by Karin Nordin
Everyone LOVES Where Ravens Roost!
‘A delicious slice of Scandi noir – such a dark, atmospheric and compelling story! And ahh, if only those ravens could talk …’
Jackie Kabler, author of The Perfect Couple
‘Brooding and atmospheric – full of mystery and twists where nothing is quite as it seems’
Catherine Cooper, author of The Chalet
‘Such a great thriller with superb characterization to boot. Hard to believe that it’s a debut. Looking forward to catching up with Detective Kjeld Nygaard and co’
Khurrum Rahman, author of Homegrown Hero
‘Absolutely loved it! If you like a slow burner, Scandi Noir this is the one for you!’
Laure Van Rensburg, author of The Downfall
‘The menacing, wintry heart of Where Ravens Roost gripped me from the very first page! Complex, layered characterisation, skilful writing and a twisty plot combine to create a Scandi Noir thriller as dark as a raven’s wing. Hard to believe this is a debut!’
Louise Mumford, author of Sleepless
‘The bleak but beautiful settings are incredibly vivid (you’ll want to wear a coat while you read this) and there are twists and turns around every corner’
Steve Frech, author of Dark Hollows
‘Nordin has produced an immersive tale of past secrets and flawed family relationships, all wrapped up with a … compelling narrative that had me glued to my Kindle for most of the day’
Jenny O’Brien, author of Silent Cry
‘If this is how the series starts, I can’t wait to read whatever comes next’
Paul Gitsham, author of The Last Straw
About the Author
Karin Nordin has been a compulsive reader of thrilling stories since childhood and discovered her love of Scandinavian crime fiction during summers spent visiting family in Norway and Sweden. She has worked in healthcare and education, including as a pharmacy technician, karate instructor, and an English language teacher for the Dutch military. Karin completed the Creative Writing MSc from the University of Edinburgh with Distinction in 2019 and also holds an MA in Scandinavian Literary Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Born in ‘The Biggest Little City in the World’ and raised in America’s Rust Belt, she now lives in the Netherlands. Where Ravens Roost is her first novel.
Where Ravens Roost
KARIN NORDIN
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2021
Copyright © Karin Nordin 2021
Karin Nordin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © February 2021 ISBN: 9780008455514
Version: 2021-01-15
Table of Contents
Cover
Everyone LOVES Where Ravens Roost!
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1: Onsdag | Wednesday
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Torsdag | Thursday
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8: Fredag | Friday
Chapter 9
Chapter 10: Lördag | Saturday
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14: Söndag | Sunday
Chapter 15: Måndag | Monday
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22: Tisdag | Tuesday
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25: Tolv år sedan | Twelve years ago
Chapter 26: Nutid | Present Day
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31: Onsdag | Wednesday
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36: Torsdag | Thursday
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48: Fredag | Friday
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54: Trettio år sedan | Thirty years ago
Chapter 55: Nutid | Present Day
Chapter 56: Trettio år sedan | Thirty years ago
Chapter 57: Nutid | Present Day
Chapter 58: Fem år sedan | Five years ago
Chapter 59: Nutid | Present Day
Chapter 60
Chapter 61: Lördag | Saturday
Chapter 62: Måndag | Monday
Chapter 63: Torsdag | Thursday
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Dear Reader …
Keep Reading …
About the Publisher
For Marijke
Prologue
The call of the ravens was what woke him.
Stenar pulled back the curtains and peered out into the night. The clock on the nightstand read a quarter past eleven, but the engulfing darkness of the sky made it feel much later than that. Stenar rubbed his eyes and focused on the long walk between the house and the old barn thinly illuminated by the waning glow of a crescent moon. The barn and its attached rookery had been his grandfather’s doing, but Stenar had learned to love those birds. Unlike members of his own species, they had been a consistent presence in his life. They understood him. They never left him.
They were his true family.
The low guttural kraas became more frequent and mutated into high-pitched shrieks like the phantom wails of the mythological draug after it tugged mariners into the sea.
Stenar went downstairs, pulled on his heavy wool-lined coat, and stepped into his mud-stained work boots. There had been an uncommon amount of rain in the last week and the distance between the house and the old barn had become a marshy length of matted grass and slick earth. His boots stuck in the mud with each step and he wrapped his arms about him to hold back the cold. Autumn had come early this year and the shorter days made for cooler nights. He would be glad for winter. Then the ground would freeze and he could make this walk with less strain on his arthritic joints. There had been a time when he would have been able to bound across the yard in a matter of seconds. Now it took minutes. But the mud made it feel like hours.
