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

Jamie watched with a sort of amused curiosity as Hallberg dialled the number for Gunnarsons and put on the most formal phone voice she’d ever heard.

‘Hello,’ she said when they answered. ‘Is this Mikael Gunnarson? My name is Julia Hallberg, I’m a polisassistent with the Stockholm Polis.’

They were sitting in Hallberg’s car, a compact Mercedes hatchback with a punchy little petrol engine. It wasn’t as luxurious as Wiik’s Volvo, but it was nice. Jamie had never been fussed on luxury. She preferred function over form, and judging by the smell – Jamie sniffed the air in the cabin and detected the faint whiff of new-used-car-smell – so had Hallberg until recently. Jamie glanced over her shoulder and spotted paper mats in the footwells of the back seats. She ran her finger along the dashboard and felt the greasy texture of faux-leather blackener. Yeah, she hadn’t had this long.

Jamie glanced over at her now, tuning out her words as she explained to the Gunnarsons that they’d like to come and meet them, talk to them about the murder of their daughter.

Hallberg was slim – narrow-waisted, narrow-shouldered. Her features were pointed, her hair dark and pulled into a low-maintenance ponytail, but well looked after. Her clothing was professional yet informal. She had on a pair of black skinny jeans and flat Chelsea-style boots with a slightly pointed toe and a fashionable buckle. Jamie didn’t think they’d be much good at a run. Especially not in the middle of a Swedish winter. On top, Hallberg was wearing a grey blazer and a white shirt open at the top button. Jamie didn’t know if she’d ever seen such a police-looking outfit.

She lifted her eyes from Hallberg’s midsection and saw that the girl was smiling at her. Then she corrected herself. Jamie had to stop calling her a girl, even in her head. She had less than ten years on Hallberg – probably more like seven – and yet they seemed lifetimes apart. Hallberg was energetic, positive, optimistic… youthful, even. Jamie was… tired. Cynical. And broken. If she thought about it, her elbow ached from where it had been cracked by a drug dealer’s baseball bat. Her shoulder had a dull throb from where she’d been stabbed. And her back-left molars were still sensitive and just a little loose from where she’d had the shit kicked out of her courtesy of a scumbag she’d been chasing.

She still couldn’t drink cold things without wincing.

‘Okay?’ Hallberg asked.

Jamie snapped out of it, realising how strung out she felt. ‘Sorry, yeah. Just sort of zoned out then for a second.’ She looked down and found she was rubbing her sore elbow and then quickly dropped her hands to her lap. ‘We good?’

‘Yeah, Mikael is going to be home in around half an hour, and Åsa is already in the house. He said we can come now.’

‘How far is it?’

‘A little way outside the city – should take a little under an hour.’

‘Okay.’ Jamie sighed and rubbed her eyes. ‘Want to grab some coffee for the road?’

‘Sure,’ Hallberg said brightly. ‘I know a great little place.’

‘Of course you do.’ Jamie hated how sick Hallberg’s positivity made her.

They pulled out of the car park under the HQ and into the final minutes of sunlight. The fog was descending, just as Jamie thought it would, and soon it would be dark.

She swallowed and looked out of the window, conserving what little energy she had left.

With any luck, Hallberg wouldn’t be the talkative type. Though as she stole a look over at the young and determined polisassistent, drumming happily on the steering wheel with her thumb, humming along to a tune only she could hear until she worked up the nerve to ask whatever burning question was on the tip of her tongue, Jamie knew she was.

And what was worse – much worse, in fact – was that she was actually starting to miss Wiik.

And they’d not even got to the coffee place yet.

Hallberg’s headlights burnt holes through the fog as they wound along a narrow road a hundred kilometres outside the city.

The fog had thickened to a soup and the temperature read-out on Hallberg’s centre console was flashing a balmy minus six degrees.

The last of the warmth had gone from the cup in Jamie’s hands, but she still held on to it, willing the triple shot of espresso to seep its way into her body and throw some fire on her mind.

Trees flashed by in vertical white strips – silver birch forest as far as the eye could see – catching the headlights.

