“No. But I have a few friends who are, like, metal nerds. Or were, at junior school. Last year. They go to another school now and, well…”

“But this is their… thing?”

“Could be. I don’t know about this particular disc, but black metal is what they do. One of them plays, in fact. Drums.” For the first time Patrik took a sip of water from the glass in front of him. He suddenly felt extremely thirsty. He was talking too much. Didn’t understand why. It was as if he had to. “Should I check with them? What did you say the band was called? Sacrament?”

26

“Why would the caretaker keep quiet about that?” Winter said.

“Is it true?” Ringmar said.

“That the kid heard the music first? I think so.”

“Some people like to claim all the glory. Perhaps the caretaker thought there would be a reward.”

“Is there anything else he’s seen that he hasn’t mentioned?”

“You mean that he’s keeping something from us?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a good point.”

“We’d better talk to him again.”

“The kid seems sharp,” Ringmar said.

“He knows something important.”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure of it. When he remembers what it is it will be a real help to us.” Winter lit a Corps and squinted at the smoke. He took another drag, exhaled, and squinted again. “I’ve been thinking about the writing on the wall,” he said. ‘And about the expression, ’The writing’s on the wall.‘ Meaning something like, you can’t avoid seeing what is obvious, that it’s there for anybody to understand. The writing’s on the wall. Is this some kind of double message we’ve been sent? Or a sort of subtext? Is the writing trying to tell us that we might have the answer under our very noses? Part of the answer, at least? I don’t know. But maybe the word ’wall’ is just that: it’s saying that the writing’s on the wall. That the word in itself isn’t significant. More like an arrow pointing in another direction. Do you follow me, Bertil?“

“I’m not sure. Go on.”

“In other words, that we don’t need to worry about the message itself, but rather the fact that it’s there.”

“That the solution is closer to hand than we think?”

“Yes. That there’s something close at hand that we can’t see.”

Ringmar rubbed his eyes and ran his hand over his forehead. He pictured the wall in the flat, red letters on a white background. Like a headline. A rubric.

“I’ve been thinking of it as a sort of rubric as well,” he said, putting his hand down again. “Rubric in the sense of a heading. So the most important thing is, what follows?”

“Hmm.”

“Did you know that the word ‘rubric’ comes originally from the Latin ’rubrica,‘ meaning red?”

“No. Is that so?”

“Jonas told me that over the weekend. He asked me if I knew what a rubric actually was, and he explained it to me.”

“He’s studying journalism, isn’t he?”

“In his first term at the College of Journalism,” Ringmar said, sounding almost proud of his son.

“Not exactly a chip off the old block, eh?” said Winter. “What else did he say about the origin of the word?”

“Rubrica, you mean? Decisions made by the Roman senate started being publicized in 59 B.C. by messages on plaster tablets being nailed up in public places,” said Ringmar, as if delivering a lecture. “The tablets were called Acta Senatus and had rubrics in red.”

“Are you suggesting there might be a connection?”

Ringmar threw out his arms.

“It was just a thought.”

“So the murderer knows about Latin rubrics? Should we go looking for him at the College of Journalism? Or is he in fact a journalist? That’s all right with me.”

“It was just a thought, as I said.”

“Interesting,” Winter said. He took another drag at his Corps, studied the smoke again. Maybe this was one of his last cigarillos. There was every reason for him to give up now, before the first of April, and get the blissful but strong aromas out of the apartment and his clothes. “But we’re getting nowhere with this. Yet. And, of course, it could be that it means nothing at all.”

“What?”

“That he just wrote whatever came into his head. The first thing he thought of. Just to confuse us.”

“Intentional misinformation? Yes, that would be the worst possible answer. There’d be nothing at all to go on then. That could mean we were dealing with somebody who enjoyed doing it.”

“Could be. Rather than someone looking for help.”

“Do you believe that as well?”

“That the message is a cry for help? Yes. Otherwise we’re lost.”

“We’re not going to clear this up on our own,” Ringmar said.

“When did we ever?” said Winter.

“Will it happen again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“This isn’t a serial murderer. He might be a psychopath, but I doubt that. Presumably not a psychopath. Crazy in a different way. And not a serial murderer.”

“So it’s something personal.”

“I don’t know, of course. But I suspect the answer is somewhere in the victims’ past. In the past of both, or hers, or his. Yes. Personal in that sense.”

Ringmar sighed audibly.

“We can’t go through every bit of paper, every memory, in Västerås and Kungsbacka.”

“We’re not on our own. We have colleagues.”

“It takes years to trace a person’s past. All the relationships he’s had since birth. Any one could be crucial. Any single person he’s come up against could be the one we’re looking for. Anybody at all.”

“We’ll have to start eliminating.”

“That work has already started,” Ringmar said without a smile.

“Perhaps it’s personal in the sense that the two victims are representatives for somebody else,” Winter said. “Symbols. Possibly stand-ins. They stand for something. A lifestyle. Or something as banal as their appearance. Both of them, or just him or her.”

“Are you thinking of the heads?”

“No, not in this context. But, of course, that is also an outrageous message. Perhaps. A symbol of something. I don’t dare speculate about that. We need help, as I said.”

Patrik was sitting in his room with earphones on and didn’t hear his father come in behind him to pull them off. The music was hissing out of the earphones like a snake, wriggling its way over the floor among the cables.

“I’ve been calling you for hours!”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Well of course you didn‘t, when you’re listening to that crap.”

Patrik could smell the alcohol, and saw his father stumble as he stepped back from the bed, then sit down awkwardly.

“What do you want?” said Patrik, trying to reach the earphones from the bed. They were too far away. He stood up and was about to pick them up when his father grabbed him by the arm.

“Leave them where they are. I want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Just a minute, there’s something I have to do.”

His father got up and left the room. Patrik could hear him unscrewing the bottle top. He came back. The smell of liquor was even stronger than before. He sat down on the bed.

“She’s moving in,” he said.

“Eh?”

His father looked at him. Several blood vessels had burst in one of his eyes. You could see it clearly when he looked to one side.

“Ulla. You know. Her I’ve been… keeping company with for a while.”

Patrik knew who Ulla was. He’d seen her twice, and that was two times too many. The first time his father had dragged her in over the threshold, and the second time it was the other way around, although it wasn’t easy to see who was dragging whom. Ulla. She had leaned over him when she was there the second time, when the old man was snoring like a pig on the living room sofa where she’d dumped him, and he thought he was going to be sick when she bent down. She’d mumbled something, but he’d wriggled out from underneath her and she’d collapsed into his bed.

Now she was going to move in. Fucking great. Fucking great. He had his father to put up with, and now it was going to be twice as cozy.