The Nightmare

On the table is an extremely beautiful young woman.

Her skin is suntanned, her long, dark hair lies glossy and curly across her forehead and shoulders. It looks as if she’s gazing up at the room with a mixture of hesitancy and surprise.

There’s something almost cheeky about the set of her mouth, like someone who laughs and smiles a lot.

But there’s no sparkle in those big, dark eyes. Tiny dark-brown spots have already begun to appear.

Joona stops and looks at the woman on the table. He guesses she’s nineteen, twenty at most. No time at all since she was a young child sleeping with her parents. Then she turned into a half-grown schoolgirl, and now she’s dead.

Across the woman’s chest, on the skin above her breastbone, is a faint curved line, like a smiley mouth drawn on in grey, some thirty centimetres long.

‘What’s that line?’ Joona asks, pointing.

‘No idea. An impression from a necklace, perhaps, or a low-cut top. I’ll take a closer look later.’

Joona looks at the lifeless body, takes a deep breath, and – as usual when he is confronted by the absolute implacability of death – a gloom settles on him, a colourless loneliness.

Life is so terrifyingly fragile.

Her finger- and toenails are painted a pinkish-beige colour.

‘What’s so special about her, then?’ he asks after a few moments.

The Needle looks at him seriously, and his glasses glint as he turns back towards the body again.

‘The marine police brought her in,’ he says. ‘She was found sitting on the bed in the front cabin of a large motor cruiser that was drifting in the archipelago.’

‘Dead?’

Nils meets his gaze and says, with a sudden lilt in his voice:

‘She drowned, Joona.’

‘Drowned?’

The Needle nods and smiles brightly.

‘She drowned on board a boat that was still afloat,’ he says.

‘So someone found her in the water and brought her on board.’

‘Well, if that had happened I wouldn’t be taking up your valuable time,’ Nils says.

‘So what’s this all about, then?’

‘There’s no trace of water on the rest of the body – I’ve sent her clothes for analysis, but the National Forensics Lab aren’t going to find anything either.’

The Needle falls silent, glances through the preliminary external report, then glances at Joona to see if he’s managed to pique his curiosity. Joona is standing completely still, and his face looks completely different now. He’s looking at the dead body with an expression of intense concentration. Suddenly he takes a pair of latex gloves from the box and pulls them on. The Needle smiles happily to himself as Joona leans over the girl, then carefully lifts her arms and studies them.

‘You won’t find any signs of violence,’ Nils says, almost inaudibly. ‘It’s incomprehensible.’

11

In the front cabin

The large motor cruiser is moored at the marine police marina on Dalarö. It lies at anchor between two police boats, white and shiny.

The tall metal gates to the marina are open. Joona Linna drives slowly in along the gravel track, past a mauve van and a crane with a rusty winch. He parks, leaves the car and walks on.

A boat has been found abandoned, drifting in the archipelago, thinks Joona. On the bed in the front cabin sits a girl who has drowned. The boat is afloat, but the girl’s lungs are full of brackish seawater.

From a distance Joona stops and looks at the boat. The front of the hull has been seriously damaged; long scratches run along the side, from a violent collision, damaging the paint and the fibreglass beneath.

He calls Lennart Johansson of the marine police.

‘Lennart,’ a voice answers brightly.

‘Lennart Johansson?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘My name is Joona Linna, National Crime.’

The line goes quiet. Joona can hear what sounds like waves lapping.

‘The motor cruiser that you brought in,’ Joona says. ‘I was wondering if it had taken on any water?’

‘Water?’

‘The hull is damaged.’

Joona takes a few steps closer to the boat as Lennart Johansson explains in a tone of heavy resignation:

‘Dear Lord, if I had a penny for every drunk who crashed …’

‘I need to look at the boat,’ Joona interrupts.

‘Look, here’s a broad outline of what happened,’ Lennart Johansson says. ‘Some kids from … I don’t know, let’s say Södertälje. They steal a boat, pick up some girls, cruise about, listen to music, party, drink a lot. In the middle of everything they hit something, quite a hard collision, and the girl falls overboard. The guys stop the boat, drive back and find her, get her up on deck. When they realise she’s dead they panic, so damn frightened that they just take off.’

