Åke Edwardson - Sun and Shadow

“Aktuell what?”

“Aktuell Rapport. The men’s magazine bought by more people than any other in Sweden. Or maybe I should say, it sells more.”

“Really?”

“I wonder why.” He said it again. “I wonder why.”

“So you recognized the magazines, did you?”

“I recognized the spine. Half an inch of red at the top. And I could see a bit of the logo.”

“You have a skill for recognizing men’s magazines.”

“True. But if you think I buy crap like that, you have another think coming.”

“I don’t think anything.”

“Is it usual for people to have pornographic trash in their homes?” wondered Halders, mainly to himself.

“I’ve no idea,” Djanali said.

“I think it’s getting more common. The spirit of the times. The collapse of the old order. People read pornographic magazines and watch pornographic films on Channel Plus and TV One Thousand.”

“You may be right.”

“They’re advertising sex toys now every evening on one of the major channels. Every night. Every damn night. And they’ve been doing it for over a year.”

“How do you know?”

“Eh?” Halders looked at Djanali as if he’d just woken up from a dream.

“How can you be so sure about that?” Djanali asked with a smile.

“Because I keep a check on it, of course. Always keep a check on things, that’s the way to go about it, isn’t it? I check for two seconds and I get so annoyed and that makes my day.”

“Make my day.”

“I’d have loved to ask them,” Halders said.

“What?”

“That ever-so-nice couple, the Elfvegrens. I’d have loved to ask them what their favorite reading was.”

“You might get a few more opportunities.”

Lareda Veitz studied the photographs and listened to Winter. She had read parts of the investigation report. This was the second time they’d met in the last two weeks. They were in Winter’s office. The forensic psychologist had made it clear that she couldn’t produce a clear profile of the killer, but she could discuss it with the officer in charge. It was not the first time they had worked together, nor was it the first time Winter had turned to forensic psychology for help.

“It’s obvious that it’s a message,” she said, looking up again. “Then again, everything is a message, but in different ways.”

“So there’s enough there for it to be taken seriously?”

“Very much so. What did you think?”

“I don’t actually know. In situations like this you think about… all the things at the side of the tracks as well. Whether this might be a sort of diversion.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course not. You’ve asked that before, and I have to give you the same answer.”

“Okay. It’s just that one has so many questions.”

She looked at one of the photographs between them on the desk, held it up, and ran her finger over the necks of the two dead bodies on the sofa.

“One of the answers could be this,” she said. “The swapping of heads. It could also be interpreted as an exchange of bodies.”

Winter nodded. Veitz’s tone was neutral, concentrated. It was the only possibility when the unspeakable was being examined in close-up. Winter had issued instructions that no calls were to be put through to his office. His mobile was on forward to Ringmar, in his office a dozen yards away. Ringmar was there should something urgent crop up.

Veitz put the photograph back on the desk.

“Let me think out loud,” she said. “Let’s have a good think about it, okay? From various different angles. Then we can dissect what we come up with.” She indicated the tape recorder next to the stack of papers and pictures. “Then you can edit the tape.”

“Of course.” Winter checked that the tape was running.

“He… we’ll say he… has changed the sex and identity of his victims. One of the answers lies in that action. The swapping.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure he knows that himself, Erik. We might have to search for unconscious motives that led him to commit the crime in this way”

“Something else was directing him?”

“Somebody else. Somebody other than himself.”

Winter nodded again, picked up one of the photographs and examined it closely. He’d done this so often that they had acquired an absurdly mundane quality. It was like looking at the patterns on the wallpaper at home, or the framed photographs on the bedside table. Aneta Djanali had talked about the violently themed advertising posters hanging on the walls of the hairdressing salon where Louise Valker had worked. Murder as a sales pitch. He thought about that now. He looked at Louise Valker’s contorted face; it had lost all human expression. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen that poster for himself. What had it looked like?

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.