The Rabbit Hunter

by Lars Kepler

  ‘He can shoot right through our vests,’ Joona says, and leaves the room.

  93

  The sky is white now that the rain has passed. Faded dog rose petals are stuck to the drain-covers. Water drips from the roof of the Forensic Medicine Department at Karolinska Institute.

  Nils ‘The Needle’ Åhlén drives past the car park in his white Jaguar, pulls up on the pavement and stops right in front of the entrance with one of the back wheels on the flowerbed.

  The Needle’s thin face is clean-shaven, and he has his white-framed aviator sunglasses perched on his crooked nose. He’s regarded as an extremely dedicated and focused pathologist, and today he’s in an unusually good mood.

  He waves cheerily at the woman at the reception desk, goes into his office, takes his jacket off and pulls his white coat on.

  ‘You know I’m a bad man … la, la, la,’ he sings as he goes into the lab.

  The Needle’s assistant, Frippe, has already taken the body out of the store and has laid it, in the sealed bag it was placed in for transportation, on the table ready for the post-mortem.

  ‘I spoke to Carlos, and he says Joona Linna’s back,’ Nils says. ‘Now everything’s going to be fine again.’

  He stops talking abruptly, clears his throat a couple of times, takes off his glasses and polishes them on the bottom of his coat.

  ‘I’m starting to understand why I had to get Mr Ritter out again,’ Frippe says, tucking his hair up in a ponytail.

  ‘Joona thinks he was murdered,’ The Needle says, and the corners of his mouth twitch into a smile.

  ‘That’s not what I think,’ Frippe says.

  ‘Three people who attended Ludviksberg School thirty years ago have been killed this week. But Joona thinks there could be more, so Anja ran all the names from their old yearbooks through the databases. There’s one suicide in the south of Sweden that Joona plans to look into … and the only other relevant death is this one,’ Nils concludes.

  ‘Which was an accident,’ Frippe says.

  ‘Joona thinks we’ve missed a murder.’

  ‘He hasn’t even seen the damn body,’ Frippe says with barely concealed irritation.

  ‘No,’ The Needle says, smiling happily.

  ‘Carl-Erik Ritter was incredibly drunk. He had 0.23 per cent alcohol in his blood. He fell into a plate-glass window on his way home from the El Bocado pub in Axelsberg and cut his carotid artery open,’ Frippe goes on, opening the body-bag.

  A cloying, swampy smell spreads through the room.

  Carl-Erik Ritter’s naked body is brown and mottled, and his blackened stomach is distended.

  The body has been stored at a temperature of 7°C to slow the decomposition process, but they are losing the fight against decay.

  Frippe leans over the grey face, and suddenly notices something red glinting in one of the nostrils.

  ‘What the hell …?’

  A brownish red liquid starts to trickle from the nose, across the dead man’s lips and down his cheek.

  ‘Shit,’ Frippe says, jerking his head back.

  The Needle hides his smile but says nothing – he reacted that way himself once upon a time. During the process of decomposition blisters often develop beneath the skin and inside the nose; when the blisters suddenly burst and the liquid drains out, it’s easy to confuse that with a nosebleed.

  Frippe goes over to the computer and stands there for a while, before returning with his iPad and starting to compare pictures from the scene with the dead man’s injuries.

  ‘Well, I’m sticking with my evaluation,’ he says after a while. ‘It’s a textbook accident … But obviously Joona could be right about other deaths, there are other districts, we could have missed a murder in Gothenburg or Ystad.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Nils mutters, pulling on a pair of vinyl gloves.

  ‘The shop window broke and Ritter fell onto the glass. It all makes sense. Take a look at the forensics team’s report,’ Frippe says, holding out the iPad.

  Nils doesn’t take it, but instead starts to examine the many superficial cuts on the body, which now look like thin black lines, focused mainly on the hands, knees, torso and face. The only really serious wound is the incision across the throat and up towards one ear.

