Page 173 of The Sleepwalker
‘I don’t know,’ Joona replies honestly.
‘The clock is ticking, for God’s sake, and .?.?.’
Noah trails off when he sees Frida Nobel hold up her phone to get the others’ attention.
‘We’ve finally got a bit of a breakthrough with the wig,’ she says.
‘Go on,’ Noah tells her. He looks like he is almost on the brink of tears.
‘Stina has been working from hospital, and she managed to get in touch with the wigmaker, Carl M. Lundh’s. It took a while, because the records were destroyed after being digitised,’ Frida continues. ‘But Stina reached out to one of their retired employees to ask if he remembered who might have bought the wig made from Lotta’s hair and he just got back to her. It turns out he’d saved the whole physical record index in his attic.’
‘Of course he had,’ Noah says with a grin.
‘Lotta has sold her hair twice, but it’s the first one that fits, timewise.’
‘OK.’
‘The first wig was bought by a woman called Veronica Nagler.’
‘Nagler,’ Rikard mumbles, logging into his computer. He runs a quick search and looks up from the screen. ‘She’s dead .?.?. An accident over six years ago.’
‘Great,’ Göran sighs.
Rikard connects his computer to the projector and shows the team the photographs from the police report.
‘She’s not the killer, but there must be some connection,’ says Frida. ‘There has to be.’
‘Maybe she’s an early victim?’ Anna suggests.
In the images, a woman with a bald head is sprawled across a ladder on the ground beneath an apple tree. Bright red apples have spilled out of a dented metal bucket. She is wearing a striped cotton nightie, and her brown floral clogs are on the ground by the trunk.
‘Are there any pictures from the autopsy?’ asks Joona.
‘Yep,’ Rikard replies.
He clicks a few times, and the first of the images fills theprojection screen. A naked woman with grey skin is laid out on the stainless-steel autopsy table. Her eyes are wide open, her dark tongue lolling out of her mouth. She doesn’t have any hair, and there is a clear injury to the side of her head. Her torso is covered in cuts and scrapes, from the notch between her collarbones, down between her breasts, to her pubic bone.
‘The ladder slipped. She probably got those grazes from the rungs and then cracked her head on one of the rocks there,’ says Noah, turning to Joona.
Rikard brings up another photograph in which a deeper mark is visible among all the other scrapes, a cut in the shape of an arrow.
60
Since the early 1970s, four crescent-shaped apartment buildings have loomed by the edge of the motorway in Täby. Viewed from above, the grey blocks resemble an open ellipse, a mandorla.
The snow-covered park in the middle of the complex is criss-crossed with trails left by dogs and people.
Joona gets out of the lift on the fifth floor, steps over a blue plastic sledge and walks through the shabby stairwell.
The wig made using Ann-Charlotte Olsson’s hair was bought by a woman called Veronica Nagler, who suffered from alopecia.
Just two years later, Veronica was found dead in her own garden.
Following an autopsy, her death was ruled an accident, despite the fact that she had unusually high levels of zopiclone in her blood. The ladder had slipped on the recently cut grass, and she had fallen and hit her head on one of the rocks laid in a circle around the trunk of the apple tree.
After Veronica’s death, her husband Erland and their son Kasper moved from the cottage in Steninge to this apartment on Kometvägen.
Joona stops and rings the bell when he reaches Erland’s apartment. He hears shuffling footsteps inside, and a man with a crooked back, slicked-back hair and grey stubble opens the door. The man is wearing a brown cardigan with holes in both elbowsover a checked shirt, a pair of trousers pulled up to his waist, and brown leather slippers.
