anxiously at his receding hairline.
“The desert is spreading,” he would say ruefully.
She kissed him on the mouth. Her stomach got in the way, but she managed it. Twice.
“I love you,” he assured her, still asleep. His hand fumbled under the sheet to draw her close, but by then she had already managed to sit upright on the edge of the bed. All of a sudden she was desperate for a pee. Her bladder was bursting all the time. She’d already been to the bathroom twice during the night.
Quarter of an hour later Anna-Maria climbed out of her Ford Escort in the car park below The Source of All Our Strength church. It was still bitterly cold. The air pinched and nipped at her cheeks. If she breathed through her mouth her throat and lungs hurt. If she breathed through her nose the fine hairs in her nostrils froze when she inhaled. She wound her scarf around to cover her mouth and looked at her watch. Half an hour max; any longer and the car wouldn’t start. It was a big parking lot with spaces for at least four hundred cars. Her light-red Escort looked small and insignificant beside Sven-Erik Stalnacke’s Volvo 740. A radio car was parked next to Sven-Erik’s Volvo. Apart from that there were only a dozen or so cars, completely covered in snow. The forensic team must have gone already. She started to walk up the narrow path to the church on Sandstensberget. The frost lay like icing on the birch trees, and right at the top of the hill the mighty Crystal Church soared up into the night sky, surrounded by stars and planets. It stood there like a gigantic illuminated ice cube, shimmering with the Aurora Borealis.
All bloody show, she thought as she struggled up the bank. This lot are rolling in money; they ought to be giving some of their cash to Save the Children instead. But I suppose it’s more fun to sing gospel songs in a huge church than to dig wells in Africa.
In the distance she could see her colleagues Sven-Erik Stalnacke, Sergeant Tommy Rantakyro and Inspector Fred Olsson outside the church door. Sven-Erik, bareheaded as usual, was standing quite still, leaning slightly backwards with his hands deep in the warm pockets of his fleece. The two younger men were bounding about like excited puppies. She couldn’t hear them, but she could see Rantakyro’s and Olsson’s eager chatter coming out of their mouths like white bubbles. The puppies barked happily in greeting as soon as they caught sight of her.
“Hi,” yapped Tommy Rantakyro, “how’s it going?”
“Fine,” she called back cheerfully.
“Soon we’ll be saying hello to your stomach first, then you’ll turn up quarter of an hour later,” said Fred Olsson.
Anna-Maria laughed.
She met Sven-Erik’s serious gaze. Small icicles had formed in his walrus moustache.
“Thanks for coming,” he said. “I hope you’ve had breakfast, because what’s in there won’t exactly give you an appetite. Shall we go in?”
“Do you want us to wait for you?”
Fred Olsson was stamping his feet up and down in the snow. He was looking from Sven-Erik to Anna-Maria and back again. Sven-Erik was supposed to be taking over during Anna-Maria’s leave, so technically he was in charge now. But since Anna-Maria was here as well it was a bit difficult to know who was making the decisions.
Anna-Maria kept quiet and looked at Sven-Erik. She was only there to keep him company.
“It would be good if you could hang on,” said Sven-Erik, “so we don’t suddenly get somebody coming along who has no business here before the body has been collected. But by all means come and stand inside the door if you’re cold.”
“Hell no, we can stand outside, I just wondered, that’s all,” Fred Olsson assured them.
“No problem.” Tommy Rantakyro grinned with blue lips. “We’re men after all. Men don’t feel the cold.”
Sven-Erik went into the church right behind Anna-Maria and pulled the heavy door shut behind them. They walked slowly through the cloakroom, slumbering in the twilight. Long ranks of empty coat hangers rattled like an out-of-tune glockenspiel, set in motion by the draught as the cold air outside met the warmth inside. Two swing doors led into the main body of the church. Sven-Erik instinctively lowered his voice as they went in.
“It was Viktor Strandgard’s sister who rang the main office around three. She’d found him dead and she used the phone in the pastor’s office.”
“Where is she? At the station?”
“Well, no. We don’t know where she is. I left instructions to get somebody out there looking for her. There was nobody in the church when Tommy and Freddy got here.”
“What did the technicians say?”
“Look but don’t touch.”
The body was lying in the middle of the central aisle. Anna-Maria stopped a little way from it.
“Fucking hell,” she burst out.
“I did tell you,” said Sven-Erik, who was standing just behind her.
Anna-Maria pulled a little tape recorder from the inside pocket of her jacket. She hesitated for a moment. She usually spoke into it rather than making notes. But this wasn’t really her case. Maybe she ought to keep quiet and just sort of go along with Sven-Erik?
Don’t go making everything so complicated, she told herself, and switched on the tape recorder without even looking at her colleague.
“The time is five thirty-five,” she said into the microphone. “It’s the sixteenth, no seventeenth, of February. I’m standing in The Source of All Our Strength church and looking at someone who, as far as we know at the moment, is Viktor Strandgard, generally known as the Paradise Boy. The dead man is lying in the middle of the aisle. He appears to have been well and truly slit open, because he absolutely stinks and the carpet beneath the body is wet. This wetness is presumably blood, but it’s a little difficult to tell because he is lying on a red carpet. His clothes are also covered in blood and it isn’t possible to see very much of the wound in his stomach; it does seem, however, that some of his intestines are protruding, but the doctor can confirm that later. He’s wearing jeans and a jumper. The soles of his shoes are dry and the carpet under his shoes is not wet. His eyes have been gouged out…”
Anna-Maria broke off and switched off the tape recorder. She moved round the body and bent over the face. She had been about to say that he made a beautiful corpse, but there were limits to what she could think aloud in front of Sven-Erik. The dead man’s face made her think of King Oedipus. She had seen the play on video at school. At the time she hadn’t been particularly affected by the scene where he put out his own eyes, but now the image came back to her with remarkable clarity. She needed to pee again. And she mustn’t forget about the car. Best get going. She switched on the tape recorder again.
“The eyes have been gouged out and the long hair is covered in blood. There must be a wound to the back of the head. There is a cut on the right of the neck, but no bleeding, and the hands are missing…”
Anna-Maria turned inquiringly to Sven-Erik, who was pointing toward the rows of chairs. She bent down with difficulty and looked along the floor among the chairs.
“Oh, I see, one hand is lying three meters away under the chairs. But where’s the other?”
Sven-Erik shrugged.
“None of the chairs has been overturned,” she continued. “There are no indications of a struggle; what do you think, Sven-Erik?”
“No,” replied Sven-Erik, who disliked speaking into the tape recorder.
“Who took the photos?”
“Simon Larsson.”
Good, she thought. That meant they would have good pictures.
“Otherwise the church is tidy,” she went on. “This is the first time I’ve been in here. There are hundreds of frosted lamps along those sections of the walls that are not made of glass bricks. How high would it be? Must be more than ten meters. Huge windows in the roof. Blue chairs in rows, straight as a die. How many people would fit in here? Two thousand?”
“Plus the pulpit,” said Sven-Erik.
He wandered round and allowed his gaze to sweep over every surface like a vacuum cleaner.
Anna-Maria turned and looked at the pulpit towering behind her. The organ pipes soared upward and met their own reflection in the windows in the roof. It was an impressive sight.
“There isn’t really very much more to add,” said Anna-Maria hesitantly, as if some idea might work its way up
