Ларс Кеплер - The Rabbit Hunter

Magnus’s flashlight moves across the dissected, splayed cadavers of rabbits, glinting with black flies.

There’s a glass jar holding knives with stained wooden handles and blunt blades.

‘This is fucking disgusting...’

They hear the clattering sound again. Magnus points his gun at the floor and the flashlight lights up a cage. The innards of a large number of animals lie tossed against the wall beside a drain. There’s a yellow plastic bucket containing a bloody chopping board and a skin scraper.

The clattering sound is coming from the little cage on the floor. A panic-stricken rabbit is darting around, its claws scraping against the metal mesh.

Joona pulls on a breathing mask and vinyl gloves and goes down into the cramped slaughter-room to examine the dead animals. He quickly takes in the stinking innards on the floor, then the dissected animals and hanging body parts, but can’t find any remains that are obviously human. What happened here seems to have been a mix of rabbit slaughter and animal torture. He can see attempts to produce rabbit-skins, and the remains of shredded leather on a filthy stretching rack, as well as unsettling evidence of violent dissections, trophy-gathering and mutilation.

On the bloodstained wall behind the workbench is an old newspaper clipping with a picture of Rex holding a silver chef’s trophy in his raised hand.

Joona carries the live rabbit in its cage up into the sunlight, then walks a little way into the forest before he lets it go.

Janus has leaned his sniper rifle against the fence surrounding the tennis court and undone his bulletproof vest. He puts a tablet in his mouth, tucks his red hair back and drinks from a bottle of water, leaning his head back and gulping it down.

‘I saw you on some of the security-camera footage from the Foreign Minister’s home,’ Joona says.

‘My first job when I started with the Security Police was cleaning up after him... A great way to spend taxpayers’ money. Some of the girls were so badly hurt that I had to take them to the emergency room... and afterwards I was the one who had to get them to keep quiet and disappear.’

‘I understand that you were transferred.’

‘That was at the Foreign Minister’s request. All I’d done was hold him up against the wall, grab him by his tiny cock and tell him that I was obliged to protect him, but that I have two faces, and one of them isn’t very nice.’

Magnus Mollander is waiting for Joona when he returns with the empty cage. Magnus’s face is grey, as if he has a fever, and he’s shivering in spite of the fact that he has beads of sweat on his forehead.

‘There’s nothing on the computer,’ he reports. ‘Forensics have done an initial assessment but can’t find anything to suggest where David Jordan might have gone.’

He breaks off his report as Rajmo walks over to them to tell them that a woman is heading down the road towards the house.

‘Get rid of any obstructions before she sees them,’ Joona says. ‘Keep out of the way, and we’ll see if she’s on her way here.’

They all huddle behind the guesthouse where they can’t be seen from the road: nine heavily armed police officers, Joona, and the forensics officer.

The gate opens with a gentle creak.

Joona draws his pistol and holds it hidden by his side as he hears the woman’s footsteps on the gravel path.

She’s getting very close to them now.

Joona takes a step forward.

The woman lets out a yelp of fear.

‘Sorry to startle you,’ Joona says, with his pistol tucked against his leg.

The woman stares at him, eyes wide open. Her hair is straight and blonde, and she’s wearing faded jeans, simple sandals and a washed-out T-shirt with the words ‘Feel the Burn’ on it.

‘I’m with the police, and I need you to answer a couple of questions,’ Joona says.

The woman tries to compose herself, takes her phone out of her bag and takes a step towards him.

‘I’ll just call the police and check that...’

She breaks off abruptly when she sees the heavily armed response unit waiting behind the guesthouse. The colour slowly drains from her face as she takes in their bulletproof vests, helmets, automatic pistols and sniper rifles.

‘Where’s David Jordan?’ Joona asks, putting his pistol back in its holster.

‘What?’

The young woman stares up at the house in amazement, and sees the front door lying on the ground.

‘David Jordan,’ Joona says. ‘He isn’t at home.’

‘No,’ she says in a thin voice. ‘He’s in Norrland.’

‘What’s he doing there?’

She screws her eyes up as if the sun is dazzling her.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Some work thing, I guess?’

‘Whereabouts in Norrland?’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Call him,’ Joona says, pointing to the phone that she’s still clutching in her hand. ‘Ask where he is, but don’t say anything about us.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she whispers, and puts her phone to her ear, but lowers it almost immediately. ‘It’s switched off... his phone’s switched off.’

‘Are you two together?’ Joona asks, looking at her with eyes as grey as stone.

‘Together? I haven’t really thought about it... we meet up fairly regularly... I like being here, I can paint when I’m here, but it’s not like we’re that close or anything, I have no idea what he does every day, other than producing Rex’s cooking shows.’

She falls silent and drags one foot across the gravel.

‘But you knew he was going away.’

‘He just said he was going to Norrland, but he knows he doesn’t need to tell me his every move.’

‘Norrland’s the size of Britain,’ Joona says.

‘He might have mentioned Kiruna,’ she says. ‘I think it was Kiruna.’

‘What do you think he was going to do in Kiruna?’

‘I have no idea.’

Without another word Joona starts to walk towards his car. He calls Anja on his new phone to ask her to book a plane ticket.

‘Have you managed to get hold of Rex Müller yet?’ he asks, getting in the car.

‘Neither he nor his son Sammy are at home, and no one knows where they are. We’ve spoken to TV4, and the boy’s mother, who’s out of the country, but...’

‘Well, it looks like David Jordan travelled up to Kiruna this morning,’ Joona says, pulling out onto the road.

‘Not according to any passenger lists.’

‘Check to see if any private planes have landed at the airport, or any private airstrip.’

‘OK.’

‘I’m heading to Arlanda now,’ he adds.

‘Of course you are,’ Anja says calmly.

‘And I’m counting on you to trace their phones in the meantime.’

‘We’re trying, but the operators are reluctant to hand over any information, to put it mildly.’

‘As long as you get the information before my plane takes off.’

‘I can talk to the prosecutor about—’

‘Fuck that, roll over them, break the law,’ he interrupts. ‘Sorry, but if we can’t locate Rex and his son they’re going to be dead very soon.’

‘Fuck that,’ she repeats calmly. ‘Roll over them and break the law.’

The winding forest road is empty. Joona passes a group of holiday homes around a glittering lake with a diving platform in the middle of it.

Joona speeds up and is just about to pull out onto the main road when Anja calls him back.

‘Joona, it can’t be done,’ she says.

She tells him that the NOU’s technicians have tried to locate David Jordan and Rex using GPS tracking. They haven’t been able to remotely activate the phones so that they transmit positional data, and because the mobile phone companies are unable to detect any signals from their local masts in Kiruna, the technicians are confident that David Jordan’s and Rex’s phones aren’t just switched off, but smashed.