The Rabbit Hunter

34

Just before they reach Norrtull the handler is given a new destination. He pulls into the car park in front of the Stallmästaregården restaurant and stops.

‘The team leading the operation are waiting for you in the pavilion,’ he says.

Joona gets out of the car and sets off towards the yellow summerhouse that looks out onto the waters of Brunnsviken. Not long ago, this area was incredibly beautiful, but these days the restaurant is ensnared in a tangle of highways, bridges and viaducts.

When he opens the thin wooden door one of the two men at the table stands up. He has strawberry-blond hair and almost white eyebrows.

‘My name is Janus Mickelsen. I’m in charge of the Rapid Response Unit of the Security Police,’ he says as they shake hands.

Janus has an oddly jerky way of moving.

Beside him sits a young man with a lopsided smile. He’s looking up at Joona with an earnest expression.

‘Gustav will be in the first group, leading the National Response Unit’s ground operation in the field,’ Janus says.

Joona shakes Gustav’s hand, and holds it a moment too long as he looks into the man’s eyes.

‘I see you’ve grown out of your Batman costume,’ Joona says with a smile.

‘You remember me?’ the young man asks sceptically.

‘You two know each other?’ Janus asks, and smiles, revealing a network of laughter lines around his eyes.

‘I used to work with Gustav’s aunt at National Crime,’ Joona explains.

Joona thinks back to the party at Anja’s summer cottage on the shores of Lake Mälaren. Gustav was only seven years old. He was dressed in a Batman costume, and spent the entire time racing around on the grass. They sat on blankets eating cold-smoked salmon and potato salad and drinking beer. Later, Gustav sat with Joona and kept asking what it was like to be a policeman.

Joona removed the magazine from his pistol and let the boy hold it. Afterwards Anja tried to persuade Gustav that it wasn’t a real pistol but a practice one.

‘Anja’s always been like a second mother to me,’ Gustav smiles. ‘She thinks being in the police is too dangerous.’

‘Things could get very dangerous tonight,’ Joona nods.

‘And no one will thank you if you get yourself killed,’ Janus says with an unexpectedly bitter tone in his voice.

Joona recalls that Janus Mickelsen had been some sort of whistle-blower many years ago. It was a big deal at the time, at least for a few weeks. He had made his career in the military, and was part of a pan-European operation against piracy in the shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia. When his superiors refused to listen to him, he spoke to the media about how the semiautomatic rifles they had been issued became overheated very quickly. Janus claimed the weapons were so inaccurate that they were a security risk. The semiautomatics stayed, and Janus lost his job.

‘We’ll start the operation at Salim Ratjen’s wife’s home. We begin at seven o’clock this evening,’ Janus explains as he unfolds a map.

He points at a building in a patch of woodland where the Response Unit will lie in wait, just opposite Parisa’s house.

‘Have you managed to find out anything about who this Amira is, and where the phone with that number might be?’ Joona asks.

‘We don’t have any matches on the name. The phone with that number is somewhere in the Malmö area, but we don’t have any way of tracing it at the moment.’

‘For the time being we’re concentrating on the operation ahead of us,’ Gustav says. ‘Ratjen’s wife works as a nurse at a dental clinic in Bandhagen. She finishes work at six, and will be home around six forty-five if she stops to go grocery shopping at the supermarket like she usually does.’

‘Ratjen has planned the second attack for Wednesday,’ Janus says. ‘This is our chance to stop it.’

‘But you still don’t know what his wife’s role is?’ Joona says.

‘We’re working on that,’ Janus replies, wiping the sweat from his freckled forehead.

‘Maybe she’s just a middle-man.’

‘We don’t really know anything,’ Gustav says. ‘This is a gamble, sure, but at the same time... We don’t need much to fit these pieces together, one tiny detail could do it. If you can find out anything about how the plan works, who the target of Wednesday’s attack is going to be, or where it’s going to take place, then we might be able to stop this whole thing right now.’

‘I want to talk to the witness before the operation,’ Joona says.

‘Why?’

‘I want to know what the killer did between the first shot and the one that killed him.’

‘He said that stuff about Ratjen and hell. It’s in the report, I must have read it a hundred times,’ Janus says.

‘But that doesn’t account for the remaining time,’ Joona persists.

‘He picked up the spent shells.’

The internal forensic analysis isn’t complete, but Joona has studied the splatter patterns, the blood on the floor and the convergence points, and he’s sure that the post-mortem is going to show that more than fifteen minutes elapsed between the first two shots to the victim’s torso, and the fatal shot to his eye.

For now, the forensics experts estimate that the sequence of events took no longer than five minutes in total.

Picking up the shells, moving around and uttering those few sentences could account for those five minutes.

If Joona’s right, though, there are still more than ten minutes that can’t be explained.

What happened during that time?

The killer is a highly skilled professional. There has to be a reason why he didn’t carry out the execution as quickly as possible.

Joona has no idea what that reason might be, but he has a feeling that there’s a vital piece missing from the picture, something much darker than what they’ve seen so far.

‘I’d still like to see her, if possible,’ he says.

‘We’ll arrange it,’ Janus nods, and tears open the seal on a large padded envelope. ‘There’s time, since the operation won’t be starting until seven o’clock. We’re meeting for a final briefing at five.’

He hands Joona a well-worn service pistol with an extra magazine, two boxes of ammunition, 9x19 parabellum bullets, and a set of Volvo keys.

Joona draws the pistol from its holster and looks at it. It’s a matte black Sig Sauer P226 Tactical.

‘Good enough?’ Janus says, and smiles as if he’s just said something very funny.

‘You don’t have any other shoulder holsters?’ Joona asks.

‘This one’s standard issue,’ Gustav replies, slightly bemused.

‘I know. It doesn’t really matter, it just moves around a little too much,’ Joona says.