Part 1

Part 1

Hampus Cedergren had just crossed the frozen creek and was examining the tracks of a rabbit when the first howl pierced the air; a long, melancholy note that rose ever so slightly towards the end. Seb, the three-year-old pointer who had been running thirty or forty metres ahead of Hampus for most of the walk, was back in a flash, pressing up against his owner’s left leg as he listened with perked ears and a lowered tail.

A few weeks ago, on his thirty-third birthday, Hampus had spotted wolf tracks a few kilometres north of the hunting cabin and presumed it was a loner—probably a young male that had been excluded from the pack and was now in search of new territory—but when the howl was followed, at first by one more and then by a whole chorus in various pitches, he realised he had been mistaken. The early snowfall had forced a pack of wolves to expand its territory so that it now included his and Seb’s little corner of the woods.

Now that they were standing still, Hampus noticed that the temperature was at least a couple degrees colder down by the ground. He knew that when the air was divided into layers of differing temperatures, sound could travel across large distances, meaning that, technically, the wolves could be more than twenty kilometres away, but it was not a risk he was willing to run. He had left his rifle at home, and even a well-trained hunting dog was defenceless against a pack of hungry, territorial wolves.

He therefore turned around, knowing perfectly well that he could expect a night of Seb whining and growling at the slightest sound because he hadn’t released his pent-up energy.

Back at the cabin, he went straight over to the big topographic map that had hung above the old chest of drawers for as long as he could remember. Grandad’s map. The edges were tattered, and it was dotted with pins indicating where the two had walked and red lines marking the areas that Hampus and Seb had managed to search before yet another winter hid everything beneath its white cloak.

He placed a finger on the location from which they had heard the wolves and let it slide across the faded paper in the direction of the sound. North. It must be a pack from the Jangen Territory up in Värmland.

He ought to turn on the computer and report his observation to the county administrative board, but instead he lingered in front of the map, trying to imagine he was him.

Where would he strike next?

If this entire map were his territory, where would he search for his prey?

It was 7 p.m. when Ove Sigvardsson pulled on his boots to go out to the stable. Later on, his wife, Inge-Britt, was able to state the exact time because she had heard the three notes that opened the Ekot evening news just as he closed the utility room door behind him. He didn’t lock it.

Normally it took Ove a little over an hour to feed his cows and do the evening milking, but the weather forecasters had warned of a hard freeze that night and Inge-Britt knew he was worried about the heat pump giving out again, so when he wasn’t back at quarter past eight, she assumed he was connecting it to the emergency generator. Even so, she went out to check whether the lights were still on over there.

They had shut off the heat in the sunroom and the fog from her breath made it difficult to see anything, but out of the corner of her eye she sensed something; a shadow, or at least some sort of density to the darkness out there.

It’s him. This time he’s come here.

That was as far as her thoughts went before a loud crash sounded and the air filled with shards of glass. The shock made her step back, but she bumped into something with one heel and was sent toppling backwards. Everything went black after that, and when she regained consciousness, she was lying on the floor. From then on, she registered only a few flashes: heavy breathing above her; large hands dragging her across the floor towards the kitchen; thin rope tightening around her wrists; a faint smell of orange. Other than that, everything was a blur up until the moment the headlights of a car illuminated the room and thereby also the figure hunching over Ove in the utility room.

Early the next morning, as Hampus sat in front of one of the computers in the little cubicle behind the police station’s reception trying to summarise last night’s events, he kept seeing in his mind Ove Sigvardsson’s big boots: two crumpled heaps of dark brown leather in a puddle of melted snow on the utility room floor.

To his colleagues, his report would merely be a collection of factual information, but for him, it was like the script of a film he had no desire to watch.

‘Hampus?’

He looked up, surprised to see the police commissioner at the station so early.

‘My office. Now.’

Hampus saved the document and followed his boss up the spiral staircase. Once the trip up these stairs had been the highlight of the day, but now he hated the sound of his footsteps echoing in the narrow cement shaft.

‘I’d like to know how you managed to turn up at the Sigvardssons’ last night when you weren’t even on duty?’

Hampus sat down on one of the guest chairs in the police commissioner’s corner office. He told her about the wolves and explained how after having stared long enough at the map, he had simply known that if he were the offender, his next target would be the Sigvardssons’ farm.

Annika Persson turned her face towards the window and sat like that for a while, rubbing her right thumb and forefinger against one another. She had been the police commissioner in Härnösand for three years, and Hampus knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t satisfied with his explanation, but what else could he say? That was what had happened.

‘Well, the important thing is that you got there in time. I’ve spoken to the hospital and the doctor on call says that if you had arrived much later, we could have had a murder case on our hands.’

She sighed and leaned back in her chair.

‘Three incidents in eight days, and each time it gets a bit more brutal. I fear this will not end well.’

After a brief pause, she added:

‘That’s why I’ve contacted Sundsvall to request backup.’

She looked down, and Hampus got the sense that they were both thinking of another time when that was exactly what she ought to have done.

‘They’re willing to lend us a couple of detectives, but they recommended that I also speak to the board in Stockholm, who have now got back to me with another suggestion. The Scandinavian countries have set up a joint training programme in suspect profiling; the so-called Profiler Academy. The first cohort started in spring and has since completed an intensive theory course, and now, lucky for us, the instructors are requesting cases for an elite academy, where they want to use current cases in order to give the very best recruits practical training.

Hampus didn’t quite understand Persson’s enthusiasm. They were dealing with a potential murderer and a population that was growing more and more frightened by the day. What they needed was more officers—not a bunch of students who would have to get to know the area first and might not even speak Swedish.

Annika leaned forwards slightly and added:

‘Suspect profiling will no doubt be one of our most important tools in the future, and I think we can learn a lot from this if they select our case.’

