‘Wouldn’t be unheard of,’ said Nyberg, ‘for her to be in her room.’
‘And not in ours,’ Norlander finished.
Mörner rushed off down the corridor with his eyes on his brand-new, albeit very fake, Rolex. It was thirteen minutes to one. The world’s press was waiting. Very soon, he would have to walk out in front of them and disclose information about the Nobel Prize candidate in six different languages.
No, there was something wrong there somewhere.
He tore open another door with excessive force. Still not the right room. It was the door to the women’s toilets.
He was just about to plough his way through the rest of the police station when he suddenly realised Kerstin Holm was staring up at him from the sink where she had been splashing water onto her pale-looking face.
‘What’re you doing here?’ he shouted.
‘Shouldn’t I be the one asking that?’ she asked, gargling.
‘You’re actually just the person I’ve been looking for,’ he said in confusion.
‘And…?’ she said slowly, drying her face with a hand towel which looked like it had seen better days.
‘I need you,’ Mörner said, sounding like an impassioned lover from beneath a balcony.
Kerstin Holm put the towel to one side, pulled a face and stared at him sceptically.
‘The press conference,’ he explained, pointing at his fake Rolex. ‘We’re in a bit of a hurry. Twelve minutes. No, eleven.’
‘You need a female hostage,’ she said in an icy tone.
‘Exactly,’ said Mörner, not registering even the slightest shift in temperature.
‘I’m ill,’ Kerstin Holm said, still drying her face. ‘Try Sara.’
‘But she’s the baby.’
‘Even better.’
Waldemar Mörner stood there in the women’s toilets, thinking it over for a few seconds.
And so it came to pass that Sara Svenhagen, without having been brought fully up to date on the case and fresh from a session in the swimming pool, found herself standing behind a podium next to Waldemar Mörner and Jan-Olov Hultin, an enormous bouquet of saliva-drenched microphones in her face. She stared at the television cameras and felt her chlorine-soaked hair stand on end.
Paul Hjelm was in his office, making notes in the form of a system of coordinates, when she and her greenish hair appeared on the TV screen.
‘Green?’ he said.
‘Chlorine,’ Kerstin Holm, sitting next to him, replied. ‘They swim a kilometre every Sunday. After a while, blonde hair goes green.’
‘A kilometre? Jorge?’
‘Twenty lengths. Quiet.’
Waldemar Mörner cleared his throat. That always boded well. Language lovers were in for a real treat.
‘Distinguished members of the press corps and other honoured guests,’ Mörner began. ‘Since we realise that rather considerable demands will be made for official transparency in connection to the recent racial killing of a well-known Swedish scientist, active in the cerebral branch, we have decided to anticipate your utterly just demands and enter into a state of openness now, for we live in an open society and the resources of the police force are finite; with that said, we now await your finely honed questions regarding Professor Emeritus Leonard Sheinkman.’
The members of the press looked expectantly at one another, hoping that someone else had understood. Eventually, a brave youngster said: ‘Who was he?’
Waldemar Mörner blinked forcefully and exclaimed: ‘He was actually a candidate for a Nobel Prize.’
The picture vanished. Paul looked indignantly up at Kerstin.
‘Now’s not exactly the time to be revelling in Mörner’s howlers,’ she said, putting the remote control down on the desk.
He would just have to agree with her. He saw a series of numbers looping around a wrist and felt a distinct sensation of unease.
‘OK,’ he said, pointing to the piece of paper on which he had drawn a system of coordinates that looked like a big plus sign. ‘Four squares, four incidents. The horizontal line is a dividing one. “Skansen” and “Skogskyrkogården” above it, “Slagsta” and “Odenplan metro station” beneath. Do we have anything concrete linking the things above with the things below?’
‘The rope links the two above,’ Kerstin said. ‘A reef knot on an eight-millimetre red-and-purple polypropylene rope. Anything else?’
‘Not exactly,’ Paul said. ‘Maybe the fact there weren’t any footprints in the wolverine enclosure. He could’ve been hanging upside down from the railing, I suppose, completely out of his mind on drugs and drawing in the earth with his fingers; Professor Sheinkman’s hands weren’t bound, after all. We need to check whether the technicians found anything like this when they went back to the wolverines.’
He held up a long, rigid, millimetre-thick metal wire with a needle-sharp point. Kerstin took it from him and examined it.
‘And this was… where? In his head?’
‘Jammed into his right temple. We’re waiting for more information from the brain surgeon helping Qvarfordt with the autopsy. I don’t know if they’re finished yet.’
‘Should we infer anything from the fact that this wire was found in the brain of a brain scientist?’ Kerstin asked, putting the wire – not without a certain repulsion – down.
‘Maybe,’ Paul said. ‘We’ll need to speak to the relatives anyway. What about revenge for an old case of misconduct? Scalpel accidentally left behind in the cerebral cortex or something?’
The door flew open. Jorge Chavez came rushing in, grabbing the remote control and switching on the television. He sat down in the middle of Hjelm’s system of coordinates, crumpling it.
‘Look,’ he said breathlessly.
His wife’s face filled the television screen. Her short, straggly hair had an undeniable greenish tinge to it.
‘I understand what you mean,’ Sara Svenhagen said to the crowd, ‘but at present we have no reason whatsoever to suspect that the Kentucky Killer has struck again.’
‘What does she know about the Kentucky Killer?’ Paul Hjelm asked darkly.
‘Everything I know,’ Jorge said. ‘Quiet.’
‘We aren’t even certain it’s race-related,’ Sara continued. ‘It’s too early to speculate.’
‘Though judging by appearances, it’s a racial killing,’ Waldemar Mörner interrupted. ‘We’ve already arrested a suspect.’
In the right-hand corner of the screen, half of Hultin’s face came into view. It was twisted, as though he had just passed half a dozen kidney stones.
‘For God’s sake!’ Paul Hjelm said, throwing his pen at the wall.
‘You’ve arrested a suspect?’ at least six members of the press clamoured. One of them, a fierce woman from Rapport, continued: ‘So have you been sitting there lying to us this whole time?’
There was a moment of violent crackling. Hultin had grabbed the entire cluster of microphones and hauled them towards him.
‘An individual has been brought in for questioning,’ he said in a crystal-clear voice. ‘We will shortly be bringing in more people for questioning. At present, however, no one has been arrested. I repeat: no one has been arrested.’
‘Waldemar Mörner, why did you claim that a suspect had been arrested?’ the fierce lady from Rapport continued.
Mörner blinked intensely. His mouth moved but no sound came out.
‘Can we move the microphones back?’ an irritated technician piped up.
Jorge Chavez switched the television off. The trio exchanged glances which veered between rage, irritation and hilarity.
‘How long is it possible for someone like Mörner to cling on to his job?’ Kerstin Holm eventually asked. ‘Where’s the limit?’
‘Far, far away,’ Jorge answered. ‘She was good, wasn’t she?’
‘Television makes colours look brighter,’ Paul said. ‘Twenty lengths?’
‘Say no more,’ Jorge replied in English, pursing his lips. ‘What’re you working on?’