Killer's Island

by Anna Jansson

“I’d rather stick needles in my eyes,” she’d replied, and Ek said he’d been expecting something along those lines from her, but if she changed her mind there was space in the boat.

  “But I expect you’d freeze the water with your looks. Can’t you try to forgive him, Maria? He’s regretting himself to death. It’s terrible seeing him now. He’d do anything to have it undone. Do you know how hard it is ripping him away from work for a few hours? He promised to come fishing but only if we used the time to talk about the investigation. He’s obsessed with finding the people who assaulted you. He’s doing his utmost, Maria.”

  “That’s lovely. Best of luck with the fishing.”

  “Maria.…” His voice was pleading.

  “No, I’ve had enough! I’m not even going to discuss it.”

  She had difficulties concentrating after the call. Her feelings for Per had already grown murky while he systematically failed to give her anything back – countering her hopes and dreams with irritation and constantly changing plans. What was it Jonatan Eriksson had said? Sometimes one makes do with the crumbs from the table because that’s all one seems to be worth. This was not the same as bitterness, she decided; this was about self-respect pure and simple – saying “no” before she got so humiliated or sick of the situation that she grew hard and nasty. But what about the rest of her life? Who would she think about now, who would she miss? It all felt so scarily empty.

  Maria went back to the police station and clocked out. She’d taken on the extra shifts partly because she didn’t want to feel lonely, and partly because she couldn’t stand the idea of the murder investigation slowing down over the public holiday. As time elapsed, witnesses progressively forgot what they had really seen. Once they’d had time to confer with each other or read the newspapers, this also affected their stories. The brain looks for order and credibility and subconsciously probes for meaning and context. Maria repeatedly went through all the material collected from the murders of Linn Bogren and Harry Molin, only pausing occasionally to replenish her mug of coffee whenever it grew cold. She called Claes and checked up on a few details. The shoes he’d handed in had matched the shoeprints, as expected. She asked a few other questions, to clear up some details concerning the suit Harry had ordered at a tailor’s in town.

  She checked up again on Claes – how he was feeling. Once he understood that she was actually concerned for him, his sadness and anger and guilt came pouring out of him in a torrent of words that seemed never-ending.

  “Do you have anyone else you can talk to?” Maria didn’t feel she could leave him hanging on the other end of the line in his current state. “Someone who could stay with you?”

  “If you mean that woman I met in Gothenburg, it’s over. Definitely over. I never want to see her again. I can’t even explain how it happened. I ended up at her place one time after we’d gone to the bar after we came ashore. I stayed the night. I didn’t love her but she kept getting in touch and wanting to see me, and I couldn’t resist her expectations. Do you understand? Once it had happened I thought seeing her again wouldn’t make things any worse. It was ruined anyway between me and Linn, I’d already broken what we promised each other. I didn’t think it could get any worse, but I was wrong. If I’d only come home right away. I don’t have anyone to talk to because I don’t want anyone to know about this. No one.”

  “You’re staying with your brother right now?”

  “Yeah, but we’ve never really been able to talk. He’s much older than me and he knows the way everything’s got to be. It’s been a relief, though, having somewhere to go. I’ll never be able to live in our house again. It’s not a safe place any more.”

  “One last question. Did Linn used to call Tarot hotlines?”

  “She did sometimes when we first met. I asked her why and she said it was good sometimes looking for support when you were facing a crossroads in your life.”

  Several hours later when Maria left the police station, the sun was low but the air was still warm. She took a deep breath and stretched her limbs. Her back was stiff. Probably she’d sat all twisted up in front of the computer, like a staple. A boy of about ten or eleven was standing outside the main entrance, looking around confusedly. Maria went to him and asked what he was doing there.

  “I want to talk to that police who tried to save Linus.”

  “That would be me.” Maria gave the boy a searching look. He shuffled his feet nervously and looked down at the ground.

  “Are you Maria Wern?” Round-eyed, he looked at her. His freckled cheeks grew flushed, then with a toss of his head he flicked his raven-black bangs out of his eyes so he could get a better look at her. “Straight up?”

