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.
Jan had stood there gazing at his former schoolmate for a minute or so; once upon a time he had been terrified of Christer. Then he had gone on his way, feeling neither joy nor sorrow.
When he reaches the main square he goes into Fridman’s ironmongery, as he has done a couple of times in the past. Torgny Fridman, the owner’s son, has taken over, and this Saturday afternoon Torgny himself is standing behind the counter. He is a slim man of about thirty, with short, pale-red hair.
Jan goes towards the back of the shop to look at axes. He has no wood to chop, but still he picks up several different types of axe, weighing them in his hands and swinging them experimentally through the air.
At the same time he keeps glancing over at the till. Torgny Fridman has acquired a dark-red beard. He is standing behind the counter chatting to his customers, a family with children. He doesn’t look in Jan’s direction. Fifteen years have gone by, and Torgny seems to have forgotten him. Why should he remember? It is only Jan who remembers.
He picks up the biggest axe, which is almost a metre in length.
The bell on the shop door pings.
‘Daddy!’ A little boy in a white jumper and jeans which are too big comes racing in, hurtling towards the counter. Behind him is a woman, smiling broadly.