Some Kind of Peace: A Novel

by Camilla Grebe

  Markus looks searchingly at me. He doesn’t take his eyes off me.

  “Could Sara’s murder have anything… to do with you, Siri?”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, baffled.

  “In the suicide note, which we now must assume was written by someone other than Sara, there is quite a lot of criticism against you. Besides, Sara was found alongside your pier. One possibility, among many,” he emphasizes, “is that someone carried out the murder, at least in part, to get at you somehow.”

  He makes this last statement sound like a question.

  I am speechless, struck mute by shock. That Sara died because someone wanted to harm me seems awful and is, if possible, even worse than the notion that Sara took her own life.

  “But who would want to kill someone to get at me?”

  Aina looks just as perplexed but says nothing.

  “Think about it, Siri. Is there anyone who might want to hurt you?”

  I try to think, but all I see is Sara’s skinny dead body floating in the water beside the pier.

  “No one,” I say. “No one would want to hurt me.”

  Markus sighs and tries again. “Siri, has anything strange happened recently? Have you received any threatening telephone calls, have you been involved in an accident, a lovers’ quarrel, trouble at work?”

  Markus’s voice fades when he notices my face.

  “A number of things have happened,” I say hesitantly.

  I’m not sure whether I should mention the anonymous letter and come across as silly, but I decide it’s best to bring it up.

  “I got a strange letter,” I say faintly, getting up to retrieve the gray envelope.

  I hand it to Markus and sit down again. Aina looks at me questioningly while Markus calmly studies the envelope and photo.

  “I’ll keep this,” he says, not revealing what he is thinking. “Anything else?”

  “No, but I must admit that I’ve felt like I was being watched here at home during the summer.”

  “What do you mean, watched? Did you see anyone?”

  I shake my head. “No, I guess it’s more like a feeling.” I look apologetically at Markus. “I’m sorry, I can’t prove it.”

  In front of me I see the power switch and the wet footprint on the floor. I start to tell Markus in detail about my theories that someone was in the house while I was asleep. He looks skeptical, runs his hand through his shiny damp blond hair, but doesn’t say anything to indicate he doesn’t believe me. He changes the subject and returns to the letter.

  “Who would send you such a letter?”

  I remain silent a long while and stare out through my dark windows. The sea is no longer visible. At a distance I see something that must be navigation lights. I hear nothing aside from the wind, which seems to have increased in strength.

  “I don’t know. No one. Someone who wants to mess with me. Make me think I have a secret admirer…”

  I pause. Privately, I have played with the thought that maybe Sven sent the photo to annoy me, but now the whole thing seems absurd.

  “No one,” I answer again, more convinced this time.

  Silence again. Nothing but the wind dancing in the crowns of the trees and the waves crashing against the cliffs can be heard. Aina looks at me. I can’t read her expression, and I know she is going to demand an explanation as soon as Markus leaves. I want him to stay. I feel strangely attracted to him. The calm he seems to spread around him. His respectful attitude toward Sara. The fact that he listens to what I say, takes it seriously, and doesn’t treat me like a complete idiot.

  Aina clears her throat. “You ought to tell him, Siri. Tell him about… when the police caught you.”

  Markus looks at me but does not look particularly surprised.

  “You mean the DUI,” he says lightly.

  “How do you know about that?” I am confused.

  Markus shrugs. “It’s my job to know that sort of thing.”

  “Okay, well, I got a call that evening. Someone called me and said that Aina was at Stockholm South Hospital and that I needed to come at once. I got in the car. Right away. I know it was stupid, but I really thought Aina was dying and there’s no way to get a taxi out here.”

  “That’s easy to confirm. We can check whether anyone called you that night and, if so, where the call came from.”

  He makes a note, gets up, and I assume he is about to leave, but he stops and turns toward Aina and me.

  “Yes, one more thing. What kind of job did Sara have?”

  “She was unemployed,” I answer, without going into the details of her complicated arrangements with various employers.

  “Apparently she wore rather expensive clothes.”

  “I think that guy she met gave her money.”

  “The guy whose name you don’t know?”

  “The guy whose name I don’t know.” I nod, looking out my dark windows again.

  Markus has no more questions. We exchange a few pleasantries about how nice it is to live close to nature as I follow him to the door. Before he steps out into the dense darkness, he turns toward me one more time. For a brief moment I think he’s about to caress my cheek. I close my eyes but no fingers touch my face and I am ashamed of imagining things about this guy, who is not only a policeman, but much too young for me. Ten years younger. At least.

  Just a kid.

  He takes out his card, turns it over, and jots down some numbers on the back.

  “These are my numbers. On the back is my private cell number. You can call anytime. If you think of something or have anything to say that you think may add to the investigation. Anything at all. Anytime at all.”

  I take the card and put it in the pocket of the bathrobe. We remain standing close to each other, perhaps for a moment too long. Then we shake hands and Markus disappears out into the evening.

  Aina is sitting on the rug, looking up at me.

  “What was that letter? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Tentatively, I start telling her about the letter. About the mysterious photo. About the power outage during the storm.

