by Håkan Nesser
There’s something about my thoughts, she interrupted herself, just as the train jolted into motion again. There’s something seriously wrong. Anything whatsoever seems able to demand entry to my head. And be granted it. I must find my barriers. I must put a stop to this. I must . . . I don’t recognize my own consciousness, and what . . . what sort of ‘I’ is going to be left? Who am I, and what is it I’m not recognizing?
She picked up a discarded copy of Metro as an antidote; started turning the pages but read not a word. She remained within her own terrified mind instead, and turned to that god she did not believe in.
Please help me, she prayed. Let me not lose my mind. Let my talk with my sister at least be a small step in the right direction. Don’t punish me for my arrogance.
This last thought was one that had been creeping over her in recent days. Arrogance. That the loss of Henrik – or his absence – was a kind of payback for having valued the wrong things in her life. That she had been egotistical, that she had let her career affect her family, that she should have had different priorities altogether. Purely clinically and purely intellectually, she could naturally dismiss this as an automatic and obsessive thought: this was how people thought in situations like this – but in the darkness of her heart it felt like an equation that was gaining greater validity, the more time passed. This was how the balance sheet looked. This was the punishment for her neglect.
It was just past seven thirty when she checked in at the Hotel Terminus opposite Central station. Her room was on the fifth floor, from which she could look out over the network of tracks, the City Hall and Kungsholmen – over stretches of water, bridges and buildings whose names she did not know. I could move to Stockholm, the thought struck her. If I don’t find my son, I might as well leave everything else as well; find a job at a hospital here, Danderyd or Karolinska, and retreat into absolute anonymity.
She drew the curtains, turned back into the room and clenched her teeth so she would not start to cry. What the hell was the point of such illusions and delusions, she thought. Why imagine it would be possible to carry on living? Why imagine Kristina would be able to cast even the slightest light on anything?
In the minibar she found two whisky miniatures. Better than nothing, she thought, unscrewing the cap of one of them.
Fortified by this small amount of alcohol, she rang her sister twenty minutes later. She told her simply that she had been signed off work for some time now and was not feeling great; this was certainly news to Kristina, but she kept her comments to a minimum. Said it was only natural in the circumstances. Or something equally trivial. Ebba told her she was in Stockholm on other business for a few days, and asked if Kristina would mind if they met and talked.
‘What about?’ asked Kristina.
‘About Robert and Henrik,’ said Ebba.
‘What would that achieve?’ asked Kristina.
Ebba was suddenly finding it hard to breathe. As if the oxygen in the small room had run out in an instant. ‘Because – because you seemed to be getting along with Henrik when we were there,’ she forced out. ‘You’ve always got on well with him. It occurred to me that he might – that he might have said something to you, the evening he went missing.’
It was quiet at the other end of the line for a few seconds before Kristina answered. No, she said, Henrik had not done that. Of course not, she would have said something if he had. Told Ebba and the police and anybody who asked, what was Ebba thinking? But if she dropped in the following afternoon, they could still have a cup of tea and a chat. Between one and three would be the best time to guarantee there would be neither husband nor child to disturb them.
But she shouldn’t get her hopes up that Kristina could be of any help.
Ebba thanked her – as if she had been granted some sort of favour – and hung up. She just sat there for a while, not knowing what to do. Turned on the TV and watched the news for a bit. Felt herself shrinking. Switched it off, had a shower and went to bed. It was only half past nine. She turned out the light and took five deep breaths, as she always did to banish the worries and trials of the day.
But sleep did not come to meet her in the way she had expected. Instead, a memory emerged. It crystallized out of the dense darkness of her own mind and of the hotel room, and its intention was not to heal.
One summer, quite a few years ago. The boys must have been twelve and seven. They had rented a house on Jutland for the whole summer. She had arranged it; a colleague at the hospital was in the USA to do some research and did not want their place standing empty. Leif and the boys went down as soon as school finished, while she worked until the end of the first week in July. But the plan was for her to go down there for four or five days over midsummer, too.
Leif had Kristina to help him. Not that he needed help, it was more a case of Kristina needing a bit of stability for a few weeks, having nowhere to live after the break-up of a love affair; this was long before Jakob Willnius came onto the scene.
Ebba drove all the way down from Sundsvall for that midsummer visit. She took the night ferry across the Skagerrak from Varberg to Grenaa. She reached the house, right down on the North Sea coast, just north of Sønderborg, early in the morning. They were all asleep, it was still only about six o’clock. It was a big house in a beautiful setting between the dunes; she had only heard it described by the doctor who owned it, and then by Leif on the phone, and it took her a while to orientate herself. She tiptoed round from room to room, up and down stairs, and finally she found her whole family asleep in a huge double bed under a wide skylight in the loft. All four of them: her husband Leif, her sister Kristina, her sons Henrik and Kristoffer. The boys were in the middle, Kristina and Leif on either side, and there was something about that picture, that grouping, which made her heart beat out of time. They were all facing the same way, like teaspoons in a kitchen drawer, with Leif at the back. The quilt was bunched up at their feet, she could see their sleeping bodies, the boys in shorts, her Co-op manager in pyjamas, Kristina in briefs and a T-shirt, all lightly, just lightly touching the one in front of them in their sleep – and it all exuded such deep harmony and such security that something started to swell in her throat. It was like a picture, just like an idyllic painting of a happy family.
