Trapped, page 5
‘I’m going to take this one,’ said Steffo, picking up the wallet. ‘It feels … Somehow it makes me happy.’
‘So, the wallet it is,’ said Vincent. ‘Would you say that you acted using your own free will?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Steffo, laughing. ‘I could have picked anything.’
‘I’d have gone for the pastry – it looks delicious,’ Jenny interjected, winking at the viewers through the camera lens.
‘Anything – of course,’ Vincent said with a wry smile, nodding at a scrap of paper on the table.
He had given it to Steffo before the experiment began. Steffo unfolded the note and looked at it. Then he frowned and cleared his throat. He touched the microphone with his hand, making the sound crackle.
‘Read it out,’ said Jenny.
But Steffo gave the note to her instead. Jenny read out the message in her clearest TV presenter voice.
‘My actions will always be governed by two things: my own preferences and values, and the influence of others. These in combination mean there is a ninety per cent degree of probability that I will select the wallet, even if I do not know why.’
Jenny glanced at Steffo, who looked very troubled. Vincent took a sip of water. Jenny turned towards the camera, behind which there was a baffled cameraman shaking his head.
‘For those of you just tuning in, we’re joined on the sofa by Vincent Walder, who is here to tell us about our brains – or possibly make us even more confused about them.’
Vincent saw himself on a monitor by the camera. Underneath it there were glowing red numbers counting down. It read 04:14, which meant he had around four minutes left to explain how he had predicted which item Steffo would choose; 414 – the fourth, first and fourth letters of the alphabet, which spelled DAD. As a dad, he probably shouldn’t have brought Aston to the studio, but the eight-year-old seemed quite contented with the pastries and orange juice in the green room. Hopefully they wouldn’t be that late to school.
‘So you’re saying that our actions can be controlled by things we’re not aware of,’ said Steffo. ‘How is it possible that I’m not familiar with my own preferences and values?’
There was a trace of agitation in his manner. Vincent made a conscious effort to return his thoughts to the studio.
‘You don’t necessarily know all your preferences and values,’ he said. ‘For example, a trauma suffered in childhood will mean that a person can’t help behaving in a certain way in adulthood. They may be completely unaware of it, but their behaviour can be predicted.’
‘But is it really that simple?’ Jenny interrupted. ‘If I fall off my bike, surely I won’t hate bicycles for the rest of my life?’
‘Hopefully not,’ Steffo chuckled, ‘given how often you do yourself a mischief on the furniture in the studio. You even came close to burning the whole studio to the ground once!’
Jenny threw an icy look at him. Steffo was referring to the time she was meant to fry some cheese puffs live on air and instead they caught fire. The clip had gone viral all around the world.
‘But if someone runs you over in a blue Audi, you’re likely to experience elevated levels of stress for a long time afterwards whenever you see a blue car,’ said Vincent. ‘Of course, it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. It’s enough for there to be powerful emotions aroused.’
One minute left. He needed to hurry.
Focus.
‘Like when I was on Strictly,’ said Steffo. ‘Those were powerful emotions, all right! Especially the final number. I remember it like it was yesterday.’
‘Not again,’ said Jenny, rolling her eyes.
Vincent realized he had Steffo where he wanted him.
‘Now we’re getting to the crux of the matter,’ he said. ‘Strong, positive emotions, connected to details from the memory of your experience. Details that can still trigger those happy emotions and thus draw you to them. Steffo, do you remember what you were wearing in that dance number?’
‘Absolutely. A white T-shirt with …’
Steffo fell silent and his eyes opened wide.
‘You’re kidding.’
‘What?’ said Jenny. ‘What is it?’
The clock under the monitor showed 00:10. Ten seconds left before they cut to the ad break. Vincent had timed it to perfection.
‘A white T-shirt with Che Guevara on it,’ said Steffo, holding up the wallet to allow the camera to zoom in on the sticker of the Cuban revolutionary for its final shot.
‘But is it really that easy?’ said Jenny in astonishment.
Vincent smiled.
‘Sometimes.’
They cut to ads a second after he fixed his gaze on the camera. There was no denying it: he knew how to do TV.
‘Thanks, guys,’ he said with a smile, putting his hand on Steffo’s upper arm. ‘You can keep the wallet.’
He left the presenters laughing behind him. He only hoped that Aston had left at least half a pastry for the other guests that morning. On his way back to the green room, he pulled out his mobile to take it off silent. There was a notification on the screen. Three missed calls. All from Mina.
7
She walked down the narrow staircase and emerged into a short corridor. On one wall there were mirrors with small make-up tables in front of them. The passage opened up into a bigger room dominated by two sofas around a table with bowls of fruit and sweets on it. A refrigerator with a glass door was full to bursting with bottles of sparkling water.
‘I thought you said last time that backstage was off limits?’ she said.
‘It is, to people I don’t know,’ Vincent said. ‘The long arm of the law is another matter.’
Mina looked around the room.
‘This is cosy,’ she said. ‘I thought dressing rooms were way tattier – I’d expected graffiti on the wall and the smell of stale beer.’
