Lazarus

Translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Lars Kepler 2018

Translation copyright © Neil Smith 2020

All rights reserved

Originally published in 2018 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Sweden, as Lazarus

Lars Kepler assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Cover photography © Dirk Wustenhagen / Trevillion Images (wintery road);

Tim Robinson / Trevillion Images (man crossing road)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008205959

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2020 ISBN: 9780008205973

Version: 2020-10-19

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Lars Kepler

About the Publisher

Prologue

The light of the white sky reveals the world in all its naked cruelty, the way it must have appeared to Lazarus outside the tomb.

The ribbed metal floor is vibrating beneath the priest’s feet. He clings to the railing with one hand as he tries simultaneously to parry the rocking with his stick.

The grey sea is moving drowsily, like a billowing tent-canvas.

The ferry is being winched forward along the two steel cables stretched between the two islands. They rise dripping out of the water in front of the boat and sink back down behind it.

The ferryman brakes, foaming waves swell up and the gangplank is extended to the concrete jetty with a clatter.

The priest stumbles slightly as the prow hits the fenders and the jolt echoes through the hull.

He’s here to visit retired churchwarden Erland Lind, seeing as he isn’t answering his phone and didn’t show up for the Advent Service in Länna Church like he usually does.

Erland lives in the warden’s cottage behind Högmarsö Chapel, it belongs to the parish. He suffers from dementia, but still gets paid to cut the grass and grit the paths when the weather turns icy.

The priest walks along the winding gravel track, his face turning numb in the cold air. There’s no one in sight, but just before he reaches the chapel he hears the shriek of a lathe from the dry dock down in the boatyard.

He can no longer remember the Bible quote he tweeted that morning, he had been thinking of repeating it to Erland.

Against the backdrop of flat farmland and the strip of forest, the white chapel looks almost as if it’s made of snow.

Because the place of worship is shut up in winter, the priest walks directly to the warden’s cottage and knocks on the door with the crook of his stick, waits, then goes inside.

‘Erland?’

There’s no one home. He stamps his shoes and looks around. The kitchen is a mess. The priest gets out the bag of cinnamon buns and puts it down on the table next to a foil tray containing the cracked remains of some mashed potato, dried-up sauce, and two grey meatballs.

The lathe down by the shore falls silent.

The priest goes outside, tries the door to the chapel, then looks in the unlocked garage.

There’s a muddy shovel on the floor, and a black plastic bucket full of rusting rat-traps.

He uses his stick to lift the plastic covering the snow-blower, but stops when he hears a distant moaning sound.

He goes back outside and walks over to the ruins of the old crematorium on the edge of the forest. The oven and the sooty stump of its chimney are sticking up from the tall weeds.

The priest walks round a stack of wooden pallets and can’t help looking over his shoulder.

He’s had an ominous feeling ever since he stepped on board the ferry.

There’s nothing reassuring about the light today.

The odd sound rings out again, closer, like a calf trapped in a metal box.

He stops and stands still, not making a sound.

Everything is quiet as his breath steams from his mouth.

The ground is muddy and trampled down behind the compost heap. There’s a bag of potting compost leaning against one tree.

The priest starts to walk towards the compost but stops when he reaches a metal pipe sticking out of the ground, some half a metre long. Perhaps it marks the boundary.

Leaning on his stick, he looks up at the forest and sees a path covered with pine-needles and cones.

The wind is whistling through the treetops, and a solitary crow cries in the distance.

The priest turns back, hears the strange moaning sound behind him and starts to walk faster. He passes the crematorium and cottage, glances over his shoulder and thinks that all he wants right now is to get back to his vicarage and sit down in front of the fire with a thriller and a glass of whisky.

1

A dirty police car is driving away from the centre of Oslo on the outer ring road. The weeds growing beneath the barriers shiver in the wind, and a plastic bag is blowing along the ditch.

Karen Stange and Mats Lystad have responded to the call even though it’s late.

