The Night Singer

Book 1: The Island Murders

by Johanna Mo

Genres: Thrillers; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

You've got no idea what you're dredging up. You're going to ruin everything.

The past is not going to stay buried in this unputdownable crime novel, the first in a series featuring Detective Hanna Duncker. Fans of Ragnar Jonasson and Ann Cleeves will be gripped by this moving and atmospheric crime novel, already a bestseller in Sweden.

Hanna Duncker has returned to the remote island she spent her childhood on and to the past that saw her father convicted for murder. In a cruel twist of fate her new boss is the policeman who put him behind bars.

On her first day on the job as the new detective, Hanna is called to a crime scene. The fifteen-year-old son of her former best friend has been found dead and Hanna is thrown into a complex investigation set to stir up old ghosts.

Not everyone is happy to have the daughter of Lars Duncker back in town. Hanna soon realises that she will have to watch her back as she turns over every stone to find the person responsible...

(P) 2021 Headline Publishing Group Ltd

Release date: August 3, 2021

Publisher: Penguin Books

Print pages: 448

Sample

the last day

Four more steps, then he turns around again. He doesn’t trust the silence behind him. All he can hear is the chirping of the bush crickets. No engines, no birds. He misses the night singer. Its high, fast song keeping the darkness at bay.

A shadow by the edge of the road makes him jump, sending a wave of pain from his broken rib.

It’s just a bush.

The darkness is full of shapes dancing around him—faster, closer—making it harder to breathe. Could his broken rib have damaged his lung?

Finally he sees the light. A tiny dot that slowly grows to a square as he approaches. His head is pounding, nausea washing over him, making the light waver, but he tries to fix his eyes on it. That is where he needs to go.

His legs give way, and he drops to his knees, breaking his fall with his hands. The sharp taste of bile fills his mouth. It feels like someone has rammed a fist into his chest and started rummaging around inside.

Staying right there on the ground feels incredibly tempting, but he is so close now.

He crawls back onto his feet and staggers forward. He hears something crunch behind him. Footsteps? No, it can’t be—it must be an animal.

He pauses, noticing movement in the light. His eyes take in what he is seeing, but it’s like they don’t want to pass it on.

Why?

The question tears at him, at the ground beneath him. Everything feels like it is about to crumble.

 

1

Hanna Duncker followed the gravel path down to the wrought-iron gate, which creaked in protest as she pushed it open. The list of things that needed repairing was getting longer and longer. She had moved into the little white house with the blue corner panels just over a month earlier and, like Kleva, the small hamlet it stood on the outskirts of, it was tiny—under fifty square meters in total. Hanna had grown up on the other side of the island, in eastern Öland, but moving back there had never been an option. If she did, she would forever be nothing but Lars Duncker’s daughter.

Lars had finally drunk himself to death last autumn, and it was while Hanna was clearing out her childhood home, alone, that she had realized what she wanted. Driving over the bridge for the first time in years had woken a powerful sense of longing in her, a longing for everything she had been missing in Stockholm. Öland was where she belonged.

Buying a house that needed so much work wasn’t something she had really thought through, but it had been the best place available within her budget. Once she had made the decision to come back to the island, she hadn’t been patient enough to let the process drag on. Within the space of just three weeks, she had sold her apartment on the outskirts of Stockholm, bought the house, and found herself a new job.

Only then had she called her brother, Kristoffer, in London. He had reacted more or less exactly how she had expected him to.

There’s something seriously wrong with you, he had hissed.

They hadn’t spoken since. Yes, she had spat out a few harsh words herself. There was just so much pent-up anger between them. Over the fact that he hadn’t come to the funeral, or the fact that he had left it to her to draw up an inventory and empty the house they had grown up in. There was only a year between them, and for a while they had almost been like twins.

From the very first morning in the new house, Hanna had developed a ritual: she walked the seven hundred meters down to the beach. After fifty or so meters, she passed Ingrid’s gray stone house, which had to be at least twice the size of her own.

This morning she saw Ingrid on the swinging seat in the garden, eyes closed. Silver hair and wrinkled skin, a blanket draped over her legs. The resemblance to Hanna’s grandmother was striking. Granny spent her days doing much the same, now that the haze of forgetfulness had enveloped her.

