Dark Secrets Read online

  The first was when they were going through the investigation chronologically. Vanja looked up from her papers and asked, “What did you do on the Sunday?”

  “The investigation got under way in earnest, but led nowhere.”

  The answer came with some speed. Practiced speed. Unconvincing speed. Torkel made a note of it and knew that Vanja had done the same. She was the closest thing to a human lie detector Torkel had ever encountered. He looked at her with a certain amount of anticipation as she gazed at Haraldsson for a long time, then glanced back at her papers. Haraldsson let out a long breath. They were on the same side, sure, but there was no need for his colleagues to know that there might have been the odd mistake in the initial stages. They had to focus on the future now. He was therefore slightly irritated—and a little worried—when Vanja waved her pen once more. Billy smiled; he was also well aware that Vanja had picked up something in Haraldsson’s voice that didn’t ring true. She had no intention of letting it go. She never did. Billy leaned back in his comfortable chair and folded his arms. This could be fun.

  “When you say ‘got under way,’ ” Vanja went on, her tone somewhat sharper, “what did you actually do? I can’t find any interviews, neither with the mother nor anyone else, no reports from door-to-door inquiries, nobody putting together a timeline from the Friday.” She looked up and stared straight at Haraldsson. “So what exactly did you do?”

  Haraldsson shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. Why the fuck did he have to sit here defending other people’s mistakes?

  “I wasn’t on duty that weekend. I didn’t pick up the case until the Monday.”

  “So what happened on the Sunday?”

  Haraldsson glanced at the two men in the room, as if seeking support for his view that looking backward wasn’t particularly helpful. No support was forthcoming. Both of them were gazing expectantly at him.

  “As I understand it, uniformed officers went to see the mother.”

  “And did what?”

  “Took down information about the boy’s disappearance.”

  “What information? Where is it?”

  Vanja didn’t take her eyes off him. Haraldsson realized they weren’t going to get anywhere until they found out everything that had happened. So he told them. The truth. Afterward there was a different kind of silence in the room. A silence that Haraldsson at least interpreted as the kind that might arise when a group of people is busy digesting what might well be the finest example of incompetence they’ve ever heard. Eventually Billy spoke.

  “So the only thing that happened on the Sunday was that someone wrote another report about the same disappearance?”

  “Well, yes, technically.”

  “Okay, so the boy disappeared on Friday at ten p.m. When did you actually start looking for him?”

  “On the Monday. After lunch. When the report was passed on to me. Well, we didn’t actually start looking then, but we did speak to his girlfriend, the school, witnesses…”

  The room fell silent once more. Experience told them that in all probability the boy was already dead by then, but if not—if he’d been held captive somewhere… Three days! Good God! Torkel leaned forward, gazing at Haraldsson with earnest curiosity.

  “So why didn’t you tell us this when we asked what happened on the Sunday?”

  “It’s never pleasant to admit that mistakes have been made.”

  “But it wasn’t your mistake. You didn’t pick up the case until the Monday. The only mistake you’ve made is not telling us. We’re a team. We can’t afford to be anything less than honest with each other.”

  Haraldsson nodded. He suddenly felt as if he were seven years old and had been sent to the headmaster for silly behavior in the playground.

  During the remainder of the briefing he told them everything (apart from the lunchtime quickie with Jenny and the fake visit to the emergency room), which meant they didn’t finish until after 9:00 p.m.

  Torkel thanked him. Billy was stretching and yawning and Vanja had started to pack away when the second surprise of the evening came.

  “Just one more thing.” Haraldsson took a small but effective pause. “We haven’t found the boy’s jacket or watch.” Torkel, Vanja, and Billy all straightened up; this was interesting. Haraldsson could see Vanja fishing for her folder in her bag.

  “I didn’t put it in the report—you never know who gets to read them, where a piece of information like that might end up.”

  Vanja nodded to herself. Clever—it was precisely that kind of detail they didn’t want leaked to the press. It would be worth its weight in gold in an interrogation. Perhaps Haraldsson wasn’t completely hopeless after all, even if most of the indications were to the contrary.

  “So he was robbed?” Billy said.

  “I don’t think so. He still had his wallet, with almost three hundred kronor in it. And his cell in his trouser pocket.”

  Everyone on the team considered the fact that someone—presumably the murderer—had taken selected items from the victim. That meant something. That and the missing heart.

  “The jacket was Diesel,” Haraldsson went on. “Green. I’ve got pictures of the relevant style on my desk. The watch was a…” Haraldsson consulted his notes. “A Tonino Lamborghini Pilot. Same applies—I’ve got pictures.”

  Afterward Torkel sat alone in the windowless room, trying to think of a reason not to go to the hotel. Should he start drawing up the timeline on the whiteboard? Put up the map? The pictures? Go through what Haraldsson had told them again? But Billy would do all that much more quickly and efficiently tomorrow morning, probably before anyone else had even arrived at the station.