  ‘One straight, gaping wound,’ Frippe reads as Nils picks at the deep gash. ‘The internal edges are smooth and not particularly drenched in blood … no tissue damage or bruising, and the surrounding skin is intact …’

  ‘Fine,’ The Needle says, running his finger along the inside of the cut.

  ‘The direct cause of death was a combination of blood loss and blood aspiration,’ Frippe goes on.

  ‘Yes, it’s a very deep wound,’ Nils murmurs.

  ‘He was drunk, lost his balance, smashed onto the plate-glass window with his full bodyweight, and his neck slid down one of the jagged edges … like the blade of a guillotine.’

  Nils gives him an amused sideways glance.

  ‘But what if those unfortunate circumstances are too perfect?’ he says. ‘What if he had help from someone applying pressure to his head, someone who made sure his neck slid along the jagged edge so that it cut right through his carotid artery and throat.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Frippe says obstinately.

  ‘He drowned slowly in his own blood,’ The Needle declares, pushing his glasses further up his long nose.

  ‘Now it feels like Joona Linna is standing here asking who’s right,’ Frippe groans.

  ‘But you’re convinced you are,’ Nils says breezily.

  ‘It was an accident. I removed two hundred and ten glass splinters from the body.’

  Nils moves his fingers to the dead man’s mouth and opens the congealed wound on the top lip, uncovering his teeth.

  ‘This was done with a knife,’ he says curtly.

  ‘A knife,’ Frippe repeats, and swallows hard.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it was murder after all,’ Frippe says, looking at the body.

  ‘No question,’ The Needle whispers, looking him in the eye.

  ‘One single wound … One single wound out of two fucking hundred was inflicted with a knife.’

  ‘To give the victim a hare-lip …’

  94

  The National Operations Unit’s black minibuses have blocked the narrow road four hundred metres from David Jordan’s home on the island of Ingarö. Heavily armed police officers are cordoning off the area, and have laid out spike strips that run all the way across, even down into the ditches.

  After consultation with Janus Mickelsen of the Security Police, the ground operation is being led by Magnus Mollander. He’s a shy blond man, who split up with his girlfriend just a few days ago. One morning she declared out of the blue that she could no longer live with someone who risked death every time he went to work. There had been no reasoning with her. She just packed her flowery suitcase and left.

  While they were driving to the house Magnus checked the satellite images of the property, which consists largely of woodland and steep rocks leading down to the water.

  The response team is made up of eight police officers in full gear: helmets, bulletproof vests, stun grenades, pistols and sniper rifles.

  Their heavy boots echo as they move down the empty road.

  At a signal from Magnus, Janus and two other snipers leave the road and head out into the undergrowth. The rest of the group head towards the fence and move along it in silence. Birdsong is coming from the treetops high above. A few butterflies are flitting among the wild flowers.

  The response team reaches the neatly maintained driveway to David Jordan’s house. Magnus waves his colleagues forward. He’s received a report from Janus telling him that the snipers have crossed the fence and are now making their way up the rocks behind the tennis court.

  He gestures to the group to spread out in pairs.

  Magnus and his partner Rajmo stand still and observe the house.

  The snipers report that they’re in posit
ion.

  Magnus is sweating. He can hear his own breathing inside the helmet as he raises his arm and gives his men the signal.

  Group one makes its way to the guesthouse and forces the door while group two follow Magnus and Rajmo towards the main building.

  Crouching, they run across the open space towards the house. They approach from two directions – Magnus breaks down the front door as other men in group two smash a window and toss in distraction grenades.

  Rajmo pulls the door back, knocking the splinters from the frame with the barrel of his gun, then runs over to the first bedroom door, crouches down and opens it. Magnus is right behind him. The burglar alarm shrieks as they check the bedrooms, opening the wardrobe doors and overturning the beds.

  As they emerge from the bedrooms they get reports from the rest of the team in the main building. They’ve searched the other end of the house but found nothing.

