Prologue
On June 1, 2004, a Hungarian businessman with uncommonly strong powers of deduction received a call to his desk landline. The conversation fell into a familiar category—analysis of the surrounding world—and no-one could have foreseen that anything important or decisive would be discussed. However, since the analyst who called that day had an optimistic outlook on the world at large—aside from the situation in Iraq—he prattled on about all sorts of things and happened to mention Professor Hans Rekke.
“I hear Rekke is taking an interest in the death of Claire Lidman.”
That was all, but it was enough to make the Hungarian businessman feel that the whole world was changing hue.
Though of course, the story had begun much earlier.
One
Hans Rekke was only twelve years old at the time.
The snow was falling very heavily when the doorbell rang in the grand house in Vienna. Dr. Brandt, his mathematics teacher, stepped inside wearing a vastly oversized fur hat. With him was a boy of Rekke’s age with curly hair and dark, intense eyes. Dr. Brandt introduced him as Gabor, and Hans proffered his hand.
It lingered alone in mid-air, the boy slipping by sinuous as a cat. There was something threatening about him, and Hans could not understand what was going on. The boy’s gaze shone green, and in every one of his movements there was a vigilance, a readiness. The two of them were placed at the large desk beside the bookshelf with the Beethoven bust, and only then did things become a little clearer.
The boy was evidently a talent of some kind, and the idea was for them to compete and measure themselves against each other. Dr. Brandt issued them their tasks—on Cantor’s mathematical proof of infinities—and at once an intense tension arose. The boy—Gabor—was trembling with eagerness and set to work immediately. Hans, however, remained still, staring at the contours of the boy’s shoulder muscles.
“Why are you not writing?” Dr. Brandt asked.
“I’m going to,” he said.
But he was wrapped up in his thoughts, consumed by a riddle that was more alluring than mathematics; and he watched in amazement as the boy performed calculations at lightning speed—a virtuoso, almost. Hans decided to let him win. What do I care? Nevertheless, something within him wanted to fight back, and he slowly worked his way into the task. Afterward, he thought it had gone quite well—not brilliantly, but decently enough—but when he looked up again, Gabor’s eyes were shining with triumph.
“I’m impressed, boys. Why don’t you take a twenty-minute break so you can get to know each other?” Dr. Brandt said, obviously pleased. So Hans and Gabor dressed to go out into the garden, their footsteps creaking against the frozen ground.
The snow was falling in large flakes. It was a cold day and Hans suddenly made out a faint wheeze—a high, four-times-accented G—audible on every third or fourth exhalation. It was a kind of vulnerability that contrasted with the fiery nature of the boy’s aura.
“What are you training in?” Hans said.
Gabor appeared to pause for thought.
“Self-defence.”
That was too vague for Hans.
“In what way?” he said.
“I can show you.”
Gabor’s body tensed and the faint wheeze of his breathing came down a semitone to an F sharp, which made Hans inattentive. That was part of his curse over the course of those years: when the soundscape changed he would compulsively analyse the notes in his surroundings. That was why he was not on his guard when Gabor grabbed hold of him.
It was as if he had fallen into a trap. He was spun around with violent force and struck the ground, and for a few seconds he saw nothing. Then he sensed Gabor’s eyes above him, replete and satisfied, as if they belonged to a predator that had gotten what it wanted.
Then he was gone. Rekke lay there with a shooting pain in the back of his head, and only after the third or fourth attempt did he manage to get to his feet and stagger into the house. His hair was sticky and wet, and he
stood in front of the bathtub on the ground floor for a long time trying to stop the flow of blood. By the time he returned to the library, some fifteen or twenty minutes had elapsed.
Dr. Brandt, still at the desk, indicated with exaggerated gestures and a look of deep disappointment that Gabor had gone home. He never noticed that Rekke was injured and pale. Nor, indeed, did Rekke’s mother. She was preoccupied the whole evening, searching for a couple of pieces of jewellery that had suddenly gone missing.
Two
Police Constable Micaela Vargas from Husby had moved in with Professor Hans Rekke of Grevgatan in Stockholm’s most refined neighbourhood, something which had gotten everyone around her all worked up and had set them to gossiping. But now she wanted out.
Rekke was depressed and hopeless, and he barely emerged from the bedroom. As soon as he had pulled himself together just a little, she would head over there to pack up her stuff. But first of all, she wanted to bring to a close the case they had embarked upon. It was to do with a woman who had been declared dead, but who had possibly made an appearance in a recently taken holiday snap in Venice, and while Micaela didn’t really believe in any of that, there was something about the story that titillated her.
