Kitabı oku: «The Nightmare», sayfa 9
25
The child on the stairs
Joona leaves the living room and looks into the bathroom, which is in the process of being photographed in detail. He carries on to the hall and out through the open front door to the landing, and stops in front of the mesh covering the lift-shaft.
The name Nilsson is on the door beside the lift. He raises his hand and knocks, then waits. After a while he hears footsteps inside. A rotund woman in her sixties opens the door slightly and peers out.
‘Yes?’
‘Hello, my name is Joona Linna, I’m a detective superintendent, and I …’
‘I’ve already said, I didn’t see his face,’ she interrupts.
‘Have the police already spoken to you? I didn’t know that.’
She opens the door and two cats lying on the telephone table jump down and disappear into the flat.
‘He was wearing a Dracula mask,’ the woman says impatiently, as if she’s already explained this numerous times.
‘Who?’
‘Who,’ she mutters, and walks into the flat.
She returns shortly afterwards with a yellowing newspaper cutting.
Joona glances at the article, which is twenty years old, about a flasher who dressed up as Dracula when he exposed himself to women on Södermalm.
‘He didn’t have a stitch on down below …’
‘I was actually …’
‘Not that I looked,’ she goes on. ‘But I’ve already told your people all about it.’
Joona looks at her and smiles.
‘I was actually thinking about something completely different.’
The woman opens her eyes wide.
‘Then why didn’t you say so at once?’
‘I was wondering if you know Penelope Fernandez, your neighbour, who …’
‘She’s like a granddaughter to me,’ the woman interrupts. ‘Such a sweet girl, so kind and pretty and …’
She stops abruptly, then asks quietly:
‘Is she dead?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because the police have been here asking horrid questions,’ she says.
‘I was just wondering if she’d had any unusual visitors in the past few days.’
‘Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I poke my nose into other people’s business and keep charts of what they get up to.’
‘No, but I was thinking that you might just have happened to notice something.’
‘Well, I haven’t.’
‘Has anything else out of the ordinary happened?’
‘Definitely not. She’s a very clever, well-behaved girl.’
Joona thanks her for her time and says that he may come back if he has further questions, then stands aside so the woman can close the door.
There are no other flats on the third floor. He starts to walk up the stairs to the next floor. Halfway up he sees a child sitting on one of the steps. It looks like an eight-year-old boy: short hair, dressed in jeans and a washed-out Helly Hansen T-shirt, and clutching a plastic bag with a Ramlösa water-bottle with its label almost rubbed off, and half a loaf of bread.
Joona stops in front of the child, who looks up at him warily.
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Mia.’
‘Mine’s Joona.’
He notices the dirt on the girl’s thin neck.
‘Have you got a gun?’ she asks.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘You told Ella that you’re a policeman.’
‘That’s right – I’m a superintendent.’
‘Have you got a gun?’
‘Yes, I have,’ Joona says in a neutral voice. ‘Do you want to practise shooting it?’
The child looks at him in astonishment.
‘You’re kidding?’
‘Yeah,’ Joona says with a smile.
The child laughs.
‘Why are you sitting on the stairs?’ he asks.
‘I like it, you get to hear stuff.’
Joona sits down beside the child.
‘What sort of stuff have you heard?’ he asks calmly.
‘I just heard that you’re a policeman, and I heard Ella lie to you.’
‘What did she lie to me about?’
‘When she said she likes Penelope,’ Mia says.
‘Doesn’t she?’
‘She puts cat poo through her letterbox.’
‘Why does she do that?’
The girl shrugs and fiddles with the plastic bag.
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do you think of Penelope?’
‘She usually says hello.’
‘But you don’t really know her?’
‘No.’
Joona looks round.
‘Do you live on the stairs?’
The girl tries not to smile.
‘No, I live on the first floor with my mum.’
‘But you hang out on the stairs.’
Mia shrugs again.
‘Most of the time.’
‘Do you sleep here?’
The girl picks at the label on the bottle and says quickly:
‘Sometimes.’
‘On Friday,’ Joona says slowly, ‘very early in the morning, Penelope left her flat. She took a taxi.’
‘She was really unlucky,’ the child says quickly. ‘She missed Björn by just a few seconds, he arrived just after she left. I told him she’d just gone.’
‘What did he say?’
‘That it didn’t matter, because he was only going to collect something.’
‘Collect something?’
Mia nods.
‘He usually lets me borrow his phone to play games, but he didn’t have time that visit, he just went into the flat and came back out again straight away, then he locked the door and ran down the stairs.’
‘Did you see what it was that he collected?’
‘No.’
‘What happened after that?’
‘Nothing, I went to school at quarter to nine.’