Hanna tried to sneak past without the old woman noticing her—she wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone right now, not even Ingrid—but Ingrid’s eyes snapped open and the resemblance was gone. Her eyes were dark brown, not greenish blue like Granny’s, and there was a pronounced alertness in them. She had probably come outside specifically to wait for Hanna. The views were better on the other side of the house, where the ruler-straight fields stretched out into the distance. On this side, the landscape was flat and rough, and would likely be developed before long. But Ingrid was more interested in her neighbors than in the countryside.

The blanket dropped to the ground as she got up and took a few steps forward.

“Hello,” she said. “Big day today.”

Hanna nodded. It was her first day as an investigator with the Kalmar police. She would be investigating serious crimes across Kalmar County, which also covered the east of Småland and the whole of Öland. Her new boss, Ove Hultmark, had decided to ease her in as gently as possible by having her start on a Wednesday.

Why had he hired her, considering their history? Hanna still couldn’t make sense of it, and that made her uneasy: Was there something going on that she didn’t understand?

“Just don’t cause a fuss, and you’ll be fine,” Ingrid told her.

In her eyes, causing a fuss was about the worst thing a person could do.

A few days after Hanna moved in, Ingrid had knocked on her door with a box of freshly baked biscuits. Hanna had tried to keep their conversation in the doorway, but Ingrid had invited herself in, asking for a cup of tea to drink with the biscuits. Black tea, nothing too floral or funny. When she saw the mess inside, she had snorted: So, this is what you didn’t want me to see? Ingrid’s bluntness had brought Hanna’s walls crashing down. Her grandmother had been exactly the same, and Hanna knew she probably wouldn’t have survived without her.

Within the space of just a few minutes, Ingrid had told Hanna all about her life. Hanna knew that her surname was Mattsson and that, after years of longing, she had finally given birth to a son when she was thirty-six years old. That he now ran the farm she had inherited from her father. That she had three grandchildren, and that the two eldest were at the university, in Linköping and Umeå. That the youngest was a much later addition, an eleven-year-old with Down syndrome. That Ingrid had a troublesome hip. By contrast, Hanna had revealed her own surname only at Ingrid’s direct request.

Does that make you Lars’s daughter? Ingrid had asked.

Hanna had nodded, and the topic had never come up again since. For a moment, however, Ingrid’s brown eyes had been full of compassion. Perhaps Hanna should follow Kristoffer’s example and change her name. He was a Baxter now, like his wife. But Hanna didn’t want to do that; she hadn’t done anything wrong.

“What are you doing today?” Hanna asked.

“It’s Wednesday,” said Ingrid. “I always take the bus to Mörbylånga and have a bit of a flutter on the V86.” Seeing Hanna’s blank face, she added: “Harness racing.”

Hanna excused herself, telling Ingrid she had an appointment she had to keep, and continued down the path toward Kleva strandväg. To date, there were only two houses on the little strip of land by the road down to the water. A family with young children lived in one of them, but the other seemed to be empty. Perhaps its owners used it as a summerhouse. Ingrid had spent much of her second visit to Hanna’s house going through the various inhabitants of Kleva—there were no more than thirty of them in total—but she hadn’t said much about the people living on the coastal road. In fact, she had spent most of the time talking about Jörgen, the Stockholmer who had moved to the island with his wife a few years earlier, and liked to complain about everything from the horse dung on the road to the people who let their houses fall into disrepair.

What a damn moaner, Ingrid had said. I’m not going to replace things that work perfectly well just because some grumpy mainlander tells me to. Despite the years Hanna had spent living in the capital, Ingrid still thought of her as an islander. And according to Ingrid, she was a welcome arrival. She was a police officer, after all.

---

•   •   •

For Hanna, the road down to the beach characterized Öland: a ruler-straight gravel track flanked by grain fields. Small, straggling forage maize crops, and some other plant she didn’t recognize. The weeds in the ditches were so high that the low stone walls were almost entirely obscured from view. A few hundred meters ahead, the trees were like a promise of something better. Beyond them, the Kalmar Strait.

The trees slowly drew closer, and the tang of fertilizer gave way to pine and seaweed. Hanna tipped back her head and let the wind caress her face. She had missed this. In Stockholm, she had lived her life in a cramped five-story building surrounded by people she knew nothing about. On Öland, she felt like she could breathe.

After another few meters, the strait appeared like a streak of blue between the trees, growing with every step she took. The gravel track opened out onto a small parking lot, and Hanna cut through it, turning south and ignoring the beach. It wasn’t quite swimming season yet, and it was still early in the morning, but she didn’t want to risk bumping into anyone. She saw an elderly man and his Labrador walking toward her, and nodded in greeting.

