The Disciple (3 page)

The nylon stockings. The nightdress. The arrangement.

This was the third victim.

‘From ear to ear’ was an inadequate description of the gaping neck wound. It was, rather, from one side of the spinal column to the other. Like opening a tin and leaving a little bit so that you can bend back the lid. The woman’s head had almost been severed from her body. A considerable amount of strength would have been required to inflict such an injury. There was blood everywhere, high up the walls and all over the floor.

Ursula was already busy taking pictures. She moved around the room carefully, making sure she didn’t step in the blood. She was always first on the scene if possible. She looked up, nodded a greeting and carried on with her photographs. Torkel asked the question, even though he already knew the answer.

‘Same?’

‘Definitely.’

‘I spoke to Lövhaga again on my way over. He’s still in there, exactly where he’s supposed to be.’

‘But we knew that, didn’t we?’

Torkel nodded.

He didn’t like this case, he thought as he stood by the bedroom door looking at the dead woman. He had stood in other doorways looking into other bedrooms, he had seen other women in nightdresses, their hands and feet bound with nylon stockings, raped and with their throats cut. They had found the first one in 1995. Then there had been three more before they managed to catch the murderer in the late spring of ’96.

Hinde was sentenced to life imprisonment in Lövhaga.

He didn’t even appeal.

And he was still in there.

But these new victims were identical copies of Hinde’s. Hands and feet bound in the same way. Excessive violence used to cut the throat. Even the blue tinge in the white nightdresses was the same. This meant that the person they were looking for wasn’t just a serial killer, but also a copycat. Someone who was copying murders from fifteen years ago, for some reason. Torkel looked down at his notebook and turned to Ursula again. She had been involved in the original case in the nineties. Ursula, Sebastian and Trolle Hermansson, who had reluctantly retired since then.

‘The husband said he got a reply to a text message at around nine o’clock this morning, but no reply to a message at one o’clock.’

‘She’s been dead for more than five hours, less than fifteen.’

Torkel knew that Ursula was right. If he had asked she would have pointed out that rigor mortis had not yet reached the legs, that there was no indication of autolysis, that the initial signs of tache noire had begun to appear, and other technical terms relating to forensics which he still hadn’t bothered to learn in spite of all the years he had spent in the police service. If you asked, someone would always explain in plain language.

Ursula wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. It was several degrees warmer up here than downstairs. The July sun had been shining in all day. Flies were buzzing around the room, attracted by the blood and the process of decay, as yet invisible to the human eye.

‘The nightdress?’ Torkel wondered after surveying the bed one last time.

‘What about it?’ Ursula lowered the camera and gazed at the old-fashioned item of clothing.

‘It’s been pulled down.’

‘Could have been the husband. Wanting to cover her up.’

‘I’ll ask him whether he touched her.’

Torkel left his place by the door and returned to the inconsolable husband in the kitchen. He really didn’t like this case at all.

The tall man had slept for a few hours. He had come home and gone straight to bed. That was what he always did. Rituals. The adrenaline had been surging through his body. He didn’t really know what happened, but afterwards it always felt as if he had used up a week’s reserves of energy during the short period of activity. But now he was awake. The alarm clock had gone off. It was time to get to work. Again. He got out of bed. So much still to do. And it was vital that everything was done in the right way. At the right time. In the right order.

Rituals.

Without them there would be nothing but chaos and fear. Rituals created control. Rituals made the bad stuffless bad. The pain less painful. Rituals kept the darkness at bay.

The man linked his Nikon camera to the computer and quickly uploaded the thirty-six pictures.

The first one showed the woman weeping, her arms crossed protectively over her breasts as she stood waiting for him to give her the nightdress to put on. Blood was trickling from one nostril, down to her lower lip. Two drops had splashed her right breast on their way to the floor, leaving red marks like rain on a window pane. She had refused to get undressed at first. Thought her clothes might somehow protect her. Save her.

