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

It was after eleven by the time Jamie rolled to a stop outside her childhood home in Stockholm.

She’d had to bribe the mechanic to re-open his shop and do an after-hours swap on her tyres. It wasn’t cheap, but it was worth it.

As Jamie pulled up onto the highway, she’d floored it, pushing the tiny hatchback as hard as the hybrid engine would allow. She sped along in the outside lane, passing car after car. And then, when she was sure no one was tailing her, she crossed all three lanes and left at a random exit for a town a little way outside the city.

She found a quiet street to park in that had clear line of sight in either direction, and waited.

Thirty minutes passed before she was sure that no one was on her tail, and then she set off again.

She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice and had no intention of letting a killer track her back to the city. If this was the sick game he wanted to play, then she wasn’t about to skip her turn.

Jamie killed the engine, coming back to the present, and stared up at the darkened house in front of her.

She exited the car and pulled her coat tight around her.

The silence in the street was heavy, pressing in on her eardrums.

Jamie moved quickly, approaching the front door, and paused. The path up to it was covered in a thin sheet of crunched-down ice from the foot traffic. Hers and Wiik’s.

But there were fresh tracks now, leading off around the side of the house. Through the garden and the snow there. There’d been no fresh snowfall for a few days and the marks were clear. Someone had walked the path and then stepped off.

Jamie leaned out, seeing them disappear around the corner. A low fence separated her house from the one next door. Whoever had walked there wouldn’t have been able to stay out of sight.

She tensed her jaw, squinting in the dim light coming off the streetlights, trying to put a timeline on it. When had she been here last? Yesterday morning. And Wiik had picked her up directly from the hotel this morning.

She checked her watch, shivering in the cold night air. 11.19 p.m. As good as forty hours. Shit, that was a big window.

Jamie knew better than to follow the tracks and disturb any potential evidence. She’d get inside, sweep the house, ascertain what was missing, where he’d got in, and then she’d decide what to do. She needed to speak to Wiik – to debrief him on Sjöberg, to find out what happened with Lundgren. But she wasn’t going to call him tonight. She didn’t feel like explaining why she’d lied. She didn’t quite know herself. Up until she’d put two and two together, she had every intention of staying in Rättvik. But now… there wasn’t a moment to lose.

Jamie let herself into her house and moved quickly – quietly – through the kitchen, and into the dining room. She slowed, taking a breath, and scanned it. Nothing looked amiss.

Moonlight came in through the broken slat on the shutters in a shaft and fell on the table. She could see her finger marks in the dust from the day previous where she’d laid out the sheets of paper – the transcriptions from her father’s notebook.

The notepad that detailed the Angel Maker case was safely back at the hotel in her duffle bag – Wiik – or at least, Hallberg – had the transcribed notes, he didn’t need the original. Her father’s final notebooks, detailing the years after Jamie left were at the hotel, too, inside a padded envelope, along with the pictures from the fridge, the two medals her father had earned, the braided bracelet from her bedroom he’d made for her as a child, and a few other personal effects of his. His final notebook – the one he’d been using in the weeks before his death – that was in her pocket right now.

But there were still two other stacks of pads still here. Shit. She’d have to take all of them, go through them, see if any were missing, if any had pages torn out.

Jamie gritted her teeth, still staring at the table. No, she couldn’t. Wiik was right – this wasn’t her case. And she wasn’t police. She was here to assist. She’d need to call it in, and as much as she hated the thought, there’d be CSTs crawling all over the place come morning. They’d have to take the notebooks for analysis, take moulds of the boot marks in the snow, pull prints from the…

Jamie’s eyes drifted upwards to the missing slat.

The back door.

She walked towards it, heart beating heavily in her chest.

They were old, wooden-framed sliding doors. The shutters outside weren’t locked, just shut with a simple latch that fell across the gap and rested on a notch. If someone put a blade between both doors, they could easily push it upwards and free them.

Jamie swallowed and studied the whole set-up.

The lock was a simple tumbler lock – easy enough to pick for those who knew how.

She filled her lungs with a shaky breath and squinted down through the missing slat.

Footprints.

In the snow.

Outside.

Someone had come to this door.

She could see lots of them, like they’d spent time there, moved around in front of it.

A well was worn against the doors, but Jamie couldn’t tell if they’d been opened.

The latch was back on the shutters and the door was…

She lifted her hand towards the handle to check if it was locked and froze. Shit – she didn’t want to wipe away any prints if there were any.

She couldn’t risk contaminating any evidence.

Jamie backed away and turned to the office instead, trying to figure out what she was going to do. She’d call it in the morning – tell Wiik she set off from Rättvik first thing, came here, and saw the prints. Yeah, so long as he didn’t check the hotels there, she’d be fine.

Jamie exhaled, looking around her darkened house. It felt different – contaminated. Poisoned, somehow.

She glanced at her feet, wondering whether the killer had stood in this spot. Whether he’d had a smug fucking grin on his face. Inside Jörgen Johansson’s house – the detective who almost caught him. And now he was screwing with his daughter, too. Raising a big middle finger.

Jamie felt her jaw tighten, her nostrils flare.

Fuck it. If this guy wanted to play this game, then she’d bite.

The joke was on him, though.

Because he had no idea who she was. Or what she was capable of.

Jamie started forward, aiming for her father’s office. If the house was about to be full of police and CSTs, then there were a few things she wanted to take care of first.