Stalker

  ‘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 twenty-two,’ 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.

  ‘Joona,’ he says warmly.

  ‘Yes,’ Joona replies.

  They shake hands and patchy applause breaks out in the corridor.

  ‘I didn’t believe it when they said you were in the building,’ Carlos says, unable to contain his smile. ‘I mean … I can’t really take it in.’

  ‘I just want to look at something,’ Joona says, and tries to walk on.

  ‘Come and see me afterwards and we’ll have a talk about the future.’

  ‘What’s there to say about that?’ Joona says, and walks away.

  His work there feels distant now, further away than his childhood. There’s nothing for me to come back to, he thinks.

  He wouldn’t be here now if the first victim’s hand hadn’t been cupped like a little bowl by her hip.

  That made a small spark begin to smoulder inside him.

  Her slender fingers could have been Lumi’s. A deep-seated curiosity woke up inside him, and he suddenly felt compelled to get closer to the body.

  ‘We need you here,’ Magdalena Ronander says as they shake hands.

  It’s no longer his job, but when he was confronted with the first victim, he felt a connection that he’d like to be able to control. Maybe he can give Margot a hand with the early stages, just until she can see a way through.

  Joona stumbles as pain shoots down his leg, his shoulder hits the wall and he hears his leather jacket scrape against the rough wallpaper.

  ‘I put a note on the intranet that you were going to be coming,’ Margot says as they stop outside room 822.

  Anja Larsson, his assistant for all those years, is standing in the doorway of her room. Her face is red. Her chin starts to quiver and tears well up in her eyes as he stops in front of her.

  ‘I’ve missed you, Anja,’ he says.

  ‘Have you?’

  Joona nods, and looks her in the eye. His pale grey eyes have a dull shimmer, as if he had a fever.

  ‘Everyone said you were dead, that you’d … But I couldn’t believe that … I didn’t want to, I … I suppose I always thought you were too stubborn to die,’ she smiles as tears run down her cheeks.

  ‘It just wasn’t my time,’ he replies.

  The corridor starts to empty as everyone returns to their rooms; they’ve already seen enough of the fallen hero.

  ‘What do you look like?’ Anja says, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her blouse.

  ‘I know,’ he says simply.

  She pats his cheek.

  ‘You’d better go, Joona. They’re waiting for you.’

  30

  Joona enters the operations room and closes the door behind him. On the long wall is a huge map of Stockholm with the crime scenes marked on it. Next to the map pictures from the examination of the scenes have been stuck up: footprints, bodies, blood-spatter patterns. There’s a large photograph of the porcelain deer’s head, with its reddish-brown glazed fur and eyes like black onyx. Joona looks at the copy of Maria Carlsson’s Filofax. The day she was murdered she had written ‘class 19.00 – squared paper, pencils, ink’, and underneath she had scribbled the letter ‘h’.

  On the other wall they’ve tried to map the victims’ profiles. They’ve begun to identify family connections and other relationships. Their movements – workplaces, friends, supermarkets, gyms, classes, buses, cafés – have been marked with pins.

  Adam Youssef stands up from his computer and walks over to Joona, shakes his hand, then pins a picture of a kitchen knife on the wall.

  ‘It’s just been confirmed that this knife was the murder weapon. Björn Kern washed it up and put it back in the drawer … but we had a number of stab-wounds through the sternum, so it was fairly easy to reconstruct the type of blade we were looking for … and it turned out that there were still tiny traces of blood on it.’

  Youssef catches his breath, scratches his head hard a couple of times, then moves on to the enlargement of the deer’s head.

  ‘The porcelain figure is made of Meissen china,’ he says, letting his finger linger over the animal’s glistening black eye. ‘But the rest of the deer wasn’t at the crime scene … Björn Kern hasn’t yet been able to give any sort of coherent statement, so we don’t know if he was the one who put it in her hand …’

  Joona stops and looks at the photograph of Maria Carlsson’s body. The dead woman is sitting propped up against a radiator under a window, wearing a pair of tights.

  He reads the report from the examination of the crime scene. There’s no mention of any tongue-stud or similar item of jewellery being found in her home.

  Adam shoots a questioning glance at Margot behind Joona’s back.

  ‘He wants to look at the film of Maria Carlsson,’ she says.

  ‘OK. What for?’

  She smiles. ‘We’ve missed something.’

  ‘Probably,’ he laughs, and scratches his neck.

  ‘You can borrow my computer,’ Margot says amiably.

  Joona thanks her and sits down on her chair, adjusts the media-player to full-screen and starts the clip. Just as Margot has described, it shows a thirty-year-old woman filmed in secret through her bedroom window as she pulls on a pair of black tights.

  He sees her face, completely unaware, her downturned eyes, the calm set of her mouth, which then switches to something approaching lethargy. Her hair is hanging round her face, it looks like it’s just been washed. She’s wearing a black bra and she’s trying to get her tights to sit properly.

