Page 37 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)

Amina Abdallah feels the chill through her wetsuit as she wades out into the freezing river with her lemon-yellow kayak.

Half an hour ago, she pulled into a parking bay by the end of the bridge and loosened the straps on the roof rack. The sun was high in the sky, but a stubborn band of last night’s snow was still lingering in the shade up against the wall.

Amina carried the kayak and the rest of her gear down to the pebbly shore just below the ?lvkarleby Power Station.

She is now getting ready to set off, and can feel the current pushing her kayak to the right over and over again.

Strictly speaking, she should be in the kitchen at home right now, but she needed to get out, to clear her head.

The roar from the turbines and the surging water is almost deafening.

Her older brother Ali has just come back from Wadi Halfa, and though he is crashing at her place in Skutsk?r, he seems to expect to be treated like some sort of king.

In his view, she should be serving him sugary tea between meals, waiting on him hand and foot and addressing him as ‘Your Excellency’.

Ali spent three years working on the railway in Sudan, but after injuring his knee he flew back to Sweden, leaving his wife and three kids behind. Now, he spends his days slumped on Amina’s sofa, watching Arabic-language TV with the Koran in one hand.

He goes on and on about how unfair life is, pushing conspiracy theories, talking about moral decay and repeating disinformation – claiming the Swedish authorities steal Muslim children and that it’s against the law to burn the Torah but not the Koran.

Ali doesn’t have a job, but Amina works in a nursery and does extra shifts cleaning offices at the weekend. She supports her mother and little sister, does all of the shopping and cooking, and looks after her uncle’s kids every Friday.

‘I’ll find you a good Nubian husband,’ Ali told her, not for the first time, as she set down a plate of booza in front of him.

‘I don’t want a husband,’ she replied.

‘I’m ashamed of you. Everyone is.’

‘Well, don’t be,’ she mumbled as she left the room.

She balances her paddle across the kayak, adjusts her helmet and straightens the tow line around her waist, then looks out at the river and the writhing current.

Amina has signed up for the Swedish kayak cross and white water kayaking championships, and has been told that she has a good chance of getting onto the national team if she wins.

The competition will be held in ?msele next summer.

She has no idea whether she is good enough, and knows she should really join a club of some kind, but she doesn’t have time to socialise. All she wants is to get out onto the water.

Amina first started kayaking in high school, but she has only ever been out on her own since then, for fun, and doesn’t know how she might get on at the championships.

Despite that, she dreams of winning.

A spruce branch floats by, and she waits for it to pass before gripping both sides of the cockpit and lifting herself up. She swings both feet inside and lowers herself onto the seat.

Amina’s kayak is a narrow rocker with a relatively short stern and a V-shaped hull, making it extremely manoeuvrable and easy to tilt when dealing with waves.

She isn’t planning to go far today, just wants to feel the power of a couple of rapids, practise some peel outs and eddy turns and work on her speed down to Kullens badplats. After that, she’ll get changed and catch the bus back up to the bridge to get her car.

She fits her spraydeck and pushes off, paddling gently.

The surging water from the power station gives the kayak real momentum, causing it to shoot forward like an arrow. Amina quickly works up to a fast stroke rate, twisting her torso and keeping her hips loose, driving herself downriver.

She wants to pick up as much speed as possible before hitting the Klockarharen rapids.

Her body is desperate for the adrenaline rush.

The kayak catches the wind blowing in from the flat landscape to the right, and she has to take a few extra strokes to adjust her course.

The water glitters brightly.

Amina picks up the pace to the right-hand side of the island and can see the low suspension bridge across the river up ahead.

Someone has attached a metal ladder rope to the bridge, and it is trailing in the water in the middle of the channel, pulsing unnaturally like a fishing line with a salmon on the end.

She decides to paddle beneath the bridge, to the right of the ladder.

As she drifts past the little island known as Korallen, she comes too close to the shore. She doesn’t notice the large rock lurking just beneath the surface until her bow hits it, and the kayak immediately flips, plunging her into the icy water.

Amina is upside down, surging forward in the powerful current.

From beneath, the surface of the water looks like aluminium foil.

She gets ready to roll before she runs out of air, leaning forward and pressing the paddle to the side of the kayak.

Above her head, green rocks and swaying seagrass race by.

The sunlight ripples through the water.

She knows she needs to make use of the current as she rights the kayak.

The river is roaring in her ears.

Amina realises she must be getting close to the bridge, and she twists around and tries to look downstream in an attempt to avoid hitting the ladder.

The cold water makes her eyes ache.

Green eddies swirl past her, carrying fragments of plants and sediment.

She speeds past a dark log on the riverbed, eyes still scanning all around.

Just then, she hears herself scream underwater.

A grey body without a head is hanging from the ladder.

It is caught between two rungs, spinning slowly like some sort of propellor. The severed vertebrae in its neck seem to glow white amid the pale-pink tissue.

Amina passes the rotating body, then tenses her stomach, swings the paddle out in a quarter-circle, breaks the surface with the blade, jerks her hip and pulls back. The kayak rolls, and she swings up out of the water, head last.

The light is blinding.

