The Rabbit Hunter

by Lars Kepler

  Whenever he spotted the sparkle of the lake through the trees he became so excited that he wanted to run the last stretch, but he always forced himself to hold back. His dad had explained that you had to approach the water carefully.

  The huge gate slides back with a heavy metallic whirr.

  The sun emerges from behind a cloud, prompting him to look up. For the first time in two years he can see the horizon. He’s looking out across fields and roads and forests.

  Joona leaves the prison grounds and reaches the car park. The gate slides shut behind him. It’s like breathing fresh air into his lungs, having a drink of water, catching his dad’s eye in unspoken agreement.

  The memory of those fishing trips comes back again, the way they would walk slowly towards the shore and see that the water was full of fish. The bright surface was broken by little rings, as if it was raining.

  The feeling of freedom is overwhelming. Emotions are churning in his chest. He could easily stop and weep, but he keeps walking without looking back. As he walks to the bus-stop, his muscles start to relax.

  He feels like he’s slowly getting back to his normal self.

  In the distance he can see the bus approaching through a cloud of dust. According to Joona’s pass, he has to get on and travel to Örebro, and then catch the train to Stockholm from there.

  He climbs onto the bus, but knows he won’t be catching the train. Instead he’s going to meet a handler from the Security Police. The meeting is due to take place in the car park beneath the Vågen shopping centre in forty-five minutes.

  He checks his watch, then leans back in his seat with a smile.

  He has the plain Omega watch that he inherited from his dad back again. His mum never sold it, even though they could have used the money.

  The sun has disappeared and the wind has picked up by the time Joona steps off the bus and makes his way to the shopping centre. Even though he only has five minutes, he stops at a fast-food stand and orders a ‘Pepper Cheese Bacon Meal with Future Fries’.

  ‘Drink?’ the owner of the restaurant asks as he prepares the food.

  ‘Fanta Exotic,’ Joona replies.

  He puts the drinks can in his pocket, then stands next to the little red flag advertising ice-cream and eats his hamburger.

  Down in the car park, a man dressed in jeans and a down jacket is standing beside a black BMW, staring at his phone.

  ‘You should have been here twenty minutes ago,’ he says sullenly when Joona appears and shakes his hand.

  ‘I wanted to get you a drink,’ Joona replies, and hands him the can.

  Taken aback, the handler thanks him and takes it before opening the car door for Joona.

  On the back seat are a basic mobile phone, a debit card and three bulky envelopes from Saga Bauer containing the forensics report from the Foreign Minister’s murder. Everything Joona has requested is in the envelopes: the preliminary investigation report, the initial findings from the post-mortem, the lab results and printouts of all the witness interviews.

  They drive past the railway station and out onto the highway towards Stockholm.

  Joona reads up on Salim Ratjen’s background, how he escaped from Afghanistan and sought asylum in Sweden, then got dragged into the drug trade. Apart from his wife, his only other family member in the country is his brother, Absalon Ratjen. The Security Police have conducted a thorough investigation, and are confident that the brothers haven’t been in contact in eight years. According to correspondence they have uncovered, Absalon severed all ties with Salim when Salim asked him to hide a large block of hash for a dealer.

  Joona has just picked up the folder of photographs from the Foreign Minister’s home when his phone rings.

  ‘Were you able to establish contact with Ratjen?’ Saga Bauer asks.

  ‘Yes. He’s given me a task, but it’s impossible to know where that might lead,’ Joona says. ‘He asked me to see his wife and tell her to make a phone call and ask for Amira.’

  ‘OK. Good work. Really good work,’ Saga says.

  ‘It’ll be a big operation tonight, won’t it?’ Joona asks, looking down at the glossy photographs: blood, splattered kitchen cabinets, an overturned potted plant, the Foreign Minister’s body from various angles, his blood-soaked torso, hands, and crooked, yellowish toes.

  ‘Do you really think you can pull this off?’ she asks seriously.

