The Disciple (26 page)

Sebastian looked enquiringly at her as if to check that he had heard correctly. She nodded. That didn’t necessarily mean that someone had been following him for six months, but it was a possibility. Sebastian took a deep breath. One thing at a time. He needed to concentrate on the interview with Hinde. Together he and Vanja set off towards the gate and the security guard who had been watching them in silence ever since they got out of the car.

‘So what’s Hinde like?’ Vanja asked curiously, her voice free of the judgemental tone she usually used when speaking to him. It was as if she sensed that they were walking into the lion’s den.

Sebastian shrugged. He was certain that Vanja had never met anyone like Edward Hinde. Few people had. Hinde wasn’t the usual perpetrator: the jealous husband or the uneducated young thug from a broken home. Hinde was something completely different, which meant she had no reference points. She couldn’t possibly imagine the depths of evil that lay within Hinde. Comparing him with any of the perpetrators Vanja had encountered over the years would be like comparing an eleven-year-old in a physics lab with a Nobel Prize winner.

‘You need to read my books.’

‘I have read your books.’

Vanja walked up to the security guard. ‘Vanja Lithner and Sebastian Bergman, Riksmord.’ They showed their IDs and visiting order. The guard took the documents and went into the small booth next to the gate; it looked as if he was making a call.

Vanja tried again with Sebastian. ‘Come on, you’ve met him.’

‘And soon you will have met him too.’

‘Is there anything in particular I need to bear in mind?’

The gate buzzed and Sebastian pushed it open; he let Vanja pass, then followed her inside. The guard gave them back their papers.

‘Be careful,’ Sebastian warned.

Edward Hinde was sitting in the visitors’ room once more. He had been brought down ten minutes ago. Two guards. Manacled hand and foot.

Into the room.

Onto the chair.

Shackled to the table.

Everything was the same, except for the fact that there were two chairs on the other side of the table this time. Riksmord were on their way in. Vanja Lithner and Billy Rosén, that was what Thomas Haraldsson had said they were called, the officers who were coming to talk to him. He wondered what they wanted to talk about. How far they had got.

The door behind him opened and once again he resisted the urge to turn around. Wait. Let them come to him. An immediate if minor advantage. They were approaching the table. From the corner of his eye he saw them pass on the same side. His right. He carried on looking out of the window, even when they were both standing in front of him. He didn’t allow his eyes to move until the woman sat down opposite him. Blonde, attractive, around thirty, blue eyes, and fit, judging by her upper arms beneath the short-sleeved blouse. She placed an anonymous black folder in front of her on the table and met his searching gaze without blinking. Edward didn’t say a word, but simply switched his attention to her colleague, who was still standing by the wall next to the table.

It wasn’t Billy Rosén. It was someone very, very familiar. Edward had to exercise every scrap of self-control to avoid showing how surprised he was.

Sebastian Bergman.

They had got a long way.

Much further than he had dared hope.

Edward kept his eyes fixed on Sebastian until he was absolutely certain that his voice would hold. Then his face broke into a satisfied, almost welcoming smile. ‘Sebastian Bergman. What a surprise.’

Sebastian did not return his greeting. Edward didn’t take his eyes off him. Sebastian remembered that look. Searching. Observing. Penetrating. You sometimes got the feeling that Edward wasn’t just looking you in the eye, but that he could see right through into your brain, where he picked out the information he wanted, information to which he wouldn’t otherwise have access.

‘And this is . . . ?’ Edward continued, sounding relaxed as he turned to Vanja.

‘Vanja,’ she replied before Sebastian had the chance to introduce her.

‘Vanja.’ Edward seemed to be savouring the word. ‘Vanja . . . Vanja what?’

‘Vanja will do fine,’ Sebastian broke in. There was no reason to give Hinde any more information than necessary.

Edward turned to Sebastian again, still wearing a disarming smile. ‘And to what do I owe the honour of a visit after all these years? Are the royalties drying up? Are you considering making it a trilogy?’ Once again Edward directed his attention to Vanja. ‘He’s written books about me. Two of them.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘I was his claim to fame . . . That’s the correct phrase, I believe?’

Vanja sat motionless, her arms folded over her chest, apparently uninterested in Edward’s comments.

