by Lars Kepler
Dr Langfeldt is already waiting.
“Police?” he asks rhetorically, holding out a broad, meaty hand. His handshake is surprisingly soft, perhaps the softest Joona has ever felt, and his expression gives nothing away as he says with a minimal gesture, “Please come in.”
The office is large but almost entirely functional. Heavy bookshelves filled with identical files cover the walls. There are no paintings or photographs; the room is entirely free of ornamentation. The only picture is what appears to be a child’s drawing in green and white chalk pinned to the door; a round face with eyes, nose, and mouth, legs and arms attached directly to it. Children of about three tend to draw adults in this way. This can be seen either as an indication that the figure has no body or that the head itself is the body.
Dr Langfeldt goes over to his desk, which is almost entirely covered in piles of paper. He moves an old rotary telephone off the visitor’s chair and makes another small gesture in Joona’s direction; Joona interprets this as an invitation to sit down.
The doctor regards him thoughtfully; his face is heavy and furrowed, and there is something lifeless about his features, almost as if he is suffering from some kind of facial paralysis.
“Thank you for taking the time—” Joona begins.
“I know what you want to see me about,” the doctor says. “You want information about Lydia Everson. My patient.”
Joona opens his mouth, but the doctor holds up a hand to stop him.
“I presume you’ve heard of professional security and the confidentiality of information relating to patient records,” Langfeldt continues. “In addition—”
“I’m familiar with the law,” Joona interjects. “If the crime under investigation would lead to more than two years’ imprisonment on conviction, then—”
“Yes, yes,” says Langfeldt. The doctor turns his peculiar dead gaze on him.
“I can of course bring you in for questioning,” Joona says softly. “The prosecutor is currently preparing a warrant for Lydia Everson’s arrest. We will then request her patient notes, obviously.”
Dr Langfeldt taps his fingers against one another and licks his lips. “It’s just …” he says, “I just want …” He pauses. “I just want a guarantee.”
“A guarantee?”
Langfeldt nods. “I want my name kept out of this business.”
Joona meets Langfeldt’s eyes and suddenly realises that the lifeless expression is in fact suppressed fear.
“I can’t make that promise,” he says harshly.
“If I plead with you?”
“I’m a stubborn man,” Joona explains.
The doctor leans back, the corners of his mouth twitching slightly. It’s the only sign of nerves or any other kind of vitality he has shown so far. “What is it you want to know?” he asks.
Joona leans forward. “Everything. I want to know everything.”
An hour later, Joona leaves the doctor’s office. He glances down the corridor opposite in passing, but the woman in the long dress has disappeared, and as he hurries down the stone staircase he notices that it’s now completely dark. It’s impossible to see the park and the trellises any longer. Downstairs, the girl on reception has evidently finished for the day. The desk is vacant, its surface cleared, and the office door is locked. Nothing but silence, although Joona knows that the unit houses hundreds of patients.
He shivers as he gets into his car and pulls out of the parking lot. Something is bothering him, something he can’t put his finger on. He tries to remember the point at which the feeling began.
The doctor had taken out a file, identical to the other files filling the shelves. He had tapped it gently on the front and said, “Here she is.”
The photograph of Lydia showed quite a pretty woman with medium-length hennaed hair and a strange, smiling expression: rage seething beneath an appealing surface.
The first time Lydia had been admitted for treatment was when she was ten years old, after she had killed her younger brother, Kasper. She had smashed in his skull one Sunday with a block of wood. She had told the doctor that her mother was forcing her to raise her brother. Kasper had been Lydia’s responsibility when her mother was at work or sleeping, and it was her job to discipline him.
Lydia was taken into care; her mother was sent to prison for child abuse. Kasper Everson was three years old when he died.
“Lydia lost her family,” Joona whispers, switching on the windscreen wipers as a bus coming the other way drenches his car.
Dr Langfeldt had treated Lydia only with powerful psychopharmaceuticals; she was not offered any kind of therapy. He felt that the killing had been committed under severe pressure from her mother. With his agreement, Lydia was placed in an open residential facility for young offenders. When she turned eighteen, she moved back to her old home and lived there with a boy she had met at the residential facility, disappearing from the records.
Five years later she turned up again, this time having been admitted to a secure psychiatric unit. Lydia had gone to a playground and picked out a boy of about five, lured him to an isolated area, and hit him. She repeated this behaviour several times before she was caught. The last incident had resulted in life-threatening injuries to the child.
Dr Langfeldt met her for the second time, and she became his patient in a unit from which she could be discharged only with the permission of the courts.
“Lydia remained in the secure unit at Ulleråker for six years. She was under treatment throughout,” Langfeldt explained. “She was an exemplary patient. The only problem was that she constantly formed alliances with other inmates. She created groups around her, groups from whom she demanded unswerving loyalty.”
She was making her own family, Joona thinks, as he turns off toward Fridhemsplan. He suddenly remembers the staff Christmas party at Skansen and considers pretending that he forgot about it, but he knows he owes it to Anja to appear.