Hampus nodded and got up to drive home and walk Seb.

Six days later, Conrad Løwe stood in front of the big window in one of the meeting rooms at Schæffergården Conference Centre just north of Copenhagen. Outside, the dusk was gradually easing the contours of the park’s trees and bushes, but he could still make out the white horse galloping around alone on a muddy pasture by the riding school some fifty metres away. How the horse could be bothered was beyond him, but the sight was a welcome distraction from the round-table discussion that had been playing out behind him for the past hour.

‘Am I the only one who is still unsure?’ asked Ulf Eriksson.

Christ, there they went again.

Was it really so hard? They had spent the last six months observing one hundred of Scandinavia’s brightest police minds, and yet they still couldn’t manage to select three recruits each. And they called themselves profiling experts?

‘What do you think, Conrad?’ asked Håkon Lunde.

I think you’re a bunch of spoiled idiots, thought Conrad. Out loud, he said:

‘If it were me, I would probably have made the selection based on other criteria, but since you’re the ones who will be training them, it doesn’t matter what I think.’

Ulf Eriksson and Håkon Lunde nodded, but Michael Halbye raised his eyebrows and said:

‘Just out of curiosity, what criteria would you have set?’

Conrad shrugged.

‘I would probably have looked at the potential for development instead of going for the safest option.’

His answer wasn’t meant as a provocation, and he could tell that Michael Halbye didn’t take it that way, but the other two instructors looked slightly peeved. Conrad ignored them and went on:

‘The recruits each of you have chosen for your teams have all delivered consistently good results, right from the initial cases to yesterday’s test, but none of them have improved significantly. Likewise, you’ve chosen to start out with cases that are similar to the ones we’ve worked with in the foundation course, so all in all you ought to be insured against fiasco, but you’ve also ruled out any chance of achieving groundbreaking results and making a real difference.’

Michael Halbye leaned in, and there was something triumphant in his voice when he said:

‘You would have started with that case about the silent robber up in Härnösand. I have to admit…’

Ulf Eriksson interrupted him:

‘The home invasion robberies? Why on earth would we send a team of profilers to Ångermanland to search for an amateur? The robber’s yield barely amounts to petty theft.’

Before Conrad had the chance to object to the use of the word ‘petty’ in connection with home invasions, Halbye replied:

‘Because the fact that a local officer shows up out of the blue in the middle of the act, so to speak, piques Conrad’s curiosity—and mine too, for that matter. What pattern does he see in the offender’s actions?’

Although Conrad was annoyed that Halbye was speaking on his behalf, he had to admit that was exactly it.

‘So how come you haven’t decided to go to Härnösand yourself?’ Håkon Lunde asked.

‘Honestly?’ Halbye answered. ‘Conrad is right. I went for the safe option—both when selecting my team and the case.’

‘Surely it’s not unreasonable that the recruits who have worked hard and delivered consistently good results are the ones who are rewarded with a place at the Elite Academy?’ Ulf Eriksson interjected.

‘No, I suppose it’s not,’ Conrad answered, even though he flat-out disagreed. Justice and equity were important principles in most of life’s affairs, but in his opinion, when it came to cultivating talent, they ought to be kept out of the equation entirely.

Conrad leaned against the window frame and watched the three instructors as they packed up their things. Tomorrow they would gather their new troops and venture out into the world to catch criminals while he, as course administrator, would have to drive home to Gitte and his new claustrophobic home office to write up more budgets, schedules and evaluations. Where was the justice in that? Was that the reward you got for over thirty-five years of service to the police?

‘See you tomorrow,’ Håkon Lunde said, leaving the room first.

Ulf Eriksson followed, but Michael Halbye hung back, and once they were alone he nodded towards three sheets of paper he had left on the table.

‘It’s almost a shame you can’t take them up there yourself.’

At that moment, there was nothing Conrad would rather do, but sadly that was not how the world worked. You couldn’t simply do whatever you felt like—at least not after you had passed sixty.

‘I’m not a profiler,’ he said.

‘But you are indisputably the person with the most arrests under your belt.’

‘But we’ve only budgeted for three teams in the elite programme,’ Conrad objected.

Halbye smiled.

‘It was just a crazy idea.’

Conrad, who had somehow managed to turn this so-called ‘crazy idea’ into a real possibility, quickly turned away so Halbye wouldn’t see the disappointment in his face. Over at the riding school, a number of bright spotlights had been switched on. The white horse was now standing still, and a woman with long hair was slowly approaching it, but when she stretched out her arm towards the horse, it leapt back a few metres and galloped off.

Only once Halbye had disappeared did Conrad walk over to the table and take a look at the three sheets of paper. They were recruit evaluations, and Conrad’s heartbeat quickened when he recognised the names; they were the same three that were written on the little scrap of paper on the desk downstairs in his room.

What were the odds of two police veterans spotting a unique potential in the same three recruits if there wasn’t something to it?

Conrad had never been particularly interested in probability, but he figured they must be almost infinitely small.

‘Nadia?’

‘Mmm.’

Nadia opened her eyes but immediately shut them again, blinded by the sun that was headed up over the treetops outside the curtainless window. She did notice, however, that the entire room was reversed, and when it occurred to her that the deep, soft voice had said her name in Swedish, she realised where she was. Matts’s room. Had the two of them really managed to sleep in such a narrow bed? Well, perhaps not sleep, exactly…

‘Nadia, we’ve overslept.’

‘What time is it?’

‘8:48.’

Matts sat on the edge of the bed with a pair of boxers in his hand. The light fell in through his long fringe, which was usually combed back but now hung in front of his face, hiding his intense, blue eyes. He looked good, even having just tumbled out of bed. Nadia threw back the duvet to get up, and Matts turned his head and watched her with a grin. He dropped the boxers, bent down over her and pressed his lips warmly against hers, while his hands slowly slid down her naked body.