Lennart stops and waits for a response.

‘Not a bad theory,’ Joona says slowly.

‘It’s not, is it?’ Lennart says cheerfully. ‘It’s all yours. Might save you a trip to Dalarö.’

‘Too late,’ Joona says, as he starts to walk towards the marine police boat.

It’s a Stridsbåt 90E, moored behind the motor cruiser. A tanned, bare-chested man in his mid-twenties is standing on deck holding a phone to his ear.

‘Suit yourself,’ he says. ‘Feel free to book a sightseeing trip.’

‘I’m here already – and I think I’m looking right at you, if you’re standing on one of your shallow …’

‘Do I look like a surfer?’

The suntanned man looks up with a smile and scratches his chest.

‘Pretty much,’ Joona says.

They end the call and walk towards each other. Lennart Johansson pulls on a short-sleeved uniform shirt and buttons it as he crosses the gangplank.

Joona holds up his thumb and little finger in a surfers’ gesture. Lennart’s white teeth flash in his suntanned face.

‘I go surfing whenever there’s enough swell – that’s why I’m known as Lance.’

‘I can see why,’ Joona jokes drily.

‘Right?’ Lennart laughs.

They walk over to the boat and stop on the jetty beside the gangplank.

‘A Storebro 36, Royal Cruiser,’ Lennart says. ‘Good boat, but it’s seen better days. Registered to a Björn Almskog.’

‘Have you contacted him?’

‘Haven’t had time.’

They take a closer look at the damage to the boat’s hull. It looks recent, there’s no algae among the glass fibres.

‘I’ve asked a forensics specialist to come out – he should be here soon,’ Joona says.

‘She’s taken a serious knock,’ Lennart says.

‘Who’s been on board since the boat was found?’

‘No one,’ he replies quickly.

Joona smiles and waits with a patient expression on his face.

‘Well, me, of course,’ Lennart says hesitantly. ‘And Sonny, my colleague. And the paramedics who removed the body. And our forensics guy, but he used floor mats and protective clothing.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Apart from the old boy who found the boat.’

Joona doesn’t answer, just looks down at the sparkling water and thinks about the girl on the table in the Department of Forensic Medicine with The Needle.

‘Do you know if your forensics guy secured all the surface evidence?’ he asks after a while.

‘He’s done with the floor, and he’s filmed the scene.’

‘I’m going on board.’

A narrow, worn gangplank leads from the jetty to the boat. Joona climbs aboard and then stands on the aft-deck for a while. He looks around slowly, scanning everything carefully. This is the first and only time he will see the crime scene like this, as a first impression. Every detail he registers now could be vital. Shoes, an overturned sun-lounger, large towel, a paperback that has turned yellow in the sun, a knife with a red plastic handle, a bucket on a rope, beer tins, a bag of charcoal, a tub containing a wetsuit, bottles of sun cream and lotion.

He looks through the large window at the wooden furnishings of the saloon and helm. From a certain angle fingerprints on the glass door stand out in the sunlight, impressions of hands that have pushed the door open, closed it again, reached for it when the boat rocked.

Joona enters the small saloon. The afternoon sun is glinting off the wood veneers and chrome. There’s a cowboy hat and a pair of sunglasses on the navy-blue cushions on one of the sofas.

The water outside is lapping against the hull.

Joona’s eyes roam across the worn floor of the saloon and down the narrow steps to the front of the boat. It’s as dark as a deep well down there. He can’t see anything until he turns his torch on. The cool, tightly focused beam illuminates the steep passageway. The red wood shimmers like the inside of a body. Joona goes down the creaking steps, thinking of the girl, toying with the idea that she was alone on the boat, dived from the foredeck, hit her head on a rock, breathed water into her lungs but somehow managed to get back on board, change out of her wet bikini into dry clothes. Perhaps she was already feeling tired and went down into the cabin, not realising that she was as badly hurt as she was, not realising that actually she had a serious concussion that was rapidly increasing the pressure on her brain.

But Nils would have found traces of brackish water on her body.

It doesn’t make sense.

Joona goes down the steps, past the galley and bathroom, into the main cabin.

