“FIND ANYTHING INTERESTING?” FABIAN Risk asked as he stepped into the bedroom upstairs. Irene Lilja was standing behind the twin bed, leaning over a stack of books on the nightstand, glancing through the titles. There was another Bang & Olufsen stereo here, and more enlarged photographs of the same countryside as on the living room walls.
“I don’t know.” She threw up her hands. “To be completely honest, I don’t get this guy. On one hand, he seems so — how should I put it? — level-headed and totally in control of his life. He has good taste, is well read, and is so meticulous it borders on a disorder.”
Fabian nodded. Lilja had arrived at the same muddled conclusion as him.
“But then you find something like this and it throws off your whole assessment.” She handed him a blue notebook with the handwritten title MY SLEEPING DIARY.
“Sleeping diary? What’s that?”
“Open it up and you’ll see.”
Fabian opened the book. It was jam-packed full of handwritten entries. Not a page was empty from cover to cover. There was a date and time in the upper right-hand corner of each page. Fabian read a passage out loud.
“May 20, 1994, 3:12 a.m. I ran as fast as I could, but I’m still in slow motion. They just kept getting closer and closer: wolves with razor-sharp teeth. I came to an elevator and pressed the button, but nothing happened. I banged on it as hard as I could. The doors opened, far too slowly. They caught up with me. I didn’t do anything. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It was like I was paralyzed. I just stood there and took it. I wanted to spit in their faces, but I didn’t dare. The littlest one, who was maybe eight years old, came up and shoved me. I was totally unprepared, lost my balance, and fell right down the cliff...” Fabian stopped speaking and looked up from the book. “So it’s a dream diary?”
Lilja nodded, took the notebook back, and flipped to the end. “Listen to this one from September 12, 2001, 5:38 a.m.... He lay down. I hit and kicked him until my white Nikes turned red and kept going until his face was no longer a face.” She met his gaze. “You heard it for yourself. He’s definitely not of sound mind.”
Fabian agreed with her, and told her about the self-help books he had found in the living room. They agreed to let Molander take over and perform a thorough examination of the whole house to look for any clues that they’d missed. On their way through the upstairs hallway, Fabian suddenly stopped. “Did you check the attic?” he asked Lilja.
“No, there doesn’t seem to be one here. I looked in every room.”
“But what else would need one of these?” Fabian lifted a long, narrow steel rod from the nail in the doorjamb it had been hanging on. It was painted white and had a hook at one end.
Lilja shrugged and Fabian started walking around the second floor to inspect the ceiling. Lilja was right: there didn’t seem to be an attic hatch in any of the rooms. Fabian didn’t find what he was looking for until he climbed up on a chair and examined the ceiling light, which resembled an upside-down umbrella. He used the rod to pull it down. A steep ladder unfolded.
They climbed up and found themselves in a dark attic with a ceiling so low they had to stoop. When Lilja turned on the light, Fabian realized his initial impression of Schmeckel had been way off the mark. The attic functioned as a studio, just like the one in his own house, although it was considerably smaller than Sonja’s and it didn’t have any skylights. The paintbrushes were clean and arranged bristles-up in jars. Tubes of paint were sorted by colour. The space looked completely different from Sonja’s artistic chaos.
“Yikes. Look what I found.” Lilja lifted one of the canvases and placed it on an easel.
Although the painting was abstract, with thick strokes of bold colour, they had no problem deciphering the battered head of a human. Sonja would surely have said that Schmeckel was talented and that the painting was interesting. Fabian found it repulsive. The head was floating free against a white background, severed from its shoulders. Sinews and blood vessels hung from the neck. The nose was crushed and the skin had been removed from large portions of the left side of the face, exposing tendons, bone, and parts of the left eye socket.
“Say what you what, but this guy obviously has a gift.” Lilja held up a few of the other canvases. All of them showed battered and beaten body parts. One of the paintings showed a pair of severed feet next to a bloody axe; another featured a torso with roughly twenty stab wounds, the knife still in the body, twisted a quarter-turn.
“I don’t know what you think, but I believe these creative impulses fit the profile of the kind of man we’re looking for,” said Lilja.
“How do we know it’s the same person?” asked Fabian.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure exactly. The man downstairs seems to be the very picture of harmony, but his house is so superficial and devoid of personal artefacts you can’t help wondering who he is deep inside. And then we come up to the attic and find so much personality here, it almost feels like a different guy.”
“Maybe he has a lodger? Someone who uses his car as well?”
“Isn’t there only the one bedroom upstairs?”
Lilja nodded.
They grew silent and each looked around the attic separately. They both needed time to think and make sense of it all. They poked around the tubes of paint, the easels, and the bizarre paintings. There was a metal box behind the jars of paintbrushes; its blue paint had rubbed off along the edges. Fabian carefully lifted the box and opened it. It contained around fifty Polaroid pictures. As soon as he saw the battered, swollen face he knew exactly how everything was connected.