Oscar sits in silence between his defence lawyers, looking up at the high windows. The sun emerges from behind the clouds and makes the dust particles in the air sparkle.
As if from a great distance he hears the prosecutor request that he be remanded in custody on suspicion of kidnapping, attempted murder and aggravated assault.
They’re serious charges, but he knows he can be held only if there’s a risk he might reoffend, destroy evidence or attempt to evade justice.
When the court decides that Oscar should be granted bail he hides his smile behind his hand. It occurs to him that he ought to say thank you, but he doesn’t. He just walks towards the exit with his lawyers.
‘Now you don’t have to worry about this any more,’ one of them smiles when they stop in the doorway.
‘Thanks, Jacob,’ Oscar replies quietly, shaking their hands.
His legal team have already put together a defence plan if the prosecutor can’t be persuaded to drop the preliminary investigation.
During Oscar’s first meeting with his lawyer, a doctor was present, and took eight blood samples from him. They weren’t going to be sent to a laboratory, but could later be used during any ensuing trial.
Seeing as they know precisely which substances the prosecutor’s office tests for, they’ll base their defence on the substances the prosecution is guaranteed to have missed.
The fact that those substances were never in Oscar’s blood is irrelevant.
The plan is to fabricate a convincing picture of illness, where different doctors have prescribed different medications without checking the side-effects and their interaction. The lawyers will be able to prove that Oscar’s temporarily confused and erratic behaviour was the result of that interaction.
Oscar doesn’t care about the trial. He’s paid to be freed because he can’t just sit in a cage waiting to be shot.
Prison can’t offer him any protection.
That’s why he’s thinking of leaving the country and staying away as long as it takes for the police to catch the murderer.
But Oscar doesn’t know that the Rabbit Hunter is waiting for him outside Police Headquarters, watching as he walks away from his lawyers.
He doesn’t notice someone follow him, walk past him through the park, and overhear him call a taxi to the Silja Line terminal in V?rtahamnen.
During the drive to the harbour Oscar books a cruise on the M/S Silja Symphony, pays for the taxi in cash, then checks in and goes on board.
He finds his cabin in the back, a suite with sloping glass windows between sea and sky. He locks the door carefully and gives the handle an extra tug just to make sure. As soon as he gets to Helsinki he’s planning to catch the ferry to Tallinn, then hire a car and drive south through eastern Europe, all the way down to southern Turkey.
Oscar gets up and opens the minibar door, which rattles with bottles. He takes out two small brown bottles of whisky, fills a glass and then sits by the window and looks down at the long line of vehicles slowly rolling onto the ferry.
Rabbits are nervous creatures. They huddle up; sitting motionless they’ll remain unseen, but they can’t handle it if the hunter stops to wait them out.
The silence makes them panic and start running, because they think they’ve been spotted.
The Rabbit Hunter goes down into the garage beneath R?dhusparken, opens the boot of the car, and makes sure he can’t be seen on any security cameras as he packs a black overnight bag with weapons, a change of clothes, vinyl gloves, wet-wipes, bin bags, tape, box cutters and a special crowbar for opening security doors.
Taking the bag with him, he leaves the garage and walks down to Fleming Street, where he catches a taxi for the ferry terminal and buys a cheap ticket under a false name.
He’s been given another chance to stop Oscar, but knows there’s still a lot that could go wrong. There are always unforeseeable factors. The plan is to get off the ferry before it leaves, but Oscar may be sitting in a crowd of people in one of the restaurants when the boat leaves. In that case he’d have to go with him to Finland in order to get the job done.
The Rabbit Hunter is planning to slice open Oscar’s stomach and pull his intestines out.
He wants each of them to have to confront his own death.
The purpose of the rhyme is to prepare them.
At the beginning, he wants them to hope that they might survive, despite all the pain and fear, so that they struggle desperately even as it slowly dawns on them that any future life will be very different from the one they’ve known.
They need to realise that they will be blind, or missing a limb, or paralysed.
They should go on fighting for their lives until the second stage, when they realise that there is no mercy, that this pain and fear are the last things they will ever experience.
The Rabbit Hunter takes no pleasure in their suffering, but he is filled with an elevated sense of justice – and then when they finally die, the world becomes completely still, like a winter landscape.
In the terminal he checks in using one of the automated machines, prints his boarding card, then follows the stream of people on board. The M/S Silja Symphony is more than two hundred metres long, with thirteen decks, and with its almost one thousand cabins, it carries more passengers than the Titanic did.
The Rabbit Hunter holds up his fake ID. He’s given the made-up last name ‘von Creutschen’ so that he ends up next to Oscar on the passenger list. He makes a note of Oscar’s cabin number from the screen, goes over to the map by the lifts, then goes downstairs to the staff quarters.
The Rabbit Hunter waits outside the staffroom. After a minute or so, a woman comes out. He catches the door, holds it open for her, and asks after Maria, to demonstrate that he has a valid reason for being there as he goes inside. He passes two men changing out of their street clothes, and says hello to a woman who is typing a message on her phone.
‘Do you have a master key-card?’ he asks.
‘I need mine,’ she replies without looking up.
‘I’ll get it back to you in no time,’ he says with a smile.
‘Ask Ramona,’ the woman replies, nodding towards the bathroom.
There’s a grey and pink imitation-leather gym bag on the bench outside the bathroom. He unzips it and searches through the clothes, running his hands over the bottom of the bag as the toilet flushes.
He quickly searches the two inside pockets as he hears her wash her hands and pull out some paper towels. He opens the two side pockets and finds Ramona’s ID and master key-card just as the lock on the door clicks.
As the door swings open he walks away calmly, card in his hand.
He’d allowed himself fifteen minutes to find a key-card, but it’s only taken five.
Not needing to use his crowbar will give him more time with Oscar in his cabin.
He carries his bag up the carpeted stairs, past decks housing the bars and restaurants, the avenue of tax-free shops, the hallways of meeting rooms, one-armed bandits and the casino.
The top deck, named after Mozart, is where the most exclusive suites are.
A drunk woman emerges from a cabin and stumbles towards him. She blocks the hallway with her arms, as if they are playing a game.
‘You look nice,’ she says with a giggle. ‘Do you want to come to my cabin and help me with …’
It’s as if something snaps in his head, he hears a crackling sound in one ear and reaches out for the wall for support as he remembers how he wept when he nailed up the remains of his latest kills around the door next to the rotting rabbits.
Now they’ll stay away, now they’ll stay away, he whispered.
The Rabbit Hunter merely smiles at the woman as he passes her. Sweat is running down his back and he finds himself thinking about the heat from the burning wheelchair.
He found the petrol in the tool-shed, and the matches in the kitchen, then he updated Nils Gilbert’s Facebook status with a suicide note.
He went out and poured petrol all over him, told him why he was going to die, and then tossed the lit match on his lap.