There’s a lingering feeling from her death on the boat, even though her body has been moved to the Department of Forensic Medicine in Solna. It’s the same feeling every time. Somehow the objects stare silently back at him, full of screams, cramps, silence.

Suddenly the boat creaks differently and seems to lean to one side. Joona waits and listens, then carries on into the cabin.

Summer light is streaming through the narrow windows by the ceiling, onto a double bed with its top end shaped to fit the bow of the boat. This was where she was found, in a seated position. There’s an open sports bag on the floor, and a polka-dotted nightdress has been unpacked. On the back of the door are a pair of jeans and a thin cardigan. A shoulder bag is hanging from a hook.

The boat sways again and a glass bottle rolls across the deck above his head.

Joona photographs the bag from various angles with his mobile phone. The flash makes the little room shrink, as if the walls, floor and ceiling all took a step closer for an instant.

He carefully takes the bag down off the hook and carries it up on deck. The steps creak under his weight. He can hear a metallic clicking sound from outside. When he reaches the saloon an unexpected shadow crosses the glass door. Joona reacts and takes a step back, into the gloom of the stairwell.

12

Unusual death

Joona Linna stands completely still, just two steps down on the dark flight of steps leading to the galley and front cabin. From there he can see the bottom of the glass doors and some of the aft-deck. A shadow crosses the dusty glass, and suddenly a hand comes into view. Someone is creeping across the deck. The next moment he recognises Erixon’s face. Drops of sweat are running down his cheeks as he rolls out his gelatine foil over the area around the door.

Joona takes the bag from the cabin up into the saloon with him. He carefully turns it upside down over the little hardwood table. Then he pokes the red wallet open with his pen. There’s a driver’s licence in the worn plastic pocket. He looks more closely and sees a beautiful, serious face caught in the flash of a photograph booth. She’s leaning back slightly, as if looking up. Her hair is dark and curly. He recognises the girl from the table in the pathology lab, her straight nose, eyes, South American features.

‘Penelope Fernandez,’ he reads on the driver’s licence, and thinks that he’s heard that name before.

In his mind he goes back to the pathology lab, with the naked body on the table, the tiled roof, the smell of death, her slack features, a face beyond sleep.

Outside in the sunshine Erixon’s bulky frame is moving very slowly as he secures fingerprints from the railing, brushing them with magnetic powder and using tape to lift them. Slowly he wipes one wet area, adds some drops of SPR solution and photographs the imprint that appears.

Joona can hear him sighing deeply the whole time, as if every movement required painful effort, as if he’d just expended the last of his energy.

Joona looks out at the deck, and sees a bucket on a rope next to a training shoe. A faint smell of potatoes is coming from the galley.

He turns back at the driver’s licence and the little photograph. He looks at the young woman’s mouth, at the slightly parted lips, and suddenly realises that something is missing.

It feels like he’s seen something, was on the point of saying something, but forgot what.

He starts when his phone begins to vibrate in his pocket. He takes it out, sees from the screen that it’s The Needle, and answers.

‘Joona.’

‘My name is Nils Åhlén, and I’m a senior pathologist at the Department of Forensic Medicine in Stockholm.’

Joona smiles: they’ve known each other for twenty years, and he’d recognise The Needle’s voice without any introduction.

‘Did she hit her head?’ Joona asks.

‘No,’ Nils replies, surprised.

‘I thought maybe she hit a rock when she was diving.’

‘No, nothing like that – she drowned, that was the cause of death.’

‘You’re sure?’ Joona persists.

‘I’ve found fungus inside her nostrils, perforations in the mucous membrane in her throat, probably the result of a severe vomit reflex, and there are bronchial secretions in both her trachea and bronchi. Her lungs look typical for a drowning: full of water, increased weight, and … well.’

They fall silent. Joona can hear a scraping sound, as if someone were pushing a metal trolley.

‘You had a reason for calling,’ Joona says.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you feel like telling me?’

‘She had a high concentration of tetrahydro‌cannabinol in her urine.’

‘Cannabis?’

‘Yes.’

‘But she didn’t die of that,’ Joona says.

‘Hardly,’ Nils says, sounding amused. ‘I just assumed that you were probably busy reconstructing the sequence of events on the boat, and that this was one little detail of the puzzle that you may not have known about.’