  “Yes, it’s me, it’s really me.” He was so sweet in his embarrassment that Maria started laughing. “What’s your name?”

  “Oliver.” He twisted uneasily. “There was one thing I didn’t tell that other police who came to our place. Something I forgot. I never got a phone number so I didn’t know how to get hold of him again and anyway I didn’t want to talk to him any more. I wanted to find you.” The little boy’s gestures grew expansive and his voice sounded eager.

  “If you like we can go to my office and have a chat. I’m not in a hurry.”

  “No, I don’t want to go in there.…”

  “So let’s have an ice cream at Max and you can tell me there instead. The officer you spoke to is probably not working today, it’s a holiday. I’ll write down what you tell me and then I’ll give him your telephone number, so you can talk some more if he’s got any other questions. An ice cream would be nice, wouldn’t it?” They sat outside in the sun. Maria dug out pen and paper. “What was his name, the policeman you spoke to?”

  “He didn’t say. He didn’t even have a uniform. It felt a bit creepy.” Oliver gave Maria a glance, then dived into his ice cream again.

  “What did he look like?” Maria wondered if it could have been Hartman himself or maybe Jesper Ek or Arvidsson who’d spoken to the boy. But his description of a tall, very thin man with a black pulled-down hat, leather jacket, and sunglasses didn’t fit. Arvidsson’s red moustache would have been the first thing the boy commented on. Hartman was definitively not thin and Ek could hardly be described as tall. Haraldsson would never wear a hat in the summer. Maria couldn’t think who the boy was describing, but let it go for the moment so he could unburden himself.

  “The police, I mean the one who came to see us, asked if Linus knew a doctor whose name was Anders, Anders Ahlström? He wanted to know if Linus thought he was a nice guy, like a sort of dad type. And I said he did think that. He was his favorite doctor.”

  Maria could well imagine. But the question puzzled her nonetheless. “Did he show you his ID?”

  “No. He just said he was a policeman.”

  “There was something you’d been thinking about,” she prompted.

  Oliver’s cone had started dripping and he bit off the end and plugged it with his index finger.

  “It was something Linus said. I promised I wouldn’t say anything about it, not to anyone, ‘cos he reckoned it was bit embarrassing.” Oliver stopped and waited to be disencumbered of his vow of silence.

  “If it helps us catch the people who hurt Linus, he’d probably like you to tell us, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.” Oliver looked relieved. “It was like this. Linus couldn’t get to sleep because he was scared. But he didn’t dare tell his dad ‘cos he’d get angry and tell Linus to stop imagining things and be quiet and get to sleep. And that’s exactly what he couldn’t do. Linus said he’d seen a nasty man outside his window in the street. Like a nazgûl, if you know what that is?”

  “An evil black knight, like in the Lord of the Rings, a creature in a black cape?” Maria felt herself breaking out in goose bumps. Had the information about a man in a cape leaked into the press after all?

  “He didn’t have a face, it was really creepy. He was just a black sort of thing, and his eyes.” Oliver grimaced. “Linus
saw him loads of times, once in the garden. But he never dared tell one of the adults. Maybe not even his favorite doctor and definitely not his mom, ‘cos she’d get really hysterical and want to drag him off to some children’s shrink if he said it was for real.”

  “Has anyone else spoken to you about nazgûl or men in capes? Have you read about it anywhere?”

  “I’ve seen ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ if that’s what you mean. Do I… do I have to talk to the other police? I prefer talking to you. I didn’t like talking to him. He smiled all the time but his eyes were angry. I don’t want to talk to him any more.”

  “I’m the one who got attacked, you see, so I’m not allowed to investigate this. But I’ll talk to my chief. His name is Tomas, he’s a sensible man and he’s smart, too. I think you could talk to him, he’d be very interested in what you just told me. Can you remember anything else about the policeman you spoke to? You said he wore dark glasses and a black hat. Did he ever take off his sunglasses? You said his eyes were angry.”