In truth, she had initially considered declining when Vincent suggested they meet in his dressing room at the Rival Hotel theatre, where he was due to perform in Stockholm. She had plastic gloves and a seat cover with her, ready to be produced at a moment’s notice.
‘The Rival Hotel’s dressing rooms are among the best in town,’ he said. ‘And since we’re basically under the stage there’s no danger of anyone overhearing us.’
He was right. The dressing room was pristine and appeared to have been recently refurbished. She let out a sigh of relief and sat down on one of the sofas, which seemed to be brand new. As yet, no groupies had made out with the band’s drummer on this sofa. She wouldn’t need the seat cover after all.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ she said. ‘Have you decided whether you’re going to help us? I’d like to introduce you to the other members of the team as soon as possible – preferably tomorrow. I thought you could tell them about those cuts that you identified as a number.’
Vincent looked at her in surprise.
‘But surely you’d realized that too?’
‘We’ve been … looking for other things. Our priority has been trying to identify the victim, in the hope that will lead us to the perpetrator. But as I said last week in Gävle, so far we’ve drawn a blank. The discovery that the victim has some kind of symbol on her seemed … surreal.’
Vincent sighed. Something crossed his face. As if he were retiring into his shell.
‘I did warn you that I don’t have the right expertise,’ he said. ‘Surreal. Hmm. You’re probably right. That means you don’t need me. Would you like a sweet?’
He pushed one of the bowls towards her. She noted that all the pieces of candy were in paper wrappers. Even if a stranger’s unhygienic hands had been digging through the bowl, the sweets themselves were still protected. She wondered whether Vincent had requested wrapped sweets on purpose. If he had analysed her that closely and knew about her foibles, it probably wouldn’t be long before the jibes started. Most people couldn’t resist cracking jokes about it. She hoped he wasn’t like most people. It was bad enough that a complete stranger seemed able to read her like an open book.
Lying at the bottom of the bowl was a Dumle toffee. Her favourite. But it was too far down. Her hand would have to touch far too many other sweets that others might have touched before she reached it. She looked longingly at the wrapped Dumle. Then she shook her head in reply to his offer.
‘I don’t think you’re wrong about the cuts,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’d like you to meet the others. Because I think you’re right. Perhaps we should have spotted the numbers ourselves. But we didn’t. We need you.’
He looked at her silently. She could hear the hum of the audience as they began to filter into the auditorium above them. In twenty minutes the curtain would rise. Then Vincent would charm and shock eight hundred people in the guise of the Master Mentalist. He would manipulate their thoughts and their behaviour with aplomb, and he would appear to be in complete control. It was hard to believe that the man sitting opposite her was the same person. Sitting there on the sofa, he seemed almost nervous.
‘I’d like to help you, if I can,’ he said finally. ‘But I’m not great with groups. Just so you know.’
No? Well, who was? A group at work was merely a bunch of strangers who thought they knew you because you worked in the same place. Mina had never understood why people insisted on talking about what they did at the weekends or how many teeth their kids had. As if it were of interest …
‘The meeting is at nine o’clock tomorrow morning at police headquarters,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’ll meet you at the main entrance. I’m going to leave you to your audience – they sound a little impatient.’
‘I’ll soon lick them into shape,’ he said. ‘Oh, by the way. Here you go.’
He fetched something lying on top of the fridge and passed it to her. An unopened bag of Dumle toffees.
‘See you tomorrow,’ he said.
8
Police headquarters was located on Polhemsgatan in the Kungsholmen neighbourhood. The air was crisp and the sky grey, as if threatening precipitation. Sleet that would be transformed to rain before it reached terra firma. March was not Vincent’s favourite month. While hugging himself to keep warm, he scrutinized the people coming and going through the main entrance. He was disappointed each time it wasn’t Mina. The butterflies in his stomach refused to settle. He didn’t know what sort of welcome he’d get from her fellow officers. Or whether he’d be welcome at all. The risk of being excluded before he had been included had the butterflies dancing some kind of war dance in his lower intestines.
Eventually, Mina emerged through the glass doors. Today she was wearing a red polo neck. He couldn’t help but notice how well that colour suited her. It was dramatic yet restrained. Naturally he understood that part of what he was feeling was because the colour red automatically triggered a shot of adrenaline inside him, in the same way it had done in humankind for hundreds of thousands of years. Blood was red. Angry faces were red. More adrenaline in your body made it easier to escape those situations.
‘I was wondering where you’d got to,’ she said. ‘Why are you standing out here? Thinking about escaping?’
‘Among other things.’
She gave him an amused look, which he noted kickstarted a dose of both the stress hormone cortisol and the ‘feel-good juice’ dopamine in his body, while also increasing his serotonin levels, which meant his brain was turning at top gear while his testosterone levels increased by 40 per cent. It was a hormonal cocktail, which when experienced by two people, was known as ‘having chemistry’. If only people knew how accurate that description was. Researchers didn’t know why it happened, but they all agreed that it existed. He wondered whether Mina felt the same thing. Because in truth, flight had never been on the cards. She was far too interesting for that.
‘You’ve talked in front of strangers a thousand times,’ she said. ‘This is exactly the same. Come on.’
