Lazarus

‘We’ll get the body to the lab now that you’ve seen it,’ she mutters.

‘He’s got no other defensive injuries either,’ Joona goes on.

‘He must have,’ she says, turning the dead man’s arms round to look.

‘He didn’t defend himself,’ Joona says calmly.

Clara Fischer sighs, lets go of the arms and stares intently at Joona.

‘How can you know so much?’

‘What am I doing here?’ Joona asks.

‘That’s what I was thinking of asking you,’ Clara says, taking a plastic sleeve from her bag and showing him an old-fashioned mobile phone.

‘A phone,’ he says.

‘A phone that we found between the cushions on the sofa … It belonged to Fabian Dissinger,’ she says, switching it on inside the plastic. ‘Two days ago he called this number – do you recognise it?’

‘That’s my number,’ Joona says.

‘One of the last calls he made in his life was to your personal phone.’

Joona takes out his mobile and sees that he missed the call.

‘Tell me what you know,’ Clara says.

‘Well, now I know why you wanted me here.’

‘You need to tell me why he called you,’ she says impatiently.

Joona shakes his head.

‘Fabian Dissinger hasn’t featured in any of my investigations.’

‘Tell me the truth,’ Clara says irritably.

‘I have no idea.’

She blows a strand of hair away from her mouth.

‘You have no idea. There must be a connection, though,’ she persists.

‘Yes,’ Joona nods, taking a step closer to the hanged man and looking at his eyes.

One of them is hidden by blue-grey swelling and pulpy red flesh, but the other is open, and the mucous membrane is punctuated by small dots of blood.

He realises that Clara Fischer held back from telling him about the phone to see if his reaction to the crime scene might reveal a connection that he would otherwise have denied.

‘Give me something,’ she says, staring at him.

In spite of the cold air in the caravan, she has tiny beads of sweat on her top lip.

‘I’d like to be present for the post-mortem,’ Joona replies.

‘You said there wasn’t a fight.’

‘The violence was one-sided … an almost uncontrolled explosion of aggression, but employing certain military techniques.’

‘You were in the military – the Special Operations Unit – before you joined the police.’

They move away from the bathroom so that two forensics officers can go in. They lay a body-bag on the floor, then fasten plastic bags round the victim’s hands, cut the wire and lift the big, rigid body down.

The dead man’s weight makes the officers groan, and they keep giving each other instructions as they carry him feet-first out through the narrow doorway. Joona gets a glimpse of Fabian Dissinger’s broad back and hairy shoulders as they set him down on the bag.

‘Hang on, turn him over,’ Joona says, moving closer.

‘Könnten Sie bitte die Leiche auf den Bauch wenden,’ Clara says in a neutral voice.

The forensics officers stare at them, but open the bag again, turn the body over, then make room for Joona and Clara.

Joona feels his heartbeat increase as he looks at the lower part of the victim’s back: the skin from the bottom of his shoulder blades down to his buttocks is unnaturally striped, as if he’d been lying on a reed mat.

‘What’s happened to his back?’ Clara whispers.

Without bothering about protective gloves, Joona crouches down and gently runs his fingertips over the damaged skin; hundreds of parallel scars made by wounds that have bled and healed over and over again.

‘I know you’ve got a legendary reputation as a detective,’ Clara says slowly. ‘But you’ve also got a criminal conviction, you’re on probation, and I’m going to arrest you and take you in for questioning unless you can explain how—’

Joona stands up, pushes past her and accidentally knocks over some of the evidence bags containing glasses and ashtrays when he reaches out to the stove for support before going on through the door and out into the sunshine.

‘I’ve got you, Joona – haven’t I?’ Clara says, hurrying after him.

He doesn’t reply, just walks across the gravel towards the gate, pushing aside a forensics officer who’s standing poking at his phone.

Behind him he hears Clara say, ‘Stop him,’ but there’s no sense of urgency in her voice.

Ready to put down anyone who tries to stop him, Joona passes two uniformed officers.

Obviously recognising the intent in his face, they back away cautiously.

The dead man in the caravan shows signs of having been beaten.

Jurek Walter’s twin brother had similar scars on his back. He had been whipped for years with a shaving strop, a length of coarse leather used to sharpen razor blades.