‘What about after school, later that day? Did anything happen then?’
Mia shrugged once more.
‘Mum was out, so I stayed at home, had some macaroni and watched TV.’
‘How about yesterday?’
‘She was gone yesterday too, so I was home.’
‘So you didn’t see anyone coming and going?’
‘No.’
Joona pulls out his card and writes a phone number on it.
‘Take this, Mia,’ he says. ‘These are two really good phone numbers. One of them’s mine.’
He points at the number printed on the card beside the police logo.
‘Call me if you ever need help, if anyone’s mean to you. And the other number, the one I’ve just written, 0200-230230, that’s the number for Childline. You can call them any time and talk about whatever you like.’
‘Okay,’ Mia says, taking the card.
‘And don’t throw it away as soon as I’ve gone,’ Joona says. ‘Because even if you don’t want to call now, you might want to another time.’
‘Björn was holding his hand like this when he left,’ Mia says, holding her hand to her stomach.
‘As if he had tummy-ache?’
‘Yes.’
26
The palm of a hand
Joona knocks on the other doors in the building but doesn’t learn anything else, beyond the fact that Penelope is a fairly quiet, almost shy neighbour who took part in annual cleaning days and meetings of the residents’ committee, but not much else. When he’s finished he walks slowly back down the stairs to the third floor.
The door to Penelope’s flat is open. One of the Security Police’s forensics experts has just dismantled the lock and placed it in a plastic bag.
Joona goes in and stands in the background, watching the forensic examination. He’s always liked seeing the experts at work – how systematically they photograph everything, securing all the evidence and making careful notes about each part of the process. A crime scene investigation destroys evidence as it proceeds: things get contaminated as the layers are stripped back. The important thing is to wreck the crime scene in the correct order, so that no evidence or vital clues are lost.
Joona looks around at Penelope Fernandez’s neat flat. What was Björn Almskog doing here? He showed up as soon as Penelope had left. It feels almost as if he’d been hiding outside the building waiting for her to go.
It could just be a coincidence, but it could also be because he didn’t want to see her.
Björn hurried inside, bumped into the little girl sitting on the stairs, didn’t have time to talk to her, explained that he was going to collect something, and was only in the flat for a few minutes.
Presumably he did collect something, like he told the child. Perhaps he’d hidden the key to the boat there, or something else he could slip in his pocket.
But perhaps he’d left something else there. What if he just needed to look at something, check some information, a phone number?
Joona goes into the kitchen and looks round.
‘You’ve checked the fridge?’
A young man with a full beard looks at him.
‘Hungry?’ he asks in a broad Dalarna accent.
‘It’s a good place to hide things,’ Joona says drily.
‘We haven’t got there yet,’ the man says.
Joona goes back to the living room and notes that Saga is still talking into a Dictaphone in one corner of the room.
Tommy Kofoed presses a strip of tape containing fibres onto transparent film then looks up.
‘Have you found anything unexpected?’ Joona asks.
‘Unexpected? Well, there was a shoeprint on the wall …’
‘Anything else?’
‘The important information usually comes from the National Forensics Lab in Linköping.’
‘So we should have results within a week?’ Joona asks.
‘If we nag the hell out of them,’ he replies, then shrugs his shoulders. ‘I’m just about to take a look at the doorframe where the knife went in, to make an impression of the blade.’
‘Don’t bother,’ Joona mutters.
Kofoed interprets this as a joke and laughs, then turns serious.
‘Did you get a glimpse of the knife? Steel?’
‘No, the blade was lighter, maybe tungsten carbide – some people prefer that. But none of it will get us anywhere.’
‘What?’
‘This whole crime scene investigation,’ Joona replies. ‘We won’t manage to find any DNA or fingerprints that will help identify the perpetrator.’
‘So what should we be doing?’
‘I think the perpetrator came here to look for something, and I think he was interrupted before he had time to find it.’
‘You mean whatever he was looking for is still here?’ Kofoed asks.
‘It’s possible,’ Joona replies.
‘But you’ve got no idea what it is?’
‘Small enough to fit inside a book.’
Joona’s granite-grey eyes stare into Kofoed’s brown eyes for a moment. Göran Stone from the Security Police is photographing both sides of the bathroom door, the frame, sill and hinges. Then he sits down on the floor to photograph the white ceiling. Joona is about to open the living room door to ask him to take some pictures of the journals on the coffee table when a camera flash goes off. The glare takes him by surprise and he has to stop, as his vision flares. Four white dots slide across his vision, then an oily pale blue hand. Joona looks round; he can’t understand where the hand came from.
‘Göran,’ Joona calls loudly through the glass door to the hall. ‘Take another picture!’
