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

They pulled up outside Jamie’s childhood home for the second time that day and Jamie exited the car.

The air was biting. The hour dwindling into evening, the temperature going with it.

Jamie exhaled, a long stream of steam expelling itself from between her lips. God, she’d missed the cold. The crisp, sharpness of the air that cut at the inside of the nose and made the chest ache.

London never came close, even on its coldest days.

Jamie looked up at her father’s house. She corrected herself. Her house. And felt the key in her pocket, digging into her palm.

‘Ready?’ asked Wiik, standing beside her.

She nodded. She was. Now that she had a reason to go. A train with a track to follow. Something to move her through the place. Before, this was just a case in a far away country that rubbed up against the raw edges of her childhood. Now it was real. There was a girl – an innocent girl – brutalised and mounted in the woods like a trophy – and a killer who thought they were smart enough to get away with it. Well, they weren’t. Not now that Jamie was here.

Jamie leaned forward, trusting the sensation of tipping over to jump-start her feet. She couldn’t lift them herself.

The houses around were quiet now, the driveways busy with cars. People had come home from work and gone inside out of the cold. All that surrounded them were dim squares of light. Windows glowing in the darkness.

The key seemed to guide itself into the lock. It slid in rustily, and she began to twist. It resisted at first, and then gave. Jamie listened to the tumblers turn and then the creak of the hinges.

Stale air hit her and then she was inside, being shuffled forward by Wiik. He was wasting no more time.

She stood there in the hallway, the stairs stretching up in front of her, the house all but pitch dark.

On the left, an archway led into the kitchen, their old family table sitting in the middle of it. On the right, another archway opened into the living room.

She looked both ways, remembering the last time she was standing in that spot.

Jamie had been fourteen. Her mum had been in the car, screaming, crying. Her mum’s voice had been shrill, echoing through the open door behind her. ‘Don’t you go up those stairs!’ she had shrieked. ‘Get in the car! Now, Jamie. I’ll leave, I’ll do it. I’m counting to three! Don’t think I won’t do it.’

She wished she had.

Jamie was calling her father’s name. Asking him to come downstairs. To say goodbye.

‘Dad?’ Jamie had called. ‘Please – come downstairs. Tell her. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her it was the last time. Tell me it will be okay. At least, say goodbye.’

But he hadn’t.

And her mum had got to three and then laid on the horn.

And Jamie had backed out of the door, keeping her eyes on her parents’ closed bedroom door for as long as she could.

Her mother had spun the front wheels, hit the rev-limiter, her mascara running down her cheeks in thick black lines. The car juddered forward and then crunched horribly as she rammed it into second and sped away.

‘Inspector Johansson?’

Jamie pulled her eyes from the door at the top of the stairs, wiping her cheeks roughly with the back of her hand. ‘Yeah, sorry, what is it?’

Wiik was standing next to her, flicking the light switch. Nothing was happening. ‘No electricity,’ he said. ‘Where’s the fuse box?’

‘The house has been empty for nineteen years,’ Jamie said, her voice quiet. ‘It won’t do any good.’

He made a dissatisfied noise. ‘Do you know where your father kept his notes?’ he asked.

Jamie peered past him into the gloom of the living room, seeing letters and paperwork spread out on their coffee table, perched on the TV, the bookcase.

The kitchen, too, was full of junk – the table had what looked like a half-rebuilt lawnmower engine on top of it.

‘No,’ she lied. ‘They could be anywhere.’

Wiik let out a long breath. ‘We’ll have to come back tomorrow,’ he decided. His anxious face portraying an awareness that every minute delayed was a minute burnt. Another minute closer to the Angel Maker’s next victim.

Jamie knew it too, but it wasn’t the reason her throat was tight.

‘Which hotel are you staying at? I can give you a lift,’ Wiik said. It came across as more of an insistence than an offer. Jamie had no doubt that he didn’t want to disturb the house until they could see what they were doing. Didn’t want to miss anything.

‘It’s fine,’ Jamie said. ‘I’ll get a taxi.’

‘I don’t mind,’ Wiik repeated. His tired expression failed to match the politeness of his offer.

‘Honestly,’ Jamie said. ‘I’m going to take a look around anyway. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.’

He clicked his teeth together behind closed lips. Looking like he was deciding if he wanted to stay and help her.

‘Look,’ Jamie went on, wishing he’d just piss off. ‘I know the house. I know my father. But there’s no use us both blundering around here in the dark. We can cover more ground if we split up. Let me go through my father’s notes, you dig into Sjöberg. Find out everything you can about him, what he died of, who visited him, his doctors. Check out the original trial, get the transcripts – they should keep those records at the court archives. The original autopsy reports — they should still be at the pathology lab, in storage, probably. We need to gather all the information we can about the original murders. Compare them, contrast them to this one.

‘If this is a copycat, then he had a connection to Sjöberg. We find that, it’s a start.’ She met his eyes in the darkness. They caught just a glimmer of light from outside, but were otherwise black holes in his shadowed face. ‘Someone may have stolen the Polis case files, but there are still breadcrumbs out there to follow.’