In the thirty-sixth and final picture she was staring blankly straight into the camera. He had squatted down by the bed and leaned in close, so close that he had felt the warmth of the blood seeping from the gaping wound in her throat. By that time most of the blood had left her body, and had been largely absorbed by the bedclothes and the mattress.

He quickly checked the pictures in between. Nightdress on. The nylon stockings. The knots. Knickers off. Before the act. After the act. The knife and its work.

The fear.

The realisation.

The result.

Everything looked good. He would be able to use all thirty-six. That was the best outcome. In spite of the almost unlimited capacity of the digital camera, he wanted to stick to the confines of an old-fashioned roll of film. Thirty-six pictures. No more. No less.

The ritual.

Billy was kneeling by the front door examining the lock as Torkel walked down the stairs. He turned to his boss.

‘No sign of forced entry as far as I can see. The indications are that he was let in.’

‘The patio door was open when we got here,’ Torkel informed him.

‘The husband opened it when he got home,’ Billy said. ‘According to him, it was locked.’

‘Is he sure about that? He seemed pretty much out of it with shock . . .’

‘He sounded sure.’

‘I’ll ask him again. Where’s Vanja?’

‘Outside. She just got here.’

‘There’s a computer in the study upstairs. Take it with you and see if you can find anything. Preferably something that links her to the others.’

‘So she’s the third?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Are we bringing anyone in, or . . .’

Billy left the question hanging in the air. Torkel knew that what he really meant was: Are we bringing in Sebastian Bergman? The same thought had occurred to Torkel, but he had immediately dismissed it. The drawbacks were obvious and significantly outweighed the advantages – but that was before tonight.

Before the third victim.

‘We’ll see.’

‘I mean, bearing in mind who he’s copying . . .’

‘As I said, we’ll see.’

The tone of voice told Billy it was time to stop asking questions. He nodded and got to his feet. Billy understood Torkel’s frustration. They had no evidence – or, to be more accurate, they had plenty. Footprints, fingerprints, semen and hairs, but in spite of all this they were no closer to making an arrest than twenty-nine days ago when they had found the first woman bound and murdered in the same way. The almost nonchalant way the perpetrator left behind forensic evidence indicated that the person in question knew he wasn’t on any police register. He was far too organised for this to be mere carelessness. Therefore, he had no previous convictions, at least not for any serious crime. But he was willing to take risks. Or forced to do so. Both possibilities were alarming; in all probability, he would strike again.

‘Take Vanja back with you and go through everything again.’

If they could just find a connection between the victims, it would be a great help. They would be able to learn something about the perpetrator and start to close in on him. The worst-case scenario was that the killer was choosing women at random, that he saw someone in town, followed her, noted where she lived, made plans and waited for the right opportunity. If that was how he was selecting his victims, they wouldn’t catch him until he made a mistake. And so far he hadn’t put a foot wrong.

Billy took the stairs in a few rapid strides, glanced into the bedroom where Ursula was still working, and went into the study. Quite small, perhaps six square metres. A desk in one corner, with an office chair. A sheet of Perspex under the chair so that the wheels wouldn’t damage the parquet flooring. A low bench housing a printer, modem, router, papers, files and office supplies. On the wall above the desk there was a long picture frame with space for eight photographs. The victim – Katharina – was alone in one picture, smiling into the camera beneath an apple tree; dark hair, straw hat, white summer dress. Like an advertisement for the Swedish summer. Österlen, perhaps. The husband – Richard – also appeared alone in another photograph, in the prow of a sailboat. Sunglasses, tanned, focused. All the other pictures showed both of them. Close together, arms around each other, smiling. It seemed as if they did a lot of travelling. There was a white sandy beach with palm trees in the background, and Billy was able to identify New York and Kuala Lumpur. No children, evidently.