  Magnus waves Rajmo forward, then runs through the living room, securing the hidden corners before heading into the huge kitchen, full of dazzling light from the sea. Magnus moves forward, and hears the team in the other part of the house shout something. His protective glasses have become dislodged and he pulls them off, but then, from the corner of his eye, he sees someone rush out from a hiding place in the yard. Magnus gasps and points his gun at the window. His finger is resting on the trigger but he can no longer see anyone, just the row of white lounge chairs.

  Magnus crouches down to limit the size of target he presents. His heart is pounding in his chest. Outside the leaves on the trees sway in the gentle wind. He wipes the sweat from his eyes and then he sees the figure again.

  It’s Rajmo, somehow reflected through various windows, making it look as if he’s outside on the deck even though he’s moving around the dining-room table ten metres away.

  Magnus stands up again, looks through the window, takes a step back and sees his partner reflected in the glass once more.

  He turns towards Rajmo and says that they need to search the house again.

  In the kitchen there’s a half-full glass of whisky on the marble counter, next to an open bag of cheese puffs. Magnus removes one of his gloves and touches the glass. It isn’t cold. No ice-cubes have melted into it recently.

  But someone has been here, and left the house in a hurry.

  He goes over to the window. Group one has reached the jetty. Two men have climbed onto the speedboat and are checking the cabin and deck hatches.

  Magnus opens the patio door and goes outside. He sees an inflatable fox in a tree. The wind must have carried the toy from the pool area.

  The alarm finally turns off and Magnus reports back to NOU command that there’s no one home, but that they’re going to search the house once more, slowly and systematically.

  ‘Joona Linna will be with you in fifteen minutes,’ the chief of staff tells him.

  ‘Good.’

  Magnus walks around the house and waves to the snipers, even though they have orders to remain on standby. The red rubber surface of the tennis court is covered with brown pine needles.

  Magnus starts to walk along the back of the main building, thinking that they should search the guesthouse once more as well. There must be a shed housing the pump and ventilation for the pool, and someone could be hiding there too.

  The lingering summer heat radiates off the dark-brown wood of the building. There aren’t many windows on this side, facing the forest.

  The ground crunches beneath Magnus’s heavy boots and the air is heavy with childhood smells of sap and warm moss.

  He discovers what look like large lobster pots hanging beneath the eaves at the back of the house, and is just about to lift them down when he receives instructions from command to go back into the house, switch on the computer and try to find a calendar or something that details any upcoming trips.

  In the distance he can hear a woodpecker. Magnus thinks about how his girlfriend always used to cover her ears when she heard a woodpecker. She couldn’t bear it, and was convinced they must get terrible headaches from having to do that.

  He starts to retrace his steps, signalling to Rajmo who has followed him around the house, but stops when he sees a hatch in the façade, about a metre and a half high. The catch is hanging loose on the outside.

  Some sort of woodshed, maybe, he thinks, drawing his knife. Rajmo moves back as Magnus nudges the door open with the blade.

  He doesn’t really believe the house could be booby-trapped, despite the warnings he was given.

  Nothing happens.

  Magnus smiles at Rajmo, puts his knife away, opens the door completely and sees a steep flight of steps leading down into the foundation of the building.

  ‘I’ll go down and check,’ Magnus says, as he sticks his hand in and presses the light-switch.

  There’s a click, but the lights don’t come on. He attaches the flashlight to his pistol and starts to go down the steps.

  ‘What the hell is that smell?’ Rajmo says as he sticks his head through the low opening.

  The cloying stench of decay gets stronger the lower they get. The narrow concrete steps seem to lead far beneath the house itself. There are spiderwebs everywhere, with big spiders swaying with their own weight.

  At the bottom of the steps is a short passageway containing two metal doors. Magnus signals to Rajmo to be ready, then quickly opens the closest door. He looks into a room containing a radon filter and water purification system. Rajmo opens the other door and shakes his head at Magnus.

  ‘Geothermal heat pump,’ he says, pulling the collar of his jacket up over his nose to escape the nauseating smell.