Nadia returned his kiss and felt her desire rekindle, but there were, after all, certain things more important than sex. And what was it she had seen in his eyes just before he kissed her? Hope, longing or just plain lust? She really hoped he wasn’t the type of person who might suggest a long-distance relationship.

In any case, that was not her biggest concern right now. She pushed him away and sat up. It was necessary to prioritise. Having decided to skip underwear and socks, she hopped towards the bathroom while pulling on the jeans that Matts had stripped off her sometime in the night.

A toothbrush would have been nice, but fortunately she found both lipstick and a hair tie in her pocket, and at two minutes to nine she slammed the door behind her and set off at a jog towards the conference wing.

In the course of the six weeks Nadia had spent at Schæffergården, she had got used to the echoing sound of hard soles striking the stone floors in the long corridors and the smell of fish stock that seeped from the kitchen already when breakfast was brought out to the buffet. The increasingly intermingled mix of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian she was immersed in no longer gave her pause, and somehow she’d reached the point where she could look at photographs of mangled human bodies without feeling nauseous.

What she could not get used to was the feeling of being surrounded by idiots. Perhaps she could have put up with the endless parade of ridiculously exaggerated anecdotes about breakneck arrests that played out each night at the cellar bar, but when another recruit dismissed an analytically well-founded argument in all seriousness with words like ‘my intuition tells me…’, that was her limit.

Nadia stopped below the bombastic Christmas decoration floating over the entrance to the conference centre and checked her phone to see which meeting room she had been assigned to. When she opened the door, she was both surprised and happy to see Bjørn Ekholt’s narrow, face in there. The Norwegian recruit’s lack of self-confidence, which he concealed behind a meticulously groomed exterior and absurdly expensive suits, had thus far prevented him from hitting on her, and he had therefore become her preferred companion during meals and in the cellar bar, but this was the first time they had the chance to work together.

Bjørn looked as though he had been up for hours. Not a single strand of his curly hair was out of place, and his white shirt seemed to have come straight off the ironing board.

‘Nice lipstick,’ he said. ‘Did you sleep at all?’

She tilted her head from side to side.

‘Who’s the lucky guy?’

Before Nadia could tell him to mind his own business, he raised his hands and said:

‘No, wait. Let me guess. The golden boy from Stockholm? Or the Norwegian wild man?’

She wrinkled her brow.

‘I’m putting my money on Matts. Jon is just too unkempt.’

Nadia reached out to slap his shoulder but stopped herself when the door opened. The man who stepped in was Stefan Berg; a skinny Swede with chronic scruff and narrow blue eyes that never stood still. Nadia had hardly spoken to him throughout the entire programme, but seeing him here irritated her nonetheless. Three specialists in the same group?

When her boss at the National Investigation Centre encouraged Nadia to apply, he had emphasised the fact that the programme was targeted at regular, police-trained detectives and that the Academy’s steering committee was only including a small group of specialists in the cohort as a trial, but now, at the end of the last module, Nadia had to wonder why on earth they had done it. The instructors acted as though specialised knowledge were something downright suspicious, and she had no doubt that in their eyes, a team consisting solely of specialists was a losing team.

Her mood sank even further when she saw the title of the three case files lying on the table.

Finally they had the chance to work on a case without a predetermined solution and they got Home Invasion Robberies in Härnösand?

Nadia had, in fact, once fought her way through a rather dry American dissertation entitled ‘Profiling Home Invasion Robbery’ because she had become fascinated by just how differently robberies could be tackled in practice, so the assignment in itself could probably prove interesting enough, but crimes, too, had a hierarchy, and while robbery ranked above simple theft, it was far from the top. It looked like she could wave goodbye to a spot at the Elite Academy.

The next four hours would be a waste of time, and she was deliberating whether she could excuse herself with a headache and go back to her room to nap when a heading on the page lying in front of Bjørn caught her eye:

The Silent Robber.

She opened up her file and quickly skimmed the summary. Three robberies in eight days. Victims tied up. Total haul just under 1,500 kronor. No fingerprints. Masked. Bla bla bla. But then came the kicker: The offender has not uttered a single word during any of the robberies.

Once everyone had finished reading, Stefan asked:

‘Who wants to take the board?’

‘I’ll pass, thanks,’ Nadia replied, dizzy at the thought of standing in front of the whiteboard for hours.

‘Come on,’ Stefan coaxed. ‘No doubt you’re the one with the nicest handwriting.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Bjørn.

Stefan smiled, and a moment later he raised his hand to his cheek and scratched it. Typical. People fought tooth and nail to arrange the individual parts of their faces so as to disguise their feelings but forgot all about the body’s biggest tattletales—hands and feet.

‘Okay. What do we know?’ Bjørn said, once he had found a marker that worked.

Nadia started off:

‘The first victim is Kerstin Ohlsson, age seventy-two. He rings the doorbell, takes her purse and ties her up with some kitchen twine he finds in a drawer. The haul is 450 kronor and a few coins.’

Bjørn noted down a few key words and Stefan took over:

‘Two days later he breaks a window to the living room where Lars and Helen Nyholm, age sixty-nine and sixty-seven respectively, are watching TV. He immediately ties up the wife, this time using a rope he found in their shed beforehand, and after the husband has handed over just under 1,200 kronor, he ties him up, too. This time he stays and searches the place, albeit without finding the 2,000 kronor Helen Nyholm has stashed in the freezer. Forensics find a reddish-brown substance, and to begin with, they think the offender cut himself on the broken window, but it turns out to be motor oil that has been in contact with large amounts of rust, most likely from a chainsaw. The oil, which was almost certainly left behind by the offender, has a unique chemical composition, suggesting that it is a mixture of several different products, but they have not yet been able to identify which.’

