She doesn’t remember saying goodbye to the receptionist, Ann-Britt, and leaving the practice quarter of an hour later.
Nor does she remember the man she met in the bar of the Clarion Hotel at Skanstull, whose room she went back to; nor the fact that he was surprised that she didn’t want payment. She doesn’t remember stumbling out of the hotel lobby, eastward along Ringv?gen, then down Katarina Bangata to Norra Hammarbyhamnen to stare at the water, the barges and warehouses lining the quay opposite, or walking back up to Ringv?gen where it curves north and becomes Renstiernas gata and passes below the steep rock faces of Vita bergen.
And she doesn’t remember finding her way home, to the exit from the labyrinth.
The labyrinth isn’t S?dermalm, it’s the brain of a sleepwalker, with its canals, its system of nerves and signals, its innumerable bends and intersections and dead ends. A walk through streets at dusk, in a sleepwalker’s dream.
The key clicks in the lock; she turns it twice to the right and opens the door.
She’s found her way out of the labyrinth.
Sofia looks at the time, and all she wants to do now is sleep.
She takes off her outdoor clothes and goes into the living room. On the table are piles of papers, files and books. The accumulated evidence of her efforts to help Jeanette compile a perpetrator profile for the murders of the immigrant boys.
A silly idea, she thinks, idly picking up a few of the documents. It hadn’t led anywhere. They had ended up with a kiss, and Jeanette hadn’t mentioned it since that night out in Gamla Enskede. Perhaps it had just been an excuse to meet?
She feels dissatisfied because the work is unfinished, and Victoria isn’t helping, not showing her any memories. Nothing.
She knows she killed Martin.
But the others? The boys without names, and the boy from Belarus?
No memories. No nagging sense of guilt.
She goes over to the bookcase concealing the soundproofed room. As she lifts the catch to slide the bookcase aside, she knows the room will be empty. The only things left in there are the remnants of herself and the smell of her own sweat.
Gao Lian has never sat on the exercise bike, but his sweat has run through her hair, down her back and over her arms. She has cycled round the world several times, without moving a centimetre. She has been pedalling in place.
Gao Lian from Wuhan is all over the room, even though he doesn’t exist. In drawings, in newspaper cuttings, on pages of notes, and on a pharmacy receipt on which she circled the initial letters of her purchases, spelling out the name GAO.
Gao Lian came to her because she needed someone who could channel her guilt. Pay the bill she owed humanity.
She has believed that all the articles, all the newspaper cuttings about the dead children, have been about her. As well as keeping up with what has been going on, she has been looking for explanations, and has found them inside herself.
She understands why she invented him. As well as being a substitute for her own feelings of guilt, he has been a surrogate for the child she wasn’t allowed to keep.
But somewhere along the way she lost control of Gao.
He didn’t turn into the person she had wanted him to be, so in the end he ceased to exist, and she no longer believes in him.
Gao Lian from Wuhan never existed.
Sofia goes into the hidden room, pulls out the rolled-up evening papers, unfurls them and lays them out on the floor. MUMMY FOUND IN BUSHES and MACABRE FIND IN CENTRAL STOCKHOLM.
She reads about the murder of Yuri Krylov, the orphan boy from Molodechno in Belarus, who was found dead out in Svartsj?landet in the spring, and she’s particularly interested in what she’s underlined in the article. Details, names, places.
Did I do that? she wonders.
She turns the mattress. The draught makes more pieces of paper and little notes fly up around her. The dust from the paper tickles her nose.
Pages torn from a German edition of Zbarsky’s study of Russian methods of embalming. Printouts from the Internet. A detailed description of the embalmment of Lenin, written by a Professor Vorobyov of the Institute of Anatomy in Kharkov, Ukraine.
Sofia puts the articles down when her phone rings, and she sees that it’s Jeanette. She gets up to answer and looks around the room.
The floor is covered with a thick layer of papers, and there’s hardly an empty surface anywhere. But the meaning, the explanation, the big Why?
The answer’s here somewhere, she thinks as she picks up the receiver.
A person’s thoughts shredded into little pieces of paper.
A psyche on display.
Klara Sj? – Public Prosecution Authority
THE LIES ARE white as snow and don’t affect the innocent.
Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist is pleased with his arrangements and convinces himself that he has solved the problems that have arisen in an exemplary fashion. Everyone is happy.
Jeanette Kihlberg has her hands full with Victoria Bergman, and he himself has arranged secret deals with Ulrika Wendin and the Lundstr?m family.
Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist tries to convince himself that all the problems are solved, at least temporarily. It’s just that he’s worried another one may have appeared.
He thinks about the report that he destroyed in the document shredder. Papers that would have helped Ulrika Wendin, but would obviously have damaged the lawyer Viggo Dürer, former police commissioner Gert Berglind and, by extension, himself as well.
Have I done the right thing? the prosecutor thinks.
Kenneth von Kwist has no answers to his own questions, which is why his unease has now spread to his gullet in the form of heartburn and indigestion.
The prosecutor’s stomach ulcer prods his conscience.
Gamla Enskede – Kihlberg House
THE PLEASURES OF a quiet life, Jeanette Kihlberg thinks as she parks outside her house in Gamla Enskede. Right now she misses simplicity and routine. Feeling content at the end of a long, hard day at work, and then being able to put work behind her.
Johan is spending the night in the city with ?ke and Alexandra, and as soon as she steps into the hall she feels the emptiness of the house. The absence of a family.
Since ?ke moved out it also smells different. Reluctantly she realises that she actually misses the smell of oil paint, linseed oil and turpentine. Had she been too intolerant? Too weak to give him a last push in the right direction when he had doubted his talent? Maybe, but it doesn’t matter now. Perhaps the marriage is over, and nothing he does is dependant on her any more.
The women in the car were in all likelihood Hannah ?stlund and Jessica Friberg. Ivo Andri? is currently hard at work trying to confirm their suspicions.