The Hypnotist (22 page)

Kennet Sträng stops and listens before slowly moving over to the staircase. He points his pistol at the floor, holding it close to his body. Daylight comes into the passageway from the kitchen. Simone follows her father, thinking that the murdered family’s house reminds her of the house where she and Erik lived when Benjamin was little.

There is a creaking sound from somewhere, the floor or deep inside the walls.

“Is it Josef?” whispers Simone.

The torch, house plans, and crowbar she balances are heavy and awkward. Her hands feel numb.

The house is completely silent now. The creaking and the muted banging have stopped.

Kennet jerks his head at her. He wants them to go down into the cellar. Every muscle in her body is telling her it’s a mistake, but she nods.

According to the plans, the best area for a hiding place is definitely the cellar. Kennet marked the drawings with a pen, showing how the wall of the section that houses the old boiler could be extended, creating a virtually invisible room. The other space Kennet marked on the plans was the innermost attic.

The cellar entrance is next to the staircase leading upstairs; it’s a narrow opening in the wall, with no door. There are still small hinges on the wall where a child safety gate has been attached. The iron steps leading down into the cellar look almost home-made; the welds are large and untidy, and the steps are covered in thick grey felt.

When Kennet clicks the light switch, nothing happens; he tries again, but the bulb has blown out.

“Stay here,” he says, in a low voice.

Simone feels a stab of pure terror. A heavy, dusty smell that makes her think of the stifling air inside a highway tunnel surges up from below.

“Give me the torch,” he says, holding out his hand.

Slowly Simone passes it over to her father. He smiles, takes the torch, switches it on, and sets off cautiously down the steps.

“Hello?” Kennet calls gruffly. “Josef? I need to speak to you.”

Not a sound comes from the cellar. Not a clatter, not a breath.

Simone clutches the crowbar and waits.

The beam of the torch illuminates little more than the walls and the ceiling of the staircase. The dense darkness below is untouched. Kennet continues down the stairs, the beam picking out individual objects: a white plastic bag, the reflector strip on an old buggy, the glass of a framed movie poster.

“I think I can help you,” calls Kennet, more quietly this time.

He reaches the bottom, sweeping the torch around to make sure no one is rushing out of a hiding place. The slanting beam moves across the floor and walls, jumping over objects close by and casting sloping, swinging shadows. Kennet begins again, searching the room calmly and systematically with the shaft of light.

Simone sets off down the steps, the metal construction clanging dully beneath her feet.

“There’s no one here,” says Kennet matter-of-factly.

“So what did we hear, then? It was definitely something,” she says.

Daylight seeps in through a dirty window just below the ceiling. Their eyes are growing accustomed to the dim light. The cellar is full of bicycles of various sizes, a buggy, sledges, skis, and a bread machine, Christmas decorations, rolls of wallpaper, and a stepladder spattered with white paint. On a box someone has written in a thick black felt-tip pen,
Josef ’s comics
.

A tapping noise comes from the ceiling, and Simone looks over at the stairs and then at her father. He doesn’t seem to hear the sound. He walks slowly toward a door at the far end of the room. Simone bumps into a rocking horse. Kennet opens the door and glances into a utility room containing a battered washing machine and dryer and an old-fashioned wringer. Next to a geothermal pump, a grubby curtain hangs in front of a large cupboard.

“Nobody here,” he says, turning to Simone.

She looks at him, seeing the grubby curtain behind him at the same time. It is completely motionless yet at the same time somehow alive.

“Simone?”

There is a damp mark on the fabric, a small oval, as if made by a mouth.

“Open up the plans,” says Kennet.

It seems to Simone that the damp oval suddenly caves inward. “Dad,” she whispers.

“What?” he replies, leaning against the door post as he puts his pistol back in his shoulder holster and scratches his head.

There is a sudden creaking noise. She wheels and sees that the rocking horse is still moving.

“What is it, Sixan?”

Kennet takes the plans from her and lays them on a rolled-up mattress; he shines the torch on the drawing and turns it around. He looks up, glances back at the plans, and goes over to a brick wall where an old dismantled bunk bed stands beside a wardrobe containing bright yellow life jackets. A chisel, various saws, and clamps hang from hooks on a precisely marked tool board. The space next to the hammer is empty; there’s an outline for a big axe, but the axe itself is gone.

Kennet measures the wall and the ceiling with his eyes, leans over, and taps on the wall behind the bed.

“What is it?” asks Simone.

“This wall must be at least ten years old.”

“Is there anything behind it?”

“Yes, quite a big space,” he replies.

“How do you get in?”

Kennet shines the light on the wall again, then on the floor next to the dismantled bed. Shadows slide around the cellar.

“Shine it there again,” says Simone.

When Kennet aims the beam at the floor next to the wardrobe, she can see that something scraping countless times along the floor has worn an arc into the concrete.

