The Man Who Watched Women (18 page)

‘Mummy's not feeling very well at the moment.' That's what she would say to him when he wasn't allowed to climb up on her knee, or when she was lying down in the middle of the day with the bedroom curtains closed. When she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chin just weeping, and his father had to collect him from nursery because she simply hadn't turned up. That's what she would say when she couldn't cope with preparing anything to eat on the days when he was at home with her, or just before she closed the door behind her, leaving him alone for several hours.

‘Mummy's not feeling very well at the moment.' That's what his father would say to him as he tried to explain in a whisper why he must wear soft slippers indoors, why he mustn't show that he was upset or worried or cross. To explain why he had to sit still, almost invisible for several hours on the days when she did actually manage to get out of bed. To explain why they never did things together, why he had to be a good boy and look after Mummy while Daddy went out to earn money.

That's what he himself would say later on, when he was older and his classmates asked why he was away from school so often, why they couldn't come round to see him, why he never joined in with anything after school, why he never came to parties or took up any kind of sport.

‘Mummy's not feeling very well at the moment.'

Sometimes, when she was a little better, she said it was a shame he'd had to grow up with such a bad mummy.

But more often she would tell him that it was his fault she was ill. If only he hadn't come along, everything would have been fine. He had destroyed her.

When he was ten years old it became impossible for her to remain at home. She disappeared. He didn't know where she had gone. Oddly enough, his father spent more time at home after that, which was ironic because by then he was perfectly capable of looking after himself, partly because he was older and partly because he no longer had to take care of his mother. It was only much later that he realised his father had used work as an escape all those years. Stayed away. His father couldn't handle her illness, and so passed the responsibility on to his son. He assumed he could have hated his father for that, but by the time the realisation came there was so much and so many others that he hated with far greater intensity.

His mother died six months after she left them. At the funeral, people spoke quietly of suicide, but he never knew for sure.

After another six months a woman he didn't know turned up on his birthday. Sofia, her name was. He didn't have a party. Who would come? After several years of virtually no social contact and a significant amount of absence from school, he had no friends. Sofia had brought him a present. A Super Nintendo. He had wanted one ever since it came out the previous year, but had always been told it was too expensive, they couldn't afford it. But Sofia hadn't seemed to think it was a particularly extravagant present. She gave him four games as well as the console! He realised immediately that she must have more money than them. More money than they had ever had.

She stayed the night.

Slept in the bedroom with his father.

They had met at the auctioneer's where he worked, his father told him later. Sofia was both knowledgeable and interested. She had brought in a number of items to sell, but had also bid for quite a lot of beautiful pieces. Expensive pieces. He liked Sofia. She made his father happier than he had been for a very long time.

He saw more of Sofia over the next few months. A lot more. One weekend his father and Sofia went away, and when they came back they were engaged. His father sat him down for a serious talk. He and Sofia were getting married, and they would be going to live with Sofia, who had a lovely place in the middle of the city. He never really doubted that his father was very fond of Sofia, but he realised that the money was not unimportant.

It was to be a fresh start.

A new life.

A better life.

He deserved it, after all that had happened. This time everything would be fine. Nothing and no one would destroy it.

A few weeks after the engagement he had been introduced to Sofia's family for the first time. Her mother and father, Lennart and Svea, who were in their sixties, and her brother Carl. Dinner at Villa Källhagen. Very pleasant. He had spilled his drink and crept away, afraid of the consequences, but no one had been cross. The longer the meal went on, the more he had felt able to relax. Sofia seemed to have a nice family, no idiots there. As they were leaving, Sofia's father had drawn him to one side.

‘My name is Lennart, as you know, but you can call me Granddad if you like, now we're going to be related.'

He was happy to do so. He had liked the man with the greying hair and the kind brown eyes that always seemed full of laughter.

At the time. When they had just met.

Before the outings.

Before the games.

Then he wasn't afraid of the dark.

With the ritual completed, the tall man sat down in the kitchen and opened the newspapers with trembling fingers. They had finally realised. It had taken time, but now they had linked the first with the second with the third. They were writing about him. He was spreading fear, the first paper said. Pictures of the houses he had visited. An anxious neighbour clutching her daughter. He turned to the second newspaper. Much the same. There was nothing about his role model, in spite of the fact that the murders were exact copies. Either the journalists didn't know the details, or they were simply unaware of the Master's greatness. The police comments were brief. They merely wished to state that they were probably dealing with a serial killer. They wanted to warn the public, and particularly women on their own, against letting strange men into their homes. They said they had several leads, but that was all. They were not prepared to comment on any possible similarities between the three victims. They gave no details whatsoever. They were trying to diminish him, turn him into someone invisible, someone whose actions were unimportant. Again. They would not succeed. It wasn't over. They would be forced to acknowledge that he was a worthy opponent. As great and as capable of instilling fear as the Master.

The tall man stood up, opened the second drawer down and took out a pair of scissors. He sat down and meticulously cut out the articles that were about him. When he had finished he folded up the newspapers and placed them in a pile on the table. Then he sat motionless. This was new. He needed to create a ritual. There would be more articles to come, he was sure of it. This was just the beginning. His whole body was tingling, as if he had suddenly moved into the next phase. The phase where the whole world would begin to search high and low for him, the hidden one. The phase where he existed.

