by Kepler, Lars
Serial killers like this don’t exist, Joona is thinking.
Occasionally a serial killer will try to excuse his urge to kill with the idea that society needs to be cleansed, but on those occasions the victims are usually homosexuals, prostitutes or specific ethnic or religious groups.
It can’t be Jurek.
He would never kill anyone for demonstrating a lack of morality.
That is of no interest whatsoever to him.
Unless there’s some advantage to it, Joona suddenly thinks, and gets up from his chair.
The murders are nothing to do with cleansing society.
It’s a competition, a contest, they’re dealing with a knockout challenge.
‘He’s alive,’ Joona whispers, pushing his chair under the table.
Jurek Walter is alive, and he has been recruiting and testing to see who would be most suitable as an accomplice.
He’s restricted his search to people with no moral boundaries.
Jurek needs someone to take his brother’s place, someone who’s utterly loyal, who’s prepared to accept punishment for the slightest mistake.
Jurek didn’t plan for the man in Oslo to take Summa’s skull, he didn’t want the man at the campsite to call me – those acts were merely by-products of his indoctrination.
The accumulation of dead bodies means that the selection is complete.
The victims that have been found so far are the ones who didn’t get through to the next round.
That’s the motive.
The motive they hadn’t been able to identify.
Joona is aware that Nathan is saying something to him, but he can’t hear him, he can’t take anything in.
‘Joona? What is it?’
Joona turns away and walks unsteadily towards the door and opens it. He checks he’s got his pistol in the holster under his arm, and starts to walk towards the lifts as he pulls out his phone and looks up Lumi’s number.
Anja catches up with him in the corridor.
‘What’s going on?’ she asks anxiously.
‘I have to go,’ he says, reaching out for the wall with one hand.
‘We’ve just received an email from Ystad that you should see: the police there have found a man’s body in an industrial estate … his head, face, and chest have been completely smashed in …’
Joona accidentally pulls down a poster for a women’s indoor hockey tournament as he makes his way to the lifts.
‘It fits the pattern,’ Anja calls after him. ‘The victim’s name is Stellan Ragnarson, he served time for cutting the throats of his girlfriend and her mother.’
Joona quickens his pace and puts the phone to his ear as the call goes through. He presses the button for the lift, but when it doesn’t come he starts to run down the stairs.
‘Lumi,’ she answers in a subdued voice.
‘It’s Dad,’ he says, and stops moving.
‘Hi, Dad … I’m in a lecture, I can’t—’
‘Lumi,’ he interrupts, trying to suppress the panic that’s building up inside him. ‘Listen to me … I was wondering, do you remember the solar eclipse in Helsinki?’
For a few moments she says nothing. Anxious beads of sweat have broken out on Joona’s forehead and neck.
‘Yes,’ she eventually replies, and swallows hard.
‘I was just thinking about that day, but we can talk about it later … I love you.’
‘I love you, Dad.’
18
Lumi drops her iPhone in her rucksack and closes her notebook with trembling hands. If Professor Jean-Baptiste Blom hadn’t had to interrupt his lecture because of a problem with his laptop, she’d never have taken the call.
She can’t believe this is happening for real, that her dad has called to ask her about the solar eclipse.
It was never supposed to happen, not really.
Winter light is flooding into the lecture theatre through the large windows. The walls are patchy, the floor shabby.
The art-history students are still sitting in their places, talking quietly or checking their phones while the professor tries to get his laptop to work.
‘I have to go,’ Lumi whispers to Laurent, who’s moved to sit closer to her.
‘Who was that?’ he asks as his warm hand slides down her back.
Lumi puts her notebook and pens in her rucksack, stands up, removes her boyfriend’s hand from her backside and starts to make her way along the row.
‘Lumi?’
She doesn’t answer, pretends not to hear, but realises that he’s gathering his things and is coming after her.
Lumi reaches the aisle and sees the professor smile through distinctly uneven teeth when the first picture appears on the large screen. It’s Robert Doisneau’s photograph of a man swimming with a floating cello.
She walks quietly towards the door as the professor resumes his argument about the dramaturgy of the moment.
She emerges into the corridor and puts her jacket on. She glances towards the toilets, feeling like she’s about to throw up, but carries on towards the exit.
‘Lumi?’
Laurent catches up with her and takes hold of her arm. She spins round, adrenalin pumping through her body.
‘What’s going on?’ he asks.
She looks at his concerned face, his stubble and long, boyish hair, messy and charming, like he’s just got out of bed.
‘There’s something I need to sort out,’ she says quickly.
‘Who was that who called you?’
‘A friend,’ she says, backing away.
‘From Sweden?’
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Is he here in Paris? Does he want to see you?’
‘Laurent …’ she pleads.
‘You’re really weird, you know that, right?’
‘It’s something private, nothing to do with—’
‘You do know I’ve moved in with you?’ he interrupts with a smile. ‘And you remember what we did last night, and again this morning … and are going to do again tonight?’