“Behind the wardrobe,” she says.

“Hold the torch,” says Kennet, drawing his pistol again.

Suddenly, from behind the wardrobe, they clearly hear the sound of someone moving slowly and carefully. Simone’s pulse increases to a violent throbbing. There’s someone there, she thinks. Oh my God! She wants to call out
Benjamin!
but doesn’t dare.

Kennet gestures to her to move back. She is just about to speak when a loud bang explodes on the floor above. Wood is shattering, splintering. Simone drops the torch and they are plunged back into darkness. Rapid steps thunder across the floor, there is a clattering across the ceiling, and dazzling beams of light sweep down the iron staircase and flood the cellar like high waves.

“Get down on the floor,” a man yells hysterically. “Down on the floor!” Simone is frozen to the spot.

“Lie down,” rasps Kennet.

“Shut your mouth!” someone yells.

“Down, down!”

Simone doesn’t realize the men are talking to her until she feels a powerful blow in the stomach that forces her to her knees.

“Down on the floor, I said!”

She tries to get air, coughing and gasping for breath. The intense beams of light continue to sweep through the cellar. Black figures pull at her, drag her up the narrow staircase. Her hands are locked behind her back. Struggling to walk, she slips and hits her cheek on the sharp metal handrail.

She tries to turn her head but someone is holding her firmly, breathing fast and pushing her roughly against the wall next to the cellar door.

Simone blinks blindly in the daylight, but it’s difficult to focus. A number of figures seem to be staring at her. Fragments of a conversation farther away reach her, and she recognizes her father’s terse, stringent tone. It’s his voice that makes her think of the smell of coffee when she was getting ready for school, with the morning news on the radio.

Only now does she realize that it is the police who have stormed the house. A neighbour must have seen the light from Kennet’s flashlight and called them.

A cop, about twenty-five, yet with lines and blue circles beneath his eyes, is looking at her with a strained expression. His head is shaved, revealing a bumpy skull. He rubs the back of his neck with his hand.

“Name?” he demands coldly.

“Simone Bark,” she says, her voice still unsteady. “I’m here with my father— ”

“I want your name, not your life story,” the man says rudely.

“Take it easy, Ragnar,” says one of his colleagues.

“You’re a fucking parasite,” he goes on, turning to Simone. “But that’s just my opinion of people who get off looking at blood.”

He snorts and turns away. Her father is speaking in an even tone, and he sounds very tired. She sees one of the officers walking away with his wallet.

“Excuse me,” says Simone to a female officer. “We heard someone down in the— ”

“Shut up,” says the woman.

“My son is— ”

“Shut up, I said. Tape her mouth. I want her mouth taped.”

The officer with the shaved head takes out a roll of broad tape, but he stops when the front door opens and a tall blond man with sharp grey eyes walks in.

“Joona Linna, National CID,” he says, in his singsong lilt. “What have you got?”

“Two suspects,” replies the female officer.

Joona looks at Kennet and Simone. “I’ll take it from here,” he says. “This is a mistake.”

Two dimples suddenly appear in Joona’s cheeks as he tells them to release the suspects. The female officer goes over to Kennet and removes the handcuffs, apologizes, and exchanges a few words with him, her ears bright red. The officer with the shaved head stands in front of Simone, rocking back on his heels and staring at her.

“Let her go,” says Joona.

“They resisted violently and I injured my thumb,” he says.

“Are you intending to arrest them?” asks Joona.

“Yes.”

“Kennet Sträng and his daughter?”

“I don’t give a shit who they are,” the officer says aggressively.

“Ragnar,” his colleague says again, in an attempt to quiet him, “take it easy. He’s one of us.”

“It’s illegal to enter the scene of a crime— ”

“Just calm down,” says Joona firmly.

“But am I wrong?” he asks.

Kennet has come over, but says nothing.

“Am I wrong?” asks Ragnar again.

“We’ll talk about this later,” replies Joona.

“Why not now?”

“For your own sake.”

The female officer comes over to Kennet again, clears her throat, and says, “We’re very sorry about all this.”

“It’s OK,” says Kennet, helping Simone up from the floor.

“The cellar,” she says, almost inaudibly.

“I’ll take care of it,” says Kennet, turning to Joona. “There are one or more persons in a hidden room in the cellar, behind the wardrobe with life jackets in it.”

“Listen carefully,” Joona calls to the others. “We have reason to believe that the suspect is in the cellar. I will be leading this operation throughout. Be careful. It is possible that a hostage situation could arise, and in that case I will be the negotiator. The suspect is a dangerous individual, but fire is to be directed at the legs in the first instance.”

Joona borrows a bullet-proof vest and quickly shrugs it on. Then he sends two officers around to the back of the house and gathers a team around him. They listen to his rapid instructions and then disappear with him through the doorway leading to the cellar. The metal staircase clangs loudly beneath their weight.