  ‘Pull it off? This is what I do,’ he replies.

  He hears her laugh to herself.

  ‘You’re aware that you’ve been away for two years, and that this killer is particularly efficient?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you read the forensic timeline?’

  ‘He knows what he’s doing, but there’s something else, I can feel it. There’s something disturbed about it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  34

  Just before they reach Norrtull the handler is given a new destination. He pulls into the car park in front of the Stallmästaregården restaurant and stops.

  ‘The team leading the operation are waiting for you in the pavilion,’ he says.

  Joona gets out of the car and sets off towards the yellow summerhouse that looks out onto the waters of Brunnsviken. Not long ago, this area was incredibly beautiful, but these days the restaurant is ensnared in a tangle of highways, bridges and viaducts.

  When he opens the thin wooden door one of the two men at the table stands up. He has strawberry-blond hair and almost white eyebrows.

  ‘My name is Janus Mickelsen. I’m in charge of the Rapid Response Unit of the Security Police,’ he says as they shake hands.

  Janus has an oddly jerky way of moving.

  Beside him sits a young man with a lopsided smile. He’s looking up at Joona with an earnest expression.

  ‘Gustav will be in the first group, leading the National Response Unit’s ground operation in the field,’ Janus says.

  Joona shakes Gustav’s hand, and holds it a moment too long as he looks into the man’s eyes.

  ‘I see you’ve grown out of your Batman costume,’ Joona says with a smile.

  ‘You remember me?’ the young man asks sceptically.

  ‘You two know each other?’ Janus asks, and smiles, revealing a network of laughter lines around his eyes.

  ‘I used to work with Gustav’s aunt at National Crime,’ Joona explains.

  Joona thinks back to the party at Anja’s summer cottage on the shores of Lake Mälaren. Gustav was only seven years old. He was dressed in a Batman costume, and spent the entire time racing around on the grass. They sat on blankets eating cold-smoked salmon and potato salad and drinking beer. Later, Gustav sat with Joona and kept asking what it was like to be a policeman.

  Joona removed the magazine from his pistol and let the boy hold it. Afterwards Anja tried to persuade Gustav that it wasn’t a real pistol but a practice one.

  ‘Anja’s always been like a second mother to me,’ Gustav smiles. ‘She thinks being in the police is too dangerous.’

  ‘Things could get very dangerous tonight,’ Joona nods.

  ‘And no one will thank you if you get yourself killed,’ Janus says with an unexpectedly bitter tone in his voice.

  Joona recalls that Janus Mickelsen had been some sort of whistle-blower many years ago. It was a big deal at the time, at least for a few weeks. He had made his career in the military, and was part of a pan-European operation against piracy in the shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia. When his superiors refused to listen to him, he spoke to the media about how the semiautomatic rifles they had been issued became overheated very quickly. Janus claimed the weapons were so inaccurate that they were a security risk. The semiautomatics stayed, and Janus lost his job.

  ‘We’ll start the operation at Salim Ratjen’s wife’s home. We begin at seven o’clock this evening,’ Janus explains as he unfolds a map.

  He points at a building in a patch of woodland where the Response Unit will lie in wait, just opposite Parisa’s ho
use.

  ‘Have you managed to find out anything about who this Amira is, and where the phone with that number might be?’ Joona asks.

  ‘We don’t have any matches on the name. The phone with that number is somewhere in the Malmö area, but we don’t have any way of tracing it at the moment.’

  ‘For the time being we’re concentrating on the operation ahead of us,’ Gustav says. ‘Ratjen’s wife works as a nurse at a dental clinic in Bandhagen. She finishes work at six, and will be home around six forty-five if she stops to go grocery shopping at the supermarket like she usually does.’

  ‘Ratjen has planned the second attack for Wednesday,’ Janus says. ‘This is our chance to stop it.’

  ‘But you still don’t know what his wife’s role is?’ Joona says.

