LAZARUS
Lars Kepler

Translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Lars Kepler 2018

Translation copyright © Neil Smith 2020

All rights reserved

Originally published in 2018 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Sweden, as Lazarus

Lars Kepler assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

Cover layout design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Cover photography © Dirk Wustenhagen / Trevillion Images (wintery road);

Tim Robinson / Trevillion Images (man crossing road)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008205959

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2020 ISBN: 9780008205973

Version: 2020-10-19

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Epilogue

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Lars Kepler

About the Publisher

Prologue

The light of the white sky reveals the world in all its naked cruelty, the way it must have appeared to Lazarus outside the tomb.

The ribbed metal floor is vibrating beneath the priest’s feet. He clings to the railing with one hand as he tries simultaneously to parry the rocking with his stick.

The grey sea is moving drowsily, like a billowing tent-canvas.

The ferry is being winched forward along the two steel cables stretched between the two islands. They rise dripping out of the water in front of the boat and sink back down behind it.

The ferryman brakes, foaming waves swell up and the gangplank is extended to the concrete jetty with a clatter.

The priest stumbles slightly as the prow hits the fenders and the jolt echoes through the hull.

He’s here to visit retired churchwarden Erland Lind, seeing as he isn’t answering his phone and didn’t show up for the Advent Service in Länna Church like he usually does.

Erland lives in the warden’s cottage behind Högmarsö Chapel, it belongs to the parish. He suffers from dementia, but still gets paid to cut the grass and grit the paths when the weather turns icy.

The priest walks along the winding gravel track, his face turning numb in the cold air. There’s no one in sight, but just before he reaches the chapel he hears the shriek of a lathe from the dry dock down in the boatyard.

He can no longer remember the Bible quote he tweeted that morning, he had been thinking of repeating it to Erland.

Against the backdrop of flat farmland and the strip of forest, the white chapel looks almost as if it’s made of snow.

Because the place of worship is shut up in winter, the priest walks directly to the warden’s cottage and knocks on the door with the crook of his stick, waits, then goes inside.

‘Erland?’

There’s no one home. He stamps his shoes and looks around. The kitchen is a mess. The priest gets out the bag of cinnamon buns and puts it down on the table next to a foil tray containing the cracked remains of some mashed potato, dried-up sauce, and two grey meatballs.

The lathe down by the shore falls silent.

The priest goes outside, tries the door to the chapel, then looks in the unlocked garage.

There’s a muddy shovel on the floor, and a black plastic bucket full of rusting rat-traps.

He uses his stick to lift the plastic covering the snow-blower, but stops when he hears a distant moaning sound.

He goes back outside and walks over to the ruins of the old crematorium on the edge of the forest. The oven and the sooty stump of its chimney are sticking up from the tall weeds.

The priest walks round a stack of wooden pallets and can’t help looking over his shoulder.

He’s had an ominous feeling ever since he stepped on board the ferry.

There’s nothing reassuring about the light today.

The odd sound rings out again, closer, like a calf trapped in a metal box.

He stops and stands still, not making a sound.

Everything is quiet as his breath steams from his mouth.

The ground is muddy and trampled down behind the compost heap. There’s a bag of potting compost leaning against one tree.

The priest starts to walk towards the compost but stops when he reaches a metal pipe sticking out of the ground, some half a metre long. Perhaps it marks the boundary.

Leaning on his stick, he looks up at the forest and sees a path covered with pine-needles and cones.

The wind is whistling through the treetops, and a solitary crow cries in the distance.

The priest turns back, hears the strange moaning sound behind him and starts to walk faster. He passes the crematorium and cottage, glances over his shoulder and thinks that all he wants right now is to get back to his vicarage and sit down in front of the fire with a thriller and a glass of whisky.

1

A dirty police car is driving away from the centre of Oslo on the outer ring road. The weeds growing beneath the barriers shiver in the wind, and a plastic bag is blowing along the ditch.

Karen Stange and Mats Lystad have responded to the call even though it’s late.

It’s really time for them to knock off for the day, but instead they’re on their way to Tveita.

A number of residents in an apartment block have been complaining about a terrible smell. The maintenance company sent someone to check the bins, but they were all clean. The smell turned out to be coming from a flat on the eleventh floor. The sound of quiet singing could be heard inside, but the occupant, a Vidar Hovland, was refusing to answer the door.

The police car drives past an industrial estate.

Behind the barbed wire fence sit skips, trucks, and depots full of salt, ready for winter.

The blocks of flats on Nåkkves vei look like a huge concrete staircase has fallen over and split into three parts.

A man in grey overalls is waving to them in front of a van with Morten’s Lock Service Ltd emblazoned on the side. Their headlights sweep over him, and the shadow of his raised hand reaches several storeys up the building behind him.

Karen pulls over to the kerb and stops gently, pulls the handbrake on, switches the engine off and gets out of the car with Mats.

The sky is already closing up for the night. The air is cold, it feels like it might snow. The two police officers shake hands with the locksmith. He’s clean-shaven, but his cheeks are grey, his chest seems shrunken and he moves in a twitchy, nervous way.

‘Have you heard the one about the Swedish Police being called to a cemetery? They’ve already found almost three hundred buried bodies,’ he jokes almost breathlessly, and looks down at the ground as he laughs.

The thickset man from the building maintenance company is sitting in his pickup smoking.

‘The old guy’s probably forgotten he’s left a bag of rubbish containing fish in the hall,’ he mutters, then shoves the car door open.

‘Let’s hope so,’ Karen replies.

‘I banged on the door and shouted through the letterbox that I was going to call the police,’ he says, and flicks the cigarette butt away.

‘You did the right thing calling us,’ Mats replies.

Dead bodies have been found here twice in the past forty years, one in the car park and the other inside one of the flats.

The two officers and the locksmith follow the maintenance man in through the door and are hit at once by the nauseating smell.

They all try to avoid breathing through their noses as they get into the lift.

The doors close and they feel the pressure under their feet as they are carried upward.

‘Floor eleven’s a favourite,’ the maintenance man says. ‘We had a difficult eviction there last year, and in 2013 one of the flats was completely gutted by a fire.’

‘On Swedish fire extinguishers it says they have to be tested three days before any fire,’ the locksmith says quietly.

The smell when the lift door opens is so awful that they all get a slightly desperate look in their eyes.

The locksmith covers his nose and mouth with his hand.

Karen struggles to stop herself retching. It’s as if her diaphragm is panicking and trying to push the contents of her stomach up through her throat.

The man from the maintenance company pulls his jumper over his nose and mouth and points out the flat with his other hand.

Karen walks over, puts her ear to the door and listens. There’s no sound from within. She rings the doorbell.

A subdued melody rings out.

Suddenly she hears a weak voice from inside the flat. A man’s voice, singing or reciting something.

Karen bangs on the door and the man falls silent, then starts again, very quietly.

‘Let’s go in,’ Mats says.

The locksmith walks over to the door, puts his heavy bag down on the floor and unzips it.

‘Can you hear that?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ Karen replies.

The door to one of the other flats opens and a small girl with tousled fair hair and dark rings under her eyes looks out.

‘Go back inside,’ Karen says.

‘I want to watch,’ the girl smiles.

‘Aren’t your mum and dad home?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, and quickly shuts the door.

Rather than use a lockpick, the locksmith drills the entire lock out. Shiny spirals of metal fly out and fall to the floor. He picks up the hot sections of the cylinder and puts them in his bag, pulls the bolt out and then backs away.

‘Wait here,’ Mats tells the maintenance man and locksmith.

Karen draws her pistol as Mats pulls the door open and calls into the flat.

‘This is the police! We’re coming in!’

Karen looks at the pistol in her pale hand. For a few moments the black metal object looks completely alien, its component parts, the barrel, bolt, and butt.

‘Karen?’

She looks up and meets Mats’s eye, then turns towards the flat, raises the pistol and goes inside with her other hand over her mouth.

She can’t see any bags of rubbish in the hall.

The stench must be coming from the bathroom or kitchen.

The only sound is her boots on the plastic floor, and her own breathing.

She walks past a narrow hall mirror and into the living room, quickly securing the corners and glancing around at the chaos. The television has been tipped onto the floor, potted ferns are lying smashed on the floor, the sofa bed is standing askew and one of the cushions has been torn open, and the standard lamp is lying on the floor.

She turns her pistol towards the passageway leading to the bathroom and kitchen, lets Mats move past her and then follows him.

Their boots crunch on broken glass.

One wall lamp is lit, small dust-particles hovering in its light.

She stops and listens.

Mats opens the bathroom door, then lowers his weapon. Karen tries to look in, but the door is blocking the light. All she can make out is a dirty shower curtain. She takes a step closer, leans forwards and nudges the door, and the light reaches across the tiles.

The handbasin is smeared with blood.

Karen shudders, then she suddenly hears a voice behind them. An old man, talking quietly. She’s so startled that she lets out a whimper as she swings round and aims her pistol along the corridor.

There’s no one there.

Full of adrenalin, she returns to the living room, hears a laugh and points her gun at the sofa.

There could easily be someone hiding behind it.

Karen hears Mats trying to say something to her, but doesn’t catch what.

Her pulse is throbbing in her head.

She moves forward slowly, her finger resting on the trigger, then notices that she’s shaking and supports it with her other hand.

The next moment she realises that the voice is coming from the stereo, as the old man starts to sing again.

Karen carries on round the sofa, then lowers her weapon and stares at the dusty cables and empty crisp packet.

‘OK,’ she whispers to herself.

On top of the stereo is a CD case from the Institute for Language and Folklore. The same track is playing on a loop, over and over again. An old man is saying something in heavy dialect, laughs, then starts to sing – There’s a wedding here at our farm, with empty plates and cracked dishes – before falling silent.

Mats is standing in the doorway, gesturing to her to move on, keen to get to the kitchen.

It’s almost dark outside now, the curtains are quivering gently in the heat from the radiators.

Karen follows her partner into the passageway, sways slightly and reaches out to the wall for support with the hand holding the pistol.

The air is thick with the smell of excrement and cadaver, strong enough to make their eyes water.

She can hear Mats taking short, shallow breaths, and focuses on not letting her nausea overwhelm her.

She follows him into the kitchen and stops.

On the linoleum floor lies a naked person with a bulging stomach and a head that’s too big.

A pregnant woman with a swollen, grey-blue penis.

The floor lurches beneath her and her field of vision contracts.

Mats is leaning against the chest freezer, moaning gently to himself.

Karen tries to tell herself that it’s just shock. She can see that the dead body is a man’s, but the swollen stomach and spread thighs make her think of a woman giving birth.

She can feel her hands trembling as she puts her pistol back in its holster.

The body is in an advanced stage of decomposition, large parts of it look slack and wet.

Mats crosses the floor and throws up in the sink, so hard that it splashes the coffee machine.

The dead man’s head looks like a blackened pumpkin that’s been attached to his shoulders. His jaw has been broken off, and the gullet and Adam’s apple have been pushed out through the deformed mouth by the gases that have built up inside.

There was a fight, Karen thinks. He got injured, broke his jaw, hit his head on the floor and died.

Mats vomits again, then spits out the slime.

Karen looks back to the stomach, parted legs, and the man’s genitals.

Mats is sweating profusely and his face is white. She’s about to go over and help him when someone grabs hold of her leg. Karen lets out a shriek and starts to fumble for her pistol, then realises that it’s the girl from the neighbouring flat.

‘You’re not allowed to be in here,’ she gasps.

‘It’s fun,’ the girl says, looking at her with those dark eyes.

Karen’s legs are shaking as she leads the child back through the flat and out into the stairwell.

‘No one’s allowed in,’ she says to the man from the maintenance company.

‘I turned away for a minute to open the window,’ he replies.

Karen really doesn’t want to go back into the flat, she knows she’s going to end up having dreams about this, waking in the middle of the night with the man’s spread legs etched on her retina.

When she enters the kitchen, Mats is turning off the tap in the sink. He turns to look at her with wet eyes.

‘Are we done here?’ she asks.

‘Yes, I just want to look in the freezer,’ he says, pointing to the bloody fingerprints around the handle.

He wipes his mouth, opens the lid and leans forward.

Karen looks on as his head jerks back and his mouth opens without a sound.

He staggers backwards and the lid slams shut with such force it makes a coffee-cup on the table jump.

‘What is it?’ she asks, walking closer to the freezer.

Mats is clutching the edge of the sink. He knocks over a plastic plant-spray and turns to look at her. His pupils have shrunk to the size of two drops of ink and his face is unnaturally white.

‘Don’t look,’ he whispers.

‘I need to know what’s in the freezer,’ she says, and can hear the fear in her own voice.

‘For the love of God, don’t look …’

2
Valeria’s plant nursery in Nacka, outside Stockholm

Dusk is slowly falling, and the darkness only becomes apparent when the three greenhouses start to glow like rice-paper lanterns.

That’s when you realise that evening has come.

Valeria de Castro has her curly hair pulled into a ponytail. Her boots are caked with mud and her padded red jacket is dirty, and tight across her shoulders.

Her breath is cloudy and the air has a crisp smell of frost.

She’s done for the day, and pulls her gloves off as she heads up towards the house.

She goes upstairs and runs a bath, tossing her dirty clothes in the laundry basket.

When she turns towards the mirror she discovers a large smudge of dirt on her forehead, and a scratch on her cheek from the bramble patch.

Thinking that she needs to do something about her hair, she smiles wryly at herself because she looks so happy.

She pulls the shower curtain as far back as it will go, leans one hand on the tiled wall, and steps into the bathtub. The water is so hot that she waits a while before lowering herself in.

She leans her head against the edge of the bath, closes her eyes and listens to the drops falling from the tap.

Joona is coming this evening.

They had a row, it was so stupid, she felt hurt, but it was all a misunderstanding, and they sorted it out like adults.

She opens her eyes and sees the reflections of the water on the ceiling, as the rings from the drips spread out across the surface.

The shower curtain has slipped along the rail again, so she can no longer see the bathroom door and lock.

The water laps softly as she puts one foot up on the edge of the bath.

She shuts her eyes again and goes on thinking about Joona, then realises she’s falling asleep and sits up.

Valeria is so hot now that she has to get out of the bath. She stands up and lets the water run off her body, then tries to look at the door in the mirror, but the glass is misted up.

She steps out of the bath onto the slippery floor, grabs a towel and starts to dry herself.

She nudges the bathroom door open, waits a moment, then looks out onto the landing.

The shadows on the wallpaper are still.

Everything’s completely silent.

She isn’t easily scared, but her time in prison has left her wary in certain situations.

She leaves the bathroom and walks across the cool landing and into the bedroom with her body steaming. It isn’t completely dark yet, there are lines of translucent cloud visible against the sky.

She gets a clean pair of jeans from the chest of drawers and pulls them on, opens the wardrobe, takes out her yellow dress and lays it on the bed.

There’s a noise downstairs.

Valeria stops moving instantly.

She holds her breath and stands there listening.

What could it have been?

Joona isn’t due to arrive for another hour or so, but she’s already made a spicy lamb stew with fresh coriander.

Valeria takes a step towards the window and starts to lower the blind when she catches sight of someone standing next to one of the greenhouses.

She jerks back and loses her grip on the cord, and the roll-blind flies up with a bang.

There’s a rattling sound as the cord gets tangled up.

She quickly turns the bedside lamp out and goes back to the window.

There’s no one there.

She’s almost certain she saw a man standing motionless at the edge of the forest.

He was as thin as a skeleton, and was looking up at her.

The glass in the greenhouses is glinting with condensation. There’s no one there. She can’t let herself be afraid of the dark, that would make things impossible.

Valeria tells herself that it must have been a customer or supplier who disappeared when he saw her naked in the window.

She often gets visitors after the nursery has closed for the day.

She reaches for her mobile, but the battery has run out.

She quickly pulls on her long, red dressing-gown and starts to go downstairs. After a few steps she feels a cold breeze around her ankles. She carries on, and sees the front door standing wide open.

