CELL 8 (5 page)

He was searching for the young policeman’s name badge, made it obvious that he was looking straight at it; made eye contact again.

“Give it to me.”

Ewert Grens opened the security door and walked down the corridor, past the rows of silent, waiting offices.

A person had just been bleeding from his ears, had looked at him with different-sized pupils.

That was all he had seen.

That was all he was able to see.

He could not possibly know that this single act of violence was linked to a murder and was the continuation of a process that had started many years ago, far away; it would prove to be the most extraordinary criminal investigation he had ever come across.

A BRIGHT LIGHT SHONE FROM ONE OF THE UPSTAIRS WINDOWS. IF ANYONE
had been walking along Mern Riffe Drive just then and looked up at the exclusive twelve-room house, he or she would have seen a man in the window, stocky, around fifty, a mustache and dark, slicked-back hair. He or she would have seen his pale skin, his tired eyes, how he stood there, completely still, staring listlessly into the dark and had then started to cry, his tears rolling slowly down his round cheeks.

It was still night in Marcusville, Ohio. Several hours until dawn. The small, silent community was asleep.

Everyone except him.

Except the man who was crying with grief and hate and loss, who was standing in the window of what had once been his daughter’s room.

Edward Finnigan had hoped that at some point it would pass. That he would be able to stop the hunt, that he would stop delving into the past, that he would be able to lie down next to his wife again, undress her, make love to her.

Eighteen years. And it just got worse. He grieved more; he missed her more and more—he hated more.

He shivered.

Pulled his bathrobe tighter around his body, moved his bare feet back a step from the dark wooden floor onto the thick carpet. He lifted his gaze from the town out there, the streets where he’d grown up, the people he knew so well, turned and looked around the room.

Her bed. Her desk. Her walls, floor, and ceiling.

She still lived here.

She was dead, but this room, it was still hers.

He had shut the door. Alice woke up so easily and he wanted to be alone; here in Elizabeth’s room he could cry, hate, and yearn without upsetting anyone. Sometimes he just stood at the window and stared at nothing. Sometimes he lay on the floor, or bent down over her bed, her teddy bear and the pink pillow, just as it had been back then. Tonight he would wait by her desk, sit in the new chair that she had never used.

He sat down.

Pens and erasers in a pile in front of him. A diary with a lock. Three books, which he leafed through absently; she had never really got past the horsey stage. A bulletin board on the wall; a yellowing sheet down in the left-hand corner: her schedule from Valley High School, one of Marcusville’s two public high schools. They’d been clear about that, that she should go to an ordinary school. If the daughter of one of the governor’s closest advisers didn’t go to the local school, that would signal dissatisfaction, and that was what politics was all about, giving signals, giving the right signals. Above the schedule, another sheet of yellowed paper, some telephone numbers, doodles and scrawls in pencil around the edge. At the top, a message from the trainer of Marcusville Soccer Team about a series match against Otway, a reminder of a doctor’s appointment at Pike County Hospital in Waverly, confirmation of a field trip to WPAY Radio Station, 104.1 FM in Portsmouth.

She had stopped midstep.

She had been on her way and he had taken all that away from her.

Edward Finnigan hated him. He had taken Elizabeth away forever, from the next day, from life, from this house.

The door handle moved. Finnigan turned his head quickly.

She looked at him with resignation in her eyes.

“Not tonight as well.”

He sighed.

“Alice, go back to bed. I’ll come soon.”

“You’ll sit here all night.”

“Not this time.”

“Always.”

She came into the room. His wife. He should touch her, hold her. But he couldn’t anymore. It was as if everything had died eighteen years ago. After a year or so they had had sex with each other twice a day, every day, so she would get pregnant, so they would have another child. But it hadn’t worked. There was no way of knowing whether it was their shared grief or just the fact that she was older and the female body slowly becomes less fertile. Not that it mattered. They never held each other anymore.

She sat down on the bed. He shrugged.

“What do you want me to do? Forget?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

Finnigan got up abruptly from what had once been his daughter’s chair.

“Forget? Elizabeth?”

“The hate.”

He cocked his head.

“I’ll never forget. And I will never stop hating. Damn it, Alice, he murdered our daughter!”

She sat in silence for a while, resignation in her eyes; she found it difficult to look at him.

“You don’t understand. It’s not about Elizabeth anymore. You’re shutting her out. You don’t feel anything anymore.”

She paused, took a deep breath, steeling herself to continue. “Your hate. Your hate is blocking everything out. You can’t love and hate at the same time. That’s just the way it is. And you’ve chosen, Edward. You made your choice a long time ago.”

“I never got to see him die.”

He paced backward and forward across the floor, the anger pulsing through him, forcing him to move.

“We waited. Years we waited. Then he died! Before he was supposed to die. We never got to see it.
He
decided when it was over. Not us!”

Alice Finnigan sat on her daughter’s bed. The only child she’d ever had. She would never stop grieving either. But this, Edward’s hate, their marriage that was no longer a marriage—she was about to give up. She had forgotten what it was like to live, for real. A couple more years sullied by this bitterness and she would go, leave behind whatever this was that she no longer recognized.

“I’m going back to bed. And I want you to come with me.”

He shook his head.

“I’ll stay here, Alice.”

She got up from the bed and was walking toward the door when he asked her to stop.

“It feels . . . it feels just like when someone breaks off a relationship.
Alice, listen to me, just for a minute
. You love someone, so you feel you’ve been abandoned. But that’s not really it, that’s not what really bothers you, that’s not what’s so painful that it makes your whole damn body burn.
Please listen to me, Alice
. It’s the power. The power you no longer have. Being forced to be at the mercy of someone else’s decision. Losing the power to decide yourself when your relationship is over. That’s always what hurts, more than the loss of the love that is no longer there.
Do you understand?
”

He looked at her with pleading eyes. She said nothing.

“That’s what it feels like. That’s how I’ve felt since he died. If only I could have been there and seen him die, see him gradually lose the ability to breathe, if I’d been able to be there and have closure . . . then I could have moved on, I know it, Alice. But now. It was
him
who decided. It was
him
who finished it. Alice, of course you understand, you have to understand, my whole body is burning, burning!”

She said nothing.

She looked at him, turned around, and left the room. Edward Finnigan remained standing where he was in the middle of the floor. He heard her closing the door to their marital bedroom.

He listened to the silence, heard a light wind blowing outside, a branch tapping against the window. He went over and looked out into the dark. Marcusville was sleeping, would sleep for a while yet; it was three hours until dawn.

IT WAS ALREADY LUNCHTIME WHEN EWERT GRENS RANG FOR A TAXI AND
then hurried down the corridors of the police headquarters. He was late and he hated that, she was waiting, she was sitting there, depending on him, they’d made her look nice, brushed her hair like they always did, helped her to put on one of the blue dresses. He asked the driver—a short thin man who laughed a lot and talked for the entire journey about Iran, his home country, how beautiful it was, the life he’d had there and would never have again—Grens asked him after a couple of endless quarter hours on Kungsholmen to drive slightly faster, showed him his ID, said it was a police job.