Some Kind of Peace (18 page)

I take the card and put it in the pocket of the bathrobe. We remain standing close to each other, perhaps for a moment too long. Then we shake hands and Markus disappears out into the evening.

Aina is sitting on the rug, looking up at me.

“What was that letter? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Tentatively, I start telling her about the letter. About the mysterious photo. About the power outage during the storm.

“Why, Siri? Why didn’t you say anything?” she looks primarily confused—not accusing, as I’d feared.

I explain quietly my fear of making her fret too much. About the risk of wearing out my friends and the desire not to be a burden. To not be a burden to anyone.

“Siri, sometimes you are such a doofus!”

Aina moves closer to me and I place my head against her shoulder. For a long, long time we sit like that.

Outside, the evening has turned into night.

Peter Carlsson and I have been talking for more than twenty minutes. We have devoted almost half the time to analyzing what triggers his compulsive thoughts about harming his girlfriend. He seems to be feeling better than the last time but is still tormented when he has to talk about the horrible things he doesn’t actually want to do but still can’t keep from imagining in detail.

His nervous expression and apologies are starting to get on my nerves. There’s something that doesn’t add up. I don’t quite know what it is, but there’s something strange about Peter. Fake. Sometimes I sense that his apologies are only empty phrases that he has memorized and repeats intermittently in order to put up with himself. That what is actually behind his dapper façade remains hidden, a secret.

“By the way,” he says suddenly, in the middle of a graphic description of his rape fantasies. “I ran into Charlotte Mimer in the hall. I didn’t know she came here. We worked together at Procter & Gamble.”

I stop in midmotion and suddenly become guarded. I look at him. His expression is eager and open.

“Although perhaps you can’t talk about your patients?”

“No, I can’t.”

He looks disappointed. “So you can’t say whether Charlotte is your patient?”

“No.”

Now I am mad at Peter, although I don’t show it. Everybody knows about therapist-client privilege.

“Peter, I would like us to get back to what we were discussing earlier. You mentioned that sometimes you have thoughts relating to strangling?”

“Well, I don’t always hold the woman around the throat, I mean,
in those images
,” Peter clarifies.

He says “hold around the throat” when he means strangling. I assume it makes things easier for him.

“It could also be that I am burning her with a cigarette.
Only in my thoughts, of course
,” he repeats, as if to indicate that this has nothing to do with reality.

“Or cut her wrists and drown her,” I suddenly say, harshly.

“Uh… yes, exactly.” Peter is baffled but also looks relieved, as if he couldn’t have said it better himself.

“In principle it can be anything at all, anything that hurts…”

Suddenly I can’t bear to listen anymore. I get up brusquely from my chair.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Peter, but that’s it for today.”

Peter looks surprised, but there is something else in his eyes, too, something ugly. He looks
satisfied
. As if the fact that his therapist interrupted the session means that he has succeeded in proving to her that he is a monster.

I throw open the door, rush out of the room, and run into Marianne, who seems to have been standing right outside. If I didn’t know better I would have thought she was eavesdropping. I try to explain the situation to her: I’m exhausted and Peter is behaving strangely. Can she help me?

“You’ll have to think of some excuse,” I say.

“Such as?” she asks vacantly, placing her hands on her round hips.

“Say I’m pregnant and have to throw up or something. Women get really sensitive when they’re pregnant, don’t they?”

Marianne stares at me in shock as I run toward the door.

“Cancel all appointments this afternoon,” I add as I open the door to the stairwell and leave the office.

I wander aimlessly around the streets by Katarina Church. It is liberating to get out in the cool air. The clouds hang heavy over the church steeple, as if the weather wanted to mimic my emotions. I sit down on a bench in the cemetery and look out over the gravestones. For once I feel no remorse for how I behaved. Listening to Peter Carlsson’s violent thoughts doesn’t feel right. Not to me, not to him.

The image of Sara’s dead face appears again. Sara. Who could have wanted to hurt her? Did someone kill her to get at me? The idea seems unlikely. I wonder about Markus’s words: “a possibility” they are working on, one “among many.” What other theories might the police have?

I ransack my memory, trying to remember what Sara told me. She had a history of substance abuse. I know she did drugs during the time she was homeless. Not large quantities or anything heavy, not according to her, anyway. Even so, the fact that she used drugs also means that she must have come into contact with any number of shady characters. Maybe there is someone from her past who wanted revenge over some old injustice. A debt? Unfinished business? Drug money? This whole chain of thought feels absurd and improbable. Why would someone take revenge on Sara now? After all these years. There is also the letter, the suicide note that isn’t really a suicide note. The letter that Sara’s murderer must have written. And whoever composed the letter knew about me. Knew that Sara was in therapy. Even knew what Sara and I talked about in detail. I know that most murders are committed by someone close to the victim and that it is unusual for the perpetrator to be a stranger. Who was close to Sara? There are several girlfriends she mentioned during our conversations. Linda and Nathalie. Broken young girls, just like Sara. I have a hard time imagining that either of them would have attacked her. I imagine that the murderer is a man, not only because murderers are most often men but also because the person Sara met recently is a man. A man who behaved strangely, to boot. I try to make a summary of sorts of everything I know about him.