Vincent looked around in curiosity as Mina guided him along the corridors of police headquarters. It looked more or less as he had expected. Public sector. Small offices with stacks of papers and binders lined up in rows, as well as a large open-plan office with partition dividers between the desks, and mugs with the inscription Polisen on the desktops.
When they reached a large glass door with a curtain on the inside, she paused.
‘So, what do you say? Ready to enter the lion’s den?’
Think of it as a performance, he told himself. Nothing to worry about. This bout of the jitters could be blamed on Mina’s red top and the increased production of cortisol.
Vincent suddenly spotted that she was also nervous. He guessed that it was because she still wasn’t 100 per cent sure what role he would play or what he had to offer, and was therefore unsure what to tell her colleagues. A highly plausible concern. But it wasn’t necessary for them both to be nervous. He tried to find the words to placate her.
‘You’re right about this being a talk like any other,’ he said. ‘But it’s really about the group dynamic. Established groups always react to the introduction of a new element. Freud spent a lot of time studying what he referred to as “group spirit” – a kind of collective consciousness that emerges over time. The theory is that a group tends to act differently to how its members would individually.’
Mina stared at him.
‘And why are you telling me this?’ she said.
‘Well, I often make use of group psychology when I do my shows,’ he said. ‘A big audience will react differently to a single person, and that’s a factor I can use to control the audience and get them where I want them. I mostly rely on Kurt Lewin’s field theory. It’s based on three key variables. Energy – ergo what causes and motivates actions. Tension – as in the difference between someone’s goals and their present state. And Need – the physical or psychological requirement that awakens that inner tension.’
Mina was still staring at him, shaking her head. But he noted that she no longer looked nervous. Diverting someone’s attention was the simplest tool in his arsenal. But it usually worked. In both directions, he realized. His own nervousness had also dissipated. Not entirely, but enough.
‘What positions do the members of the group have?’
‘It’s irrelevant,’ said Mina curtly. ‘The police organizational structure is complicated and it would take me an age to explain it to you. Besides, this particular group was formed to cut through the usual hierarchies. Julia’s in charge – that’s all you need to know.’
She opened the door and they went in. Three pairs of eyes turned towards them. There ought to have been four, but one of the people in the room was asleep.
‘Hi, everyone. This is Vincent Walder. I know that Julia has told you that Vincent will be consulting for us on aspects of the investigation.’
Heavy silence. A gentle snore from the sleeping man. Vincent noted the oddity of sleeping in the middle of a workplace meeting and reviewed the possible explanations in his head. At a guess, the man either suffered from narcolepsy or he was a new father. The latter was statistically far likelier. A vomit stain on his shoulder provided the final clue.
‘Hello,’ Vincent said tentatively.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Mina anxiously shifting her weight from foot to foot. Personally, he now felt completely at ease. He was in work mode. This was his field. All he had to do was find the key to each person sitting around the table, while at the same time finding his own place in the group dynamic. Then it would all be fine.
‘As Mina said, my name is Vincent. And I’m a mentalist. This means I’ve made it my job to find out how we can manipulate the human psyche and people’s behaviour. Of course, that’s only possible if you actually have a good grasp of how people function in the first place. I am not, however, a psychologist or therapist – I primarily use my skills as an entertainer.’
A somewhat over-tanned man with discreet streaks in his hair snorted. His shirt was undone one button too far, exposing a red rash, the legacy of a recent waxing. He looked good in a way that suggested a certain desperation about growing older. There was an air of self-confidence about him that suggested, despite his over-inflated ego, many women found him attractive. No doubt the well-developed pectoralis major helped. It was funny how both sexes were drawn to big chests, albeit for completely different reasons. Big breasts on a woman indicated a good ability to feed offspring. Well-developed chest muscles on men indicated strength and the ability to provide protection. Moobs, however, were an entirely different matter.
‘Sorry,’ said Mina, interrupting his train of thought. ‘I haven’t introduced everyone.’
She began with the man with the over-inflated ego:
‘This is Ruben Höök. And that’s Christer Bengtsson, our grand old man.’
‘I’m not that fucking old,’ Christer muttered.
Vincent hid a smile. Christer was clearly a glass-half-empty kind of guy. He didn’t know what disappointments had shaped the older policeman’s view on life, but he guessed it had been a self-fulfilling prophecy. No ring on his finger. Most likely lived alone. A considerable waistline and slightly laboured breathing indicated a penchant for junk food and little exercise. No pets at home that needed walking, then. Newspaper ink on his fingers – so he still read his news in the papers rather than online. Vincent was willing to bet there would be an obsolete Bakelite telephone with a rotary dial in Christer’s home.
‘Would someone mind waking up Peder?’
Mina said it without any trace of negativity. Peder was clearly well liked by his colleagues, otherwise they wouldn’t have tolerated him sleeping during the meeting, no matter how many kids he had at home.
‘Peder! Wake up!’
Ruben shook Peder, and he sat up groggily.
‘What? Who?’
‘Here,’ said Mina, placing a Red Bull in front of him.
He gave her a grateful look.