It’s really time for them to knock off for the day, but instead they’re on their way to Tveita.

A number of residents in an apartment block have been complaining about a terrible smell. The maintenance company sent someone to check the bins, but they were all clean. The smell turned out to be coming from a flat on the eleventh floor. The sound of quiet singing could be heard inside, but the occupant, a Vidar Hovland, was refusing to answer the door.

The police car drives past an industrial estate.

Behind the barbed wire fence sit skips, trucks, and depots full of salt, ready for winter.

The blocks of flats on Nåkkves vei look like a huge concrete staircase has fallen over and split into three parts.

A man in grey overalls is waving to them in front of a van with Morten’s Lock Service Ltd emblazoned on the side. Their headlights sweep over him, and the shadow of his raised hand reaches several storeys up the building behind him.

Karen pulls over to the kerb and stops gently, pulls the handbrake on, switches the engine off and gets out of the car with Mats.

The sky is already closing up for the night. The air is cold, it feels like it might snow. The two police officers shake hands with the locksmith. He’s clean-shaven, but his cheeks are grey, his chest seems shrunken and he moves in a twitchy, nervous way.

‘Have you heard the one about the Swedish Police being called to a cemetery? They’ve already found almost three hundred buried bodies,’ he jokes almost breathlessly, and looks down at the ground as he laughs.

The thickset man from the building maintenance company is sitting in his pickup smoking.

‘The old guy’s probably forgotten he’s left a bag of rubbish containing fish in the hall,’ he mutters, then shoves the car door open.

‘Let’s hope so,’ Karen replies.

‘I banged on the door and shouted through the letterbox that I was going to call the police,’ he says, and flicks the cigarette butt away.

‘You did the right thing calling us,’ Mats replies.

Dead bodies have been found here twice in the past forty years, one in the car park and the other inside one of the flats.

The two officers and the locksmith follow the maintenance man in through the door and are hit at once by the nauseating smell.

They all try to avoid breathing through their noses as they get into the lift.

The doors close and they feel the pressure under their feet as they are carried upward.

‘Floor eleven’s a favourite,’ the maintenance man says. ‘We had a difficult eviction there last year, and in 2013 one of the flats was completely gutted by a fire.’

‘On Swedish fire extinguishers it says they have to be tested three days before any fire,’ the locksmith says quietly.

The smell when the lift door opens is so awful that they all get a slightly desperate look in their eyes.

The locksmith covers his nose and mouth with his hand.

Karen struggles to stop herself retching. It’s as if her diaphragm is panicking and trying to push the contents of her stomach up through her throat.

The man from the maintenance company pulls his jumper over his nose and mouth and points out the flat with his other hand.

Karen walks over, puts her ear to the door and listens. There’s no sound from within. She rings the doorbell.

A subdued melody rings out.

Suddenly she hears a weak voice from inside the flat. A man’s voice, singing or reciting something.

Karen bangs on the door and the man falls silent, then starts again, very quietly.

‘Let’s go in,’ Mats says.

The locksmith walks over to the door, puts his heavy bag down on the floor and unzips it.

‘Can you hear that?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ Karen replies.

The door to one of the other flats opens and a small girl with tousled fair hair and dark rings under her eyes looks out.

‘Go back inside,’ Karen says.

‘I want to watch,’ the girl smiles.

‘Aren’t your mum and dad home?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, and quickly shuts the door.

Rather than use a lockpick, the locksmith drills the entire lock out. Shiny spirals of metal fly out and fall to the floor. He picks up the hot sections of the cylinder and puts them in his bag, pulls the bolt out and then backs away.

‘Wait here,’ Mats tells the maintenance man and locksmith.

Karen draws her pistol as Mats pulls the door open and calls into the flat.

‘This is the police! We’re coming in!’

Karen looks at the pistol in her pale hand. For a few moments the black metal object looks completely alien, its component parts, the barrel, bolt, and butt.

