Watching You(9)

He walked closer to the mirror to defeat the gloom. When he got close enough he could see that something was trickling below the crater, like red, glowing lava down the side of a volcano. A brief second of horror was followed by the realisation that the blood was coming from his fingers. He tore the bandage off and wiped the stubbornly bleeding right knuckles with the white parts of the bandage, then looked down his left arm instead. On a leather strap round his left wrist sat his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust from 1957. Eighteen carat gold.

He looked down at it, took it off, failed to read the time. It was the second time that day that he had forgotten to protect it from the wet.

He went into the bedroom, dropped his rucksack beside the bed, put the post down on the desk, switched the desk lamp on and pointed it at his watch. For a moment he thought he could see condensation, possibly even some droplets inside the glass, but after using his underpants to wipe the face he realised it was just an illusion. The water had been on the outside. He breathed out.

In pride of place on the desk – next to a photo frame that was turned away, presenting its bright blue back to the room – stood a rectangular wooden box. He opened it, revealing six velvet-lined compartments. He put the Rolex in one of the empty compartments, briefly ran his fingers over all five watches, then shut the lid and closed the gilded catch. That was when the feeling returned at last, the cleansing feeling, the feeling that he had been given a chance to begin again.

There wasn’t really any rational explanation. On the contrary: Allan had blocked his way more effectively than ever, and his encounter with Christoffer Ekman at S?dermalm Hospital hadn’t inspired much hope.

Berger pulled the underpants on, now annoyingly damp from wiping the watch, and was suddenly back in the dismal hospital room. He wouldn’t have recognised Ekman if it hadn’t been for the heavily bandaged arms sticking out at an odd angle. His face looked pretty much unfamiliar – just one colleague among many others – but as he got closer and Ekman opened his eyes, he recognised those strangely bright green irises. The two men said hello, communicating in clipped, polite – almost official – tones. Berger noted that Ekman’s injuries were lower down his arms than he remembered from the drenched porch, close to his elbows, in fact. From the outline under the sheets he quickly calculated Ekman’s height and came up with one metre seventy-five, no more.

The first officer going through a smashed-in doorway would usually have his weapon raised. No torch, not the first officer, that came later. At the moment of entry he’d have both hands on the pistol, arms slightly bent, usually held off to one side of the body. So the knives must have flown past Ekman’s raised pistol. Just above it. While Berger went on talking to Ekman on autopilot, he figured out that a reasonable estimation of the average height of an officer would be around one metre eighty-five, possibly slightly more, in which case the knives would definitely have passed below most officers’ arms if they were bent.

Somewhere a seed started to germinate and finally took root when Berger left the hospital. It was watered and nourished during his purposefully meandering walk through the rain-soaked backstreets of S?dermalm, only to blossom fully now, by the desk in his bedroom in Ploggatan.

Had Berger just noticed the first sign of a possible mistake?

Christoffer Ekman had produced one single memorable remark during their conversation. It was right at the end; Berger was already on his feet.

Ekman fixed him with his bright green eyes and hissed: ‘This is pure evil. You’ve got to catch the bastard.’

A cliché. But true. As clichés all too often are.

He had to start again.

Berger went over to his bed and lay down. He piled the pillows up against the wall, pulled the covers over him and leaned over to dig about in his rucksack. He pulled out three bulky folders. He put the one marked Ellen Savinger to one side and placed the other two on his thighs. The one on his left was marked Jonna Eriksson, the right-hand one Julia Almstr?m.

Start again. Look with fresh eyes. Find more tiny mistakes. Where the execution didn’t quite match up to the ambition.

If a man of Berger’s height had been first into the house the knives would have passed below his arms. The scum hadn’t actually considered that. Berger detected a sudden crack in his perfect facade.

In his head he always called the perpetrator the Scum.

Start again. He moved ‘Jonna Eriksson’ to one side and opened ‘Julia Almstr?m’. The first one.

Then he fell asleep.

When he woke up an indeterminate amount of time later – because Julia Almstr?m had fallen to the floor with a thud – he was still in a swirling world where a fancy school building merged into a load of oily, rattling chains and revolving cogs, where a truck waiting on Kommend?rsgatan in ?stermalm somehow became a sweaty man’s torso above which a pair of twin boys aged about eleven hovered like cherubs, where an artist’s drawing verified by two independent witnesses suddenly came to life and slowly opened its mouth until it became unfeasibly large, then, as scarily as every other time over the past few weeks, when it bared its teeth and got closer to his bicep, it merged with another drawing and the two faces became one, their features distorted, skull-like, as the merged teeth started to snap all around them, sinking into raw flesh until the faces faded away and were replaced by a bucket of stinking urine and excrement that bubbled and boiled and overflowed, suddenly leaving just a naked concrete wall, with a brown stain that grew redder and redder as it spread, and when the bright red stain covered the whole wall he woke up as the folder hit the floor.