Erik leaves the car in front of the garage, hurries up the path to his dark house, unlocks the door and goes inside. He turns the light on in the hall but doesn’t take his outdoor clothes off, just carries on down the steep staircase to the cellar that contains his extensive archive.
In the locked steel cabinets he keeps all the documents from his years in Uganda, from the major research project at the Karolinska Institute, and about his patients at the Psychology Clinic. All the written material is collected in the form of logbooks, personal journals and extensive notes. The recordings of his sessions have been saved on eight external hard-drives.
Erik’s heart is thumping as he unlocks one of the cabinets and searches back in time to the year when his life crossed paths with that of Rocky Kyrklund.
He pulls the file out of a black box and hurries upstairs to his study. He switches the lamp on, glances at the black window, removes the elastic band round the file, and opens it on the desk in front of him.
It was nine years ago, and life was very different. Benjamin was still in primary school, Simone was writing her dissertation in art history, and he himself had just started working at the Crisis and Trauma Centre with Professor Sten W Jakobsson.
He no longer remembers the exact details of how he was contacted and invited to join a team for a forensic psychology project. He had actually decided not to take part in anything like that again but, given the particular circumstances, changed his mind when his colleague Nina Blom asked for his help.
Erik remembers spending the evening in his new office, reading the material the prosecutor had sent over. The man who was going to be evaluated was a Rocky Kyrklund, and he was vicar of the parish of Salem. He was being held in custody on suspicion of having murdered Rebecka Hansson, a forty-three-year-old woman who had attended Mass and then stayed behind to speak to him in private on the Sunday before she was murdered.
The murder had been extremely aggressive, fuelled by hatred. The victim’s face and arms had been destroyed. She was found lying on the linoleum floor of her bathroom, with her right hand around her neck.
There was fairly persuasive forensic evidence. Rocky had sent her a number of threatening text messages, and his fingerprints and strands of his hair were found in her home, and traces of Rebecka’s blood were found on his shoes.
An arrest warrant was issued and he was eventually picked up seven months later in conjunction with a serious traffic accident on the motorway at Brunnby. He had stolen a car at Finsta and was heading for the airport at Arlanda.
In the accident Rocky Kyrklund suffered serious brain damage which led to epileptic seizures in the frontal and temporal lobes of his brain.
He would suffer recurrent bouts of automatism and memory loss for the rest of his life.
When Erik met Rocky Kyrklund, his face was criss-crossed with red scars from the accident, his arm was in plaster, and his hair had just started to grow again after several operations. Rocky was a large man with a booming voice. He was almost two metres tall, broad-shouldered, with big hands and a thick neck.
Sometimes he would faint, falling off his chair, knocking over the flimsy table holding glasses and a jug of water, and hit his shoulder on the floor. But sometimes his epileptic attacks were almost invisible. He just seemed a bit subdued and distant, and afterwards he couldn’t remember what they had been talking about.
Erik and Rocky got on fairly well. The priest was undeniably charismatic. He somehow managed to give the impression of speaking straight from the heart.
Erik leafs through the private journal in which he made notes during their conversations. The various subjects can be traced from one session to the next.
Rocky had neither admitted nor denied the murder; he said he couldn’t remember Rebecka Hansson at all, and couldn’t explain why his fingerprints had been found in her home, or how her blood came to be on his shoes.
During the best of their conversations, Rocky would circle the small islands of memories in an attempt to discern a bit more.
Once he said that he and Rebecka Hansson had had intercourse in the sacristy, albeit interrupted. He could remember details, such as the rough rug they had been lying on. An old gift from the young women of the parish. She had begun to menstruate, leaving a small bloodstain, like a virgin, he said.
During the following conversations he couldn’t remember any of this.
The conclusion of the examination was that the crime had been committed under the influence of severe mental disturbance. The team believed that Rocky Kyrklund suffered from a grandiose, narcissistic personality disorder with elements of paranoia.
Erik leafs past a circled note, ‘paying for sex + drug abuse’, in the journal, followed by some ideas for medication.
Naturally he shouldn’t have had an opinion on the matter of guilt, but as time passed Erik became convinced that Rocky was guilty, and that his mental disorder constituted a serious risk of further crimes.
During one of their last sessions, Rocky was talking about a ceremony to mark the end of the school year in a church decked out with spring greenery, when he suddenly looked up at Erik and said he hadn’t murdered Rebecka Hansson.
‘I remember everything now, I’ve got an alibi for the whole of that evening,’ he said.
He wrote down the name Olivia, and an address, then gave the sheet of paper to Erik. They carried on talking, and Rocky began to speak in broken fragments, then fell completely silent, looked at Erik, and suffered a severe epileptic attack. Afterwards Rocky didn’t remember anything, he didn’t even recognise Erik, just kept whispering about wanting heroin, saying he could kill a child if only he was given thirty grams of medical diacetylmorphine in a bottle with an unbroken seal.
Erik never took Rocky’s claim of an alibi seriously. At best it was a lie; at worst Rocky could have bribed or threatened someone to support the alibi.
Erik threw away the scrap of paper, and Rocky Kyrklund was found guilty and sentenced to secure psychiatric care, with severe restrictions on any parole application.
And nine years later a woman is murdered in Bromma in a way that was reminiscent of Rebecka Hansson’s murder, Erik thinks, closing the file bearing Rocky’s name.
Aggressive violence directed at the face, neck and chest.
But, on the other hand, murders of this sort aren’t altogether unusual. They can be triggered by anything from the jealousy of an ex-husband, aggression linked to Rohypnol and anabolic steroids, so-called honour killings, or a pimp making an example of a prostitute trying to break away from him.
The only concrete connection is that Susanna Kern was left at the scene of the murder with her hand covering her ear, just like Rebecka Hansson was found on the floor with her hand round her own neck.
Perhaps Susanna Kern merely got tangled up in the belt of her kimono during the struggle.
The parallels certainly aren’t unambiguous, but they are there, and they’re forcing Erik to do something he should have done a long time ago.
He puts the file in his desk drawer and looks up the number of senior consultant Simon Casillas at Karsudden Hospital once more.
‘Casillas,’ the man answers in a voice like dried leather.
‘Erik Maria Bark from the Karolinska.’
‘Hello again.’
‘I’ve checked my diary, and I could actually squeeze in a visit.’
‘A visit?’
The sound of a squash court is audible in the background, a ball hitting the wall, the squeak of shoes.
‘I’m taking part in a research project for the Osher Centre at the Institute which involves us following up on old patients,