He is older, but what does “older” mean? Sara was twenty-five. What did “older” mean to her? Thirty-five, like me? Or fifty-five, like her father? My impression was that we were talking about a man who is older than me.

He has plenty of money. Sara was showered with expensive designer clothing and other presents. But what does that really say? Stockholm is teeming with rich guys in their forties.

The main thing that sets this man apart is that for some reason he approached Sara, courted her, gained her confidence, but did not want to have sex with her. Why would a middle-aged man have this kind of a relationship with a young woman? Why? I can’t answer. But I know it’s not normal. I think about how worried I was when Sara first told me about the man she had met. My intuition that something wasn’t right. I suddenly feel convinced that my intuition was correct. Something was wrong.

I search my memory to see if I can remember whether Sara mentioned how they met. She may have said something about this, but I can’t remember. The video recordings of the therapy sessions, I think. I have to look at the videotapes. Maybe there are additional facts there, details I’ve forgotten. I decide to look through the tapes when the police, who borrowed them to make copies, give them back to me. And when I can bear to. Watching Sara curled up in the chair, talking about her life as she puffs on one of her endless cigarettes, seems impossible right now.

The room is bright, with white walls. In the corner is a well-kept Kinnarps desk with a shiny surface. There doesn’t appear to be a speck of dust. On the bookshelves, also from Kinnarps, are Jofa binders arranged by color. I am sitting in a visitor’s chair at a small table in what must be a designated area for questioning. It strikes me that the furniture and the arrangement of the room are not unlike my own. A room for work, a room for talk.

On the other side of the table are Sonja and Markus, the police officers on Sara’s case. Unlike our previous conversation, this is clearly an interrogation. The tone is friendly but formal. There is not a trace of warm blankets or refills on glasses of wine. On the table in front of me is a mug filled with coffee-machine cappuccino that Markus made for me. “From our new coffee machine,” he announced, not without irony in his voice.

It is Sonja who runs the meeting with her rapid, slightly nervous conversational style. Markus sits beside her, taking notes and interrupting now and then with a question.

“How much do you know about Sara’s substance abuse?”

Informing me that the circumstances surrounding Sara’s death are still unclear and that it is no longer a possibility that Sara committed suicide but that she was killed instead, Sonja steers the conversation to Sara’s past.

“A little… not that much really. But you watched the tapes, right?”

“Well, yes, we’ve copied them and are in the process of looking through them. By the way, you can take the original tapes with you when you leave. In any event, we assume you must have talked with each other also when the camera wasn’t on. Hence the question.”

“Sara used drugs, and then she quit. On her own. Because she wanted to.”

“Do you know that Sara has a record?”

“Yes, I know that she had been arrested for shoplifting, and maybe for possession, too?”

“And for handling stolen goods. We also know that she prostituted herself occasionally. Did you know about that too?”

For a moment I remain silent. That Sara had prostituted herself is news to me, and the information makes me feel sick. I can imagine how bad things must have gotten for Sara when she decided to sell her body and can only guess how much of it she must have repressed in order to even bear it.

I shake my head. “No, I didn’t know that.”

Somehow this is embarrassing. As if I ought to have known all of Sara’s secrets, as if my ignorance on this matter makes me a bad therapist, underscoring my incompetence.

“No? So you don’t know if she was still in touch with individuals from that period in her life?”

I shake my head.

Sonja sighs quietly.

“We still don’t know whether Sara’s death is connected to her past or if in some way it’s connected to you. There are signs that indicate the crime may have been aimed against you.”

I nod again. Markus had already explained this to me.

“And what is your relationship to drugs?”

“Drugs?” I repeat Sonja’s question mechanically.

“I have no relationship to drugs. That is, not illegal drugs. Now and then I drink a glass of wine, but nothing more.”

“You were recently taken in for a DUI? I’d say that sounds like more than a couple glasses of wine.”

“That was a special situation, of course I never would drive under the influence otherwise, but as I already explained to your colleague…”

Sonja almost imperceptibly raises an eyebrow and looks briefly in Markus’s direction. I suddenly have the feeling that Markus hasn’t told Sonja about our conversation.