The Rabbit Hunter

by Lars Kepler

  ‘Why did they do it?’ Joona interrupts.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lock you up.’

  ‘So that Wille could see Grace without being disturbed, I assume.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘He always got what he wanted,’ Rex mutters, chalking his cue.

  ‘Aim for the Kaisa,’ Joona says, pointing at the yellow ball. ‘She needs to go into this pocket.’

  Rex leans forward and takes the shot, but ends up hitting one of the reds, which rolls into the other red.

  ‘And that’s a kiss,’ Joona says. ‘No points for that.’

  Rex shakes his head with a smile as Joona steps up and hits the Kaisa straight into the corner pocket.

  ‘What does Grace say?’ Joona says as he continues with his turn.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the evening you were locked up,’ he replies, taking another shot and potting Rex’s white cue-ball in the same pocket.

  ‘I don’t know. I never saw her again,’ Rex says. ‘I left the school and she never answered my letters or phone calls.’

  ‘I’m talking about now, though,’ Joona says.

  ‘I heard she moved back to Chicago, but I haven’t seen her for thirty years.’

  ‘You’ve been accused of murdering the Foreign Minister,’ Joona says.

  ‘Who’d accuse me of that?’ Rex manages to say.

  ‘You’re in serious trouble here,’ Joona says, backing away from the table.

  ‘I’ve done lots of stupid things,’ Rex tries to explain as he adjusts the position of his cue. ‘But I haven’t killed anyone.’

  His shot misses. The white cue-ball rolls past the Kaisa, hits the cushion and bounces off.

  ‘If you’re not involved in the murders, then you could be on the list of future victims.’

  ‘Am I going to get protection?’

  ‘If you can explain why,’ Joona says.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Rex says, wiping his forehead.

  ‘Revenge?’ the detective suggests, taking his shot.

  ‘That’s not very likely.’

  Joona gives him a sideways glance, then takes another shot.

  ‘It depends on what you’ve done,’ he says.

  ‘Nothing,’ Rex protests. ‘What the hell, I get under people’s skin, maybe I sleep with women I shouldn’t, say stupid stuff, and no doubt there are plenty of people who’d like to take a swing at me, but—’

  ‘Forty-one,’ Joona says, then straightens up and looks at him seriously.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Rex says.

  ‘So you’ve done lots of stupid things,’ Joona reminds him.

  ‘I pissed in the Foreign Minister’s pool, but I—’

  ‘You already said that,’ Joona interrupts.

  ‘I’ve done it more than once,’ Rex confesses, suddenly blushing.

  ‘I don’t care where you’ve pissed.’

  ‘A hundred times, maybe,’ he says, with a peculiar intensity in his voice.

  ‘Get a different hobby.’

  ‘I will, of course I will. What I’m trying to say is that I saw something once when I was there.’

  Joona leans over and takes another shot, to prevent Rex from seeing the satisfied smile on his face. The balls click together, and one of them hits the cushion and rebounds into a pocket.

  ‘Forty-nine,’ Joona says, slowly chalking the end of his cue.

  ‘Listen,’ Rex goes on. ‘I’m a sober alcoholic these days, but before things changed, before I started to take it seriously, I used to go there a lot … Sometimes I threw those hideous garden gnomes of his in the water, sometimes terracotta pots and garden furniture. I mean, he must have known about it, and just didn’t care, unless he thought it was fair payback.’

  ‘You thought you saw something?’ Joona prompts, as he moves around the table checking the angles.

  ‘I know I saw something, even if I was drunk … I don’t remember when, but I still know what I saw …’

  He falls silent and shakes his head sadly.

  ‘You can think what you like,’ he says in a low voice, ‘but I saw someone in a mask with a weird, bulging face … inside the Foreign Minister’s house.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Four months, maybe? I’m not really sure.’

  ‘What were you doing earlier that day?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Where did you get drunk?’

  ‘Just like Jack Kerouac, I try to do my drinking at home, to limit the damage, but it doesn’t always work out.’

