by Lars Kepler
Janus nods.
‘We talked about old times when we met,’ Rex says.
‘Happy memories,’ Janus mutters, fastening one of the buttons on his fly.
‘Yes.’
‘We can offer witness protection. I can personally guarantee the very highest level.’
‘Why would I need protection?’ Rex asks.
‘I just mean, if you have information that you don’t want to talk about because you’re worried something might happen to you,’ he explains in a low voice.
‘Is there some kind of threat against me?’ Rex asks.
‘I hope not; I love your stuff on TV,’ Janus replies. ‘All I’m saying is that I help people who help me.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t have anything to tell you.’
Janus pretends to be taken aback by this, as if he doubts Rex’s words or is at least very surprised by them.
‘I’m picking up energies from you. I like them, but they feel a bit hemmed in,’ he says, squinting at Rex.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’m joking. I can’t help it. Everyone seems to think I look like a hippie.’
‘Peace,’ Rex says with a wry smile.
‘Is that a Chagall?’ Janus asks, pointing at a print on the wall. ‘Wonderful … the falling angel.’
‘Yes.’
‘You told my colleague you had coffee with the Foreign Minister a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Yes.’
‘What day was that, exactly?’
‘I don’t remember,’ Rex says.
‘But you do remember which café you went to?’
‘Vetekatten.’
‘Coffee and cake?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s great. I mean, they ought to remember you: Rex the celebrity chef and Sweden’s Foreign Minister sitting there eating cake,’ Janus smiles.
‘Sorry, but can we do this later … we just got back from the funeral, and …’
‘I was just about to ask about that.’
‘OK, but I need to take care of my son. We’re pretty shaken …’
‘Of course, I understand,’ Janus says, raising a trembling hand to his mouth. ‘Actually, I’d like to talk to him too, when it’s convenient.’
‘Give me a call and we can arrange a time,’ Rex says, opening the door.
‘Do you have a car?’
‘No.’
‘No car,’ Janus repeats thoughtfully before disappearing down the stairs.
66
Joona spends the evening exercising in his tiny cell while repeating his Dutch lieutenant’s words about courage and fear: ‘It’s all about the strategic distribution of energy and the importance of concealing your best weapons for as long as you can.’
Joona sleeps fitfully that night and wakes early. He washes his face and starts to work through the case in his head. He examines every detail he can remember, looks at everything from all three hundred and sixty degrees, piece by piece, like the tiny cogs in a clock, and becomes increasingly confident about his theory.
Rain is falling against the window from a solid grey sky. Time passes.
It’s already afternoon when two prison guards knock on Joona’s door, unlock it and ask him to go with them.
‘I need to make a phone call, even though it’s probably already too late,’ he says.
They lead him through the tunnel without replying. As if repeating the events from a few days earlier, he is led to a meeting he hasn’t requested. This time he is shown into one of the smaller rooms beyond the usual visiting-rooms, where inmates usually see their legal representatives.
The guards let him in, then lock the door behind him.
A man is sitting with his head in his hands. The desk divided across the middle by a screen thirty centimetres high. One wall of the room is adorned with a black and white photograph of Paris. The Eiffel Tower has been tinted a golden yellow colour.
‘Is Absalon Ratjen dead?’ Joona asks.
Carlos Eliasson leans back in his chair and takes a deep breath. His face is in shadow, and there’s an anxious darkness in his otherwise friendly eyes.
‘I just want you to know that I took you seriously. I sent two response teams.’
‘Was he shot?’ Joona asks, sitting down across from his former boss.
‘Stabbed,’ Carlos says in a subdued voice.
‘First in the gut. He bled profusely but retained consciousness despite the extreme pain. Then about fifteen minutes later he was dispatched by …’
‘A machete to the back of his neck,’ Carlos whispers in astonishment.
‘By a machete to the back of his neck,’ Joona nods.
‘I don’t understand how you could have heard about that. You’ve been kept in isolation, but …’
‘And because you hadn’t figured out the killer’s plan,’ Joona goes on, ‘you couldn’t see that the Foreign Minister was the first victim because the murderer needed a big funeral to lure his next victim into the open.’
Carlos’s face turns red, and he stands up and loosens his bowtie.
‘The acting US Defence Secretary,’ he mumbles.
‘Who was right?’ Joona asks.
Carlos pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his head.
‘You were right,’ he says helplessly.
‘And who was wrong?’
‘I was. I did what you said, but I still doubted you,’ Carlos admits, and sits back down.
‘We’re facing an intelligent spree killer with top-class military training … and he has another seven victims on his list.’
‘Seven,’ Carlos whispers, staring at Joona.
‘The killer has a strong personal motive for these murders … one that somehow distorts his perception of reality.’
‘I’ve got a proposal,’ Carlos says tentatively, and takes out a leather folder.
‘I’m listening,’ Joona replies gently, just as he did a few days ago when the Prime Minister came to see him.
‘This is a signed agreement,’ Carlos says, holding up a sheet of paper. ‘The remainder of your sentence is being commuted to community service with the police … with immediate effect, if you accept the terms.’
