by Kepler, Lars
‘Would you like me to show you the guest bedroom?’ she says shyly.
They stand up and Joona hits his head on the light, and it makes a metal clanging sound. They go up the creaking staircase together to a narrow room with a deep window alcove.
‘Nice,’ he says, stopping right behind her.
She turns and finds herself unexpectedly close to him, moves backwards and gestures slightly oddly towards the wardrobe.
‘There are extra pillows in there … and blankets, if you’re cold.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Or you could sleep in my bed, of course, if you like,’ she whispers, taking his hand and leading him with her.
She stops in the doorway to her bedroom, stands on tiptoe and kisses him. He responds, puts his arms round her and almost picks her up.
‘Shall we make the sheets into a tent?’ he whispers.
‘That’s what we always used to do,’ she smiles, and feels her heart beat faster.
She unbuttons his shirt and pushes it down over his shoulders, places her hands on his biceps and looks at him.
‘It’s funny … I remember your body, but you were only a tall boy back then, you didn’t have all these muscles and scars.’
He unbuttons her dress, kisses her on the lips and the side of her neck, then looks at her again.
She’s slim, with small breasts.
He remembers her dark nipples.
Now she has tattoos on her shoulders, and her arms are muscular and covered with scratches from thorny shrubs.
‘Valeria … how can you be so beautiful?’ he says.
She pulls down her pants and lets them fall to the floor, then steps out of them. Her pubic hair is black and tightly curled.
With trembling hands she starts to unbutton his trousers, but can’t quite figure out how the catch on his belt works and only succeeds in pulling it tighter instead.
‘Sorry,’ Valeria giggles.
She blushes and forces herself not to stare too hard as he takes his trousers off.
They pull the large duvet over themselves, then sit beneath it on the bed, laughing and looking at each other in the soft light before starting to kiss again.
They roll to one side, push the duvet off, feeling like teenagers, but simultaneously not. They’re strangers, yet oddly familiar.
She sighs as he kisses her neck and lips, sinking back onto the bed and looking into his intense grey eyes, and feels a burst of giddy joy in her heart.
He kisses her breasts and sucks one of her nipples. She pulls his head towards her and he feels her heart racing.
‘Come here,’ she whispers, pulling him upwards and parting her legs as he lies on top of her.
Joona can’t stop looking at her, those serious eyes, her half-open lips, her neck, the shadow of her collarbone.
Valeria pulls him closer and feels how hard he is as he slips inside her.
His weight presses her into the mattress, and the muscles in her thighs strain as her legs are pushed apart.
He feels her squeezing, moist warmth, then lets out a gasp as he changes rhythm.
She opens her eyes and sees the tenderness in his, the lust.
She responds to his movements and the soft light runs across her breasts, stomach, hips.
Her breathing speeds up and she raises her hips, leans her head back and closes her eyes.
The duvet slides to the floor.
The water in the glass on the bedside table is swaying, casting reflections that move in an elliptical pattern across the ceiling, over and over again.
5
It’s Sunday, and the early winter’s day is so dark that it feels as though the sun has already gone down. Joona has spent the past two nights at Valeria’s, but is going back to work on Monday.
Valeria is sitting at the desk up in her bedroom, going through some quotes on her laptop when she hears a car.
She looks out of the window and sees Joona put his spade in the wheelbarrow and wave towards a white Jaguar that’s approaching along the gravel track.
Joona tries to get Nils Åhlén to stop, but he drives straight over the row of potted hyacinths. There’s a cracking sound as the pots break and damp compost sprays up around the tyres. The car comes to a stop with one wheel perched on the tall edging stone.
Valeria stands in the window and watches as a tall man in pilot’s glasses gets out of the precariously balanced car. He’s wearing a white lab coat under his unbuttoned duffel coat. His thin nose is crooked and his cropped hair grey.
Nils Åhlén is Professor of Forensic Medicine at the Karolinska Institute, and one of the leading forensic medical officers in Europe.
Joona shakes hands with his old friend and says he looks paler than usual.
‘You should be wearing a scarf,’ Joona says, and tries to fasten Åhlén’s collar.
‘Anja gave me the address here,’ Nils says, without returning Joona’s smile. ‘I need to—’
He breaks off abruptly when he sees Valeria coming down the steps.
‘What’s happened?’ Joona asks.
Nils Åhlén’s thin lips are colourless, and he has a hunted look in his eyes.
‘I need to talk to you in private.’
Valeria walks over to them and holds out her hand to the tall man.
‘This is Valeria,’ Joona says.
‘Professor Nils Åhlén,’ Åhlén replies formally.
‘Nice to meet you,’ Valeria smiles.
‘I need to have a word with Nils,’ Joona says. ‘Is it OK if we go into the kitchen?’
‘Of course,’ she says, and leads them up to the house.
‘I’m sorry to have to disturb you on a Sunday,’ Nils Åhlén says.
‘Don’t worry, I was doing some work upstairs anyway,’ Valeria says, and heads towards the stairs.
‘Don’t come down, I’ll let you know when we’re done,’ Joona calls after her.
‘OK.’