  Joona takes another shot, the balls click and the Kaisa disappears into the corner pocket.

  ‘Which month was it?’

  He knocks Rex’s cue-ball into the same pocket, simultaneously hitting a red ball, which rolls diagonally across the table and down into the opposite pocket.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Rex says.

  ‘Fifty-nine points,’ Joona says. ‘What did you do afterwards?’

  ‘Afterwards?’ Rex says, trying to remember. ‘Oh, yeah … I went to Sylvia’s, she never sleeps, and tried to tell her what I’d seen. It seemed like a really smart idea at the time, but …’

  ‘And what did she think?’ Joona asks, holding back on his final shot.

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ he says, sounding frustrated.

  ‘You went to see Sylvia … and said nothing?’

  ‘We had sex,’ he mutters.

  ‘Do you usually see Sylvia when you’re drunk?’ Joona asks.

  ‘I hope not,’ Rex says, leaning his cue against the wall.

  ‘We can stop playing. We can even agree to a tie,’ Joona says. ‘If you call Sylvia and ask what date it was.’

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘OK.’

  Joona leans across the table with his cue.

  ‘Hold on,’ Rex says quickly. ‘You were joking about arresting me, right?’

  Joona straightens up, turns towards him and looks him in the eye with a completely neutral expression.

  Rex runs his hand through his hair and takes out his iPhone, puts his glasses on and looks for Sylvia among his contacts. He walks off towards the bar as he makes the call.

  ‘Sylvia Lund,’ she says when she answers.

  ‘Hi, it’s me, Rex.’

  ‘Hello, Rex,’ she says in a measured tone of voice.

  He makes an effort to keep his voice friendly and stress-free.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  Rex looks at the tired-looking man behind the bar.

  ‘No, I’m not drunk, but—’

  ‘You sound strange,’ she interrupts.

  Rex walks a little way up the ramp towards the street in order to talk in peace.

  ‘I need to ask you something,’ he says.

  ‘Can we do this tomorrow? I’m kind of busy,’ she says impatiently.

  Her voice fades as she turns to say something to someone else.

  ‘But I just need—’

  ‘Rex, my daughter’s been invited to—’

  ‘Listen, I just need to know what day I came to see you that night, and—’

  The line goes dead as Sylvia hangs up on him.

  Rex looks out at the street and sees a balloon floating between the cars. He can feel his hands shaking as he calls her again.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ Sylvia asks angrily.

  ‘I just need to know when it was,’ he persists.

  ‘It’s over,’ she says. ‘I want you to stop—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘You’re drunk, I knew it—’

  ‘Sylvia, if you don’t tell me, I’m going to call your husband and ask when was the last time he got home from a trip and you were nicer than usual to him.’

  There’s complete silence on the line. Sweat trickles down his back.

  ‘The last day of April,’ she says, and ends the call.

  86

  A student with matted hair gets out
of the lift at the seventeenth floor, but Joona goes up to the top of the building, cool-box in hand. He feels like he’s trying to start a fire by gently blowing on the embers, and he knows that flames are going to leap up any minute now. He’s here to see Johan Jönson, a computer expert for the NOU, and one of the best IT analysts in Europe. Johan was known as ‘the nerd’, until he developed the Transvector decryption program that MI6 have started using.

  Johan opens the door with a sandwich in his hand and invites Joona into the large room.

  In return for turning down all his lucrative private sector offers, Johan demanded to have the entire top floor of the Nyponet block of student residences at the college put at his disposal.

  All the internal walls have been removed and replaced by plain steel pillars. The huge room is stuffed full of electronic equipment.

  Johan is a rather short man with a black moustache and a small goatee. His head is shaved, and his dark eyebrows are thick, growing together across the top of his nose. He’s wearing a tight shirt that looks like Paris Saint-Germain’s uniform, and it’s slid up to reveal his bulging stomach.

  Joona takes the hard-drive containing the security-camera footage from the Foreign Minister’s home out of the cool-box, removes the bubble-wrap and hands it to Johan Jönson.