The Gunnarsons had done well for themselves and lived in a large property set on a hillside overlooking a narrow valley and a small lake. This road served only their house and ended at their gate. Another had branched off about a kilometre back, no doubt to another mansion, but now there was nothing else.

Jamie exhaled, feeling nauseated by the constant pendulum swing of the road.

Hallberg drove smoothly with both hands on the wheel, and had mercifully fallen silent.

Yet that hadn’t made Jamie feel better.

The Gunnarsons held the key – the answer to the question, what don’t we understand? But she didn’t feel right. Something didn’t feel right.

An imposing black gate swam out of the gloom, two large stone pillars sitting on either side of it. From them, stone walls ran off into the forest in either direction – they were ten feet high and topped with pointed rocks. There must have been millions of them. And it probably cost that much to put them there.

The gate looked heavy and immovable. Though Jamie expected that security was important when you were thirty minutes’ drive from the nearest village – and any potential rescue.

Hallberg slowed and wound down her window, leaning out to speak into an intercom that stuck out of the ground twenty feet short of the gate.

Jamie looked ahead – seeing a slit of yellow light between the join of the two gates. She sat taller and tried to see over it, catching just a glimpse of the flat roof of the Gunnarsons’ mansion.

They’d come up on the side of a slope – the ground to their right fell away towards the valley floor, and on the left climbed up to the top of the hill some few hundred feet above. Jamie wondered how much of it they owned.

The house itself seemed to perch on the hillside, and from here Jamie could see that trees hemmed it in at the back, but at the front it was open. She expected a manicured lawn rolled away at the front of the house down to the boundary, giving an unobstructed view of the valley. She pictured it, even from behind the impenetrable gates able to visualise the glass front. If it was her, the whole side of the house would be glass. Plenty of natural light, space, and not a neighbour around for miles. What could be better?

A wash of cold air hit Jamie and she looked around at Hallberg. ‘What’s up?’ she asked.

Hallberg leaned back in and turned to Jamie. ‘No answer.’

‘Try it again,’ Jamie said, keeping her breathing even.

Hallberg leaned out and pressed the call button for the second, and then third time.

The temperature in the car had plunged now and their breath was misting in front of their faces, the blowers on the dash fighting to keep the fog from the inside of the windscreen.

Hallberg withdrew her hand and looked over at Jamie. ‘They know we’re coming.’

Jamie shrugged. ‘Rich people,’ she said, brushing it off. And yet, something didn’t feel right.

How long could they sit there and wait?

‘Should I try calling them?’ Hallberg asked.

Jamie leaned her head back, tapping her fingers on the cup between her knees, spying the thin shred of light between the gates. Her skin had begun to goose pimple, and it wasn’t because of the cold. ‘Yeah,’ she said after a second. ‘Call them.’

Hallberg wound the window up and pulled her phone from the centre console, getting the number up on-screen.

Jamie checked her watch. It was nearly six thirty now. The cloud cover had blotted out all of the moonlight, and the forest around them was drenched in a black stillness.

Fog swirled in front of the headlights.

Hallberg placed the call and the tinny sound of the dial echoed around them.

A dull bang rang out somewhere in the distance, and Jamie sat bolt upright. A cluster of birds flapped out of the trees in a spray of snow and careened into the air, cawing madly at the disturbance.

Hallberg was sitting up like a meerkat, her head turning on her shoulders. ‘What the hell was that?’

Jamie swallowed hard, her heart racing. She knew that sound well – even muted by the glass in the windows, even dulled by the forest and the fog and the distance. ‘That was a gunshot,’ she said.

To be more precise, it was a report from a hunting rifle. It had a distinct sound. One she’d come to know intrinsically from the trips with her father. Medium calibre. A 6.5mm round. Something designed to hunt bigger prey than geese. That much she was certain of.

Hallberg’s voice was strained now, her eyes wide. ‘Where did it come from? Was it close? Inspector Johansson?’ She was looking around wildly, but by the time she got to her name, Jamie was already out of the car.