‘Hello?’ she calls quietly.

There are fallen leaves on the doormat, they’ve blown in across the wooden floor. Valeria slips her wet feet into her wellington boots, grabs the large torch from the coat rack and goes outside.

She follows the path down the greenhouses, checks the doors and shines the torch between the rows of plants.

The dark leaves light up in its beam as shadows and reflections play across the glass walls.

Valeria walks round the furthest greenhouse. The edge of the forest is black. The cold grass crunches beneath her feet as she walks.

‘Can I help you with something?’ she says loudly, shining the torch towards the trees.

The tree trunks look pale and grey in the light, but further in there’s nothing but darkness. Valeria walks past her old wheelbarrow, and can smell the rust on it. Slowly she moves the beam of the torch from tree to tree.

The long grass looks untouched. She goes on aiming the torch at the trees. In amongst the trunks she catches sight of something on the ground. It looks like a grey blanket covering a log.

The light from the torch is getting weaker, and she shakes it. It grows stronger again, and she moves closer.

As she holds a branch out of the way she feels her heart start to beat faster, and the torch trembles in her hand.

It looks almost as if there could be a body under the blanket, someone hunched up, maybe missing one or both arms.

She has to pull the blanket off and look.

The forest is completely silent.

A dry branch snaps beneath her boot and suddenly the whole edge of the forest is bathed in white light. It’s coming from behind her, and as it moves long, thin shadows merge with hers as they slip across the ground.

3

Joona Linna lets his car roll slowly towards the furthest greenhouse. The narrow, cracked tarmac track is edged with tall grass and tangled forest.

He has one hand resting on the steering wheel.

There’s a thoughtful look on his face, a lonely look in his eyes, grey as sea-ice.

Joona keeps his hair cut short, because it starts sticking out in all directions if he lets it grow too long.

He’s tall and muscular, the way you can only be from decades of hard exercise, when all your muscles, sinews and ligaments work together.

He’s wearing a dark grey jacket, with an open-necked white shirt.

A wrapped bouquet of red roses is lying on the passenger seat beside him.

Before Joona Linna joined Police Academy he was in the military, part of the Special Operations Unit, where he qualified for a cutting-edge course in the Netherlands in unconventional close combat and urban guerrilla warfare.

Since Joona became a superintendent with the National Crime Division, he has solved more complex murder cases than anyone else in Scandinavia.

When he was sentenced to four years in prison, there were plenty of people who thought the entire trial in Stockholm Courthouse was unfair.

Joona didn’t appeal against the judgement. He had known the risk he was taking when he tried to save a friend.

Last autumn Joona’s sentence was reduced to community service as a neighbourhood officer in Norrmalm in Stockholm. He’s been staying in a police service apartment on Rörstrandsgatan, opposite the Philadelphia Church. In a few weeks’ time he’s due to return to duty as a superintendent, and get back his office in Police Headquarters.

Joona turns the car round and stops, gets out and stands there in the cool air.

The lights are on in Valeria’s little house, and the front door is wide open.

The light from the kitchen window is spreading out through the bare branches of the weeping birch and across the frost-covered grass.

He hears a snapping sound from the forest and turns. A weak light is moving amongst the trees, and leaves rustle as footsteps approach him.

Joona quickly unfastens his holster with one hand.

He steps aside when he sees Valeria emerge from the forest with a torch in her hand. She’s wearing a red dressing-gown and wellington boots. Her cheeks are pale and her hair wet.

‘What are you doing in the forest?’ he asks.

She’s looking at him oddly, as if her thoughts were a long way away.

‘I was just checking the greenhouses,’ she says.

‘In your dressing-gown?’

‘You’re early,’ she points out.

‘I know, it’s very impolite, I tried to drive slower,’ he says, fetching the bunch of roses.

She thanks him, looks at him with her big brown eyes, and invites him up to the house.

The kitchen smells of cumin and bay, and Joona starts to say something about how hungry he is, then changes his mind and tries to explain that he knows he’s early and that he’s not in any rush to eat.

‘It’ll be ready in half an hour,’ she smiles.

‘Perfect.’

Valeria puts the flowers down on the table and goes over to the stove. She lifts the lid of the pan and stirs it, then puts her reading glasses on and checks the cookbook before adding the chopped parsley and coriander from the chopping board.

‘You’re staying the night, aren’t you?’ she asks.

‘If that’s OK.’

‘I mean, so you can have some wine,’ she explains with a blush.

‘I guessed as much.’

‘You guessed as much,’ she says, imitating his Finnish accent with a wry smile.

‘Yes.’

She takes two glasses from one of the top cupboards, opens a bottle of wine and pours it.

‘I’ve made the bed in the spare room and left a towel and toothbrush.’

‘Thanks,’ Joona says, taking the glass.

They drink a silent toast, tasting the wine and looking at each other.

‘I didn’t get to do this in Kumla,’ he says.

Valeria looks at the cut ends of the roses, puts them in a vase on the table, then turns serious.

‘I’m going to say it straight out,’ she begins, pulling at the belt of her old dressing-gown. ‘I’m sorry I reacted the way I did.’

‘You’ve already apologised,’ Joona replies.

‘I wanted to say it face to face … I behaved stupidly and immaturely when I found out you were still a police officer.’

‘I know you thought I lied, but I—’

‘It wasn’t just that,’ she interrupts, and blushes again.

‘Everyone likes a police officer, don’t they?’

‘Yes,’ she replies, trying so hard not to smile that the tip of her chin wrinkles.

She stirs the pot again, puts the lid back on and lowers the heat slightly.

‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

‘No, it’s only … I was planning to sort out my hair and make-up before you came, so I’ll nip off and do that now,’ she says.

‘OK.’

‘Do you want to wait here or keep me company?’

‘I’ll keep you company,’ Joona smiles.

They take their wine-glasses upstairs with them and go into the bedroom. The yellow dress is still lying on the neatly made bed.

‘You can sit in the armchair,’ Valeria mumbles.

‘Thanks,’ he says and sits down.

‘You don’t have to watch.’

He looks away as she takes the dressing-gown off, pulls on the yellow dress and starts to fasten the small buttons that run up from the waist.

‘I don’t often wear a dress, just the occasional day in the summer when I go into the city,’ she says, looking at her reflection in the mirror.

‘Really beautiful.’

‘Stop looking,’ she smiles as she fastens the last of the buttons over her breasts.

‘I can’t,’ he replies.

She moves closer to the mirror and starts to put up her damp hair with hairclips.

Joona looks at her slender neck as she leans forwards to put lipstick on.

She sits down on the bed and picks up one of her earrings from the bedside table when she stops and meets his gaze.

‘I think my reaction was because of that time in Mörby Centrum … I’m still ashamed of that,’ she says quietly. ‘I don’t even want to think about what you must have thought of me.’

‘That was one of my first operations with the Stockholm Rapid Response Unit,’ he replies, looking down at the floor.

‘I was an addict, a junkie.’

‘People take different paths, that’s just how it is,’ he replies, looking her in the eye.

‘But it upset you,’ she says. ‘I could tell … and I remember trying to counter that with a kind of hatred.’

‘Do you know, I could only ever picture the way you were in high school … you never answered any of my letters, then I did my military service and ended up abroad.’

‘And I ended up in Hinseberg Prison.’

‘Valeria—’

‘No, it was all so pointless, so fucking immature – I took every bad decision I possibly could … And then I came close to ruining things for us again.’

‘You weren’t expecting me to carry on in the police,’ he says softly.

‘Do you even know why I was in prison?’

‘I’ve read the file, and it’s no worse than what I’ve done.’

‘OK, as long as you’re aware that I’m no angel.’

‘Of course you are,’ he retorts.

Valeria goes on looking at him, as if there’s more to see, as if there’s something hidden that might soon become apparent.

‘Joona,’ she says seriously. ‘I know you’re convinced that it’s dangerous to be together with you, that you expose the people you care about to danger.’

‘No,’ he whispers.

‘You’ve been through some terrible things, for a very long time, but it isn’t written in the stars that it always has to be like that.’

4

Joona is eating one last helping even though he’s already full, as Valeria wipes the bottom of her plate with a piece of bread. They’re sitting at the kitchen table, with the vase of roses moved to the worktop so they can see each other.

‘Do you remember when we went on that canoeing course together?’ Valeria asks, emptying the last of the bottle of wine in Joona’s glass.

‘I think about that summer a lot.’

It was high summer, and the two of them decided to spend the night on a small island they had spotted. It lay in an inlet, and was barely bigger than a double bed, with soft grass, a few bare rock outcrops, and five trees.

Valeria wipes the lipstick from the rim of her glass.

‘Who knows how differently our lives might have turned out is that storm hadn’t blown in,’ she says without looking at him.

‘I was so in love with you in high school,’ he says, thinking that the same feelings are washing over him again.

‘I don’t think that ever really passed for me,’ she says.

He puts his hand on hers and she looks at him with shimmering eyes before picking up another piece of bread.

Joona wipes his mouth on his napkin and leans back, making his chair creak.

‘How’s Lumi?’ Valeria asks. ‘Is she getting on OK in Paris?’

‘I spoke to her on Saturday, she sounded happy, she was going to a party at Perottin, which apparently is a gallery I ought to know about … and I started asking if she was going to be out late and how she was going to get home.’

‘The worried dad,’ Valeria says with amusement.

‘She said she’d probably get a taxi, and then I might have got a bit annoying, telling her to make sure she sits behind the driver and puts the seatbelt on.’

‘OK,’ Valeria smiles.

‘I realised she wanted to end the call but I couldn’t help telling her to take a photograph of the taxi-driver’s licence and send it to me, and so on.’

‘She didn’t send the picture, did she?’

‘No,’ he laughs.

‘Young people want us to care, but not too much … they want us to have faith in them.’

‘I know, but it just comes out, I have trouble not thinking like a police officer.’

They remain seated at the table, drink the last of the wine, talk about the nursery and Valeria’s two sons.

The darkness outside is thick now, as Joona thanks her for the meal and starts to clear the table.

‘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 freezer.’

‘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 them 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.

Joona helped the woman out of the coffin and put his coat round her. As he held her and told her that help was on its way, he suddenly caught sight of movement between the trees. Some of the branches were moving, the snow on them falling softly to the ground.

‘Someone had been standing there watching us,’ he says quietly.

The fifty-year-old woman survived, despite having spent almost two years in the coffin. Jurek Walter had appeared from time to time, opening the coffin and giving her water and food. She had gone blind, was terribly emaciated, and had lost her teeth. Her muscles had withered away, and she was deformed by sores. Her hands and feet were both frostbitten.

At first the doctors thought she was merely traumatised, but it turned out she had suffered severe brain damage.

Large parts of the forest were cordoned off that same night. The following morning a police tracker-dog led them to a location two hundred metres from where the woman had been buried. Excavations uncovered the remains of a man and a boy, buried in a blue plastic barrel. It was later confirmed that they had been buried four years earlier, but hadn’t survived for long despite the fact that the barrel was supplied with air through a tube.

Joona can see that Valeria is shaken; all the colour has drained from her face and she’s got one hand clasped over her mouth.

She’s thinking back to Joona’s description of the first time he saw Jurek Walter, standing in the snow beneath the window of his next victim. It reminds her of the man she saw on Friday, at the edge of the forest next to the greenhouse. She should probably tell Joona about that, but doesn’t want to give him any reason to think that Jurek is still alive after all.

7

A prosecutor took over responsibility for the preliminary investigation once Jurek had been arrested, but Joona and Samuel led the interviews with him, from the decision to remand him in custody until the main hearing.

‘It’s hard to understand, but somehow Jurek Walter got inside the head of anyone who came close enough,’ Joona says, meeting Valeria’s gaze. ‘There’s nothing supernatural about it, I’d put it down to a sort of cold awareness of human weakness … he would pick up on something fundamental that meant you completely lost any ability to defend yourself.’

Jurek Walter confessed to nothing during the whole of his time in custody. He didn’t claim to be innocent either, just spent most of his time on a philosophical deconstruction of the concepts of crime and punishment.

‘I only realised during the final hearing that Jurek’s plan was to get me or Samuel to say that there was a possibility that he was innocent … that he had merely stumbled upon the grave and was trying to help the woman out when we arrested him.’

One evening when Joona and Samuel were running together, Samuel had raised the hypothetical question of what would have happened if anyone other than Jurek had been beside the grave when they arrived.

‘I can’t help thinking about it,’ Samuel said. ‘That anyone who had been standing by the grave at that moment would have been prosecuted.’

It was true that there was a lack of concrete evidence, and that it was mostly the circumstances of the arrest and lack of any adequate alternative explanation that had supported the prosecution.

Joona knew Jurek was dangerous, but had no idea at the time just what level of danger they were dealing with.

Samuel Mendel became more withdrawn, he couldn’t handle it, couldn’t bear to be in close proximity with Jurek, he said he felt dirty, that his soul was being poisoned.

‘Almost against my will, I find myself saying things that suggest he could be innocent,’ Samuel said.

‘He’s guilty … But I think he’s got an accomplice,’ Joona replied.

‘It all points to a lone madman who—’

‘He wasn’t alone at the grave when we got there,’ Joona interrupted.

‘Yes, he was, that’s just him manipulating us, because that could mean you saw the real perpetrator fleeing into the forest.’

Joona has thought about the last conversation he had with Jurek before the main hearing many times.

Jurek Walter was sitting on a chair in the heavily guarded interview room, his lined face staring down at the floor.

‘It’s completely irrelevant to me if I’m found guilty, even though I’m innocent,’ he said. ‘I’m not afraid of anything, not pain … not loneliness or boredom. The court’s going to go along with the prosecutor … and my guilt is going to be regarded as proven beyond reasonable doubt.’

‘You’re refusing to defend yourself,’ Joona says.

‘I refuse to get bogged down in technicalities, seeing as digging a grave and filling it in are basically the same thing.’

Obviously Joona realised he was being manipulated, that Jurek Walter needed him on his side in order to be released. That was why he was trying to sow seeds of doubt. Joona knew what Jurek was up to, but at the same time couldn’t ignore the fact that there was actually a crack in the case.

‘He thought he’d won you over to his side,’ Valeria says in a frightened voice.

‘I think he took it as a promise.’

During the main hearing Joona was called as a witness to talk about the arrest.

‘Is it possible that Jurek Walter was in fact trying to rescue the woman from the grave?’ the defence lawyer asked.

An internal compulsion to agree with him was nudging Joona towards the edge. Such a possibility was obviously within the bounds of plausibility. Joona began to nod in response, but stopped and forced himself to go back to the exact memory of the appalling scene in the forest clearing, where Jurek Walter was unquestionably shoving the woman back into the grave every time she tried to crawl out.

‘No … he was the person keeping her captive in the grave. He’s the one who killed them all,’ Joona replied.

After due consideration, the Chair of the Court declared that Jurek Walter was being sentenced to secure psychiatric treatment with specific restrictions applied to any eventual parole proceedings.

Before he was taken out of the court, Jurek Walter turned towards Joona. His face was covered with tiny wrinkles, and his pale eyes looked oddly empty.

‘Now Samuel Mendel’s sons are going to disappear,’ Jurek said calmly. ‘And Samuel’s wife Rebecka will disappear. But … No, listen to me, Joona Linna. The police will look for them, and when the police give up, Samuel will go on looking. And when he eventually realises that he’ll never see his family again, he’ll kill himself …’

Light was playing through the leaves in the park outside, casting quivering, transparent shadows across his thin figure.

‘And your little daughter,’ Jurek Walter went on, looking down at his fingernails.

‘Be careful,’ Joona said.

‘Lumi will disappear,’ Jurek whispered. ‘And Summa will disappear. And when you realise that you’re never going to find them … you’re going to hang yourself.’

He looked up and stared directly into Joona’s eyes. His face was quite calm, as if things had already been settled the way he wanted.

‘I’m going to crush you into the dirt,’ he said quietly.

