Joona Linna Crime Series Books 1-3: The Hypnotist, The Nightmare, The Fire Witness. Lars KeplerЧитать онлайн книгу.
light penetrates the fibres of the material like a fainter darkness.
With a trembling hand she unbuttons her coat and tosses it on the floor. Shulman removes all his clothes, and Simone’s eyes travel over his muscular shoulders and down the line of thick, curly dark hair that runs along his navel.
He studies her calmly. She begins to undress but is overwhelmed by a dizzying feeling of loneliness as she stands there before him. He lowers his eyes, moves closer, and kneels, his hair spreading over his shoulders. He traces a line over her hipbone with his finger.
He gently pushes her down onto the edge of the bed and begins to pull down her panties; she raises herself up, keeping her legs together, and feels them slip down and get stuck for a moment around one ankle. She leans back, closes her eyes, allows him to part her thighs, and feels his warm kisses on her stomach, over her hipbone and groin. She is panting, running her fingers through his long, thick hair. She wants Shulman inside her; the desire roars through her body like a storm, waves of darkness surging through her blood, pools of liquid heat flooding her, sucking and tickling, down towards her sex. He moves on top, and she hears herself sigh as he pushes inside her. He whispers something she cannot hear. When she pulls him towards her, she does so in a hunger for escape, for just one brief moment of calm.
She feels the weight of Sim’s toned body on top of her, she feels the physical pleasure, but the possibility of escape is gone, and she knows it. It is not attainable. She cannot stop thinking. She has to get home. She has to keep looking for Benjamin. She has to find him.
63
monday, december 14: afternoon
The day is bitterly cold, the sky open and blue. People are moving silently, lost in their own worlds. Tired children are on their way home from school. Kennet stops outside the 7-Eleven on the corner. There’s a special offer on coffee and a saffron Lucia bun. He goes inside, and as he joins the queue his cell phone rings. It’s Simone.
“Have you been out, Sixan?”
“I had to go to the gallery. Then I had a job to do.” She stops abruptly. “I just got your message, Dad.”
“Have you been asleep? You sound—”
“Yes. Yes, I slept for a little while.”
“Good,” says Kennet.
He meets the assistant’s tired eyes and points to the sign advertising the special offer.
“Have they traced Benjamin’s call?” asks Simone.
“I haven’t had a reply yet. This evening at the earliest, they said. I was just going to give them a ring now.”
The assistant is waiting for Kennet to choose which Lucia bun he would like, and he quickly points to the biggest one. She puts it in a bag, takes his crumpled twenty-kronor note, and waves in the direction of the coffee machine and cups. He nods, walks past the grill where the sausages are turning, and manages to extricate a cup from the dispenser while continuing his conversation with Simone.
“You spoke to Nicky yesterday?” she says.
“He’s a very nice kid,” he says.
“Did you find out anything about Wailord?”
“Quite a lot.”
“Like what?”
“Hang on a minute.”
Kennet removes the steaming coffee cup from the machine, snaps on a lid, and takes it and the bag containing the bun over to one of the small round plastic tables.
“Are you still there?” he asks, sitting down on a wobbly chair.
“Yes.”
“I think this is about a group of kids who are shaking Nicky down for his money and telling him they’re Pokémon characters.”
Kennet notices a man with tousled hair pushing an oversize buggy. A big girl in a pink snowsuit—too old to be pushed, Kennet thinks—reclines inside, sucking on a dummy with a tired smile on her face.
“Does this have anything to do with Benjamin?”
“The Pokémon boys? I don’t know. Maybe he tried to stop them,” says Kennet.
“We need to talk to Aida,” Simone says resolutely.
“After school, I thought.”
“What do we do now?”
“I’ve actually got an address,” says Kennet.
“For what?”
“The sea.”
“The sea?”
“That’s all I know.” He takes a sip of the coffee, breaks off a piece of the Lucia bun, and pops it in his mouth.
“Where is the sea?”
“Close to the Frihamnen,” says Kennet as he chews, “out on Loudden.”
“Can I come with you?”
“Are you ready?”
“Give me ten minutes.”
Gathering up his coffee and the rest of his bun, Kennet heads out into the very cold afternoon to pick up his car by the hospital. A cyclist darts through traffic, slaloming in between the cars. As he stops at the crossing, Kennet feels as if he has overlooked something important, as if he has seen something crucial but failed to interpret it. The traffic thunders past. He can hear a rescue vehicle somewhere in the distance. He takes a sip of coffee and watches a woman waiting on the other side of the road, her dog trembling on the end of a short leash. A truck passes just in front of him, and the ground shakes with its considerable weight. He hears someone giggling and has just registered that it doesn’t sound genuine when he feels a hard shove in his back. He takes several steps out into the road to avoid losing his balance, turns, and sees a ten-year-old girl looking at him, her eyes open wide. She must be the one who pushed me, he just has time to think. There’s no one else there. At the same moment, he hears the screech of brakes and feels an incomprehensible force hurl itself at him. Something like a gigantic hammer knocks his legs out from under him. There is a cracking sound at the back of his neck. All at once his body is soft and faraway, in free fall, and then there is darkness.
64
monday, december 14: afternoon
Erik Maria Bark is sitting at the desk in his office. A pale light finds its way in through the window that faces the empty inner courtyard. A take-away container holds the remains of a salad, and a warm two-litre bottle of Coca-Cola sits next to the desk lamp with its pink shade. Erik is studying a printout of the photo Aida sent to Benjamin. Despite having looked at it dozens of times, he cannot grasp what the subject of the picture really is.
He considers calling Simone and having her read out Aida’s message and Benjamin’s reply word for word, but then tells himself that Simone doesn’t need to hear from him at this point. He can’t understand why he was so nasty, why he told her he was having an affair with Daniella. Perhaps it was only because he longed to be forgiven by Simone while she found it so easy to distrust him.
Suddenly he hears Benjamin’s voice in his mind once again, calling from the boot of the car. Erik takes a pink capsule out of the wooden box and washes it down with the Coke. His hand has started to shake so much that he has difficulty replacing the bottle on the desk.
Benjamin was trying so hard to be grown up, not to sound afraid. But the boy must be terrified, thinks Erik, shut in the boot of a car in the dark.
How long can it take for Kennet to trace the call? Erik is irritated with himself for handing the job over to the old man, but if his father-in-law can find Benjamin, nothing else is of any importance.