Dark Secrets (18 page)

The seduction.

The game.

Which he would win.

The victory.

The pleasure.

All out of reach, because he wasn’t functioning as he normally did. He blamed the house. His mother. The fact that Torkel had suddenly popped up from the past. There were reasons, but he still found it immensely annoying. External circumstances didn’t usually affect him and impinge on his actions.

Life fitted in with Sebastian Bergman, not the other way around.

Or that was how it used to be.

Before Lily and Sabine.

No, he wasn’t going to give in. Not tonight. It didn’t matter what had happened, who fitted in with whom, or that certain people would probably class the days he got through as more of an existence than a life. It didn’t matter that he had ostensibly lost control. He still had the ability to make the best of the situation.

He was a survivor.

In every sense of the word.

He went into the kitchen and took down a bottle of wine from the
plain wine rack above the cupboard. He didn’t even look at the label. It didn’t make any difference. It was wine, it was red, and it would do its job. As he pushed open the patio door he wondered what his approach should be.

Sympathetic.

(I thought you might not want to be alone…)

Concerned.

(I saw the light was still on. Are you okay?)

Or firm but considerate.

(You definitely shouldn’t be alone on a night like this…)

It was irrelevant; the result would be the same.

He was going to have sex with Clara Lundin.

The paint on the ceiling above the bed had started to flake slightly, Torkel noticed as he lay on his back in bed in yet another anonymous hotel room. There had been so many hotel nights over the years that the impersonal had become the norm. Simplicity was preferable to originality. Functionality was more important than coziness. To be honest, there wasn’t much difference between the two-room apartment south of Stockholm he had moved into after the divorce from Yvonne and a basic Scandinavian hotel room. Torkel stretched and tucked his hands under the pillow and his head. The shower was still running. She was taking her time in the bathroom.

The investigation. What had they actually achieved so far?

They had the spot where the body had been dumped, but not the scene of the murder. They had a tire track that might have come from the murderer’s car, but then again it might not. They had a young man in custody, but it was looking more and more likely that they would let him go the following day. On the plus side, after being passed from pillar to post and back again, Billy had managed to get hold of a woman in the relevant security company who knew who he needed to speak to in order to get hold of the tape from the CCTV cameras on Gustavsborgsgatan.
The man was at a fiftieth birthday party in Linköping, but would start working on it as soon as he could the following morning, when he got back. He wasn’t sure, however, if the recordings from the Friday in question would still be there. Some tapes were kept for only forty-eight hours. The local council had views on that kind of thing. He would check when he got back. Tomorrow morning. Billy had given him until eleven.

Vanja was convinced that Roger’s girlfriend was lying about the times on the evening Roger disappeared, but as Lisa’s father had quite rightly pointed out, it was one person’s word against another’s. The CCTV tapes would help them out there too. Torkel sighed. It was slightly depressing to think that the progress of the investigation in the immediate future appeared to depend on how long the security provider in Västerås kept their recordings from public places. What happened to good old-fashioned police work? Torkel immediately pushed the thought aside. That was the kind of thing those opera-loving, whiskey-swigging old detectives in crime films used to think. Using technology
was
the new honest police work. DNA, surveillance cameras, advanced data technology, information sharing and mapping, bugging, tracing cell phones, retrieving deleted text messages. That was how crimes were solved these days. Trying to fight against it or refusing to embrace it was not only pointless, it was like standing up and extolling the magnifying glass as the most important investigative tool for any officer. Stupid and backward. And this was not the time to be either of those things.

A young boy had been murdered. They were under scrutiny. Torkel had just watched the news on Channel 4 followed by a talk show on the increase in violence among young people: cause—effect—solution. This was in spite of the fact that there were more and more indications that Leo Lundin could well be innocent and that Torkel and his team had made a point of emphasizing this precisely so that Leonard would not be condemned by the public and the press. But perhaps the producers thought that as soon as a young person was the victim of violence, it counted as youth violence regardless of how old the perpetrator
might be? Torkel didn’t know. He only knew that the discussion had not brought anything new to the table. Absent fathers in particular were blamed, absent parents in general, violence in movies and above all in games, and finally a woman in her thirties with piercings came out with what Torkel had just been waiting to cross off the list.

“But we mustn’t forget that society is much more aggressive these days.”

So those were the causes. Parents, video games, and society.

The solutions were conspicuous by their absence, as usual, unless you counted a legal obligation to take equal maternity/paternity leave, increased censorship, and more hugs as solutions. Evidently it wasn’t possible to do anything about society. Torkel had turned off the TV before the show ended and started to talk about Sebastian. He hadn’t given his old colleague much thought in recent years, but he had still thought an encounter would turn out differently.

With more warmth.

He was disappointed.

That was when she had gone for a shower. She emerged from the bathroom now, naked except for a towel wound around her hair. Torkel carried on as if there hadn’t been a fifteen-minute break in the conversation.

“You should have seen him. I mean, he was pretty strange when we worked together all those years ago, but now… It seemed as if he was deliberately trying to annoy me.”

