No. No. That was no good at all. He did not want that to happen. It was the bit about Theres and the loony bin that really stuck in his throat. However crazy she was—and we’re talking seriously crazy here—he didn’t want to see her sitting in some cell picking at her nails for the rest of her life. So he just had think of something, and fast.
After pondering for a while he had a useless plan that was the best he could come up with.
‘Theres?’ he said. The girl didn’t look at him, but she did turn her head in his direction. ‘I think you’d better…’ He broke off, rephrased what he was going to say. ‘Go and change your clothes.’
The girl didn’t react. He didn’t want to go over to her, didn’t want to get too close to the scene of the crime where he might be contaminated, to use the technical term, or leave traces behind. In a louder voice he said, ‘Go to your room. Put on some clean clothes. Now.’
The girl stood up, leaving a trail of blood behind her as she walked through the cellar. Jerry went upstairs and gathered together a sleeping bag, a loaf of bread, a tube of caviar and a torch. He went outside and around the house, then down the cellar steps and in through the other door.
Being careful not to step in any of the bloodstains, he went to Theres’ room and found her sitting on the bed and staring at the wall. She had changed into a clean velour tracksuit but her blonde hair was caked with dried blood and her hands, face and feet were covered in almost-black, coagulated clumps. For the first time since the whole thing had started, Jerry felt his stomach turn over. Seeing the remains of his parents stuck to Theres’ skin was somehow more unpleasant than the sight of their bodies.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re going.’
‘Where?’
‘Out. You have to hide.’
Theres shook her head. ‘Not out.’
Jerry closed his eyes. In the midst of the chaos Theres had created, he had managed to forget that she had more problems with her view of the world than the obvious ones. He had to work from her perceptions.
‘The big people are coming,’ he said. ‘They’re coming here. Soon. You have to get away.’
The girl hunched her shoulders as if she was trying to protect herself from a blow. ‘The big people?’
‘Yes. They know you’re here.’
In a single movement the girl got up from the bed and grabbed hold of a small axe that was lying on the floor. It showed signs of recent use. She moved towards Jerry.
‘Stop!’ he said. Theres stopped. ‘What are you thinking of doing with that axe?’
Theres raised and lowered the axe. ‘The big people.’
Jerry moved back a step to make sure he was out of range, and said, ‘OK. OK. I’m going to ask you a question now, and I want an honest answer.’ Jerry snorted at his own stupidity. Had he ever heard Theres lie? No. He didn’t believe she was even capable of lying. And yet it was a question he needed her to answer. He pointed at the axe.
‘Are you intending to hit me with that?’
Theres shook her head.
‘Are you intending to hit me or stab me or…chop me up in any way?’
Another shake of the head. Sussing out the reason why Theres regarded him differently from his parents could wait for a later conversation. Right now all Jerry needed to know was that being around her didn’t mean he was in mortal danger. To be on the safe side, he added, ‘Good. Because if you do anything to me, the big people will come and get you. Straight away. Bang, get it? You are not to touch me, is that clear?’
Theres nodded, and Jerry realised that what he had just said was true, basically. He told Theres to put on some shoes, and made sure he kept his eye on her as they left the room.
When he opened the outside door Theres stood there as if she was glued to the floor, refusing to move and staring out into the darkness with big eyes. Enticing her, exhorting her to move forward didn’t help, so instead he pretended to listen hard, then whispered with simulated fear, ‘Come on, sis! They’re coming, they’re coming! I can hear their machines!’
At last Theres unglued her feet from the floor, and Jerry had to move out of the way as she rushed towards the doorway with the axe firmly clutched to her chest. She carried on up the garden, looking to right and left, adrenaline-fuelled panic in every movement. Jerry made the most of the opportunity and fled towards the forest with her.
Jerry had a childhood memory of an opening among the trees about five hundred metres into the forest, and he managed to find it with the help of the torch. The branches of a huge oak hung down over the glade, and the ground was covered in dry leaves. He pulled out the sleeping bag, unzipped it and showed Theres how to crawl inside. Then he gave her the torch, the bread and the caviar.
‘OK sis,’ he said. ‘You’ve caused a hell of a problem, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to fix this. But you’re to stay here, OK? I’ll come back as soon as I can. Do you understand?’
Theres shook her head violently, and glanced anxiously around the glade where the fir trees stood in dark ranks. ‘Not go.’
‘Yes,’ said Jerry. ‘I have to. Otherwise we’ve had it. If I don’t go… The big people will come and take both of us if I don’t go. I have to go back and fool them. That’s just the way it is.’
Theres wrapped her arms around her knees and curled up into a ball. Jerry crouched down and tried to catch her eye, but without success. He picked up the torch and shone it on her. She was shivering, as if she was terribly cold.
It was always going to end up like this.
What he didn’t understand was why he had regarded the whole situation as normal for such a long time. Why he had got used to the fact that his parents had a girl in the cellar, a girl who was now thirteen years old and didn’t know a thing about the world. Why this had become perfectly natural.
