Angel Maker: An Unputdownable Scandinavian Crime Thriller With A Chilling Twist (DI Jamie Johansson Book 1)

They swept out of the city at pace. The scene was a few kilometres north, just off the side of a well-worn path through the forest that was perfect for runners and walkers. Popular, too. The trail wound endlessly through the zebra-striped birch trees.

The Angel Maker’s kills had never been hidden away. They were always meant to be found.

Jamie looked over the initial assessment of the scene as Wiik drove, putting distance between them and the house. With every streetlight that washed past, her tension eased. The file on her lap showed an aerial shot of the area. A few hundred metres to the east of the scene, a road ran away from the city. What looked like a lay-by had been circled as a possible site that the killer had parked in.

Jamie leafed through the other papers – copies of the witness statements from the couple who had found the girl while out for a morning run in the snow.

They had seen no one. Heard nothing. Just glimpsed the girl through the trees and stopped. Gone closer. Then had realised what they were looking at.

Officers arrived fifteen minutes later, and the scene had been locked down since.

The body was still in situ, the whole area cordoned off. No one was going in or out on Wiik’s orders. He wanted the scene as untouched as possible until they had Jamie’s father’s notes, the original case files. And Robert Nyström in an interview room.

Jamie had to hand it to him, Wiik was a focused man. She appreciated that.

‘Do we have an ID on the victim yet?’ she asked, reaching the back page. There was nothing in the file about the victim.

Wiik shook his head. ‘Nothing yet. No missing persons matching her age and description so far.’

Jamie stared out of the window. Droplets of moisture had beaded on the glass and streaked backwards as they drove. ‘Teenage girls don’t just disappear without anyone missing them,’ Jamie said.

Wiik met her with silence, seemingly not having an answer, and drove on.

They were waved in at the side of the road, a two-lane that connected Stockholm with a small outlying town called Vallentuna, and pulled to a halt in front of a police officer. He had a baton and was directing traffic to keep moving. To not slow down and gawp at the procession of police vehicles that had carved deep, muddy welts into the verge with their tyres.

Wiik clicked the engine off and rubbed his eyes in the driver’s seat. Jamie wondered how many times he’d been to this scene in the last two days.

It was nearly thirty-six hours since the body had been discovered.

Usually, they would have cleared it long before, but the cold air was keeping everything preserved.

Jamie remembered walking through her father’s study at fourteen, stepping lightly not to wake him as he lay asleep on the sofa, clutching an empty whisky bottle. Snoring. He always snored so loudly.

She had looked at each of the photos on his wall in turn. All seven girls, all posed.

She swallowed, remembering how frightened she had been.

They were all around her age. Maybe a little older. But girls. Like her.

‘Ready?’ Wiik asked.

Jamie nodded, not trusting her voice, and climbed out of the car and her memories.

The cold grabbed at her cheeks and she screwed her eyes up, staring into the darkened sky, the swollen underbelly of the clouds hanging still above them. On her right, the birch trees swayed in the wind, a snowy bank letting down into their shadow. On her left, the road stretched away, wet and shimmering in the flashing blue lights coming off a patrol car in the middle of the pack.

Jamie pulled her peacoat tighter around her shoulders and waited for Wiik to walk around the bonnet and head down into the forest.

He judged the slope with careful confidence, made little steps, and then lurched forward so as not to slip.

Jamie followed, crunching through the snow at the side of the muddy bank. She was tired and didn’t trust her footing.

The sound of the road died behind them as they reached the interior of the woods, their breath close in their ears. Wiik strode quickly, following the thin and twisted line of blue-and-white police tape. It bounced from trunk to trunk, guiding them deeper, until the flashing blues were eaten by the trees.

Jamie swallowed, keeping her fists balled in her pockets and her eyes on Wiik’s broad shoulders. The only sound was their footsteps cracking through the frost underfoot and squelching into the mud beneath.

She was surprised he hadn’t put up more of a fight before bringing her here. Maybe her DCI had told him what she was like when she got the scent of a case. Maybe Wiik really didn’t expect to find much in her father’s house. Or maybe he just read that look on her face and knew that forcing her to go inside would have set the investigation back.

He seemed the pragmatic type.

Either way, Jamie was glad she was here and not there.

As terrible as that was.

Wiik slowed ahead, and Jamie drew up at his shoulder, squinting at the sudden onslaught of light.

In front of them, plastic sheeting had been stapled to trees. It spanned the gaps roughly, bunching on the snow, creating a shield all around to protect the scene from onlookers.

Inside, Jamie could see floodlights burning, the translucent sheets glowing against the inky backdrop of the forest.

‘Ready?’ Wiik asked. A vertical slit cut in the sheet in front of him billowed softly.

The thickness of the forest had culled the wind here, but the tops still swayed high above, groaning gently in the winter silence.

Jamie nodded, pushing her hands deeper into her pockets, and stepped through.

The victim was about thirteen.

Jamie clamped her teeth together, her eyes moving across the girl’s pale blue skin.

A thin layer of snow had settled on her shoulders, her hair, her outstretched fingers.

They were held in front of her face, palms flat together, wrists bound with rope to hold them in place.

She was on her knees, doubled over so that her back curved slightly.

The soles of her naked feet pointed upwards, the tips of her toes blackened by the cold.

A thin white confirmation dress hung from her exposed shoulders. It was soaked red in the front where sharpened limbs of birch branches pushed through the fabric, burying themselves in the earth, propping her up in position.

Her elbows rested on two of them, allowing her hands to remain aloft in front of her closed eyes.

