Marked For Revenge. Emelie Schepp
stood and examined herself for a moment, studying her arms, hips and thighs. She let her hand caress her shoulder, down to the curve of her back, her buttocks. Her whole body shuddered as she surveyed her bruises. They had darkened, and would gradually disappear—along with her thoughts of Danilo.
She pulled a drawer out, forcefully grabbed a silk bra and matching panties, flung them onto the bed and went into the bathroom. She showered quickly, put on the underwear and swept a thin bathrobe around herself.
In the kitchen, she poured a glass of wine, stood by the window and looked at the dense clouds. After taking a big sip, she held the cool glass to her temple. Leaving the window, she went into her office and unlocked the door to the secured inner room.
Standing on the threshold, she turned on the light and looked into the small secret space. Her gaze traveled across the bulletin boards, whiteboard, pictures, photographs, books and notes. Every detail of her childhood that she could find, she had recorded here. She carefully stroked her neck with her fingertips. She felt the uneven skin, the three letters that would never disappear, that were immortalized in her pale skin. K. E. R. Ker—the goddess of death.
Her eyes focused on the drawing in the middle of the bulletin board, attached with staples in every corner. It was a sketch she had drawn of Danilo after their encounter last spring. After all these years, she had searched for him then in his home in Södertälje.
Tell me instead what you as a prosecutor are doing in my place, he had said to her. He hadn’t any idea who she was when she had suddenly appeared in his home.
I need your help.
He had laughed.
Oh, really? You don’t say. How interesting. And what can I help you with?
You can help me to find out something.
Something? And what is this something about?
My background.
Your background? How could I help you with that when I don’t even know who you are?
But I know who you are.
Really? Who am I, then?
You are Danilo.
Brilliant. Did you work that out all by yourself, or did you perhaps read my name on the door?
You are someone else, too?
You mean I’m schizoid?
Show me your neck?
He had fallen completely silent.
You’ve got another name written there, she had said. I know what it says. If I guess right then you must tell me how you got it. If I guess wrong then you can let me go.
We’ll change the agreement a little. If you guess right then I’ll tell you. Sure, that’s no problem. If you guess wrong, or if I don’t have a name on my neck, then I’ll shoot you.
She had guessed correctly.
She took another sip of wine, went into the room, sat on the chair and put the glass on the desk in front of her.
She felt some sort of melancholy about what she had to do.
No one knew that she had a room dedicated to all of the unsorted memories of her childhood, and no one would ever know, either. She hadn’t said a word about it to anyone. Not her father or mother. The room had been her own business and no one else’s.
Last spring, she had gotten more answers about her background than she had wanted. She had found out about the man who had made her into what she was, into what she had been: a child soldier.
She still remembered his words: From a crushed child you can carve out a deadly weapon. A soldier without feelings, without anything to lose, is the most dangerous there is.
She was made to call him Papa.
But his real name was Gavril Bolanaki.
Now Gavril was dead, and from Danilo—or Hades, as was carved into his neck as a trafficked child—there was nothing left to gain.
She got up suddenly and started to pull the pictures of the shipping containers from the walls and folded them up. She ripped down the pictures of the house on the island outside Arkösund, where she had lived with Danilo and the other children. She put the photographs of mythological gods and goddesses into an envelope and piled the books about Greek mythology in stacks. She erased the notes from the whiteboard. She took empty boxes, lined them up along the wall in the bedroom, and put all of the pictures, books, photographs and notes in them. Finally, she took down the sketch of Danilo and put it on the boxes.
In the kitchen, she poured a new glass of wine and drank it standing up. Then she went back into the bedroom, opened her nightstand drawer and looked at the journals hidden there.
For a moment, she considered just leaving them there, but she regretted the hesitation and put them into the boxes, too.
After two hours, both the hidden room and one more glass of wine were empty.
With her finger on the switch, she looked around the room and realized that, without all of the materials of her investigation, the room looked remarkably naked.
She had cleaned up everything that revealed her background. It was meaningless to keep it. She should let it remain a secret, live her life as buttoned-up as the oxford shirts she wore in court.
She closed her eyes.
And turned off the light.
She stood still, listening to the sound of her heart pounding.
Her life would take another direction from now on, no longer driven by shadows from the past.
She felt a shiver go down her spine and wondered if it was relief she felt.
TRAIN ATTENDANT MATS JOHANSSON kept his eyes looking out the window. The late night’s intense calm had settled in on the X2000 between Copenhagen and Stockholm. It was the sort of quiet that made him relax.
He always longed for peace and quiet, which is why he and his wife spent every summer in a little red cottage in the middle of a forest in Småland. The cottage had a white veranda, and they sat there every warm summer evening and looked out at the majestic trees and the emerald green lawn. They puttered around in the garden each day, planted carrots and tomatoes. But this time of year there was nothing to do there, Mats thought. Not in cold, harsh Sweden.
He saw the clock turn 10:12 p.m., knew that there were ten minutes left before they would arrive in Norrköping and went with calm, steady steps down the aisle, keeping his balance as the train swayed.
When he opened the door to the fifth car, he saw a young woman standing outside the bathroom. Her hair was dark, shoulder-length and glossy.
She was pounding on the locked door and yelling, turning toward the people sitting closest to her, but no one would meet her panicked eyes.
The train slowed down with wavelike motions, and the brakes squeaked lightly on the rails.
The young, desperate woman yelled again.
Mats went to her quickly, and when she saw him coming closer, she rushed forward and grabbed his arm. Speaking in a language he didn’t understand, she dragged him to the locked bathroom door and gesticulated wildly.
He understood that something serious was going on.
The clock read 10:22 p.m. when he finally was able to force the door open.
He saw the toilet. To the left of it was a wall-mounted changing table. He stepped cautiously forward and saw a young woman propped up in a sitting position on the floor. Her fingers were bloody. Her face was pale and her lips were blue. Some sort of white foam dripped from her lower lip onto her chest.
Mats covered