The badger, p.13
The Badger, page 13
Emma gave her an address. Annika noted it down on an envelope while Emma carried on talking.
“I can send some pictures. I’ve got to work today, but I can meet you both there tomorrow afternoon if you’re interested. There’s no hurry, really, but I’d quite like to complete on the estate as quickly as I can. If you understand.”
“Yes, sure. Send pictures. I’ll be in touch,” said Annika.
A few minutes later Emma Sieverts had sent her an email. She opened the pictures on her mobile. From the front door to the road it looked like a simple, rectangular brick house with a lawn, surrounded by lots of neglected bushes. Tree tops were rising up behind the roof, indicating that the forest was the nearest neighbour to the back. Annika smiled as she saw four apple trees in a kind of square in the grounds. The pictures were just a few instant mobile photos which Emma must have taken herself, not at all as well-polished as usual estate agent shots. In any case, they warmed Annika’s heart. They felt genuine. She wanted to see more, opening picture after picture.
Inside, the rooms were bare. The walls were covered in marks where paintings had been. The light was shining welcomingly through the windows and it was liberating to escape the furniture rented in by the styling firms. Annika couldn’t help but imagine how Jan Apelgren and his wife had gone about their business inside, watched television on a sofa or cooked in the kitchen.
Her warm feeling disappeared in a flash when the next picture showed a dark staircase in the hall. She instinctively closed her screen. The image of the basement staircase was pounding the back of her eye. She couldn’t live there.
But still. Everything else about it had felt good. She placed a hand below her navel and glanced at her mobile again. They were going to be a family soon. They needed somewhere to live where the children could run outside on the lawn without her needing to keep a look out for cars all the time.
What’s so bad about basements, in the end? After all, she wasn’t a little girl any more. She had only imagined it that time, getting scared when the light went out. That was all. She had to leave all that behind her. Soon she would have to teach her own children that there wasn’t anything to be afraid of in dark basements.
Annika took a deep breath and scrolled on to the next picture. This one surprised her. There wasn’t a dark basement down the stairs. Instead, there was a fresh, recently done up entertainment room with a wood burning stove made of black cast iron. The long aspect opened up to picture windows to a lawn. The sunshine was flickering beautifully through the branches at the edge of the forest, bathing the room in a golden light.
A smile spread across her face. In her mind’s eye she could see a glowing fire crackling in the stove, warming her feet as she sat in a comfortable armchair, reading in the last light of the evening sun.
The house was on a slope. It was split-level, with its main entrance on the upper floor. Sure, a lot of it was technically underground, but it was very far from being a cold, damp basement. Annika felt the warmth radiating through her body. She wanted to see the house. What did she have to lose? For a second she recalled the whispers which had tried to lure her a long time ago. She shuddered and pushed them out of her mind. She wasn’t going to listen to them. Quite the opposite in fact, she was going to defeat them.
It was time to let go of her old fears and get on with her life.
30
SATURDAY 28 MAY
Her death released the creatures into my life. They came to me and I gave them her body. In return, they opened the black earth and led me into their tunnels. They showed me to my new home.
In another apartment, on the other side of Gothenburg, Cecilia Wreede was sitting on her sofa comparing notes. Her copy of I am the Badger was full of brightly coloured Post-its, dog-eared pages, and interposed paper notes. She opened a page and circled the same sentence she had already marked in yellow highlighter pen. It read like any other part of any murder investigation.
At first, she felt a revulsion to the book and refused to buy it. What sick individual draws their inspiration from an actual case before it is solved, to coldly turn it into entertainment? Books based on true stories were bad enough, if they weren’t penned in a respectful manner. But this? She couldn’t escape the fact that the real Badger was still killing every year. The Association of Relatives, with Christoffer at the helm, had come out with official protests against the book, which presumably only led to more people buying the drivel.
All the same, she couldn’t help but buy herself a copy. This was what she had before her now, full of smudgy notes and with pages about to fall out. The first half hadn’t impressed her. It was like a pretty run-of-the-mill thriller. A copper with a tricky relationship with alcohol and married men had, as usual, been winding up half of the police station, refusing to drop a hopeless case. (It resembled her own case, or some kind of fantasy version of it.) It was well-written, but she had seen it all before. Nothing in it even came near to actual police work.
But that wasn’t the whole picture. The action in the book was interlaced with a kind of autobiography. The story was about how a man was turned into a killer, and that was where she started to see connections which shouldn’t be there. In the middle of the book, as the chief inspector was identifying the pattern left by the killer, she began to get a sense of what was going on.
Cecilia had been reading the book sitting up in bed. It was going from thriller to supernatural horror with each new page. The Badger in the book was some kind of demi-human who lived in the ground alongside supernatural monsters. He would make his way into the houses of his victims from below, just like the real Badger did. His first victim had been his own wife, who had been unfaithful and betrayed his love.
For Cecilia, it wasn’t the horror story that scared her, but how close the subject matter was to reality. What the situation was regarding the real Badger was something Jan Apelgren could have no idea about, if he actually was behind the words – the entire police investigation was subject to a confidentiality clause. Yet the book was disturbingly faithful to the investigation.
