JÄGARASEN, VÄSTMANLAND COUNTY
Blood roaring in her ears, Detective Inspector Stella Cole pointed the snub-nosed pistol at the Internal Affairs chief.
Without the duct-tape bindings, Assistant Police Commissioner Nik Olsson would have collapsed at her feet.
But there he stood, pinned in place between two parallel stacks of wooden crates, arms outspread across their tops. Waiting for death like a cow in a slaughterhouse killing pen.
He raised his head. In his bloodshot eyes she read a beseeching gaze. Don’t do it.
His face was as pale as a corpse’s. In just a few seconds, the gun barrel pushed against his cheek would discharge its lethal load and then there would be no face at all.
‘Please,’ he croaked.
Shutting out Nik’s pleas, she tightened her finger on the trigger.
Then she fired.
***
STOCKHOLM, FOUR MONTHS EARLIER
The party was into its second hour. They were celebrating closing a case – a gangland hit – and then the murder squad’s door opened.
As heads turned, the murmur of disgusted voices rippled beneath the disco beat issuing from a sound system someone had borrowed from the media briefing centre.
Stella looked up as Nikodemus Olsson entered the press of bodies.
His entrance was as unwelcome as it was unexpected – for who would invite the head of Avdelningen för särskilda utredningar, the Special Investigations Division AKA Internal Affairs AKA ‘the Rat Squad’ to a detectives’ party?
The atmosphere dimmed perceptibly, the way a spring day in Stockholm could be rendered winter again as lowering storm clouds obscured the sun.
But Nik, thin of frame, clean of jaw, eyes burning with the zeal of a mediaeval witchfinder, could withstand much greater forces than those ranged against him now. His thin lips curved into a smile as he made his way to the drinks table, actually two desks cleared of paperwork and pushed against the wall.
He cracked the tab on a can of Diet Coke. Took a cautious sip as if even a sugar-free drink might offer him too much pleasure. Then threaded his way to where Stella was standing.
She had been talking to Jonna, her friend and assistant. But Jonna had been whisked off to dance by a younger detective. Micki Gustafsson was new, a replacement for a once-promising young detective named Tilde.
Micki, bless him, hadn’t worked out that Jonna was gay. Stella grinned as she watched him trying his best moves on her assistant, who favoured Stella with a wink over Micki’s shoulder.
Standing just a little too close, Nik looked down at Stella. He shifted his gaze to the can of lager in her right hand.
‘You’re enjoying the party, I see.’
From any other officer in the station, the remark would have been a harmless observation. To be taken at face value. They might be holding a bottle themselves, or a shot glass brimming with aquavit.
But from Nik, the nearest thing the SPA had to a bone fide puritan, the simple six-word sentence was freighted with layer upon layer of meaning. None of it pleasant.
—You’ve been drinking alcohol on SPA property. Not an offence but a lapse in judgment.
—Maybe you have a problem with drink. Don’t worry. A lot of officers do.
—I myself prefer to keep a clear head.
—Because I’m a moralising prick with a broomstick up his arse.
Stella grinned. Oops. That last thought most certainly wasn’t Nik’s. She nodded at the silver can in his smooth, pink-skinned hand with its perfectly manicured nails.
‘You want to go easy on those, Nik,’ she said, irritated that her voice was slurring, just a little. ‘I read somewhere that those artificial sweeteners give you cancer.’
He sniffed. Then leaned closer, until his face was so close to hers she could see the individual pores on his sharp-ridged nose.
‘I know what you think, Stella. You’re the golden girl. Or, what do they call you? The Queen of Weirdness? Fluent in Swedish. A star detective. We’re lucky to have you. All that. You think your clearance rate means you’re armour-plated. That your past won’t catch up with you. But believe me when I say that I am looking very closely at you.’ He sipped from his can of Diet Coke. ‘Roisin Griffin didn’t come all this way on some hunch. I’ve been talking to some people in London and I am starting to piece together a very disturbing picture of certain … events … that happened before you left.’
At the mention of Roisin’s name, it was Stella’s turn to recoil. The Northern Irish detective inspector had been a member of her team at the Met. Talented, hard-working, but, ultimately, overambitious. And, finally, corrupt, selling information on cases to a sleazy reporter from the Sun to further her career and damage Stella’s. It hadn’t worked, and, in the end, Roisin’s envy had cost her her life.
Nik closed the gap once more, backing Stella against her own desk. His eyes burned.
‘I already told you about Rosh,’ Stella stammered. ‘She was obsessed.’
Nik pushed his face into hers.
‘Do you know what Franz Kafka said about obsession, Stella?’ he hissed. ‘He said “Don’t bend. Don’t water it down. Don’t try to make it logical. Don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” I think that’s what Roisin was doing. And I intend to discover where her obsession would have taken her.’
‘Get to hell, Nik,’ she snapped, pushing him away from her.
‘Oh! I see. We’re back to using violence, are we?’ he said, overloud, so that a few nearby cops turned their heads to see who was getting into it. ‘Well, maybe you’ve had too much to drink. We don’t want to fall back into our old ways, do we?’
So he’d dug up her old medical records. Bastard. She had to bite down a caustic reply threatening to burst free from her lips.
If Nik had left it there, the evening might have ended more or less peaceably. Just a bunch of very drunk cops spilling out of SPA headquarters onto Kungsholmsgatan, heading for a curry house or a bar. But Nik, even more than Roisin, was not one to rule his obsessions. He let them rule him. Knelt before them: a willing servant before his master.
‘It’s not your fault,’ he said, more emolliently. ‘I mean, losing your husband and baby daughter to a hit and run. Well,’ he smiled unpleasantly, ‘that would be enough to turn anyone away from righteousness. I suppose we should be grateful that this time it’s only alcohol you’re abusing, and not pills.’
Stella was not conscious of reaching to her right. Her hands were already flat on the desk behind her. Supporting her as she leaned backwards to avoid having to inhale Nik’s signature scent: soap-and-sanctimony. It would feel, later, as she replayed the events in her head, that her hand had moved of its own volition.
Either way, it came up gripping a pistol.
As time slowed down, troubling thoughts chased each other through Stella’s head.
Was it wise to point a gun at an assistant police commissioner?
Probably not. No, strike that. Most definitely, assuredly, not.
And if said APC was Nik Olsson?
Make that a bank of red lights. Accompanied by blaring sirens and a blue-and-white striped barrier pole clanging down into a steel support.
With a feeling of unreality, heightened by the cans of Oppigårds Grim lager she’d consumed, Stella considered Nik’s face, disfigured by a flinch so total every feature seemed to be screaming at its neighbour to get out of the way.
Jonna was there, hands upraised. ‘Stella! Put the gun down!’
Her expression, mouth open, blue eyes wide, was enough to shock Stella back into herself again.
She’d been ready to shoot Nik in the face. Or had she? Her finger lay alongside the trigger guard, not curled round the trigger itself. Yeah, because that excuse would fly. She’d broken a cardinal rule of gun safety.
Seized with a fit of shaking, she lowered her arm, and let Jonna uncurl her fingers from the pistol’s grip. With the gun safe in her friend’s hands, Stella collapsed back against the desk. Her legs were trembling and sparks were flying round the periphery of her vision.
Nobody spoke. Taylor Swift still blared from a speaker until someone snapped off the music.
And then, a triumphant smirk on his face, into which the colour had returned, Nikodemus Olsson, Assistant Police Commissioner and head of the Rat Squad, arrested Stella.
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