Page 141 of The Sleepwalker

An ambulance is parked outside a tired-looking 1970s house with large windows facing out onto the water. Behind the wheel, the driver is sitting with his face in his hands.

A large white forensic tent has been erected on the driveway, lit up from the inside like a marquee at a crayfish party.

Joona watches as an officer in uniform vomits to one side of the garage while his partner rubs his back.

Forensic technicians wearing protective suits over their thick winter coats are busy photographing the ground, and their flashes light up the snow with an aggressive brightness.

Joona says hello to an officer with a red nose standing guard outside the tent, and asks for Erixon.

‘Knock, knock,’ the officer says as he pushes back the rustling material.

‘Who’s there?’ a woman’s voice replies.

‘Police.’

‘Police who?’ she asks without looking up.

‘Police, open the door,’ he says with a grin.

Joona ducks down and steps into the tent. He greets the woman from the National Forensic Centre and sees her blush.

There is a whirring space heater on the ground, and the hot air is making the roof of the tent bulge upwards.

The biggest of the two tables is cluttered with BioPack bags, storage envelopes, boxes, OH film, transport sleeves, bottles of Basic Yellow 40 and gelatine lifters.

Erixon is working on his laptop computer at the other table. The burly forensic technician is wearing white coveralls and a hairnet, a face mask hanging around his neck.

‘Jesus of Nazareth,’ he sighs, looking up from the screen.

‘Far from it,’ Joona replies.

‘The responding officers forced entry,’ Erixon explains with a nod towards the broken front door. ‘The killer had screwed it shut from the outside .?.?. We haven’t touched anything, just photographed, numbered things and secured prints .?.?.’

Erixon continues, telling Joona that the perpetrator also seems to have taken a sturdy piece of wood from a pile at the rear of the house and screwed it above the garage door, preventing it from opening any more than about twenty-five centimetres.

‘We can talk again once you’re done,’ he rounds off. ‘I’ll keep working till then.’

Joona pulls on a pair of coveralls and shoe protectors and heads into the house.

Picking his way across the step plates, he crosses a lounge and continues up the stairs.

For some reason, news of the murdered woman in Stocksund had fallen between the cracks, when it should really have reached him as soon as the call came in.

He assumes the delay is precisely because, for the first time, the victim was female.

It wasn’t until Erixon arrived at the scene and asked whether Joona had already stopped by that the mistake was realised.

Joona cuts through the kitchen and into the cold bedroom, pausing in the middle of the floor. He turns back to look at the splintered door and listens to the recording of the emergency call.

Ida has locked herself in her room, and the sound of the axe hitting the door is audible in the background as she talks to the operator. She sounds desperate and afraid.

‘What do you mean by a madwoman?’

‘A woman with an axe, she’s broken in.’

The minute the operator understood the seriousness of the situation, he asked for an address to dispatch a car, but the call ended as he was trying to ascertain other, vital information.

The air in the bedroom is the same temperature as outside.