The Disciple Read Online Free PDF Page A

patio. Billy followed her. They stepped up onto the decking and walked past the four wicker chairs and the table with a closed green sun umbrella in the middle, which made Billy think of a seating area outside a restaurant rather than ordinary garden furniture. They went over to two white wooden deck chairs, where they could just imagine the Granlunds enjoying the evening sun over a drink.
    ‘There.’ Vanja pointed at a window on the left. Billy looked. Inside he could see most of the ground floor; Torkel was sitting chatting to Richard Granlund while the crime-scene team went through the rest of the house, but that couldn’t be what Vanja wanted to show him.
    ‘What?’ he asked.
    ‘There,’ she said again, pointing. She was more precise this time, and now he saw what she meant. It was more or less right in front of him: an impression on the window pane. There was an almost rectangular mark measuring a few square centimetres, with a smaller dot below it, flanked by two half-moon shapes. The one on the left curved slightly to the right, the one on the right slightly to the left, like a pair of brackets enclosing the other marks. Billy immediately knew what they were. Someone – probably the murderer – had looked in through the window, with his forehead and nose resting on the glass as he cupped his hands to shut out the light, leaving secretions from his sebaceous glands on the window pane.
    ‘He’s tall,’ Billy stated, leaning forward. ‘Taller than me.’
    ‘If he’s the one who did this,’ Vanja nodded towards the marks, ‘then that means he was visible from those houses over there.’ She pointed to the neighbouring houses beyond the flowerbeds. ‘Somebody might have seen him.’
    Billy was doubtful. The middle of a weekday in July. The nearby houses looked as if the occupants might be away on holiday. Very few curious souls had gathered on the street or discovered they had important things to do in the garden when the police turned up. This was the kind of area that more or less emptied in the summer. The residents had the time and money to go off to their summer cottages, to go sailing, or even abroad. Had the perpetrator been aware of this? Counted on it?
    Probably.
    They would knock on doors, of course. Lots of doors. If the murderer had been let in, as Billy believed, it was likely that he had approached the house from the front. Knocking on the patio door was peculiar and frightening, and his chances of getting in would be considerably reduced. In which case he must have walked up the garden path. He would have been in full view there, too. But the same thing had applied in the two previous cases, and it hadn’t helped them at all. No one had seen anything or anyone. No car, no one behaving oddly in the area, no one who had asked the way, been creeping around, cycled past, turned up with a message.
    Nothing and no one.
    Everything had been perfectly normal in the neighbourhood, with the minor exception that a woman had been brutally murdered.
    ‘Torkel wants us to head back,’ Billy said. ‘If we’re lucky we’ll find a common denominator this time.’
    ‘It feels as if we need some luck. He’s picking up the pace.’
    Billy nodded. Three weeks had elapsed between the first and second murders, but only eight days between the second and third. Together they set off across the lawn, which almost resembled the green on a golf course; in spite of a long spell of hot, dry weather, there was not a single patch of yellow to be seen. Vanja glanced at her colleague as he loped along beside her in his dark blue hoodie, carrying the laptop in one hand.
    ‘Sorry if I sounded a bit pissed off before.’
    ‘It’s cool – I expect you were pissed off.’
    Vanja smiled to herself. It was so easy to work with Billy.

The bedroom.
    With the bag in his hand the tall man went straight over to the chest of drawers by the window. He placed the bag on the piece of furniture and opened the top drawer. From the