He was actually looking for any mention of internet poker. Someone who had recently come into money, for example, had entered the forum to ask for advice on their newly acquired Abyssinian. The cat was so lively, shredding the Svenskt Tenn designer curtains—what could he do? The cat owner might get into conversation with another owner, and poker would be mentioned in passing.
That was the key: in passing. These nouveau riche types thought it was fun to mention in passing how much they had spent on a bottle of wine or a suit, or the fact that they had just thrown away thirty thousand in a game of online poker the other night in spite of the fact that they were such bad players, ha ha, but not to worry, they were sitting on a hundred and twenty thousand IBM B-portfolio options, say no more.
That kind of comment. Made in passing.
It was a time-consuming and tedious task. Often Jerry would find a perfect candidate, but then never see that person on the poker site. Either he was no longer playing, or he was using a different handle.
But he compiled a list, and as time went by one of these rich or slightly less rich idiots would turn up at the table. Then it was time to join the game.
There was no ideology behind it. No Robin Hood fantasies on Jerry’s part. On the contrary. Since the opportunities to skin rich people were so rare, he also gathered information on ordinary players, gambling addicts and poor people. The main thing was that they played badly.
To tell the truth, it gave him even more satisfaction to fleece someone he knew to have problems. He found Wheelsonfire on a forum for caravan owners, complaining that he couldn’t afford a new fridge for his caravan—did anyone know where he could find a second-hand one? The fact that he was a bad poker player was mentioned in a different context.
When Wheelsonfire popped up on Partypoker and Jerry managed to take four thousand off him, he felt a deep, sincere and malicious pleasure. No new fridge for you, wanker. You can sit there roasting on your campsite while your food rots.
His fear of other people and his unease around them grew neither better nor worse. But his contempt increased. As did his income. A year or so after he had begun playing and gathering information, he was bringing in eight to ten thousand a month, as a general rule, money that the tax office hadn’t yet realised they should be enquiring about.
He sat there in his little apartment in Norrtälje, dipping his virtual fingers in the global river of money. He played for five or six hours a day, and regardless of whether he won or lost, he was never gripped by greed. It didn’t matter to him. The important thing was that he had a little power base where he could sit and let his lash whistle across the backs of all those world-wide idiots. He could flog them hard and almost hear them whimper. Sometimes he even felt something that resembled happiness.
When the girl was about twelve years old, she became listless. Nothing seemed to reach her anymore. Day in and day out she sat on her bed staring at the wall, doing nothing. She didn’t sing, she didn’t talk, she barely moved, and she had to be fed baby food from the jar with a spoon; that was still the only thing she would eat.
It became quite frightening after a while, and Lennart and Laila began to have serious discussions about whether they should give her up and let the professionals take care of her. Drive somewhere no one knew them and just leave her at a hospital, then drive away without saying anything. But it felt too cold, too terrible not to know what might become of her. So they waited.
After all, everything seemed to have gone so well. The girl had learned to write using the typewriter, she could form whole words and sentences. She spent a long time typing out every single word from an old copy of the local paper. Articles, adverts, the speech bubbles in the cartoon strips, the TV guide. It took her almost four months to type out the entire newspaper onto sixty pages of A4.
It was when this project was almost finished that something happened. Laila saw the first sign when she went down to the cellar one morning and found the girl staring into the washing machine; she closed the door, then looked inside the tumble drier. Then the laundry basket.
‘What are you looking for?’ Laila asked, but as usual the girl ignored her.
Another day Laila stood silently by the workshop door watching the girl opening drawers and looking in cupboards just as she had done when she was little, just as Laila had done.
The girl had grown to be beautiful with her curly golden hair, and there was something deeply upsetting about seeing this lovely creature wandering around and around like a swan in a cramped cage, searching for something that didn’t exist. The dark, gloomy cellar, the rattling as she pulled out yet another drawer of random tools, while her golden hair cascaded over her shoulders.
Laila tapped on the door frame with the crutch she had started to use to help her get down the stairs, and the girl immediately stopped searching, went to her room and sat on the bed. Laila sat down beside her.
‘Little One? What is it you want?’
The girl didn’t answer.
A week or so later, Laila had gone down to the cellar one evening to get a pair of gloves from the storeroom. She stood in the doorway of the girl’s room, watching her as she slept. With her hair spread over the pillow, her arms resting straight down by her sides, she looked like a very beautiful corpse. Laila shuddered.
Then she caught sight of the typewriter. There was a blank piece of paper in it, a pale glow in the reflection of the cellar light. No. Not blank. There was something written on it. After checking that the girl really was asleep, Laila went into the room and carefully pulled out the sheet of paper.
The girl’s writing ability also seemed to have deteriorated. There was just one line, without any punctuation. It was the first thing Laila had seen that the girl had come up with for herself. It said:
‘Where love how love colour feels how it is where’
Laila read the line several times, then her gaze slid over to the bed. The girl’s eyes were open, shining faintly as she lay there looking at Laila. She sat down on the edge of the bed with the piece of paper in her hand.
‘Love,’ she said. ‘Is it love you’re searching for, Little One?’
