The Asylum (20 page)

‘You’re right … I was late that night.’

‘And you were in the visitors’ room at the hospital tonight?’

Hanna nods without speaking.

‘What do you
do
up there?’

No reply.

‘Are you meeting someone? Is it one of the guards?’

Hanna takes a couple of sips and peers into her half-empty glass. Then she changes the subject. ‘I get so bloody tired of the kids sometimes. I enjoy the job most of the time, but when I’ve been with them for too long I start to get a bit panicky. They just want to do the same things, over and over again. Play the same games …’

Jan has never actually seen Hanna
playing
with the children; usually she just stands there watching them while they play on their own. But he smiles. ‘Everybody feels like that now and again.’

Hanna sighs. ‘I feel like that nearly all the time. I can’t cope with hordes of kids, somehow.’

Jan sees the children from the Dell in his mind’s eye. Cheery faces. Josefine, Leo and all the others. ‘You should try to see them as individuals,’ he says. ‘They’ve all got their own character.’

‘Oh yes? They sound like a troupe of monkeys to me. They spend all bloody day screaming; I’m practically deaf when I get home after work.’

Hanna empties her glass and an awkward silence falls.

Jan stands up. ‘I’ll get another round in.’

She doesn’t object. When he returns with fresh drinks he wants to get back to the previous topic of conversation, so he looks around before asking, ‘So do you know someone up at the hospital, then?’

Hanna hesitates, but then mumbles that she does.

‘Who is it?’

‘I’m not telling you. Who do
you
go to see?’

‘Nobody,’ Jan says quickly. ‘Not one of the patients, anyway.’

‘But you want to get to them, don’t you? I mean, you were down in the basement that night when I came back … Why do you go creeping around down there?’

Now it is Jan’s turn to fall silent. ‘Curiosity,’ he says eventually.

‘Yeah, right.’ Hanna smiles wearily at him. ‘But there’s no point in searching for a way in down there.’

‘Oh? But you get through the sally port without any problems?’

She nods quickly. The vodka seems to be making her more
relaxed.
‘I’ve got a contact. In the hospital, I mean. Someone I can trust.’

‘A guard?’ Jan immediately thinks of Lars Rettig.

‘Kind of.’

‘Who is it?’

‘I’m not saying.’

This is like a game of chess
, Jan thinks. A game of chess in a night club.

The music is louder now, and the place no longer seems quite so big. More people have arrived and begun to fill up the tables and the stools by the bar. It’s only to be expected, of course; the Medina Palace is a night club, with the emphasis on
night
– people arrive late, and now they’re here to stay. The night people.

But no one comes to join Jan and Hanna; they are sitting very close together now, as if they have been friends since childhood.

‘You and I should trust each other too,’ Jan says.

Hanna’s blue eyes are cool. ‘Why?’

‘Because we can help each other.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, in different ways …’ Jan breaks off. He has grasped that Hanna might be able to help him meet Rami, but he doesn’t know how.

Hanna’s glass is empty. She looks at her watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’ She starts to get up, a little unsteadily.

‘Wait,’ Jan says quickly. ‘Stay a bit longer. I’ll get us another drink. Do you like liqueurs?’

Hanna sits down again. ‘Maybe.’

‘Good.’ He dashes over to the bar; he is as fast as Rami’s squirrel, and he comes back with four small glasses on a tray. A double round of coffee liqueurs, to save time. ‘Cheers, Hanna.’

‘Cheers.’

The drink tastes sweet and the world becomes even more noticeably wrapped in cotton wool. The beat of the music grows louder, and he leans closer to her. ‘So what do you think of Marie-Louise?’

Hanna gives a little smile. ‘Miss Control Freak,’ she says with a
snigger.
‘She’d have a heart attack if that thing you told me about happened at our place.’

‘What thing?’

‘That business with the boy who disappeared in the forest.’

Jan gives a curt nod, but keeps his eyes fixed on the table. He doesn’t want to talk about William, so he changes the subject. ‘Is Lilian married?’

‘No. She was, but it didn’t work out … Her husband kind of got bored.’

Jan doesn’t ask any more questions, but he wonders about the man who walked Lilian to work this evening. Has she got a new boyfriend?

