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 Norrtalje 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.
At some point in the middle of all this, Jerry began to seriously despair. The locked doors, the difficult shopping expeditions, the constant fear. The way Theres had come to dominate his existence without saying or doing anything.
He realised he was going to have to hand her over sooner or later. A great big anonymous basket on the steps of the youth psychiatric service. Then he would be free to live his own life again. Without fear or anxiety.
But for the time being, the food problem had to be solved. Jerry took the only course of action he could think of and rang Ingemar. They hadn’t been in touch since Jerry had explained that he was finished with the cigarette business after the incident with Broderna Djup. When Jerry asked if he was still in a position to get hold of just about anything, Ingemar was up for it straight away.
‘As long as we’re not talking about drugs…shoot. What do you need?’
‘Baby food. Can you get hold of baby food?’
It was a point of honour to Ingemar that he never asked about the goods he supplied, but from the silence that followed Jerry’s question, it was clear that his principles were being severely tested. However, the only thing he eventually said was: ‘You mean that stuff in jars? Stewed meat, that kind of crap?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how many do you want?’
‘A hundred, maybe.’
‘Jars? I’m not exactly going to make a fortune on this, you know.’
‘I’m offering you the retail price. Eleven kronor a jar.’
‘Twelve?’
And so it was agreed. When Jerry hung up, he felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He had made a decision. When the hundred jars were gone, he would hand over Theres. It was a nice even number and it felt right. Another two weeks, approximately.
Ingemar turned up with the jars and Jerry paid him. When Ingemar asked if he would be needing any more, Jerry said no. Then he carried in the two boxes himself. The labels on the jars were in some kind of East European language, and each one contained something that was presumably meat stew. Theres didn’t seem to care, she shovelled down the contents with the same joyless single-mindedness she always displayed when she was eating.
Since the keyboard was one of the few things that seemed to interest her, Jerry had started teaching her to use the internet, and that evening they had something resembling a pleasant interlude together as they sat side by
