The Nightmare (3 page)

He kisses her lightly on the mouth and begins to lead her inland, until they reach a small meadow surrounded by tight clumps of high wild grasses. Butterflies and small bumblebees flit over the wildflowers. It’s hot in the sun and the water shimmers between the trees on the north side. Björn and Penelope stand still, hesitate, study each other with shy smiles, then turn serious.

“What if someone comes?” she asks.

“We’re the only ones on this island.”

“Are you sure?”

“How many islands exist in Stockholm’s archipelago? Thirty thousand? Probably more,” he says.

Penelope slips out of her bikini top, kicks off her shoes, and pulls off her shorts and bikini bottom at the same time so that she’s standing completely naked in the grass. Her initial feeling of embarrassment gives way to pure joy. There’s something remarkably arousing about the cool sea air against her skin and the warmth that simultaneously arises from the earth.

Björn looks at her and mumbles that he’s not sexist, but he does want to just look at her for another second. She’s tall; her arms are muscular yet still have a soft roundness to them. Her narrow waist and sinewy thighs make her look like a playful ancient goddess.

Björn’s hands shake as he pulls off his T-shirt and his flower-patterned swimming trunks. He’s younger than she is. His body is still boyish, almost hairless.

“Now I want to look at you,” she says.

He blushes and walks over to her with a smile.

“So I can’t look at you?”

He shakes his head and hides his face in her neck and hair.

They begin to kiss standing still. They hold each other tightly. Penelope is so happy she has to force a huge grin from her face so that she can keep kissing. She feels Björn’s warm tongue in her mouth, his erection, his heart beating faster and faster. They find a spot between the tufts of grass and stretch out. With his tongue he searches for her breasts and their brown nipples. He kisses her stomach, he opens her thighs. As he looks at her, it strikes him that their bodies have begun to glow in the evening sun, as if illuminated. Everything now is gentle. She’s wet and swollen as he licks her slowly and softly until she has to move his head away. She whispers to him, pulls him to her, steers him with her hand until he slides inside her. He’s breathing heavily into her ear and she stares straight up at the rosy sky.

Afterward, she stands up, naked in the warm grass, and arches toward the sky. She takes a few steps and peers between the trees.

“What is it?” Björn asks, his voice thick.

She looks back at him, sitting naked on the ground and smiling up at her.

“You’ve burned your shoulders.”

“Happens every year.”

He gently touches the pink spots.

“Let’s go back—I’m hungry,” she says.

“Let me swim for a bit.”

She pulls her bikini bottom and shorts back on, puts on her sneakers, then stands with her bikini top in her hand. She allows her gaze to wander over his hairless chest, his strong arms, the tattoo on his shoulder, his careless sunburn … and his light, playful look.

“Next time,
you’re
on the bottom,” she says.

“Next time,” he repeats cheerfully. “You’re stuck on me—I knew it!”

She laughs and waves at him dismissively. She hears him whistle to himself as she walks through the forest toward the tiny, steep beach where they’ve anchored.

She stops for a moment to put on her bikini top before she continues down to the boat.

On board, Penelope wonders whether Viola is still sleeping in the aft cabin. She thinks she should start a pot of fresh potatoes and some crowns of dill and then wash up and change for the evening. Strangely, the deck near the stern is totally damp as if from a rain shower. Viola must have swabbed the deck for some reason. The boat feels different somehow. Penelope can’t say what it is, but all at once she has goose bumps. The birds suddenly stop singing and everything is silent. Penelope is now aware of every one of her movements. She walks down the stairs. The door is open to the guest cabin and the lamp is lit, but Viola is not there. Penelope notices her hand shakes as she knocks on the door to the tiny toilet. She peers inside and returns to the deck. Looking ashore, she can see Björn walking down to the water. She waves to him, but he’s not looking her way.

Penelope opens the glass doors to the salon.

“Viola?” she calls softly.

She goes down to the galley, takes out a pot, puts it on the element, and returns to the search. She peers into the large bathroom, then the main cabin where she sleeps with Björn. Looking around in the dark cabin, at first she thinks that she sees herself in a mirror.

Viola is sitting on the edge of the bed, her hand resting on the pink pillow from the Salvation Army.

“What are you doing in here?”

As Penelope hears her own voice, she’s also realizing that nothing is as it should be. Viola’s face is cloudy white and wet; her hair hangs down in damp streams.