Joona goes over to the curtains and looks out at the darkness, where the branches of the birch trees are blowing in the wind.

‘You’ve never told me much about your friend Samuel,’ Valeria says.

‘I’ve tried, but …’

‘It wasn’t your fault his family went missing.’

Joona sits down again and looks at her with moist eyes.

‘I was sitting at home, at the kitchen table with Summa and Lumi … we’d just made spaghetti and meatballs when Samuel phoned … he was so upset that it took a while for me to realise that Rebecka and the boys weren’t at the house on Dalarö that they’d set off for several hours earlier … he’d already been in touch with the hospitals and the police … he tried to pull himself together, tried to take deep breaths, but his voice broke when he asked me to check that Jurek Walter hadn’t escaped.’

‘Which he hadn’t,’ Valeria said breathlessly.

‘No, he was locked in his cell.’

All traces of Rebecka and the boys stopped on the gravel track five metres in front of their abandoned car. Tracker dogs couldn’t pick up any scent. For two months the police conducted a thorough search of the forests, roads, buildings, rivers and lakes. After the police and volunteers had given up, Samuel and Joona carried on looking on their own, without once discussing what they feared most.

‘Jurek Walter had an accomplice, and he took them,’ Valeria says.

‘Yes.’

‘And then it was your turn.’

Throughout this period Joona kept watch over his family, went with them everywhere, but obviously he realised that wasn’t going to be enough, not long-term.

Samuel stopped looking and returned to work a year or so after his family went missing. He lasted three weeks before, having finally given up hope, he drove to his summerhouse, went down to the beach where his sons used to swim, and shot himself in the head with his service pistol.

Joona tried talking to Summa about moving, about starting a new life, but she couldn’t appreciate just how dangerous Jurek Walter was.

To begin with he tried to find a way out for all of them together. Perhaps they could get new identities and live quietly in some distant country.

He called his old lieutenant on an encrypted line, but he was aware that wouldn’t be enough. New, secret identities wouldn’t be 100 per cent secure. They would merely buy them a period of grace.

‘But why didn’t you just take off together?’ Valeria whispers.

‘I would have given anything to be able to do that, but …’

When Joona realised what had to be done, it became an obsession. He started to work out a plan that could save all three of them.

There was one thing that was more important than him being together with Summa and Lumi.

Their lives were more important.

If he took off or disappeared with them, that would be a direct challenge to Jurek’s accomplice to start looking for them.

And if you look for people who are trying to hide, sooner or later you always find them, Joona knew that.

So they mustn’t be given any cause to look, he reasoned. That was the only sure way of not being found.

Which left him with one solution: Jurek Walter and his shadow needed to believe that Summa and Lumi were dead. Joona was going to arrange a car accident and make it look like they were both killed.

‘But why not all three of you?’ Valeria exclaimed. ‘You could have pretended that you were in the car as well, that’s what I’d have done.’

‘Jurek would never have believed that … My loneliness was what tricked him, the fact that I lived alone for year after year … No one would be able to manage that, not without eventually being lulled into a false sense of security and giving in to the temptation to see their family.’

‘So you thought you were being watched by the shadow the whole time.’

‘I was,’ Joona says in a hollow voice.

‘We know that now, but had you ever seen anyone?’

‘No.’

Now that it’s all been over for a couple of years, Joona knows he did the right thing. They all paid a high price, but it saved Summa and Lumi’s lives.

‘Jurek’s twin brother Igor was helping him all along,’ Joona says. ‘It was appalling … he had no life of his own, he was so mentally traumatised that his only purpose in life was to obey Jurek.’

Joona falls silent and thinks of the scars on Igor’s back, evidence of a lifetime of abuse from a razor strap.

When Jurek escaped after fourteen years in isolation, he carried on with his plan as if nothing had happened.

A lot of people lost their lives during those terrible days when Jurek Walter was free.

‘But both Jurek and his brother are dead now,’ Valeria points out.

‘Yes.’

Joona remembers the moment he shot the brother three times in the heart from close range. The bullets went right through his body, and Igor was thrown backwards into a gravel pit. Even though Joona knew Jurek’s twin brother had to be dead, he still shuffled down the steep slope to make absolutely sure.

Saga Bauer shot Jurek Walter and saw his body get carried away down a river and washed out to sea.

By the time Joona was finally reunited with his wife Summa, she was dying of cancer. He took her and their daughter Lumi to a house in Nattavaara, in the far north of Sweden. The little family had six months together. When Summa died, they buried her where her grandmother grew up, in Purnu in Finland.

It wasn’t until a year later that Joona finally dared to believe it was really over, when Saga found the remains of Jurek’s body, and the fingerprints and DNA analysis confirmed that it was definitely him.

It was as if Joona could finally breathe again.

For all those involved, the grief and wounds from those years will always be there. Saga Bauer hasn’t been the same since she went undercover to investigate Jurek Walter. She’s become darker, and sometimes Joona can’t help thinking that Saga’s trying to run away from her fate.

8

Saga Bauer is running fast across the old Skansbron through the damp shadows of the newer bridges up above.

Heavy traffic is thundering past her.

She lengthens her stride as she approaches the end of the bridge.

Her sports top is dark with sweat across her chest.

Almost every day she runs all the way to Gamla Enskede after work and collects her half-sister Pellerina from school.

Saga has reconnected with her father after a rift that started when she was a teenager. Though the worst of the misunderstandings have been sorted out now, Saga is finding it hard to slip back into being someone’s daughter again. Maybe they’ll never be able to patch things up completely.

Saga speeds up as she passes beneath the echoing viaduct carrying Nynäsvägen and the railway lines.

She’s muscular, like a ballet dancer, and beautiful in a way that catches people’s attention. Her long blond hair is plaited with colourful ribbons, and her eyes are strikingly blue.

Saga Bauer is an Operational Superintendent with the Swedish Security Police, but this autumn her boss has made her write reports and take part in turgid meetings about cooperation between the police in Sweden and the USA. In order to avoid open disagreement and internal criticism, it has been decided to declare the collaboration a great success. Amongst other things, both Saga Bauer and Special Agent López have been forced to become friends on Facebook.

Saga passes the dismal-looking sports hall and carries on into the old garden suburb, then sprints the last stretch before she gets to Enskede School.

Dust is flying up from the football pitch, drifting through the tall chain-link fence.

Pellerina is twelve now, but isn’t allowed to go home on her own after school. She has to stay behind and participate in after-school activities until she’s picked up.

Pellerina has Down Syndrome, and was born with Fallot’s Tetralogy, a combination of four different heart defects that prevent blood getting to her lungs. She had a shunt installed when she was four weeks old, and had to undergo serious heart surgery before her first birthday.

She has learning difficulties, but is able to attend a regular school with the help of specially trained assistants.

Saga’s pulse-rate and breathing calm down as she walks round the main school building and approaches the Mellis out-of-school club. She can see her little sister through the ground-floor window. Pellerina looks happy, she’s jumping about and laughing with two other girls.

Saga opens the front door, walks through the cloakroom and takes her shoes off beside the line of tape on the floor, then goes into the club. She can hear music from the dance and yoga room, and stops in the doorway.

A pink shawl has been draped over a lamp. The bass of the music is making one of the windows rattle, and the paper snowflakes stuck to it seem to dance.

Saga recognises Anna and Fredrika from her sister’s class, they’re both a head taller than Pellerina.

They’re all barefoot. Their sausagy socks are lying in the dust beneath one of the chairs. They’re standing in a row in the middle of the floor, counting themselves in, then wiggling their hips, taking a step forward, clapping their hands and spinning round.

Pellerina is smiling broadly as she dances, unaware of the string of snot hanging from her nose. Saga can see she’s doing it well, she’s learned all the moves, but she’s a bit too enthusiastic, jutting her hips out more than the other two girls.

Anna turns the music off. Out of breath, she tucks a lock of hair behind her ear and claps her hands.

From her vantage point over by the door, Saga sees the two girls exchange a look above Pellerina’s head, and Fredrika pulls a moronic face, which makes Anna laugh.

‘Why are you laughing?’ Pellerina asks, still panting for breath as she puts her thick glasses back on.

‘We’re laughing because you’re so clever and pretty,’ Fredrika says, stifling a giggle.

‘You’re both clever and pretty too,’ Pellerina says with a smile.

‘But not as pretty as you,’ Anna says.

‘Yes, you are,’ Pellerina laughs.

‘You should think about going solo,’ Fredrika says.

‘What does that mean?’ Pellerina asks, pushing her glasses further up her nose.

‘That it might be better if we filmed you dancing on your own—’

Fredrika stops abruptly when Saga walks into the room. Pellerina runs over and hugs her.

‘Are you having fun?’ Saga asks calmly.

‘We’re practising our dance,’ Pellerina replies.

‘Is it going well?’

‘Really well!’

‘Anna?’ Saga says, looking at the girl. ‘Is it going well?’

‘Yes,’ she says, and glances at Fredrika.

‘Fredrika?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can tell you’re both nice girls,’ she says. ‘Keep it that way.’

Saga waits in the cloakroom as Pellerina hugs her special-needs helper several times before pulling on her winter overalls and putting her drawings in a bag.

‘They’re the coolest girls in the class,’ Pellerina explains as they walk across the schoolyard hand in hand.

‘But if they tell you to do funny things, you must say no,’ Saga says as they walk home.

‘I’m a big girl.’

‘You know I’m a worrier,’ Saga explains, and feels a lump in her throat.

She takes hold of Pellerina’s hand and thinks about the girls pulling faces over her head. It sounded like they were thinking of filming Pellerina to mock her, and spread the clip.

Afterwards everyone always claims it was just an innocent game that got out of hand, when there was never any doubt that it was simply cruel. Dark energy fills the room and you choose to carry on regardless.

9

Pellerina lives with her dad in a bright-red plastered house with a red-tiled roof on Björkvägen in Gamla Enskede.

The old apple trees and lawn are sparkling with tiny ice crystals.

As Saga closes the gate Pellerina runs to the door and rings the bell.

Lars-Erik Bauer is wearing cords and a white, crumpled open-neck shirt. He could have done with getting his hair cut a month ago, but his unkempt, greying hair makes him look appealingly eccentric. Every time Saga sees her father she’s struck by how old he is now.

‘Come in,’ he says, and helps Pellerina out of her overalls. ‘You’re welcome to stay for dinner, Saga.’

‘I haven’t got time,’ Saga replies automatically.

Pellerina’s thick glasses have steamed up. She takes them off and clambers up the stairs to her room.

‘I’m making macaroni cheese, I know that’s one of your favourites.’

‘It was when I was little.’

‘Just say what you’d like then – I can go to the shop,’ her dad says.

‘Stop it,’ she says with a smile. ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ll eat anything. Macaroni cheese will do fine.’

Lars-Erik looks genuinely delighted that she wants to stay for a while. He takes her coat, hangs it up and tells her to make herself at home.

‘I’m worried that a couple of the girls at Mellis aren’t being very nice,’ Saga says.

‘In what way?’ her dad asks.

‘I don’t know, just a feeling, they were pulling faces.’

‘Pellerina usually handles most things pretty well on her own, but I’ll have a word with her,’ he says before they head upstairs to her sister’s room.

Lars-Erik is a cardiologist, and has bought a professional ECG-machine so he can monitor Pellerina’s heart, seeing as she could suffer a recurrence of her earlier problems.

Saga looks at her sister’s latest drawings while their dad connects the electrodes to her chest. The pale scar from her operations runs vertically down her breastbone.

‘I’m going to start dinner,’ Lars-Erik says, and leaves them.

‘I’ve got a silly heart,’ Pellerina sighs, putting her glasses back on.

‘You’ve got the best heart in the world,’ Saga says.

‘Daddy says I’m all heart,’ she smiles.

‘He’s right – and you’re the best little sister in the whole world.’

‘You’re best, you look just like Elsa,’ Pellerina whispers, reaching out for Saga’s long hair.

Usually it annoys Saga whenever anyone compares her to a Disney princess, but she likes the fact that Pellerina sees herself and Saga as the two sisters in Frozen.

‘Saga?’ Lars-Erik calls from the bottom of the stairs. ‘Can you come down here for a moment?’

‘I’ll be back soon, Anna,’ she says, patting her sister’s cheek.

‘OK, Elsa.’

Lars-Erik is chopping leeks when Saga walks in. There’s a parcel on the kitchen table. It’s wrapped in aluminium foil and has a paper heart stuck on top, with the words To my darling daughter, Saga.

‘I ran out of wrapping paper,’ he says apologetically.

‘I don’t want presents, Dad.’

‘It’s nothing, just a little token.’

Saga tears the foil off and crumples it into a shiny ball, and puts it down next to the flowery cardboard box.

‘Open it,’ Lars-Erik says with a wide smile.

The box contains an old-fashioned porcelain Christmas elf, packed in shredded paper. He’s wearing a tree-green outfit, has rather piercing eyes, pink cheeks and a cheerful little mouth.

There’s a large porridge bowl in his arms.

Her Christmas elf.

It used to get brought out every Christmas, and the pot filled with pink and yellow toffees.

‘I’ve been looking for one … well, for ages, really,’ Lars-Erik says. ‘And today I happened to wander into an antiques shop in Solna and there he was.’

Saga remembers that her mum threw the elf on the floor once when she was angry with her dad, smashing it to pieces.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ she says, and puts the box down on the table.

When she goes back up to see Pellerina, she notices that her heart rate has increased, as if her sister had been running. Pellerina is staring at her phone open-mouthed, with a look of horror on her face.

‘What’s happened?’ Saga asks in a concerned voice.

‘No one can see, no one can see,’ her sister says, pressing the phone to her chest.

‘Dad!’ Saga calls.

‘It’s not allowed!’

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ Saga says. ‘Just tell me what you were looking at.’

‘No.’

Lars-Erik hurries up the stairs and comes into the bedroom.

‘Tell Daddy,’ Saga says.

‘No!’ Pellerina cries.

‘What is it, Pellerina? I’m in the middle of cooking,’ he says, to encourage her to speak.

‘It’s something on her phone,’ Saga explains.

‘Show me,’ Lars-Erik says, and holds out his hand.

‘It’s not allowed,’ Pellerina sobs.

‘Who says so?’ he asks.

‘It says in the email.’

‘I’m your dad, so I’m allowed to see.’

She hands him the phone and he opens and reads it with a frown.

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ he says with a smile, putting the phone down. ‘That isn’t real, you know that, don’t you?’

‘I have to send it on, otherwise—’

‘No, you don’t have to. We don’t send silly emails in this family,’ Lars-Erik says firmly.

‘One of those chain emails?’ Saga asks.

‘Yes, a really silly one,’ he replies, then turns back towards Pellerina. ‘I’ll get rid of it.’

‘No, please!’ she pleads, but Lars-Erik has already deleted it.

‘It’s all gone now,’ he says, and hands the phone back to her. ‘We can forget all about it.’

‘I get chain emails too,’ Saga says.

‘But do they come to see you too?’

‘Who?’

‘The clown girls,’ Pellerina whispers, pushing her glasses further up her nose.

‘That isn’t real, it’s all made up,’ her dad says. ‘It’s just some little kid who’s made it all up to scare people.’

After Lars-Erik removes the electrodes and switches the ECG-monitor off, Saga carries her little sister downstairs and lays her down on the sofa in front of the television. She tucks her up in a blanket, and puts Frozen on, as usual.

It’s dark outside now. Saga goes into the kitchen to help her dad with the cooking. As soon as he’s finished pouring the cream, eggs and grated cheese onto the macaroni, she picks up a pair of silicone oven-gloves and puts the dish in the oven.

‘What did the email say?’ she asks quietly.

‘That you have to send the email to three other people to escape the curse,’ he sighs. ‘Otherwise the clown girls will come when you’re asleep and poke your eyes out – that sort of thing.’

‘I can see why she’d be frightened,’ Saga says.