Amina takes a deep breath and then leans as far back as she can, spluttering for air. Once she has regained her balance, she quickly starts paddling towards a calmer patch of water, fumbling for the bilge pump with shaking hands.

*?*?*

Joona leaves the Police Authority building and walks down one of the paths in Kronobergsparken in the afternoon darkness.

The news is reporting that Storm Eyolf is approaching from the Barents Sea, in a wide front covering the Kola Peninsula, the White Sea and the Baltic, but there is almost no breeze in Stockholm.

On one of the park benches, a man with a beard is huddled in a sleeping bag, surrounded by plastic bags, cans and grubby possessions.

‘We’ve gotta be patient with AI,’ he mutters with a wheezy laugh.

Joona walks past him and turns off onto another path. Between the trees, he can see the lights of the buildings on Parkgatan glittering warmly.

A weary-looking man in workout gear and a winter coat is standing beneath one of the streetlamps with a pit-bull terrier on a lead.

Without warning, the dog starts barking at something in the darkness.

It pulls on its lead with such force that the man has to take a couple of steps forward before he manages to restrain it, but the dog rears up on its hind legs and continues to bark.

Joona left the interview with Jenny Gyllenkrans with what is likely a description of the killer’s car: a rusty, pale-blue Opel Kadett with a roof rack and around fifteen air fresheners hanging from the rear-view mirror.

Probably to dull the stench of rancid blood, he thinks as he climbs the steep slope.

Once he had asked everything he wanted to know, Stina Linton showed Jenny a sketch of the parking area at the campsite with a mark indicating the location of the victim’s Mercedes, and asked Jenny to point out where both her own car and the old Opel had been parked.

With a bit of luck, they might be able to pinpoint the killer’s tyre tracks, and possibly even shoeprints.

It is definitely a step forward, though the message from Erixon revealing that the blonde hair in the caravan was not Jenny’s also came as a disappointment.

The minute Joona left the interview room, he paused in the corridor to read Erixon’s brief report in full.

The special thing about mitochondrial DNA is that it comes from the mother’s egg cell, meaning a child’s mtDNA is a direct clone of their mother’s.

The only changes in this particular type of DNA – passed down since the very first mother – are a long line of mutations, and it just so happens that mutations are precisely what scientists focus on when attempting to match DNA.

The lab results for the mtDNA from the strand of hair showed that it was not a match for Jenny Gyllenkrans, nor anyone else in the usual registers or databases.

Despite his powerful internal drive, Joona doesn’t usually allow himself to feel frustrated. He knows that preliminary investigations can take time, and that the trail sometimes goes cold before new leads rise to the surface.

This time, however, he feels acutely impatient, because he is convinced they are chasing an active serial killer.

There will be another murder, and soon.

It is like a grass fire approaching the edge of a forest.

They are close, and they need to extinguish the blaze before it spreads any further.

Thanks to Hugo Sand’s testimony, they have a first description of the killer: a woman with long blonde hair.

They have a strand of her hair from the caravan, and because the lab prioritised their case, they also have her mitochondrial DNA.

Using commercially available genealogical databases, they could probably identify – and possibly even arrest – her today.

But following a pilot case in which the police used ancestral DNA to solve a double murder in Linkoping, the Authority for Privacy Protection ruled that the use of such databases runs counter to Swedish law.

Without realising it, Joona has walked to the far side of the park and through the gate to the old Jewish cemetery. He leaves a small white pebble among the others on his friend Samuel Mendel’s grave.

He no longer knows what to say to him, but he stands quietly for a moment, looking down at the headstone, as the first soft white flakes begin to fall from the dark sky.

The snow soon grows heavier, lingering on the ground for a few seconds before melting away.

Joona leaves the cemetery and makes his way up towards the play area, watching the teenagers playing basketball behind the tall fence. He takes out his personal phone and calls Agneta Nkomo.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s Joona Linna again,’ he says. ‘I wanted to ask if you could help me with something.’

‘Of course, if I can.’

‘As a police officer, I’m not allowed to use commercial databases to match DNA, but that rule doesn’t apply to journalists.’

The basketball hits the fence in front of Joona and bounces down to the tarmac.

‘Do you have the killer’s DNA?’ Agneta asks in disbelief.

‘In all likelihood, yes. A blonde hair from the caravan.’

‘OK, wow .?.?. Yes, I can help,’ she says.

‘There’s only one database that handles this particular type of DNA.’

‘No problem, I’ll do it .?.?. and I assume it’s urgent?’ she says.

‘It is.’

‘Have you made any other progress?’

‘We’re in the process of tracking down a suspected escape car, an old Opel.’

‘So you still think robbery is the motive?’

‘It’s not the primary motive, in my opinion .?.?. That wouldn’t explain the degree of violence. But robbery is probably part of the explicit drive.’

Once Joona has shared everything he can and they have ended the call, he sends an encrypted message containing the DNA profile from the blonde hair to Agneta. He then sighs and turns back towards the station in the snow. His work phone starts ringing before he gets there.

‘Linna,’ he answers.

‘This is Jaromir Prospal, detective superintendent with Northern Uppland,’ says a man with a glum voice. ‘I think we might have something for you.’