Penelope takes Viola’s face in her hands. She moans softly, then screams right into her sister’s face, “Viola? What’s wrong?
Viola!
”

But she already understands what’s out of place and what’s wrong. Her sister is not breathing, her sister’s skin is not giving off warmth. There is nothing left of Viola. The light of life has been snuffed out.

The narrow room tightens around Penelope. Her voice is a stranger’s. She wails and stumbles backward, knocking her shoulder hard on the doorpost as she turns to run up the stairs.

Up on the aft deck, she gulps down air as if she’s suffocating. She glances about, ice-cold terror filling her bones. One hundred meters away on the beach, she spots a man in black. Somehow Penelope understands how things fit together. She knows this is the man who was underneath the bridge in the military inflatable. This was the man who had his back turned when she passed by. And she knows this is the man who killed Viola—and is not finished.

From the beach, the man waves to Björn, who’s now swimming twenty meters from shore. He’s yelling something to Björn. Penelope rushes to the steering console and rummages in the tool drawer. She finds a Mora knife and races back to the stern.

She sees Björn’s slow swimming strokes and the water rings around him. He’s looking at the man in confusion. The man is waving, motioning for him to come over. Björn smiles an uncertain smile and begins to swim toward land.

“Björn!” Penelope screams as loud as she can. “Swim to sea!”

The man on the beach turns toward her and begins to run toward the boat. Penelope cuts off the rope, slips on the wet stern deck, leaps back up, and runs to the steering console and starts the motor. Without looking around, she raises the anchor and engages the gear in reverse at the same time.

Björn must have heard her, because he turns away from land and starts to swim toward the boat instead. As Penelope steers in his direction, the man in black changes course and starts running toward the other side of the island. Intuitively, she knows that’s where he’s pulled his inflatable ashore, at the northern inlet.

And she knows without a doubt that there is no possible way for them to speed away from it.

Motor rumbling, she steers toward Björn, and as she gets closer, she slows and stretches a boat hook toward him. The water is so cold, and he looks exhausted and so frightened. His head keeps bobbing under the surface. She jabs the boat hook his way and accidentally strikes his forehead. He starts to bleed.

“Hold on to it!” Penelope cries out.

The black inflatable is rounding the island. She can clearly hear the roar of its motor. Björn grimaces in pain, but after several attempts, he finally manages to wrap his elbow around the boat hook, and Penelope hauls him as quickly as she can to the swimming platform. He reaches the edge and holds on. She lets go of the boat hook and it drops into the water and drifts away.

“Viola is dead!” she screams, and hears the panic and despair in her own voice.

As soon as Björn grabs the ladder tight she runs back to the steering console and hits the gas.

He climbs over the railing and she hears him yell that she should steer straight across to the island of Ornö and its spit.

She can hear the rubber boat draw closer. She turns in a tight curve and the boat thuds heavily underneath the hull.

Penelope can’t speak, she can only whimper. “That man killed Viola!”

“Watch out for the rocks!” Björn warns through chattering teeth.

The inflatable has rounded Stora Kastskär and is now picking up speed on the smooth open water.

Blood runs down Björn’s face.

They are swiftly reaching the large island. Björn turns to see that the rubber boat is now only three hundred meters behind.

“Head for the dock!”

She hits reverse, and shuts off the motor as the prow of the boat slams the dock with a crunching sound. The waves of their wake race toward the rocky shore and roll back, making the boat tip to the side. Its ladder breaks to pieces. Water sloshes over the railing. Penelope and Björn jump off and race across the dock toward land as the rubber boat roars closer. Behind them they can hear the hull knock against the dock in the swells. Penelope slips and steadies herself with her hand, then clambers up the steep rocks that edge the forest. The motor of the rubber boat falls silent and Penelope knows their head start is insignificant. She rushes into the trees with Björn. They head deeper into the woods as her thoughts whirl in panic and her eyes dart back and forth for a place where they can hide.

4

the swaying man

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.

5

the national homicide squad

First week of June. For several weeks the people of Stockholm have been waking up much too early. The sun rises at three thirty a.m. and remains bright almost the entire night. The weather has been unusually warm. The exuberant bird cherries and lilacs bloomed at the same time. Dense sprays of buds spread their aroma from Kronoberg Park all the way to the entrance of the National Police Board headquarters.