‘Stop it,’ she says, feeling that she’s liable to burst into tears any second.
He sees the look on her face and turns serious.
‘OK,’ he says.
The second-hand on the big wall-clock is slowly ticking round. A police car drives past somewhere nearby. She lets him hold her hand in both of his, but can’t bring herself to look him in the eye.
‘But you’re still coming to the party later, aren’t you?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know,’ he repeats quietly.
Lumi pulls away and hurries for the exit, passes through the glass doors, turns left along the pavement and crosses the Rue Fénelon.
She stops in front of the broad flight of steps leading up to the church, removes a peace badge from her jacket and uses the needle to remove the SIM card from her mobile.
She drops it on the ground, stamps on it to destroy it, then hurries on.
On the other side of the Boulevard de Magenta she tosses her mobile phone in a bin, then walks to the Gare du Nord, where she takes the metro to the huge railway terminus of Gare de Lyon.
Her neck is throbbing with anxiety, and she’s having trouble breathing as she pushes her way through a group of tourists.
The concourse is full of the noise of excited travellers, freight wagons, braking trains and echoing public announcements.
The throng of people is reflected in the great glass roof, like some huge single organism.
Lumi hurries past the flower stalls, newsagents and fast-food joints, takes the escalator beneath the main station passageway and passes the security control to reach the left-luggage lockers.
She’s breathing hard as she stops in front of the small lockers, taps in a code and removes the bag from the locker, then goes into the women’s bathroom, locks herself in the last cubicle, takes her jacket off and hangs it up on the hook. She opens the bag, takes out a small penknife, selects the sc
rewdriver tool, then crouches down under the washbasin and runs her hand over the wall. Just above the overflow pipe, a few centimetres off the floor, she finds the painted-over screws. She fits the screwdriver into their slots and removes the panel concealing the valves in the pipes. She reaches in and pulls out the package, screws the hatch back in place, stands up and looks at herself in the mirror.
Her lips are white with stress and her eyes look oddly shiny.
Lumi tries to concentrate on what she’s about to do, though she still can’t quite believe it’s happening.
She loosens the string and is about to remove the paper from the parcel when she hears someone come into the bathroom.
She hears a woman talking, complaining in a slurred voice about high-class prostitutes. She walks along the cubicles, hitting each door with the palm of her hand as she goes.
Without making a sound, Lumi removes the paper from the pistol, a small Glock 26 with a night sight.
She inserts one of the magazines and tugs the gun away in her bag.
The woman outside is still ranting to herself.
With very deliberate movements, Lumi takes the envelope of cash out of the bag, divides the bundle of notes in two, puts one in her purse and replaces the other in the bag. She picks out one of the passports, checks the name, mouths it to herself, then takes one of the mobile phones out of the bag.
The woman is quiet now, but Lumi can hear her heavy breathing.
Something falls to the floor with a clatter.
Lumi switches the phone on and taps in the PIN-code.
She’s worried something bad has happened to her dad, that’s her main concern. Lumi didn’t ask any questions, but she can’t help hoping that he’s wrong. Part of her is wondering if he’s been expecting disaster to strike for so long that he couldn’t bear it any longer, and has seen it coming even though it doesn’t really exist.
But now he’s called her and asked if she remembers the solar eclipse in Helsinki.
That means just one thing: their disaster plan has been activated.
She said yes.
Meaning that she thinks she can carry out her part of it.
Lumi wipes the tears from her cheeks, tries to breathe calmly, puts on her new jacket, tucks the old one in her bag, pulls the hood up over her head, then flushes the toilet and leaves the cubicle.
A large woman is standing in front of the mirror at one of the basins. The floor below her is soaking wet.
Lumi hurries out and goes to one of the counters in the departure hall, takes a numbered ticket, then when it’s her turn buys a return ticket on the next train to Marseille. She pays cash, then makes her way to the platform.
The heavy smell of the train brakes hangs in the air.
Lumi waits with her head lowered, her bag between her feet. The sign on the platform says the train won’t be there for another twenty minutes or so.
She thinks back to those months in Nattavaara. The last time she spent with her mum was also the first she spent with her dad. She didn’t really know him before then, all she’d had to go on was a few random memories and stories.
But she loved being close to him, those evenings at the dinner table, the early mornings.
She loved the fact that he had trained her, patiently and tirelessly.
They grew close to each other through their preparations for worst-case scenarios.
Lumi lifts her chin and listens. The tannoy is announcing delays.
There’s the sound of train whistles in the distance.
A thin man in a lead-coloured coat is walking along the opposite platform, making his way through the waiting passengers before suddenly running for the stairs.
Lumi lowers her gaze and thinks back to when Saga Bauer came to see them, to tell them that Jurek Walter’s body had been found.
It had felt like throwing open the doors to the garden on a summer’s morning. She could walk out into a new world, she could move to Paris.
A train is approaching, rattling as it passes a set of points before pulling up at platform 18 with a hiss. Lumi picks up her bag, climbs on board and finds her seat. She sits with her bag in her lap, looking out of the window, when she suddenly sees the man in the grey coat outside the train.