  Oliver hesitated. “You could see his eyes through the lenses even though they were tinted black. His eyes were evil.”

  CHAPTER 33

  MARIA WERN WALKED HOME with Oliver, taking Smittens Backe toward Stora Torget. They zigzagged between the market stalls, all offering exactly the same as in other street markets – printed T-shirts, bronze and silver jewelery, sweets, and braided hair extensions – whether in Crete or Paris. Only the odd stall here and there offered local items such as blueberry jam, Gotland mix tea, Gotland mustard, and mint jelly. She tried repeatedly to get Hartman on the cell phone, but most likely he couldn’t hear the phone over the noise of the party. It was just as impossible getting hold of Arvidsson and Ek.

  “Are either of your parents at home? I’d like to talk to them.” Oliver thought they would be. His mother had told him they were having guests for dinner in the evening and that he had to be home early. They crossed the square diagonally and Oliver walked ahead through the lanes until they stood in front of a white-washed house with climbing roses on both sides of a low, green-painted door. There was movement behind the lace curtain: someone was at home. The front door was opened by a barefooted woman in summery clothes and lavishly curly hair. She stepped into her sneakers as Maria was introducing herself.

  “Can I come in a moment?” Maria showed her ID.

  “We’ve got guests coming in a minute.” The woman looked troubled.

  “I really don’t want to barge in and this won’t take a minute.” Maria knew exactly how those last minutes felt before the arrival of guests.

  They sat down in the glass conservatory, where climbing vines across the ceiling providing some shade against the sunlight. Oliver disappeared into his room.

  “Linus was like a son in our home. We’re desperately sad and torn up that this could happen. It could just as well have been Oliver who was attacked on the way home from Linus’s house. The first few days Oliver wouldn’t speak to anyone else at all. He just sat in the dark in his room and when we tried to talk to him he’d shout at us and tell us to stop lying about Linus being dead.”

  “It must be so difficult for him to comprehend.…” Maria felt tears pressing just behind her eyes and she cleared her throat when she felt her voice thickening, “that someone he was just playing with is suddenly dead.”

  “In a horrendous way!” Oliver’s mother moved her hand to her throat and then tossed her hair out of her eyes. “I was afraid Oliver would be damaged psychologically, so I insisted that the police had to bring a child psychologist if they wanted to question him. By the time they managed to get hold of someone with the right expertise, Oliver wouldn’t speak to her.”

  “When Oliver came looking for me he told me he’d been visited by a male police officer. Are you aware of that?”

  “No, if that’s what happened it must have been yesterday when we weren’t at home. We went up to our summer house yesterday and Oliver wouldn’t come. He never mentioned this to me. If a policeman did come here I’ll be furious, that’s not what we agreed with the police.”

  “I promise I’ll double-check that with my chief and get back to you.”

  “What do you mean?” Oliver’s mother looked worried.

  Maria hesitated briefly and then chose her words so they wouldn’t be more frightening than necessary. “Don’t leave him unsupervised until I’ve checked this.”

  As soon as the door had closed behind Maria’s back she tried again to reach Hartman. This time she was successful. The party mood in his voice instantly disappeared when she revealed her fears to him.

  “I’ll come in straight away. If someone questioned that boy without a psychologist it was done expressly against my orders.” Maria repeated Oliver’s description of the policeman. “In which case who was he? He didn’t show his ID.”

  “To be honest, Maria, I don’t know. And it’s scaring me.”

  The anxiety would not let go, nor the feeling of powerlessness. Their lack of insight into the assault case was frustrating. Maria was caught between extremes. Had she needlessly scared Oliver’s already anxious mother when she said the boy should not be left alone? Or should she have taken the boy to the station to protect him from someone who wanted to harm him The thought crashed down like a bolt of lightning. If the evil was already here, in uniform, then he wouldn’t be safe here, either. No, she mustn’t think like that. It wasn’t realistic. She’d probably been working too hard, and now she was seeing evil everywhere. Anyway, the investigation lay with Arvidsson. She hadn’t managed to get hold of him and now the ball was in Hartman’s court. She couldn’t do anything else.

