The Nightmare. Ларс Кеплер

I understand it was unpleasant …’

      ‘Okay,’ Joona says harshly.

      ‘Tommy Kofoed is in charge of the crime scene investigation, and I’ll call Britta at Police Academy and tell her you’ll be calling in today, and will be a guest-lecturer next week,’ Carlos says.

      The heat hits Joona when he emerges from Police Headquarters. As he takes his jacket off he realises that someone is approaching him from behind, stepping out between the parked cars in the street from the shadows of the park. He turns round and sees that it’s Penelope’s mother, Claudia Fernandez.

      ‘Joona Linna,’ she says in a tense voice.

      ‘Claudia, how are you?’ he asks seriously.

      She just shakes her head. Her eyes are bloodshot and her face looks anguished.

      ‘Find her, you have to find my little girl,’ she says, and hands him a thick envelope.

      Joona opens the envelope and sees that it’s full of banknotes. He tries to give it back, but she won’t take it.

      ‘Please, take the money. It’s all I’ve got,’ she says. ‘But I can get more, I’ll sell the house, as long as you find her.’

      ‘Claudia, I can’t take your money,’ he says.

      Her tormented face crumples:

      ‘Please …’

      ‘We’re already doing everything we can.’

      Joona gives the envelope back to Claudia, and she holds it stiffly in her hand, then mumbles that she’ll go home and wait by the phone. Then she stops him and tries to explain again:

      ‘I told her not to come to mine … she’s never going to call me.’

      ‘You had an argument, Claudia, but that’s not the end of the world.’

      ‘But how could I say that? Can you imagine?’ she asks, and raps her knuckles against her forehead. ‘Who says a thing like that to their own child?’

      ‘It’s so easy to just …’

      Joona’s voice tails off, he feels his back sweating and forces himself to suppress the fragments of memory that are starting to stir.

      ‘I can’t bear it,’ Claudia says quietly.

      Joona takes hold of Claudia’s hands, and tells her he’s doing all he can.

      ‘You have to get my daughter back,’ she whispers.

      He nods, and they go their separate ways. Joona hurries down Bergsgatan, and peers up at the sky as he walks to his car. It’s sunny but a little hazy, and still very close. Last summer he was sitting in the hospital holding his mother’s hand. As usual, they spoke Finnish to each other. He told her they’d go to Karelia together as soon as she felt better. She was born there, in a little village which, unlike so many others, wasn’t burned down by the Russians during the Second World War. His mum had said it would be better if he went to Karelia with one of the people who were waiting for him.

      Joona buys a bottle of Pellegrino from Il Caffè and drinks it before getting in the warm car. The steering wheel is hot and the seat burns his back. Instead of driving to Police Academy, he drives back to Sankt Paulsgatan 3, the flat of the missing Penelope Fernandez. He thinks about the man he encountered in the flat. There had been a remarkable speed and precision to his movements, as if the knife itself had been alive.

      Blue and white tape has been strung up across the door, with the words ‘Police’ and ‘No entry’ on it.

      Joona shows his ID to the uniformed officer on guard, and shakes his hand. They’ve met before, but never worked together.

      ‘Hot today,’ Joona says.

      ‘Just a bit,’ the police officer says.

      ‘How many forensics people have we got here?’ he asks, nodding towards the stairwell.

      ‘One of ours and three from the Security Police,’ the officer says brightly. ‘They want to get hold of DNA as quickly as possible.’

      ‘They won’t find any,’ Joona says, almost to himself as he starts to walk towards the stairs.

      An older police officer, Melker Janos, is standing outside the door to the flat on the third floor. Joona remembers him from his training as a stressed and unpleasant senior officer. Back then Melker’s career was on the up, but an acrimonious divorce and sporadic alcohol abuse gradually saw him demoted to a beat officer again. When he sees Joona he greets him curtly and irritably, then opens the door for him with a sarcastic servile gesture.

      ‘Thanks,’ Joona says, without expecting any response.

      Inside the door he finds Tommy Kofoed, the forensics coordinator from the National Homicide Commission. Kofoed is scuttling about sullenly. He reaches no higher than Joona’s chest. When their eyes meet he opens his mouth in an almost childishly happy grin.

      ‘Joona, great to see you. I thought you were going off to Police Academy.’

      ‘I got the directions wrong.’

      ‘Good.’

      ‘Have you found anything?’ Joona asks.

      ‘We’re secured all the shoeprints from the hall,’ he says.

      ‘Yes, they probably match my shoes,’ Joona says as he shakes Kofoed’s hand.

      ‘And the attacker’s,’ Kofoed says with an even broader smile. ‘We’ve got four prints. He moved in a bloody weird way, didn’t he?’

      ‘Yes,’ Joona replies curtly.

      There are protective mats laid out in the hall so that any evidence isn’t contaminated before it’s been secured. There’s a camera on a stand with its lens pointing at the floor. A sturdy lamp with an aluminium shade is lying in the corner with its cord wrapped round it. The forensics team have looked for invisible shoeprints by shining light almost parallel to the floor. Then they’ve secured the prints electrostatically and identified the perpetrator’s steps through the hall from the kitchen.

      Joona can’t help thinking that their precision is a waste of effort, seeing as the attacker’s shoes, gloves and clothes have almost certainly already been destroyed and burned.

      ‘How exactly did he run through here?’ Kofoed asks, pointing at the marks. ‘There, there … and then across to there, then there’s nothing until here and here.’

      ‘You’ve missed one,’ Joona smiles.

      ‘Like hell we have.’

      ‘There,’ Joona points.

      ‘Where?’

      ‘On the wall.’

      ‘Bloody hell.’

      Some seventy centimetres above the floor there’s a faint shoeprint on the pale grey wallpaper. Tommy Kofoed calls one of his colleagues and asks him to take a gelatine print.

      ‘Is it okay to walk on the floor now?’ Joona asks.

      ‘As long as you don’t walk on the walls,’ Kofoed grunts.

       24

       The object

      In the kitchen stands a man in jeans and a pale brown blazer with leather patches on the elbows. He strokes his blond moustache as he talks loudly and points at the microwave oven. Joona walks in and watches as a forensics officer in a protective mask and gloves packs the buckled aerosol can in a paper bag, folds it