Sun and Shadow Page 23

  How carefully had he read the case notes on the interviews with all the people working at the salon?

  “One moment,” he said, reaching for his black notebook. He scribbled a note, then looked up at Lareda, who was deep in thought. “Keep going, Lareda.”

  “I’m improvising a bit,” she said. “He’s put down a marker ... or several that might be interlinked. Somehow or other the text and the music and the action are interlinked.” She looked up at Winter. “They’re not disparate markers.” She looked down at the desktop again, with a glance at the tape recorder. “And what they’re saying is that he wants to be stopped.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d come to that conclusion as well?”

  “Yes. He wants us to liberate him from his misery”

  “The action itself is an anxiety reduction or conversion. When anxiety gets sufficiently strong it deforms the normal. Eventually he’s forced to act and that brings him some calm. Temporary calm because the anxiety starts building up again and he’s back to square one.”

  “Back to square one? You mean it will happen again?” Winter looked at the tape recorder and spoke to it. “Unless we stop him, that is.” He turned to the psychologist. “Unless we help him?”

  “I think we’re dealing with a person who’s been on the way to becoming psychotic for a long time, and his ego has been increasingly fragmented. Visions, dreams ... in the end he has to act them out.”

  “He acts out his visions? Is that what you mean?”

  “He might have had an experience earlier in life that’s at the bottom of all this. Or an important part of it. Perhaps a long time ago. Perhaps fairly recently. But it was too horrific for him to forget. Though at the same time it hasn’t been possible for him to remember it. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “And then it all comes back to him.” She looked at the photographs highlighted in the sunlight from the window, seemingly split in two by sunshine and shadow. ‘And what he finally does is to act out his drama. It’s a force that drives him to turn the drama into reality. Do you follow me? An inner vision becomes external reality“

  “What exactly happened, then?” Winter suddenly walked over to the window and adjusted the venetian blinds. The sun had been in his eyes. The conversation had pained him. Lareda’s sober voice intensified his feeling that they were now sinking into an abyss. This is what life’s like. Abysses lurking in the human condition—memories and feelings of isolation and alienation and a lack of contact.

  He turned around to face the room. Lareda’s glasses looked black in the shadow inside his office. “What kind of an experience was it? Do you dare make a guess?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She took off her glasses and squinted at Winter, who was still by the window.

  “He’s been greatly outraged at some point. Perhaps several times, but not necessarily so.”

  “Outraged? Greatly outraged? How?”

  “I think it has to do with the woman. Women.” She held up one of the photographs again, and Winter went to stand beside her.

  “The wounds on their bodies are different, and that can’t be a coincidence. I’ve read the pathologist’s report and studied the pictures on the basis of that. The man here is ‘only’ killed; but it’s different with the woman. She’s more than killed. She’s more than dead.” Veitz ran her finger over the woman’s naked body. “There and there. There. There. None of the injuries were fatal in themselves.” She looked up at Winter. “It’s different with the man.”

  “I know. But not how, or why.”

  “He’s been greatly offended by women. Perhaps one, perhaps several. Maybe not this woman. Maybe another. She could be a substitute.”

  “Substitute? She could be anybody at all as long as she’s a woman?”

  “That could be the case. Don’t push me into saying anything more than that.”

  “What if I do push you, even so?” Winter remained where he was and she put on her glasses again, then looked up at him. “Can’t you sit down?” she said. “My neck hurts if I have to look up at you like this.”

  Winter sat down.

  “I’m pushing you,” he said.

  “Well, I think that this woman, Louise, wasn’t the one in his dreams or visions. But I can’t be sure.”

  “No, I understand that. But he’s been outraged. Was it something to do with sexuality? Do you think his outrage was triggered by something sexual?”

  It often is, he thought. Something to do with loneliness and a person’s secrets.

  “That’s possible,” Veitz said. “The outrage could be linked with a sexual act, or a sexual conception. He might have been made to feel ridiculous in a sexual context. It could well have been something like that. There are many examples of that nature in forensic psychology”

  “Made to look ridiculous?” I’m repeating everything she says, Winter thought.

  “In one way or another. A more risky interpretation is that he’s been spiritually castrated. By a woman. And that it happened in somebody else’s presence. A man.”

  “Castrated?”

  “He’s felt castrated. He couldn’t put it into words when it happened, but now it’s dawned on him. It might have happened with another man looking on. But it’s the woman who’s the guilty one. Who’s done that to him.”

  “Who is therefore guilty of making him what he’s become,” Winter said.

  “Yes. Who is responsible for his being driven to subject her in this way. And it could be that the ‘her’ is a substitute. His imagination has finally become so strong that he has to turn it into reality. The other reality that he still has a foothold in. The real reality.”

  “He can act normally, then? Still?”

  “I think so.”

  “So he could be any of us?”

