by Lars Kepler
“Hey, open the door! This isn’t a joke!” the boy says in a high voice.
The man in the suede jacket continues around the shed, emptying the last of the petrol. Then he puts the container back where it had been hidden.
“What are you doing?” the boy yells.
He then throws his whole body against the door and tries to kick it open, but it doesn’t give. He tries to call his mother on his mobile phone. Her phone is off. His heart is thudding with panic as he goes from one filthy window to the next.
“Have you lost your mind?” he yells.
As the boy recognises the stinking smell of petrol vapour, terror seizes his body and his stomach cramps.
“Hey! Hello?” he yells with fear in his voice. “You know I’m in here!”
The man takes a match from his pocket.
“What do you want? Please! Tell me what you want!”
“It’s not your fault,” the man says. “But a nightmare must be reaped.” He hasn’t raised his voice at all. He strikes the match.
“Let me out!” the boy screams.
The man throws the match into the grass soaked in petrol. It makes a sucking sound, as a sailing-boat’s sail does when it fills with wind. Light blue flames burst up with such force that the man has to step backwards. The boy is screaming for help. The fire quickly circles the shed. The man takes a few more steps backwards. He feels the heat on his face; he hears the terrible screams.
In a few seconds, the whole shed is ablaze. The glass panes behind the bars shatter from the heat along the walls.
The boy’s screams are even higher when the heat ignites his hair.
The man walks calmly away. He crosses the train tracks again and then stands by the industrial buildings to watch the torch that had once been an old shed. A few minutes later, a freight train arrives from the north, rolling slowly along its tracks, wheels now scraping and creaking as the row of brown wagons passes the high flames. As the man disappears along Stenby Road, the wind catches his suede jacket, lifting it high behind him. Underneath, he is completely dressed in black.
23
the forensic technicians
Although it’s the weekend, the head of the National Criminal Investigation Department is in his office. He’s never been particularly welcoming to unexpected visitors. There’s a busy sign in red, lit up on his door, which is shut.
Joona knocks on it as he pushes it open.
“I have to know the minute the maritime police find anything,” Joona says.
Carlos Eliasson pushes a book across the desk. “Both you and Erixson have been attacked. That’s traumatic. You need a break. You need to take care of yourselves.”
“We do take care of ourselves.”
“They’ve finished the helicopter search,” Carlos says.
Joona stiffens.
“Finished! How much area did they cover?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who’s in charge of the operation?”
“We have nothing to do with it,” Carlos says. “It’s under the direction of the maritime police.”
Joona says sharply, “It would be awfully nice to know whether we’re dealing with one murder or three.”
“Joona, you’re not on this. I’ve handed it over to Jens Svanehjälm. We’re putting together a team with Säpo. Petter Näslund and Tommy Kofoed will be on it from our side and—”
“What’s my job?”
“To take the week off.”
“No.”
“Then you get to teach a week at the Police Training Academy.”
“No.”
“Don’t be so obstinate,” Carlos says.
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck me?” Carlos Eliasson exclaims. “I’m your boss.”
“Maybe Penelope Fernandez and Björn Almskog are still alive,” Joona argues roughly. “His apartment is burned out; hers would have been if I hadn’t got there on time. I believe the killer is looking for something they have and I believe he drowned Viola trying to get it out of her—”
“Thank you very much,” Carlos barks. “Thank you for your input. We have … no, give me a minute here. I know that you’re finding this hard to accept, but there are other police officers than you, Joona. And most of them are highly competent, I assure you.”
“I agree,” Joona says slowly, a sharp edge to his voice. “And you ought to look out for them, Carlos.”
Joona studies the brown spots on his shirtsleeves. Erixson’s blood.
“What are you implying?”
“I’ve met the killer. I think we’ll lose some men before this is done.”
“I know he surprised you,” Carlos says more softly. “And I know this has been tough.”
“All right, then,” Joona says gruffly.
“Tommy Kofoed will be in charge of the investigation and I’ll call Brittis at the Police Training Academy. She will welcome you as a guest teacher all next week,” Carlos concludes.
As Joona leaves the police station, the heat hits him hard. Pulling off his jacket, he senses someone coming up behind him. Someone has emerged from the shadows of the park. Joona turns and sees that it’s Claudia Fernandez.
“Joona Linna,” she calls in a tense voice.
“Claudia, how are you doing?” he asks gravely.
Claudia Fernandez’s eyes are bloodshot and her face looks tortured.
“Find her. You must find my girl,” she says, and thrusts a thick envelope at him.
Joona opens it. It’s stuffed with money. He pushes it back to Claudia, but she refuses.
“Please, take my money. It’s everything I have,” she says. “But I’ll find more. I’ll sell the house. Just find her.”
“Claudia, I can’t take your money,” he says quietly.
“Please.”
“We are already doing everything we can.”
Joona puts the envelope back in Claudia’s hands. She holds it away from her body. She murmurs that she will return home and wait next to the phone. Then she holds him back and tries to explain. “I told her that she was no longer welcome in my home … she won’t call me.”
