The Nightmare

‘Hot today,’ Joona says.

‘Just a bit,’ the police officer says.

‘How many forensics people have we got here?’ he asks, nodding towards the stairwell.

‘One of ours and three from the Security Police,’ the officer says brightly. ‘They want to get hold of DNA as quickly as possible.’

‘They won’t find any,’ Joona says, almost to himself as he starts to walk towards the stairs.

An older police officer, Melker Janos, is standing outside the door to the flat on the third floor. Joona remembers him from his training as a stressed and unpleasant senior officer. Back then Melker’s career was on the up, but an acrimonious divorce and sporadic alcohol abuse gradually saw him demoted to a beat officer again. When he sees Joona he greets him curtly and irritably, then opens the door for him with a sarcastic servile gesture.

‘Thanks,’ Joona says, without expecting any response.

Inside the door he finds Tommy Kofoed, the forensics coordinator from the National Homicide Commission. Kofoed is scuttling about sullenly. He reaches no higher than Joona’s chest. When their eyes meet he opens his mouth in an almost childishly happy grin.

‘Joona, great to see you. I thought you were going off to Police Academy.’

‘I got the directions wrong.’

‘Good.’

‘Have you found anything?’ Joona asks.

‘We’re secured all the shoeprints from the hall,’ he says.

‘Yes, they probably match my shoes,’ Joona says as he shakes Kofoed’s hand.

‘And the attacker’s,’ Kofoed says with an even broader smile. ‘We’ve got four prints. He moved in a bloody weird way, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Joona replies curtly.

There are protective mats laid out in the hall so that any evidence isn’t contaminated before it’s been secured. There’s a camera on a stand with its lens pointing at the floor. A sturdy lamp with an aluminium shade is lying in the corner with its cord wrapped round it. The forensics team have looked for invisible shoeprints by shining light almost parallel to the floor. Then they’ve secured the prints electrostatically and identified the perpetrator’s steps through the hall from the kitchen.

Joona can’t help thinking that their precision is a waste of effort, seeing as the attacker’s shoes, gloves and clothes have almost certainly already been destroyed and burned.

‘How exactly did he run through here?’ Kofoed asks, pointing at the marks. ‘There, there … and then across to there, then there’s nothing until here and here.’

‘You’ve missed one,’ Joona smiles.

‘Like hell we have.’

‘There,’ Joona points.

‘Where?’

‘On the wall.’

‘Bloody hell.’

Some seventy centimetres above the floor there’s a faint shoeprint on the pale grey wallpaper. Tommy Kofoed calls one of his colleagues and asks him to take a gelatine print.

‘Is it okay to walk on the floor now?’ Joona asks.

‘As long as you don’t walk on the walls,’ Kofoed grunts.

24 (#ulink_b08a4db0-9bd5-5b15-a353-6b4fe304519a)

The object (#ulink_b08a4db0-9bd5-5b15-a353-6b4fe304519a)

In the kitchen stands a man in jeans and a pale brown blazer with leather patches on the elbows. He strokes his blond moustache as he talks loudly and points at the microwave oven. Joona walks in and watches as a forensics officer in a protective mask and gloves packs the buckled aerosol can in a paper bag, folds it over twice, then tapes and labels the bag.

‘You’re Joona Linna, aren’t you?’ the man with the blond moustache says. ‘If you’re as good as everyone says, you ought to come over to us.’

They shake hands.

‘Göran Stone, Security Police,’ the man says proudly.

‘Are you in charge of the preliminary investigation?’

‘Yes, I am … well, formally Saga Bauer is – for the sake of the statistics,’ he grins.

‘I’ve met Saga Bauer,’ Joona says. ‘She seems capable of …’

‘Doesn’t she just?’ Göran Stone says, then bursts out laughing before covering his mouth.

Joona looks out of the window, thinking about the boat that was found adrift, and trying to figure out who the murderer had been tasked with liquidating. He is aware that the investigation is at far too early a stage to be able to draw any conclusions, but at the same time it’s always useful to consider different hypotheses. The only person the perpetrator was almost certainly after was Penelope, Joona thinks. And the only person he probably didn’t mean to kill was Viola, seeing as he couldn’t have known that she was going to be on the boat – her presence was the result of an unfortunate quirk of fate, Joona tells himself as he leaves the kitchen and walks over to the bedroom.

The bed is neatly made, the cream-coloured bedspread smooth. Saga Bauer from the Security Police is standing in front of a laptop that she’s placed on the windowsill as she talks on her phone. Joona remembers her from a seminar about counter-terrorism.

Joona sits down on the bed and tries to gather his thoughts again. He imagines Viola and Penelope standing in front of him, then puts Penelope’s boyfriend Björn next to them. They can’t all have been on the boat when Viola was murdered, he tells himself. Because then the perpetrator wouldn’t have made his mistake. If he had got on board when they were out at sea he would have murdered all three, put them on the right beds and sunk the boat. So his mistake means that Penelope can’t have been on the boat. Which means that they must have moored somewhere.

Joona gets up again, leaves the bedroom and walks into the living room. He looks at the wall-mounted television, the red sofa, the modern table with piles of left-wing magazines and newspapers. He walks over to the bookcase covering a whole wall, stops, and thinks about the pinched cables in the machine room which would have arced within a matter of minutes, igniting the cushion which had been stuffed next to the pipe from the fuel tank. But the boat didn’t sink. The engine can’t have been running for long enough.

There’s no such thing as coincidence any more.

Björn’s flat was destroyed by fire, Viola was murdered the same day, and if the boat hadn’t been abandoned the fuel tank would have exploded.

Then the murderer attempted to set off a gas explosion in Penelope’s flat.