After a bus ride and a short hitch-hike he was back in the garden. There was no sign of activity from the outside, but blue and white tape was fastened across the front door. Jerry looked over his shoulder to make sure no one was following him. It felt as if someone was, but it might just as easily be a ghost created by his exhausted brain.
He didn’t dare to believe he had got off so lightly. Presumably the police had checked his alibi and gathered evidence that made him an unlikely murderer, but he had so much valuable information that he kind of thought it ought to show. That they’d be back to drag it out of him.
He got on his motorbike and started the engine. As he rode out onto the gravel track that would take him to the glade from the opposite direction, he decided that, with the greatest respect, he didn’t give a damn about any of it. They would just have to carry on as best they could. The only thing that mattered now was Theres.
Why this was the case he had no idea. He hated people. The police officers who had questioned him during the night had been arseholes to a man, and his only pleasure had been in comprehensively fooling them. He wasn’t really mourning his parents, but his childhood. He no longer had any friends. But Theres.
Theres?
No. He couldn’t get his head round it. It was just something he had to do. She was kind of the only person he didn’t feel the slightest scrap of hatred or contempt for. Perhaps it was that simple.
He propped the motorbike against a tree in the forest, waited for five minutes to be on the safe side, just to make sure no one was following him. Then he set off.
It took him over half an hour to find the glade because he was coming from the wrong direction, and when he did find it he was met by the very thing he had feared: nothing. The glade was empty. Only the dry leaves, scattered over the ground or blown into piles. He rubbed his eyes.
What the fuck happens now?
The forest was not large. Sooner or later Theres would reach a track, someone would see her, someone would…it was impossible to work through all the links in the chain. Just one cold fact remained. They were fucked, big time.
Jerry looked around and caught sight of something blue on the edge of the forest. The unopened tube of Kalles Caviar had been thrown a couple of metres in among the trees. Next to it lay the bag containing the sliced loaf, also unopened. Only the sleeping bag and the torch were missing. Perhaps she had taken them with her.
Before long the shit would really hit the fan. But for the time being he was here in this silent glade in the middle of the forest, where no bastard had any questions or accusations to throw at him. He took the bread and the tube of caviar and sat down on the ground in the middle of the glade, squeezed a generous amount of caviar on a slice of bread, slapped another slice on top and tucked in.
He closed his eyes and chewed. His body felt doughy after a night in the cells, and the sticky mess he was swallowing didn’t help. He dreamed of just sitting there, disintegrating, rotting away and turning into the formless mass he felt like. Becoming one with nature in the silent stillness.
Then came the hiccup. He had swallowed too quickly.
He hiccupped and hiccupped, and couldn’t stop. Then came the sobs, competing with the hiccups to make his body jerk as he sat there. So much for his quiet absorption into the earth. He put his head between his knees. Suddenly he threw caution to the winds, flung his head back and yelled, ‘THERES! THEERRREESS!’
The bellow stopped both the sobbing and the hiccupping. Without any real hope he listened for an answer. None came. However, there was a rustling sound among the leaves a couple of metres from where he was sitting. His mouth hanging open, he saw a hand shoot up out of the ground. The only thing his tired brain could come up with was the poster for some zombie film, and his instinctive reaction was to shuffle backwards half a metre.
Then his brain made the right connections and he crawled forward to help Theres out. She wasn’t just covered in leaves. With the help of the axe she had hacked away and dug herself a hole, crawled into it wrapped in the sleeping bag, then scooped earth and leaves over her until she was invisible.
Jerry dug away a considerable amount of earth with his hands until his sister lay exposed in her blue cocoon. He wondered what she would have done if he’d been kept in custody for a week. Would she just have stayed in her hole? Maybe she would. He unzipped the sleeping bag and helped her to crawl out. She was still clutching the axe.
‘You’re just too fucking much, you are,’ he said.
Theres looked around carefully, examining the trees as if they might attack her at any moment, and asked, ‘Big people gone?’
‘Yes,’ said Jerry. ‘They’ve gone now. All gone.’
During the next few weeks Jerry was constantly afraid that the apartment would be searched. He didn’t know how the police operated in cases like these, but in the TV series he’d seen, house searches happened all the time. If the police knocked on the door and wanted to search the place, they were fucked. There was nowhere to hide Theres.
But nobody knocked on the door; nobody rang the bell. The only thing that happened was that Jerry was called in for questioning again. When he got home Theres was still there, and the apartment appeared to be untouched. Perhaps it wasn’t like the TV after all.
Many people that Jerry had never seen before came to Lennart and Laila’s funeral, drawn no doubt by curiosity thanks to all the articles in the press. ‘Bestial murder of Swedish chart toppers.’ Lennart and Laila should have seen the headlines. In spite of everything, they had ended their career as chart toppers.
It was only when the funeral was over that Jerry began to come down to earth, gather his thoughts and try to look clearly at the situation. Up to that point his mind had been constantly fixed on the murder, and he had gone to the computer several times a day to Google news and comments relating to his parents.
Theres didn’t make much noise. When he tried to ask her why she had done what she had done, she refused to talk about it, but it did seem as if she realised that what she had done had hurt Jerry; perhaps she was even ashamed of herself.
Jerry had no idea what actually went on inside her head, and he was scared of her. He put away every knife, tool and sharp object in a locked cupboard. At night he made up a bed for her on the sofa in the living room and double deadlocked the front door so she couldn’t get out. Then he locked the door of his own room. He still found it difficult to drop off because he was afraid she would manage to get in while he was asleep and vulnerable. She was his sister, and she was a total stranger.
She never made any demands; in fact, she rarely spoke at all. She spent most of her time sitting at the desk, aimlessly tapping the computer keyboard or simply staring at the wall. It would probably have been more trouble looking after a hamster. More trouble, but less worry. A hamster didn’t have the ability to turn into a wild lion with no warning.
Theres caused him practical problems in only one respect, and that was her food. She refused to eat anything other than jars of baby food. That would have been fine, except that every single person in Norrtälje seemed to know the man whose parents had been murdered. It might have been his imagination, but Jerry had the feeling people were looking at him everywhere he went.
He didn’t dare go into the local supermarkets and put twenty jars of baby food through the checkout. Someone might start to put two and two together. He tried to solve the problem by buying a couple of jars here and there, but Theres got through at least ten jars a day, and it was too time-consuming to spread his purchases like that.