She swallowed and swallowed, but the questions she was trying to force back down in the process kept bubbling up. Why aren’t I lying there with them? How come Leif and I have never – never ever – slept like that with the boys? Why am I standing here?
Or: Why am I the one standing here?
She did not wake them. She crept back down the stairs, found a bed in another room and slipped under a blanket. She was woken four hours later by Leif, bringing her a cup of coffee and a Danish pastry. He looked at her in some surprise and asked whether she’d had an allergic reaction to something; she admitted that there must have been some variety of pollen in the air, and she had got through a whole packet of tissues on the way down.
No, this was certainly not a memory designed to heal.
27
The woman was small and slightly ruddy-faced.
Gunnar Barbarotti was fleetingly put in mind of a female marathon runner. Thin as a rake, not an excess gram on her body, she sat very upright in her seat with her hands folded on the table in front of her. The look in those green eyes was open and alert.
Thirty-five, he judged. Strong-willed, had undoubtedly been through a lot.
He nodded to her. She stood up and shook hands. First with him, then with Eva Backman. Tillgren, officer in training, shut the door behind them.
They sat down. Eva Backman started the tape recorder and went through the formalities. Indicated to the woman that she could start.
‘My name is Linda Eriksson. I live in Gothenburg.’
Eva Backman stuck one thumb in the air to indicate the player was recording properly.
‘I work as a physiotherapist at Sahlgrenska hospital. I’m thirty-two years old, married with two children . . . will
that do?’
‘That’ll do,’ confirmed Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘Can you tell us why you’re here?’
She cleared her throat and launched in.
‘I’m here because I have a sister,’ she said. ‘Or rather, had a sister. Jane, her name was Jane . . . our surname was Andersson as children, but she became Almgren when she got married. I don’t really know how to . . . hrrm. I’m sorry.’
‘Have a drink of water,’ said Eva Backman.
‘Thanks.’
She poured some mineral water into a glass and took a gulp. Sighed and clasped her hands again. ‘Well the thing is, my sister died a few weeks ago. She was run over by a bus in Oslo, I don’t – I don’t know what she was doing there. She’d been living here in Kymlinge for a couple of years. My sister wasn’t . . . exactly well.’
‘Wasn’t exactly well?’ queried Barbarotti.
‘No. She had a personality disorder, as they say, and she’d been that way for quite a long time.’
‘How old was your sister?’ asked Eva Backman.
‘Thirty-four. Two years older than me. I don’t really know where to start, it’s such a long story.’
‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ Gunnar Barbarotti assured her. ‘Why not take it from the beginning?’
Linda Eriksson nodded and drank a bit more water.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I suppose you could say I come from a problem family.’
She attempted an apologetic smile, as if she wanted to say sorry for the fact that they even existed. Barbarotti felt washed by a wave of sympathy for this woman, delicate but strong. He decided, without really being conscious of it, not to question anything she said.
‘But this is the price, of course,’ she went on. ‘There are three of us, and I’m the youngest. My mother’s been in a mental hospital for some years now, my brother Henry, he’s the eldest, has at least two years of his prison sentence left to serve . . . and then there was Jane. I’ve never seen my father; Henry and Jane had a different one, but he’s dead. So they’re my half-brother and sister. My dad was apparently English . . . I don’t know if it’s true, but my mother used to say he was.’
‘But you all grew up together?’ put in Eva Backman. ‘You and your half-siblings?’
‘On and off.’
‘Where?’ asked Gunnar Barbarotti.
‘All over. I think I lived in ten different places in my first fifteen years,’ said Linda Eriksson with a quick smile. ‘Including two years here in Kymlinge. Henry’s eight years older than me, and he left home pretty early. But Jane and I . . . well yes, we grew up as sisters. We only had each other, you might say.’
‘If we concentrate on Jane,’ suggested Barbarotti. ‘Did you stay in regular contact with each other as adults, too?’
Linda Eriksson shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid not. It just didn’t work. Keeping in touch with Jane would have been like . . . well, like being dragged down by someone who was drowning.’
‘Why?’ said Eva Backman.
‘Because she was the way she was. It started when she was still at secondary school, she was already trying out drugs – all sorts. Permanently obsessed with herself and her problems, it’s all part of the clinical picture, they say. She spent time in various treatment centres after she turned eighteen, and that was when we started falling out of touch. Though in the end there was one treatment that seemed to work, or she got out of the drug habit, at any rate, and found a man . . . and the other part of the story is that our mother was in a very bad way as well. I moved out when I was in the first year of upper secondary – social services and a school psychologist arranged somewhere for me to live independently.’