Okay, Nadia thought. Maybe knowledge can become too specialised. She paged forwards to her notes on the third and final robbery and said:

‘At the Sigvardssons, who are more or less the same age as the Nyholms, he breaks a large window while the wife, Inge-Britt, is standing right in front of it. He ties her up, and when the husband, Ove, returns from the stable, the robber attacks him without warning but is forced to flee when a police officer shows up. The haul here is therefore zero kronor.’

‘So all in all, his return on the three robberies creeps up to just over 1,500 kronor,’ said Bjørn.

Nadia noticed that his high forehead had contracted into three wavy lines.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘Nothing.’

Bjørn was apparently just as insecure professionally as he was in the cellar bar.

‘Come on,’ Nadia said. ‘I can tell you’re thinking about something.’

‘It’s just… When an offender carries on in the same manner despite such a meagre haul, surely we have to ask ourselves whether it could be a matter of faked crime scenes?’

‘You mean he might be after something besides money?’

They discussed the possibility but came to the conclusion that the offender was quite simply inexperienced and improvising.

‘They should have called him “the unlucky robber”,’ said Stefan.

No, Nadia thought. What makes him special is not his bad luck; it’s precisely his silence.

The more she thought about it, the more impressed she was that someone was capable of dominating others so completely using gestures and body language alone.

Conrad Løwe looked at his watch. He would give them another ten minutes. Then they would have had two hours, which ought to be sufficient for them to familiarise themselves with the material, but not enough to go in depth with the analysis and prepare a presentation. He wanted shots from the hip, not a polished PowerPoint.

For the first time since he had stood by the window in the meeting room a day and half ago, he felt a twinge of uncertainty.

Given that there were just three instructors tied to the programme, it had been implied that only three teams totalling nine recruits could be selected for the Elite Academy, but the exhaustive guidelines did not, in fact, specify those numbers, and because no one had known in advance what would turn up when they issued the call for relevant ongoing cases, there was plenty of extra room in the budget to cover four return tickets to Härnösand and cheap lodging. Conrad’s consulting contract with the police was so vaguely formulated that it could entail just about anything, and the assignments he had already said yes to were still so far off that it wouldn’t be a problem.

What was making him sit restlessly on the desk chair was therefore not the fact that he was acting without the permission of the steering committee, but rather the names written in big black letters on the three green folders in front of him.

He opened the top folder and skimmed the summary on the first page.

Norwegian Bjørn Ekholt, adopted from Somalia as an infant, was thirty-seven years old, had a PhD in mathematics and was a crime analyst at the Oslo Police. He was both intelligent and likeable, and the further into the course they had got, the clearer it had become that he had a unique ability to translate tiny fragments of knowledge into concrete scenarios, but it seemed that Ekholt’s high intelligence made it difficult for him to make decisions.

Conrad had underlined a sentence in the instructors’ evaluation:

The greater the pressure, the more the recruit gets hung up on insignificant details.

In the margin, Conrad had pencilled in two words:

Remove pressure.

He had lost count of how many of Ekholt’s type he had run into throughout his long career, and although he knew exactly how to handle them, it was impossible to say whether a single case would be enough to make a breakthrough. Only time would tell.

Conrad closed the folder and opened the next one.

Swedish Stefan Berg would turn thirty-five in a few weeks, was a laboratory technician and held a managerial position at the National Forensic Centre, the forensic science unit of the Swedish Police. Several of the instructors had noted that when Berg made an effort, he could analyse a crime scene as though he had been present when the crime was committed, but unfortunately his making an effort did not happen often enough, and in several cases he had overlooked forensic clues that could have led to a quicker and more precise resolution. Stirring the ambitions of a middle-aged man was no easy task, but if they ended up going to Härnösand, Conrad had a few ideas he wanted to try out.

If they ended up going…

Yesterday he had phoned Gitte to tell her that he might only be home briefly before heading off again but would naturally be back by Christmas, and although he had promised himself he wouldn’t make the final decision until he had seen how the three recruits handled today’s little test, he could tell that mentally he was already packing his bags.

It was not necessary to open the last folder. Nadia Elmkvist was, hands down, the biggest wild card, and he had spent so much time analysing the contents of her folder that he could recite every line in his sleep.

At twenty-six, she was by far the youngest recruit at the Academy. Top marks all the way from primary school to her master’s degree in anthropology, after which she had immediately been appointed interrogation expert at the National Investigation Centre. According to the thorough background check that had been conducted in connection with her employment, she had grown up as the youngest and only sister to three brothers, which had initially made Conrad suspect that she was accustomed to being applauded each time she did a pirouette, but after having observed her for a day or so, he was fairly certain she had never done a pirouette in her entire life. Despite her feminine appearance, she definitely seemed more like the type who had spent her childhood climbing trees and running races than dressing up like a princess.

In spite of her age, Nadia Elmkvist mastered even the most advanced interrogation techniques, and it was generally agreed that her phenomenal ability to read body language was invaluable. However, these evident strengths were offset by a number of equally apparent weaknesses.

The instructors described her as insufferably arrogant.

The recruit seems to believe that she knows better than everyone else. Insists on arguing about everything. EVERYTHING!

The quote was not the only instance of the instructors allowing their personal frustrations to shine through in the individual evaluation of Nadia Elmkvist, and that was precisely what had initially made Conrad suspect the instructors of allowing their fear of making a mistake to outweigh the possibility of uncovering a unique potential when selecting recruits.

He opened the folder after all and gazed at his own small jottings:

Tactic: Keep on a short leash.

Conrad knocked and entered without waiting for a reply.