  Struggling not to throw up, Magnus sweeps his flashlight across the passageway and sees a narrow wooden door at the end.

  They can hear a loud humming noise.

  Magnus tries to open the door but it’s locked. Rajmo takes a step back and kicks the handle so hard that the entire lock comes loose and the door swings open.

  The stench of rotting meat hits them like a noxious wave. The humming becomes a deafening buzz as tens of thousands of flies fill the air.

  ‘Christ,’ Magnus groans, clapping one hand over his nose and mouth.

  The air is so thick with flies that they can’t see the rest of the room.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Rajmo manages to say.

  The flies disperse, followed by a sound like someone dragging a stick across railings, then everything is quiet.

  Magnus can feel his legs shaking as he steps inside the stinking room.

  The flashlight’s beam plays unsteadily across a workbench covered in black blood. It’s run down one of the wooden legs and onto the floor. Blood has sprayed across the walls, all the way to the ceiling.

  Magnus’s flashlight moves across the dissected, splayed cadavers of rabbits, glinting with black flies.

  There’s a glass jar holding knives with stained wooden handles and blunt blades.

  ‘This is fucking disgusting …’

  They hear the clattering sound again. Magnus points his gun at the floor and the flashlight lights up a cage. The innards of a large number of animals lie tossed against the wall beside a drain. There’s a yellow plastic bucket containing a bloody chopping board and a skin scraper.

  The clattering sound is coming from the little cage on the floor. A panic-stricken rabbit is darting around, its claws scraping against the metal mesh.

  95

  Joona pulls on a breathing mask and vinyl gloves and goes down into the cramped slaughter-room to examine the dead animals. He quickly takes in the stinking innards on the floor, then the dissected animals and hanging body parts, but can’t find any remains that are obviously human. What happened here seems to have been a mix of rabbit slaughter and animal torture. He can see attempts to produce rabbit-skins, and the remains of shredded leather on a filthy stretching rack, as well as unsettling evidence of violent dissections, trophy-gathering and mutilation.

  On the bloodstained wall behind the workbenc
h is an old newspaper clipping with a picture of Rex holding a silver chef’s trophy in his raised hand.

  Joona carries the live rabbit in its cage up into the sunlight, then walks a little way into the forest before he lets it go.

  Janus has leaned his sniper rifle against the fence surrounding the tennis court and undone his bulletproof vest. He puts a tablet in his mouth, tucks his red hair back and drinks from a bottle of water, leaning his head back and gulping it down.

  ‘I saw you on some of the security-camera footage from the Foreign Minister’s home,’ Joona says.

  ‘My first job when I started with the Security Police was cleaning up after him … A great way to spend taxpayers’ money. Some of the girls were so badly hurt that I had to take them to the emergency room … and afterwards I was the one who had to get them to keep quiet and disappear.’

  ‘I understand that you were transferred.’

  ‘That was at the Foreign Minister’s request. All I’d done was hold him up against the wall, grab him by his tiny cock and tell him that I was obliged to protect him, but that I have two faces, and one of them isn’t very nice.’

  Magnus Mollander is waiting for Joona when he returns with the empty cage. Magnus’s face is grey, as if he has a fever, and he’s shivering in spite of the fact that he has beads of sweat on his forehead.

  ‘There’s nothing on the computer,’ he reports. ‘Forensics have done an initial assessment but can’t find anything to suggest where David Jordan might have gone.’

  He breaks off his report as Rajmo walks over to them to tell them that a woman is heading down the road towards the house.

  ‘Get rid of any obstructions before she sees them,’ Joona says. ‘Keep out of the way, and we’ll see if she’s on her way here.’

  They all huddle behind the guesthouse where they can’t be seen from the road: nine heavily armed police officers, Joona, and the forensics officer.

  The gate opens with a gentle creak.

  Joona draws his pistol and holds it hidden by his side as he hears the woman’s footsteps on the gravel path.