Although the book was becoming more and more bizarre, Cecilia’s interest in it was mounting. The time had now come for her to dissect what she had been reading. She took a swig of coffee and made a table on a fresh page in her notebook. On the left she wrote fact, on the right fiction.
Once finished, she stared at her work. Every detail tallied. Everything but the monsters in the earth, of course. They felt unnecessary, designed just to terrify. As if the Badger himself wasn’t terrible enough.
She wandered from one side of the living room to the other, wrapped in her white dressing gown with red rose print, trying to gather her thoughts. The writer obviously knew as much as the police did. How could this have come about? Reluctantly, she realised there could only be one explanation. Somebody with access to the investigation must have leaked information to Apelgren. However, that was beyond the realms of possibility. Apelgren hadn’t been seen in several years. Cecilia sat down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. Would anyone have leaked the investigation, thousands of pages of constantly developing material, to a dead man? It was absurd to think so.
Could the book have been written by someone on the inside? Were there people working on the investigation harbouring ambitions of being a writer? Jonas? Hardly. Come to that, none of her colleagues would be that stupid to let the details match up as closely as they did. They would have realised that they risked prosecution for misconduct if they misused classified material to their own advantage. Besides, it would seem unreasonable to write under Jan Apelgren’s name. That would have only complicated the publishing process. Surely writing under any other pseudonym would have been better?
She stared at the book. The cover was anything but discreet. It was meant to look like cracked concrete. Blood was running out from the cracks, as if the wall itself was bleeding. The title in gold was shining in her eyes, challenging her. I am the Badger. Jan Apelgren.
Her eyes landed on the publisher’s logo in the bottom corner. She remembered Christoffer’s suggestion to contact the publishing house and made a mental note that it was probably time to tie up that loose end.
She left the kitchen, tugging the charger cable out of her phone. Jonas’s number was stored under favourites. There weren’t many other people she was calling these days. She had fewer and fewer friends as the years went by and she rarely made the effort to talk to her casual dates other than online. While the phone was ringing, she highlighted a few sections in particular.
In the end, nothing remains of them. But the objects that once were theirs remain with me, as souvenirs. Each one, treated with equal care.
“Have you read the book?” said Cecilia the moment Jonas picked up, as usual before he had time to say anything.
“Hi, Cecilia,” he said. His voice was gravelly as if he had only just woken up. “Are you having a nice weekend?”
“You know I don’t like small talk.”
“No. Bought a copy but haven’t got around to starting it. I prefer fantasy, you know. All of these detective novels just remind me of work.”
“Read it then we can discuss. There’s more to it than meets the eye.”
Cecilia hung up and blinked at the sunshine outside the window. Her legs were feeling restless. She needed to move, drown out her thoughts with adrenalin, even though the memory of being chased still made her uneasy. She had come so close to being a victim herself that winter.
She had replaced the running track with the treadmill at the gym, maintaining that it was to escape the cold. Now, with the warmer air and the lighter evenings, it felt like a failing to run indoors. She wanted to be outside, but her fear at the mere thought of running around Skatås again reared its ugly head. She hated herself for allowing it to hold her back, but it sure as hell did.
Her eyes landed on the chest of drawers where she still kept her service weapon.
What if she were to take the weapon out with her on her run? She knew that it wasn’t allowed. But who was to know? Her hands were trembling when she removed the pistol and thrust it into her belt bag along with her police ID, merely as a precaution. It bore down uncomfortably against her hip, but it was doing its job. The concerns she had about being hounded again were lifting.
She breathed a deep sigh of relief and headed off out.
31
SUNDAY 29 MAY
Why did I choose to disappear down below the ground, among creatures I have only seen as clawed shadows, grinding jaws full of soil and insects?
The car was bumping along the pitted tarmac as Annika and Martin drew up outside the house. Martin switched the engine off and looked over Annika’s shoulder at what had once been Jan Apelgren’s place. The brickwork on the outside was redder in real life than in the pictures. The windows were empty, black spaces, staring out through the face of the building like square eyeballs.
“Is this it?” said Martin, looking at Annika in bemusement.
“Yes,” said Annika.
“Are you serious? The garden looks like a jungle. Hasn’t anyone been taking care of it?”
“Don’t believe so. But you’re not scared of a bit of garden work, are you?”
“Not if I can help it.”
Annika sighed. “I’m happy to do it. Shall we go in? She’s waiting.”
The shingle flagstones along the pathway to the front door were uneven where the ground had settled over the years. Some moved under their feet. Annika knocked, then reached for the door handle. It wasn’t locked so they went inside.
“Hello?” called Annika.
Emma Sieverts appeared in the hall to meet them. Smiling, she shook their hands and introduced herself to Martin.
“Welcome, welcome,” said Emma. “I thought I’d show you around a bit, if you like?”
Martin tapped on the wood panelling which lined the wall in the hall. The sound didn’t carry, indicating the stone wall behind. “Is this original?” he said.
Emma laughed. “Yes, absolutely. The house is from the 1970s, apart from the bedroom area which is a later addition. Mr and Mrs Apelgren purchased the house just a few years before they disappeared. They didn’t have the time to do that much work on it.”