‘Good morning, folks,’ he said and tossed his folders onto the table. ‘I’m aware that you still have two hours left, but I’d like to hear what you’ve got so far. Who’s our offender?’

He had expected objections or perhaps even protests, but Nadia immediately pointed at a whiteboard covered in writing and said:

‘He—because it is, of course, a male—is between twenty and thirty-five years old and has lived a relatively normal life until a pressing need for money forces him to resort to crime. He’s disorganised and cautious by nature, as well as extremely isolated socially, which suggests that he has little or no connection to the job market. He’s also in relatively good physical shape.’

Conrad glanced at the notes he had made when reviewing the case last night. The answer Nadia had just reeled off was spot on, and his initial impulse was to deliver the good news immediately, but they were missing one piece—the most important one—so he restrained himself and said:

‘Could you explain how you reached those conclusions?’

‘We base his age primarily on available statistics on home invasion robberies, but it is corroborated by the physical strength that is presumably required to carry out a robbery without any weapons,’ Stefan answered.

‘And what makes you think that he’s socially isolated?’

‘Robbers often work alone,’ Nadia replied. ‘But I’ve reviewed a large-scale study of home invasion robberies and not one of them was committed by a single offender. This guy robs alone because he is alone.’

The answer was concise but also a bit categorical, so Conrad decided to challenge her a bit.

‘According to FBI analyses, the increase in home invasion robberies can partly be attributed to the fact that it has become less risky to break into private homes when the residents are present, so how do you know he isn’t a former burglar who is simply tired of alarms and surveillance cameras?’

‘If he were, he probably would have found the money in the freezer.’

Conrad couldn’t decide whether her answer was confident or downright cocky, but once again she was right. The freezer was exactly the kind of place where people hid their money in the belief that a burglar would never think to look there—which, naturally, an experienced burglar knew.

‘What are your grounds for claiming that he’s disorganised?’

This time, Bjørn answered:

‘The development in his methodology suggests that he’s improvising. The first time, he rings the doorbell, but when the victim tries to shut the door, he realises he needs the element of surprise, so he starts smashing windows instead. He also realises that it’s a good idea to have something handy to tie up the victims with and that he has to search the place if he wants a bigger haul. These are all things he could have figured out beforehand if he had thought through even just the most obvious scenarios, but instead he jumps right into it, gradually fine-tuning his technique as he learns from his mistakes.’

Conrad noted that Ekholt appeared relatively confident during his account, but given that he was simply summarising what the group had figured out together, it was too early to celebrate.

‘That sounds reasonable,’ he said. ‘But you also claim he’s cautious by nature. How does that fit with simply jumping into a home invasion robbery?’

Stefan hesitated for only a moment before delivering the answer:

‘We derive his cautiousness from the fact that he hides the car some distance away and doesn’t bring along the rope that could be traced back to him. That means he’s aware of the risks he’s taking but decides to go through with it anyway, which is why we suspect that he must be in desperate need of money. Otherwise, he quite simply wouldn’t do it.’

‘The only thing we can’t explain is his apparently unmotivated physical attack on Ove Sigvardsson,’ said Nadia.

A distant look came over her.

‘That and his silence, of course.’

Conrad perked up his ears. Personally, he was convinced that this was the most significant characteristic in the profile.

Nadia went on:

‘Even I, who believes that you can communicate pretty much everything using body language, have to admit that it would be easier for him to complete his mission if he could order his victims around with words, but he doesn’t, and if we knew why, we would have him. Either there is something very distinctive about his speech—a stutter, lisp, accent or something else that, if made public, would quickly send the police in his direction—or he knows the victims personally.’

She shrugged.

‘The answer depends on how he selects his victims, and that’s not something we can determine on the basis of the material we’ve been given access to.’

Conrad looked down at his notepad.

The victim profile is key, he had written just before gathering his papers to come up here. He could no longer remember why he had been in doubt. Of course his recruits would figure it out.

As Conrad Løwe was eliminating point by point his prior reservations about the impending Härnösand adventure, Nadia, meanwhile, began to wonder what his personal tutelage of the recruits was really about.

When Løwe first burst in on their session, she had hoped it was because there was news in the case—that the police in Härnösand had found a connection between the victims or, even better, tracked down the offender so they could establish whether their theories were right—but if so, surely he would have told them right away, and when she saw the way he now covered his lower face with his hand in an attempt to hide a smile, she asked herself what the hell he was doing here.

The answer came a moment later when he laid out three green folders in front of him and said:

‘I’ve come to give you your final evaluations. You’ll have them sent to you as well, of course, but I want to run through the most important points.’

‘Right now? In the middle of our case session?’ Nadia exclaimed, but Løwe appeared not to hear her.

He spent the next ten minutes dissecting Stefan and then Bjørn, and based on what Nadia had witnessed over the past two hours, his assessments were so dead on that she felt an unfamiliar hint of nervousness when he pulled out the last folder and said:

‘And then there’s you, Nadia.’

Still without looking in her direction, he took a dramatic pause before adding:

‘One could naturally ask oneself whether it is even relevant to train female profilers when 99% of crimes requiring an offender profile are committed by men.’

Nadia grinned at the blatant provocation:

‘You mean it takes one to know one. If that were the case, surely the Academy should have recruited at prisons rather than police stations.’

For the first time since Løwe entered the room, he looked straight at Nadia, and even though she hadn’t said anything wrong, the intense anger in his grey eyes made her bite her tongue and look down. Of course women were able to see through men and their motives. It had been necessary since the dawn of time.

‘Your evaluation warned me that you were arrogant, bordering on insufferable, but that right there…’

He shook his head.

‘You make me seriously consider whether I’ve made a mistake.’

‘A mistake?’ Bjørn exclaimed.

Nadia could hear the hope in his voice.

