Dark Secrets (19 page)

Something real.

So he left.

A guilty conscience wasn’t normally part of Sebastian’s repertoire,
but even he understood that things would be difficult for Clara Lundin when she woke up. He had realized how lonely she was earlier in the day when they were in the garden, and their encounter on the sofa had confirmed it. The way she pushed her lips against his, the way her hands clutched his head, the way she pressed her body against him. She was almost desperate for closeness. On every level, not only physically. After years of being rebuffed or having her feelings and thoughts ignored at best, or being shouted at and threatened at worst, she was starved of tenderness and consideration. She was like sand in the desert, simply sucking up anything resembling normal human kindness. His hand on her knee. Contact. A clear sign that she was desirable. It was like opening a floodgate of need.

For skin.

For closeness.

For someone.

That was the problem, Sebastian thought as he walked the short distance back to his parents’ house. It had been too easy, and she had been grateful. He could deal with most emotions when it came to his conquests, but gratitude always revolted him slightly. Hatred, contempt, sorrow—they were all better. Gratitude made it so obvious that everything happened on his terms. He knew that already, of course, but it was nicer if he could convince himself that the situation was somehow equal.
Maintain the illusion.
Gratitude broke it. Showed him up as the complete bastard he was.

It was only a quarter to four in the morning when he got home, and he had absolutely no desire to go back to bed. So what should he do? Even though he didn’t really want to do it, and kept hoping that it would all sort itself out somehow, he realized that sooner or later he would have to tackle all the cupboards and drawers. Putting it off wasn’t going to make it any easier.

He went into the garage and found some flattened removal boxes
leaning against the wall in front of the old Opel. He took three of them and stopped when he was back in the house. Where to start? He decided on the former guest room and study. He dismissed the desk and the old office equipment, opened up one of the boxes, and started piling in books from the shelves covering one wall. They were a mixture of fiction, nonfiction, reference works, and textbooks. Everything went in. No doubt the same applied to the books as to the Opel in the garage: the secondhand value was zero. Once the first box was full he tried to close it. He couldn’t do it, but that would be some removal firm’s problem, thought Sebastian, dragging it over to the door with some difficulty. Then he opened up another box and carried on. By five o’clock he had fetched another four boxes from the garage and emptied virtually the entire shelving unit. There were only two shelves to go, over on the right-hand side. Full of photograph albums. Neatly labeled with the year and a note of the contents. Sebastian hesitated. After all, it was his parents’ so-called life sitting on those shelves. Should he just shove the whole lot into a cardboard box and send it off to the dump? Could he do that? He put off the decision; they had to come off the shelves anyway, but where they ended up could be determined at a later stage.

Sebastian had cleared more than half, starting with the top shelf and getting as far as
WINTER/SPRING 1992—INNSBRUCK
, when his hand touched something concealed behind the thick albums. A box. He grasped for it, got hold of it, and took it down. It was a shoe box; small, pale blue, with a sun in the middle of the lid. For children’s shoes, presumably. But it was an odd place to keep shoes. Sebastian sat down on the bed and opened the box with a certain amount of expectant curiosity. It wasn’t even half full. A sex toy from the infancy of sex toys, neatly sealed up in its original box, which was covered in pencil drawings from something that might have been the
Kama Sutra
. A safety deposit box key and some letters. Sebastian picked up the letters. Three of them. Two were addressed to his mother. A woman’s handwriting. The third was from his mother to someone called Anna Eriksson in Hägersten.
Returned to
sender, address unknown
was stamped on the envelope. More than thirty years ago, judging by the postmarks. From Hägersten and Västerås. The box seemed to contain things his mother didn’t want the rest of the world to know about. Obviously important enough to keep, but in secret. What had she done? Who were they from? A lover? A brief, amorous adventure away from home and his father? Sebastian opened the first letter.

Then there was an address. Sebastian gave the matter some thought.
Anna Eriksson
. The autumn after he moved to the USA. The name didn’t ring a bell, but perhaps that was hardly surprising. It was thirty years ago, and the number of women who had passed through his life while he was at the university was considerable. He had been given a one-year post in the Psychology Department the year after he had
graduated with top grades. He had been at least twenty years younger than his colleagues and had felt like a puppy in a room full of dinosaur skeletons. If he really made an effort he might be able to remember at least the name of someone he’d slept with, but probably not. No Anna sprang to mind, anyway. Perhaps the next letter would make things clearer.

There was more, something about moving house and writing again, but Sebastian didn’t get any further. He just kept reading the same sentence over and over again. He had a child. Or, at least, he might have. A son or daughter. He might be a father again. Maybe.
Maybe.
A brief realization that his life could suddenly have been completely different almost made him faint. He leaned forward with his head between his knees and breathed deeply. His thoughts were in turmoil. A child. Did she get rid of it? Or was it still alive?

