Stalker

136

Joona has been following the signs to Rimbo, but he leaves road 280 at Väsby and is heading towards Finsta when Margot calls to tell him that Jackie and her daughter aren’t in the flat at Lill-Jans plan. All the evidence suggests they’ve been abducted; there are traces of blood on the floor, all the way out into the stairwell. The door to the wardrobe has been smashed and on the wall inside the child had written ‘the lady talks funny’.

Joona repeats several times that they have to find the house near Finsta, that’s where she’s taken Jackie and Madeleine. Erik is probably already there in his cage, or will be very shortly.

‘Find the house – that’s the only thing that matters right now,’ Joona says before they end the call.

He’s passed plenty of farms in the darkness along the way, and has seen agricultural premises and sawmills with chimneys of varying sizes.

He’s driving fast along the black road, not letting himself think that it might be too late, that time has already run out.

He has to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.

There are always questions to ask, answers still to find.

Nelly keeps repeating herself the whole time, returning to old patterns, he thinks.

There has to be a farm in Roslagen that Nelly somehow has access to.

The farm didn’t belong to her family, but her grandfather may have managed it, Joona reasons. He was also a priest, and the Swedish Church owns a great deal of land and forest, and a large number of properties.

As he drives, Joona tries to think through the case again and consider everything he had read and seen long before he knew that Nelly was the person Rocky called the unclean preacher.

Everyone makes mistakes.

He needs to find something that can connect a farm in Roslagen with the video featuring Jackie.

Joona thinks about the yellow raincoat, the narcotic substances, the collection of trophies, and the way she clearly marked the places she took them from on the bodies, then about her completely ignorant husband out in Bromma, her expensive clothes, hand cream, the jar of nutritional supplements, and then he picks up his phone and calls Nils Åhlén.

‘You’ve climbed up onto a very precarious branch,’ Åhlén says. ‘That escape from prison wasn’t exactly-’

‘It was necessary,’ Joona interrupts.

‘And now you want to ask me something,’ Åhlén says, and clears his throat.

‘Nelly takes iron pills,’ Joona says.

‘Maybe she suffers from anaemia,’ Åhlén replies.

‘How do you get anaemia?’

‘A thousand different ways… everything from cancer and kidney disease to pregnancy and menstruation.’

‘But Nelly takes iron hydroxide.’

‘Do you mean iron oxide-hydroxide?’

‘She’s got speckled hands,’ Joona says.

‘Freckles?’

‘Blacker… proper pigment change, and-’

‘Arsenic poisoning,’ Åhlén interrupts. ‘Iron oxide-hydroxide is used as an antidote to arsenic… and if she’s got dry, speckled hands, then…’

Joona stops listening when he finds himself thinking about one of the photographs he left on the floor of his hotel room.

A picture of a two-millimetre-long splinter that looks like a blue bird’s skull.

The fragment had been found on Sandra Lundgren’s floor. It looked ceramic, but actually consisted of glass, iron, sand and chamotte clay.

He drives past a big red barn, and thinks that the little bird’s skull was a tiny shard of slag, a by-product of glass production.

‘Glass,’ he whispers.

The ground around old glassworks is often contaminated with arsenic. They used to use great quantities of the poisonous semi-metal as a refining agent, to prevent bubbles and to homogenise the glass.

‘A glassworks,’ Joona says out loud. ‘They’re at a glassworks.’

‘That could fit,’ Nils Åhlén says, as if he had been following Joona’s internal thought process.

‘Are you sitting at your computer?’

‘Yes.’

‘Search for an old glassworks in the vicinity of Finsta.’

Joona is driving along beside a lake that shimmers in the darkness behind the trees and bushes as he hears Nils Åhlén hum while he taps at his keyboard.

‘No… all I’m getting is one that burned down in 1976, Solbacken glassworks in Rimbo, used to make sheet glass and mirrors… the land is owned by the Swedish Church, and-’

‘Send the address and coordinates to my phone,’ Joona interrupts. ‘And call Margot Silverman.’

Joona brakes sharply and turns hard right, locking the wheels. He puts the car into reverse, throwing up a shower of grit, veers backwards into the road, changes gear and puts his foot down again.