He had stood in front of the deep ravine, watching the rain sweep in towards the valley.
Over the course of nineteen minutes, Kent Wrangel had begged for his life something like a hundred times, and had sworn he was innocent almost as often.
DJ hadn’t wounded him particularly badly, just stuck his hunting knife into his stomach, just above his pubic bone, then held his shaking body upright on the edge of the deep ravine.
He stood there with the knife in Kent’s stomach, explaining why this was happening.
Kent gasped for breath as his gut filled up with blood.
DJ had tilted the sharp blade of the knife upward, and whenever Kent got tired or slumped to the ground slightly, the knife cut higher into his guts.
Towards the end Kent had been in agony. One knee almost buckled several times, and the knife had slid up diagonally towards his ribs.
Blood filled his boots and started to overflow.
‘And now the kite string breaks,’ DJ said, pulling the knife out, looking Kent in the eye and shoving him in the chest with both hands, out over the edge.
DJ wipes his mouth, glances over towards the hallway leading to the hotel rooms, and starts to remove the cartridges from the rifles. He opens the duffle bag on the floor in front of his feet and drops the ammunition into the compartment next to the underwear.
It’s time to bring this to a conclusion.
First Lawrence, or possibly James, and then, last of all, Rex.
Maybe he’ll have time to kill one of them before all hell breaks loose, before the screaming starts and they start running.
But fear has never saved the rabbits.
He knows that their panic follows simple patterns.
His hands tremble slightly as he fits the silencer to his pistol, inserts a fresh magazine, and puts it back in the bag, next to the short-handled axe.
If they don’t come out soon, he’ll have to start going from room to room.
He takes out his black SOCP dagger, wipes the grease from the blade, and checks the cutting edge.
His mother was left pregnant after the rape, but it probably wasn’t until he was born that her psychosis really hit her.
She was only nineteen years old, and must have been horribly lonely and frightened.
DJ doesn’t remember his early years, but now knows that she gave birth to him alone, and kept his existence a secret. She hid him out in the barn. His first memory is of lying under a blanket, freezing, eating beans from a tin.
He has no idea how old he was then.
Throughout his childhood her chaotic psyche became part of his life, part of his perception of reality.
His maternal grandparents didn’t move home for good until Lyndon White Holland’s long stint as ambassador to Sweden came to an end.
DJ was almost nine when his grandfather found him in the barn.
At the time he spoke a mixture of Swedish and English, and hadn’t really understood that he was a human being.
It took time to get used to his new circumstances.
His mother was looked after at home. She was kept heavily medicated and spent most of her time in bed with the curtains drawn.
Sometimes she got frightened and started screaming, and sometimes she hit him for leaving the door open.
Sometimes he told her about the rabbits they had shot that day.
Sometimes they would sit on the floor next to the bed together, singing her nursery rhyme until she fell asleep.
A year or so later he recorded the whole rhyme for her on a cassette tape so she could listen to it if she felt anxious.
His mum never wanted to talk about his dad, but once, when he was thirteen and her medication had just been changed, she told him about Rex.
It was the only time that happened during his childhood, and he can still remember those few sentences by heart. As a child, he clung to every little word, building whole worlds of hope around what she had said.
He had learned that they had been in love, and had to meet in secret, like Romeo and Juliet, before she came back to Chicago.
DJ couldn’t understand why he didn’t go with her.
She replied that Rex didn’t want children, and that she had promised not to get pregnant.
At first DJ believed her, but then he started to think she was hiding from Rex in Chicago because she was ashamed of the way she looked after the truck accident.
He still doesn’t know where the idea of the accident came from. He has no memory of her ever having talked about it.
When he was fourteen years old his mum saw a picture of Rex in an article in Vogue, about the new generation of chefs in Paris. She went straight out into the barn and tried to hang herself, but Grandpa climbed up to the beam on a ladder and cut her down before she died.
Grandma and Grandpa had her committed to a psychiatric hospital and he was sent to the Missouri Military Academy, which took younger boys.
DJ tucks the dagger under the tablecloth when he hears someone coming down the hallway.
He closes the duffle bag with his foot, leans back again, and wonders which one of the men the fates have chosen to send out first.
His head crackles and he can see his mother huddled on the floor in the stall, covering her ears and whimpering in terror as one of the rabbits they thought was dead suddenly jerks and starts running again.
DJ remembers catching it under a green plastic bucket, sticking his hand inside to grab it, then nailing it to the wall. His mother was shaking uncontrollably, then threw up in terror and screamed at him that he wasn’t allowed to bring the rabbits inside.
106
DJ looks up when he hears the footsteps get closer, and Lawrence appears in the light of one of the lamps. DJ raises his hand in greeting, thinking that the man will soon be running from room to room clutching his intestines in his arms.
Lawrence looks like he’s been crying. His eyes are swollen and red and he’s still wearing his wet clothes.
‘Did you find the phones?’ he asks, blinking hard.
‘Can’t find them anywhere,’ DJ replies.
‘We think Rex took them,’ Lawrence says in a tense voice.
‘Rex?’ DJ says. ‘Why would he do that?’
‘We just think it’s him,’ Lawrence snaps.
‘You and James? That’s what you two think?’
‘Yes,’ Lawrence says, and his face turns red.
He goes behind the reception desk and switches on one of the computers. The rain is still clattering on the roof. The storm seems to have been catching its breath, then returning with even greater fury.
Just two months after DJ returned from his last tour in Iraq, his grandfather died, leaving a fortune to his only grandchild.
DJ’s grandmother had passed away two years earlier. He went to the clinic to visit his mother, but she didn’t even recognise him.
He was alone.
That was when he decided to go to Sweden, so at least he could see his father.
Rex was already a successful chef. He’d been a guest on countless television programmes and had published a cookbook.
DJ set up a production company, changed his name to his grandmother’s maiden name, and approached Rex without any thought of revealing that he was Rex’s son.
Nonetheless, he was incredibly nervous before their first meeting, and suffered an attack of narcolepsy in the dimly lit passageway leading to the Vetekatten café.
He woke up on the floor and arrived at the meeting half an hour late.
They didn’t look alike, except maybe around the eyes.
DJ presented Rex with a business proposal. He offered him a ridiculously generous contract, drew up a new strategy, and in less than three years managed to get him a slot on the main Sunday morning breakfast show and turn him into the biggest chef in the country, and a bona fide celebrity.
DJ came to act as a sort of manager, they started to socialise, and gradually became friends.