He stumbled over a rock and fell. He was about to get up when he felt something on the back of his neck. A boot on his head. The game was up. The shadows had defeated him.
He wanted to see who it was that was going to kill him. He tried to turn his head, but the boot prevented him. Then somebody pulled him to his feet. He still could see nothing. He was blinded. For a moment he felt the breath of the person placing the blindfold over his eyes and tying the knot at the back of his head. He tried to say something. But when he opened his mouth, no words came out, just a new attack of coughing.
Then a pair of hands wrapped themselves around his throat. He tried to resist, but he didn’t have the strength. He could feel his life ebbing away.
It would be nearly two hours before he finally died. As if in a borderland of horror between the nagging pain and the hopeless will to live, he was taken back in time, to the occasion when he had given rise to the fate that had now caught up with him. He was thrown to the ground. Somebody pulled off his pants and sweater. He could feel the cold earth against his skin before the whiplashes hit him and transformed everything into an inferno. He didn’t know how many lashes there were. Whenever he passed out, he was dragged back up to the surface by cold water thrown over him. Then the blows continued to rain down. He could hear himself screaming, but there was nobody there to help him. Least of all Shaka, lying dead in his pen.
The last thing he felt was being dragged over the ground, into the house, and then being beaten on the soles of his feet. Everything went black. He was dead.
He couldn’t know that the last thing that happened to him was being dragged naked to the edge of the forest and left with his face pressed into the cold earth.
By then it was dawn.
That was October 19, 1999. A few hours later it started raining, rain that barely perceptibly turned to wet snow.
Chapter Two
Stefan Lindman was a police officer. At least once every year he found himself in situations where he experienced considerable fear. On one occasion he’d been attacked by a psychopath weighing over 300 pounds. He had been on the floor with the man astride him, and in rising desperation had fought to prevent his head from being torn off by the madman’s gigantic hands. If one of his colleagues hadn’t succeeded in stunning the man with a blow to the head, he would certainly have succumbed. Another time he’d been shot at while approaching a house to deal with domestic violence. The shot was from a Mauser and narrowly missed one of his legs. But he had never been as frightened as he felt now, on the morning of October 25, 1999, as he lay in bed staring up at the ceiling.
He barely slept. He dozed off now and again only to be woken with a start by nightmares the moment he lost consciousness. In desperation he finally got up and sat in front of the television, zapping the channels until he found a pornographic film. But after a short while he switched it off in disgust and went back to bed.
It was 7 A.M. when he got up. He’d devised a plan during the night. A plan that was also an invocation. He wouldn’t go directly up the hill to the hospital. He would make sure he had enough time not only to take a roundabout route, but also to circle the hospital twice. All the time he would search for signs that the news he was going to receive from the doctor would be positive. To give himself an extra dose of energy, he would have coffee in the hospital cafeteria, and force himself to calm down by reading the local paper.
Without having thought about it in advance, he put on his best suit. Generally, when he wasn’t in uniform or other working clothes, he dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Today, though, he felt his best suit was called for. As he knotted his tie he contemplated his face in the bathroom mirror. It was obvious he hadn’t been sleeping or eating properly for weeks. His cheeks were hollow. And he could use a haircut. He didn’t like the way it was sticking out over his ears.
He didn’t like at all what he saw in the mirror this morning. It was an unusual feeling. He was a vain man, and often checked his appearance in the mirror. Normally, he liked what he saw. His reflection would generally raise his spirits, but this morning everything was different.
When he’d finished dressing he made coffee. He prepared some open-faced sandwiches, but didn’t feel like eating anything. His appointment with the doctor was for 8:45. It was now 7:27. So he had exactly one hour and eighteen minutes for his walk to the hospital.
By the time he walked onto the street it had started drizzling.
Lindman lived in the center of Borås, in Allégatan. Three years ago he had lived in Sjömarken, outside the town, but then he had happened to hear about this three-room apartment and hadn’t hesitated to sign a lease for it. Directly across the street was the Vävaren Hotel. He was within walking distance of the police station, and could even walk to Ryavallen Stadium when Elfsborg were playing a home game. Soccer was his biggest interest, apart from his work. Although he didn’t tell anybody, he still collected pictures and press clips about his local team in a file. He had daydreams about being a professional soccer player in Italy, instead of a police officer in Sweden. These dreams embarrassed him, but he couldn’t put them behind him.
He walked up the steps taking him to Stengardsgatan and kept on towards the City Theater and the high school. A police car drove past. Whoever was in it didn’t notice him. His fear stabbed into him. It was as if he were already gone, were already dead. He pulled his jacket more tightly around him. There was no real reason why he should expect a negative verdict. He increased his pace. His mind was buzzing. The raindrops falling onto his face were reminders of a life, his life, that was ebbing away.
He was thirty-seven. He’d worked in Borås ever since leaving the police academy. It was where he wanted to be posted. He was born in Kinna and grew up in a family with three children; his father was a secondhand car salesman and his mother worked in a bakery. Lindman was the youngest. His two sisters were seven and nine years older than he was — you could almost say he was an afterthought.
When Lindman thought back to his childhood, it sometimes seemed strangely uneventful and boring. Life had been secure and routine. His parents disliked traveling. The furthest they could bring themselves to go was Borås or Varberg. Even Gothenburg was too big, too far, and too scary. His sisters had rebelled against this life and moved away early, one to Stockholm and the other to Helsinki. His parents had taken that as a failure on their part, and Lindman had realized he was almost bound to stay in Kinna, or at least to go back there when he’d decided what to do with his life. He’d been restless as a teenager, and had no idea what he wanted to do when he grew up.
Then, purely by chance, he’d gotten to know a young man devoted to motocross. He’d become this man’s assistant and spent a few years traveling around racetracks the length and breadth of central Sweden. But he tired of that eventually and returned to Kinna, where his parents welcomed him with open arms, the return of the prodigal son. He still didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, but then he happened to meet a policeman from Malmö who was visiting some mutual friends in Kinna. And the thought struck Lindman: maybe I should become a police officer? He thought it over for a few days, and made up his mind to at least give it a try.
His parents received his decision with a degree of unease, but Lindman pointed out that there were police officers in Kinna — he wouldn’t need to move away.
He set out immediately to turn his decision into reality. The first thing he did was to go back to school and earn some more academic credits. Since he was so eager, it had been easier than he’d expected. He occasionally worked as a substitute school caretaker in order to earn his keep.