The gate was closed before them and from inside the car, Jamie couldn’t see over. Hallberg was nearly yelling as Jamie climbed onto her bonnet, stepping up onto her roof to get a better look at the house.

It was as she thought – sprawling, glass-fronted. Open to the elements, the wilds, and anyone with a long enough rifle and the balls to set up across the valley.

It wasn’t far, maybe two, three hundred metres at most. You wouldn’t have to be a match shooter to line up a shot from that distance.

Jamie’s head turned back to the house now, scanning it for any signs of anything amiss. A small part of her was hoping that their neighbours were just hunting enthusiasts.

But then she saw it.

One of the full-length windows facing the valley was shattered. The top quarter still clung to the frame, but a spider web of cracks ran across the glass, the lower portion lying in shards on the polished oak floor of the Gunnarsons’ house.

Her heart sank, her blood running cold.

Hallberg was out of the car now, calling up at her, but she couldn’t hear words. All Jamie had in her ears was rushing blood.

Another shot rang out and Jamie flinched, ducking reflexively.

She was shielded by the trees from the shooter, but the house wasn’t.

A second window exploded in a shower of glass. It fell to the floor and skittered everywhere, raining down onto the snow-covered lawn below.

Jamie was frozen, staring up at the house.

‘Inspector!’

Jamie couldn’t move.

‘Jamie!’ Hallberg was grabbing at her leg now, trying to pull her down – no doubt fearful that she was about to get her head blown off.

Jamie’s foot slipped on the frozen droplets stuck to Hallberg’s roof and her legs splayed. She landed on her hip and slid down the windscreen and onto the bonnet.

The moisture stung her skin, cold and painful, and the lump of the windscreen washer jet dug into her thigh.

Jamie grunted, rolling down to the ground and onto her feet.

She was moving then, going on instinct and nothing else.

Hallberg was still yelling behind her, but Jamie wasn’t listening – the Gunnarsons were in trouble, if not dead already. Was Eriksson across the valley right now? Finishing what he started twenty-five years ago? Would Leif Lundgren be next? Would the parents of his latest victim?

Jamie charged at the gate and leapt up, the Kevlar toecaps of her boots hitting the slick steel, her hands finding the top.

She scrambled up, the tread on her boots raking wet lines down the black paint, her shoulders creaking and straining as she hauled herself upwards and swung her leg over the top.

She stole a glance back, her breath already ragged, and caught a glimpse of Hallberg, rooted in place behind the open door of her car, her mouth open in shock, eyes wide with fear.

And then she was gone.

Jamie’s heels hit the tarmac of the Gunnarsons’ drive and she was on the other side, already moving fast up the sweeping driveway.

The freezing fog stung her cheeks and made her lungs ache. Her throat tightened and tried to make her cough. Jamie suppressed it and sped forward, the sound of the idling Mercedes already drowned by the fog behind her.

The trees had fallen away on her right now and had been replaced by a sloping lawn. It dropped forty feet or so over twice that distance and ended in the same high stone wall that kept the trees at bay.

Jamie couldn’t see anything beyond it but a blockade of grey mist, but she knew somewhere out there a shooter had line of sight to the house over the highest branches.

She looked up at it now – a square building with a flat roof that pushed back into the hillside.

Jamie’s legs were burning as she reached the top of the drive, keeping low as she moved, her knees tight to her chest. The asphalt widened in front of a huge double garage next to the front door, and Jamie ducked between the two cars parked there – a top-end BMW coupe and an inordinately expensive Porsche saloon with exhausts big enough for Jamie to put her fist in – four of them.

She caught her breath quickly, fingers tingling, heart hammering, and peeked through the driver’s window. Nothing moved in the ocean of fog.

Jamie cursed, glancing back down at the gate. There was still no sign of Hallberg and no sound was coming from within.

Something flashed in the corner of Jamie’s eye – a blazing rose in the darkness. It strobed for an instant and then died, and the boom reached her a second later. The glass over her head exploded and the bullet ripped into the bonnet of the BMW behind her, gouging a big silver trough in the gleaming black paint. Sparks danced as the bullet ricocheted up into the trees behind the house, the BMW wobbling from the impact. Its lights began to flash, the alarm blaring in shock.

