I get out of the car, walk round to the boot, open it.
I grip Lizard Man beneath the arms and start hauling him further inside the barn. His armpits are moist and warm. He is heavy but flexible. Finally we are inside. I sit him against a pillar, then walk back towards the steps. The quadbike is where it was before, the rope still connected to its roof rack. I untie the rope, for now. I return to Lizard Man, wrap the rope around his neck and tighten it. I throw the other end of the rope over one of the rafters, sigh, then look away.
I don’t do this gladly; in fact, I’d gladly never think about it at all.
I hang a dead man.
The process is more difficult than I’d thought.
Lizard Man weighs about as much as an average adult male, and it’s not as if he is putting up much of a fight. The rafter groans, the rope chafes against the wood as I pull. I try to close my ears, try to convince myself that this is inevitable, unavoidable. Eventually, after much exertion on my part, Lizard Man is firmly in the air and the rope is once again attached to the back of the quadbike.
I roll the car down into the yard, close the large doors from the inside, take the flashlight from the floor and walk back to the ground floor without so much as glancing at Lizard Man. At the top of the stairs, three steps from the top, I look over my shoulder after all. A man who hanged others, who used people, threatened and blackmailed them, who was planning to kill me. If I were him, I would say something like one plus one equals two.
But I’m not him; I am me.
And so I say nothing. I simply go through my calculations one more time and leave as fast as I can. The smell of cinnamon buns makes the impenetrable night seem strangely sugary and sweet.
After driving about eight kilometres, I stop at a remote lay-by. I pull off the latex gloves and remove the protective coverings from my shoes. I do the same with the overall. I took the hairnet from my head earlier. I place everything in a black plastic bag and stuff it in the bin.
I return the car to the adventure park and walk a kilometre in the direction of the airport. Then I hail a taxi and arrive home just after five. My phone is exactly where I left it: on the table in the hallway.
I give Schopenhauer his food, have a shower and make some tea. I don’t regale Schopenhauer with the details of the night’s events, instead I stroke his head, his smooth back and purring sides before letting him out onto the balcony to watch the sunrise. I drink my cup of tea and eat a slice of rye bread with butter and gravlax. Eating this triggers my hunger. I make another sandwich, then a third, then eat two pots of sour yoghurt with a thick drizzle of honey. I hadn’t even noticed how hungry I was. I have been on the move all day and all evening, and the day’s events have made paying attention to today’s menu something of a challenge.
Finally, once I have brewed another cup of tea, I sit down at the kitchen table and compose another email to Osmala. This time I don’t need to think about the tone of voice. It comes to me right away. I believe this will make the message convincing enough, the kind of message that will make Osmala act, despite the previous false, bodiless alarm.
In the message, I explain that I fear for my life and that I am on my way to a particular farmstead in the woods to meet my boss, an infamous criminal, and that if this is my last message, I want the police to know who murdered me. I give coordinates for the barn that are as specific as I believe the putative author of this email would be able to give, then add a description of the barn itself. I tell him that this message will be sent automatically at a specific time unless I can get home in time to disable it. Then I press ‘send’ and switch off my computer. I stand up, put my plate and Schopenhauer’s in the dishwasher and switch it on. I lean against the kitchen counter and listen to the slosh of water. For the first time in a very long while, my mind is calm, emptied of thoughts, and I go out to the balcony to join Schopenhauer.
The morning is still fragile, the sparsely positioned lampposts leave large dark spots across the forecourt. Schopenhauer’s eyes are fixed on the ragged, almost leafless birches and the bushes beneath them, which now look thicker than a jungle. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary there myself, but I can perfectly understand why Schopenhauer is watching them so intently.
He has decided he will not be taken by surprise.
32
I sleep until midday, shave, get dressed, do up my tie and step outside. The day is bright and windless, the air crisp and refreshingly cold, the sun looks almost white, though it gives no warmth at all, like a winter’s day in the middle of autumn.
The train journey is pleasant: no one tries to threaten my life or steal my travel card. I glance at the tabloid headlines on my phone, but I know it’s still too early. I prefer not to imagine that my plan hasn’t worked. In any case, I will need to be more alert, more vigilant than ever before. Perhaps it’s not the worst thing that could happen after all. Before ending up at the adventure park, who did I trust most in the world? Schopenhauer. And who do I still trust? Schopenhauer. Both of them, in fact: the cat and the philosopher.
I enter the adventure park via the back door. I walk through the hallway, and a cursory glance tells me our customer numbers are on the up. There are more children – and adults – in the park than ever. Laura’s murals and the attention they have garnered have injected the kind of energy into the park that I had imagined the bank might have done. The bank that will soon no longer exist. I reach my office, sit down at my desk and switch on the computer. As I wait for the system to boot up, I listen to the sounds of the park. My office door is open, and though there are two corners between here and the hall, the noise carries right the way in.
I sign into the bank’s management system and see that the account balance is a big fat zero. Because granting a loan can be done in only a few clicks, everyone working at the ticket office has been able to award them. Judging by the log-in history, most of them were awarded by Kristian, who, to his credit, has demonstrated first-class sales skills. In a single afternoon he managed to award almost thirty loans to the maximum credit limit. If I’m not mistaken, this was the afternoon when he first told me about his courses and showed off his sales techniques.
Yet again, I have to admit that I was both right and wrong: there is clearly a market for low-interest loans, but though they are fair for all parties, people feel no more compunction to repay them than they do exorbitant interest rates. Nobody has paid so much as a first instalment, not a single client seems interested in paying back on an interest-only basis. I am about to log out of the management system and into the accounting system I have created for the bank, when I see someone walking into my office without knocking.
I know who this new arrival is without raising my eyes. I recognise the way the steps fall one after the other.
Laura looks astonishingly similar to how she looked the first time she showed me round the park. Naturally, her bushy hair is the same, brown and thick, her dark-rimmed glasses are the same, she has the same bright, inquisitive look in her eyes, and she is wearing the same clothes too: a yellow hoodie, black jeans, a pair of colourful trainers. And when I say she looks the same, it’s something more than just her hair and clothes; there’s something about her way of being, the way she moves, the way she stands in the middle of the room. In a way, it feels like returning to the moment I first laid eyes on her. Except I can’t return to that moment. I cannot. Not to mention that in reality such a thing is impossible, but after everything that has happened, given everything I know about her – I just can’t.