Stalker - Ларс Кеплер

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the corridor.

      ‘I didn’t believe it when they said you were in the building,’ Carlos says, unable to contain his smile. ‘I mean … I can’t really take it in.’

      ‘I just want to look at something,’ Joona says, and tries to walk on.

      ‘Come and see me afterwards and we’ll have a talk about the future.’

      ‘What’s there to say about that?’ Joona says, and walks away.

      His work there feels distant now, further away than his childhood. There’s nothing for me to come back to, he thinks.

      He wouldn’t be here now if the first victim’s hand hadn’t been cupped like a little bowl by her hip.

      That made a small spark begin to smoulder inside him.

      Her slender fingers could have been Lumi’s. A deep-seated curiosity woke up inside him, and he suddenly felt compelled to get closer to the body.

      ‘We need you here,’ Magdalena Ronander says as they shake hands.

      It’s no longer his job, but when he was confronted with the first victim, he felt a connection that he’d like to be able to control. Maybe he can give Margot a hand with the early stages, just until she can see a way through.

      Joona stumbles as pain shoots down his leg, his shoulder hits the wall and he hears his leather jacket scrape against the rough wallpaper.

      ‘I put a note on the intranet that you were going to be coming,’ Margot says as they stop outside room 822.

      Anja Larsson, his assistant for all those years, is standing in the doorway of her room. Her face is red. Her chin starts to quiver and tears well up in her eyes as he stops in front of her.

      ‘I’ve missed you, Anja,’ he says.

      ‘Have you?’

      Joona nods, and looks her in the eye. His pale grey eyes have a dull shimmer, as if he had a fever.

      ‘Everyone said you were dead, that you’d … But I couldn’t believe that … I didn’t want to, I … I suppose I always thought you were too stubborn to die,’ she smiles as tears run down her cheeks.

      ‘It just wasn’t my time,’ he replies.

      The corridor starts to empty as everyone returns to their rooms; they’ve already seen enough of the fallen hero.

      ‘What do you look like?’ Anja says, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her blouse.

      ‘I know,’ he says simply.

      She pats his cheek.

      ‘You’d better go, Joona. They’re waiting for you.’

       30

      Joona enters the operations room and closes the door behind him. On the long wall is a huge map of Stockholm with the crime scenes marked on it. Next to the map pictures from the examination of the scenes have been stuck up: footprints, bodies, blood-spatter patterns. There’s a large photograph of the porcelain deer’s head, with its reddish-brown glazed fur and eyes like black onyx. Joona looks at the copy of Maria Carlsson’s Filofax. The day she was murdered she had written ‘class 19.00 – squared paper, pencils, ink’, and underneath she had scribbled the letter ‘h’.

      On the other wall they’ve tried to map the victims’ profiles. They’ve begun to identify family connections and other relationships. Their movements – workplaces, friends, supermarkets, gyms, classes, buses, cafés – have been marked with pins.

      Adam Youssef stands up from his computer and walks over to Joona, shakes his hand, then pins a picture of a kitchen knife on the wall.

      ‘It’s just been confirmed that this knife was the murder weapon. Björn Kern washed it up and put it back in the drawer … but we had a number of stab-wounds through the sternum, so it was fairly easy to reconstruct the type of blade we were looking for … and it turned out that there were still tiny traces of blood on it.’

      Youssef catches his breath, scratches his head hard a couple of times, then moves on to the enlargement of the deer’s head.

      ‘The porcelain figure is made of Meissen china,’ he says, letting his finger linger over the animal’s glistening black eye. ‘But the rest of the deer wasn’t at the crime scene … Björn Kern hasn’t yet been able to give any sort of coherent statement, so we don’t know if he was the one who put it in her hand …’

      Joona stops and looks at the photograph of Maria Carlsson’s body. The dead woman is sitting propped up against a radiator under a window, wearing a pair of tights.

      He reads the report from the examination of the crime scene. There’s no mention of any tongue-stud or similar item of jewellery being found in her home.

      Adam shoots a questioning glance at Margot behind Joona’s back.

      ‘He wants to look at the film of Maria Carlsson,’ she says.

      ‘OK. What for?’

      She smiles. ‘We’ve missed something.’

      ‘Probably,’ he laughs, and scratches his neck.

      ‘You can borrow my computer,’ Margot says amiably.

      Joona thanks her and sits down on her chair, adjusts the media-player to full-screen and starts the clip. Just as Margot has described, it shows a thirty-year-old woman filmed in secret through her bedroom window as she pulls on a pair of black tights.

      He sees her face, completely unaware, her downturned eyes, the calm set of her mouth, which then switches to something approaching lethargy. Her hair is hanging round her face, it looks like it’s just been washed. She’s wearing a black bra and she’s trying to get her tights to sit properly.

      There’s a lamp with a clouded white shade and alabaster base in the window, and her shadow moves across the chest of drawers and the flowery wallpaper. She slips her hand between her thighs and tries to pull the thin nylon material up towards her crotch, and he can see her breathing through her mouth as the film ends.

      ‘Did you see what you were looking for?’ Adam asks, leaning over Joona’s shoulder.

      Joona remains seated in front of the screen, then plays the film again, watches her struggle with her tights, then freezes the picture after thirty-five seconds and clicks to advance it frame by frame.

      ‘We’ve done that too,’ Adam says, stifling a belch.

      Joona moves closer to the screen and watches Maria Carlsson as she moves very slowly, breathing with her mouth open. Her eyes blink and her long lashes cast shadows across her cheeks. Her right hand sinks weightlessly between her thighs to her crotch.

      ‘This won’t do,’ Adam says to Margot. ‘We need to get on.’

      ‘Give him a chance,’ she replies.

      Maria Carlsson turns jerkily towards the camera, the grey shadow crosses her face, as if she were being lifted up from a bath full of lead. Her lips part, the light from the lamp in the window shines on her face, making her eyes glow, and there’s a shimmer in her mouth, then the film ends.

      Behind Joona, Adam and Margot have started to talk about investigating the people in the drawing class that Maria was about to set out for; they’ve already tried to find out if any of their names begin with ‘H’, but without success so far.

      Joona moves the cursor and plays the last five seconds again. The light plays across her hair, her ear and cheeks, making her eyes shine, and then her mouth flashes.

      He enlarges the image as far as he can without losing too much focus, then shifts the enlarged area so that it covers her mouth, and looks at the last few frames again. Her parted lips fill the screen, light

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