Afterward, she stands up, naked in the warm grass, and arches toward the sky. She takes a few steps and peers between the trees.
“What is it?” Björn asks, his voice thick.
She looks back at him, sitting naked on the ground and smiling up at her.
“You’ve burned your shoulders.”
“Happens every year.”
He gently touches the pink spots.
“Let’s go back—I’m hungry,” she says.
“Let me swim for a bit.”
She pulls her bikini bottom and shorts back on, puts on her sneakers, then stands with her bikini top in her hand. She allows her gaze to wander over his hairless chest, his strong arms, the tattoo on his shoulder, his careless sunburn … and his light, playful look.
“Next time, you’re on the bottom,” she says.
“Next time,” he repeats cheerfully. “You’re stuck on me—I knew it!”
She laughs and waves at him dismissively. She hears him whistle to himself as she walks through the forest toward the tiny, steep beach where they’ve anchored.
She stops for a moment to put on her bikini top before she continues down to the boat.
On board, Penelope wonders whether Viola is still sleeping in the aft cabin. She thinks she should start a pot of fresh potatoes and some crowns of dill and then wash up and change for the evening. Strangely, the deck near the stern is totally damp as if from a rain shower. Viola must have swabbed the deck for some reason. The boat feels different somehow. Penelope can’t say what it is, but all at once she has goose bumps. The birds suddenly stop singing and everything is silent. Penelope is now aware of every one of her movements. She walks down the stairs. The door is open to the guest cabin and the lamp is lit, but Viola is not there. Penelope notices her hand shakes as she knocks on the door to the tiny toilet. She peers inside and returns to the deck. Looking ashore, she can see Björn walking down to the water. She waves to him, but he’s not looking her way.
Penelope opens the glass doors to the salon.
“Viola?” she calls softly.
She goes down to the galley, takes out a pot, puts it on the element, and returns to the search. She peers into the large bathroom, then the main cabin where she sleeps with Björn. Looking around in the dark cabin, at first she thinks that she sees herself in a mirror.
Viola is sitting on the edge of the bed, her hand resting on the pink pillow from the Salvation Army.
“What are you doing in here?”
As Penelope hears her own voice, she’s also realizing that nothing is as it should be. Viola’s face is cloudy white and wet; her hair hangs down in damp streams.
Penelope takes Viola’s face in her hands. She moans softly, then screams right into her sister’s face, “Viola? What’s wrong? Viola!”
But she already understands what’s out of place and what’s wrong. Her sister is not breathing, her sister’s skin is not giving off warmth. There is nothing left of Viola. The light of life has been snuffed out.
The narrow room tightens around Penelope. Her voice is a stranger’s. She wails and stumbles backward, knocking her shoulder hard on the doorpost as she turns to run up the stairs.
Up on the aft deck, she gulps down air as if she’s suffocating. She glances about, ice-cold terror filling her bones. One hundred meters away on the beach, she spots a man in black. Somehow Penelope understands how things fit together. She knows this is the man who was underneath the bridge in the military inflatable. This was the man who had his back turned when she passed by. And she knows this is the man who killed Viola—and is not finished.
From the beach, the man waves to Björn, who’s now swimming twenty meters from shore. He’s yelling something to Björn. Penelope rushes to the steering console and rummages in the tool drawer. She finds a Mora knife and races back to the stern.
She sees Björn’s slow swimming strokes and the water rings around him. He’s looking at the man in confusion. The man is waving, motioning for him to come over. Björn smiles an uncertain smile and begins to swim toward land.
“Björn!” Penelope screams as loud as she can. “Swim to sea!”
The man on the beach turns toward her and begins to run toward the boat. Penelope cuts off the rope, slips on the wet stern deck, leaps back up, and runs to the steering console and starts the motor. Without looking around, she raises the anchor and engages the gear in reverse at the same time.
Björn must have heard her, because he turns away from land and starts to swim toward the boat instead. As Penelope steers in his direction, the man in black changes course and starts running toward the other side of the island. Intuitively, she knows that’s where he’s pulled his inflatable ashore, at the northern inlet.
And she knows without a doubt that there is no possible way for them to speed away from it.
Motor rumbling, she steers toward Björn, and as she gets closer, she slows and stretches a boat hook toward him. The water is so cold, and he looks exhausted and so frightened. His head keeps bobbing under the surface. She jabs the boat hook his way and accidentally strikes his forehead. He starts to bleed.
“Hold on to it!” Penelope cries out.
The black inflatable is rounding the island. She can clearly hear the roar of its motor. Björn grimaces in pain, but after several attempts, he finally manages to wrap his elbow around the boat hook, and Penelope hauls him as quickly as she can to the swimming platform. He reaches the edge and holds on. She lets go of the boat hook and it drops into the water and drifts away.
“Viola is dead!” she screams, and hears the panic and despair in her own voice.
As soon as Björn grabs the ladder tight she runs back to the steering console and hits the gas.
He climbs over the railing and she hears him yell that she should steer straight across to the island of Ornö and its spit.