‘Karen?’

She looks up and meets Mats’s eye, then turns towards the flat, raises the pistol and goes inside with her other hand over her mouth.

She can’t see any bags of rubbish in the hall.

The stench must be coming from the bathroom or kitchen.

The only sound is her boots on the plastic floor, and her own breathing.

She walks past a narrow hall mirror and into the living room, quickly securing the corners and glancing around at the chaos. The television has been tipped onto the floor, potted ferns are lying smashed on the floor, the sofa bed is standing askew and one of the cushions has been torn open, and the standard lamp is lying on the floor.

She turns her pistol towards the passageway leading to the bathroom and kitchen, lets Mats move past her and then follows him.

Their boots crunch on broken glass.

One wall lamp is lit, small dust-particles hovering in its light.

She stops and listens.

Mats opens the bathroom door, then lowers his weapon. Karen tries to look in, but the door is blocking the light. All she can make out is a dirty shower curtain. She takes a step closer, leans forwards and nudges the door, and the light reaches across the tiles.

The handbasin is smeared with blood.

Karen shudders, then she suddenly hears a voice behind them. An old man, talking quietly. She’s so startled that she lets out a whimper as she swings round and aims her pistol along the corridor.

There’s no one there.

Full of adrenalin, she returns to the living room, hears a laugh and points her gun at the sofa.

There could easily be someone hiding behind it.

Karen hears Mats trying to say something to her, but doesn’t catch what.

Her pulse is throbbing in her head.

She moves forward slowly, her finger resting on the trigger, then notices that she’s shaking and supports it with her other hand.

The next moment she realises that the voice is coming from the stereo, as the old man starts to sing again.

Karen carries on round the sofa, then lowers her weapon and stares at the dusty cables and empty crisp packet.

‘OK,’ she whispers to herself.

On top of the stereo is a CD case from the Institute for Language and Folklore. The same track is playing on a loop, over and over again. An old man is saying something in heavy dialect, laughs, then starts to sing – There’s a wedding here at our farm, with empty plates and cracked dishes – before falling silent.

Mats is standing in the doorway, gesturing to her to move on, keen to get to the kitchen.

It’s almost dark outside now, the curtains are quivering gently in the heat from the radiators.

Karen follows her partner into the passageway, sways slightly and reaches out to the wall for support with the hand holding the pistol.

The air is thick with the smell of excrement and cadaver, strong enough to make their eyes water.

She can hear Mats taking short, shallow breaths, and focuses on not letting her nausea overwhelm her.

She follows him into the kitchen and stops.

On the linoleum floor lies a naked person with a bulging stomach and a head that’s too big.

A pregnant woman with a swollen, grey-blue penis.

The floor lurches beneath her and her field of vision contracts.

Mats is leaning against the chest freezer, moaning gently to himself.

Karen tries to tell herself that it’s just shock. She can see that the dead body is a man’s, but the swollen stomach and spread thighs make her think of a woman giving birth.

She can feel her hands trembling as she puts her pistol back in its holster.

The body is in an advanced stage of decomposition, large parts of it look slack and wet.

Mats crosses the floor and throws up in the sink, so hard that it splashes the coffee machine.

The dead man’s head looks like a blackened pumpkin that’s been attached to his shoulders. His jaw has been broken off, and the gullet and Adam’s apple have been pushed out through the deformed mouth by the gases that have built up inside.

There was a fight, Karen thinks. He got injured, broke his jaw, hit his head on the floor and died.

Mats vomits again, then spits out the slime.

Karen looks back to the stomach, parted legs, and the man’s genitals.

Mats is sweating profusely and his face is white. She’s about to go over and help him when someone grabs hold of her leg. Karen lets out a shriek and starts to fumble for her pistol, then realises that it’s the girl from the neighbouring flat.

‘You’re not allowed to be in here,’ she gasps.

‘It’s fun,’ the girl says, looking at her with those dark eyes.