Joona merely looks at him.
‘And, after the community service, I can guarantee that you’ll be reinstated, at your old rank,’ Carlos says, tapping the folder.
Joona’s expression doesn’t change.
‘Same pay as before. You can have more if that’s important to you.’
‘Can I have my old office back?’ Joona finally says.
‘A lot has changed while you’ve been in here,’ Carlos says, squirming in his seat. ‘We’re no longer the National Criminal Police, as you know … these days we’re the NOU, the National Operations Unit. And the National Forensics Centre is the new name for—’
‘I want my office back,’ Joona interrupts. ‘I want my old office, next to Anja.’
‘That isn’t going to work, not right now, anyway. It’s too soon, and it wouldn’t work in the building, because after all you are a convicted criminal.’
‘I see.’
‘Don’t take it too hard,’ Carlos says. ‘We’ve got a great building at Tors Street, number 11 … It’s not the same, I know, but there’s going to be an overnight flat and … Well, it’s all here in writing. Read it through, then …’
‘I prefer to trust people,’ Joona says without touching the document.
‘Is that a yes? You do want to come back, don’t you?’ Carlos asks.
‘This isn’t a game for me,’ Joona says seriously. ‘The risk of another murder increases every day the killer walks free.’
‘We can leave right away,’ Carlos says, getting up from his chair.
‘I need my Colt Combat,’ Joona says.
‘It’s in the car.’
67
Joona has been given access to a four-hundred-square-metre office in a narrow glass and steel building situated on a wedge of land between Tors Street
and the shunting yard of the Central Station.
The premises used to belong to Collector Bank, and it looks like they were abandoned in haste. A couple of ergonomic chairs have been left behind, along with a half-dismantled desk, some dusty cables and a scattering of brochures.
The first evening he makes himself a simple pasta dish in the little staff kitchen, pours himself a glass of wine and sits down to eat on one of the office chairs in the unlit conference room. Through the big, dusty windows he has a view of the rusty railway tracks and the trains rolling into the yard.
The news is dominated by the murder of the acting US Secretary of Defence. No arrests have been made. There’s talk of it being a disaster for the police, even worse than the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme back in the eighties. The FBI are sending their own team and exchanges between the two countries have become tense.
The Security Police press officer is sticking to script: all known threats are under continuous strict monitoring, and they are adhering to the very highest international standards.
Joona reads the post-mortem report on Absalon Ratjen, who was murdered in front of his wife and children. He puts his plate down on a small filing cabinet, and finds himself thinking about the railway tracks, and the merciless junctions.
Once upon a time Joona was married and had a child, and then he became single.
Memories sweep through him: his father, mother, Summa, Lumi, Disa and Valeria.
That night he settles down on a sun-bleached sofa in the reception area. Somewhere in his dreams he hears Summa laughing right next to his ear, and he turns to look at her. She’s barefoot, and the sky is burning behind her. She’s wearing a plaited crown made of red roots.
At eight o’clock the next morning a delivery from the NOU arrives: computers, printers, photocopiers, and boxes full of the paperwork relating to the investigation.
Now he can get to work.
Joona knows that none of the murders has been carried out by terrorists – it’s been a spree killer. He is hunting a killer with a carefully worked-out plan who in all likelihood will kill again soon.
He tapes photographs of the three victims up on a long wall, then draws a complex network of connections to relatives, friends and colleagues. On the opposite wall he draws up a timeline mapping their childhood, education and careers.
In the large conference room he covers the walls with photographs from the murder scenes: overviews, details, sketches, and the in-depth analysis from the post-mortem on Absalon Ratjen’s body.
He covers the floor of the hallway leading to the kitchen with the crime scene and medical reports, then lays out the transcripts of interviews with family, friends and workmates.
He spreads printouts of tip-offs from the public across the floor of the office, as well as three emails from a female reporter requesting profiles for both Absalon Ratjen’s killer and the sniper in the tower on Kungs Street.
Joona pulls his buzzing phone from his pocket and sees that the call is from the Forensic Department at Karolinska Institute.
‘Is this even legal?’ Nils ‘The Needle’ Åhlén’s nasal voice asks.
‘What?’ Joona asks with a smile.
‘I mean … Are you back in the police again? Are you leading the investigation? Are you authorised to—’
‘I think so,’ he interrupts.
‘You think so?’
‘Looks that way right now, anyway,’ Joona says.
‘Well, I want to remain anonymous when I answer your question,’ Nils says, and clears his throat. ‘Absalon Ratjen bled for precisely nineteen minutes before he was killed … which is exactly the same length of time Teddy Johnson lived between the first and final, fatal shot … I’d chalk that up to coincidence if you weren’t the one asking.’
‘Thanks for your help, Nils.’
‘I’m anonymous,’ he says pointedly, and ends the call.
Joona turns to the wall with the photographs. From the amount of blood and the splatter pattern in the Foreign Minister’s kitchen, he had already estimated that approximately fifteen minutes had passed between the first and last shots.
