by Kepler, Lars
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.’
&n
bsp; 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.