Lars Kepler 2-book Bundle (60 page)

Joona takes out his phone and makes a call. He shakes his head with growing irritation. Erik and Simone can hear a tinny voice at the other end responding to his terse questions. When Joona flicks his phone shut, his expression is tense and serious.

“What is it?” Erik asks.

Joona stretches up to look out the window. “They still haven’t heard from the patrol that went out to the house,” he says, sounding distracted.

“That’s not good,” Erik says quietly.

“I’ll call the station.”

“But we can’t just sit and wait for them.”

“We’re not going to,” Joona replied. “We’ve got a car—it should be here already.”

“God,” Simone says. “Everything takes such a bloody long time.”

“The distances are a little different up here,” says Joona. He shrugs his shoulders and they follow him as he heads for the exit. Once through the doors, a different, dry cold suddenly hits them, a cold of another magnitude entirely.

Two dark-blue cars pull up in front of them, and two men dressed in the bright yellow uniforms of the Mountain Rescue Service get out.

“Joona Linna?” asks one of them.

Joona nods briefly.

“We were told to deliver a car to you.”

“Mountain Rescue?” Erik asks anxiously. “Where are the police?”

One of the men straightens up and explains tersely. “There isn’t that much difference up here. Police, Customs, Mountain Rescue—we usually work together as necessary.”

The other man chips in. “We’re a bit short-staffed at the moment, with Christmas just around the corner.”

No one says anything for a moment. Erik looks desperate by this stage. He opens his mouth to speak, but Joona gets there first. “Have you heard anything from the patrol that went out to the cottage?” he asks.

“Not since seven o’clock this morning.”

“How long does it take to get up there?”

“Oh, you’d need an hour or two.”

“Two and a half,” says the other man. “Bearing in mind the time of year.”

“Which car?” Joona asks impatiently, moving towards one of them.

“Doesn’t make a difference,” replies one of the men.

“Give us the one with more fuel in it,” says Joona, and they climb inside. Joona takes the keys and asks Erik to enter their destination into the brand-new GPS system.

“Wait,” Joona calls after the men, who are heading for the other car.

They stop.

“The patrol that went out to the cottage this morning—were they Mountain Rescue as well?”

“Yes, I’m sure they were.”

They follow the shore of Lake Volgsjö and then, just a few miles further on, they come out onto the main road, driving west in a straight line for about six miles before turning off onto the winding road that means fifty miles more. They travel in silence. Once they have left Vilhelmina far behind, they notice that the sky seems to lighten and a strange, soft glow appears to open up the view. They become aware of the contours of mountains and lakes around them.

“You see?” says Erik. “It’s getting lighter.”

“It won’t get lighter for several weeks,” Simone replies.

“The snow catches the light through the clouds,” says Joona.

Simone rests her head against the window. They drive through snow-covered forests, immense white fields that have been cleared of trees, dark boggy areas, and lakes that look like enormous plains. In the darkness they can just make out a strangely beautiful lake, with steep shores, cold and frozen, sparkling darkly by the light of the snow.

After almost one and a half hours, sometimes heading north, sometimes west, the road begins to narrow. They are now in Dorotea, approaching the Norwegian border, and high, jagged mountains tower above them. Suddenly a car coming in the opposite direction flashes its headlights at them. They pull over to the side of the road, watching as the other car stops and reverses towards them.

“Mountain Rescue,” says Joona dryly, when they see that the car is the same as theirs. He rolls down the window, and crisp ice-cold air sucks all the heat out of the car.

“Are you the lot from Stockholm?” shouts one of the men in the car in Finnish.

“We are,” Joona replies in Finnish. “City slickers, that’s us.” They laugh, then Joona reverts to Swedish. “Was it you who went out to the house? Nobody has been able to get hold of you.”

“No radio coverage,” replies the man. “But it was a waste of petrol. There’s nothing up there.”

“Nothing? No tracks around the house?”

The man shakes his head. “We went through the layers of snow.”

“What do you mean?” asks Erik.

“It’s snowed five times since the twelfth—so we searched for tracks through five layers of snow.”

“Well done,” says Joona.

“That’s why it took a while.”

