Page 5 of The Sleepwalker (Joona Linna #10)

Tiny snowflakes swirl across the tarmac in the half light on Goran Greiders v?g, giving Joona the sense of slowly driving a motorboat down a grey canal.

He is thinking about the fact that it isn’t unusual for killers to be found at the scene of the crime, drunk or on drugs, regretful or paralysed by their deeds. But Hugo Sand was fast asleep on the bloody floor with a severed arm beneath his head.

Joona passes the Department of Neuroscience and turns off towards the National Board of Forensic Medicine, where electric Advent candles glow in every window. Nils ?hlén’s white Porsche is parked a few metres from a slanting charging post surrounded by shards of red plastic from a broken taillight.

He parks, gets out of the car and fills his lungs with the cool air.

A sudden rush of anxiety for Valeria washes over him, and he takes out his phone and dials her number, but the call goes straight to voicemail.

She has gone to Brazil to be with her mother. Her father’s death didn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but her mother has really been struggling with the loss.

Joona makes his way up the steps into the building and finds Lisette Josephson waiting on one of the sofas in reception.

Following a request from the Prosecution Authority, Joona is here to support her. At present, the focus of the preliminary investigation is to find sufficient grounds to charge Hugo Sand, and to do so as quickly as possible.

Joona says hello and sits down opposite her. Lisette glances at the clock on her phone and says that she has time to take him through the latest developments before they go in.

‘You asked about CCTV, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be that easy this time,’ she says in a weary tone. ‘The owner of the campsite managed to wipe the entire hard drive while he was trying to save the footage.’

‘Can it be recovered?’

‘Apparently not, according to our IT guys.’

‘OK.’

Muffled rock music drifts through to them from the autopsy room. Drums, bass and rhythm guitar.

‘We’ve spoken to Jasmin, the victim’s wife. She says she has no idea what Josef was doing at the campsite .?.?. but his computer was full of cookies from a forum used by people buying sex – before someone told him to download Tor and switch to the Darknet.’

‘And that’s where the trail goes cold,’ says Joona.

‘Aside from the fact that Hugo Sand also uses Tor, so it’s possible we’ll find some sort of correspondence between them.’

Lisette reaches into her briefcase, pulls out a thick ream of paper and puts it down on the table in front of her.

‘Printouts of Hugo’s text messages, social media posts, call logs, et cetera,’ she says.

‘Have you read through everything?’

‘Of course.’

‘So what are you thinking? Who is Hugo?’ asks Joona.

‘I see a young man .?.?. Articulate, self-absorbed and pretty irresponsible,’ Lisette begins.

‘He lives at home with his father Bernard and Bernard’s partner, Agneta Nkomo .

.?. He’s had a number of brief, casual relationships with various women .

.?. but his current girlfriend is called Olga, and they’ve been planning a trip together, trying to save up money.

Hugo’s name doesn’t crop up on any of our databases.

Some drug use, but no serious criminal activity.

No history of violence, no extremism .?.

. We found traces of benzodiazepine in his blood, but nowhere near enough to have made him fall asleep at the crime scene. ’

‘What possible motive could he have?’

‘That’s not exactly clear, but I’m going to pursue the theory that it was a homophobic hate crime,’ she replies.

‘Hugo arranged to meet the victim, possibly with the view to sell sex or rob him .?.?. They met at the caravan, and either it happened right away or the man’s approach acted as a kind of trigger, unleashing some sort of uncontrollable rage in Hugo. ’

‘Is there anything to indicate homophobia here?’ Joona asks, pointing to the printouts.

‘No, but we’ll keep looking.’

Nils ?hlén’s assistant, Chaya Aboulela, comes through to reception, says a quick hello and shakes their hands.

Chaya has a narrow, somewhat stern face, with arched black brows, pale brown irises and full lips. Her hair is covered by a pale-yellow hijab, and she is wearing an open doctor’s coat over an embroidered blouse and a pair of low-cut jeans.

‘The maestro will see you now,’ she says with a wry smile.

Joona and Lisette follow her down the corridor.

‘I’m assuming you’ve seen a dead body before,’ Chaya says to the prosecutor. ‘But I should probably warn you that this one is particularly grizzly.’

‘I see corpses more often than my own kids,’ Lisette mutters.

Chaya opens the heavy doors to the autopsy room. The lighting is harsh, gleaming on the stainless-steel table, sink, taps and strainers.

Nils ?hlén is waiting in the middle of the room in his white coat. He has a narrow, crooked nose and thin lips. The lights on the ceiling look like a bright pearl necklace in the lenses of his aviator glasses.

?hlén is a professor at the Karolinska Institute and considered one of the world’s leading experts in forensic autopsy.

On the bench in front of him, Josef Lindgren’s remains have been laid out and numbered.

Joona and Lisette slowly make their way forward and study the dead man.

It is a classic – if chaotic – case of dismemberment, with the arms, legs and head severed from the torso. Unfortunately for Josef Lindgren, the process was also carried out in an extremely aggressive manner, starting while he was still alive and thus forming part of the murder itself.