Joona doesn’t yet know what these similarities mean, but there’s no doubt that they’re a message for him.

He starts to run towards the car park, jumps into his car and spins it round, sending mud flying up over the sides.

As he drives away from the campsite he calls the Norwegian Criminal Police. He needs to know if there were any injuries on the back of the grave-robber who was found dead in Oslo, the man who had Summa’s skull in his freezer.

13

Joona has taken a taxi straight from the airport to the Karolinska Institute’s Department of Forensic Medicine on the outskirts of Stockholm.

There are electric Advent lights in the windows of the red brick building and black rosehips covered in frost on the bare bushes outside.

Joona hasn’t taken his medication today because it makes him feel as if he’s not as sharp as he could be.

As a result of an accident many years ago, Joona suffers from cluster migraines. Sometimes an attack will knock him out completely for several minutes, and sometimes it sweeps past like a threatening storm. So far, the only thing that helps is an anti-epilepsy drug called Topiramate.

Joona walks through the glass doors and turns left into the corridor, where he bumps into the elderly cleaner with his cart.

‘How’s Cindy getting on?’ Joona asks.

‘She’s much better now, thanks,’ the man says with a smile.

Joona can’t count the number of times he’s stood in this corridor during his years in the police, waiting to hear what Nils Åhlén has found out.

Things are different today, seeing as the bodies they’re going to analyse are only present in photographic form.

Fabian Dissinger, the sex-offender found dead in Rostock, had been abused over a long period of time. The scars were consistent with his having lain still on his front while someone beat him from the side. The wounds healed, were opened up again by fresh blows, then healed once more.

The Oslo grave-robber had no scars on his back. But shortly before his death five severe blows had been delivered with either a belt or a strop.

The lights are on in the main post-mortem lab.

Saga is crouching down with her back against the tiled wall, and Nils is standing in his medical coat, rubbing his thin hands.

‘The Norwegian Criminal Police have sent the pictures, I received them in the car on the way here. I’ve forwarded them to you,’ Joona explains.

‘Thanks,’ Nils says.

‘Don’t I get a hug?’ Saga says, getting to her feet.

Her blond hair is in plaits, and as usual she’s wearing faded jeans and a jacket from her boxing club.

‘You look happy,’ he says, walking over and giving her a hug.

‘I suppose I am,’ she replies.

He takes a step back and looks her in the eye. She keeps hold of his arm with one hand for a few moments.

‘Even though you’re dating a police officer.’

‘Randy,’ she smiles.

Nils Åhlén opens his computer, finds the emails and clicks on the attachments. The three of them gather in front of the screen as Nils brings up the images from the two crime scenes.

‘What’s this all about?’ Saga eventually says. ‘Both men were assaulted and killed, with extreme force, excessive brutality … neither of them made much effort to defend themselves … and both have been whipped across the back.’

‘In the same way as Jurek’s brother,’ Joona says.

‘That’s debatable,’ she says.

‘Fabian Dissinger has exactly the same sort of scars as Jurek Walter’s twin brother … although the brother’s were much worse, of course, a lot older, and—’

‘In which case they’re not the same,’ she points out.

‘Both victims had direct connections to me,’ Joona says.

‘Yes,’ she replies.

‘We know everyone says Jurek Walter is dead,’ Joona says after a pause. ‘But I’ve been thinking that … well, perhaps that isn’t the case.’

‘Stop that,’ Saga says in a tense voice.

‘Joona,’ Nils Åhlén says, nudging at his glasses nervously. ‘We’ve got a body, we’ve got a one hundred per cent DNA match—’

‘I want to go through the evidence again,’ Joona says, cutting him off. ‘I need to know if there’s even a theoretical possibility that he could still be alive, and—’

‘There isn’t,’ Nils interrupts.

Saga shakes her head and starts walking towards the door.

‘Wait, this affects you too,’ Joona says to her back.

‘I’ll get the file,’ Nils Åhlén says. ‘We’ll do it your way.’

‘You’re both mad,’ Saga mutters as she turns and walks towards them.

