The Nightmare. Ларс Кеплер

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       Preface

      There’s no wind when the large leisure cruiser is found drifting in Jungfrufjärden in the southern part of the Stockholm archipelago one light evening. The water is a sleepy bluish-grey colour, and is moving as gently as fog.

      The old man in a rowing boat calls out a couple of times even though he has a feeling he’s not going to get any answer. He’s been watching the boat from shore for almost an hour as it’s been drifting slowly backwards on the offshore current.

      The man angles his rowing boat so that the side butts up against the motor cruiser. He pulls the oars in, ties the rowing boat to the swimming platform, climbs up the metal steps and over the railing. In the middle of the aft-deck is a pink sun-lounger. When he can’t hear anything he opens the glass door and goes down a few steps into the saloon. The large windows are casting a grey light across the polished teak interior and dark-blue upholstery of the sofa. He carries on down the steep wooden steps, past the dark galley and bathroom and into the large cabin. Pale light is filtering through the narrow windows up by the ceiling, illuminating the arrow-shaped double bed. Towards the top of the bed a young woman in a denim jacket is sitting against the wall in a limp, slumped posture with her legs wide apart and one hand resting on a pink cushion. She’s looking the old man straight in the eye with a bemused, anxious smile on her face.

      It takes a moment for the man to realise that the woman is dead.

      In her long, dark hair there’s a clasp in the shape of a dove, a peace dove.

      When the old man goes over and touches her cheek, her head topples forward and a thin stream of water trickles out of her mouth and down her chin.

       The word ‘music’ actually refers to the artistry of the muses, and comes from the Greek myth of the nine muses. All nine were the daughters of the great god Zeus and the titan Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. The muse of music itself, Euterpe, is usually depicted with a double-flute between her lips, and her name means ‘bringer of joy’.

       The talent known as musicality has no generally accepted definition. There are people who lack the ability to discern shifting frequencies of notes, and there are people who are born with an extensive musical memory and the sort of perfectly attuned hearing that enables them to identify any given note without any points of reference whatsoever.

       Through the ages a number of exceptionally talented musical geniuses have emerged, some of whom have become extremely famous, such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who toured the courts of Europe from the age of six, and Ludwig van Beethoven, who composed many of his greatest works after he had become totally deaf.

       The legendary Nicolò Paganini was born in 1782 in the Italian city of Genoa. He was a self-taught violinist and composer. To this day there have been very few violinists capable of playing Paganini’s fast, complicated compositions. Up to his death Paganini was pursued by rumours that he had only acquired his unique talent by signing a contract with the devil.