Kennedy's Brain Page 0,11

the springs again even though it was not officially permitted: the mechanical hell was very fragile and extremely valuable. There was nothing else like it in the world.

It was then that Henrik made up his mind to create a hell of his own. She did not believe he was serious. And in addition, she doubted if he had sufficient technical skill to construct the necessary mechanisms. But three months later he invited her into his room and showed her an almost exact copy of the hell in Copenhagen. She had been most surprised, and felt very bitter towards Aron who was not interested in what his son was capable of achieving.

Why did she think of that now, as she sat with her police companions, waiting for Artur? Perhaps because on that occasion she had felt great satisfaction deep down for the fact that Henrik gave her life a meaning far beyond any satisfaction she could derive from doctoral dissertations or archaeological digs. If there is a meaning in life it must be centred upon a person, she thought, nothing else. It had to be a person.

Now he was dead. And she was dead as well. She cried in waves; tears came like showers that squeezed out their contents then vanished again. Time had ceased to be of any significance at all. She had no idea how long she waited. Shortly before Artur arrived the thought struck her that Henrik would never deliberately expose her to the slightest pain, no matter how much difficulty life was causing him. She was the guarantee that he would never take his own life.

What was the alternative? Somebody must have killed him. She tried to tell that to the policewoman guarding her. Soon afterwards Göran Wrath came into her hotel room. He flopped down onto a chair in front of her and asked her why. Why what?

'What makes you think that he was murdered?'

'There is no other explanation.'

'Did he have any enemies? Had something happened?'

'I don't know. But why else should he die? He's twenty-five years old.'

'We don't know. There's no sign of any assault.'

'He must have been murdered.'

'There's no indication of that.'

She continued to insist. Somebody must have killed her son. It was a crude, brutal murder. Göran Wrath listened, notebook in hand. But he wrote nothing down, and that annoyed her.

'Why aren't you writing anything?' she suddenly yelled in frustration. 'I'm telling you, something must have happened!'

He opened his notebook, but still wrote nothing down.

At that very moment Artur came into the room. He was dressed as if he had just come home after being out hunting in heavy rain and trudging for ages through endless swamps. He was wearing wellington boots and the old leather jacket she could remember from her childhood, the one that smelled so pungently of tobacco and oil and goodness knows what else. His face was pale, his hair tousled. She leapt to her feet and clung tightly onto him. He would be able to help her out of this nightmare, just like he did when she was little and crept into his bed after waking up in the middle of the night. She told him everything. There was a brief moment when she was convinced that everything had been a figment of her imagination. Then she noticed that he had started crying, and Henrik died for the second time. Now she knew that he would never wake up again.

Nobody could console her any longer, the catastrophe was total. But Artur forced her to carry on telling him, he was determined in his despair. He wanted to know. Göran Wrath appeared once again. His eyes were red, and this time he did not even take his notebook out of his pocket. Artur wanted to know what had happened, and it seemed that now he was present, Louise dared to listen to what the police officer had to say.

Göran Wrath repeated what he had said before. Henrik had been lying under the covers, wearing a pair of blue pyjamas, and had probably been dead for at least ten hours before Louise discovered him.

The most obvious thing was that nothing appeared to be unusual. There was no sign of a crime, no sign of a struggle, no break-in, or a sudden attack or anything else to suggest that anybody had been in the flat while Henrik had gone to bed and passed away. There was no farewell letter to indicate suicide. The probability was that something had burst inside him,