wouldn’t return again today. It would be best for them not to see each other for a while, not to have any contact whatsoever.

But there was one thing left to do. She had to clean up. He had taken care of the worst of it, but she had to go down there and really scrub. The whole room had to be scoured with the most powerful cleaner there was. Every inch. She mustn’t use the cleaning materials that the cleaning lady used. When she was done she should burn the brush, the rag, everything she had used. Stick it in the furnace, turn up the shunt overnight.

We’ll get through this, he had said.

She didn’t believe him. They would come looking for Arvid. They would find him.

No, he had said, you have to trust me.

They would find them out, find out how things were between her and Anders.

Let them find out how things are between us, he had said. We’re going to get through this.

63.

Sara felt that she was starting to become hoarse. She had been standing there shouting into the lighthouse for a long while, the whole time with the wind whipping the right side of her face. She couldn’t lose her voice now. This just couldn’t fail because her voice gave out, right when she was finally getting somewhere.

Fredrik was standing to the side of the doorway, leaning against the lighthouse. He was frozen stiff. He had taken out his notepad and his aching fingers were struggling to write down what Rickard Traneus was answering to Sara’s questions. It was logical, but also completely bizarre. This must have been the strangest interrogation she had ever done.

There was a lot going through Rickard Traneus’s head. She didn’t want to steer him too much and risk him getting annoyed and refusing to speak. While she asked her questions, she was also wondering in the back of her head how all this was going to end. They had to get him to come out, or else go in there and fetch him. Would he come out of his own volition once he’d said what he had to say? Would he resist? Was he armed?

“Did you go in to them? Did you go into the house or did you stay there at the entrance and listen?” she yelled gruffly.

Her vocal cords felt dry and rigid.

“They killed him,” Rickard Traneus said softly from the upper floor.

They could barely hear him, but rather than ask him to speak louder, she leaned further in through the doorway. Fredrik gave her a wary look when she put her foot on the threshold. She gave him a dismissive wave.

“I understand,” she said.

Somewhere she had already sensed what was coming and would really have preferred not to hear it. She wished that he didn’t have to go through it. No one should have to suffer at their own hand like that. What sort of a future was there for Rickard Traneus? What would he do once he had served out his sentence? There was no punishment in the world that could atone for such a crime. Not in the eyes of the world, but above all not in his own eyes. He would always have to carry it around with him. He didn’t think it was his own fault, but he would still have to carry it around.

“You went in to them, didn’t you, Rickard?”

64.

He held the heavy blade tightly in his right hand. He felt the steel edges press through the glove’s thick leather. He listened and he understood.

When the last piece fell into place there was nothing that could stop him. He became consumed with one single thought. That man had to die. That man who walked around in Father’s house as if he’d already taken his place. He had never heard anything so sickening, never met anyone so despicable. That man wasn’t a human being. He was an animal. A snake.

There was no deliberation. Once he had understood, everything happened in a split second. The fury engulfed him like a storm surge of fire.

He bolted from the spot where he had been hiding, rushed through the house with the steel blade raised in his right hand. He spotted him at once. He looked ridiculously ordinary. A man like any other. But when he met his gaze, there was no doubt. It was terrified and full of guilt, but above it was a look of absolute certainty. Anders Traneus knew that this was the end, that this was his punishment and that there was no escape.

Rickard roared at him, released a sound that expressed as much pain as it did rage. He raised the blade above his head, aimed his blow. The room was spinning around him, disappeared into a blur, but Anders remained clearly in focus in the middle of his field of vision. He was longing to drive that steel right through his throat, bury it into the chest that he glimpsed through the opening in his shirt, and extinguish his life.

And he hacked. Rickard brought down his blade.

Then all of a sudden she was there, her arms outstretched, not to protect herself, but to protect him, like a shield.

“Rickard! No!”

Her words cut into him, screamed inside him. But it was too late. The blade fell. Quick, heavy, and hard. Left a deep cut in her chest.

He stared at the red gash, saw how her limbs buckled and she sat down on the edge of the couch and slipped on down to the floor.

Beside himself, he turned toward Anders. He shoved the table out of the way, forced him into a corner of the room. Anders backed away, cravenly begging, knocking over furniture in his way.

The first blow cut through the tendons and veins of his arms, just beneath his hands that were raised toward him in a pleading gesture, or possibly just for protection. He stared in amazement at what he had brought about, blood that was pumping from the lacerated arms, hands that dangled limply when there were no longer any muscles or tendons to control them. But he didn’t stop. He was burning inside, boiling with rage, hate, and despair. But it was more than emotions that drove him. He was beyond feelings. It was a searing primordial power that made him swing that keen, heavy blade that he was holding in his hand. A power that would annihilate and restore, that would put everything back in its place and make the world whole again.

The second blow hit him right across the bridge of his nose. The bone was crushed when the steel broke through and forced his bloody eyes out of his skull. With all his might he brought his arm down a third time, slicing the blade into his chest, cutting through bone and cartilage with little resistance. During the half second it took him to swing his arm back over his right shoulder he caught a glimpse of his heart through the blood-soaked cleft in his chest, beating hard and strenuously a few final times in its as-yet-undamaged grayish-blue sack.

He took a half step back as he smote for the forth time, and the blade sliced off his throat and the arteries on either side of his neck. His head shot backward in a surprising, grotesque motion and opened up a gaping fissure out of which blood spurted in copious but ever-weakening eruptions.

The body lay lifeless on the floor in front of him, but still he didn’t stop. He raised his hand and hacked at it a fifth time, a sixth, a seventh …

65.

The waves crashed against the rocky west side of the island. The air had become more humid, the clouds thicker and lower in the sky, but still no rain.

Fredrik thought about the pieces that had fallen into place. Kristina Traneus killed her husband, the lover buried him, and the son took his revenge on the lover and his mother. The latter possibly by mistake. And Leo Ringvall? He must have come to the farm, snooped around, looked in through the window, maybe even caught sight of the lacerated bodies. But he had nothing to do with what happened. Except in as far as he was yet another of a long line of people who wouldn’t weep at Arvid Traneus’s funeral.