by Kepler, Lars
She grabs the briefcase and follows Nathan into the building.
The floor of the empty corridor is worn from heavy use. The doorframes and skirting boards are badly scratched and dented.
The door to the professor’s room is open.
Nils Åhlén is sitting at his computer in his medical coat. His thin face is clean-shaven and sad, his grey hair cropped short.
Someone has sprayed Twisted Christmas on his window in fake snow.
Saga knocks and steps into the room.
‘I’ve got one just like that,’ Nils says when he sees the briefcase.
‘Found it on the roof of your car,’ Saga says, putting the briefcase down on his desk.
‘Well, it’s not supposed to be there,’ he replies, and logs out of his computer.
‘We’ve come straight from the Pilgrim Bar, where we spoke to Arne Rosander, who said you were looking at the bodies.’
‘Have you given up this idea about Jurek Walter?’ Nils asks.
‘It isn’t him, we’ve got witnesses and some blurred security camera footage,’ Nathan replies.
‘When we find the real perpetrator, these murders will stop … and as soon as Joona hears that, he can come home,’ Saga says.
Nils nods and his thin lips form themselves into a gloomy smile. He puts both hands on his desk and heaves himself to his feet.
‘Then let’s get going,’ he says, and leaves the room.
Saga and Nathan follow him to the post-mortem lab closest to his office. The automatic doors swing open. The white tiles on the walls reflect the glare of the fluorescent lights.
Saga walks over to the dead woman, who’s lying with her eyes open, her lips shrunken. Her naked body is grey and pale, and the deep wound in her neck is gaping dark red. The plastic surface of the post-mortem table, with its gullies and troughs, is dark with blood.
‘Who confirmed the ID?’ she asks.
‘Erica Liljestrand’s sister, even if she had trouble recognising her, she kept saying there must be some misunderstanding before I realised she was talking about the eyes.’
‘What about them?’ Nathan says, leaning forward.
‘Everyone gets brown eyes because of the haemolysin … regardless of what colour they used to be … and that can confuse relatives.’
‘What can you tell us about her?’ Saga asks impatiently.
Nils lifts up one of the dead woman’s arms.
‘Well, you can see here that the livor mortis is fairly faint … it’s really only visible where the body was pressing directly against the floor.’
‘So she lost a lot of blood.’
‘I’m a long way from finished with my examination, but the cause of death is somewhere between loss of blood and inhalation of blood … her neck was cut and her spine broken.’
‘The prosecutor’s convinced it’s a criminal gang making a show of strength.’
‘That could be right,’ Nils said, nudging his pilot’s glasses further up his nose.
‘If it wasn’t wrong,’ Saga says quickly.
‘You sound like Joona,’ he says.
‘No, but I know the prosecutor’s wrong, because this is the same killer as the one down in Ystad … I’ve asked them to send you their post-mortem report.’
‘It hasn’t arrived.’
‘Well, it’s the same perpetrator,’ she says, ‘and we need his DNA. The victims put up resistance, it must be possible to find something.’
‘Yes, but that sort of analysis takes time,’ he says.
Saga’s face is pale and tense, her eyes blank from lack of sleep.
‘We’re aware that you’re not finished yet,’ Nathan says. ‘But we know you think the man is the prime target.’
Nils pulls his mask down under his chin and looks at them both.
‘Seeing as the man and woman were basically killed at the same time, it’s impossible to tell – from body temperature and decay – which of them died first, but of course that isn’t what you’re asking.’
Saga lets out a loud groan.
‘We want to know if the perpetrator really only wanted to kill one of them,’ Nathan says.
‘The man, as you know, is in a far worse state, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he was the primary target.’
‘How do you mean?’ Nathan asks, noting that Saga has turned to face the tiled wall.
‘For instance, if the man was driven by jealousy and was planning to harm the woman, when he sees a man in her company, he could be seized by a sudden, terrible fury against the man.’
‘In which case she’d be the primary target even though he was subjected to a more violent attack,’ Nathan says.
‘But if we’re looking at a show of strength from a criminal organisation … Then it’s far more likely that the man is the target and the woman merely a witness who needed to be silenced,’ Nils goes on.
‘Yes,’ Saga says, still facing the wall.
‘On the other hand, she had been drugged, which puts the spotlight back on her again … I’ve just received the toxicology report, which shows that she had gamma-hydroxybutyrate in her blood.’
Saga turns and looks at Nils.
‘GBH …? Was she even conscious when she was murdered?’
‘She must have been incredibly tired, but I’m sure she was awake because she was holding on to something so tightly … otherwise she would have dropped it.’
‘What was she holding?’
Nils goes over to a cabinet and returns to Saga with a plastic bag containing a small matchbook, the sort where you open the lid and pull out a match to light it.
Saga holds the bag up to the light and angles it to avoid reflections.
The little matchbook is a promotional product. The black front is decorated with a headless skeleton holding a skull in each hand.
As if he can’t work out which one is his, Saga thinks. Like Hamlet confronted with a new problem.
There are three matches missing.
On the back is nothing but the word Head in white lettering. Perhaps this is the mistake they’ve been waiting for.