  ‘You can find erased material, can’t you?’ Joona says.

  ‘Erased sometimes means just that,’ the analyst replies. ‘But usually it just means that you say it’s been erased even though it’s still there. It’s a little like Tetris, the older material just sinks deeper and deeper.’

  ‘This recording is four months old.’

  Johan puts the remains of his sandwich down on a dusty monitor and weighs the hard-drive in his hand.

  ‘I think we should try a program called Under Work Schedule, which brings everything up at the same time … it’s a little like one of those paper garlands you cut and unfold, with lots of angels or gingerbread men all joined together.’

  ‘Quite a long garland,’ Joona says.

  It’s possible to restore deleted digital material, but given the thirteen cameras in the Foreign Minister’s home were installed seven years ago, they would effectively have to look through ninety-one years’ worth of footage.

  Not even Joona could persuade Carlos to provide the resources necessary to look through that amount of material. But now that he has a precise date, nothing can stop him.

  ‘Look for Walpurgis Night,’ he says.

  Johan sits down on a stained office chair and grabs a handful of sweets from a plastic bowl.

  More than forty computers of various types are perched on top of desks, filing cabinets and kitchen tables. Bundles of cables run across the floor between crates full of old hard-drives. In one corner of the huge space is a stack of obsolete equipment: assorted circuit boards, soundcards, graphics cards, screens, keyboards, routers, consoles and processors.

  Joona spots an unmade bed with no legs in one corner, behind a bench covered with spare parts and a magnifying lamp. There’s a collection of bright yellow earplugs on an upturned plastic bucket, next to an alarm clock. Johan probably has less space to live in now than he did when he was a student.

  ‘Move that printer and sit down,’ he says to Joona as he attaches the hard-drive to the main computer in the network.

  ‘We have footage from the last time Rex pissed in the swimming pool in our files already, but we’re looking for the thirtieth of April, so it’ll be material that’s been recorded over several times,’ Joona explains, moving the printer and a Thomas Pynchon book from the chair.

  ‘Excuse the mess, but I’ve just linked up thirty computers with the help of a new version of MPI in order to get the sort of supercomputer I need.’

  The date and time are at the bottom of the screen. The image shows the first light of day hitting the front of the house and the closed front door.

  ‘Good cameras, good lenses, ultra-HD,’ Johan nods approvingly.

  Joona lays out a map showing the location of every camera in the Foreign Minister’s property, numbered one to thirteen.

  ‘OK, let’s burn some rubber,’ Johan mutters as he types commands with a rapid-fire clatter of keys.

  The row of computers begins to click, fans whirr into life and diodes start to flash.

  ‘Up comes the underworld … slowly but surely,’ the analyst says, tugging at his short beard.

  A grey image appears on the large screen, like iron filings gathering around shifting magnetic fields.

  ‘It’s too old,’ Johan whispers.

  Several layers of flickering shadows appear, and they can make out parts of the garden. Joona sees two ghostly silhouettes walk down the drive. One is the Foreign Minister, and the other is Janus Mickelsen of the Security Police.

  ‘Janus,’ Joona says.

  ‘The Foreign Minister was his first deployment with the Security Police,’ Johan murmurs as he types new commands into the main computer.

  The image disappears, the house is just about visible through the grey fog, and the snow-covered garden flickers into view.

  ‘The garland’s still folded up, but we can start pulling the gingerbread men apart now … June fourth, June third, June second …’

  Pale shapes glide to and fro at a rapid pace, passing straight through each other. It looks like an X-ray, with the outlines of figures moving inside one another, through cars reversing and driving into the garage.

  ‘May fifteenth, fourteenth … And here we have thirteen lovely versions of the last day of April,’ Johan Jönson says softly.