  “Why, Siri? Why didn’t you say anything?” she looks primarily confused—not accusing, as I’d feared.

  I explain quietly my fear of making her fret too much. About the risk of wearing out my friends and the desire not to be a burden. To not be a burden to anyone.

  “Siri, sometimes you are such a doofus!”

  Aina moves closer to me and I place my head against her shoulder. For a long, long time we sit like that.

  Outside, the evening has turned into night.

  Date: September 14

  Time: 2:00 p.m.

  Place: Green Room, the practice

  Patient: Peter Carlsson

  Peter Carlsson and I have been talking for more than twenty minutes. We have devoted almost half the time to analyzing what triggers his compulsive thoughts about harming his girlfriend. He seems to be feeling better than the last time but is still tormented when he has to talk about the horrible things he doesn’t actually want to do but still can’t keep from imagining in detail.

  His nervous expression and apologies are starting to get on my nerves. There’s something that doesn’t add up. I don’t quite know what it is, but there’s something strange about Peter. Fake. Sometimes I sense that his apologies are only empty phrases that he has memorized and repeats intermittently in order to put up with himself. That what is actually behind his dapper façade remains hidden, a secret.

  “By the way,” he says suddenly, in the middle of a graphic description of his rape fantasies. “I ran into Charlotte Mimer in the hall. I didn’t know she came here. We worked together at Procter & Gamble.”

  I stop in midmotion and suddenly become guarded. I look at him. His expression is eager and open.

  “Although perhaps you can’t talk about your patients?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  He looks disappointed. “So you can’t say whether Charlotte is your patient?”<
br />
  “No.”

  Now I am mad at Peter, although I don’t show it. Everybody knows about therapist-client privilege.

  “Peter, I would like us to get back to what we were discussing earlier. You mentioned that sometimes you have thoughts relating to strangling?”

  “Well, I don’t always hold the woman around the throat, I mean, in those images,” Peter clarifies.

  He says “hold around the throat” when he means strangling. I assume it makes things easier for him.

  “It could also be that I am burning her with a cigarette. Only in my thoughts, of course,” he repeats, as if to indicate that this has nothing to do with reality.

  “Or cut her wrists and drown her,” I suddenly say, harshly.

  “Uh… yes, exactly.” Peter is baffled but also looks relieved, as if he couldn’t have said it better himself.

  “In principle it can be anything at all, anything that hurts…”

  Suddenly I can’t bear to listen anymore. I get up brusquely from my chair.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Peter, but that’s it for today.”

  Peter looks surprised, but there is something else in his eyes, too, something ugly. He looks satisfied. As if the fact that his therapist interrupted the session means that he has succeeded in proving to her that he is a monster.

  I throw open the door, rush out of the room, and run into Marianne, who seems to have been standing right outside. If I didn’t know better I would have thought she was eavesdropping. I try to explain the situation to her: I’m exhausted and Peter is behaving strangely. Can she help me?

  “You’ll have to think of some excuse,” I say.

  “Such as?” she asks vacantly, placing her hands on her round hips.

  “Say I’m pregnant and have to throw up or something. Women get really sensitive when they’re pregnant, don’t they?”

  Marianne stares at me in shock as I run toward the door.

  “Cancel all appointments this afternoon,” I add as I open the door to the stairwell and leave the office.

  I wander aimlessly around the streets by Katarina Church. It is liberating to get out in the cool air. The clouds hang heavy over the church steeple, as if the weather wanted to mimic my emotions. I sit down on a bench in the cemetery and look out over the gravestones. For once I feel no remorse for how I behaved. Listening to Peter Carlsson’s violent thoughts doesn’t feel right. Not to me, not to him.

  The image of Sara’s dead face appears again. Sara. Who could have wanted to hurt her? Did someone kill her to get at me? The idea seems unlikely. I wonder about Markus’s words: “a possibility” they are working on, one “among many.” What other theories might the police have?

  I ransack my memory, trying to remember what Sara told me. She had a history of substance abuse. I know she did drugs during the time she was homeless. Not large quantities or anything heavy, not according to her, anyway. Even so, the fact that she used drugs also means that she must have come into contact with any number of shady characters. Maybe there is someone from her past who wanted revenge over some old injustice. A debt? Unfinished business? Drug money? This whole chain of thought feels absurd and improbable. Why would someone take revenge on Sara now? After all these years. There is also the letter, the suicide note that isn’t really a suicide note. The letter that Sara’s murderer must have written. And whoever composed the letter knew about me. Knew that Sara was in therapy. Even knew what Sara and I talked about in detail. I know that most murders are committed by someone close to the victim and that it is unusual for the perpetrator to be a stranger. Who was close to Sara? There are several girlfriends she mentioned during our conversations. Linda and Nathalie. Broken young girls, just like Sara. I have a hard time imagining that either of them would have attacked her. I imagine that the murderer is a man, not only because murderers are most often men but also because the person Sara met recently is a man. A man who behaved strangely, to boot. I try to make a summary of sorts of everything I know about him.

  He is older, but what does “older” mean? Sara was twenty-five. What did “older” mean to her? Thirty-five, like me? Or fifty-five, like her father? My impression was that we were talking about a man who is older than me.