Nils unlocks his filing cabinet and pulls out the folder containing the reports and photographs relating to Jurek Walter. From the cold store he fetches a sealed jar containing a finger preserved in formalin. The glass enlarges the finger slightly. Small white particles are swirling around the swollen finger, as pale as ice.

‘The only evidence we have that Jurek is dead is one finger,’ Joona says.

‘It was an entire damn torso,’ Saga says, raising her voice. ‘Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, intestines—’

‘Saga, listen,’ Joona says. ‘I just want us to do this, I want us to go through what we know together. Because that will either help us relax, or—’

‘I shot him, I killed him,’ Saga says. ‘He could have killed me, I don’t know why he hesitated, but I shot him in the neck, the arm, the chest—’

‘Calm down,’ Nils says, and pulls over an office chair for her.

Saga sits down, puts her face in her hands for a few moments, then lowers her hands and takes a deep breath.

‘Jurek Walter died that night,’ she goes on, her voice breaking. ‘I don’t know how many times I’ve been through it all in my head … how hard it was, running through the deep snow, the way the flare reflected off the tiny crystals … I had a clear view of him, and I shot him with my Glock 17. The first shot hit him in the neck, the second in his arm … I walked towards him and shot him again, with three shots to the chest. Every single damn shot hit him, and I saw the blood spray from the exit wounds onto the snow behind him.’

‘I know, but—’

‘It’s hardly my bloody fault that he fell into the rapids, but I fired into the water and saw a cloud of blood billow out around him, and I followed him downstream, firing and firing until the body was swept away by the current.’

‘Everyone did what they had to – and more,’ Nils Åhlén says slowly. ‘The police sent divers down that same night, and the following morning they searched the banks with sniffer dogs for more than ten kilometres downstream.’

‘They should have found the body,’ Joona says in a subdued voice.

He knows that Saga carried on looking on her own. The search probably formed part of her long road back to life, a way for her to work through what had happened privately. She’s told him about how she followed the river all the way to the sea near Hysingsvik, then marked out an area on the map and systematically searched the archipelago by dividing it into squares. She studied tidal currents and went out to every single island and skerry along a hundred-kilometre length of coast, spoke to residents and summer visitors, fishermen, people who worked the ferries, oceanographers …

‘I found him,’ Saga whispers, looking at Joona with bloodshot eyes. ‘Damn it, Joona, I found him.’

He’s heard her explanation of how, after more than a year of looking, she bumped into a man on the rugged north coast of Högmarsö. He was a retired churchwarden, collecting driftwood from the beach. She spoke to him and discovered that he had found the dead body of a man at the water’s edge five months earlier.

Saga had gone with him to the inhabited part of the island. The churchwarden’s cottage and the old crematorium were tucked behind a sugar-white chapel.

‘Jurek’s body had been carried on the current and washed ashore during the storms we had at the end of that winter,’ Saga says, without taking her eyes off Joona.

‘That all checks out,’ Nils says. ‘Do you get that, Joona? It all makes sense. He’s dead.’

‘The only parts of Jurek Walter that were left were his torso and one arm,’ Saga goes on. ‘The churchwarden told me he carried the swollen body through the forest in his wheelbarrow, and left it on the floor of the toolshed behind the chapel. But the smell drove his dog mad, so he ended up having to move it to the old crematorium.’

‘Why didn’t he call the police?’ Joona asks.

‘I don’t know. He made his own hooch and was fiddling his benefits,’ she says. ‘Maybe he’d already started to go senile … But he took pictures of the body on his phone in case the police did show up asking questions … and he kept one of the fingers at the back of his freezer.’

Nils Åhlén pulls a printed picture from the file and passes it to Joona.

He takes the photograph and angles it so the reflection of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling of the post-mortem lab don’t get in the way.

On a cement floor beside a red lawnmower lies a bloated body with no head. A pool of water has spread out around it. The loose covering of white skin has slid off the chest, and the three jagged entry wounds gape like craters.

Saga has come and stood next to him so she can see the picture.

‘That’s Jurek, that’s where I hit him.’

14

Nils Åhlén very calmly lays out copies of the scanned fingerprints, Jurek Walter’s DNA profile taken at the time of his arrest, and the laboratory’s response.

‘The match is exact because we’ve got both DNA and fingerprints … not even identical twins share the same fingerprints,’ he explains.