Now he knows that the precise answer is nineteen minutes.
He’s convinced that somewhere there’s something that connects the three victims.
That connection is the key that will unlock the case.
There’s no way they were picked at random.
There are almost too many links between William Fock and Teddy Johnson, going back to their teenage years at Ludviksberg School, but Ratjen seems utterly divorced from them.
He led an entirely different sort of life.
Nowhere in the wealth of material that’s already been gathered is there a single thing linking all three of them.
A newspaper article from the Orlando Sentinel includes a picture of the Foreign Minister and Teddy Johnson back when he was Governor of Florida, standing in front of a killer whale as it leaps out of the water.
Ratjen’s life was very different.
The lift doors open over in the reception area, then there’s a gentle knock on the glass wall of the conference room.
Saga comes in smiling and hands over a salt shaker and a loaf of bread as a housewarming gift.
‘You’ve made it really cosy,’ she jokes.
‘It’s a little bigger than my office at Kumla,’ he replies.
Stepping carefully between the sheets of paper on the floor, Saga goes and looks out of the window, then turns back towards Joona again.
‘We aren’t allowed to have any contact,’ she says. ‘But at least Verner agreed to let me continue with my investigation … I was so delighted, I managed to knock over a stack of papers on his desk … and then a report accidentally fell into my bag … but I didn’t realise that until I got home.’
‘What report?’
‘The Security Police’s file about Salim Ratjen’s family,’ she says, pulling the report from her bag.
‘Wow.’
‘You understand that under no circumstances can I forget to take this with me … and I certainly can’t say that it might be helpful to you if you’re still trying to find a link between Absalon Ratjen and the Foreign Minister.’
Joona takes the file and leafs through until he finds the pages about Absalon Ratjen. In the background he hears Saga say she’s going to pop down to Lilla Bantorget to get coffee.
‘What do you want?’ she asks.
He reads about how Absalon Ratjen fled military service, and mutters that he needs to think.
Absalon was seventeen when he came to Sweden, almost three years before Salim did. Joona already knows from the Employment Office’s records that Absalon attended language classes and applied for every job that came up, but the Security Police have more information. They found his name in an abandoned investigation into a cleaning company that was suspected of tax offences. He was one of a group of asylum-seekers who were thought to have worked illegally as cleaners, but because they were tricked out of their wages the prosecution had to be abandoned.
Joona goes into a narrow office overlooking Bonniers Konsthall. He’s gathered the facts he has about the killer on one side, and the possible parameters on the other. He’s also made a list of advanced military training courses around the world that teach the techniques demonstrated by the murderer.
He examines the forensics photographs of the wounds on Absalon Ratjen’s body. The knife hasn’t yet been identified, but the wide blade had a serrated back, and a very sharp cutting edge.
The fatal blow to the top of his spinal cord was dealt by a machete with a rusty blade.
Joona sits down on the floor to read the rest of the Security Police report.
The threatening email about ‘eating your dead heart’ was from a colleague in Canada, and concerned an upcoming Lego robot tournament.
The voice message containing the nursery rhyme about rabbits was sent from an unregistered mobile phone that is no longer in use.
Saga returns, and puts
a cup of coffee down on the floor next to him.
‘Did you find anything?’
Joona leafs past the list of phone numbers, the IP addresses and the timeline. He sips some coffee and reads about Absalon’s attempts to get a student loan.
‘It looks like one of the children ran a finger through the blood,’ Saga says, pointing at the photographs from Absalon’s kitchen.
‘Yes,’ Joona says without looking up.
He scans the list of addresses of the various asylum centres and homes where Absalon lived, comparing them with those of the Foreign Minister and US politician. Both of them were from wealthy families, and when they first left home it was to go to boarding school.
That was roughly the same time Absalon left a communal residence in Huddinge.
A year later his name cropped up in a report to the Environmental Health Board.
Joona feels a shiver run up his spine.
When Absalon was eighteen years old, an advisor at the Employment Office gave him a chance. The advisor’s son worked as a groundskeeper at a boarding school south of Stockholm, but had been having problems with drugs. Absalon was secretly offered half the son’s salary if he would take on the groundskeeper’s duties until the advisor’s son got back from rehab.
Before the story was uncovered he had been living in the groundskeeper’s flat for almost a year, driving without a licence, and handling machinery he wasn’t qualified to use.
Joona gets up and goes over to the window, takes his phone out and calls Anja.
He’s sure that he’s uncovered the link between the three victims.
‘I need to know who made a complaint to the Environmental Health Board twenty-two years ago.’
‘Do you want to talk about it over dinner?’ she says with her mouth too close to the receiver.
‘I’d be happy to.’
He hears her humming ‘Let’s talk about sex’ as her fingernails tap on the keyboard of her computer.
‘So, what do you want to know?’
‘The name of the school and the person who filed the complaint.’
‘Simon Lee Olsson … headmaster of Ludviksberg School at the time.’
When Joona ends the call Saga drops her cup in the bin and looks him in the eye.