  He has plenty of money. Sara was showered with expensive designer clothing and other presents. But what does that really say? Stockholm is teeming with rich guys in their forties.

  The main thing that sets this man apart is that for some reason he approached Sara, courted her, gained her confidence, but did not want to have sex with her. Why would a middle-aged man have this kind of a relationship with a young woman? Why? I can’t answer. But I know it’s not normal. I think about how worried I was when Sara first told me about the man she had met. My intuition that something wasn’t right. I suddenly feel convinced that my intuition was correct. Something was wrong.

  I search my memory to see if I can remember whether Sara mentioned how they met. She may have said something about this, but I can’t remember. The video recordings of the therapy sessions, I think. I have to look at the videotapes. Maybe there are additional facts there, details I’ve forgotten. I decide to look through the tapes when the police, who borrowed them to make copies, give them back to me. And when I can bear to. Watching Sara curled up in the chair, talking about her life as she puffs on one of her endless cigarettes, seems impossible right now.

  The room is bright, with white walls. In the corner is a well-kept Kinnarps desk with a shiny surface. There doesn’t appear to be a speck of dust. On the bookshelves, also from Kinnarps, are Jofa binders arranged by color. I am sitting in a visitor’s chair at a small table in what must be a designated area for questioning. It strikes me that the furniture and the arrangement of the room are not unlike my own. A room for work, a room for talk.

  On the other side of the table are Sonja and Markus, the police officers on Sara’s case. Unlike our previous conversation, this is clearly an interrogation. The tone is friendly but formal. There is not a trace of warm blankets or refills on glasses of wine. On the table in front of me is a mug filled with coffee-machine cappuccino that Markus made for me. “From our new coffee machine,” he announced, not without irony in his voice.

  It is Sonja who runs the meeting with her rapid, slightly nervous conversational style. Markus sits beside her, taking notes and interrupting now and then with a question.

  “How much do you know about Sara’s substance abuse?”

  Informing me that the circumstances surrounding Sara’s death are still unclear and that it is no longer a possibility that Sara committed suicide but that she was killed instead, Sonja steers the conversation to Sara’s past.

  “A little… not that much really. But you watched the tapes, right?”

  “Well, yes, we’ve copied them and are in the process of looking through them. By the way, you can take the original tapes with you when you leave. In any event, we assume you must have talked with each other also when the camera wasn’t on. Hence the question.”

  “Sara used drugs, and then she quit. On her own. Because she wanted to.”

  “Do you know that Sara has a record?”

  “Yes, I know that she had been arrested for shoplifting, and maybe for possession, too?”

  “And for handling stolen goods. We also know that she prostituted herself occasionally. Did you know about that too?”

  For a moment I remain silent. That Sara had prostituted herself is news to me, and the information makes me feel sick. I can imagine how bad things must have gotten for Sara when she decided to sell her body and can only guess how much of it she must have repressed in order to even bear it.

  I shake my head. “No, I didn’t know that.”

  Somehow this is embarrassing. As if I ought to have known all of Sara’s secrets, as if my ignorance on this matter makes me a bad therapist, underscoring my incompetence.

  “No? So you don’t know if she was still in touch with individuals from that period in her life?”
r />   I shake my head.

  Sonja sighs quietly.

  “We still don’t know whether Sara’s death is connected to her past or if in some way it’s connected to you. There are signs that indicate the crime may have been aimed against you.”

  I nod again. Markus had already explained this to me.

  “And what is your relationship to drugs?”

  “Drugs?” I repeat Sonja’s question mechanically.

  “I have no relationship to drugs. That is, not illegal drugs. Now and then I drink a glass of wine, but nothing more.”

  “You were recently taken in for a DUI? I’d say that sounds like more than a couple glasses of wine.”

  “That was a special situation, of course I never would drive under the influence otherwise, but as I already explained to your colleague…”

  Sonja almost imperceptibly raises an eyebrow and looks briefly in Markus’s direction. I suddenly have the feeling that Markus hasn’t told Sonja about our conversation.

  “Assistant Detective Stenberg may have already discussed this with you, but now I’d like to.”

  I am surprised by her sharp tone and notice that Markus looks embarrassed, shifting back and forth on his chair. I feel guilty for having put him in an awkward situation but also realize it’s not my job to protect him.

  “No, I do not use any illegal drugs. Never have. No, I don’t usually drive drunk, but someone had called me and said that my best friend was dying. I got scared and was shocked and… I got in the car. Half-baked, stupid, idiotic, I know.”

  “The majority of people we bring in for DUIs have extremely good excuses for driving a car in a state of intoxication.”

  “Yes, but, as I’ve explained—”

  “Your husband died in a diving accident?”

  Sonja changes the subject yet again, and I feel confused and deceived. As if Sonja’s other questions were only a maneuver, intended to bring me to this exact point. I suddenly realize that this is what happens to crime victims. Nothing is private anymore. Nothing can remain secret. Sara’s life will be exposed in the slightest detail. I’ve heard people call it psychological autopsy. And my life will also be scrutinized. My secrets will be disrobed and exposed as well.