Stalker. Ларс Кеплер

point … or compete, match his strength against the police, because he feels so damn strong and smart while the police are still miles behind him … And that feeling of invincibility is going to lead to more murders.’

      Joona looks over at the first victim, and his eye is caught by her white hand, resting beside her hip, cupped like a small bowl, like a mussel-shell.

      He stands up with some effort, with the help of his stick, thinking that something attracted the perpetrator to Maria Carlsson, made him cross his boundary as an observer.

      ‘And that’s why,’ Margot goes on. ‘That strong sense of superiority is why I think there could be some sort of signature, that we haven’t seen …’

      She falls silent when Joona walks away from her, heading towards the post-mortem table with weary steps. He stops in front of the body and leans on his stick. His heavy leather aviator’s jacket is open, its sheepskin lining visible. As he leans over the body, his holster and Colt Combat come into view.

      She stands up, and feels the child in her belly has woken up. It falls asleep when she moves about, and wakes up if she sits or lies down. She holds one hand to her stomach as she walks over to Joona.

      He’s looking closely at the victim’s ravaged face. It’s like he doesn’t believe she’s dead, as if he wanted to feel her moist breath against his mouth.

      ‘What are you thinking?’ Margot asks.

      ‘Sometimes I think that our idea of justice is still in its infancy,’ Joona replies, without taking his eyes from the dead woman.

      ‘OK,’ she says.

      ‘So what does that make the law?’ he asks.

      ‘I could give you an answer, but I’m guessing you have a different one in mind.’

      Joona straightens up, thinking that the law chases justice the way Lumi used to chase spots of reflected light when she was little.

      Åhlén follows the original post-mortem as he conducts his own. The usual purpose of an external examination is to describe visible injuries, such as swellings, discolouration, scraped skin, bleeding, scratches and cuts. But this time he is searching for something that could have been overlooked between two observations, something beyond the obvious.

      ‘Most of the stab-wounds aren’t fatal, and that wasn’t the point of them either,’ Åhlén says to Margot and Joona. ‘If it was, they wouldn’t have been aimed at her face.’

      ‘Hatred is stronger than the desire to kill,’ Margot says.

      ‘He wanted to destroy her face,’ Åhlén nods.

      ‘Or change it,’ Margot says.

      ‘Why is her mouth gaping like that?’ Joona asks quietly.

      ‘Her jaw is broken,’ Åhlén says. ‘There are traces of her own saliva on her fingers.’

      ‘Was there anything in her mouth or throat?’ Joona asks.

      ‘Nothing.’

      Joona is thinking about the perpetrator standing outside filming her as she puts on her tights. At that point he is an observer who needs, or at least accepts, the boundary presented by the thin glass of the window.

      But something lures him over that boundary, he repeats to himself, as he borrows Åhlén’s thin torch. He shines it into the dead woman’s mouth. Her saliva has dried up and her throat is pale grey. There’s no sign of anything in her throat, her tongue has retracted, and the inside of her cheeks are dark.

      In the middle of her tongue, at its thickest part, is a tiny hole from a piece of jewellery. It could almost be part of the natural fold of the tongue, but Joona is sure her tongue was pierced.

      He goes over and looks at the first report, and reads the description of the mouth and stomach.

      ‘What are you looking for?’ Åhlén asks.

      The only notes under points 22 and 23 are the injuries to the lips, teeth and gums, and at point 62 it says that the tongue and hyoid bone are undamaged. But there’s no mention of the hole.

      Joona carries on reading, but there’s no mention of any item of jewellery being found in the stomach or gut.

      ‘I want to see the film,’ he says.

      ‘It’s already been examined tens of thousands of times,’ Margot says.

      Leaning heavily on his stick, Joona raises his face, and his grey eyes are now as dark as thunderclouds.

       29

      Margot signs Joona in as her guest at the reception of the National Criminal Investigation Department, and he has to put on a visitor’s badge before they pass through the security doors.

      ‘There are bound to be loads of people wanting to see you,’ Margot says as they walk towards the lifts.

      ‘I haven’t got time,’ he says, taking his badge off and throwing it in a waste-paper bin.

      ‘It’s probably a good idea to prepare yourself for shaking a few hands – can you manage that?’

      Joona thinks of the mines he laid out behind the house in Nattavaara. He made the ANNM out of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, so that he had a stable secondary explosive substance. He had already armed two mines with three grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate as a detonator, and was on his way back to the outhouse to make the third detonator when the entire bag of PETN exploded. The heavy door was blown off, and knocked his right leg out of its socket.

      The pain had been like a flock of black birds, heavy jackdaws landing on his body and covering the ground where he lay. They rose again, as though they’d been blown away, when Lumi ran over to him and held his hand in hers.

      ‘At least I’ve still got my hands,’ he says as they pass a group of sofa and armchairs.

      ‘That makes it easier.’

      Margot holds the lift door open and waits for him to catch up.

      ‘I don’t know what you think you’re going to see on the video,’ she says.

      ‘No,’ he says, and follows her in.

      ‘I mean, you seem pretty bloody weird,’ she smiles, ‘but I almost think I like that.’

      When they emerge from the lift the corridor is already full of their colleagues. Everyone comes out of their rooms, leaving a passageway open between them.

      Joona doesn’t look anyone in the eye, doesn’t smile back at anyone, and doesn’t answer anyone. He knows what he looks like. His beard is long and his hair scruffy, he’s limping and leaning on his stick, and he can’t stand up straight.

      No one seems to know how to handle his return; they want to see him, but they mostly seem rather shy.

      Someone’s holding a bundle of papers, someone else a mug of coffee. These are people he saw every day for many years. He walks past Benny Rubin, who’s standing eating a banana with a neutral expression on his face.

      ‘I’ll go as soon as I’ve seen the film,’ Joona tells Margot as he carries on past the doorway of his old room.

      ‘We’re working in room 22,’ Margot says, pointing along the corridor.

      Joona stops to catch his breath for a moment. His injured leg hurts and he presses the stick into the floor to give his body a break.

      ‘Which rubbish tip did you find him on?’ Petter Näslund says with a grin.

      ‘Idiot,’ Margot says.

      The head of the National Criminal Police, Carlos Eliasson, comes towards Joona. His reading glasses are swinging on a chain round his neck.