The Nightmare

by Lars Kepler

  “Checked out the body?” Tommy asks in his sullen fashion.

  “I didn’t even enter the room,” John replies.

  “Good,” Kofoed mumbles, and he begins to lay protective mats on the floor.

  Minutes later, Joona and Nathan Pollock are able to walk into the hallway. John Bengtsson is waiting for them next to a blue sofa. He points toward the double doors that are ajar and reveal a well-lit room. Joona continues walking across the protective mats and pushes the doors wide open.

  Warm sunshine pours into the room through high windows. Carl Palmcrona is hanging in the center of the spacious room. Flies creep over his white face and into his eye sockets and open mouth to lay their small, yellowish eggs. They buzz around the pool of urine as well as the sleek black briefcase on the floor. The narrow laundry line has cut into Palmcrona’s throat, forming a deep red furrow. Blood has flowed out and down his shirtfront.

  “Executed,” Tommy Kofoed declares as he pulls on protective gloves.

  Every trace of sullenness has vanished, and he smiles as he goes down on his knees to begin photographing the hanging body.

  “We’ll probably find injuries to the cervical vertebra,” Pollock says pointing.

  Joona glances up at the ceiling and back to the floor.

  “Obviously it’s a statement,” Kofoed says triumphantly and keeps the flashing camera focused on the corpse. “I mean, the killer didn’t bother to hide the body but wants to say something instead.”

  “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Bengtsson exclaims just as eagerly. “The room is empty and there are no chairs or ladders to climb on.”

  “So the question is, what does the killer want to say?” Tommy Kofoed says as he lowers the camera to peer at the body. “Hanging is connected to treason and betrayal. Think of Judas Iscariot who—”

  “Just a second,” Joona says mildly.

  They see him point at the floor.

  “What is it?” asks Pollock.

  “We’re looking at a suicide,” Joona replies.

  “What a typical suicide!” Tommy Kofoed laughs. “He flaps his wings and flies—”

  “The briefcase,” Joona says. “If he set it upright, he’d reach the noose.”

  “But he couldn’t have reached the ceiling,” Pollock points out.

  “He could have fastened the noose beforehand.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  Joona shrugs and says, “Keep in mind the music and the knots …”

  “Let’s take a look at the briefcase,” Pollock says.

  “Let me just secure the area first,” says Kofoed.

  They watch Kofoed, his bent, short body, as he creeps forward and rolls out over the floor a sheet of black plastic film with a bottom layer of thin gelatin. Then he carefully presses on the film with a rubber roller.

  “Can you get me a couple of bio-packs and a large container?” he requests as he points to his collection bag.

  “Wellpapp?” asks Pollock.

  “Yes, thanks,” Tommy says as he catches the packs that Pollock throws in a high arch to him.

  He secures any biological traces on the floor and then waves Pollock into the room.

  “You’ll find the marks of his shoes on the outer edge of the briefcase,” Joona says. “It has fallen over backward and the body has swung diagonally.”

  Pollock says nothing, just walks over to the leather briefcase and gets on his knees beside it. His silver ponytail falls forward as he leans down to put the briefcase on its edge. Obvious light gray marks are clearly visible on the black leather.

  “So it’s so, then,” Joona remarks quietly.

  “Fucking awesome,” Tommy Kofoed says, and his whole tired face smiles up at Joona.

  “Suicide,” Pollock mutters.

  “Technically speaking, yes,” Joona says.

  They stand looking at the body for a while.

  “What do we really have here?” asks Kofoed. He’s still smiling. “Someone high up, with a job deciding who can export military equipment, who decides now to take his own life.”

  “Not our department,” sighs Pollock.

  Tommy Kofoed rolls off his gloves and gestures at the hanging man.

  “Joona? What’s the deal with the knots and the music?” he asks.

  “It’s a double sheet bend,” Joona says and points to the knots around the lamp hook. “I connect it to Palmcrona’s long naval career.”

  “And the music?”

  Joona stops and looks at him meditatively.

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  “Well, I know it’s a sonata for violin. Early nineteenth century or—”

  He is interrupted by the doorbell. The four of them glance at one another. Joona starts to walk back to the hallway and the rest follow but stop before they can be seen from the landing.

  At the front door, Joona considers a quick view through the peephole but decides against it. He can feel air stream through the keyhole as he presses down the door handle. The heavy door swings open. The landing is dark. Joona’s hand goes for his pistol as he checks behind the open door. A tall woman is caught in a faint gap of light by the handrail. She has huge hands. She’s probably about sixty-five years old. She’s completely still. Her gray hair is cut in a short, girlish pageboy style, and there’s a large, skin-colored bandage on her chin. She looks Joona right in the eye without a hint of a smile.

  “So have you cut him down yet?” she asks.

  7

  helpful people

  Joona had thought he’d have time to make the National Criminal Investigation Department meeting at one o’clock.

