Lars Kepler 2-book Bundle (17 page)

She went out into the forest with the gun to kill herself, he thinks. She knelt on the moss and placed the barrel in her mouth, but she changed her mind; she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

When he’d spied her on the edge of the trees, she was on her way back to the cottage, on her way back to the alternative from which she had wanted to escape.

Erik picks up the phone and calls Joona.

“Erik? I was going to call you, but there’s been so much—”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Erik. “Listen, I’ve got—”

“I just want to say how sorry I am about all this business with the media. I promise to track down the leak when things calm down.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I feel guilty, because I was the one who persuaded you to do it.”

“I made my own decision. I don’t blame anyone else.”

“Personally, even though we’re not allowed to say so at the moment, I still think hypnotising Josef was the right thing to do. It could well have saved Evelyn’s life.”

“That’s what I’m calling about,” says Erik. “A thought occurred to me. Have you got a minute?”

Erik can hear the sound of a chair scraping against the floor and then an exhalation as Joona sits. “OK,” he says. “Go on.”

“When we were out at Värmdö and I spotted Evelyn from the car, I saw her walking among the trees, heading for the cabin, dragging her shotgun in the bushes.”

“Yes?”

“Is that the way to carry a gun if you’re afraid someone might surprise you, might be coming to kill you?”

“No,” replies Joona.

“I think she’d gone out into the forest to kill herself,” says Erik. “The knees of her jeans were wet. She’d probably been kneeling on the damp moss with the gun pointing at her forehead or her chest, but then she changed her mind and couldn’t go through with it. That’s what I think.”

Erik stops speaking. He can hear Joona breathing heavily at the other end of the line. A car alarm starts screeching down on the street.

“Thank you,” says Joona. “I’ll go and have a chat with her.”

The interview with Evelyn is to be conducted in one of the offices in the custody suite. In order to make the dreary room slightly more inviting, someone has placed a red tin of Christmas gingerbread biscuits on the table, and electric holiday candles from IKEA glow in the windows. Evelyn and her solicitor are already seated when Joona begins the recording.

“I know these questions may be difficult for you, Evelyn,” he says quietly, “but I would be grateful if you would answer them anyway, as best you can.”

Evelyn does not reply but looks down at her knees.

“Because I don’t think it’s in your best interests to remain silent,” he adds gently.

She does not react but keeps her eyes firmly fixed on her knees. The solicitor, a middle-aged man with shadows of stubble on his face, gazes expressionlessly at Joona.

“Are you ready to begin, Evelyn?” Joona asks.

She shakes her head. He waits. After a while she raises her chin and meets his eyes.

“You went out into the forest with the gun to kill yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“I’m glad you didn’t go through with it.”

“I’m not.”

“Is this the first time you’ve tried to commit suicide?”

“No.”

“Before this occasion?”

She nods.

“But not before Josef turned up with the cake?”

“No.”

“What did he say to you, when he came?”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“About what? About what he said?”

Evelyn straightens up in the chair, and her mouth narrows. “I don’t remember,” she says, almost inaudibly. “I’m sure it wasn’t anything special.”

“You were going to shoot yourself, Evelyn,” Joona reminds her.

She stands up, goes over to the window, switches the electric candles off and on absently, walks back to her chair, and sits down with her arms folded over her stomach.

“Can’t you just leave me in peace?”

“Is that what you really want?”

She nods without looking at him.

“Do you need a break?” asks her solicitor.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with Josef,” Evelyn says quietly. “There’s something wrong inside his head. When he used to fight, when he was little, he would hit too hard. He wasn’t just angry, like little boys get. He was trying to hurt you. He was dangerous. He destroyed all my things. I couldn’t keep anything.”

Her mouth trembles.

“When he was eight … When he was eight, he came on to me. He wanted us to kiss each other. Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad, but I didn’t want to, and he kept insisting. I was scared of him. He did weird things. He would sneak into my room at night when I was sleeping and bite me and make me bleed. I started to hit back. I was still stronger than he was.”

She wipes away the tears rolling down her cheeks.

