Dark Secrets Read online

  “Yes, you told me.”

  “He means not working together at all! When I push him on how he sees our collaboration, it eventually emerges that we won’t be working together at all! That’s a bit strange, don’t you think?”

  “Doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  Jenny recycled his words from dinner. She had realized this was a good way of appearing to be up to speed even when she wasn’t. Not that she was uninterested in her husband’s job. Not at all. She loved to hear about everything from incompetent forgers to the details of the security van heist last summer. But then Hanser had arrived, and Haraldsson’s tales of police work were pushed aside in favor of lengthy diatribes on the injustice of it all.

  Bitterness.

  Moaning.

  He needed to be thinking about something else.

  “But do you know who you can get really, really close to?” Jenny turned to him and slid her hand under the covers, down toward his limp penis. Haraldsson turned to her with the expression of someone who has had three teeth filled and has just found out that there’s a hole in a fourth.

  “Again?”

  “I’m ovulating.” The hand found its goal and clutched. Squeezed. Gentle but demanding.

  “Again?”

  “I think so. My temperature was up by half a degree this morning. Best to be on the safe side.”

  To his surprise Haraldsson could feel himself beginning to harden once more. Jenny moved over to his side of the bed and lay with her back to him.

  “Do it from behind, you can push deeper that way.”

  Haraldsson shuffled into the right position and slid in easily. Jenny half turned toward him.

  “I need to be up early in the morning, so don’t take all night.” She patted Haraldsson on the cheek and turned back.

  And as Thomas Haraldsson took hold of his wife’s hips, he allowed his thoughts to wander.

  He would show them.

  Show the lot of them.

  Once and for all.

  He promised himself that he would solve the murder of Roger Eriksson.

  While Haraldsson attempted to impregnate his wife without encroaching on her night’s sleep, the man who was not a murderer was sitting in his dressing gown just a mile or so away in a residential area that was by now only sporadically lit, keeping up to date with the investigation. Via the Internet. He was sitting in the dark, illuminated only by the cold light of the screen, in what he proudly referred to as his study.

  The local paper was making a big splash with the death—he couldn’t bring himself to call it “the murder”—although they weren’t updating the story quite as often by this stage. Today the focus of their report had been “a school in shock,” with four pages on the situation at Palmlövska High. Everybody seemed to have been given the opportunity to express their views, from catering staff to pupils and teachers. Most of them might as well have kept their mouths shut, the man who was not a murderer concluded as he read every banal line, every cliché-filled quote. It was as if everyone had an opinion but nobody had anything to say. The local paper was also able to inform its readers that the prosecutor had decided that a boy who was the same age as the victim was to be arrested, but only on the lowest level of suspicion.

  The evening papers had more. Knew more. Made a bigger thing of it. Aftonbladet knew that the boy had terrorized and beaten up the victim in the past, and had evidently been the direct cause of Roger Eriksson’s move to a new school. A man who had a full-length picture next to his byline made the already tragic story even more heartrending by writing about the bullied boy who had escaped his tormentors, picked himself up and moved on, made new friends at a new school and was beginning to regard his future with optimism when he was struck down by meaningless violence. Not a dry eye in the house.

  The man who was not a murderer read the emotive article and thought back. Did he wish it hadn’t happened? Absolutely. But there was no point in thinking that way. It had happened. It couldn’t be undone. Did he feel any regret? Not really. To him, regret meant that a person would act differently if faced with the same situation again.

  And he wouldn’t.

  He couldn’t.

  There was too much at stake.

  He switched to the online version of Expressen. Under “latest” they had a short piece with the headline CASE AGAINST VÄSTERÅS MURDER SUSPECT WEAKENED. Not good. If the police let the young man go, they would start looking again. He leaned back in his desk chair. He always did that when he needed to think.

  He thought about the jacket.

  The green Diesel jacket that was hidden in a drawer behind him. Roger’s bloodstained jacket. What if it was found at the home of the young man the police were holding?

