the handrail. She has huge hands. She’s probably about sixty-five years old. She’s completely still. Her gray hair is cut in a short, girlish pageboy style, and there’s a large, skin-colored bandage on her chin. She looks Joona right in the eye without a hint of a smile.
“So have you cut him down yet?” she asks.
7
Joona had thought he’d have time to make the National Criminal Investigation Department meeting at one o’clock.
But he’d wanted to have lunch with Disa first. They were to meet at Rosendal’s Garden on Djurgarden. Joona arrived early and had to wait for a while in the sunshine. He idly watched the mist hovering over the small vineyard. Then he saw Disa coming, her cloth purse slung over her shoulder. Her narrow, intelligent face was closely sprinkled with late-spring freckles and her hair flowed free over her shoulders, loosed from its customary tight braids. She’d prettied up in a dress patterned in small flowers; on her feet were sandals with wedge heels.
Carefully they hugged each other.
“Hi,” Joona said. “You look great.”
“You, too,” said Disa.
Together they went to the buffet to choose their food and then sat down at an outdoor table. Joona noticed that her nails wore a new coat of polish. Usually they were short and ragged, embedded with the dirt Disa picked up in her work as an archaeologist. Joona’s gaze wandered away from her hands and out over the orchard.
“Queen Kristina received a leopard as a present from the Count of Kurland. She kept it here at Djurgarden.”
“I didn’t know that,” Joona said absentmindedly.
“I read in the palace accounts that the Royal Treasury paid forty daler in silver coins, the cost of a serving girl’s funeral. She was ripped apart by that leopard.”
Disa leaned back in her chair and picked up her glass.
“Stop talking so much, Joona Linna,” she said.
“Sorry,” Joona said. “I just…”
He fell silent again, suddenly exhausted.
“What’s up?” She was suddenly concerned.
“Please, just tell me more about the leopard.”
“You look so sad.”
“I was thinking about my mother… It’s been one year today since she passed away. I went to lay a wreath at her grave.”
“I miss Ritva very much,” Disa said.
She put her fork down and sat quietly for a while.
Finally she said, “Do you know what she said the last time I saw her? She took my hand and told me that I should seduce you and make sure I got knocked up.”
Joona laughed. “I can believe that!”
The sun sparkled in Disa’s quiet, dark eyes. “I told her that I didn’t believe that would happen. Then she told me I should leave you and never look back.”
He nodded but was at a loss for words.
“And then you’d be all alone,” Disa continued. “A large, lonely Finn.”
He stroked her fingers.
“I don’t want that,” he said.
“Don’t want what?”
“Don’t want to be a large, lonely Finn.”
“And I now want to use my teeth on you. Bite you hard. Can you explain that? My teeth always start to itch when I look at you,” Disa said with a smile.
Joona reached out to touch her face. He knew he was already late to the meeting with Carlos Eliasson and the CID, but he kept sitting there across from Disa, making small talk and thinking at the same time that he should go down to the Nordic Museum to look at the Sami bridal crown.
While he was waiting for Joona Linna, Carlos Eliasson had told the National Criminal Investigation Department about the young woman who’d been found dead on a motorboat in the Stockholm archipelago, and Benny Rubin noted for the record that there was no rush to begin an investigation and that they should wait for the Coast Guard’s findings.
Joona had come in a little later but had hardly taken part in the meeting when a call came from John Bengtsson of Routine Patrol.
Joona and John had a history together over the years. They’d played floorball more than a decade before. John Bengtsson was popular, but when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, a lot of his friends had fallen away. Although he was now fully recovered, like other people who’d had a brush with death, he had a slight air of fragility, of a depth of understanding, about him.
Joona had stood in the hallway outside the conference room listening on the phone to John’s slow recitation. His voice was filled with the tiredness that comes immediately after high stress. He described how he’d just found the general director for the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products hanging from the ceiling in his home.
“Suicide?” asked Joona.
“No.”
“Murder?”
“Can’t you just come over?” John asked. “I can’t decide what I’m seeing. The body is hanging way too high above the floor, Joona.”
He’d taken Nathan Pollock and Tommy Kofoed along. Joona had just explained that this was a suicide when the doorbell had rung at Palmcrona’s home. In the darkness of the landing, a woman was standing and holding two plastic grocery bags in her large hands.
“So have you cut him down yet?” she asked.
“Cut him down?”
“Director Palmcrona,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Excuse me, I’m just a housekeeper and I thought…”
Obviously she was troubled, and she turned away to start walking down the stairs. She was stopped in her tracks by the answer to her first question.
“He’s still hanging there.”
“I see.” She turned toward him with a blank face.
Joona asked, “Did you see him earlier today?”
“No.”
“How did you come to ask whether we’d taken him down, then? Did you see anything unusual?”
“A noose from the ceiling in the small salon,” she answered.
“So you saw the noose?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“But you weren’t afraid that he might use it?”
“Dying’s not a nightmare.” She was holding back a smile.
“What did you just say?”
The woman just shook her head.
“How do you think he died, then?”
“I think he tightened the noose around his neck,” she replied in a low voice.
