by Bragelonne
AGNETA STOLE A KISS from her son. Adam was always excited when he was about to leave for Sweden. He was never happier than when spending time with his father.
As long as she could remember, Erich had unconditionally governed her son’s heart. On the orders of King Ebner, because maternal milk was best for the child, Agneta had breastfed Adam until he was sixteen months old and endured the painful bites of his small, voracious teeth. She alone had been the one to rise at night to calm her son down, to change his nappies, sing him lullabies, look after him. But Adam had eyes only for his father. The way he looked at him … eyes so full of love and admiration, as if Erich was perfection personified. There were times when she felt she was not even part of the same universe as Adam; she had become invisible, whatever efforts she went to, to make his childhood happy, healthy and balanced. ‘A mother’s role is thankless,’ her own mother had always said, when she had been an unruly teenager. ‘You’ll understand that when you become one yourself,’ she would say again and again. Of course, mother.
If only her parents could still have been around … Ever since the day Erich had abandoned her after she had informed him of her pregnancy, she had missed them even more. Agneta had revisited her memories and regrets – all the occasions when she had unwittingly hurt them because of her capricious nature. Had she known how little precious time with them she had left, she would have acted differently. They had died much too early. She had still been only nineteen and so immature. She hadn’t been ‘complete’, as her father put it. Her parents would have seen what she hadn’t in Erich and warned her.
Nothing had worked out the way she had hoped. Erich catered to their needs, and Adam and she were never left hungry. Apart from that he had been a despicable life companion.
When she had first known him, he was already locking himself inside his laboratory all weekend. Following Adam’s birth, though, he spent all his free time there, apart from the daily, sacred hour when he would take a walk with his son. She was never allowed to accompany them. She herself no longer had any place in Erich’s life. She had merely become his son’s nanny.
Never, not on a single occasion since her pregnancy, had he touched her. Not even a fleeting caress or a chaste kiss. Erich had installed himself in the small bedroom and Adam had slept with her until she had left for England, four years ago, now. Not that Erich was abstinent. She had smelled the sex of other women rising from him. The bastard didn’t even take care to shower after returning from his extracurricular fucks.
She had tried to elicit a reaction from him, to provoke him. First, she had opted for the silent approach, slipping into his bed at night. Without even casting a glance at her naked body, he had ordered her back to her room to sleep. The memory of that humiliation still lingered, how Erich had trampled on her self-esteem. Next she had tried tears, but with no more success. On her last attempt, she had stood facing him, holding a knife in her hand, threatening to mutilate herself if he didn’t treat her better, like any decent man. He had stared coldly at her and his indifference had wounded her more than the cuts she had wanted to inflict on herself. Never had she felt so insignificant and scorned. Everything she had been proud of – her body, her erotic appeal – had been shattered into a thousand pieces by Erich Ebner.
How she had come to regret having spent all the proceeds from the sale of her family home! Her parents had put a block on her inheritance until she had reached the age of thirty, so she had been unable to leave Erich and start a new life elsewhere. There had been no other choice than to stay put.
Two miserable years had gone by. On the verge of despair, she’d finally contacted her aunt who lived in England. The old cow had no wish to get involved, believing Agneta was just being melodramatic and trying to get hold of the money early. Agneta had had to wait until the egocentric bitch had finally realised the gravity of the situation and agreed to lend her some money, in advance of the inheritance.
So Agneta had escaped to England with her son. Because Adam was her son. At the maternity ward, in order to take revenge on Erich, she had declared his father as unknown, and had given him her name alone. Legally, Erich had no connection or rights to him. He wasn’t even aware of the aunt’s existence. So he would be unable to contact or find them.
Life in Cornwall would have been perfect had not Adam proved inconsolable. He couldn’t bear being away from his father. Four months after their arrival, Agneta had obeyed her aunt and agreed to get in touch with Erich. As soon as he had been reunited with him, Adam began to live fully again.
