LITMIR.BIZ

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the phone back to Daniella with a silent nod of thanks. “I have to question this patient,” he explains, in a serious tone.

      “I’m sorry,” says Erik. “My assessment is the same as Dr Richards’.”

      “When will he be able to talk to me?” asks Joona.

      “Not while he’s in shock.”

      “I knew you’d say that,” says Joona quietly.

      “The situation is still extremely critical,” explains Daniella. “His pleural sack is damaged, the small intestine, the liver, and—”

      A policeman wearing a dirty uniform comes in, his expression uneasy. Joona waves, walks over, and shakes his hand. He says something in a low voice, and the police officer wipes his mouth and glances apprehensively at the doctors.

      “I know you probably don’t want to talk about this right now,” says Joona. “But it could be very useful for the doctors to know the circumstances.”

      “Well,” says the police officer, clearing his throat feebly, “we hear on the radio that a caretaker’s found a dead man in the toilet at the playing field in Tumba. Our patrol car’s already on Huddingevägen, so all we need to do is turn and head up towards the lake. We reckoned it was an overdose, you know? Jan, my partner, he goes inside while I talk to the caretaker. Turns out to be something else altogether. Jan comes out of the locker room; his face is completely white. He doesn’t even want me to go in there. So much blood, he says three times, and then he just sits down on the steps …”

      The police officer falls silent, sits in a chair, and stares straight ahead.

      “Can you go on?” asks Joona.

      “Yes … The ambulance shows up, the dead man is identified, and it’s my responsibility to inform the next of kin. We’re a bit short-staffed, so I have to go alone. My boss says she doesn’t want to let Jan go out in this state; you can understand why.”

      Erik glances at the clock.

      “You have time to listen to this,” says Joona.

      The police officer goes on, his eyes lowered. “The deceased is a teacher at the high school in Tumba, and he lives in that development up by the ridge. I rang the bell three or four times, but nobody answered. I don’t know what made me do it, but I went round the whole block and shone my torch through a window at the back of the house.” The police officer stops, his mouth trembling, and begins to scrape at the arm of the chair with his fingernail.

      “Please go on,” says Joona.

      “Do I have to? I mean, I … I …”

      “You found the boy, the mother, and a little girl aged five. The boy, Josef, was the only one who was still alive.”

      “Although I didn’t think …” He falls silent, his face ashen.

      Joona relents. “Thank you for coming, Erland.”

      The police officer nods quickly and gets up, runs his hand over his dirty jacket in confusion, and hurries out of the room.

      “They had all been attacked with a knife,” Joona Linna says. “It must have been sheer chaos in there. The bodies were … they were in a terrible state. They’d been kicked and beaten. They’d been stabbed, of course, multiple times, and the little girl … she had been cut in half. The lower part of her body from the waist down was in the armchair in front of the TV.”

      His composure finally seems to give. He stops for a moment, staring at Erik before regaining his calm manner. “My feeling is that the killer knew the father was at the playing field. There had been a football match; he was a referee. The killer waited until he was alone before murdering him; then he started hacking up the body—in a particularly aggressive way—before going to the house to kill the rest of the family.”

      “It happened in that order?” asks Erik.

      “In my opinion,” replies the detective.

      Erik can feel his hand shaking as he rubs his mouth. Father, mother, son, daughter, he thinks very slowly, before meeting Joona Linna’s gaze. “The perpetrator wanted to eliminate the entire family.”

      Joona raises his eyebrows. “That’s exactly it … A child is still out there, the big sister. She’s twenty-three. We think it’s possible the killer is after her as well. That’s why we want to question the witness as soon as possible.”

      “I’ll go in and carry out a detailed examination,” says Erik.

      Joona nods.

      “But we can’t risk the patient’s life by—”

      “I understand that. It’s just that the longer it takes before we have something to go on, the longer the killer has to look for the sister.”

      Now Erik nods.

      “Why don’t you locate the sister, warn her?”

      “We haven’t found her yet. She isn’t in her apartment in Sundbyberg, or at her boyfriend’s.”

      “Perhaps you should examine the scene of the crime,” says Daniella.

      “That’s already under way.”

      “Why don’t you go over there and tell them to get a move on?” she says, irritably.

      “It’s not going to yield anything anyway,” says the detective. “We’re going to find the DNA of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in both places, all mixed up together.”

      “I’ll go in a moment and see the patient,” says Erik.

      Joona meets his gaze and nods. “If I could ask just a couple of questions. That might be all that’s needed to save his sister.”

       3

       tuesday, december 8: early morning

      Erik Maria Bark returns to the patient. Standing in front of the bed, he studies the pale, damaged face; the shallow breathing; the frozen grey lips. Erik says the boy’s name, and something passes painfully across the face.

      “Josef,” he says once again, quietly. “My name is Erik Maria Bark. I’m a doctor, and I’m going to examine you. You can nod if you like, if you understand what I’m saying.”

      The boy is lying completely still, his stomach moving in time with his short breaths. Erik is convinced that the boy understands his words, but the level of consciousness abruptly drops. Contact is broken.

      When Erik leaves the room half an hour later, both Daniella and the detective look at him expectantly. Erik shakes his head.

      “He’s our only witness,” Joona repeats. “Someone has killed his father, his mother, and his little sister. The same person is almost certainly on his way to the older sister right now.”

      “We know that,” Daniella snaps.

      Erik raises a hand to stop the bickering. “We understand it’s important to talk to him. But it’s simply not possible. We can’t just give him a shake and tell him his whole family is dead.”

      “What about hypnosis?” says Joona, almost offhandedly.

      Silence falls in the room.

      “No,” Erik whispers to himself.

      “Wouldn’t hypnosis work?”

      “I don’t know anything about that,” Erik replies.

      “How could that be? You yourself were a famous hypnotist. The best, I heard.”

      “I was a fake,” says Erik.

      “That’s not what I think,” says Joona. “And this is an emergency.”

      Daniella flushes

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