He was standing in the centre of the room, his back turned; must have put more wood on the fire because it was burning again. Without moving her leaden head, she followed his outline with her eyes. From the waist and up to the hair that hung dark and wet on the shoulders.
She managed to open her mouth, tried to find out what she had to do for her lips to shape sounds, things that could turn into words.
– What … have you done to me.
The echo of her words came rolling back at her. He didn’t turn round.
– A shot. It’ll do you good. You’ll feel good.
Viljam
, she tried to say,
Johannes Viljam, Jo. We’ll have a good time. Together.
She opened her eyes as far as she was able. Cold now. Dark in the room. Just a few glowing embers left in the fireplace. Couldn’t see him but knew he was there. Heard the sound of his breathing.
Her hands held fast in some way. Fastened together. She was lying in a corner of the sofa, naked. Her mouth felt swollen.
– Viljam.
She heard a noise from over by the table. That was where he was sitting. Still wearing his outdoor jacket, she could make out, the hood pulled down over the head now.
– I’m cold, she managed to say.
– It’s better to be cold. Things don’t hurt as much then. The cold is an anaesthetic.
The tone of his voice was different. Not different, but something that had been faintly present in it before was stronger now.
– Why did you give me that shot?
He turned towards her. – I like being together best this way. Calm and easy.
He tossed something on to the mantelpiece.
– I see from your call list that you haven’t rung anybody but me this evening. We’ve got plenty of time.
– Can you take off these handcuffs?
He made a clucking sound with his tongue. – This is the way it is now, he said, and sounded saddened. – You’d best get used to it. The way Mailin had to.
She closed her eyes. Still she managed to keep the thought at bay. The thought that it wasn’t Berger who had killed Mailin.
– You called me that morning. After she went missing. I could hear how upset you were.
He stood up, crossed the floor and stopped in front of her. She could just make out the lines of his jaw, the shadowed eye sockets.
– She shouldn’t have gone prying into that business with Ylva.
Liss twisted round. – Ylva? Is that someone you’re having a relationship with?
He shrugged his shoulders. – Used to have.
– Did Mailin find out?
– Yes, she did.
He stepped towards the fireplace, turned an almost unburnt log over and made it flare up again.
– There was an article about an unsolved murder in one of the magazines she subscribed to. It was only when she read about it that she began to see the connection. Before she was due to come out here that day, she sat searching on the net. Logged off when she heard me come home. Deleted the history. But I was able to restore it while she was in the bathroom. A load of old stuff about Ylva. She was reading it behind my back.
Liss struggled to compose her slowly drifting thoughts, couldn’t relate them to what Viljam was standing there and saying.
– It had been more than two years since I’d said anything about Ylva. That was during the first sessions in the office in Welhavens Street. And she still had her notes from those days on the CD, even though she’d promised to delete them. Delete everything that was said about Jacket.
Finally Liss got it: the printout she had found inside the sofa cover. The girl in Bergen was Ylva. There was something about her in the newspapers years ago. She’d been murdered.
– You were at work the day Mailin went missing, she whispered, because it still seemed possible that these thoughts did not belong together. – And then at home with my mother and Tage.
He came closer again.
– That’s what you think. What everyone thinks. But when she was supposed to be coming out here, the day before, she went to the post office to deposit some money. I followed. Waited for her in the car. She could have run off when she saw me there, but she got in. She had a whole pile of printouts about Ylva and what happened that time in Bergen in her bag. I’d interrupted her when I came home, and now she’d been to the post office and continued searching on the net. That’s why I came out here with her. I was with her when she was in pain.
– Was it here? Liss managed to say.
– Was what here?
– That you stabbed her in the eyes with a syringe.
– Not a syringe. The corkscrew. I had to screw it in.
He bent over her, his eyes just about visible. Liss’s body felt too heavy for her to move.
– Is that what you’re going to do to me?
He didn’t answer.
