Watching You(10)
Crap dream, he had time to think. Then he opened his eyes and stared out at nothingness. Or – even worse – into nothingness.
He felt the same distaste as usual about the cherubs. They shouldn’t be there. This was a work dream, a typical procedural dream; he’d had so many of them over the years, always along the same lines. And the twins definitely shouldn’t be there.
Yet that wasn’t what lingered. Berger leaned over the edge of the bed. The contents of Julia Almstr?m’s file lay strewn across the floor – photographs of notebooks, Post-it notes, receipts, newspaper cuttings – but that wasn’t what he was after. He reached for his rucksack and managed to dig out a very small plastic bag. The documents from the investigation stuck to his feet as he walked over to the desk.
The box of watches sat there is splendid isolation. He opened the gilded clasp, stared down at his five watches and briefly ran his fingers over the empty compartment. His eyes hadn’t regained their focus, everything was still dreamily blurred. He took hold of a couple of the velvet-lined dividing walls and lifted them. The entire row of watches came loose, revealing a cubbyhole underneath. It contained a number of small plastic bags, each one bearing a label. He opened one of the desk drawers, took out a pack of tiny labels, wrote Ellen Savinger on it in shaky handwriting, then pulled it off and stuck it to the little plastic bag he had taken from his rucksack. He held it up to the light and examined the tiny cog. It was no more than a centimetre in diameter. He adjusted the order of the other bags – the names Jonna Eriksson and Julia Almstr?m were visible on a couple of them – and then put the new evidence bag in alongside them.
Berger stood there for a while. Half-formed ideas swirled around him until one of them dived down and grabbed hold of him. He hurried over to the bed, reached for the file labelled Ellen Savinger and opened it. Hunched over, he spread out the police photographer’s pictures from inside the house in M?rsta. The cell in the basement, the overturned bucket, the bloodstain that wasn’t quite as big as he remembered it. Plenty of angles, but not much else. He slammed his hand down on the pictures and bowed his head. Then another idea grabbed him. He pulled out his mobile phone and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eventually the photographs appeared.
The twins were the fixed point. The pole star, the still point of the turning world. Everything stemmed from there. Even though he was on his way back into the revolving world he stopped himself there. To get his bearings. Marcus and Oscar. They were about eight years old there, in a ditch full of coltsfoot. He felt the peculiar calm that reigns in the eye of a hurricane. Perhaps their presence was his attempt to stop the passage of time. Stop the constant rotation.
But time did exist. As did chaos. Beyond the pole star was the revolving world. All that we really have.
He scrolled through the photos. At the end were a couple of pictures he had taken from the porch in M?rsta, looking towards the ambulance, police vans and cordon. He paused and felt himself frown, then scanned backwards to the cellar again.
He couldn’t recall having taken so many photographs. The light was considerably worse than in the police photographer’s professional efforts. In fact the pictures were pretty useless. He scrolled back and forth through them. He paused a couple of times at pictures of the wall, with the bloodstain towards the bottom of the frame. He zoomed using his fingers, the way Deer had taught him. Then he returned to the still point. Marcus and Oscar. Paris. He could never just scroll past them, no matter what else he might have on his mind; it was impossible. But in the end he swiped his finger across the screen and brought up the next photograph, the first one from inside the house.
It was an unassuming picture. A patch of wall lit up by the beams of at least three torches. Down in the corner, half a square metre of cement looked slightly lighter. He moved on to the pictures from inside the cell. He selected one in which the patch of blood had almost completely slid beyond the bottom right corner of the frame. He zoomed in on the concrete wall as far as he could.
As usual he tried not to look at the time on the mobile phone. Time was marked by clocks and watches, that was one of the laws of nature. He got his Rolex out of the box. Half past three, the hour of the wolf. It was a bonus that he’d fallen asleep without his usual nightly whisky; he could drive at the risk of nothing more than a lack of sleep. And possibly hydroplaning.
Berger dug out his toolbox from an unbelievably messy cupboard in the hall, tossed a couple of things in his rucksack and set off.
7
Monday 26 October, 03.32
One of the very few advantages of the bizarre rank of ‘detective inspector with special responsibilities’ was access to a car. One of the many disadvantages was that it didn’t come with a place in the garage. When he reached the car down on the offshoot of Bondegatan, at least three yellow parking tickets had dissolved and seeped through the grille on the bonnet.
It was always strange to drive through Stockholm without any traffic, he hadn’t reached the northbound motorway that fast since he was in uniform. He allowed himself the luxury of driving fast. He pulled off at M?rsta, drove through it to the outskirts. The extensive forests of Uppland got closer and closer.
To be on the safe side he parked outside the last apartment block before the more rural scenery took over. He walked through the rain with the rucksack over his shoulder, no umbrella; police officers didn’t use umbrellas, full stop. Without seeing a soul, he finally spotted the derelict buildings in the weak glow of the street lamps. He felt he could see just how porous the rotten wood had become.