That was why she had come to the police station on Bergsgatan to meet Inspector Kaj Lindroos, who had investigated the incident almost fourteen years earlier. But Kaj Lindroos was taking his time, which didn’t surprise her. He had sounded recalcitrant and grumpy on the phone, and she was standing a little listlessly in reception on the ground floor, staring out at the street. A truck drove by with a pack of screeching sixth-formers celebrating their graduation in the back. It was June 5, 2004, a glorious summer’s day, and she was on the brink of chucking it in and leaving when she heard a voice behind her.
“My private investigator colleague, I presume?”
She turned around and shook his hand. He was younger than she had imagined—barely fifty—with big brown eyes and back-combed blond hair, but he was also seedier. He looked at her as if it were five to three in the morning. She tugged her denim jacket closer to her body.
“I’m grateful you agreed to see me,” she said.
“Claire Lidman’s dead,” Kaj Lindroos said.
“Probably. But I still think this is somewhat interesting,” she said, touching her inside pocket. “I promise to be brief.”
Inspector Lindroos continued to eye her body.
“You can be as brief as you like but I still don’t believe it.”
Micaela wished she had something to ram down his throat.
“Maybe you could take a look at the picture before you make up your mind,” she said, following him into the elevator.
—
Of course Kaj Lindroos was going to take a look at the photo, and it was obviously downright ridiculous to be bugged by the fact that the girl was so young, and an immigrant to boot. On the other hand, it wasn’t that easy to fend off one’s prejudices, especially where the Lidman investigation was concerned. It was the gaping wound of his career, and there was most definitely something peculiar about the whole business. A beautiful, well-educated woman who had negotiated with business high-flyers for a living had disappeared without trace fourteen years ago—only to turn up a few months later burned to a crisp in a petrol-tanker crash in Spain. Of course, he had pondered it all a thousand times since then. Then again…fuck it. That was all history, and it was a Friday afternoon. He really should be off home soon to get drunk and maybe even have a crack at the wife. It had to be worth a try at the least.
“So you work in youth crime?” he said.
“I try to do other stuff in my free time.”
“I bet you do. I like your denim jacket,” he said, but he actually meant her tits, and he scrutinised her from head to toe again.
Her legs could have done with being longer, and it wouldn’t have hurt for her to
to smile a bit more. But it would be churlish to complain.
They stepped into his office, and he shuffled some papers out of the way on his desk. Outside the open window, the sixth-formers were screaming away as the parade of trucks passed by. He was tempted to say something scornful about them, but he didn’t want to come across as out of touch.
“What a party,” he said. “Almost makes you wish you were down there.”
“Almost,” she said.
“Did you scream when they let you out for the last time?”
“For all I was worth.”
“Can’t have been that long ago, I suppose?” he said, regretting it immediately.
The same irritation again, the same unconscious way of saying that she was too young and inexperienced to put forward strange theories suggesting that Claire had risen from the dead. But that couldn’t be helped.
“Did you mean something by that?” she said.
“No, no,” he said. “But back in my day everyone thought those white caps were right wing. Now, all of a sudden, everyone wants them.”
“Is that right?” she said, uninterested.
“Apparently being a rebel is out again.”
“Is it?”
“Do you like Ulf Lundell?”
“Who?”
These goddamn chicks from the hood didn’t know diddly-squat about Sweden.
“Well, what do you say? Might as well get it over with,” he said in a tone that failed to entirely mask his irritation, and she nodded. She slipped her hand into her inside pocket and pulled out a plastic-covered photograph.
For a moment he was frightened. He couldn’t understand why. No, he reassured himself—it was impossible. There was a death certificate. DNA samples. He’d seen the body himself. Claire Lidman was most definitely not roaming the world again dressed in an elegant red coat.
Three
Hans Rekke was playing the adagio in Pathétique on the grand piano. He stopped after just a few minutes. The piece no longer spoke to him, though it probably wasn’t Beethoven’s fault. Nothing spoke to him any longer. He stood up wondering where to turn. Left or right?
His life at present consisted of these kinds of decisions. Should he lie down or stay seated? There was a car alarm wailing outside and his wall clock was ticking—tick tick tick tick tick—as if to show how many seconds were being wasted on meaninglessness.
Where had Micaela got to? He hadn’t seen her in a week. Perhaps she had moved back home—and who could blame her? He probably made for dreadful company—but it still hurt. He decided to go to the kitchen and drink a glass of wine; he was in such a poor state that he regarded even that as a sign of enterprise. But he didn’t succeed in that either. Instead, he diverted to the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Close it again, he chided. Leave. But his hands had a life of their own, and he helped himself to the new pills he had been given by Freddie, his doctor from hell.
They were called OxyContin, and were hardly addictive at all, according to Freddie. Rogue, he thought, as he sank onto the toilet seat and let the memories wash over him—of course, there were no good memories, just anguished nonsense, like those distant days in Vienna when the snow had kept falling and falling. Would those recollections never fade? He stood up, listening. Was that a sound? Most definitely. Footsteps in the stairwell. Familiar footsteps.