She goes and checks on Pellerina, who’s fallen asleep. Saga takes her glasses off and puts them down on the coffee table.

‘She’s sleeping,’ Saga says when she comes back into the kitchen.

‘I’ll wake her when it’s time to eat – this always happens, school wears her out.’

‘I have to go,’ she says.

‘Haven’t you got time to eat first?’ he asks.

‘No.’

He goes into the hall with her and passes her her coat.

‘Don’t forget your elf,’ he reminds her.

‘He can stay here,’ Saga says as she opens the door.

Lars-Erik stands in the doorway. The light plays on his lined face and unkempt hair.

‘I thought you’d like it,’ he says quietly.

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ she says, and walks away.

10

It’s three o’clock and the white sky is already starting to grow darker.

Joona has never had any objection to being on patrol, but after Nils Åhlén’s visit it feels like the world has become a more dangerous place.

He’s walking past the wrought-iron railings outside Adolf Fredrik Church, and sees a black-clad group standing around an open grave. The surrounding gravestones have been vandalised and are covered with swastikas.

As Joona passes Olof Palmes gata he notices someone waving behind the window of a Thai restaurant.

An intoxicated woman has stood up from her table and is staring at him.

As he moves closer she spits on the window right in front of him.

He carries on towards Hötorget, where the market traders are busy selling fruit and vegetables. His mind keeps wandering to the grave-robber in Oslo. As soon as he gets Summa’s cranium back from Norway, he’s planning to rebury it with the rest of her remains. He hasn’t yet decided whether to tell Lumi about what’s happened. It would upset her terribly.

Joona has just passed the Concert Hall when he hears a man yelling in an aggressive, drunken voice. There’s the sound of a glass bottle breaking, and Joona spins round and sees shards of green glass on the road.

People are keeping their distance from a man who’s clearly under the influence of narcotics. He’s unshaven, and his blond hair is gathered in a messy tangle at the back of his head. He’s wearing a battered leather jacket and jeans that are dark with urine around the crotch and down one leg.

The man isn’t wearing shoes or socks, and Joona can see he’s injured one foot and is bleeding on the pavement.

The man is swearing at a woman who’s hurrying away, then he stands still with an imperious expression and points one finger at the people around him as if he were about to say something incredibly important.

‘One, two, three, four … five, six, seven …’

Joona walks closer and sees that there’s a young girl standing behind the confused man. Her dirty face is upset, and she looks like she’s about to burst into tears. A pink tracksuit top is her only protection from the cold.

‘Can we go home now?’ she asks, tugging tentatively at the man’s jacket.

‘One … two … three …’

He loses his thread and reaches out for the lamppost to stop himself falling. His eyes look drugged, his pupils have shrunk to pinpricks and there’s snot streaming from his thin nose.

‘Do you need any help?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes, please,’ the man mutters.

‘What can I do?’

‘Shoot the ones I point at.’

‘Are you armed?’

‘I’m pointing at all the ones who—’

‘Stop that,’ Joona interrupts calmly.

‘OK, OK,’ the man mutters.

‘Are you armed?’

The man points at a man who’s stopped to look, then at a woman walking past with a pushchair.

‘Daddy,’ the girl pleads.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ Joona says to her, ‘but I need to find out if your dad’s got a weapon of any sort on him.’

‘He needs to get some rest, that’s all,’ she whispers.

Joona tells the man to put his hands behind his head, and he does as Joona says. But when he lets go of the lamppost he loses his balance and stumbles backwards, into the shadow of the blue wall of the Concert Hall.

‘What drugs have you taken?’

‘Just a bit of ketamine, and some speed.’

Joona crouches down next to the girl. Her father has started to point his finger discreetly at different people again.

‘How old are you?’

‘Six and a half.’

‘Do you think you could look after a teddy bear?’

‘What?’

Joona opens his bag and pulls out the stuffed toy. In the run-up to Christmas the police have been given teddy bears that they can give to any child in trouble or who’s witnessed anything violent. Often that’s the only present they’re going to get in families with drug problems.

The girl stares at the little bear, which has a stripy top and a big red heart on its chest.

‘Would you like to look after it?’ Joona smiles.

‘No,’ she whispers, and glances up at him shyly.

‘You can have it if you want,’ Joona explains.

‘Really?’

‘But it needs a name,’ Joona says, handing the stuffed toy over to her.

‘Sonja,’ the girl says, pressing the bear to her neck.

‘That’s a lovely name.’

‘It was my mum’s name,’ she tells him.

‘We need to take your dad to hospital – is there anyone you can stay with in the meantime?’

The child nods and whispers something in the teddy bear’s ear.

‘Grandma.’

Joona calls an ambulance, then contacts an acquaintance at Social Services and asks her to collect the girl and take her to the address they’ve looked up.

As he finishes explaining everything to the girl, a police car arrives at the scene. Its blue lights flash across the tarmac.

Two uniformed colleagues get out of the car and nod to Joona.

‘Joona Linna? Your boss has contacted me over the radio,’ one of them says.

‘Carlos?’

‘He wants you to answer your phone.’

Joona takes his phone out and sees that Carlos Eliasson – head of the National Operational Unit – is calling him, though there’s no ringtone.

‘Joona,’ he says as he answers.

‘Sorry to disturb you while you’re working, but this is top priority,’ Carlos says. ‘A superintendent with the German police, Clara Fischer at the BKA, is trying to get in touch with you as soon as possible.’

‘What for?’

‘I’ve said you can help them with a preliminary investigation … The police in Rostock are looking into a death at a camping site, probably murder … Victim’s name is Fabian Dissinger … a serial rapist who was recently released from a secure psychiatric unit in Cologne.’

‘I’m still on probation, I’m on patrol duties until—’

‘She asked for you specifically,’ Carlos interrupts.

11

Joona is driving past pale green fields and large stone houses with tarmac drives full of cars and bicycles.

The plane from Stockholm landed at Rostock-Laage Airport an hour ago. Joona hired a BMW and set off north on Autobahn 19.

He doesn’t know why Superintendent Clara Fischer has requested assistance from him specifically. They’ve never been in contact before, and the man who was found dead at the campsite has never cropped up in any of Joona’s cases.

Clara Fischer didn’t specify precisely what she thought Joona would be able to contribute, but because the German and Swedish police forces have a long history of cooperation, Carlos gave the go-ahead.

During the flight Joona had time to read three of the case files relating to the murder victim that he had been sent by the Bundeskriminalamt.

Fabian Dissinger was convicted of twenty-three violent rapes of both men and women in Germany, Poland and Italy. According to one psychiatric report, he had an antisocial personality disorder with sadistic tendencies and elements of psychopathy.

Joona turns sharp left and drives through a patch of woodland. He catches sight of a muddy motocross course in a clearing on his right, then there’s nothing but trees until he reaches the camping site, Ostseecamp Rostocker Heide.

Joona parks just outside the police cordon and walks over to the group of German police officers waiting for him.

The winter sun is glinting off the cables and satellite dishes on the roofs of the caravans.

Superintendent Clara Fischer is a tall woman with dark brown eyes; something about her proud bearing suggests that she would be quick to take offence. Her penetrating gaze seems to grow sharper as she watches Joona approach. Her short curly hair is greying at the temples. She’s wearing a black leather jacket that reaches below her hips, and black leather boots with low heels that are now completely grey with mud from the wet ground.

Clara studies Joona as if the slightest shift in his expression is of great significance.

‘Thanks for coming at such short notice,’ she says, not breaking eye contact as she shakes his hand.

‘I like campsites …’

‘Great.’

‘But I’m wondering why I’m here,’ he concludes.

‘Certainly not because Fabian Dissinger’s death is a great loss to Germany,’ Clara Fischer replies, setting off towards one of the plots.

Joona follows her along one of the tarmac paths that crisscross the campsite. The winter air is cold as the white rays of sunlight shine through the bare treetops.

‘I’m not saying he got what he deserved, but if I had my way he’d have spent the rest of his life in prison,’ she says calmly.

‘Not an unreasonable opinion.’

They pass the shower block and a small kiosk. A few campers are standing outside the cordon taking pictures of the crime scene on their phones. The red-and-white plastic tape is rippling in the wind.

‘Not an unreasonable opinion,’ Clara repeats, and glances at him. ‘I know that some of our colleagues in Berlin refused to work on a case last week … A known paedophile was found drowned in a ditch near a school … I can understand that, when at the same time they’re having to drop the investigation into the mugging and murder of a young woman in Spandau.’

An empty beer can rolls across a patch of sand surrounding a cluster of recycling bins. Broken glass sparkles in the sunshine, and there’s a bundle of bubble-wrap wedged between two of the containers.

Joona and Clara walk on in silence through a group of older caravans that have been shut up for the winter.

Two uniformed officers are guarding the inner cordon. They greet Clara with respectful salutes.

‘A Cabby 58 from 2005,’ she says, nodding towards the caravan. ‘Dissinger had been renting it for the past two months and four days.’

Joona looks at the boxy caravan, perched on breezeblocks. Trickles of red-brown rust have run down the side from a crooked aerial on the roof.

Two forensics officers in white overalls are examining the ground around a camping table on the gravel outside the caravan, and numbered sticks mark the site of any finds. There’s a sooty aluminium saucepan full of rainwater and dead flies.

‘I presume you haven’t had time to look at the reports we sent through.’

‘Not all of them, no.’

She smiles bleakly.

‘Not all of them,’ she repeats. ‘We’ve found a huge quantity of violent porn on his computer … so I think we can surmise that eleven years of psychiatric treatment didn’t sort out all his problems. He was locked up, medicated, just ticking over … and all the while waiting for a chance to pick up where he left off.’

‘Some people are like that,’ Joona replies simply.

A tall forensics officer in protective white overalls leaves the caravan to make space for them, and says something to Clara that Joona doesn’t hear.

They step up onto the step-shaped stool in front of the open door.

Clara watches his every move without embarrassment. It’s as if she’s on the verge of asking a question but keeps stopping herself.

Translucent plastic mats have been laid out on the cork floor to protect it. The floor of the caravan creaks under their weight.

There’s a brown jacket with threadbare lapels and blood-stained sleeves lying on the sun-bleached, pale blue fitted benches.

‘Someone ought to have heard the fight,’ Clara says quietly.

The glass top covering the small sink and gas-hob is laden with test-tubes of biological samples and plastic bags containing seized items – coffee-cups, beer glasses, cutlery, toothbrushes, and cigarette butts.

‘Dissinger received a visitor, he was probably planning on the usual, but time had got the better of him, he was weaker, older … and the tables turned and he was assaulted and killed by the person he was planning to rape.’

Sunlight is streaming in through the grimy windows and stained cream curtains. The remains of broken spiders’ webs are trembling in the draught from the open door.

‘He was found by two youngsters … It seems he told one of them a few days ago that he’d be happy to offer them a drink.’

‘I’d like to talk to them,’ Joona says, looking at the blood on the rounded corner of one of the cupboards.

‘They’re pretty shaken, but if they hadn’t arrived too late for that drink they’d probably be in a considerably worse state than that.’

The double bed is stained with blood and one of the reading lights set into the headboard has been pulled out and is hanging by its wires. Someone was dragged off the bare mattress, then shoved back and dragged along the side of the caravan when they tried to escape.

‘His relatives aren’t exactly queuing up to organise his funeral, so I left him hanging in there until you got here,’ Clara concludes, and gestures towards the closed door to the bathroom.

‘Thanks.’

12

Joona opens the sliding door to the bathroom. A large man, bare-chested, is hanging from an overhead locker between the cassette toilet and washbasin. His feet reach the floor, but both his legs have been broken at the knee, rendering them incapable of supporting his weight.

He has a length of steel wire round his neck. It has cut into his skin below his Adam’s apple, to a depth of at least five centimetres.

Blood has run down his hairy chest and bulging stomach to his jeans.

‘You’re certain about the ID?’

‘Hundred per cent,’ Clara says, looking intently at Joona again.

The man’s face has been smashed in, there isn’t much left of his features.

The hands hanging by his sides are black with hypostasis.

‘He must have had plenty of enemies after the trial,’ Joona says thoughtfully. ‘Have you—’

‘Statistically, revenge is an unusual motive,’ Clara says, cutting him off.

Joona looks at the wall behind the body. The dead man evidently struggled for a long time before he was asphyxiated. In his efforts to loosen the wire by swinging back and forth, he managed to break the basin. Even though it can’t be counted as an out-and-out hanging, seeing as the dead man’s feet are touching the ground, Joona is certain they’re going find fractures to the hyoid bone and at the top of the thyroid cartilage.

‘I’m working on the hypothesis that he managed to lure a young man whose life had gone off the rails – care-homes, petty crime, prostitution, steroids, Rohypnol,’ Clara continues, pulling on a pair of white latex gloves.

‘There wasn’t a fight,’ Joona says.

‘No?’

‘He should have been able to put up a decent fight, but his knuckles aren’t damaged at all.’

‘We’ll get the body to the lab now that you’ve seen it,’ she mutters.

‘He’s got no other defensive injuries either,’ Joona goes on.

‘He must have,’ she says, turning the dead man’s arms round to look.

‘He didn’t defend himself,’ Joona says calmly.

Clara Fischer sighs, lets go of the arms and stares intently at Joona.

‘How can you know so much?’

‘What am I doing here?’ Joona asks.

‘That’s what I was thinking of asking you,’ Clara says, taking a plastic sleeve from her bag and showing him an old-fashioned mobile phone.

‘A phone,’ he says.

‘A phone that we found between the cushions on the sofa … It belonged to Fabian Dissinger,’ she says, switching it on inside the plastic. ‘Two days ago he called this number – do you recognise it?’

‘That’s my number,’ Joona says.

‘One of the last calls he made in his life was to your personal phone.’

Joona takes out his mobile and sees that he missed the call.

‘Tell me what you know,’ Clara says.

‘Well, now I know why you wanted me here.’

‘You need to tell me why he called you,’ she says impatiently.

Joona shakes his head.

‘Fabian Dissinger hasn’t featured in any of my investigations.’

‘Tell me the truth,’ Clara says irritably.

‘I have no idea.’

She blows a strand of hair away from her mouth.

‘You have no idea. There must be a connection, though,’ she persists.

‘Yes,’ Joona nods, taking a step closer to the hanged man and looking at his eyes.

One of them is hidden by blue-grey swelling and pulpy red flesh, but the other is open, and the mucous membrane is punctuated by small dots of blood.

He realises that Clara Fischer held back from telling him about the phone to see if his reaction to the crime scene might reveal a connection that he would otherwise have denied.

‘Give me something,’ she says, staring at him.

In spite of the cold air in the caravan, she has tiny beads of sweat on her top lip.

‘I’d like to be present for the post-mortem,’ Joona replies.

‘You said there wasn’t a fight.’

‘The violence was one-sided … an almost uncontrolled explosion of aggression, but employing certain military techniques.’

‘You were in the military – the Special Operations Unit – before you joined the police.’

They move away from the bathroom so that two forensics officers can go in. They lay a body-bag on the floor, then fasten plastic bags round the victim’s hands, cut the wire and lift the big, rigid body down.

The dead man’s weight makes the officers groan, and they keep giving each other instructions as they carry him feet-first out through the narrow doorway. Joona gets a glimpse of Fabian Dissinger’s broad back and hairy shoulders as they set him down on the bag.

‘Hang on, turn him over,’ Joona says, moving closer.

‘Könnten Sie bitte die Leiche auf den Bauch wenden,’ Clara says in a neutral voice.

The forensics officers stare at them, but open the bag again, turn the body over, then make room for Joona and Clara.

Joona feels his heartbeat increase as he looks at the lower part of the victim’s back: the skin from the bottom of his shoulder blades down to his buttocks is unnaturally striped, as if he’d been lying on a reed mat.

‘What’s happened to his back?’ Clara whispers.

Without bothering about protective gloves, Joona crouches down and gently runs his fingertips over the damaged skin; hundreds of parallel scars made by wounds that have bled and healed over and over again.