Ursula didn’t answer. Torkel watched her as she went over to the dressing table, picked up a bottle of body lotion, and started to rub it in. Lait de Beauté Aloe Vera, he knew. He’d seen her do that quite a few times now.

Over quite a few years.

When had it started? He wasn’t sure. Before the divorce, but after things started to go wrong. Quite a lengthy period. Anyway, he’d gotten divorced. Ursula had stayed married. She had no plans to leave Mikael, as far as Torkel knew. But, then, he knew very little about Ursula and
Mikael’s relationship. Mikael had gone through some difficult times with too much alcohol. An intermittent alcoholic. He knew that, but if Torkel understood correctly these periods were more infrequent these days and lasted for a much shorter time. Perhaps they had an open marriage and could sleep with anyone they liked, whenever they liked, as often as they liked? Perhaps Ursula was deceiving Mikael with Torkel? Torkel felt as if he was close to Ursula, but when it came to life with her husband outside work, he knew virtually nothing. He had asked questions in the beginning, but it was obvious Ursula thought it had nothing to do with him. They sought each other’s company when they were working together, and they could carry on doing so. It didn’t have to be any more than that. He didn’t need to know any more than that. Torkel had chosen to drop the subject, to refrain from digging any more for fear of losing her completely. He didn’t want that. He wasn’t really sure what he did want from their relationship, except that it was more than Ursula was prepared to give. Therefore he made the best of it. They spent the nights together when it suited her. Like now, as she turned back the covers and slipped into bed beside him.

“I’m warning you. If you say one more word about Sebastian, I’m leaving.”

“It’s just that I thought I knew him, and…” Ursula placed a finger on his lips and propped herself up on one elbow. She looked at him, her expression serious.

“I mean it. I’ve got my own room. I’ll go back to my room, and you don’t want that.”

She was right.

He didn’t want that.

He kept quiet and turned off the light.

Sebastian woke from the dream. As he straightened out the fingers of his right hand, he quickly oriented himself.

The house next door.

Clara Lundin.

Unexpectedly good sex.

In spite of this he awoke with a feeling of disappointment. It had been so easy. Far too easy for him to wake up with the sense of temporary satisfaction.

Sebastian Bergman was good at seducing women. Always had been. Over the years other men had sometimes been surprised at his success with the opposite sex. He wasn’t good looking in a classic way. He had always veered between being overweight and almost overweight, and in recent years he had come to a halt somewhere in the middle; his features were neither distinct nor sharp, more bulldog than Doberman if you wanted to go for a dog comparison. His hair had started to retreat, and his choice of clothes always tended more toward the professor of psychology than the fashion magazine. Admittedly there were women who went for money, appearance, and power. But that was only certain women. If you wanted to have a chance with
all
women, you had to have something else. Which was what Sebastian had: charm, intuition, and a range. A realization that all women are different and an ability to develop a selection of different tactics to choose between. Try one, change halfway through, check how it’s going, change again if necessary.

Sensitivity.

The ability to listen.

When it worked best, the woman believed
she
was seducing
him
. That was a feeling the rich men who flashed their Platinum Amex cards in the bar would never understand.

Sebastian got a kick from steering the course of events, parrying, adjusting, and, eventually, if he had played his cards right, complementing it all with the physical pleasure. But with Clara Lundin it had just been too easy. Like a master chef in a five-star restaurant being asked to fry an egg. He had no opportunity to show what he could do. It was boring. It was just sex.

On the way over he had decided to go for the sympathetic option, and when she opened the door he held out the bottle of wine.

“I thought you might not want to be alone…”

She had let him in and they had sat on the sofa, opened the bottle of wine, and he had listened to the same thing he had heard at lunchtime, only in a longer and more refined version in which her shortcomings as a parent received more attention. He had made the right noises and nodded in the right places, topped up her wineglass, carried on listening, and occasionally answered questions on police procedure, about the routine when a person was taken into custody, what might be expected to happen next, what the different degrees of suspicion meant, and so on. When at last she was unable to hold back the tears any longer, he had placed a consoling hand on her knee and sympathetically leaned closer. He almost felt a jolt run through her body. The silent sobbing stopped, and her breathing altered, grew heavier. She turned to Sebastian and looked into his eyes. Before he really had time to react, they were kissing.

In the bedroom she had welcomed him with total abandonment. Afterward she wept, kissed him, and wanted him all over again. She fell asleep with as much skin contact as possible.

She still had one arm resting on Sebastian’s chest and her head nestled in the hollow between his chin and shoulder when he woke up. Gently he extricated himself from her embrace and got out of bed. She didn’t wake up. He looked at her as he dressed quietly. As much as Sebastian was interested in the seduction phase, he was equally uninterested in prolonging the association beyond sex. What would that give him? Nothing but repetition. More of the same, but without the excitement. Utterly meaningless. He had left enough women after these one-night stands to know that this was a mutually shared view only on very rare occasions, and as far as Clara Lundin was concerned he was sure she expected some kind of continuation. Not just breakfast and small talk, but something more.