Columbia, she tries. Warner, Columbia and NLC.
No sound, even though she’s screaming inside. Her brain is going to wither as well, just like her body.
Warner isn’t a state, nor is it a Canadian province. She’s thinking of American film companies. Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers and New Line Cinema.
She tries tensing her muscles, but can’t feel anything at all. She has no body, yet it still hurts, and she thinks she must be moving because she imagines she can hear the sound of skin scraping against wood. A dry, rasping squeak. She can’t move her tongue either, and suspects she must be getting close to the end, that her body is on its way to dissolving into nothingness.
Warner Brothers, New Line Cinema.
She can see images from the film Seven, distributed by New Line Cinema.
She’s got it on her computer, and has seen it several times.
She remembers the seven deadly sins in the order that the murders occur, beginning with gluttony, where the killer forces a fat man to eat himself to death.
Then greed, where a businessman is drained of blood.
And then sloth …
She can’t get any further, because she suddenly realises what they’re going to do to her.
The man in the film who was punished for his sloth had been tied to a bed in a dark room, and she feels sick when she thinks of the way he looked.
His grey-brown skin had almost split away from his skull, his veins and bones seemed to have eaten their way half out of him, and he had looked like one of those bodies that have been found in peat or whatever it is.
A thousand years old, but with the expressions on their faces almost intact.
Is that what she looks like now?
Then she hears a scratching sound, followed by a metallic bang, so loud that it makes her ears pop.
The police are here, she thinks. They’re unlocking the door to let me out.
The light that falls into the room where Ulrika Wendin is tied down is so bright that it feels like the corneas of her eyes are catching fire.
Hundudden – Island of Djurg?rden
THE DOOR OF Viggo Dürer’s garage had been locked with a solid metal bolt from the inside. The garage was empty. There were no other doors, and just one small window that even a child couldn’t have got through.
It’s like a classic crime mystery. The locked room.
When Hurtig had started saying how hard it had been to break the door open, it had struck Jeanette that there had to be another way into Dürer’s garage. She and Hurtig are now standing inside it together with the unit commander, and once she’s explained her reasoning the three of them turn round and look at the solid wooden shelving. The hidden door must be behind there.
The unit commander gives the order to fetch a crowbar, and two of the masked officers disappear off towards the van at the gate.
Jeanette carefully inspects the way the shelves are constructed. The sides are sturdy and on the inside of them there are large rivets on steel rails that appear to be attached to the back of the sides, as well as the roof and floor of the shelving, like a large metal rectangle. It’s suddenly apparent that the shelving is fastened from the other side, since there are several thick screws sticking out of the metal rails. She shouldn’t have just accepted that the garage was empty, she sighs to herself. Now they may have lost valuable time.
The two officers return with a crowbar each, and begin to prise off the metal rails. Behind them are grooves in the concrete that must be the outline of the door, and a third officer begins to pull at one of the screws. There’s a loud noise and the door opens a few centimetres. Another few tugs and the gap grows to ten centimetres.
Ulrika, Jeanette thinks. For a brief moment she has time to paint a terrifying mental picture of what might be behind the shelving. Ulrika Wendin’s body, bricked into the wall. But the illusion vanishes the moment the door flies open.
Inside is a cramped niche in the wall, perhaps half a metre deep, and a very narrow flight of steps leads down into the darkness to the left. In the ceiling of the niche a broken catch is swinging from a loop. She can feel the tension rising in every vein and muscle.
Then the response unit takes over again.
Their commander takes two of his most experienced officers with him, and after what feels like at least ten minutes a voice calls from the hole in the ground. ‘Cellar secure!’
Jeanette and Hurtig hurry down the narrow staircase and are hit by a dry, rancid smell. Nothing, Jeanette convinces herself. They haven’t found anything down here.
She remembers Ulrika Wendin. Her face, her voice, the way she moved. If they had found her down here, dead or alive, they wouldn’t have declared the cellar secure.
The staircase leads to an almost square room, perhaps five by five metres, with a closed door in the far wall. A lit bulb hangs from a chain in the ceiling, and on the floor there are two large dog cages. The walls are covered with maps, photographs, newspaper cuttings and layer upon layer of pieces of paper, all different sizes.
‘What the hell …?’ Hurtig groans at the sight of the dog cages, and Jeanette can see that he’s thinking the same thing she is.
There are toys hanging from the ceiling on pieces of string. Jeanette counts twenty or so, including a little wooden dog with wheels and a bunch of broken Bratz dolls. But the main impression is one of paper and more paper. L’homme du petit papier, she thinks.
Viggo Dürer is the man with scraps of paper. How could Sofia have got it so right?
The room also contains a small shelf holding a row of bottles and jars, and a low, open cupboard with more stacks of papers and documents. On top of the cupboard are two miniature toy monkeys, one with a pair of cymbals and the other with a drum.
She takes a closer look at the bottles on the shelf. Some are marked with chemical symbols, others with Cyrillic writing, but she has a pretty good idea what they contain. Even though they are all sealed, there is a faintly acrid smell.
‘Embalming fluids,’ she mutters, turning towards Hurtig, who looks even paler now.
The door at the far end of the room opens. ‘We’ve found the other entrance, and another room,’ the unit head says, and she thinks his voice sounds unsteady. ‘It seems to be …’ He breaks off and pulls off his balaclava. ‘A drying room or something …’ His face is white as chalk.
A drying room? Jeanette thinks.
He shows them into a narrow corridor, barely a metre wide and between six and seven metres long. It’s made entirely from concrete and comes to an abrupt end at a ladder leading up to a hole in the ceiling. A strip of light is shining on the metal of the ladder.
Halfway along the left-hand wall is a steel door.
‘The drying room?’ Jeanette indicates the door, and the unit head nods.