Joona shows Åhlén into the kitchen and invites him to sit down. The fire in the stove crackles.
‘Would you like coffee?’
‘No, thanks … I won’t …’
He tails off and sinks onto a chair.
‘So how are you doing really?’
‘This isn’t about me,’ Nils replies, sounding troubled.
‘So what’s happened, then?’
Nils doesn’t meet his gaze, just brushes the tabletop with one hand.
‘I have a lot of dealings with my colleagues in Norway,’ he begins tentatively. ‘And I’ve had a call from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health … that’s where their forensic medicine and pathology departments are based these days.’
‘I know.’
Nils swallows hard, takes his glasses off, makes a half-hearted attempt to polish them and then puts them back on again.
‘Joona, I’m sitting here, but I still don’t know how on earth to tell … I mean, not without you …’
‘Just tell me what’s happened.’
Joona pours a glass of water and puts it down in front of Åhlén.
‘As I understand it, the Norwegian Criminal Police have taken over from the Oslo police in the preliminary investigation of a suspected murder … They found a dead man in a flat. All the evidence suggested a run-of-the-mill drunken fight at first, but when they looked in the victim’s freezer they found body parts belonging to a large number of different people, frozen at various stages of decomposition … They’re working on the theory that the dead man was a previously unknown grave-robber … he may also have been involved in necrophilia and cannibalism … It seems he used to travel to antiques fairs and auctions as a dealer, taking the opportunity to raid local graves and help himself to souvenirs.’
Nils Åhlén takes a sip of water, then wipes his top lip with a trembling finger.
‘What does this have to do with us?’
‘I don’t want you to get upset now,’ Nils says, meeting Joona’s gaze for the first time. ‘He had Summa’s skull in his free
zer.’
‘My Summa?’
Joona reaches out for the worktop and manages to knock over the empty wine bottle, but doesn’t appear to notice as it clatters into the sink with the glasses and plates. His ears are roaring as memories of his wife flood his mind.
‘Are you sure?’ he whispers, looking out of the window at the greenhouses.
Nils Åhlén pushes his glasses further up his nose and explains that the Norwegian police have tried to find matches for DNA from the body parts found in the freezer in police databases held by Europol, Finland, and the Scandinavian countries.
‘They found Summa’s dental records … and seeing as I signed her death certificate, they called me.’
‘I see,’ Joona says, and sits down opposite his friend.
‘They found all his travel documents in his flat … in the middle of November he was at a house clearance in Gällivare … that’s not far from where Summa is buried.’
‘Are you sure about this?’ Joona repeats.
‘Yes.’
‘Can I see the pictures?’
‘No,’ Nils whispers.
‘You don’t have to worry,’ Joona says, looking Nils in the eye.
‘Don’t do it.’
But Joona has already opened his case and taken out the file from the Norwegian Criminal Police. He lays one photograph after the other down on the kitchen table.
The first one shows the open chest freezer from above. A child’s grey foot is sticking out of a frosted lump of white ice. A skeletal spine is nestled next to a bearded face and bloody tongue.
Joona leafs through photographs of the thawing body-parts on a stainless steel worktop. A human heart in an advanced state of decay, a leg cut off at the knee, an entire baby’s body, three fleshless craniums, some teeth, and a torso complete with breasts and arms.
Suddenly Valeria walks into the kitchen and puts two used coffee-cups on the draining board.
‘For God’s sake!’ Joona snaps, trying to cover the pictures even though he knows she’s already seen them.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbles and hurries out.
He gets to his feet, leans one hand against the wall, stares out at the greenhouses, then back at the pictures again.
Summa’s skull.
It’s just a coincidence, he tells himself. The grave-robber didn’t know who she was. There’s no indication on the gravestone, and nothing in any public registers.
‘What do we know about the perpetrator?’ he asks, and hears Valeria go back upstairs.
‘Nothing, they’ve got no leads at all.’
‘And the victim?’
‘All the evidence suggests a fight in the flat, he had a lot of alcohol in his blood when he died.’
‘Isn’t it a bit odd that the police don’t have any leads on the other person?’
‘What are you thinking? Joona, what exactly are you thinking now?’ Nils Åhlén asks with apprehension in his voice.
6
Valeria is sitting at her computer upstairs when Joona comes up and knocks on the door.
She turns towards him and the pale light through the leaded window gives her hair a chestnut-red shimmer.
‘Nils has gone,’ Joona says in a subdued voice. ‘Sorry I was angry, I just didn’t want you to have to see that.’
‘I’m not that fragile,’ she replies. ‘You know, I’ve seen dead bodies plenty of times.’
‘But that was more than body-parts … this is personal,’ Joona says, then falls silent.
There’s a family grave in Stockholm with the names Summa Linna and Lumi Linna on the headstone, but the urns under the ground don’t contain their ashes. The deaths of Joona’s wife and daughter were fabricated, and they lived on for many years in a secret location with new names.
‘Let’s go down to the kitchen and heat that soup up,’ Valeria says after a while.
‘What?’
She gives him a hug, and he wraps his arms round her and rests his cheek against her head.
‘Let’s go and eat,’ she repeats quietly.