Langfeldt had closed his eyes and massaged his temples as he went on. “After six years without incident, Lydia was allowed to begin spending periods away from the secure unit.”
“No incidents at all?” asked Joona.
Langfeldt thought about it. “There was one thing, but it was never proven.”
“What was it?”
“A patient’s face was injured. She maintained she’d cut her own face, but the rumour was that Lydia Everson had done it. As far as I recall it was only gossip; there was nothing to it.”
Joona nodded, blank-faced. “Go on,” he said.
“She was allowed to move back to the family home. She was still under outpatient treatment, but she was looking after herself, and there was absolutely no reason,” said the doctor, “to doubt her assertion that she wanted to get better. After two years it was time for Lydia to complete her treatment. She chose a form of therapy that was very fashionable at the time. She joined a hypnosis group with—”
“Erik Maria Bark,” Joona supplied.
Langfeldt nodded. “It seems as if the hypnosis didn’t do Lydia much good,” he said superciliously. “She ended up trying to commit suicide and came back to me for the third time.”
“Did she tell you about her breakdown?”
Langfeldt shook his head. “As I understand it, the whole thing was the fault of that hypnotist.”
“Are you aware that she told Dr Bark she had a son named Kasper? That she told him she had imprisoned her son?” Joona asked sharply.
Langfeldt shrugged his shoulders. “I did hear that, but I presume a hypnotist can get people to admit to just about anything.”
“So you didn’t take her confession seriously?”
Langfeldt smiled thinly. “She was a wreck. It was impossible even to hold a conversation with her. I had to give her electroconvulsive therapy, heavy antipsychotic drugs—it was a major task to get her back together on any level.”
“So you didn’t even try to investigate whether there was any basis to her confession?”
“My as
sessment was that such statements arose from her feelings of guilt over having murdered her brother as a child,” Langfeldt replied sternly.
“When did you let her out?” Joona asked.
“Two months ago. She was definitely well.”
Joona stood up, and his gaze fell on the only picture in Dr Langfeldt’s room, the childish drawing on the door. “That’s you,” said Joona, pointing at it. A walking head, he thought. Just a brain, no heart.
96
saturday, december 19: evening
At five o’clock in December, the sun has been gone for two hours. The air is cold. The sparse streetlamps of Skansen provide a misty light. Down below, the city is just visible as smoky patches of light. Glassblowers and silversmiths are hard at work in the open-air museum. Joona walks through the Christmas market in Bollnäs Square. Fires are burning, horses are snorting, chestnuts are roasting. Children race through a stone maze, others drink hot chocolate. There is music everywhere, and families are dancing around a tall Christmas tree on the circular dance floor. As Joona walks towards one of the narrow gravel paths down to Solliden restaurant, he hears the laughter of children behind him and shudders.
His mobile rings. Joona answers it in front of a stall selling sausages and reindeer meat.
“It’s Erik Maria Bark.”
“Hi.”
“I think Lydia has taken Benjamin to Jussi’s haunted house. It’s somewhere outside Dorotea in Västerbotten, in Lapland.”
“You think?”
“I’m almost certain,” Erik replies doggedly. “There are no more flights today. You don’t have to come, but I’ve booked three tickets for first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Good,” says Joona. “If you can send me a text with all the information you have on Jussi, I’ll contact the police in Västerbotten.”
The beautiful yellow-painted restaurant is decorated with festive strings of light and branches of fir. A Christmas smorgasbord has been laid out on four huge tables; Joona spots his colleagues as soon as he walks in. They are sitting beside enormous windows that look out over the waters of Nybroviken and Södermalm, with the Gröna Lund theme park on one side and the Vasa Museum on the other.
“Here we are,” Anja calls out.
She stands up and waves. Her enthusiasm gives Joona a lift. He still has an unpleasant, crawling sensation in his body after his visit to the doctor at Ulleråker. He says hello to everyone and sits down next to Anja.
Carlos Eliasson is sitting opposite him. He wears a Santa hat and nods cheerfully at Joona. “We’ve already drunk a toast,” he confides. His normally sallow skin has a healthy flush.
Anja tries to slip her hand under Joona’s arm, but he stands up and says he is going for some food.
Joona walks between the tables full of people chatting and eating, thinking that he can’t really summon up the right frame of mind for a Christmas buffet. It’s as if part of him is still in the living room with Johan Samuelsson’s parents or at the psychiatric unit at Ulleråker, walking up the stone staircase towards the locked corridor with its rows of cells.
He takes a plate, joins the queue for herring, and contemplates his colleagues from a distance. Anja has squeezed her round, lumpy body into a red angora dress. She is still wearing her winter boots. Petter is talking intensely to Carlos; his head is newly shaven, and his scalp is shining with sweat under the chandeliers.
Joona helps himself to three different kinds of herring. He looks at a woman from another party. She is wearing a pale grey tight-fitting dress and is being led to the table by two girls with elegant hairstyles. A man in a grey suit hurries after them with a little girl in a red dress.