‘To get straight to the point, I’ve taken it upon myself to uncover whether the three of you—despite your apparent weaknesses—are worth spending a bit more time on.’

Løwe’s upper lip twitched oddly at the words ‘taken it upon myself’, and Nadia wished she knew how to interpret that slight tic. He was not one of the instructors, so she only knew him as the grey eminence who oversaw everything from behind the scenes, but if she had to describe him in one word, she would definitely say gruff. Then again, perhaps there just wasn’t much to smile about when you had spent most of your life in the company of death, mutilation and human evil in its purest form.

He now continued:

‘Specifically, I want to offer you the chance to continue working on the case in Härnösand.’

‘Are you serious?’ asked Bjørn.

Løwe nodded.

‘As soon as we’re finished here, I’ll clear it with your respective superiors, and if they don’t have any objections, I’ll go ahead and book the tickets. I’ll travel ahead to meet with the local police commissioner and take care of all the practical details while you go home and pack, and if all goes according to plan, we’ll meet at the airport in Sundsvall next Sunday afternoon.’

Once again, he looked directly at Nadia:

‘But I don’t intend to waste my time, so if any of you have the slightest doubts as to whether you are willing and able to go into this wholeheartedly, now is the time to back out. Is that clear?’

Nadia’s first impulse was to say no.

Was this even what she wanted? A life full of death, mutilation and human evil in its purest form. A life that would convince her there was nothing to smile about?

Her eyes fell on the green folder in front Løwe.

Arrogant, bordering on insufferable.

Well, in any case, there would be plenty of reason to smile once she had shown Conrad Løwe & Co. just how wrong they were.

Already on the plane to Stockholm, Nadia had an odd sense of travelling into a world where humans were only temporarily tolerated. Occasionally the snow-clad treetops gave way to reveal tiny clusters of red buildings and fenced-in pastures, but even from this altitude they were few and far between, and she had a feeling that if the humans who lived in the houses down there turned their backs for even a second, the forest would immediately close in on itself and obliterate their teeny-tiny fingerprints on the landscape.

The flight was delayed, so she had to run straight to the Sundsvall gate, where Bjørn and Stefan were waiting, and now she sat with her forehead against the cool window, catching her breath while the plane lifted off. It wasn’t even three o’clock, but the sun had already set, leaving a neon pink fracture in the horizon. Below her, Stockholm was aglow in yellow, and the red and green twinkling of taillights and traffic signals made the city look like a magic treasure chest.

She could really use a smoke.

‘Did you know there are ninety-eight billion trees in Sweden?’ said Bjørn.

He had specifically requested the aisle seat, and judging by the way he gripped the armrests, it probably wasn’t because of the extra legroom.

‘I believe it,’ Nadia said. ‘What does that amount to? Almost ten thousand trees per inhabitant?’

‘Good thing it’s a criminal and not a tree we have to find, then,’ said Stefan. ‘I’ve never been to Härnösand, but I believe it’s one of the places with the most. Trees, that is. I think the crime rate is the same as in the rest of the country.’

He let out a small sigh and added:

‘One might have hoped for a case with a bit more substance to it.’

‘The more I think about it, the more disconcerting I find it, actually,’ Bjørn said.

‘Disconcerting?’ asked Stefan. ‘We’ve had cases where the offender removed his victims’ organs while they were alive or tied them up and fed them to rats.’

‘Yes, but that was in America, and both those instances were related to gang wars that the victims were involved in themselves. This, on the other hand, is something that could happen to anyone.’

‘Statistically, the chance of being robbed in one’s own home is miniscule, at least here in Scandinavia,’ said Stefan.

‘But it exists, and that’s enough,’ Bjørn replied. He paused and then added:

‘Haven’t you ever lain in a dark bedroom, holding your breath until the footsteps out in the stairwell passed your floor? Or stood behind a curtain staring out at the shadows in the garden, convinced that just a moment ago one of them moved?’

Stefan said nothing, which was answer enough for Nadia. Of course he had.

‘A home is the closest thing we have to a piece of the world we can consider ours, and just the thought of someone violating that place makes us vulnerable,’ she said.

At that moment, the plane veered abruptly to the right, and Bjørn’s frozen expression made her wish she could put her hand on his, but seeing as she had wangled herself the window seat, that would require her reaching across Stefan, which Bjørn definitely would not take well.

Once the plane had reached its cruising altitude, Bjørn and Stefan put on headphones and Nadia stared down at the scattered patches of light below.

What would it be like to stand outside a house like that with a dark mask over your face?

She closed her eyes and let herself sink into the scenario:

A blue door in a white frame. The mask was tight and warm across her face, and her hand trembled lightly with adrenaline as she reached towards the doorbell. What was waiting on the other side? A frail old woman or redneck hulk? The uncertainty made her throat constrict and…

Nadia interrupted her chain of thought.

The night before, she had sat down and reviewed the written evaluation from the Academy. She had gone through the instructors’ critique point by point and created a mental list of things she would have to work on if she wanted the last laugh. Lack of empathy with the victims was one of the points, and yet here she was, once again trying to envision the situation from the perspective of the offender.

‘More coffee?’

Nadia turned and nodded to the flight attendant.

Stefan had fallen asleep with his head dangling and arms folded across his chest, so Nadia placed her cup on the tray the attendant reached across him, but just when she had added the milk, an abrupt snore sounded from the middle seat, and she saw, as though in slow motion, how a twitch caused Stefan’s elbow to hit the tray. The next second, she felt a hot sting down one arm and across her chest.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled, half asleep.

As though that helped. Resembling a mature and reasonably put-together individual was such a given that she hadn’t even considered adding it to her list.

The flight attendant returned with a stack of little napkins you usually got with your aeroplane peanuts.

