Dark Secrets (17 page)

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve never had anything to do with them, so what are we talking about here? A thousand? Five thousand? Fifteen thousand?”

“I really don’t know. My advice is not to speak to them at all.”

The look on Lena’s face told him this definitely wasn’t an option.

“I haven’t so far. But now they want to pay.”

Torkel gazed at her. She probably needed the money. She didn’t want to hear about his moral scruples or his considerations based on experience. She wanted a price ticket. Did he really have the right to comment? How long was it since he had really needed money? Had he ever been in that position?

“Do whatever you like. Just be careful, that’s all.” Lena nodded, and to his great surprise Torkel heard himself say, “Put a high price on yourself.”

Lena nodded with a smile, then turned and left. Torkel stood watching her for a few seconds as she headed off down the street in the late spring sunshine. Then he shook off the visit and turned, ready to get back to the job and his colleagues.

But his trials were far from over.

Haraldsson was limping toward him. From the serious expression on his face, Torkel concluded that Haraldsson wanted to talk. About the matter Torkel had put off for as long as possible. The matter that Vanja had asked him to sort out three times so far.

“W
HEN SOMEONE
says you’ll be working in association with one another, what would you say that means?”

Haraldsson was lying on his back on his side of the double bed with his hands linked behind his head, gazing into space. Next to him lay Jenny, with two pillows under her bottom and the soles of her feet planted firmly on the mattress. From time to time she pushed her lower abdomen up toward the ceiling at which her husband was staring blankly. It was ten thirty.

They had made love.

Or screwed.

Or not even that, if Haraldsson was completely honest. He had dutifully emptied his seed into his wife while his thoughts had been somewhere else altogether.

At work.

At the meeting with Torkel, when Haraldsson told him that Hanser—against Torkel’s specifically expressed wish—had tried to remove him from the investigation.

“I suppose it means you’ll be working together,” Jenny replied, raising her hips off the mattress once more in order to make the downward slope to her waiting womb a little steeper.

“Well, yes, that’s what you’d think, isn’t it? In my opinion, if you said to a colleague that you’d be working in association with one another,
that would mean you’d be working together. On the same thing. Toward the same goal. Wouldn’t it?”

“Mmm.”

To be honest, Jenny was only half listening. The situation wasn’t exactly unfamiliar. Ever since Haraldsson got a new boss, his main topic of conversation had been the job, and when he talked about the job, he just wanted to air his complaints. The fact that the target for his irritation was now Riksmord rather than Kerstin Hanser didn’t really make much difference.

New words, same old song.

“Do you know what that Torkel Höglund means by working in association with one another? Do you?”

“Yes, you told me.”

“He means not working together at all! When I push him on how he sees our collaboration, it eventually emerges that we won’t be working together at all! That’s a bit strange, don’t you think?”

“Doesn’t make any sense at all.”

Jenny recycled his words from dinner. She had realized this was a good way of appearing to be up to speed even when she wasn’t. Not that she was uninterested in her husband’s job. Not at all. She loved to hear about everything from incompetent forgers to the details of the security van heist last summer. But then Hanser had arrived, and Haraldsson’s tales of police work were pushed aside in favor of lengthy diatribes on the injustice of it all.

Bitterness.

Moaning.

He needed to be thinking about something else.

“But do you know who you can get really, really close to?” Jenny turned to him and slid her hand under the covers, down toward his limp penis. Haraldsson turned to her with the expression of someone who has had three teeth filled and has just found out that there’s a hole in a fourth.

“Again?”

“I’m ovulating.” The hand found its goal and clutched. Squeezed. Gentle but demanding.

“Again?”

“I think so. My temperature was up by half a degree this morning. Best to be on the safe side.”

To his surprise Haraldsson could feel himself beginning to harden once more. Jenny moved over to his side of the bed and lay with her back to him.

“Do it from behind, you can push deeper that way.”

Haraldsson shuffled into the right position and slid in easily. Jenny half turned toward him.

“I need to be up early in the morning, so don’t take all night.” She patted Haraldsson on the cheek and turned back.

And as Thomas Haraldsson took hold of his wife’s hips, he allowed his thoughts to wander.

He would show them.

Show the lot of them.

Once and for all.

He promised himself that he would solve the murder of Roger Eriksson.

While Haraldsson attempted to impregnate his wife without encroaching on her night’s sleep, the man who was not a murderer was sitting in his dressing gown just a mile or so away in a residential area that was by now only sporadically lit, keeping up to date with the investigation. Via the Internet. He was sitting in the dark, illuminated only by the cold light of the screen, in what he proudly referred to as his study.

The local paper was making a big splash with the death—he couldn’t bring himself to call it “the murder”—although they weren’t updating the story quite as often by this stage. Today the focus of their
report had been “a school in shock,” with four pages on the situation at Palmlövska High. Everybody seemed to have been given the opportunity to express their views, from catering staff to pupils and teachers. Most of them might as well have kept their mouths shut, the man who was not a murderer concluded as he read every banal line, every cliché-filled quote. It was as if everyone had an opinion but nobody had anything to say. The local paper was also able to inform its readers that the prosecutor had decided that a boy who was the same age as the victim was to be arrested, but only on the lowest level of suspicion.