Jamie slumped to the ground against the door of the Porsche and protected her head, ears ringing, and felt shards of glass raining down on her head and shoulders. She swore to herself, barely able to hear her own voice.

She didn’t know how far out the shooter was, but he was no slouch and wasn’t afraid to put a bullet in her.

He wasn’t here for Jamie, though – he’d put rounds into the house. After the Gunnarsons. They were the target. Jamie was just a witness.

She snatched a breath and rolled over, bear-crawling to the front bumper, lining up the front door. It was hidden behind a stonework wall – one that was no doubt designed to block out the frigid wind sweeping up off the lake. But now Jamie hoped it would provide her with cover. Hoped.

She had to move, and fast – get inside, find Mikael and Åsa Gunnarson. Get them somewhere safe – then wait for backup to arrive.

Jamie was in the open for just a moment.

She saw another flash, then dived forward, her elbows slamming against the composite front door with a loud crash.

The stones on the corner of the protective wall plumed into dust and crumbled to the ground, leaving a hole the size of an orange. She didn’t know what rifle the shooter was using, but they weren’t hunting bullets – not jacketed or open-tipped. Jamie glanced at the hole in the wall, the wide gouge in the bonnet of the still-wailing BMW – they were serious. Ballistic tips, she guessed. Bullets that had a plastic nose cone that disintegrated on impact, allowing the flat head of the bullet to bloom and expand into its target. For maximum damage. For maximum stopping power. The kind of bullet that would turn a glancing shot into a kill shot. Jacketed bullets would pierce, could nick, could pass straight through a victim and miss everything important. A ballistic tip as good as exploded when it struck, guaranteeing serious damage.

Jamie stared at the hole in the BMW, wondering what it would be like to get hit by one.

She didn’t want to think about it.

There were two people inside that were on the shooter’s kill list. Two people who could be the answer to their questions. Who could be the linchpin in this investigation. Who could be the difference between the end of this case or a trail of victims stretching away from them.

Jamie clamped her jaw shut to stop it quivering, raked in as deep a breath as she could, and then turned to the door, pushing down on the handle and plunging inside.

The interior was bright, the floors a dark and rich wood. Walnut or cherry. There was no time to consider which.

On Jamie’s left, a door came up. Garage, had to be. She opened it and stuck her head in, was met with a dark interior. A four-by-four sat quietly on the far side, an open roof box on top of it, skis sticking out the front. The Gunarassons had just come back from, or were planning, a trip.

‘Hello?’ she called.

There was no reply.

Jamie cursed. She didn’t think it was going to be that easy.

She left the door open and stepped back into the corridor, advancing. Ahead, the space opened up into a large open-plan kitchen and living room.

Another door lay open on Jamie’s left, leading to a small bathroom. Empty again. Shit.

Jamie came up on the corner of the kitchen and slowed, pressing herself to the wall.

The smell of food was thick in the air – Italian maybe, or Mediterranean. Something rich – but there was another scent. A metallic tang.

Jamie looked at the wall she was pressed against. White.

The one opposite, white.

All the walls were white.

She let her eyes drift across the back wall – running from the open bathroom door into the open living room.

She got a third of the way along and stopped, her stomach twisting itself into a sickening knot. On the back wall – between a photograph of the Gunnarsons sitting, arms around one another, on a boat, bathed in golden sunshine, and an old black-and-white photograph of a young girl Jamie assumed was Tilde Gunnarson – was a spray of scarlet.

She edged towards the corner and looked out, casting her eyes over the long room – the gleaming white countertop of the kitchen island, the white leather sofas, the brushed-steel freestanding fireplace, the reclaimed-wood dining table beset with candles and plates of half-eaten food… and a woman slumped down on top of her dinner, back to the shattered window, cheek against the surface, eyes wide and vacant, a blood-red hole between her shoulders.

