Stalker

by Lars Kepler

  ‘Before you ended up here?’

  ‘No.’

  The guards push Rocky up against the fence, hit the backs of his knees, force him to the ground and put handcuffs on him.

  ‘Look out for him!’ the other patient cries.

  The larger of the guards puts his knee on Rocky’s back while the other one holds his baton to his throat.

  ‘Look out for him …’ the other patient sobs.

  As Erik follows one of the guards away from Ward D, he starts to smile to himself. There is no alibi. Rocky killed Rebecka Hansson, and there’s no connection between the murders.

  Out in the car park he stops and takes several deep breaths as he looks up past the trees in the park at the bright sky. A feeling of liberation is spreading through his body, as a longstanding burden is lifted from his shoulders.

  26

  Nils Åhlén, professor of forensic medicine, pulls in and parks his white Jaguar across two parking spaces.

  The National Criminal Investigation Department want him to take a look at two homicides.

  Both bodies have already been through post-mortems. Åhlén has read the reports. They’re beyond reproach, far more thorough than is strictly necessary. Even so, the head of the preliminary investigation has asked him to take a second look at both bodies. They’re still fumbling in the dark, and want him to try to identify any subtle similarities, signatures or messages.

  Margot Silverman believes she’s dealing with a narcissistic serial killer, and thinks the murderer is trying to communicate.

  Åhlén leaves his car and breathes in the morning air. There’s almost no wind today, the sun is shining and the blue blinds have been lowered in all the windows.

  There’s something next to the entrance. At first Nils Åhlén thinks someone’s dumped rubbish behind the railing of the little concrete steps, but then he sees that it’s a human being. A bearded man is asleep on the tarmac, with his back leaning against the cement foundations of the brick wall. He’s wrapped in a blanket, and his forehead is resting against his tucked-up knees.

  It’s a warm morning, and Åhlén hopes the man is left to sleep in peace before the security guards find him. He adjusts his aviator’s sunglasses and walks towards the door, but stops when he notices the man’s clean hands and the white scar running across his right knuckles.

  ‘Joona?’ he asks gently.

  Joona Linna raises his head and looks at him, as though he wasn’t asleep, just waiting to be addressed.

  Åhlén stares at his old friend. Joona is almost unrecognisable. He’s lost a lot of weight, and is sporting a thick, fair beard. His pale face is grey, with dark rings under his eyes, and his hair is long and messy.

  ‘I want to see the finger,’ he says.

  ‘I might have guessed.’ Åhlén smiles. ‘How are you? You look OK.’

  Joona takes hold of the railings and pulls himself up heavily, then picks up his bag and stick. He knows how he looks, but he can’t help it, he’s still grieving.

  ‘Did you fly or drive down?’ Åhlén asks.

  Joona peers at the lamp above the door. At the bottom of the glass under the bulb is a small heap of dead insects.

  After Saga’s visit, Joona went with his daughter Lumi to visit Summa’s grave in Purnu. Then they walked down to the little sandy beach at Autiojärvi and talked about the future.

  He knew what she wanted to do, without her having to say anything.

  In order for Lumi not to lose her place at the Paris College of Art, she had to be there to enrol in two days’ time. Joona arranged for her to live with his friend Corinne Meilleroux’s sister in the eighth arrondissement. They didn’t have time to make too many other arrangements, but he gave Lumi enough money to get by.

  And a whole load of useful tips about close combat and automatic weapons, she joked.

  He drove her to the airport, and it took a real effort not to go to pieces. She gave him a hug and whispered that she loved him.

  ‘Or did you catch the train?’ Åhlén asks patiently.

  He returned to the house in Nattavaara, dismantled the alarm system, locked the weapons in the cellar, and packed a rucksack. Once he’d turned the water off and shut the house up, he walked to the railway station and caught the train to Gällivare, made his way to the airport and flew to Arlanda, then caught the bus in to Stockholm. He covered the last five kilometres to the campus of the Karolinska Institute on foot.

