by Lars Kepler
In front of a Falun-red dance platform, a band dressed in white suits is playing the traditional Swedish folk song “Hårgalåten.”
Petter Näslund is dancing the slängpolska with Fatima Zanjani from Iraq. He’s saying something and laughter lights up her face. Whatever he’s saying, he seems to be making Fatima very happy.
The song is about a time when the Devil came to play the violin. He played so well that the young people never wanted to stop dancing. Finally they were so exhausted, they started to weep. Their shoes wore out, their feet wore out, and soon only their heads were left hopping to the Devil’s music.
Anja is nearby on a camp chair. She wears a flower-patterned blue dress and stares morosely at the dancing couples. However, when she sees Joona get up from the table, her round face flushes.
“Happy summer, Anja,” he says.
Saga Bauer is dancing over the grass between the trees. She’s chasing soap bubbles with Magdalena Ronander’s twins. Her flowing blond hair with its entwined coloured ribbons shines in the sun. Two middle-aged women pause to admire her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says the leader of the band after the applause dies down. “We have a special request.”
Carlos Eliasson smiles and looks at someone behind the stage.
The singer smiles. “I have my roots in Oulu, and I am going to sing a special Finnish song for you. It’s a tango called ‘Satumaa.’?”
Magdalena Ronander is wearing a wreath of flowers in her hair as she heads towards Joona and tries to catch his eye. Anja stares at her feet. The band starts playing the tango.
Joona has already turned to Anja and he bows slightly. He asks quietly, “May I have the honour?”
Anja’s face, and even her neck, blushes bright red. She looks up at him and nods seriously.
“Yes, yes you may.”
She puts her fingers on Joona’s arm and throws a proud glance at Magdalena. She steps onto the dance platform with her head high.
Anja concentrates on her steps at first, a furrow on her brow, but soon she relaxes and her face is calm and happy. She had fashioned an elaborate arrangement of her hair on the back of her neck, even sprayed it heavily to keep it in place, but now it looks just right. She follows Joona’s lead, and her steps become lighter and lighter.
As the sentimental song nears its end, Joona feels a nip on his shoulder, which doesn’t hurt.
Anja gives him another nip, a bit harder, and he feels forced to ask, “What are you doing?”
Her eyes are shining brightly like glass.
“I just felt like it,” she says honestly. “I wanted to see what would happen. You never know unless you try …”
At that moment, the music ends. Joona releases her and thanks her for the dance. Before he can escort her away, Carlos hurries over and asks Anja for the next dance.
Joona steps to one side and watches his colleagues dance, and others, dressed in summer white, gather on picnic blankets, eating and drinking happily. He decides to head to his car.
Reaching the car park, Joona Linna opens the door to his Volvo. In the backseat, there’s a huge bouquet waiting, wrapped in gift paper. Joona climbs into the car and phones Disa. The call goes to voice mail.
disa helenius
Disa sits in front of her computer. She’s in her apartment on Karlaplan. She’s wearing her reading glasses and has a throw draped over her shoulders. Her mobile phone is on her desk next to a cup of cold coffee and a partially eaten cinnamon bun.
The photo of a worn cairn of stones in the middle of a green meadow is on her screen. The stones mark a mass grave of cholera victims near Skanstull in Stockholm.
She’s tapping notes into a document on her computer. She stretches her back and lifts her coffee mug halfway to her lips and then thinks better of it. She gets up to brew a new pot of coffee when the telephone on the desk buzzes.
Without reading the name of the caller, she shuts it off. She stands by the window, looking out. She sees dust dancing in the sunlight. Disa feels a tightness in her throat. She sits back down at her computer. She intends never to speak to Joona Linna again.
joona linna
There’s a festive feeling in the air as Midsummer draws near. The traffic is light on Tegnérgatan as Joona slowly walks along. He’s stopped trying to reach Disa. She’s turned off her phone and it’s obvious she wants to be left alone. Joona passes the Blue Tower and then turns down Drottninggatan, which is lined with antique stores and small shops. At the new occult bookstore Aquarius, an old woman pretends to admire the display. As Joona passes by, she gestures towards the glass and then begins to follow him.
It takes a few moments for him to realise that he’s being followed.
He stops at the black fence by Adolf Fredrik Church and turns around. The woman is ten metres behind him. She’s about eighty years old. She peers at him and holds out a card.
“This is you, isn’t it?” she says as she shows it. “And here is the crown, the bridal crown.” She holds out another.
Joona walks over to her and takes the cards from her hand. They’re playing cards from one of the oldest card games in all of Europe, tarokt.
“What do you want from me?” Joona asks calmly.
“Nothing at all,” says the old woman. “But I have a message for you from Rosa Bergman.”
