“We can get him under the bridge,” Bartram said.
They pulled out and passed the cars that had stopped at the red light and waved to the Volvo driver to stop next to the Shell gas station. They walked toward the car, one on each side, and the driver, who was alone, rolled down his mud-covered window as Morelius approached. They were about the same age.
“Can I see your driver’s license, please?”
The man took his wallet out of his inside pocket and produced his license from a collection of other plastic cards. He was wearing a thick polo-necked shirt and a thin jacket. Glasses, his thinning hair combed back. He seemed nervous, but it would have been odd if he hadn’t been. Morelius couldn’t smell any alcohol.
“You were a bit ahead of yourself back there.”
“I know.”
“You’re supposed to stop at a red light.”
“I know, I know. I thought I could make it before it changed from yellow.” He looked up at Morelius. “You can usually make it on yellow.”
“That depends,” said Morelius. “Were you in a hurry?”
“I’m late picking up the kids from nursery school. Very late, in fact. They actually phoned me to ask where I was.” He looked at Morelius again, but he wasn’t playing for sympathy. “They even phoned,” he said again.
Morelius thought he saw Bartram struggling to suppress a giggle.
“It’s true,” the man said. “It’s in Fräntorp,” he said, as if that confirmed everything. “I can call them,” he said, pointing to his mobile phone in its holder on the dashboard.
“That won’t be necessary,” Morelius said. “But make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The man took his driver’s license and stared at it, as if expecting it to turn into an arrest warrant any moment.
“Er ... you mean there won’t be anything?”
“What do you mean, anything?”
“Fine, or points docked, or whatever.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Er ... no.”
“Be more careful in future,” Morelius said, and walked back to the patrol car. Bartram was already inside. Morelius heard the man start his engine and drive off.
“He was lucky to get stopped by officers who weren’t on traffic duty,” said Bartram. “They have to think about their success rates.”
The law and order boys had to think about everything, Morelius thought. Drugs, traffic offenses, robbery and burglary, violent assault. All-arounders. Double murders.
“We drive around town and see that bastard who mugged that woman and beat her up so badly that she was off work for three years, and he was in prison for a month. Does anybody expect us to take twelve hundred kronor off a guy who’s rushing to pick up his kids from nursery school?”
“Not today, in any case,” Morelius said.
“I let a shoplifter go the other day,” Bartram said.
“Eh?”
“I took it upon myself to let a shoplifter go, without reporting him.”
“You don’t say.”
“You can’t always throw your weight around. Show who’s boss.”
There was a crackling from the radio: “Eleven-ten. Come in eleven-ten.”
“We’re at the roundabout just north of Central Station,” Bartram said.
“We’ve just had a call from a mobile phone at Kungsportsplatsen. They’re holding somebody who’s stabbed a passenger in a tram, and they’re trying to restrain him, over.”
“Roger,” said Bartram, and Morelius switched on the lights and siren.
“They’re at the stop for northbound traffic. Did you get that? Over.”
“Yep, roger,” Bartram said, and they raced past Brunnsparken and turned left.
Winter wrote down the message: W ALL. Drew a circle around the first letter. What was the point of sitting here, doing this? Riddles like this took time that could be spent on other riddles, but he was fascinated by the message, gave it a higher priority than it might have deserved. No obvious answer. One word? Several? Or was the murderer just being facetious, pointing out that there was a wall there? Did “wall” have a symbolic significance? Was it something to do with the music? Was “wall” a frequent symbol in this kind of music? Setter had come up with a new suggestion regarding the genre: black metal. Not death metal. Black metal. Even worse.
He looked at the word once more, wrote it again, drew another circle. All? Had he killed all? Were all going to die? He’d already been thinking about that. Why was there a circle round the W? Is that what we should be thinking about? What begins with W?
He got up and went to the mirror over the sink. The slight tan he’d brought back from the Costa del Sol had gone, replaced by the usual bluish hue typical of winter. Winter. Winter started with W. He pressed his right hand lightly against his cheek. Winter. A bit early for paranoid thoughts.
The investigation had only just begun, but it didn’t seem like that. He felt as if it had started the moment he’d boarded the plane for Málaga. That’s when the tale started.
W. Double-U. Double murder.
The telephone rang, and he thought about the phone ringing at home with nobody speaking at the other end. He’d answered last night just before Angela made him his Paris sandwich, but there was nobody there. Not even any breathing this time, just the tone signaling an open line. Maybe he should change his number and go unlisted.
He went to his desk and answered.
“Hello, it’s Lotta. I bet I’m disturbing something important, but I wondered whether you and Angela would like to come around for dinner tomorrow evening? It’s Friday tomorrow.”
“I’ll ask her.”
“What about you yourself?”
“Well, I suppose I can come.”
“I’m overwhelmed by your enthusiasm.”
“Assuming nothing more happens, nothing new.”
“I read about it. A couple in Vasastan.”
“That’s where they lived, yes.”
“Only a few doors away from you, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Don’t remind me. And, above all, don’t remind Angela.”
