Authors: Johan Theorin
‘Shame about Gerhard,’ she said as she walked past. ‘Hope he’s OK.’
Do you really?
Per directed the thought at her back as she went in to see Nilla, and the next moment felt thoroughly ashamed of himself.
Jerry didn’t wake up.
His room was small, and the closed blinds transformed the sunshine outside into small glowing dots. Per sat in the darkness beside him during Saturday and Sunday, long hours when very little happened. The nurses came and went, changing his drip. They looked at him, patted his hand, and went out again.
Jerry had been sent for X-rays and put in plaster on Friday evening; half his face and his right arm and leg were covered in bandages. Those parts of his face that were visible were bruised and battered, but Per knew that the most serious bleeds were in the brain.
He had been moved from the emergency department to intensive care, and then to his own room off a ward. This could have been interpreted as a positive sign, but in fact the opposite was true, as a nurse made clear to Per.
‘Just don’t expect any miracles,’ was all she said.
Jerry had been moved to a room of his own because there wasn’t much they could do. He lay in a torpor, muttering to himself and opening his eyes occasionally. He was asleep for most of the time.
Per sat by the bed, remembering that Jerry had failed to turn up when his mother Anita lay dying of kidney failure ten years earlier. He hadn’t even phoned. Three days before her death he had sent a Get Well Soon card by post. Per had thrown it away without showing it to her.
Then he tried to remember when he had been closest to his father during the almost fifty years they had known one another. As a child? No. And not as an adult, either. He couldn’t recall one single hour of closeness – so perhaps this was it.
I ought to say something about his life
, Per thought.
I ought to tell him what I think of him. Get it all off my chest and then I’ll feel better
.
But he said nothing. He just waited.
When he went down to get some lunch on Saturday he saw the headline in one of the evening papers in the little shop:
So the news was out at last. Sex and violence in one headline – that was pure gold for the press. Per bought the paper, but didn’t learn anything new. It simply said that the police were investigating an arson attack on a property owned by ‘the notorious porn director Jerry Morner’, and that two bodies had been found in the house. Next to the article a black and white picture from the seventies showed a smiling Jerry holding a copy of
Babylon
up to the camera. It didn’t mention the fact that he was in hospital – merely that he was unavailable for comment.
Inspector Marklund turned up at the hospital at about three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and Per met him outside the door of Jerry’s room.
‘I’m on my way back to Växjö,’ Marklund said quietly. ‘How is he? Has he said anything?’
‘He hasn’t come round yet … They think he’s suffered brain damage.’
Marklund just nodded.
‘Have you found the driver?’ said Per.
‘Not yet, but we’re examining the motorway and we’ve found some tyre marks. The car must have been damaged, so we’re checking garages too. And we’re looking for witnesses.’
Per glanced towards Jerry’s room. ‘It must have been someone Jerry knew … I mean, he was getting out of the car when I spotted him. So he must have gone along with whoever it was of his own free will.’
‘Did you recognize the driver?’
Per shook his head.
‘Did you get the number?’
‘I was too far away; the car was up above me on the bridge. I could see it was dark-red … I think I saw one like it driving past our cottage on Öland a few days ago.’
Marklund took out his notebook. ‘Can you remember any details?’
‘Not many … It was a Swedish number plate, and I think it was a Ford Escort, a few years old.’ He looked wearily at the inspector. ‘Is that any help?’
Marklund closed the notebook. ‘You never know.’
But Per realized it was no help at all.
Jerry was sinking deeper and deeper into unconsciousness, but his eyes occasionally moved behind his eyelids. His breathing was shallow, and he mumbled disjointed words. They sounded like a long series of Swedish names, many of them women: ‘Josefine, yes … Amanda … Charlotte? … Suzanne, what do you want?’
He never mentioned Per’s mother Anita, nor Regina.
As the day passed, his breathing grew weaker and weaker, but in the midst of all the mumbling there were other names and words Per recognized: ‘Bremer … Moleng Noar … and Markus Lukas, so ill …’
At about eight o’clock on Sunday evening, when Per had almost fallen asleep, Jerry suddenly looked at him with total clarity and whispered, ‘Pelle?’
‘I’m here,’ said Per. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, Dad.’
‘Good, Pelle … Good.’ He fell silent.
Per leaned closer. ‘Who was it?’ he asked. ‘Who was driving the car?’
‘Bremer.’
‘It can’t have been.’
But Jerry simply nodded, then closed his eyes again.
He passed away just after nine on Sunday evening, with a barely audible sigh. The wheezing Per had heard ever since he was a child stopped with a quiet exhalation, and his body gave up the struggle.
Per was sitting by the bed holding Jerry’s hand when it happened, and he remained there when the room became utterly silent.
He sat there for several minutes. He tried to think of someone who needed to know that Jerry had gone, someone he ought to call – but he couldn’t come up with a single person.
Eventually he went to look for a doctor.
Per got back to Casa Mörner an hour after midnight, once he had seen his father’s body transferred to a trolley and wheeled away by a porter.
The last thing one of the night nurses had done in Jerry’s room was to go over and open the window wide, the curtains fluttering as the cold night air swept in.
She turned to Per and gave him a brief, embarrassed smile. ‘I usually open the window when they’ve gone,’ she said. ‘To let the soul out.’
Per nodded. He looked over at the window and could almost see Jerry’s spirit drifting away through the night, like a shimmering silver ball outside the hospital. Would it sink down towards the ground, or float up to the stars?
