“Meanwhile take a seat, I’ll be back shortly.”
Erik sat down and looked around the area through the other side of the glass wall. About ten police were sitting at separate desks working away. Telephones were ringing, conversations were going on, photocopiers were buzzing and keyboards clicking. He had no instinct for desk work and suddenly felt a strong urge to get back to his duties in the forest.
He wondered whether he should hang up his warmly lined jacket, but decided not to, it would only be a short visit. Tell the policeman what he saw, and then leave.
In the distance he could see the chief inspector approaching with two cups of coffee. As he came into the room, a drawing taped onto the wall fluttered from the draft. A green ghost, drawn by a child. Erik immediately thought of his three grandchildren, who sent him drawings every week, squeezing them into an envelope that was far too small. They mainly drew suns and trees, flowers and boats. Or cars. But never ghosts.
He took the cup that Henrik offered him, and immediately sipped some coffee. The steaming liquid burned his throat.
The detective inspector sat down and pulled out a notepad. The first question he asked was about Erik’s profession, and he talked about felling trees.
“Most trees have a natural fall direction.” Erik put his cup down and gesticulated. “And the direction of the fall is influenced by whether the tree leans to one side, the extent and form of its branches and the direction of the wind. A lot of snow and ice in the crown can easily weigh a ton, and can make it hard to judge which way the tree will fall, and this winter has been bloody cold.”
Henrik nodded in agreement. It had been an exceptionally cold winter and close to record snow depths in many parts of the country.
Erik went on in an enthusiastic voice: “The basis of safe tree felling is the width of the holding wood, the bit between your front wedge and your back cut. This is the ‘hinge,’ and if your hinge is too wide it will be a heavy and clumsy fall. But if the hinge is too narrow that’s even worse because it might give way and then the tree would fall out of control. You can really hurt yourself if you don’t do it properly. You can’t mess around with nature. Bang!” Erik clapped his hands together. “You can end up under a tree trunk with a broken leg or worse. One of my coworkers was knocked out by a birch that splintered. He was out cold for several minutes before we managed to bring him back to consciousness.”
Erik picked up the cup and took another sip of coffee.
Henrik then began to steer the conversation toward what was important.
“You saw a van?”
“Yes.”
“On Sunday?”
“Yes, at about eight in the evening.”
“You’re sure about that? And the time too?”
“Yep.”
“According to Gabriel and Hanna, who visited you yesterday, you said it was an Opel. Is that correct?”
“Yep, to be sure.”
“And you are quite certain that it was an Opel?”
“Absolutely. I’ve owned one myself. See!”
Erik unhooked a bunch of keys from his belt and showed Henrik a metal key ring with a symbol.
“Opel. And I’ve got one of these too.” Erik picked out a Volvo symbol from the bunch, that too in metal.
Henrik nodded.
“Where did you see it? The Opel?”
“On the road outside my house. It was going very fast.”
“If I get a map, can you point out exactly where you saw the van and which direction it was traveling in?”
“Of course.”
Henrik Levin went off for a few moments and came back with a map that he unfolded on the desk.
Erik took a marker, looked for his house on the map and put a red cross and arrow on the road shown by a brown line.
“This is where I saw it. Right here. And it was heading for the coast.”
“Thank you. Did you catch a glimpse of the driver?”
“No. I was blinded by the headlights. I couldn’t see anything except the color of the van.”
“License plate?”
“I couldn’t see that either.”
“Did you notice any other vehicle?”
“No. At that time of day the road is usually empty. Except for the occasional truck.”
Henrik fell silent. The man in front of him seemed credible. He was wearing red work clothes and an orange over-the-jacket fluorescent vest.
Henrik folded the map and picked up a pile of printouts of pictures of Opel vans.
“I know you can’t remember which model of van it was, but I want you to look through these pictures and see if there is anything that reminds you of the van you saw.”
“But I didn’t see...”
“I know, but look at the pictures and take your time. Give it the time it needs.”
Erik sighed. He unzipped his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair.
It wasn’t going to be a quick visit.
*
Jana Berzelius was still feeling slightly nauseous. She rested her head in her hands and tried to gather her thoughts. She was shaken.
The lettering on the boy’s neck had affected her in a way she had never previously experienced. She knew what the name meant. But that he should have just that particular name, that wasn’t possible.
It couldn’t happen.
It wasn’t allowed to happen.
She sat on the edge of her H?stens bed. The room suddenly felt small. Shrinking. Stifling.
She tried again to gather her thoughts but realized she was in a state of mental paralysis. Her brain refused to function. When she finally made her way to the kitchen, her hands shook. A glass of water didn’t make things better. And nothing in the fridge could help. The nausea was too strong and Jana dismissed the idea of having something to eat. Instead she turned on the espresso machine.
With the cup in her hand, she went back into the bedroom and sat on the bed again. She put the cup on the bedside table, opened the cupboard underneath and took out one of the black notebooks she had there. She slowly looked through her notes, at the images and symbols she saw in her dreams. Arrows, circles and letters of the alphabet in neat rows. Here and there a drawing. Some of them were dated; the very first date noted under a sketch of a face was September 22, 1991. She was nine years old and for therapeutic reasons had been encouraged to keep notes about her recurring dreams. She had told her parents of these experiences, about her horribly realistic dreams, but her mother and father, Karl and Margaretha Berzelius, had thought they were far too imaginative. Her brain was playing a trick on her. They had brought her to a psychologist to help her to get past the “phase,” as they put it.
But nothing helped. The dreams continued to trouble her so much that she tried everything she could to stay awake. The never-ending anxiety, with difficulty breathing and sense of despair that she felt was breaking her down. When her parents said good-night in the evening, she had immediately opened her eyes again and thought about how she could stay awake all night long. She liked games in the dark and she often passed the time by galloping with her fingers across the covers and bunching up the filling in the duvet into small obstacles that her fingers could jump over.
She also moved around inside the room, in the dark, or sat in the deep window bay and looked out over the garden. She stretched up to be as tall as possible in the three-meter-high room, or crouched down making herself as small as possible under the wide bed. The psychologist had told her she should let things take their time, and that the dreams would eventually disappear.
But they didn’t.
They only got worse.
And after yet another two weeks of dramatic nights, her father had thought about whether they should start giving her medicine. He wanted to solve her silly ideas once and for all. Sleep was one of our primary needs, and any idiot at all could do it.