Svedberg stood quite still. He carefully removed the tape and untied the ropes. Then he searched through the whole house. The room in which he assumed Wallander’s daughter slept was empty. There was nobody in the house but Wallander’s father.
“When did it happen?” he asked.
“Last night,” said Wallander’s father. “Just after eleven.”
“How many of them were there?”
“One.”
“One?”
“Just one. But he had a gun.”
Svedberg stood up. His head was a complete blank.
Then he went out to the telephone to call Wallander.
Chapter Twenty-six
The acrid smell of winter apples.
That was the first thing she noticed when she came to. But then, when she opened her eyes in the darkness, there was nothing but solitude and terror. She was lying on a stone floor and it smelled of damp earth. There was not a sound to be heard, even though fear sharpened all her senses. Carefully, she felt the rough surface of the floor with one hand. It was made of individual slabs fitted together. She realized she was in a cellar. In the house at Osterlen where her grandfather lived and where she had been brutally woken and abducted by an unknown man, there was a similar floor in the potato cellar.
When there was nothing more for her senses to register, she felt dizzy and her headache got steadily worse. She could not say how long she had been there in darkness and silence; her wristwatch was still on the bedside table. Nevertheless she had the distinct impression it was many hours since she had been woken up and dragged away.
Her arms were free. But she had a chain around her ankles. When she felt it with her fingers she discovered there was a padlock. The feeling of being confined by an iron lock turned her cold. It occurred to her that people are usually tied up with ropes. They were softer, more flexible. Chains belonged to the past, to slavery and ancient witch trials.
But worst of all during this waking up period were the clothes she had on. She could feel right away they were not hers. They were unfamiliar-their shape, the colors she could not see but seemed to think she could feel with her fingertips, and the smell of a strong washing powder. They were not her clothes, and somebody must have dressed her in them. Somebody had taken off her nightie and dressed her in everything from underclothes to stockings and shoes, an outrage that made her feel sick. The dizziness immediately got stronger. She put her head in her hands and rocked backwards and forwards. It’s not true, she thought in desperation. But it was true, and she could even remember what had happened.
She had been dreaming something but could no longer remember the context. She was woken by a man pressing a handkerchief over her nose and mouth. A pungent smell, then she was overcome by a feeling of numbness and fading senses. The light from the lamp outside the kitchen door produced a faint glow in her room. She could see a man in front of her. His face was very close when he bent over her. Now when she thought about him she recalled a strong smell of shaving lotion even though he was unshaven. He said nothing, but although it was almost dark in the room she could see his eyes and had time to think she would never forget them. Then she remembered nothing else until she woke up on the damp stone floor.
Of course she understood why it had happened. The guy who bent over her and anaesthetized her must have been the one who was hunting and being hunted by her father. His eyes were Konovalenko’s eyes, just as she had imagined them. The man who killed Victor Mabasha, who killed a policeman and wanted to kill another, her own father. He was the one who had sneaked into her room, dressed her and put chains around her ankles.
When the hatch in the cellar ceiling opened, she was completely unprepared. It occured to her afterward that the man had doubtless been standing up there, listening. The light shining through the hole was very strong, perhaps specially planned to dazzle her. She caught a glimpse of a ladder being dropped down and a pair of brown shoes, a pair of trouser legs approaching her. Then, last of all, the face, the same face and the same eyes that had stared at her as she was being knocked out. She looked away in order not to be dazzled and because her fear had returned and was paralyzing her. But she noticed the cellar was larger than she had thought. In the darkness the walls and ceiling seemed close to her. Maybe she was in a cellar extending under the whole ground floor of a house.
The man stood in such a way that he shielded her from the light streaming down. He had a flashlight in one hand. In the other he had a metal object she could not make out at first.
Then she realized it was a pair of scissors.
She screamed. Shrill, long. She thought he had climbed down the ladder in order to kill her, and that he would do it with the scissors. She grabbed the chains around her legs and started pulling at them, as if she could break free despite everything. All the time he was staring at her, and his face was no more than a silhouette against the strong background light.
Suddenly he turned the flashlight onto his own face. He held it under his chin so that his face looked like a lifeless skull. She fell silent. Her screaming had only increased her fear. And yet she felt strangely exhausted. It was already too late. There was no point in offering resistance.
The skull suddenly started talking.
“You’re wasting your time screaming,” said Konovalenko. “Nobody will hear you. Besides, there’s a risk I’ll get annoyed. Then I might hurt you. Better keep quiet.”
His last words were like a whisper.
Daddy, she thought. You’ve got to help me.
Then everything happened very quickly. With the same hand in which he held the flashlight, he grabbed her hair, pulled it and started cutting it off. She started back, in pain and surprise. But he was holding her so tightly, she could not move. She could hear the dry sound of the sharp scissors clipping away around the back of her neck, just under her earlobes. It happened very quickly. Then he let her go. The feeling of wanting to vomit came back. Her cropped hair was another outrage, just like him dressing her without her being aware of it.
Konovalenko rolled up the hair into a ball and put it in his pocket.
He’s sick, she thought. He’s crazy, a sadist, a madman who kills and feels nothing.
Her thoughts were interrupted by him talking again. The flashlight was shining on her neck, where she was wearing a necklace. It was in the form of a lyre, and she had gotten it from her parents for her fifteenth birthday.
“The necklace,” said Konovalenko. “Take it off.”
She did as she was told and was careful to avoid touching his hands when she held it out. He left her without a word, climbed up the ladder, and returned her to the darkness.
She crawled away, to one side, until she came up against a wall. She groped along till she came to a corner. Then she tried to hide there.
The previous night, after successfully abducting the cop’s daughter, Konovalenko had ordered Tania and Sikosi Tsiki out of the kitchen. He had a great need to be alone, and the kitchen suited him best just now. The house, the last one Rykoff had rented in his life, was planned so that the kitchen was the biggest room. It was arranged in old-fashioned style, with exposed beams, a deep baking oven, and open china cupboards. Copper pots were hanging along one wall. Konovalenko was reminded of his own childhood in Kiev, the big kitchen in the kolkhoz where his father had been a political superintendent.
He realized to his surprise that he missed Rykoff. It was not just a feeling of now having to shoulder an increased practical workload. There was also a feeling that could hardly be called melancholy or sorrow, but which nevertheless made him occasionally feel depressed. During his many years as a KGB officer, the value of life, for everybody but himself and his two children, had gradually been reduced to calculable resources or, at the opposite pole, to expendable persons. He was always surrounded by sudden death, and all emotional reactions gradually disappeared more or less completely. But Rykoff’s death had affected him, and it made him hate even more this cop who was always getting in his way. Now he had his daughter under his feet, and he knew she would be the bait that would entice him out into the open. But the thought of revenge could not liberate him entirely from his depression. He sat in the kitchen drinking vodka, being careful not to get too drunk, and occasionally looking at his face in a mirror hanging on the wall. It suddenly occurred to him that his face was ugly. Was he starting to get old? Had the collapse of the Soviet empire resulted in some of his own hardness and ruthlessness softening?