Maybe she should get a dog. Yes, she would be at work all day, but she suspected Ingrid would be more than happy to look after it. For an eighty-one-year-old, she was still incredibly active; the problem with her hip was barely noticeable.

But no. Hanna didn’t even like dogs. Besides, her loneliness felt less tangible here on the island, despite the fact that she hadn’t really spoken to anyone but Ingrid. There was no one in Stockholm she would stay in touch with. Definitely not Fabian.

Hanna followed the path a little farther before pausing to look out at the Kalmar Strait. She breathed in the scent of seaweed and salt air. The wind had bent the trees inward, and there was an upturned rowboat on the ground beside her, the white paint scraped off along its hull. She actually preferred the view from the other side of the island: the sea blending with the horizon, seemingly never-ending. From where she was standing now, she could make out the mainland on the other side. Ingrid wasn’t alone in thinking that most of the island’s problems stemmed from the mainland, and she also wasn’t alone in using mainlander as an insult. Hanna had bristled when she first noticed it in the newspaper after returning to Öland. On page four, there had been two articles about crimes that had been committed, and both went to great lengths to point out that the perpetrator was a mainlander.

A sudden sense of longing took hold of her, an echo of what she had felt as she drove over the bridge last autumn. The desire for a life that wouldn’t slowly suffocate her.

She was twelve the last time she was genuinely happy.

Her fingers dug beneath the sleeve of her jacket and sweater. She didn’t need to see the tattoo to feel its presence, her pulse like a fluttering bird’s heart beneath the black ink. Touching it always seemed to calm her down.

If Hanna was going to make it to the police station on time, she knew she would have to head back, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to move. The plan was to meet Ove Hultmark and then join in the morning meeting. It was the first part that made her most nervous. She had been nineteen when she last sat face-to-face with Ove Hultmark, as he questioned her about her father. About what he claimed her father had done.

There’s something seriously wrong with you.

Kristoffer’s words came back to her, gnawing and niggling away. The suspicion that he might be right after all. That what he had said before hanging up was true:

You’ve got no idea what you’re dredging up. You’re going to ruin everything.

 

2

Breakfast!” Rebecka Forslund shouted, knocking on the door beneath the picture of a unicorn Molly had drawn for her big brother.

The painkillers had numbed her headache to a dull throb, but the nausea was going nowhere. Rebecka had barely slept a wink last night; the alcohol leaving her system had only worsened her anxiety. She had tried to lie still at first, to avoid disturbing Petri, but at some point in the small hours she had crawled out of bed and taken a hot shower before returning to bed. When his alarm went off this morning she had pretended to be asleep, and though she was awake, it had been a struggle to get up when her own alarm started ringing. Joel hated having to rush in the mornings, and he wouldn’t appreciate being woken up with just half an hour to get ready for the bus. His classes didn’t start until nine on Wednesdays.

Rebecka didn’t wait for an answer before opening his door. The boy could sleep through anything. A few nights earlier, Gerd’s garage had burned down, and the fire engine had arrived with sirens wailing. Joel was probably the only person in the whole of Gårdby who hadn’t woken up. Fortunately the fire hadn’t spread.

His room smelled faintly of sweat and hormones and the awful incense sticks he insisted on burning. Rebecka moved over to the window, raised the blind, and opened it, breathing in the cool, crisp air. Having a teenager was nothing like she had imagined it would be. Joel could be moody sometimes, but he kept it all inside, spending hours hunched over his sketchpad or staring at the computer. He almost always did as he was told, and she rarely had to nag him about clothes on the floor or doing his homework, yet the worry was always there: That he would end up a homebody. That he wouldn’t be able to manage life out in the real world. The darkness in him frightened her.

Rebecka turned around, and it took her a moment to process what she was seeing: Joel’s bed was empty. His black duvet was heaped in the middle of the mattress, but that was nothing new. She didn’t want to impose rules on the kids that she herself didn’t keep, and since she had heard that bed mites preferred neatly made beds, she only bothered when they were expecting company.

Her mind raced back to the night before. They had gone over to Gabriel and Ulrika’s for a barbecue. As a rule they stayed home on weeknights, but it was Gabriel’s fortieth birthday, and Ulrika had bought him an expensive grill, inviting them over to try it.