Karen’s legs are shaking as she leads the child back through the flat and out into the stairwell.

‘No one’s allowed in,’ she says to the man from the maintenance company.

‘I turned away for a minute to open the window,’ he replies.

Karen really doesn’t want to go back into the flat, she knows she’s going to end up having dreams about this, waking in the middle of the night with the man’s spread legs etched on her retina.

When she enters the kitchen, Mats is turning off the tap in the sink. He turns to look at her with wet eyes.

‘Are we done here?’ she asks.

‘Yes, I just want to look in the freezer,’ he says, pointing to the bloody fingerprints around the handle.

He wipes his mouth, opens the lid and leans forward.

Karen looks on as his head jerks back and his mouth opens without a sound.

He staggers backwards and the lid slams shut with such force it makes a coffee-cup on the table jump.

‘What is it?’ she asks, walking closer to the freezer.

Mats is clutching the edge of the sink. He knocks over a plastic plant-spray and turns to look at her. His pupils have shrunk to the size of two drops of ink and his face is unnaturally white.

‘Don’t look,’ he whispers.

‘I need to know what’s in the freezer,’ she says, and can hear the fear in her own voice.

‘For the love of God, don’t look …’

2

Valeria’s plant nursery in Nacka, outside Stockholm

Dusk is slowly falling, and the darkness only becomes apparent when the three greenhouses start to glow like rice-paper lanterns.

That’s when you realise that evening has come.

Valeria de Castro has her curly hair pulled into a ponytail. Her boots are caked with mud and her padded red jacket is dirty, and tight across her shoulders.

Her breath is cloudy and the air has a crisp smell of frost.

She’s done for the day, and pulls her gloves off as she heads up towards the house.

She goes upstairs and runs a bath, tossing her dirty clothes in the laundry basket.

When she turns towards the mirror she discovers a large smudge of dirt on her forehead, and a scratch on her cheek from the bramble patch.

Thinking that she needs to do something about her hair, she smiles wryly at herself because she looks so happy.

She pulls the shower curtain as far back as it will go, leans one hand on the tiled wall, and steps into the bathtub. The water is so hot that she waits a while before lowering herself in.

She leans her head against the edge of the bath, closes her eyes and listens to the drops falling from the tap.

Joona is coming this evening.

They had a row, it was so stupid, she felt hurt, but it was all a misunderstanding, and they sorted it out like adults.

She opens her eyes and sees the reflections of the water on the ceiling, as the rings from the drips spread out across the surface.

The shower curtain has slipped along the rail again, so she can no longer see the bathroom door and lock.

The water laps softly as she puts one foot up on the edge of the bath.

She shuts her eyes again and goes on thinking about Joona, then realises she’s falling asleep and sits up.

Valeria is so hot now that she has to get out of the bath. She stands up and lets the water run off her body, then tries to look at the door in the mirror, but the glass is misted up.

She steps out of the bath onto the slippery floor, grabs a towel and starts to dry herself.

She nudges the bathroom door open, waits a moment, then looks out onto the landing.

The shadows on the wallpaper are still.

Everything’s completely silent.

She isn’t easily scared, but her time in prison has left her wary in certain situations.

She leaves the bathroom and walks across the cool landing and into the bedroom with her body steaming. It isn’t completely dark yet, there are lines of translucent cloud visible against the sky.

She gets a clean pair of jeans from the chest of drawers and pulls them on, opens the wardrobe, takes out her yellow dress and lays it on the bed.

There’s a noise downstairs.

Valeria stops moving instantly.

She holds her breath and stands there listening.

What could it have been?

Joona isn’t due to arrive for another hour or so, but she’s already made a spicy lamb stew with fresh coriander.

Valeria takes a step towards the window and starts to lower the blind when she catches sight of someone standing next to one of the greenhouses.

She jerks back and loses her grip on the cord, and the roll-blind flies up with a bang.

There’s a rattling sound as the cord gets tangled up.