‘I’m leaving now,’ Joona says.
‘Please, wait … I’m just trying to explain everything so you believe me when I give you the name,’ he says anxiously. ‘There was this guy in class, his name was Rex. We thought he was a total loser, but he was always hanging around, wanting to be part of the gang, getting beer for us, doing our homework … I have a very clear memory of a rainy summer’s day when we were smoking behind the main building – there were some bricked-up cellar steps where we used to go – and Rex was hanging around, and said he was going out with a girl named Grace. Wille knew who she was and looked interested, he wanted to know more, and got Rex to boast about having sex with her in the meadow behind the school. It was all a bit pathetic, but Wille enjoyed teasing him. Then just a few hours later he was talking to Grace and telling her that Rex had joined the club and that she could become a member too seeing as they were together. I don’t really know what he said, but the idea was that Rex had organised a secret party for her that night. Most of the students weren’t allowed out after eight o’clock, but the groundskeeper used to help us, and he unlocked the boarding house and brought her over to the Rabbit Hole.’
A cold night wind blows through the hole in the floor. The doors bang against the edge of the drop.
‘I think about it every day,’ Oscar whispers. ‘The fact that … that she’d made such an effort to look nice, and was so ridiculously happy about everything, blushing and talking about Rex, thinking he was about to show up, but he was locked up in the stables.’
Oscar’s thin mouth stretches into something that’s supposed to be a smile, but his eyes are dark.
‘Wille locked Rex in and told him that Grace was his now, that it was just the way things went.’
He shakes his head slowly. The wind sweeps across the roof of the building, making the windows rattle.
‘Go on.’
‘I don’t think I want to say any more,’ he whispers.
‘How old were you when this happened?’
‘Nineteen,’ he replies.
‘So you can’t blame anyone else,’ Joona says.
‘I’m not, but Wille liked humiliating people,’ Oscar goes on quietly. ‘He liked to make them squirm, make them feel ashamed, but this, what happened when Grace realised she’d been drugged, it was so … the hell he kicked off, the things he got us to do … we were drunk, I don’t even want to think about who did what. Some of us were shouting, others were like animals. I refused, but everyone had to do it, they wanted everyone to do it, so they put a sort of crown of rabbits’ ears on me and I did it. I don’t know how, but I did it, it was there inside me after all. I was so fucking scared, but I did it … they even got the fucking groundskeeper to do it with her before he carried her out.’
‘Absalon Ratjen?’
He nods, then sits there motionless, staring into space for a while before he goes on.
‘Afterwards, when we let Rex out of the stables, Wille told him he’d had sex with Grace. He made up lots of crap about what the two of them had done, and how much she’d liked it. I just felt numb. I was empty, my soul had been sucked out and all I could think about was getting away from the school, and I started to walk. But when I reached the outdoor swimming pool, just before the bridge, I made up my mind to go back and set fire to the pavilion.’
‘You got expelled.’
‘I’m not telling you this to get some sort of forgiveness. What I did was wrong, I know that, but I don’t want to die,’ Oscar says. ‘Christ, all I want is for you to believe me when I say Rex Müller is the one hunting us down.’
‘You seem very sure.’
‘I am.’
‘But you thought I was the murderer just now?’ Joona says.
‘Rex has money. He doesn’t need to get his hands dirty unless he wants to.’
‘You’re sure Rex was locked up while the rape was taking place?’
‘I helped do it … and I helped let him out afterwards,’ he replies heavily.
Joona pulls his damp phone from his inside pocket, looks at the blank screen and realises that it’s ruined.
The victims’ nineteen minutes of suffering must correspond with how long the rape took.
Rex was locked inside the stables. All the other boys took part, but someone other than Grace was inside the Rabbit Hole.
‘You said everyone joined in,’ Joona says.
‘Yes.’
‘But that isn’t entirely true, is it?’
‘Isn’t it?’ Oscar mumbles.
‘Was there a witness?’
‘No.’
‘Who saw you?’
‘No one.’
‘I need the names of everyone who was in the Rabbit Hole,’ Joona says.
‘Not from me,’ Oscar says.
‘I need to make sure they get protection.’
‘But I don’t want them to get protection,’ Oscar replies, looking at Joona with empty eyes.
79
Valeria is walking down towards the greenhouses. It’s cool, and she wraps her worn cardigan more tightly around her. She’s thinking about asking Micke to help her with the frame of the new polytunnel. She loves her nursery: the fresh air, the racks of seedlings, the rows of plants and trees.
But today her chest feels empty.
She knows she should transplant her cuttings into pots, but can’t summon up the enthusiasm.
She closes the glass door behind her, moves some buckets out of the way and sits down on the metal stool and stares out into space. When Micke opens the door she jumps and gets up.
‘Hi, Mum,’ he says, holding up a bottle of champagne in a gift-bag.
‘It didn’t work,’ she says bitterly.
‘What didn’t work?’
She turns away and starts to remove dead leaves from a sugar plum just to give her hands something to do.
‘He leads a different kind of life,’ she says.
‘But I thought …’
He trails off, and she turns to look at him again with a sigh. It still surprises her that he’s an adult. Time froze when she was locked up in prison, and her sons somehow remained five and seven years old in her head. They will forever be two little boys in their pyjamas who love it when she chases and tickles them.
‘Mum … he seems to make you happy.’
‘He’ll never stop being a policeman.’
‘That doesn’t matter, does it?’ Micke says. ‘I mean, you’re not really in a position to dictate how people should live their lives …’
‘You don’t understand … while he was in prison I didn’t have to feel ashamed of the way I turned out.’
‘Has he made you feel ashamed?’
She nods, but suddenly isn’t sure if it’s true. An unpleasant chill blossoms in her chest.
‘What exactly happened, Mum?’ Micke asks, carefully putting the bottle of champagne down on the floor.
Valeria whispers that maybe she should call and talk to him. She leaves the greenhouse, wiping tears from her cheeks, and tries to stay calm, but still finds herself walking faster. She pulls her boots off in the hallway and hurries into her bedroom, picks up her phone and calls him.
She gets put through to Joona’s voicemail. She hears the short bleep and takes a deep breath.
‘I need a police officer to come and arrest me for being so stupid,’ she says, then ends the call.
A sob rises in her throat and her eyes fill with tears. She sits down on the bed and covers her face with both hands.
80
The Rabbit Hunter leaves the car on a forest track, slings his bag over his shoulder and walks to the guest marina at Malma Kvarn, where he selects an older model Silver Fox with a powerful engine. He climbs on board, breaks open the ignition cover, connects the cable from the starter engine to the one from the battery, and immediately hears a dull rumble.
Thirty metres away, a family are unloading a sailing boat. The youngest children are standing on the pier looking very tired in their red life jackets.
Clouds sail across the sky.
The Rabbit Hunter unties the boat and steers out through the sound.