The Nightmare. Ларс Кеплер

12

       Unusual death

      Joona Linna stands completely still, just two steps down on the dark flight of steps leading to the galley and front cabin. From there he can see the bottom of the glass doors and some of the aft-deck. A shadow crosses the dusty glass, and suddenly a hand comes into view. Someone is creeping across the deck. The next moment he recognises Erixon’s face. Drops of sweat are running down his cheeks as he rolls out his gelatine foil over the area around the door.

      Joona takes the bag from the cabin up into the saloon with him. He carefully turns it upside down over the little hardwood table. Then he pokes the red wallet open with his pen. There’s a driver’s licence in the worn plastic pocket. He looks more closely and sees a beautiful, serious face caught in the flash of a photograph booth. She’s leaning back slightly, as if looking up. Her hair is dark and curly. He recognises the girl from the table in the pathology lab, her straight nose, eyes, South American features.

      ‘Penelope Fernandez,’ he reads on the driver’s licence, and thinks that he’s heard that name before.

      In his mind he goes back to the pathology lab, with the naked body on the table, the tiled roof, the smell of death, her slack features, a face beyond sleep.

      Outside in the sunshine Erixon’s bulky frame is moving very slowly as he secures fingerprints from the railing, brushing them with magnetic powder and using tape to lift them. Slowly he wipes one wet area, adds some drops of SPR solution and photographs the imprint that appears.

      Joona can hear him sighing deeply the whole time, as if every movement required painful effort, as if he’d just expended the last of his energy.

      Joona looks out at the deck, and sees a bucket on a rope next to a training shoe. A faint smell of potatoes is coming from the galley.

      He turns back at the driver’s licence and the little photograph. He looks at the young woman’s mouth, at the slightly parted lips, and suddenly realises that something is missing.

      It feels like he’s seen something, was on the point of saying something, but forgot what.

      He starts when his phone begins to vibrate in his pocket. He takes it out, sees from the screen that it’s The Needle, and answers.

      ‘Joona.’

      ‘My name is Nils Åhlén, and I’m a senior pathologist at the Department of Forensic Medicine in Stockholm.’

      Joona smiles: they’ve known each other for twenty years, and he’d recognise The Needle’s voice without any introduction.

      ‘Did she hit her head?’ Joona asks.

      ‘No,’ Nils replies, surprised.

      ‘I thought maybe she hit a rock when she was diving.’

      ‘No, nothing like that – she drowned, that was the cause of death.’

      ‘You’re sure?’ Joona persists.

      ‘I’ve found fungus inside her nostrils, perforations in the mucous membrane in her throat, probably the result of a severe vomit reflex, and there are bronchial secretions in both her trachea and bronchi. Her lungs look typical for a drowning: full of water, increased weight, and … well.’

      They fall silent. Joona can hear a scraping sound, as if someone were pushing a metal trolley.

      ‘You had a reason for calling,’ Joona says.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Do you feel like telling me?’

      ‘She had a high concentration of tetrahydro‌cannabinol in her urine.’

      ‘Cannabis?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘But she didn’t die of that,’ Joona says.

      ‘Hardly,’ Nils says, sounding amused. ‘I just assumed that you were probably busy reconstructing the sequence of events on the boat, and that this was one little detail of the puzzle that you may not have known about.’

      ‘Her name is Penelope Fernandez,’ Joona says.

      ‘Good to know,’ Nils mutters.

      ‘Was there anything else?’

      ‘No.’

      Nils breathes down the phone.

      ‘Say it anyway,’ Joona says.

      ‘It’s just that this isn’t an ordinary death.’

      He falls silent.

      ‘What have you spotted?’

      ‘Nothing, it’s just a feeling …’

      ‘Great,’ Joona says. ‘Now you’re starting to sound like me.’

      ‘I know, but … Obviously it could be a case of mors subita naturalis, a swift but entirely natural death … There’s nothing to contradict that, but if this is a natural death, it’s a very unusual natural death.’

      They end the call, but The Needle’s words are echoing through Joona’s head: mors subita naturalis. There’s something mysterious about Penelope Fernandez’s death. Her body wasn’t just found in the water by someone and brought on board. Because then she would have been lying on deck. Okay, so whoever found her may have wanted to show the dead woman some respect. But in that case they would have carried her into the saloon and laid her on the sofa.

      The last alternative, Joona thinks, is of course that she was taken care of by someone who loved her, who wanted to put her to bed in her own room, in her own bed.

      But she was sitting on the bed. Sitting.

      Maybe The Needle is wrong, maybe she was still alive when she was helped back on board and shown to her room. Her lungs could have been badly damaged, beyond salvation. Maybe she felt ill, wanted to lie down and be left in peace.

      But why was there no water on her clothes, or the rest of her body?

      There’s a fresh-water shower on board, Joona thinks, and tells himself that he’s going to have to search the rest of the boat: check the aft-cabin, as well as the bathroom and galley. There’s a lot left to look at before the whole picture starts to emerge.

      When Erixon gets to his feet and takes a couple of steps, the whole boat rocks again.

      Once more Joona looks out through the glass doors from the saloon, and for a second time finds himself staring at the bucket on a rope. It’s standing next to a zinc wash-tub where someone had left a wetsuit. There are water-skis by the railing. Joona looks back at the bucket again. He looks at the rope tied to the handle. The curved zinc tub shimmers in the sun, shining like a new moon.

      Suddenly it hits him: Joona can see the sequence of events with icy clarity. He waits, lets his heart settle down, and thinks through what happened once more, until he is now absolutely certain that he’s right.

      The woman now identified as Penelope Fernandez was drowned in the wash-tub.

      Joona thinks back to the curved mark on her chest that he noticed in the pathology lab, which made him think of a smiling mouth.

      She was murdered, then placed on the bed in her cabin.

      His thoughts start to come faster now as adrenalin pumps through his body. She was drowned in brackish seawater and then placed on her bed.

      This isn’t an ordinary death, and this isn’t an ordinary murderer.

      A tentative voice starts to echo inside him, getting faster and more insistent. It keeps repeating the same five words, louder and louder: Get off the boat now, get off the boat now.

      Joona