‘Her name is Penelope Fernandez,’ Joona says.

‘Good to know,’ Nils mutters.

‘Was there anything else?’

‘No.’

Nils breathes down the phone.

‘Say it anyway,’ Joona says.

‘It’s just that this isn’t an ordinary death.’

He falls silent.

‘What have you spotted?’

‘Nothing, it’s just a feeling …’

‘Great,’ Joona says. ‘Now you’re starting to sound like me.’

‘I know, but … Obviously it could be a case of mors subita naturalis, a swift but entirely natural death … There’s nothing to contradict that, but if this is a natural death, it’s a very unusual natural death.’

They end the call, but The Needle’s words are echoing through Joona’s head: mors subita naturalis. There’s something mysterious about Penelope Fernandez’s death. Her body wasn’t just found in the water by someone and brought on board. Because then she would have been lying on deck. Okay, so whoever found her may have wanted to show the dead woman some respect. But in that case they would have carried her into the saloon and laid her on the sofa.

The last alternative, Joona thinks, is of course that she was taken care of by someone who loved her, who wanted to put her to bed in her own room, in her own bed.

But she was sitting on the bed. Sitting.

Maybe The Needle is wrong, maybe she was still alive when she was helped back on board and shown to her room. Her lungs could have been badly damaged, beyond salvation. Maybe she felt ill, wanted to lie down and be left in peace.

But why was there no water on her clothes, or the rest of her body?

There’s a fresh-water shower on board, Joona thinks, and tells himself that he’s going to have to search the rest of the boat: check the aft-cabin, as well as the bathroom and galley. There’s a lot left to look at before the whole picture starts to emerge.

When Erixon gets to his feet and takes a couple of steps, the whole boat rocks again.

Once more Joona looks out through the glass doors from the saloon, and for a second time finds himself staring at the bucket on a rope. It’s standing next to a zinc wash-tub where someone had left a wetsuit. There are water-skis by the railing. Joona looks back at the bucket again. He looks at the rope tied to the handle. The curved zinc tub shimmers in the sun, shining like a new moon.

Suddenly it hits him: Joona can see the sequence of events with icy clarity. He waits, lets his heart settle down, and thinks through what happened once more, until he is now absolutely certain that he’s right.

The woman now identified as Penelope Fernandez was drowned in the wash-tub.

Joona thinks back to the curved mark on her chest that he noticed in the pathology lab, which made him think of a smiling mouth.

She was murdered, then placed on the bed in her cabin.

His thoughts start to come faster now as adrenalin pumps through his body. She was drowned in brackish seawater and then placed on her bed.

This isn’t an ordinary death, and this isn’t an ordinary murderer.

A tentative voice starts to echo inside him, getting faster and more insistent. It keeps repeating the same five words, louder and louder: Get off the boat now, get off the boat now.

Joona looks at Erixon through the glass as he drops a swab in a small paper bag, seals it with tape and writes on it with a ballpoint pen.

‘Peekaboo,’ Erixon smiles.

‘We’re going ashore,’ Joona says calmly.

‘I don’t like boats, they keep moving the whole time, but I’ve only just got …’

‘Take a break,’ Joona says sharply.

‘What’s got into you now?’

‘Just follow me and don’t touch your phone.’

They go ashore and Joona leads Erixon a short way from the boat before he stops. He can feel his cheeks flush as calmness spreads through his body, settling as a weight in his thighs and calves.

‘There could be a bomb on board,’ he says quietly.

Erixon sits down on the edge of a concrete plinth. Sweat is dripping from his forehead.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘This is no ordinary murder,’ Joona says. ‘There’s a risk that …’

‘Murder? There’s nothing to suggest …’

‘Hold on,’ Joona interrupts. ‘I’m certain that Penelope Fernandez was drowned in the wash-tub that was out on deck.’

‘Drowned? What the hell are you saying?’

‘She drowned in seawater in the tub, then was moved to the bed,’ Joona goes on. ‘And I think the plan was that the boat should sink.’

‘But …’

‘Because then … then she’d be found in her water-filled cabin with water in her lungs.’

‘But the boat never sank,’ Erixon says.

‘That’s what made me start to wonder if there is some sort of explosive device on board, a device that didn’t go off, for whatever reason.’