Memories of Gabriel paralyzed her for a moment, but she quickly brushed them to one side. Thinking about him was too painful right now. Joel had brought Molly home and put her to bed around nine o’clock. When Rebecka and Petri got back a few hours later, she had looked in on both of them. It wasn’t just the outline of Joel’s thin body she had seen in bed: she specifically remembered seeing his dark, messy hair. But now his bed was empty. What did that mean? Joel never snuck out at night.

Rebecka headed down to the kitchen as her anxiety levels continued to rise. Molly sensed it and looked up from her cereal.

“Do you want me to go and wake him up?” she asked.

Rebecka occasionally sent Molly upstairs to drag Joel out of bed. However stubborn and withdrawn he might be in the mornings, his little sister almost always managed to get through to him. There were nine years and a messy relationship between them. Rebecka sometimes wished she had met Petri sooner, so that he could have fathered both her children.

She should call him now, she realized. Petri had left for Kastlösa an hour earlier. A young couple had hired him to renovate the kitchen in their summerhouse before they came to the island in early June. Rebecka doubted Joel had snuck out without her noticing it—not after four o’clock, in any case—but she couldn’t be sure, and Petri might have given him a ride. He did that sometimes, whenever Joel missed the bus or needed to get to school earlier. Mörbylånga was on his way, after all. She tried to find her phone, convinced she had left it on the kitchen worktop.

“Mommy?” asked Molly.

“Joel has left already,” Rebecka told her. “He’s going on a school trip today. I forgot.”

The lie came out so easily.

“I want to go on a trip, too!”

Molly looked up at her, waiting for a reply, but all Rebecka could do was nod. Where the hell was her goddamn phone? She rummaged through the pile of old newspapers, moving the box of cereal so abruptly that it tipped over. Another wave of nausea rose up in her, and she raised a hand to her mouth, took a few quick sips from the glass of water she had filled to wash down the painkillers. Eventually she found her phone on top of the microwave, where she always left it.

Rebecka went out onto the porch to call Petri. She didn’t want Molly to hear her. He answered after three rings.

“Did you give Joel a lift this morning?” she asked.

“No, his classes start later today.”

“Did you see him?”

“No, why?”

“His bed was empty when I went up to wake him.”

Saying it aloud gave fuel to her fears, and Rebecka let out a sob.

“I’m sure he just got a ride with someone else,” said Petri. “Or took an earlier bus.”

He was trying to reassure her, but his words had the opposite effect. There was no logical explanation for Joel’s empty bed. He didn’t have any group work to prepare, no homework he had forgotten, and those were the only reasons he ever went to school before he absolutely had to.

“Have you tried calling him?”

“Of course I have,” Rebecka snapped, hanging up.

What the hell was wrong with her? Calling Joel had never even crossed her mind. She scrolled down to his number, but his phone was switched off. Maybe that was why she hadn’t immediately tried to reach him, because she had known it would be. That excuse felt better than blaming her hungover, sleep-deprived, emotional wreck of a head, in any case. Fifteen years of parental guilt came crashing down on her, making her sway. No matter how hard she tried, she was never enough. But rather than wallow in that, she called Joel’s friend Nadine.

“When did you last speak to Joel?” she asked without even saying hello.

“Yesterday, why?”

“Do you know what he’s doing today?”

There was a brief silence that Rebecka interpreted as hesitation.

“Going to school, I guess,” said Nadine.

Rebecka didn’t have the energy to argue. The teenager’s hesitation could be because of so many things. Nadine had moved from Gårdby to Kalmar, on the mainland, three years earlier, but she was still the person Joel spent the most time with. Rebecka sometimes wondered if they were a couple, but she had learned not to ask. In truth, she hoped they weren’t. Joel had never said anything, but Rebecka knew that Nadine had tried to kill herself at least once, that it was one of the reasons she had moved.

“If you talk to him, would you ask him to call me?”

“Sure.”

Molly came out onto the porch wearing her pink unicorn backpack. She probably needed a jacket—it wasn’t quite warm enough to go without yet—but Rebecka decided not to get one. She didn’t bother asking if Molly had brushed her teeth, either. Apparently that was something children typically lied about anyway. Instead, she took her daughter’s hand, and they started walking toward Gårdby School. It was no more than eight hundred meters away, but Rebecka didn’t trust Molly on the road; the girl was far too easily distracted. She also didn’t trust the people racing by in their cars. Too many of them ignored the speed limit. Molly giggled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Are you really going to walk to school in those?”

Rebecka looked down at her feet and realized she was wearing Petri’s wooden clogs, which were at least seven sizes too big for her.