The barn wasn’t as sturdy as it once was. It was listin
g to one side and there was a hole in the roof that Stenar’s son had promised to fix more than ten years ago. It hadn’t been much of a hole then, but the heavy weight of snow over the years had turned it from a crack that let in an annoying amount of rain to a window-sized skylight offering a view of the stretching birch trees that surrounded the edge of the property. Stenar could see the hole as he approached the barn and the thought of it filled him with a weight of spiteful regret.
The closer he came to the barn the more flustered the caws of the ravens grew. He reached into his pocket and removed an old metal torch. His eyesight had diminished over the years and the copper red colour of the barn blended into the pitch-black of the night, concealing the edges of the door. He used to be able to find it by memory. Could reach for the handle with his eyes closed. But his memory, like his knees and his eyes, had become less reliable over the years. He pressed his thumb against the torch knob but stopped when a voice cut through the calls of the ravens.
Stenar froze, his boots sinking deeper into the mud.
Didn’t he know that voice?
He slipped the torch back into his pocket and listened. The voice was muted against the high-pitched cries of the birds, but Stenar could hear anger in the speaker’s tone. Anger followed by a mocking laugh that almost mimicked the provoking toc-toc-tocs that Stenar had heard in his youth. He slowly crept around the side of the barn, his boots mucking through the thick sludge with each step, bypassing the closed door until he came to a small broken window on the side of the rookery. He peeked in through the frosted glass but was met with the flapping of sable wings, blocking his view of whoever was in the barn. He placed one hand on the side of the building and used it to guide his steps around the back where a portion of the wooden planks had rotted away, resulting in a jagged peephole. All he could see were shadows.
Another voice, sharper and more frazzled than the first, cut through the ravens’ crying and Stenar felt his heart skip a beat. He was certain he knew that voice. There was no doubt in his mind.
Stenar turned and headed back around the edge of the barn towards the door. At the corner of the building he slipped in the mud and reached out for the wall to brace himself. He impaled his hand on a loose nail. The sharp pain that tore through his palm sent him down hard on his left knee. His leg burned like it was on fire. He heard a pop and knew he’d dislocated something. He tried to stand and realised that pop was probably the hip he was supposed to have replaced last summer. A gripping cramp seized his leg but he ignored it, dragging himself through the mud towards the barn door. The birds clamoured in their pen, rattling against the mesh chicken wire and snapping at whatever intrusion had disturbed the sanctity of their barn.
He had to get up. He had to help.
The cawing of the ravens drowned out the voices. Stenar hoisted himself up on an old milk crate. The pain in his knee radiated down his calf. He took one hard step forward and his hip popped back into the socket. He winced, wiping his mud and blood-stained hand on his jacket. Then he limped back towards the door. A harsh metallic clang rang out in the night and both the sound of the voices and the birds ceased, leaving behind them an unearthly silence in the dead air. Stenar stopped. A minute passed before he heard the sound of someone shuffling inside the barn. He leaned against the wall to support himself, the wet wood splintering against his coat, and peered in through that same broken window beside the rookery. He wiped at the frost-covered window with his uninjured palm. The ravens sat still on their perches, clearing a view to the main open space of the barn.
What he saw both shocked and confused him. As he tried to process the image before him, one of the birds nearest the window craned its neck and stared at him with two dark voids for eyes. Its unnaturally hooked bill gave the impression that it was sneering. Taunting. The bird had seen what Stenar had seen, but unlike him it understood.
It understood and it would never forget.
Chapter 1
Onsdag | Wednesday
Kjeld’s phone rang nonstop from the bustling rain-slick streets of Gothenburg to the winding frost-covered roads of Jämtland county. Even when he stopped at the Shell off the E16 near Mora to take a piss and refill his coffee amid the crowd of tourists scrambling to try an authentic Swedish cinnamon roll and purchase discounted painted horses, his phone wouldn’t stop buzzing in his jacket pocket. A busload of tourists en route to the Dala horse museum caused the queue for the single toilet to curve through the gift shop and outside the front entrance. Kjeld grumbled and relieved himself on the backside of the building beside an industrial waste container.
His phone continued to vibrate against his chest, but Kjeld didn’t answer. He knew who it was: Detective Sergeant Esme Jansson who had been, until recently, his partner in the Violent Crimes Division at Gothenburg City Police. That was before his suspension. It was temporary, they said. Just until the investigation into the Aubuchon murder was cleared up, but regardless of how that turned out Kjeld didn’t have high expectations of the chief going easy on him. Apparently the line between good police work and breaking the law was finer than Kjeld realised and as far as the police commission was concerned, he’d not only stepped over that line, but completely ignored its existence. He didn’t disagree with them that he’d made mistakes. He had. But there had been circumstances that he thought warranted those mistakes. Esme understood. She was there when the aptly named Kattegat Killer made his final demands. But she wasn’t the ranking officer on the scene. He was.