– Don’t you want me to see you?
– Shut up, he said, startling her. That new tone in his voice was darker now, pushing the familiar one away. She tried to put together something to say. Something that could stop what was about to happen, make it change direction.
– But Mailin left here again. She didn’t go missing until the next evening.
He laughed briefly. She didn’t see it, but she could hear the muted clucking sounds.
– Think it over while I make a quick trip to the shed. It wouldn’t surprise me if you worked it out. You know, you’re not all that slow. Just a shame you never learned how to use it.
She heard him open the outside door.
Is that when you wrote it in the book, Mailin, while he was out in the shed? You managed to get over to the fireplace and pick up a piece of charcoal. Maybe you couldn’t even see.
The stuff he’d injected her with came surging back, retreated, surged inwards again. Each time she became more and more sleepy. Let yourself flow on these waves, don’t want anything any more.
I’ll look after you.
An image appears in the darkness, Mailin naked and bound. She’s bleeding from the eyes.
It mustn’t happen to you, Liss.
She rocked over on her side, got to her feet. The chair was still next to the kitchen cupboard. With one foot she managed to push it over towards the work surface, climbed up on to it. Wriggled upright back first. Turned so that the window latch caught under the handcuffs and then gave a jerk. The latch snapped off. She couldn’t reach as high as the upper latch with her hands. She stretched up, bit round it and snapped like a fish taking bait. Pulled it halfway open. Another bite and it was loose and she flipped it free with her tongue.
The window was frozen. She pressed her full weight against it, but it didn’t move. She leaned back and butted as hard as she could and it flew open.
She didn’t feel the coldness of the snow on her bare feet.
Not the outhouse, Liss! You’ve got to take the other direction, away from the cabin.
She ran from the veranda, part of the way down towards the lake, hid behind a tree, climbed again, up in the direction of the cliff, the wind blew the fresh snow away there, the hill would be firmer underfoot, if she could get up there, she could run. She dragged herself over a snowdrift, fell and couldn’t break her fall. Something ran down into her eyes; she rubbed her face in the snow, darkening it where she rubbed. Sank down and crawled on. Maybe what she was hearing were footsteps in the snow. She lay still without moving, listening into the wind. Then she crawled on, another metre up the slope, then another, rolled up over the edge and on to the top of the cliff.
He stood leaning against the pine trunk in front of her. Tutted in mock sadness when she tried to get to her feet.
– Oh Liss. I did try to tell you.
He bent down to her. An axe in his hand. – You’re not going anywhere without me, he whispered. – Not until I say so.
S
HE WAS SWEPT
into the warm doze as though by a tidal wave. That was where she heard the voice. It was no longer Mailin’s. It was her father who had made his way through the snowdrift to tell her something.
This place is yours, Liss. Yours and Mailin’s.
But it’s
you
who owns the cabin.
He stands by the window looking out.
From now on, you two are the owners. I have to go away.
Odd way to say it. Not like when he’s going to Berlin or Amsterdam. Be gone a few weeks and come back home with presents for her.
He sits on the edge of the bed. Strokes her hair. He doesn’t usually do that. Usually stares at her for a long time with a strange smile. But he never touches her.
Why do you have to go away?
He says nothing for a long time. Finally shakes his head slowly.
You’re the one I’ll miss, Liss. We’re the same, you and I. Nothing anyone can do about it.
Viljam had lit the paraffin lamp. He had put the axe down on the edge of the fireplace and was standing there reading her notebook. Everything she’d written to Mailin. She couldn’t bear to think about what he had done to her. Only that he had let her grow cold. Liss was cold too, huddled up in a corner of the sofa. She wasn’t angry with him. He’d given her another shot. The good pain was tightly packed around her.
– Jacket stopped you when you were going to swim out and die, she tried to say. Could feel her voice full of thick sauce. – He saved you.
Viljam didn’t look up from the notebook, turned over a few pages, seemed engrossed in what she had written.
