Stalker Read online

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street,

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

  Copyright © Lars Kepler 2014

  Translation copyright © Neil Smith 2016

  All rights reserved

  Originally published in 2014 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Sweden, as Stalker

  Lars Kepler assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

  Cover layout © Claire Ward / HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2016

  Cover photography © Stephen Carroll / Trevillion Images

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

  Source ISBN: 9780007467822

  Ebook Edition © MAY 2016 ISBN: 9780007467846

  Version: 2016-04-05

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Epilogue

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by Lars Kepler

  About the Publisher

  It wasn’t until the first body was found that anyone took the film seriously. A link to a video clip on YouTube had been sent to the public email address of the National Criminal Investigation Department. The email contained no message, and the sender was impossible to trace. The police administration secretary did her job, followed the link, watched the film, and assumed it was a rather baffling joke, but nonetheless entered it in the records.

  Two days later three experienced detectives gathered in a small room on the eighth floor of National Crime headquarters in Stockholm, as a result of that very film. The oldest of the three men was sitting on a creaking office chair while the other two stood behind him.

  The clip they were watching on the wide computer monitor was only fifty-two seconds long.

  The shaky footage, filmed in secret on a handheld camera through her bedroom window, showed a woman in her thirties putting on a pair of black tights.

  The three men at National Crime watched the woman’s peculiar movements in embarrassed silence.

  To get the tights to sit comfortably she took long strides over imaginary obstacles and did several squats with her legs wide apart.

  On Monday morning the woman had been found in the kitchen of a terraced house on the island of Lidingö, on the outskirts of Stockholm. She was sitting on the floor with her mouth grotesquely split open. Blood had splattered the window and the white orchid in its pot. She was wearing nothing but a pair of tights and a bra.

  The forensic post-mortem later that week concluded that she bled to death as a result of the multiple lacerations and stab-wounds that were concentrated, in a display of extraordinary brutality, around her throat and face.

  The word stalker has existed since the early 1700s. In those days it meant a tracker or poacher.

  In 1921 the French psychiatrist de Clérambault published a study of a patient suffering from erotomania. This case is widely regarded as the first modern analysis of a stalker. Today a stalker is someone who suffers from obsessive fixation
disorder, an unhealthy obsession with monitoring another individual’s activities.

  Almost 10 per cent of the population will be subjected to some form of stalking in the course of their lifetime.

  The most common form is when the stalker has or used to have a relationship with the victim, but in a striking number of cases when the fixation is focused on strangers or people in the public eye, coincidence is a key factor.

  Even though the vast majority of cases never require intervention, the police treat the phenomenon seriously because the pathological obsessiveness of a stalker brings with it a self-generating potential for danger. Just as rolling clouds between areas of high and low pressure during stormy weather can suddenly change and turn into a tornado, a stalker’s emotional lurches between worship and hatred can suddenly become extremely violent.

  1

  It’s quarter to nine on Friday, 22 August. After the magical sunsets and light nights of high summer, darkness is encroaching with surprising speed. It’s already dark outside the glass atrium of the National Police Authority.

  Margot Silverman gets out of the lift and walks towards the security doors in the foyer. She’s wearing a black wrap cardigan, a white blouse that fits tightly at the chest, and high-waisted black trousers that stretch across her expanding stomach.

  She makes her way without hurrying towards the revolving doors in the glass wall. The guard sits behind the wooden counter with his eyes on a screen. Surveillance cameras monitor every section of the large complex round the clock.

  Margot’s hair is the colour of pale, polished birchwood, and is pulled into a thick plait down her back. She is thirty-six years old and pregnant for the third time, glowing, with moist eyes and rosy cheeks.

  She’s heading home after a long working week. She’s worked overtime every day, and has received two warnings for pushing herself too hard.

  She is the National Police Authority’s new expert on serial killers, spree killers and stalkers. The murder of Maria Carlsson is the first case she’s been in charge of since her appointment as detective superintendent.

  There are no witnesses and no suspects. The victim was single, had no children, worked as a product advisor for Ikea, and had taken on her parents’ unmortgaged terraced house after her father died and her mother went into care.

  Maria usually travelled to work with a colleague of a morning. Since she wasn’t waiting down on Kyrkvägen, her colleague drove to her house and rang the doorbell, looked through the windows, then walked round the back and saw her. She was sitting on the floor, her face covered in knife-wounds, her neck almost sliced right through, her head lolling to one side and her mouth grotesquely open.

  According to the preliminary report from the forensic post-mortem, there was evidence to suggest that her mouth had been arranged after death, even if it was theoretically possible that it had settled into that position of its own accord.

  Rigor mortis starts in the heart and diaphragm, but is evident in the neck and jaw after two hours.

