The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  Carin Gerhardsen

  THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE

  Contents

  Katrineholm, October 1968

  Stockholm, November 2006, Monday Evening

  Tuesday Evening

  Diary of a Murderer, November 2006, Tuesday

  Wednesday Morning

  Wednesday Afternoon

  Thursday Evening

  Friday Evening

  Diary of a Murderer, November 2006, Saturday

  Saturday Morning

  Saturday Evening

  Monday Morning

  Diary of a Murderer, November 2006, Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday Evening

  Thursday Morning

  Thursday Evening

  Friday Morning

  Friday Afternoon

  Diary of a Murderer, November 2006, Friday

  Friday Evening

  Saturday Morning

  Saturday Afternoon

  Saturday Evening

  Sunday Morning

  Sunday Afternoon

  Monday Morning

  Monday Afternoon

  Monday Evening

  Stockholm, December 2006

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE

  Carin Gerhardsen was born in 1962 in Katrineholm, Sweden. Originally a mathematician, she enjoyed a successful career as an IT consultant before turning her hand to writing crime fiction. The Gingerbread House is the first title in the Hammarby series, novels following Detective Inspector Conny Sjöberg and his murder investigation team. Carin now lives in Stockholm with her husband and their two children. She is currently working on the seventh title in the series.

  Katrineholm, October 1968

  The brown Queen Anne-style villa is a stately building, perched at the top of a grass-covered hill and surrounded by tall pine trees. The white corner posts and window casings, with their rounded corners, give it an inviting, fairy-tale shimmer. In summer the pines offer shade to the children playing around the house. But now, in autumn, they look almost threatening, like stern guards tasked with protecting the preschool against the winter cold and other unwanted guests. The first snow sits on the ground like a wet rag and has not yet melted away. All is silent, except for a dog barking somewhere in the distance.

  Suddenly the door flies open and out swarm the children: boisterous children in clothes new and old, neat and tattered; tall and short children, skinny and round; blond children, dark children, with braids, freckles, glasses or caps; children walking and jumping, chattering and listening; children running ahead and children following behind.

  The door slams shut, then opens again, and out walks a little girl with a white fur cap and red quilted jacket. Behind her is a boy in a dark-blue quilted jacket, with a scarf and a red, white and black Katrineholm SC cap – KSC has to be your team, at least in this part of town. The two children do not speak to each other; instead the girl, whose name is Katarina, walks quickly down the hill until she reaches the big, black iron gate. With some effort, she opens the gate just enough to slip through before it closes. Right behind her comes the boy, whose name is Thomas, and before he opens the gate to squeeze out he stops for a moment and takes a deep breath.

  Once out on the pavement, his fears are confirmed: all the children have clustered on the opposite street corner. He sees how Katarina, apparently without hesitation, crosses the street, right into the jaws of the wild beast. Thomas makes a quick decision and, instead of crossing the street, turns left to take a detour home. He has taken only a few steps before they are on her. One of the girls, the resourceful Ann-Kristin, always with a sarcastic smile and a malicious gleam in her eye, tears off Katarina’s cap and throws it to Hans – ‘King Hans’ – as the other children shout and laugh with delight.

  Thomas stops, wondering whether he should help Katarina, but before he can complete the thought the children catch sight of him. At a clear signal from Hans, they rush eagerly back across the street and throw themselves on Thomas. The rest of the children follow like bloodthirsty dogs, and Katarina remains behind, astonished and relieved: for whatever reason, it was not her turn this time. She leans over and picks up her no longer particularly white fur cap, puts it on anyway, then crosses the street to view the spectacle at close range.

  Where does this resourcefulness come from? And this unfailing bond that unites twenty-one, sometimes twenty-two children out of twenty-three? And the obvious but unspoken authority of the leaders when half the group, acting suddenly and enthusiastically as one, ties a terrified little boy to a lamp-post with skipping ropes and scarves, while the other half gathers stones to hurt him?

  Thomas, incapable of offering resistance, incapable of screaming, sits on the wet, cold asphalt. Unmoving, silent. He looks at his schoolmates. A few throw rocks at him, at his head, his face, his body. Someone bangs his head against the lamp-post over and over again while another whips him with a skipping rope. A few of the children are laughing, others whisper with condescending, knowing expressions on their little faces, and a few simply stand there impassively and watch. One of those is Katarina; she gets to be one of them now – her schoolmates.

  At some point during the assault the teacher herself passes by on the pavement. She casts a quick glance at the tied-up boy and his playmates, and raises her hand to wave goodbye to a few of the girls standing closest.

  Just as suddenly as it started, they are done. In half a minute the children have scattered and are once again just ordinary, delightful kids on their way home from school. They go their separate ways, one by one, or two by two, perhaps three or four together. Left on the pavement is a six-year-old boy with an aching body and an insurmountable sorrow.