‘I don’t doubt that that’s Jurek Walter’s finger,’ Joona says quietly.

‘It was cut off an already dead body,’ Nils Åhlén says emphatically.

‘Joona, he’s dead, aren’t you listening?’ Saga asks, wiping tears from her cheeks.

‘One dead body part is enough,’ Joona replies. ‘The finger could have been cut from an amputated hand that had been lying in brackish water for the same length of time as the body.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she groans.

‘Purely theoretically,’ Joona persists.

‘Nils, tell him that’s not possible.’

Nils Åhlén pushes his glasses up his nose again and looks at Joona.

‘You’re suggesting he could have cut his own hand off in order to …’

He trails off and meets Joona’s gaze.

‘Let’s say Jurek was incredibly lucky and somehow survived being shot, swam with the current, made it to land and survived,’ Joona says seriously.

‘Those shots were fatal,’ Saga protests.

‘Jurek started out as a child soldier,’ Joona says. ‘Pain is irrelevant to him, he would have cauterised the wounds himself and amputated his own arm if that’s what it took.’

‘Joona, you do realise that this is impossible,’ Nils says wearily.

‘It’s only impossible if it genuinely can’t be done.’

‘OK, we’re listening,’ Saga says, sinking back onto her chair.

Joona’s face is pale and impassive.

‘Jurek finds a man with roughly the same build as him, the same age,’ he says. ‘He shoots his victim the same way you shot him … then he removes the dead man’s head and leaves the rest of the body to soak somewhere along the coast … in some sort of cage or crate.’

‘Along with his own hand,’ Nils says quietly.

‘It wouldn’t even be that bizarre for him – he used to keep people buried alive in coffins, only checking on them from time to time.’

‘To do that, he’d have had to have the cooperation of the churchwarden Saga met.’

‘Jurek has ways of making people obey him.’

Drips from a tap glint in the drainage gulley in the floor.

Joona looks at Nils and Saga. His pale grey eyes look almost black now, and his face is beaded with sweat.

‘Am I right: there’s a theoretical possibility that Jurek is still alive?’ he asks in a whisper.

‘Joona,’ Nils pleads, then he nods in response.

‘That’s nonsense, it isn’t enough, this is nothing, for God’s sake!’ Saga exclaims, sweeping the reports and photographs onto the floor.

‘I’m not saying I believe that he’s alive,’ Joona says tentatively.

‘Good, Joona, because that would have felt kind of weird,’ she blurts. ‘Seeing as I shot him and then found his body.’

‘It was actually only a finger.’

‘In theory, Joona’s right,’ Nils says.

‘OK, what the hell,’ Saga says, sitting back down on her chair. ‘So you’re right in theory, but no matter how you look at it, there’s no logic to the entire premise. Why the fuck would Jurek want to whip and kill two perverted ex-cons in Norway and Germany?’

‘That doesn’t sound like Jurek Walter,’ Nils Åhlén concedes.

Joona closes his eyes and his eyelids tremble as he tries to compose himself enough to pursue his line of reasoning.

‘Jurek had three types of victim,’ he begins, opening his eyes. ‘The true victims, his primary targets, were the ones he didn’t kill himself, like Samuel Mendel.’

‘Which is why it was so hard to establish a pattern,’ Nils says.

‘The second category were the people he took from his prime targets, the people who made their lives worth living.’

‘Children, wives, siblings, parents, friends.’

‘Jurek didn’t actively want to kill them either. As individuals, they had no significance to him.’

‘Which is why he kept them locked up or buried in coffins and drums,’ Nils says, nodding in agreement.

‘The third category were people who happened to get in his way … he didn’t want to kill them either, but he did so for practical reasons, to remove them as obstacles.’

‘So he never really set out to kill anyone?’ Saga says.

‘He didn’t get anything out of the act of killing itself, there was no sexual motive, it wasn’t even about domination, just his own personal sense of justice … he wanted the first category, the primary victims, to be broken down to the point they would choose death over life.’

He looks down at the floor and the photographs of the decayed torso, whipped backs and lab reports.

‘Now we have two victims with no apparent connection to each other, with injuries inflicted in a way that is reminiscent of what happened to Jurek’s brother. One victim had Summa’s skull in his freezer, and the other had tried to contact me.’