Simone is afraid that her whole body is shaking, so Kennet wraps his arms around her. He whispers to her that everything will be fine, but the only thing Simone wants to hear is her son’s voice from the cellar; she prays that she will hear him calling to her any second.

After only a short while Joona returns, the bullet-proof vest in his hand. “He got away,” he says tersely.

“Benjamin, where’s Benjamin?” asks Simone.

“Not here,” replies Joona.

“But the room— ”

She moves toward the cellar doorway. Kennet tries to hold her back, but she yanks her hand away and pushes past Joona and down the iron steps. With three spotlights on stands filling the space with light, the cellar is now as bright as a summer’s day. The stepladder has been moved and is now under the small open window. The wardrobe has been pushed to one side and a police officer guards the entrance to the secret room. Simone walks slowly toward him. She can hear her father behind her, but she doesn’t understand what he is saying.

“I have to,” she says faintly.

The officer raises a hand and shakes his head.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you in,” he says.

“It’s my son.”

She feels her father’s arms around her, but tries to break free.

“He isn’t here, Simone.”

“Let go of me!”

She lurches forward and looks into a room with a mattress on the floor, piles of old comics, empty bags of crisps, cans and cereal boxes, pale blue overshoes, and a large, shiny axe.

In the car on the way back from Tumba, Simone listens to Kennet rant about the police and their lack of coordination. She says nothing, gazing out the window as he complains. The streets are filled with families on their way somewhere. Mothers and their toddlers dressed in snowsuits, children trying to make their way through the slush on sledges. They wear the same backpacks. A group of girls with Lucia tinsel in their hair woven into shiny headbands eat something out of a small bag and laugh with delight.

More than twenty-four hours have passed since Benjamin was taken away from us, pulled out of his own bed and dragged out of his home, she thinks. She looks down at her hands. Ugly red marks from the handcuffs are still clearly visible.

There is nothing to indicate that Josef Ek is involved in Benjamin’s disappearance. There were no traces of Benjamin in the hidden room, only of Josef. It is more than likely that Josef was sitting in there when she and her father went down into the cellar. Realizing they had discovered his hiding place, he must have reached for the axe as quietly as possible. And when the tumult erupted, when the police came storming down to the cellar and dragged her and Kennet upstairs, Josef had taken the opportunity to push the wardrobe aside, move the ladder over to the window, and climb out. He got away, he deceived the police, and he is still at large. A national alert has gone out.

But Josef Ek can’t have kidnapped Benjamin. They were simply two things that happened at approximately the same time, just as Erik has been trying to tell her.

“Are you coming?” asks Kennet.

She looks up and realizes that they are parked outside their apartment block on Luntmakargatan and Kennet is repeating his question.

She unlocks the door and sees Benjamin’s coat hung in the hall. Her heart leaps and she just has time to think that he must be home before she remembers that he was dragged out in his pyjamas.

Her father’s face is grey; again she registers how old he seems to have become. He says he’s going for a shower and disappears into the bath room.

Simone leans against the wall and closes her eyes. If I can just have Benjamin back, she thinks, I will forget everything that has happened, that is happening, that will happen; I won’t talk about it, I won’t think about it, I won’t be angry with anyone, I’ll just be grateful.

She hears the water begin to run in the bathroom.

With a sigh she slides off her shoes, lets her jacket drop to the floor, and eases down onto the bed. Suddenly she cannot remember what she’s doing in the bedroom. Did she come in to get something or just to lie down and rest for a while? She feels the coolness of the sheets against the palm of her hand and sees Erik’s creased pyjama bottoms sticking out from under the pillow.

Just as the shower stops running she remembers what she was going to do. She was going to get a clean towel for her father and then try to find something on Benjamin’s computer that could be linked to his abduction. She takes a bath towel out of the cupboard and goes back into the hall just as the bathroom door opens and Kennet emerges, fully dressed.

“Towel,” she says.

“I used the small one.”

His hair is damp and smells of lavender. She realizes he must have used the cheap soap in the pump dispenser by the washbasin.

“Did you wash your hair with soap?” she asks.

“It smelled nice,” he replies.

“There is shampoo, Dad.”

“Same thing.”

“Fine,” she says with a smile, deciding not to tell him what the small hand towel is used for.

“I’ll make some coffee,” says Kennet, heading for the kitchen.

Simone drops the bath towel on the sideboard and goes into Benjamin’s room, where she sits at the desk and switches on the computer. She needs to clean up in here. The bedclothes on the floor and the water glass lying on its side remind her, stabbingly, of the abduction.

The welcome melody from the computer’s operating system rings out, Simone places her hand on the mouse, waits a few seconds, then clicks on the miniature picture of Benjamin’s face to log in.

The computer requests a user name and password. Simone types in
BENJAMIN
, takes a deep breath, and writes
DUMBLEDORE
.