“I’ll try not to. Mom has just called, by the way.”
“How is she?”
“She seems to be coping okay. Better than I’d expected, to be honest.”
“What’s she doing?”
“She seems to have become a bit more sociable. She’s meeting some of their friends down there more often than she used to.”
“That’s good.”
“She’s coming home for Christmas.”
“Is that what she said?”
“As good as.”
“I’d better buy some Tanqueray.”
He noted the ensuing pause and knew what was coming next. He’d also wondered when he should mention it.
“I dreamed about Dad last night,” she said. “He was emerging from a clump of trees. It was summer. Bright sunshine, you know.”
“On his own?”
“I don’t know. I woke up then, I think. Incidentally, he was younger ... more or less like we are now. I remember noting that from his face. Isn’t that odd?”
“I don’t know. It’s not so odd to have been dreaming about him. I ... I think about him as well. I’ve had that kind of dream.”
The madman with the knife had calmed down by the time they got there. So much, in fact, that he was lying on the ground. Morelius bent down to examine him.
“He’s not dead, is he?”
Morelius looked up at Bartram.
“Coma, I think. He’s on GHB.”
“Here comes the ambulance.”
“I said they should send an ambulance too,” said a young man with a mobile in his hand.
“Was it you who reported the incident? Okay, what happened?”
“He started stabbing at random, then focused on one person when we stopped here. I ran after him and tackled him.”
“And then?”
“He tried to get up, but there were seve
ral of us holding him down.”
“Where’s the knife?”
“He dropped it. It’s over there,” he said, pointing toward the pavement. Morelius could see the knife on the road midway between where they were and the pavement.
“Was anybody hurt? In the tram or out here in the street?”
“No. Apart from him.”
“Who was he after?”
They moved out of the way when the ambulance team arrived with a stretcher and gave the man a quick examination. He was still lying there with no signs of life.
“GHB, probably,” Morelius said.
The man was lifted onto the stretcher and carried to the ambulance. Morelius turned to the hero and repeated his question.
“He was after somebody in particular, is that right?”
“I don’t know. It looked that way, but he‘s, well, he’s as high as a kite, so ...”
“So he wasn’t after anybody in particular?”
“I really don’t know.”
Winter had gone to get a cup of coffee, and returned. It was snowing again. It wasn’t December yet, but winter had set in. Several inches of snow, and he had no doubt they would still be there over the holiday period. The new era. He breathed deeply in, then out, then in again.
This was something new. He lost concentration, regained it, then lost it again. He thought about his father, about Angela, about their child, about his mother, about his sister, about the case again, about the telephone that kept ringing, about Angela again. About Alicia.
Möllerström came with some new photographs. Winter had asked to see all of them. They were taken from every conceivable angle.
From the front all that could be seen was the jagged necklace. The same was true from the side. That applied to both of them.
But you could see from the back, if you knew. They didn’t quite fit, the balance wasn’t right. Considerable strength had been needed to do this, Pia Fröberg had said. She was a pathologist who knew what she was talking about. Even she had paled at the thought.
But the bottom line was the lack of balance.
There were no fingerprints apart from their own. We checked especially around the eyes, Lars Beier had said. The deputy chief of the forensic division had looked pretty sick himself, and surprised. As if they’d been presented with something unreal.
The puzzle was the same as always: why? Why had he done it?
Winter tried to examine all the photographs one more time. The worst was the photo of her face in profile. The body leaning against a big, fat cushion.
They were holding hands, a grip welded by death. Afterward, the pathologist had said. The fingers had been intertwined after death.
He switched on the tape again as he scrutinized the pictures. The guitars as loud as possible. Incredibly fast. It was mainly the drums, furiously beating. The base drum, bang-bang-bang-bang. The voice was hissing, like a disembodied spirit. A witch. Were they words he could hear?
“Even somebody who’s used to it—a fan, that is—can hardly ever work out the words.”
Johan Setter was sitting opposite Winter. His leather jacket was scuffed with age. Setter’s brow was wrinkled in thought.
“I went to Madhouse in Drottninggatan, but they couldn’t help much. They listened to the tape, but they weren’t able to make any specific comments.”
“Specific comments? What do you mean by that?”
“The bottom line is that they didn’t have a clue. Even so, it’s one of the best shops in Gothenburg for metal music. The girl did say that it was more like black metal, rather than death metal. Not that there’s much of a difference. That made it more difficult, she said.”
“What is the difference?”
“With regard to the music, the tempo is quicker with black metal. The singing is shriller. Deeper in death metal. As if it were coming from the back of the throat.”
“With regard to what else, then?”
“Eh?”
“With regard to the music, you said. What else? The words?”
“Oh, yes. The text in black metal is evidently more ... er ... mythological. Sort of Viking Romanticism and that sort of crap. A dose of Satanism.”
“Satanism?”
“Well, evidently some of the fans get inspired—more than when they’re listening to death metal.”
“Inspired by the words?”
