by Lars Kepler
“Six months?” I leaped to my feet. “I have patients; they rely on me. I can’t just leave them,” I said furiously.
Annika’s gentle smile disappeared like a candle flame being extinguished. Her face closed down and her voice turned brittle. “Your patient has demanded that an immediate ban be placed on your activities. She has also made a complaint against you to the police. These are not trivial matters as far as we are concerned; we have invested in your work, and if it should transpire that your research has not been up to the required standard, we will have to take appropriate measures.”
I didn’t know what to say; I just wanted to laugh at the whole thing. “This is ridiculous,” was all I managed to get out. I turned to leave the room.
“Erik,” Peter Mälarstedt called after me, “consider this a good opportunity.”
I stopped. “What?”
“To—ah—reconsider the trajectory of your work.”
I wheeled to face him. “Peter, do you believe all that crap about implanting false memories?”
Annika slammed the palm of her hand down on the table. “Erik, enough. That’s not the important thing. The important thing is to follow the rules. Take a leave of absence from your work with hypnosis, try to regard it as an offer of reconciliation. You can continue with your research, you can work in peace and quiet, but you will not practise hypnosis therapy while we are conducting our investigation.”
“I can’t admit to something that isn’t true.”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“Well, that’s what it sounds like. If I request a leave of absence, it looks as if I’m making an admission.”
“Tell me you’ll request a leave of absence,” she insisted stiffly.
“This is fucking idiotic,” I said with a laugh, and left the room.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun was sparkling in the puddles after a brief shower, and the smell of the forest—wet earth and rotten roots—rose up from the ground as I ran along the track around the lake, pondering Lydia’s actions. I was certain she had been speaking the truth under hypnosis—but which truth had she actually told me? Presumably she was describing a real concrete memory, but she had placed the memory in the wrong time. During hypnosis it is even more obvious that the past is not past, I reminded myself.
I filled my lungs with the fresh, cold spring air and sprinted the last stretch home through the forest. When I got to our street I saw a big black car parked in front of our drive, with two men leaning against the bonnet, waiting. One of them was checking his reflection in the shiny paintwork as he smoked a cigarette. The other was taking pictures of our house. They hadn’t seen me yet. I slowed down and was just wondering whether to turn around when they spotted me. The man with the cigarette quickly stubbed it out with his foot, while the other immediately turned the camera on me. I was still out of breath as I approached them.
“Erik Maria Bark?” asked the man who had been smoking.
“What do you want?”
“We’re from the press, Expressen.”
“The press?”
“Yes. We’d like to ask you a few questions about one of your patients.”
I shook my head and waved a hand. “I can’t discuss my patients.”
“Right.”
The man’s gaze slid over my flushed face, my black tracksuit top, my bulky trousers, and my woolly hat. I heard the photographer behind him cough. A bird darted through the air above us, its body describing a perfect arc, reflected in the roof of the car. Above the forest, the sky was thickening and darkening. It looked like more rain.
“There’s an interview with your patient in tomorrow’s paper. She makes some pretty serious accusations against you,” said the journalist.
I met his gaze. He had a fairly sympathetic face: middle-aged, running slightly to fat.
“This is your chance to respond,” he said quietly.
The lights weren’t on in our house. No doubt Simone was still at the gallery. Benjamin was at preschool.
“Otherwise her version will be printed with no contradiction from you,” the man said frankly.
“I would never dream of discussing a patient,” I repeated slowly. I walked up the drive past the two men, unlocked the door, went inside and stood in the hall, and listened to them drive away.
The telephone rang at seven-thirty the following morning. It was Annika Lorentzon. “Erik,” she said, sounding strained. “Have you seen the paper?”
Simone sat up in bed beside me, her expression anxious; I waved dismissively and moved into the hall.
“If this is about Lydia’s accusations, I’m sure everybody realises they’re just lies.”
“No,” she said sharply. “Everybody doesn’t realise that at all. After reading this story, many people will see her as a weak, defenceless, vulnerable person, who has been used by a particularly manipulative doctor toward his own selfish ends. The man she trusted most of all, the man in whom she confided, has betrayed and exploited her. That’s what’s in the paper.”
I could hear her breathing heavily at the other end of the line. She sounded hoarse and tired. “This compromises everything we do, as I’m sure you understand.”
“I’ll write a response,” I said curtly.
“That won’t be enough, Erik.” She paused briefly, then said tonelessly, “She’s intending to sue.”
I snorted. “She’ll never win.”
“You still don’t understand how serious this is, do you?”
“So what is she saying?”
“I suggest you go out and buy a paper. Then I think you ought to sit down and think about your response. The board would like to see you at four o’clock this afternoon.”