– You needed someone to hold you. But he used you.
Abruptly he tossed the book aside and loomed over her. – Where do you get that from?
She couldn’t lift her hands to defend herself.
– Did she send you anything else? Have you got more CDs? If you’ve hidden anything, then …
It took a few seconds for her to understand what he was talking about.
– There was only one. The one I told you about when I called.
He straightened up again.
– Why didn’t you want anyone to know about Jacket? she groaned. – He was the one who did things to you. You were innocent.
– You understand fuck-all, so don’t talk about it.
He laughed. As suddenly, he was serious again.
– He took a helluva chance letting me come to him. He could have lost everything, ended up in jail, been stoned, ostracised, strung up. Do you understand? He took that chance so that I could be with him. How many are there who care so much that they’ll risk everything just to be with some fucking kid?
– I understand that, she murmured.
He picked up the notebook again, sat in the chair by the fireplace and carried on reading.
She pulled herself up from the sofa, struggled across the floor and into the light from the paraffin lamp. Stood naked in front of him, hands cuffed behind her back so tightly that the pain flashed from her wrists down into her fingertips.
– You killed someone, he said without looking up.
First time she’d heard someone else say those words. But as things stood, it meant nothing at all.
– Everything written there is true, she heard herself reply.
– And now you’re going to offer to keep your mouth shut if I let you walk out of here.
The thought hadn’t occurred to her.
– I can’t let you go, he said. – I came out last time you were here. Had to find out if you knew anything. I could let you go then, but not now. I won’t fool you into believing that. I’ll be honest with you. You’ll never leave here again.
He tossed the notebook into the fire. – Do you realise that?
Liss saw the way a tiny flame began to wrap itself around the red plush cover.
– It wasn’t because of that business with Ylva that I couldn’t let Mailin live, he said tonelessly. – Jo and Jacket swore an oath. Death before anyone else knew about them.
Alongside the burning notebook Liss saw the remains of a book cover.
Sándor Ferenczi,
she read. The inside was a roll of flaking ash.
– Mailin found out about it, she murmured.
– She never gave up, Viljam interjected. – Kept asking and asking who Jacket was.
Liss tried to hold on to some of the thoughts that were seeping away into the distance, somewhere far from the room she was in, far from the smoke from the fireplace, from the dust and the cold wooden walls, all the smells that would remain behind after her and Mailin, after her father, who once stood by her bed and said he was going away, after his mother, who had sought refuge here before the world came and brought her in.
– Mailin realised that Jacket was Berger.
Viljam looked at her for a few moments. – That’s what happened, he answered.
– He was going to expose you on
Taboo
. He was going to break the pact.
Viljam shook his head. – I was at Berger’s house every day after Mailin … went missing. Finally he realised what had happened to her. He even wanted to talk about
that
in front of the camera. He was certain he had me where he wanted me. I got him to believe that I would appear on his programme and confess. We sat and planned it together. Shock TV. He looked forward to it like a kid. Pity to have to deprive him of that enjoyment.
The high she was on was utterly unlike anything Liss had ever experienced before. – You’re fucked up, Viljam, she snuffled. – You’re a fucked-up piece of shit.
Distantly she realised that this was what he had been waiting for, that she would make him angry. He leapt up, forced her down on to the chair by her hair. At the corner of the fireplace was a coil of rope, he twisted it around her waist, tightened it across her breasts and knotted it behind the back of the chair. He made a noose out of the loose end and put it over her head.
– You’re no different from any of them, he growled. – Won’t be missing you.
She started to cough. – Mailin did everything she could to help you, she managed to say. – Mailin looked after you.
He snorted. – She tricked me into talking. And while I was talking, she sat there stroking me. Stripped me naked. Had me in her office.
– You’re lying. Mailin would never have done that.
He tightened the rope around her neck. – Maybe your sister wasn’t quite the saint you think she was.