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

Jamie stepped into the dark interior, the smell of dust still hanging thickly in the air.

The whole place felt like it had been violated. The CSTs had been through everything. Plastic sheeting stretched through the rooms, forming gangplanks they’d walked on. Print dust was sprinkled on the surfaces, and little white paper stickers littered the house – markers for items to check for prints, photograph and catalogue.

The house may have been hers, but it had never felt further from it.

‘Alright, Robert,’ Jamie muttered, pushing the door closed behind her. ‘Where are you?’

Jamie pulled her phone from her pocket and flicked on her torch. She’d dropped a message to Hallberg on the way over to forward any information they had on Nyström that might have helped. But it looked like he was living a frugal life. His apartment was mortgage free, his car was paid for, and he got by on his pension as well as a little consulting work with the SPA every now and then.

The CSTs had gone over his apartment but found nothing of use. No particulates, no fibres, no prints, no DNA. Though that didn’t surprise Jamie, considering the circumstances of the other abductions. Eriksson was skilled, he was smart and he was very experienced. And perhaps worst of all was that he was completely unassuming – friendly faced. A damn priest, for God’s sake. The perfect disguise. On top of that, there was no CCTV inside Nyström’s building either. There were two exits, a number of directions they could have gone in, and no specific time on the abduction itself. Neighbours reported hearing nothing out of the ordinary, and no one saw a damn thing, either. It was as though Nyström vanished into thin air.

All they had was the grainy photograph from the tollbooth, but that didn’t put a time on anything except when that car passed through. Which could have been an hour or a day after Nyström was taken. Probably the latter, because it hadn’t been clocked coming the other way, and there were at least four other routes that could have been taken out of the city that were free of tolls. The photo told them that the driver wanted to be clocked there. Which told them that it was an obvious misdirect. Or an un-obvious non-misdirect. Or a double, triple or quadruple bluff.

Basically, it meant shit. Just one more thing to make sure they didn’t know which way was up in this investigation.

And with the Angel Maker case now breaking on national news, the assassination of Åsa Gunnarson smeared across every front page in the country, Emmy Berg’s photo in every tabloid, Leif Lundgren under police protection, every CST in the city being bounced from crime scene to crime like pinballs, the primary suspect on the run with every patrol car from here to Svalbard on the lookout, and now the SID breathing down the neck of the primary investigator, the case was stretching the SPA thinner than it ever had been.

Per Eriksson was running rings around them, and Jamie couldn’t help but feel like he had them chasing their tails on purpose. Every clue seemed to lead them deeper into this maze, and every stone they turned over only pushed everyone further in different directions.

It had been a tiring, difficult, dangerous four days, and Jamie didn’t think things were about to ease just yet.

And lost in the maelstrom of it all was Robert Nyström. A man who dedicated his life to catching bastards like Per Eriksson. A man who’d worked alongside her father to put Sjöberg behind bars. A man that everyone seemed to have forgotten about.

Jamie paused at the open door to her father’s office, took a breath, and went in.

Inside, it was pitch black. There were no windows in the office – her father had made sure of that. He wanted the place completely inaccessible. The door was heavy and equipped with a bolt lock too. Just in case.

Jamie swung her phone around, its pale light casting a ghostly glow, and then she paused, noticing a small battery-powered LED floodlight that had been affixed to the top of the door. It was hanging on the back. No doubt the CSTs had put it up there while they were working and missed it when they were leaving. Jamie wasn’t complaining though. She pushed the door to and reached up, flicking it on and blinding herself at the same time.

It cast a harsh, shadowless glare on everything and she swore, ducking out of the light and jamming the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she muttered, seeing stars and turning back to the room.

Everything was illuminated now.

She sighed, not knowing what she was looking for. Or where to start. Her childhood was fuzzy to her – just repetitive snapshots of her arguing parents, of sitting at her father’s desk at work, of her father asleep on the sofa, of her mother slamming the front door and storming out, of hovering at the top of the stairs as they moved through the house in a twister of profanity and tears. Jamie shook the memories out of her head, and moved forward.

With every book she read, every surface she ran her hand over and every drawer she opened, her childhood split in two and revealed itself to her. The shell was cracking a little more with every minute she spent on Swedish soil, and soon, it would all be exposed.