Everyone in the flat stops. The man from Dalarna looks out from the kitchen, and the man by the front door looks round at Joona with interest. Tommy Kofoed takes his breathing mask off and scratches his neck. Göran Stone is still sitting on the floor with a curious look on his face.
‘Just like you did a few moments ago,’ Joona says, pointing. ‘Take another picture of the bathroom ceiling.’
Göran Stone shrugs, raises his camera and takes another photograph of the ceiling. The flash goes off, and Joona feels his pupils contract as his eyes start to water. He closes his eyes and once again sees a black square. He realises it’s the glass panel in the door. Because of the flash he’s seeing it in negative.
In the middle of the square are four white dots, and beside them a pale blue hand.
He knew he’d seen it.
Joona blinks, his vision returns to normal and he walks straight over to the glass door. The remnants of four pieces of tape form an empty rectangle, and there’s a handprint on the glass beside them.
Tommy Kofoed comes over to stand next to Joona.
‘A handprint,’ he says.
‘Can you get it?’ Joona says.
‘Göran,’ Kofoed says. ‘We need a picture of this.’
Göran Stone gets up from the floor and hums to himself and he brings his camera over and looks at the handprint.
‘Yes, someone’s been a bit messy here,’ he says happily, and takes four pictures.
He moves out of the way and waits as Tommy Kofoed treats the print with cyanoacrylate to bind the salts and moisture, then Basic Yellow 40.
Göran waits a few seconds, then takes two more pictures.
‘Now we’ve got you,’ Kofoed whispers to the print, as he carefully lifts it off onto transparent plastic.
‘Can you check it at once?’ Joona asks.
Tommy Kofoed takes the print out into the kitchen. Joona stays where he is, staring at the four pieces of tape on the pane of glass. Behind one of them is the torn-off corner of a sheet of paper. Whoever left the handprint didn’t have time to remove the tape carefully, just tugged the paper from the door leaving one corner behind.
Joona looks more closely at the torn-off corner. He sees straight away that it isn’t ordinary paper. It’s photographic printing paper, used for colour photographs.
A photograph which had been stuck on the glass door to be looked at and studied. And then there’s a sudden rush, there’s no time to remove the photograph carefully – instead someone rushed up to the door, put their hand on the glass to steady it, and pulled the photograph from the tape.
‘Björn,’ Joona says quietly.
This photograph must be what Björn came to collect. He wasn’t holding his hand to his stomach because it hurt, but because he was hiding a photograph under his jacket.
Joona moves his head slightly so he can see the impression of the handprint in the light, the narrow lines of the palm.
A human being’s papillary lines never change, never age. And, unlike DNA, even identical twins don’t share the same fingerprints.
Joona hears quick footsteps behind him and turns round.
‘Okay, that’s more than fucking enough!’ Saga Bauer yells. ‘This is my investigation. Christ, you’re not even supposed to be here!’
‘I just wanted …’
‘Shut up!’ she snaps. ‘I’ve just spoken to Petter Näslund. You’re nothing to do with this, you’re not supposed to be here – you’re not allowed to be here!’
‘I know, I’m about to go,’ he says, and looks back at the pane of glass.
‘Fucking Joona Linna,’ she says slowly. ‘You can’t just show up here and pick at little bits of tape …’
‘There was a photograph stuck to the glass,’ he replies calmly. ‘Someone tore it off, they leaned over this chair, rested their hand on the glass, and pulled it off.’
She looks at him reluctantly and he notices a white scar running across her left eyebrow.
‘I’m perfectly capable of running this investigation,’ she says firmly.
‘The handprint is probably Björn Almskog’s,’ Joona says, and starts to walk to the kitchen.
‘Wrong way, Joona.’
He ignores her and walks into the kitchen.
‘This is my investigation,’ she shouts.
The forensics team have set up a small work-station in the middle of the floor. Two chairs and a table with a computer, scanner and printer. Tommy Kofoed is standing behind Göran Stone, who has connected his camera to the computer. They’ve imported the handprint and are running an initial test for a fingerprint match.
Saga follows Joona.
‘What have you got?’ Joona asks, without bothering about Saga.
‘Don’t talk to Joona,’ she says sharply.
Tommy Kofoed looks up.
‘Don’t be silly, Saga,’ he says, then turns to Joona. ‘No luck this time, the print’s from Björn Almskog, Penelope’s boyfriend.’
‘He’s in the database of suspects,’ Göran Stone says.
‘What was he suspected of?’ Joona asks.
‘Violent riot and threatening a public servant,’ Göran replies.
‘They’re the worst,’ Kofoed jokes. ‘He probably took part in a march.’
‘Funny,’ Göran says sourly. ‘Not everyone in the force is quite so entertained by the rioting and sabotage of the extreme left-wing, and …’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Kofoed interrupts.
