A sweet, chemical smell fills the car. The smell is very familiar, it’s easily recognizable. Gun grease.
He catches sight of the pistol, sees it raised to the back of the man’s head, where the snake is still slithering. He holds his breath as …
The bang made Sarac open his eyes. Molnar was leaning over him, his hands just centimetres in front of Sarac’s face.
‘David, can you hear me?’ He clapped his hands in front of Sarac’s nose, forcing him to blink. Sarac opened his mouth and swallowed a mixture of saliva and air. He coughed and gasped for air as his heart raced in panic. A machine was bleeping close by, and there was the sound of running in the corridor.
‘You blacked out.’ Molnar’s voice sounded shaky. ‘Your face went all blue, you scared the shit out of me, David.’ He put his hand on Sarac’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.
‘You’re not thinking of dying on me, are you? Not after all the work we did cutting you out of the wreckage.’ Molnar’s tone was joking, but there was a hint of anxiety there too.
Sarac grabbed hold of his hand. ‘J-Janus,’ he stammered. ‘Everything’s fucked.’ The lights in the ceiling flickered. He gasped for air again. Terror was clutching at his chest, and the spider’s legs had hold of his head. ‘We’ve got to find him, Peter,’ he panted. ‘It’s all my fault …’
The hospital staff came storming in, three or four white coats. Maybe more. Sarac felt Molnar being pushed aside, then an oxygen mask was placed over his nose and mouth. Everything started to blur and the room became a mass of pain and colours.
‘… a severe migraine attack, but we can’t rule out a further hemorrhage,’ Dr Vestman’s voice said. ‘We need to get him back to Intensive Care.’
The bed started to roll, a peculiar feeling. Various figures hovered above him, slipping in and out of his clouded field of vision. White coats, green ones. Faces covered by masks. He thought he could hear a voice. A whisper, close to his right ear, so faint he could hardly hear it.
Protect the secret, David. You promised!
The voice blurred into the background. And fell silent.
After that …
Nothing.
It’s all about attitude, Jesper Stenberg thinks. If you just have the right attitude and focus on the right things, you can get through pretty much any challenge.
He had a framed quotation by Robert Kennedy on the wall. A moving-in gift that Karolina had persuaded the caretakers to put up immediately above the huge desk, just in time for his first day at the department.
No society can function without a democratically controlled, fair, measured, and powerful justice system. Bobby Kennedy hadn’t hesitated to do what was required of him. He didn’t let himself get distracted by political intrigues. Instead he focused on doing as much good as he could for society. He had aimed at a higher goal.
Stenberg thought he had made a similar choice. Either he was someone who had driven his fragile lover to suicide, or he was someone who was no longer subjected to the warped whims of a demonstrably sick person. Someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sophie’s suicide had been unavoidable. If it hadn’t been for the happy pills, it would probably have happened a long time ago, without affecting him. But instead she had chosen to kill herself in a fiendishly calculated way, literally trying to take him down with her. A frontal attack on him, his family, and their shared future. The measures he had taken were therefore no more than a form of self-defense. Sophie had tried to destroy him, but he had withstood the attack, even if it had taken almost all of his strength of will.
He had reversed back down into the garage with Sophie’s body on the hood of his car. He had done his utmost not to meet her gaze on the other side of the shattered windshield. He parked in the darkest corner of the garage and covered the hood with a tarpaulin he took off a sports car that had been covered up for the winter. Then he had forced himself to leave the scene calmly, resisting the temptation to run for his life.
He had made the call half an hour later. It took him three attempts before his fingers managed to find the right number in the phone book. Then he had followed instructions, getting a taxi home and disposing of all his clothes, before downing half a bottle of whiskey and falling asleep on the sofa.
During the days that followed he had felt okay, but the nights were worse. As soon as he shut his eyes Sophie’s shattered face appeared in his head. Staring at him with an accusing look in her eyes, making him wake up with a scream. He had blamed everything on his new job, and the tension of recent weeks. As usual, Karolina was a rock. She listened and comforted him, made him chamomile tea and left her self-help magazines on the kitchen table. It was in one of them he had read that the more the brain got stuck in a particular track, the harder it was to break out of. In other words, you had to make a conscious choice about how you wanted to think about things, and what thoughts you no longer wanted to entertain. And, just a couple of days later, once the shock had subsided, he had decided what thoughts he wanted to have. After that, the nightmares had almost disappeared altogether.
The police investigation had actually made him stronger. He had read every last line but skipped the photographs of the scene of the accident and the autopsy. Everything was basically true, none of the essential facts was missing. At least nothing that had any effect on the end result.
In the end she had been found by someone delivering papers. Her body had gone through the windshield of a Volvo that had been parked illegally below the window of her study. Her iPad was on her desk, containing her suicide note. Just a couple of lines about how she couldn’t bear it anymore, that she didn’t want to go back to the clinic. The note had been sent to her father’s work e-mail that same night, just minutes before she was found. Her penthouse apartment also contained plenty of pharmaceuticals, prescribed by doctors both in Sweden and abroad. A chair was found next to the open window, and the front door was locked. The autopsy more or less confirmed what was already clear: death caused by massive trauma, her stomach full of a mixture of pills and alcohol.
Naturally, Stenberg had called John Thorning to convey his condolences. He had practised for hours so that the words came out right, in a calm tone of voice, before he dialed the number with trembling hands. But the whole thing had been a huge anticlimax. The call was forwarded to John’s secretary, who told him that Sophie’s father wasn’t taking any calls, even from him. He felt extremely relieved, and almost burst out laughing. After that, his letter of condolence practically wrote itself.
Our deepest sympathies on your tragic loss …
The funeral had been a quiet affair, with only the closest family present. Suicide wasn’t something that the Thorning family wanted to make a public show of.
Karolina had naturally organized a tasteful wreath. Lilies to symbolize innocence, white narcissi for friendship and closure. An almost perfect choice.
And, as always after something ended, new opportunities presented themselves. His plan was already in motion. The need for it was obvious, and discussions were already under way. All they were waiting for was for someone to take the initiative. Someone who had the courage, will, and energy to dare to lead the way.
The judicial system was hopelessly old-fashioned, a product of the 1950s that had been patched up as time went on, and which stood no chance of meeting the challenges and threats posed by the twenty-first