‘Could I also get something cold to put on it?’ Nadia asked once she had absorbed as much as possible with the doll-sized napkins.

Fortunately, it was only her shirt that had taken a hit. Copenhagen had been crisp but not cold that morning, so she had packed her warm coat in her suitcase and was travelling in a thin leather jacket. If she kept it zipped up until they got to the hotel, no one would realise she was one big stain underneath.

Once the attendant had given Nadia a can of Coke and Stefan had settled back into his uncomfortable sleeping position, she gave it another go.

Now she saw a woman, thin and getting on in years, standing behind a closed door. The woman lifted her hand and turned the lock, but just as her fingers grasped the handle, the door was shoved in with considerable force. A man with a black mask over his face forced his way into the hall. He said nothing, just grabbed her upper arm and…

Nadia shook her head.

She honestly couldn’t see how this was supposed to help them catch the offender.

Meanwhile, in Härnösand, Hampus was in the police station’s changing room after a shift that, apart from issuing a speeding ticket to some idiot who had crossed the bridge at eighty kilometres an hour and twice separating the rivalling gangs of Romanian beggars at the central station, had been spent crisscrossing the county to follow up on those of the evening’s emergency calls where the dispatcher had deemed immediate response unnecessary. In all cases, it had been loose drainpipes, low-hanging branches and the like that had convinced residents that the silent robber was sneaking into their homes.

‘I heard they’re coming tonight,’ said Micke.

They were the same age and had known each other since school, but Micke’s pale, slightly bulging eyes and constant restlessness still made Hampus think of a fish that constantly has to keep moving so as not to be swept along by the current.

Micke continued:

‘Jennifer says they need someone to go along to interrogations and that sort of thing, and I was thinking about asking Annika whether I could be considered. Who knows—if I do well, I might have a shot at being accepted onto the next team.’

His long, slender fingers tugged at one of the buttons on his uniform shirt, but then he stopped mid-button, overcome by a dreamy look.

‘Profiler… that would be quite something.’

‘What? What would it be?’

‘You know, cool, or… Don’t you ever think about how great it would be to make a real difference? Hunting serial killers rather than shoplifters?’

Hampus thought about it.

‘No,’ he replied and put away his uniform in his locker before heading up to Annika Persson’s office.

She was standing by the window. Instead of her normal jeans and shirt, she was dressed in a blue, tailored dress, and when Hampus got closer he could see that she had also smeared something blue on her eyelids. Maybe she always looked like that on Sundays.

‘I hadn’t expected to see you here,’ she said and narrowed her eyes slightly, making the blue make-up look even more surreal.

‘What do you mean?’

She sat down and crossed her legs, and Hampus noticed that a run on one of them made it look as though a long worm were making its way across her knee.

‘Practically every single officer at the station has stopped by my office to tell me they want the chance to learn something about offender profiling, but I hadn’t expected you to be among the volunteers.’

‘I’m not. Hasse says you’re the one who has taken me off the shift plan as of tomorrow, and I just wanted to know why.’

She blinked a few times as though trying to redirect her thoughts down a different track.

‘Have a seat.’

Hampus sat down.

‘I’ve spent the afternoon with Conrad Løwe, who is in charge of the three recruits who are going to help us with the home invasion robberies, and, among other things, we discussed how the cooperation will work in practice. They will obviously be working closely with Per, Jennifer and the other detectives, but they will also need what you could call a liaison.’

She paused, and in the silence Hampus could hear Micke’s laughter from Jennifer’s office. Someone ought to tell him that she wasn’t interested.

Finally she told him: ‘Conrad Løwe requested you specifically.’

‘Me? How come?’

The corners of Annika’s mouth pulled down and back slightly, like a predator about to bare its teeth, but the look in her eyes was not angry—more like sad, or apologetic.

‘For starters, you were the first officer to arrive on two of the crime scenes, but…’ She paused once more before continuing: ‘Conrad Løwe was particularly interested in how you managed to figure out that the Sigvardssons’ farm would be the offender’s next target.’

‘But I told you, I can’t explain it.’

Annika swivelled in her chair and retrieved a thick brown envelope from the low bookcase behind her.

‘I’ve given you access to the folder on the shared drive with material on the case, but here’s a print-out of the most important documents as well. Happy reading.’

The wind had picked up, carrying with it a damp chill all the way from the Gulf of Bothnia, and it nipped at Hampus’s skin and made his face stiffen on the short trip from the garage to the cabin. It had already been dark for several hours, so instead of walking Seb right away, he just let him run around outside for a little while. Hopefully, the wind would die down a bit while he cooked his dinner and ate.

He took out the eggs and cracked the first one against the edge of a bowl. The shell broke, sending small, hard flecks down into the slippery softness; impossible to pick out.

While he emptied the fridge of anything that might make the omelette taste of something besides egg, he thought of Annika’s envelope. He had left it on the corner of the table in the living room, but once the food was done, he moved the envelope over to the chest of drawers, so he wouldn’t have to look it while he ate. It was no use.

Eventually, he opened it.

On top of the pile was a ‘Memorandum on the joint Scandinavian Academy for Offender Profiling’. He skimmed through the headings, which consisted of the usual meaningless words—‘Objectives’, ‘Organisation’, ‘Jurisdiction’ and ‘Evaluation’—and didn’t stop until he came across a page containing short CVs for each of the three recruits at the end of the brief.

Good grief.

It was like a show of political correctness:

A Norwegian, a Swede and a Dane.

One black and two white.

Two men and one woman. Or girl, rather. The Danish recruit, Nadia Elmkvist, did not appear to be a day over twenty.

There was a mathematician, a lab technician and an anthropologist; none of them had any police training, and, naturally, they lived in Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen respectively.

Great.