  Linus had seen a man in a dark cape, just like Jill Andersson and Louise Mutas. Each of them, entirely based on their own subjective experience, had described him as a sleepwalker, a masked monk, a drunk, or a black and faceless knight. Either the perpetrator was inept because people saw him at the crime scenes, or there was actually an intention for him to be seen. A third alternative might be that he was unaware of his actions – was it really possible that these crimes had been committed by a sleepwalker? Suddenly Maria remembered Jonatan Eriksson. She’d promised the infection specialist that they’d have a coffee and a chat. Maybe he could fill her in about sleeping disorders? Maria called the hospital. Jonatan was not on call. She reached him at home. Half an hour later they met outside Skafferiet, a charming café on Adelsgatan where one could choose between pies, salads, and other light meals. The atmosphere was very pleasant. Maria had not been there since Christmas, when there had been a cozy fire crackling in the hearth. Now the doors to the outside tables were wide open. He came toward her with open arms and she couldn’t quite stop herself from chuckling. People were looking and assuming they were a couple. She gave him a quick hug.

  “Good to see you.”

  “At last,” he said a little sulkily, then smiled. “I was hoping you’d get in touch.”

  They ordered a prawn salad each, with homemade bread, and sat down indoors with a view through the window of Adelsgatan. After a sun-drenched day on the beach, many tourists were seeking their way into Visby in the evening to have something nice to eat. They were lucky to have found a table, Maria realized, as she noted the line building up behind them at the register.

  He looked at her with happy eyes and smiled, but said nothing. So much was unexpressed. Maria chose to bring up her formal errand first.

  “What do you know about sleepwalkers?”

  The question was completely unexpected. Maria looked so deadly serious that Jonatan burst out laughing.

  “What was that?”

  “I’m serious. Is it possible to kill another human being in your sleep? Are there checks and boundaries in the subconscious that prevent people from doing things they don’t want to do, like in hypnosis?”

  “Are we talking shop now?” he asked.

  “Yes. But I can’t tell you anything else about it.”

  “There is one case involving a sleepwalker. A man drove to
his stepparents’ house and stabbed them with a knife. Both of them died from their injuries. He woke up in his own bed. There was an exhaustive investigation into his sleeping disorder… to evaluate whether he could be put on trial for the crime.”

  “So there’s no way of faking it?”

  “No. If you’re really sleepwalking it’s verifiable by something called an EEG test. In fact, it doesn’t happen while you’re dreaming, which is what a lot of people think, but in deep sleep, right at the cusp between dream sleep and deep sleep. The longer this transition the greater the risk of sleepwalking. The motor-dynamics aren’t deactivated, as they are in dream sleep, otherwise we’d do everything in real life that we do in our dreams, and the consequences of that would be quite awful, wouldn’t they? A sleepwalker moves robotically, the body motor is not fully activated but it is in motion. Sleepwalkers can even talk, but the voice sounds mechanical. Afterwards, the sleepwalker can’t remember anything.”

  “I walked in my sleep when I was a child and had a high temperature,” Maria remembered. “Once I woke up in the greenhouse and I’d wet myself.”

  “It’s quite common for children to walk in their sleep, but it usually goes away. Among adults suffering from it, sleepwalking can be triggered by alcohol, a lack of sleep, or stress. It can be very debilitating and awkward for the person afflicted by it. Anything sleepwalkers may damage has to be removed, and it’s best if they sleep on the ground floor with locked windows and closed doors.”

  “It must be terribly stressful not to be in full control of what you’re doing.”

  “There have been cases of people stripping themselves naked and doing the most extraordinary things. If you’re not in command of what you’re doing you can’t be put on trial for it, either. Or what do you think, as a police officer? It’s an illness.”

  “There’s a new prescription drug to help people stop smoking. Fumarret. Have you heard of it? I read an article about how in certain cases it led to confusion and sleepwalking.”