But the girl had closed her eyes again, and didn’t answer.
One morning in the middle of October, when Lennart was in the garage putting the winter tyres on the car, Laila sat in the living room feeling despondent and restless at the same time. She tried playing a Lill-Babs song to cheer herself up, but it didn’t help.
There was a knot of anxiety in her stomach, an ominous feeling. She walked up and down the room, leaning on her crutch, but the feeling wouldn’t go. As if something had happened just now, something she ought to know about. Suddenly she got the idea it was something to do with the girl. As she limped towards the cellar, she became more and more convinced that she was right. Their poor foundling had taken the step from apathy to the final separation that is death.
She felt she should hurry. Perhaps it wasn’t too late.
She didn’t ground the crutch properly on the fifth step, and it slid away when she put her weight on it. She fell head first down the stairs, and when her head met the edge between the wall and the staircase, she heard rather than felt something crack in the back of her neck.
Steps. She could hear footsteps. Back and forth. Light, tiptoeing steps. Her entire back was a blue flame of pain, and she couldn’t move her head, couldn’t feel her fingers. She opened her eyes. The girl was standing next to her.
‘Little One,’ Laila wheezed. ‘Little One, help me. I think I’ve…had it.’
The girl looked her in the eye. Studied her. Looked her in the eye. Never before had the girl looked her in the eye for so long. She leaned down and looked even deeper, as if she were searching for something in or behind Laila’s eyes. The girl’s eyes enveloped Laila like two dark blue wells, and for a brief moment the pain disappeared.
In her confusion Laila thought: She can heal. She can make me whole. She’s an angel.
Laila opened her trembling
lips, ‘I’m here. Help me.’
The girl straightened up and said, ‘Can’t see it. Can’t see it.’
A shape that shouldn’t have been there flickered on the edge of Laila’s field of vision. A hammer. The girl was holding a hammer in her hand. Laila tried to scream. She could only manage a whimper.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘What are you going to do what are you—’
‘Quiet,’ said the girl. ‘Open look.’
Then she struck Laila’s temple with the hammer. Once, twice, three times. Laila was no longer able to feel anything, her sight went and she was blind. Her hearing seemed to be drifting around the room, however, and she could hear the girl grunt in annoyance, footsteps walking away.
Laila no longer had any idea what was up or down, she was floating in a vacuum and only her hearing was keeping her alive, a fine thread that had come to breaking point.
She heard a clinking sound as the girl put something down on the floor. Her hearing guessed that it was nails, perhaps five of them. Then she felt something. A sharp point against her skin, someone took a deep breath and the last thing her hearing perceived was a harsh metallic clang and a crunching, cracking sound as her skull split open beneath the point of the nail.
Then there was silence as the process of opening up the skull continued.
One hour later Lennart came down to the cellar. He didn’t even have time to scream.
In some ways Jerry was lucky that day, because he unconsciously established an alibi for himself. The wide-ranging police investigation that was to follow would probably have focused more closely on Jerry if he hadn’t decided on that particular day that he’d had enough of sitting around indoors, and spent several hours at the bowling alley.
He didn’t know anybody there, he just sat at a table and drank several cups of coffee, ate a couple of sandwiches and read the papers, distractedly watching the semi-useless players as they went after their strikes and spares. After that he went to the Co-op Forum store and spent half an hour hanging out in the media department, where he bought a few DVDs. At the cheap supermarket he stocked up, out of habit, on cans of ravioli and instant noodles. An impulse led him to Jysk, where he wandered around for a while and eventually bought a new pillow.
He couldn’t have arranged things better if it had been planned. A whole day when his activities could be confirmed by the staff in the bowling alley, checkout assistants and his printed receipts. This would actually end up being the police’s only grounds for suspicion: the fact that his alibi was almost too watertight for a recluse like Jerry. But they couldn’t really arrest him for that.
He went home and had a beer, then rang Lennart and Laila. No one answered, but it was possible to trace the call later, extending his documented afternoon activities by a further half hour. By that stage the bodies of his parents had grown so cold since the morning that he couldn’t possibly have been the perpetrator.
He then had his final unplanned stroke of genius. He got on his motorbike and went to visit his sister.
There was some suspicion that he knew about body temperature, knew they had to be reported dead before too long had elapsed if the time of death were to be fixed within the period for which he had an alibi.
Needless to say, no such thoughts were in Jerry’s mind as he drove out to his parents’ house through the darkness. There were no thoughts in his mind at all. It was good to be out on the bike. The forward movement of his body replaced the circular movement of his thoughts, going round and round inside his head.
He drove right up to the porch steps, noticing that the light wasn’t on in the kitchen. However, he could just see a glimmer of light behind the blanket at the cellar window. He went up the steps and knocked. No one came. He tried the handle, and found that the door wasn’t locked.
‘Hello?’ he shouted as he walked into the hallway, but there was no answer. ‘Anyone home?’
He hung his leather jacket on Lennart’s homemade coat rack, which in his opinion was a bit kitsch, and took a stroll around the house. He couldn’t understand it. Since the occasion many years ago when he and Theres had checked out Bowie, he didn’t think his parents had ever left her alone.
