‘No, what makes you say that?’ Sebastian smiled his most disarming smile. He wanted to prolong the pleasure as much as possible.
‘I don’t know, it’s just a feeling.’ Stefan put his coffee on the table next to the flowers and sat down. There was silence for a few seconds. Sebastian decided it was time to begin.
‘I met Vanja today.’
Stefan looked weary rather than surprised. ‘I thought we’d agreed that you weren’t going to contact her. What did she say?’
‘She said: “What the fuck is he doing here?”’
Stefan shook his head. ‘You promised.’
‘It wasn’t like that. I was trying to get a job.’
‘Where?’
‘With Riksmord.’
‘Of all places . . .’
‘Come on, you said I ought to sort something out, and I want to get back to work. I need . . . structure. You’re right about that. But it has to be something interesting. Challenging.’
‘Not like everything you had to sit through yesterday evening?’
Sebastian didn’t reply. He glanced out of the window again. The men were sitting smoking. The piano remained in exactly the same place.
‘Group therapy works much better if everyone participates,’ Stefan went on. ‘Makes a contribution.’
‘It’s not my thing, I told you that. For God’s sake, they never stopped talking about their banal problems. How can you stand it?’
‘You get used to it. I have patients who are considerably more trying,’ Stefan said meaningfully. Sebastian allowed the irony to pass; he still had the heavy artillery in reserve.
‘Anyway, I’m not coming tonight.’
‘I think you should give it one more chance.’
‘I don’t think so. The thing is . . .’ A deliberate pause. He knew from his experience of giving lectures that sudden changes of topic are usually more effective when they follow an introductory pause. He was going for the maximum effect now. Time for the bombshell: ‘I slept with Annette after the meeting last night.’
Stefan’s face lost its colour. ‘Why the hell did you do that?’
Sebastian spread his arms wide in an apologetic gesture. ‘It was a mistake. I didn’t mean to do it.’
‘You didn’t mean to do it? What the fuck are you talking about, you didn’t mean to do it?’
Stefan tried to calm himself by leaning back in the chair. It didn’t seem to work all that well, Sebastian noted with satisfaction.
‘It was . . . something to do. A distraction. You know me. That’s the way I am.’ He looked at Stefan with feigned interest. ‘Do you know her well?’
‘She’s been my patient for a long time. She feels utterly abandoned by everyone. Her son, her ex-husband, everyone. She has issues with trust, and very low self-esteem.’
‘Yes, that was obvious. She absorbed intimacy like a sponge. But she went like a train in bed.’
Stefan leapt up from the chair, splashing coffee all over the table. ‘Do you realise what you’ve done? Do you have any idea how she must have felt when she woke up alone? I presume you didn’t stay for breakfast.’
‘No, I’ve had bad experiences when it comes to that kind of thing.’
‘And now you’re intending to avoid her?’
‘That’s the plan. It usually works.’ Sebastian opted for another deliberate pause, gazing at Stefan with obviously insincere sympathy. ‘I’m sorry, Stefan, but I did tell you I don’t belong in group therapy.’
‘The question is whether you actually belong anywhere. Get out.’ Stefan pointed to the door. ‘I can’t fucking look at you anymore.’
Sebastian nodded and got to his feet, leaving Stefan with the current issue of the daily newspaper and his cut flowers.
Stefan was right.
Every day did have significance.
The tall man was as close to excited as he could be when he got home. He had seen the placards and the headlines in the evening papers. The police had held a press conference. About him. He wanted nothing more than to start reading, but simply rushing indoors and opening the newspapers he had bought was out of the question.
The ritual.
He had to follow the ritual.
Sticking to the routine, he quickly switched on the light in the hallway and locked the door behind him. Took off his shoes, placed them on the shoe rack, put on his slippers, took off the thin jacket and hung it on the only coat hanger on the hat shelf, which was empty but for a large torch. When he had taken off what he intended to take off – in winter his scarf, hat and gloves would also be placed on the shelf, always in that order – he opened the door to the toilet and switched on the light. As always he felt a pang of distaste the second he looked into the thick darkness of the windowless room, before the fluorescent tube flashed into life. He went in, checked that the torch within reach on the small shelf was working, then unzipped his fly and urinated. He took the torch over to the basin and washed his hands, returned the torch to its proper place, and left the toilet door open when he went into the apartment. He switched on the main light in the living room as he turned left into the kitchen, and switched on the lights over the cooker and on the ceiling. Two torches to check in the kitchen. Both working. Only the bedroom left. Ceiling light, bedside light, check the torch on the bedside table.
All the lights were on. Not that it was necessary. Sunlight was pouring in through every window of the apartment. There was nothing to stop it or to subdue its effect. No shutters on the outside, no curtains on the inside. The first thing the tall man had done when he moved in was to remove all the blinds. No, the electric light wasn’t needed today. But it was part of the ritual. If you did it even when it wasn’t necessary, there was no need to worry about forgetting it when it was important.
