The room at Goose Alley is growing chilly as the shadows chase the rays of afternoon sun out of the window. Cardell guesses the time from their angle among the ceiling beams and is proven correct when Saint Gertrud chimes the hour and a quarter. He has slept late. Drafts of air rush up from between the floorboards, and it is time to get going again. Tonight their journey will take them along the Rill, all the way to the Bog and to Pretty Klara, a public house of ill repute in a desolate and unfortunate neighborhood where no decent person would be seen dead. And sure enough he soon hears steps on the stairs, shortly followed by the sounds of Emil Winge at the door. The footfalls alone tell Cardell that something has happened. They betray movements of another sort to the ones he has seen from Emil Winge during this dismal summer, increasingly melancholy and subdued, quick only when he has backed away from something in alarm. Soon he has crossed the threshold, panting from the stairs and flushed by his news.
“A memory made me aware of something I should have thought of a long time ago.”
“Well?”
“The French driver. Let us assume that what was shouted was not Le ton beau des vivants. What he instead said was Le tombeau des vivants. I assign no blame to the widow: the sounds are the same, especially for anyone who doesn’t speak French, but if I had known better from the first, we would have been spared a great deal of effort.”
Cardell throws out his arms, a gesture that for a moment allows himself to forget he only has the one.
“Do me a favor and speak as if to a normal person.”
“I think Erik Three Roses is in Dane’s Bay.”
“The madhouse?”
“Either that or the hospital. They’re next door to each other.”
“And how do you know all this, all of a sudden?”
“The words don’t refer to some ‘beautiful song of the living.’ Le tombeau des vivants can instead be understood as a deprecatory phrase for places like Dane’s Bay.”
“Namely?”
“The tomb of the living.”
They walk over the Red Lock, where the current has begun to calm in anticipation of winter, past Ironmonger’s Square and the marketplace, along the quay under the cliff. On the side facing the rocks, boards and ballast lie piled on top of each other. Sheltered by the cliff, a sailor has started a fire over which sits a steaming cauldron. Others are lined up on their way to the shack that leans against the rock, where some opportunist publican has set up an establishment in the hopes that the sailors’ thirst will exceed their desire to walk all the way to the Lynx at Sutthoff bridge. They tread the stairs that climb the wall, catching their breath on the rickety platform halfway up. Fewer ships than ever dare the waves of the inlet. Commerce is scarce. Few bother to sail all the way to Stockholm anymore, and those who do are met by a city where their goods have been declared illegal.
At the far slopes of the ridge they pass Ersta, and then they stare right down into the abyss of the shipyard, at the bottom of which the workers can be seen scurrying like ants through mud, pressed down under the weight of their burdens. The isthmus narrows and they can see water on both sides. At the tollgate, Cardell announces their intention soon to return. All they have to do is follow the millstream north to bring the hospital within sight. In its grounds, the half-naked branches of the trees grope at the wind. The leaves tumble through the air until the wind deserts them in the hollow through which the stream trickles. Winge and Cardell follow its path past a poorly raked gravel yard, where the stream tunnels under the foundations of the building itself. At the entrance, a woman in an apron answers their knock, nods at the name they give, and ushers them in.
A large chapel fills the entire middle of the building. There are stairs on either side, and they are shown one floor up, past open doors where beds are crowded together, and then on to a corridor. She opens a door and gestures them in with a muttered confirmation. “Erik Three Roses.”
There he is, sitting on his bed with his hands in his lap, as if lifted straight out of Margareta Colling’s description, albeit marked by his suffering. The handsome face that still shows more of the boy than the man is pale and gaunt, his body thin, his hair limp. He shows no reaction as they walk in until Emil Winge addresses him.
“Erik Three Roses?”
The boy stares dully in front of him, and although he makes a small attempt to lift his head, his gaze remains fixed on the same spot.
“This is Jean Michael Cardell, on official police business. My name is Emil Winge. We have come to ask you a few questions about Linnea Charlotta Colling.”
A spasm of pain comes over the boy’s face as if he has been struck. His voice is thick and the words sound as if formed with a swollen tongue.
“I killed her.”
Cardell steps forward. He can’t keep the anger out of his voice.
“But why, for the love of God?”
Three Roses looks down into his lap, astonished, then shakes his head.
“I don’t know.”
He stares at his palms for a while, before lifting them up to his visitors, his eyes now tightly closed.
“See!”
His hands shake. They are spotless.
After an hour of plying him with questions they are none the wiser. Sometimes it is as if Erik Three Roses is answering a different query. On other occasions, he doesn’t answer at all, lost in thought and seemingly oblivious to his visitors. When his attention returns, he no longer knows who he is talking to, and the introductions must be repeated. When Cardell’s patience wears thin, he stomps out, thumping his wooden hand on the door frame on his way, muttering curses to blacken the air in his wake. Emil Winge remains for a while until he too grows tired of repeating the same thing over and over. He finds Cardell in the corridor, leaning against the wall as if bracing himself against his anger. In one of the rooms they find the same woman who showed them in. Winge takes her aside.
“Is he always like that?”
She shrugs.
“I just see him at mealtimes, but I can’t remember him any different.”
“Is he given anything apart from normal food and drink?”
She nods.
“Oh yes. He is well cared for. His curative is paid for in advance.”
“May I see it?”
She leads them to a storage room, opening the heavy door with a key she wears on a chain around her neck. She follows a row of bottles on a shelf with her finger until she stops at one with Three Roses’s name, with the dosage written on the label. Emil Winge lifts the cork, smells first, and then carefully dips a finger that he brushes over his tongue. He shakes his head at Cardell, who interprets the meaning of his gesture and takes the woman by the arm.
“Listen carefully to me now. Erik Three Roses shouldn’t be given anything more than the same food and drink you give your other patients. No drops, whether these or anything else. I speak on the authority of the police. We will return…”
He turns his gaze to Winge, who holds up two fingers.
“…the day after tomorrow. At this point, Three Roses should be more capable of speaking for himself, and if not, we will know that our instructions have been ignored, in which case any responsible party will be held to account.”
Cardell spits against the building wall after they have exited the front door.
“It’s not an easy thing to believe when you see him.”
Emil Winge nods in agreement.
“That was also my first thought. But if all murderers betrayed their intentions by mere appearances, the world would be a simpler place than it is.”
“So what now?”
“The bottle contained thebaica, a poppy extract. It dulls pain at the cost of confusion. I both believe and hope that it is these drops that make him as he is, and that his speech will be clearer when it has left his body.”
“It’s just as well you have experience with these things.”
Winge suppresses a shiver, recalling a narrow room with straps holding him down against his will, the sickly-sweet drops being poured into a mouth forced open: a lifetime’s worth of enduring humiliation.