She wondered whether inside she would find memories of Robert Nyström and the Angel Maker case. Or whether she would simply discover more reasons that she’d repressed the first decade of her life.

Jamie scanned the room before approaching her father’s desk. It didn’t look like the CSTs had taken anything during the search, and everything that had been touched and moved had been put back.

Still, it felt violated.

Jamie sat at her father’s desk, the ancient chair squeaking horribly as she rolled back on it, trying to picture Robert Nyström. But she didn’t have to think hard. She stared at the wall behind the desk, under the shelves, at the photographs pinned up there, and let her eyes rest on the picture of two men in angling gear holding a fish up between them. It was a river pike about three feet long. A gädda. On the right was her father – six-two, burly, blonde with a big face, wide teeth that always reminded Jamie of a carthorse’s, and pale blue eyes. On the left was Robert Nyström. He was an inch taller than her father, but half as wide. He had narrow shoulders and a narrow head. His chin was strong, his hair cut short. It was nearly white in this photo – even though he must have only been about forty. Jamie never remembered it being any other way. But that’s probably because she was more focused on his eyebrows. He had prominent cheekbones that, when coupled with his large, dark bushy brows – which a horned owl would be proud of – made his eyes look sunken. He was smiling in the picture, his grin cutting into his cheeks. As was her father.

Jamie reached out and took the photo off the wall, listening as the pin dropped somewhere behind the desk.

She studied it more closely.

Her father and Nyström took a lot of trips like that. Fishing, hunting. Every winter, they’d travel north to icefish near a little village called… Jamie rocked back in the chair, trying to remember the name. But for the life of her, she couldn’t. It began with ‘V’, she thought.

She sighed, rocked back, and then turned the picture over, laughing at herself. On the back, the words Vemdalen, 1992 were written. Jamie would have been nine.

She went back to the other photos and scanned across them, feeling her throat ache at the sight of herself and her father. In one she was just a baby, in another, she was a little girl – maybe five or six – in another she was a teenager. Her mother was distinctly absent from each.

Jamie paused on the last one, looking at it. Her and her father were standing on a rise above a lake. She was probably thirteen – God, that must have been during the Angel Maker case.

Jamie narrowed her eyes, trying to recall it.

She was standing there, holding her father’s Remington Model 700, grinning. Her dad couldn’t have looked happier. She always hated hunting. Never liked the idea of killing anything for sport. Her father didn’t, either. Anything they shot, they ate. Her father would gut the thing right there in the woods with his knife – a beautiful stag-horn-handled hunting knife that he carried in a sheath on the back of his belt. To work, when hunting. It never left his person.

Where it was now, Jamie didn’t know. She’d not found it when she’d gone through the office the first time. Her mother probably had it with her father’s effects. She’d picked them up at the coroner’s office when she’d ID’d his body before the funeral. Jamie never saw what was in that bag. Her mother had kept it from her and then said she’d thrown it away. ‘Nothing you’d want to keep,’ she said.

Jamie realised now her mother had probably lied about that, too.

She exhaled hard, staring down at her father.

Deer was his favourite. They’d stalk one for days, sometimes. One well-placed kill shot, only when it was guaranteed. ‘Through the heart,’ he’d say, pointing to his chest. ‘Or through the head.’ And then he’d hold his hand up to his temple like a gun.

She laughed sardonically at that image – at the cruel irony of it as she sat ten feet from the blood-stained wall – and then felt her eyes burn with tears. She wiped them away and went back to the photo, remembering that weekend. Teasing it from the tumult of her childhood.

He had one arm around her, the other across his body, on her shoulder. She looked at the image more closely and noticed her father’s ring. It had always irked her mother that he’d worn it, as he’d always refused to wear a wedding ring.

It was a family thing – his father’s before him. Big, brass, with a crest on it. He’d often joked that it was a good reminder for the people on the wrong end of it not to step out of line again.

She’d always thought that was great. Hilarious. Brave. Exciting.

Now, she saw it for what it was.

But it was a part of her father, for better or worse.

Mostly worse.