  “I suppose he could, really” she said, and Winter thought of Angela for a tenth of a second. “But probably not for much longer. It depends on how he handles the fantasy that on one occasion he’s now turned into reality”

  She fell silent, deep in thought. She cleared her throat.

  “Could you get me a glass of water, please, Erik? Tap water would be fine.”

  He went over to the cupboard where several clean glasses were kept and filled one with water for her.

  She drank deeply, then went on.

  “I can also see an element of domination here—as a consequence of what might have happened. It has to do with the change of identities. It exposes a conflict to do with a desire to dominate.”

  “Dominate? Dominate the woman?”

  “Domination. The reason for his torture. That’s the woman. And at the same time, the desire to be somebody else. He wants to be two dif ferent people, and acts on that basis. Afterward. After the murder.”

  “I don’t get that last part.”

  “He wants to dominate as a man, but he also wants to escape from himself and become somebody else. The swapping of heads, or bodies, is a metaphor for that. A way of making it real.”

  “So to some extent at least, we’re talking about revenge here? A twisted act of revenge? Frustrated love? Could it be as simple as that?”

  “On one level I think it could be.”

  ‘And the people involved don’t need to be the actual people who are the targets for revenge? For hatred?“ The people in the photographs, Winter thought.

  “No.”

  “But they could be reminiscent of them? In other words, in one way or another he or she, or both of them, are reminiscent of the real person. Or persons?”

  “That could be the case.”

  “Does this mean that he—I’m talking about the murderer—could be somebody who’s always thought of himself as inferior? Sexually, for instance. Who’s felt himself to be castrated, ridiculed, without actually having been subjected to a direct... er, public humiliation?”

  “A good question.”

  “And?”

  “It’s possible.”

&n
bsp; “That would mean in turn that we might not have any one specific incident involving him that could provide us with any answers.”

  “Yes.”

  Winter suddenly realized how thirsty he was. He got himself a glass of water and refilled Lareda’s glass. Then he sat down.

  The woman who had been killed. Louise. Who was she? Was she part of a history, or just a symbol for somebody else? In which case, who was the real woman? Was there somebody out there who could supply them with an answer? Who’d been in contact? But what if it was Louise? Had they dug sufficiently deeply into her past? Of course not. How far had they gotten?

  He would take it upon himself to pay a visit to Kungsbacka. Her mother still lived there. She had answered the questions his colleagues had put to her, but he had some more to ask.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  “What about?”

  “About power, domination.” He looked at the tape recorder again. “I’ll listen to it all later. Edit it, as you suggested.”

  “Yes ... power... that’s a new word. But, all right, if we say that he wants to be in command.... What happened to him once upon a time—his humiliation—might have led to a life devoted to recovering the foothold he’d lost.”

  “A life searching for domination?”

  “Yes. But more or less unconsciously. We talked about the conscious and unconscious before.” She looked at the tape recorder, as if expecting to receive confirmation of what she’d just said. “But he was searching for some sort of status.”

  “Status? In life? In which life?”

  “In which life? Well... I think his private life is in ruins. Perhaps that’s how it’s always been. We’re dealing with somebody who doesn’t have many contacts. Few friends.”

  “Lives on his own?” Winter asked.

  “Yes.” She looked at the tape recorder again, as if it were a shorthand secretary. “Let’s say that, for argument’s sake.”

  “What about his job?”

  “Hard to say, of course. But it’s not impossible that this person has a job that gives him a degree of domination.”

  “But you can dominate in a variety of ways.”

  “It has to be obvious.” She looked at Winter, having removed her glasses. “I think that’s the point.”

  “Obvious? You mean that people have to realize that this man has a bit more power than the rest of us?”

  “You could put it like that. A man is judged by the power he exerts.” She was silent for a while, thinking. “If we take the sexual thing a bit further, we can talk in terms of penis extension.”

  “As opposed to castration,” Winter said.

  “Yes. But still on a subconscious level.”

  “He becomes aware of it later? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “We were discussing this before, weren’t we? Murder is caused by an imagination that has grown too powerful. There are no smoke screens any longer.”

  “But what triggers the actual murder?” Winter asked. “What evokes sufficient evil to make him kill them?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Veitz said.

  “The murderer must have gotten into the apartment, and he must have had a reason for being in that particular place, at that particular time, with those particular people.”

  “Maybe not ‘those particular people.’”

  “All right. But you know what I mean.”

  “Yes. It’s still a very good question.”

  Winter stood up. His head felt feverish, overheated by the headlong rush of thoughts through his mind. He tried to concentrate, closed his eyes, walked over to the window, opened the venetian blinds and looked out at the blue sky and the white ground. Cars were passing silently on the other side of the river. The façades of the buildings were illuminated. The trees were weighed down with snow that had frozen onto the branches. It was the day before the day before the day.

  He turned around.

  “Let’s think about what you said about his job. You said he wanted to be seen.”

  “Yes. It’s important for him to be noticed.”

  “He has to be noticed when he walks along the street?”

