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:
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
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.
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:
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.
