Ларс Кеплер - Stalker

‘Then they’d be lying.’

‘Are you sure about that? You don’t remember anything from—’

‘I don’t remember an alibi, because there wasn’t one,’ Rocky interrupts.

‘But you do remember your colleague — what if he was the one who murdered Rebecka?’

‘I murdered Rebecka Hansson,’ Rocky says.

‘Do you remember that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know anyone called Olivia?’

Rocky shakes his head, then looks towards the approaching guards and raises his chin.

‘Before you ended up here?’

‘No.’

The guards push Rocky up against the fence, hit the backs of his knees, force him to the ground and put handcuffs on him.

‘Look out for him!’ the other patient cries.

The larger of the guards puts his knee on Rocky’s back while the other one holds his baton to his throat.

‘Look out for him...’ the other patient sobs.

As Erik follows one of the guards away from Ward D, he starts to smile to himself. There is no alibi. Rocky killed Rebecka Hansson, and there’s no connection between the murders.

Out in the car park he stops and takes several deep breaths as he looks up past the trees in the park at the bright sky. A feeling of liberation is spreading through his body, as a longstanding burden is lifted from his shoulders.

Nils Åhlén, professor of forensic medicine, pulls in and parks his white Jaguar across two parking spaces.

The National Criminal Investigation Department want him to take a look at two homicides.

Both bodies have already been through post-mortems. Åhlén has read the reports. They’re beyond reproach, far more thorough than is strictly necessary. Even so, the head of the preliminary investigation has asked him to take a second look at both bodies. They’re still fumbling in the dark, and want him to try to identify any subtle similarities, signatures or messages.

Margot Silverman believes she’s dealing with a narcissistic serial killer, and thinks the murderer is trying to communicate.

Åhlén leaves his car and breathes in the morning air. There’s almost no wind today, the sun is shining and the blue blinds have been lowered in all the windows.

There’s something next to the entrance. At first Nils Åhlén thinks someone’s dumped rubbish behind the railing of the little concrete steps, but then he sees that it’s a human being. A bearded man is asleep on the tarmac, with his back leaning against the cement foundations of the brick wall. He’s wrapped in a blanket, and his forehead is resting against his tucked-up knees.

It’s a warm morning, and Åhlén hopes the man is left to sleep in peace before the security guards find him. He adjusts his aviator’s sunglasses and walks towards the door, but stops when he notices the man’s clean hands and the white scar running across his right knuckles.

‘Joona?’ he asks gently.

Joona Linna raises his head and looks at him, as though he wasn’t asleep, just waiting to be addressed.

Åhlén stares at his old friend. Joona is almost unrecognisable. He’s lost a lot of weight, and is sporting a thick, fair beard. His pale face is grey, with dark rings under his eyes, and his hair is long and messy.

‘I want to see the finger,’ he says.

‘I might have guessed.’ Åhlén smiles. ‘How are you? You look OK.’

Joona takes hold of the railings and pulls himself up heavily, then picks up his bag and stick. He knows how he looks, but he can’t help it, he’s still grieving.

‘Did you fly or drive down?’ Åhlén asks.

Joona peers at the lamp above the door. At the bottom of the glass under the bulb is a small heap of dead insects.

After Saga’s visit, Joona went with his daughter Lumi to visit Summa’s grave in Purnu. Then they walked down to the little sandy beach at Autiojärvi and talked about the future.

He knew what she wanted to do, without her having to say anything.

In order for Lumi not to lose her place at the Paris College of Art, she had to be there to enrol in two days’ time. Joona arranged for her to live with his friend Corinne Meilleroux’s sister in the eighth arrondissement. They didn’t have time to make too many other arrangements, but he gave Lumi enough money to get by.

And a whole load of useful tips about close combat and automatic weapons, she joked.

He drove her to the airport, and it took a real effort not to go to pieces. She gave him a hug and whispered that she loved him.

‘Or did you catch the train?’ Åhlén asks patiently.

He returned to the house in Nattavaara, dismantled the alarm system, locked the weapons in the cellar, and packed a rucksack. Once he’d turned the water off and shut the house up, he walked to the railway station and caught the train to Gällivare, made his way to the airport and flew to Arlanda, then caught the bus in to Stockholm. He covered the last five kilometres to the campus of the Karolinska Institute on foot.

‘I walked,’ he replies, without noticing the look of surprise on Åhlén’s face.

Joona waits, with one hand on the black iron railings as Åhlén unlocks the blue door. They walk together along the corridor with its muted colours and worn floor.

Joona can’t walk quickly with his stick, and has to stop and cough several times.

They pass the door to the toilets and are approaching a window containing a large pot plant that seems to consist mainly of roots. Dandelion seeds are drifting through the air in the sunshine outside. Something moves unexpectedly out there. Joona’s instinct is to duck down and draw his gun, but he forces himself to walk over to the window instead. An old woman is standing on the pavement, waiting for a dog that’s running back and forth among the dandelions.

‘How are you?’ Åhlén asks.

‘I don’t know.’

Joona’s body is trembling, and he goes into the toilet, leans over the basin and drinks some water straight from the tap. He straightens up and dries his face with a paper towel, then goes back out into the corridor.

‘Joona, I’ve got the finger in the locked cabinet in the pathology lab, but... I’m meeting Margot Silverman in half an hour... You can wait in my room instead if you don’t feel up to it—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Joona interrupts.

Nils Åhlén opens the swing-door to the pathology lab, and holds it open for Joona. Together they walk into the bright room with its shimmering white tiles. Joona puts his rucksack down by the wall next to the door, but keeps the blanket round his shoulders.

A cloying stench of decay lingers over the room in spite of the whirring fans. There are two bodies on the post-mortem tables. The more recent one is covered, and blood is slowly trickling down the stainless steel gutter.

They go over to the desk with the computer. Joona waits quietly as Åhlén unlocks a heavy door.

‘Sit down,’ he says as he puts the glass jar on the table.

He pulls a folder out of a box, opens it and places the test results from the National Forensics Lab, the old ID documents, the fingerprint analysis and enlargements of the images from Saga’s phone in front of Joona.

Joona sits down and stares at the jar. After a few seconds he picks it up, holds it up to the light, examines it closely, and nods.

‘I’ve kept everything here because I had a feeling you’d show up,’ Åhlén says. ‘But, like I said on the phone, you’ll see that it all checks out. The old man who found the body cut the finger off, as you can see from the angle of the cut... and that happened long after death, just as he explained to Saga.’

Joona carefully reads the report from the laboratory. They had built up a DNA profile based on thirty STR regions. The match was one hundred per cent, thus confirming the results of the fingerprint analysis.