Martin gave a start. “Apelgren?” He looked at Annika. “Is this his house?”
Annika lowered her eyes.
“Yes. Didn’t Annika tell you?” said Emma.
“No,” said Martin. He looked questioningly at Annika.
“I see,” said Emma after a few seconds of awkward silence. She briefly glanced at Annika. “So, there it is, anyway. Now you both know.”
She pointed through a wide doorway towards an empty living room. The floor was laid with oak hardwood in a herringbone pattern. Emma’s voice echoed between the bare walls.
“This is the living room. Through this door you have the kitchen, dating originally from the seventies too. You can knock the wall down between the kitchen and living room, if you like. Past the staircase are the bedroom and bathroom.”
Martin shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we don’t need to see the rest.”
Emma paused. “Now I’m not getting it. Why not?”
“But I do,” said Annika.
Martin pointed past an indoor trellis towards the stairs. “Annika, can you see what I’m seeing? We just don’t want a house if there’s a cellar.”
Annika knew that there was nothing to be afraid of down there, but her heart rate was increasing anyway and her armpits were clammy with sweat. She looked at Martin and smiled stiffly. “Look, I’ve seen the pictures. This isn’t your usual basement.” It felt good saying it. As if she had conquered her fear through her words.
“I don’t understand, we have weeded out that many houses just because they…” He stopped in the middle of his sentence, holding his arms out wide. “But sure, let’s take a look.”
Emma smiled. “And seeing as we’re talking about the entertainment room, we can actually start down there if you’d like. All of the downstairs has recently had a lot of work done.”
The steps creaked as they followed Emma down the stairs. The picture windows to the back let the sunshine in, warming the newly laid wooden floor. The trees were swaying in the wind making the light sparkle, lending everything a golden shimmer. A faint smell of paint from the whitewashed walls was a giveaway that the works had only recently been completed.
Annika took a few steps out onto the floor, then did a pirouette. She looked Martin in the eyes and a smile spread across her face. “See? This isn’t some creepy, enclosed basement.”
Martin looked around, smiling. He nodded. “You’re right, this isn’t your usual basement.”
“Lovely, isn’t it?” said Emma. She indicated a short hallway past the stairs, further into the house. “Over there you have a few rooms which are your more traditional basement spaces, utility room and a little storeroom.”
"No damp problems?” said Martin, giving Annika a grin.
“No,” said Emma. “Mr and Mrs Apelgren had their drains re-done just before they disappeared. Even so, the basement was in a terrible condition when I took charge of the house. But now everything’s brand new. Walls, ceiling, floor. All of it was finished just a few weeks ago.”
They went into the short hallway. “Geothermal heating,” said Emma, pointing to a droning boiler in the utility room. It was complete with new washer and dryer, and sink unit with basin for washing by hand. The painted concrete walls were covered in a maze of copper pipes, clambering along the walls from the boiler, further into the house.
“How large is the house?” asked Martin.
“In total, 200 square metres,” said Emma. “The upstairs living space is 125 square, but downstairs it’s only about 75.”
“Quite remarkable,” said Martin. “So there’s less here than upstairs?”
“Yes,” said Emma. “The bedroom part upstairs is an extension. The lower level, including the basement space, is only a little more than half the length of the house.”
“Well, it doesn’t really matter,” said Annika. “We’ll be mostly using the upstairs anyway. And the entertainment room, of course.”
“Do you want to take a look around by yourselves?” said Emma. “I can wait up there.”
Annika took Martin’s hands as soon as Emma had left them alone. “Admit it, it wasn’t such a daft idea!”
“It wasn’t,” he said, looking around the entertainment room. The spotlights in the ceiling were gleaming in the glass of the stove. “But I don’t really understand, basements were a big no-no just a short time ago. And now we’re standing in one. How did that happen?”
“I know,” said Annika. “But honestly, this isn’t the same thing.” She went up to the picture windows and looked out across the lawn towards the edge of the forest.
“And you don’t feel uncomfortable living in the same house as he did?”
Annika turned around. “Why would that be? He happens to be dead.”
“Officially declared dead,” said Martin. “How do we know he’s not going to show up one day wanting his house back?”
“He is dead,” said Annika, leaning forwards. “In fact, we have him to thank for having the funds to buy his house.”
Martin shook his head. “It’s just too good to be true, something’s got to be amiss. Can’t we keep up the search?”
Annika took his hand and laid it against her stomach. “We’re going to have a child to take care off soon, Martin. We can’t stay in the apartment. This house is perfect. I don’t want us to risk losing it, not now we’ve got the chance.”
Martin nodded. “Okay, I could live here, it’s not that.”
“I promise you’ll like it here.”
“Only if I get my man cave,” said Martin. He looked into Annika’s eyes. His lips curled into a smile, scattering tiny laughter lines around the corners of his eyes. Annika’s heart swelled with love. They were going to have a new life together, in what would soon be their house. She had yearned for this for as long as she could remember. All of her doubts would soon be over. It was so close now she could almost touch it.
