The Last Lullaby by Carin Gerhardsen

Author:Carin Gerhardsen [Gerhardsen, Carin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405914109
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Thursday Evening

‘Critical but stable, they said. He is breathing on his own, but his pulse was very high. At first I thought he was dead. He was staring straight ahead, but I noticed that his blink reflexes functioned. He’d stepped on broken glass so his foot was completely bloody, he’d run his fist into the wall so it must have hurt like hell and on top of that he broke one arm when he fell. And he did not react in the slightest to the pain. They say he’s catatonic.’

‘Catatonic – is that a temporary condition?’ Sjöberg asked.

‘It depends, apparently,’ Westman replied. ‘In this case it may have been caused by possible brain damage – from the fall or when he banged his head against the wall – or by some kind of mental shock or however you want to put it, a reaction to the photograph. They are also talking about epileptic fits; I don’t know whether that can be brought on mentally or just physically. In any event he’s going to get electroconvulsive therapy and is on a drip. They seem to think there is some hope that he will recover.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘But I already have.’

‘Tell it again, from a psychological perspective, so to speak.’

Westman cleared her throat and tried again.

‘He was just as you described. Taciturn. A little melancholy as I interpreted it. He talked in a drawl; I can understand how it must have been unbearable for Jens. He did not comment on his wife’s and children’s deaths at all. It was as if they did not really concern him. Or as if he didn’t think it concerned him, if you know what I mean?’

‘As if he had waived his right to mourn them?’

‘Exactly. And then quite unexpectedly he started talking about guilt.’

‘Guilt?’

‘Yes, he said something along the lines that guilt is like a shackle that you drag around, but that you get used to it.’

‘In what context did he say this?’ Sjöberg wondered.

‘We asked him if he had a bad conscience because he hadn’t taken responsibility for the children. Then he said that he’d been a bad father. He said something else strange too: that he had not killed his children in a legal sense.’

‘As if all the same he believes that he is responsible for the children’s deaths in some way? Morally responsible?’

‘That was how I understood it.’

‘That would mean that he knows something about these murders after all,’ Sjöberg said thoughtfully. ‘Even if he didn’t commit them himself.’

‘He denied that he murdered them. It was a concrete no to that question.’

‘And then you showed him the photograph?’

‘First we asked if he knew that Catherine had a man in her life, Erik. He did not. Then we told him that Erik was actually named Einar Eriksson and there was a flash in his eyes. I thought it seemed as if the name had struck a chord. But it passed just as quickly again.’

‘Perhaps it occurred to him that there must be many people with that name?’ Sjöberg suggested.

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