studies.
His eyes.
Most of all she sees fury in them. And despair.
The others are waiting over by the patrol car. Zeke told the uniformed officer to sit and wait in the car.
‘No need for you to stand out here freezing. He’ll keep on hanging where he’s hanging.’
‘Don’t you want to talk to the man who found him?’ The officer looked over his shoulder. ‘That’s who found him.’
‘We’ll take a look first.’
Then this swollen frozen body in this lonely oak; a gigantic overgrown baby that someone, or more than one, has tortured the life out of.
What do you want with me? Malin wonders. Why have you dragged me out here on this godforsaken morning? What do you want to tell me?
The feet, blue-black, the toes turning black, swing against all the whiteness.
The eyes, Malin thinks. Your isolation. It’s like something moving across the plain, across the town, and into me.
First the obvious.
The branch is five metres above the ground, no clothes, no blood in the snow, no tracks in the thin covering around the tree, apart from the really fresh ones from a pair of boots.
From the man who found you, Malin thinks. One thing is certain: you didn’t get up here by yourself; and the injuries on your body, someone else must have given you those. And you probably didn’t get them here, otherwise the ground beneath you would be covered in blood. No, you froze for a good while somewhere else, so long that your blood turned solid.
‘You see those marks on the branch?’ Zeke says, looking up at the body.
‘Yes,’ Malin replies. ‘Like someone’s torn the bark off.’
‘I swear, the man who did this must have used a crane to get him up into the tree, then tied the noose afterwards.’
‘Or people,’ Malin says. ‘There may have been more than one.’
‘No tracks between here and the road.’
‘No, but it was a windy night. The ground changes by the minute. Loose snow, bits of ice. It’s changing all the time. How long would any track last? Quarter of an hour. An hour. No longer.’
‘We’re still going to have to get the forensics team to check the ground.’
‘They’re going to need the biggest heater on the planet,’ Malin says.
‘Well, that’s their business.’
‘How long do you reckon he’s been hanging there?’
‘Impossible to say. But no longer than the first hours of darkness. Someone would have seen him during the day.’
‘He could have been dead long before that,’ Malin says.
‘That’s Johannison’s job.’
‘Anything sexual?’
‘Isn’t everything, Fors?’
Her surname. Zeke uses it when he’s joking, when he answers a question he thinks is unnecessary or stupid, or just stupidly formulated.
‘Come on, Zeke.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything sexual involved here. No.’
‘Good, we agree on that, then.’
They head back towards the cars.
‘Whoever did this,’ Zeke says, ‘must have a bloody huge sense of purpose. Because no matter how you go about it, it’s no easy thing to get that body up here and into the tree.
‘You’d have to be absolutely livid,’ he adds.
‘Or really sad,’ Malin replies.
‘Sit in our car instead. It’s still warm.’
The uniforms clamber out of the patrol car.
The middle-aged man in the back seat looks meaningfully at Malin and makes an effort to move.
‘You can stay,’ she says, and the man sinks down, still tense, his thin eyebrows twitching. His entire body seems to be saying one single thing: How the hell do I explain this? What was I doing out here at this time of day?
Malin sits next to him, Zeke gets into the front.
