The Nightmare

4

Paragraph 21 of the police law states that a police officer may enter any building, house, room, or other place if there is reason to believe that a person has died, is unconscious, or is otherwise unable to call for help.

The reason Criminal Assistant John Bengtsson has received the assignment to examine the top-floor apartment in the building at Grevgatan 2 on this Saturday in June is that Carl Palmcrona, the general director of the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products, has not appeared at work and has missed an important meeting with the foreign minister.

This is certainly not the first time that John Bengtsson has had to enter buildings to search for deceased or injured persons. He remembers silent, fearful parents waiting in the stairway while he enters rooms to find young men barely alive after heroin overdoses, or worse, murder scenes: women in their living rooms, battered to death by spouses as the TV drowns out the sound.

Bengtsson carries his breaking-and-entering tools and his picklock through the entry door and takes the elevator to the top floor. He rings the bell and waits. He examines the lock on the outer door. After a while, he hears shuffling. It sounds as if it is coming from the stairwell one floor below. It sounds as if someone is sneaking away.

Bengtsson listens for a moment, then tries the door handle. The door swings open silently.

“Anyone home?” he calls out.

Nothing. He drags his bag over the threshold, wipes his feet on the doormat, closes the door behind him, and steps into a large hallway.

Gentle music can be heard from one of the rooms so he continues in that direction, knocks at the door, and enters. It’s a large drawing room, sparsely furnished-three Carl Malmsten sofas, a low glass coffee table, and a tiny painting of a ship in a storm on the wall. An ice-blue sheen comes from a music system with a modern flat, transparent design. Meandering, melancholy music comes from the speakers.

Across the room is a set of double doors. Bengtsson swings them open to reveal a salon with tall Art Nouveau windows. The late-spring light is broken by the multiple small panes at the top.

A well-dressed man swings in the middle of the white room.

John Bengtsson stands quietly in the doorway and stares at the dead man for an eternity before he notices the laundry line fastened to the ceiling-lamp hook.

The body seems poised at the moment of a jump into the air. His ankles are stretched and his toes point to the ground. He’s hanged-but there’s something that does not fit. Something is not as it should be.

Bengtsson cannot step through the double doors; he must keep the crime scene intact. His heart pounds and he feels the heavy rhythm of his pulse. He finds he cannot look away from the swaying man in the empty room.

The whisper of a name begins to echo in Bengtsson’s brain: Joona. I have to talk to Joona Linna immediately.

There is no furniture in this room. Just the hanged man, who, in all probability, is none other than Carl Palmcrona, the general director of ISP.

The rope is fastened to the center of the lamp hook emerging from the rosette in the center of the ceiling.

There’s nothing for him to climb on, Bengtsson thinks.

The ceiling height must be at least three and a half meters.

Bengtsson calms himself, collects his thoughts, and registers everything he sees. The hanged man’s face is as blanched as damp sugar and John Bengtsson can see only a few blood spots in the wide-open eyes. The man is wearing a thin overcoat, a light gray business suit, and black leather-soled oxfords. A black briefcase and a cell phone lie on the parquet floor a short distance from the pool of urine that has collected directly underneath the body.

The hanged man suddenly shakes.

Bengtsson takes a sharp breath.

A heavy thud from the ceiling above. The sounds of a hammer in the attic. Someone walks across the attic floor. Another thud and Palmcrona’s body shakes again. The sound of a power drill. Silence. Someone calling for more cable: “Cable reel.”

Bengtsson notices how his pulse begins to slow as he turns to walk away from the salon. He sees the outer door is open and he stops, sure he’d closed it. He knows he could be wrong. He leaves the apartment, but before he reports to his department, he picks up his cell phone and calls Joona Linna at the National Criminal Investigation Department.