Broken Mirrors (ARC) Page 17

  Almost as delicious as these months of listening to Ellie. Hearing her lie and lie and lie. Everything’s fab! Loving life. All great with Johan. Big adventure. I’m on the trail of a serial killer.

  Except you never were, Ellie. You were just picking up the breadcrumbs I left out for you like a good little puppet. Gifting Tove’s mother a computer so she could find pictures I had planted on her old one was a particular stroke of genius.

  Admittedly you found the American, but he was hardly a challenge. He was a child, doing cartwheels in the grass. Mamma, pappa! Look at me! Look what I can do!

  If only he could have controlled himself a little better so that my aunt didn’t have to die. Giving her the phone was a mistake. I thought it would keep her busy, keep her focussed, when I could see her starting to slip. She’s always started to slip, sooner or later, ever since I was a little girl. That is the difference between her and me. I never slip.

  Good bye, Sigrid, I think now, as I step over her body. It has been a long time since I felt my special syringe slide into the neck of someone I had chosen. Too long. I had forgotten just how nice it felt. Was Liv really the last one? Goodness.

  Not long until another one now. It’s not a thrill that slips through me, simply acceptance. This is who I am and this is what must happen. I can no more control it than I can a tsunami or earthquake. We all must die. It is nothing personal.

  But if Lotta thinks that this is my revenge, she is very wrong. I did not do this for fear of who she could tell about me. I did all this just for fun.

  48

  Johan was a helluva lot better at cycling through melting ice than me. He zipped around corners in a controlled skid, wove around frozen puddles without breaking speed, while I slithered and slid and generally came within a hair’s breadth of breaking my neck every block or so.

  We’d flown around Ringvägen and were climbing Skanstull bridge. The lights of Hammarby were twinkling ahead, our way was lit like tiny, resentful beacons of brake lights glowing red, two by two through the drizzle as far as the eye could see. I’d got through to the emergency number and was trying and failing to make the situation understood when Nadja must have seen all the missed calls from me and called back. They had Casey Donnantuoro under arrest and were making their way back to the city.

  Nadja was sending a local team directly to the old factory and would catch up herself as soon as she could. I’d declined to mention that Johan and I were on our way too. She could find out that bit of information in good time.

  ‘This way!’ Johan’s voice was almost eaten by the wind, but I saw him swerve off to the right and onto a dirt pathway that wound along the waterfront towards the factory where Krister was.

  ‘Shit —’ My bike skidded out from under me and I was deposited in an ungainly heap in a prickly push.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine — keep going — I’ll catch up!’ I yelled. He hesitated, then did as he was told. I yanked the bike to a standing position, and gritting my teeth got back on. ‘Come on fucker, don’t let me down,’ I muttered under my. breath. This little bit of pathway was treacherously steep and the worst place to remount, but I didn’t have the time to hesitate, I hoped on and hoped for the best and somehow I was back in business.

  I could only just spy the reflectors of Johan’s bike in the distance as I pedalled as fast as I could after him. I hit rocks and ice and stones but somehow absorbed each skid to pedal on. My jeans were soaked through and there was a dark stain spreading on my knee where I must have burst the skin when I fell. Everything was burning, everything was throbbing, I felt as though I’d gone into another dimension of physical misery when I finally spied Johan’s bike hang a sharp left.

  The huge factory loomed high overhead, black against the purple sky, and even if I couldn’t see the lights of people moving around the yard, the throb of horrified, excited chatter, I would have known it was the right place. I could almost taste the malignant energy. This is her lair, I thought. This is where she has been hiding out all this time.

  At a half crumbled wall, Johan had stopped. He leaned his bike against it, careful not to make any noise, though I suspected no one would have heard. I stuck mine against his, and he took my hand as we both crept towards a gap in the wall.

  Though I had had a rough idea of what to expect, nothing could have prepared me for the sight that greeted us. An old cobblestoned yard, bordered by once imposing, now mostly crumbled, walls, was flooded with silver light, casting an eerie glow over the gathering. There was a small platform in the centre of the yard, it looked as though it had once been a fishpond or fountain, now boarded over.

  A crowd of people, normal, standard people I’d stood next to in lines for coffee, waiting for the T-bana, held doors for, were crowded round the platform like a mediaeval mob, baying for blood. I couldn’t understand the low Swedish chant, but fuck I could comprehend it, and the sheer, palpable malevolence stabbed at my spine like electric shocks. One or two of them were even holding mobile phones where their pitchforks should be, filming the horror.