Jan is quite pleased when there is a brief silence, because it means he can have another drink. He tries to pull himself together, and looks at Hanna over the top of his glass. ‘Shall we play a game?’

Hanna empties her own glass. ‘What kind of game?’

‘A guessing game.’

‘What about?’

‘I’ll try to guess who
you
meet at St Psycho’s, and you try to guess who
I
want to meet up there.’

‘St … We’re not supposed to call it that.’

‘I know.’ Jan gives her a conspiratorial smile. ‘OK, I’ll go first … Is it a man?’

Hanna gazes at him tipsily, then nods. ‘And yours? Is it a woman?’

Jan nods in return, and goes on: ‘Is it someone from your past? Someone you knew before he ended up in St Psych— St Patricia’s?’

She shakes her head. ‘Did you know this woman?’

Jan nods and sips his drink. ‘I met her before … years and years ago.’

‘Is she famous?’ Hanna asks with a smile.

‘Famous?’

‘Yes. Did people talk about her, did she have her name and her picture in the papers? Because of some crime?’

Jan shakes his head; he isn’t lying. After all, Rami was never
famous
– not as a criminal, anyway. She wasn’t very well known at
all;
as far as he is aware, she never appeared on television. He raises his glass to Hanna. ‘And your friend on the inside,’ he says. ‘Is
he
famous?’

Hanna stops smiling; her gaze slides sideways. ‘Maybe,’ she says quietly.

Jan carries on looking at her. Suddenly another name comes into his head, a very well-known name, but it’s such a stupid idea that he almost laughs out loud. ‘Is it Rössel? Ivan Rössel?’

Hanna visibly stiffens – and suddenly it isn’t funny any more.

Jan puts down his glass. ‘Surely that’s not who you’re meeting up there, Hanna? Not Ivan Rössel? He’s a murderer!’

She opens her mouth and hesitates briefly, then gets to her feet. ‘I have to go.’

And that’s exactly what she does, without another word. Jan watches her go, a straight-backed pre-school teacher with blonde hair, making a beeline for the exit.

He stays where he is, holding on to his glass. It’s empty, but Hanna’s second coffee liqueur is still standing there untouched, so he reaches out and knocks that back as well. It tastes horrible, but he drinks it anyway.

Then he gazes blankly into space, suddenly remembering what Lilian said about Hanna Aronsson:
She’s young and a bit crazy, but she has a very exciting private life
.

A bit crazy? She must be, if she’s sneaking into St Psycho’s and hanging out with Ivan Rössel.

The child-killer
.

That’s what one of the newspapers called him, and another referred to him as
Ivan the Terrible
.

What is Hanna doing with Rössel?

29

IVAN RÖSSEL IS
smiling at Jan as if they are good friends. He has broad shoulders and black, curly hair that flops down over his forehead; he looks like a middle-aged rock star. He wears the satisfied expression of a man who seems to enjoy being photographed. Or a man who thinks he is smarter than the photographer.

The photograph was taken by the police, and it is on Jan’s computer screen.

Rössel was not a rock musician when the police arrested him, nor a celebrity of any kind; he was a high-school teacher of chemistry and physics at a school here on the west coast. Unmarried and with no close friends. Rössel was popular with the pupils, but some of his colleagues found him arrogant and boastful at times.

His elderly mother has also spoken to a number of newspapers, describing him as ‘a good boy with a kind heart’.

Needless to say, most of the articles about Rössel that Jan finds on the internet are concerned with the murders of young men and women allegedly committed by the teacher in various places in southern Sweden and Norway. He has been dubbed
the child-killer
, but in fact he is suspected of murdering teenagers. And his only conviction is for a series of arson attacks.

Rössel was a pyromaniac – or at least fires occurred remarkably frequently in houses and shops wherever he was living, and on two occasions people died as a consequence. Someone broke in at night, stole money and valuables, then set fire to the place.

It wasn’t until Rössel had been arrested and sentenced to long-term psychiatric care for the fires and the burglaries that the police began to investigate another remarkable coincidence: the fact that several teenagers had been murdered or had vanished without a trace in the areas where Rössel had been living.