  With the footage running at eight times normal speed, they watch the Foreign Minister and his wife leave the house at 7.30 in separate cars. A landscaping company appears two hours later. One man cuts the hedge and another blows leaves. The postman drives past, and at 2.00 a boy on a bike stops and looks into the garden as he scratches his leg. At 7.40 the first car returns to the double garage and lights go on inside the house. Half an hour later the second car arrives, and the garage door closes. Around 11.00 the lights start to go off, and by midnight everything is dark. Then nothing happens until 3.00 a.m., when Rex Müller climbs over the fence and weaves his way across the lawn.

  ‘Now let’s check the cameras in real-time, one by one,’ Joona says, moving closer.

  ‘OK,’ Johan says, tapping a new command. ‘We’ll start with number one.’

  On the large screen they see a perfectly sharp image of the front door and a view of the illuminated garden down towards the gate. Every so often pink petals from the flowering Japanese cherry trees drift down.

  87

  After three hours they’ve looked through that night’s footage from all thirteen cameras. Thirteen different angles of a sleeping house on the morning of May 1 between 3.36 and 3.55. Four cameras captured Rex during those nine minutes, from the moment he puts his bottle down in the middle of the road and clambers over the black iron railings, until he leaves the garden and delightedly ‘discovers’ a bottle of wine in the middle of the road.

  ‘Nothing,’ Johan sighs.

  Rex is in the grounds for nine minutes, and during that time there is no sign of anyone else in any of the recordings, no vehicles on the road, no movement behind the curtains.

  ‘But he saw the murderer,’ Joona says. ‘He must have, his description matches what other witnesses have said.’

  ‘Maybe it was a different day,’ Johan mutters.

  ‘No, this was the night it happened … He saw the murderer, even if we can’t,’ Joona says.

  ‘We can’t see what he saw – all we’ve got are these cameras.’

  ‘If only we knew exactly when he saw him … Start with camera seven, that’s the one pointing at the pool.’

  Once again they see Rex on the edge of the screen as he stumbles onto the deck at the outer limit of the lens’s distorted perspective.

  He walks over to the side of the pool, sways for a while, then opens his fly and urinates in the water, before weavi
ng over to the navy-blue garden furniture and letting his urine cascade over the recliners and table.

  He buttons his trousers, turns towards the garden and looks at something. He lurches slightly, then walks back towards the house, where he stops in front of the patio door and looks into the living room. He leans against the railing, then disappears out of shot.

  ‘What’s he looking at just after he zips his fly? There’s something in the garden,’ Joona says.

  ‘You want me to enlarge his face?’

  On the screen Rex moves backwards towards the pool, circles the furniture and turns his back to the camera.

  When he starts to move forward again, Johan zooms in on his face and follows it as he urinates on the table. He rests his chin on his chest, closes his eyes and lets out a sigh before zipping his trousers.

  Rex turns towards the garden, sees something and smiles lazily to himself before his face slips offscreen as he loses his footing.

  ‘No, it’s not there … keep going,’ Joona says.

  Rex turns to face the house and starts to walk towards it, and Johan zooms in even closer. Rex’s drunk face fills the whole screen: bloodshot eyes, bottom lip dark with wine, stubble starting to grow out.

  They see him stop in front of the patio doors and look into the living room. He opens his mouth slightly, as if he realises he’s been spotted, before the look in his eyes becomes concerned, scared, and he turns away and disappears.

  ‘There! That’s when he sees him,’ Joona says urgently. ‘Run it again. We need to take another look.’

  Johan Jönson makes a loop of the twenty seconds in front of the glass door, when Rex sees something and starts to smile before becoming scared.

  ‘What do you see?’ Joona whispers.

  They zoom out and try to follow his gaze. He seems to be staring directly into the living room.

  Without breaking the loop, they switch to camera six and see Rex from behind and slightly off to one side. His face is reflected in the glass, as if he’s looking at his own reflection.

  ‘Is he in there?’ Joona whispers.

  The shift in Rex’s face, from bemusement to fear, is visible in the reflected image. Through the glass the living-room furniture looks like indistinct shadows.

  ‘Is there someone standing in there?’ Johan says, leaning forward.