  Hatred etched on their faces turned them into human gargoyles. They began to sway, as one, seemed almost about to break into some Bacchus-like frenzy of vitriol when suddenly they parted. Someone was moving through them.

  ‘Mia,’ breathed Johan. I squeezed his hand as Mia walked through the crowd to the little platform. She was followed by two people supporting a third, staggering, barely conscious woman I took to be Lotta Berglund. On her left was the guy with the long hair who had approached me. On her right — it was Corinna.

  Mia reached the platform and held up her hands for silence. She said something, though her back to us and we couldn’t catch the words. But we did catch the next word.

  ‘Mia.’

  Krister stepped forward, ashen, staring at his former girlfriend in horror.

  ‘He is saying she cannot do this,’ Johan whispered. I nodded. I’d caught it more or less. ‘That it’s not too late. If she turns herself in he will support her —’

  Mia threw back her head and laughed and some of the crowd joined in.

  ‘Please, Mia, listen —’ Johan muttered, Krister ignored the jeers, his face set in a determined, blank stare. ‘It doesn’t have to be like this. You don’t have to be like this. Come with me now and I will protect you.’

  ‘Do you think he means it?’ I whispered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Johan.

  Just then sirens were heard, approaching fast, and the crowd scattered with a flurry of screams and frantic shoves. As the sirens got louder, Corinna and the guy scarpered too, leaving poor Lotta slumped on the platform. Neither Mia nor Krister moved.

  Johan began to creep forward.

  The police cars were still a few blocks away, I judged. I could see the syringe glinting in the light in Mia’s hand. The drug was instantaneous. If she got to Johan —

  But she showed no sign of being aware of him.

  She was staring at Krister, transfixed.

  ‘You would help me?’ she asked in Swedish. ‘Even now?’

  ‘Always,’ Krister said. ‘I promised, didn’t I? Forever.’

  ‘Even though you know what I am?’

  ‘Forever,’ he repeated, firmly.

  Her hand holding the syringe relaxed and Johan lunged forward, grabbed her in a headlock as she struggled viciously. I ran to Lotta, checked her pulse. She stirred weakly, groaned. The sirens were deafening.

  ‘Over here!’ I screamed. I spied the first couple of uniformed officers approaching but they still seemed a million miles away. I heard Johan grunt as Mia bit him, then Krister was there. He grabbed her ankles and the two of them wrestled her to the ground.

  ‘We need an ambulance —’ I yelled.

  ‘There is one just behind us, please stay calm —’ It was the same no nonsense young woman who’d been first to respond when I found Mattias Eklund. Her partner seemed no more up to the task than he had then.

  I heard Johan yell
and realised he must have loosened his grip on Mia for an instant — with super human strength she wriggled from his grasp and to her feet.

  The officer with the plait pulled out her gun, yelled at her to freeze but Mia sprinted to the edge of the yard and clambered onto the high fence at the edge of the water.

  ‘No — Mia —’ Krister ran for her. ‘Please Mia, no —’

  A bullet ricocheted off one of the iron bars of the fence as Mia yanked herself over and flung herself into the black waters of Årstaviken.

  There was an instant of stillness, of silence as we all stared at the spot from which she had disappeared. Then the two police officers sprang into action, the paramedics arrived and took charge of Lotta. My breath heaved in my chest as I struggled to my feet and staggered over to Johan, wondering why he hadn’t moved yet.

  It was then that I noticed the syringe sticking out of his jeans leg.

  Hi!

  Thank you so much for reading Broken Mirrors! I really hope you enjoyed it and don’t hate me too much for the cliffhanger :-)

  Panic not, because I am hard at work on the Stockholm Murders Book 3 and you’ll have it before the end of 2019.

  In the meantime, you can pop over to my Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/csduffywriter/ where I share news of upcoming releases and we’re often chatting about crime fiction - either mine or someone else’s!

  Also feel free to drop me a line: claire@csduffywriter.com I respond to all emails, though sometimes it takes me a while!

  Thanks again for reading - and if you get a moment to pop a review on Amazon or Goodreads I won’t be mad!!

  Claire xx

  About the Author

  C.S. Duffy writes crime thrillers with a healthy dose of black humour. Her background is in film and TV, and she has several projects in development in Sweden and the UK, including the feature film Guilty. She is the author of Life is Swede, a thriller in the form of a blog - leading several readers to contact Swedish news agencies asking them why they hadn’t reported the murder that features in the blog. Her supernatural audio series is currently running on Storytel in several countries and she was selected as Spotlight author at Bloody Scotland in 2018.

  www.csduffywriter.com