Dark Secrets (8 page)

Opening the beer with one hand, he went back into the living room. On the way he switched on the main light. The bulbs were uplighters beneath an edging strip all the way around the room, providing an even, pleasant light. A tasteful detail that felt almost modern. Sebastian caught himself feeling reluctantly impressed.

He sat down on one of the armchairs and put his feet on the low coffee table without removing his shoes. Then he took a swig of the beer and leaned his head back. He absorbed the silence. The total silence. You couldn’t even hear any traffic. The house was almost at the end of a cul-de-sac, and the nearest main road was hundreds of yards away. Sebastian spotted the piano. He took another swig of his beer, put the can down on the table, stood up, and went over to the black, shining instrument.

Absentmindedly he pressed one of the white keys. A dull, slightly out of tune A broke the silence.

Sebastian had started playing the piano when he was six. Stopped when he was nine. At that point his private teacher had taken his father
to one side after a lesson during which Sebastian had virtually refused to touch the keys at all and had told Herr Bergman that it was a waste of her time and his money for her to turn up once a week and try to teach a pupil who was so lacking in motivation and, she was absolutely certain, any kind of musical ability. Which was incorrect. Sebastian did not lack musical ability. Nor had he refused to play as some kind of rebellion against his father; that came many years later. He had simply thought it was indescribably boring. Pointless. He couldn’t get involved in something that he found so uninteresting. Not then.

Not since then.

Not now. There was no limit to the amount of time and energy he had once been able to devote to those things that interested and fascinated him, but if they didn’t… Putting up with something, tolerating it—these were concepts unknown to Sebastian Bergman.

Slowly he leaned forward and scrutinized the photographs on the lid of the piano. His parents’ wedding photo in the center; two pictures of his maternal and paternal grandparents on either side. A picture of Sebastian when he left school, and one in which he was perhaps eight or nine years old, posing in his team uniform in front of a set of goalposts. His foot resting on the ball as he gazed into the camera, his expression serious, certain of victory. Then a photo of his parents together, with a coach in the background. On holiday somewhere in Europe. His mother looked about sixty-five in this picture. Twenty years ago, then. Even though it had been a very deliberate choice, Sebastian was struck by how little he knew about his parents’ lives after he had left them. He didn’t even know what his mother had died of.

Then he caught sight of the photograph right at the back. He picked it up. It was the third picture of him. He was sitting on his new moped in front of the garage. Sebastian’s mother had been very fond of that picture. He had a theory that it was because it was one of the few pictures from his teenage years—perhaps the only one—in which he looked genuinely happy. But it wasn’t the picture of him sitting on his Puch Dakota moped that had captured his interest: it was a newspaper
clipping tucked into the frame. The picture showed Lily in her white hospital gown, holding a tiny sleeping baby in her arms. Beneath the picture it said
Eine Tochter
and a date, August 11, 2000. And, below that, his and Lily’s names. Sebastian removed the clipping and examined it carefully.

He remembered when he had taken the picture, and suddenly he could almost smell the hospital and hear the sounds they both made. Lily had smiled at him. Sabine had been asleep.

“Where the hell did you get this?”

Sebastian stood there with the clipping in his hand. He was totally unprepared for this. There wasn’t supposed to be anything in this house to remind him of it. But here he stood, with the picture of the two of them in his hand. They didn’t belong here. They belonged to a different world. His two worlds, his two circles of hell. Each difficult enough to handle on its own, but together… They weren’t supposed to have anything to do with each other. He clenched his right hand into a tight fist, over and over again, without even being aware of it.
Fuck her!
Even though she was dead, his mother could still get to him. Sebastian could feel his breathing growing more labored.
Fuck her! Fuck this entire house!
What was he going to do with all the
crap
in here?

He carefully folded up the newspaper clipping, tucked it into his inside pocket, and walked back into the kitchen. He opened the door of the cleaning cupboard and
bingo
—the telephone book was on the shelf, exactly where it had always been. He took it over to the armchair and looked up real estate agents in the Yellow Pages. He started with
A
. Not surprisingly, no one answered. The first three agencies carried a message about office hours and suggested he might like to call back, but the fourth ended with: “If you would like to leave a message after the beep, we will call you back.”

