Joona Linna: Stalker Part 16

She falls silent when Joona walks away from her, heading towards the post-mortem table with weary steps. He stops in front of the body and leans on his stick. His heavy leather aviator's jacket is open, its sheepskin lining visible. As he leans over the body, his holster and Colt Combat come into view.

She stands up, and feels the child in her belly has woken up. It falls asleep when she moves about, and wakes up if she sits or lies down. She holds one hand to her stomach as she walks over to Joona.

He's looking closely at the victim's ravaged face. It's like he doesn't believe she's dead, as if he wanted to feel her moist breath against his mouth.

'What are you thinking?' Margot asks.

'Sometimes I think that our idea of justice is still in its infancy,' Joona replies, without taking his eyes from the dead woman.

'OK,' she says.

'So what does that make the law?' he asks.

'I could give you an answer, but I'm guessing you have a different one in mind.'

Joona straightens up, thinking that the law chases justice the way Lumi used to chase spots of reflected light when she was little.

hlen follows the original post-mortem as he conducts his own. The usual purpose of an external examination is to describe visible injuries, such as swellings, discolouration, sc.r.a.ped skin, bleeding, scratches and cuts. But this time he is searching for something that could have been overlooked between two observations, something beyond the obvious.

'Most of the stab-wounds aren't fatal, and that wasn't the point of them either,' hlen says to Margot and Joona. 'If it was, they wouldn't have been aimed at her face.'

'Hatred is stronger than the desire to kill,' Margot says.

'He wanted to destroy her face,' hlen nods.

'Or change it,' Margot says.

'Why is her mouth gaping like that?' Joona asks quietly.

'Her jaw is broken,' hlen says. 'There are traces of her own saliva on her fingers.'

'Was there anything in her mouth or throat?' Joona asks.

'Nothing.'

Joona is thinking about the perpetrator standing outside filming her as she puts on her tights. At that point he is an observer who needs, or at least accepts, the boundary presented by the thin gla.s.s of the window.

But something lures him over that boundary, he repeats to himself, as he borrows hlen's thin torch. He shines it into the dead woman's mouth. Her saliva has dried up and her throat is pale grey. There's no sign of anything in her throat, her tongue has retracted, and the inside of her cheeks are dark.

In the middle of her tongue, at its thickest part, is a tiny hole from a piece of jewellery. It could almost be part of the natural fold of the tongue, but Joona is sure her tongue was pierced.

He goes over and looks at the first report, and reads the description of the mouth and stomach.

'What are you looking for?' hlen asks.

The only notes under points 22 and 23 are the injuries to the lips, teeth and gums, and at point 62 it says that the tongue and hyoid bone are undamaged. But there's no mention of the hole.

Joona carries on reading, but there's no mention of any item of jewellery being found in the stomach or gut.

'I want to see the film,' he says.

'It's already been examined tens of thousands of times,' Margot says.

Leaning heavily on his stick, Joona raises his face, and his grey eyes are now as dark as thunderclouds.

29.

Margot signs Joona in as her guest at the reception of the National Criminal Investigation Department, and he has to put on a visitor's badge before they pa.s.s through the security doors.

'There are bound to be loads of people wanting to see you,' Margot says as they walk towards the lifts.

'I haven't got time,' he says, taking his badge off and throwing it in a waste-paper bin.

'It's probably a good idea to prepare yourself for shaking a few hands can you manage that?'

Joona thinks of the mines he laid out behind the house in Nattavaara. He made the ANNM out of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane, so that he had a stable secondary explosive substance. He had already armed two mines with three grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate as a detonator, and was on his way back to the outhouse to make the third detonator when the entire bag of PETN exploded. The heavy door was blown off, and knocked his right leg out of its socket.

The pain had been like a flock of black birds, heavy jackdaws landing on his body and covering the ground where he lay. They rose again, as though they'd been blown away, when Lumi ran over to him and held his hand in hers.

'At least I've still got my hands,' he says as they pa.s.s a group of sofa and armchairs.

'That makes it easier.'

Margot holds the lift door open and waits for him to catch up.

'I don't know what you think you're going to see on the video,' she says.

'No,' he says, and follows her in.

'I mean, you seem pretty b.l.o.o.d.y weird,' she smiles, 'but I almost think I like that.'

When they emerge from the lift the corridor is already full of their colleagues. Everyone comes out of their rooms, leaving a pa.s.sageway open between them.

Joona doesn't look anyone in the eye, doesn't smile back at anyone, and doesn't answer anyone. He knows what he looks like. His beard is long and his hair scruffy, he's limping and leaning on his stick, and he can't stand up straight.

No one seems to know how to handle his return; they want to see him, but they mostly seem rather shy.