And now he was stuck with the consequences. A trembling girl he was going to have to leave alone in the forest, his parents chopped up into little bits back at home. He could have put a stop to it all long ago. And yet he had to carry on now, because there was nothing else he could do. He got up. Theres grabbed at his trouser leg.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I have to. They’ll come for us otherwise. Both of us. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He pointed at the sleeping bag. ‘Keep warm.’
Theres mumbled, ‘The big people are dangerous. You’ll be dead.’
Jerry couldn’t help smiling. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll be back.’ He didn’t dare delay any longer, so without any further words of farewell he turned and left Theres in the glade.
Behind him Theres held out the axe, as if she were offering it to him. For protection. But Jerry had already disappeared in the darkness, and for the first time since she was found, the girl was alone in the vast outdoors.
Five minutes after he got back in the house, Jerry called the police. Five minutes which he used for something he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to do. To grieve. With his head drooping he stood motionless in the middle of the hallway as a lump formed in his stomach. He let it grow, tasting its colour and weight.
Without moving a muscle, in the middle of the hallway in his childhood home. All the times he had taken off his shoes in this hallway, the shoes getting bigger and bigger. The aroma of cooking from the kitchen, or bread baking. Happy or sad, coming home from nursery or school. Never again. Never again in this house, never again with his parents.
The lump rose and fell inside him. He gave himself five minutes to take his leave of everything. He stood completely still. He didn’t cry. After five minutes he went to the telephone in the kitchen, rang the emergency number and explained that he had just got home and found his mother and father brutally murdered. He didn’t recognise his own voice.
Then he sat down on a chair in the kitchen. While he waited for the police, he tried to work out how he ought to behave. What he would say wasn’t difficult. He had found them on the floor of the cellar, end of story, he didn’t know anymore. He’d gone into shock and it had been twenty minutes before he
called the police.
It was the strange voice he had heard coming out of his mouth that worried him. How should he talk, how should he behave? He calmed himself down with the thought that there was probably no set pattern. Double murders were unlikely to be an everyday occurrence for the Norrtälje police, so they would have nothing to compare with, nothing to make his behaviour appear suspicious.
However, he did get up from his chair and go outside to wait. A normal person wouldn’t want to sit in the house where his parents lay murdered.
Would they?
He knew nothing, and could only hope that whoever was on their way knew nothing either.
As he had expected he immediately became the prime suspect and was taken into custody. He was interrogated in minute detail over what had happened when he found his mother and father, and what he had done during the course of the day.
He had hoped he would be released after a few hours, but that didn’t happen. The bodies had to be removed and the forensic pathologists had to do their job, and the information he had given had to be checked. Jerry spent the night on a bunk bed in a cell, where grief over his parents and anxiety over Theres kept him wide awake.
In the middle of the night he was brought up for further questioning with regard to the fact that they had found traces of someone living in the cellar. Clothes, jars of baby food, spoons with comparatively recent remains of food on them. What did he know about this? He knew nothing. He didn’t visit his parents all that often, and had no idea what they got up to.
Since he had been expecting these questions, and suspected there would be fingerprints, he admitted that he had been in his old room a few times. But he hadn’t seen any signs of anyone else living there, not a thing. This was something new to him, a complete bloody mystery, in fact. Who did they think had been living there?
He was taken back to his cell to pick more foam out of his mattress, and towards morning he was released without a world of explanation. He was asked to stay in the Norrtälje area.
After a bus ride and a short hitch-hike he was back in the garden. There was no sign of activity from the outside, but blue and white tape was fastened across the front door. Jerry looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was following him. It felt as if someone was, but it might just as easily be a ghost created by his exhausted brain.
He didn’t dare to believe he had got off so lightly. Presumably the police had checked his alibi and gathered evidence that made him an unlikely murderer, but he had so much valuable information that he kind of thought it ought to show. That they’d be back to drag it out of him.
He got on his motorbike and started the engine. As he rode out onto the gravel track that would take him to the glade from the opposite direction, he decided that, with the greatest respect, he didn’t give a damn about any of it. They would just have to carry on as best they could. The only thing that mattered now was Theres.
Why this was the case he had no idea. He hated people. The police officers who had questioned him during the night had been arseholes to a man, and his only pleasure had been in comprehensively fooling them. He wasn’t really mourning his parents, but his childhood. He no longer had any friends. But Theres.
Theres?
No. He couldn’t get his head round it. It was just something he had to do. She was kind of the only person he didn’t feel the slightest scrap of hatred or contempt for. Perhaps it was that simple.
He propped the motorbike against a tree in the forest, waited for five minutes to be on the safe side, just to make sure no one was following him. Then he set off.
It took him over half an hour to find the glade because he was coming from the wrong direction, and when he did find it he was met by the very thing he had feared: nothing. The glade was empty. Only the dry leaves, scattered over the ground or blown into piles. He rubbed his eyes.
What the fuck happens now?
The forest was not large. Sooner or later Theres would reach a track, someone would see her, someone would…it was impossible to work through all the links in the chain. Just one cold fact remained. They were fucked, big time.
