Stalker. Ларс Кеплер

they end the conversation Erik hears himself babble about the fabricated research project, about health-service funding, tax declarations, online CBT, and someone called Doctor Stünkel.

      He slowly puts his phone down on the desk. Watches the little screen turn black as it slips into dormancy. The room is perfectly still. His leather seat creaks quietly like a moored boat. Through the open window he can hear the hiss of an evening shower approach across the gardens.

      He bends forward and rests his elbows on the desk, leans his head on his hands and asks himself what on earth he’s doing. What did I just say? he thinks. And who the hell is Stünkel?

      This could be a crazy idea, he knows that. But he also knows he has no choice. If Rocky’s alibi was genuine, then he must be released, even if that would mean a media frenzy and a miscarriage of justice.

      Erik skims through the logbook. There are no notes about an alibi, but towards the end one page has been torn out. He leafs forward, then stops. From that last session with Rocky there’s a faint note in pencil that Erik doesn’t remember. In the middle of the page, it says ‘a priest with dirty clothes’ across the lines, then the remainder of the book is blank.

      He stands up and goes out into the kitchen to find something to eat. While he walks through the library he repeats to himself that he has to find out if Rocky’s alibi was real.

      If it was genuine, then this new murder could be connected to the old one, and Erik will have to confess everything.

       19

      Saga Bauer is driving slowly through the vast campus of the Karolinska Institute. As she approaches Retzius väg 5, she turns into the deserted car park and stops in front of the empty building.

      Even though she’s tired and not wearing any make-up, hasn’t washed her hair and is wearing baggy clothes, most people would probably say she was the most beautiful person they had ever seen.

      Recently there’s been something hungry and hunted about her appearance: the bright blue of her eyes makes her creamy white skin look radiant.

      On the floor in front of the passenger seat is a green holdall containing underwear, a bulletproof vest and five cartridges of ammunition: .45 ACP, hollow-tipped.

      Saga Bauer has been on sick leave from her job with the Security Police for more than a year, and she hasn’t visited the boxing club in all that time.

      The only time she’s missed work was during Barack Obama’s visit to Stockholm. She stood at a distance and watched the President’s cortège. Being constantly on the lookout for threats is an occupational hazard. She remembers the tingle that ran through her body when she identified a potential vantage point from which to fire a rocket-propelled grenade, an unguarded window, but a moment later the danger had passed and nothing had happened.

      The Forensic Medicine Department is closed, all the lights in the red-brick building seem to be off, but a white Jaguar with a damaged front bumper is parked on the path right in front of the entrance.

      Saga leans to the side, opens the glove compartment, takes out the glass jar and leaves the car. The air is mild and smells of freshly mown grass. She feels her Glock 21 bouncing under her left arm, and can hear a faint sloshing sound from the jar as she walks.

      Saga has to clamber across the flowerbed to get past Nils Åhlén’s car. The thorns of the wild rose make a scratching sound as they let go of her military trousers. The branches sway and a few rose petals drift to the ground.

      The lock of the front door is prevented from clicking shut with the help of a rolled-up information leaflet.

      She’s been here enough times before to find her way. The grit on the poorly cleaned floor crunches as she heads down the corridor towards the swing-door.

      She can’t help smiling when she looks at the jar, and the cloudy liquid, the particles circling round.

      The memory flashes through her, and her free hand goes involuntarily to one of the scars he left on her face, the deep cut just below her eyebrow.

      Sometimes she thinks he must have seen something special in her, that that was why he spared her life, and sometimes she thinks that he simply considered death too easy – he wanted her to live with the lies he had made her believe, in the hell he had created for her.

      She’ll never know.

      The only thing that is certain is that he chose not to kill her, and she chose to kill him.

      She thinks of the darkness and the deep snow as she walks down the empty corridor of the Forensic Medicine Department.

      ‘I hit him,’ she whispers to herself.

      She moistens her mouth, and in her mind’s eye sees herself firing and hitting him in the neck, arm and chest.

      ‘Three shots to the chest …’

      She changed her magazine and shot him again when he’d fallen into the rapids, she held the flare up and saw the cloud of blood spread out around him. She ran along the bank, shooting at the dark object, and carried on firing even though the body had been carried off by the current.

      I know I killed him, she thinks.

      But they never found his body. The police sent divers under the ice, and checked both banks with sniffer-dogs.

      Outside the office is a neat metal sign bearing his name and title: Nils Åhlén, Professor of Forensic Medicine.

      The door is open, and the slight figure is sitting at his neat desk reading the newspaper with a pair of latex gloves on his hands. He’s wearing a white polo-neck shirt under his white coat, and his pilot’s sunglasses flash as he looks up.

      ‘You’re tired, Saga,’ he says amiably.

      ‘A bit.’

      ‘Beautiful, though.’

      ‘No.’

      He puts the newspaper down, pulls off the gloves and notices the quizzical look in her eyes.

      ‘To save getting ink on my fingers,’ he says, as though it were obvious.

      Saga doesn’t answer, just sets the jar down in front of him. The chopped-off finger moves slowly in the alcohol, through a cloud of wispy particles. A swollen and half-rotten index finger.

      ‘So you think that this finger belonged to …’

      ‘Jurek Walter,’ Saga says curtly.

      ‘How did you get hold of it?’ Nils Åhlén asks.

      He picks up the jar and holds it up to the light. The finger falls against the inside of the glass as if it were pointing at him.

      ‘I’ve spent more than a year looking …’

      To start with Saga Bauer borrowed sniffer-dogs and walked up and down both banks of the river, from Bergasjön all the way to Hysingsvik on the Baltic coast. She followed the shoreline, combed the beaches, studied the currents of Norrfjärden all the way down to Västerfladen, and made her way out to every island, talking to anyone who went fishing in the area.

      ‘Go on,’ Åhlén said.

      She looks up and meets his relaxed gaze behind the shimmering surface of his sunglasses. His latex gloves are lying on the desk in front of him, inside out, in two little heaps. One is quivering slightly, either from a draught or because of the rubber contracting.

      ‘This morning I was walking along the beach out at Högmarsö,’ she explains. ‘I’ve been there before, but I gave it another go … the terrain on the north side is quite tricky, a lot of forest on the cliffs at the headland.’

      She thinks of the old man walking towards her from the other direction with an armful of silver-grey driftwood.

      ‘You’ve