‘I’d still like to see her, if possible,’ he says.
‘We’ll arrange it,’ Janus nods, and tears open the seal on a large padded envelope. ‘There’s time, since the operation won’t be starting until seven o’clock. We’re meeting for a final briefing at five.’
He hands Joona a well-worn service pistol with an extra magazine, two boxes of ammunition, 9x19 parabellum bullets, and a set of Volvo keys.
Joona draws the pistol from its holster and looks at it. It’s a matte black Sig Sauer P226 Tactical.
‘Good enough?’ Janus says, and smiles as if he’s just said something very funny.
‘You don’t have any other shoulder holsters?’ Joona asks.
‘This one’s standard issue,’ Gustav replies, slightly bemused.
‘I know. It doesn’t really matter, it just moves around a little too much,’ Joona says.
35
Joona follows his handler’s black BMW down into the depths of the garage beneath Katarinaberget and parks in front of a rough concrete wall.
They’re far below the shelter’s immense, sliding doors.
He’s heard rumours that the Security Police had a secret prison, but didn’t know it was here.
His handler is waiting for him. He runs his ID through a card-reader and taps in a long code.
Joona follows the man into the airlock. Once the door to the garage has locked behind them, the man runs his card through another reader and taps in another code. They are let into the security control room. Joona slides his ID through a hatch and the guard behind the reinforced glass checks it.
Joona signs himself in and his irises and fingerprints are scanned.
He puts his jacket, pistol and shoes on a conveyor-belt, walks through the body-scanner and is allowed past the next airlock, where he introduces himself to a female agent whose dark-brown hair is in a thick plait over one shoulder.
‘I know who you are,’ she says, blushing slightly.
She returns his pistol, watches as he puts the holster back on, then hands him his jacket.
‘Thanks.’
‘You’re a lot younger than I expected,’ she adds, and her blush spreads to her neck.
‘So are you,’ he smiles, and puts his shoes back on.
They start walking, and the agent explains that they’ve moved Sofia Stefansson from the old ice-store to an isolation room in the machine house.
Joona has read and compared all the interviews that have been conducted with Sofia.
Her testimony is fairly consistent.
The few discrepancies can be ascribed to her fear: she wanted to be helpful and said what she thought her interrogator wanted to hear.
Saga’s interview with Sofia is the most useful: it’s fairly exceptional given the circumstances. She managed to help the witness remember the short conversation in which Ratjen’s name was mentioned by highlighting specific details.
Without that interview, they wouldn’t even have a case.
But if Joona is right about the timing, the witness has been keeping quiet about a large chunk of what happened.
The killer fired two shots, then moved quickly and purposefully, running over to grab the Foreign Minister by the hair, force him down on his knees, and then press the pistol to one of his eyes.
The killer treated his victim like an enemy, Joona thinks.
If you ignore the missing minutes, the attack looks more like something that happened in the heat of battle than an execution.
Sofia slipped and hit the back of her head on the floor, then lay there listening to the brief conversation about Ratjen before the Foreign Minister was killed by a shot to the eye.
‘I’m thinking,’ Joona explains, without the agent having asked.
‘You don’t have to explain,’ she says, stopping in front of a metal door.
The agent knocks on the metal door, tells Sofia she has a visitor, and lets Joona in, locking the door behind him.
Sofia is sitting on a dove-blue sofa in front of a television, watching an episode of the BBC’s adaptation of Sherlock Holmes. The television is connected only to a DVD-player. There are piles of discs in front of her, alongside a large plastic bottle of Coke.
Her face is pale and she’s not wearing any make-up. She looks like a child with her fragile body and light-brown hair pulled up into a ponytail. She has on grey tracksuit bottoms and a white T-shirt with a sparkly kitten on the front. One of her hands is bandaged, and she has grey bruises around her wrists.
Joona can see that, although she hasn’t accepted her new life yet and she’s terrified that they’re going to start torturing her again, she has started to understand that they aren’t going to kill her, but they aren’t going to let her go any time soon either.
‘My name is Joona Linna,’ he says. ‘I used to be a detective … I’ve read all the interviews with you. Everything tells me that you’re entirely innocent, and I understand why you’re frightened given the way you’ve been treated here.’
‘Yes,’ she whispers, switching the television off.
He waits a moment before sitting down beside her. He is aware that sudden movements or sharp noises can trigger post-traumatic stress which would make her clam up. He saw her tremble when the agent locked the door: perhaps the metallic sound reminded her of the noise of a spent bullet.
‘I don’t have the authority to get you released,’ he explains frankly. ‘But I’d still like you to help me. I need you to make more of an effort than ever to remember the things I ask you about.’
He can feel her trying to read him, her survival instinct attempting to break through the shock.
Very slowly he pulls out the two composite sketches that have been produced using her description.
In one of them the balaclava covers the murderer’s head so that only his eyes and mouth are visible.
In the other they’ve attempted to imagine his face without the mask – but the lack of detail makes it look like the face is still covered.
There’s nothing particularly distinctive about the killer’s features. His eyes are maybe strangely calm, his nose more prominent than usual. His mouth is almost white, and his jaw is fairly broad, but he has an unremarkable chin.
He has no beard or moustache in the sketch, but from the colour of his eyebrows they have chosen to give him mousy-blond hair, in a nondescript cut.
‘They tried a longer nose and I said “I don’t know”,’ she explains. ‘They made it shorter and I said “Maybe, I don’t know”, they made it thinner and I said “I don’t know”, they made it wider and I said “Maybe” … In the end they got annoyed and decided it was good enough.’
‘It looks good,’ Joona said.
‘Maybe I just feel unsure about everything because they kept questioning my memory the whole time. He was black for a while, but I hadn’t said anything like that. Maybe they were trying to get me to remember other things, like the colour of his eyes and eyebrows.’
‘They understand how people remember faces,’ Joona nods.
‘He had long hair for a while, with straggly bits around his cheeks,’ she says with a frown. ‘It suddenly popped into my head that I’d seen that, but I knew he’d kept the balaclava on the whole time, so it couldn’t be true, I couldn’t have seen his hair.’
‘What do you think you saw?’ he asks gently.
‘What?’
‘If it wasn’t hair?’
‘I don’t know. I mean, I was lying on the floor at the time … but there was something hanging down his cheeks, like strips of fabric.’
‘You don’t think it could still have been hair?’
‘No, it was thicker, more like leather, maybe.’
‘How long were the strips?’
‘This long,’ she says, putting one hand to her shoulder.
‘Can you draw them on this picture?’
She takes the sketch of the masked face and she adds what she saw hanging down beside his face with a trembling hand.
At first it looks like big feathers or quills, but then it starts to resemble matted hair. The point of her pen makes holes in the paper.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says, pushing the picture away.
‘Did the Foreign Minister say anything about a man with two faces?’
‘What?’