  This late on a Friday evening the large foyer is almost deserted, aside from two police officers in dark-blue sweaters who are standing talking, and a tired-looking prosecutor emerging from one of the rooms dedicated to custody negotiations.

  When Margot was appointed head of the preliminary investigation she was conscious of the pitfalls of being overambitious; she knew she had a tendency to be too eager, too willing to think on a grand scale.

  Her colleagues would have laughed at her if she’d told them at the outset she was absolutely convinced they were dealing with a serial killer.

  Over the course of the week Margot Silverman has watched the video of Maria Carlsson putting her tights on more than two hundred times. All the evidence suggests that she was murdered shortly after the recording was uploaded to YouTube.

  Margot has tried to interpret the short film, but can’t see anything special about it. It’s not unusual for people to have a fetish about tights, but nothing about the murder indicates any inclination of that nature.

  The film is simply a brief excerpt from an ordinary woman’s life. She’s single, has a good job, and has almost completed a course of evening classes on drawing cartoons.

  There’s no way of knowing why the perpetrator was in her garden, whether it was pure chance or the result of a carefully planned operation, but in the minutes before the murder he captured her on film, so there has to be a reason for this.

  Given that he’s sent the link to the police, he must want to show them something.

  The perpetrator wants to highlight something about this particular woman, or a certain type of woman. Perhaps it’s about all women, the whole of society.

  But to Margot’s eyes there’s nothing unusual about the woman’s behaviour or appearance. She’s simply concentrating on getting her tights to sit properly, frowning and pursing her lips.

  Margot has visited the house on Bredablicksvägen twice, but she’s spent most of her time examining the forensic video of the crime scene before it was contaminated.

  The perpetrator’s film almost looks like a lovingly created work of art in comparison to the police’s. The forensics team’s minutely detailed recording of the evidence of the bestial attack is relentless. The dead woman is filmed from various angles as she sits with her legs stretched out on the floor, surrounded by dark blood. Her bra is in shreds, dangling from one shoulder, and one white breast is hanging down towards the bulge of her stomach. There’s almost nothing left of her face, just a gaping mouth and red pulp.

  Margot stops as if by chance beside the fruit bowl on the table by the sofas, looks over at the guard, who is talking on the phone, then turns her back on him. For a few seconds she watches the guard’s reflection in the glass wall facing the large inner courtyard, before taking six apples from the bowl and putting them in her bag.

  Six is too many, she knows that, but she can’t stop herself taking them all. It’s occurred to her that Jenny might like to make an apple pie that evening, with lots of butter, cinnamon and sugar to caramelise them.

  Her thoughts are interrupted when her phone rings. She looks at the screen and sees a picture of Adam Youssef, a member of the investigating team.

  ‘Are you still in the building?’ Adam asks. ‘Please tell me you’re still here, because we’ve—’

  ‘I’m sitting in the car on Klarastrandsvägen,’ Margot lies. ‘What did you want to tell me?’

  ‘He’s uploaded a new film.’

  She feels her stomach clench, and puts one hand under the heavy bulge.

  ‘A new film,’ she repeats.

  ‘Are you coming back?’

  ‘I’ll stop and turn round,’ she says, and begins to retrace her steps. ‘Make sure we get a decent copy of the recording.’

  Margot could have carried on out through the doors and gone home, leaving the case in Adam’s hands. It would only take one phone call to arrange a full year of paid maternity leave. Perhaps that’s what she would have done if she’d known how violent her first case would turn out to be.

  The future lies in shadow, but the planets are approaching dangerous alignments. Right now her fate is floating like a razor blade on still waters.

  The light in the lift makes her face look older. The thick dark line of kohl round her eyes is almost gone. As she leans her head back she understands what her colleagues mean when they say she looks like her father, former District Commissioner Ernest Silverman.

  The lift stops at the eighth floor and she walks along the empty corridor as fast as her bulging stomach will allow. She and Adam moved into Joona Linna’s old room the same week the police held a memorial service for him. Margot never knew Joona personally, and had no problem taking over his office.

  ‘You’ve got a fast car,’ Adam says as she walks in, then smiles, showing his sharp teeth.

  ‘Pretty fast,’ Margot replies.

  Adam Youssef is twenty-eight years old, but his face is round like a teenager’s. His hair is long and his short
-sleeved shirt is hanging outside his trousers. He comes from an Assyrian family, grew up in Södertälje and used to play football in the first division north.

  ‘How long has the film been up on YouTube?’ she asks.

  ‘Three minutes,’ Adam says. ‘He’s there now. Standing outside the window and—’

  ‘We don’t know that, but—’

  ‘I think he is,’ he interrupts. ‘I think he is, he almost has to be.’