Many aspects of the murder investigation have been kept under wraps, but the newspapers keep on repeating the few details that were made public. Ivan Rössel was not only a teacher, he was also a great camping enthusiast. He owned a large, soundproofed caravan which he would set up in a secluded corner of some Swedish or Norwegian campsite early in the summer. There he would stay until the beginning of the autumn term, keeping himself to himself but undertaking lots of excursions in the area. A number of teenagers were found murdered in the vicinity of the campsites on which he had stayed, and one young man disappeared without a trace. Nineteen-year-old John Daniel Nilsson went outside for a breath of fresh air during a school dance in Gothenburg one evening in May, and never came back.

Jan actually remembers that particular case; he had been living in Gothenburg when John Daniel disappeared, six years ago.

Once Rössel had been locked up for the arson attacks, the police began to investigate the connection between him and the young people who had died or disappeared. But by that time Rössel’s caravan had just happened to catch fire, his car had been scrapped, and any evidence was lost. And Rössel himself refused to admit anything.

There are many articles about Rössel’s background and camping trips – hundreds of articles – but after reading half a dozen Jan has had enough.

Rössel is incarcerated, and St Patricia’s seems to be the right place for him. Surely Hanna Aronsson can’t be interested in such a disturbed individual? Or can she?

Instead Jan begins to search for another name on the internet: St Patricia’s. But he doesn’t find any pictures or long articles, just brief facts and statistics about the hospital from the Prison Service. And a link to St Patricia takes him in completely the wrong
direction,
to a website about patron saints. He learns that St Patricia was a nun, a member of the Order of St Clare in Stockholm in the fifteenth century. Patricia helped orphaned children, the sick and the old, and the poorest of the poor in the narrow alleyways of the city.

There are just a few lines about the saint, nothing more.

Jan shuts down the computer, stands up and starts to pack. He is going to visit his elderly mother and his childhood home in Nordbro for the first time in six months.

The smells at home are the same. The smells of his mother, her perfumes and pot-pourri. His father died three years ago, but the smell of his tobacco and his aftershave still lingers in the room; it has impregnated the walls.

Jan walks around among all the memories.

There is an old photo of Jan and his brother Magnus, three years his junior, on top of the TV. They are eight and five, smiling at the camera. Next to it there is a recent picture of Magnus as an adult in front of Big Ben, his arm around a girl. Magnus is studying medicine at King’s College; he lives in Russell Square in London with his fiancée, who comes from Kensington, and he has a bright future.

Jan looks around the living room and notices that the parquet floor and the glass tables are thick with dust. ‘You ought to do a bit more housework, Mum.’

‘I can’t do the housework … Daddy used to do the housework.’

Jan’s mother always referred to her husband as
Daddy
.

‘Couldn’t you get someone in to do a bit of cleaning?’

‘Out of the question – I can’t afford it.’

His mother spends most of her time sitting in the shabby leather armchair in front of the television, huddled in her dressing gown and pink slippers. Sometimes she stands motionless by the window. Jan wants to get her moving, help her to make decisions, acquire new friends. She has spent too much of her life living through her husband.

Perhaps she is already bored with not having to go to work, only
a
couple of years after her retirement. She doesn’t seem particularly pleased to have Jan home.

‘Weren’t you supposed to bring your girlfriend with you?’ she asks all of a sudden.

‘No,’ Jan says quietly. ‘Not this time.’

Of course Jan has no girlfriend to show around Nordbro. He has no old friends to catch up with in the neighbourhood either, so later that afternoon he takes a long, solitary walk through the town where he grew up.

As usual, on his way to the centre he passes the residential home where Christer Vilhelmsson is cared for along with the other brain-damaged patients, but it is windy and he is not sitting outside today.

Christer was in Year 11 when Jan was in Year 10, and since Jan is now twenty-nine, his schoolmate must be thirty. Time passes, even if Christer himself perhaps does not notice.

Christer was sitting outside on the patio just once when Jan walked past, on a sunny spring day four years ago. He was in a deckchair rather than a wheelchair, but Jan had wondered if he was actually able to walk. Even from the road, from a distance of some fifty metres, Jan could see that this twenty-six-year-old man was an adult only in physical terms. The blank expression and the way he constantly nodded to himself with his head slightly tilted to one side showed that time had gone backwards for Christer Vilhelmsson that night out in the forest. The car that had hit him in the darkness had hurled him into the ditch and back to his childhood.