‘The rescue operation speaks for itself,’ Göran grins.
‘What?’ Joona asks. ‘What do you mean? I haven’t had time to keep up with the operation – what’s happened?’
27
Extremists
Carlos Eliasson, head of the National Crime Unit, jumps, and spills a load of fish-food into the aquarium when Joona Linna throws his door open.
‘Why is there no ground-search?’ he asks in a hard voice. ‘There are two lives at stake, and we can’t get hold of any boats.’
‘The marine police have made their own evaluation, you know that perfectly well,’ Carlos replies. ‘They’ve searched the entire area by helicopter and everyone agrees that Penelope Fernandez and Björn Almskog are either dead or they don’t want to be found … and neither of those options suggests that there’s any urgency to conduct a ground-search.’
‘They’ve got something the killer wants, and I honestly believe …’
‘There’s no point guessing … We don’t know what happened, Joona. The Security Police seem to think these youngsters have gone underground, they may well be sitting on the train to Amsterdam by …’
‘Stop that,’ Joona interrupts sharply. ‘You can’t rely on the Security Police when it comes to …’
‘This is their case.’
‘Why? Why is it their case? Björn Almskog was once suspected of taking part in a riot. That doesn’t mean anything. Anything at all.’
‘I spoke to Verner Zandén, and he was quick to point out that Penelope Fernandez has links to extreme left-wing groups.’
‘Maybe, but I’m convinced that this murder is about something else entirely,’ Joona says stubbornly.
‘Of course you are! Of course you’re convinced,’ Carlos shouts.
‘I don’t know what, but the person I encountered in Penelope’s flat was a professional killer, not just …’
‘The Security Police seem to think that Penelope and Björn were planning an attack.’
‘Is Penelope Fernandez supposed to be a terrorist now?’ Joona asks in astonishment. ‘Have you read any of her articles? She’s a pacifist, and always condemns …’
‘Yesterday,’ Carlos says, cutting him off. ‘Yesterday someone from the Brigade was arrested by the Security Police, just as he was on his way into her flat.’
‘I don’t even know what the Brigade is.’
‘A militant left-wing organisation … They’re loosely connected to Anti-Fascist Action and the Revolutionary Front, but are independent … They’re close to the Red Army Faction ideologically, and they want to become as operative as Mossad.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Joona says.
‘You don’t want it to make sense, which is a different matter,’ Carlos says. ‘There’ll be a ground-search in the fullness of time, and we’ll check the currents and see how the boat drifted so that we can start dragging and maybe send some divers down.’
‘Good,’ Joona says.
‘What remains is trying to figure out why they were killed … or why and where they’re hiding.’
Joona opens the door to the corridor, but stops and turns back towards Carlos again.
‘What happened to the guy from the Brigade who tried to get into Penelope’s flat?’
‘He was released,’ Carlos replies.
‘Did they find out what he was doing there?’ Joona asks.
‘He was just visiting.’
‘Visiting,’ Joona sighs. ‘That’s all the Security Police managed to get?’
‘You’re not to investigate the Brigade,’ Carlos says with sudden anxiety in his voice. ‘I hope that’s understood?’
Joona leaves the room and takes his phone out as soon as he’s in the corridor. He hears Carlos shout that that’s an order, and that he doesn’t have permission to trespass on Security Police territory. As Joona walks away he looks up Nathan Pollock’s number and calls him.
‘Pollock,’ Nathan says when he answers.
‘What do you know about the Brigade?’ Joona says as the lift doors open.
‘The Security Police have spent several years trying to infiltrate and map the militant left-wing groups in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. I don’t know if the Brigade are particularly dangerous, but the Security Police seem to believe that they’ve got weapons and explosives. Several of the members were in youth custody centres and have previous convictions for violent offences.’
The lift glides downwards.
‘I understand that the Security Police arrested someone with direct links to the Brigade outside Penelope Fernandez’s flat.’
‘His name’s Daniel Marklund, he’s part of the inner circle,’ Nathan replies.
‘What do you know about him?’
‘Not much,’ Pollock replies. ‘He’s got a suspended sentence for vandalism and unlawful hacking.’
‘What was he doing at Penelope’s?’ Joona asks.
The lift stops and the doors open.
‘He was unarmed,’ Nathan says. ‘Demanded legal representation at the start of the preliminary interview, refused to answer any questions at all and was released the same day.’
‘So they don’t know anything?’
‘No.’
‘Where can I get hold of him?’ Joona asks.
‘He’s got no home address,’ Nathan explains. ‘According to the Security Police he lives with the other key members of the group in the Brigade’s premises at Zinkensdamm.’
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