Wiik looked back at her, a statue in her front hallway. His mouth widened but didn’t curl up. ‘Chief Inspector Smith was right.’

Jamie kept her eyes on him but said nothing back. She wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not.

Wiik turned, pulling a card from his jacket pocket. He held it out to her and Jamie took it. ‘Let me know where you’re staying,’ he said stepping towards the door. ‘I’ll pick you up in the morning.’

Jamie watched him through the door. ‘Does this mean you’re letting me assist on the case?’

He raised a hand over his shoulder to wave goodbye, but didn’t turn. ‘It doesn’t seem like I have a choice.’

He dropped her duffle at the kerb and then gave her a nod before getting in the car and driving off.

Jamie brought it inside and closed the door. Jamie took another look around the dark interior and breathed in the scent of her childhood home. It hadn’t changed much. It still stank of stale whisky and cigarettes.

She flicked on the torch on her phone and swallowed, stepping slowly, beginning a lap of the house.

The living room was a mess of old books, magazines and papers. They were everywhere, all over the floor and coffee table, stacked on top of the old TV. Newspapers had been left in piles next to the sofa. Old clothes were draped over the back. Socks had been kicked off and left on the carpet. Jamie counted five empty whisky bottles.

Everything was covered in a layer of dust.

She tried to distance herself from her own memories and tilted her head to read some of the envelopes and letters on the table. Bills, mostly. Electric, gas, water… Past due. Late Payment. Final warning.

Jamie took in a slow breath.

Shit, he’d just given up. Knew he was winding down to the day he’d kill himself.

Jamie leaned in and picked up the envelope on top. It was dated the 17th September 2001. A week before her 18th birthday. It said that the electric would be cut off in four days.

She put it down, replacing it just where it was, thinking about how her father had held out, living in the dark for four days before he took his own life on the day she was old enough not to have her mother sell the house out from under her.

It hadn’t stopped her lying about it though.

Jamie circled back through the hall and into the kitchen.

The fridge was still awash with photos of her as a girl, held on by stalwart magnets.

She moved closer, stepping past the rusted engine on the table. The wood around it was stained with oil, the floor littered with screws and bolts. They skittered into the darkness as her boots clipped them.

Her fingers stretched out.

The photos.

Her and her father camping. Her and her father fishing. Her and her father at the finish line of the one-hundred-metre sprint at her school sports day.

She had won.

Her and her father at the beach.

Jamie swallowed, her fingers only a few inches away from them.

Her eyes burned.

She touched one of the photos and the magnet gave out, held on only by the friction of the years.

It hit the ground and bounced, the photo coming away in her hand.

The rest, like dominoes, disturbed after all these years, finally let go, and rained down onto the tiles.

The photos all fell away and spun and flew into the darkness around her.

‘Shit,’ she muttered, looking around to see where they went.

Jamie sighed, feeling a tear warm on her cheek, her breath still misting in front of her, and looked at the one she had managed to save.

Her father was standing between two larch trees on a rocky outcropping. It was in the foothills under Stäjan, a mountain near the Norwegian border. Jamie was on his shoulders, her hands around his head. She must have been seven or eight. And he still made her look tiny.

Her mother had complained that entire trip. Her feet hurt. It was too far. It was too hot.

Jamie had grown tired, and her mother had insisted they go back to the car instead of pressing on to the top.

Her father had lifted her up like she was nothing and put her on his shoulders. Told her to hold tight.

They had left her mother behind and not returned for hours.

Jamie smiled down at the photo, remembering how funny she thought it was.

When it began to grow dark, they stopped and her father gathered firewood, used the flint and steel he carried on his keys to start a fire. And they’d sat in front of it and looked up through the trees at the stars. He’d told her about constellations.

Jesus, she couldn’t believe she remembered all that.

But she must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew, they were hammering down a motorway in the car, streetlights flashing past. Her parents were arguing in the front seat.

Hell, her mother must have been waiting for hours before they got back.

Jamie swallowed and tucked the photograph into her back pocket.

She still thought it was kind of funny.

The dining room beckoned. Jamie headed out of the kitchen and into it.

They had rarely eaten in there other than at Christmas. Her mother had always kept the room neat. There was a glass cabinet against the left-hand wall, filled with the ‘good china’, glass decanters and crystal glassware her parents had received as wedding presents.

Jamie looked over, remembering there being more decanters. Remembering them always being half-full of various shades of amber liquids.

There were just a few left, and they were all empty.

Jamie stared for a moment and then let her eyes drift across to the glass doors at the back of the room. They let out onto the garden.

Thin slits of moonlight bled through the shutters. A slat was missing and Jamie could see the grey of fresh snow covering the lawn.

There was only one room left now. Her father’s study.

Her mother had always hated her going in there. And Jamie could see why. As a child it was always exciting – the thrill of seeing these dark, mysterious things her father did, and having the luxury of not understanding them. In her mind, her father was a superhero. A man who wasn’t afraid of anything, who’d punch the bad guys in the face. Who carried a knife and a revolver on his belt like a western gunslinger, and who never let the villain get away.