These days, he spent half of his school holidays in Falkenberg. Agneta was forced to accept that father and son had managed to establish a solid and harmonious relationship; to the extent that she could make Adam obey her, simply by threatening to cancel his Swedish holidays or to inform Erich of his misdeeds. This was how she had succeeded in putting a stop to the child’s worrying pyromania. The double threat had worked wonders.
Adam turned round and blew his mother a kiss. Agneta’s features were so sad, he blew her another across the open palm of his hand, his lips twisted as if he were miserable. But it was just a pretence … Because he was, at long last, about to see Father! He didn’t want to say, but he would have much preferred to be living with him. Time in Sweden went by too fast, whereas, when he was with his mother, every second lasted an eternity … until the next holiday came around…
Father had explained how he should adapt to the situation. In Sweden he should act like a Swede, and in England like an Englishman. As to German, he had to master it to honour his ancestors and their culture. Father gave him lessons – things he had to learn by heart and study once he returned to Mother’s. And when he came back to Falkenberg, he was questioned on the subject. On this occasion, Adam was to recite a particular poem. He said nothing of all this to Mum. Neither had he told her that, when he was in Falkenberg, he used Father’s name. It was much easier that way.
He was in a great hurry to go fishing for crabs. Small Swedish kids threw them back into the water soon after they caught them, but Father had explained that was the wrong way to proceed. A crab, once captured, had to be sacrificed. So, they would bring them back to the house. Father had shown him how to break their legs, just like Adam did with the wings of flies. Then it had been his turn. Father had handed over one of the crabs, the smallest one, but Adam had felt guilty because he had blinked briefly as the pincer had broken between his fingers. He hadn’t done it on purpose, it was just that the cracking noise had surprised and disgusted him. Father had told him that, if he wanted to become an excellent surgeon, he could not close his eyes, even if the sight, the noise or the odour of something took him by surprise or disturbed him. His own body must constantly be alive to sensations.
So Adam had practised, surreptitiously of course. But where he lived with Mum, there weren’t any crabs, so he had used cats – the kittens the gardener was planning to drown. He’d hidden them in the old hen house and practised there.
Now, he never closed his eyes. Father would be so proud of him.
Father had promised that, during the course of the next holidays, they would step things up. He wasn’t sure what he meant, but it nonetheless excited him and it could only be wonderful, because they would be doing it together.
And the next holidays began today.
Grand Hotel, Falkenberg
Wednesday, 22 January 2014, 19.00
EMILY PLACED THE FOLDER on the bed.
It had been a productive afternoon: Alexis, Bergström and Olofsson had sifted through a veritable mountain of information. It was now a matter of analysis, which would take her most of the night. The Kommissionar had also contacted the Gothenburg Rikskriminalpolisen to check whether, over the course of the past sixty years, any victims had been found with their eyes pulled out or without their trachea. His colleagues had not reported any trachea instances, and the eye gougings had usually been tied to crimes of passion or cases of gang warfare.
Emily unlocked her safe and pulled out the
envelope containing the photographs of the London crime scenes. She sat down on the bed, crosslegged, and placed her notepad next to her.
Before browsing through the new information, she wanted to reconnect with the case, to the narrative being subconsciously written by the serial killer. To do that properly, she had to examine all the snapshots of the crime scenes again, one by one, as if she were seeing them for the very first time. Because she had mentally recorded every single detail of the images, they had become a familiar landscape she could gaze at without truly looking. Now she had to come off automatic pilot and force herself to study things afresh.
Once she had completed her examination of the final photograph, Emily re-read the questions she had listed in her notebook. During the course of the hour that followed, she forced herself to criticise every conclusion she had previously reached.
‘Victims washed clean. Of what? Why?’
The killer cleaned his victims. Yes, he was eliminating all traces of himself, but maybe that was only coincidental. Emily was more inclined to interpret this washing as a mark of remorse, of respect: the killer was taking care of his victims, making them presentable. These ablutions were as necessary as the enucleation. Was it perhaps a purification ritual? As children symbolised innocence, he did not wish to dirty them through his actions. And neither they, nor Linnéa had been sexually interfered with.