“It got worse. He wanted to see my breasts. He tried to get in the bath with me. He said he’d—if I didn’t do what he said—he said he’d hurt Buster.” She pauses for a moment to wipe away more tears. “He killed my dog and threw it off an overpass!” She leaps to her feet and moves to the window again. “He must have been about twelve when he—”

Her voice breaks and she whimpers quietly to herself before continuing.

“When he asked if he could put his cock in my mouth. I said he was disgusting. So he went into my little sister’s room and began to hit her. She was only two years old.”

Evelyn weeps and then composes herself.

“He made me watch while he jerked off, several times every day. If I said no, he hit my sister, told me he’d kill her. Maybe a few months later, he started demanding sex from me. Every day. He threatened me. But I came up with an answer. I don’t know why it worked, but I told him he was below the age of consent and it was against the law. I wouldn’t do something illegal.”

She wipes the tears away again.

“He seemed to buy it; I don’t know why. I thought his demands would go away. I thought—if you can believe it—that he’d
outgrow
them, like it was a
phase
. So I moved out. A year passed, but then he started calling me, reminding me he would be fifteen soon. That’s when I hid. I … I don’t know how he found out I was at the cottage.” She is sobbing with her mouth open now. “Oh God!”

“So he threatened you,” says Joona. “He threatened to kill the whole family if you didn’t—”

“He didn’t say that!” she screams. “He said he would start with Dad. It’s all my fault. I just want to die …”

She sinks down on the floor and cowers against the wall.

Joona sits in his office and stares at his hands. One hand still holds the telephone. When he informed Jens Svanehjälm of Evelyn’s sudden change of heart, Jens had listened in silence, sighing heavily as Joona went over the cruel motive behind the crime.

“To be perfectly honest, Joona,” he had said eventually, “this is all a little bit thin, bearing in mind that Josef Ek accused his sister of being behind the whole thing. What we really need is a confession or some kind of forensic evidence.”

Joona glances around the room, rubs his hand over his face, then calls Daniella Richards to arrange a suitable time to continue questioning Josef, when the suspect will have a lower level of analgesics in his body.

“His head must be clear,” says Joona.

“You could come in at five o’clock,” says Daniella.

“This afternoon?”

“His next dose of morphine isn’t due until six. It levels out around teatime.”

Joona looks at the clock. It’s 2:30 p.m.

“That would suit me very well,” he says.

After the conversation with Daniella Richards, he calls Lisbet Carlén and informs her of the time.

In the staff room he takes an apple from the fruit bowl; when he returns to his office, his seat is occupied by Erixon, the crime-scene technician. His entire body is wedged against the desk. His face is bright red, and he is puffing and panting as he waves a weary hand at Joona.

“If you shove that apple in my mouth, you’ll have a suckling pig all ready for Christmas,” he says.

“Oh, shut up,” says Joona, taking a bite.

“I deserve it,” says Erixon. “Since that Thai place opened on the corner, I’ve put on twenty-five pounds.”

Joona shrugs. “The food’s really good.”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“So what did you find in the women’s locker room?” asks Joona.

Erixon holds up a chubby hand in a defensive gesture. “Don’t say,
What did I tell you?
”

Joona grins. “We’ll see,” he says diplomatically.

“All right,” says Erixon, wiping the sweat from his cheeks. “There was hair belonging to Josef Ek in the drain, and there was blood from his father between the tiles on the floor.”

“What did I tell you?” Joona beams.

In the lift down to the foyer, Joona calls Jens Svanehjälm again.

“I’m glad you called,” says Jens. “I’m getting a lot of shit about this hypnosis business. They’re saying we ought to scrap the preliminary investigation into Josef, that it’s just going to cost money and—”

“Hold on.”

“But I’ve decided to—”

“Jens?”

“What?” he replies irritably.

“We’ve got forensic evidence,” he says seriously. “We can link Josef Ek to the first crime scene and to his father’s blood.”

Chief Prosecutor Jens Svanehjälm breathes heavily on the other end of the phone. “Joona, you know you’ve called at the last possible minute.”