  But he’d wanted to have lunch with Disa first. They were to meet at Rosendal’s Garden on Djurgården. Joona arrived early and had to wait for a while in the sunshine. He idly watched the mist hovering over the small vineyard. Then he saw Disa coming, her cloth purse slung over her shoulder. Her narrow, intelligent face was closely sprinkled with late-spring freckles and her hair flowed free over her shoulders, loosed from its customary tight braids. She’d prettied up in a dress patterned in small flowers; on her feet were sandals with wedge heels.

  Carefully they hugged each other.

  “Hi,” Joona said. “You look great.”

  “You, too,” said Disa.

  Together they went to the buffet to choose their food and then sat down at an outdoor table. Joona noticed that her nails wore a new coat of polish. Usually they were short and ragged, embedded with the dirt Disa picked up in her work as an archaeologist. Joona’s gaze wandered away from her hands and out over the orchard.

  “Queen Kristina received a leopard as a present from the Count of Kurland. She kept it here at Djurgården.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Joona said absentmindedly.

  “I read in the palace accounts that the Royal Treasury paid forty daler in silver coins, the cost of a serving girl’s funeral. She was ripped apart by that leopard.”

  Disa leaned back in her chair and picked up her glass.

  “Stop talking so much, Joona Linna,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Joona said. “I just …”

  He fell silent again, suddenly exhausted.

  “What’s up?” She was suddenly concerned.

  “Please, just tell me more about the leopard.”

  “You look so sad.”

  “I was thinking about my mother … It’s been one year today since she passed away. I went to lay a wreath at her grave.”

  “I miss Ritva very much,” Disa said.

  She put her fork down and sat quietly for a while.

  Finally she said, “Do you know what she said the last time I saw her? She took my hand and told me that I should seduce you and make sure I got knocked up.”

  Joona laughed. “I can believe that!”

  The sun sparkled in Disa’s quiet, dark eyes. “I told her that I didn’t believe that would happen. Then she told me I should leave you and never look back.”

  He nodded bu
t was at a loss for words.

  “And then you’d be all alone,” Disa continued. “A large, lonely Finn.”

  He stroked her fingers.

  “I don’t want that,” he said.

  “Don’t want what?”

  “Don’t want to be a large, lonely Finn.”

  “And I now want to use my teeth on you. Bite you hard. Can you explain that? My teeth always start to itch when I look at you,” Disa said with a smile.

  Joona reached out to touch her face. He knew he was already late to the meeting with Carlos Eliasson and the CID, but he kept sitting there across from Disa, making small talk and thinking at the same time that he should go down to the Nordic Museum to look at the Sami bridal crown.

  ———

  While he was waiting for Joona Linna, Carlos Eliasson had told the National Criminal Investigation Department about the young woman who’d been found dead on a motorboat in the Stockholm archipelago, and Benny Rubin noted for the record that there was no rush to begin an investigation and that they should wait for the Coast Guard’s findings.

  Joona had come in a little later but had hardly taken part in the meeting when a call came from John Bengtsson of Routine Patrol.

  Joona and John had a history together over the years. They’d played floorball more than a decade before. John Bengtsson was popular, but when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, a lot of his friends had fallen away. Although he was now fully recovered, like other people who’d had a brush with death, he had a slight air of fragility, of a depth of understanding, about him.

  Joona had stood in the hallway outside the conference room listening on the phone to John’s slow recitation. His voice was filled with the tiredness that comes immediately after high stress. He described how he’d just found the general director for the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products hanging from the ceiling in his home.

  “Suicide?” asked Joona.

  “No.”

  “Murder?”

  “Can’t you just come over?” John asked. “I can’t decide what I’m seeing. The body is hanging way too high above the floor, Joona.”

  He’d taken Nathan Pollock and Tommy Kofoed along. Joona had just explained that this was a suicide when the doorbell had rung at Palmcrona’s home. In the darkness of the landing, a woman was standing and holding two plastic grocery bags in her large hands.

  “So have you cut him down yet?” she asked.

  “Cut him down?”

  “Director Palmcrona,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Excuse me, I’m just a housekeeper and I thought …”

  Obviously she was troubled, and she turned away to start walking down the stairs. She was stopped in her tracks by the answer to her first question.

  “He’s still hanging there.”

  “I see.” She turned toward him with a blank face.

  Joona asked, “Did you see him earlier today?”

  “No.”

  “How did you come to ask whether we’d taken him down, then? Did you see anything unusual?”

  “A noose from the ceiling in the small salon,” she answered.

  “So you saw the noose?”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “But you weren’t afraid that he might use it?”

  “Dying’s not a nightmare.” She was holding back a smile.

  “What did you just say?”

  The woman just shook her head.

  “How do you think he died, then?”

  “I think he tightened the noose around his neck,” she replied in a low voice.

  “How did he manage to get the noose around his neck?”

  “I don’t know … maybe he needed help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  Her eyes rolled toward the back of her head and for an instant, Joona thought she was going to faint. Instead, she steadied herself with a hand on the wall and then she met his gaze.

  Softly, she said, “There are always helpful people around.”

  8

  the needle

  The police station’s swimming pool is large and blue, almost completely still. Lit from below, its light dances across the walls and ceiling of the natatorium, and all that breaks the stillness is the steady movement of Joona Linna swimming laps, one after the other.

