Stalker

62

Joona opens his eyes and looks up at the white ceiling. Daylight is filtering into the room around the edges of the dark-blue roller-blind. The window is open slightly, and fresh air is streaming in, cooling the clean sheets.

There are blackbirds singing in the garden.

He looks at the alarm clock and sees that he has slept for thirteen hours. Erik has left him a phone, and on the bedside table are two pink capsules and three tablets on top of a note saying ‘Eat us now, drinks loads of water, and have a look in the fridge’.

Joona swallows the drugs, empties the glass of water, then groans as he stands up. But he can at least bear to put some weight on his leg. The pain is still there, but it’s far from severe. The nausea and pain in his stomach have vanished as though they never existed.

He goes over to the window and looks out at the apple trees as he dials Lumi’s number.

‘It’s Dad,’ Joona says, feeling his heart tighten.

‘Dad?’

‘How are you getting on? Do you like Paris?’

‘It’s a bit bigger than Nattavaara,’ his daughter replies in a voice that could be Summa’s.

‘How’s college?’

‘I’m still finding it confusing, but I think it’s pretty good…’

Joona reassures himself that she’s got everything she needs, and Lumi tells him to shave off his beard and join the police again, and then they end the call.

Erik has left him a pair of black sweatpants and a white T-shirt. The clothes are too small, the trousers flutter round his calves and the T-shirt is tight across his chest. By the bed is a pair of white slippers, the sort you get in hotels.

Joona thinks that mysteries are only mysteries until you have discounted all the impossibilities.

When he was in hospital Margot told him that the videos had been recorded long before the murders took place.

Maria Carlsson owned nothing but black underwear, but the seams of the tights she was wearing when she died were different to the ones in the video. The spoon found in the tub of ice cream in Susanna Kern’s home wasn’t the same one that was in the video, and the post- mortem will probably show that Sandra Lundgren hadn’t injected herself with insulin in her thigh on the day she was murdered.

Classic stalking. The women have been watched and their behaviour mapped over a long period.

Joona leans against the walls as he walks through the house towards the kitchen. He tells himself that he’ll call the police in Huddinge and follow up the previous day’s events as soon as he’s had something to eat.

He drinks some more water, puts coffee on, and looks in the fridge, where he finds half a pizza and a tub of yoghurt.

On the kitchen table, next to Erik’s empty coffee cup, are printouts relating to an almost ten-year-old case that was tried in Södertälje District Court.

Joona eats the cold pizza as he reads the verdict, the post-mortem analysis and the entire preliminary investigation report.

The old murder has striking similarities to the recent ones.

The vicar of the parish of Salem, Rocky Kyrklund, was arrested and convicted for the murder of a woman called Rebecka Hansson.

Joona was pretty out of it yesterday when Erik was taking care of him, but he can remember what Erik said. Margot Silverman had asked him to go and talk to a guy who had been sentenced to secure psychiatric care. She wanted Erik to find out if he had any accomplices or disciples.

She must have meant Rocky Kyrklund.

Margot’s thinking along the right lines, Joona thinks, bracing his arms on the table as he stands up again. He walks barefoot into the back garden, sits down on the cushionless garden swing for a while, then walks over to the shed.

On one end is a water-damaged dartboard. Joona opens the door and gets out the cushions for the swing-seat. He goes back to the shed to close the door, but stops and looks at the neat arrangement of DIY tools and gardening implements on the wall.

In the turning circle at the end of the road an ice-cream van starts to play its jingle. Joona picks up an old Mora knife with a red wooden handle and tests its weight, then takes down a smaller knife in a plastic sleeve, walks out and shuts the door behind him.

He puts the smaller knife on the ground beside the swing-seat, then stands in the middle of the lawn and weighs the Mora knife in his right hand. He changes his grip, tries to find some sort of balance, a sense of lightness, puts the knife down by his hip and stretches out the other arm, feeling it tug at his wound.

Cautiously he tries to perform a kata against two opponents with the knife. He doesn’t follow through on all the elements, but his legs still feel frustratingly heavy when he finishes.

Joona twists his body and moves his legs in the reverse order, leaving his attacker’s torso unguarded. He performs a diagonal cut, starting at the bottom, blocks the second attacker’s hand and diverts the force of the assault as the knife moves downward, then glides out of danger.

He repeats the pattern of movements, slowly, perfectly balanced. His hip hurts, but his level of concentration is the same as before.

The different elements of the kata are only complicated because they don’t come naturally, but against untrained opponents they can be extremely effective. In nine coordinated movements the attackers are disarmed and rendered harmless. It works like a trap – if anyone chooses to attack, the trap is sprung.

Katas and shadow-boxing can never replace sparring and real-life situations, but they’re a way to get the body used to the movements, and, by repetition, train the body to think that certain movements belong together.

Joona rolls his shoulders, finds his balance, hits out a few times, follows through with his elbow, then repeats the kata, but faster this time. He performs the vertical cut, deflects the imaginary attack, changes grip, but drops the knife in the grass.

He stops and straightens his back. Listens to the birdsong and the wind in the trees. He takes some deep breaths, bends over, picks up the knife and blows some grass off it, and finds its centre of gravity. Then he takes the knife in his right hand, throws it past the hammock at the dartboard, which wobbles, and the old darts come loose and fall off into the grass.

Someone claps, and he turns round and sees a woman in the garden. She’s tall and blonde, and is watching him with a calm smile on her face.