Half of his head is still connected to his neck, his right arm has been severed just beneath the shoulder, his left arm at the elbow, and both legs have been cut off.

‘Just to explain what you’re looking at: we’ve laid out the bigger pieces separately, as you can see, and we’ve tried to arrange the smaller body parts in a kind of anatomical order,’ Chaya explains to Lisette.

‘We’ve got his right hand and the tip of his index finger here, some loose teeth and fragments of jawbone here . .?.’

Joona hears her voice fade as he sinks into a relaxed state of hyperfocus in an attempt to take in every detail, studying the wounds on the man’s torso.

He takes in the stump of Lindgren’s arm and the gash on his ribs, the man’s throat and the ragged edges where his thigh has been severed.

One of his legs is intact, his foot still wearing a sock, but the other has been hacked into five pieces.

A section of Lindgren’s head, complete with hair, has a visible blunt force injury to the temple. The majority of his face has been laid out beside a piece of his skull, still attached to ragged scraps of neck muscle.

Centimetre by centimetre, Joona works through the incomplete cuts, the superficial injuries and scrapes. There is a short, diagonal wound on one side of Josef Lindgren’s stomach and another on his shoulder.

‘I’m guessing you’d like to know how our victim died?’ he hears ?hlén say.

‘Yes,’ Lisette replies with a nod.

‘Which was the first wound, which killed him,’ ?hlén continues. ‘The sequence and number of injuries .?.?.’

Joona’s eyes linger on every little bruise, on the faint patches of livor mortis beneath the skin that was touching the floor.

‘Do you have any working theories yet?’ Lisette asks, looking up at ?hlén.

‘Of course .?.?. But I know by now to let Joona go first,’ he replies.

‘Sorry, but you know that Joona has access to fewer facts than I do.’

‘This isn’t a competition .?.?. It’s just that Joona has a very good eye,’ ?hlén explains, pushing his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose.

‘OK, be my guest.’ The prosecutor gives him a forced smile and gestures to Joona.

‘It’s clear that the victim and whoever killed him saw each other before the attack,’ he begins.

‘And you’re sure of that?’ asks Lisette.

‘They were standing face to face.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because the first blow came from directly in front of Lindgren,’ he says.

‘The axe was probably concealed before it swung upwards and hit him square on the left temple, side-on .?.?. It was powerful enough to knock him down, and he collapsed onto his side .?.?. He was likely pretty groggy when the killer chopped off his right leg on the floor.’

Lisette shakes her head.

‘There’s no way you can know that,’ she says.

‘Using the pictures you sent me from the crime scene, I can,’ Joona replies.

‘Judging by the marks on the floor and the angle of the wounds, I’m guessing it took at least five strokes to separate his leg from his body.

The blood was pumping out of his artery at full pressure – that’s what caused the spatter marks right up the wall in the main bedroom. ’

‘Annoying, isn’t he?’ Chaya mutters to the prosecutor.

‘That injury to his leg was probably fatal,’ Joona continues. ‘But in this particular case, it’s not what actually killed him, because it all happened so quickly.’

‘Bravo,’ whispers ?hlén.

‘The victim shuffled back, trying to get away and stem the bleeding with both hands. It was the next blow, through his skull, that killed him .?.?. Strictly speaking, the rest of the injuries were just part of the dismemberment process.’

For a few seconds, silence fills the room.

‘Who needs a professor of forensic pathology?’ ?hlén says with a smile.

‘You know it,’ Joona replies.

‘OK .?.?. With the proviso that we haven’t even started the autopsy yet, I’d say we’re looking at a total of eighty-three major wounds, plus a couple of minor cuts.

Some of the injuries would have taken multiple strokes – cleaving his head, for example.

As Joona says, it was the second blow to the skull that killed Josef Lindgren, but it took another four to separate the top of his head from his body. ’

‘Some didn’t go all the way through .?.?. like this one, on his left thigh,’ Chaya points out.

‘Is there anything missing?’ asks Joona.

‘Yes .?.?. oddly enough, we’re short of two teeth,’ ?hlén replies, scratching his temple.

‘The whole campsite is cordoned off, and we’re bringing in sniffer dogs tomorrow,’ says Lisette.

‘Shall we flip him over?’ asks ?hlén.

‘Please,’ says Joona.

Chaya and ?hlén lift the sturdy torso and gently turn it onto its front.

‘You haven’t said when you think he died,’ says Lisette.

‘Judging by the temperature of the body and the extent of the livor mortis, I’d say he’d been dead for almost an hour when the first officers arrived.’

‘Around two in the morning, in other words,’ says Joona.

‘Yes.’

They study Josef Lindgren’s exposed spine.

‘Who did this?’ asks Lisette. ‘What sort of killer are we looking for?’

‘It wouldn’t require a huge amount of physical strength,’ says ?hlén, ‘but whoever it was would need to be in fairly good shape.’

‘Could a young man have done this?’

‘Sure.’

‘In his sleep?’