The Silenced. Литагент HarperCollins USD

to let her have more detectives until they had something to go on. He had blamed the summer holidays and the fact that they had other cases that were higher priority. In fact he was actually counting on her managing on her own, so that he would later be able to report good results to his boss.

      “I’m calling about the unidentified body that was found in the water at Källstavik,” the woman on the phone said. “I saw a note that you wanted to be informed the moment we found anything.”

      “Absolutely.” Julie closed the door behind her, shutting out the voices of those of her colleagues who were already on their way home.

      “We’ve found a match in the DNA register …” the woman began.

      Julia put her cup down a little too hard, spilling some of the contents on the pale wood of the desktop.

      “… but I’m afraid I can’t say much more than that.”

      “No?” Julia slipped onto her chair.

      “There’s a match in the register, referring to another case. It’s not a complete match, just sixty-five percent compared to the usual ninety-nine. The sample we received was badly degraded. What that means is—”

      “You’ve matched it to DNA that was found in another case, but never identified,” Julia interrupted.

      “Exactly. All I get on the screen is the fact that there’s a match in the register, the percentage of the similarity between the samples, and the number of the case in which the other sample was found.”

      Julia got hold of a pen and paper. “Would you mind giving me the number?”

      She wrote the digits and letters down, one by one, then stared at the familiar combination.

      “Skarpö,” she said. As much to herself as to the woman on the other end of the line.

      Her brain was working at high speed, already starting to process the consequences of what she’d just been told. But she still forced herself to ask one more time:

      “Just so I know I’ve got this right. Our dismembered body was present at the shoot-out on Skarpö?”

      “That’s certainly what the DNA sample suggests. The match came through a few minutes ago. I’m new here, so I don’t really know what the procedures are, but I thought you’d probably want to know as soon as possible. I mean, there’s been a lot in the papers and everything.”

      “You did exactly the right thing. Thanks very much for letting me know.”

      “No problem.”

      Julia ended the call. And realized that she was smiling. A line of inquiry, she thought. For a moment she imagined herself as a sniffer dog with its nose pressed to the ground.

      And what a line of inquiry …

      * * *

      Sarac cautiously opened the door to his apartment. He breathed in the stale air with its smell of newly constructed Ikea furniture. Then he took a long stride across the heap of advertisements and newspapers, snuck in, and lowered all the blinds before switching on the weak lamp above the stove. He rubbed his hands together, trying to get some warmth back into his frozen fingers.

      Even though it was his home, the apartment filled him with unease and he had to sit down and take a few deep breaths to control his anxiety—the new and deep-rooted varieties alike. He was safe there, he told himself, at least for a few hours.

      Everything looked just as he remembered, yet he was still convinced that the apartment had been painstakingly cleaned. That anything suggesting that he was anything other than the heroic police officer David Sarac had long since been removed.

      The clock on the microwave said 14:50, which meant that at best he had about three hours before the staff in the nursing home realized that he’d escaped, and maybe as long as three and a half hours before the news reached the right people. Not long, but long enough.

      The envelope containing his passport, banknotes of various currencies, and the credit card he only used when traveling was still in the bottom drawer of his desk. He breathed a sigh of relief. The people who had cleaned his apartment obviously didn’t think he was likely to want to run. He could hardly blame them. Only a few days ago he hadn’t even wanted to go outside. That he had managed to handle the train journey to Stockholm was largely because Eskil had given him a healthy dose of tranquilizers that had protected him against the sounds, the lights, and, not least, the voices in his head.

      In the pantry he found a packet of ramen noodles. As the water boiled he emptied the pockets of his borrowed clothes and put the train ticket, key ring, and bus pass on the kitchen table. Then, finally, the bag of sleeping pills.

      He undressed and stuffed the clothes into a plastic bag he found under the sink. There were surveillance cameras at the Central Station that he hadn’t been able to avoid. It wouldn’t take long for them to find him. And police photos showing what he looked like. He dug out a pair of black jeans and a cotton shirt from his wardrobe. They were both too big, reminding him of how much weight he had lost. He ate the noodles straight from the pan, then washed down another tranquilizer with tap water. Oddly enough, the food tasted considerably better than anything he had eaten in the nursing home.

      When he had finished he washed everything up carefully and put the trash in the bag containing the clothes. He was planning to dump it in a bin by the entrance to the subway, so that at least there wouldn’t be any visible evidence that he had been in the apartment.

      In the back of the hall cupboard he found a padded jacket and a black knit hat. Just as he had hoped, his own clothes made him look different. Just an ordinary Swede on his way to work.

      He put the things on the kitchen table in his jacket pockets, turned out the light, and then slowly peered behind the blind. Everything looked quiet outside. He couldn’t help glancing at the windows opposite. That was where they had watched him from last year. Waiting for his next move.

      All your doing, your fault, the voices whispered.

      * * *

      It was almost nine o’clock at night by the time Julia got all the boxes into her office. The corridor was deserted, its doors closed, half the fluorescent lights in the ceiling above the linoleum floor switched off. She liked working late. It meant she avoided unnecessary distractions, telephones ringing, colleagues knocking on her door when they didn’t actually want anything.

      The pictures were all laid out on her desk. First their unidentified body with its silent grin. She looked at him. No matter who he was and what he had done, no one deserved to die like that. Someone had stripped him of everything. His name, his dignity, even his humanity.

      Below the pictures of the body she had lined up the photographs from Skarpö.

      First the burned-out wreck of a house surrounded by snow. Black beams, a solitary chimney stack sticking up toward the sky from the foundations. Then a number of pictures that were far worse: charred bodies among the ruins, others outside in the snow. Lifeless, some of them with visible holes in their torsos or heads. Spent cartridges everywhere. Short ones from pistols, longer ones from assault rifles, red or blue ones from shotguns. The photographs were an all-too-visible reminder of just how violent the shoot-out had been.

      Superintendent Peter Molnar lay on his back with his mouth wide-open, several of his dazzlingly white teeth shot out. The blood around his head formed a red halo. His eyes were staring blankly up at the sky. She’d seen the picture before, enough times for the shudder in her stomach not to feel quite so strong. Poor Peter. He’d been a good officer, someone most people spoke well of. Admittedly, he and the men on his team were the same tiresome alpha males whom the force seemed to be awash with. The guys who tried it on with her, one after the other, on the few occasions she had been stupid enough to visit any of the police bars. But Peter was at least both smart and funny. He knew when it was time to give up and go and hunt easier prey. And now his wife was a widow and his children left fatherless. She turned the photograph over.

      Detective Inspector