Sun and Shadow (17 page)

She laughed, replaced her cigarette in the ashtray, and took another drink of her hot chocolate. What a mixture. If she’d been drinking espresso he could have understood it, but not a cigarette and chocolate. He was drinking espresso. Double espresso. It tasted awful. You didn’t get much either.

“What do you think they saw when they went in?” she asked.

“No, idea.”

“It must have been awful.”

“A dead married couple,” he said. “There’s only one thing worse than that.”

“What?”

‘A live married couple.“

She grinned, but noticed that he wasn’t even smiling. Maybe it wasn’t a joke. She knew what he’d been through, was still going through. She reached for his hand, brushed against her cigarette and burned herself.

“Ouch!”

“That’s what happens when you mess around with that crap.”

She stroked her finger and blew on it.

“It hurts.”

“About time you stopped.”

“I’ve only just started.”

“I think they saw something worse than a Wes Craven,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Halloween. I think it was Halloween in that apartment, sort of.”

“Explain.”

“Come on, Ria. For once I’ve been following this in the newspapers. I mean, you could say that I’m an interested party. I checked to see what the police had to say about what they found inside there. What had happened. Are you with me?”

“No.”

“It says nothing at all about it. About what had happened, sort of. I think that’s fishy.”

“Take it easy. They never tell you all that much, do they?”

“Do you read the papers regularly?”

“I read about the TV programs. What’s on in town.”

“Don’t you see what I’m getting at?”

“Are you saying that they’re keeping quiet because there was something extra horrific inside there?”

“Yes. That’s the way I see it. Less is more.” He drank the last drops of his cold espresso and made a face.

“That’s smart.”

“What?”

“A smart way of putting it. Less is more.”

“There’s another thing.”

“And?”

“I think I might know what kind of music they were playing in there.”

They were three cars behind and Morelius saw the Volvo jump a red light.

“We can get him under the bridge,” Bartram said.

They pulled out and passed the cars that had stopped at the red light and waved to the Volvo driver to stop next to the Shell gas station. They walked toward the car, one on each side, and the driver, who was alone, rolled down his mud-covered window as Morelius approached. They were about the same age.

“Can I see your driver’s license, please?”

The man took his wallet out of his inside pocket and produced his license from a collection of other plastic cards. He was wearing a thick polo-necked shirt and a thin jacket. Glasses, his thinning hair combed back. He seemed nervous, but it would have been odd if he hadn’t been. Morelius couldn’t smell any alcohol.

“You were a bit ahead of yourself back there.”

“I know.”

“You’re supposed to stop at a red light.”

“I know, I know. I thought I could make it before it changed from yellow.” He looked up at Morelius. “You can usually make it on yellow.”

“That depends,” said Morelius. “Were you in a hurry?”

“I’m late picking up the kids from nursery school. Very late, in fact. They actually phoned me to ask where I was.” He looked at Morelius again, but he wasn’t playing for sympathy. “They even phoned,” he said again.

Morelius thought he saw Bartram struggling to suppress a giggle.

“It’s true,” the man said. “It’s in Fräntorp,” he said, as if that confirmed everything. “I can call them,” he said, pointing to his mobile phone in its holder on the dashboard.

“That won’t be necessary,” Morelius said. “But make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

The man took his driver’s license and stared at it, as if expecting it to turn into an arrest warrant any moment.

“Er ... you mean there won’t be anything?”

“What do you mean, anything?”

“Fine, or points docked, or whatever.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Er ... no.”

“Be more careful in future,” Morelius said, and walked back to the patrol car. Bartram was already inside. Morelius heard the man start his engine and drive off.

“He was lucky to get stopped by officers who weren’t on traffic duty,” said Bartram. “They have to think about their success rates.”

The law and order boys had to think about everything, Morelius thought. Drugs, traffic offenses, robbery and burglary, violent assault. All-arounders. Double murders.

“We drive around town and see that bastard who mugged that woman and beat her up so badly that she was off work for three years, and he was in prison for a month. Does anybody expect us to take twelve hundred kronor off a guy who’s rushing to pick up his kids from nursery school?”

“Not today, in any case,” Morelius said.

“I let a shoplifter go the other day,” Bartram said.

“Eh?”

“I took it upon myself to let a shoplifter go, without reporting him.”

“You don’t say.”

“You can’t always throw your weight around. Show who’s boss.”

There was a crackling from the radio: “Eleven-ten. Come in eleven-ten.”

“We’re at the roundabout just north of Central Station,” Bartram said.

“We’ve just had a call from a mobile phone at Kungsportsplatsen. They’re holding somebody who’s stabbed a passenger in a tram, and they’re trying to restrain him, over.”

“Roger,” said Bartram, and Morelius switched on the lights and siren.

“They’re at the stop for northbound traffic. Did you get that? Over.”

“Yep, roger,” Bartram said, and they raced past Brunnsparken and turned left.

 

Winter wrote down the message: W ALL. Drew a circle around the first letter. What was the point of sitting here, doing this? Riddles like this took time that could be spent on other riddles, but he was fascinated by the message, gave it a higher priority than it might have deserved. No obvious answer. One word? Several? Or was the murderer just being facetious, pointing out that there was a wall there? Did “wall” have a symbolic significance? Was it something to do with the music? Was “wall” a frequent symbol in this kind of music? Setter had come up with a new suggestion regarding the genre: black metal. Not death metal. Black metal. Even worse.

He looked at the word once more, wrote it again, drew another circle. All? Had he killed all? Were all going to die? He’d already been thinking about that. Why was there a circle round the W? Is that what we should be thinking about? What begins with W?