That amazed her back then.

Now she knew him to be a quick-to-violence man with more problems than anyone was prepared to admit. Let alone Jamie.

She had to see a counsellor. Had been forced to confront what she’d done. To one girl. To one mixed-up girl who’d rushed her with a knife. Who’d helped a killer murder four others. Who’d killed a man herself. Who had left her no other choice.

Her father had just been expected to get on with it.

Jamie steadied herself, staring down at her hand halfway to the door. It was going numb in the cold.

She had to move.

Jamie stepped forward, pressed the handle down, and stepped inside.

The air was slightly warmer in here.

Her phone threw a harsh light around the room, and Jamie took it all in.

There was a desk on the right, cluttered with papers, an ancient grey computer. The back wall was a tangle of pinned-up newspaper clippings, photographs from crime scenes and permanent marker drawn right onto the paint.

Jamie cast her eyes over it, picking out the bright yellow of evidence markers in the gloom. The shine of blood in the camera flashes of the CSTs. These were all crime scene photos. Her father’s last cases. The crimes varied and brutal.

Jamie set her jaw and came forward.

She could see no angel wings among them.

The carpet underfoot groaned a little as she walked, the fibres gone stiff with time.

Beneath the photos and the papers pinned to the wall was a low, wide bookcase. Jamie remembered it and knelt, running her fingers across the volumes and spines.

There were books on everything crime-related. Criminology, psychology, sociology. Books written by other detectives, by psychologists, some by criminals even. They covered everything from Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man right through to studies and books on ‘the warrior gene’. He had been a voracious reader, among other things. Insomniac. Philanderer. Addict. Drinker.

Jamie looked past those and found what she was looking for. A stack of small leather notebooks. His work notebooks.

She hadn’t been lying when she’d said her father wasn’t one for making a lot of notes. But he’d always carried a notepad. To take down names, thoughts, anything of use he saw or thought of.

Jamie didn’t know what she expected to find, but she needed to see.

There were three stacks.

She lifted the one on the top of the left-hand stack, peeled back the cover and saw the dates 1984–1986 written in it.

No, way too early.

The Angel Maker killed the girls from 1995 to 1996.

She moved across to the second stack and checked.

1992. Getting warmer.

The third stack was slightly shorter. She took the top notebook and looked at it. The date inside the front page said 1995.

Jamie exhaled and flipped through all the pages, letting the near-silent flap of the paper punctuate the room. This was it.

She held it close to her chest and let her eyes drift over the remaining ones.

Her mother had taken her to England in the winter of 1997. Just before Christmas. To make it hurt more. It was her dad’s favourite time of the year. On the twenty-third, he would take Jamie north, and they would hunt a goose for Christmas dinner.

She never liked hunting. But her father had always reminded her that the ones bought in supermarkets or butchers were farmed, brutalised, culled for their meat.

At least they were giving the goose a fighting chance doing it their way.

1997 had been the roughest year for him. For Jamie’s mother. For all of them. The Angel Maker had broken her father, and that trip was going to be their first chance to get away. To normalise.

Two days in the frozen north. Two days, just the two of them at the little hunting cabin they always went to. The goose was inconsequential. Jamie couldn’t have cared less whether they shot one.

But lying there on an icy ridge was one of her favourite places in the world. Spread out on the ground next to him, the barrel of his old Remington 700 resting on the rolled-up blanket that was always spread across the back seat of his car…

God, how it stunk. He’d shoot on it and then wrap the goose in it. Jamie could smell it now, all grease and gunpowder and feathers. She shook her head, remembering how much her mother complained about it. But how much she’d loved it.

He always kept the rifle in good order, had it hanging above his…

Jamie turned to look at the desk and then tilted her head back.

There it was, on the shelf, like always. Cut out in a dim silhouette, the polished stock catching the residual light from her phone.

Too high for her to reach as a child. But always there.

She couldn’t help but smile looking at it. It didn’t mean death, or shooting, or even Christmas. It meant her father.

And these notepads – she turned her head back to the third and final stack – chronicled the last years of his life. The years she had lost him. His final cases, his final thoughts. His final hours.

She let out a long exhale, unable to leave them behind, and grabbed the whole stack, standing up in the darkness of her father’s study, and turned. She froze.

Against the back wall, there was a leather sofa. One her father had often sat on to read.

And she had often sat there with him while he did.

Had often sat there, watched him as he typed up his reports on a beaten-up old Imperial 200 typewriter too, falling asleep to the sound of his tapping and clacking.

Tap, tap, tap. Her eyes growing heavy.

She looked at it now, clutching at his notebooks, and then turned away.

Jamie left the sofa where she’d fall asleep a thousand times behind.

Along with the chaotic black stain on the wall above it.

The ancient blood of her father.

From where he’d blown the back of his skull out with his snub-nose .38 Smith & Wesson Special.