Hunter. Ларс Кеплер
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is a large white house with a pale thatched roof on Ceder Street outside Helsingborg. This early in the morning the surrounding parkland is draped in grey mist, but yellow light is shining from the ground-floor windows.
Nils Gilbert wakes with a start. He must have dozed off in his wheelchair. His face feels hot and his heart is pounding. The sun hasn’t risen above the treetops, and the house and park are heavily shaded.
The gloomy garden resembles the realm of the dead.
He tries to see if Ali has arrived, if he’s taken the wheelbarrow and shovel from the shed.
Just as Nils rolls over to the kitchen door to let in some fresh air, he hears an odd scraping noise. It sounds like it’s coming from the large living room. It must be the cat trying to get out.
‘Lizzy?’
The sound stops abruptly. He listens for a while, then leans back.
His hands start to shake on the armrests of the wheelchair. His legs twitch and bounce in a meaningless dance.
He hid the signs of Parkinson’s for as long as he could: the stiffness in one arm, the foot that dragged ever so slightly, the way his handwriting changed until it was so small that even he couldn’t read the microscopic scrawl.
He didn’t want Eva to notice anything.
And then she died, three years ago.
Eva had complained about being tired for several weeks.
It was a Saturday, and she had just come home from Väla with lots of heavy grocery bags. She was having trouble breathing and her chest felt tight. She said that she was probably coming down with a real stinker of a cold.
By the time she sat down on the sofa, sweat was dripping down her cheeks.
She lay down, and was already dead by the time he asked if she wanted him to turn the television on.
So now it’s just him and fat Lizzy.
He can go weeks without talking to anyone. Sometimes he worries that his voice has disappeared.
One of the few people he sees at all is the girl who looks after the pool. She walks around in jeans and a gold-coloured bikini top, and seems very uncomfortable when he tries to talk to her.
The first time he attempted to say anything to her she looked at him like he was ninety years old or had a serious mental illness.
The people who bring his food are always in a rush. They barely get his signature before hurrying away. And the physiotherapist, an angry, large-breasted woman, just does her job. She gives him curt commands and pretends not to hear his attempts to make conversation.
Only the Iranian man from the garden-maintenance company has any time for him. Ali sometimes comes in for a cup of coffee.
It’s really for his sake that Nils keeps the pool open, but he still hasn’t plucked up the courage to ask if he’d like a swim.
Ali works hard, and often gets sweaty.
Nils knows that he books him far too often, which is why the garden looks the way it does, with precisely clipped shrubs and hedges, leafy archways and perfectly swept paths.
It’s quiet. It’s always so quiet here.
Nils shivers and pushes himself over to the jukebox.
He bought it when he was twenty years old: a genuine Seeburg, made by the Swedish Sjöberg company.
He used to change the singles from time to time. He would make new labels on his typewriter and slip them in under the glass top.
He inserts the coin into the slot, hears it rattle down and activate the mechanism before rolling out into the tray again.
He’s used the same coin all these years.
He taps the buttons for C7 with his shaking hand. The machine whirrs as the record is placed on the turntable.
Nils rolls away as the fast drum intro to ‘Stargazer’ starts to play. He is thrown back in time to when he saw Rainbow live at the Concert Hall in Stockholm in the late 1970s.
The band were over an hour late starting, but when Dio walked on and started to sing ‘Kill the King’, the audience moved as one towards the stage.
Nils goes over to the big windows. Every afternoon he lowers the shades on the west-facing windows to protect his paintings from the strong light.
Through the nylon gauze the window looks even darker and greyer.
To Ali, this whole place must look like a tragic manifestation of the absence of children and grandchildren.
Nils knows that the house is ridiculously showy, that the park is overblown, and that no one ever uses the pool.
His company produces advanced electronics for radar and electronic guidance systems. He’s had good government contacts and has been able to export dual-use products for almost twenty years now.
His arms suddenly shiver.
Over the loud music he thinks he can hear a small child chanting a nursery rhyme.
He turns the wheelchair and makes his way out into the hall.
The voice is coming from the abandoned upper floor. He rolls over to the staircase that he hasn’t climbed in many years, and sees that the door to the bedroom at the top is standing ajar.
The music from the jukebox stops. There’s a clicking sound as the single is slotted back into place among the others, and then silence descends.
Nils started to be afraid of the dark six months ago, after having a nightmare about his wife. She came back from the dead, but could only stand upright because she was impaled on a rough wooden post that ran between her legs, right through her body and neck, and out through her head.
She was angry that he hadn’t done anything to help her, that he hadn’t called for an ambulance.
The bloody pole reached all the way to the floor, and Eva was forced to walk with a strange, bow-legged gait as she came after him.
Nils puts his hands on his lap. They’re twitching and shaking, darting about in exaggerated gestures.
When they are still again he tightens the strap around his waist that prevents him from sliding out of the chair.
He rolls into the living room and looks around. Everything looks the way it always does. The chandelier, the Persian rugs, the marble table and the empire-style sofa and armchairs that Eva brought from her childhood home.
The phone is no longer on the table.
Sometimes Eva’s presence in the house is so real that he thinks her older sister has a spare key and is creeping around like in some Scooby-Doo cartoon in order to scare him.
He sets off towards the kitchen again, then thinks he sees something out of the corner of his eye. He quickly turns his head and imagines he sees a face in the antique mirror, before realising that it’s just a blemish in the glass.
‘Lizzy?’ he calls out weakly.
One of the kitchen drawers clatters, and then he hears footsteps on the floor. He stops, his heart pounding, turns the chair and imagines the blood running down the pole between Eva’s legs.
He presses on silently, rolling towards the big double doors, the wheels making a faint sticky sound on the hardwood floor.
Now Eva is walking bowlegged through the kitchen. The pole is scraping across the slate floor, leaving a trail of blood before catching on the threshold to the dining room.
The stupid nursery rhyme starts up again.
The radio in the kitchen must be switched on.
The footrest of the wheelchair hits the back door with a gentle clunk.
He looks towards the closed door to the dining room.