Stalker

49

Adam runs down the corridor ahead of Margot. Filip Cronstedt was given emergency sedation when he was brought into A &E early that morning, and has been kept like that ever since.

The real serial killer is still on the loose.

Margot follows Adam into their office and sees the treetops of Kronoberg Park in the pale sunlight through the small windows.

‘Have we got a copy?’

‘It looks like it,’ he replies.

Margot is gasping for breath as she sinks onto the second chair in front of the computer while Adam clicks the video file. The base of her spine is stinging and she leans back, her shirt pulling up over her bulging stomach.

‘The film has been online for two minutes,’ he whispers, and starts the media-player.

The camera is moving quickly through the outer fringes of a bird cherry. The leaves obscure the view for a moment, then a bedroom window appears on the screen, with condensation along the bottom.

The garden is shady, but the white sky shimmers in the windowsill.

The camera moves backwards again when a woman dressed in her underwear comes into the room. She hangs a white towel with old hair-dye stains over the back of a chair, then stops and leans one hand against the wall.

‘One minute left,’ Adam says.

The room fills with soft light from the lamp in the ceiling. They can make out fingerprints on the mirror, and a slightly tilted framed poster from the Picasso exhibition at Moderna Museet.

The camera moves to one side, and now they can both see a reddish-brown porcelain deer on the bedside table.

‘The deer,’ Margot pants, leaning towards the screen as her plait falls over her shoulder.

The snapped deer’s head that Susanna Kern was clutching in her hand must have come from an ornament exactly like that one.

The woman in the bedroom is holding one hand to her mouth, and walks slowly over to the bedside table, opens the drawer and takes something out of it. Her face is more visible in the glow of the bedside lamp. She has pale eyebrows and a straight nose, but her eyes are hidden behind the reflection in her dark-framed glasses, and her mouth is relaxed. Her bra is red and worn, and her underpants white, with some sort of sanitary pad. She rubs something over one of her thighs and then takes out a small, white stick and presses it to her muscle.

‘What’s she doing?’ Adam asks.

‘That’s an insulin injection.’

The woman holds a swab against her thigh and screws her eyes shut for a moment, then opens them again. She leans forward to put the syringe back in the drawer, and manages to catch the little deer, knocking it over. Small fragments fly up in the sharp lighting as the head snaps off and falls to the floor.

‘What the hell is this?’ Adam whispers.

With a weary look on her face the woman bends over and picks up the porcelain head, puts it on the bedside table, then goes round the bed towards the steamed-up window. Something makes her stop and peer out, searching the darkness beyond.

The camera moves slowly backwards, and some leaves brush over the lens.

The woman looks worried. She puts out her hand, takes hold of the cord of the blinds and loosens the catch by tugging it to the side. The slats slide down, but end up crooked and she pulls the cord and lets them fall again, then gives up. Through the damaged blinds she can be seen turning back towards the room and scratching her right buttock before the film suddenly comes to an end.

‘OK, I’m a bit tired,’ Adam says in an unsteady voice, and stands up. ‘But this is crazy – isn’t it?’

‘So what do we do? Watch the film again?’

Her phone buzzes on the desk, Margot turns it over and sees that it’s one of the forensics team.

‘What have you got?’ Margot says as soon she answers.

‘Same thing, impossible to trace either the film or the link.’

‘So we’re waiting for someone to find the body,’ Margot says, and ends the call.

‘She’s maybe one metre seventy tall, weighs less than sixty kilos,’ Adam says. ‘Her hair is probably dark blonde when it’s dry.’

‘She’s got type-1 diabetes, went to see the Picasso exhibition last autumn, single, regularly colours her hair,’ Margot adds in a monotone.

‘Broken blinds,’ Adam says, printing out a large colour picture where the whole of the woman’s face is illuminated.

He goes over to the wall and pins the photograph up as high as he can. A solitary picture, no name, no location.

‘Victim number three,’ he says weakly.

To the left of the photograph are pictures of the first two victims, stills taken from the YouTube clips. The difference is that below those two first pictures are names and photographs of the murder scenes, as well as reports from the forensic analysis of the scenes and the post-mortems.

Maria Carlsson and Susanna Kern.

Multiple stab and knife-wounds to their faces, necks and chests, severing their aortas, lungs and hearts.