Once, many years ago, there had been a power cut in the area where he was living. Everything had gone dark, not just in his apartment but everywhere. Pitch-dark. He had quickly found the nearest torch, but either the batteries were dead or the bulb had blown. He hadn’t checked it for a long time. That was before the ritual. The panic, the paralysing fear that had gripped him, had caused him to vomit, then lie motionless on the floor for several hours, until the power was restored.
He loved the summer. Not necessarily the heat, but the light. The best time was around midsummer, but it was the light he loved, not the celebrations. He didn’t like any celebrations. Particularly midsummer.
It was one midsummer’s eve when he first noticed that something was wrong.
That she wasn’t like everyone else.
He was three, perhaps four years old. They had all got in the car and driven down to the big meadow by the lake. The pole was already up when they arrived. There were lots of people, and they ended up quite a long way from the centre of the celebrations with their blankets and their picnic basket. From time to time fragments of folk music were carried over on the breeze as they sat with their sandwiches, a strawberry tart, and white wine for Mum and Dad. The dancing began at three o’clock. There were lots of people, and they ended up forming four or five circles. He loved dancing; some of the traditional dances were such fun. It might have started earlier, it probably had, but he had no memory of that. The first time was there. At midsummer. In the sun in the outermost circle. When she was dancing with him. His little hand in hers. He remembered feeling happy and looking up at her. She was staring straight ahead into the distance as she danced. She wasn’t really there. She wasn’t singing. Wasn’t smiling. Her body carried out the movements of the dance as if she were asleep. Completely without emotion. Indifferent. He remembered feeling a little afraid, tugging at her hand. She looked down at him and smiled, but the smile never reached her eyes. It was mechanical, learned behaviour, there to assure him that everything was as it should be. But it wasn’t. Not then, and definitely not since then.
‘Mummy’s not feeling very well at the moment.’ That’s what she would say to him when he wasn’t allowed to climb up on her knee, or when she
was lying down in the middle of the day with the bedroom curtains closed. When she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chin just weeping, and his father had to collect him from nursery because she simply hadn’t turned up. That’s what she would say when she couldn’t cope with preparing anything to eat on the days when he was at home with her, or just before she closed the door behind her, leaving him alone for several hours.
‘Mummy’s not feeling very well at the moment.’ That’s what his father would say to him as he tried to explain in a whisper why he must wear soft slippers indoors, why he mustn’t show that he was upset or worried or cross. To explain why he had to sit still, almost invisible for several hours on the days when she did actually manage to get out of bed. To explain why they never did things together, why he had to be a good boy and look after Mummy while Daddy went out to earn money.
That’s what he himself would say later on, when he was older and his classmates asked why he was away from school so often, why they couldn’t come round to see him, why he never joined in with anything after school, why he never came to parties or took up any kind of sport.
‘Mummy’s not feeling very well at the moment.’
Sometimes, when she was a little better, she said it was a shame he’d had to grow up with such a bad mummy.
But more often she would tell him that it was his fault she was ill. If only he hadn’t come along, everything would have been fine. He had destroyed her.
When he was ten years old it became impossible for her to remain at home. She disappeared. He didn’t know where she had gone. Oddly enough, his father spent more time at home after that, which was ironic because by then he was perfectly capable of looking after himself, partly because he was older and partly because he no longer had to take care of his mother. It was only much later that he realised his father had used work as an escape all those years. Stayed away. His father couldn’t handle her illness, and so passed the responsibility on to his son. He assumed he could have hated his father for that, but by the time the realisation came there was so much and so many others that he hated with far greater intensity.
His mother died six months after she left them. At the funeral, people spoke quietly of suicide, but he never knew for sure.
After another six months a woman he didn’t know turned up on his birthday. Sofia, her name was. He didn’t have a party. Who would come? After several years of virtually no social contact and a significant amount of absence from school, he had no friends. Sofia had brought him a present. A Super Nintendo. He had wanted one ever since it came out the previous year, but had always been told it was too expensive, they couldn’t afford it. But Sofia hadn’t seemed to think it was a particularly extravagant present. She gave him four games as well as the console! He realised immediately that she must have more money than them. More money than they had ever had.
She stayed the night.
Slept in the bedroom with his father.
They had met at the auctioneer’s where he worked, his father told him later. Sofia was both knowledgeable and interested. She had brought in a number of items to sell, but had also bid for quite a lot of beautiful pieces. Expensive pieces. He liked Sofia. She made his father happier than he had been for a very long time.
He saw more of Sofia over the next few months. A lot more. One weekend his father and Sofia went away, and when they came back they were engaged. His father sat him down for a serious talk. He and Sofia were getting married, and they would be going to live with Sofia, who had a lovely place in the middle of the city.
He never really doubted that his father was very fond of Sofia, but he realised that the money was not unimportant.
It was to be a fresh start.
A new life.
A better life.
He deserved it, after all that had happened. This time everything would be fine. Nothing and no one would destroy it.
