couldn’t be solved by conventional forces or weaponry.
Although a long time has passed since he left the military to study at the Police Academy, he still has dreams about his time as a paratrooper. He’s back on the transport plane, listening to the deafening roar and staring out through the hydraulic hatch. The shadow of the plane moves over the pale water far below like a grey cross. In his dream he runs down the ramp and jumps out into the cold air, hears the whine of the cords, feels his harness jerk as his limbs are thrown forward when the parachute opens. The water approaches at great speed. The black inflatable boat is foaming against the waves far below.
Joona was trained in the Netherlands for effective close combat with knives, bayonets and pistols. He was taught to exploit changing situations and to use innovative techniques. These goal-orientated techniques were a specialised version of a system of close combat known by its Hebrew name, Krav Maga.
‘OK, we’ll take this situation as our starting point, and make it progressively harder as the day goes on,’ Joona says.
‘Like hitting two people with one bullet?’ The tall man with the shaved head grins.
‘Impossible,’ Joona says.
‘We heard that you did it,’ the woman says curiously.
‘Oh no.’ Joona smiles, running his hand through his untidy blond hair.
His phone rings in his inside pocket. He sees on the screen that it’s Nathan Pollock from the National Criminal Investigation Department. Nathan knows where Joona is, and would only call if it was important.
‘Excuse me,’ Joona says, then takes the call.
He drinks from the glass of water, and listens with a smile that slowly fades. Suddenly all the colour drains from his face.
‘Is Jurek Walter still locked up?’ he asks.
His hand is shaking so much that he has to put the glass down on the table.
Snow is swirling through the air as Joona runs out to his car and gets in. He drives straight across the large exercise yard where he trained as a teenager, takes the corner with the tyres crunching, and leaves the garrison.
His heart is beating hard and he’s still having trouble believing what Nathan told him. Beads of sweat have appeared on his forehead, and his hands won’t stop shaking.
He overtakes a convoy of articulated lorries on the E20 motorway just before Arboga. He has to hold the wheel with both hands because the drag from the lorries makes his car shake.
The whole time he can’t stop thinking about the phone call he received in the middle of his training session with the Special Operations Group.
Nathan Pollock’s voice was quite calm as he explained that Mikael Kohler-Frost was still alive.
Joona had been convinced that the boy and his younger sister were two of Jurek Walter’s many victims. Now Nathan was telling him that Mikael had been found by the police on a railway bridge in Södertälje, and had been taken to Södermalm Hospital.
Pollock had said that Mikael’s condition was serious, but not life-threatening. He hadn’t yet been questioned.
‘Is Jurek Walter still locked up?’ was Joona’s first question.
‘Yes, he’s still in solitary confinement,’ Pollock had replied.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about the boy? How do you know it’s Mikael Kohler-Frost?’ Joona had asked.
‘Apparently he’s said his name several times. That’s as much as we know … and he’s the right age,’ Pollock had said. ‘Naturally, we’ve sent a saliva sample to the National Forensics Lab—’
‘But you haven’t informed his father?’
‘We have to try to get a DNA match before we do that, I mean, we can’t get this wrong …’
‘I’m on my way.’
The car sucks up the black, slushy road, and Joona Linna has to force himself not to speed up as his mind conjures up images of what happened so many years before.
Mikael Kohler-Frost, he thinks.
Mikael Kohler-Frost has been found alive after all these years.
The name Frost alone is enough for Joona to relive the whole thing.
He overtakes a dirty white car and barely notices the child waving a stuffed toy at him through the window. He is immersed in his memories, and is sitting in his colleague Samuel Mendel’s comfortably messy living room.
Samuel leans over the table, making his curly black hair fall over his forehead as he repeats what Joona has just said.
‘A serial killer?’
Thirteen years ago Joona embarked on a preliminary investigation that would change his life entirely. Together with his colleague Samuel Mendel, he began to investigate the case of two people who had been reported missing in Sollentuna.
The first case was a fifty-five-year-old woman who went missing when she was out walking one evening. Her dog had been found in a passageway behind the ICA Kvantum supermarket, dragging its leash behind it. Just two days later the woman’s mother-in-law vanished as she was walking the short distance between her sheltered housing and the bingo hall.
It turned out that the woman’s brother had gone missing in Bangkok five years before. Interpol and the Foreign Ministry had been called in, but he had never been found.
There are no comprehensive figures for the number of people who go missing around the world each year, but everyone knows the total is a disturbingly large number. In the USA almost one hundred thousand go missing each year, and in Sweden around seven thousand.
Most of them show up, but there’s still an alarming number who remain missing.
Only a very small proportion of the ones who are never found have been kidnapped or murdered.
Joona and Samuel were both relatively new at the National Criminal Investigation Department when they started to look into the case of the two missing women from Sollentuna. Certain aspects were reminiscent of two people who went missing in Örebro four years earlier.
On that occasion it was a forty-year-old man and his son. They had been on their way to a football match in Glanshammar, but never got there. Their car was found abandoned on a small forest road that was nowhere near the football ground.
At