“But no one’s been there?” asks Simone.

The man shakes his head. “Not since the twelfth, like I said.”

“Shit,” Joona says quietly.

“So are you coming back with us, then?” asks the man.

Joona shakes his head. “We’ve come all the way from Stockholm. We’re not turning back now.”

The man shrugs his shoulders. “Suit yourself.” They wave and head off to the east.

“No radio coverage,” Simone whispers. “But Jussi said he was calling from there.”

They drive on in silence. Simone is thinking the same thing as the others. This trip may be a disastrous mistake. They could have been lured in the wrong direction, up into a crystal world of snow and ice, of wilderness and darkness, while Benjamin is somewhere else altogether, without protection, without his medication, perhaps no longer even alive.

It’s the middle of the day, but this far north, deep in the forests, day is like night at this time of year, an immense night that overshadows the dawn from December to January, that refuses to crack and let in the light.

They reach Jussi’s house, driving the last part across the hard crust on the snow. The air is freezing, utterly still and fragile. Joona draws his gun. It’s been a long time since he saw real snow and experienced this dry feeling in his nose from severe cold.

Three small buildings face one another in a U-shaped formation. The snow has formed a huge, softly curved dome over each of the roofs, and there are drifts against the walls, right up to the windowsills. Erik gets out of the car and looks around. The Mountain Rescue team’s tyre tracks are clearly visible, as are their footprints around the buildings.

“Oh God,” Simone whispers, hurrying forward.

“Wait,” says Joona.

“There’s no one here, it’s empty, we’ve—”

“It
seems
to be empty,” Joona says. “That’s all we know.”

Simone waits, shivering, as Joona crunches across the snow. He stops by one of the small windows, leans forward, and can make out a wooden chest and some rag rugs on the floor. The chairs have been placed upside down on the dining table, and the refrigerator is empty and switched off, with the door wide open.

Simone looks at Erik, who has stopped in the middle of the yard, looking around as if perplexed. She is about to ask him what’s wrong when he says loudly and clearly, “He isn’t here.”

“There’s nobody here,” Joona replies wearily.

“I mean,” Erik says, “this isn’t his haunted house.”

“What are you saying?”

“This is the wrong cottage. Jussi’s haunted house is pale green. I’ve heard him describe it: there’s a larder off the porch, a tin roof with rusty nails, a satellite dish near the gable end, and the yard is full of old cars, buses, and tractors.”

Joona waves his hand. “This is his address. This is where he’s registered.”

“But it’s the wrong place.”

Erik takes a few steps towards the house again; then he looks at Simone and Joona, his expression deadly serious, and says stubbornly, “This is not the haunted house.”

Joona swears and takes out his mobile phone, then swears even more when he remembers there is no coverage.

“We’re not likely to find anyone we can ask out here, so we’ll have to drive until we pick up a signal again,” he says, getting back in the car. They reverse up the drive and are about to pull out onto the road when Simone spots a dark figure among the trees. He is standing there motionless with his arms by his sides, watching them.

“There!” she shouts. “There’s someone over there!”

The edge of the forest on the other side of the road is dense and dark, the snow packed tightly between the trunks, the branches overloaded. She gets out of the car, even though Joona tells her to wait, and tries to see between the trees. The headlights are reflected in the windows of the house. Erik catches up with her.

“I saw someone,” she whispers.

Joona gets out of the car, draws his gun, and follows them. Simone hurries toward the edge of the forest and spots the man once again among the trees, further in this time.

“Wait, please!” she shouts.

She runs a little way but stops when she meets his gaze. It’s an old man with a furrowed, utterly serene face. He is very short, he hardly reaches up to her chest, and he is wearing a thick, stiff anorak and trousers made of reindeer skin. A couple of dead ptarmigans are slung over his shoulder.

“Sorry to bother you,” Simone says.

He says something she doesn’t understand, then looks down and mumbles something. Erik and Joona approach cautiously. Joona has already concealed his gun inside his jacket.

“I guess he’s speaking Finnish,” says Simone.

“Hang on,” says Joona, turning to the man.