She can hear the rubber boat draw closer. She turns in a tight curve and the boat thuds heavily underneath the hull.
Penelope can’t speak, she can only whimper. “That man killed Viola!”
“Watch out for the rocks!” Björn warns through chattering teeth.
The inflatable has rounded Stora Kastskär and is now picking up speed on the smooth open water.
Blood runs down Björn’s face.
They are swiftly reaching the large island. Björn turns to see that the rubber boat is now only three hundred meters behind.
“Head for the dock!”
She hits reverse, and shuts off the motor as the prow of the boat slams the dock with a crunching sound. The waves of their wake race toward the rocky shore and roll back, making the boat tip to the side. Its ladder breaks to pieces. Water sloshes over the railing. Penelope and Björn jump off and race across the dock toward land as the rubber boat roars closer. Behind them they can hear the hull knock against the dock in the swells. Penelope slips and steadies herself with her hand, then clambers up the steep rocks that edge the forest. The motor of the rubber boat falls silent and Penelope knows their head start is insignificant. She rushes into the trees with Björn. They head deeper into the woods as her thoughts whirl in panic and her eyes dart back and forth for a place where they can hide.
4
the swaying man
Paragraph 21 of the police law states that a police officer may enter any building, house, room, or other place if there is reason to believe that a person has died, is unconscious, or is otherwise unable to call for help.
The reason Criminal Assistant John Bengtsson has received the assignment to examine the top-floor apartment in the building at Grevgatan 2 on this Saturday in June is that Carl Palmcrona, the general director of the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products, has not appeared at work and has missed an important meeting with the foreign minister.
This is certainly not the first time that John Bengtsson has had to enter buildings to search for deceased or injured persons. He remembers silent, fearful parents waiting in the stairway while he enters rooms to find young me
n barely alive after heroin overdoses, or worse, murder scenes: women in their living rooms, battered to death by spouses as the TV drowns out the sound.
Bengtsson carries his breaking-and-entering tools and his picklock through the entry door and takes the elevator to the top floor. He rings the bell and waits. He examines the lock on the outer door. After a while, he hears shuffling. It sounds as if it is coming from the stairwell one floor below. It sounds as if someone is sneaking away.
Bengtsson listens for a moment, then tries the door handle. The door swings open silently.
“Anyone home?” he calls out.
Nothing. He drags his bag over the threshold, wipes his feet on the doormat, closes the door behind him, and steps into a large hallway.
Gentle music can be heard from one of the rooms so he continues in that direction, knocks at the door, and enters. It’s a large drawing room, sparsely furnished—three Carl Malmsten sofas, a low glass coffee table, and a tiny painting of a ship in a storm on the wall. An ice-blue sheen comes from a music system with a modern flat, transparent design. Meandering, melancholy music comes from the speakers.
Across the room is a set of double doors. Bengtsson swings them open to reveal a salon with tall Art Nouveau windows. The late-spring light is broken by the multiple small panes at the top.
A well-dressed man swings in the middle of the white room.
John Bengtsson stands quietly in the doorway and stares at the dead man for an eternity before he notices the laundry line fastened to the ceiling-lamp hook.
The body seems poised at the moment of a jump into the air. His ankles are stretched and his toes point to the ground. He’s hanged—but there’s something that does not fit. Something is not as it should be.
Bengtsson cannot step through the double doors; he must keep the crime scene intact. His heart pounds and he feels the heavy rhythm of his pulse. He finds he cannot look away from the swaying man in the empty room.
The whisper of a name begins to echo in Bengtsson’s brain: Joona. I have to talk to Joona Linna immediately.
There is no furniture in this room. Just the hanged man, who, in all probability, is none other than Carl Palmcrona, the general director of ISP.
The rope is fastened to the center of the lamp hook emerging from the rosette in the center of the ceiling.
There’s nothing for him to climb on, Bengtsson thinks.
The ceiling height must be at least three and a half meters.
Bengtsson calms himself, collects his thoughts, and registers everything he sees. The hanged man’s face is as blanched as damp sugar and John Bengtsson can see only a few blood spots in the wide-open eyes. The man is wearing a thin overcoat, a light gray business suit, and black leather-soled oxfords. A black briefcase and a cell phone lie on the parquet floor a short distance from the pool of urine that has collected directly underneath the body.
The hanged man suddenly shakes.
Bengtsson takes a sharp breath.
A heavy thud from the ceiling above. The sounds of a hammer in the attic. Someone walks across the attic floor. Another thud and Palmcrona’s body shakes again. The sound of a power drill. Silence. Someone calling for more cable: “Cable reel.”
Bengtsson notices how his pulse begins to slow as he turns to walk away from the salon. He sees the outer door is open and he stops, sure he’d closed it. He knows he could be wrong. He leaves the apartment, but before he reports to his department, he picks up his cell phone and calls Joona Linna at the National Criminal Investigation Department.