He left Kalmar at half past midnight and drove slowly across the Öland bridge. As he drove north on the island he kept glancing in the rear-view mirror. A couple of times he saw headlights coming up behind him at high speed and gripped the wheel more tightly, but both cars overtook him.
Down by the quarry it was almost completely dark, with only a couple of outside lights showing over at the new houses. Per drove up to his little cottage, got out of the car and listened, but everywhere was quiet. The faint soughing of the wind, nothing else.
Then he heard the telephone ringing in the kitchen.
He began to walk slowly towards the house, and the phone continued to ring.
Markus Lukas
, he thought.
You’ve killed Bremer and now you’re hiding somewhere, wondering if you managed to kill my father
.
He unlocked the door and followed the sound into the kitchen. He looked at the telephone for a few seconds, then picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’
No one spoke; all he could hear was an echoing sound, and rhythmic cries in the background.
It was a recording, Per realized, and he had heard it before. On Maundy Thursday someone had rung up and played exactly the same thing in the middle of the day.
And now he recognized what he was listening to – a girl crying out. It was the soundtrack from one of Jerry’s films.
He clutched the receiver tightly. ‘Talk to me,’ he said. ‘Why are you doing this?’
There was no answer – the soundtrack continued. He listened and closed his eyes. ‘You don’t need to play that … Jerry’s gone now,’ he went on. ‘You killed him.’
He held his breath and listened for some kind of response, but all he heard was the sound of the film for a few more seconds, then a click. The call was over.
He slowly replaced the receiver and saw his own pale face reflected in the kitchen window.
What was the message he had just been given? That this Markus Lukas intended to carry on? That he wasn’t just pursuing Jerry for what he’d done, whatever that might be, but the whole Mörner family? The sins of the father passed on to the children and grandchildren …
He got up and went back out into the night. To Ernst’s old workshop.
The trolls stared at him from the shelves lining the walls as he started to carry out Ernst’s tools. Hammers, saws, chisels, sledgehammers and wooden clubs – plenty of excellent weapons. Under the light outside the cottage, Per could see that many of the tools were blunt and worn, but some were sharp. There was a big axe for chopping wood that looked lethal. He raised it with both hands.
You want revenge? You just come here then
.
Come here and see if I’m prepared to pay for something my father did …
He took his weapons inside, locked the door and distributed them through the different rooms. He placed the axe next to his bed. Then he turned off the light and lay in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling and thinking of Markus Lukas, the man whose face was turned away.
Eventually he fell asleep.
Four hours later the rising sun woke him. He raised his head, blinked and saw the big axe within reach on the floor. It all came flooding back.
His father had been murdered and his daughter was seriously ill.
The world was cold and empty.
He lay in bed for an hour or so but couldn’t get back to sleep, and in the end he got up and had some breakfast. He looked at the telephone, but it remained silent.
After a while he picked up the receiver and made the necessary calls following the death of a relative: to a funeral director, to Jerry’s bank, and to the priest at the church where the funeral would take place.
Then he sat and stared out of the window, waiting for something to happen. But he had to occupy himself in the meantime. He took out his questionnaires.
He couldn’t work at the moment, of course, he just didn’t have the strength – so he started making up the answers. He filled in the forms himself, one after another. At first it was a slow process, but as time went by it became surprisingly easy to conjure up people who had seen an advert for a particular soap and were considering buying it. Some of them, like ‘Peter from Karlstad’ and ‘Christina from Uppsala’, were absolutely certain they would be making a purchase. They were convinced that this soap would give their life new meaning.
If Per hadn’t been feeling so bad, he would have laughed.
Making up his own answers was much quicker, too – in just a few hours he had done three days’ work. And his fear of Markus Lukas had begun to subside.
Afterwards he went into Jerry’s bedroom and looked around. His father hadn’t been there for long and had left few traces, not even his smell. A pair of scruffy flannel trousers was draped over the back of a chair, and Jerry’s briefcase was still lying on the bed.
Per went over and opened it. He had hoped there might be something important inside, but he found nothing but some pills for high blood pressure and two small spring-loaded hand grippers that Jerry had been given to help rebuild his strength after the stroke.
And the old copy of
Babylon
, of course.
He opened the magazine and looked at the photo sequences. But he wasn’t studying the young girls, just the man referred to in the caption as Markus Lukas, the man who never showed his face. In the pictures he looked about thirty; the magazine was twelve years old, so Markus Lukas must be in his forties now.
Per looked at the back of the man’s head and tried to imagine Markus Lukas behind the wheel of a car. Was this the man who had killed his father?
Suddenly he saw something he hadn’t noticed before: there was an arm sticking out in one of the pictures. It was pointing at the naked couple on the bed, and it was wearing two wristwatches. One gold, and one stainless steel.
It was Jerry’s arm. Per looked at it for a long time.
The telephone rang twice on Monday evening. The first call was from a reporter on an evening paper who had somehow found out that Jerry was dead and that Per was his son. He’d heard that Jerry had died in a car accident ‘in mysterious circumstances’, and asked a long series of questions, but Per refused to give him any answers.
‘Ring the police,’ was his only response.
‘Are you intending to take over?’ asked the reporter. ‘Are you going to run his porn empire from now on?’
‘There is no empire,’ said Per, and put the phone down.
The second call was from Marika.
‘How are you feeling, Per?’
It sounded as if she really wanted to know.
He sighed. ‘Oh, you know.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been spending much time with Nilla … Things will get better.’