‘What are you looking for?’ Laila asked, but as usual the girl ignored her.
Another day Laila stood silently by the workshop door watching the girl opening drawers and looking in cupboards just as she had done when she was little, just as Laila had done.
The girl had grown to be beautiful with her curly golden hair, and there was something deeply upsetting about seeing this lovely creature wandering around and around like a swan in a cramped cage, searching for something that didn’t exist. The dark, gloomy cellar, the rattling as she pulled out yet another drawer of random tools, while her golden hair cascaded over her shoulders.
Laila tapped on the door frame with the crutch she had started to use to help her get down the stairs, and the girl immediately stopped searching, went to her room and sat on the bed. Laila sat down beside her.
‘Little One? What is it you want?’
The girl didn’t answer.
A week or so later, Laila had gone down to the cellar one evening to get a pair of gloves from the storeroom. She stood in the doorway of the girl’s room, watching her as she slept. With her hair spread over the pillow, her arms resting straight down by her sides, she looked like a very beautiful corpse. Laila shuddered.
Then she caught sight of the typewriter. There was a blank piece of paper in it, a pale glow in the reflection of the cellar light. No. Not blank. There was something written on it. After checking that the girl really was asleep, Laila went into the room and carefully pulled out the sheet of paper.
The girl’s writing ability also seemed to have deteriorated. There was just one line, without any punctuation. It was the first thing Laila had seen that the girl had come up with for herself. It said:
‘Where love how love colour feels how it is where’
Laila read the line several times, then her gaze slid over to the bed. The girl’s eyes were open, shining faintly as she lay there looking at Laila. She sat down on the edge of the bed with the piece of paper in her hand.
‘Love,’ she said. ‘Is it love you’re searching for, Little One?’
But the girl had closed her eyes again, and didn’t answer.
One morning in the middle of October, when Lennart was in the garage putting the winter tyres on the car, Laila sat in the living room feeling despondent and restless at the same time. She tried playing a Lill-Babs song to cheer herself up, but it didn’t help.
There was a knot of anxiety in her stomach, an ominous feeling. She walked up and down the room, leaning on her crutch, but the feeling wouldn’t go. As if something had happened just now, something she ought to know about. Suddenly she got the idea it was something to do with the girl. As she limped towards the cellar, she became more and more convinced that she was right. Their poor foundling had taken the step from apathy to the final separation that is death.
She felt she should hurry. Perhaps it wasn’t too late.
She didn’t ground the crutch properly on the fifth step, and it slid away when she put her weight on it. She fell head first down the stairs, and when her head met the edge between the wall and the staircase, she heard rather than felt something crack in the back of her neck.
Steps. She could hear footsteps. Back and forth. Light, tiptoeing steps. Her entire back was a blue flame of pain, and she couldn’t move her head, couldn’t feel her fingers. She opened her eyes. The girl was standing next to her.
‘Little One,’ Laila wheezed. ‘Little One, help me. I think I’ve…had it.’
The girl looked her in the eye. Studied her. Looked her in the eye. Never before had the girl looked her in the eye for so long. She leaned down and looked even deeper, as if she were searching for something in or behind Laila’s eyes. The girl’s eyes enveloped Laila like two dark blue wells, and for a brief moment the pain disappeared.
In her confusion Laila thought: She can heal. She can make me whole. She’s an angel.
Laila opened her trembling lips, ‘I’m here. Help me.’
The girl straightened up and said, ‘Can’t see it. Can’t see it.’
A shape that shouldn’t have been there flickered on the edge of Laila’s field of vision. A hammer. The girl was holding a hammer in her hand. Laila tried to scream. She could only manage a whimper.
‘No,’ she whispered. ‘What are you going to do what are you-’
‘Quiet,’ said the girl. ‘Open look.’
Then she struck Laila’s temple with the hammer. Once, twice, three times. Laila was no longer able to feel anything, her sight went and she was blind. Her hearing seemed to be drifting around the room, however, and she could hear the girl grunt in annoyance, footsteps walking away.
Laila no longer had any idea what was up or down, she was floating in a vacuum and only her hearing was keeping her alive, a fine thread that had come to breaking point.
She heard a clinking sound as the girl put something down on the floor. Her hearing guessed that it was nails, perhaps five of them. Then she felt something. A sharp point against her skin, someone took a deep breath and the last thing her hearing perceived was a harsh metallic clang and a crunching, cracking sound as her skull split open beneath the point of the nail.
Then there was silence as the process of opening up the skull continued.
One hour later Lennart came down to the cellar. He didn’t even have time to scream.
In some ways Jerry was lucky that day, because he unconsciously established an alibi for himself. The wide-ranging police investigation that was to follow would probably have focused more closely on Jerry if he hadn’t decided on that particular day that he’d had enough of sitting around indoors, and spent several hours at the bowling alley.
He didn’t know anybody there, he just sat at a table and drank several cups of coffee, ate a couple of sandwiches and read the papers, distractedly watching the semi-useless players as they went after their strikes and spares. After that he went to the Co-op Forum store and spent half an hour hanging out in the media department, where he bought a few DVDs. At the cheap supermarket he stocked up, out of habit, on cans of ravioli and instant noodles. An impulse led him to Jysk, where he wandered around for a while and eventually bought a new pillow.
He couldn’t have arranged things better if it had been planned. A whole day when his activities could be confirmed by the staff in the bowling alley, checkout assistants and his printed receipts. This would actually end up being the police’s only grounds for suspicion: the fact that his alibi was almost too watertight for a recluse like Jerry. But they couldn’t really arrest him for that.
He went home and had a beer, then rang Lennart and Laila. No one answered, but it was possible to trace the call later, extending his documented afternoon activities by a further half hour. By that stage the bodies of his parents had grown so cold since the morning that he couldn’t possibly have been the perpetrator.
He then had his final unplanned stroke of genius. He got on his motorbike and went to visit his sister.
There was some suspicion that he knew about body temperature, knew they had to be reported dead before too long had elapsed if the time of death were to be fixed within the period for which he had an alibi.
Needless to say, no such thoughts were in Jerry’s mind as he drove out to his parents’ house through the darkness. There were no thoughts in his mind at all. It was good to be out on the bike. The forward movement of his body replaced the circular movement of his thoughts, going round and round inside his head.
He drove right up to the porch steps, noticing that the light wasn’t on in the kitchen. However, he could just see a glimmer of light behind the blanket at the cellar window. He went up the steps and knocked. No one came. He tried the handle, and found that the door wasn’t locked.