  Stockholm, November 2006, Monday Evening

  It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but it was already dark. Snow was falling in large white sheets that melted as soon as they touched the ground. Passing cars blinded him with their headlights, and he had to take care not to get splashed as he walked along the pavement. Why were the cars going so fast that they sprayed him with dirty water? Drivers weren’t supposed to splash pedestrians; that was in the Highway Code. But maybe they didn’t see him; maybe he wasn’t visible walking in the darkness, with his rather unassuming, short body, in his dark clothing. His posture was perhaps not the best either; he probably did look a little silly because his feet pointed outwards, like a clown’s. But he was not a clown.

  He was a quiet person who never got into arguments, probably because he never contradicted anyone. This was not really all that remarkable, since he seldom saw anybody. Except at his job, of course, out in Järfälla, where he worked in the post room of a big electronics company. He delivered internal and external mail to all the engineers, secretaries, managers and everyone else who worked there. That was all he did; he was not entrusted, for example, with sorting the mail. There were other, more qualified persons who could handle such things, who could make important decisions, like deciding whether the mail was properly addressed.

  He was very bad at making decisions. When he thought about it, he seldom had an opinion of his own about anything. If, on some random occasion, he was asked what he thought about something, he could not come up with a satisfactory answer. His only real desire was to be accepted by those around him. He was forty-four years old and, as yet, this had never happened.

  The question was: If this one small desire were to be fulfilled at some point, would he then move up a rung on the ladder of his needs and suddenly start asserting opinions about other things too? Do you automatically get to do that when you are a valued person?

  He looked up at the windows of the building on the other side of Fleminggatan. They were illuminated and pleasantly inviting in the
autumn darkness, with potted plants and curtains, lamps with beautiful shades, colourful fans and other decorative objects. Some windows already displayed Advent candleholders, as if to further underscore the picturesqueness of the scene, and behind every illuminated window a happy family, a happy couple or at least a happy individual could be found. This was clear from the warm light and cosy setting.

  His own window, on the other hand, gaped dark and empty, except for a sparsely foliated Ficus and the cord trailing from a blind. The kitchen window was, likewise, completely bare, except for an old transistor radio sitting there in lonely majesty. He did actually read the occasional home decorating magazine with interest. Not because he was looking for inspiration for his own home. Why waste effort on an apartment that no one else was ever in? Just him, one small, insignificant person – or maybe no one at all. He was not visible to the cars that splashed water from the gutter in the autumn darkness, and he was not heard – in fact, he hardly heard himself. No, he read home decor magazines for the same reason he looked up at other people’s windows. In his imagination he moved to another world, a world of friendly people with warm smiles and big, soft, colourful cushions on their couches.

  Today he had almost been offered a piece of cake at work. It didn’t happen often, for in the post room there was never any reason to celebrate. Besides, he was almost never there for more than a few minutes at a time, when he picked up freshly sorted mail to be delivered to other departments.

  However, when he dropped off the mail at section eleven, the workers were all sitting around eating cake, for some reason unknown to him. He always felt a little uncomfortable delivering mail to section eleven in particular. They always seemed to be having a coffee break right then, so they could see him as he arrived, in his ridiculous post-room uniform. Maybe ‘uniform’ was too grand a word – it was just a pair of blue trousers and a blue jacket, but in any event, he was the only one dressed that way and it was never good to stick out.

  And so they saw him there, or to be more precise one person saw him. A real joker, who made fun of everything and everyone, and had lots of opinions. The others laughed at his jokes and seemed to share his opinions for the most part, for he was never contradicted. ‘Hey there, Mr Postman!’ he said today, sitting with his arms crossed and his legs stretched out under the break table. ‘Would you like some cake?’ Without expecting an answer he continued, ‘If you do, then you’d better get going on your little scooter and fetch that circuit board from the hardware division first, like I told you yesterday and the day before yesterday. Is everyone in the post room a little slow or is it just you?’ Laughter from the others at the table, maybe at the mail deliverer, or maybe out of habit. There would be no cake for him, for he had no authority to act as a courier and run errands for people. His task was simply to dole out the mail that was assigned to him.

  Mentally, he was not slow. True, he had had no education to speak of, but he did read a lot. He was probably not of above-average intelligence, but he was not slow. He had done quite well in school for the first few years, but that had to come to an end. In Katrineholm, you did not do well in school; it was absolutely forbidden. Actually, you weren’t supposed to be good at anything, except bandy and football and that sort of thing. There were definite, unspoken rules for everything: what you could be good at (sports), what you should not be good at (music, languages, crafts, conduct), what you should be mediocre in (any other school subject), what you should wear (store-bought clothes of the right brands), what you shouldn’t wear (caps, glasses, anything handmade), where you should live (apartment building), what political values you should have (Social Democrat, but definitely not communist), and what bandy team you should cheer for (KSC, not Värmbols). Above all, you were not allowed to excel or be different in any way.

  But for a grown man in Stockholm, other rules applied. Here, individual ideas were appreciated; a deviant appearance was often positively accepted. Above all, education and self-confidence were necessities.

