‘Yep, everything.’
‘Make sure you get some fresh air.’
‘Mum.’
Then they’re gone. Janne will bring her back tomorrow, Saturday evening, so we can have Sunday together.
What am I going to do now?
Wait for the phone to ring? Read the paper?
Think?
No. Thinking has a way of leading you into a very tangled forest.
8
‘He died of his head injuries. The perpetrator used a blunt object, repeatedly, almost as if in a frenzy, to beat in the cranium and the face until it became the shapeless mass of flesh it is now. He was alive when he received the blows, but in all likelihood lost consciousness fairly quickly. The perpetrator or perpetrators also appear to have used a knife.’
Karin Johannison is standing beside the blue body, which is lying on the cold steel of the pathology laboratory. Arms and legs and head stick out from the trunk like lumpy, irregular stumps. The torso is cut open, with the skin and fat folded into four flaps, revealing a jumble of guts. The skull has been sawn open, dutifully, at the back of the head.
It looks methodical and haphazard at the same time, Malin thinks. As if someone had been planning it for a long time, and then lost their composure.
‘I had to let him thaw out before I could start,’ as Karin had put it over the phone. ‘But once I got started it was pretty straightforward.’
Zeke is standing quietly beside Malin, apparently unconcerned; he’s seen death many times before and realises that it’s impossible to grasp.
Karin works with death, but she doesn’t understand it. Perhaps none of us does, Malin thinks. But most of us appreciate what death can encompass. Karin, Malin thinks, doesn’t understand a lot of what everything in this basement room is actually about; here she is useful, functional, as precise as the instruments she uses in her work. As precise as the room itself.
The most practical face of death.
White walls, small windows at ceiling height, stainless-steel cabinets and shelves along the wall holding textbooks and bandages, compresses, surgical gloves and so on. The linoleum floor is a bluish colour, easy to clean, hardwearing, cheap. Malin never gets used to this room, to its role and function, but she is nevertheless drawn to it.
‘He didn’t die from the rope,’ Karin says. ‘He was dead by the time he was hauled up into the tree. If he’d died of strangulation the blood wouldn’t have run to his head the way it did. With a hanging the blood vessels are shut off directly, to put it in layman’s terms, but here the physical blows made the heart pump faster, which accounts for the abnormal amount of blood.’
‘How long has he been dead?’ Malin asks.
‘You mean now?’
‘No, before he was strung up in the tree.’
‘I’d say at least five hours, maybe a bit longer. Considering there was no great quantity of blood in his legs even though he was found hanging.’
‘What about the blows to the body?’ Zeke says.
‘What about them?’
‘What have you got to say about them?’
‘Doubtless very painful, if he was conscious at the time, but they weren’t fatal. There are marks on the legs that show he was dragged, that someone hauled the body over damp ground. The wounds have dirt in them, and fragments of fabric. Someone undressed him after the beating, and then moved the body. At least that’s what I believe happened. He was finished off with a knife.’
‘And his teeth?’ Zeke asks.
‘In too poor a state to be useful, most of his teeth were broken.’
Karin takes hold of one of the wrists. ‘Do you see these marks here?’
Malin nods.
‘They were made by chains. That’s how they got him up into the tree.’
‘They?’
‘I don’t know. But do you imagine a single man could have done this, considering the amount of physical strength required?’
‘Not impossible,’ Malin says.
Zeke shakes his head. ‘We don’t know yet.’
The snow had concealed nothing.