  ‘I walked,’ he replies, without noticing the look of surprise on Åhlén’s face.

  Joona waits, with one hand on the black iron railings as Åhlén unlocks the blue door. They walk together along the corridor with its muted colours and worn floor.

  Joona can’t walk quickly with his stick, and has to stop and cough several times.

  They pass the door to the toilets and are approaching a window containing a large pot plant that seems to consist mainly of roots. Dandelion seeds are drifting through the air in the sunshine outside. Something moves unexpectedly out there. Joona’s instinct is to duck down and draw his gun, but he forces himself to walk over to the window instead. An old woman is standing on the pavement, waiting for a dog that’s running back and forth among the dandelions.

  ‘How are you?’ Åhlén asks.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Joona’s body is trembling, and he goes into the toilet, leans over the basin and drinks some water straight from the tap. He straightens up and dries his face with a paper towel, then goes back out into the corridor.

  ‘Joona, I’ve got the finger in the locked cabinet in the pathology lab, but … I’m meeting Margot Silverman in half an hour … You can wait in my room instead if you don’t feel up to it—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Joona interrupts.

  27

  Nils Åhlén opens the swing-door to the pathology lab, and holds it open for Joona. Together they walk into the bright room with its shimmering white tiles. Joona puts his rucksack down by the wall next to the door, but keeps the blanket round his shoulders.

  A cloying stench of decay lingers over the room in spite of the whirring fans. There are two bodies on the post-mortem tables. The more recent one is covered, and blood is slowly trickling down the stainless steel gutter.

  They go over to the desk with the computer. Joona waits quietly as Åhlén unlocks a heavy door.

  ‘Sit down,’ he says as he puts the glass jar on the table.

  He pulls a folder out of a box, opens it and places the test results from the National Forensics Lab, the old ID documents, the fingerprint analysis and enlargements of the images from Saga’s phone in front of Joona.

  Joona sits down and stares at the jar. After a few seconds he picks it up, holds it up to the light, examines it closely, and nods.

  ‘I’ve kept everything here because I had a feeling you’d show up,’ Åhlén says. ‘But, like I said on the phone, you’ll see that it all checks out. The old man who found the body cut the finger off, as you can see from the angle of the cut … and that happened long after death, just as he explained to Saga.’

  Joona carefully reads the report from the laboratory. They had built up a DNA profile based on thirty STR regions. The match was one hundred per cent, thus confirming the results of the fingerprint analysis.

  Not even identical twins have the same fingerprints.

  Joona lays out the photographs of the mutilated body in front of him and examines the violet-coloured entry-wounds.

  He leans back and closes his burning eyelids.

  Everything checks out.

  The angles of the shots are just as Saga described. The size and constitution of the body, the size of the hand, the DNA, the fingerprint …

  ‘It’s him,’ Åhlén says quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ Joona whispers.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ Åhlén asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You’ve been declared dead,’ Åhlén says. ‘There was a witness to your suicide, a homeless man who—’
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  ‘Yes, yes,’ Joona interrupts. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

  ‘Your flat was sold when your estate was wound up,’ Åhlén explains. ‘They got almost seven million for it, the money went to charity.’

  ‘Good,’ Joona says bluntly.

  ‘How has Lumi taken everything?’

  Joona looks over at the window, watching the slanting light and the shadows of the dirt on the glass.

  ‘Lumi? She’s gone to Paris,’ he replies.

  ‘I mean, how did she deal with you coming back after so many years, how has she dealt with the loss of her mother, and …’

  Joona stops listening to Åhlén as memories spread out inside him. More than a year ago he made his way in secret to Finland. He thinks about the afternoon when he arrived at the gloomy Radiotherapy and Cancer Clinic in Helsinki to fetch Summa. She could still walk with a Zimmer frame at the time. He can remember exactly how the light fell in the foyer, reflecting off the floor, the windows and pale woodwork, as well as the row of wheelchairs. They walked slowly past the unstaffed cloakroom and the confectionery machine and emerged into the fresh winter air.