  At first glance this might seem like an egotistical thought and act. Laying a false trail in order to make a fellow human being appear guilty. An immoral, selfish attempt to avoid the consequences of his actions.

  But was that really the case?

  The man who was not a murderer could help Roger’s relatives and friends. They would be able to stop wondering who had taken the teenager’s life and devote their full attention to the process of working through their grief. He could erase the question mark. Help everyone to move on. That was worth a great deal. And as a bonus he would also improve the clear-up rate of the Västerås police. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed like an entirely unselfish act. A good deed, in fact.

  It didn’t take many clicks on the keyboard before he found out who the police were holding. Leo Lundin. His name was all over various chat rooms, forums, and blogs. The Internet really was fantastic.

  Soon he had the address too.

  Now he really could help.

  Sebastian looked at the clock—how many times was that? He didn’t know. 11:11. The last time it had been 11:08. Was it possible for time to move so slowly? The restlessness was in his blood. He didn’t want to be in this town, in this house. What was he supposed to do? Sit down in one of the armchairs, read a book, and feel at home? Impossible. The house hadn’t felt like a home even when he was living here. He had flicked through the TV channels without finding anything of interest. Since he didn’t drink, the booze cupboard was of no interest. Nor was he the type to browse through his mother’s scented bath oils and exclusive bath pearls before sliding down into a relaxing/refreshing/harmonious/energizing bath in the decent-size, almost luxurious bathroom that had been his mother’s refuge; it was the only room she had told her husband she wanted to plan and decorate herself, if Sebastian remembered rightly. Her room in his house.

  Sebastian had spent a while wandering around and opening cupboards and drawers at random. To a certain extent he was driven by sheer curiosity, just as he always opened the bathroom cabinet whenever he was visiting other people, but he was also driven—he admitted to himself somewhat reluctantly—by a desire to see what had happened in this house since he left it. The abiding impression was: nothing, really. The best Rörstrand china was still in its place in the white corner display cabinet; wall hangings and tablecloths for every occasion and every season lay laundered and meticulously rolled in the wardrobes. Sure, there were lots of pointless new ornaments made of glass and china, along with souvenirs from various trips and holidays, all sharing the shelf space behind the closed cupboard doors with presents from a whole lifetime: candlesticks, vases, and—from another era—ashtrays. Objects that were rarely or never used, kept simply because someone else had brought them into the house and it was therefore regarded as impossible to get rid of them without appearing ungrateful or—God forbid—giving the impression that you had better taste than the donor. Things he hadn’t seen before, but the feeling in the house was the same. In spite of new furniture, knocked-down walls, and modern lighting, in Sebastian’s eyes the house was a sea of pointless items that did nothing to contradict the feeling that life in the Bergman home had been lived in exactly the same calm, quiet, conventionally middle-class, timid way he remembered. The very sigh
t of all these objects his mother had left behind bored him even more, and the only genuine feeling he could conjure up was an enormous weariness at the prospect of sorting out all this shit. Getting rid of it.

  The agent had called around three. He had seemed a little surprised at Sebastian’s attitude; after all, these days everyone regarded their house as an investment, and people usually guarded their investment with the capitalist approach of modern times. But Sebastian had made no attempt to negotiate. He wanted to sell, essentially at any price. Preferably today. The agent had promised to come around as soon as he could. Sebastian hoped that would be tomorrow.

  He thought about the woman on the train. The piece of paper with her phone number on it was by his bed. Why hadn’t he had a little more foresight? Called her earlier, suggested dinner at some pleasant restaurant of her choice. Taken time over a good meal, with good wine for her. Talked, laughed, listened. Gotten to know her for the evening. They could have been relaxing in comfortable armchairs in some hotel lobby now, a drink in their hands, discreet lounge music in their ears, and he could tentatively, almost accidentally, allow his fingers to brush against her bare knees just below the hem of her dress.

  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 inter
mittent 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.