She quickly sinks down onto the floor, making out that she’s looking for something in her bag, and checks the time.
They should have set off by now.
She doesn’t answer when the woman next to her asks if she can help with anything.
A whistle blows on the platform and the train starts to move. She waits for a long while before sitting back up in her seat and apologising to the woman.
Lumi closes her eyes tightly to stop herself from crying.
For some reason she finds herself thinking back to the end of her first term, when she accidentally insulted another student by suggesting that his photographs might be sexist. At the exhibition later that month he had scrawled ‘five sexist pictures by a sexist’ across the photographs.
They ended up going out with each other after that, and this summer he moved in with her, to see if they could make it work.
She opens her eyes, but can still picture him in front of her. Laurent, with his untidy hair and pilled sweaters. Those intense brown eyes. Laurent, with his beautiful smile, Southern French accent and pouting lips.
Paris and its sprawling suburbs are already long gone.
Lumi thinks of how she pulled away from Laurent and ran from him like Cinderella.
When the train pulls into Lyon two hours later, she gets to her feet, pulls the hood of her top over her head and steps out onto the platform.
The wind is warmer here.
Lumi never had any intention of travelling all the way to Marseille.
She joins the stream of people moving through the huge station, takes the escalator to the lower floor and walks along a tiled passageway to the Hertz Car Hire desk. She takes out her fake passport, fills in all the forms, pays cash and is given the key to a red Toyota.
If she takes the A42 autoroute she can be in Switzerland in two hours.
19
Joona Linna is driving as fast as he can along Järlasjön. The heavy snowfall vanishes without a trace the instant it hits the dark surface of the lake. He tries calling Valeria again but there’s no answer.
Panic flashes through his mind. It’s as if Jurek Walter were sitting in the darkness on the back seat of the car, leaning forward to whisper to him:
‘I’m going to crush you into the dirt.’
Joona is cursing himself for being so slow, for not spotting what Jurek was doing earlier.
Valeria isn’t answering her phone.
If he meets a vehicle coming the other way he’s going to have to assume that it’s Jurek or one of his accomplices. He’ll have to block the road with the car and throw himself into the ditch, ready to jump to his feet and shoot the driver through the windscreen.
He’s able to drive even faster when he reaches the narrow road past Hästhagen. The swirling snow behind the car glows red in the glare of the rear lights.
The forest opens up, and the dark soil of the fields has recently been covered by a layer of snow.
The falling snowflakes are smaller now; they fly up into the air as he turns into the drive that leads to Valeria’s nursery.
There are fresh tyre tracks from a heavy vehicle on the drive and turning circle. They weren’t made by Valeria’s car, which is parked in its usual place with a thin layer of snow covering its roof, windscreen and bonnet.
The lights are on in the greenhouses, but he can’t see anyone inside.
Joona turns the wheel sharply to the left, heading towards the deep ditch, then reverses and stops, so the car is blocking the road for any other vehicles.
He takes the bag from the passenger seat and gets out of the car, then puts his hand under his jacket and draws his Colt Combat.
The windows of Valeria’s house are dark. There’s no sound. The snow is slowly drifting down
, white against the white sky.
As he approaches the first greenhouse he sees signs of recent movement on the ground.
A bucket full of Leca balls has been overturned.
Joona walks along the glass walls, peering in. There are green leaves pressed up against the glass, which is foggy with condensation.
He hears the sound of a dog barking in the distance.
When he reaches the furthest greenhouse, he sees Valeria’s red padded jacket lying on the floor next to one of the benches.
He cautiously nudges the door open, walks into the humid air, stops to listen, then carries on between the benches with his pistol aimed at the floor.
He moves between the steaming vegetation, a striking contrast to the world outside, which has gone into hibernation for winter.
He hears a clatter, possibly a pair of scissors landing on a cement floor.
Joona moves his finger to the trigger and crouches beneath the branches of a row of Japanese flowering cherries. There’s someone moving about further inside the greenhouse, rapid movements through the damp foliage.
Valeria.
She’s got her back to him, and is holding a knife in her hand.
Walking slowly, Joona puts his pistol back in its holster and holds a protruding branch aside.
‘Valeria?’
She turns round with a surprised smile. She’s dressed in a dirty Greenpeace T-shirt, and her curly hair is pulled up in a thick ponytail. There’s a streak of compost across her left cheek.
She puts the knife down on a stool and pulls off her gloves.
He sees that she’s been grafting new branches onto apple tree rootstock, binding the grafts with twine to hold them in place, then painting them with wax to seal them.
‘Careful, I’m a bit dirty,’ she says, stifling a smile in a way that makes the tip of her chin wrinkle.
She leans forward and kisses him on the lips without touching him.
‘I’ve been trying to call you,’ Joona says.
Valeria feels the back pockets of her jeans.
‘Must have left my phone in my jacket.’
Joona glances out at a dark branch when a gust of wind passes through the trees.