  There’s a lamp with a clouded white shade and alabaster base in the window, and her shadow moves across the chest of drawers and the flowery wallpaper. She slips her hand between her thighs and tries to pull the thin nylon material up towards her crotch, and he can see her breathing through her mouth as the film ends.

  ‘Did you see what you were looking for?’ Adam asks, leaning over Joona’s shoulder.

  Joona remains seated in front of the screen, then plays the film again, watches her struggle with her tights, then freezes the picture after thirty-five seconds and clicks to advance it frame by frame.

  ‘We’ve done that too,’ Adam says, stifling a belch.

  Joona moves closer to the screen and watches Maria Carlsson as she moves very slowly, breathing with her mouth open. Her eyes blink and her long lashes cast shadows across her cheeks. Her righ
t hand sinks weightlessly between her thighs to her crotch.

  ‘This won’t do,’ Adam says to Margot. ‘We need to get on.’

  ‘Give him a chance,’ she replies.

  Maria Carlsson turns jerkily towards the camera, the grey shadow crosses her face, as if she were being lifted up from a bath full of lead. Her lips part, the light from the lamp in the window shines on her face, making her eyes glow, and there’s a shimmer in her mouth, then the film ends.

  Behind Joona, Adam and Margot have started to talk about investigating the people in the drawing class that Maria was about to set out for; they’ve already tried to find out if any of their names begin with ‘H’, but without success so far.

  Joona moves the cursor and plays the last five seconds again. The light plays across her hair, her ear and cheeks, making her eyes shine, and then her mouth flashes.

  He enlarges the image as far as he can without losing too much focus, then shifts the enlarged area so that it covers her mouth, and looks at the last few frames again. Her parted lips fill the screen, light shines in and the pink tip of her tongue becomes visible. He clicks to advance the image, frame by frame. The curve of her tongue comes into view, becomes lighter, and in the next shot it looks like a white sun fills the whole of her mouth. The sun contracts. And in the penultimate frame the glow has shrunk to a white dot on a grey pea.

  ‘He took the jewellery,’ Joona says quietly.

  The two detectives fall silent and turn to look at him and the computer screen. It takes a few moments for them to interpret the enlarged image, the pink tongue and hazy stud.

  ‘OK, we missed the fact that her tongue was pierced,’ Adam says in a rasping voice.

  Margot is standing with her legs apart and her hands round her stomach, and looks at Joona as he leans against the desk and gets up from the chair.

  ‘You saw that she had a hole in her tongue and wanted to watch the film to see if the stud was there,’ she says, picking up her phone.

  ‘I just thought her mouth was important,’ Joona says. ‘Her jaw was broken, and she had her own saliva on her hand.’

  ‘Impressive,’ Margot says. ‘I’ll request an enlargement from Forensics at once.’

  Joona stands still, staring at the pictures and maps on the wall as Margot speaks into the phone.

  ‘We’re collaborating with the BKA,’ Margot explains once she’s hung up. ‘The Germans are way out in front when it comes to this sort of thing, in all forms of image enhancement … Have you met Stefan Ott? Handsome guy, curly hair. He’s developed his own programs, which J-lab …’

  ‘OK, so we’ve got an item of jewellery on the film,’ Adam says, thinking out loud. ‘The degree of violence is aggressive, fuelled by hatred … probably jealousy, and …’

  Margot’s inbox bleeps and she opens the email and clicks on the image so that it fills the whole screen.

  In order to improve the contrast of the stud itself, the image enhancement software has changed all the colours. Maria Carlsson’s tongue and cheeks are blue, almost like glass, but at the same time the stud is clearly visible.

  ‘Saturn,’ Margot whispers.

  At the end of the stud piercing Maria’s tongue is a silver sphere with a ring around its equator, just like the planet Saturn.

  ‘That’s not an “h”,’ Joona says.

  They turn and see that he’s looking at the photograph of Maria’s Filofax where it says ‘class 19.00 – squared paper, pencils, ink’, then on the line below the letter ‘h’.

  ‘That’s the symbol for Saturn,’ he says. ‘It actually represents a scythe or sickle. That’s why it’s slightly crooked, and sometimes it’s crossed up at the top.’

  ‘Saturn … the planet. The Roman god,’ Margot says.

  31

  Joona and Margot have taken their shoes off and are standing looking through a pane of glass. The room inside is warm and damp.

  ‘I’ve tested for allergens, and it turns out that I’m allergic to mindfulness,’ she says.

  To the strains of Indian music, about thirty perspiring women are moving with mechanical symmetry on their yoga mats.

  Margot got five officers to check through Maria Carlsson’s Internet traffic once more: her email, Facebook and Instagram accounts. The stud in her tongue is only visible in a few pictures, and is only mentioned by one of her friends on Facebook before all communication between them ceased.

  ‘You got lick it, before we kick it. Me too wanna pierce my tongue.’