  He could go out for something to eat. But he wasn’t that hungry—not enough to sit alone in a restaurant. He could ask Vanja to keep him company, of course, but she was going to spend the evening reading up on the case in her hotel room. He knew that. Extremely ambitious and conscientious, Vanja. She probably wouldn’t say no if he asked her to join him for dinner, but it wasn’t what she wanted, and she would feel slightly stressed all evening. Torkel dismissed the idea.

  Billy? Torkel thought Billy had many excellent qualities, and his knowledge of computers and technology made him an invaluable member of the team, but Torkel couldn’t remember their ever having dinner together, just the two of them. The conversation didn’t flow as easily with Billy. Billy just loved a night in a hotel. There wasn’t a single TV show on any channel between ten o’clock at night and two in the morning that Billy hadn’t seen, and he liked to chat about them. TV, movies, music, games, computers, new phones, and foreign magazines, which he read online. When he was with Billy, Torkel felt like a dinosaur.

  He sighed. It would be a walk and a sandwich and a beer in his room, with the TV for company. He consoled himself with the thought that Ursula would be coming tomorrow. Then he would have a companion for dinner.

  Torkel switched off the lights and left the conference room. Last to leave as usual, he thought as he walked through the empty office. Hardly surprising that his wife had had enough.

  Chapter Five

  IT WAS dark by the time Sebastian paid the cabdriver and got out of the car. The driver also got out, opened the trunk, lifted out Sebastian’s bag, and wished him a nice evening. A nice evening in his parents’ house? Well, there’s always a first time, Sebastian thought. And the fact that both of his parents were dead certainly increased the chances significantly.

  Sebastian crossed the road; the cab, which had turned around in the neighbors’ drive, passed behind him. He stood by the low white wooden fence that needed painting and noticed that the mailbox was overflowing. Didn’t some kind of central notification go out when someone died, stopping all the mail? Evidently not.

  On his arrival in Västerås several hours earlier, Sebastian had gone to the funeral director’s office to pick up the house key. Apparently one of his mother’s oldest friends had organized the funeral when he’d refused to have anything to do with it. Berit Holmberg.
Sebastian couldn’t remember ever having heard the name. The funeral director had offered to show him some kind of album of the ceremony, which had allegedly been very beautiful, atmospheric, and well attended. Sebastian had declined.

  He had gone to a restaurant afterward. Spent a long time over a good meal. Lingered over coffee, reading a book. He had fingered the card the woman on the train had given him, but decided to wait. Tomorrow or the following day he would call her. Interested but not desperate—that was always the best approach. He had gone for a walk. Thought about seeing a movie but decided against it. There was nothing he found appealing. Eventually he had been unable to put off the real purpose of his visit any longer and hailed a cab.

  Now he was standing in the street staring at the house he had left the day after his nineteenth birthday. Well-tended flower beds lined both sides of the stone garden path. At the moment they consisted mainly of low, neatly pruned conifers, but soon the perennials would be in flower. His mother had loved her garden and had cared for it tenderly. At the back there were fruit trees and a vegetable patch. The stone path led to a two-story house. Sebastian had been ten years old when they moved in; it had just been built. Even in the faint light of the street lamps Sebastian could see that it really needed some attention now. Lumps of plaster had fallen off the facade, the paint on the window frames was flaking, and in two places the roof was a shade darker. Missing tiles, probably. Sebastian overcame his sheer physical reluctance to go inside and walked the few steps to the front door.

  He unlocked it and stepped into the hallway. It smelled musty. Stuffy. He dropped his bag and remained standing in the archway leading to the rest of the house. Just on the other side were a dining table and chairs, and farther to the right the living room opened out. Sebastian noticed that a wall had been knocked down and that the ground floor was now what was known as “open plan.” He moved a little farther inside. He recognized only a fraction of the furniture. A bureau that had belonged to his grandfather was familiar, and some of the paintings on the walls, but the wallpaper behind them was new to him. So was the flooring. How long was it since he had been here? Sebastian refused to think of this house as “home.” He had moved out when he was nineteen, but he had visited after that. Nurtured a vain hope that he and his parents might be reconciled when they were all grown up. But no. He remembered visiting the week after he turned twenty-five. Was that the last time? Almost thirty years ago. It wasn’t surprising that he hardly recognized a thing.

  There was a closed door in one wall of the living room. When Sebastian lived there it had been a guest room. Rarely used. His parents had a wide circle of acquaintances, but they were almost all from the town itself. He opened the door. One wall was covered in bookshelves, and where there used to be a bed there was now a desk. With a typewriter and an old-fashioned calculator with a roll of paper in it. Sebastian closed the door. Presumably the entire house was full of shit like that. What was he going to do with it all?

  He went into the kitchen. New cupboards, new table, same old car dealer’s floor made of vinyl. He opened the door of the fridge. Full. All rotten. He picked up a carton of milk from the door. Opened. Best before March 8. International Women’s Day. Even though he knew what to expect, Sebastian stuck his nose in the opening. Pulling a face, he put the carton back and took out a can of beer that was next to a bag containing something he guessed might once have been cheese, but that now resembled a successful research project in a laboratory specializing in mold.

  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.

  Chapter Six

  TORKEL 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: