Kitabı oxu: «The Fire Witness»
THE FIRE WITNESS
LARS KEPLER
Translated from the Swedish by Neil Smith
Copyright
This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Lars Kepler 2011
Translation copyright © Neil Smith 2018
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2011 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Sweden, as Eldvittnet
Lars Kepler asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
Cover design © Claire Ward HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photography © Svetlana Bekyarova/Arcangel Images
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2018 ISBN: 9780007467761
SOURCE ISBN: 9780008241834
Version: 2018-02-21
International Praise for Lars Kepler:
‘A terrifying and original read’ Sun
‘A rollercoaster ride of a thriller full of striking twists’ Mail on Sunday
‘Sensational’ Lee Child
‘An international book written for an international audience’ Huffington Post
‘Ferocious, visceral storytelling that wraps you in a cloak of darkness. It’s stunning’ Daily Mail
‘One of the best – if not the best – Scandinavian crime thrillers I’ve read’ Sam Baker, Red
‘A creepy and compulsive crime thriller’ Mo Hayder
‘Intelligent, original and chilling’ Simon Beckett
‘Mesmerizing … a bad dream that takes hold and won’t let go’ Wall Street Journal
‘One of the most hair-raising crime novels published this year’ Sunday Times
‘Grips you round the throat until the final twist’ Woman & Home
‘A serious, disturbing, highly readable novel that is finally a meditation on evil’ Washington Post
‘A genuine chiller … deeply scarifying stuff’ Independent
‘Far above your average thriller … you’ll be terrified’ Evening Standard
‘A pulse-pounding debut that is already a native smash’ Financial Times
‘The cracking pace and absorbing story mean it cannot be missed’ Courier Mail
‘Utterly outstanding’ Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten, Denmark
‘Disturbing, dark and twisted’ Easy Living
‘Creepy and addictive’ She
‘Brilliant, well written and very satisfying. A superb thriller’ De Telegraaf, Netherlands
and all liars shall have their part in the lake
which burneth with fire and brimstone
Revelations 21:8
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
International Praise for Lars Kepler
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158
Chapter 159
Chapter 160
Chapter 161
Chapter 162
Chapter 163
Chapter 164
Chapter 165
Chapter 166
Chapter 167
Chapter 168
Chapter 169
Chapter 170
Chapter 171
Chapter 172
Chapter 173
Chapter 174
Chapter 175
Chapter 176
Chapter 177
Chapter 178
Chapter 179
Chapter 180
Chapter 181
Chapter 182
Chapter 183
Chapter 184
Chapter 185
Chapter 186
Chapter 187
Chapter 188
Chapter 189
Chapter 190
Chapter 191
Chapter 192
Chapter 193
Chapter 194
Chapter 195
Read on for an Exclusive Extract From the Next Joona Linna Thriller, The Sandman
Keep Reading…
If You Liked The Fire Witness, Try the Latest Joona Linna Thriller
About the Author
Also by Lars Kepler
About the Publisher
A medium is a person who claims to have a paranormal gift, an ability to see connections beyond accepted scientific parameters.
Some mediums offer contact with the dead through spiritualist seances, while others offer guidance with the help of Tarot cards, for instance.
Trying to contact the dead through a medium is a practice that reaches a long way back through human history. A thousand years before the birth of Christ, King Saul of Israel attempted to ask the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel for advice.
All over the world the police seek the help of mediums and spiritualists with complex cases. This happens many times every year, even though there isn’t a single documented case of a medium contributing to solving a case.
1
Elisabet Grim is fifty-one years old and her hair is peppered with grey. She has cheerful eyes, and when she smiles you can see that one of her front teeth sticks out a bit further than the other.
Elisabet works as a nurse at the Birgitta Home, a children’s care home north of Sundsvall. It’s a privately-run home, and takes girls aged between twelve and seventeen who have been placed in care.
Many of the girls have problems with drugs when they arrive, almost all have a history of self-harm and eating disorders, and several of them are very violent.
There aren’t really any alternatives to secure children’s homes with alarmed doors, barred windows, and airlocks. The next step is usually adult prison and compulsory psychiatric care, but the Birgitta Home is one of the few exceptions, offering girls a path back to open care homes.
Elisabet likes to say that the Birgitta Home is where the good girls end up.
She picks up the last piece of dark chocolate, puts it in her mouth and feels its blend of sweetness and bitterness tingle on her tongue.
Slowly her shoulders start to relax. It’s been a difficult evening, even though the day started so well: lessons in the morning, and swimming in the lake after lunch.
After supper the housekeeper went home, leaving her on her own at the home.
The number of night staff was cut four months after the Blancheford holding company bought the care business of which the Birgitta Home forms a part.
The residents were allowed to watch television until ten. She spent the evening in the nurses’ office, and was trying to catch up with her journal entries when she heard angry shouting. She hurried to the TV room where she found Miranda attacking little Tuula. She was yelling that Tuula was a cunt and a whore, and dragged her off the sofa to kick her in the back.
Elisabet is starting to get used to Miranda’s violent outbursts. She rushed in and pulled her away from Tuula, earning herself a blow on the cheek, and she had to shout at Miranda about this being clearly unacceptable behaviour. Without any discussion she led Miranda away to the isolation room along the corridor.
Elisabet said goodnight, but Miranda didn’t answer. She just sat on the bed staring at the floor, and smiled to herself when Elisabet closed and locked the door.
The new girl, Vicky Bennet, was booked for an evening conversation, but there was no time because of the trouble with Miranda and Tuula. Vicky tentatively pointed out that it was her turn, and got upset when she was told it would have to be postponed, smashed a cup, then slashed her stomach and wrists with one of the fragments.
When Elisabet came in, Vicky was sitting with her hands in front of her face and blood running down her arms.
Elisabet bathed the cuts, which turned out to be superficial, put a plaster on her stomach, and bandaged her wrists, then sat and comforted her until she saw a little smile. For the third night in a row she gave the girl ten milligrams of Sonata so that she’d get some sleep.
2
All the residents are asleep now, and the Birgitta Home is quiet. There’s a light on in the office window, making the world outside seem impenetrable and black.
With a deep frown on her face, Elisabet is sitting in front of the computer writing up the evening’s events in the journal.
It’s almost midnight, and she realises that she hasn’t even found time to take her evening pill. Her little habit, she likes to joke. The combination of nights on call and exhausting day-shifts have ruined her sleep. She usually takes ten milligrams of Stilnoct at ten o’clock so that she can be asleep by eleven and get at least a few hours’ rest.
The September darkness has settled on the forest, but the smooth surface of Himmelsjön is still visible, shining like mother-of-pearl.
At last she can switch the computer off and take her pill. She pulls her cardigan tighter around her and thinks how nice a glass of red wine would be. She’s longing for a chance to sit in bed with a book and a glass of wine, reading and chatting with Daniel.
But she’s on call tonight, and will be sleeping in the little overnight room.
She jumps when Buster suddenly starts barking out in the yard. He sounds so agitated that she gets goosebumps on her arms.
It’s late, she should be in bed.
She’s usually asleep by now.
The room turns darker when the computer shuts down. Suddenly everything seems incredibly quiet. Elisabet becomes aware of the sounds she herself is making. The sigh of the office chair when she stands up, the tiles creaking as she walks over to the window. She tries to see out, but the glass just reflects her own face, the office with its computer and phone, the yellow and green patterned walls.
Suddenly she sees the door slip open behind her.
Her heart starts to beat faster. The door was only just ajar, but now it’s half-open. There must be a draught, she tries to tell herself. The wood-burning stove in the dining room always seems to pull in a lot of air.
Elisabet feels peculiarly anxious, and fear starts to creep through her veins. She daren’t turn around, just stares into the dark window at the reflection of the door behind her back.
She listens to the silence, to the computer, which is still ticking.
In an attempt to shake off her unease, she reaches out her hand and switches off the lamp in the window, then turns around.
Now the door is wide open.
A shiver runs down her spine.
The lights are on in the corridor leading to the dining room and the girls’ rooms. She leaves the office, intending to check that the vents on the stove are closed, when she suddenly hears whispers from one of the bedrooms.
3
Elisabet stands still, listening as she looks out into the corridor. At first she can’t hear anything, then there it is again. A slight whisper, so faint that it’s barely audible. ‘It’s your turn to close your eyes,’ a voice whispers.
Elisabet stands perfectly still, staring off into the darkness. She blinks several times, but can’t see anyone there.
She has time to think that it must be one of the girls talking in her sleep when she hears a strange noise. Like someone dropping an overripe peach on the floor. And then another one. Heavy and wet. A table leg scrapes as it moves, then another two peaches fall to the floor.
Elisabet catches a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye. A shadow slipping past. She turns around, and sees that the door to the dining room is slowly swinging closed.
‘Wait,’ she says, even though she tells herself it was just the wind again.
She hurries over and grabs the handle, but meets a peculiar resistance. There’s a brief tug-of-war before the door simply glides open.
Elisabet walks into the dining room, very warily, trying to scan the room with her eyes. The scratched table stands out in the darkness. She moves slowly towards the stove, sees her own movement reflected in its closed brass doors.
The flue is still radiating heat.
Suddenly there’s a crackling, knocking sound behind the stove doors. She takes a step back and bumps into a chair.
It’s only a piece of firewood falling against the inside of the doors. The room is completely empty.
She takes a deep breath and walks out of the dining room, closing the door behind her. She starts to head back towards the corridor where her overnight room is, but stops again and listens.
She can’t hear anything from the girls’ rooms. There’s an acrid smell in the air, metallic, almost. She looks for movement in the dark corridor, but everything is still. Even so, she is drawn in that direction, towards the row of unlocked doors. Some of them seem to be ajar, while others are closed.
On the right-hand side of the corridor are the bathrooms, and then an alcove containing the locked door to the isolation room where Miranda is sleeping.
The peephole in the door glints gently.
Elisabet stops and holds her breath. A high voice is whispering something in one of the rooms, but falls abruptly silent when Elisabet starts to move again.
‘Quiet, now,’ she says.
Her heart starts to beat harder when she hears a series of rapid thuds. It’s hard to localise them, but it sounds like Miranda is lying in bed kicking the wall with her bare feet. Elisabet is about to go and check on her through the peephole in the door when she sees that there’s someone standing in the alcove. There’s someone there.
She lets out a gasp and starts to back away, with a dream-like sense of wading through water.
She realises at once how dangerous the situation is, but fear makes her slow.
Only when the floor of the corridor creaks does the impulse to run for her life finally manifest itself.
The figure in the darkness suddenly moves very quickly.
She turns and starts to run, hearing footsteps behind her. She slips on the rag-rug, and knocks her shoulder against the wall, but keeps moving.
A soft voice is telling her to stop, but she doesn’t, she runs, almost throwing herself along the corridor.
Doors fly open then bounce back.
In panic she rushes past the registration room, using the walls for support. The poster of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child falls to the floor. She reaches the front door, fumbles, and manages to open it, shoves the door open and runs out into the cool night air, but slips on the porch steps. One of her legs folds beneath her as she lands awkwardly on her hip. The stabbing pain from her ankle makes her yell out loud. She slumps to the ground, then hears heavy steps in the porch, and starts to crawl away. She loses her indoor shoes as she struggles to her feet with a whimper.
4
The dog is barking at her as it runs about, panting and moaning. Elisabet limps away from the house, across the dark driveway. The dog barks again, ragged and anxious. Elisabet knows she won’t be able to get through the forest – the nearest farm is half an hour’s drive away. There’s nowhere to go. She looks around in the darkness, then creeps behind the drying house. She reaches the old brew-house and opens the door with shaking hands, goes inside, and carefully closes the door.
Gasping, she sinks to the floor and tries to find her telephone.
‘Oh God, oh God …’
Elisabet’s hands are shaking so badly that she drops it on the floor. The back comes loose and the battery falls out. She starts to pick up the pieces as she hears footsteps crunching across the gravel.
She holds her breath.
Her pulse is thudding through her body. Her ears are roaring. She tries to look out through the low window.
The dog is barking right outside. Buster has followed her there. He’s scratching at the door and whimpering.
She crawls further into the corner next to the brick fireplace, and tries to breathe quietly, hiding right at the back next to the wood basket, as she pushes the battery back into her mobile.
Elisabet lets out a scream when the door to the brew-house opens. She tries to shuffle along the wall in panic, but there’s nowhere to go.
She sees a pair of boots, then the shadowy figure, and then the terrible face, and the hand holding the dark, heavy hammer.
She nods, listens to the voice, and covers her face.
The shadow hesitates, then rushes across the floor, holds her down on the floor with one foot, and strikes hard. There’s a flash of pain at the front of her head, just above her hairline. Her sight disappears completely. The pain is appalling, but she can still feel the warm blood running over her ears and down her neck like a soft caress.
The next blows hits the same place, her head lurches, and all she can feel is how air is being drawn down into her lungs.
Bewildered, she can’t help thinking that the air is wonderfully sweet, then she loses consciousness.
Elisabet doesn’t feel the rest of the blows and how they make her body flinch. She doesn’t notice the keys to the office and the isolation room being taken from her pocket, and she isn’t aware of being left on the floor, or how the dog slips into the brew-house and starts to lick the blood from her crushed head as life slowly leaves her.
5
Someone’s left a big red apple on the table. It looks really lovely, all shiny. She decides to eat it and then pretend not to know anything about it. Ignore the questions and nagging, just sit there looking grumpy.
She reaches towards it, but when she’s got it in her hand she realises that it’s completely rotten.
Her fingers sink into the cold, wet flesh.
Nina Molander wakes up the moment she snatches her hand back. It’s the middle of the night. She’s lying in bed. The only sound is the dog barking out in the yard. Her new medication often wakes her at night, and she has to get up to pee. Her calves and feet have swollen up, but she needs the pills, otherwise her thoughts turn very dark and she stops caring about anything and just lies there with her eyes shut.
She feels she needs something bright, something to look forward to. Not just death, not just thinking about death.
Nina folds the covers back, sets her feet down on the warm wooden floor, and gets out of bed. She’s fifteen years old, and has straight blonde hair. She’s got a stocky build, with broad hips and big breasts. Her white flannel nightdress is stretched tight across her stomach.
The children’s home is quiet, and the corridor is lit up by the green sign for the emergency exit.
She can hear strange whispering behind one door, and Nina wonders if the other girls are having a party without bothering to ask if she’d like to join in.
I don’t want to anyway, she thinks.
There’s the smell of a burned-out fire in the air. The dog starts barking again. The floor in the corridor is colder. She doesn’t bother trying to be quiet. She feels like slamming the toilet door several times. She couldn’t care less about Almira getting angry and throwing things at her.
The old tiles creak gently. Nina carries on towards the toilets, but stops when she feels something wet under her right foot. A dark puddle is seeping out from under the door to the isolation room where Miranda is sleeping. At first Nina just stands still, unsure of what to do, but then she notices that the key is in the lock.
Very odd.
She reaches out for the shiny handle, opens the door, goes inside and switches the light on.
There’s blood everywhere – dripping, shining, oozing.
Miranda is lying on the bed.
Nina takes a few steps back, doesn’t even notice that’s she’s wet herself. She reaches out to the wall for support as she sees the bloody shoeprints on the floor, and thinks she’s going to faint.
She turns around and rushes out into the corridor, opens the door of the next room, turns the light on and goes over and shakes Caroline’s shoulder.
‘Miranda’s hurt,’ she whispers. ‘I think she’s been hurt.’
‘What are you doing in my room?’ Caroline asks, sitting up in bed. ‘What the hell’s the time?’
‘There’s blood on the floor!’ Nina shouts.
‘Just calm down.’
6
Nina is breathing far too fast as she looks into Caroline’s eyes. She has to make her understand, but at the same time is surprised by her own voice, and the fact that she’s dared to shout in the middle of the night.
‘There’s blood everywhere!’
‘Be quiet,’ Caroline hisses, and gets out of bed.
Nina’s cries have woken the others; she can already hear voices from the other rooms.
‘Come and look!’ Nina says, scratching her arms anxiously. ‘Miranda looks funny, you have to come and look at her, you …’
‘Can you just calm down? I’ll come and look, but I’m sure …’
They hear a scream from the corridor. It’s little Tuula. Caroline hurries out. Tuula is staring into the isolation room, her eyes open wide. Indie comes out into the corridor, scratching one armpit.
Caroline pulls Tuula away, but still has time to see the blood on the walls and Miranda’s white body. Her heart is beating fast. She stands in Indie’s way, thinking that none of them need to see any more suicides.
‘There’s been an accident,’ she explains quickly. ‘Can you take everyone to the dining room, Indie?’
‘Has something happened to Miranda?’ Indie asks.
‘Yes, we need to wake Elisabet.’
Lu Chu and Almira come out from the same room. Lu Chu is only wearing a pair of pyjama trousers, and Almira is wrapped in the duvet.
‘Go to the dining room,’ Indie says.
‘Can I wash my face first?’ Lu Chu asks.
‘Take Tuula with you.’
‘What the hell is going on?’ Almira asks.
‘We don’t know,’ Caroline replies curtly.
While Indie tries to get everyone into the dining room, Caroline hurries along the corridor to the staff’s overnight room. She knows Elisabet takes sleeping pills and never hears when any of the girls are running about at night.
Caroline bangs on the door as hard as she can.
‘Elisabet, you have to wake up,’ she cries.
No response. Not a sound.
Caroline carries on, past the registration room to the nurses’ office. The door is open, so she goes in, picks up the phone and calls Daniel, the first person she thinks of.
The line crackles.
Indie and Nina come into the office. Nina’s lips are white, she’s moving weirdly, and her body’s shaking.
‘Wait in the dining room,’ Caroline snaps.
‘What about the blood? Did you see the blood?’ Nina screams, drawing blood as she scratches her right arm.
‘Daniel Grim,’ a tired voice says over the phone.
‘It’s me, Caroline – there’s been an accident here, and Elisabet won’t wake up, I can’t wake her, so I called you, I don’t know what to do.’
‘I’ve got blood on my feet,’ Nina yells. ‘I’ve got blood on my feet …’
‘Calm down,’ Indie shouts, and tries to take Nina out of the room.
‘What’s going on?’ Daniel asks in a voice that’s suddenly very awake, and very focused.
‘Miranda’s in the cell, it’s full of blood,’ Caroline replies, then swallows hard. ‘I don’t know what we …’
‘Is she badly hurt?’ he asks.
‘Yes, I think … well, I …’
‘Caroline,’ Daniel interrupts. ‘I’m going to call an ambulance, then …’
‘But what should I do? What should …’
‘See if Miranda needs help, and try to wake Elisabet,’ Daniel replies.
7
The emergency call centre in Sundsvall is located in a three-storey brick building on Björneborgsgatan, next to Bäckparken. Jasmin doesn’t usually have any trouble with the night-shift, but she’s feeling unusually tired now. It’s four o’clock in the morning, and the worst part of the night has passed. She’s sitting in front of the computer with her headset on, and blows on the mug of black coffee. In the staffroom they’re still laughing and joking. The day before, the tabloids ran a story about one of the police’s emergency operators earning a bit extra on the side, from telephone sex. It turned out that she just had an administrative job with a company that ran sex chat-lines, but the tabloids made it sound like she was dealing with both types of call in the emergency call centre.
Jasmin looks past the screen and out through the window. It hasn’t started to get light yet. An articulated lorry rumbles past. There’s a streetlamp further along the road. Its weak light illuminates a tree, a grey electricity box, and a stretch of empty pavement.
Jasmin puts her coffee cup down and takes an incoming call.
‘SOS 112 … What’s the nature of the emergency?’
‘My name is Daniel Grim, I’m a counsellor at the Birgitta Home. One of the residents has just called me. It sounded extremely serious, you have to get out there.’
‘Can you tell me what’s happened?’ Jasmin asks as she searches for the Birgitta Home on the computer.
‘I don’t know, one of the girls called. I didn’t really understand what she was saying, there was a lot of shouting in the background, and she was crying and saying there was blood all over the room.’
Jasmin gestures to her colleague Ingrid Sandén that they need more operators.
‘And are you at the scene yourself?’ Jasmin says through the headset.
‘No, I’m at home, I was asleep, but one of the girls called …’
‘You’re talking about the Birgitta Home, north of Sunnås?’ Jasmin asks calmly.
‘Please, hurry up,’ he says in a shaky voice.
‘We’re sending police and an ambulance to the Birgitta Home, north of Sunnås,’ Jasmin repeats, just to be sure.
She transfers the call to Ingrid, who goes on talking to Daniel while Jasmin alerts the police and paramedics.
‘The Birgitta Home is a children’s home, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, a secure children’s home,’ he replies.
‘Shouldn’t there be some staff there?’
‘Yes, my wife Elisabet is on duty, I’m about to call her … I don’t know what’s happened, I don’t know anything.’
‘The police are on their way,’ Ingrid says calmly, and from the corner of her eye sees the flashing blue lights of the first emergency vehicle sweep across the deserted street.
8
The narrow turning off Highway 86 leads straight into the dark forest, toward Himmelsjön and the Birgitta Home.
The grit crunches beneath the tyres of the police car. The headlights play across the tall trunks of the pines.
‘You said you’d been out here before?’ Rolf Wikner asks, changing up to fourth gear.
‘Yes … a couple of years ago one of the girls tried to set light to one of the buildings,’ Sonja Rask replies.
‘Why the hell can’t they get hold of the staff?’ Rolf mutters.
‘Probably got their hands full – regardless of what’s happened,’ Sonja says.
‘It would be useful to know a bit more.’
‘Yes,’ she agrees calmly.
The two colleagues sit in silence next to each other, listening to the communications over the police radio. An ambulance is on its way, and another police car has set out from the station.
The road, like so many logging roads, is perfectly straight. The tyres thunder over potholes and dips. Tree trunks flit past as the flashing blue lights make their way far into the forest.
Sonja reports back to the station as they pull up into the yard in front of the dark red buildings of the Birgitta Home.
A girl in a nightdress is standing on the steps of the main building. Her eyes are wide open, but her face is pale and distant.
Rolf and Sonja get out of the car and hurry over to her in the flickering blue light, but the girl doesn’t seem to notice them.
A dog starts to bark anxiously.
‘Is anyone hurt?’ Rolf says in a loud voice. ‘Does anyone need help?’
The girl waves vaguely towards the edge of the forest, wobbles, and tries to take a step, but her legs buckle beneath her. She falls backwards and hits her head.
‘Are you OK?’ Sonja asks, rushing over to her.
The girl lies there on the steps staring up at the sky, breathing fast and shallow. Sonja notes that she’s drawn blood from scratching her arms and neck.
‘I’m going in,’ Rolf says firmly.
Sonja stays with the shocked girl and waits for the ambulance while Rolf goes inside. He sees bloody marks left by boots and bare feet on the wooden floor, heading off in different directions, including long strides through the passageway towards the hall, then back again. Rolf feels adrenaline course through his body. He does his best not to stand on the footprints, but knows that his primary objective is to save lives.
He looks into a common room where all the lights are on, and sees four girls sitting on the two sofas.
‘Is anyone hurt?’ he calls.
‘Maybe a bit,’ a small, red-haired girl in a pink tracksuit smiles.
‘Where is she?’ he asks anxiously.
‘Miranda’s on her bed,’ an older girl with straight dark hair says.
‘In here?’ he says, pointing towards the corridor with the bedrooms.
The older girl just nods in reply, and Rolf follows the bloody footprints past a dining room containing a large wooden table and tiled stove, and into a dark corridor lined with doors leading to the girls’ private rooms. Shoes and bare feet have trodden through the blood. The old floor creaks beneath him. Rolf stops, pulls his torch from his belt, and shines it along the corridor. He quickly looks along the hand-painted maxims and ornate biblical quotations, then aims the beam at the floor.
The blood has seeped out across the floor from under the door in a dark alcove. The key is in the lock. He walks towards it, carefully moves the torch to his other hand, and reaches out towards the handle and touches it as gently as he can.
There’s a click, the door slips open, and the handle pings back up.
‘Hello? Miranda? My name is Rolf, I’m a police officer,’ he says into the darkness as he steps closer. ‘I’m coming in now …’
The only sound is his own breathing.
He carefully pushes the door open and sweeps the beam of the torch around the room. The sight that greets him is so brutal that he stumbles and has to reach out for the doorframe.
Instinctively he looks away, but his eyes have already seen what he didn’t want to see. His ears register the rushing of his pulse as well as the drips hitting the puddle on the floor.
A young woman is lying on the bed, but large parts of her head seem to be missing. Blood is spattered up the walls, and is still dripping from the dark lampshade.
The door suddenly closes behind Rolf, and he’s so startled that he drops the torch on the floor. The room goes completely black. He turns and fumbles in the darkness, and hears a girl’s small hands hammering on the other side of the door.
‘Now she can see you!’ a high-pitched voice screams. ‘Now she’s looking!’
Rolf finds the handle and tries to open the door, but it won’t budge. The little peephole glints at him in the darkness. With his hands shaking, he pushes the handle down and shoves with his shoulder.
The door flies open, and Rolf staggers into the corridor. He breathes in deeply. The little red-haired girl is standing a short distance away looking at him with big eyes.
9
Detective Superintendent Joona Linna is standing at the window in his hotel room in Sveg, four hundred and fifty kilometres north of Stockholm. The dawn light is cold, steamily blue. There are no lights lit along Älvgatan. It will be many hours yet before he finds out if he’s found Rosa Bergman.
His light grey shirt is unbuttoned and hanging outside his black suit trousers. His blond hair is unkempt, as usual, and his pistol is lying on the bed in its shoulder holster.
Despite numerous approaches from various specialist groups, Joona has remained as an operative superintendent with the National Crime Unit. His habit of going his own way annoys a lot of people, but in less than fifteen years he has solved more complex cases in Scandinavia than any other police officer.
During the summer a complaint was filed against Joona with the Internal Investigations Committee, claiming that he had alerted an extreme left-wing group about a forthcoming raid by the Security Police. Since then, Joona has been relieved of certain duties without actually being formally suspended.
The head of Internal Investigations has made it very clear that he will contact the senior prosecutor at the National Police Cases Authority if he believes there are any grounds at all for prosecution.
The allegations are serious, but right now Joona hasn’t got time to worry about any potential suspension or reprimand.
His thoughts are focused on the old woman who had followed him outside Adolf Fredrik Church in Stockholm, and who gave him a message from Rosa Bergman. With thin hands she passed him two tattered cards from an old ‘cuckoo’ card game.
‘This is you, isn’t it?’ the woman said uncertainly. ‘And here’s the crown, the bridal crown.’
‘What do you want?’ Joona asked.
‘I don’t want anything,’ the old woman said. ‘But I’ve got a message from Rosa Bergman.’
His heart began to thud. But he forced himself to shrug and explain kindly that there must be some mistake: ‘Because I don’t know anyone called …’
‘She’s wondering why you’re pretending that your daughter’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Joona replied with a smile.
He was smiling, but his voice sounded like a stranger’s, distant and cold, as if it were coming from under a large rock. The woman’s words swirled through him and he felt like grabbing her by her thin arms and demanding to know what she was talking about, but instead he remained calm.
‘I have to go,’ he explained, and was about to turn away when a migraine shot through his brain like the blade of a knife through his left eye. His field of vision shrank to a jagged, flickering halo.
When he regained fragments of his sight, he saw that people were standing in a circle around him. They moved aside to make way for the paramedics.
The old woman had vanished.
Joona had denied knowing Rosa Bergman, had said there must be some misunderstanding. But he had been lying.
Because he knows very well who Rosa Bergman is.
He thinks about her every day. He thinks about her, but she shouldn’t know anything about him. Because if Rosa Bergman knows who he is, then something could have gone very badly wrong.
Joona left the hospital a few hours later and immediately set about trying to find Rosa Bergman.
He had no choice but to conduct the search alone, and requested a period of leave.
According to official records there was no one called Rosa Bergman living in Sweden, but there are more than two thousand people with the surname Bergman in Scandinavia.
Joona systematically checked through database after database. Two weeks ago the only option remaining to him was to start to search the physical archives of the Swedish Population Register. For centuries the maintenance of the register was the responsibility of the Church, but in 1991 the register was digitised and transferred to the Tax Office.
Joona started to work his way through the registers, beginning in the south of the country. He sat down in the National Archive in Lund with a paper cup of coffee in front of him, searching in the card files for a Rosa Bergman born at the right time and place. Then he travelled to Visby, Vadstena, and Gothenburg.
He went to Uppsala, and the vast archive in Härnösand. He searched through thousands of pages of births, locations, and family connections.
10
Joona spent the previous afternoon in the archive in Östersund. The sweet antiquarian smell of discoloured old paper and heavy bindings filled the room. Sunlight wandered slowly across the tall walls, glinting off the glass of the motionless clock before moving on.
Just before the archive closed, Joona found a girl who was born eighty-four years ago and who was christened Rosa Maja in the parish of Sveg in Härjedalen, in the province of Jämtland. The girl’s parents were Kristina and Evert Bergman. Joona couldn’t find any information about their marriage, but the mother, Kristina Stefanson, was born nineteen years before in the same parish.
It took Joona three hours to locate an eighty-four-year-old woman named Maja Stefanson in a care home in Sveg. It was already seven o’clock in the evening, but Joona still got in his car and drove to Sveg. It was late by the time he arrived, and he wasn’t allowed into the home.
Joona booked into Lilla Hotellet and tried to get some sleep, but woke up at four o’clock, and has been standing at the window ever since, waiting for morning.
He’s almost certain that he’s found Rosa Bergman. She’s adopted her mother’s maiden name, and is using her middle name.
Joona looks at his watch and decides that it’s time to go. He buttons his jacket, leaves the room, goes down to reception, and out into the small town.
The Blue Wings care home is a cluster of yellow-plastered houses around a neat lawn with footpaths and benches to rest on.
Joona opens the door to the main building and goes inside. He forces himself to walk slowly through the neon-lit corridor lined with closed doors leading to offices and the kitchen.
She wasn’t supposed to be able to find me, he thinks once more. She wasn’t supposed to know about me. Something’s gone wrong.
Joona never talks about the reason why he’s ended up alone, but it’s with him every waking moment.
His life burned like magnesium, flared up and died away in an instant, from gleaming white to smouldering ash.
In the dayroom a thin man in his eighties is standing and staring at the bright screen of the television. A TV chef is heating sesame oil in a pan, and talking about various ways of updating traditional crayfish parties.
The old man turns to Joona and screws up his eyes.
‘Anders?’ the man says in an unsteady voice. ‘Is that you, Anders?’
‘My name is Joona,’ he replies in his soft Finnish accent. ‘I’m looking for Maja Stefanson.’
The man stares at him with moist, red-rimmed eyes.
‘Anders, listen, lad. You’ve got to help me get out of here. It’s full of old people.’
The man hits the arm of the sofa with a frail fist, but stops abruptly when a care assistant walks into the room.
‘Good morning,’ Joona says. ‘I’m here to visit Maja Stefanson.’
‘How lovely,’ she says. ‘But I should warn you, Maja’s dementia has got worse. She tries to get out whenever she has a chance.’
‘I understand,’ Joona says.
‘Back in the summer she managed to get all the way to Stockholm.’
The care assistant leads Joona through a freshly-mopped corridor with subdued lighting, and opens one of the doors.
‘Maja?’ she calls out warmly.
11
An old woman is making the bed. When she looks up, Joona recognises her at once. It’s the woman who was following him outside Adolf Fredrik Church, the one who showed him the playing cards. The one who told him she had a message from Rosa Bergman.
Joona’s heart is beating hard.
She’s the only person who knows where his wife and daughter are, and she shouldn’t be aware of his existence.
‘Rosa Bergman?’ Joona asks.
‘Yes,’ she replies, raising one of her hands like a schoolgirl.
‘My name is Joona Linna.’
‘Yes,’ Rosa Bergman smiles, shuffling towards him.
‘You had a message for me,’ he says.
‘Oh my, I don’t remember that,’ Rosa replies, and sits down on the sofa.
He swallows hard and takes a step towards her.
‘You asked me why I was pretending my daughter is dead.’
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she says sternly. ‘That’s not nice at all.’
‘What do you know about my daughter?’ Joona asks, taking another step towards the woman. ‘Have you heard anything?’
She merely smiles distractedly, and Joona lowers his gaze. He tries to think clearly, and notices that his hands are shaking as he goes over to the kitchenette in the corner and pours coffee into two cups.
‘Rosa, this is important to me,’ he says slowly, putting the cups on the table. ‘Very important.’
She blinks a couple of times, then asks in a timid voice: ‘Who are you? Has something happened to Mother?’
‘Rosa, do you remember a little girl called Lumi? Her mother’s name was Summa, and you helped them to …’
Joona falls silent when he sees the lost expression in the woman’s eyes, clouded with cataracts.
‘Why did you try to find me?’ he asks, even though he knows there’s no point.
Rosa Bergman drops her coffee cup on the floor and starts to cry. The care assistant comes in, and soothes her in a practised way.
‘I’ll show you out,’ she says quietly to Joona.
They walk through the corridor.
‘How long has she had dementia?’ Joona asks.
‘It happened quickly with Maja … We started to notice the first signs last summer, so about a year ago … people used to say it was like a second childhood, which is still pretty close to the truth for most sufferers.’
‘If she … if she suddenly has a lucid period,’ Joona says seriously, ‘would you mind contacting me?’
‘That does actually happen occasionally,’ the woman nods.
‘Call me at once,’ he says, handing her his card.
‘Detective Superintendent?’ she says in surprise, and pins the card to the noticeboard behind the desk in the office.
12
When Joona emerges into the fresh air he breathes in deeply, as if he’s been holding his breath. Perhaps Rosa Bergman had had something important to tell him, he thinks. It’s possible that someone asked her to pass on a message. But she succumbed to dementia before she managed to tell him.
He’s never going to know what it was.
Twelve years have passed since he lost Summa and Lumi.
The last traces of them have been erased along with Rosa Bergman’s lost memories.
It’s over now.
Joona sits in his car, wipes the tears from his cheeks, closes his eyes for a while, then turns the key in the ignition to drive back home to Stockholm.
He’s driven thirty kilometres south along the E45 towards Mora when the head of the National Crime Unit, Carlos Eliasson, calls him.
‘We’ve got a murder at a children’s home up in Sundsvall,’ Carlos says in a tense voice. ‘The emergency call centre was alerted just after four this morning.’
‘I’m on leave,’ Joona says, almost inaudibly.
‘You could still have come to the karaoke evening.’
‘Another time,’ Joona says, almost to himself.
The road runs straight through the forest. Far off between the trees a silvery lake is glinting.
‘Joona? What’s happened?’
‘Nothing.’
Someone calls for Carlos in the background.
‘I’ve got a meeting now, but I want … I just spoke to Susanne Öst, and she says the Västernorrland Police aren’t going to make a formal request for help from National Crime.’
‘So why are you calling me?’
‘I said we’d send an observer.’
‘We never send observers, do we?’
‘We do now,’ Carlos says, lowering his voice. ‘I’m afraid this one’s rather sensitive. You remember Janne Svensson, the captain of the national hockey team? The press never stopped talking about how incompetent the police were.’
‘Because they never found …’
‘Don’t start … that was Susanne Öst’s first big case as a prosecutor,’ Carlos goes on. ‘I don’t want to say that the press were right, but the Västernorrland Police could have done with you on that occasion. They were too slow, they went by the book, and time passed … nothing unusual, of course, but sometimes the press picks up on it.’
‘I can’t talk any more,’ Joona says by way of conclusion.
‘You know I wouldn’t ask you if it was just a straightforward murder,’ Carlos says, and takes a deep breath. ‘But there’s going to be a lot of coverage, Joona … this one’s very, very brutal, very bloody … and the girl’s body has been arranged.’
‘How? How has it been arranged?’ Joona asks.
‘Apparently she’s lying on her bed with her hands over her face.’
Joona drives on in silence, his left hand on the wheel. The trees flit past on both sides of the car. He can hear Carlos breathing over the phone. There are other voices in the background. Without saying anything, Joona turns off the E45 towards Los, onto a road that will take him to the coast, and then up to Sundsvall.
‘Please, Joona, just go up there … help them solve the case themselves, preferably before the press gets hold of it.’
‘So now I’m not just an observer?’
‘Yes, you are … just hang around, observe the investigation, make suggestions … As long as you realise that you have no official authority.’
‘Because I’m the subject of an internal investigation?’
‘It’s important that you keep a low profile,’ Carlos says.
13
North of Sundsvall Joona leaves the coast road and turns onto Highway 86, which heads up inland along the valley of Indalsälven.
After two hours of driving he’s approaching the isolated children’s home.
He slows down and turns onto a narrow gravel track. Sunlight filters through the tall pine trees.
A dead girl, Joona thinks.
While everyone was asleep, a girl was murdered and positioned on her bed. The violence was extreme and very aggressive, according to the local police. They have no immediate suspect, it’s too late for roadblocks, but everyone in the local force has been informed, and Superintendent Olle Gunnarsson is leading the preliminary investigation.
It’s just before ten o’clock by the time Joona parks and leaves the car beyond the police’s outer cordon. The ditch is swarming with insects. The forest has opened up into a large clearing. Damp trees are sparkling in the sunlight on the slope down towards the lake, Himmelsjön. By the side of the road is a metal sign saying The Birgitta Home, Specialist Children’s Home.
Joona walks towards the cluster of rust-red buildings, gathered around the central yard like a traditional farm. An ambulance, three police cars, a white Mercedes, and three other cars are parked in front of the buildings.
A dog is barking nonstop as it runs along a line between two trees to which it’s tethered.
An older man with a walrus moustache, a pot-belly, and a crumpled linen suit is standing in front of the main building. He’s spotted Joona, but shows no sign of saying hello. Instead he finishes rolling his cigarette and licks the paper. Joona steps over another cordon, and the man tucks the cigarette behind his ear.
‘I’m the National Police observer,’ Joona says.
‘Gunnarsson,’ the man says. ‘Superintendent.’
‘I’m supposed to follow your work here.’
‘Yes, as long as you don’t get in the way,’ the man says, looking at him coolly.
Joona looks up at the main building. The forensics team is already at work. The rooms are illuminated by arc lights, lending all the windows an unnatural glow.
A police officer emerges from the door, his face almost white. He claps one hand to his mouth, stumbles down the steps, then leans against the wall, bends forward, and throws up onto the nettles beside the water butt.
‘You’ll do the same once you’ve been inside,’ Gunnarsson says to Joona with a smile.
‘What do you know so far?’
‘Not a damn thing … We got the call in the middle of the night, from a counsellor at the home … Daniel Grim’s his name. That was at four o’clock. He was at his home on Bruksgatan in Sundsvall, and had just received a call from here … he didn’t know much when he called the emergency call centre, just that the girls were yelling about lots of blood.’
‘So it was the girls themselves who made the call?’ Joona asks.
‘Yes.’
‘But they called the counsellor in Sundsvall rather than the police?’ Joona says.
‘Exactly.’
‘There must have been night staff here?’
‘No.’
‘Shouldn’t there have been?’
‘Presumably,’ Gunnarsson says in a tired voice.
‘Which one of the girls called the counsellor?’ Joona asks.
‘One of the older residents,’ Gunnarsson says, looking in his notebook. ‘A Caroline Forsgren … But as I understand it, she wasn’t the one who found the body. That was … it’s a hell of a mess, several of the girls have looked in the room. It’s bloody nasty, I don’t mind saying. We’ve taken one of them off to hospital. She was hysterical, and the paramedics thought that was the safest thing to do.’
‘Who was first on the scene?’ Joona asks.
‘Two colleagues, Rolf Wikner and Sonja Rask,’ Gunnarsson replies. ‘I got here at around a quarter to six and called the prosecutor … and then she evidently wet herself and contacted Stockholm … so now we’re lumbered with you.’
He smiles at Joona without any warmth.
‘Do you have a suspect?’ Joona asks.
Gunnarsson takes a deep breath and says in a didactic tone: ‘Years of experience have taught me to let an investigation unfold at its own pace … we need to get people out here, start to interview the witnesses, secure the evidence …’
‘Is it OK to go in and take a look?’ Joona asks, looking up at the door.
‘I wouldn’t recommend it … we’ll soon have pictures.’
‘I need to look at the girl before she’s moved,’ Joona says.
‘We’re dealing with an attack with a blunt instrument, very brutal, very aggressive,’ he says. ‘The perpetrator’s a strong guy. After her death the victim was laid out on her bed. No one noticed anything until one of the girls was going to the toilet and trod in the blood that was seeping under the door.’
‘Was it still warm?’
‘Look … these girls are pretty tricky to deal with,’ Gunnarsson explains. ‘They’re frightened, and they’re very angry, they object to everything we say, they don’t listen, they scream at us, and … Earlier on they were determined to get through the cordon to fetch things from their rooms – iPods, Lypsyl, coats, and so on – and when we were going to move them to the other building, two of them escaped into the forest.’
‘Escaped?’
‘We’ve just managed to catch up with them … now we just need to get them to return voluntarily. They’re lying on the ground demanding to be allowed to ride on Rolf’s shoulders.’