Åsa Gunnarson’s arms were splayed on the wood, her wine glass knocked over outside the knuckles of her right hand, her left still clutching the knife she’d been eating with.

Her auburn hair lay around her head in a tangled mess and a thin stream of blood ran from her open mouth.

Through the gaps in the wooden slats of the table, her blood was dripping, pooling beneath her. Her white, body-con dress was soaked, her feet at odd angles, ankles rolled over on her heels as she had tried to move, the last dregs of life draining from her.

Judging by the spray across the table and the wall, the first round had hit her square in the back – blown the front of her chest out, and doused the house in her blood.

Jamie ducked back in, forcing herself to breathe. She couldn’t get the stench out of her nose now. Blood. So much blood. The human body holds around five litres of it. And Åsa Gunnarson’s was soaking into her expensive walnut flooring.

Jamie swallowed the rising bile in her throat and forced herself to focus. Åsa was dead. But the table held two plates – Åsa’s and the one opposite. It sat on the table, the wide rim of the bowl speckled with blood. Jamie could see a knife and fork on the floor next to the chair that had been pushed back from the table at an odd angle.

Jamie narrowed her eyes, blocking out the dead woman and tried to call out. ‘Mik—’ Her voice was a croak. She cleared her throat willed herself to volume. ‘Mikael Gunnarson?’ she shouted across the living room, searching for any sign of the missing husband, her eyes decoding the scene.

How many shots had she heard from the car? Two, three?

One was in Åsa – the bullet in pieces inside her chest cavity. The second had blown out another window.

Jamie leaned out and looked at the windows. Eight of them in a row. The third had been broken by the first shot, right behind Åsa. The fifth and sixth were broken, too. Two more shots.

She went back to the blood-splattered wall and searched past the photo of Tilde Gunnarson.

A corridor led into the back of the house, to the bedrooms, Jamie guessed, and next to it a welt in the wall that showed the concrete beneath the paint. That was the second.

She kept moving, seeing another welt, higher this time – the third shot – and below it, on the floor, another photograph lying in pieces, blown apart, its glass spread around in sharp fragments.

At the far end of the living room, Jamie could see another dividing wall that separated the lounge area with the sofas and the fireplace from a corridor that dog-legged left and out of sight. Bedrooms, laundry room? She didn’t know, but the bullets had chased Mikael Gunnarson that way, and that’s where she had to go, too.

Shit.

It was thirty feet with no cover.

And a shooter with no intentions of letting anyone walk away from this house alive.

Suicide.

That was the word that came to mind.

Jamie glanced down at her watch, thought about the drive up. The twenty-minute-at-best delay time before the flashing blues arrived.

The shooter would know that, and wouldn’t want to let the Gunnarsons slip through his fingers. If he hadn’t already, he’d be advancing on the property, perhaps moving to a new vantage point. Jamie had to go quickly, get Mikael and then either hold out until support arrived, or get somewhere safe until the shooter came for them.

She didn’t have time to think about who it could have been.

She just needed to move.

Jamie backed up towards the front door to get a running start, pressed her heels into it for grip, and then balled her fists, ready to spring forward and charge across the gap.

She counted to three in her head and then went on two before she lost her nerve.

Jamie sprinted into the open, the wash of freezing wind from the blown-out windows hitting her like a wall and punching the air out of her lungs.

She gasped and kept going, her boots crunching on broken glass as she made for the cover of the opposite wall.

Another flash lit up in her peripherals and the wall in front of her erupted in a shower of concrete and paint.

The bang echoed through the house, deafening her as she threw her hands up to protect her face, grains of concrete smashing into her arms as she broke through the cloud.

Jamie screwed her eyes shut against the dust, feeling it hitting her bared teeth as she moved, and barely caught sight of the dividing wall as it lunged out at her.

She tried to readjust, but she was moving too fast. Her shoulder clipped it and she spun to the ground, landing hard and sliding into the narrow corridor.

Jamie was panting, flat on her back, and looked out into the living room, a thick cloud of white paint and plaster still lingering in the blood-heavy air.

