‘I see.’
‘Welcome to my world,’ Saga sighs, and kick-starts her motorcycle. ‘Come to the boxing club with me.’
53
Narva Boxing Club is almost empty. The chain holding the punchbag clanks rhythmically as a heavyweight metes out hard blows, a distant look on his face. Dust particles dance in the air above the ring. Two younger men are groaning as they do sit-ups on rubber mats beneath the broken speedball.
Saga emerges from the locker room in a burgundy vest top, black leggings and well-used boxing gloves. She stops in front of Joona and asks him to help wrap her hands.
‘The security service’s main job, in any country, is to frighten its politicians,’ she says in a low voice, handing him one of the rolled bandages.
Joona pulls the loop at the end over her thumb, then winds the elasticated fabric across her palm and around her knuckles. She clenches her fist as he does.
‘It doesn’t really matter to the Security Police that there weren’t any terrorists – either way, the threat has been dealt with,’ she goes on as he pulls the bandage between her fingers. ‘And because politicians can’t admit to a waste of taxpayers’ money, the operation is being hailed as a triumph.’
The heavyweight boxer is punching faster now, and the two younger men have moved on and are now using skipping ropes.
Joona pulls the gloves over her hands, fastens the laces, then winds sports tape around her wrists.
Saga climbs up into the ring and Joona follows, taking two leather punch pads with him.
‘Sweden has been spared,’ Saga says, testing the pads. ‘But not thanks to us.’
Joona starts circling, changing the height and position of the pads, and Saga follows, striking with a complicated series of hooks and uppercuts.
He counters with one pad, but she slips away and hits out with another sequence of blows that echoes around the gym.
She hunches her shoulders, tilts her head and jabs with her left hand.
‘Janus and I are going to keep working on the preliminary investigation to make sure that nothing leads back to the Foreign Minister,’ she says, panting for breath.
Joona angles the pads so she can practise straight punches, then swings the right one and hits her on the cheek, before backing away and letting her come at him with two heavy right hooks.
‘Lower your chin a little,’ he says.
‘I’m too proud for that,’ she smiles.
‘So what happens if you find the murderer?’ Joona asks, following her towards the blue corner.
She fires off a sequence of four rapid punches at the two pads.
‘My main job is to make sure he doesn’t confess to the murder,’ she says. ‘So he can’t be connected to it in any way, can’t be prosecuted, or—’
‘He’s extremely dangerous,’ Joona interrupts. ‘And we don’t know if he’s going to kill again. We have no idea what his motives are.’
‘That’s why I’m talking to you.’
The heavyweight has stopped punching now; he’s standing with his arms around the punchbag, staring dreamily at Saga.
‘You need to lower your chin.’
‘Oh, no,’ she laughs.
She slips out of the corner, hits a hard right hook, rolls her shoulders and follows through with a body-blow that makes Joona take a few steps back.
‘If I was in the police, I’d try a different approach,’ he says.
‘What?’ Saga asks, wiping the sweat from her face.
‘The other Ratjen.’
‘Let’s take a break,’ she says, holding out both her hands.
‘Salim Ratjen has a brother in Sweden,’ Joona says, removing the tape.
‘He’s been under heavy surveillance since the Foreign Minister’s murder.’
‘What have you found out?’ Joona asks, untying the laces.
‘He lives in Sk?vde, he’s a high-school teacher, and he has no contact with Salim,’ she says, climbing out of the ring.
She shakes her gloves onto the floor as she walks towards the locker room. When she comes back she has a towel around her neck and she’s taken the tape off her hands.
They go into the little office and Saga puts her military-green laptop on the desk. The walls are lined with glass-fronted cupboards containing medals and trophies, yellowing newspaper clips and framed photographs.
‘I don’t like to think about what would happen if Verner found out I still have this information,’ Saga mutters as she clicks to bring it up. ‘Absalon Ratjen lives at 38A L?nsmans Street, teaches maths and science at Helena School …’
She brushes her hair from her face and reads on:
‘He’s married to a Kerstin R?nell, who teaches PE at the same school … they have two children, both in elementary school.’
She gets up and lowers the blind on the office door.
‘Obviously we’re monitoring their phones,’ she says to Joona. ‘We’re keeping an eye on their online activities and so on, checking their emails, both private and at the school … His wife’s the only one who occasionally looks at porn.’
‘And he has absolutely no connection to the Foreign Minister?’
‘None.’
‘So who has he been in contact with in the past few weeks?’
Saga wipes her forehead as she checks the laptop.
‘The usual stuff … and he mentioned a meeting with a car mechanic that never actually happened …’
‘Look into that.’
‘We also have a strange email from a computer with no IP address.’
‘Strange in what way?’
Saga turns the laptop towards Joona and brings up white text on a black background: I’ll eat your dead heart on the razorback battlefield.
The light of the desk lamp flickers as an underground train passes below them.
‘It seems pretty threatening,’ she says. ‘But we think it’s actually jargon related to a competition … Absalon Ratjen teaches advanced maths at the school, and his students are taking part in the First Lego League, which is an international contest for programmable robots made out of Lego.’
‘Take it seriously anyway,’ Joona says.
‘Janus is taking it seriously … he’s working full-time on this email, and a recorded phone call that … Well, we don’t know if it’s a nuisance call or a wrong number. All we can hear is the sound of Ratjen’s breathing, and a child reciting a nursery rhyme.’
She clicks on an audio file and a moment later a tentative child’s voice echoes from the speaker of the laptop:
Ten little rabbits, all dressed in white,
Tried to get to heaven on the end of a kite.
Kite string got broken, down they all fell,
Instead of going to heaven, they all went to …
Nine little rabbits, all dressed in white,
Tried to get to heaven on …
The call ends abruptly and is followed by silence. Saga clicks to close the audio file, and mutters that the rhyme could also be connected to the contest as she searches through the report.
‘Absalon is the next victim,’ Joona says, and gets up from his chair.
‘That can’t be right,’ she objects, smiling despite herself. ‘We’ve examined it from every—’
‘Saga, you have to send people down there right away.’
‘I’ll call Carlos, but can you tell me why you—’
‘Make the call first,’ Joona interrupts.
Saga takes out her phone and asks to be put through to Carlos Eliasson, head of the National Operations Unit and Joona’s former boss.
Ratjen, rabbits and hell, Joona repeats to himself.
He thinks about the high-pitched and slightly bemused child’s voice, and the rhyme about the rabbits that end up in hell.
When he was questioning Sofia he’d tried to analyse the composite sketches of the killer.
Sofia told him she had thought the killer had long strands of hair hanging down his cheeks.
Searching her memory, she then described them as strips of thick fabric, possibly leather.
When she tried to draw the strips onto the picture, at first they looked like big feathers, before turning into matted hair.
But they weren’t feathers, Joona thinks.
He’s almost certain that what she saw hanging over the murderer’s cheeks were sliced-off rabbits’ ears.
Ratjen, rabbits and hell.