The mirror man, p.6
The Mirror Man, page 6
12
Tracy hears the rain approaching as it reaches Stockholm’s metal rooftops. The first few drops hit the windowsill, and soon the neighbourhood is enveloped in the clatter of the downpour.
She is lying naked in bed beside a man called Adam. It’s the middle of the night. His apartment is dark and he is asleep.
They met at a bar while she was out with her colleagues.
He flirted with her and bought her a few drinks. Eventually they started joking with each other, and when the others went home, she stayed behind.
Adam has thick, straggly bleached hair with dark roots and kohl beneath his eyes.
He told her that he worked as a high school teacher and claimed to come from an aristocratic family.
They staggered back to his apartment beneath an ominous night sky. Tracy lives in Kista, but his place is in the centre of town.
The apartment is small, with well-worn floorboards and dented doors, peeling paint on the ceiling and a shower above the bath.
He has crates of vinyl records on the floor and black silk sheets on his bed.
Tracy thinks back to when they first got back to his place, and he sat down on the edge of the mattress holding a red toy bus.
It was around twenty centimetres long with black wheels and had two rows of tiny windows.
She picked up her tights, her blouse and her silvery skirt, draping them over the back of a chair before moving towards him in her underwear.
When she approached, he nonchalantly reached out and rolled the front of the bus up her thigh.
‘What’s going on here?’ she asked, trying to smile.
She couldn’t hear his reply. He avoided eye contact and pressed the windscreen between her legs, slowly moving the bus back and forth.
‘Seriously,’ she said, taking a step back.
He mumbled an apology and put the bus on the bedside table, though his eyes lingered on it as though he could see the driver and passengers inside.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing,’ he replied, turning to her with half-closed eyes.
‘Are you OK?’
‘It was just a bit of fun,’ he said, smiling up at her.
‘Why don’t we start over?’
He nodded, and she stepped forward again and caressed his shoulders, kissing him on the forehead and lips. She kneeled in front of him and started unbuttoning his black jeans.
It took him a while to get hard enough to put on a condom.
When he was ready, Tracy felt aroused as he pushed into her. She was lying on her back, holding his hips, trying to enjoy herself and groaning a little too much.
He thrust into her over and over again.
Her breathing quickened, and she tensed her thighs and toes. Adam suddenly stopped moving, still squeezing her breast with one hand.
‘Keep going,’ she whispered, trying to catch his eye.
He reached for the toy bus from the bedside table and tried to push it into her mouth. It hit her teeth and she turned away, but he tried again, pressing it against her lips.
‘Stop, I don’t want to,’ she said.
‘OK, sorry.’
They continued having sex, but she had lost interest and just wanted it to end, faking an orgasm after a while to hurry things along.
Adam grew sweaty as he climaxed and rolled to the side when he had finished, quietly saying something about breakfast before falling asleep with the bus in his hand.
Tracy is now lying awake, staring up at the ceiling. She realises she really doesn’t want to wake up here with Adam.
She gets out of bed, grabs her clothes and goes to the bathroom to pee, clean herself up and get dressed.
When she comes back out, he is still sleeping, mouth open. His breathing is heavy and drunken.
The rain is now lashing down against the window.
Tracy goes out into the hallway and notices that her feet are still tender as she pushes them into her red pumps.
In a blue ceramic dish on top of a chest of drawers, she spots Adam’s keys, wallet and the signet ring he was wearing earlier.
She grabs the ring and studies the coat of arms, which features a wolf and two crossed swords, and pushes it onto her ring finger. She heads for the front door, glancing back to his dark bedroom.
The entire building hums with the crashing downpour.
Tracy unlocks the door and steps out into the stairwell, closing it behind her and hurrying down the stairs.
She doesn’t know why she stole his ring. She’s not the kind of person who lifts things casually, and in fact, she hasn’t stolen anything since preschool, when she took a small plastic cake home with her.
Outside, the rain is pelting the pavement and making it glisten.
The water is spurting out of drainpipes and flooding the road.
The drains are overflowing.
Tracy has only made it a few steps when she notices someone walking at the same speed as her on the other side of the road.
She catches glimpses of them between the parked cars. The cold water splashes onto her calves as she tries to pick up the pace.
Her footsteps echo between the buildings.
She turns off onto Kungstensgatan and starts running along the edge of Observatory Grove Park.
She hears the bushes rustling.
The lights are out in the windows on the other side of the street.
There is no sign of anyone.
Tracy calms herself down, but she is still out of breath as she hurries down the stone steps towards Saltmätargatan.
It’s dark, and she clings on to the handrail as Adam’s ring scrapes against the wet metal.
Tracy reaches the bottom, and glances back up the steps.
The glow of the street light at the top of the steps seems grey in the rain, and she blinks, but can’t tell whether anyone is following her.
Without thinking, Tracy takes the short cut to the bus stop through the playground behind the Stockholm School of Economics.
The far street lamp is the only one working, but it isn’t so dark that she can’t see.