Someone's holding a bundle of papers, someone else a mug of coffee. These are people he saw every day for many years. He walks past Benny Rubin, who's standing eating a banana with a neutral expression on his face.

'I'll go as soon as I've seen the film,' Joona tells Margot as he carries on past the doorway of his old room.

'We're working in room twenty-two,' Margot says, pointing along the corridor.

Joona stops to catch his breath for a moment. His injured leg hurts and he presses the stick into the floor to give his body a break.

'Which rubbish tip did you find him on?' Petter Nslund says with a grin.

'Idiot,' Margot says.

The head of the National Criminal Police, Carlos Elia.s.son, comes towards Joona. His reading gla.s.ses are swinging on a chain round his neck.

'Joona,' he says warmly.

'Yes,' Joona replies.

They shake hands and patchy applause breaks out in the corridor.

'I didn't believe it when they said you were in the building,' Carlos says, unable to contain his smile. 'I mean ... I can't really take it in.'

'I just want to look at something,' Joona says, and tries to walk on.

'Come and see me afterwards and we'll have a talk about the future.'

'What's there to say about that?' Joona says, and walks away.

His work there feels distant now, further away than his childhood. There's nothing for me to come back to, he thinks.

He wouldn't be here now if the first victim's hand hadn't been cupped like a little bowl by her hip.

That made a small spark begin to smoulder inside him.

Her slender fingers could have been Lumi's. A deep-seated curiosity woke up inside him, and he suddenly felt compelled to get closer to the body.

'We need you here,' Magdalena Ronander says as they shake hands.

It's no longer his job, but when he was confronted with the first victim, he felt a connection that he'd like to be able to control. Maybe he can give Margot a hand with the early stages, just until she can see a way through.

Joona stumbles as pain shoots down his leg, his shoulder hits the wall and he hears his leather jacket sc.r.a.pe against the rough wallpaper.

'I put a note on the intranet that you were going to be coming,' Margot says as they stop outside room 822.

Anja Larsson, his a.s.sistant for all those years, is standing in the doorway of her room. Her face is red. Her chin starts to quiver and tears well up in her eyes as he stops in front of her.

'I've missed you, Anja,' he says.

'Have you?'

Joona nods, and looks her in the eye. His pale grey eyes have a dull shimmer, as if he had a fever.

'Everyone said you were dead, that you'd ... But I couldn't believe that ... I didn't want to, I ... I suppose I always thought you were too stubborn to die,' she smiles as tears run down her cheeks.

'It just wasn't my time,' he replies.

The corridor starts to empty as everyone returns to their rooms; they've already seen enough of the fallen hero.

'What do you look like?' Anja says, wiping her nose on the sleeve of her blouse.

'I know,' he says simply.

She pats his cheek.

'You'd better go, Joona. They're waiting for you.'

30.

Joona enters the operations room and closes the door behind him. On the long wall is a huge map of Stockholm with the crime scenes marked on it. Next to the map pictures from the examination of the scenes have been stuck up: footprints, bodies, blood-spatter patterns. There's a large photograph of the porcelain deer's head, with its reddish-brown glazed fur and eyes like black onyx. Joona looks at the copy of Maria Carlsson's Filofax. The day she was murdered she had written 'cla.s.s 19.00 squared paper, pencils, ink', and underneath she had scribbled the letter 'h'.

On the other wall they've tried to map the victims' profiles. They've begun to identify family connections and other relationships. Their movements workplaces, friends, supermarkets, gyms, cla.s.ses, buses, cafes have been marked with pins.

Adam Youssef stands up from his computer and walks over to Joona, shakes his hand, then pins a picture of a kitchen knife on the wall.

'It's just been confirmed that this knife was the murder weapon. Bjrn Kern washed it up and put it back in the drawer ... but we had a number of stab-wounds through the sternum, so it was fairly easy to reconstruct the type of blade we were looking for ... and it turned out that there were still tiny traces of blood on it.'

Youssef catches his breath, scratches his head hard a couple of times, then moves on to the enlargement of the deer's head.

'The porcelain figure is made of Meissen china,' he says, letting his finger linger over the animal's glistening black eye. 'But the rest of the deer wasn't at the crime scene ... Bjrn Kern hasn't yet been able to give any sort of coherent statement, so we don't know if he was the one who put it in her hand ...'

Joona stops and looks at the photograph of Maria Carlsson's body. The dead woman is sitting propped up against a radiator under a window, wearing a pair of tights.

He reads the report from the examination of the crime scene. There's no mention of any tongue-stud or similar item of jewellery being found in her home.

Adam shoots a questioning glance at Margot behind Joona's back.

'He wants to look at the film of Maria Carlsson,' she says.

'OK. What for?'

She smiles. 'We've missed something.'

'Probably,' he laughs, and scratches his neck.

'You can borrow my computer,' Margot says amiably.