The picture lingered in her fingers and she realised then that the photo didn’t only contain her and her father. There was a third there, Nyström. The man behind the camera.

She scanned it for anything else she might recognise and saw the land falling away behind her and her father, a lake in the background, the weak, cloud-blocked light playing off the surface. It looked to be in a rolling valley beset with larch trees, a narrow strip of water stretching into the distance.

A small cabin stood at the near side of the lake, smoke curling from its chimney. Jamie could just make out the tiny outline of her father’s car in the gravel stretch before it.

Jamie furrowed her brow, trying to recall the cabin. And then it burst into life in her mind. It was an old hunting cabin – damp and raw. Sap oozed from the walls, the inner surfaces rough with uncut bark. The seams were sealed with gum, the pitched roof awash with cobwebs. Jamie could remember lying on the top bunk of one of the bunks in there, staring up at them, watching as the spiders scuttled around in the lamplight on their silver webs, fascinated but not scared.

The cabin had no electricity, no running water. Her father and Nyström would fill plastic jugs from the lake and boil it every morning over the fire in the stone hearth.

No one owned the cabin. It was built long ago by those passing through and maintained by those who stayed there. She could picture her father and Nyström sawing wood to repair the leaky roof one summer while she skipped stones on the lake.

Something in Jamie’s head twigged then, and she reached into her pocket, pulling out her father’s notebook.

She flipped through a few pages, still holding the photograph, and stopped at the entry she wanted, re-reading the note written to her. The words said, ‘There are things I want you to have. That they would take. Things that only you can find. I know you will. One day.’

Jamie went back to the photograph now and stared down at that tiny cabin. They were there once – it was cold. Jamie remembered that. Just her and her father. Snow had been beating against the windows. Maybe it was a Christmas one year, Jamie didn’t know. The fire was small and they were huddled around it. Her father had leaned the thin mattresses from the bunk beds up against the window and door to stop the wind getting in.

They’d made soup and drunk hot chocolate for the best part of two days, just talking. About her father’s life, about what Jamie wanted to do when she grew up. About all the things she wanted to be. He’d told her to make a list – write a letter to her future self. Telling her all the things she wanted to do. She remembered some of them – she wanted to be a figure skater – no, a hockey player. Her mother had wanted her to do figure skating, not hockey. She’d wanted to be a zookeeper – or a park ranger – in Africa. Someone who protected elephants and rhinos from poachers.

Jamie bit her lip, dredging the riverbed of her mind.

She wanted to be a detective, like her dad, of course.

And she wanted to be an Olympian – yes, that was it. Biathlon. Skiing and shooting. Her father had loved the biathlon. She’d trained so hard in those last few years she’d been here. After moving to England, her mother had refused to let her continue.

Jamie felt anger well in her, sadness, and then regret.

When she’d left her father behind, she felt like she’d left herself behind, too.

Jamie let out a rattling breath and summoned the strength to return to that cabin – to her shaking, frozen, eleven-year-old fingers scribbling on that grubby paper.

What had she done with it?

Her father had written a letter, too, but wouldn’t let her read it. Because she wouldn’t let him read hers.

She laughed now at that. Christ, they could have both frozen to death in there. The lake had frozen solid in hours, the temperature plunging as the storm rolled in – one of the most fierce the country had ever faced. At the time, it didn’t even enter her mind. There, with her dad, nothing could have hurt her.

She closed her eyes, reliving those moments.

After they’d finished, he’d taken the notes and folded them up, placing them inside a piece of hide, all rolled up. And then he’d bound it in leather string, had her put her finger on the knot as he’d tied the bow. And then he’d pried up one of the floorboards with his stag-horn knife and put the parcel underneath it. He’d said, ‘We’ll come back here in twenty years, and find these letters. And we’ll see who you grew up to be. Who knows, maybe we’ll even bring your daughter here.’

Jamie had made a loud, long ewwwwuegh sound to express her disgust at the idea of having kids of her own. The noise she’d make now at the thought wouldn’t be too far away.

She lowered the picture slowly. ‘There are things I want you to have. That they would take. Things that only you can find. I know you will. One day,’ she said out loud to herself. She turned on the chair to look at the near-black stain on the wall and held back tears. ‘What things, Dad? What things?’