by Kepler, Lars
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, bre
athing 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.