He got up and went to the mirror over the sink. The slight tan he’d brought back from the Costa del Sol had gone, replaced by the usual bluish hue typical of winter. Winter. Winter started with
W
. He pressed his right hand lightly against his cheek. Winter. A bit early for paranoid thoughts.

The investigation had only just begun, but it didn’t seem like that. He felt as if it had started the moment he’d boarded the plane for Málaga. That’s when the tale started.

W
.
Double-U
. Double murder.

The telephone rang, and he thought about the phone ringing at home with nobody speaking at the other end. He’d answered last night just before Angela made him his Paris sandwich, but there was nobody there. Not even any breathing this time, just the tone signaling an open line. Maybe he should change his number and go unlisted.

He went to his desk and answered.

“Hello, it’s Lotta. I bet I’m disturbing something important, but I wondered whether you and Angela would like to come around for dinner tomorrow evening? It’s Friday tomorrow.”

“I’ll ask her.”

“What about you yourself?”

“Well, I suppose I can come.”

“I’m overwhelmed by your enthusiasm.”

“Assuming nothing more happens, nothing new.”

“I read about it. A couple in Vasastan.”

“That’s where they lived, yes.”

“Only a few doors away from you, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Don’t remind me. And, above all, don’t remind Angela.”

“I’ll try not to. Mom has just called, by the way.”

“How is she?”

“She seems to be coping okay. Better than I’d expected, to be honest.”

“What’s she doing?”

“She seems to have become a bit more sociable. She’s meeting some of their friends down there more often than she used to.”

“That’s good.”

“She’s coming home for Christmas.”

“Is that what she said?”

“As good as.”

“I’d better buy some Tanqueray.”

He noted the ensuing pause and knew what was coming next. He’d also wondered when he should mention it.

“I dreamed about Dad last night,” she said. “He was emerging from a clump of trees. It was summer. Bright sunshine, you know.”

“On his own?”

“I don’t know. I woke up then, I think. Incidentally, he was younger ... more or less like we are now. I remember noting that from his face. Isn’t that odd?”

“I don’t know. It’s not so odd to have been dreaming about him. I ... I think about him as well. I’ve had that kind of dream.”

The madman with the knife had calmed down by the time they got there. So much, in fact, that he was lying on the ground. Morelius bent down to examine him.

“He’s not dead, is he?”

Morelius looked up at Bartram.

“Coma, I think. He’s on GHB.”

“Here comes the ambulance.”

“I said they should send an ambulance too,” said a young man with a mobile in his hand.

“Was it you who reported the incident? Okay, what happened?”

“He started stabbing at random, then focused on one person when we stopped here. I ran after him and tackled him.”

“And then?”

“He tried to get up, but there were several of us holding him down.”

“Where’s the knife?”

“He dropped it. It’s over there,” he said, pointing toward the pavement. Morelius could see the knife on the road midway between where they were and the pavement.

“Was anybody hurt? In the tram or out here in the street?”

“No. Apart from him.”

“Who was he after?”

They moved out of the way when the ambulance team arrived with a stretcher and gave the man a quick examination. He was still lying there with no signs of life.

“GHB, probably,” Morelius said.

The man was lifted onto the stretcher and carried to the ambulance. Morelius turned to the hero and repeated his question.

“He was after somebody in particular, is that right?”

“I don’t know. It looked that way, but he‘s, well, he’s as high as a kite, so ...”

“So he wasn’t after anybody in particular?”

“I really don’t know.”

Winter had gone to get a cup of coffee, and returned. It was snowing again. It wasn’t December yet, but winter had set in. Several inches of snow, and he had no doubt they would still be there over the holiday period. The new era. He breathed deeply in, then out, then in again.

This was something new. He lost concentration, regained it, then lost it again. He thought about his father, about Angela, about their child, about his mother, about his sister, about the case again, about the telephone that kept ringing, about Angela again. About Alicia.

Möllerström came with some new photographs. Winter had asked to see all of them. They were taken from every conceivable angle.

From the front all that could be seen was the jagged necklace. The same was true from the side. That applied to both of them.

But you could see from the back, if you knew. They didn’t quite fit, the balance wasn’t right. Considerable strength had been needed to do this, Pia Fröberg had said. She was a pathologist who knew what she was talking about. Even she had paled at the thought.

But the bottom line was the lack of balance.

There were no fingerprints apart from their own. We checked especially around the eyes, Lars Beier had said. The deputy chief of the forensic division had looked pretty sick himself, and surprised. As if they’d been presented with something unreal.

The puzzle was the same as always: why? Why had he done it?

Winter tried to examine all the photographs one more time. The worst was the photo of her face in profile. The body leaning against a big, fat cushion.

They were holding hands, a grip welded by death. Afterward, the pathologist had said. The fingers had been intertwined after death.

He switched on the tape again as he scrutinized the pictures. The guitars as loud as possible. Incredibly fast. It was mainly the drums, furiously beating. The base drum, bang-bang-bang-bang. The voice was hissing, like a disembodied spirit. A witch. Were they words he could hear?

“Even somebody who’s used to it—a fan, that is—can hardly ever work out the words.”

Johan Setter was sitting opposite Winter. His leather jacket was scuffed with age. Setter’s brow was wrinkled in thought.

“I went to Madhouse in Drottninggatan, but they couldn’t help much. They listened to the tape, but they weren’t able to make any specific comments.”

“Specific comments? What do you mean by that?”

“The bottom line is that they didn’t have a clue. Even so, it’s one of the best shops in Gothenburg for metal music. The girl did say that it was more like black metal, rather than death metal. Not that there’s much of a difference. That made it more difficult, she said.”

“What is the difference?”

“With regard to the music, the tempo is quicker with black metal. The singing is shriller. Deeper in death metal. As if it were coming from the back of the throat.”