‘I know you’ve got a legendary reputation as a detective,’ Clara says slowly. ‘But you’ve also got a criminal conviction, you’re on probation, and I’m going to arrest you and take you in for questioning unless you can explain how—’

Joona stands up, pushes past her and accidentally knocks over some of the evidence bags containing glasses and ashtrays when he reaches out to the stove for support before going on through the door and out into the sunshine.

‘I’ve got you, Joona – haven’t I?’ Clara says, hurrying after him.

He doesn’t reply, just walks across the gravel towards the gate, pushing aside a forensics officer who’s standing poking at his phone.

Behind him he hears Clara say, ‘Stop him,’ but there’s no sense of urgency in her voice.

Ready to put down anyone who tries to stop him, Joona passes two uniformed officers.

Obviously recognising the intent in his face, they back away cautiously.

The dead man in the caravan shows signs of having been beaten.

Jurek Walter’s twin brother had similar scars on his back. He had been whipped for years with a shaving strop, a length of coarse leather used to sharpen razor blades.

Joona doesn’t yet know what these similarities mean, but there’s no doubt that they’re a message for him.

He starts to run towards the car park, jumps into his car and spins it round, sending mud flying up over the sides.

As he drives away from the campsite he calls the Norwegian Criminal Police. He needs to know if there were any injuries on the back of the grave-robber who was found dead in Oslo, the man who had Summa’s skull in his freezer.

13

Joona has taken a taxi straight from the airport to the Karolinska Institute’s Department of Forensic Medicine on the outskirts of Stockholm.

There are electric Advent lights in the windows of the red brick building and black rosehips covered in frost on the bare bushes outside.

Joona hasn’t taken his medication today because it makes him feel as if he’s not as sharp as he could be.

As a result of an accident many years ago, Joona suffers from cluster migraines. Sometimes an attack will knock him out completely for several minutes, and sometimes it sweeps past like a threatening storm. So far, the only thing that helps is an anti-epilepsy drug called Topiramate.

Joona walks through the glass doors and turns left into the corridor, where he bumps into the elderly cleaner with his cart.

‘How’s Cindy getting on?’ Joona asks.

‘She’s much better now, thanks,’ the man says with a smile.

Joona can’t count the number of times he’s stood in this corridor during his years in the police, waiting to hear what Nils Åhlén has found out.

Things are different today, seeing as the bodies they’re going to analyse are only present in photographic form.

Fabian Dissinger, the sex-offender found dead in Rostock, had been abused over a long period of time. The scars were consistent with his having lain still on his front while someone beat him from the side. The wounds healed, were opened up again by fresh blows, then healed once more.

The Oslo grave-robber had no scars on his back. But shortly before his death five severe blows had been delivered with either a belt or a strop.

The lights are on in the main post-mortem lab.

Saga is crouching down with her back against the tiled wall, and Nils is standing in his medical coat, rubbing his thin hands.

‘The Norwegian Criminal Police have sent the pictures, I received them in the car on the way here. I’ve forwarded them to you,’ Joona explains.

‘Thanks,’ Nils says.

‘Don’t I get a hug?’ Saga says, getting to her feet.

Her blond hair is in plaits, and as usual she’s wearing faded jeans and a jacket from her boxing club.

‘You look happy,’ he says, walking over and giving her a hug.

‘I suppose I am,’ she replies.

He takes a step back and looks her in the eye. She keeps hold of his arm with one hand for a few moments.

‘Even though you’re dating a police officer.’

‘Randy,’ she smiles.

Nils Åhlén opens his computer, finds the emails and clicks on the attachments. The three of them gather in front of the screen as Nils brings up the images from the two crime scenes.

‘What’s this all about?’ Saga eventually says. ‘Both men were assaulted and killed, with extreme force, excessive brutality … neither of them made much effort to defend themselves … and both have been whipped across the back.’

‘In the same way as Jurek’s brother,’ Joona says.

‘That’s debatable,’ she says.

‘Fabian Dissinger has exactly the same sort of scars as Jurek Walter’s twin brother … although the brother’s were much worse, of course, a lot older, and—’

‘In which case they’re not the same,’ she points out.

‘Both victims had direct connections to me,’ Joona says.

‘Yes,’ she replies.

‘We know everyone says Jurek Walter is dead,’ Joona says after a pause. ‘But I’ve been thinking that … well, perhaps that isn’t the case.’

‘Stop that,’ Saga says in a tense voice.

‘Joona,’ Nils Åhlén says, nudging at his glasses nervously. ‘We’ve got a body, we’ve got a one hundred per cent DNA match—’

‘I want to go through the evidence again,’ Joona says, cutting him off. ‘I need to know if there’s even a theoretical possibility that he could still be alive, and—’

‘There isn’t,’ Nils interrupts.

Saga shakes her head and starts walking towards the door.

‘Wait, this affects you too,’ Joona says to her back.

‘I’ll get the file,’ Nils Åhlén says. ‘We’ll do it your way.’

‘You’re both mad,’ Saga mutters as she turns and walks towards them.

Nils unlocks his filing cabinet and pulls out the folder containing the reports and photographs relating to Jurek Walter. From the cold store he fetches a sealed jar containing a finger preserved in formalin. The glass enlarges the finger slightly. Small white particles are swirling around the swollen finger, as pale as ice.

‘The only evidence we have that Jurek is dead is one finger,’ Joona says.

‘It was an entire damn torso,’ Saga says, raising her voice. ‘Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, intestines—’

‘Saga, listen,’ Joona says. ‘I just want us to do this, I want us to go through what we know together. Because that will either help us relax, or—’

‘I shot him, I killed him,’ Saga says. ‘He could have killed me, I don’t know why he hesitated, but I shot him in the neck, the arm, the chest—’

‘Calm down,’ Nils says, and pulls over an office chair for her.

Saga sits down, puts her face in her hands for a few moments, then lowers her hands and takes a deep breath.

‘Jurek Walter died that night,’ she goes on, her voice breaking. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve been through it all in my head … how hard it was, running through the deep snow, the way the flare reflected off the tiny crystals … I had a clear view of him, and I shot him with my Glock 17. The first shot hit him in the neck, the second in his arm … I walked towards him and shot him again, with three shots to the chest. Every single damn shot hit him, and I saw the blood spray from the exit wounds onto the snow behind him.’

‘I know, but—’

‘It’s hardly my bloody fault that he fell into the rapids, but I fired into the water and saw a cloud of blood billow out around him, and I followed him downstream, firing and firing until the body was swept away by the current.’

‘Everyone did what they had to – and more,’ Nils Åhlén says slowly. ‘The police sent divers down that same night, and the following morning they searched the banks with sniffer dogs for more than ten kilometres downstream.’

‘They should have found the body,’ Joona says in a subdued voice.

He knows that Saga carried on looking on her own. The search probably formed part of her long road back to life, a way for her to work through what had happened privately. She’s told him about how she followed the river all the way to the sea near Hysingsvik, then marked out an area on the map and systematically searched the archipelago by dividing it into squares. She studied tidal currents and went out to every single island and skerry along a hundred-kilometre length of coast, spoke to residents and summer visitors, fishermen, people who worked the ferries, oceanographers …

‘I found him,’ Saga whispers, looking at Joona with bloodshot eyes. ‘Damn it, Joona, I found him.’

He’s heard her explanation of how, after more than a year of looking, she bumped into a man on the rugged north coast of Högmarsö. He was a retired churchwarden, collecting driftwood from the beach. She spoke to him and discovered that he had found the dead body of a man at the water’s edge five months earlier.

Saga had gone with him to the inhabited part of the island. The churchwarden’s cottage and the old crematorium were tucked behind a sugar-white chapel.

‘Jurek’s body had been carried on the current and washed ashore during the storms we had at the end of that winter,’ Saga says, without taking her eyes off Joona.

‘That all checks out,’ Nils says. ‘Do you get that, Joona? It all makes sense. He’s dead.’

‘The only parts of Jurek Walter that were left were his torso and one arm,’ Saga goes on. ‘The churchwarden told me he carried the swollen body through the forest in his wheelbarrow, and left it on the floor of the toolshed behind the chapel. But the smell drove his dog mad, so he ended up having to move it to the old crematorium.’

‘Why didn’t he call the police?’ Joona asks.

‘I don’t know. He made his own hooch and was fiddling his benefits,’ she says. ‘Maybe he’d already started to go senile … But he took pictures of the body on his phone in case the police did show up asking questions … and he kept one of the fingers at the back of his freezer.’

Nils Åhlén pulls a printed picture from the file and passes it to Joona.

He takes the photograph and angles it so the reflection of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling of the post-mortem lab don’t get in the way.

On a cement floor beside a red lawnmower lies a bloated body with no head. A pool of water has spread out around it. The loose covering of white skin has slid off the chest, and the three jagged entry wounds gape like craters.

Saga has come and stood next to him so she can see the picture.

‘That’s Jurek, that’s where I hit him.’

14

Nils Åhlén very calmly lays out copies of the scanned fingerprints, Jurek Walter’s DNA profile taken at the time of his arrest, and the laboratory’s response.

‘The match is exact because we’ve got both DNA and fingerprints … not even identical twins share the same fingerprints,’ he explains.

‘I don’t doubt that that’s Jurek Walter’s finger,’ Joona says quietly.

‘It was cut off an already dead body,’ Nils Åhlén says emphatically.

‘Joona, he’s dead, aren’t you listening?’ Saga asks, wiping tears from her cheeks.

‘One dead body part is enough,’ Joona replies. ‘The finger could have been cut from an amputated hand that had been lying in brackish water for the same length of time as the body.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she groans.

‘Purely theoretically,’ Joona persists.

‘Nils, tell him that’s not possible.’

Nils Åhlén pushes his glasses up his nose again and looks at Joona.

‘You’re suggesting he could have cut his own hand off in order to …’

He trails off and meets Joona’s gaze.

‘Let’s say Jurek was incredibly lucky and somehow survived being shot, swam with the current, made it to land and survived,’ Joona says seriously.

‘Those shots were fatal,’ Saga protests.

‘Jurek started out as a child soldier,’ Joona says. ‘Pain is irrelevant to him, he would have cauterised the wounds himself and amputated his own arm if that’s what it took.’

‘Joona, you do realise that this is impossible,’ Nils says wearily.

‘It’s only impossible if it genuinely can’t be done.’

‘OK, we’re listening,’ Saga says, sinking back onto her chair.

Joona’s face is pale and impassive.

‘Jurek finds a man with roughly the same build as him, the same age,’ he says. ‘He shoots his victim the same way you shot him … then he removes the dead man’s head and leaves the rest of the body to soak somewhere along the coast … in some sort of cage or crate.’

‘Along with his own hand,’ Nils says quietly.

‘It wouldn’t even be that bizarre for him – he used to keep people buried alive in coffins, only checking on them from time to time.’

‘To do that, he’d have had to have the cooperation of the churchwarden Saga met.’

‘Jurek has ways of making people obey him.’

Drips from a tap glint in the drainage gulley in the floor.

Joona looks at Nils and Saga. His pale grey eyes look almost black now, and his face is beaded with sweat.

‘Am I right: there’s a theoretical possibility that Jurek is still alive?’ he asks in a whisper.

‘Joona,’ Nils pleads, then he nods in response.

‘That’s nonsense, it isn’t enough, this is nothing, for God’s sake!’ Saga exclaims, sweeping the reports and photographs onto the floor.

‘I’m not saying I believe that he’s alive,’ Joona says tentatively.

‘Good, Joona, because that would have felt kind of weird,’ she blurts. ‘Seeing as I shot him and then found his body.’

‘It was actually only a finger.’

‘In theory, Joona’s right,’ Nils says.

‘OK, what the hell,’ Saga says, sitting back down on her chair. ‘So you’re right in theory, but no matter how you look at it, there’s no logic to the entire premise. Why the fuck would Jurek want to whip and kill two perverted ex-cons in Norway and Germany?’

‘That doesn’t sound like Jurek Walter,’ Nils Åhlén concedes.

Joona closes his eyes and his eyelids tremble as he tries to compose himself enough to pursue his line of reasoning.

‘Jurek had three types of victim,’ he begins, opening his eyes. ‘The true victims, his primary targets, were the ones he didn’t kill himself, like Samuel Mendel.’

‘Which is why it was so hard to establish a pattern,’ Nils says.

‘The second category were the people he took from his prime targets, the people who made their lives worth living.’

‘Children, wives, siblings, parents, friends.’

‘Jurek didn’t actively want to kill them either. As individuals, they had no significance to him.’

‘Which is why he kept them locked up or buried in coffins and drums,’ Nils says, nodding in agreement.

‘The third category were people who happened to get in his way … he didn’t want to kill them either, but he did so for practical reasons, to remove them as obstacles.’

‘So he never really set out to kill anyone?’ Saga says.

‘He didn’t get anything out of the act of killing itself, there was no sexual motive, it wasn’t even about domination, just his own personal sense of justice … he wanted the first category, the primary victims, to be broken down to the point they would choose death over life.’

He looks down at the floor and the photographs of the decayed torso, whipped backs and lab reports.

‘Now we have two victims with no apparent connection to each other, with injuries inflicted in a way that is reminiscent of what happened to Jurek’s brother. One victim had Summa’s skull in his freezer, and the other had tried to contact me.’

‘That can’t be coincidence,’ Saga says quietly. ‘But these murders don’t fit Jurek Walter’s persona.’

‘I agree, I completely agree, I don’t think it’s Jurek either, but maybe someone’s trying to tell me something, and maybe that person has some sort of connection to him,’ Joona says.

‘What if there are other victims?’ Saga says, and looks him in the eye.

15

Stellan Ragnarson is a lanky man with kind eyes and a somewhat uncertain, beseeching smile. He’s started cutting his hair very short after it got too thin to look boyish.

This evening he’s wearing his shiny black jogging bottoms and a washed-out grey hoodie with the New York Rangers logo on it.

He takes half a kilo of steak from the fridge, tears off the plastic and tips the meat into a large stainless steel bowl.

Marika is sitting at the drop-leaf table with her phone and a bar of chocolate.

She’s five years younger than him, and works at the petrol station in the E65, opposite the ICA Kvantum supermarket.

‘You spoil him’ she says, breaking off three chunks of chocolate.

‘I can afford it,’ he replies, and puts the bowl down on the floor below the kitchen window.

‘Today, maybe.’

Stellan smiles as the big dog devours the meat with a snap of its neck. Rollof is an impressive-looking Rottweiler, self-assured and calm. His tail was docked when he was a puppy because it was coiled up over his back.

Stellan is unemployed, but he won some money on the horses yesterday and surprised Marika by buying her a rose.

They go and sit on the sofa and eat ham-and-mustard toasted sandwiches, and watch the television show Stranger Things.

Marika’s phone rings just as they’re finishing. She looks at the screen and says it’s her sister again.

‘Take it,’ he says, standing up. ‘I’ll go up and play for a bit before I take Rollof out.’

‘Hi, Sis,’ Marika answers with a smile, and plumps up the cushion behind her back.

Stellan gets a can of beer from the fridge and goes upstairs to his computer.

Six months ago he began to explore the Dark Web, the invisible part of the World Wide Web that’s said to be five thousand times the size of the ordinary Internet.

Even if you haven’t studied software programming and Internet protocols, most people are aware that every computer and phone has its own individual IP address, a combination of letters and numbers that can be used to identify the user and locate them geographically.

Stellan was attracted to Darknet, part of the Dark Web which employs servers without IP addresses. That’s where most of the really dangerous deals and developments are happening: guns, drugs, rape, contract killings, slave trade and organ theft.

But after what happened eleven days ago, he stopped looking at the Dark Web altogether. He cut off all contact and tried to get rid of the software, without success.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself.

He’s not using the Dark Web any more, from now on he’ll make do with a bit of online gaming.

He’s started to get caught up in the game Battlefield.

It’s intense, but only a game nonetheless.

