Part 79 (1/2)

He's driving fast along the black road, not letting himself think that it might be too late, that time has already run out.

He has to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

There are always questions to ask, answers still to find.

Nelly keeps repeating herself the whole time, returning to old patterns, he thinks.

There has to be a farm in Roslagen that Nelly somehow has access to.

The farm didn't belong to her family, but her grandfather may have managed it, Joona reasons. He was also a priest, and the Swedish Church owns a great deal of land and forest, and a large number of properties.

As he drives, Joona tries to think through the case again and consider everything he had read and seen long before he knew that Nelly was the person Rocky called the unclean preacher.

Everyone makes mistakes.

He needs to find something that can connect a farm in Roslagen with the video featuring Jackie.

Joona thinks about the yellow raincoat, the narcotic substances, the collection of trophies, and the way she clearly marked the places she took them from on the bodies, then about her completely ignorant husband out in Bromma, her expensive clothes, hand cream, the jar of nutritional supplements, and then he picks up his phone and calls Nils hlen.

'You've climbed up onto a very precarious branch,' hlen says. 'That escape from prison wasn't exactly-'

'It was necessary,' Joona interrupts.

'And now you want to ask me something,' hlen says, and clears his throat.

'Nelly takes iron pills,' Joona says.

'Maybe she suffers from anaemia,' hlen replies.

'How do you get anaemia?'

'A thousand different ways ... everything from cancer and kidney disease to pregnancy and menstruation.'

'But Nelly takes iron hydroxide.'

'Do you mean iron oxide-hydroxide?'

'She's got speckled hands,' Joona says.

'Freckles?'

'Blacker ... proper pigment change, and-'

'a.r.s.enic poisoning,' hlen interrupts. 'Iron oxide-hydroxide is used as an antidote to a.r.s.enic ... and if she's got dry, speckled hands, then ...'

Joona stops listening when he finds himself thinking about one of the photographs he left on the floor of his hotel room.

A picture of a two-millimetre-long splinter that looks like a blue bird's skull.

The fragment had been found on Sandra Lundgren's floor. It looked ceramic, but actually consisted of gla.s.s, iron, sand and chamotte clay.

He drives past a big red barn, and thinks that the little bird's skull was a tiny shard of slag, a by-product of gla.s.s production.

'Gla.s.s,' he whispers.

The ground around old gla.s.sworks is often contaminated with a.r.s.enic. They used to use great quant.i.ties of the poisonous semi-metal as a refining agent, to prevent bubbles and to h.o.m.ogenise the gla.s.s.

'A gla.s.sworks,' Joona says out loud. 'They're at a gla.s.sworks.'

'That could fit,' Nils hlen says, as if he had been following Joona's internal thought process.

'Are you sitting at your computer?'

'Yes.'

'Search for an old gla.s.sworks in the vicinity of Finsta.'

Joona is driving along beside a lake that s.h.i.+mmers in the darkness behind the trees and bushes as he hears Nils hlen hum while he taps at his keyboard.

'No ... all I'm getting is one that burned down in 1976, Solbacken gla.s.sworks in Rimbo, used to make sheet gla.s.s and mirrors ... the land is owned by the Swedish Church, and-'

'Send the address and coordinates to my phone,' Joona interrupts. 'And call Margot Silverman.'

Joona brakes sharply and turns hard right, locking the wheels. He puts the car into reverse, throwing up a shower of grit, veers backwards into the road, changes gear and puts his foot down again.

137.

Gasping with pain, Erik pokes the copper pipe through the roof of the cage, uses one bar as a pivot and tries to prise the next one up. The lever is still a bit too short, even though he hangs off the end with the whole of his weight. There's a crash as the pipe slides out. Erik falls to the floor, hitting his good arm against the mesh.

Breathing hard, he gets up and switches the torch on, and sees that he's managed to bend the metal another few centimetres.

He listens out for noises from the tunnels, but he hasn't heard anything since Nelly chased after Jackie.

Erik has scanned the cellar with the torch, but hasn't been able to find a better tool than the length of copper pipe he managed to drag towards the cage.

The welded joints of the cage are all solid and carefully made, but with the help of the pipe he's succeeded in bending one of the bars in the roof to the point where he's starting to believe it might be possible to break it. It could take hours, days, even, but it isn't completely impossible.

He pushes the pipe through the mesh in the roof, then stops.

Shuffling steps are approaching along the pa.s.sageway. Erik pulls the pipe back and hides it under the mattress, picks up the torch and listens. There's someone there, he heard right, there are footsteps approaching.

He switches the light off and thinks that he has to play along, no matter what happens. He hasn't got a choice, it would be far too easy for Nelly to kill him in the cage.