The Nightmare. Ларс Кеплер

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       24

       The object

      In the kitchen stands a man in jeans and a pale brown blazer with leather patches on the elbows. He strokes his blond moustache as he talks loudly and points at the microwave oven. Joona walks in and watches as a forensics officer in a protective mask and gloves packs the buckled aerosol can in a paper bag, folds it over twice, then tapes and labels the bag.

      ‘You’re Joona Linna, aren’t you?’ the man with the blond moustache says. ‘If you’re as good as everyone says, you ought to come over to us.’

      They shake hands.

      ‘Göran Stone, Security Police,’ the man says proudly.

      ‘Are you in charge of the preliminary investigation?’

      ‘Yes, I am … well, formally Saga Bauer is – for the sake of the statistics,’ he grins.

      ‘I’ve met Saga Bauer,’ Joona says. ‘She seems capable of …’

      ‘Doesn’t she just?’ Göran Stone says, then bursts out laughing before covering his mouth.

      Joona looks out of the window, thinking about the boat that was found adrift, and trying to figure out who the murderer had been tasked with liquidating. He is aware that the investigation is at far too early a stage to be able to draw any conclusions, but at the same time it’s always useful to consider different hypotheses. The only person the perpetrator was almost certainly after was Penelope, Joona thinks. And the only person he probably didn’t mean to kill was Viola, seeing as he couldn’t have known that she was going to be on the boat – her presence was the result of an unfortunate quirk of fate, Joona tells himself as he leaves the kitchen and walks over to the bedroom.

      The bed is neatly made, the cream-coloured bedspread smooth. Saga Bauer from the Security Police is standing in front of a laptop that she’s placed on the windowsill as she talks on her phone. Joona remembers her from a seminar about counter-terrorism.

      Joona sits down on the bed and tries to gather his thoughts again. He imagines Viola and Penelope standing in front of him, then puts Penelope’s boyfriend Björn next to them. They can’t all have been on the boat when Viola was murdered, he tells himself. Because then the perpetrator wouldn’t have made his mistake. If he had got on board when they were out at sea he would have murdered all three, put them on the right beds and sunk the boat. So his mistake means that Penelope can’t have been on the boat. Which means that they must have moored somewhere.

      Joona gets up again, leaves the bedroom and walks into the living room. He looks at the wall-mounted television, the red sofa, the modern table with piles of left-wing magazines and newspapers. He walks over to the bookcase covering a whole wall, stops, and thinks about the pinched cables in the machine room which would have arced within a matter of minutes, igniting the cushion which had been stuffed next to the pipe from the fuel tank. But the boat didn’t sink. The engine can’t have been running for long enough.

      There’s no such thing as coincidence any more.

      Björn’s flat was destroyed by fire, Viola was murdered the same day, and if the boat hadn’t been abandoned the fuel tank would have exploded.

      Then the murderer attempted to set off a gas explosion in Penelope’s flat.