Lars Kepler 2-book Bundle (100 page)

“That’s how he put it, but my feeling is that there
was
something to celebrate and they were toasting it with champagne. An agreement—”

“No facts to support what you’ve just said.”

“But think about the picture for a second,” Joona says stubbornly. “There’s an atmosphere in that private box and … look at their faces, they’re very happy about something.”

“Even so, we can’t prove it. We need Penelope Fernandez’s help.”

“What do her doctors have to say?”

“We’ll be able to talk to her soon. But right now, she’s mentally too exhausted.”

“We have no idea what she can tell us,” Joona says.

“No we don’t, but what the hell
do
we have?”

“We have the photograph,” Joona says. “We have the four musicians in it and perhaps we can tell the piece they were playing by their hand positions.”

“Oh, Joona.” Saga sighs.

“What?” he says, smiling.

“That’s just fucking crazy—I hope you realise that.”

“Robert said that theoretically it might be possible.”

“Let’s just wait until Penelope is a little better.”

“I’ll call,” Joona says. He picks up his phone and calls the police station, requesting a connection to room U 12.

Saga looks at his impassive face.

“My name is Joona Linna and I—”

He stops talking and a large smile spreads across his face.

“Of course I remember you and your red cape,” he says, and listens some more. “Yes, but … I almost believed you were going to suggest hypnosis?”

Saga can hear the doctor’s laughing voice through the phone.

“No, but really—we absolutely,
absolutely
must talk to her.”

His face takes a serious turn.

“I can understand her feelings, but can’t you change her mind? All right, we’ll just have to figure something else out … Bye.”

He hangs up at the same time he turns onto Bellmansgatan.

“That was Dr Daniella Richards,” Joona tells Saga.

“What does she say?”

“She feels we can question Penelope in a few days. The big problem is we have to find a different place for her to live—she refuses to stay in that underground room. She says—”

“There’s no more secure place.”

“She refuses,” Joona says simply.

“We’ve got to make it clear how dangerous the situation is.”

“I believe she knows that better than we do.”

In the Mosebacke Etablissement’s restaurant, Disa and Joona are sitting across from each other. Sunshine fills the room through the enormous windows looking out over Gamla Stan, Skeppsholmen, and the glittering water. They are just finishing a lunch of fried Baltic herring with mashed potatoes garnished with lingonberries. They pour the last of the light beer into their glasses. In the background, on a raised platform, Ronald Brautigam performs on a black grand piano. The violinist, Isabelle van Keulen, is finishing the last stroke of her bow, her right elbow lifted.

The last note of the violin trembles, waiting for the piano, then finishes with a high, shivering sound as the music ends. After the concert, Joona and Disa walk out of the restaurant and onto Mosebacke Square. They pause for a moment, facing each other.

“What’s all this about Paganini?” she asks. She pats Joona’s collar into place. “The last time we were together, you talked about Paganini, too.”

He gently catches her hand.

“I just wanted to see you—”

“Just so we can argue about you not taking your medicine?”

“No,” he says seriously.

“Do you take it, then?”

“I’ll start soon,” he says, a bit impatiently.

She says nothing more, meets his eyes for a second, then sighs and suggests they keep walking.

“At any rate, it was a very pleasant concert,” she says. “Somehow I felt the music fit this soft light here, outside. I’d always thought Paganini was … well, you know, like a tightrope walker. Actually, I did have the chance to hear Yngwie Malmsteen play the Caprice no. 5 once at Gröna Lund.”

“Ah, in the days when you and Benjamin Gantenbein were going out.”

“We’ve just become Facebook friends after all these years.”

They walk to Slussen hand in hand and head down Skeppsbron.

“Do you think you could tell what music a violinist is playing just by the finger positions?”

“Without hearing it, you mean?”

“On a photograph.”

“Maybe. Perhaps you might get pretty close … it depends on how well you know the instrument,” she replies.

“How close? How exact?”

“I’ll ask Kaj if you think it’s important,” she says.

“Who’s Kaj?”