When I saw my face on the front page, I felt as if my heartbeat were slowing down. It was a close-up of me in my woolly hat and black top. My face was flushed, I looked bilious and irritable, and I seemed to be waving my hand dismissively. I bought a copy of the paper and went back home. The centre spread was adorned with a picture of Lydia, curled up with a teddy bear in her arms. The whole article focused on how I, Erik Maria Bark, had used her as a kind of lab rat, persecuting her with assertions of abuse. I had broken her down, taking advantage of her suggestibility during deep hypnosis to manipulate her into believing herself guilty of imaginary crimes. The culmination of my persecution had come when I stormed into her house and challenged her to commit suicide. She had simply wanted to die, she said. She compared herself to a member of a cult and me to a cult leader and asserted that, thanks to me, she had no will of her own. It was only when she was in the hospital that she finally dared to start questioning my treatment of her. According to the reporter, she had wept and explained that she wasn’t interested in any kind of compensation. Money could never make up for what she had been through. All she wanted was that I never be allowed to do this to anyone else.
On the next page was a picture of Marek. The ex-torturer agreed with Lydia, saying that my activities were life-threatening, and that I was obsessed with making up sick ideas to which my patients were then forced to confess under hypnosis.
Further down the page, a so-called ‘expert’ furnished a comment—I’d never heard of the man—but here he was denigrating the whole of my research, equating hypnosis with a séance and hinting that I probably drugged my patients in order to get them to do what I wanted.
There was an empty silence inside my head. I sat at the kitchen table until the door opened and Simone walked in. When she had read the paper, her face was ashen.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said. My mouth was completely dry.
I sat there staring into empty space, thinking the unthinkable. What if my theories were wrong? What if hypnosis didn’t work on deeply traumatised individuals? What if it was true that my desire to find patterns had influenced their memories? I didn’t believe it was possible for Lydia to see a child that didn’t exist while she was under hypnosis. I had bee
n convinced that she was describing a genuine memory, but now I was beginning to doubt myself.
It was a strange experience, walking the short distance through the lobby to the lift up to Annika Lorentzon’s office. For years, the place had been like a second home to me, but now none of the staff wanted to look me in the eye. When I passed people I knew and associated with, they simply looked stressed and strained, turned away, and hurried off.
Even the smell in the lift was strange. It smelled of rotten flowers, and it made me think of rain, farewells, funerals.
As I walked out of the lift, Maja Swartling slipped quickly past, ignoring me. Rainer Milch was waiting for me in the doorway of Annika’s office. He moved aside and I went in and said hello.
“Please sit down, Erik,” said Rainer.
“Thank you, I’d prefer to stand,” I said curtly, but regretted it at once. What the hell had Maja Swartling been doing in here? Perhaps she had come to my defence. After all, she was one of the few people who had a real, detailed knowledge of my research.
Annika Lorentzon was standing by the window on the far side of the room. I thought it was both odd and impolite of her not to welcome me. Instead she stood there with her arms wrapped around her body, staring fixedly out the window.
“We gave you a real opportunity, Erik,” said Peter Mälarstedt.
Rainer Milch nodded.
“But you refused to back down,” he said. “You refused to step aside voluntarily while we conducted our investigation.”
“I could reconsider,” I said quietly.
“It’s too late now. We could have used it to defend ourselves the day before yesterday; today it would just look pathetic.”
Annika opened her mouth. “I’m going to appear on TV tonight to explain how we could have allowed you to continue,” she said faintly, without turning to face me.
“But I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. “The fact that a patient comes along with ridiculous accusations surely can’t be allowed to negate years of research, countless treatments that have always been beyond reproach—”
“It isn’t just one patient.” Rainer Milch interrupted me. “It’s several. In addition, we have a contact who has been studying your work for several years. In her opinion, you have overreached, and almost all your theses are built on castles in the air. You have no proof, and you constantly disregard the best interests of the patients in order to ensure that you are right.”
I was completely at a loss. “And the name of this expert?” I asked.
They didn’t respond.
“Is her name perhaps Maja Swartling?”
Annika Lorentzon’s cheeks flushed red. “Erik,” she said, turning to face me at last. “You are suspended from today onwards. I don’t want you in my hospital any longer.”
“But what about my patients? I have to see—”
She cut in. “They will be transferred.”
“That won’t do them any good, they—”
“Well, whose fault is that?” she said, raising her voice.
There was total silence in the room. Frank Paulsson stood with his face averted; Ronny Johansson, Peter Mälarstedt, Rainer Milch, and Svein Holstein remained seated, their faces expressionless.
“So that’s it, then,” I said emptily.
Just a few weeks before I had stood in this same room and been allocated new funding. Now it was all over.
When I reached the lobby, a group of people were waiting for me. A very tall woman with blonde hair thrust a microphone in front of my face.
“Hi,” she said brightly. “Do you still believe that hypnosis is a good form of treatment?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“So you’re going to continue practising?”
I turned away, but the television cameraman followed me, the black gleam of the lens seeking me out. I looked at the blonde woman, read the name badge on her chest, stefanie von sydow, saw her white crocheted hat and her hand, waving the camera over.
