The Nightmare. Ларс Кеплер

Penelope, sink the motor cruiser and make the whole thing look like an accident. It was the same pattern here, before he was disturbed. He wants to remain invisible, he wants to get on with his business but hide it from the police.

      Joona looks around slowly, trying to gather his observations into a coherent whole.

      It sounds like some children are rolling balls across the floor in the flat upstairs. They would be trapped in an inferno of fire if Joona hadn’t pulled the plug from the microwave in time.

      He’s never been subjected to such a deliberate and dangerous attack before. He’s convinced that the person who was inside the home of peace campaigner Penelope Fernandez isn’t some hate-filled enemy from the extreme right. Those groups may be guilty of carefully planned acts of violence, but this individual is a trained professional in a league far above the extreme right-wing groups in Sweden.

      So what were you doing here? Joona asks himself. What is a fixer doing with Penelope Fernandez, what has she got caught up in? What’s going on under the surface?

      He thinks about the man’s unpredictable movements, the knife-technique that was designed to get past any standard defensive manoeuvres, including those taught by the police and military.

      He feels a shiver run through him when he realises that the first blow would have hit his liver if his pistol hadn’t been hanging below his right arm, and the second would have hit his head if he hadn’t thrown himself backward.

      Joona gets up from the sofa and goes into the bedroom. He looks at the neatly made bed and the crucifix hanging above it.

      A fixer thought he had murdered Penelope, and his intention was to make it look like an accident …

      But the boat didn’t sink.

      Either the murderer was interrupted, or he left the scene of the crime intending to return later and finish the job. But he certainly couldn’t have intended the boat to have been found drifting by the marine police with a drowned girl on board. Something went wrong along the way, or else his plans changed suddenly. Perhaps he received new orders, but a day and half after Viola’s murder he was in Penelope’s apartment.

       You must have had very strong reasons for visiting her flat. What would motivate you to take a risk like that? Was there something in the flat that connects you or your employer to Penelope?

      You did something here, removed fingerprints, erased a hard disk, erased a message on an answer-machine, or collected something, Joona thinks.

       That was what you were planning, anyway, but perhaps you got interrupted when I arrived.

       Perhaps you were planning to use the fire to get rid of the evidence?

       It’s a possibility.

      Joona thinks that he could have done with Erixon right now. He can’t conduct a crime scene investigation without a forensics expert, he doesn’t have the right equipment. And he could ruin evidence if he were to search the flat on his own, possibly contaminate DNA and miss invisible clues.

      Joona goes over to the window and looks down at the street, and the empty tables outside a café.

      He realises he’s going to have to go to Police Headquarters and talk to his boss, Carlos Eliasson, and ask to be put in charge of the preliminary investigation: that’s the only way to get access to another forensics expert, the only way to get any help while Erixon is off work injured.

      Joona’s phone rings just as he makes up his mind to follow the correct procedures and go and talk to Carlos and Jens Svanehjälm, and put together a small investigative team.

      ‘Hi, Anja,’ he says.

      ‘I’d like to have a sauna with you.’

      ‘A sauna?’

      ‘Yes, can’t the two of us have a sauna together? You could show me what a proper Finnish sauna is like.’

      ‘Anja,’ he says slowly. ‘I’ve lived almost my whole life here in Stockholm.’

      He goes out into the hallway, then carries on towards the front door.

      ‘You’re a Swedish Finn, I know,’ Anja goes on. ‘Could there be anything more boring? Why can’t you be from El Salvador? Have you read any of Penelope Fernandez’s articles? You should see her – the other day when she went on the attack against Swedish arms exports on television.’

      Joona can hear Anja’s breathing down the phone as he leaves Penelope Fernandez’s flat. He sees the paramedics’ bloody footprints on the stairs and feels his scalp prickle when he thinks of his colleague sitting in the stairwell with his legs wide apart, his face getting paler and paler.

      Joona thinks again about the fact that the fixer thought he had killed Penelope Fernandez. That part of his job was done. The second part involved him breaking into her apartment, for some reason. If she’s still alive, finding her has to be a priority, because it won’t be long before the fixer realises his mistake and takes up the chase again.

      ‘Björn and Penelope don’t live together,’ Anja says.

      ‘Yes, I’ve worked that out,’ he replies.

      ‘People can still love each other – just like you and me.’

      ‘Yes.’

      Joona emerges into the strong sunshine. The air is heavy and even more close than it had been earlier.

      ‘Can you give me Björn’s address?’

      Anja’s fingers fly over the key of her computer with tiny clicking sounds.

      ‘Almskog, Pontonjärgatan 47, second floor …’

      ‘I’ll head over there before …’

      ‘Hang on,’ Anja says abruptly. ‘Not possible … Listen to this, I’ve just double-checked the address … There was a fire in the building on Friday.’

      ‘And Björn’s flat?’

      ‘That entire floor was destroyed,’ she replies.

       19

       An undulating landscape of ash

      Detective Superintendent Joona Linna goes up the steps, stops, and stands absolutely still as he gazes into a black room. The floor, walls and ceiling are badly burned. The smell is still strongly acrid. There’s practically nothing left of those internal walls that aren’t load-bearing. Black stalactites hang from the ceiling. Charred stumps of posts rise up from an undulating landscape of ash. In places you can see right through between the beams to the rooms below. It’s no longer possible to tell which parts of that floor of the building belonged to Björn’s flat.

      Grey plastic has been hung over the empty windows, blocking off the summer’s day and a green building on the other side of the street.

      The only reason no one was injured in the fire at Pontonjärgatan 47 was that most people were at work when it broke out.

      At five minutes past eleven o’clock the first call was received by the emergency control centre, but even though Kungsholmen fire station is very close to the building, the fire spread so rapidly that four flats were completely destroyed.

      Joona thinks about his conversation with fire investigator Hassan Sükür. He used the second-highest level on the National Forensic Laboratory’s scale when he explained that their findings indicated that the fire had started in the home of Björn Almskog’s eighty-year-old neighbour Lisbet Wirén. She had gone down to the corner shop to exchange a small win on a lottery scratchcard for two new cards,