“Apparently so.”
“How the hell is that possible when they can’t hear what’s being said?”
“You need to have the text,” said Setter. “They always supply that.”
“So this is more intellectual than it first appears,” said Winter.
Setter hoped to see that he was smiling, but he wasn’t.
“So, we need to have the words for this stuff,” Winter said, gesturing toward the cassette that Setter had put on the desk in front of him. “And that will also mean that we’ll know who’s playing. And singing. Or hissing, rather.”
“I thought it would be dead easy,” said Setter. “Straightforward. But they were sort of surprised that they didn’t recognize it. The people at Madhouse said that all the tapes sounded the same.”
“Couldn’t they say if it was Swedish or foreign?”
“Not even that. It’s not going to be easy.”
“Who said it had to be easy?” Winter recognized that he was being a pain. “But you’ve eliminated one thing at least.” A good word, that. Eliminated. “It’s not death metal.”
“I bought all the magazines and fanzines they had on display,” said Setter, bending down and producing a little pile from his shoulder bag, putting them on the desk. “I haven’t gotten around to going through them yet.”
Winter picked out some of them. Necrologium—the 9th Book of Blasphemy. He’d missed the previous eight. Combichrist. Fear. Reinforced. He hesitated when he saw the title of the next one: Amputation Magazine.
21
The picture was on the kitchen table. He picked it up and looked at it. Who had done that? Who could do anything like that? Put up your hand, whoever did it. Come on, hands up!
He put up his right hand, and held the Polaroid photo in his left, as he was left-handed. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Why should he do it any differently? Hold the photo in his right hand? He shook his head, and wondered what to do with the picture. He couldn’t make up his mind. As usual.
But he had made up his mind, hadn’t he?
He lowered his right hand and pinned the photo to the wall using a thumbtack with a black head. He took a close look at it. They were looking back at him, but something wasn’t right. The guy on the sofa seemed to be about to nod, but evidently he’d prevented his head from falling forward at the last minute. That was cleverly done. The same applied to her. C-l-e-v-e-r.
He was crying now. Apart from that it was quiet everywhere. Quiet. Snow quieted everything down. He was crying, and could hear his own misery. He knew there was somebody listening, but that devil hadn’t put in an appearance yet.
He didn’t want it to be quiet. He went to the record player and chose an LP, put it on, and hummed along with the music—the old hometown looks the same, as I step down from the train—now that was real music, he’d had the feeling that she would like it when he played Tom for her the first time, but she’d laughed at him. Not like later, when she did that terrible thing to him. “Switch it off.” She’d laughed. “It reminds me of home. For God’s sake, ha ha ha, switch it off before it kills me.”
She’d looked through his records, and laughed even more.
“Is this what you listen to? Oh no, I don’t think I can survive this.”
Ha ha ha. H-a h-a h-a.
Almost like when it happened. He ought to have realized.
“What’s the matter?” his father had asked on one occasion. “There’s something the matter with you.” The next time he went home he hadn’t said anything at all, because there was nothing more for him to say, was there? Never again.
The sun came out and
the whole room was lit up. The photograph melted into the light. Burned up. I can forget it now, he thought.
Fredrik Halders and Aneta Djanali went to Hair.
“Unisex,” Halders said. Young men and women cut the hair of young men and women. Halders had put all that behind him. He eyed his crew cut in the mirrors on every side. Nothing for an artist of hirsute inclinations to exploit, but at least he still owned his own skull.
“Do you patronize places like this?” he asked.
“Eh?”
“Do you come to places like this to get your Afro curls straightened out?”
“Shut up,” Djanali said to Halders, via one of the mirrors.
They were an odd couple. It wasn’t the first time she’d made that observation.
“What can I do for you?” asked a woman in her thirties who emerged from a room on the left and stationed herself behind the counter and the cash register where they were standing. She was very tall, not far short of six feet, wearing a black blouse and a black skirt. Her hair was parted, an apparently simple style. Halders breathed in all the pleasant perfumes and listened to the music from the local radio station. He felt out of place, and no doubt all the others present felt that he was out of place as well. Come on, get a grip. You are with Aneta. You have to show her what you can do. Screw all the fags.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions about Louise Valker,” said Djanali, producing her ID card. “We’re from the crime unit.” The woman nodded, poker-faced. “Are you the owner of this establishment?”
“Yes. My name is Irma Fletcher.” She looked at the doorway she’d just come through. “Perhaps we could go to my office.”
Once there, they sat around an oblong table with a glass surface. There were several glossy magazines strewn over it. All Halders could see on the covers were female heads; he closed his eyes, then looked at the walls, where he found a number of black-and-white fashion posters depicting women in clothes that had been torn to shreds. They looked as if they’d been splattered with blood. One woman was lying on the floor, her eyes staring. In the background was a man in an overcoat and hat carrying a machine gun. Halders looked at the outline and guessed that it was a dummy Uzi.
“What the hell is that?” said Halders, gesturing toward the wall.
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