His daughter Julia’s heels clicking as briskly as ever. Well, actually…he listened more carefully…perhaps not as ever. The footsteps slowed, deprived of their spring and their youthful insolence, and he was reminded that Julia had looked troubled of late. But the old memories were like a haze across his thoughts and he could not recall whether she had mentioned anything.
He tidied his hair and made for the door. He was never called upon to open it—Julia usually let herself in—and now he scrutinised her, his thoughts still not clear. She wore jeans with holes at the knees, a leather jacket from a vintage store, and a pair of black shoes with absurdly high heels, and she was overly made up. She tugged her jacket close around her, as if cold.
“Hello, sweetheart. Is it snowing?” he said, peering at her shoulder as though he had just discovered a couple of snowflakes.
“Was that a joke?”
“Yes,” he said in embarrassment. “Of course.”
He extended his arms to embrace her, but she walked straight past him.
“It’s summer, Pappa.”
“Naturally.”
“Or perhaps it’s snowing somewhere in your thoughts?” she said, which unfortunately hit the nail on the head, but right now he needed to return to the present. His little girl was here. He subjected her to even closer inspection. She had definitely lost weight, and he didn’t like that. Chastisement of the body ran in the family. Of course, his
mother considered it a virtue—a sign of elegance and class—but he knew that it sometimes masked a dread, a deadly addiction. It was the only thing he knew that strived for a dearth, an absence.
“Sweetheart,” he said. “Let’s have some lunch.”
“You’re cooking, are you?”
There was a prickliness in her voice, a tension of sorts in her slender arms.
“Definitely,” he said, going to the kitchen and opening the fridge. “My clumsiness usually amuses you. Otherwise, I dare say Mrs. Hansson will have prepared something. See here.” He peered into a bowl on the middle shelf. “Definitely risotto,” he said, sniffing it. “With white wine, vegetable broth and Parmesan. And take a look here.” He perked up. “Fried champignons and arugula—quite a feast.”
“No, I’ve got to get going.”
“But you’ve only just arrived. I’ll heat it up in the microwave. I can even offer you a glass of wine—you did turn nineteen recently, if I’m not mistaken?”
He beamed, pretending to be more scatterbrained than he was, but he got nothing in return.
“I’m only here to say one thing,” said Julia, as he stood there with the risotto in his hands and a premonition that he was going to hear something disturbing.
But perhaps it was just the memory of that winter obtruding on him. He did his best to look like a calm, reassuring father—as if he hadn’t just gulped down a bunch of opiates.
Four
I shouldn’t have come, Micaela thought. I shouldn’t have let myself get dragged into this business.
She knew precisely when it had happened. At exactly half past eight in the evening on the tenth of May, when Samuel Lidman—the widower—had come to see them at Grevgatan and had slapped a photograph down onto the coffee table. It had been an agonising experience. Samuel Lidman had been breathing heavily and sweating profusely at his brow and shirtfront. He was wearing a brown corduroy suit and polished cowboy boots, and while he was an imposing figure from the neck down—as if carved from stone—his face was flushed red, his eyes downcast. It hadn’t been hard to feel sorry for him.
“You have to look carefully,” he said. “I’ve got other pictures with me. Look at the ear, the nose, the lips. It’s absolutely astounding.”
It was no small thing that he was seeking to prove. His wife had been dead for thirteen and a half years—not dead as in missing and never found, but dead as in identified by her dental records and buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Solna. It was—as Rekke put it—a rather ambitious project to bring her back to life. But Samuel was evidently eager to try, by pointing to a beautiful woman in a red coat captured in a holiday snap taken in Venice.
“Do you see? Do you?” he said.
“Absolutely; let us examine it,” Rekke said.
Micaela guessed he would dismiss the discovery as gently as possible. When all was said and done, he was a gentleman who disliked hurting others, and Samuel looked as if his whole life was at stake.
Their guest was without doubt a man who had suffered greatly. He had been head over heels in love and newly wed when Claire had left him without any warning or words of farewell. That had been a long time ago—in the autumn of 1990. But the wound had been torn open time and time again, and it really was true that the story didn’t add up. Claire was a beautiful and talented woman who had enjoyed a meteoric career. She had been the Chief Analyst at one of Sweden’s largest banks—Nordbanken—reporting directly to the CEO, William Fors. At that time—during the early days of the financial crisis in the nineties that had seen the Swedish housing bubble burst—she had been responsible for the recovery of loans and secured lines of credit from precarious major corporations and financiers. She was under pressure, Samuel told them, but she liked that. She was a fighter and a gambler, and their marriage had been happy, he reassured them. Rock solid, as he put it.