Jamie began to circle, taking it all in, using the path in the snow that Wiik and everyone else who had attended the scene had walked.

She breathed slowly, steadying her heart as best she could.

Wiik stayed back.

The boughs – six in total – had been driven through the girl’s back.

The cuts in her dress were fine. The cuts in her skin, fine. Done with precision and care.

Each of the boughs was the same thickness – an inch. Maybe a touch thicker. Just small enough to be pushed between the ribs without causing them to break.

The branches stretched upwards, curving, splitting into thinner and thinner limbs. They drooped under their own weight, the tangle of them supporting a dusting of fresh snow.

Three each side of her spine had been positioned such that they looked like wings, arcing away from her back.

She was ready to take flight.

An angel.

Jamie stopped, realising she had done a full circle of the scene now, had drowned in its grim radiance.

Her eyes ached.

‘Well?’ Wiik said, barely above a whisper.

The photographs in her father’s study lined themselves up in front of her eyes. ‘Mm,’ she replied, her throat tight.

‘Is it him?’ Wiik asked.

He couldn’t seriously expect her to know.

‘I don’t know,’ Jamie replied, voice thin and quiet. ‘But it’s good.’

‘Good?’

She looked up, seeing his raised eyebrows, his enquiring eyes. ‘A good imitation, if it’s not him,’ Jamie said. ‘My father always thought that Sjöberg had killed before. Was convinced of it. You can’t kill a girl for the first time and then create this.’ She didn’t have to gesture for Wiik to know what she was talking about.

His silence was enough invitation to explain.

‘If this is a copycat,’ Jamie said. ‘Then we’re probably looking at the same thing. Someone who idolises Sjöberg, someone who wanted to emulate him. But someone who has killed before. Someone who knows what it’s like to take a blade to flesh. To work on a human being like they’re a thing, not a person.’

Jamie sighed, glancing down at the pool of blood around the girl. It had melted the snow, forming a circle of flatness around her, the undergrowth visible around her body.

‘Have SOCOs been through?’ Jamie asked.

‘Hmm?’

‘Shit, sorry, uh,’ she said, racking her brain. ‘CSTs.’ Crime scene technicians.

‘Yes,’ Wiik said plainly. ‘Though they are not confident. A single set of footprints led from the road to the scene’ – he turned, pointing with two fingers the way that they’d come – ‘and back. The killer stepped in his own prints heading in the reverse direction, which has destroyed any hope of identifying any sizing or shoe tread patterns.’

The killer knew what they were doing.

‘The branches were dusted for prints, but they weren’t able to pull anything from them here. They suspect the killer wore gloves. But they’ll test for trace residue of polymers and particulates once the body is removed to the lab.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘The girl herself,’ Wiik went on, ‘was dead before she was mounted like this, but not for long. She was washed and dressed carefully before being carried here. Her body shows no signs of bruising or trauma.’

‘Apart from the wooden stakes driven through her back,’ Jamie muttered, taking another circle. She noticed more with every step. Saw more. Felt more.

Anger churned in her chest.

Wiik kept talking. ‘The rope used is a standard unbleached linen or cotton – natural fibres. Of that much they’re sure, but we’re still waiting for confirmation. We’ll check security footage from all nearby shops that sell potential matches. But I doubt the killer would be so sloppy.’

‘Mm,’ Jamie said, taking the kill in. She paused as she moved behind the girl, staring at Wiik through the wings. Her body shows no signs of trauma. That’s what Wiik said.

‘Was she raped?’ Jamie asked plainly. There wasn’t any other way to approach it.

‘We don’t know,’ he said, meeting Jamie’s eyes over the girl’s head. Her brown hair fell in clean strands around her serene face, framing it.

‘That was one of the hallmarks of the Angel Maker,’ Jamie went on, again. ‘He raped his victims before he killed them.’

Wiik pressed his mouth into a crumpled line. ‘It is impossible to say until she is examined by the pathologist. That the girls historically chosen have all been of pubescent age suggests that there is a sexual element at work – that the angelic element is linked to purity. Virginity. There’s a sorrowfulness to his kills,’ Wiik said. ‘An attempt at the restoration of innocence.’

Jamie drew a slow breath. She didn’t want to conjecture anymore. ‘What about the dress? The original dresses were taken from the church that Sjöberg and his wife attended. They held a Bible group there every Sunday.’

Jamie was surprised at how much she was dredging from her memories. She had suppressed them for so long. She considered what else would rise from the recesses of her mind.

And then decided that whatever did, it was worth it to catch this bastard.

Judging by Wiik’s expressionless face, Jamie suspected that the insight about the girl’s attire wasn’t new information. No doubt they’d already questioned all of the officers and detectives at the SPA who were working at the time, had cobbled together as much information in lieu of the missing files as they could.

‘We have taken photographs. We will make enquiries,’ Wiik said. ‘That church is now closed. A ruin. It was burnt down after Sjöberg was convicted. It won’t have been from there.’

Jamie didn’t think it had been.

‘We need those files,’ she said. ‘The originals.’

Wiik nodded. ‘We do. Your father’s notes, too.’

Jamie didn’t know if that was a shot at her.

She exhaled, hard. The faint taste of blood lingered in the frozen air. ‘When is the pathology lab going to take possession of the body?’ She needed to know what this girl had gone through.

‘When I say so,’ Wiik replied curtly. ‘I will want to examine the scene again in daylight. Once I have read your father’s notes.’

Jamie approached him slowly, her boots crunching in the snow. ‘Okay,’ she said, not needing to do more than whisper to be heard in the quiet of the forest. ‘Take me home.’