‘Why the Y carved into the left arm?’
Emily noted down what the left arm evoked for her. Vena Amoris, she wrote, almost as a reflex. An old Egyptian belief according to which a vein directly connected the left hand’s ring-finger to the heart. OK, but then why carve the Y into the arm, and not the hand?
Inside her handbag, her mobile phone buzzed.
She picked it up and was greeted by the nasal voice of Arthur Hannah, an old colleague from the Canadian police. She’d left him a message earlier in the day, asking him to take a look at the case.
Art was in charge of the geographical profiling department at the famous Mounted Police Force. Since she had been working at the Yard, Emily had sought his help several times. Using complicated mathematical formulae, Arthur was always capable of locating the domicile or place of work of the criminals he was hunting down. He was also an unconditional fan of Bruce Springsteen.
‘Hey, Art.’
‘Fuck me, Em, your guy is some nasty piece of shit. Another fat bastard who orders his daily Starbucks every morning, like all of us, and kisses his wife every night while no one knows he’s locked the neighbour’s son in his basement for the past ten days. And people think he’s worth a trial and all that fuss? People are crazy. If they only saw what we witness every single day, they’d burn them alive in a public square, I’m telling you.’
Emily frowned silently and listened to him puff on his cigarette.
‘I don’t know why, Em, but your case, it somehow makes me think of “What a Wonderful World”. When Thiele and Weiss wrote that song, they must have hoovered up so much coke it was coming out of their arseholes. What’s “wonderful” about all this, eh? Anyway, I’m happy for you; you seem to be having a lot of fun at the Yard. Classy, business trips to Viking land, eh?’
‘Did you manage to go through all of it?’ the profiler asked, trying to get him back on track.
‘Yep, and it’s ruined my plans. I was hoping for a quiet day at the office! I was about to sit down, listen to a 1981 bootleg and watch the Live in Dublin DVD, but, instead of spending time with my mate Bruce, I had to start devising a set of equations to pinpoint some congenital idiot whose childhood was traumatic enough to make him gouge out eyes and tracheas as if they were weeds. I really believe people should think a bit longer before they shit kids out. If they come out so twisted, it would have been better to use some form of protection.’
‘What have you found?’
‘I’m sorry, Em, but my mathematical model just can’t tell me anything about the guy in question. Your story is a proper mess: London, Sweden, four kids, the woman. A real clusterfuck. There’s nothing I can do with all those separate elements. I agree with you in thinking there might be two of them, but it just makes matters even more complicated…’
Art’s voice sounded guilty. There was nothing worse for him than to have to concede defeat to a criminal.
‘Did the inscriptions lead you anywhere, by the way?’ he asked. ‘Guys who pull eyes out and cut tracheas are already twisted, but intellectual knife tattoos – it’s a bit much.’
‘You mean the letters carved into the arms?’ Emily asked, not quite understanding what might be intellectual about them.
‘Yep.’
‘I’m not sure why they are angled differently. But for now, the only plausible explanation I found about the X and Y was that he was marking them according to their gender.’
Art roared with laughter on the other end of the line. ‘Fuck, Em, I just realised I’m going senile … If my wife were here, she’d take the piss and blame Bruce for making me gaga … Can you believe I didn’t realise it was a Y?’
‘Really? What did you think it was?’
Emily listened to Arthur Hannah’s explanation and then hung up, aghast.
Her colleague had just thrown a whole different light on the investigation.
Falkenberg
July 1982
ADAM WOKE UP, STARTLED. He pushed the sheet away. His pyjamas were soaked. He slipped a hand under his body. The bed was wet.
His fists tightened with rage. His mother had placed the pads in his luggage, but he had disposed of them before arriving in Sweden. Had Father come across them, Adam wouldn’t have been able to look him in the face, or, at any rate, contemplate that half-smile that never left his features and demonstrated how proud he was of his son. Last time, he had told him that a boy of his age should not wet himself. It should be sufficient to order one’s body to stop. ‘Assert your will,’ he had told Adam.
