Stalker

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Joona interrupts.

27 (#ulink_72e91cf9-aaf9-5f7f-81c4-1fc60803c1bf)

Nils Åhlén opens the swing-door to the pathology lab, and holds it open for Joona. Together they walk into the bright room with its shimmering white tiles. Joona puts his rucksack down by the wall next to the door, but keeps the blanket round his shoulders.

A cloying stench of decay lingers over the room in spite of the whirring fans. There are two bodies on the post-mortem tables. The more recent one is covered, and blood is slowly trickling down the stainless steel gutter.

They go over to the desk with the computer. Joona waits quietly as Åhlén unlocks a heavy door.

‘Sit down,’ he says as he puts the glass jar on the table.

He pulls a folder out of a box, opens it and places the test results from the National Forensics Lab, the old ID documents, the fingerprint analysis and enlargements of the images from Saga’s phone in front of Joona.

Joona sits down and stares at the jar. After a few seconds he picks it up, holds it up to the light, examines it closely, and nods.

‘I’ve kept everything here because I had a feeling you’d show up,’ Åhlén says. ‘But, like I said on the phone, you’ll see that it all checks out. The old man who found the body cut the finger off, as you can see from the angle of the cut … and that happened long after death, just as he explained to Saga.’

Joona carefully reads the report from the laboratory. They had built up a DNA profile based on thirty STR regions. The match was one hundred per cent, thus confirming the results of the fingerprint analysis.

Not even identical twins have the same fingerprints.

Joona lays out the photographs of the mutilated body in front of him and examines the violet-coloured entry-wounds.

He leans back and closes his burning eyelids.

Everything checks out.

The angles of the shots are just as Saga described. The size and constitution of the body, the size of the hand, the DNA, the fingerprint …

‘It’s him,’ Åhlén says quietly.

‘Yes,’ Joona whispers.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Åhlén asks.

‘Nothing.’

‘You’ve been declared dead,’ Åhlén says. ‘There was a witness to your suicide, a homeless man who—’

‘Yes, yes,’ Joona interrupts. ‘I’ll sort it out.’

‘Your flat was sold when your estate was wound up,’ Åhlén explains. ‘They got almost seven million for it, the money went to charity.’

‘Good,’ Joona says bluntly.

‘How has Lumi taken everything?’

Joona looks over at the window, watching the slanting light and the shadows of the dirt on the glass.

‘Lumi? She’s gone to Paris,’ he replies.

‘I mean, how did she deal with you coming back after so many years, how has she dealt with the loss of her mother, and …’

Joona stops listening to Åhlén as memories spread out inside him. More than a year ago he made his way in secret to Finland. He thinks about the afternoon when he arrived at the gloomy Radiotherapy and Cancer Clinic in Helsinki to fetch Summa. She could still walk with a Zimmer frame at the time. He can remember exactly how the light fell in the foyer, reflecting off the floor, the windows and pale woodwork, as well as the row of wheelchairs. They walked slowly past the unstaffed cloakroom and the confectionery machine and emerged into the fresh winter air.

Åhlén’s phone buzzes, and he pushes his sunglasses up onto his nose and reads the text message.

‘Margot’s here, I’ll go and let her in,’ he says, and heads towards the door.

Summa had chosen to have palliative care in her flat on Elisabetsgatan, but Joona took her and Lumi to her grandmother’s house in Nattavaara, where they had six happy months together. After the years of chemotherapy, radiation, cortisone and blood transfusions, all that was left was pain relief. She had morphine patches that lasted for three days, and took another 80 milligrams of OxyNorm every day.

Summa loved the house and the countryside around it, the air and light that streamed into the bedroom. Her family was together at last. She grew thinner, lost her appetite, lost all the hair on her body, and her skin became as soft as a baby’s.

Towards the end she weighed almost nothing, her whole body hurt, but she still liked it when Joona carried her round, and sat her on his lap so they could kiss.

28 (#ulink_dfa417fd-5d83-5b1c-af30-db3b7dad4f05)

Joona sits motionless, staring at the glass jar containing the amputated finger. The particles in the liquid have sunk to the bottom.

He really is dead.

Joona smiles to himself as he repeats the sentence in his head.

Jurek Walter is dead.

He disappears into recollections of his staged suicide, and is still sitting there with the blanket round his shoulders when Margot Silverman and Nils Åhlén come into the pathology lab.

‘Joona Linna. Everyone said you were dead,’ Margot says with a smile. ‘Can I ask what the hell actually happened?’

Joona meets her gaze, and thinks that he was forced to do what he did, he was forced to take every step he had taken over the past fourteen years.

Margot stands still, staring into Joona’s eyes, into their greyness, as she hears Åhlén remove the protective covering from his sterilised tools.

‘I came back,’ Joona replies in a deep Finnish accent.

‘A bit too late,’ Margot says. ‘I’ve already got your job and your room.’

‘You’re a good detective,’ he replies.

‘Not good enough, according to Åhlén,’ she says breezily.

‘I just said you ought to let Joona look at the case,’ Åhlén mutters, stretching the latex gloves before putting them on.

While Åhlén begins his external inspection of Maria Carlsson’s body, Margot tries to explain the case to Joona. She recounts all the details about the tights and the quality of the film, but doesn’t get the response or the follow-up questions she had been expecting, and after a while she starts to worry that he might not even be listening.

‘According to the victim’s calendar, she was about to go off to a drawing class,’ Margot says, glancing at Joona. ‘We’ve checked, and it’s true enough, but there’s a small “h” at the bottom of the page of the calendar that we don’t understand.’

The legendary superintendent has aged. His blond beard is thick and his matted hair is hanging down over his ears, and curling at the back of his neck, over the padded collar of his jacket.