  “Yes. Could be.”

  “People walking along the Avenue who happen to be brain surgeons or Nobel Prize winners in medicine can’t prove that, right? You can’t tell by looking at them, is that right?”

  “That’s right, assuming they’re not wearing their stethoscopes. But you don’t do that when you’re walking around Gothenburg, do you?”

  “Brain surgeons don’t use stethoscopes anyway”

  “Knives, then,” Veitz said, and Winter started laughing uncontrollably. It was as if the lid were being forced off a pressure cooker. He had to hold on to the window frame for support, and when he saw the disapproving look on the psychologist’s face, he burst out laughing again and the lid blew off.

  “Oh, dear ...” she said, and Winter tried to put the lid back on. Not knives, he thought. That might make them mistaken for chefs, especially along the Avenue. He felt the pressure building up on the lid again.

  “Are you thinking about something funny Erik?”

  “No ... no, I’m sorry, Lareda. It’s just the tension.” That’s true, he thought. The tension, the private, the professional tension. His private life wasn’t in ruins, as Lareda had said about the murderer‘s, but it was not exactly idyllic at the moment either. His professional life: you couldn’t see by looking at him that he was a chief inspector. He didn’t have a uni—

  “Take yourself as an example,” she said. “You can walk down the Avenue, but nobody would know that you are a detective chief inspector.”

  “No, but ...”

  “You dress as—”

  “Uniform,” Winter said. ‘A uniform. What’s the easiest way of telling that someone has power or authority?“

  ‘A uniform,“ Veitz said.

  Winter sat back down. Rubbed his eyes, put on his reading glasses, then took them off again. He could feel a film of sweat on his brow. It felt warm in his office, almost hot.

  “Let’s take it easy now,” he said. “Uniform. How did we get there?”

  “You’d better listen to the tape,” she said. Winter lifted it up carefully. The tape was still running.

  “What is this?” he said. ‘Are we looking for a man in uniform?“ He looked at her, as if expecting her to nod in agreement. But she didn’t respond.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “We said at the start that we’d have a good think about this, from various angles. That’s what we’ve done, and one such angle is this one.” She breathed in audibly. “But when you listen to the tape you’ll hear what it is—hypotheses, rambling thoughts. We’ve touched on this and that. A man in uniform? Well, yes, if we still think we’re looking for a lonely man who’s trying to impose some sort of order and status on his external life. But we don’t know if that’s true.”

  “But I’ve got all the words on record,” Winter said, tapping the tape recorder. “Brainstorming is never wrong. Nor are words.”

  “You mean you call this conversation brainstorming?”

  Winter didn’t reply. He was looking at the photographs, which had acquired the same nuances as his desktop, now that the sun was on its way to somewhere else.

  A word can say more than a thousand pictures.

  35

  Winter went to the coffee room, stood by the window, and smoked a Corps. The snow lay undisturbed on the other side of the car park. Police officers in uniform were talking to one another down below, their breath forming speech balloons between them.

  Visitors came and went. He could see his own bicycle in the stand outside the main entrance. Eight inches of snow on the handlebars, frame, and saddle, like icing on a gingerbread bike.

  A laugh floated up from one of the speech balloons. One of the policemen had put on a Santa hat.

  He poured out some coffee and took it back to his office, two cups. Lareda Veitz looked up from
her notepad.

  “Could it be that he wants to look for new challenges?” Winter asked as he gave her the cup. “Take it by the handle. It’s hot.”

  “Thank you. Challenges? Well, what do you think yourself?”

  “I thought of that while I was getting the coffee. That he might be growing. Feels that he’s growing. This business of it possibly happening again.”

  “But the desire to be found out is always there,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. She started to say something, then stopped.

  “What were you going to say?” Winter asked.

  “Power. We spoke about power before, and dominance. I don’t quite know how to put it ...”

  “You’ve done pretty well so far,” Winter said, taking a drink from his own cup, which had cooled down a little.

  “It’s not all that unusual in cases like this for the murderer to try and get power over the person who exposes him. His unmasker.”

  “His unmasker? But there is no unmasker. Has he already defined his unmasker?”

  “His future unmasker. He’s left messages, hasn’t he? They’re aimed at somebody.”

  ‘At whom?“ Winter asked, but he knew the answer already.

  “At you, Erik.” She was sitting in the shadow and her spectacles were black again. “You are the hunter. The detective. The one who will presumably unmask him.”

  “So he wants to dominate me? Erik Winter?”

  “You in your role as hunter. Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter.”

  “It’s nothing personal, then,” Winter said, but he wasn’t smiling. Nor was Veitz. He looked at her. “Can it become personal?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That he actually focuses on ... me? Me personally because I’m the hunter?”

  “No.”

  ‘Are you sure?“

  “No.”

  “He has something I don’t have in this case. He knows why it happened. And who did it. That gives him the upper hand, doesn’t it?”