‘Anyway,’ Edward went on, ‘first he helped to get me arrested, then he revealed . . . the mechanisms behind the monster.’ He smiled again. Not at Vanja this time, but more to himself, as if recalling a fond memory, a better time. Or as if he was just extremely happy with the way he had expressed himself.

‘We topped the bestseller lists. Book signings. Lectures all over Europe. Perhaps the USA too – how did that go, Sebastian?’

Sebastian didn’t respond either. He leaned indolently against the wall and folded his arms just like Vanja, while keeping his eyes fixed on Edward with an almost challenging expression.

Hinde met his gaze and tilted his head slightly to one side before addressing Vanja once more. ‘He’s not saying anything. Good plan. We don’t like uncomfortable silences in this country. So we fill them. Babble on. Give ourselves away.’ Edward paused, as if to consider whether he had said too much, whether he had just provided an example of the very fault he had described. ‘I’m a psychologist too,’ he explained to Vanja. ‘I was two years above Sebastian. Did he mention that?’

‘No.’

Sebastian was watching Hinde carefully. Where was he going? Why had he mentioned that? Nothing Edward Hinde did was unplanned. Everything had a purpose. The only question was what that purpose might be.

‘He doesn’t want to admit how alike we are,’ Hinde was saying. ‘Middle-aged psychologists who have a complex relationship with women. That’s what we are, isn’t it, Sebastian?’

Hinde released Vanja from his gaze and looked up at Sebastian. Suddenly Vanja had a strong feeling that Sebastian was right. Hinde
was
mixed up in the four murders. Not only as the inspiration, but actually involved. For real. Somehow. She had no idea how, but he knew why they were here.

It was only a feeling, hard to get hold of – intuition. It came to her now and again. She was sometimes struck by it when she was sitting with a suspect or double-checking an alibi. A sudden deep conviction that there was a link. That there was some kind of involvement, perhaps guilt. Even when there was no physical proof, perhaps not even a chain of circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction. But the feeling was there. It could come from anywhere: body language, how the person in question looked her in the eye, or a tone of voice that struck a false note in an otherwise perfectly ordinary conversation. Vanja knew she was good at spotting that false tone, and there was something about the way Hinde had spoken to Sebastian. A tiny, almost imperceptible undertone of smugness and triumph. Easy to miss. But it was there, and that was enough for Vanja. Torkel had probably been right, even if it would be virtually impossible for her to come out and admit it: putting Sebastian in front of Hinde in this room had been the right decision.

‘What do you know about my women?’ Sebastian asked; nothing in his voice gave away the fact that they were getting close to the reason for their visit.

‘There are a lot of them. Or there used to be, at any rate. I don’t know what the situation is these days.’

Sebastian left his spot by the wall, pulled out the spare chair and sat down. Edward examined him carefully. He had grown older. Not only because of the years that had passed. Life had been hard on Sebastian. Edward thought he knew why. He wondered briefly whether to bring up the marriage to the German.

The daughter.

The tsunami.

The news which had brought such joy to his heart when he finally heard about it. It had taken quite some time. Sebastian’s loss certainly hadn’t featured heavily in the press. Edward had been forced to do a little detective work. Assemble the pieces of the jigsaw. Put two and two together.

It had begun when he had seen some names he thought he recognised in a list of those who were dead or missing. Swedes or those with Swedish connections. There, among the 543 names, were two that seemed somehow familiar: Lily Schwenk and Sabine Schwenk-Bergman. Then he had to go back through the newspaper archives. He found it when he reached 1998. A small notice stating that Sebastian Bergman, the world-famous profiler and author, had married Lily Schwenk. And a year or so after that, in a German newspaper, little Sabine. Sebastian’s wife and daughter on a list of those dead or missing. At first he was pleased. Then, after a while, he began to feel disappointed. Cheated. Almost envious. As if he wished he could have been that great wave, the unstoppable force that took Sebastian’s family away from him and left him broken. But it was still useful information, regardless of how he felt, and it would no doubt come in handy at some point, but not here and not now. Not at their first meeting. He wanted to find out what they knew. How far they had got. So Edward kept quiet. It was their turn to talk.

‘Four women have been murdered.’

Vanja saw the flash in Edward’s eyes as he leaned forward across the table, suddenly interested.