  ‘We’re working on that,’ Janus replies, wiping the sweat from his freckled forehead.

  ‘Maybe she’s just a middle-man.’

  ‘We don’t really know anything,’ Gustav says. ‘This is a gamble, sure, but at the same time … We don’t need much to fit these pieces together, one tiny detail could do it. If you can find out anything about how the plan works, who the target of Wednesday’s attack is going to be, or where it’s going to take place, then we might be able to stop this whole thing right now.’

  ‘I want to talk to the witness before the operation,’ Joona says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to know what the killer did between the first shot and the one that killed him.’

  ‘He said that stuff about Ratjen and hell. It’s in the report, I must have read it a hundred times,’ Janus says.

  ‘But that doesn’t account for the remaining time,’ Joona persists.

  ‘He picked up the spent shells.’

  The internal forensic analysis isn’t complete, but Joona has studied the splatter patterns, the blood on the floor and the convergence points, and he’s sure that the post-mortem is going to show that more than fifteen minutes elapsed between the first two shots to the victim’s torso, and the fatal shot to his eye.

  For now, the forensics experts estimate that the sequence of events took no longer than five minutes in total.

  Picking up the shells, moving around and uttering those few sentences could account for those five minutes.

  If Joona’s right, though, there are still more than ten minutes that can’t be explained.

  What happened during that time?

  The killer is a highly skilled professional. There has to be a reason why he didn’t carry out the execution as quickly as possible.

  Joona has no idea what that reason might be, but he has a feeling that there’s a vital piece missing from the picture, something much darker than what they’ve seen so far.

  ‘I’d still like to see her, if possible,’ he says.

  ‘We’ll arrange it,’ Janus nods, and tears open the seal on a large padded envelope. ‘There’s time, since the operation won’t be starting until seven o’clock. We’re meeting for a final briefing at five.’

  He hands Joona a well-worn service pistol with an extra magazine, two boxes of ammunition, 9x19 parabellum bullets, and a set of Volvo keys.

  Joona draws the pistol from its holster and looks at it. It’s a matte black Sig Sauer P226 Tactical.

  ‘Good enough?’ Janus says, and smiles as if he’s just said something very funny.

  ‘You don’t have any other shoulder holsters?’ Joona asks.

  ‘This one’s standard issue,’ Gustav replies, slightly bemused.

  ‘I know. It doesn’t really matter, it just moves around a little too much,’ Joona says.

  35

  Joona follows his handler’s black BMW down into the depths of the garage beneath Katarinaberget and parks in front of a rough concrete wall.

  They’re far below the shelter’s immense, sliding doors.

  He’s heard rumours that the Security Police had a secret prison, but didn’t know it was here.

  His handler is waiting for him. He runs his ID through a card-reader and taps in a long code.

  Joona follows the man into the airlock. Once the door to the garage has locked behind them, the man runs his card through another reader and taps in another code. They are let into the security control room. Joona slides his ID through a hatch and the guard behind the reinforced glass checks it.

  Joona signs himself in and his irises and fingerprints are scanned.

  He puts his jacket, pistol and shoes on a conveyor-belt, walks through the body-scanner and is allowed past the next airlock, where he introduces himself to a female agent whose dark-brown hair is in a thick plait over one shoulder.

  ‘I know who you are,’ she says, blushing slightly.

  She returns his pistol, watches as he puts the holster back on, then hands him his jacket.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re a lot younger than I expected,’ she adds, and her blush spreads to her neck.

  ‘So are you,’ he smiles, and puts his shoes back on.

  They start walking, and the agent explains that they’ve moved Sofia Stefansson from the old ice-store to an isolation room in the machine house.

  Joona has read and compared all the interviews that have been conducted with Sofia.

  Her testimony is fairly consistent.

  The few discrepancies can be ascribed to her fear: she wanted to be helpful and said what she thought her interrogator wanted to hear.