5
the national homicide squad
First week of June. For several weeks the people of Stockholm have been waking up much too early. The sun rises at three thirty a.m. and remains bright almost the entire night. The weather has been unusually warm. The exuberant bird cherries and lilacs bloomed at the same time. Dense sprays of buds spread their aroma from Kronoberg Park all the way to the entrance of the National Police Board headquarters.
The National Police Board, Sweden’s only centrally operating police organization, is responsible for combating serious crime at both the national and international level.
The head of the National Criminal Investigation Department, Carlos Eliasson, is standing by the low window on the fifth floor, scanning the view over Kronoberg Park while pressing the phone to his ear and dialing Joona Linna’s number. Once again, he hears his call connect to voice mail. He sets the phone down and glances at the clock.
Next door, a tired voice tries to deal with a European arrest warrant and the Schengen Information System.
Petter Näslund enters Carlos’s office and, clearing his throat carefully, leans against a streamer that declares: WE MONITOR, MARK THE SPOT, AND DISTURB.
“Pollock and his guys will be here soon,” Petter says.
“I can tell time,” says Carlos.
“The sandwiches are ready,” Petter says.
Carlos suppresses a smile and asks, “Have you heard they’re recruiting?”
Petter’s face turns red as he looks at the floor, collects his thoughts, and looks up again. “I would … Can you think of anyone better who would work well in the National Homicide Squad?”
There are five experts who make up the National Homicide Squad. The Commission, as they’re known, works systematically using a methodology known by its initials, PIGC, Police Investigation of Grave Criminality. The burden they carry is enormous. They are in such demand, they barely have time to get to the police station for a meeting.
The paradise fish in Carlos’s aquarium calmly make their turns. As he reaches for fish food, the phone rings.
“They’re on the way up,” says Magnus in reception.
Carlos tries one last time to reach Joona Linna by phone, then gets up, checks himself quickly in the mirror, and goes to welcome his guests. Just as he reaches the elevator, the doors soundlessly slide open. Seeing the entire Commission together makes an image flash in his mind: a Rolling Stones concert he attended a few years back with some of his colleagues. The band on the stage looked like relaxed businessmen, and just like the National Homicide Squad, they were all dressed in dark suits and ties.
Nathan Pollock steps out first, his distinctive silver hair in a ponytail. Following him is Erik Eriksson. He likes eyeglasses decorated with diamonds, hence the nickname “Elton.” Behind him saunters Niklas Dent, next to P. G. Bondesson, and walking behind all of them is Tommy Kofoed. Kofoed is the forensic technician. He’s hunchbacked, and stares sullenly at the ground.
Carlos shows them to the meeting room, where Operating Commander Benny Rubin is already sitting at the round table, waiting for them, a cup of coffee before him. Tommy Kofoed takes an apple from the fruit basket and bites in loudly. Nathan Pollock looks at him with a smile and shakes his head slightly. Kofoed stops right in the middle of a chew.
“Welcome,” Carlos begins. “It’s good we can get together. There are several serious issues on the agenda.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Joona Linna?” asks Tommy Kofoed.
“Well …” drawls Carlos.
“That man does just what he pleases,” Pollock says quietly.
“Hey, come on now,” Tommy Kofoed says defensively. “Give the man his due. The Tumba murders last year? He had them all figured out and I still don’t know how he did it.”
“Against all fucking logic,” Elton says with a smile.
“I’d say I’m fairly well versed in forensics,” Tommy Kofoed continues, “but Joona walked in, took a look at the blood spatters … He knew right away when each murder had occurred … Amazing …”
“It’s true, it’s true. He could see the whole picture,” Pollock says. “The degree of violence, the level of force, the stress level, how the footprints found in the apartment lagged more, which showed more exhaustion than those in the locker room.”
“Fucking awesome,” Tommy Kofoed mutters.
Carlos clears his throat, returns to his informal agenda.
“The Co
ast Guard called this morning,” he tells them. “An old fisherman found a dead woman.”
“In his nets?”
“No, he saw a large motorboat drifting with the current near Dalarö. He rowed out, boarded the vessel, and found her sitting on her berth in the fore.”
“That doesn’t sound like something for us,” Petter Näslund says, and smiles.
“Was she murdered?” asks Pollock.
“Probably a suicide,” answers Petter quickly.
“There’s no need to make snap judgments,” Carlos says as he helps himself to a slice of sugar cake. “But I wanted to bring it up.”
“Anything else?”
“We had a request from the police in West Götaland,” Carlos says. “The form is on the table.”
“I won’t be able to take it on,” Pollock says.
“I know how busy you are,” Carlos says, slowly sweeping crumbs from the table. “Let’s skip to the other end of the agenda: recruiting someone for the NHS.”
Benny Rubin looks around with a sharp glance and explains that the leadership is aware of the heavy workload, and they therefore, as a first step, have allocated funds for expanding the Commission by one fulltime position.
“What does everyone think?” Carlos asks.
“Shouldn’t Joona Linna be here?” asks Tommy Kofoed. He leans forward and takes one of the wrapped sandwiches.