14
Joona puts on protective clothing, goes up the steps to the main building and in through the door. Inside the porch the fans of the arc lights are working hard and the air is already warm. Every detail is visible in their strong glare. Dust is moving slowly through the air.
Joona walks carefully along the protective mats that have been laid out across the floor tiles. One picture has fallen to the floor, and the broken glass glints in the strong light. Bloody shoe prints lead off in different directions in the corridor, towards the front door, and back again.
The house has retained its original character from when it was a grand farmhouse. The painted panels have faded over the years, but are still colourful, and the traditional patterns made by itinerant painters curl across the walls and woodwork.
Further along the corridor a forensics officer named Jimi Sjöberg is shining a green lamp at a black chair, having already applied Hungarian red to it.
‘Blood?’ Joona asks.
‘Not on this one,’ Jimi mutters, and moves on with the green lamp.
‘Have you found anything unexpected?’
‘Erixon called from Stockholm and told us not to touch a thing until Joona Linna had given the go-ahead,’ he replies with a smile.
‘I’m grateful.’
‘So we haven’t really got going yet,’ Jimi goes on. ‘We’ve laid out all these damn mats, and photographed and filmed everything, and … well, I took the liberty to get samples of the blood in the corridor so we could send something off to the lab.’
‘Good.’
‘And Siri lifted the prints in the hall before they got contaminated …’
The other forensics expert, Siri Karlsson, has just dismantled the brass handle from the door to the isolation room. She puts it carefully in a paper bag, then comes over to Joona and Jimi.
‘He’s here to take a look at the crime scene,’ Jimi explains.
‘It’s pretty unpleasant,’ Siri says through her mask. Her eyes look tired and troubled.
‘So I understand,’ Joona says.
‘You can look at pictures instead if you’d rather,’ she says.
‘This is Joona Linna,’ Jimi tells her.
‘Sorry, I didn’t realise.’
‘I’m just an observer,’ Joona says.
She looks down, and when she raises her eyes again there’s a trace of a blush on her cheeks.
‘Everyone’s talking about you,’ she says. ‘I mean … I … I don’t care about the internal investigation. I think it’ll be interesting to work with you.’
‘Same here,’ Joona says.
He stands still and listens to the whirr of the lamps, and tries to focus, so that he’ll be able to absorb the impressions of what he sees without giving in to the instinct to look away.
15
Joona goes over to the alcove and the door that no longer has a handle.
The lock and key are still in place.
He closes his eyes for a moment, then walks into the small room.
Everything is still, and brightly lit.
The warm air is heavy with the smell of blood and urine. He forces himself to inhale it to detect the other smells: damp wood, sweaty sheets, deodorant.
The hot metal of the lamps ticks. He can hear the muffled sound of barking through the walls.
Joona stands perfectly still and forces himself to look at the body on the bed. His eyes linger on every detail, even though he’d like nothing more than to hurry out, leave the building, and walk into the fresh air and shade of the forest.
Blood has run across the floor, and is spattered over the immoveable furniture and the pale biblical motifs on the walls. It’s sprayed across the ceiling and over to the toilet. A thin girl in the early stages of puberty is lying on the bed. She has been laid out on her back, with her hands covering her face. She’s wearing nothing but a pair of cotton pants. Her breasts are covered by her elbows, and her feet are crossed at the ankles.
Joona feels his heart beating, feels his own blood coursing through his veins to his brain, as his pulse roars in his temples.
He forces himself to look, register, and think.
The girl’s face is hidden.
As if she’s frightened, as if she doesn’t want to see the perpetrator.
Before the girl was positioned on the bed she was subjected to extreme violence.
Repeated blows with a blunt object to her forehead and scalp.
She’s only a young girl, and must have been horribly frightened.
A few short years ago she was just a child, but a chain of events has led her to this room, to this secure children’s home. Maybe she was just unlucky with her parents and foster parents. Maybe she thought she’d be safe here.
Joona studies every terrible detail until it feels as if he can longer bear it. Then he shuts his eyes for a few moments and thinks about his daughter’s face and the gravestone that isn’t hers, before opening his eyes again and carrying on with the examination.
The evidence suggests that the victim was sitting on the chair at the little table when the attacker struck.
Joona tries to identify the movements that led to this spatter pattern.
Every drop of blood falling through the air naturally assumes a round shape, and has a diameter of five millimetres. If the drop is smaller, that means that the blood has been subjected to external force that’s broken it into smaller drops.
And that’s when spatter pattern analysis comes in.
Joona is now standing on two protective mats in front of the small table, probably exactly where the murderer stood a few hours before. The girl was sitting on the chair on the other side of the table. Joona looks at the spatter pattern, turns around, and sees blood sprayed high up the wall. The implement has been swung backwards several times to gain momentum, and every time it changed direction for another blow, blood sprayed back from it.
Joona has already stayed longer at this crime scene than any other superintendent would have. But he isn’t finished yet. He goes back to the girl on the bed, stands in front of her, sees the stud in her navel, the lip-print on the glass of water, sees that she has had a birthmark removed below her right breast, sees the fine hairs on her shins, and a yellowed bruise on her thigh.
He leans cautiously over her. Her bare skin is emitting very faint heat now. He looks at the hands covering her face, and sees that she didn’t manage to scratch the perpetrator, there’s no skin under her fingernails.
He takes a few steps back, and then looks at her again. Her white skin. The hands over her face. There’s hardly any blood on her body. Only the pillow is bloody.
Apart from that she’s clean.
Joona looks around the room. Behind the door there’s a small shelf with two hooks for clothes beneath it. On the floor beneath the shelf are a pair of trainers with white socks tucked inside them, and a pair of washed-out jeans is hanging from one of the hooks, along with a black college sweater and a denim jacket. There’s a small white bra on the shelf.
Joona doesn’t touch the clothes, but they don’t appear to be bloody.
Presumably she got undressed and hung her clothes up before she was murdered.
So why isn’t her whole body covered with blood? Something must have protected her. But what? There’s nothing else here.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
