The car lurched over the deep ruts and holes.
“It wouldn’t be easy to drive in here, even with a small car,” Fredrik noted after the Saab’s chassis had bottomed out on the rough road.
The forest stood thick around them on both sides. Tall pines, planted several decades ago at a disciplined distance, now had a tangle of undergrowth between them. Whoever owned the forest hadn’t been looking after it properly. Yet a bit farther on, Irene could see that the trees opened up, revealing some deforestation.
The beautiful weather of yesterday still held. When the wind was still, the silence was almost overwhelming. The sun rays fell through the tree trunks at an angle. There was a heavy scent of damp earth and of vegetation that had started coming to life in the first of the spring warmth.
“This must be it,” said Fredrik. He stopped a few meters in front of a group of spruce trees growing in a clump, creating an impassable wall.
Irene and Fredrik walked toward the spruces with their gazes fixed on the ground, tracing several old tire tracks from heavy vehicles but also a few barely noticeable ones from regular cars.
“Now we know why he parked here. It’s not possible to go any farther.” Fredrik pointed at the continuation of the road behind the spruce grove. There it descended into a deep hollow filled with water at the bottom. It was obvious that any car that drove down there would get stuck in the mud.
Irene started walking back to their car. When she reached the path that the witness with the dog had been on, she turned and looked around her. Their Saab could be seen at an angle from behind, since the forest road curved around the spruce grove. The small car that the witness had seen had been parked closer to the spruces. With a sigh, Irene had to agree with him: It was impossible to see the license plate and doubtless difficult to determine a particular make, since all compact cars seemed to look alike these days.
She walked back to Fredrik, who was standing near the waterfilled hole, deep in thought. “I think I would try to reach the clearing, rather than force my way through this mass of undergrowth. It must be easier to make one’s way along the edge of it,” he said.
“If it stretches far enough in the direction of the cottage, then I agree. Let’s take a look.”
They made a circuit around the mud hollow and trudged forward toward the clearing, stopping at the edge of the woods to look around. The clearing was narrow and relatively long.
“You could walk at least a hundred meters here. Then you’d have to get out your machete,” Fredrik concluded.
It was still quite difficult to make their way. The earth’s surface was damp and porous, and they sank into it at each step. Irene’s suede boots would need to be both washed and brushed before she could show herself in public in them again. Fredrik, who went around in boat shoes, was even worse off. The best footwear would have been rain boots.
They stopped at the edge of the clearing. The vegetation looked impassable.
“What do we do now? I wish we really had a machete,” Fredrik groaned.
“I suggest we do what my dog would do.”
“And what does your dog do?”
“Follow the game trail.”
A short distance away, she had noticed a narrow opening between some spruce trees, a game trail. A large pile of moose dung was lying in the middle of it.
“It probably leads down to the lake, because the animals want to drink after they’ve grazed. Let’s follow the path and see how close to the cottage we can get,” said Irene.
They had to bend down and push away hanging branches, at the same time as watching where they put their feet. Irene slipped several times on the slimy roots.
“Good thing it’s not tick season yet,” Fredrik puffed.
Irene was about to answer, when she felt a thread across her mouth. She spit and sputtered, thinking it was a sturdy spider-web. Disgusted, she wiped her mouth with her hand and got ahold of the filament. She instinctively glanced at it before she shook it from her fingers. She stopped and held it up to the sunlight that filtered down through the spruce trees.
A spider hadn’t produced this thread, but a sheep probably had. A thin forest-green-colored woolen thread, about three or four centimeters long, dangled from Irene’s fingers, pinched between her thumb and index finger.
“What is it? Why are you stopping?” Fredrik asked, irritated.
He was busy picking things out of his hair. The hair gel he always used in the morning to get his bangs to stand straight up turned out to be the ideal surface for twigs and pine needles to attach themselves to.
“A thread. Someone has been on this path before us. It hasn’t been here very long, because it isn’t faded or dirty.”
She showed Fredrik her find. He whistled softly. “We’ll have to keep an eye out for more fibers.”
Irene found a new thread only twenty meters farther up, but this one was bright red. It hung on the outer branch in a patch of thick shrubbery. Irene stopped and pointed. “It’s at shoulder height for me. This piece is about as long as the green one. Where could these threads have come from?”
“I think we’re looking for a short murderer, max one hundred and sixty centimeters tall, wearing a hat with a tassel or pompom made of green and red yarn.”
Irene laughed and took a doggie poop bag from her pocket. She carefully placed the two woolen threads inside. Maybe the technicians could get something out of them.
The path led down to the lake. They estimated that if they walked fifty meters along the edge of the lake and then turned their backs to it and walked into the vegetation, they should arrive at the cottage.
To their relief, the lake shore widened into a small sandy beach, and a narrow gravel path led into the woods from the beach. The path ended about ten meters from the Schyttelius cottage’s gate.
“It’s probably a community path to the beach for all of the cottage owners in the area,” Irene suggested.
“Maybe. But there’s nothing keeping someone from turning off the path earlier and climbing over the Schytteliuses’ fence at the back of the property. No one would see. Should we check?”
Fredrik had already turned on his heel and was on his way back in the same direction they had just come. Thirty meters away, he stopped and pointed.
Irene could also see a barely noticeable walkway between some raspberry bushes. It followed the rotten wooden fence along the lake side of the Schytteliuses’ property. The fence sagged to the ground in the middle from age and poor maintenance.
“We can step right onto the property,” Fredrik determined. They did so, taking a good look at where they put their feet.
“If the murderer went this way on Monday, the ground would still have been frozen. It has rained since then, and the frost has started rising out of the topsoil. The murderer didn’t have as much trouble getting here as we did,” said Irene.
“Think about the position of the car and the trails. He knew he was going to get here without risking being seen. Everything points to familiarity with the area.”
Fredrik was right. The murders had been planned, and the murderer had known how to make his way to and from the cottage without being seen.
They walked toward the back of the cottage. The Schyttelius family had built a large glassed-in veranda running the length of the wall. So this was where the superintendent had sat at the crayfish party seventeen years ago. Irene turned her back to the veranda and looked down at the lake. She could glimpse water through the thicket.
“Too bad they didn’t own the property all the way down to the lake. Then they could have cleared it for the sake of the view,” she remarked.
“Must have been irritating for them.”
“Probably.”
“Should we take the road back? It’s longer. .”
“. . but it will be faster,” Irene finished.
THEY STOPPED at a hot dog stand and ate before heading for Eva Moller’s house. It was easy to find