“You must be mistaken. I don’t know anyone by—”
“She’s wondering why you pretend that your daughter is dead.”
epilogue
It’s early autumn in Copenhagen. The air is clear and cool when a group of men, discreetly transported in four separate limousines, arrives at the Glyptotek Museum. The men walk up the stairs and enter. They walk past the fruitful winter garden beneath its high glass ceiling. Their footsteps echo on the stone hallway floor as they pass antique sculptures and enter the magnificent concert hall.
The audience is already seated. The Tokyo String Quartet is in its place on the low stage. The musicians hold their legendary Stradivarius instruments, the ones once played by Niccolò Paganini himself.
The four late-arriving guests find their seats around a table in the colonnades to one side of the hall. The youngest is still almost a boy, a fine-limbed blond man whose name is Peter Guidi. The other men wear expressions that are determined but also one step from fear; they are prepared to enslave themselves. They are all soon going to kiss his hand.
The musicians nod to one another and start to perform the Schubert String Quartet no. 14. It begins with great pathos, a deep emotion held in check, a power restrained. A violin calls, painfully and beautifully. The music takes a breath one last time and then it all pours out. The melody seems happy, but the instruments have, at the same time, an underlying tone of sorrow as if it were breath left behind from many lost souls.
Every single day, thirty-nine million bullets are made. Worldwide military spending, at the lowest estimate, is $1,226 trillion a year. In spite of the fact that enormous amounts of armaments are manufactured, the demand never lessens and it is impossible to estimate the volume. The nine largest exporters of weapons in the world are the United States, Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, and China.
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Blue Door
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Blue Door 2012
Copyright © Lars Kepler 2010
Translation copyright © Laura A. Wideburg 2012
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2010 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Sweden, as Paganinikontraktet
Lars Kepler asserts the mo
ral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
EPub Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007488087
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following previously published material: “Starman,” “Life on Mars,” and “Ziggy Stardust,” written by David Bowie, reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation and Tintoretto Music admin. by RZO Music, Inc.; Pablo Neruda, “Soneto XLV,” Cien sonetos de amor, © Fundación Pablo Neruda, 2012
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Exclusive extract
Read on for a sneak preview of Lars Kepler’s third Joona Linna thriller
The Fire Witness
1
ELISABET GRIM IS fifty-three years old. She has grey strands in her hair. Her eyes are happy and when she smiles, one of her two front teeth juts out a bit more than the other.
Elisabet works as a nurse at Birgittagården, a home instituted by a state plan for wayward youth, north of Sundsvall. The home is a privately-owned registered residence for care of special cases and has eight girls between the ages of twelve and seventeen.
Many of the girls are drug addicts when they arrive. Almost all of them have issues with self-injury, including eating disorders, and many of them are fairly violent.
For these girls, there is no alternative to the closed home, with its alarms, barred windows and double locked doors. The next step would be adult jail or forced psychiatric confinement. Birgittagården, on the other hand, is a hopeful place – hope that these girls can be guided back into open care.
“The nice girls are the ones who end up here,” Elisabet usually says.
Right now, she’s eating the last bite of a dark chocolate bar and can taste its sweetness and its bitter aftertaste on her tongue.
Slowly, her shoulders begin to relax. The evening had been difficult, although the day had begun so well. Instruction during the morning. After lunch the girls had leisure time and spent it swimming in the lake.
After the evening meal, the house mother returned home to leave Elisabet in charge on her own.
The girls were supposed to watch television until ten in the evening, while Elisabet sat in the nurse’s office and tried to catch up with her personal reviews. When Elisabet heard angry yelling, she hurried to the television room and saw Miranda beating up tiny Tuula. Miranda was screaming that Tuula was a slut and a whore as she yanked Tuula off the sofa and began to kick her in the back.
Elisabet had gotten used to Miranda’s violent outbursts. She ran into the room and pulled Miranda away from Tuula and was slapped in the face for her trouble. In a loud voice, she lectured Miranda about unacceptable behaviour and without further discussion led the girl through the hallway past the registration room and into the isolation room.
Elisabet said good night but Miranda did not answer. She just sat on the bed looking down at the floor with a secret smile as Elisabet shut and locked the door.
The new girl, Vicky Bennet, was supposed to have had an evening chat, but the conflict between Miranda and Tuula had prevented that. Vicky timidly mentioned that it was her turn for a private chat, and when it was put off, she felt unhappy, broke a teacup and cut herself on the stomach and wrists with a shard.
When Elisabet returned, she saw Vicky with her hands in front of her face and blood running down her arms.