He got up and went over to the cleaning cupboard. Next to the vacuum cleaner was a paper sack for the recycling. He picked up the newspapers from the table and placed them in the sack. Then he closed the door, picked up the cuttings and walked to his desk in the other room. He opened the top drawer. He kept envelopes in the drawer. In three different sizes. He took out one of the largest and placed the cuttings inside it. The ones from
Expressen
on top of the ones from
Aftonbladet
. If any more newspapers wrote about him, they could go behind
Aftonbladet
, he decided. If he printed out anything from the internet, it would have a separate envelope. He went over to the chest of drawers, opened the top drawer and placed the envelope containing the cuttings underneath the black sports bag. That was what he would do. Cut out, gather together, recycling, into the envelope, into the chest of drawers. A ritual. He immediately felt calmer.

The tall man sat down at the computer, opened his web browser and went into fygorh.se. He had reported on his recent observations, and the information had been extremely well received. On page seven he clicked on the small blue button right in the middle of a long extract on runic script. A new page opened and he entered his password. He gasped when he saw the change on the page.

He had been given a new task.

He was ready for the next one.

Number four.

The lift had been out of order all week. Sebastian walked up the three flights of stairs to his apartment. It didn't matter; he couldn't get much sweatier. The sun had been beating down on him all the way home. This summer it didn't seem to make any difference which direction you were going in or at what time of day. From the moment the sun rose at around four in the morning, it seemed to be at its zenith. Shade was in short supply. The area of high pressure had lingered over the country for so long that the tabloids had been forced to invent new phrases. ‘Record Temperatures' and ‘What a Scorcher!' were no longer enough. ‘Sizzling Sun Strikes Again' and ‘The Inferno Summer' were a couple of examples from the last week's crop, both linked to articles detailing how several people had ended up in hospital with the symptoms of dehydration, and tales of dogs dying in parked cars.

There were flowers hanging on his door. A bouquet in grey paper with a note attached. Sebastian ripped it off as he unlocked the door and went inside. He read the note as he pulled off his shirt without unbuttoning it, but it merely told him things he already knew or had worked out for himself: that someone had sent him flowers, but he hadn't been at home to receive them, so they had been left on the door. Sebastian went into the kitchen and tore off the paper. Roses. A dozen, perhaps. Red. Definitely expensive. A card attached to the stems. Evidently he was being congratulated on something. That was all it said. ‘Congratulations' in fancy writing. And a name: Ellinor.

The hand-holder.

He knew breakfast had been a mistake. He had known it at the time, and this was the confirmation. He threw the flowers in the sink and took a glass out of the cupboard. Filled it with water, drank it greedily and filled it again. Then he walked out of the kitchen. For a moment he wondered what the congratulations were for, but he decided not to worry about that.

The apartment was only marginally cooler than outside. It smelled stuffy. Dusty. He considered opening the window, but realised it wouldn't make any difference. He took off all his clothes and threw them on the unmade bed in the spare room. He needed to do a couple of loads of washing, but decided not to bother with that either.

It struck him that the building was unusually quiet. No pipes humming away, no flushing toilets, no children yelling in the apartment above, no footsteps on the stairs. The whole place felt empty. Which it probably was, more or less; most of his neighbours were away on holiday. Not that he missed them – he hardly knew the names of any of them. He deliberately avoided residents' meetings, communal clean-up days and neighbourhood parties. The children in the block had even stopped ringing his doorbell trying to sell Christmas magazines, May flowers and other crap. But it was quiet. Too quiet.

The encounter with Stefan hadn't had the desired effect. He had gone there as a victor. He had won. He was going to show Stefan once and for all who set the agenda for their contact with one another. He would make it clear that if Stefan was intending to take the initiative and force him into something like that bloody group therapy session, then Stefan would have to wear the consequences. Sebastian had been fully prepared for an invigorating fight. Instead Stefan had seemed almost resigned. Highly unsatisfactory.

Sebastian went into the spare room and switched on the television, which was mounted on the wall at the foot of the bed. He was about to lie down on the unmade bed when the telephone rang. He gave a start at the unfamiliar sound. His landline. Must be Trolle. For a moment he considered letting it ring, but curiosity got the better of him. Perhaps Trolle had found something. Something juicy. He went into the kitchen. This could be fun.

‘Yes?'

‘Did you get the flowers?'

Sebastian closed his eyes. Not Trolle. Most definitely not Trolle. A woman's voice. Not fun at all.

‘Who's this?'

‘Ellinor Bergkvist.'

‘Who?' He managed to sound suitably puzzled. He had no intention of giving her any encouragement.

‘Ellinor Bergkvist. We met at the talk on Jussi Björling, and you came back to my place.'

‘Oh yes,' Sebastian said, as if he had just succeeded in putting a face to the name.

‘You knew who I was when I said my name, didn't you?'

‘What do you want?' Sebastian snapped, not even trying to hide his irritation.

‘I just wanted to congratulate you on your name day. Jacob.'

Sebastian didn't reply. Presumably his full name was on some Wikipedia page. He could just imagine her surfing around to find a link, a reason to call him. Get in touch. Flowers to his address and a phone call to his landline. Wasn't his number ex-directory these days? It had been in the past, he knew that, but nowadays?

‘Your name is Jacob Sebastian Bergman, isn't it.' No hint of uncertainty in her voice. A statement. Sebastian cursed himself. The second she'd slipped her hand into his he should have pushed her away. He would have to do it now instead.