“Yes, of course. Good idea, little Simon.”
The corpses of five men were strung up in the middle of the room, each with a noose of a sturdy blue nylon rope around the neck. The ends were fastened around sturdy hooks screwed into the beams about seven meters above. The men’s feet were about half a meter from the floor, and the bodies had been placed at least two meters apart in such a way that the four outermost bodies formed a square, the sides of which ran parallel to the walls. All the bodies were missing hands but the lower arms were intact from the elbow down to the wrist. The faces had been disfigured to the point that most of the human elements were gone; also the genitals, which had either been mutilated beyond recognition or removed. Death and the injuries gave the men a similar look, as if their physical differences no longer existed. Simonsen recognized the phenomenon and knew that when he had studied the dead a little longer, their individuality would return.
“Chainsaw?”
Elvang confirmed this. That was one of his positive attributes. He wasn’t afraid to express an immediate opinion, in direct contrast to most other pathologists that Simonsen knew, who seldom wanted even to confirm the sex of a corpse before it had undergone a CT scan. And physicians were even worse.
“While they were still alive?”
“No.”
The answer was a relief; the whole thing was horrific enough as it was, even though he surprisingly did not react physically when he saw the bodies. Perhaps because the room had been aired out, or perhaps because he had had time to prepare himself for the sight, or perhaps because he was mentally desensitized and had already seen more than was good for him. Who could know what the reason was, and who cared? Not he, at any rate. He continued his slow circle around the men.
In view of the fact that each of them must have bled a great deal, there were not a lot of bloodstains. Under each of the dead was only a small, viscous pool about the diameter of a tennis ball. The neck, the top of the chest, and the thighs were bloody, and there were also red clumps in their hair. Otherwise there was no trace of blood, but he could clearly discern the sickly sweet smell of blood that mingled with the stronger stink of excrement and bodily fluids. The temperature, and the three open windows, kept the stench at a minimum. The yellow-white swollen bodies led his thoughts to hanging sides of pork on a slaughterhouse assembly line, a disrespectful image that, to his vexation, he was unable to shake.
He focused on the heads of the men as he slowly moved in among the bodies and examined each of them. The wounds varied from person to person. Three of them had had their entire faces sawed off. The blade had been drawn straight down from the crown of the head to the jaw so that brain, mouth cavity, and throat were exposed. The rest had been slashed in a crisscross manner with the blade held perpendicular to the face. Two had retained their tongues and some teeth. One had an almost-undamaged eye.
The same destructiveness had dominated the removal of the genitals. Two had lost their penises and testicles, two others only the penis. On one the cut was so deep that the bladder had fallen out and was hanging out over the crotch. The remaining victim had lost only the foreskin. The man in the middle had emptied his bowels; sticky black excrement covered his buttocks and the backs of his thighs, and a handful of flies had found their way there. The wounds at the wrists, however, were clean and precise. Simonsen could see the marrow in the two bones of the lower arm and started randomly wondering which one was the ulna and the other radius. But which was the large and which was the small he could not remember.
He started over and walked another round, this time looking for identifying markers. A rough estimate put the men’s ages between forty and seventy years. One had a gold ring in his left ear as well as a faded eagle tattooed on the right shoulder, and two had scars from appendix or hernia operations. One was bald and had an unnaturally dark complexion, probably from a tanning salon. The corpse in the back left corner had long, unclipped toenails that were infected with fungus and resembled pork rinds. In the right ear canal was a tooth with a gold filling.
A last round was devoted to inspecting the ropes that had been hung with mathematical precision parallel to the walls. If he lined them up diagonally and looked down the series of ropes with one eye, he was unable to see the final one. That was true of both diagonals. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble inserting the screws into the ceiling.
Simonsen concluded his inspection and walked back to Elvang, who had displayed only a fleeting interest in the bodies and now looked extremely bored.
“Your initial assessment?”
The professor did not hesitate.