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There’s no way of knowing why the perpetrator was in her garden, whether it was pure chance or the result of a carefully planned operation, but in the minutes before the murder he captured her on film, so there has to be a reason for this.
Given that he’s sent the link to the police, he must want to show them something.
The perpetrator wants to highlight something about this particular woman, or a certain type of woman. Perhaps it’s about all women, the whole of society.
But to Margot’s eyes there’s nothing unusual about the woman’s behaviour or appearance. She’s simply concentrating on getting her tights to sit properly, frowning and pursing her lips.
Margot has visited the house on Bredablicksvägen twice, but she’s spent most of her time examining the forensic video of the crime scene before it was contaminated.
The perpetrator’s film almost looks like a lovingly created work of art in comparison to the police’s. The forensics team’s minutely detailed recording of the evidence of the bestial attack is relentless. The dead woman is filmed from various angles as she sits with her legs stretched out on the floor, surrounded by dark blood. Her bra is in shreds, dangling from one shoulder, and one white breast is hanging down towards the bulge of her stomach. There’s almost nothing left of her face, just a gaping mouth and red pulp.
Margot stops as if by chance beside the fruit bowl on the table by the sofas, looks over at the guard, who is talking on the phone, then turns her back on him. For a few seconds she watches the guard’s reflection in the glass wall facing the large inner courtyard, before taking six apples from the bowl and putting them in her bag.
Six is too many, she knows that, but she can’t stop herself taking them all. It’s occurred to her that Jenny might like to make an apple pie that evening, with lots of butter, cinnamon and sugar to caramelise them.
Her thoughts are interrupted when her phone rings. She looks at the screen and sees a picture of Adam Youssef, a member of the investigating team.
‘Are you still in the building?’ Adam asks. ‘Please tell me you’re still here, because we’ve—’
‘I’m sitting in the car on Klarastrandsvägen,’ Margot lies. ‘What did you want to tell me?’
‘He’s uploaded a new film.’
She feels her stomach clench, and puts one hand under the heavy bulge.
‘A new film,’ she repeats.
‘Are you coming back?’
‘I’ll stop and turn round,’ she says, and begins to retrace her steps. ‘Make sure we get a decent copy of the recording.’
Margot could have carried on out through the doors and gone home, leaving the case in Adam’s hands. It would only take one phone call to arrange a full year of paid maternity leave. Perhaps that’s what she would have done if she’d known how violent her first case would turn out to be.
The future lies in shadow, but the planets are approaching dangerous alignments. Right now her fate is floating like a razor blade on still waters.
The light in the lift makes her face look older. The thick dark line of kohl round her eyes is almost gone. As she leans her head back she understands what her colleagues mean when they say she looks like her father, former District Commissioner Ernest Silverman.
The lift stops at the eighth floor and she walks along the empty corridor as fast as her bulging stomach will allow. She and Adam moved into Joona Linna’s old room the same week the police held a memorial service for him. Margot never knew Joona personally, and had no problem taking over his office.
‘You’ve got a fast car,’ Adam says as she walks in, then smiles, showing his sharp teeth.
‘Pretty fast,’ Margot replies.
Adam Youssef is twenty-eight years old, but his face is round like a teenager’s. His hair is long and his short-sleeved shirt is hanging outside his trousers. He comes from an Assyrian family, grew up in Södertälje and used to play football in the first division north.
‘How long has the film been up on YouTube?’ she asks.
‘Three minutes,’ Adam says. ‘He’s there now. Standing outside the window and—’
‘We don’t know that, but—’
‘I think he is,’ he interrupts. ‘I think he is, he almost has to be.’
Margot puts her heavy bag on the floor, sits down on her chair and calls Forensics.
‘Hi, Margot here. Have you downloaded a copy?’ she asks, sounding stressed. ‘Listen, I need a location or a name – try to identify either the location or the woman … All the resources you’ve got, you can have five minutes, do whatever the hell you like, just give me something and I promise I’ll let you go so you can enjoy your Friday evening.’
She puts the phone down and opens the lid of the pizza box on Adam’s desk.
‘Are you done with this?’ she asks.
There’s a ping as an email arrives and Margot quickly stuffs a piece of pizza crust in her mouth. An impatient worry line deepens on her forehead. She clicks on the video file and maximises the image on screen, pushes her plait over her shoulder, hits play and rolls her chair back so Adam can see.
The first shot is an illuminated window wavering in the darkness. The camera moves slowly closer, leaves brushing the lens.
Margot feels the hairs on her arms stand up.
A woman is standing in the well-lit room in front of a television, eating ice cream from the tub. She’s tugged her jogging pants down and is balancing on one foot to pull her sock off.
She glances at the television and smiles at something, then licks the spoon.
The only sound in the room in Police Headquarters comes from the fan in the computer.
Just give me one detail to go on, Margot thinks as she looks at the woman’s face, the fine features of her eyes, cheeks and the curve of her head. Her body seems to be steaming with residual heat. She’s just been for a run. The elastic of her underwear is loose after too many washes, and her bra is clearly visible through her sweat-stained vest.
Margot leans closer to the screen, her stomach pressing against her thighs, and her heavy plait falls forward over her shoulder again.
‘One minute to go,’ Adam says.
The woman puts the tub of ice cream on the coffee table and leaves the room, her jogging pants still dangling from one foot.
The camera follows her, moves sideways past a narrow terrace door until it reaches the bedroom window, where the light goes on and the woman comes into view. She tramples the jogging pants off and kicks them towards an armchair with a red cushion. The trousers fly through the air, hit the wall behind the chair and fall to the floor.
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The camera glides slowly through the last of the dark garden and stops right outside the window, swaying slightly as if it were floating on water.
‘She’d see him if she just looked up,’ Margot whispers, feeling her heart beat faster in her chest.