Hampus decided to call Annika and tell it like it was—that he quite simply could not see the point of cooperating with these people—but just as he was about to return the brief to the pile, he noticed a few lines on the page underneath. The report from the first robbery.

Hampus had been on duty that evening, and when the alarm came in, he had been wandering the roadside along Ramsåsvägen looking for an elk that had supposedly been hit by a car. He therefore arrived on site just fifteen minutes later. At that point, Kerstin Ohlsson was still in such shock that she kept repeating the same words over and over again:

Right here in my home. He was right here.

It took a cup of coffee and half a cheroot to get her to explain what had happened:

She had been watching television when the doorbell rang. She hadn’t been expecting anyone but assumed it was the neighbour, who was often nice enough to bring down her mail from the main road, so she opened up without attaching the door chain. Outside stood a man. He was tall, dressed in dark clothing and wearing a black mask that left nothing but a pair of brown eyes visible. Before she had time to react, he jammed his foot in the door. He said nothing; merely pushed her back into the hallway, closed the door behind him and locked it.

I asked him what he wanted, but he didn’t answer. When he signalled that it was my money he was after, I was so relieved I started to cry.

Those were the words that had caught Hampus’s eye. He had written them down himself, but now that he reread these few lines, he realised why this particular case bothered him so much. The fear the offender left in his victims was completely disproportionate to what the robberies yielded.

Kerstin Ohlsson had lived on that farm for more than forty years, at first with a husband and children and then alone, but already that night she had talked about moving into town because she doubted she would ever feel safe there again.

And for what?

A measly 450 kronor in cash and a credit card the offender hadn’t attempted to use.

Hampus read through the entire report, and once he was finished, three other words remained with him.

Then he left.

It was as if that sentence pinpointed the very thing he had been trying to make sense of ever since that night out at the Sigvardssons. One evening in early December, the offender had rung a doorbell and, once he got what he came for, simply walked off again. A week later, Hampus had sat on a tile floor pushing both hands against a deep gash in Ove Sigvardsson’s head. The door to the utility room had been unlocked; the offender could have walked right in, but instead he had broken a several-square-metre windowpane. Sigvardsson had immediately offered him his money, and he had nearly beaten his victim to death nonetheless.

Why?

Hampus nudged Seb, who had put his head on his knee, probably as a reminder that he was still owed a walk, but when Hampus came back after having retrieved a notepad from the back room, the dog had slinked into its basket.

A few hours later, Hampus stood in the front hall trying to fasten a headlamp around his head while Seb performed his usual wagging dance about his legs.

It would be a hassle to drive back and forth to walk the dog if they ended up working late, and he probably ought to move into the flat until this whole ordeal was over, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that doing so would be the same as giving up; an acknowledgement that she was never coming back.

Maybe he could convince his sister to drive by after work and walk Seb.

Once he had switched on the lamp and shoved his hands into the big gloves, they headed out. It was still windy, but as soon as the quiet of the forest descended on his thoughts, he enjoyed the walk just as much as Seb did.

He had always loved walking in a dark forest. In the daylight, eyes became greedy; they wanted to see everything at once. But when only a small section was lifted out of the darkness, it was as though you saw everything in a whole new way; clear-cut and simple. The nuances emerged: trees so misshapen by wind and weather you could hardly believe they belonged to the same species and a terrain that cast long shadows moulded by the ice that had once traversed the soft earth, heavily and infinitely slowly.

There had been a moment when he believed that the answers to his questions were hidden somewhere in those papers, but the more he read, the flatter and more irrelevant it all became. It was as though the words had nothing to do with reality, and were he to base his theory on the reports alone, he would hardly dare claim that the robberies had been committed by the same offender, even though he was certain that was the case. Surely Annika would understand that he was of far more use in the police car.

Now that he had hauled along the rifle, there was naturally no trace of any wolves, but Hampus noticed that Seb kept close. He zigzagged in and out of the beam of light and turned around several times, sending heavy clouds of warm breath in Hampus’s direction, as if checking to make sure he was still there.

They walked all the way out to the solitary grand fir, and when they got back, he was decided. Surely Annika would not insist if he threatened to quit.

His phone was charging in the kitchen. When he pulled it out of the plug, the screen lit up to reveal a new message:

You are to show up in plain clothes at Sjögården Bed & Breakfast tomorrow at 9 a.m., and I expect you to be obliging and cooperative in every way. Sincerely Annika.

Jörgen Sjödin drew back the curtain and looked out the window.

Nothing.

A little while ago, when he switched off the TV, he had returned his hearing aids to their small, velvet-lined box so he would know where to find them tomorrow, and yet he was certain there had been a sound.

He let go of the curtain and returned to the armchair, where the battered copy of his favourite novel was waiting, but he barely managed to find the place he had left off before he heard something once again.

It was always such a pain to get the little devices inserted into his ear, but this time he succeeded on the first try, after which all was silent. Or as silent as things got in an old wooden house when freezing winds are blowing in from the east, gaining considerable speed on the big pasture before ramming against the gable wall.

Then he heard it again.

This time he turned off the lights in the living room before pulling the curtain aside, and now he thought he saw a faint shadow streak across the barn, but his eyes weren’t what they had been either, and his reading glasses were still perched on his nose.

Jörgen had lived alone for nearly thirty years. It wasn’t as though the offers of company had come pouring in after his wife’s death, but he had quickly realised that he liked it that way. He had grown fond of the quiet mornings when he would stick his bare feet into his boots and step outside to awaken both body and soul with a big gulp of fresh air, and he couldn’t imagine giving up the lovely evening hours where he would round off the day in peace and quiet with a good book.

Apart from December 2003 when a storm had snapped the trees all around him like matchsticks, he could not recall ever having been afraid in this house, and he was not afraid now. Even so, he had to admit, it was damn noisy out there tonight.