“You had an argument. That’s not the end of the world, Claudia.”
“But how could I ever have said such a thing?” She hits her forehead with her fist. “What kind of a person says that to her own child?”
“Sometimes words just slip out …”
Joona’s voice dies away. He forces away fragments of memory that have been stirred up.
“I can’t stand it,” she says quietly.
Joona takes Claudia’s hand in his and repeats that he’s doing everything he can.
“Of course you must get your daughter back,” he whispers to her.
She nods, and they break apart to walk away in different directions. Joona hurries down Bergsgatan and squints at the sky as he heads to his car. It’s sunny, but also hazy and still extremely humid. Last summer he would have been sitting at the hospital, holding his mother’s hand. They spoke to each other in Finnish, as they usually did. He told her that they’d take a trip to Karelia as soon as she was feeling better. She had been born in a small Karelian village, one of the few not burned down by the Russians during the Second World War. His mother had replied that Joona ought to go to Karelia with someone special instead.
Joona buys a bottle of Pellegrino at Il Caffè and drinks it all before he climbs back into his overheated car. The steering wheel is hot to the touch and the seat almost burns his back. Instead of heading over to the Police Training Academy, he returns to Sankt Paulsgatan 3 and to Penelope Fernandez’s apartment. He recalls the remarkable speed and precision of movement, as if the knife his assailant had used had come alive.
The entrance is cordoned off with blue-and-white police tape marked DO NOT CROSS and CRIME SCENE in bold letters.
Joona flashes his badge to the uniformed officer on duty, then shakes his hand. They’ve met before but never worked together.
“Hot today.”
&n
bsp; “You’re telling me,” the officer replies.
“How many technicians on the scene?” Joona asks, nodding towards the stairwell.
“One of our guys and three from Säpo,” the officer answers cheerfully. “They’ve trying to find DNA from the perp.”
“They’re not going to find any,” Joona says, almost to himself, as he starts up the stairs.
Standing in front of the apartment door on the fourth floor is Melker Janos, an older officer whom Joona remembers from his own training days as a stressed and unpleasant superior. At that time, Melker was rising in his career, but then came a bitter divorce and periodic alcohol abuse, which resulted in his step-by-step demotion until he landed back on patrol.
When he sees Joona, he greets him sourly and opens the door for him with an exaggeratedly servile gesture.
“Thanks,” Joona says. He doesn’t wait for a response.
Tommy Kofoed is just inside the door, moving around hunched and morose. He doesn’t even reach Joona’s chest any more, but when their eyes meet, Kofoed’s face breaks into a wide grin.
“Joona, great to see you. I thought they were sending you over to the Police Training Academy.”
“I took a wrong turn.”
“How wonderful!”
“Have you found anything?”
“We’ve secured all the shoe prints in the hallway,” Tommy replies.
“Yes, they’ll all match my shoes.” Joona grins as they shake hands.
“And the attacker’s,” Kofoed protests. “He was moving around in an awfully peculiar way, wasn’t he?”
“Right.”
There are mats everywhere, protecting the floor from evidence contamination. A camera has been set up on a tripod and the lens is focused on the floor. A strong lamp with an aluminum reflector lies in the corner, its cord wrapped around the base. The technicians are scanning for invisible shoe prints using raking light, a kind of light which shines parallel to the floor, then they lift the prints electrostatically. They’ve marked the intruder’s path from the kitchen through to the hall.
Joona doubts they will connect these prints with his assailant. The man would have certainly destroyed any shoes, gloves, and clothes he was wearing. He’s probably burned them.
“Tell me, how did he run, exactly?” asks Kofoed as he points to the markings. “There … there … across there … and then nothing before here … and here.”
“You’ve missed a shoe print,” Joona says with a small smile.
“What the hell?”
“There.” Joona points.
“Where?”
“On the wall.”
“What the fuck!”
A faint shoe print can be seen about seventy centimetres above the floor, outlined on the light grey wallpaper. Tommy Kofoed calls another technician over and asks him to take a gelatin print.
“Can I walk on the floor now?” Joona asks.
“Sure. Just keep off the walls,” a frustrated Kofoed replies.
24
the object
In the kitchen, there’s a man wearing jeans and a light brown blazer with leather patches on the elbows. He’s stroking his blond moustache, talking loudly and pointing at the microwave oven. As Joona walks inside, he observes a technician in a mask and protective gloves pack the misshapen spray can into a paper bag, wrapping the open end of the bag twice. Then he tapes the bag shut and writes on it.
“Joona Linna, right?” the man with the moustache says. “If you’re as good as they say, you ought to come and work for us.”
They shake hands.
“Göran Stone, Säpo,” the man says contentedly.
“Are you in charge of the initial investigation?” asks Joona.
“Yes, I am. Or rather, formally, it’s Saga Bauer. For the sake of statistics,” he adds and grins.