The shooter had led her across the space, pulled the trigger a fraction too soon, misjudged the travel time of the shot, misjudged her speed. But any closer and the bullet would have ripped through her arms, maybe her whole body.

Jamie wanted to roll over and vomit.

But she wasn’t done yet.

Still breathing hard, she pushed herself to her feet and reached out, steadying herself on the corner of the wall.

A hallway stretched towards the back of the house – two doors were on the left, and then at the far end, there was a door on the right leading outside. Jamie edged forwards, tweaking her ears for any sounds of movement. She couldn’t hear anything and prayed that Mikael Gunnarson hadn’t been stupid enough to try to make a break for it through the back door.

Jamie slowed at a window on her right and glanced out. It faced down the valley – there was no way the shooter could have line of sight from where he was. She saw a flagstone path running away from the house, moving towards a gate at the treeline about fifty feet down the garden.

Was the shooter heading for that right now?

She set her jaw and pushed on. There was no time to waste.

The first door on her left was open. She glanced inside – saw a sprawling bathroom with a walk-in shower. But no Mikael.

She exhaled, trying to calm herself, but her heart wouldn’t quit. It was still hammering against her ribs.

‘Mikael?’ She tried again. ‘Mikael Gunnarson? It’s the police,’ Jamie offered. ‘If you’re okay, let me know.’

But there was nothing but silence.

Just one door left.

Jamie moved towards it with conviction now and found that it was closed.

She paused for a second, laid her hand on the wood, taking an extra breath, and then she pushed down on the handle and stepped inside.

The door creaked open and her boots sank into a plush carpet. The interior was dark and she could just make out the outline of a bed from the ambient light coming in through the large window on the right-hand side of the room.

‘Mikael?’ she said into the darkness.

Whether it was the rustle of the carpet, the creak of a tensioned tendon, or just the primitive part of Jamie’s brain alerting her to danger, she didn’t know. But the instant before it happened, she twisted instinctively to the left and locked her muscles.

Something hard hit her in the guts and she was thrown off her feet, driven sideways, deeper into the room, and slammed against the wall next to the window.

All the wind left her body, along with a sharp yelping sound, and stars danced in front of her eyes.

In the light coming in through the door now, she saw the figure of a man rear back, pulling his shoulder from her chest, winding up a punch. His elbow raised in the darkness, silhouetted against the hallway lighting, and hung there before propelling his closed fist back towards Jamie’s face.

She pulled her hands up into a tight guard and rolled to the right, feeling the fist bounce across her forearms and hit the wall next to her left ear.

The attacker grunted and swore, pulling his hand back in shock, giving Jamie enough space to react. Her training kicked in, the muscle memory doing the work, and she stepped inside the man’s reach, leaned into her left foot and threw her right knee upwards as hard as she could, bringing it around in a sharp arc.

The point impacted him in the lower midriff, just above the pubis, and he let out a low groan, clutching at his front and doubling over.

Jamie wasted no time and danced onto her right foot, sent a low kick with her left into the back of his calf.

Her foot sang, the vibration reaching all the way to her hip.

But the man went down to a knee, his eyes wide with fear in the darkness as he stared up at Jamie. ‘Nnälla, döda mig inte,’ he whispered, squeezing it out between ragged breaths. Please, don’t kill me.

Jamie lowered her balled fist, the one meant for the man’s jaw, and glanced at the door, massaging her sternum with her off hand. ‘Mikael Gunnarson?’ she asked, still not lowering her guard fully.

He nodded, fearfully, raising his hands next to his shoulders. ‘Snälla, jag betalar vad du vill,’ he said, looking up at Jamie. Please, I’ll pay whatever you want.

She swallowed and let her hands fall now. ‘My name is Detective Inspector Jamie Johansson,’ Jamie said, proffering the man a hand. ‘I’m with the SPA – Stockholm Polis.’

‘You’re not here to kill me?’ he mumbled, not taking it.

‘No,’ Jamie said, wincing at the pain in her chest and turning her attention to the open door instead. ‘I’m here to save your life.’