“Have I told you about the time when my grandfather took me to an auction and I accidentally smashed a Chinese vase by dropping it on the floor? Do you think my grandmother was happy when we came home and told her that it had cost thirty thousand kroner? And do you think my mother defended me?”
Rose drifted off. She had been overly sensitive to stories like that her whole life. She couldn’t watch films in which children were misunderstood. She couldn’t listen to adults trying to explain away evil deeds. She couldn’t stand men with nicotine-stained fingers, men who parted their hair on the right, and men who started their sentences with “I’ve already told you . . .”—that damn supercilious “already” that served only to widen the distance between them and you. And most of all, she had always hated women who didn’t defend their children like lionesses.
And now this bimbo was raking it all up again. That was the last thing she needed.
Then the other girl shouted from the sitting room that Denise should come because there was more news, and Denise jumped down from the sink and threw the used toilet paper on the floor. Apparently it was something they had been waiting for, because this time Denise was in too much of a rush to shut the door to the hallway.
They don’t care about me. They can’t even be bothered to watch what they say. Rose opened her eyes and looked blankly around the room.
She knew that they would just leave her to die. And for the first time in weeks, it wasn’t what she wanted anymore.
—
For some time there was no other sound from the sitting room than the faint humming of the TV.
But when they turned it off and moved over to the dining table, she was able, with a lot of concentration, to catch the odd word, and even sentences when Jazmine raised her voice.
She couldn’t understand much of what they were talking about, but one thing was clear: the girls, and Jazmine in particular, had started to feel uneasy—maybe even scared.
It was someone called Patrick who had them worried. They were discussing that the police might now be able to link Birna, Michelle, Bertha, and Senta together because of him. And that Birna’s gang members had been questioned and had mentioned someone called Jazmine and the girl Michelle who had been killed.
Rose tried her best to follow. Jazmine’s voice began to quiver. Meanwhile, Rose’s breathing became heavier, causing small bubbles of spit to be pushed back and forth through the straw she was breathing through. They were talking about a shooting, the dead Michelle, the police, and a robbery at a nightclub. And then she suddenly heard very clearly what Denise said.
“We need new passports, Jazmine. You deal with that. And I’ll head over to Anne-Line’s place and break in. If she has any money, I’ll take it. If she doesn’t, I’ll wait for her to come home.”
Then it went quiet. What they had been discussing was apparently an unexpected development in the case, and now they were going to escape.
And here she was. Doomed.
There was a long pause before Jazmine finally reacted. “Anne-Line will kill you, Denise.”
She laughed at that. “Not when I have this with me.” Apparently she was showing something to Jazmine.
“You’re not taking that hand grenade with you, Denise! Do you even know how it works? Do you even know if it works?”
“Yes, it’s easy enough. You screw the metal cap off the bottom, releasing a small ceramic ball on a string, which you need to let drop and then yank. Then you have four seconds before it goes boom!”
“But you’re not going to use it, are you?”
She laughed again. “You’re easily fooled, Jazmine. It would make too much noise, and besides, I know what it can do to a human being. My grandfather showed me loads of pictures, and it’s a complete mess. No, I’ll take the pistol and I’ve already loaded the cartridge. Now we know it works! So just grab the hand grenade if you feel scared being alone.”
“Don’t mess with me. I’ll come with you, Denise. I don’t want to be alone with her out there.”
What is she scared of? thought Rose. That I’ll lose thirty kilos in ten minutes and free myself? That I’ll suddenly jump out and knock her down with a couple of spinning backfists? That she will be taken down forever with seventeen varieties of kickboxing?
Rose couldn’t help squinting her eyes and laughing behind the duct tape, and she stopped only when she could sense one of the girls standing in the doorway looking at her.
Then she grunted a few times as if she were dreaming.
“Stay here and keep an eye on her until I get back,” said Denise dryly. “Then I will make sure that we won’t be hearing any more from her.”
41
Monday, May 30th, 2016
Anneli let herself in the house and in her rush simply threw her bag in the hallway of the ground-floor apartment. She had seen at least thirty types of oil filter on the Internet that could be used as makeshift silencers, and the one she was looking for needed to be fairly large. She turned on the fluorescent lights in the mechanical engineer’s sitting room, and having scanned the room for half a second she understood why he only rarely ventured home. The room was stuffed from floor to ceiling with shelves of things that, in her opinion, belonged in a junkyard—components and spare parts that even in her wildest imagination she couldn’t believe had any meaningful use.
She found a suitable oil filter on the bottom of a box that contained at least twenty others. It was red and round with a hole at one end that fit fairly well around the barrel of the gun.
She waved the gun around the room and could hardly stop herself from firing it to see how well her homemade silencer worked. Actually, she was just about to pull the trigger while pointing at a sack of packthread or kapok, or whatever it was, when the doorbell rang.
Anneli was puzzled. Was it a door-to-door collection? Doctors Without Borders had just been here. Could it be the Red Cross or some other charity? She shook her head. They were a day late in that case, because who in their right mind would knock door-to-door on a Monday? No one!
Anneli frowned because she didn’t have any neighbors or friends who called unexpectedly. But perhaps it was someone here to visit the mechanical engineer. In that case, she would advise them to go online and buy the first available ticket to Venezuela, Laos, or wherever the hell he was these days.
She went over to the curtain and lifted it a little to see who was waiting on the doorstep.
It was a woman with raven-black hair and makeup that gave her both a cheap and tough appearance. Anneli had never seen her before, and she wouldn’t have opened the door if it hadn’t been for the woman’s pleated skirt. The absurd combination aroused her curiosity. She put the gun down on a shelf just inside the door to the sitting room and opened the front door with a smile that quickly disappeared.
The woman on the doorstep looked at her coldly, pointing a pistol directly at her chest. Despite the makeover, there was no doubt about who she was now that Anneli saw her close-up.