A few weeks after the engagement he had been introduced to Sofia’s family for the first time. Her mother and father, Lennart and Svea, who were in their sixties, and her brother Carl. Dinner at Villa Källhagen. Very pleasant. He had spilled his drink and crept away, afraid of the consequences, but no one had been cross. The longer the meal went on, the more he had felt able to relax. Sofia seemed to have a nice family, no idiots there. As they were leaving, Sofia’s father had drawn him to one side.
‘My name is Lennart, as you know, but you can call me Granddad if you like, now we’re going to be related.’
He was happy to do so. He had liked the man with the greying hair and the kind brown eyes that always seemed full of laughter.
At the time. When they had just met.
Before the outings.
Before the games.
Then he wasn’t afraid of the dark.
With the ritual completed, the tall man sat down in the kitchen and opened the newspapers with trembling fingers. They had finally realised. It had taken time, but now they had linked the first with the second with the third. They were writing about him. He was spreading fear, the first paper said. Pictures of the houses he had visited. An anxious neighbour clutching her daughter. He turned to the second newspaper. Much the same. There was nothing about his role model, in spite of the fact that the murders were exact copies. Either the journalists didn’t know the details, or they were simply unaware of the Master’s greatness. The police comments were brief. They merely wished to state that they were probably dealing with a serial killer. They wanted to warn the public, and particularly women on their own, against letting strange men into their homes. They said they had several leads, but that was all. They were not prepared to comment on any possible similarities between the three victims. They gave no details whatsoever. They were trying to diminish him, turn him into someone invisible, someone whose actions were unimportant. Again. They would not succeed. It wasn’t over. They would be forced to acknowledge that he was a worthy opponent. As great and as capable of instilling fear as the Master.
The tall man stood up, opened the second drawer down and took out a pair of scissors. He sat down and meticulously cut out the articles that were about him. When he had finished he folded up the newspapers and placed them in a pile on the table. Then he sat motionless. This was new. He needed to create a ritual. There would be more articles to come, he was sure of it. This was just the beginning. His whole body was tingling, as if he had suddenly moved into the next phase. The phase where the whole world would begin to search high and low for him, the hidden one. The phase where he existed.
He got up and went over to the cleaning cupboard. Next to the vacuum cleaner was a paper sack for the recycling. He picked up the newspapers from the table and placed them in the sack. Then he closed the door, picked up the cuttings and walked to his desk in the other room. He opened the top drawer. He kept envelopes in the drawer. In three different sizes. He took out one of the largest and placed the cuttings inside it. The ones from Expressen on top of the ones from Aftonbladet. If any more newspapers wrote about him, they could go behind Aftonbladet, he decided. If he printed out anything from the internet, it would have a separate envelope. He went over to the chest of drawers, opened the top drawer and placed the envelope containing the cuttings underneath the black sports bag. That was what he would do. Cut out, gather together, recycling, into the envelope, into the chest of drawers. A ritual. He immediately felt calmer.
The tall man sat down at the computer, opened his web browser and went into fygorh.se. He had reported on his recent observations, and the information had been extremely well received. On page seven he clicked on the small blue button right in the middle of a long extract on runic script. A new page opened and he entered his password. He gasped when he saw the change on the page.
He had been given a new task.
He was ready for the next one.
Number four.
The lift had been out of order all week. Sebastian walked up the three flights of stairs to his apartment. It didn’t matter; he couldn’t g
et much sweatier. The sun had been beating down on him all the way home. This summer it didn’t seem to make any difference which direction you were going in or at what time of day. From the moment the sun rose at around four in the morning, it seemed to be at its zenith. Shade was in short supply. The area of high pressure had lingered over the country for so long that the tabloids had been forced to invent new phrases. ‘Record Temperatures’ and ‘What a Scorcher!’ were no longer enough. ‘Sizzling Sun Strikes Again’ and ‘The Inferno Summer’ were a couple of examples from the last week’s crop, both linked to articles detailing how several people had ended up in hospital with the symptoms of dehydration, and tales of dogs dying in parked cars.
There were flowers hanging on his door. A bouquet in grey paper with a note attached. Sebastian ripped it off as he unlocked the door and went inside. He read the note as he pulled off his shirt without unbuttoning it, but it merely told him things he already knew or had worked out for himself: that someone had sent him flowers, but he hadn’t been at home to receive them, so they had been left on the door. Sebastian went into the kitchen and tore off the paper. Roses. A dozen, perhaps. Red. Definitely expensive. A card attached to the stems. Evidently he was being congratulated on something. That was all it said. ‘Congratulations’ in fancy writing. And a name: Ellinor.
The hand-holder.
He knew breakfast had been a mistake. He had known it at the time, and this was the confirmation. He threw the flowers in the sink and took a glass out of the cupboard. Filled it with water, drank it greedily and filled it again. Then he walked out of the kitchen. For a moment he wondered what the congratulations were for, but he decided not to worry about that.
The apartment was only marginally cooler than outside. It smelled stuffy. Dusty. He considered opening the window, but realised it wouldn’t make any difference. He took off all his clothes and threw them on the unmade bed in the spare room. He needed to do a couple of loads of washing, but decided not to bother with that either.
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