Sebastian waited.

“My name is Sebastian Bergman. I want to sell a house and all its contents. I don’t know how this works, but I really want to get it sorted so that I can leave this fucking town as soon as possible. I couldn’t give
a damn about the money. You can take whatever percentage you want, just as long as it goes through quickly. If you’re interested give me a call.”

Sebastian left his cell number and hung up, then he leaned back in the armchair. He felt immensely tired. He closed his eyes, and in the silence he could hear his own heart beating.

It was too quiet.

He was lonely.

His hand moved up to the breast pocket of his shirt, which contained the card the woman on the train had given him. What time was it? Too late. If he called her now he might as well start the conversation by asking if she was interested in a one-night stand. That wouldn’t work on her. He knew that. He would just lose what he had achieved so far and have to start again with minus points. He wasn’t that interested in her. He took a deep breath and allowed the air to escape slowly in a long exhalation. Again. With each breath he could feel the fatigue strengthening its grip on him. He wouldn’t call anyone. He wouldn’t do anything.

He wanted to sleep.

He was going to sleep.

Until the dream woke him.

T
ORKEL WAS
having breakfast in the hotel dining room. Billy had already gone to the station to set up their office, and he hadn’t seen any sign of Vanja yet. Outside the window the residents of Västerås were hurrying to work on this overcast spring day. Torkel glanced through the morning papers, both national and local. They all carried stories about the murder. There was less in the nationals; they were mainly giving an update. The only new information they had, apart from the fact that Riksmord had arrived, was that it could be some kind of ritual murder, according to sources close to the police, since the victim’s heart was missing. Torkel sighed. If the morning papers were speculating about ritual murder, what on earth would the evening tabloids make of it? Satanism? Organ theft? Cannibalism? Perhaps they would find some German “expert” who would inform their readers that it was not at all impossible that a disturbed individual suffering from certain delusions might eat another person’s heart in order to absorb some of that person’s strength. There would be a reference to the Incas or some other long-extinct tribe linked in people’s minds with human sacrifice. And then there would be the Web survey:

Torkel shook his head. He would just have to put up with it. He was turning into what Billy called a GOM—a Grumpy Old Man. Even though he surrounded himself with younger people all day, he was aware that more and more frequently he was slipping into a way of thinking that might suggest he felt things were better in the past. Nothing was better in the past. Apart from his private life, but then that didn’t exactly have any bearing on the rest of the world. He just had to make the best of things. Torkel really didn’t want to turn into one of those tired old police officers who complained cynically about the times he was living in, while sinking deeper and deeper into his armchair with a glass of whiskey in his hand and Puccini on the stereo. Time to pull himself together. His cell buzzed. A text message. From Ursula. He pressed
Read
. She had arrived and gone straight to the scene where the body was found. Could they meet there? Torkel emptied his coffee cup and left the dining room.

Ursula Andersson was standing at the edge of the little pond. With her knitted wool sweater tucked into dark green waterproof pants that came up to her chest, she looked more like an angler, or someone about to clean up an oil spill on some beach, than one of the sharpest police officers in the country.

“Welcome to Västerås.”

Ursula turned and saw Torkel nod to Haraldsson before ducking under the police tape cordoning off most of the valley.

“Nice pants.”

Ursula smiled at him.

“Thank you very much.”

“Have you been in?” Torkel nodded toward the pond.

“I’ve measured the depth and taken a few samples of the water. Where are the others?”

“Billy’s sorting things out at the station, and Vanja was going to speak to the girlfriend. As far as we know, she was the last person to see
the boy alive.” Torkel came over and stopped by the edge of the pond. “How’s it going?”

“No chance of any footprints. A whole crowd of people have been stomping around here. The kids who found the body, police, ambulance crew, people out for a walk in the woods.” Ursula crouched down and pointed to a shapeless dent in the muddy ground. Torkel squatted down beside her.

“Besides which, any traces are deep and sunken. It’s too muddy and waterlogged.” Ursula made a sweeping gesture with her hand. “A week ago it was even wetter, apparently. Most of the valley was underwater.” She stood up and glanced over in Haraldsson’s direction, leaning slightly closer to Torkel.