  Saga’s interview with Sofia is the most useful: it’s fairly exceptional given the circumstances. She managed to help the witness remember the short conversation in which Ratjen’s name was mentioned by highlighting specific details.

  Without that interview, they wouldn’t even have a case.

  But if Joona is right about the timing, the witness has been keeping quiet about a large chunk of what happened.

  The killer fired two shots, then moved quickly and purposefully, running over to grab the Foreign Minister by the hair, force him down on his knees, and then press the pistol to one of his eyes.

  The killer treated his victim like an enemy, Joona thinks.

  If you ignore the missing minutes, the attack looks more like something that happened in the heat of battle than an execution.

  Sofia slipped and hit the back of her head on the floor, then lay there listening to the brief conversation about Ratjen before the Foreign Minister was killed by a shot to the eye.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ Joona explains, without the agent having asked.

  ‘You don’t have to explain,’ she says, stopping in front of a metal door.

  The agent knocks on the metal door, tells Sofia she has a visitor, and lets Joona in, locking the door behind him.

  Sofia is sitting on a dove-blue sofa in front of a television, watching an episode of the BBC’s adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. The television is connected only to a DVD-player. There are piles of discs in front of her, alongside a large plastic bottle of Coke.

  Her face is pale and she’s not wearing any make-up. She looks like a child with her fragile body and light-brown hair pulled up into a ponytail. She has on grey tracksuit bottoms and a white T-shirt with a sparkly kitten on the front. One of her hands is bandaged, and she has grey bruises around her wrists.

  Joona can see that, although she hasn’t accepted her new life yet and she’s terrified that they’re going to start torturing her again, she has started to understand that they aren’t going to kill her, but they aren’t going to let her go any time soon either.

  ‘My name is Joona Linna,’ he says. ‘I used to be a detective … I’ve read all the interviews with you. Everything tells me that you’re entirely innocent, and I understand why you’re frightened given the way you’ve been treated here.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispers, switching the television off.

  He waits a moment before sitting down beside her. He is aware that sudden movements or sharp noises can trigger post-traumatic stress which would make her clam up. He saw her tremble when the agent locked the doo
r: perhaps the metallic sound reminded her of the noise of a spent bullet.

  ‘I don’t have the authority to get you released,’ he explains frankly. ‘But I’d still like you to help me. I need you to make more of an effort than ever to remember the things I ask you about.’

  He can feel her trying to read him, her survival instinct attempting to break through the shock.

  Very slowly he pulls out the two composite sketches that have been produced using her description.

  In one of them the balaclava covers the murderer’s head so that only his eyes and mouth are visible.

  In the other they’ve attempted to imagine his face without the mask – but the lack of detail makes it look like the face is still covered.

  There’s nothing particularly distinctive about the killer’s features. His eyes are maybe strangely calm, his nose more prominent than usual. His mouth is almost white, and his jaw is fairly broad, but he has an unremarkable chin.

  He has no beard or moustache in the sketch, but from the colour of his eyebrows they have chosen to give him mousy-blond hair, in a nondescript cut.

  ‘They tried a longer nose and I said “I don’t know”,’ she explains. ‘They made it shorter and I said “Maybe, I don’t know”, they made it thinner and I said “I don’t know”, they made it wider and I said “Maybe” … In the end they got annoyed and decided it was good enough.’

  ‘It looks good,’ Joona said.

  ‘Maybe I just feel unsure about everything because they kept questioning my memory the whole time. He was black for a while, but I hadn’t said anything like that. Maybe they were trying to get me to remember other things, like the colour of his eyes and eyebrows.’

  ‘They understand how people remember faces,’ Joona nods.

  ‘He had long hair for a while, with straggly bits around his cheeks,’ she says with a frown. ‘It suddenly popped into my head that I’d seen that, but I knew he’d kept the balaclava on the whole time, so it couldn’t be true, I couldn’t have seen his hair.’

  ‘What do you think you saw?’ he asks gently.