You have to put together a team to carry out a military operation; players spend most of the time talking about the mission, but it’s still fun getting to know new people from all corners of the world.

Stellan puts his beer down on the desk and sticks a plaster over the camera lens on the computer before putting on his headphones and microphone and getting going.

His team’s task in the game is to liquidate a terrorist leader in a run-down building in Damascus.

They’ve been given satellite pictures of the building, and have been flown in from their base by helicopter.

Stellan takes one hand off the handset to open the can, but doesn’t have time before he has to get back to the game.

They force entry through a back door and enter the building in two pairs. Stellan and his backup, who goes by the name Straw, run through a pillared walkway along the side of a courtyard, with cracked marble tiles and rusting military equipment among desiccated palm trees.

‘Take it nice and slow now,’ Stellan says over the voice-chat.

‘I can take the lead if you’re getting cold feet,’ Straw says, then lets out a belch.

‘You haven’t even seen the guards, have you?’ Stellan says quietly.

The guards’ cigarettes are barely visible in a dark corner. When they inhale, the light of the burning tobacco glints off their automatic rifles.

Straw sighs in Stellan’s headphones, then walks straight out and shoots the terrorist leader’s guards. The heavy fire echoes through the walkway and off the walls.

‘Fuck, you can’t do that before we’ve checked the courtyard,’ Stellan says, reaching for the can of beer again.

He tries to open the ring-pull as Straw’s avatar saunters into the courtyard with his gun hanging by his hip.

‘Do you need help with that can?’ he asks.

Stellan pulls off his headphones and stands up so fast that his chair topples over behind him. He stares at the screen, looks at the plaster covering the lens, then hears a voice from the headphones, now lying on the desk next to the handset.

‘Sit back down,’ Straw calls.

Stellan walks closer and pulls out the headphones, forces the computer to shut down, unplugs it and tries to figure out how anyone could see him as he carries the laptop to the wardrobe, stuffs it inside and shuts the door.

He goes over to the window and looks out at the dark street. There’s a parked car with misted-up windows outside. Stellan lets the blinds fall with a clatter, picks up the chair from the floor and sits down, his heart racing.

‘What’s going on?’ he whispers to himself.

He tucks the handset and headphones away in one of the desk drawers with trembling hands.

He thinks it must have something to do with what happened eleven days ago.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck …’

Even if he did spend two years in prison studying IT, he now realises how stupid it was to dabble in Darknet. There’s no real anonymity, there’s always someone who can outsmart the system.

But until eleven days ago he had been obsessed with it, unable to resist the temptation.

He went way too far before realising he was in very deep water, that he was in a league way beyond anything he could have imagined. Some of the people on Darknet were lethal, they knew no boundaries at all. In real time he had watched two men shoot a boy sitting in front of his computer. Blood sprayed across the Star Wars posters and saggy mask of Trump’s face that was lying on the floor.

Stellan read up about the risks, and found out that anyone who hooked up using the Vidalia browser became accomplices in all activity on the Dark Web.

But Tor software is supposed to protect users, making them impossible to trace.

It’s all a matter of mix cascades, a relay system that means that your signals are sent through a random sequence of proxy servers around the world.

Stellan doesn’t understand it completely, but his reading of it was that the software would give him access to the darkest parts of the Internet without anyone being able to identify or trace him.

16

Stellan gets up on shaky legs, nudges the blinds aside and looks out at the street again. The car has gone. He goes downstairs and pulls the cable out of the router in the living room. Marika is sitting on the sofa in front of the television, and pats the seat beside her when she sees him.

‘I have to take Rollof out,’ he says in a toneless voice.

She pulls an exaggeratedly upset face.

‘You always put the dog first.’

‘He needs the exercise, he’s a big dog.’

‘What’s the matter? You don’t look great,’ she says.

‘It’s just … we can’t use the Internet any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘We need to switch network, we’ve got a virus that will ruin everything if we try to get online.’

‘But I need to go online.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes, I’ve got to pay the bills, and—’

‘Go round to your sister’s and use her computer,’ he says, cutting her off.

Marika shakes her head.

‘This feels pretty messed up.’

‘I’ll call the support number after I’ve been out with Rollof.’

‘This shouldn’t be allowed to happen,’ Marika mutters.

Stellan goes out into the hall, and the moment he takes the leash down and the silvery links rattle, Rollof comes rushing over.

It’s a quiet, rainy winter’s evening in the south of Sweden. The fields are brown and bare. Stellan and Rollof set off along the side of the E65 as usual. Heavy trucks thunder past occasionally. Stellan can’t help looking over his shoulder at regular intervals, but they’re alone.

Thin mist is hanging over the allotments on the other side of the wide road. Rollof sticks close to him, breathing calmly.

It’s a raw night, dark and cold. They turn right onto Aulinvägen and walk along the yellowed grass, with the big industrial estate to their left. The huge car parks are deserted at this time of night.

Stellan is aware that he isn’t thinking very clearly, that he might be behaving irrationally, but he’s decided to burn down the workshop. If he burns it down, he’ll be able to get an insurance payout, move away from Ystad, change his Internet supplier and get new electronic equipment.

There’s a light in one of the old greenhouses up ahead. Rollof stops, then barks and growls at the dense bushes in the deserted plot.

‘What is it?’ Stellan asks in a low voice.

The leash is taut around the dog’s thick neck, making his breathing sound strained. Rollof is dependable, but he can be a real handful when he encounters other male dogs.

‘No fighting, now,’ Stellan warns, pulling him away.

The other dog doesn’t bark back, but some of the branches in front of the greenhouse start to sway.

Stellan feels a shiver run down his spine. For a moment he thought there was someone standing over there.

He heads into the big industrial estate. The streets are empty, and between the streetlamps everything is pitch-black. His shadow grows longer, then has time to disappear altogether before he reaches the next circle of light. His footsteps echo off the brick and corrugated metal façades.

It isn’t easy for anyone with a criminal record to succeed in the job market in Sweden. Stellan was convicted of a double murder when he was twenty years old.

Since his release he’s had a number of temporary jobs, has been on loads of courses, trying to get better qualifications, but mostly he’s lived off social security benefits.

His restless search of the Darknet, his voyeuristic observation of what other people were getting up to, all had its roots in an old fantasy. Even in prison he had talked about getting hold of some girls and letting them earn money for him. He had read about it, thought about it, considered the risks and decided to figure out the best way to succeed.

That was what was in his mind when he ventured into the Dark Web. He’d advertised in a couple of forums that he wanted to buy three girls, but hadn’t got any responses.

When he made the adverts more specific and explained that he wanted to keep the girls in cages and exploit them sexually, he suddenly started to get responses. Many of them were provocative, and some tried to frighten him off. Others seemed serious, but when he made further enquiries they appeared to be connected to organised crime.

Stellan doesn’t know why he can’t stop thinking about keeping them in cages. Maybe it’s the idea that it might actually be achievable.

Ten years ago he inherited an old industrial unit that he had tried to rent out. While he was waiting for more responses on the Dark Web marketplaces, he built a sturdy inner wall towards the back of the long, narrow building. Without measuring the walls inside and out, it was impossible to tell that there was a hidden room containing five cages equipped with beds, a shower, toilet, and a small kitchen area with a fridge.

Stellan had almost finished work on it when he was contacted by Andersson.

He didn’t appreciate how dangerous he was – if only he had.

Andersson showed an interest in his plans, and was prepared to deliver five young girls from Romania.

The offer was perfect in every detail. It all sounded great – like getting an inside tip on the horses.

But at the same time, Andersson radiated a compromising seriousness that made Stellan shiver with fear.

He did more research into the Tor network.

Provided he was careful, he couldn’t be traced, because his information was relayed via countless nodes and was encrypted until it reached its recipient.

The deal was a bit too big for him.

But if he managed to build up a client base, he could earn a fortune.

Stellan couldn’t stop thinking about the imprisoned girls. Despite that, he didn’t actually know what he was going to do with them.

He didn’t want to rape them, he didn’t want to beat them. He fantasised about them becoming so demoralised that they would consent to anything without resistance.

Andersson got him to divulge details of his background, and asked complicated questions about loyalty.

He felt annoyed by that, and created a sort of Trojan horse in the form of a PDF document as a way of gaining the upper hand.

When the attachment was opened, Andersson revealed his exact location.

So now Andersson knew that he knew.

Stellan had his address.

Don’t fuck with me, that had been the thought in his mind.

Andersson’s response had been as rapid as it was unexpected.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he wrote. ‘The only way you can regain my trust is by filming yourself slicing through your Achilles tendons.’

That was eleven days ago.

Stellan pretended to believe it was all a joke, but deep down he knew Andersson was mad.

Without making a big deal of it, he tried to pull out of the arrangement, explaining that he’d run into difficulties and was going to have to put the whole thing on ice.

It’s too late for that, Andersson replied.

What do you mean?

I’ll be paying you a visit soon.

Andersson, I’m very sorry, Stellan wrote. I didn’t mean to—

He stopped when the fan on his computer started to run at top speed.

I own you, Andersson replied.

The next moment Stellan’s screen went black. The room went dark. The computer restarted, the hard-drive rattled, the screen flickered, then the connection came back up and suddenly Stellan saw himself on the screen.

Andersson was controlling his laptop remotely, and had activated the camera and seen him sitting at his desk without a top on, a coffee mug next to the keyboard.

With his heart pounding, Stellan left the Dark Web, went into his system settings, closed off the Internet connection and tried to remove the Tor browser from his computer.

Since then Stellan hasn’t ventured onto Darknet. The suffocating feelings of being watched and observed have grown worse with each passing day.

The gates of Herrestadsgatan 18 are open. Rollof raises his leg and pisses on the post, as usual. They pass Jeppsson Engineering and the blue canvas covering an old trolleybus.

Stellan and the dog leave the gravel drive and carry on across the wet grass, past a big, silver-coloured building, towards a long, narrow industrial yellow-brick unit with a flight of metal steps in front of it.

The sign announcing Ystad Tyre and Mechanical Workshop is still there, though the business is long gone.

Stellan ties the leash to a concrete block meant to support roadworks signs, kneels down, ruffles the loose skin on the back of Rollof’s neck and tells him that he’ll be back soon.

He switches the lights on and the fluorescent strip-lights flicker and buzz into life, spreading their harsh glare across dirty benches and heavy mountings. The cement floor is covered with oil stains and drill-holes where machinery once stood. There’s evidence of the defunct workshop everywhere. Anything that could be sold at the auction that followed the bankruptcy had been removed and taken away.

As he approaches the false wall, he hears Rollof start to growl outside. Stellan unlocks the door of the cleaning cupboard, pulls out the industrial vacuum cleaner, takes down the topless calendar, inserts the long key into the lock and pushes the hidden door open.

Inside the secret room he has constructed three cages out of heavy-duty wire mesh, firmly fixed to the concrete floor.

All that they contain at the moment is three plain, unmade beds from Ikea and three plastic bedpans.

The ceiling lamp is casting chequered shadows across the mattresses.

The little kitchen consists of an all-in-one unit containing a sink, hotplate, a hand-held shower to fit on the tap, a microwave oven and a small fridge.

He’s aware that the sensible thing to do would be to dismantle the cages before he sets light to the workshop. Stellan walks over to the furthest cage and inserts the crowbar between the brick wall and the mesh frame and pushes.

He’s planning on siphoning off the diesel from the bus outside Jeppsson’s once he’s destroyed the cages, drenching everything, then starting the fire in here using one of the radiators.

The workshop isn’t insured for its full value, but he can hardly call and ask to change the terms now.

Stellan wrenches one side of the frame out, pushing it away from him as it falls. His phone buzzes and he hooks the crowbar on the mesh as he takes it out and looks at the screen. He’s received a text message from a number he doesn’t recognise: Pour petrol over yourself and …

Stellan doesn’t finish reading the text, just throws his phone at the wall, unable to figure out how Andersson could have got hold of his phone number.

‘What’s going on?’ he whispers, stamping on the phone until it shatters.

He decides not to bother dismantling the cages. They’ll probably burn along with everything else, so he won’t be found out.

Suddenly the lights go out. The fuse must have blown. Stellan feels his way out, stumbling over the paper bag containing screws, angle irons and a random assortment of other spares. The heavy security door is closed and he pulls it open, goes into the cleaning cupboard, then the workshop. All the lights have gone out. Weak grey light is coming in through the windows that haven’t been covered with plywood. Stellan can see that the door to the fuse box with its old enamel fuses is already open.

Outside, Rollof starts barking. The dog is clearly agitated, he’s pulling at his leash, then starts growling and barking again.

A shadow passes one of the windows. Someone’s creeping round the building.

Stellan’s heart is beating so hard that his throat hurts.

He looks at the door in front of him, unsure what to do.

The chain from the broken winch is swinging behind him.

Stellan spins round but can’t see anyone.

He starts walking towards the door, hears quick footsteps behind him and then feels a flare of pain in his head.

He staggers sideways, aware of an excruciating pain in his temple.

His legs buckle and he collapses on the floor, and hears himself making guttural moaning sounds.

His back arches in cramp, his body tenses, then starts to jerk uncontrollably. Someone grabs him by one leg and starts to drag him across the floor.

‘I’m sorry,’ he gasps, blinking the blood from his eyes.

The man shrieks something, then stamps on his mouth. Stellan feels him carry on stamping until he loses consciousness altogether.

When he comes round, his face feels wet and warm.

He’s lying on his side, and tries to raise his head as he sees the man overturn the old desk, then come back with a rusty saw in one hand and kick him in the stomach.

Stellan’s breathing rattles off the concrete floor.

He’s thinking that he has to crawl out and release Rollof.

The man stamps on the base of his spine several times, then walks round him.

Stellan feels the man take hold of the back of his head, put the jagged blade to his neck, then start to saw.

He hears the sound change, and just has time to think that the pain is utterly unbearable before everything fades away.

17

Joona and Nils Åhlén are standing in the lift in silence, not looking at each other. The floor is wet with melted snow. The only sound is the swishing of the cables in the lift-shaft as they head up to the conference room on the eighth floor.

Nathan Pollock from the National Murder Commission has already called the first meeting. Within the National Operations Unit, he’s responsible for the search for victims who might fit the pattern of the two known cases.

The look on Joona’s face is one of intense concentration, focus.

The collar of his coat is uneven, half up, half down.

Seeing as they agree that there’s a theoretical possibility that Jurek Walter survived Saga’s gunshots, Joona has to follow this to the end of the road.

The reason he can’t fend off a feeling of impending disaster is that the choice of victim doesn’t fit with Jurek’s sense of balance.

Neither the choice of victim nor the method makes sense.

Jurek isn’t interested in excessive violence, he simply does whatever is necessary to achieve the result he’s after.

The dead men in Germany and Norway both have a link to Joona, but there’s nothing to indicate any clear connection to Jurek Walter.

The fact that the victim at the campsite in Rostock had been whipped doesn’t necessarily mean anything. He could have been a masochist, he could have self-harmed, or been assaulted by the other patients in the secure psychiatric unit.

It hasn’t even been established beyond reasonable doubt that he was beaten using a shaving strop. Maybe Joona is getting carried away by his imagination.

And the man in Oslo only had a few scars on his back. They could have been caused during the assault that caused his death.

Joona forces himself to pay attention as Nils tells him that his assistant Frippe has started playing golf with his wife.

Joona tries to smile, and thinks once more that he’s probably overreacting.

Jurek is dead.

The man in Oslo and the man at the campsite must have been killed by the same person, and there was a definite connection to him in both cases.

Joona has been trying to figure out how the murdered sex-offender could have got hold of his private telephone number.

Fabian Dissinger hasn’t cropped up in any Swedish investigation, at least not since Joona started working in the police.

Same thing with the grave-robber in Oslo.

The lift slows down, stops, and the doors slide open.

Anja is waiting for them. Without saying a word she hugs Joona tightly, then takes a step back.

