“Keep going,” he said.

“What about?”

“About power, domination.” He looked at the tape recorder again. “I’ll listen to it all later. Edit it, as you suggested.”

“Yes… power… that’s a new word. But, all right, if we say that he wants to be in command… What happened to him once upon a time-his humiliation-might have led to a life devoted to recovering the foothold he’d lost.”

“A life searching for domination?”

“Yes. But more or less unconsciously. We talked about the conscious and unconscious before.” She looked at the tape recorder, as if expecting to receive confirmation of what she’d just said. “But he was searching for some sort of status.”

“Status? In life? In which life?”

“In which life? Well… I think his private life is in ruins. Perhaps that’s how it’s always been. We’re dealing with somebody who doesn’t have many contacts. Few friends.”

“Lives on his own?” Winter asked.

“Yes.” She looked at the tape recorder again, as if it were a shorthand secretary. “Let’s say that, for argument’s sake.”

“What about his job?”

“Hard to say, of course. But it’s not impossible that this person has a job that gives him a degree of domination.”

“But you can dominate in a variety of ways.”

“It has to be obvious.” She looked at Winter, having removed her glasses. “I think that’s the point.”

“Obvious? You mean that people have to realize that this man has a bit more power than the rest of us?”

“You could put it like that. A man is judged by the power he exerts.” She was silent for a while, thinking. “If we take the sexual thing a bit further, we can talk in terms of penis extension.”

“As opposed to castration,” Winter said.

“Yes. But still on a subconscious level.”

“He becomes aware of it later? Is that what you’re saying?”

“We were discussing this before, weren’t we? Murder is caused by an imagination that has grown too powerful. There are no smoke screens any longer.”

“But what triggers the actual murder?” Winter asked. “What evokes sufficient evil to make him kill them?”

“That’s a very good question,” Veitz said.

“The murderer must have gotten into the apartment, and he must have had a reason for being in that particular place, at that particular time, with those particular people.”

“Maybe not ‘those particular people.’”

“All right. But you know what I mean.”

“Yes. It’s still a very good question.”

Winter stood up. His head felt feverish, overheated by the headlong rush of thoughts through his mind. He tried to concentrate, closed his eyes, walked over to the window, opened the venetian blinds and looked out at the blue sky and the white ground. Cars were passing silently on the other side of the river. The façades of the buildings were illuminated. The trees were weighed down with snow that had frozen onto the branches. It was the day before the day before the day.

He turned around.

“Let’s think about what you said about his job. You said he wanted to be seen.”

“Yes. It’s important for him to be noticed.”

“He has to be noticed when he walks along the street?”

“Yes. Could be.”

“People walking along the Avenue who happen to be brain surgeons or Nobel Prize winners in medicine can’t prove that, right? You can’t tell by looking at them, is that right?”

“That’s right, assuming they’re not wearing their stethoscopes. But you don’t do that when you’re walking around Gothenburg, do you?”

“Brain surgeons don’t use stethoscopes anyway”

“Knives, then,” Veitz said, and Winter started laughing uncontrollably. It was as if the lid were being forced off a pressure cooker. He had to hold on to the window frame for support, and when he saw the disapproving look on the psychologist’s face, he burst out laughing again and the lid blew off.

“Oh, dear…” she said, and Winter tried to put the lid back on. Not knives, he thought. That might make them mistaken for chefs, especially along the Avenue. He felt the pressure building up on the lid again.

“Are you thinking about something funny Erik?”

“No… no, I’m sorry, Lareda. It’s just the tension.” That’s true, he thought. The tension, the private, the professional tension. His private life wasn’t in ruins, as Lareda had said about the murderer‘s, but it was not exactly idyllic at the moment either. His professional life: you couldn’t see by looking at him that he was a chief inspector. He didn’t have a uni-

“Take yourself as an example,” she said. “You can walk down the Avenue, but nobody would know that you are a detective chief inspector.”

“No, but…”

“You dress as-”

“Uniform,” Winter said. ‘A uniform. What’s the easiest way of telling that someone has power or authority?“

‘A uniform,“ Veitz said.

Winter sat back down. Rubbed his eyes, put on his reading glasses, then took them off again. He could feel a film of sweat on his brow. It felt warm in his office, almost hot.

“Let’s take it easy now,” he said. “Uniform. How did we get there?”

“You’d better listen to the tape,” she said. Winter lifted it up carefully. The tape was still running.

“What is this?” he said. ‘Are we looking for a man in uniform?“ He looked at her, as if expecting her to nod in agreement. But she didn’t respond.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“We said at the start that we’d have a good think about this, from various angles. That’s what we’ve done, and one such angle is this one.” She breathed in audibly. “But when you listen to the tape you’ll hear what it is-hypotheses, rambling thoughts. We’ve touched on this and that. A man in uniform? Well, yes, if we still think we’re looking for a lonely man who’s trying to impose some sort of order and status on his external life. But we don’t know if that’s true.”

“But I’ve got all the words on record,” Winter said, tapping the tape recorder. “Brainstorming is never wrong. Nor are words.”

“You mean you call this conversation brainstorming?”

Winter didn’t reply. He was looking at the photographs, which had acquired the same nuances as his desktop, now that the sun was on its way to somewhere else.

A word can say more than a thousand pictures.

35

Winter went to the coffee room, stood by the window, and smoked a Corps. The snow lay undisturbed on the other side of the car park. Police officers in uniform were talking to one another down below, their breath forming speech balloons between them.

Visitors came and went. He could see his own bicycle in the stand outside the main entrance. Eight inches of snow on the handlebars, frame, and saddle, like icing on a gingerbread bike.

A laugh floated up from one of the speech balloons. One of the policemen had put on a Santa hat.

He poured out some coffee and took it back to his office, two cups. Lareda Veitz looked up from her notepad.

“Could it be that he wants to look for new challenges?” Winter asked as he gave her the cup. “Take it by the handle. It’s hot.”

“Thank you. Challenges? Well, what do you think yourself?”

“I thought of that while I was getting the coffee. That he might be growing. Feels that he’s growing. This business of it possibly happening again.”

“But the desire to be found out is always there,” she said, taking a sip of coffee. She started to say something, then stopped.

“What were you going to say?” Winter asked.

“Power. We spoke about power before, and dominance. I don’t quite know how to put it…”

“You’ve done pretty well so far,” Winter said, taking a drink from his own cup, which had cooled down a little.

“It’s not all that unusual in cases like this for the murderer to try and get power over the person who exposes him. His unmasker.”

“His unmasker? But there is no unmasker. Has he already defined his unmasker?”