Elisabet washed the superficial wounds and put a bandage on Vicky’s stomach and gauze on her wrists while she comforted her and called her affectionate names until she saw a tiny smile appear. For the third night in a row, she gave the girl ten milligrams of Sonata so that she could sleep.
2
ALL THE GIRLS ARE FINALLY ASLEEP and Birgittagården is quiet. There’s one lamp lit in the office window, which makes the world outside seem impenetrably dark.
Elisabet, her brow lined in a deep furrow, is sitting in front of her computer adding the evening’s events into the log.
It’s almost midnight and she sees that she hasn’t even taken her evening pill. My own little drug, as she usually calls it. Difficult days and nights where she had to be on call are interfering with her sleep. Taking ten milligrams of Stilnoct at ten p.m. allows her to be asleep by eleven for a few hours of rest.
The September darkness has covered the forest, but she can still see the surface of the lake, Himmelsjö, shining like mother-of-pearl.
Finally, she is able to hit the off-button on her computer and take her pill. She pulls her shawl around her shoulders and thinks that a glass of red wine would hit the spot right now. She longs to go to her own bed where she can sit with a book and her glass of wine and read, or have a little chat with her husband Daniel.
Tonight, however, she’s on-call and has to sleep on the premises.
She jumps when Buster begins to bark in the yard outside. His barking is so strident that goose bumps of alarm rise up on her arms.
It’s very late. She should have been in bed a long time ago.
She’s usually asleep at this time of night.
As the computer screen goes black, the room turns dark. All at once, there is utter silence. Elisabet becomes aware of the sounds she’s making. She hears the hiss of the office chair’s gas lift as she stands up and the creak of the floor tiles beneath her feet as she moves to the window. She tries to look out, but the darkness only shows a reflection of her own face, the office with its computer and telephone, the walls painted in yellow and green patterns.
She sees the reflection of the door gliding open behind her back.
Her heart pounds. The door is now half-open. It must be the draft, she tries to convince herself. The tile oven in the kitchen always draws such a great deal of air.
Elisabet feels an odd disquiet: fear begins to creep through her veins. She does not dare turn around but stares into the dark windowpane with the reflection of the half-open door behind her.
The silence is broken only by the low mechanical sounds of the computer completing its shutdown.
In order to shake off the discomfort she feels, she reaches out and turns off the lamp in the window before she turns around.
Now the door is wide open.
She shudders.
The hallway lights are on between the dining room and the girls’ bedrooms.
Elisabet leaves the office, deciding to double-check that the lids to the tile oven are closed, when she is surprised by whispering from the bedrooms.
3
ELISABET STANDS MOTIONLESS and stares down the hallway, straining to hear. At first she can hear nothing but then there’s a whisper so delicate that it's hardly perceptible.
“It’s your turn to close your eyes,” someone whispers.
Elisabet keeps still, staring into the darkness so hard she’s blinking, but can’t see anyone...
She barely has time to think that it must be one of the girls talking in her sleep when she hears an odd noise as if someone has dropped an over-ripened peach onto the floor. Then another one, heavy and wet. A table leg scrapes the floor, followed by the same sound.
Elisabet sees movement out of the corner of her eye, a shadow gliding past. She turns around and sees that the door to the dining room
is slowly closing.
“Wait!” she calls out even though she still suspects it might be the draft.
She runs over and grabs the door handle but there’s unusual resistance and she has to fight the door before it finally gives way and opens.
Elisabet enters the dining room. She moves cautiously and tries to take in the entire room at once. The scratched dining room table gives a dull reflection. She slowly walks to the tile oven and sees her own movements reflected in its polished brass fire doors. Warmth emanates from the heated pipes.
There’s a rustle and a knock inside the oven. Elisabet takes a quick step backwards and bumps into a chair.
Nothing more than a log falling and hitting the inside of the fire door. The room is empty.
She takes a deep breath and turns to leave the dining room, closing the door behind her. She walks back to the hallway, to her room. She stops again and listens.
She can’t hear a thing from the girls’ bedrooms. A sour, somewhat metallic aroma is floating through the air and she searches for movement, but everything is quiet. Still, she’s drawn towards the long row of unlocked doors. Some are slightly open, while others are completely closed.
On the right side of the hallway there are bathrooms and an alcove where the door to the isolation room is located. Miranda should be fast asleep in there.
The peephole glitters slightly.
Elisabet catches her breath as she hears a light voice whispering in one of the rooms, but it cuts off as soon as Elisabet starts walking again.
“It’s time to be quiet,” Elisabet calls out.
Her heart jumps when she hears a series of quick thuds. It’s hard to locate the sound, but it seems as if Miranda is lying in bed and kicking her naked feet against the wall. Elisabet decides to check on Miranda through the peephole but then she sees someone standing in the alcove.