‘That can’t be coincidence,’ Saga says quietly. ‘But these murders don’t fit Jurek Walter’s persona.’

‘I agree, I completely agree, I don’t think it’s Jurek either, but maybe someone’s trying to tell me something, and maybe that person has some sort of connection to him,’ Joona says.

‘What if there are other victims?’ Saga says, and looks him in the eye.

15

Stellan Ragnarson is a lanky man with kind eyes and a somewhat uncertain, beseeching smile. He’s started cutting his hair very short after it got too thin to look boyish.

This evening he’s wearing his shiny black jogging bottoms and a washed-out grey hoodie with the New York Rangers logo on it.

He takes half a kilo of steak from the fridge, tears off the plastic and tips the meat into a large stainless steel bowl.

Marika is sitting at the drop-leaf table with her phone and a bar of chocolate.

She’s five years younger than him, and works at the petrol station in the E65, opposite the ICA Kvantum supermarket.

‘You spoil him’ she says, breaking off three chunks of chocolate.

‘I can afford it,’ he replies, and puts the bowl down on the floor below the kitchen window.

‘Today, maybe.’

Stellan smiles as the big dog devours the meat with a snap of its neck. Rollof is an impressive-looking Rottweiler, self-assured and calm. His tail was docked when he was a puppy because it was coiled up over his back.

Stellan is unemployed, but he won some money on the horses yesterday and surprised Marika by buying her a rose.

They go and sit on the sofa and eat ham-and-mustard toasted sandwiches, and watch the television show Stranger Things.

Marika’s phone rings just as they’re finishing. She looks at the screen and says it’s her sister again.

‘Take it,’ he says, standing up. ‘I’ll go up and play for a bit before I take Rollof out.’

‘Hi, Sis,’ Marika answers with a smile, and plumps up the cushion behind her back.

Stellan gets a can of beer from the fridge and goes upstairs to his computer.

Six months ago he began to explore the Dark Web, the invisible part of the World Wide Web that’s said to be five thousand times the size of the ordinary Internet.

Even if you haven’t studied software programming and Internet protocols, most people are aware that every computer and phone has its own individual IP address, a combination of letters and numbers that can be used to identify the user and locate them geographically.

Stellan was attracted to Darknet, part of the Dark Web which employs servers without IP addresses. That’s where most of the really dangerous deals and developments are happening: guns, drugs, rape, contract killings, slave trade and organ theft.

But after what happened eleven days ago, he stopped looking at the Dark Web altogether. He cut off all contact and tried to get rid of the software, without success.

It doesn’t matter, he tells himself.

He’s not using the Dark Web any more, from now on he’ll make do with a bit of online gaming.

He’s started to get caught up in the game Battlefield.

It’s intense, but only a game nonetheless.

You have to put together a team to carry out a military operation; players spend most of the time talking about the mission, but it’s still fun getting to know new people from all corners of the world.

Stellan puts his beer down on the desk and sticks a plaster over the camera lens on the computer before putting on his headphones and microphone and getting going.

His team’s task in the game is to liquidate a terrorist leader in a run-down building in Damascus.

They’ve been given satellite pictures of the building, and have been flown in from their base by helicopter.

Stellan takes one hand off the handset to open the can, but doesn’t have time before he has to get back to the game.

They force entry through a back door and enter the building in two pairs. Stellan and his backup, who goes by the name Straw, run through a pillared walkway along the side of a courtyard, with cracked marble tiles and rusting military equipment among desiccated palm trees.

‘Take it nice and slow now,’ Stellan says over the voice-chat.

‘I can take the lead if you’re getting cold feet,’ Straw says, then lets out a belch.

‘You haven’t even seen the guards, have you?’ Stellan says quietly.

The guards’ cigarettes are barely visible in a dark corner. When they inhale, the light of the burning tobacco glints off their automatic rifles.

Straw sighs in Stellan’s headphones, then walks straight out and shoots the terrorist leader’s guards. The heavy fire echoes through the walkway and off the walls.

‘Fuck, you can’t do that before we’ve checked the courtyard,’ Stellan says, reaching for the can of beer again.