Little Star

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 Norrtalje 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 Norrtalje 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