‘And Jane?’ said Gunnar Barbarotti.
‘Well, she got together with this Germund. They got married and had two children. Moved to Kalmar. I thought they were doing fine, but when I went to visit them a couple of years later, I realized I’d been wrong. Neither of them had a proper job, he was a recovering alcoholic, of course, and they’d joined some kind of sect and were up to all sorts of weird things. I only went to see them the once, and six months later I heard it had all come crashing down. Jane had tried to kill her husband and children, there was some kind of jealousy motive behind it, and in the end she was sentenced to secure psychiatric care and lost the right to see her children.’
‘And her husband got custody?’
‘Yes. He was considered capable, evidently. But I don’t know, there was a lot of trouble even after . . . though it was probably mainly Jane’s fault.’
‘Were you in touch with her – or with them – during this period?’ asked Eva Backman.
‘Hardly at all. The information came through my mother. And she wasn’t always the most reliable of sources. Anyway, Germund moved abroad with the children about . . . let me see, it must be two years ago now, and I don’t think Jane ever managed to find out where they lived. She was in and out of residential care, but about a year ago she was discharged, and she seems to have coped, somehow. Not declared fit for work, of course, but as far as I know – or as far as I knew, perhaps I should say – she was coping on her own. Naturally I had no idea about – about this.’
She threw her arms wide and her apologetic expression returned. As if she were the irresponsible one, and it was her negligence that had led to the catastrophe.
‘How long has it been since you were last in touch with your sister?’ asked Barbarotti.
‘I haven’t seen her for over a year. But I talked to her on the phone. The last time was in March.’
‘What did you talk about?’
‘She wanted to borrow money. I said no and she slammed down the phone.’
‘When did you find out she was dead?’
‘The day she died. They rang from the hospital in Oslo. She had my number on a scrap of paper in her purse, apparently.’
‘The twenty-fifth of July?’
‘Yes. We were just back from a two-week holiday in Germany. My husband’s from there.’
‘Tell us what happened after that,’ prompted Eva Backman.
‘Well, it was me who dealt with the practical side. I went to Oslo to identify the body. I contacted the undertaker and arranged the funeral and the inventory of her estate and all that. I didn’t bother trying to get any help from my brother and mother, but they did come to the funeral. Three mourners plus two prison guards and a psychiatric nurse – not exactly a cheery occasion.’
‘What date was the funeral?’
‘The fourth of August.’
‘Here in Kymlinge?’
‘Yes. She lived here these past few years, like I said.’
‘And then?’
‘Well, then there was her flat to see to. I managed to get the landlord to agree to half the month’s rent as long as I got everything cleared out by the fifteenth, and it was last Monday I came up here and started to sort it out.’
Eva Backman looked in her notebook. ‘Fabriksgatan 26, is that right?’
‘That’s right. I’d set aside three days, not that she owned much stuff, of course, but it still takes time. I decided to get rid of everything. I arranged with a firm of hauliers that they would come and fetch the things and take them to various charities, or direct to the tip – I know she was my sister, but I simply couldn’t face poking about in her dismal life. She hadn’t kept anything memorable either. No photo albums or anything like that.’
‘Her children and former husband?’
‘I discussed it with the police and a couple of social workers and we all more or less agreed it would be best to leave them in peace. There was nothing to gain by dragging Jane into their lives again. It may sound a bit cynical, but that was what we decided.’
‘How old are the children, did you say?’ asked Eva Backman.
‘Ten and eight.’
‘Sounds like a sensible decision,’ observed Gunnar Barbarotti. ‘So you were clearing out her flat, and it was then that . . .’
Linda Eriksson closed her eye
s for a moment. She took a deep breath as if to steel herself. The thin shoulders in the green cotton dress rose and fell. Gunnar Barbarotti thought again that this was a woman he admired. Her life had the worst possible starting point, but she had come through. He exchanged a glance with Eva Backman, and thought he could detect she was feeling the same.
‘Yes. I started with the other rooms, left the kitchen till last. It was this morning, and . . . well, when I started emptying the freezer, it was then I caught sight of those . . . fingers. Sorry . . .’
A shudder ran through her thin body, and for a second Barbarotti thought she was going to throw up on the table. But she recovered. Shook her head and drank some of her water. Eva Backman put a hand on her arm.
‘Thank you. Sorry, I think I must still be in shock. It was so awful when I realized what was in that plastic bag . . .’
Gunnar Barbarotti waited, and gestured to his colleague to say nothing either.
‘It was an arm. Cut off at the elbow. A supermarket bag, from ICA, one of those red-and-white ones, and I must have just sat there staring at it for ten minutes before I was able to do anything. I’d started dumping everything from the freezer in a bin bag, ready to throw it in the refuse room, and if those fingers hadn’t been sticking out, I might not have noticed anything . . . but then I opened another bag. At first I couldn’t work out what it was, but then I saw it was part of a pelvis.’
She stopped. A few seconds passed.
‘A man?’ said Eva Backman.
