Åke Edwardson - Sun and Shadow

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.”

“With regard to what else, then?”

“Eh?”

“With regard to the music, you said. What else? The words?”

“Oh, yes. The text in black metal is evidently more… er… mythological. Sort of Viking Romanticism and that sort of crap. A dose of Satanism.”

“Satanism?”

“Well, evidently some of the fans get inspired-more than when they’re listening to death metal.”

“Inspired by the words?”

“Apparently so.”

“How the hell is that possible when they can’t hear what’s being said?”

“You need to have the text,” said Setter. “They always supply that.”

“So this is more intellectual than it first appears,” said Winter.

Setter hoped to see that he was smiling, but he wasn’t.

“So, we need to have the words for this stuff,” Winter said, gesturing toward the cassette that Setter had put on the desk in front of him. “And that will also mean that we’ll know who’s playing. And singing. Or hissing, rather.”

“I thought it would be dead easy,” said Setter. “Straightforward. But they were sort of surprised that they didn’t recognize it. The people at Madhouse said that all the tapes sounded the same.”

“Couldn’t they say if it was Swedish or foreign?”

“Not even that. It’s not going to be easy.”

“Who said it had to be easy?” Winter recognized that he was being a pain. “But you’ve eliminated one thing at least.” A good word, that. Eliminated. “It’s not death metal.”

“I bought all the magazines and fanzines they had on display,” said Setter, bending down and producing a little pile from his shoulder bag, putting them on the desk. “I haven’t gotten around to going through them yet.”

Winter picked out some of them. Necrologium-the 9th Book of Blasphemy. He’d missed the previous eight. Combichrist. Fear. Reinforced. He hesitated when he saw the title of the next one: Amputation Magazine.

The picture was on the kitchen table. He picked it up and looked at it. Who had done that? Who could do anything like that? Put up your hand, whoever did it. Come on, hands up!

He put up his right hand, and held the Polaroid photo in his left, as he was left-handed. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Why should he do it any differently? Hold the photo in his right hand? He shook his head, and wondered what to do with the picture. He couldn’t make up his mind. As usual.

But he had made up his mind, hadn’t he?

He lowered his right hand and pinned the photo to the wall using a thumbtack with a black head. He took a close look at it. They were looking back at him, but something wasn’t right. The guy on the sofa seemed to be about to nod, but evidently he’d prevented his head from falling forward at the last minute. That was cleverly done. The same applied to her. C-l-e-v-e-r.

He was crying now. Apart from that it was quiet everywhere. Quiet. Snow quieted everything down. He was crying, and could hear his own misery. He knew there was somebody listening, but that devil hadn’t put in an appearance yet.

He didn’t want it to be quiet. He went to the record player and chose an LP, put it on, and hummed along with the music-the old hometown looks the same, as I step down from the train-now that was real music, he’d had the feeling that she would like it when he played Tom for her the first time, but she’d laughed at him. Not like later, when she did that terrible thing to him. “Switch it off.” She’d laughed. “It reminds me of home. For God’s sake, ha ha ha, switch it off before it kills me.”

She’d looked through his records, and laughed even more.

“Is this what you listen to? Oh no, I don’t think I can survive this.”

Ha ha ha. H-a h-a h-a.

Almost like when it happened. He ought to have realized.

“What’s the matter?” his father had asked on one occasion. “There’s something the matter with you.” The next time he went home he hadn’t said anything at all, because there was nothing more for him to say, was there? Never again.

The sun came out and the whole room was lit up. The photograph melted into the light. Burned up. I can forget it now, he thought.

Fredrik Halders and Aneta Djanali went to Hair.

“Unisex,” Halders said. Young men and women cut the hair of young men and women. Halders had put all that behind him. He eyed his crew cut in the mirrors on every side. Nothing for an artist of hirsute inclinations to exploit, but at least he still owned his own skull.

“Do you patronize places like this?” he asked.

“Eh?”

“Do you come to places like this to get your Afro curls straightened out?”

“Shut up,” Djanali said to Halders, via one of the mirrors.

They were an odd couple. It wasn’t the first time she’d made that observation.

“What can I do for you?” asked a woman in her thirties who emerged from a room on the left and stationed herself behind the counter and the cash register where they were standing. She was very tall, not far short of six feet, wearing a black blouse and a black skirt. Her hair was parted, an apparently simple style. Halders breathed in all the pleasant perfumes and listened to the music from the local radio station. He felt out of place, and no doubt all the others present felt that he was out of place as well. Come on, get a grip. You are with Aneta. You have to show her what you can do. Screw all the fags.