‘It’s probably next to the fuel tank or the gas cylinders in the galley,’ Erixon says slowly. ‘We’ll have to get the area evacuated and call in the Bomb Squad.’

13

Reconstruction

At seven o’clock that evening five very serious men meet in room 13 of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the Karolinska Institute. Detective Superintendent Joona Linna wants to take charge of the preliminary investigation into the case of the woman who was found dead on a boat in the Stockholm archipelago. Even though it’s Saturday, he has summoned his immediate boss, Petter Näslund, and Chief Prosecutor Jens Svanehjälm to a reconstruction in order to try to convince them that they’re actually dealing with a murder.

One of the fluorescent tubes in the ceiling keeps flickering. The cool lighting glints off the dazzling white tiled walls.

‘Need to change the starter,’ The Needle murmurs.

‘Yes,’ Frippe agrees.

Petter Näslund mutters something under his breath from where he’s standing over by the wall. His wide, strong face looks like it’s shaking in the flickering light. Beside him stands Chief Prosecutor Jens Svanehjälm with an irritable expression on his young face. He seems to be considering the risks of putting his leather briefcase down on the floor and leaning against the wall in his smart suit.

There’s a strong smell of disinfectant in the room. Large, adjustable lamps hang from the ceiling above a free-standing stainless steel table, with a double tap and deep drainage channels. The floor is covered with pale grey linoleum. A zinc tub like the one on the boat is already half full of water. Joona Linna keeps fetching more water in a bucket from the tap on the wall above the drain, and then emptying it into the tub.

‘It isn’t actually against the law for someone to be found drowned on a boat,’ Svanehjälm says impatiently.

‘Quite,’ Petter says.

‘This could just be an accidental drowning that hasn’t been reported yet,’ Svanehjälm goes on.

‘The water in her lungs is the same water the boat was floating in, but there’s practically none of that water on her clothes or the rest of her body,’ The Needle says.

‘Strange,’ Svanehjälm says.

‘There’s bound to be a rational explanation,’ Petter says with a smile.

Joona empties one last bucket into the tub, then puts the bucket on the floor, looks up at the others and thanks them for coming.

‘I know it’s the weekend and everyone would rather be at home,’ he says. ‘But I think I’ve noticed something important.’

‘Of course we’re going to come if you tell us it’s important,’ Svanehjälm says amiably, and finally puts his briefcase down between his feet.

‘The perpetrator made his way onto the leisure cruiser,’ Joona says seriously. ‘He went down the steps to the front cabin and saw Penelope Fernandez asleep, then went back up to the aft-deck, dropped the bucket on the rope into the water and started to fill the wash-tub that was standing on deck.’

‘Five, six buckets,’ Petter says.

‘Then, when the tub was full, he went down to the cabin and woke Penelope. He took her up the steps and out onto the deck, where he drowned her in the tub.’

‘Who would do something like that?’ Svanehjälm asks.

‘I don’t know yet, maybe it was some sort of torture, like waterboarding …’

‘Revenge? Jealousy?’

Joona tilts his head and says thoughtfully:

‘This isn’t any ordinary murderer. Maybe the perpetrator wanted information from her, to get her to say or admit to something, before finally holding her underwater until she could no longer resist the urge to breathe in.’

‘What does our pathologist say?’ Svanehjälm asks.

The Needle shakes his head.

‘If she was drowned,’ he says, ‘then I’d have found signs of violence on her body, bruises and …’

‘Can we wait with the objections?’ Joona interrupts. ‘Because I’d like to start by showing what I think happened, the way it looks in my head. And then, once I’m done, I’d like us all to go and look at the body, and see if there’s any basis for my theory.’

‘Why can’t you ever do anything the way it’s supposed to be done?’ Petter asks.

‘I do need to go home soon,’ the prosecutor warns.

Joona looks at him with an ice-grey glint in his pale eyes. There’s a hint of a smile playing at the corners of his eyes, a smile that does nothing to detract from the seriousness of his look.

‘Penelope Fernandez,’ he begins. ‘She had been sitting on deck just before, smoking a joint. It was a warm day and she felt tired, so went down to rest on her bed for a while, and fell asleep wearing her denim jacket.’