As Jeanette walked to the metro station at Enskede g?rd that morning there was a chill mist in the air, almost like fog, and the lawns around the villas were wet with night dew.
Late spring in Sweden, she thought. Long, light nights and greenery, capricious lurches between heat and cold. She actually liked this time of year, but right now it made her feel lonely. There was a collective demand to make the most of this short period. Be happy, live your life, seize the day. Late spring in this city is hazardous, she thought.
It was the morning rush hour, and the train was almost full. There was reduced service because of signalling work, and a technical fault was causing further delays. She had to stand, squeezed into a corner by one of the doors.
Technical fault? She presumed that meant someone had jumped in front of a train.
She looked around.
An unusual amount of smiling. Presumably because most people were just a week or two away from their holiday.
She wondered how people at work thought of her. As a miserable cow sometimes, she assumed. Bossy. Domineering, maybe. Hot-tempered at times.
She wasn’t really any different from the other senior detectives. The work demanded a certain authority and decisiveness, and the responsibility meant that you sometimes asked too much of your subordinates. And cost you your sense of humour as well as your patience. Did the people she worked with actually like her?
Jens Hurtig liked her, she knew that. And ?hlund respected her. Schwarz did neither. The others were probably somewhere in between.
But there was one thing that bothered her.
Most of them called her Jan, and she was sure they all knew she didn’t like it.
That showed a lack of respect.
They could be split into two groups. Schwarz was at the forefront of the Jan team, followed by a long list of other officers. The Jeanette team consisted of Hurtig and ?hlund, but even they slipped up occasionally, along with a handful of other officers and recent recruits who had only ever seen her name written down.
Why didn’t she get the same level of respect as the other senior officers? She was better qualified and had a higher rate of closed cases than most of them. Each year, when their rates of pay were adjusted, she received black-and-white evidence that she was still below the average salary for someone of her level. Ten years of experience were forgotten while new officers were promoted and others advanced.
Could the lack of respect really be because she was a woman?
The train stopped at Gullmarsplan. A lot of passengers got off and she sat down on an empty seat at the end of the carriage before it filled up with new passengers.
She was a woman in a position where most of her colleagues were men. Women weren’t senior officers in the police. They didn’t take command, not at work, and not on the football pitch. They weren’t decisive, bossy or dominant like her.
The train shuddered, left Gullmarsplan and pulled out onto the Skanstull Bridge.
Jan, she thought. One of the guys.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
BY THE THIRD day after the discovery on Kungsholmen nothing new had come to light that could lead the investigation forward, and Jeanette was feeling frustrated. In the register of missing children there was no one who, at first glance at least, matched the dead boy. Of course there were hundreds, possibly thousands of undocumented children in Sweden, but unofficial contacts within the church and the Salvation Army had indicated that they weren’t aware of anyone who might match the victim.
The City Mission in Gamlastan had no information to offer either. But someone who worked for their nightly outreach programme told them that a number of children usually gathered beneath the Central Bridge.
‘They’re incredibly elusive, those kids,’ the male charity worker lamented. ‘When we’re there they come out and grab a sandwich and a mug of soup, then disappear again. It’s perfectly obvious that they don’t really want to have anything to do with us.’
‘Isn’t there anything social services can do?’ Jeanette asked, even though she already knew the answer.
‘I doubt it. I know they were down there a month or so ago, and all the kids scattered and didn’t come back for a couple of weeks.’
Jeanette Kihlberg thanked him for the information and wondered if a visit to the bridge might turn something up, if she could manage to persuade one of the kids to talk to her.
The door-to-door inquiries around the teacher-training college had been completely useless, and the time-consuming work of contacting refugee centres had now been expanded to cover the whole of central Sweden.
But no one was missing a child who might match the mummified boy who’d been found in the bushes by the metro station. ?hlund had been through hours of security camera footage from the station and the neighbouring college, but hadn’t found anything unusual.
At half past ten she called Ivo Andri? at the Institute of Pathology in Solna.
‘Tell me you’ve got something for me! We’ve ground to a halt here.’
‘Well.’ Andri? took a deep breath. ‘Here’s what I’ve got. The first thing is that all his teeth have been removed, so there’s no point calling in a forensic orthodontist to check his dental records. Secondly, the body’s completely desiccated, mummified, in fact …’
He fell silent, and Jeanette waited for him to go on.
‘I’ll start again. How do you want it? Technical terminology or something more comprehensible?’
‘Whatever you think best. If there’s anything I don’t understand I’ll ask, and you can explain.’
‘OK. Well, if a dead body is left in a dry environment at a high temperature, with relatively good ventilation, it dries out fairly quickly. Which means that there’s basically no decay. And in extreme cases of drying – such as this one – it’s difficult, not to say impossible, to remove the skin, especially from the skull. The facial skin has dried out completely and can’t be removed from the underlying –’
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Jeanette said impatiently. ‘I don’t want to seem unfriendly, but I’m mainly interested in how he died and when it might have happened. Even I could see that he was dried out.’
‘Of course. Maybe I got a bit sidetracked. You have to appreciate that it’s practically impossible to say when death occurred, but I can tell you that he hasn’t been dead for longer than six months. The process of mummification also takes time, so I’d guess he died somewhere between November and January.’
‘OK, but that’s still a fairly broad period of time, isn’t it? Have you managed to get any DNA?’
‘Yes, we’ve taken DNA from the victim, as well as urine from the bag.’
‘What? You mean someone pissed on the bag?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the killer, does it?’
‘No, that’s true.’
‘But it might take another week before we get back comprehensive results about the DNA and can build up a more extensive profile. It’s a tricky job.’
‘OK. Have you got any ideas about where the body might have been kept?’