The evening papers had more. Knew more. Made a bigger thing of it.
Aftonbladet
knew that the boy had terrorized and beaten up the victim in the past, and had evidently been the direct cause of Roger Eriksson’s move to a new school. A man who had a full-length picture next to his byline made the already tragic story even more heartrending by writing about the bullied boy who had escaped his tormentors, picked himself up and moved on, made new friends at a new school and was beginning to regard his future with optimism when he was struck down by meaningless violence. Not a dry eye in the house.

The man who was not a murderer read the emotive article and thought back. Did he wish it hadn’t happened? Absolutely. But there was no point in thinking that way. It had happened. It couldn’t be undone. Did he feel any regret? Not really. To him, regret meant that a person would act differently if faced with the same situation again.

And he wouldn’t.

He couldn’t.

There was too much at stake.

He switched to the online version of
Expressen
. Under “latest” they had a short piece with the headline
CASE AGAINST VÄSTERÅS MURDER SUSPECT WEAKENED
. Not good. If the police let the young man go, they would start looking again. He leaned back in his desk chair. He always did that when he needed to think.

He thought about the jacket.

The green Diesel jacket that was hidden in a drawer behind him.
Roger’s bloodstained jacket. What if it was found at the home of the young man the police were holding?

At first glance this might seem like an egotistical thought and act. Laying a false trail in order to make a fellow human being appear guilty. An immoral, selfish attempt to avoid the consequences of his actions.

But was that really the case?

The man who was not a murderer could help Roger’s relatives and friends. They would be able to stop wondering who had taken the teenager’s life and devote their full attention to the process of working through their grief. He could erase the question mark. Help everyone to move on. That was worth a great deal. And as a bonus he would also improve the clear-up rate of the Västerås police. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like an entirely unselfish act. A good deed, in fact.

It didn’t take many clicks on the keyboard before he found out who the police were holding. Leo Lundin. His name was all over various chat rooms, forums, and blogs. The Internet really was fantastic.

Soon he had the address too.

Now he really could help.

Sebastian looked at the clock—how many times was that? He didn’t know. 11:11. The last time it had been 11:08. Was it possible for time to move so slowly? The restlessness was in his blood. He didn’t want to be in this town, in this house. What was he supposed to do? Sit down in one of the armchairs, read a book, and feel at home? Impossible. The house hadn’t felt like a home even when he was living here. He had flicked through the TV channels without finding anything of interest. Since he didn’t drink, the booze cupboard was of no interest. Nor was he the type to browse through his mother’s scented bath oils and exclusive bath pearls before sliding down into a relaxing/refreshing/harmonious/energizing bath in the decent-size, almost luxurious bathroom
that had been his mother’s refuge; it was the only room she had told her husband she wanted to plan and decorate herself, if Sebastian remembered rightly. Her room in his house.

Sebastian had spent a while wandering around and opening cupboards and drawers at random. To a certain extent he was driven by sheer curiosity, just as he always opened the bathroom cabinet whenever he was visiting other people, but he was also driven—he admitted to himself somewhat reluctantly—by a desire to see what had happened in this house since he left it. The abiding impression was: nothing, really. The best Rörstrand china was still in its place in the white corner display cabinet; wall hangings and tablecloths for every occasion and every season lay laundered and meticulously rolled in the wardrobes. Sure, there were lots of pointless new ornaments made of glass and china, along with souvenirs from various trips and holidays, all sharing the shelf space behind the closed cupboard doors with presents from a whole lifetime: candlesticks, vases, and—from another era—ashtrays. Objects that were rarely or never used, kept simply because someone else had brought them into the house and it was therefore regarded as impossible to get rid of them without appearing ungrateful or—God forbid—giving the impression that you had better taste than the donor. Things he hadn’t seen before, but the feeling in the house was the same. In spite of new furniture, knocked-down walls, and modern lighting, in Sebastian’s eyes the house was a sea of pointless items that did nothing to contradict the feeling that life in the Bergman home had been lived in exactly the same calm, quiet, conventionally middle-class, timid way he remembered. The very sight of all these objects his mother had left behind bored him even more, and the only genuine feeling he could conjure up was an enormous weariness at the prospect of sorting out all this shit. Getting rid of it.

The agent had called around three. He had seemed a little surprised at Sebastian’s attitude; after all, these days everyone regarded their house as an investment, and people usually guarded their investment with the capitalist approach of modern times. But Sebastian had
made no attempt to negotiate. He wanted to sell, essentially at any price. Preferably today. The agent had promised to come around as soon as he could. Sebastian hoped that would be tomorrow.

He thought about the woman on the train. The piece of paper with her phone number on it was by his bed. Why hadn’t he had a little more foresight? Called her earlier, suggested dinner at some pleasant restaurant of her choice. Taken time over a good meal, with good wine for her. Talked, laughed, listened. Gotten to know her for the evening. They could have been relaxing in comfortable armchairs in some hotel lobby now, a drink in their hands, discreet lounge music in their ears, and he could tentatively, almost accidentally, allow his fingers to brush against her bare knees just below the hem of her dress.