But one evening Claire went to post a letter to her sister in London and never came back. She disappeared without trace. The police initiated strenuous efforts the very next day. Those weeks were terrible, according to Samuel. Nonetheless, he said he longed for that time because then he still had his past. The time he’d had with Claire was still beautiful and unbesmirched. But that, too, would be taken away from him. When the police operation was at its most intensive, word had arrived from her—not a long letter like the one she had written to her sister but just a postcard depicting a
Cézanne—to the effect that she’d left him and couldn’t take it anymore.
That had hurt more than her dying, he said, and not long afterward he had gone travelling. He described it as a pilgrimage, and for several weeks he had been unreachable. When he eventually called home from Bombay, he found out that Claire had died in an explosion caused by a petrol tanker in San Sebastián, and there was apparently time for him to make it to the funeral at Solna Church and see her one last time.
But he hadn’t wanted to.
“It wasn’t really her anymore,” he said. It hadn’t helped matters that he’d been told the body was badly burned. He decided to ignore it all and continue travelling.
“That was the biggest mistake of my life,” he said. “They were able to fool me.”
It wasn’t straightforward to follow his logic. The sister, mother and Inspector Kaj Lindroos had all identified the body, but Samuel had become increasingly obsessed with the idea that Claire might still be alive. This was obviously related to the fact that he hadn’t been able to say goodbye, and that Claire must have had help leaving Sweden since she would otherwise have left traces in her wake rather than vanishing in a puff of smoke. Micaela recalled how Samuel strained his muscular body and sweated even more as Rekke examined the photograph. It wasn’t much of a photo, either—it was about as far from proof of resurrection as you could get. Nevertheless, Rekke picked up the print with a grave expression and stared at it—out of politeness, Micaela thought—alongside the old photographs of Claire that Samuel had brought with him.
“Fascinating,” he said.
“You do see it, don’t you? It’s her…”
“I don’t know,” Rekke said. “The focus is not altogether sharp, is it? I’m not prepared to say anything with certainty except that Claire and this woman have the same charisma. Where I go, life goes, as I was once told by a haughty violinist. But I do wonder…wait a moment…”
He didn’t say any more, and it didn’t matter how much Samuel Lidman went on about the similarities between Claire and this woman, Rekke couldn’t hear him. He was deep in one of his trance-like states.
“She’s a little anxious, is she not?” he said at last. “Appears to be looking for someone?”
“Perhaps.”
Samuel Lidman contemplated Rekke tensely.
“But above all…”
“Yes?”
“There is something particular about her gait. She is lunging forward, but a little asymmetrically. Had Claire injured her right knee?”
Samuel Lidman looked astonished.
“Yes, absolutely,” he said. “Why do you ask? She tore her ligaments while skiing.”
“Because this woman’s gait has compensatory features. The left foot and hip, well, do you see…They are tilted slightly and taking her weight, which could be temporary, as the result of a sudden imbalance. But at the same time, there is nothing defensive about her—there is no sense that something has been disturbed or twinged.”
“What are you getting at?”
“That compensatory way of turning her body is something she has practised to perfection, and it may be that one cannot even tell she is doing it. Perhaps it is necessary to freeze the image to see it. Of course, it might have its origins in an old fracture in the lower leg or thigh, but injuries there do not usually trouble us for such a long time. Rather, I would guess that something in the meniscus never properly healed.”
Samuel Lidman leaped from his chair and paced back and forth across the kitchen, growing more agitated with each passing minute.
He managed to create a febrile atmosphere—as if they were actually on to something—and for half an hour or so Micaela devoted herself mostly to calming him down. That was why it had taken her a while to notice that Rekke had fallen silent. He needed to be alone, he said, and only the next day did she realise that he had begun to doubt his conclusion.
That was typical of Rekke. His brain noted a series of details with lightning speed and formed them into a picture—an observation. But afterward, he would spend more time doubting the conclusion than it had taken to reach it, and on this particular occasion he was particularly ashamed of himself. He had raised the hopes of an unhappy man. “I am a fool,” he said, and perhaps that had been the beginning of his crisis—his descent into darkness.
But it didn’t matter how ashamed he was—Samuel Lidman was already off his head and didn’t care one jot that Rekke had changed his mind. He just kept on at them, and in the end Micaela had promised to get to the bottom of it, which was why she had turned up to see Inspector Kaj Lindroos clutching the photograph. But it was also why she had no strength of conviction either way, and now as she laid the picture on Lindroos’s cluttered desk it seemed insignificant and paltry.
“There we have it then,” said Kaj Lindroos, picking it up.
But he didn’t seem to have it in him to look for long. He turned his gaze toward the window, as if hoping to hear the graduating sixth-formers again.
“You probably should look a little closer.”
He fidgeted.
“You don’t feel like a drink, do you? Maybe somewhere down by the water? I could tell you a thing or two.”
He looked at her with a new attentiveness, ...
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