The Nightmare - Ларс Кеплер

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Björn hears him and stops, treading water, then turns to look back towards land.

      Time almost stands still. Penelope rushes to the helm and digs about in the toolbox, finds a knife and runs back to the aft-deck.

      She sees Björn’s slow strokes, the rings spreading out across the water around him. He’s looking curiously at the man. The man beckons him towards him. Björn smiles uncertainly and starts to swim back to shore.

      ‘Björn!’ Penelope screams as loudly as she can. ‘Swim away from shore!’

      The man on the shore turns towards her, then starts running towards the boat. Penelope cuts through the rope, slips over on the wet wooden deck, gets to her feet, hurries to the helm and starts the engine. Without looking she raises the anchor and puts the boat in reverse.

      Björn must have heard her, because he’s turned away from shore and has started to swim towards the boat instead. Penelope steers towards him as she sees the man in black change direction and start running up the slope towards the other side of the island. Without really thinking about it, she realises that the man has left his black inflatable in the bay to the north.

      She knows there’s no way they can outrun that.

      She slowly turns the big boat and steers towards Björn. She yells at him as she gets closer, then slows down and holds a boathook out to him. The water’s cold. He looks scared and exhausted. His head keeps disappearing below the surface. She manages to hit him with the point of the boathook, cutting his forehead and making it bleed.

      ‘You have to hold on!’ she shouts.

      The black inflatable is already coming into view at the end of the island. She can hear its engine clearly. Björn is grimacing with pain. After several attempts he finally manages to wrap his arm around the boathook. She pulls him towards the swimming platform as fast as she can. He grabs hold of the edge and she lets go of the boathook and watches it drift off across the water.

      ‘Viola’s dead,’ she screams, hearing the mixture of despair and panic in her voice.

      As soon as Björn has climbed up onto the steps she runs back to the wheel and accelerates as hard as she can.

      Björn clambers over the railing and she hears him yell at her to steer straight towards Ornäs.

      The roar of the inflatable’s motors is rapidly approaching from behind.

      She swings the boat round in a tight curve, and the hull rumbles beneath them.

      ‘He killed Viola,’ Penelope whimpers.

      ‘Mind the rocks,’ Björn warns, his teeth chattering.

      The inflatable has rounded Stora Kastskär and is speeding across the flat, open water.

      Blood is running down Björn’s face from the cut on his forehead.

      They’re rapidly approaching the large island. Björn turns to see the inflatable some three hundred metres behind them.

      ‘Aim for the jetty!’

      She turns and puts the engines in reverse, then switches them off when the fore hits the jetty with a creak. The whole side of the boat scrapes past some protruding wooden steps. The swell hisses as it hits the rocks and rolls back towards them. The boat rocks sideways and the wooden steps shatter as water washes over the railings. They leap off the boat and hurry across the jetty. Behind them they hear the hull scrape against the jetty on the waves. They race towards land as the black inflatable roars towards them. Penelope slips and puts her hand out, then clambers up the steep rocks towards the trees, gasping for breath. The inflatable’s engines go quiet below them, and Penelope realises that they have barely any advantage at all. She and Björn rush through the trees, deeper into the forest, while her mind starts to panic as she looks around for somewhere they can hide.

       4

       The floating man

      Paragraph 21 of Swedish Police Law permits a police officer to gain entry to a house, room or other location if there is reason to believe that someone may have died, is unconscious or otherwise incapable of calling for help.

      The reason why Police Constable John Bengtsson on this Saturday afternoon in June has been instructed to investigate the top flat at Grevgatan 2 is that the director general of the Inspectorate for Strategic Products, Carl Palmcrona, has been absent from work without any explanation and missed a scheduled meeting with the Foreign Minister.

      It’s far from the first time that John Bengtsson has had to break into someone’s home to see if anyone is dead or injured. Mostly it’s been because relatives have suspected suicide. Silent, frightened parents forced to wait in the stairwell while he goes in to check the rooms. Sometimes he finds young men with barely discernible pulses after a heroin overdose, and occasionally he has discovered a crime scene, women who have been beaten to death lying in the glow from the television in the living room.

      John Bengtsson is carrying his house-breaking tools and an electric pick gun as he walks in through the imposing front entrance. He takes the lift up to the fifth floor and rings the doorbell. He waits a while, then puts his heavy bag down on the floor and inspects the lock. Suddenly he hears a shuffling sound in the stairwell, from the floor below. It sounds like someone is trying to creep silently down the stairs. Police Constable John Bengtsson listens for a while, then reaches out and tries the handle: the door isn’t locked, and glides open softly on its four hinges.

      ‘Is anyone home?’ he calls.

      John Bengtsson waits a few seconds, then pulls his bag into the hall and closes the door, wipes his shoes on the doormat and walks further into the large entrance hall.

      Gentle music can be heard in a neighbouring room. He goes over, knocks and walks in. It’s a spacious reception room, sparsely furnished with three Carl Malmsten sofas, a low glass table and a small painting of a ship in a storm on the wall. An ice-blue glow is coming from a flat, transparent music centre. Melancholic, almost tentative violin music is playing from the speakers.

      John Bengtsson walks over to the double door and opens them, and finds himself looking into a sitting room with tall, art-nouveau windows. The summer light outside is refracted through the tiny panes of glass in the top sections of the windows.

      A man is floating in the centre of the white room.

      It looks supernatural.

      John Bengtsson stands and stares at the dead man. It feels like an eternity before he spots the washing-line fixed to the lamp-hook.

      The well-dressed man is perfectly still, as if he had been frozen in the middle of a big jump, with his ankles stretched and the toes of his shoes pointing down at the floor.

      He’s hanging – but there’s something else, something that doesn’t make sense, something wrong.

      John Bengtsson mustn’t enter the room. The scene needs to be left intact. His heart is beating fast, he can feel the heavy rhythm of his pulse, and swallows hard, but he can’t tear his eyes from the man floating in the middle of the empty room.

      A name has started to echo inside John Bengtsson’s head, almost as a whisper: Joona. I need to speak to Joona Linna.

      There’s no furniture in the room, just a hanged man, who in all likelihood is Carl Palmcrona, the director general of the Inspectorate for Strategic Products.

      The cord has been fastened to the middle of the ceiling, from the lamp-hook in the middle of the ceiling-rose.

      There was nothing for him to climb on, John Bengtsson thinks.

      The height of the ceiling is at least three and a half metres.

      John Bengtsson

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