The light from the room reaches beyond the leaves of a rosebush, casting a slight flare across the top of the lens.
Adam is sitting with his hand over his mouth.
The woman pulls her vest off, tosses it onto the chair, then stands for a moment in her washed-out underwear and stained bra, looking over at the mobile phone charging on the bedside table beside a glass of water. Her thighs are tense and pumped with blood after her run, and the top of the jogging pants has left a red line across her stomach.
There are no tattoos or visible scars on her body, just faint white stretch-marks from a pregnancy.
The room looks like millions of other bedrooms. There’s nothing worth even trying to trace.
The camera trembles, then pulls back.
The woman takes the glass of water from the bedside table and puts it to her mouth, then the film ends abruptly.
‘Bloody hell, bloody hell,’ Margot repeats irritably. ‘Nothing, not a sodding thing.’
‘Let’s watch it again,’ Adam says quickly.
‘We can watch it a thousand times,’ Margot says, rolling her chair further back. ‘Go on, what the hell, go ahead, but it’s not going to give us a fucking thing.’
‘I can see a lot of things, I can see—’
‘You can see a detached house, twentieth-century, some fruit trees, roses, triple-glazed windows, a forty-two-inch television, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream,’ she says, gesturing towards the computer.
It hasn’t struck her before, the way we’re so similar to each other. Seen through a window, a broad spectrum of Swedes conform to the same pattern, to the point of being interchangeable. From the outside we appear to live exactly the same way, we look the same, do the same things, own the same objects.
‘This is totally fucked up,’ Adam says angrily. ‘Why is he posting these films? What the hell does he want?’
Margot glances out of the small window, where the black treetops of Kronoberg Park are silhouetted against the hazy glow of the city.
‘There’s no doubt that this is a serial killer,’ she says. ‘All we can do is put together a preliminary profile, so we can—’
‘How does that help her?’ Adam interrupts, running one hand through his hair. ‘He’s standing outside her window and you’re talking about offender profiling!’
‘It might help the next one.’
‘What the fuck?’ Adam says. ‘We’ve got to—’
‘Just shut up for a minute,’ Margot interrupts, and picks up her phone.
‘Shut up yourself,’ Adam says, raising his voice. ‘I’ve got every right to say what I think. Haven’t I? I think we should get the papers to publish this woman’s picture on their websites.’
‘Adam, listen … much as we’d like to be able to identify her, we’ve got nothing to go on,’ Margot says. ‘I’ll talk to Forensics, but I doubt they’re going to find anything more than they did last time.’
‘But if we circulate her picture to—’
‘I haven’t got time for your nonsense now,’ she snaps. ‘Think for a minute … Everything suggests he’s uploaded the clip directly from her garden, so of course there’s a theoretical chance of saving her.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying!’
‘But five minutes have already passed, and that’s a long time to be standing outside a window.’
Adam leans forward and stares at her. His tired eyes are bloodshot and his hair is on end.
‘Are we just going to give up, then?’
‘This is a matter of urgency, but we have to think clearly,’ she replies.
‘Good,’ he says, still sounding annoyed.
‘The perpetrator is brimming with confidence, he knows he’s way ahead of us,’ Margot explains quickly as she picks up the last slice of pizza. ‘But the better we get to know him …’
‘Get to know him? Fine, but that’s not really what I’m thinking right now,’ Adam says, wiping sweat from under his nose. ‘We couldn’t trace the previous film, we didn’t find anything at the scene, and we won’t be able to trace this film either.’
‘We’re unlikely to get any forensic evidence, but we can try to pin him down by analysing the films and the brutality of his MO,’ Margot replies, as she feels the baby move inside her. ‘What have we really seen so far, what has he shown us, and what’s he seeing?’
‘A woman who’s been for a run, and is now eating ice cream and watching television,’ Adam says tentatively.
‘What does that tell us about the murderer?’
‘That he likes women who eat ice cream … I don’t know,’ Adam sighs, and hides his face in his hands.
‘Come on, now.’
‘Sorry, but—’
‘I’m thinking about the fact that the murderer uploads a film showing the period leading up to the murder,’ Margot says. ‘He takes his time, enjoys the moment, and … he wants to show us the women alive, wants to preserve them alive on film. Maybe it’s the living he’s interested in.’
‘A voyeur,’ Adam says, feeling his arms prick with discomfort.
‘A stalker,’ she whispers.
‘Tell me how to filter the list of creeps who’ve been let out of prison or psychiatric care,’ Adam says, as he logs into the intranet.
‘A rapist, violent rape, someone with obsessive fixation disorder.’
He types quickly, clicks the mouse, types some more.
‘Too many results,’ he says. ‘Time’s running out.’
‘Try the first victim’s name.’
‘No results,’ he sighs, tearing his hair.
‘A serial rapist who’s been treated, possibly chemically castrated,’ Margot says, thinking out loud.
‘We need to check the databases against each other, but that will take too long,’ he says, getting up from his chair. ‘This isn’t working. What the hell are we going to do?’
‘She’s dead,’ Margot sighs, then leans back. ‘She might have a few minutes left, but …’
‘I don’t know if I can handle this,’ Adam says. ‘We can see her, we can see her face, her home … Christ, we can see right into her life, but we can’t find out who she is until she’s dead and someone finds her body.’
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Susanna Kern can feel her thighs tingling from her run as she pulls her sweaty jogging pants down and kicks them towards the chair.
Since she turned thirty she has run five kilometres three evenings each week. After her Friday run she usually eats ice cream and watches television, seeing as Björn doesn’t get home until ten o’clock.
When Björn landed the job in London she thought it would feel lonely, but fairly quickly she came to appreciate the hours she had to herself in the weeks when Morgan was with his dad.