The water is now trickling past her collar and down her back.
In the playground, the muddy puddles ripple with the pounding rain. Behind the huge university building, soaked cardboard boxes lie strewn across the grass.
She regrets taking this route.
The rain is drumming down on the jungle gym. It almost sounds like there is a dog trapped inside the playhouse, panting and throwing itself against the walls. Its windows glitter in the dark.
The ground is saturated, and Tracy tries to avoid the worst of the mud in an attempt to save her shoes.
The rain hisses through the trees’ bare branches, making a hollow clang whenever a large droplet hits the low metal fence surrounding the playground.
Something crosses Tracy’s field of vision. At first, she doesn’t realise what is happening.
An instinctive fear courses through her, making it difficult to breathe.
She slows down, her legs now heavy, trying to take in what she is seeing.
Her heart is pounding in her chest.
The seconds seem to stop ticking by.
Beneath the monkey bars, a girl hovers like a ghost in the darkness.
There is a steel cable around her throat, blood staining the front of her dress.
Her blonde hair is wet and clings to her cheeks as she holds her eyes wide open, her bluish-grey lips parted.
The girl’s feet are perhaps a metre and a half above the ground. Her black sneakers lie beneath her.
Hands shaking, Tracy drops her bag to search for her phone and call the police when she sees the girl move.
Her feet have started twitching.
Tracy gasps and runs over to her, slipping in the mud. She reaches the girl and sees that the steel cable around her throat runs up to the very top of the jungle gym and down the other side.
‘I’m going to help you,’ Tracy shouts, moving around the back.
The cable is wound up by a winch that has been screwed into one of the wooden posts supporting the jungle gym. Tracy grips the crank, but it seems to have been locked somehow.
She pulls at it, fingers desperately searching for a catch.
‘Help!’ she shouts at the top of her voice.
She tries to open the panel covering the mechanism, but her hand slips and she cuts her knuckle. She pulls at the winch, trying to prise the entire thing out from the post, but it won’t budge.
There is a homeless woman in a wet fur coat standing nearby, watching Tracy with a blank look. She has a couple of plastic bags draped over her shoulders, and a white rat’s skull strung around her neck.
Tracy runs back around to the girl, gripping her legs and lifting her up, feeling the cramp-like twitches in her calves.
‘Help! I need help!’ Tracy shouts to the homeless woman.
She steps on the black sneakers, trying to get the girl to stand on her shoulders so that she can loosen the wire around her throat, but her body feels stiff and slips off her, swinging to the side.
The bar above them creaks.
Tracy lifts her again, holding her up. She stands like that in the darkness, in the rain, until the girl stops moving and the heat from her body fades. In the end, Tracy can’t keep holding her any more, and slumps to the ground in tears. She doesn’t know that the girl has been dead for some time.
13
Large parts of Observatory Grove Park have been cordoned off with officers stationed on the perimeter to keep journalists and curious members of the public away from the crime scene. Joona has just got back from the airport where he dropped Valeria off, and parks his car by Adolf Fredriks kyrka. As he walks the short distance to Saltmätar street, a journalist with a white moustache and furrowed face pushes over to him.
‘I recognise you – aren’t you from the National Crime Unit?’ he asks with a smile. ‘What’s going on?’
‘You’ll have to speak to the press officer,’ Joona tells him as he walks past.
‘So can I write that there’s a danger to the public, or . . . ?’
Joona shows his ID to the officer by the tape who lets him inside. The ground is still wet from last night’s rain.
‘Can I just ask one question?’ the journalist shouts from behind him.
Joona heads straight for the inner cordon to the rear of the university building, and sees that they have already put up a protective tent around the jungle gym.
He can make out the movements of the forensic science technicians through the white vinyl.
A man in his mid-twenties with thick eyebrows and a neat beard waves to Joona and makes his way over.
‘Aron Beck, Norrmalm Police,’ he says, introducing himself. ‘I’m leading the preliminary investigation.’
They shake hands before lifting the cordon and walking along the path to the playground.
‘I’m pretty anxious to get started,’ says Aron, ‘but Olga said no one should touch anything before you’d seen the victim.’
They walk over to a young woman with a freckled face, red hair and light-coloured eyebrows. She is wearing a pinstripe coat and black boots.
‘This is Olga Berg.’
‘Joona Linna,’ he says, shaking her hand.
‘We’ve spent all morning trying to obtain footprints and other evidence, but the weather hasn’t exactly been on our side. Most of it’s gone, but I guess that’s just part of the job,’ she says.
‘A friend of mine, Samuel Mendel, always used to say that if you can think about something that doesn’t exist, you’ve just changed the rules of the game.’
She studies him with a smirk.
‘They were right about your eyes,’ she says, leading them over to the tent.
A path of step plates has been laid out on the ground around the main crime scene.
They pause outside as Olga explains that forensics have emptied every rubbish bin in the area, including down in the metro station and as far away as Odenplan. They have taken photographs, found multiple sets of fingerprints on the playground, and secured shoe prints from a muddy trail and along the edge of the footpath.