“Whoops.” She smiled.

But her smile quickly faded as she remembered the question going around and around in her mind: Where was Joel?

They passed the burned-out garage. The back wall was all that was left of it, the rest a pile of warped black beams and planks sticking up like arms waving for help. The smell of smoke was still so sharp that it made her nose sting. There had been a thunderstorm that night, but many people were convinced it was deliberate. Fires were a touchy subject in the area. For a couple of years in the late 1950s, a pyromaniac had terrorized eastern Öland, and the police had never managed to catch the culprit. Then, in March 2003, Ester Jensen had died when her house was set alight with her inside. Between 2005 and 2012, a further six people had died in fires in the north of the island. The last of those fires, in a garage, had been started in an attempt to cover up a double murder.

Molly didn’t even look up as they passed the garage. Instead, she spent the whole walk to school talking about what games she was going to play during break. Something about kings and knights. Rebecka murmured often enough to get away with not really listening.

After a quick hug, Molly ran off into the yellow school building Rebecka herself had attended thirty years earlier. There had been fewer children back then, but plenty was still the same. Rebecka paused for a moment, at a loss for what to do next.

“Hello.”

She turned toward the voice. It belonged to Ulrika, who was dropping off Elias. He would be nine this autumn, and wasn’t particularly keen on having his mother chaperone him. Ulrika forced him into a hug before letting him go.

“Thanks for last night,” said Rebecka.

“It was nice, wasn’t it?”

Though she had drunk her fair share the previous evening, Ulrika looked considerably fresher than Rebecka felt. She had showered, and was wearing a light face of makeup; there was just a slight hint of shadow beneath her eyes that her concealer had failed to cover. Ulrika was hopeless when it came to planning, and had invited them over across the hedge the same day, whispering that it was a birthday surprise for Gabriel. In addition to Elias, they also had a daughter, Linnea, who was a year younger than Joel. The fact that the two couples had children who were roughly the same age was one of the main reasons they had started spending time together when they became neighbors seven years earlier. Rebecka, Petri, and Joel had moved into the house just a few months before Molly was born.

How had Joel seemed last night? A little low, perhaps, but he and Linnea had gone inside to draw together; she wanted to learn how to do portraits. Her drawing had actually been surprisingly good, though she would never be quite as skilled as Joel.

Rebecka and Ulrika walked home together, Ulrika pushing her mint-green bicycle. She worked on the checkout at Almérs and had changed her hours to fit around the children’s schedule. During the week she didn’t begin until nine, though she often took extra shifts on weekends to boost her hours.

“Is Linnea at school?” asked Rebecka.

“I really hope so.”

Ulrika gave her a concerned look, and Rebecka found herself blurting out all her worries.

“I’m sure he just went in early,” Ulrika told her. “Come on, this is Joel we’re talking about.”

Rebecka’s own teenage years had made her think Joel’s would be worse, but she had never once caught him with booze. She had never even caught him in a lie.

Rebecka glanced over at Ulrika. She really had enjoyed the barbecue. It had been surprisingly easy for the four adults to spend time together over the past few months, possibly because they had so many similar evenings to fall back on, but it wouldn’t work going forward. Not after what Gabriel had done to her. Rebecka seriously doubted he would tell Ulrika about it; he was too weak for that. She personally had no intention of saying anything to Petri.

“See you later,” said Ulrika, turning off toward her house.

Rebecka knew she should head into the studio. She scraped together a living making and selling pottery, and had an order for a fruit bowl to finish off. She also painted watercolors, though she rarely sold any of them. Deep down, she knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate, so she went into the kitchen instead and poured herself the last of the coffee. She knew Joel would be angry, but she had no other option: she called his school, and was put through to the assistant principal.

“Is Joel Forslund there?” Rebecka asked.

“Oh, I’m glad you called,” said the woman she had sold a set of teacups to. “I was just about to get in touch with you. Joel wasn’t in school yesterday, either. Has something happened?”

 

3

There were no empty parking spaces outside the station, so Hanna left her car across the road, by the Giraffen Shopping Center. The drive from the island had taken her only thirty minutes. The Kalmar Police Station was clad in dark wood and pale stone, and she could see what looked like two large fingerprints carved into the wall. Hanna stepped inside and told the young man behind reception who she was and who she had come to meet.

The seconds ticked away, and Hanna didn’t know where to look. The different shades of gray stone on the floor seemed to blend together,