  Åhlén’s phone buzzes, and he pushes his sunglasses up onto his nose and reads the text message.

  ‘Margot’s here, I’ll go and let her in,’ he says, and heads towards the door.

  Summa had chosen to have palliative care in her flat on Elisabetsgatan, but Joona took her and Lumi to her grandmother’s house in Nattavaara, where they had six happy months together. After the years of chemotherapy, radiation, cortisone and blood transfusions, all that was left was pain relief. She had morphine patches that lasted for three days, and took another 80 milligrams of OxyNorm every day.

  Summa loved the house and the countryside around it, the air and light that streamed into the bedroom. Her family was together at last. She grew thinner, lost her appetite, lost all the hair on her body, and her skin became as soft as a baby’s.

  Towards the end she weighed almost nothing, her whole body hurt, but she still liked it when Joona carried her round, and sat her on his lap so they could kiss.

  28

  Joona sits motionless, staring at the glass jar containing the amputated finger. The particles in the liquid have sunk to the bottom.

  He really is dead.

  Joona smiles to himself as he repeats the sentence in his head.

  Jurek Walter is dead.

  He disappears into recollections of his staged suicide, and is still sitting there with the blanket round his shoulders when Margot Silverman and Nils Åhlén come into the pathology lab.

  ‘Joona Linna. Everyone said you were dead,’ Margot says with a smile. ‘Can I ask what the hell actually happened?’

  Joona meets her gaze, and thinks that he was forced to do what he did, he was forced to take every step he had taken over the past fourteen years.

  Margot stands still, staring into Joona’s eyes, into their greyness, as she hears Åhlén remove the protective covering from his sterilised tools.

  ‘I came back,’ Joona replies in a deep Finnish accent.

  ‘A bit too late,’ Margot says. ‘I’ve already got your job and your room.’

  ‘You’re a good detective,’ he replies.

  ‘Not good enough, according to Åhlén,’ she says breezily.

  ‘I just said you ought to let Joona look at the case,’ Åhlén mutters, stretching the latex gloves before putting them on.

  While Åhlén begins his external inspection of Maria Carlsson’s body, Margot tries to explain the case to Joona. She recounts all the details about the tights and the quality of the film, but doesn’t get the response or the follow-up questions she had been expecting, and after a while she starts to worry that he might not even be listening.

  ‘According to the victim’s calendar, she was about to go off to a drawing class,’ Margot says, glancing at Joona. ‘We’ve checked, and it’s true enough, but there’s a small “h” at the bottom of the page of the calendar that we don’t understand.’

  The legendary superintendent has aged. His blond beard is thick and his matted hair is hanging down over his ears, and curling at the back of his neck, over the padded collar of his jacket.

  ‘The films suggest narcissism, obviously,’ she goes on, sitting down on a stainless steel stool with her legs wide apart.

  Joona is thinking about the perpetrator watching the woman through the window. He can come as close as he wants, but there’s still a pane of glass between them. It’s intimate, but he’s still shut out.

  ‘He wants to communicate something,’ Margot says. ‘He wants to make a point … or compete, match his strength against the police, because he feels so damn strong and smart while the police are still miles behind him … And that feeling of invincibility is going to lead to more murders.’

  Joona looks over at the first victim, and his eye is caught by her white hand, resting beside her hip, cupped like a small bowl, like a mussel-shell.

  He stands up with some effort, with the help of his stick, thinking that something attracted the perpetrator to Maria Carlsson, made him cross his boundary as an observer.

  ‘And that’s why,’ Margot goes on. ‘That strong sense of superiority is why I think there could be some sort of signature, that we haven’t seen …’

  She falls silent when Joona walks away from her, heading towards the post-mortem table with weary steps. He stops in front of the body and leans on his stick. His heavy leather aviator’s jacket is open, its sheepskin lining visible. As he leans over the body, his holster and Colt Combat come into view.