“I wonder if you’d like to comment on the fact that another of your patients, a woman named Eva Blau, was committed last week to a secure psychiatric unit.”
“What are you talking about?”
The white light streaming through the tall hospital windows at the end of the corridor was reflected in the recently mopped floor of the secure psychiatric unit at Southern Hospital. I passed a long row of locked doors with flaking paint and rubber strips around their edges and stopped outside B39. Looking back down the corridor, I noticed that my shoes had left tracks in the shining film covering the floor.
From a distant room, loud thuds could be heard, then the faint sound of weeping, and then silence. I stood for a while trying to gather my thoughts before I knocked on the door, turned the key in the lock, and went in.
The waft of disinfectant I brought in with me blended with the miasma of sweat and vomit in the dark room and almost made me retch. Eva Blau was lying on the bed with her back to me. I went over to the window to pull up the roller blind and let in some light, but the mechanism was stuck. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Eva starting to turn over. I tugged at the blind but lost my grip and it flew up with a loud crack.
“Sorry,” I said, “I just wanted to let in a bit of light.”
In the sudden brightness, Eva Blau was sitting up and looking at me with heavily drugged eyes, the corners of her mouth curving downwards bitterly. My heart was pounding. The tip of Eva’s nose had been cut off. She was hunched over, with a bloodstained bandage around her hand, just staring at me.
“Eva, I came as soon as I heard,” I said.
She banged her clenched fist slowly against her stomach. The circular wound from the severed tip of her nose glowed red in her tortured face.
“I tried to help you all,” I said. “But I’m beginning to understand that I was wrong about almost everything. I thought I was on to something important, that I understood how hypnosis worked. But I didn’t, I didn’t understand anything. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you, not one of you.”
She rubbed her nose with the back of her hand, and blood began to trickle from the wound above her mouth.
“Eva? Why have you done this to yourself?” I asked her.
“It was you, you, it’s your fault!” she yelled. “It’s all your fault. You’ve destroyed my life, you’ve taken everything I have!”
“I understand that you’re angry with me because—”
“Shut the fuck up. You don’t understand anything. My life has been destroyed, and I will destroy yours. I can wait, I can wait as long as it takes, but I will have my revenge.”
Then she started to scream, her mouth wide open, the sound hoarse and insane. The door flew open and a doctor came in.
“You were supposed to wait outside,” he said. He sounded shaken, but he was angry.
“The nurse gave me the key, so I thought—”
He pulled me into the corridor, closed the door, and locked Eva in.
“Haven’t you done enough harm? This patient is suffering from persecutory delusions—”
I interrupted him with a smile. “I don’t think so.”
“That is my assessment of this patient,” he said.
“Of course. I’m sorry.”
“Hundreds of times every day she demands that we lock her door and lock the key inside the key cupboard.”
“Yes, but—”
“And she keeps saying she won’t testify against anyone, that we can subject her to electric shocks and rape, but she won’t tell us anything. What the hell did you actually do to your patients? She’s terribly frightened. I can’t believe you went ahead and—”
“She’s angry with me, but she isn’t afraid of me.”
“I heard her screaming,” he said.
After my visit to the hospital and my encounter with Eva Blau, I drove to Television Centre and asked to speak to Stefanie von Sydow, the TV news reporter who had tried to get a comment out of me earlier. The receptionist dialled an editorial assista
nt and then handed me the phone. I said I was ready to do an interview if they were interested. After a little while the assistant came downstairs. She was a young woman with short hair and an intelligent expression.
“Stefanie can see you in ten minutes,” she said.
“Good.”
“I’ll take you to make-up.”
The interview was brief. When I went home, the entire house was in darkness. I called out but there was no reply. I was surprised to find Simone upstairs sitting in front of the television, but it wasn’t switched on.
“Has something happened?” I asked. “Where’s Benjamin?”
“He’s at David’s,” she answered tonelessly.
“Isn’t it time he was home? What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“But what’s the matter? Talk to me, Simone.”
“Why should I? I don’t even know you.”
Anxiety rose sharply within me like mercury in a thermometer; I moved closer and tried to brush a strand of hair from her face.
“Don’t touch me,” she snapped, snatching her head away.
“What is it? Talk to me, Simone.”
She nodded, and in a voice full of pain, she said, “Erik, please tell me the truth. Have you been unfaithful?”
My heart raced, but my voice stayed gruesomely steady. “What are you talking about?”
“Who is Maja?”
“Maja? I don’t know … should I know who that is?”
“Have you been cheating on me?” Simone’s lips quivered.
“Simone? What is this about?”
My thoughts swirled. How could she know? “I would never … I get it … You’re talking about Maja Swartling. Yes? She hates me for some reason, she’s already influenced the board, and—”
“Erik,” Simone interrupted. “You get one more chance. Have you slept with another woman?”
“No.”
“You have not been unfaithful. You give me your word?” Her eyes filled with tears.