Have they taken her with them?
But the garage door was shut, which meant the car was still inside. Without giving the matter any more thought, he went and turned on the cellar stair light. He stopped with his hand on the switch and listened. The door was ajar, and he could hear some kind of motor coming from down below. He pulled the door open.
He managed five steps before he collapsed on the stairs, before his brain registered what his eyes were seeing. His windpipe contracted and it was impossible to breathe.
Lennart and Laila, what ought to be Lennart and Laila judging by their clothes, were lying next to one another at the bottom of the staircase. The whole floor was covered in blood. Strewn around in the blood were a number of different tools. Hammers, saws, chisels.
Their heads were mush. Pieces of skull with short or long clumps of hair still attached lay scattered all over the floor, lumps of brain matter were stuck to the walls, and all that was left above Lennart’s shoulders was a piece of spine sticking up with a grubby bit of skull still attached. The rest of his head lay crushed and spread all over the floor and the walls.
Theres was kneeling in the blood next to what remained of Laila’s head, which was slightly more than in the case of Lennart. In her hand she held her drill; the battery was so run down that the bit was hardly rotating at all. With the last scrap of power left in the machine she was busy boring her way in behind Laila’s ear. A little pearl earring in Laila’s earlobe vibrated as the drill laboriously worked its way through the bone. Theres struggled and tugged, changed the direction of the drill and managed to pull it out, wiped the blood from her eyes and reached for the saw.
Jerry was on the point of passing out through lack of oxygen, and he managed to draw a panting breath. Theres turned her head in the direction of the sound, looked at his feet. A strange calm descended over Jerry. He was not afraid, and even though what he was seeing was obviously horrific, it was just like a picture, something to register: what I am seeing is horrific.
Somewhere deep inside he had sensed that things would end up like this, one way or another. That it would all end badly. Now it had happened, and even if it couldn’t have been any worse, at least it had happened. There was nothing to add. This was just how the world was. Nothing new, even if the details were disgusting.
‘Theres,’ he said, his voice almost steady. ‘Sis. What the fuck have you done? Why have you done this?’
Theres lowered the saw and her eyes slid from Laila to Lennart, over the bits of their heads strewn all around her.
‘Love,’ she said. ‘Not there.’
THE OTHER GIRL
She was born on November 8, 1992, one of the last babies delivered in the maternity unit at Österyd. The unit was in the process of being moved to the central location in Rimsta, and they had already started packing. Only one midwife and a trainee were on duty.
Fortunately it was an easy delivery. Maria Svensson was admitted at 14:42. One hour and twenty minutes later, the child was born. The father, Göran Svensson, waited outside the room as usual. That’s what he had done when their other two children were born, and that’s what he did this time. As he waited he flicked through a few copies of a magazine, Året Runt.
Just after four o’clock the midwife emerged and informed him that he had been blessed with a perfect daughter. Göran abandoned the article on breeding rabbits he had been reading and went in to see his wife.
As he walked into the room he made the mistake of looking around. A number of bloodstained compresses had been tossed aside into a metal dish, and Göran was hit by a wave of nausea before he managed to look away. The combination of a sterile environment and bodily fluids revolted him. That was why he could never be present at a birth.
He pulled himself together and went over to kiss his wife’s sweaty b
row. The child was lying on her chest, a wrinkled red lump. It was incomprehensible that it would turn into a person. He ran his finger over the child’s damp head. He knew what was expected of him.
‘Did it go OK?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ said Maria. ‘But I think I’m going to need a few stitches.’
Göran nodded and looked out of the window. It was almost completely dark outside, wet snowflakes licking the glass. He was a father of three now. Two boys and a girl. He knew Maria had wanted a girl, and it didn’t make any difference to him. So everything had turned out for the best. His eyes followed a trickle of liquid running down the window pane.
A life begins.
A child had been born on this day. His child. The only thing he wished for now was a little more happiness. Sometimes he would pray to God for this very thing: give me a greater capacity to feel happiness. But his prayer was rarely answered.
A miracle had taken place in this room, just a few minutes ago. He knew that. But he couldn’t make himself feel it. The trickle of liquid reached the bottom of the window and Göran turned back to his wife, smiling. What he felt was a faint satisfaction, a certain sense of relief. It was done. It was over for this time.
‘Teresa, then,’ he said. ‘Happy with that?’
Maria nodded. ‘Yes, Teresa.’
It had been decided long ago. Tomas if it was a boy, Teresa if it was a girl. Good names. Reliable names. Arvid, Olof and Teresa. Their little trio. He stroked Maria’s cheek and started to cry without knowing why. Because of the image of the wet snow against the window of a warmly lit room where a child had been born. Because there was a secret he would never be part of.
When the nurse came in to do Maria’s stitches, he left the room.
Teresa was fourteen months old when she started daycare. Lollo, the childminder, had five other children to look after and Teresa was the youngest. It was a problem-free induction. After only four days Maria was able to leave her daughter for the whole day and go back to work full-time at Österyd Pets.