31
Following their meeting with Nils Åhlén it doesn’t take Saga and Nathan long to track down the unlicensed club, Head, in basement premises at Ringvägen 151, next to Lilla Blecktornsparken. The borderline-illegal hard rock club is open on Fridays and Saturdays, from midnight until six in the morning.
They’ve got no way of knowing if the matchbook belonged to the perpetrator, but the victim’s friends are pretty adamant that she didn’t go to hard rock clubs.
Nathan has gone home to talk to Veronica. He’s going to deal with the meeting with the prosecutor tomorrow morning, and has offered Saga a lie-in if she’s willing to go to the club.
The plan is for her to go there tonight and talk to the bouncers, find out if there are any membership lists or security cameras.
Saga has been home and had three hours’ sleep to prepare for her visit to the club.
She’s showered and changed her clothes, and she’s due to meet Randy in an hour.
She picks up her phone and calls Pellerina. After a long pause her dad answers instead and says her sister’s hands are covered in chocolate cake mix.
‘Is everything OK with her?’
‘Same as usual,’ he replies.
‘You sound a bit low.’
She hears him walk out of the kitchen.
‘Oh, it’s just that I’ve been trying Internet dating … there are apps you can put on your phone,’ he tells her.
‘What does Pellerina think about that?’
‘I haven’t mentioned it to her, it all feels a bit embarrassing, actually.’
‘Everyone does it these days.’
‘I’m wondering what you do when you meet up for real.’
‘I don’t know,’ she replies, and goes over to drink from the glass of water on her bedside table.
‘Because I’ve been emailing a researcher at the Uppsala University Hospital, and I was wonde
ring about asking her out for dinner.’
‘Do it,’ she replies.
‘Would you be able to keep Pellerina company on Monday?’ he asks with a smile in his voice.
‘This coming Monday?’
‘In the evening.’
‘I can’t, I’m working late,’ she replies, and hears her sister shout out in the background that she’s washed her hands now.
‘It’s not that I’m desperate or anything. I thought it might be fun, that’s all,’ her dad says.
‘Can I talk to Pellerina?’
‘But it’s OK with you if I start dating?’
‘Stop it – what do you think?’ Saga says impatiently.
‘Pellerina Bauer,’ her sister says, taking the phone.
‘Hi, this is Saga.’
‘I’ve washed my hands now.’
‘Are you baking?’
‘Sticky chocolate cake.’
‘Yummy.’
‘Yes,’ Pellerina says quietly.
‘What’s on your mind?’
‘Dad’s allowed to cry too.’
‘Of course, but why do you say that? Has Dad been sad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘He doesn’t want to talk about it.’
‘I’m sure the cake will make him feel happier.’
‘Yes.’
After a break-up, Randy has been renting premises from an old friend who’s put his advertising business on hold. A lot of the equipment is still there, or piled up in boxes lining one wall. The studio is in a dirty yellow-brick industrial building in Västberga, filled with a mixture of studios, body-shops, dentists, and gynaecologists, investment companies and tyre specialists.
Saga takes the big industrial lift up to the top floor and walks along the corridor to the old photographic studio.
‘Did you see the pizza delivery guy?’ Randy asks, giving her a hug.
‘No.’
Randy works as a police officer but he’s a passionate photographer. He takes pictures of her every time they meet.
Twelve pictures, half frame.
The only furniture Randy brought with him is a double bed. It’s standing in the middle of the studio surrounded by camera tripods, professional flashlights, reflectors, and backdrops.
The sky outside the big windows is dark.
They sit down on the bed and eat pizza and drink wine from coffee-cups in the light of a standard lamp.
Randy reaches for a wine-box that’s perched on a black box of lighting gear and fills their mugs.
‘I can stay till twelve,’ she says, feeding him some pizza.
Randy was adopted from China, and is still in contact with his biological mother in Yuxi, in Yunnan province. He grew up on Lidingö and graduated from Police Academy five years ago.
On the walls there are already several large photographs of Saga, so intimate that the small hairs on her body are visible.
Beside the bed are several pencil sketches for his latest idea, which would have her lying inside a large heptagram of cherries, photographed from directly above.
Saga picks up one of the sheets and looks at the sketch.
The lamp shines through the paper. Randy has drawn her face as an oval and the cherries as small dots forming a seven-pointed star.
‘It’s an old symbol of the creation, the seven days,’ he says. ‘God created man and woman on the sixth day … and He made them both to rule over all the creatures on earth.’
‘Equal from the start,’ she says.
‘We don’t have to do this particular picture … You can give the whole creation story the finger instead, as a little greeting to Ai Weiwei.’
‘No,’ she smiles.
‘Or we could just eat all the cherries.’
‘Stop it, let’s do it now, it’s a fun idea.’
Randy lays the cherries out on the floor and then starts to rig up the camera, reflectors, and lights.
Saga gets up from the bed, takes off her jeans and hangs them over a spare tripod. She unzips her old Adidas jacket and walks over to a full-length mirror leaning against the wall.