She shows them into the conference room with a satisfied smile. Three smaller tables have been pushed together. On one of them there’s a closed laptop and two bundles of papers and folders. There’s an Advent candelabra with a dusty cable poking out of the bin.

The inner courtyard is visible through the low windows, the flat roofs covered with masts and satellite dishes, the exercise yard of the custody unit and the spire of the old police headquarters.

‘You were quick,’ Nathan says behind them.

As usual, his grey hair is tied in a ponytail and he’s wearing a black jacket, narrow trousers and shoes with Cuban heels.

‘How’s things?’ Joona asks, shaking his old friend’s hand.

‘Shit but OK, thanks,’ Nathan replies, as usual.

He walks over to the wall and pulls down a Christmas picture and a poster telling police officers to keep an eye on their teenage children.

‘Nathan thinks Christmas is bad for the room’s feng shui,’ Anja says.

‘What have you got?’ Joona says, sitting down on one of the chairs.

Nathan jerks his head slightly to get his ponytail in the right place, then opens the laptop and starts to tell them about his dealings with Europol.

‘We asked about victims in the past six months who were serious criminals or mentally ill … violent assaults, sexual offences.’

‘With particular emphasis on signs of beatings and whipping,’ Anja adds.

‘We asked them to discount terrorism, organised crime, the drug trade, and financial crimes,’ Nathan goes on.

‘Their response was that there aren’t any murders that fulfil those criteria,’ Anja says, filling four glasses from the carafe of water.

‘But there must be some, purely statistically,’ Nathan continues. ‘So we contacted the national police authorities, then moved on to separate districts and departments.’

‘I don’t want to say it’s been tough, but there are forty-five different nation states in Europe, so that means an awful lot of heads of department,’ Anja explains. ‘Some of them are suspicious and don’t want to reveal details, but the biggest problem is probably …’

She tails off and sighs.

‘This all gets a bit grubby,’ she goes on. ‘But in general the police don’t put a huge amount of effort into cases of one criminal killing another. And if any of their worst offenders dies, the usual reaction is relief. That isn’t the official attitude, of course, but it’s inevitable … no one becomes personally motivated when a paedophile dies, you don’t spend a lot of time calling other districts, other countries.’

‘I spoke to a Hungarian officer who said he didn’t want to sound like Duterte … but he explained that even if they wouldn’t go so far as to encourage murders of any sort, they really don’t have any objection to society being cleaned up,’ Nathan says.

‘And I spoke to an English superintendent who said he’d put our murderer on the payroll if he moved to Tottenham.’

Joona raises his glass, looks at the surface of the water and the round, translucent shadow on the table, and feels a degree of relief for the first time.

Jurek isn’t trying to make the world a better place, he would never feel any obligation to punish offenders – that isn’t how he works.

‘But I want to stress that we’re far from finished with our inquiries,’ Nathan says, taking an apple from the bowl in the middle of the table. ‘We just thought you’d want to see the three responses we’ve received so far that match the criteria.’

A roaring sound fills Joona’s head.

‘Match?’ he repeats, putting his fingertips to his left temple.

‘Let’s see,’ Nathan says, opening a file on the laptop. ‘This one took a lot of persuasion … at first they said they didn’t have any murders at all, then I was eventually put through to a superintendent in Gdansk … And without any hesitation he told me that they’d found a middle-aged man in the abandoned branch of the River Vistula known as “the Dead Vistula” … The man hadn’t drowned, he’d been beaten to death. His face had been bitten and his head was almost severed from his body.’

‘He’d been in prison for three murders and the desecration of a corpse,’ Anja says.

‘What else?’ Joona asks, his mouth suddenly dry.

‘I spoke to Salvatore Giani this morning – he sends his regards,’ Nathan says, and takes a bite of the apple.

‘Thanks,’ Joona whispers.

‘Salvatore had a murder in Segrate, on the outskirts of Milan … Last Thursday a woman by the name of Patrizia Tuttino was found with her neck broken in the boot of her own car, outside the Department of Reconstructive Surgery at the San Raffaele Hospital … During the search of her house they discovered that she had carried out at least five contract-killings before she embarked upon her gender realignment.’

Nathan frowns as he taps at the laptop, then turns it towards Joona to show him a picture.

The shadow of the hospital building’s cupola reaches across the pavement to a red Fiat Panda with a damaged front bumper. There’s a dead body lying in the open boot. The plastic bag over her head is smeared with lipstick on the inside. Her dress and fur coat are black with mud. She’s a tall woman, with full breasts, broad thighs, and thick knees.

‘And the third victim?’ Joona asks.

Nathan rubs his forehead.

‘There’s a popular national park outside Brest-Litovsk in Belarus, the Białowiez˙a Forest. Last week a man’s body was found in the undergrowth behind some rubbish bins at the new tourist attraction based around Ded Moroz, who’s a sort of eastern Slavic Father Christmas … The victim was a man who worked as a warden in the park. He’s been brutally assaulted, both his arms were broken and he’d been shot in the back of the neck. His name was Maksim Rios.’

‘I see,’ Joona says.

‘Our Belarusian colleague said the man had been whipped in the past year, “like some poor kid in an orphanage”, as he put it.’

‘I need to think,’ Joona says.

‘We’re still waiting for pictures, as well as responses from plenty more countries … As Anja says, the problem is that most of them don’t have any objection to some of their offenders disappearing.’

Joona sits with his hands over his face as he listens while Nathan relates the sarcastic response of the police in Marseille.

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 screwdriver 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.

‘I thought we were going to meet at Farang?’

‘We need to talk, things are happening which …’

He falls silent and takes a deep breath. Valeria swallows hard and her face tenses.

‘You think he’s alive,’ she whispers. ‘But they found the body, it was his body, wasn’t it?’

‘I’ve been through it all with Nils, but it isn’t enough … Jurek Walter’s alive. I didn’t think he was, but he’s alive.’

‘No,’ she says, quietly but firmly.

Joona looks over his shoulder, but he can’t see the door of the greenhouse, there are too many plants in the way.

‘You need to trust me,’ he says. ‘I’m going to get Lumi to a safe place abroad and try to protect her, and – well, I’m asking you to come with me.’

Valeria’s face has turned grey, it does that when she’s worried. The wrinkles around her mouth become more defined, and her face becomes less expressive.

‘You know I can’t do that,’ she says quietly.

‘This is a difficult decision.’

‘Is it? Because I’m almost starting to wonder what this is all about … I don’t want to exaggerate my own significance, but this has come right at the start of us having a serious relationship … I’ve wanted you to know you weren’t under any sort of pressure, I’m not trying to compete with Summa, because I can’t, I know that.’

Joona takes one step to the side so he can get a better view of the greenhouse behind her.

‘I hear what you’re saying, but—’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean … that was a silly thing to say.’

‘I do understand,’ he says. ‘We can discuss everything, but Jurek’s alive … and he’s killed at least five people in the past month.’

Valeria rubs her forehead with her dirty fingers, leaving two black streaks above her right eyebrow.

‘Why haven’t I read anything about that in the papers?’ she counters.

‘Because the victims are spread across Europe, and because the victims are criminals as well, murderers and sex offenders … Jurek’s looking for someone he can work with, he’s been testing various candidates and killing the ones who don’t make the grade.’

He looks at his watch, then glances up towards the dark house.

‘Do you genuinely think it’s dangerous for the two of us to stay here?’

‘Yes,’ he says, looking her in the eye. ‘There’s a good chance you’re already being watched. He’ll have been watching you, getting to know you, your routines.’

‘It sounds so over the top.’

‘You have to come with me,’ Joona pleads.

‘When are you thinking of leaving?’ she says after a pause.

‘Now.’

She looks at him in astonishment and moistens her lips.

‘Can I join you later?’

‘No.’

‘You’re saying I just have to pack a bag and leave?’

‘There’s no time to pack.’

‘How long are we going to be in hiding?’

‘Two weeks, two years … as long as it takes.’

‘All this would be ruined, everything I’ve worked so hard to achieve,’ she says in a toneless voice.

‘Valeria, you can always start again, I’ll help you.’

She stands there silently, her eyes lowered.

‘Joona,’ she says, and looks up. ‘You’ve done what you could, I appreciate that this could be serious, but I don’t have a choice. I can’t leave, I’ve got my greenhouses, my client-base … This is my home … and I’m going to celebrate Christmas with my boys for the first time … you know how much that means to me.’

‘You could be back in time for Christmas,’ Joona says, feeling desperation rising. ‘Listen, Valeria – when Jurek escaped I was living with a woman, Disa … I never thought I’d ever dare to do that again.’

‘Disa? Why haven’t you ever mentioned her?’

‘I didn’t want to frighten you,’ he says heavily.

She shuts her eyes when she realises what he means.

‘He killed her.’

‘Yes.’

She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘That doesn’t mean he’s going to kill me,’ she says in a shaky voice.

‘Valeria,’ Joona begs, feeling more helpless than at any point in his life.

‘I can’t, I just can’t,’ she says. ‘How am I supposed to leave the boys again?’

‘Please, you—’

‘I can’t,’ she interrupts.

‘I’ll organise police protection.’

‘Never,’ she says, then lets out a surprised laugh.

‘You wouldn’t have to see them.’

‘Joona, listen to me, no cops, not on my property … except you.’

He stands with his head bowed for several seconds, then opens his bag, takes out a pistol in a shoulder holster, removes it and hands it to her.

‘This is a Sig Sauer. It’s loaded, eleven shots in the magazine … Carry it with you at all times, keep it with you even when you’re in bed … See here, all you have to do is release this catch, hold it with both hands, aim and fire. Don’t hesitate if you get the opportunity, shoot immediately, several times.’

She shakes her head.

‘I’m not going to do that, Joona.’

He puts the gun down on the stool next to her knife and takes a deep breath.

‘The other thing I need to do is give you a warning. From now on you have to regard anything that isn’t absolutely familiar to you as a trap. Unexpected visitors, a new customer, someone who’s changed their car or has turned up at the wrong time … No matter what it is, you call this number.’

Joona shows her a number on his mobile, then sends her the contact details.

‘Keep that number, and make sure it’s always the first option when you open your phone … It won’t be enough to save you immediately, Jurek’s too quick for that, but this number belongs to a friend of mine, Nathan Pollock … he’ll be able to see where you are, and that increases the chances of them tracking and rescuing you.’

‘This all sounds crazy,’ she says simply, fixing her eyes on him.

‘I’d stay with you if it wasn’t for Lumi, I have to look after her,’ he says.

‘It’s OK, I understand, Joona.’

‘I’ve got to go now,’ he whispers. ‘If you want to come with me, you’ll have to come as you are, in boots and dirty trousers … I’ll go back to the car and wait twenty seconds.’

She doesn’t answer, just looks at him and tries to hold back the tears and swallow the lump in her throat.

Joona walks out of the greenhouse and gets in his car, reverses to the turning circle and stops.

He looks at his watch.

Snowflakes are falling through the glow from the big greenhouses.

The seconds tick past, he should have left by now.

He leans against the cold seat and puts his right hand on the gearstick.

Everything is quiet and still.

He starts the engine again and the headlights form a swirling tunnel down towards the edge of the forest.

The fans whirr as the car heats up.

Joona stares ahead of him, then glances at his watch again, changes gear and drives slowly round the turning circle. He looks at the greenhouses in the rear-view mirror and he drives slowly away from Valeria’s nursery.

20

Erica Liljestrand is sitting on her own at the counter in the Pilgrim Bar, waiting for a friend from her biotechnology course.

Sleet is running down the window facing the street.

She puts her phone down beside the glass of wine and looks at the fingerprints on the screen before it goes dark.

She and Liv agreed to meet here at ten o’clock to discuss the New Year’s Eve party, but Liv is over an hour late now, and she’s not answering her phone.

There are hardly any customers in the Pilgrim Bar this evening, probably because the building’s being renovated and the façade on Regeringsgatan is covered up. The entrance is hidden by scaffolding and dirty white nylon netting.

The three guys at the table at the back have started glancing in her direction, so she sticks with the bartender, chatting to him and checking her phone.

Weird that a woman sitting alone in a bar has to think of herself as fair game, she thinks.

Erica knows she isn’t exactly pretty, and she’s a long way from being a flirt. Even so, the simple fact that she’s there on her own is enough for them.

The bartender, who says his name is Nick, seems to assume that he’s irresistible. He’s a suntanned, wrinkled man in early middle-age, with blue eyes and a fashionable haircut. His short-sleeved shirt is tight across his bulging biceps, and only half covers the fuzzy tattoo on his neck.

So far Nick has told her about mountain-climbing in Thailand, skiing in the French Alps, and the jittery stock market.

Erica glances surreptitiously at the older, pink-cheeked couple chatting over at one of the corner tables. They look happy with their bottle of wine and nachos with salsa and guacamole.

She calls Liv again, and lets it ring for a ridiculous amount of time.

Dirty water is dripping from the scaffolding outside.

She puts her phone down and traces a scratch in the polished wood of the bar counter with her fingernail, then stops when she reaches the foot of her glass and takes a sip.

The bell jangles as the door opens.

Erica turns to look.

It isn’t Liv, but a man the size of a bear. He brings cold air from the street in with him, then takes off his black raincoat and squeezes it into a plastic bag.

The man is wearing a dark blue knitted sweater with leather patches on the elbows, cargo trousers and military-style boots.

He says hello to the bartender and sits down a metre or so away from Erica, with one chair between them, and hangs the plastic bag from a hook under the bar.

‘It’s a blowy night,’ he says in a deep, soft voice.

‘Looks that way,’ the bartender replies.

The large man rubs his hands together.

‘What vodkas have you got?’

‘Dworek, Stolichnaya, Smirnoff, Absolut, Koskenkorva, Nemiroff,’ Nick says.

‘Black Smirnoff?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll have five doubles of Smirnoff, then.’

Nick raises his eyebrows.

‘You want five glasses of vodka?’

‘Room temperature, if that’s OK,’ the man smiles.

Erica looks at the time on her phone and decides to wait another ten minutes.

The bartender places five shot glasses in front of the large man, then fetches a bottle from the shelf.

‘And refill her glass, seeing as we’re celebrating,’ he says, nodding in Erica’s direction.

Erica has no idea what he’s talking about. Maybe it was just a joke that didn’t quite work. She looks at him, but he doesn’t look back. His face looks sad, and his thick neck has settled into folds, his hair is cropped and he has beautiful pearl earrings in each earlobe.

‘Do you want another glass of wine?’ the bartender asks Erica.

‘Why not?’ she replies, stifling a yawn.

‘Seeing as we’re celebrating,’ Nick says, then fills a fresh glass.

The large man has taken out a book of matches and is now chewing on one of them.

‘I used to have a bar in Gothenburg,’ he says, then gets to his feet.

He stands still, as if he can no longer understand where he is. Slowly he turns to look at the bartender, then Erica. His pupils are dilated, and the match falls from his lips. He keeps turning, looks at the older man at the corner table, then one of the young men, before licking his lips and sitting back down again.

He clears his throat and empties the first glass of vodka, then puts it down on the bar.

Erica looks at the flat matchbook lying next to the line of glasses. The black cover is decorated with what looks like a small white skeleton.

‘Are you spending Christmas in Stockholm?’ Nick asks, putting a bowl of large green olives in front of Erica.

‘I’ll be going to my parents’ in Växjö,’ she replies.

‘Nice, Växjö’s a good town.’

‘You?’ she asks politely.

‘Thailand, as usual.’

‘I don’t think so,’ the large man says.

‘Sorry?’ Nick says in surprise.

‘Not that I can see into the future, but—’

‘Can’t you?’ the bartender interrupts. ‘That’s a relief, you almost had me worried there for a moment.’

The large man has lowered his gaze and is looking at his stubby fingertips. The young men get up noisily and leave.

‘It’s complicated,’ the large man says after a while.

‘Isn’t it just,’ Nick says tartly.