“Kaj Samuelsson. He works in the music history department. He was a good friend of my father’s and I used to practise driving with him.”

“Can you phone him now?”

“Sure,” Disa says, and then raises her eyebrows slightly. “You’re not kidding. You really want me to call him this second.”

“Yes,” Joona says.

Disa drops his hand and pulls out her mobile phone. She scrolls through her contact list and then calls the professor.

“Hi, Disa here,” she says. “Am I interrupting your lunch?”

Joona can hear the sound of a man’s voice coming from the phone. After a little small talk, Disa says, “By the way, I have a good friend here with some questions for you.”

She laughs at something he says and then she asks directly, “Can you tell which note a violinist is playing … no, not that way … just by looking at the fingers?”

Joona observes Disa who listens, frowning. From Gamla Stan, he can hear the distant strains of march music.

“All right,” Disa says. “You know what, Kaj, I think I’ll just hand you over to him directly.”

She hands the phone to Joona without saying a word.

“Joona Linna,” he says.

“Ah, Disa talks about you a great deal,” says Kaj Samuelsson. He sounds relaxed.

“A violin has only four strings,” Joona begins. “Logically, there are only a limited number of notes that can be played.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“The lowest note is the open G,” Joona continues calmly. “And somewhere there must be the highest note that—”

“Yes, good reasoning,” the professor says. “In 1636, the French scientist Mersenne published the
Harmonie universelle
. In that work, he posits that the best violinists can play one octave higher than the open string. This means the range can be from G to third E, which gives us altogether thirty-four notes in the chromatic scale.”

“Thirty-four notes,” Joona repeats.

“But if we go to musicians in the modern era, the range is greater due to new fingerings,” Samuelsson continues. He sounds amused. “And you can begin to count on reaching third A and have a chromatic scale of thirty-nine notes.”

“Keep going,” Joona continues, watching Disa, who has gone off to look at some odd, jumbled-looking paintings displayed in a gallery window.

“However, when Richard Strauss expanded Berlioz’s
Grand Treatise on Instrumentation and Modern Orchestration
from 1904, fourth G became accepted as the highest possible note that could be reached by an orchestra violinist, which means forty-nine notes.”

Kaj Samuelsson laughs to himself at Joona’s impressed silence.

“Actually, we have yet to reach the highest possible note,” the professor explains. “And in addition, we now have flageolets and quarter tones.”

Disa and Joona are now strolling past a newly built replica of a Viking ship docked at Slottskajen as he speaks. They’re nearing Kungsträdgården.

“What about a cello?” Joona asks impatiently.

“Fifty-eight,” Samuelsson replies.

Disa is giving Joona a vexed look and points at an outdoor café.

“My real question is, if you were to look at a photograph of four musicians—two violins, one viola, and one cello—and if the image is clear, would you be able to tell, just from the placement of their fingers on the strings, which piece they’re playing?”

Joona hears Kaj Samuelsson mumbling to himself on the other end.

“There are so many alternatives, thousands …”

Disa shrugs and keeps walking without looking at Joona.

“Seven million combinations,” Kaj says at last.

“Seven million,” Joona repeats.

There’s silence on both ends of the phone.

“Yet on my photograph,” Joona goes on, his voice stubborn, “you can clearly see the fingers and the strings so that many alternatives could be eliminated immediately.”

“I’ll gladly take a look at your photo,” the professor replies. “But I would not be able to guess the notes, it’s just not possible and—”

“But—”

“Imagine, Joona Linna,” the professor continues happily. “Imagine you’ve actually figured out the approximate notes … How will you be able to tell from all the thousands of string quartets out there—Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart—which one is the correct composition?”

“I realise it might be impossible,” Joona says.

“Seriously, it is,” Kaj replies.

Joona thanks him for his time and goes to Disa, who is sitting on the rim of a fountain waiting for him. She lays her cheek on his shoulder as he sits down beside her. Just as he’s putting an arm around her, he remembers Robert Riessen’s words about his brother:
If not even Axel could figure it out, no one can.

While Joona is quickly walking up the Bragevägen pavement, he hears children happily yelling on the grounds of the German School.