Without realising that Randy has stopped working, she lets her jacket fall to the floor, then pulls off her worn old T-shirt. He can’t help staring as she stands there in her underpants applying cherry-red lipstick to her lips and nipples.
There’s a bang and she looks up. Randy has dropped the heavy lead of one of the stands on the floor, and mumbles an apology as he picks it up.
‘Are you cold?’ he asks in a hoarse voice.
‘Not yet.’
‘The lamps will soon warm things up.’
She screws the lipstick back down, takes off her underpants and follows his instructions as she lies down in the middle of the star so that her nipples are in line with the cherries on the floor.
Last weekend she took his picture as he sat naked with angel’s wings on his back and a bottle of calvados in one hand.
Randy has already mounted the camera on a pantograph that he moves along a rail in the ceiling to be able to photograph her from above. He climbs up a stepladder, looks at her, climbs back down and moves the ladder.
‘Ready for the first picture?’
‘You want me to just lie here?’
‘You’re so incredibly beautiful, it’s insane,’ he says, and squeezes the black rubber bulb at the end of the long shutter-release cable.
He climbs up and winds the film on, climbs back down, moves the ladder out of the way and adjusts one of the studio lights and a silver-coloured screen.
‘Great,’ he mutters. ‘This is going to be really great …’
Saga raises one knee a little more.
‘Good, that’s great, stay like that.’
‘Are you coming with me to see Dad and Pellerina for the Lucia celebrations?’
‘I told you, I’d love to,’ Randy replies, still taking pictures.
His gaze is introverted now, he’s already seeing the developed pictures, her white skin and luminous beauty inside the pointed star of cherries. Her ribs stand out beneath her skin like rippled sand, and her blonde pubic hair shifts from bronze to glass.
After the final picture Saga gets up and eats some of the leftover cherries from a bowl. She has red marks on her back from lying on the hard surface.
‘Are we nearly done with the foreplay?’ she asks.
‘Maybe,’ he replies.
Saga angles the floor lamp away from her and lies down on the side of the bed and waits while he disconnects the last of the cables. She has a couple of hours before it’s time to go to the hard rock club. Randy sits down on the bed and pulls his T-shirt off. She rolls onto her back and he kisses her neck and breasts.
She parts her legs slightly and closes her eyes, but she can still feel his eyes burning her skin. Randy kisses her stomach and the inside of her thighs, and she can feel his breathing as he starts to lick her, gently and rhythmically.
She disappears into the soft heat of his mouth.
The hot metal of the lamps clicks around them.
She puts one hand on his stubbled head and hears his breathing get quicker. The pulsating heat spreads through her whole body.
‘Slower,’ she whispers.
He carries on, light as a feather, and shifts sideways slightly, not noticing that he knocks the floor lamp over with his foot. She sees it fall, and feels him tremble between her legs as it hits the floor and goes out.
‘God, that gave me a fright,’ he smiles.
‘I noticed,’ she laughs.
‘OK?’
She smiles and nods, helps him take his trousers off, then pushes him down onto his back. She looks at his naked body, his muscles, narrow hips, straight black pubic hair and semi-erect penis.
Saga takes a condom out of the packet on top of his iPad next to the bed, opens the wrapper and meets his eye. She takes him gently in her mouth until he gets hard, then holds his erection with one hand and rolls the condom on.
Sh
e leans over him, opens her mouth and feels the taut, plasticky rubber against her lips and tongue.
‘Come here,’ he whispers.
She sits astride him and lets him slide all the way into her, squeezes him tight and starts to move her hips.
She leans forward, resting her hands on his chest, and slides back repeatedly, sighing. He starts to breathe faster, holding her backside with both hands, then throws his head back and ejaculates.
Saga didn’t have time to reach an orgasm, wasn’t even close, it all happened too fast, but she’s learned that that’s how he works, they’ll carry on again shortly, and she’ll have longer the second and third times.
Randy pulls the condom off and ties a knot in it. They lie beside each other without speaking. His breathing is still fast. After a short while he leans over her and starts to suck gently at one of her nipples.
Saga is stroking his damp neck when her phone rings from the pile of clothes on the floor. She gets to her feet, finds her jacket and pulls out her phone.
‘Bauer,’ she answers.
‘I know it’s late, but in my defence I’m only remembering what you said about getting in touch if we had the smallest detail that could help piece together a picture of the perpetrator,’ Senior Prosecutor Arne Rosander says.
‘Absolutely,’ Saga says very professionally.
She takes a few more steps away from the bed. Her whole body is still tingling. Through the window she sees that part of the building on the other side of the street is being redecorated, they’ve left the lights on and there’s a stepladder in the middle of the floor.
‘It might be nothing,’ Arne Rosander goes on. ‘But I’ve spoken to our eyewitness specialist … and today she interviewed another woman who saw the perpetrator in the street outside the bar … This woman wasn’t able to give any sort of description earlier – that’s the way it is sometimes – but last night she had a dream about him.’
‘I’m listening.’
Saga turns back to look at the studio again. Randy is lying naked on the bed, looking over at her with shining eyes.
‘A large man with a thick neck, cropped hair and a bloody face … and listen to this, this is pretty interesting – he was wearing pearl earrings.’