Ларс Кеплер - The Rabbit Hunter

Anja quickly looks up his name and discovers that a David Jordan is the founder of the company that produces Rex’s cooking shows, and that he pretty much acts as his manager.

‘Where does he live?’ Joona asks.

‘He lives... out on Ingarö, and his company has an office on Observatorie Street.’

‘Send one team out to Ingarö, one to the office, and another to Rex Müller’s home,’ Joona tells Carlos. ‘But don’t forget that he’s extremely dangerous... he’s very likely to try to kill the first men in.’

‘Don’t say such things,’ Carlos mutters.

Joona and Anja wait while Carlos quickly organises a leadership team and gives the National Operations Unit the order to break into the house on Ingarö, then gives the two other addresses to the local police response teams.

Before he ends his call he stresses the importance of heavy armaments and protective vests.

‘He can shoot right through our vests,’ Joona says, and leaves the room.

The sky is white now that the rain has passed. Faded dog rose petals are stuck to the drain-covers. Water drips from the roof of the Forensic Medicine Department at Karolinska Institute.

Nils ‘The Needle’ Åhlén drives past the car park in his white Jaguar, pulls up on the pavement and stops right in front of the entrance with one of the back wheels on the flowerbed.

The Needle’s thin face is clean-shaven, and he has his white-framed aviator sunglasses perched on his crooked nose. He’s regarded as an extremely dedicated and focused pathologist, and today he’s in an unusually good mood.

He waves cheerily at the woman at the reception desk, goes into his office, takes his jacket off and pulls his white coat on.

‘You know I’m a bad man... la, la, la,’ he sings as he goes into the lab.

The Needle’s assistant, Frippe, has already taken the body out of the store and has laid it, in the sealed bag it was placed in for transportation, on the table ready for the post-mortem.

‘I spoke to Carlos, and he says Joona Linna’s back,’ Nils says. ‘Now everything’s going to be fine again.’

He stops talking abruptly, clears his throat a couple of times, takes off his glasses and polishes them on the bottom of his coat.

‘I’m starting to understand why I had to get Mr Ritter out again,’ Frippe says, tucking his hair up in a ponytail.

‘Joona thinks he was murdered,’ The Needle says, and the corners of his mouth twitch into a smile.

‘That’s not what I think,’ Frippe says.

‘Three people who attended Ludviksberg School thirty years ago have been killed this week. But Joona thinks there could be more, so Anja ran all the names from their old yearbooks through the databases. There’s one suicide in the south of Sweden that Joona plans to look into... and the only other relevant death is this one,’ Nils concludes.

‘Which was an accident,’ Frippe says.

‘Joona thinks we’ve missed a murder.’

‘He hasn’t even seen the damn body,’ Frippe says with barely concealed irritation.

‘No,’ The Needle says, smiling happily.

‘Carl-Erik Ritter was incredibly drunk. He had 0.23 per cent alcohol in his blood. He fell into a plate-glass window on his way home from the El Bocado pub in Axelsberg and cut his carotid artery open,’ Frippe goes on, opening the body-bag.

A cloying, swampy smell spreads through the room.

Carl-Erik Ritter’s naked body is brown and mottled, and his blackened stomach is distended.

The body has been stored at a temperature of 7 °C to slow the decomposition process, but they are losing the fight against decay.

Frippe leans over the grey face, and suddenly notices something red glinting in one of the nostrils.

‘What the hell...?’

A brownish red liquid starts to trickle from the nose, across the dead man’s lips and down his cheek.

‘Shit,’ Frippe says, jerking his head back.

The Needle hides his smile but says nothing — he reacted that way himself once upon a time. During the process of decomposition blisters often develop beneath the skin and inside the nose; when the blisters suddenly burst and the liquid drains out, it’s easy to confuse that with a nosebleed.

Frippe goes over to the computer and stands there for a while, before returning with his iPad and starting to compare pictures from the scene with the dead man’s injuries.

‘Well, I’m sticking with my evaluation,’ he says after a while. ‘It’s a textbook accident... But obviously Joona could be right about other deaths, there are other districts, we could have missed a murder in Gothenburg or Ystad.’

‘Maybe,’ Nils mutters, pulling on a pair of vinyl gloves.

‘The shop window broke and Ritter fell onto the glass. It all makes sense. Take a look at the forensics team’s report,’ Frippe says, holding out the iPad.

Nils doesn’t take it, but instead starts to examine the many superficial cuts on the body, which now look like thin black lines, focused mainly on the hands, knees, torso and face. The only really serious wound is the incision across the throat and up towards one ear.

‘One straight, gaping wound,’ Frippe reads as Nils picks at the deep gash. ‘The internal edges are smooth and not particularly drenched in blood... no tissue damage or bruising, and the surrounding skin is intact...’

‘Fine,’ The Needle says, running his finger along the inside of the cut.

‘The direct cause of death was a combination of blood loss and blood aspiration,’ Frippe goes on.

‘Yes, it’s a very deep wound,’ Nils murmurs.

‘He was drunk, lost his balance, smashed onto the plate-glass window with his full bodyweight, and his neck slid down one of the jagged edges... like the blade of a guillotine.’

Nils gives him an amused sideways glance.

‘But what if those unfortunate circumstances are too perfect?’ he says. ‘What if he had help from someone applying pressure to his head, someone who made sure his neck slid along the jagged edge so that it cut right through his carotid artery and throat.’

‘It was an accident,’ Frippe says obstinately.

‘He drowned slowly in his own blood,’ The Needle declares, pushing his glasses further up his long nose.

‘Now it feels like Joona Linna is standing here asking who’s right,’ Frippe groans.

‘But you’re convinced you are,’ Nils says breezily.

‘It was an accident. I removed two hundred and ten glass splinters from the body.’

Nils moves his fingers to the dead man’s mouth and opens the congealed wound on the top lip, uncovering his teeth.

‘This was done with a knife,’ he says curtly.

‘A knife,’ Frippe repeats, and swallows hard.

‘Yes.’

‘So it was murder after all,’ Frippe says, looking at the body.

‘No question,’ The Needle whispers, looking him in the eye.

‘One single wound... One single wound out of two fucking hundred was inflicted with a knife.’

‘To give the victim a hare-lip...’

The National Operations Unit’s black minibuses have blocked the narrow road four hundred metres from David Jordan’s home on the island of Ingarö. Heavily armed police officers are cordoning off the area, and have laid out spike strips that run all the way across, even down into the ditches.

After consultation with Janus Mickelsen of the Security Police, the ground operation is being led by Magnus Mollander. He’s a shy blond man, who split up with his girlfriend just a few days ago. One morning she declared out of the blue that she could no longer live with someone who risked death every time he went to work. There had been no reasoning with her. She just packed her flowery suitcase and left.