‘Did she have any ID on her?’ Joona asks.
‘Nothing. No driver’s licence, no phone,’ Aron replies. ‘Ten girls were reported missing overnight, but you know how it goes – most of them will turn up as soon as they’ve charged their phones.’
‘You’re probably right,’ says Joona.
‘We just spoke to the woman who found the victim,’ Aron continues. ‘She got here too late to be able to save her, and she’s pretty fucking shaken up. She kept talking about a homeless woman, but so far we don’t have any witnesses to the crime itself.’
‘I’d like to take a look at the victim now,’ says Joona.
Olga steps into the large tent and tells her colleagues to take a break. A moment later, the forensic science technicians start streaming out in their white single-use overalls.
‘It’s all yours,’ says Olga.
‘Thanks.’
‘I won’t tell you what I think yet,’ says Aron. ‘I wouldn’t want to hear that I’ve gotten everything wrong.’
Joona pushes back the plastic, steps into the tent and pauses. The bright spotlights make the details and colours of the jungle gym pop, as though they were in a saltwater aquarium.
A young woman is hanging by her neck from the jungle gym. Her head is tipped forward, her damp hair covering her face.
Joona takes a deep breath and forces himself to look at her again.
She is a little younger than his daughter and is wearing a black leather jacket, a plum-coloured dress and thick black tights.
Her filthy sneakers are on the ground beneath her, and the fabric of her dress is dark with blood from the wound on her neck.
Sticking to the step plates, Joona moves around the jungle gym to examine the winch fixed to one of the posts.
The killer likely used a combi drill, because the screw heads look pristine, free of the damage typically caused by a screwdriver slipping out as it turns.
He studies the winch and sees that the catch has been deliberately bent to prevent it from being loosened.
An unusual murder. An execution.
A demonstration of power.
Whoever did this screwed the winch to the jungle gym, threw the wire over the top, and created a noose using the hook.
Joona moves to the front of the jungle gym again, pausing in front of the young woman.
Her blonde hair is wet but untangled, her nails are broken, and she isn’t wearing any makeup.
He looks up and sees that the steel cable has slipped sideways, damaging the crossbar.
She was alive when the noose was put around her neck, he thinks. Then the killer went back to the winch and turned the crank.
Together the gears made her almost weightless as the killer turned the crank.
The spool rotated, hauling the young woman up by her neck. She struggled to break free, kicking with such force that the steel wire shifted along the crossbar.
A gust of wind causes the rustling flaps of the tent to bulge.
Joona’s eyes remain unwaveringly on the victim as Aron and Olga come into the tent and stand beside him.
‘What are you thinking, Joona?’ Olga asks after a moment.
‘She was killed here.’
‘We knew that already,’ Aron replies. ‘The woman who found her said she was still alive. She saw her legs moving.’
‘I can understand the mistake.’ Joona nods.
‘So I’m wrong after all?’ he says.
Since the killer had already left the scene by the time the witness arrived, Joona knows that any signs of life she thought she saw were most likely nothing but idiomuscular contractions. The steel wire must have completely cut off all blood flow to the young woman’s brain. She probably had about ten seconds to try to loosen the noose and kick her legs in panic before losing consciousness. She would have died shortly after that, but her nerve pathways may have continued to send signals to her muscles for several hours.
‘My feeling is that the killer wanted to show just how helpless the victim was – whoever she may be – while also demonstrating their own power,’ says Olga.
The girl’s right ear, waxy and white, is visible between the strands of her blonde hair. The lining of her leather jacket is stained inside the collar.
Joona studies her small hands and short nails, the pale tan lines on her skin left by jewellery.
He slowly raises his hand and pushes the damp hair back from her face. Meeting her wide eyes, a profound sense of sadness washes over him.
‘Jenny Lind,’ he says quietly.
14
Joona is deep in thought as he passes through the glass entrance to the National Police Board.
Jenny Lind was executed in a playground. Hanged in the rain.
He continues through a set of revolving doors before turning right into a waiting lift.
Jenny vanished on her way home from school in Katrineholm five years ago. The search for her was intense and lasted for weeks.
The girl’s picture was everywhere, and in the first year of her disappearance, they received a huge number of tips from the public. Her parents pleaded with the abductor not to hurt their daughter, and a substantial award was offered.
The perpetrator drove a lorry with stolen number plates, and despite having clear tyre tracks and a composite drawing of the driver from Jenny’s classmate, they were never able to trace the vehicle.
There was a high level of engagement from the police, the public and the media, but the case eventually went quiet.
No one believed Jenny could still be alive.
But she had been, until only a few hours ago.
She is now hanging in the middle of a brightly lit tent, like something in a display case at a museum.
The lift comes to a stop with a ping, and the doors open.
The former head of the National Crime Unit, Carlos Eliasson, was forced to retire after taking full responsibility for Joona’s actions in the Netherlands last year. He saved Joona from prosecution by claiming that he had personally authorised every step of the operation.