The man doesn’t answer, carries on picking at his matchbook. The bartender stands and looks at him for a while, waiting for him to look up, then he starts wiping the counter with a grey cloth.

‘Nice earrings,’ Erica says, and hears the bartender let out a laugh.

‘Thanks,’ the man says in a serious voice. ‘I wear them for my sister, my twin sister, she died when I was thirteen.’

‘That’s terrible,’ she whispers.

‘Yes,’ he says simply, and raises his shot glass towards her. ‘Cheers … cheers, whatever your name is …’

‘Erica,’ she says.

‘Cheers, Erica …’

‘Cheers.’

He drinks, puts the empty glass down, and licks his lips.

‘They call me the Beaver.’

The bartender turns away to hide his smile.

‘It’s a shame your friend’s late,’ the Beaver says after a pause.

‘How did you know that?’

‘I could say it’s deduction, a logical conclusion,’ he says. ‘I watch people, I saw the way you’ve been looking at your phone, the way you turned towards the door … And I’ve also got a sixth sense.’

‘A sixth sense, like telepathy?’ she asks, forcing herself not to smile.

Nick removes her first wine-glass and wipes the counter.

‘It’s hard to explain,’ the Beaver goes on. ‘But in layman’s terms I should probably call it precognition … Along with claircognizance, intrinsic knowledge.’

‘That sounds pretty advanced,’ Erica says. ‘So you’re some sort of medium?’

She can’t help feeling sorry for him. He seems completely unaware of how weird he comes across.

‘My abilities aren’t paranormal … there’s a logical explanation.’

‘OK,’ the bartender says sceptically.

They wait for him to go on, but instead he empties the third shot glass with very precise movements, then sets it down beside the others.

‘Almost every time I’m with other people, I know the order in which they’re going to die,’ he says. ‘I don’t know when it’s going to happen – in ten minutes or fifty years … but I can see the order.’

Erica nods. She regrets having encouraged him to talk. She only felt obliged to be a bit friendlier because Nick was starting to act like a bully. She’s wondering how soon she can leave without it looking like she’s trying to get away from him when her mobile buzzes.

21

Erica turns her phone round, hoping it will give her an excuse to leave the bar at once. It’s a text from Liv, apologising for not showing up, and saying she had to help a friend who’d drunk too much get home.

Erica’s thumbs feel oddly numb when she replies that she understands and that they can meet up tomorrow instead.

‘I have to go,’ she says, pushing her almost untouched glass of wine away.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ the large man says, looking at her intently.

‘No, it’s … I believe everyone has abilities that they don’t use,’ she replies rather vaguely.

‘I’m aware it sounded overdramatic, what I said, but I never seem to be able to find the right words to describe it.’

‘I understand,’ she says, looking at the screen.

‘Sometimes I only have time to count everyone, but sometimes I can do everyone in a room … It’s like I see a big clock-face with Roman numerals, and when the hand points to the number one, I find myself looking at the first person in the room who’s going to die, I don’t know how, but it’s just what happens. Tick tock, the hand moves to the number two, and I’m looking at another person … often I catch sight of my own face in a mirror before I lose contact.’

‘Can I settle up?’ Erica says to the bartender.

‘I scared you,’ the Beaver says, still trying to catch her eye.

‘Can you leave her alone, now?’ Nick says.

‘Erica, I just want to say that your number wasn’t the first to come up in this room.’

‘Stop it,’ the bartender says, leaning across the bar.

‘I’m stopping,’ the Beaver says calmly, and tucks the flat little matchbook in the chest pocket of his sweater. ‘Unless you’d like to know who number one was?’

‘Excuse me,’ Erica says, and heads off towards the toilets.

The bartender watches her go, and sees her wobble and hold one hand out to the wall to steady herself.

The Beaver empties his fourth glass of vodka, then puts it down silently next to the last one.

‘OK, who’s going to die first?’ the bartender asks.

‘You … which isn’t really surprising,’ the Beaver replies.

‘Why isn’t it surprising?’

‘Because I’m here to cut your throat,’ the Beaver replies calmly.

‘Am I going to have to call the police?’

‘You’ve already dosed her glass with Xyrem, haven’t you?’ the Beaver asks.

‘What the hell do you want?’ Nick hisses.

‘Did you know that one of your girls died in the ambulance?’ the Beaver says, turning the last glass on the bar.

‘You’re mentally ill,’ Nick tells him. ‘You may not be aware of it yourself, but …’

He falls silent when Erica returns to her stool. Her cheeks are pale and she sits quietly for a while with her eyes half-closed.

‘I’m fairly sure I’m going to succeed, seeing as you’re number one, and I’m number five,’ the Beaver says quietly.

The older couple call out their thanks, put their coats on and leave the bar. Now there are just the three of them left in the room.

‘I should probably go,’ Erica says, slurring her words. ‘I’m not feeling too good …’

‘Would you like me to call a taxi?’ Nick asks amiably.

‘Thanks,’ she manages to say.

‘He’s only pretending to call,’ the Beaver says. ‘That’s his way of getting you to stay here until the bar’s empty.’

‘Drink up and leave,’ the bartender says.

‘When my sister died, I—’

‘Shut up,’ the bartender says, getting his phone out.

‘I want to hear,’ Erica says, and feels a fresh wave of tiredness wash over her.

‘I had a permanent stomach ache when I was a child,’ the Beaver says. ‘It felt swollen and heavy … and when I was thirteen it had got so big that I couldn’t hide it any more. They took me to see a doctor who concluded that it was a tumour … not an ordinary tumour, though, but my twin sister, a so-called “foetus in foetu”.’

He pulls up his knitted sweater and white vest to reveal a long, pale scar across the side of his fat, hairless stomach.

‘Bloody hell,’ Erica murmurs.

‘Behind my peritoneum was a sort of capsule of tissue, twenty-five centimetres long … that was where she was,’ he says. ‘I saw the pictures afterwards, when she was dead: thin arms and big hands, stomach, small, stick-like legs, her spine and a bit of her face … but no brain. My blood was the only thing keeping her alive.’

Erica feels nausea rising in her gullet, and stands up and tries to put her coat on, but one of the sleeves is inside out and she stumbles, and only just manages to grab the bar in time.

‘They also found parts of her in my brain,’ the Beaver goes on. ‘But they were too difficult to remove … so they’ll have to stay where they are as long as they don’t metastasise … I can feel her most of the time. You can’t exactly see it on an MRI, but I think I’ve got her tiny brain inside mine … that’s why I’ve got an extra sense.’

Erica drops her handbag on the floor, and her glasses case and eyeliner roll out and disappear under the barstool. She feels like she’s about to be sick, and wonders if she’s eaten something that’s disagreed with her.

‘God,’ she whispers, and feels that her back is wet with sweat.

She sinks to the floor to put her things back in her bag, but she’s so tired she has to lie on her side and rest for a moment before she can get back up again.

The floor feels cool against her cheek. She closes her eyes but starts at a sudden noise. It’s the bartender, shouting at the Beaver.

‘Get out!’ he roars.

Erica knows she has to get up, she has to go home. She forces her eyes open and sees the bartender backing away with a baseball bat in his hands.

‘Just fuck off!’ he shouts.

The large man who said he was known as the Beaver sweeps several bottles off the bar, then moves quickly towards Nick.

Erica hears thuds and deep sighs.

The bartender hits the floor hard and rolls over, sending two chairs flying before he crashes into the wall.

The Beaver follows him with long strides. He grabs the baseball bat from Nick and hits him over the legs three times, yelling something in a ragged voice before he smashes a table. He tosses the broken bat at Nick, then stamps on the remains of the table, kicking the pieces away.

Erica tries to sit up, and looks on as the Beaver drags Nick to his feet again before shoving him hard in the chest and screaming into his face.

‘OK, just calm down,’ Nick pants.

He can’t put any weight on his right leg, and there’s blood running down his face from a cut above one eyebrow. The Beaver grabs him by the neck with one hand and punches him in the face with the other. He pushes Nick down onto a table, knocking glasses and a candleholder to the floor, then shoves the table into the wall, knocking it over and sending Nick sprawling across the floor.

Erica has to lie down again, and watches as the Beaver stands astride the bartender, hitting him in the face.

Nick is trying to get away from the big man. Blood sprays from his mouth as he coughs and begs him to stop. The Beaver grabs him by one hand and breaks his arm at the elbow.

Nick lets out a shriek of desperation as the Beaver yanks at the arm and tries to break it again.

The Beaver is panting heavily as he takes hold of Nick’s neck with both hands, then squeezes so tightly that his face turns white, and he roars and thuds the bartender’s head against the floor, before suddenly letting go and stepping away from Nick, who splutters and tries to catch his breath.

The Beaver staggers backwards.

When he pulls something from his pocket, the little matchbook falls out and lands on the floor.

He flicks open a broad-bladed knife with a click, then walks forward again, yelling so hard that his uneven teeth glint in the glow of one of the wall lights.

‘I’m sorry I was rude to you, I didn’t mean it,’ Nick groans. ‘You don’t have to kill me, I promise …’

Erica feels heavy steps across the floor against her cheek.

The Beaver reaches Nick, holds his raised hand aside and stabs him with the knife.

The blade penetrates deep into his chest.

Blood sprays up into the Beaver’s face as he pulls the knife out.

He lets out a roar of rage and stabs again.

Nick has almost lost consciousness, and is merely whimpering weakly now.

The Beaver spins him round, grabs hold of his hair and sets about trying to scalp him. He cuts off a large chunk of skin and tosses it aside.

It’s as if he’s taken some sort of terrible drug.

The Beaver drops the knife, lets out a roar, then drags the lifeless body over towards the door by one leg.

Nick must surely be dead by now, but the Beaver goes on beating him and stamping on his stomach. He pulls a framed photograph of John Lennon off the wall, smashes it, sending pieces of glass flying in all directions, then tosses the remnants of the frame onto the bloody body.

He tips a table on top of Nick, then backs away gasping before turning round and looking at her.

‘I’m not involved in this,’ she says weakly.

He walks towards her and picks the flick knife up from the floor. A string of congealed blood is hanging from the blade.

‘Please …’

Erica doesn’t even have the energy to lift her head from the floor as he walks over to her and grabs her by the hair.

The pain really isn’t that overwhelming as the blade cuts through tissue, sinews and blood vessels. Far worse is the ice-cold storm wind in her face, combined with the feeling of being asphyxiated from within.

22

When Saga wakes up she can hear Randy moving about in the kitchen. He often spends the night at hers, and sometimes sleeps in the old photographic studio he rents. Randy comes in with a cup of coffee and a croissant with jam for her.

He’s five years younger than Saga, and has a shaved head, calm eyes and a sceptical smile. He’s a police inspector, and is part of a team investigating online hate crimes.

‘Whenever I go home to Örgryte, Mum brings me breakfast in bed,’ he says.

‘You’re spoiled,’ Saga smiles, and sips the coffee.

‘I know your mum was—’

‘I don’t want to talk about her,’ she interrupts.

‘OK, sorry,’ he says, lowering his eyes.

‘It doesn’t do me any good, which is why I’ve got this rule. It’s better to avoid the subject altogether, I’ve already said that.’

‘I know, but—’

‘This isn’t about you.’

‘But I’m here,’ he says quietly.

‘Thanks,’ she replies curtly.

When he’s gone she wonders if she might have sounded too dismissive. There’s no way Randy could know what she’s been through. She texts him to say sorry and thank him for breakfast.

After work Saga collects her half-sister from school and takes her to see her hearing consultant. On the way home she asks her about the clown girls.

‘Dad says they’re not real,’ Pellerina says.

‘That’s right, they’re not,’ Saga tells her.

‘I still don’t want them to find me.’

Their dad isn’t in when they get home. Saga hopes he’ll be back soon, she wants to talk to him about the present she couldn’t accept because it reminded her too much of her mum’s illness.

Now Pellerina is standing at the kitchen worktop wearing a polka-dot apron and whisking cake mixture while Saga greases the tin.

The doorbell rings and Pellerina squeals that it’s their dad.

Saga wipes her hands on some kitchen roll, then goes into the hall to answer the door.

It’s Joona Linna.

His face is serious, his grey eyes icy cold.

‘Come in,’ she says.

He looks over his shoulder, then walks into the hall and closes the door behind him.

‘Who else is in the house?’

‘Just me and Pellerina,’ she replies. ‘What’s happened?’

He looks over at the wooden staircase, then the door to the kitchen.

‘Joona, I realise that you really believe Jurek’s still alive,’ she says.

‘At first it was only a theoretical possibility … but now I’ve identified the pattern,’ he says, peering through the spyhole in the front door.

‘Wouldn’t you like to come in and have coffee?’ she asks.

‘I haven’t got time,’ he replies, looking back at her again.

‘I know recent events have stirred up loads of old memories,’ she says. ‘But I honestly don’t think Jurek’s behind this. Look at the level of violence; it’s aggressive in a way that Jurek never was … and yes, I know you’re going to say it was his accomplice. I hear what you’re saying, I know that so far as you’re concerned there’s a clear pattern, but I just can’t see it.’

‘Saga, I’m only here to say you need to go into hiding, you need to find a safe place for yourself and your family … but I’m starting to realise that you won’t be doing that.’

‘I’d never manage to get Dad and Pellerina to come with me … I’m not even going to try, I don’t want to frighten them.’

‘But—’

A door slams in the kitchen, and Joona’s hand reaches instinctively for the pistol under his jacket before he hears Pellerina laughing.

‘If Jurek’s alive, it’s my fault,’ Saga says in a low voice. ‘You know that, I was the one who let him out … so it’s my responsibility to stop him.’

‘It isn’t worth it,’ he says. ‘You’re like a sister to me, I don’t even want you to try to stop Jurek, I just want you to hide.’

‘Joona, you’re doing the right thing from your point of view, you’re convinced about all this and you need to protect Lumi,’ she says. ‘But for me, the right thing is staying and trying to find the person who’s behind these murders … and I’m not ruling anything out, not even Jurek Walter.’

‘Then work with Nathan … I’ve sent everything I’ve got to him.’

‘OK, I’ll talk to him.’

‘Saga!’ Pellerina calls from the kitchen.

‘I need to get back to her,’ she says.

‘Don’t think Jurek’s like everyone else,’ Joona goes on. ‘He didn’t treat you differently because you’re so beautiful …’

‘And there was I thinking you’d never even noticed,’ she smiles.

‘I’ve noticed, Saga,’ he says. ‘But Jurek doesn’t care about how you look, he’s interested in your mind, your soul … your darkness, what he likes to call your catacombs.’

‘You do know I’ve spoken to Jurek Walter, don’t you? More than you have, actually,’ she reminds him.

‘But back then you were merely a tool for him, a Trojan horse—’

‘OK, fine,’ she says, raising her hands to get him to stop.

‘Saga, listen to me … if you stay, you’re going to see him again.’

‘That’s just an idea you’ve got into your head,’ she says.

‘You don’t have to listen to me, but I can’t go without giving you three pieces of advice first.’

‘I’m listening.’

She leans against the doorframe and folds her arms over her chest.

‘One … don’t try to talk to him, don’t try to arrest him, don’t worry about any ethical considerations if there aren’t any witnesses – you need to kill him at once, and make sure he’s dead this time.’

‘He’s already dead.’

‘Two … remember that he isn’t on his own, and that—’

‘If your theory’s correct,’ she interrupts.

‘Jurek’s used to having a brother who would obey him like a dog … these murders mean he’s recruited an accomplice – and that means he can be in more than one place at the same time.’

‘Joona, that’s enough now,’ Saga says.

‘Three,’ Joona goes on. ‘If what can’t happen happens anyway, you need to remember that you can’t make any agreements with him, because they’ll never work in your favour … He won’t let go, and with each agreement you make with him, you’ll end up deeper in his trap … Jurek will take everything from you, but it’s you he wants to get at.’

‘I want you to leave now,’ she says, and looks him in the eye.

‘Maybe that would be just as well.’

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