His phone buzzed that he had a voicemail. He grabbed his coffee from the ledge of the trash container and retrieved his messages. You have three new voice messages, the soft computerised tone informed him.
There was a pause and then Esme’s voice, firm and direct, was loud in his ear. But it was the increasing heaviness of her southern Scanian dialect, accented by unnecessary diphthongs and an aggressively rolled “r” that told him she was livid.
‘What the hell is this about a temporary leave of absence? Don’t you know we’re facing an inquest in a couple of weeks? And you just up and disappear to leave me with this mess? You’re a fuckin’ arsehole, Nygaard. I’ve got the commission breathing down my neck about my statement, the Special Investigations Division is asking me to provide a witness testimony for your actions covering the entire Aubuchon case, and your neighbour called me about feeding your cat. When did I ever say you could give my number to your neighbour? I’m not your fuckin’ cat-sitter. You can’t just head out of town and expect other people to cover your shit for you.’
End of first message. New message.
Esme’s voice was louder this time.
‘Pick up your goddamned phone, Nygaard! I’ve got a shit ton of your paperwork sitting on my desk and I am not cleaning it up for you. I don’t care if you’re on a fuckin’ beach in Tahiti, you need to get your arse back here and fix this problem. The chief says you haven’t turned in your deposition yet. I swear to God if I get demoted because you’re an arsehole, I will never forgive you.’
End of message. Last message.
‘Your apartment is a shit mess. You know that? Where do you keep the cat food? Call me back.’
You have no new messages. To replay these messages, press—
Kjeld punched the end-call button on his phone and slipped it in his pocket, walking around the petrol station and back towards his car. He felt guilty for avoiding Esme’s calls, but he knew that she would try to get him to open up about everything that had happened during their last case. She would pester him until he shared his feelings and Kjeld didn’t want to share them. He wanted to bury them just like he wanted to bury so many things in his past. But Esme was right. He should have told her he was going out of town. She deserved that at least. Hell, she deserved a lot more than that for covering his arse for the last four years, but Kjeld hadn’t been thinking about her when he got into his car and started driving. If he was honest with himself, he hadn’t been thinking about anything related to the last few months. Not her, not the
chief, not the case that got him suspended, not the testimony he was supposed to give, not the possibility that he would lose his job or worse, serve time for impeding the course of a criminal investigation, not the fact that Bengt was threatening to contest his visitation rights to his daughter. Nothing.
All he was thinking about was the strange call he’d received from his father, a man he hadn’t spoken to in almost twelve years. It was uncanny. Seeing his father’s number pop up on the notification of missed calls was the last thing he’d expected to see that week. And his first thought was that it hadn’t been his father calling at all, but someone else using the phone to give him news of the old man’s death. Then he heard the familiar voice on the recording and was surprised by the severity of his gut reaction – hard disappointment.
He listened to the message three times, but it didn’t make any sense. The context was unclear and the voice on the other end of the line was disorientated and vague, but it prickled at something in Kjeld that urged him to drive home.
Whether that prickle was hatred or sympathy, however, Kjeld didn’t know. What he did know was that nothing short of an act of God would cause Stenar Nygaard to break his vow to never speak to his son again. And that act was worth driving almost ten hours across the country to confront.
‘Take our picture?’ a middle-aged woman asked. She was bundled up in a thick down coat with a blue and yellow Swedish football scarf wrapped around her neck. When Kjeld didn’t respond right away she waved a large Nikon camera in his face. Behind her were three other women with similar short, cropped haircuts and puffy jackets, smiling with their cinnamon rolls and Daim chocolate bars.
Kjeld sighed and took the camera. He must have looked like an anomaly standing among them. While his appearance rarely stood out in a crowd of Swedes, at just over six feet, with ruddy unkempt hair, a thin scar above his top lip, and the scruff of what would be a full beard if he didn’t shave soon, he was the physical antithesis of the tourists hovering around the bus. One of the women stared at the side of his head and Kjeld felt a moment of self-consciousness. She said something in a language he didn’t understand. He assumed she was talking about the piece of flesh and cartilage missing from his left ear. He snapped four quick photos with the Shell petrol station in the background. The women thanked him in broken English, nodding their heads enthusiastically before hurrying off to the group conglomerating around a man waving a green flag attached to a long staff.