  She stands up, and feels the child in her belly has woken up. It falls asleep when she moves about, and wakes up if she sits or lies down. She holds one hand to her stomach as she walks over to Joona.

  He’s looking closely at the victim’s ravaged face. It’s like he doesn’t believe she’s dead, as if he wanted to feel her moist breath against his mouth.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Margot asks.

  ‘Sometimes I think that our idea of justice is still in its infancy,’ Joona replies, without taking his eyes from the dead woman.

  ‘OK,’ she says.

  ‘So what does that make the law?’ he asks.

  ‘I could give you an answer, but I’m guessing you have a different one in mind.’

  Joona straightens up, thinking that the law chases justice the way Lumi used to chase spots of reflected light when she was little.

  Åhlén follows the original post-mortem as he conducts his own. The usual purpose of an external examination is to describe visible injuries, such as swellings, discolouration, scraped skin, bleeding, scratches and cuts. But this time he is searching for something that could have been overlooked between two observations, something beyond the obvious.

  ‘Most of the stab-wounds aren’t fatal, and that wasn’t the point of them either,’ Åhlén says to Margot and Joona. ‘If it was, they wouldn’t have been aimed at her face.’

  ‘Hatred is stronger than the desire to kill,’ Margot says.

  ‘He wanted to destroy her face,’ Åhlén nods.

  ‘Or change it,’ Margot says.

  ‘Why is her mouth gaping like that?’ Joona asks quietly.

  ‘Her jaw is broken,’ Åhlén says. ‘There are traces of her own saliva on her fingers.’

  ‘Was there anything in her mouth or throat?’ Joona asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Joona is thinking about the perpetrator standing outside filming her as she puts on her tights. At that point he is an observer who needs, or at least accepts, the boundary presented by the thin glass of the window.

  But something lures him over that boundary, he repeats to himself, as he borrows Åhlén’s thin torch. He shines it into the dead woman’s mouth. Her saliva has dried up and her throat is pale grey. There’s no sign of anything in her throat, her tongue has retracted, and the inside of her cheeks are dark.

  In the middle of her tongue, at its thickest part, is a tiny hole from a piec
e of jewellery. It could almost be part of the natural fold of the tongue, but Joona is sure her tongue was pierced.

  He goes over and looks at the first report, and reads the description of the mouth and stomach.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Åhlén asks.

  The only notes under points 22 and 23 are the injuries to the lips, teeth and gums, and at point 62 it says that the tongue and hyoid bone are undamaged. But there’s no mention of the hole.

  Joona carries on reading, but there’s no mention of any item of jewellery being found in the stomach or gut.

  ‘I want to see the film,’ he says.

  ‘It’s already been examined tens of thousands of times,’ Margot says.

  Leaning heavily on his stick, Joona raises his face, and his grey eyes are now as dark as thunderclouds.

  29

  Margot signs Joona in as her guest at the reception of the National Criminal Investigation Department, and he has to put on a visitor’s badge before they pass through the security doors.

  ‘There are bound to be loads of people wanting to see you,’ Margot says as they walk towards the lifts.

  ‘I haven’t got time,’ he says, taking his badge off and throwing it in a waste-paper bin.

  ‘It’s probably a good idea to prepare yourself for shaking a few hands – can you manage that?’

  Joona thinks of the mines he laid out behind the house in Nattavaara. He made the ANNM out of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, so that he had a stable secondary explosive substance. He had already armed two mines with three grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate as a detonator, and was on his way back to the outhouse to make the third detonator when the entire bag of PETN exploded. The heavy door was blown off, and knocked his right leg out of its socket.

  The pain had been like a flock of black birds, heavy jackdaws landing on his body and covering the ground where he lay. They rose again, as though they’d been blown away, when Lumi ran over to him and held his hand in hers.

  ‘At least I’ve still got my hands,’ he says as they pass a group of sofa and armchairs.