Father was a hero. He was a survivor of World War Two. He’d told Adam the story of the long months spent in Buchenwald concentration camp. He’d also mentioned Doktor Fleischer. Adam had asked him whether there might be a street in Germany named after him, as he was a hero. Father had explained this was not the case; that real success was not to have a name on a plaque, but to be able to succeed fully with the projects you undertook. So Adam had tried in vain to follow the precept of ‘asserting his will’. Every night, before falling asleep, he whispered to his body. Ordering it to obey, not to betray him, to banish the shame. But it didn’t work and once again he had woken bathed in urine.
He got up, pulled the sheets off the bed, folded them and placed them under the mattress. As soon as Father was away, he would wash and dry them. He undressed, slipped on a new pair of pyjamas and opened his cupboard to pull out some spare bedding. He searched around, stood on a stool to look through the top shelf, but couldn’t find any more sheets. He would have to spend the rest of the night with just the bed cover, but when Father came to wake him the following morning, he would instantly realise that Adam had succumbed again. There was nothing for it, Adam would have to make a silent visit to the laundry room to pick up new sheets.
Returning to his room, Adam noticed a light on downstairs – in the laboratory. Their routine was to sleep between nine at night and seven in the morning. This was the same for both himself and Father. He knew he’d heard Father close his door on the other side of the corridor, after wishing him a good night earlier. Maybe he’d forgotten to switch off the light? Or maybe there was an intruder…? Adam was not allowed to go down to Father’s lab, but if someone had broken in, he had a duty to confront him, didn’t he?
His pulse quickening, Adam looked around him. He saw nothing he could use against the thief. But he had to be courageous. He had to protect Father. After all, he had inherited his character; he, too, should be a hero.
His heart beating in overdrive, he slowly opened the door to the cellar, praying to himself it wouldn’t creak. ‘Assert your will. Assert your will,’ he repeated t
o himself, hoping this might assist his quivering legs to move forward.
Holding himself against the wall he crept down the cellar stairs, cautiously watching where he stepped. A strong smell of disinfectant reached his nose, making him blink.
Arriving in the cellar’s main space, he found himself facing a row of metal shelves. He stared at the shelving. Surprised, he tentatively extended a hand forward. His fingers came into contact with shining skin, not unlike the meat that hung in a butcher’s window.
Fascinated, and completely forgetting the danger he had been prepared to face, Adam stepped towards the centre of the room. A completely naked boy lay stretched across a metal table.
He was about to touch the boy when he noticed Father. He froze. But it wasn’t anger he saw in his father’s eyes; it was surprise.
Father gestured slightly with his head, seeming to invite Adam to continue exploring his surroundings. Adam walked around the body and placed his left hand on the child’s wrist; it was as cold as the table on which it rested. Remaining calm, with his other hand he snapped the forefinger backwards until it cracked loudly.
He then looked up to his father, who was staring intensely at him.
‘See, Father, I no longer have to close my eyes.’
Falkenberg police station
Thursday, 23 January 2014, 07.00
ALEXIS CAME RUSHING THROUGH the swing doors of the conference room, out of breath and dishevelled. Emily didn’t even look up at her.
Thirty minutes earlier Alexis had received a text message from the profiler asking her to get to the police station as soon as possible. She’d quickly slipped the same clothes she had worn the day before over her body, still warm from the caresses of the previous night. Stellan had accompanied her to the door, and, following a final kiss she could still taste on her mouth, she’d run to her appointment.
The profiler pulled a batch of thick cardboard folders from her rucksack. A mess of tracing-paper sheets escaped and floated down to the floor like dead leaves. Emily picked them up and set them down on the table, her face inscrutable. Her gestures were slow and deliberate, with the precision of a Japanese ritual. It was clear that she had also dressed in a hurry: her untidy chignon had slipped down to the nape of her neck, her boots were unlaced and her features looked as crumpled as her sweater.