  The woman who had posted that was called Linda Bergman, and she was an instructor in Bikram yoga in the centre of Stockholm. They were in very regular contact for six months before she suddenly unfriended Maria.

  Linda Bergman emerges from the staffroom dressed in jeans and a grey sweater. She’s suntanned, and has quickly showered and put on some make-up.

  ‘Linda? I’m Margot Silverman,’ Margot says, shaking the woman’s hand.

  ‘You didn’t say what this was about, and I can honestly say that I have absolutely no idea,’ she says.

  They walk along the pavement in the direction of Norra Bantorget while Margot tries to get Linda to relax by asking about Bikram yoga.

  ‘It’s a form of Hatha yoga, but takes place in a room with high humidity, at a temperature of forty degrees,’ Linda explains.

  They enter the former playground in front of the old Norra Latin School. The spherical fountain shimmers silvery white, and the wind keeps scattering showers of tiny droplets.

  ‘The founder’s name is Bikram Choudhury … he created a series of twenty-six positions that are actually the best I’ve ever tried,’ she goes on.

  ‘Let’s sit down,’ Margot says, patting her stomach.

  They sit down on an empty park bench beside the fence facing Olof Palmes gata.

  ‘You used to be friends with Maria Carlsson on Facebook,’ Joona says, drawing a deep vertical line in the path, raising a little cloud of dust.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asks warily.

  ‘Why did you unfriend her?’

  ‘Because we no longer have anything to do with each other.’

  ‘But you seem to have been in very close contact for several months,’ Margot says.

  ‘She came to a few classes, and we started talking, and …’

  Linda tails off and her gaze flits anxiously from Margot to Joona.

  ‘What did you talk about?’ Margot asks.

  ‘Can I ask if I’m suspected of having done something?’

  ‘You’re not,’ Joona says.

  ‘You knew that Maria had a piercing, that she had a tongue-stud?’ Margot goes on.

  ‘Yes,’ Linda says, and gives a slightly embarrassed smile.

  ‘Did she have several different studs?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you remember what hers looked like?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Linda stares at the old school building and the play of the shadows under the trees for a moment before replying:

  ‘It had a tiny model of Saturn at the top.’

  ‘A tiny model of Saturn,’ Margot repeats, very gently. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Linda says blankly.

  ‘Is it to do with astrology?’

  Linda looks over at the trees again, and kicks the ground with her trainers.

  ‘Do you know where she got it from? It doesn’t seem to be for sale anywhere, not from any of the usual Internet sites, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t understand where this is going,’ Linda says. ‘I’ve got another class soon, and—’

  ‘Maria Carlsson’s dead,’ Margot interrupts, with quiet seriousness. ‘She was murdered last week.’

  ‘Murdered? She was murdered?’

  ‘Yes, she was found on—’

  ‘Why are you telling me?’ Linda interrupts and stands up.

  ‘Please, sit down,’ Margot says.

  ‘Maria’s dead?’

  Linda sits down, her eyes drift off towards the fountai
n, and she starts to cry.

  ‘But I … I …’

  She shakes her head and hides her face in her hands.

  ‘Did you give her the stud?’ Joona asks.

  ‘Why the hell do you keep going on about that tongue-stud?’ she snaps. ‘Find the killer instead. This is completely sick!’

  ‘Did you give her the stud?’ Joona repeats, drawing a short line across the first one.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she replies, wiping the tears from her cheeks. ‘She got it from a guy.’

  ‘Do you know the name of the guy?’ Margot asks.

  ‘I don’t want to get involved,’ she whispers.

  ‘We respect that,’ Margot nods.

  Linda looks at her with bloodshot eyes, and purses her lips.

  ‘His name is Filip Cronstedt,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Do you know where he lives?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was Maria going out with him?’

  Linda doesn’t answer, just stares down at the ground as the tears begin to fall again. Joona adds the last curve to the symbol with his stick and leans back.

  ‘Why did she have a model of Saturn on her tongue-stud?’ Margot asks carefully. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because it looked nice,’ she says weakly.

  ‘In Maria’s diary there’s a symbol written in ten different places – it’s the old symbol for Saturn,’ Margot says, and points to the ground.

  32

  Linda’s cheeks turn red as she looks at the symbol drawn in the grit in front of Joona’s feet. The stylised scythe has already begun to be erased by the wind. She says nothing, but her forehead is shiny with sweat.

  ‘Sorry, but I’m expecting a phone call,’ Joona says, and stands up with the help of his stick.

  Margot watches him limp off towards the steps of the Norra Latin School and pull out his mobile. She understands that he’s left them alone to give her a chance to create a more intimate atmosphere between her and Linda Bergman.

  ‘Linda,’ she says, ‘I’m going to find out what all this is about sooner or later, but I’d rather you told me.’

  The young woman has dark-grey sweat marks under her arms now, as she slowly brushes the hair from her face.