67
Joona has been given access to a four-hundred-square-metre office in a narrow glass and steel building situated on a wedge of land between Tors Street and the shunting yard of the Central Station.
The premises used to belong to Collector Bank, and it looks like they were abandoned in haste. A couple of ergonomic chairs have been left behind, along with a half-dismantled desk, some dusty cables and a scattering of brochures.
The first evening he makes himself a simple pasta dish in the little staff kitchen, pours himself a glass of wine and sits down to eat on one of the office chairs in the unlit conference room. Through the big, dusty windows he has a view of the rusty railway tracks and the trains rolling into the yard.
The news is dominated by the murder of the acting US Secretary of Defence. No arrests have been made. There’s talk of it being a disaster for the police, even worse than the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme back in the eighties. The FBI are sending their own team and exchanges between the two countries have become tense.
The Security Police press officer is sticking to script: all known threats are under continuous strict monitoring, and they are adhering to the very highest international standards.
Joona reads the post-mortem report on Absalon Ratjen, who was murdered in front of his wife and children. He puts his plate down on a small filing cabinet, and finds himself thinking about the railway tracks, and the merciless junctions.
Once upon a time Joona was married and had a child, and then he became single.
Memories sweep through him: his father, mother, Summa, Lumi, Disa and Valeria.
That night he settles down on a sun-bleached sofa in the reception area. Somewhere in his dreams he hears Summa laughing right next to his ear, and he turns to look at her. She’s barefoot, and the sky is burning behind her. She’s wearing a plaited crown made of red roots.
At eight o’clock the next morning a delivery from the NOU arrives: computers, printers, photocopiers, and boxes full of the paperwork relating to the investigation.
Now he can get to work.
Joona knows that none of the murders has been carried out by terrorists – it’s been a spree killer. He is hunting a killer with a carefully worked-out plan who in all likelihood will kill again soon.
He tapes photographs of the three victims up on a long wall, then draws a complex network of connections to relatives, friends and colleagues. On the opposite wall he draws up a timeline mapping their childhood, education and careers.
In the large conference room he covers the walls with photographs from the murder scenes: overviews, details, sketches, and the in-depth analysis from the post-mortem on Absalon Ratjen’s body.
He covers the floor of the hallway leading to the kitchen with the crime scene and medical reports, then lays out the transcripts of interviews with family, friends and workmates.
He spreads printouts of tip-offs from the public across the floor of the office, as well as three emails from a female reporter requesting profiles for both Absalon Ratjen’s killer and the sniper in the tower on Kungs Street.
Joona pulls his buzzing phone from his pocket and sees that the call is from the Forensic Department at Karolinska Institute.
‘Is this even legal?’ Nils ‘The Needle’ ?hlén’s nasal voice asks.
‘What?’ Joona asks with a smile.
‘I mean … Are you back in the police again? Are you leading the investigation? Are you authorised to—’
‘I think so,’ he interrupts.
‘You think so?’
‘Looks that way right now, anyway,’ Joona says.
‘Well, I want to remain anonymous when I answer your question,’ Nils says, and clears his throat. ‘Absalon Ratjen bled for precisely nineteen minutes before he was killed … which is exactly the same length of time Teddy Johnson lived between the first and final, fatal shot … I’d chalk that up to coincidence if you weren’t the one asking.’
‘Thanks for your help, Nils.’
‘I’m anonymous,’ he says pointedly, and ends the call.
Joona turns to the wall with the photographs. From the amount of blood and the splatter pattern in the Foreign Minister’s kitchen, he had already estimated that approximately fifteen minutes had passed between the first and last shots.
Now he knows that the precise answer is nineteen minutes.
He’s convinced that somewhere there’s something that connects the three victims.
That connection is the key that will unlock the case.
There’s no way they were picked at random.
There are almost too many links between William Fock and Teddy Johnson, going back to their teenage years at Ludviksberg School, but Ratjen seems utterly divorced from them.
He led an entirely different sort of life.
Nowhere in the wealth of material that’s already been gathered is there a single thing linking all three of them.
A newspaper article from the Orlando Sentinel includes a picture of the Foreign Minister and Teddy Johnson back when he was Governor of Florida, standing in front of a killer whale as it leaps out of the water.
Ratjen’s life was very different.
The lift doors open over in the reception area, then there’s a gentle knock on the glass wall of the conference room.
Saga comes in smiling and hands over a salt shaker and a loaf of bread as a housewarming gift.
‘You’ve made it really cosy,’ she jokes.
‘It’s a little bigger than my office at Kumla,’ he replies.
Stepping carefully between the sheets of paper on the floor, Saga goes and looks out of the window, then turns back towards Joona again.
‘We aren’t allowed to have any contact,’ she says. ‘But at least Verner agreed to let me continue with my investigation … I was so delighted, I managed to knock over a stack of papers on his desk … and then a report accidentally fell into my bag … but I didn’t realise that until I got home.’
‘What report?’
‘The Security Police’s file about Salim Ratjen’s family,’ she says, pulling the report from her bag.
‘Wow.’
‘You understand that under no circumstances can I forget to take this with me … and I certainly can’t say that it might be helpful to you if you’re still trying to find a link between Absalon Ratjen and the Foreign Minister.’
Joona takes the file and leafs through until he finds the pages about Absalon Ratjen. In the background he hears Saga say she’s going to pop down to Lilla Bantorget to get coffee.
‘What do you want?’ she asks.
He reads about how Absalon Ratjen fled military service, and mutters that he needs to think.
Absalon was seventeen when he came to Sweden, almost three years before Salim did. Joona already knows from the Employment Office’s records that Absalon attended language classes and applied for every job that came up, but the Security Police have more information. They found his name in an abandoned investigation into a cleaning company that was suspected of tax offences. He was one of a group of asylum-seekers who were thought to have worked illegally as cleaners, but because they were tricked out of their wages the prosecution had to be abandoned.
Joona goes into a narrow office overlooking Bonniers Konsthall. He’s gathered the facts he has about the killer on one side, and the possible parameters on the other. He’s also made a list of advanced military training courses around the world that teach the techniques demonstrated by the murderer.
He examines the forensics photographs of the wounds on Absalon Ratjen’s body. The knife hasn’t yet been identified, but the wide blade had a serrated back, and a very sharp cutting edge.
The fatal blow to the top of his spinal cord was dealt by a machete with a rusty blade.
Joona sits down on the floor to read the rest of the Security Police report.
The threatening email about ‘eating your dead heart’ was from a colleague in Canada, and concerned an upcoming Lego robot tournament.