“I’ve met her. She seems capable—”
“Isn’t that right?” Göran Stone laughs out loud and then snaps his mouth shut.
Joona glances out the window. His mind is back to the drifting boat. What kind of contract had the killer been given, and why? He knows it’s much too soon to draw any type of conclusion, but still, a tentative hypothesis is not a bad thing. Joona leaves the kitchen and heads for the bedroom. The bed is made. The cream bedcover is smoothed. Saga Bauer from Säpo is standing in front of a laptop on the windowsill while also talking on her mobile phone. Joona remembers her from a counterterrorism seminar.
Joona sits down on the bed and tries to reorder his thoughts yet again. Three people on a boat. He visualises Penelope and Viola standing before him and in his mind he places Björn next to them. All three of them could not have been on the boat when Viola was killed, otherwise the killer would have got the right person. At sea he would have just killed all three, put them on their beds, and sunk the boat. So they were not at sea. They’d docked the boat somewhere.
Joona stands up again and walks into the living room. He lets his eyes wander over the flat-screen TV on the wall, the red tartan blanket folded over the arm of the sofa, the modern table with copies of Ordfront and Exit fanned on top.
He walks over to a bookshelf that covers an entire wall. He stops and thinks about the boat. He visualises the apparently crimped cables in the engine room, which were supposed to have generated an electric arc within a few minutes; the seat cushion stuffed behind the cables in order to catch fire more easily; the loop in the rerouted fuel line. Why hadn’t the boat sunk? They had probably not run the engine long enough.
These were not coincidences: Björn’s apartment is set on fire. The same day, Viola is murdered, and if the boat had not been abandoned, there would have been an explosion in the fuel tank. Then the killer tries to ignite a gas explosion in Penelope’s apartment.
Björn’s apartment. The boat. Penelope’s apartment.
He’s searching for something either Penelope or Björn possesses. He started by searching Björn’s apartment and when he didn’t find what he was looking for, he set the apartment on fire. Then he followed the boat and when he’d searched it and couldn’t find what he was looking for, he tried to force Viola to talk. When she couldn’t reveal anything useful, he headed to Penelope’s apartment.
Joona borrows a pair of latex gloves from a box and goes back to the bookshelf. He peers at the layer of dust in front of the books and sees there is none in front of some of the volumes. He concludes that someone has pulled out those books recently, perhaps sometime during the past several weeks.
“I don’t want you here,” Saga Bauer says behind him. “This is my investigation.”
“I’ll be going,” he says softly, “but there’s one thing I have to find first.”
“Five minutes,” she says.
He turns to look at her. “Can you have these books photographed?”
“Already done,” she snaps.
“From above so you can see the dust,” he says, not troubled at all.
She realises what he’s getting at. She doesn’t change her expression, but simply takes a camera from a technician and photographs every shelf she can reach before she tells Joona that he can look at the books on the five lower shelves.
Joona takes out Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and looks inside. Flipping through it, he notices the underlined passages and notes written in the margins. He looks at the gap between the books but sees nothing. He replaces the book. Then his eyes range over a biography of Ulrike Meinhof, a worn-out anthology called Key Texts of Political Feminism, and the collected works of Bertolt Brecht.
Joona looks at the next shelf down. Three books have obviously been taken out of the bookshelf recently since there’s no dust in front of them. One of them, The Cleverness of Antelopes, is a collection of witness reports from the genocide in Rwanda. Another is Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection Cien sonetos de amor. The last is The Roots of Swedish Racial Ideas in the History of Ideas.
Joona flips through each one. When he reaches The Roots of Swedish Racial Ideas in the History of Ideas, a
photograph falls out. It’s a black-and-white picture of a serious young woman with plaited hair. He recognises Claudia Fernandez. She can’t be more than fifteen years old, and the resemblance to her daughter is remarkable.
Who would keep a photograph of one’s mother in a book on racial biology? Joona wonders to himself as he turns the photograph over.
On the backside of the photo, someone has written a line: Don’t go far off, not even for a day. It’s in pencil.
Joona takes out Neruda’s poetry collection again. He flips through it until he finds the entire verse:
No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.
The photograph should have been in the Neruda collection.
If the killer had been looking through the books, this photo could have fallen out.
He was standing right here, Joona thought. He was looking at the dust in front of the books just as I am doing now and he was quickly flipping through the ones pulled out the past few weeks. He notices a photograph has fallen out of one of the books and is on the floor. He automatically picks it up and sticks it back, but into the wrong book.
Joona closes his eyes.
That’s what happened, he thinks. The hit man was looking through the books.
If he knows what he’s looking for, then the object must be small enough to be hidden between the pages of a book.
What could it be?
A letter? A will? A photograph? A confession? Maybe it was a CD or a memory stick or a SIM card?
25
the child on the staircase
Joona leaves the living room and peeks into the bathroom, now in the process of being photographed in minute detail. He continues along the hallway and out the door of the apartment. He stops in front of the tight grillwork that covers the lift shaft.
