The Nightmare. Ларс Кеплер

silent and fluid. Joona ejects the cartridge, but realises that he’s not going to have time. Instead he turns the useless pistol round, so that the barrel runs parallel to the bone in his lower arm.

      ‘I don’t get it,’ one woman says.

      ‘He turns the pistol into a tonfa,’ Pollock explains.

      ‘A what?’

      ‘It’s a sort of baton … like the ones the American police use, it extends your reach and increases the power of any blow because the area of impact is smaller.’

      The man with the knife has reached Joona. He takes a long, hesitant step. The knife-blade glints as it describes a semi-circle, aimed at Joona’s torso. The man’s other hand is raised, and follows the rotation of his body. Joona isn’t even looking at the knife, and moves forward instead, taking a long stride and striking hard as he does so. He hits the man on the neck, just below his Adam’s apple, with the barrel of the pistol.

      The knife spins as it falls towards the floor as if in a dream, and the man sinks to his knees, opens his mouth wide, clutches his neck and then collapses to the floor.

       10

       Drowned

      Joona Linna is sitting in his car on Fleminggatan, on his way to the Karolinska Institute in Solna, thinking about Carl Palmcrona’s hanging body, the tense washing-line, the briefcase on the floor.

      In his mind Joona tries adding the two circles of shoeprints on the floor around the dead man.

      This case isn’t over yet.

      Joona turns onto Klarastrandsleden. He drives along the side of the canal where the trees have already woven their leafy baskets, leaning into the water, sinking their branches into the smooth, mirror-like surface.

      In his mind’s eye he sees the housekeeper, Edith Schwartz, again – every detail, the veins on the large hands holding the bags of shopping, and the way she said that there are helpful people everywhere.

      The Department of Forensic Medicine is situated among the trees and neat lawns of the large Karolinska Hospital campus, a red-brick building at Retzius väg 5, surrounded by large buildings on all sides.

      Joona pulls into the empty visitors’ car park. He notes that senior pathologist Nils Åhlén has driven over the kerb and parked his white Jaguar in the middle of the lawn next to the main entrance.

      Joona waves to the woman in reception, who responds by giving him the thumbs-up, and he carries on along the corridor, knocks on Nils Åhlén’s door and walks in. As usual, The Needle’s office is utterly free from superfluous objects.

      The blinds are drawn, but the sunlight is still filtering in between the blades. The light reflects off all the white surfaces, but sinks into the expanses of brushed grey steel.

      The Needle is wearing his white-framed aviator glasses and a white polo-neck under his white coat.

      ‘I’ve just issued a parking ticket to a badly parked Jaguar outside,’ Joona says.

      ‘Good,’ Nils says.

      Joona stops in the middle of the floor and becomes serious. His eyes turn silvery dark.

      ‘So, how did he die?’ he asks.

      ‘Palmcrona?’

      ‘Yes.’

      The phone rings and The Needle nudges the post-mortem report towards Joona.

      ‘You didn’t have to come all the way out here to get an answer to that,’ he says before picking up the receiver.

      Joona sits down opposite him on the chair with a white leather seat. The post-mortem on Carl Palmcrona’s body is finished. Joona leafs through it, stopping to read different passages at random.

      74. Kidneys weight a total of 290 grams. Smooth surface. Tissue grey-red. Consistency firm, elastic. Clear delineation.

      75. Urinary ducts appear normal.

      76. Bladder empty. Mucous membrane pale.

      77. Prostate normal size. Tissue pale.

      The Needle nudges his aviator glasses up his narrow, bent nose, then ends the phone call and looks up.

      ‘As you can see,’ he says with a yawn, ‘there’s nothing unexpected. Cause of death is asphyxia … With a full-blown hanging, of course, it’s rarely a matter of suffocation in the common sense, but of a blockage of the arteries.’

      ‘The brain suffocates because the supply of oxygenated blood stops.’

      The Needle nods.

      ‘Arterial compression, bilateral constriction of the carotid arteries, and of course it happens very fast, he would have been unconscious within a matter of seconds …’

      ‘But he was still alive before he was hanged?’ Joona asks.

      ‘Yes.’

      The Needle’s thin face is clean-shaven and gloomy.

      ‘Can you estimate the height of the drop?’ Joona asks.

      ‘There are no fractures in the cervical spine or the base of the skull – so I’d guess ten, twenty centimetres.’

      ‘Right …’

      Joona thinks about the briefcase and the prints from Palmcrona’s shoes. He opens the report again and leafs through to the external examination: the skin of the neck and the estimated angles.

      ‘What are you thinking?’ The Needle asks.

      ‘I’m wondering if there’s any chance he was strangled with the same cord, and then just strung up from the ceiling.’

      ‘No,’ Nils replies.

      ‘Why not?’ Joona asks quickly.

      ‘Why not? There was only one groove, and it was in perfect condition.’ Nils begins to explain, ‘When a person is hanged, the rope or cord obviously cuts into the throat, and …’

      ‘But a perpetrator could also know that,’ Joona interrupts.

      ‘It’s practically impossible to reconstruct, though … you know, with a real hanging the groove around the neck forms the shape of an arrowhead, with the point uppermost, just by the knot …’

      ‘Because the weight of the body tightens the noose.’

      ‘Exactly … and for the same reason the deepest part of the groove should be exactly opposite the point.’

      ‘So he died from being hanged,’ Joona concludes.

      ‘No question.’

      The tall, thin pathologist bites his bottom lip gently.

      ‘But could he have been forced to commit suicide?’ Joona asks.

      ‘Not by force – there’s no sign of that.’

      Joona closes the report and drums on it with both hands, thinking that the housekeeper’s comment that other people were involved in Palmcrona’s death must have been just confused talk. But he can’t get away from the two different shoeprints Tommy Kofoed had found.

      ‘So you’re certain of the cause of death?’ Joona says, looking The Needle in the eye.

      ‘What were you expecting?’

      ‘This,’ Joona says, putting his finger in the post-mortem report. ‘This is exactly what I was expecting, but at the same time there’s something nagging at me.’

      The