“But I’m in time.”

“Yes.”

They are just about to hang up when Joona says, “What did I tell you?”

“What?”

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

There is silence at the other end of the line. Then Jens says, slowly and deliberately, “Yes, Joona, you were right.”

They end the conversation, and the smile fades from the detective’s face. He walks along the glass wall facing the courtyard and checks the time once again. In half an hour he wants to be at the Nordic Museum.

Joona walks up the staircase in the museum and down the long, empty corridors, passing hundreds of illuminated display cases without even glancing at them. He does not see the tools, the treasures, or the fine examples of handicrafts; he does not notice the exhibitions, the folk costumes, or the large photographs.

The guard has already drawn up a chair next to the faintly illuminated display case. Without saying a word, Joona sits down as usual and contemplates the Sami bridal headdress, sewn by descendents of indigenous people from the Scandinavian peninsula. Fragile and delicate, it widens out into a perfect circle. The pieces of lace are reminiscent of the cup of a flower, or a pair of hands brought together with the fingers stretching upward. Slowly Joona moves his head, so that the light gradually moves. The headdress is woven from roots, tied by hand. The material was dug from the ground, but it shines like gold.

The present is gone, but the memory lingers mercilessly.

He is driving a car, the rain has stopped, but the puddles of water glow like fire in the sunset. Everything is so wonderfully beautiful, and then gone forever.

This time, Joona sits in front of the display case for an hour before he gets to his feet, nods to the guard, and slowly leaves the museum. The slush on the ground is dirty, and he can smell diesel from a boat beneath the bridge, Djurgårdsbron. He is ambling toward Strandvägen when his mobile rings. It’s Nils Åhlén, the Chief Medical Officer.

“I’m glad I got hold of you,” The Needle says when Joona answers.

“Have you finished the postmortem?”

“More or less.”

Joona sees a young father on the pavement, tipping a buggy up over and over again to make his child laugh. A woman is standing motionless at a window, gazing out into the street; when he catches her eye, she immediately takes a step backwards into her apartment.

“Did you find anything unexpected?” asks Joona.

“Well, I don’t know …”

“But?”

“Joona, these bodies were subjected to a great deal of violence. Particularly the little girl.”

“I realise that,” says Joona.

“Many of the wounds were inflicted purely for pleasure. It’s appalling.”

“Yes,” says Joona, thinking about how things looked when he arrived at the scenes of the crimes: the shocked police officers, the feeling of chaos in the air, the bodies inside. He remembers Lillemor Blom’s ashen cheeks as she stood outside smoking, her hands shaking. He recalls how the blood had splashed on the windowpanes, had run down the inside of the patio doors at the back of the house.

“And then there’s this business with the rather surgical cut to the stomach,” says The Needle.

“Have you come to any conclusion about that?”

The Needle sighs. “Well, it’s just as we thought. The cut was inflicted some two hours after death. Someone turned her body over and used a sharp knife to cut open the old C-section scar.” He leafs through his papers. “However, our perpetrator doesn’t know much about
section caesarea
. Katja Ek had an emergency C-section scar running down from the navel in a vertical line.”

“And?”

The Needle puffs loudly. “Well, the thing is, the cut in the womb is always horizontal, even if the cut in the stomach is vertical.”

“But Josef didn’t know that,” says Joona.

“No,” replies The Needle. “He simply opened the stomach without realising that a C-section always involves two incisions, one through the stomach and one through the womb.”

“Is there anything else I ought to know straightaway?”

“Maybe the fact that he attacked the bodies for an unusually long time; he just kept on and on. They were long dead by the time he was done with them. He must have been getting more and more tired. That kind of violence would take a lot out of you. But he couldn’t get enough; his rage showed no sign of subsiding.”

Silence falls between them. Joona continues along Strandvägen. He starts to think about his most recent interview with Evelyn again.

“Anyway, I just wanted to confirm this business with the C-section,” says The Needle, after a while. “The fact that the cut was made some two hours after death.”