They go down to the kitchen and she takes the soup they made earlier out of the fridge. She puts the pan on the stove and turns the hotplate on, but when she switches on the light in the extractor fan Joona walks over and turns it off.
‘What’s happened?’ Valeria asks.
‘Summa’s grave has been vandalised and …’
Joona falls silent, turns his face away and she sees him wipe tears from his cheeks.
‘You’re allowed to cry, you know,’ she says gently.
‘I don’t honestly know why this upsets me so much … someone has dug up her grave and taken her skull back to Oslo with him.’
‘God,’ she whispers.
He goes and stands by the window and looks out at the greenhouses and forest. Valeria can see that he’s closed the curtains in the living room, and there’s a knife lying on the old dresser.
‘You know Jurek Walter’s dead,’ she says in a serious voice.
‘Yes,’ Joona whispers, closing the curtains in the kitchen window.
‘Do you want to talk about him?’
‘I don’t think I can,’ he says simply, and turns towards her.
‘OK,’ she replies in a composed voice. ‘But you don’t have to keep anything from me, I can cope with listening, I promise … I know what you did to save Summa and Lumi, so I understand that he’s a monster.’
‘He’s worse than anything anyone could ever imagine … he digs his way inside of you … and leaves you hollowed out.’
‘But it’s over now,’ Valeria whispers, and reaches out towards him. ‘You’re safe now, he’s dead.’
Joona nods.
‘This has dragged it all up again … it’s like I could feel his breath on the back of my neck when I heard what had happened to Summa’s grave.’
Joona returns to the window and peers out between the curtains. Valeria looks at his back in the gloom of the kitchen.
They sit down at the table and she asks him to tell her more about Jurek Walter. Joona puts his hands on the table to stop them shaking and says in a low voice:
‘He was diagnosed with … non-specific schizophrenia, chaotic thinking, and acute psychosis characterised by bizarre and extremely violent behaviour, but that doesn’t mean a thing … he was never schizophrenic … the only thing that diagnosis shows is how terrified the psychiatrist who conducted the evaluation was.’
‘Was he a grave-robber?’
‘No,’ Joona says.
‘There you are, then,’ she says, and tries to smile.
‘Jurek Walter would never bother with trophies,’ he says heavily. ‘He wasn’t a pervert … but he had a passion for ruining people’s lives. Not killing them, not torturing them – not that he would have hesitated to do either in an instant, but to understand him you have to realise that he wanted to destroy his victims’ souls, extinguish the spark inside them …’
Joona tries to explain that Jurek wanted to take everything away from his victims, then watch as they carried on living – going to work, eating, watching television – until the terrible moment when they realised that they were already dead.
They sit in near-darkness as Joona tells Valeria about Jurek Walter. Even though he was the worst ever serial killer in the Nordic countries, the general public know nothing because all information about him has been declared highly classified.
Joona explains how he and his partner Samuel Mendel began to close in on Jurek Walter.
They took turns to keep watch outside one particular woman’s home. Her two children had gone missing in circumstances that were reminiscent of a number of other victims in the case.
It was as if the earth had opened up and swallowed them.
The pattern that had emerged showed that a disproportionate number of missing people in recent years came from families where someone else had already gone missing.
Joona falls silent and Valeria watches as he knits his hands together in an attempt to hold t
hem still. She gets up, makes some tea and fills two mugs before sitting down again and waiting for him to go on.
‘The weather had been mild for two weeks, it had started to thaw, but that day it started to snow again,’ he says. ‘So now there was fresh snow on top of what was already there …’
Joona has never spoken about those last hours, when Samuel arrived to relieve him.
A thin man had been standing at the edge of the forest, staring up at the window where the woman whose children had gone missing was lying asleep.
The man’s face, so thin and wrinkled, was completely impassive.
Joona found himself thinking that the very sight of the building seemed to give the man a feeling of pleasurable calm, as if he were already dragging his victim off into the forest.
The thin figure did nothing but watch before turning away and vanishing.
‘You’re thinking of the first time you saw him,’ Valeria says, putting her hand over his.
Joona looks up and realises that he’s stopped talking, and nods before telling her that he and Samuel had got out of the car and followed the fresh trail of footprints.
‘We ran along an old railway line, into Lill-Jans Forest …’
But in the darkness among the trees they suddenly lost the man’s trail. With nothing else to go on, they turned to head back.
As they were retracing their steps along the railway track, they saw that the man had left the rails and had set off into the forest instead.
Because the ground beneath the fresh snow was wet, his shoes had left dark prints. Half an hour before they had been white, impossible to see in the weak light, but now they were as dark as granite, unmistakable.
As they headed through the forest they heard a whimpering, moaning sound.
It sounded like someone crying from the very depths of hell.
Between the tree trunks they spotted the man they had been pursuing. The ground was dark with freshly dug soil around a shallow grave. A filthy, emaciated woman was trying to get out of a coffin. She was sobbing as she struggled, but every time she almost got out, the man shoved her back down again.
They drew their pistols and rushed in, managed to get the man on the ground and cuffed his hands and ankles.
Samuel was sobbing as he called the emergency control centre.
