In the kitchen, there’s a man wearing jeans and a light brown blazer with leather patches on the elbows. He’s stroking his blond moustache, talking loudly and pointing at the microwave oven. As Joona walks inside, he observes a technician in a mask and protective gloves pack the misshapen spray can into a paper bag, wrapping the open end of the bag twice. Then he tapes the bag shut and writes on it.
“Joona Linna, right?” the man with the moustache says. “If you’re as good as they say, you ought to come and work for us.”
They shake hands.
“Göran Stone, Säpo,” the man says contentedly.
“Are you in charge of the initial investigation?” asks Joona.
“Yes, I am. Or rather, formally, it’s Saga Bauer. For the sake of statistics,” he adds and grins.
“I’ve met her. She seems capable—”
“Isn’t that right?” Göran Stone laughs out loud and then snaps his mouth shut.
Joona glances out the window. His mind is back to the drifting boat. What kind of contract had the killer been given, and why? He knows it’s much too soon to draw any type of conclusion, but still, a tentative hypothesis is not a bad thing. Joona leaves the kitchen and heads for the bedroom. The bed is made. The cream bedcover is smoothed. Saga Bauer from Säpo is standing in front of a laptop on the windowsill while also talking on her mobile phone. Joona remembers her from a counterterrorism seminar.
Joona sits down on the bed and tries to reorder his thoughts yet again. Three people on a boat. He visualises Penelope and Viola standing before him and in his mind he places Björn next to them. All three of them could not have been on the boat when Viola was killed, otherwise the killer would have got the right person. At sea he would have just killed all three, put them on their beds, and sunk the boat. So they were not at sea. They’d docked the boat somewhere.
Joona stands up again and walks into the living room. He lets his eyes wander over the flat-screen TV on the wall, the red tartan blanket folded over the arm of the sofa, the modern table with copies of Ordfront and Exit fanned on top.
He walks over to a bookshelf that covers an entire wall. He stops and thinks about the boat. He visualises the apparently crimped cables in the engine room, which were supposed to have generated an electric arc within a few minutes; the seat cushion stuffed behind the cables in order to catch fire more easily; the loop in the rerouted fuel line. Why hadn’t the boat sunk? They had probably not run the engine long enough.
These were not coincidences: Björn’s apartment is set on fire. The same day, Viola is murdered, and if the boat had not been abandoned, there would have been an explosion in the fuel tank. Then the killer tries to ignite a gas explosion in Penelope’s apartment.
Björn’s apartment. The boat. Penelope’s apartment.
He’s searching for something either Penelope or Björn possesses. He started by searching Björn’s apartment and when he didn’t find what he was looking for, he set the apartment on fire. Then he followed the boat and when he’d searched it and couldn’t find what he was looking for, he tried to force Viola to talk. When she couldn’t reveal anything useful, he headed to Penelope’s apartment.
Joona borrows a pair of latex gloves from a box and goes back to the bookshelf. He peers at the layer of dust in front of the books and sees there is none in front of some of the volumes. He concludes that someone has pulled out those books recently, perhaps sometime during the past several weeks.
“I don’t want you here,” Saga Bauer says behind him. “This is my investigation.”
“I’ll be going,” he says softly, “but there’s one thing I have to find first.”
“Five minutes,” she says.
He turns to look at her. “Can you have these books photographed?”
“Already done,” she snaps.
“From above so you can see the dust,” he says, not troubled at all.
She realises what he’s getting at. She doesn’t change her expression, but simply takes a camera from a technician and photographs every shelf she can reach before she tells Joona that he can look at the books on the five lower shelves.
Joona takes out Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and looks inside. Flipping through it, he notices the underlined passages and notes written in the margins. He looks at the gap between the books but sees nothing. He replaces the book. Then his eyes range over a biography of Ulrike Meinhof, a worn-out anthology called Key Texts of Political Feminism, and the collected works of Bertolt Brecht.
Joona looks at the next shelf down. Three books have obviously been taken out of the bookshelf recently since there’s no dust in front of them. One of them, The Cleverness of Antelopes, is a collection of witness reports from the genocide in Rwanda. Another is Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection Cien sonetos de amor. The last is The Roots of Swedish Racial Ideas in the History of Ideas.
Joona flips through each one. When he reaches The Roots of Swedish Racial Ideas in the History of Ideas, a photograph falls out. It’s a black-and-white picture of a serious young woman with plaited hair. He recognises Claudia Fernandez. She can’t be more than fifteen years old, and the resemblance to her daughter is remarkable.
Who would keep a photograph of one’s mother in a book on racial biology? Joona wonders to himself as he turns the photograph over.
On the backside of the photo, someone has written a line: Don’t go far off, not even for a day. It’s in pencil.
Joona takes out Neruda’s poetry collection again. He flips through it until he finds the entire verse:
No estés lejos de mí un solo día, porque cómo,
porque, no sé decirlo, es largo el día,
y te estaré esperando como en las estaciones
cuando en alguna parte se durmieron los trenes.
The photograph should have been in the Neruda collection.
If the killer had been looking through the books, this photo could have fallen out.
He was standing right here, Joona thought. He was looking at the dust in front of the books just as I am doing now and he was quickly flipping through the ones pulled out the past few weeks. He notices a photograph has fallen out of one of the books and is on the floor. He automatically picks it up and sticks it back, but into the wrong book.
Joona closes his eyes.
That’s what happened, he thinks. The hit man was looking through the books.
If he knows what he’s looking for, then the object must be small enough to be hidden between the pages of a book.
What could it be?
A letter? A will? A photograph? A confession? Maybe it was a CD or a memory stick or a SIM card?