He rings Axel’s doorbell and hears the melodious chime inside, but no one answers, and after waiting for a while, he decides to walk around the house. Suddenly he hears a screeching noise. He can see people standing in the shadow of a tree, and he pauses at a distance. A girl holding a violin stands on the marble patio. She looks about fifteen years old. Her hair is extremely short, and he can see some drawings she’s inked on her arms. Axel Riessen is with her, nodding and listening carefully as she drags the bow across the strings. Her movements look awkward, as if she’s holding the instrument for the very first time. Perhaps this is Axel’s daughter, or even his grandchild, because he watches her with such a gentle, curious expression.

The bow crosses the strings at the wrong angle and elicits a hissing, whining sound.

“It’s not in tune,” the girl says as an excuse for the terrible noise.

She smiles and, with care, hands the instrument back to Axel.

“Playing the violin means listening,” Axel says in a calm, friendly fashion. “The music is already inside you. You just release it into the world.”

He sets the violin to his own shoulder and begins to play the introductory melody to ‘Séguedille’ from Bizet’s
Carmen
, then stops and holds out the violin to demonstrate.

“Now I’m going to tune these strings a little strangely, here … and here,” he says, and he turns the pegs a few times in different directions.

“Why are—”

“Now the violin is completely out of tune,” he continues. “And if I’d only learned how to play mechanically with exact fingering, then I would sound like this.”

He plays ‘Séguedille’ again, and it is so terrible it’s almost unrecognisable.

“How pretty!” she says, joking.

“However, if you listen to the strings …” he says as he taps the E string. “Hear that? It’s much too low, but that makes no difference at all. You compensate by moving your finger further up the fingerboard.”

Joona watches Axel Riessen put the violin back on his shoulder and play the piece again on the falsely tuned violin. He seems to use gymnastic fingering, but the piece is perfectly in tune.

“You’re a magician!” The girl laughs and claps her hands.

“Hello,” Joona says. He walks up and holds out his hand. Axel gathers the violin and bow together in his left hand and then shakes Joona’s hand. The girl shyly does the same.

He looks at Axel with his mis-tuned violin.

“That’s impressive.”

Axel shakes his head.

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t played for thirty-four years.” His voice sounds stiff as he says this.

“Do you believe that?” Joona asks the girl.

She nods and then she says mysteriously, “Don’t you see the glow around him?”

“This is Beverly,” Axel says in a low voice. “Beverly Andersson.”

Beverly gives Axel a big smile, and then she simply walks away between the trees.

Joona nods at Axel. “I need to talk to you.”

“Sorry about earlier, when I took off like that,” Axel says. He begins to retune the violin. “But something came up.”

“Not to worry—I just came back.”

Joona watches Axel who, in turn, watches the girl pick some flowering weeds from the shaded lawn.

“Do we have a vase inside?” she calls out.

“In the kitchen,” Axel replies.

She carries her tiny bouquet of dandelions—white balls of fluff—into the kitchen.

“That’s her favourite flower,” Axel says as he listens closely to the G string. He adjusts the peg slightly and then sets the violin on the mosaic table.

“I’d like you to take a look at this,” Joona says, and he takes out the photograph from the folder.

They sit down at the table. Axel takes a pair of glasses from his front pocket and studies the photograph thoroughly.

“When was this taken?” he asks quickly.

“We don’t know, but it was suggested this was in the spring of 2008,” Joona replies.

“All right.” Axel looks much more relaxed immediately.

“Do you recognise these people?” Joona asks calmly.

“Of course,” Axel says. “Palmcrona, Pontus Salman, Raphael Guidi, and … Agathe al-Haji.”

“I need your help in one specific area. Could you take a good look at the musicians in the background?”

Axel looks up at Joona speculatively and then down again at the photograph.

“The Tokyo String Quartet—they’re very good,” he says in a neutral voice.

“Well, the thing I’m wondering about is … I’ve been thinking about this picture and wondering if it is possible for a knowledgeable person to tell … just by looking at the picture … which piece they’re playing.”