‘Could I possibly ask for some details?’

Sebastian and Vanja exchanged a glance. Sebastian gave a brief nod, and Vanja opened the folder she had placed on the table. She took out a photograph of the first crime scene; it was a wide-angle shot that showed everything.

‘The nightdress, nylon stockings, a hidden supply of food, the victim raped while lying on her stomach,’ she said, pushing the picture across to Hinde. He gave it a cursory glance then looked up with an expression of genuine surprise.

‘Someone is copying me.’

‘Imagine that,’ Sebastian said in a measured tone of voice.

‘So that’s why you wanted to talk to me. I was wondering.’ The voice was filled with sudden insight, as if he had just been given the answer to a question he had pondered for a long time. A master class in total surprise. It would have fooled anybody. Even Vanja, if she hadn’t been on her guard. But she was actively looking for signs that would confirm her intuition, and it was clear to her that Hinde hadn’t been wondering any such thing. He knew. He had known all along. He was just playing games.

Hinde shook his head wearily. ‘Can’t people come up with their own ideas anymore? That’s the problem nowadays. There’s no originality out there. They just copy those who were first. And best.’

‘This isn’t an idea someone has come up with on their own. This is you.’ Sebastian’s voice had hardened.

An accusation.

Clear and unmistakeable.

Vanja wasn’t sure if this was the right technique when it came to Hinde, but Sebastian knew him better than she did, so she swallowed her objections.

Edward looked up from the photograph on the table, total surprise in both his expression and his voice. ‘Me? I never leave the secure unit. I don’t have any privileges. My freedom of movement is extremely limited.’ He extended his arms, stretching the chains attached to his handcuffs to demonstrate how fettered he was. ‘I’m not even allowed to use the telephone.’

‘Someone is helping you.’

‘Really?’ Edward leaned forward across the table, manifesting a clear and sincere interest. He had missed this, he realised. The discussion. The game. A statement from Sebastian which he could then counter. Choose to go along with his reasoning, question him, or try to divert his attention, go around in circles, challenge and be challenged. God, how he had missed it. Most people he met in the secure unit were sub-humans, free of any scrap of intelligence. In this room there was at least some intellectual fibre, something to chew on. It was wonderfully liberating.

He leaned back. ‘And how exactly might that happen, do you think?’

‘How do you choose them?’ Sebastian opted to ignore the bait. He wasn’t in the mood. Every time you answered a question, you lost control of the conversation. You were being led instead of leading. Sebastian couldn’t allow that to happen. Not with Hinde.

‘Who?’

‘The women.’

Hinde sighed deeply and shook his head. Disappointed. The right thing for Sebastian would have been not to respond at all. To allow Hinde’s ‘Who?’ to lie unanswered between them. Their eyes would have met. As in a duel. Who would pick up the thread first? And how? Giving the right answer to the question immediately killed the excitement for Hinde. Killed the conversation. Killed his interest.

‘Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian . . . What’s happened to you? Straight down to business. No finesse. No conversation. You ask, I am expected to answer. Whatever happened to a meeting of equals?’

‘We are not equals.’

Hinde sighed a fraction too loudly. Sebastian didn’t even pick up on that. He couldn’t bring himself to embark on a dialogue when prompted, measure his strength against Hinde’s. Edward leaned back in his chair. Disappointed again.

‘You’re boring me, Sebastian. You never used to do that. You were always more of a . . .’ Hinde searched for the right words, found them after a while, ‘. . . stimulating challenge. What’s happened to you?’

‘I got tired of playing games with psychopaths.’

Edward decided to let Sebastian go. This was too boring, too pointless. He was obviously not the same formidable opponent he had once been. Hinde turned to Sebastian’s attractive colleague. Perhaps she would give him a little something back. She was young enough; it should be possible to lure her into his labyrinth.

‘Vanja, may I touch your hair?’

‘Pack it in!’ Sebastian’s words sounded like a whiplash. Hinde was taken aback. A strong reaction. Raised voice. It sounded like genuine anger. Interesting. So far Sebastian had seemed calm and decisive. Determined not to be drawn into any kind of discussion, not to give anything away. But this little outburst of rage was definitely worth probing further. Hinde tilted his head to one side and allowed his gaze to roam up and down Vanja’s hair.