‘Even so, he still has things to tell us,’ Malin says.
Karin Johannison, analyst, pathologist and researcher at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, with a part-time post as a crime-scene investigator with the Linkoping Police, is flapping her arms around her heavily padded body, elegant even though conducting an inelegant gesture. Small fragments of feathers fly up in the air like misshapen snowflakes and Malin imagines that the jacket must have been incredibly expensive considering how well-padded its red fabric is.
Even in her fur hat and with cheeks red from the February chill, Karin is the spitting image of a slightly aged Riviera princess, like a middle-aged Francoise Sagan, without a cloud in her sky, far too attractive for the job she does. The suntan from her holiday in Thailand at Christmas is still lingering on her skin and sometimes, Malin thinks, I wish I could have been like Karin, married to money and the easy life.
They approach the body cautiously, stepping in footprints already there.
Karin is behaving like an engineer, pushing aside any thoughts of the naked human being in the tree in front of them, refusing to see the fat, the skin, what had once been the face, suppressing any empathy with the thoughts that might have passed through the swollen body’s brain, and which are now slowly settling over the city, the plain and the forests like an ominous murmur; a whimper that could perhaps only be silenced in one way, through an answer to the question: Who did it?
‘What do you see, Karin?’
I know, Malin thinks. You see an object, a screw or a nut, a narrative machine that needs to be analysed, that will be allowed to tell its innate story.
‘He can hardly have got up there by himself,’ Karin says, standing almost immediately below the body. She has just photographed the footprints around it, laying a ruler beside them, because even if they are in all likelihood merely their own and Peter Liedbergh’s they need to be checked.
Malin doesn’t answer. Instead she asks, ‘How long do you think he’s been dead?’
‘Impossible to know just by looking at him. I’m going to have to work without any preconceptions on this one. We’ll get answers to those questions in the post-mortem.’
The answer she was expecting. Malin thinks instead of Karin’s suntan, her plump jacket and how the wind is cutting straight through her own Stadium coat.
‘We need to take a look at the ground before we get him down,’ Karin says. ‘We’ll have to bring in the heater the army have got up in Kvarn, and erect a tent so we can get rid of all this snow.’
‘But won’t you just end up with a quagmire?’ Malin asks.
‘Only if we carry on too long,’ Karin replies. ‘They can probably have the heater here in a few hours. If they’re not on duty somewhere else, that is.’
‘He shouldn’t be left hanging there much longer,’ Malin says.
‘It’s minus thirty out here,’ Karin says. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to the body in this sort of cold.’
Zeke has kept the engine running and there is probably a forty-degree difference in temperature between the inside of the car and the air outside. Warm breath is turning to ice crystals on the side windows.
Malin gets into the passenger seat.
‘Quick, shut the door,’ Zeke snaps. ‘So, has Mrs Johannison taken charge of the situation?’
‘Kvarn. She’s getting the heater from there.’
Another two patrol cars have arrived, and through the tracery of the crystals Malin sees Karin direct the uniformed officers out in the field.
‘We might as well go now,’ Zeke says.
Malin nods.
As they drive back past Sjovik’s fruit farm Malin turns on the radio, tuning it to P4. An old friend of hers, Helen Aneman, presents a programme on that channel every day between seven and ten o’clock.
Her friend’s soft voice comes on as ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ fades out.
‘During that last track I took a look at the
‘That was quick,’ Zeke said over the noise of the radio.
‘He’s no slacker, Daniel,’ Malin says.
‘Daniel?’
‘If you feel like starting the day with something stomach-churning,’ the velvet voice on the radio says, ‘have a look at the pictures on the
5
Daniel Hogfeldt leans back against his office chair and the responsive backrest dips towards the floor.
He rocks back and forth like he used to in Grandfather’s rocking-chair in the cottage out in Vikbolandet, the one that burned down soon after Grandma finally passed away at Vrinnevis Hospital in Norrkoping. First Daniel looks out through the window at Hamngatan, then across the open-plan newsroom at his colleagues crouched over their computers, most of them completely indifferent to their work, happy with what they’ve got, and tired, so tired. If there’s one poison worse than all the others for journalists, Daniel thinks, it’s tiredness. It messes people up, ruins them.
I’m not tired. Not in the slightest.