So at least no one had lost their mother this time. He stood there for a while, staring at the pictures. Gazing at the couple’s loving smiles. They had their arms around each other in every photograph. Perhaps they always posed for the camera like that. Perhaps it was just a pretence, to show the world how happy they were. But it didn’t look that way; it looked as if they were genuinely in love, standing there wrapped around each other. Somehow Billy couldn’t tear himself away from the images of the man and the woman. There was something about their happiness that affected him intensely. They looked so full of joy. So in love. So alive. Things didn’t usually touch Billy like this. He had no difficulty in maintaining a professional distance between himself and the victims. Obviously he was always affected to a certain extent; he suffered with the relatives, but the sorrow didn’t usually pierce so deeply. He knew exactly why it was different this time. He had just met someone whose happy expression and inviting smile reminded him of the woman in the pictures. It made the tragedy real. He thought about Maya, pulling up the covers and hugging him sleepily this morning. She had tried to get him to stay for just a little bit longer and a little bit longer and a little bit longer, until the whole morning had gone. The image of a smiling Maya fitted perfectly with the romantic photographs in front of him, but not with the grotesquely contorted, bound and raped woman in the room next door. And yet for a second he had seen Maya lying there face down in a huge pool of blood. He turned his head away and closed his eyes. He had never felt this fear before. Never.

And he must never let it happen again. He knew that. He must never let in the violence and the terror and allow it to poison him. It would destroy love. Make him fearful and constantly anxious. The importance of keeping his private life and his work completely separate was crystal clear to him; without that distance he could lose everything. He could hug Maya, hold her tight, but he could never share that feeling. It was too dark and bottomless to be brought into their relationship. He would hold her for a long time when he got home. She would ask him why. He would lie. He didn’t want to reveal the truth to her. Billy turned around, picked up the laptop from the desk and went downstairs to find Vanja.

The tall man gave the computer the order to print out all the pictures, and the printer responded immediately with an efficient hum of activity. As the images emerged on high-gloss paper, he created a new folder for the photographs on screen, copied it, went into the password-protected web page, identified himself as the administrator and uploaded the folder. The web page had the nondescript address fygorh.se, which was actually a random combination of letters that would not appear high up on any list found through a search engine. If a casual browser should somehow end up on the page, they would see only badly laid out text, barely legible against the colourful, moving background. The text, which sporadically changed both colour and font, consisted of extracts from books, government investigations, dissertations, other websites and completely meaningless passages, with no separation or spaces between them. The text was interrupted here and there by strange pictures and drawings, with no discernible purpose. It looked like a digital version of the nonsense sometimes seen on bus shelters or electricity boxes, created by someone who was unable to choose between all the possibilities on offer, and instead had decided to try everything in one place. No one was able to concentrate on the site for very long. He had requested the visitor statistics. Of the seventy-three people who had inexplicably found their way there, the person who had stayed the longest had managed only one minute and twenty-six seconds. Which was just what he wanted. Nobody had bothered to click through to the fifth page, or noticed the little red button right in the middle of a piece about listed buildings in Katrineholm. If you clicked on the button it opened a new page, which demanded your username and password. Beyond this security check was the folder containing the pictures he had just placed there. The folder had the less-than-informative title ‘3’.

The printer had finished its work. He picked up the pictures, leafed through them and counted. All thirty-six were there. He took out a large bulldog clip and attached it to the top of the pictures. He walked across to the other side of the room where a sheet of hardboard had been nailed to the wall, and hooked the bulldog clip onto a nail in the top right-hand corner. Above the nail was the number three, ringed in black ink. He glanced at the topmost pictures below numbers ‘1’ and ‘2’. Women. In their bedrooms. Half-naked. Weeping. Terrified. The bulldog clip on the far left held only thirty-four pictures. He had failed with two of them. Before the act. He had been too eager. Deviated from the ritual. It would never happen again. The second bundle was complete. He picked up the camera again and took a photograph of the board with its macabre display. The first phase had been completed. He put the camera down on the desk, picked up the black sports bag from the floor just inside the door.