  Life was hard. His mother had died when he was very young, and his father was a shift worker at a printing company and did not have much time left over for his son. He was a loving father, but lacked the skills to run a household or bring up a child. After decades of chain smoking, he too died at an early age, leaving behind a great void.

  From the very start he had been different, but he had never been able to figure out exactly how. Well, he had the wrong dialect to start with – he had spent the first few years of his life in Huskvarna. He was also forced to wear a cap, but still – that was probably not the main reason. No doubt there was something wrong with his personality, even then. As a little boy he had been happy and outgoing. He liked people, but he had realized early on that people did not like him in return. And this soon took the individuality and good humour out of him. It was probably there – in preschool, the year that Swedish children start formal schooling before entering primary school – that he began to turn into the person he was today. The constant physical abuse, interspersed with ostracism and name-calling, had not only transformed him into a silent shadow, it had deprived him of all self-confidence as well.

  Even so, the next year he started primary school as an enthusiastic, curious and interested seven-year-old. But raising his hand to answer questions caused problems from the very start. You had to be careful not to think you were somebody. If he was asked a question that he could answer, the other children giggled and exchanged looks. If his answer was wrong, there was laughter. Several of his old tormentors from preschool were in the same class, and the other children were quickly initiated in how he should be treated. At playtime they beat him up, made up mean rhymes about him, or else he stood alone, watching the other children play games. Sometimes he did not even go to school, but stayed at home in bed, either sick – headache and stomachache – or pretending to be sick. His marks suffered, and at sixteen he dropped out. He was given a so-called extended trainee position, which he did not choose himself, in a haberdasher’s shop where he did what he was told.

  As far as he was concerned, his schooling was a wasted decade, but maybe things were better for children growing up now. On the TV news the other day there had been something about the successful ‘Katrineholm Project’, as the news anchor called it. In the interview, the pompous county councilman Göran Meijer called it ‘Project Forest Hill’, after the primary school (and former preschool) where the successful anti-bullying programme had first been introduced. He wondered whether the new methods, described with big phrases like ‘respect for the individual’, ‘physical contact’, ‘adult supervision’ and ‘mentoring’, might even allow a Huskvarna dialect and Värmbols caps.

  After his stint in the haberdasher’s shop he moved to Stockholm, where he lived with his great-uncle in a studio apartment on Kungsholmen. Here he completed his education at night school. Against all odds, and without further qualifications, he managed to get the job he still had. His great-uncle was long since dead and the apartment was now his.

  Suddenly his thoughts were interrupted and he stopped short on the zebra crossing, standing in the middle of the street outside his own apartment building. There was something very familiar about the man who had just passed, and without knowing why he turned and followed him. The clear blue eyes and blond, curly hair, the somewhat eager but purposeful expression, a scar by his left eyebrow, the way he walked – everything added up. But was it really possible that after all these years he would recognize a person he had not seen since he was six or seven years old? It was probably just that he had been thinking right then about the attention given to the Katrineholm Project, making him see ghosts.

  This uncertainty was based on common sense, but emotionally he had no doubts. In his mind’s eye he saw that man almost every day. There was no doubt that it was him.

  The man took the stairs down to the metro and rapidly approached the turnstile, where, with a practised hand, he slid his railcard through the reader and pushed through. He walked all
the way down the long escalator that led into the underworld. On the platform he pulled a newspaper out of his jacket pocket and thumbed through it, waiting for the train.

  He kept ten or twelve metres from the man the whole time, and then sat down on the bench behind him. Thoughts were flying through his head and he could not give any reasonable explanation for his actions. During the last twenty years he had not done anything out of the ordinary: going to work, going home, shopping, eating, sleeping, going to the movies or taking an occasional walk, reading and watching TV. And then suddenly he found himself down in the metro, on his way to an unknown destination, following a man he had not seen in almost forty years. He was filled with an unexpected sense of well-being. Something was happening in his life; he was on an adventure, and he was enjoying it.

  * * *

  It was always pleasant to settle down in the carriage with a newspaper on the way home from work. He began his day at the estate agency at seven in the morning, so that he could be home before the day was over and spend some time with his kids before they went to bed. He had to be up by five-thirty and seldom got to bed before eleven-thirty, so he suffered from a constant shortage of sleep. But he had learned to live with it, and in a few years the kids would more or less take care of themselves. Then he and Pia would be able to sleep in on weekends.

  They had three children, three wonderful children who, despite their stubbornness and their whining and their unlimited energy levels, still made him feel very good. It was the same with Pia, whom he had met at college, although they did not get together until eight years later when they met again at a party. She worked part-time as a dental hygienist in the suburb where they lived, and their relationship was still exceptionally good after fifteen years. They were best friends and could talk to each other about almost anything.

  He was basically happy with his work too, even if he did not always like having to show properties on weekends. The company was doing well, and that was the main thing. Work as an estate agent meant freedom and variety, and he and his partner took home a good salary every month, so he wasn’t complaining.