Jerry looked around and caught sight of something blue on the edge of the forest. The unopened tube of Kalles Caviar had been thrown a couple of metres in among the trees. Next to it lay the bag containing the sliced loaf, also unopened. Only the sleeping bag and the torch were missing. Perhaps she had taken them with her.
Before long the shit would really hit the fan. But for the time being he was here in this silent glade in the middle of the forest, where no bastard had any questions or accusations to throw at him. He took the bread and the tube of caviar and sat down on the ground in the middle of the glade, squeezed a generous amount of caviar on a slice of bread, slapped another slice on top and tucked in.
He closed his eyes and chewed. His body felt doughy after a night in the cells, and the sticky mess he was swallowing didn’t help. He dreamed of just sitting there, disintegrating, rotting away and turning into the formless mass he felt like. Becoming one with nature in the silent stillness.
Then came the hiccup. He had swallowed too quickly.
He hiccupped and hiccupped, and couldn’t stop. Then came the sobs, competing with the hiccups to make his body jerk as he sat there. So much for his quiet absorption into the earth. He put his head between his knees. Suddenly he threw caution to the winds, flung his head back and yelled, ‘THERES! THEERRREESS!’
The bellow stopped both the sobbing and the hiccupping. Without any real hope he listened for an answer. None came. However, there was a rustling sound among the leaves a couple of metres from where he was sitting. His mouth hanging open, he saw a hand shoot up out of the ground. The only thing his tired brain could come up with was the poster for some zombie film, and his instinctive reaction was to shuffle backwards half a metre.
Then his brain made the right connections and he crawled forward to help Theres out. She wasn’t just covered in leaves. With the help of the axe she had hacked away and dug herself a hole, crawled into it wrapped in the sleeping bag, then scooped earth and leaves over her until she was invisible.
Jerry dug away a considerable amount of earth with his hands until his sister lay exposed in her blue cocoon. He wondered what she would have done if he’d been kept in custody for a week. Would she just have stayed in her hole? Maybe she would. He unzipped the sleeping bag and helped her to crawl out. She was still clutching the axe.
‘You’re just too fucking much, you are,’ he said.
Theres looked around carefully, examining the trees as if they might attack her at any moment, and asked, ‘Big people gone?’
‘Yes,’ said Jerry. ‘They’ve gone now. All gone.’
During the next few weeks Jerry was constantly afraid that the apartment would be searched. He didn’t know how the police operated in cases like these, but in the TV series he’d seen, house searches happened all the time. If the police knocked on the door and wanted to search the place, they were fucked. There was nowhere to hide Theres.
But nobody knocked on the door; nobody rang the bell. The only thing that happened was that Jerry was called in for questioning again. When he got home Theres was still there, and the apartment appeared to be untouched. Perhaps it wasn’t like the TV after all.
Many people that Jerry had never seen before came to Lennart and Laila’s funeral, drawn no doubt by curiosity thanks to all the articles in the press. ‘Bestial murder of Swedish chart toppers.’ Lennart and Laila should have seen the headlines. In spite of everything, they had ended their career as chart toppers.
It was only when the funeral was over that Jerry began to come down to earth, gather his thoughts and try to look clearly at the situation. Up to that point his mind had been constantly fixed on the murder, and he had gone to the computer several times a day to Google news and comments relating to his parents.
Theres didn’t make much noise. When he tried to ask her why she had done what she had done, she refused to talk about it,
but it did seem as if she realised that what she had done had hurt Jerry; perhaps she was even ashamed of herself.
Jerry had no idea what actually went on inside her head, and he was scared of her. He put away every knife, tool and sharp object in a locked cupboard. At night he made up a bed for her on the sofa in the living room and double deadlocked the front door so she couldn’t get out. Then he locked the door of his own room. He still found it difficult to drop off because he was afraid she would manage to get in while he was asleep and vulnerable. She was his sister, and she was a total stranger.
She never made any demands; in fact, she rarely spoke at all. She spent most of her time sitting at the desk, aimlessly tapping the computer keyboard or simply staring at the wall. It would probably have been more trouble looking after a hamster. More trouble, but less worry. A hamster didn’t have the ability to turn into a wild lion with no warning.
Theres caused him practical problems in only one respect, and that was her food. She refused to eat anything other than jars of baby food. That would have been fine, except that every single person in Norrtälje seemed to know the man whose parents had been murdered. It might have been his imagination, but Jerry had the feeling people were looking at him everywhere he went.
He didn’t dare go into the local supermarkets and put twenty jars of baby food through the checkout. Someone might start to put two and two together. He tried to solve the problem by buying a couple of jars here and there, but Theres got through at least ten jars a day, and it was too time-consuming to spread his purchases like that.
He considered buying in bulk over the internet, but gave up on that idea. His name had been mentioned all over the place, and a hundred jars of baby food on his account, a box with his name on the address label might also raise eyebrows somewhere.
He tried to get Theres to eat something different, he tried to explain the problem to her, but that did no good. When he stopped buying baby food to see what would happen, she stopped eating. He thought hunger would eventually make her see sense, but after four days she hadn’t eaten anything, and it was starting to show in her face. He was forced to capitulate and set off on a long expedition to stock up on pureed chicken casserole and meatballs.