Erik hears Joona introduce himself, point to the car, then mention Jussi’s name. He is speaking Finnish in a steady, muted way. The old man nods slowly, pulls out a pipe, and lights it. He listens to Joona with his face upturned, as if he were looking for something and listening at the same time. Taking a puff of his pipe, he asks Joona something in a calm, melodic, clucking voice; Joona replies, and the man shakes his head regretfully. He looks at Erik and Simone with an expression of sympathy. When he offers them the pipe, Erik has enough presence of mind to accept it, take a puff, and pass it back. The tobacco is bitter and strong; Erik wills himself not to cough.

Simone hears the Sami explain something at length to Joona. He breaks a twig from a tree and draws a few lines in the snow. Joona leans over the snow map, pointing and asking questions. He takes a small notepad out of his inside pocket and copies the map. Simone whispers “thank you” as they walk back to the car. The little man turns away, points into the forest, and sets off along a narrow track between the trees.

They have left the car doors open, and the seats are so cold they burn their backs and legs when they get in.

Joona hands Erik the piece of paper onto which he copied the old man’s directions.

“He was speaking an odd kind of Umeå Lappish, so I didn’t really understand everything. He was talking about the Kroik family place.”

“But he knew Jussi?”

“Yes. If I understood him correctly, Jussi has another house, a hunting lodge even deeper in the forest. There’s supposed to be a lake up ahead on the left. We can drive as far as a place where three big stones have been raised in memory of the fact that the Sami used to spend their summers here. The snow-ploughs don’t go any further, so we have to walk north across the snow from there until we see an old trailer.”

Joona looks at Simone and Erik with an ironic expression and adds, “The old man said that if we fall through the ice on Lake Djuptjärnen, we’ve gone too far.”

They drive for forty minutes, slowing down to pause at the three standing stones hewn and raised by the community of Dorotea. The headlights make everything look grey and shadowy. The stones appear for a few seconds, then disappear into the darkness again.

Joona parks the car by the edge of the forest and says he probably ought to camouflage it; he cuts a few branches but changes his mind. He glances up at the starlit sky and sets off as quickly as he can. The others follow, as quietly as possible. The hard crust lies like a heavy board over the deep snow. The old man’s directions are correct; after a third of a mile, they see a rusty trailer half buried in the snow and turn off the path. Others have walked along the track they are on. Below them lies a house surrounded by snow. Smoke is rising from the chimney. In the light from the windows, the outside walls appear to be mint green.

This
is Jussi’s house, Erik thinks.
This
is the haunted house.

In the yard they can just make out big dark snow-covered shapes that form a strange labyrinth. As they head slowly towards the house, they move along narrow passageways between these great heaps of snow-covered vehicles—scrap cars, buses, combine harvesters, ploughs, and scooters—their feet crunching on the snow.

Inside the house, they see a figure moving past the window. Something’s happening over there; the movements are rapid, violent. Erik can’t wait any longer, he starts running towards the house; he doesn’t give a damn about the consequences. Simone runs alongside him, panting. As they close the distance, running across the hard snow, they suddenly hear a muffled scream, followed by rapid, floundering thuds. A figure appears in the window again. A branch snaps off at the edge of the forest. The door of the woodshed bangs. Simone is breathing fast. They stop at the edge of a path that has been shovelled out of the snow, just before reaching the house.

The person at the window has disappeared. The wind sighs in the treetops. Light snow swirls across the ground. Suddenly the door is flung open, and they are dazzled; someone is shining a powerful torch in their faces. They shade their eyes with their hands and squint in order to try and see.

“Benjamin?” Erik calls out.

When the beam of light is lowered to the ground, Erik recognises Lydia. In one hand she is holding the torch, in the other, a large pair of scissors. The light illuminates a figure in the snow. It’s Jussi. His face is an icy bluish-grey, his eyes are closed, he is covered in frozen blood, and an axe sticks out of his chest. Simone stands next to Erik in silence. He can tell by her shallow, rapid breathing that she has also seen the body. At the same moment he realises that Joona is no longer with them. He must have gone a different way, thinks Erik. He’ll creep up on Lydia from behind if I can just keep her busy for long enough.