Part 66 (2/2)

His lungs feel tight. He has to breathe soon. The buzzing sound of the motorboat gets louder.

He keeps swimming, but is getting closer to the surface, has no energy left, needs oxygen.

s.h.i.+mmering bubbles drift around him.

He kicks out with his legs and feels his diaphragm tighten, cramping in an effort to force his lungs to breathe in some air.

The water gets lighter, full of swirling sand. He can make out the bottom beneath him, rough blocks of stone and coa.r.s.e sand. He takes one last stroke with his arms, then pulls himself forward across the stones with his hands.

Erik breaks the surface, gasps for breath, coughs, puts his hand over his mouth, coughs again and spits out a mouthful of slime. He's rocking with the swell from the boat. His vision goes dark and he gasps and wipes the water from his face with trembling hands.

He makes his way up on to the rocks on unsteady legs, then collapses. His whole body shakes as he sits behind the curtain of branches. The police boat is moving along the lake, but its engine is no longer audible.

Even if Nelly manages to leave her house and hire a car, it will be a while before she gets here. It makes sense to wait beneath the trees and dry off a bit before he makes his way to the meeting point.

The sound of shouting, laughing children fades away as if in fog. In the distance the sirens are howling, and the helicopter goes on circling above the nature reserve on the other side of the lake.

After half an hour or so Erik leaves his hiding place, climbs up the rocks, crosses the footpath and steps behind a large hazel bush. The ground in the shade beneath the branches is littered with toilet paper. He moves on towards the rust-red exterior of Sickla recreation centre.

Suddenly the sound of a siren echoes loudly between the walls, and he stops abruptly, his heart pounding. People are sitting at an outdoor cafe a short distance away, eating and drinking, quite unconcerned. The vehicle disappears and Erik carries on walking. He's just thinking that he needs to wait on the other side of the building, hidden by the bushes, when he catches sight of Nelly. She's wearing a green floral-print dress, and her blonde hair is tied up with a scarf of the same colour.

On the other side of the street is a black jeep. Nelly shades her face with one hand as she looks down towards the water.

Erik walks across the gra.s.s and steps across some low bushes, and is just emerging on to the pavement when Nelly catches sight of him. Her lips part as though she were suddenly frightened. Erik looks round for traffic, then walks straight across the road in his wet underpants. Nelly looks him quickly up and down, then lifts her chin as if they were about to have a perfectly ordinary discussion about patients.

'Original, but quite s.e.xy,' she smiles, quickly opening the back door. 'Get under the blanket.'

He huddles down on the floor behind the seat and pulls the red rug over himself. The sun-heated car smells of plastic and leather.

Erik hears Nelly get in the driver's seat and close the door. She starts the engine and pulls away to the left, b.u.mping off the kerb and then speeding up, and he slides back towards the seat.

'We know Rocky was wrongly convicted of the murder of Rebecka Hansson, but-'

'Not now, Nelly,' he interrupts.

'But do we know he's innocent of these new murders? I mean ... What if he's started copying the murder he was convicted of ... just to put the blame on you?'

'It's not him, I hypnotised him, he saw the preacher and ...'

'But couldn't he just have divided himself into different characters? So that he's the unclean preacher when commits the murders?'

Nelly falls silent and inserts a disc into the CD player. The car fills with Johnny Cash's heavy voice: Wanted man in California, wanted man in Buffalo, wanted man in Kansas City, wanted man in Ohio ... wanted man in Mississippi, wanted man in ol' Cheyenne. Wherever you might look tonight, you might see this wanted man.

Erik lies there with the blanket on top of him, smelling the sand on the mats on the floor, and can't help smiling at the fact that Nelly is trying to be funny at a time like this.

116.

Rocky is asleep on the pa.s.senger seat next to Joona. His big head lolls to the side when the road bends. The landscape is spa.r.s.ely populated and desolate, almost abandoned.

Joona is driving fast, thinking about the text message Lumi sent him earlier today. She wrote that she loves Paris, but misses their conversations up in Nattavaara.

Just beyond Flen the road and railway come together on two narrow strips of land. A long goods train thunders past next to the car, closer and closer. The brown trucks reflect off the water. The road and rails converge at an arrowhead, the train pa.s.ses beneath them and then appears alongside again before dark pine forest comes between them.

The forest gradually grows thinner, and the landscape flattens into huge fields. Combine harvesters roll across the fields in clouds of dust, cutting off the stalks and separating wheat from chaff.

Skldinge is on route 55, not far from Katrineholm. Joona turns off to the right and sees a few red houses through the trees, then the sandy-coloured church with its pointed spire, rising from the plain.

Skldinge Church.

An ordinary Swedish church out in the countryside, dating back to the twelfth century, surrounded by rune stones.

The gravel crunches beneath the tyres as he pulls over and stops in front of the parish house.

Maybe they have found the serial killer now. The preacher from Rocky's nightmarish memories. The old priest with rouged cheeks and arms full of needle tracks.

The church door is closed and the windows dark.

Joona pulls his Colt Combat from its holster and notices that the tape is dirty and has started to peel off. He usually wraps sports tape round the lower part of the b.u.t.t so that his hand doesn't slip if he finds himself in a drawn-out firefight.

He pulls out the magazine and checks that it's full, presses it back in and feeds a bullet into the chamber even though he can't really believe that the unclean preacher is just waiting for them inside the church.

Nothing is that simple.

The path has been raked, and the churchyard is well tended. The sun is filtering through the leaves of a huge oak.

The preacher is an extremely dangerous man, a serial killer who never rushes, who takes his time, who watches and plans, down to the last detail, until something else takes over and he turns into a wild animal.

His weakness is his arrogance, his narcissistic hunger.

Joona glances towards the church, then across the fields. He has two extra magazines of ordinary parabellum bullets in one pocket, and one magazine of fully jacketed ammunition in the other.

Even if the preacher isn't here, he thinks, even if he's never been here, this is the end of the road.

If he can't find something here that can convince Margot, then it's over, Erik will be found guilty even though he's innocent, just like Rocky was found guilty years ago of murdering Rebecka Hansson.

And the serial killer will go free.

Today is the day everything gets decided. Erik can't keep on running, he's got nowhere left to go, the hunters will drive him out of the forest.

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