  While he swims, idle thoughts tumble over and over in his head: Disa’s face when she told him her teeth itched when she looks at him.

  Joona touches the edge of the pool, turns underwater, and kicks off again. He doesn’t realize he’s picking up speed when the memory of Carl Palmcrona’s apartment on Grevgatan comes to him. Once again, he sees the hanging body, the pool of urine, and the flies on the body’s face. The dead man had been wearing his coat and shoes and yet had taken the time to turn on music.

  Actions both impulsive and yet planned, not that unusual when it comes to suicide.

  Joona’s swimming even faster now, picking up more speed as he kicks off another lap. He sees himself walking back through Palmcrona’s hallway and opening the door after the unexpected ringing of the doorbell. The tall woman in the darkness of the landing. The impression of her large hands. The fact she was hiding behind the door.

  Breathing heavily, Joona pulls up to the edge of the pool and steadies himself, resting his arms on the plastic grille over the gutter. His breathing slows but he can feel the heavy increase of lactic acid in his shoulder muscles. A group of policemen in bathing suits walk into the pool area carrying two rescue dummies: one a child and the other an overweight adult.

  Dying’s not a nightmare. The large woman had smiled when she said that.

  Joona heaves himself out of the pool. He’s filled with nervous tension. The Carl Palmcrona case won’t leave him alone. For some reason, the empty, light-filled room keeps coming back into his mind: the languid violin music and the slow buzzing of the flies.

  Joona knows in his gut that it is a suicide and is not a case for the CID. Still, he feels the urge to run back to the apartment, to take another look and examine it minutely to make sure he’s missed nothing.

  Initially he’d thought that shock had confused the housekeeper, fogged her mind, and made her suspicious, causing her to speak in that strange, disjointed way. Now Joona tries thinking in reverse. Maybe she wasn’t confused at all. Maybe she wasn’t shocked in the least but was answering his questions as clearly as she could. Edith Schwartz had hinted that Carl Palmcrona may have had help with the noose: that there were helpful hands, helpful people. In any case, she’d insinuated he was not alone in meeting his death. He was not the only person responsible.

  Something is not right.

  But he can’t put his finger on why he thinks that.

  Joona walks through the door to the changing room and unlocks his locker. He picks up his cell phone and calls Nils Åhlén, “The Needle.”

  “I’m not done yet,” The Needle says instantly.

  “It’s about Palmcrona. What was your first impression, even if—”

  “I’m not done yet.”

  “Even if you’re not done—”

  “Come by on Monday.”

  “I’m coming over now.”

  “At five o’clock, me and the missus are going to check on a sofa at the furniture store.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty-five minutes,” Joona says, and disconnects the phone before The Needle can protest again that it’s too soon.

  After Joona has showered, dressed, and come out of the changing room, he can hear the laughter from the children’s swimming class.

  He wonders what’s behind the death of a man as important as the general director for the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products. When it came to the export of military equipment in Sweden, this was the one person who made all the final decisions regarding Sweden’s export of arms, and now he’s found hanged.

  What if I’m wrong? What if he really was murdered? Joona says to himself. I have to talk to Pollock before I
go see The Needle. Maybe Pollock and Kofoed have had a chance to look at the material evidence by now.

  Joona strides through the hallway, runs down a staircase, and calls his assistant, Anja Larsson, to see if Nathan Pollock is still at the station.

  9

  all about hand-to-hand combat

  Joona’s thick hair is still wet as he opens the door to Lecture Hall 11 where Nathan Pollock is lecturing a special training group on handling hostage situations and rescue operations. Projected on the wall behind Pollock is the anatomy of a human body, and seven weapons are lined up on a table. They range from a small silver SIG Sauer P238 to a matte-black automatic carbine from Heckler & Koch equipped with a 40 millimeter grenade thrower. Pollock is demonstrating an attack technique on a young police officer. He holds a knife close to his body, then suddenly rushes the officer and marks his throat. He turns back to the group.

  “The problem with a cut like this is that the enemy can still scream. He can still move, and since only one artery is cut, it’ll take some time for him to bleed to death,” Pollock tells them.

  He walks up to the young officer again and puts his arm around the officer’s face so that his elbow covers the officer’s mouth.

  “If I do this instead, I can cover the scream, control his head, and slice open both arteries with one cut.”

  Pollock lets the young officer go just as Joona Linna enters the room. The young officer wipes his mouth and returns to his seat. With a big grin, Pollock tries to wave Joona over, but Joona shakes his head.

  “I just need a word with you,” Joona says quietly.

  A few of the police officers swivel their heads as Pollock walks over to Joona and shakes hands. The shoulders of Joona’s jacket are dark from the water dripping from his hair.

  “Tommy Kofoed took shoe prints from the Palmcrona scene,” Joona says. “I must know—did he find anything else unusual?”

  “I didn’t realize there was a rush on it,” Nathan says. He also keeps his voice low. “Of course we photographed all the impressions on the foil, but we haven’t had time to analyze the results. I absolutely have no overview yet—”