He tried desperately to remember who Anna was. Put a face to the name. But no memories surfaced. He was finding it difficult to concentrate. He took a deep breath in order to focus his visual memory. Still nothing. The conflicting emotions of happiness and shock were overshadowed for a moment by a sudden surge of anger. He might have a child, and his mother had never said a word. The familiar feeling that she had let him down washed over him. Twisted and turned in
his stomach. To think he had begun to want to forgive her. Or, at least, had hoped to find some peace in the internal battle he constantly waged with her. That feeling was gone. The battle would always be there now. For the rest of his life, he realized.

He had to find out more. He had to remember who Anna Eriksson was. He got up. Walked around the room. Recalled the last letter—there had been three letters in the box. Perhaps it contained more pieces of the puzzle. He picked it up. His mother’s rounded handwriting on the envelope; for a second he wanted to throw it away. Disappear and never look back. Leave this secret and bury it where it had already been preserved for so long. But his hesitation was soon replaced by action—anything else was unthinkable—and with trembling hands Sebastian carefully took the letter out of the envelope. It was his mother’s handwriting, her sentence construction, her words. At first he didn’t understand what he was reading; his brain was too overloaded.

Sebastian read the letter one more time. His mother had followed the script for their relationship to the letter. Even after her death she still managed to hurt him. He tried to calm his thoughts and concentrate
on facts, not feelings. Stand outside. Act professionally. What did he know? Thirty years ago when he was working at Stockholm University, he got someone called Anna Eriksson pregnant. Perhaps she had an abortion, perhaps she didn’t. At any rate she had moved from—he looked at Anna’s address—Vasaloppsgatan 17, at some point thirty years ago. He had gone to bed with her. Was she one of his former students? Probably. He had had sex with several of them.

It was possible to trace his former head of the department, Arthur Lindgren, via directory inquiries. Arthur, who was now retired, answered after three separate calls; the last time Sebastian let the phone ring more than twenty-five times. Arthur was still living on Surbrunnsgatan, and when he had woken up a little and grasped who was calling him at half past five in the morning, he had been surprisingly helpful. He promised to look through the documents and files he had at home in search of an Anna Eriksson. Sebastian thanked him. Arthur had always been one of the few people Sebastian respected, and that respect was mutual; he knew that Arthur had actually defended him when the university first tried to kick him out. In the end, however, the situation had become untenable even for Arthur. Sebastian’s womanizing was no longer restricted to discreet little affairs; there were so many rumors about him that the board managed to have him suspended on the third attempt. That was when he went to the USA, to the University of North Carolina. He had begun to realize that his days were numbered and applied for a Fulbright scholarship.

Sebastian started to draw up a timeline, noting down the date of the first letter: December 9, 1979. The second letter was dated December 18. He counted back nine months from December, which took him to March 1979.

He had arrived in Chapel Hill in North Carolina at the very beginning of November 1979. So March to October was the relevant period, eight possible months. She had probably discovered she was pregnant around the time of the first letter, so September–October would seem to be the most likely months. Sebastian tried to recall as many memories as he could of sexual encounters during the autumn of 1979. It
wasn’t easy: that particular period at the university had been one of the most intensive in his catalog of sexual misdemeanors. This was partly because the stress of the department’s constant investigations into his behavior simply exacerbated his need for affirmation and partly because after a number of years spent experimenting, he had perfected the role of seducer. The clumsiness was gone, along with the fear, the ineptitude. He simply enjoyed what he was good at, and he had crossed every boundary during the course of several hectic years.

When he looked back on those days later on, he had been amazed at his behavior. When the HIV/AIDS panic had begun to rage at the beginning of the eighties, he had realized with horror just how bad his abuse had actually been. He had started trying to find ways to resist and gained a great deal of strength from his more detailed research into serial killers in the United States. He remembered the moment when he was sitting in Quantico, the FBI training center, where he was working on a joint project with the FBI and the University of North Carolina, and realized that the way he acted had much in common with the motivation behind a serial killer’s actions. Admittedly, these actions had completely different consequences; it was as if he were playing poker for matchsticks and the serial killers for gold chips. But the basis was the same: difficult upbringing with a lack of empathy and love, poor self-esteem, and a need to show the individual’s strength. And then that constant cycle of fantasy—execution—angst, spinning around all the time. The individual needs affirmation and fantasizes about control; in his case it was sexual, in the serial killer’s it was a matter of another person’s life and death. The fantasy becomes so strong that in the end it is impossible to resist acting it out. This is followed by angst over what he has done. The affirmation was, in fact, worthless. He is bad. A bad person. With the despair the fantasies return, assuaging the angst. These fantasies soon grow so strong that the need to find an outlet for them is reawakened. Around and around it goes.