Joona ladles food onto his plate almost at random. There are no potatoes left in the small brass pan, and he moves on rather than wait for a waitress to come along with a fresh supply. There is no sign of his favourite dish, a Finnish turnip bake. Making his way back to the table, Joona balances his plate as he moves between officers who are now on their fourth foray to the buffet. At one table, five forensic technicians are singing Helan går, the traditional toast, with their small, tapering schnapps glasses raised. Joona sits down and immediately feels Anja’s hand on his leg. She smiles at him.
“You remember you said I could do anything I wanted with you.” She leans over and whispers loudly, “I want to dance the tango with you tonight.”
Carlos hears her and shouts, “Anja Larsson, you and I will dance the tango!”
“I’m dancing with Joona,” she says firmly.
Carlos tilts his head to one side and slurs, “I’ll grab a ticket and wait in line.”
Carlos is fast asleep on a chair in the cloakroom. Petter and his friends have gone into town to continue the celebrations at Café Opera, and Joona and Anja have promised to see that Carlos gets home safely. While they wait for their taxi, they take the opportunity to go out into the cold air. Joona leads Anja up onto the open-air dance floor, warning her about the thin film of ice he thinks he can feel on the wood beneath their feet.
Joona hums softly as they dance.
“Marry me,” Anja whispers.
Joona doesn’t reply; he is remembering Disa and her melancholy face. He thinks about their friendship over all these years and how he has had to disappoint her. Anja tries to stretch up and lick his ear, and he carefully moves his head a little further away.
“Joona,” she whispers. “You dance so beautifully.”
“I know,” he replies, swinging her around.
The aroma of log fires and mulled wine surrounds them. Anja presses her body against his. It’s going to be difficult to walk Carlos all the way down to the taxi stand, he thinks. Soon they’ll have to make a move towards the escalator.
At that moment his phone rings in his pocket. Anja groans with disappointment as he moves to one side and answers.
“Hello,” says a strained voice. “It’s Joakim Samuelsson. You came to see us earlier today.”
“Yes, I know. What can I do for you?” says Joona. He thinks back to how Joakim Samuelsson’s pupils dilated when he was asked about Lydia Everson.
“I wonder if we could meet,” says Joakim Samuelsson hesitantly. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
Joona looks at his watch. It’s nine-thirty.
“Could we meet now?” asks Joakim, adding that his wife and daughter have gone to see his in-laws.
“That’s fine,” says Joona. “Can you be at police headquarters in forty-five minutes?”
“Yes,” says Joakim, sounding infinitely weary.
“Sorry, my love,” Joona says to Anja, who is waiting for him in the middle of the dance floor. “But there’ll be no more dancing the tango tonight.”
“Your loss,” she says acidly.
“Spirits don’t agree with me,” Carlos slurs as they begin to lead him down towards the escalator and the exit.
“Don’t throw up,” says Anja sharply, “because if you do I’ll demand a raise.”
“Anja, Anja,” says Carlos, cut to the quick.
97
saturday, december 19: evening
Joakim is sitting in a white Mercedes directly opposite the entrance to National Police Headquarters. The interior light is on, and his face looks tired and lonely in its dim glow. He gives a start when Joona taps on the windscreen; he is deeply lost in thought.
“Hi,” he says, opening the door. “Get in.”
Joona climbs in and waits. The car smells vaguely of dog. The backseat is covered with a hairy blanket.
“When I think about myself,” says Joakim, “when I think about the way I was before Johan was born, it’s like thinking about a total stranger. I had a pretty tough time when I was growing up; I ended up in an institution for young offenders. I had been fostered out, but that doesn’t really mean anything; they just want you out of the system. But when I met Isabella, I pulled myself together and started studying properly. I qualified as an engineer the year Johan was born. I remember once we took a holiday.
I’d never been on holiday before. We went to Greece. Johan had just learned to walk.” Joakim Samuelsson shuts his eyes, shakes his head. “So long ago. He was so much like me … the same …”
He falls silent. A rat, damp and grey, scuttles along the dark pavement by bushes littered with rubbish.
“What did you want to tell me?” asks Joona after a while.
Joakim rubs his eyes. “Are you sure it was Lydia Everson who did this?” he asks, his voice weak.
Joona nods. “I’m absolutely sure.”
“Right,” whispers Joakim Samuelsson. He turns his exhausted, furrowed face toward Joona. “I do know her,” he says simply. “I know her very well. We were in the youth offenders’ institution together. When Lydia was only fourteen they found out she was pregnant. They were shit-scared at first: then they forced her to have an abortion. It was supposed to be kept quiet, but they botched the job. There were all sorts of complications, infections. But after a while she recovered.”
Joakim’s hands are shaking as he places them on the steering wheel.
“We moved in together when we left the institution. We lived in her house in Rotebro and tried to have a baby. She was completely obsessed with the idea. But nothing happened. So she went to see a gynaecologist. I’ll never forget that day, when she came back from the doctor’s.” He runs his shaking hands through his hair. “They said there was too much scarring from the abortion and the aftermath. The doctor told her she could never get pregnant.”
“And the one time she was pregnant,” says Joona, “was it yours?”
“Yes.”
“So you owed her a child,” Joona says, almost to himself.
