‘I don’t know,’ he says with a laugh. ‘Probably, seeing as the guy they came from has a fairly immaculate fashion sense.’
Jeanette thinks he looks embarrassed, as if he were ashamed. But before she has time to ask him about it, he gets up, adjusts his trousers, and makes a move to go inside the house.
Jeanette pulls on the rubber gloves and follows him.
They don’t see anything odd in the hall. Some hooks holding a few coats in muted colours. An umbrella leaning against a dresser, on top of which are a phone book and a calendar. The walls are white, and the floor is grey. Everything looks normal, but the penetrating smell tells them that they’re going to find something disgusting.
Hurtig goes first, and they take care not to touch anything unnecessarily. Jeanette does her best to put her feet down where Hurtig’s have been. Forensics can be fussy, and she doesn’t want to get told off for not being careful.
After the hall they reach the kitchen, and when Jeanette sees what’s on the table she knows that they’ve come to the right place, even if it doesn’t explain the revolting smell.
On the table
IN HANNAH ?STLUND’S kitchen there are two Polaroid pictures. Jeanette walks over and picks up one of them. Hurtig looks at the picture over her shoulder.
‘Silfverberg,’ she says, then puts it down and picks up the other one.
‘Look at this.’
He stares at the picture for a few seconds. ‘Karl Lundstr?m,’ he says. ‘So they killed him as well? It wasn’t what the doctor said, that Lundstr?m died when his kidneys packed up after too much morphine.’
‘That’s what it looked like, but they could have messed with his drip. There wasn’t a proper investigation because his death seemed natural, but the thought had actually already occurred to me.’
She looks at the arrangement of pictures on the kitchen table.
Something’s nagging at her, but she can’t put her finger on what it is, and her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up outside.
Jeanette goes out onto the front step to greet Ivo Andri? and the forensics team. She pulls off her mask and takes a deep breath of the fresh air. Whatever it is inside the house, it’s best to let forensics go first.
Ivo gets out. When he catches sight of Jeanette his face breaks into a smile. ‘So …’ He screws his eyes up. ‘What have we got today?’
‘We don’t know anything apart from the fact that something in there stinks.’
‘You mean it smells of death?’ His smile fades.
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘You and Hurtig can wait outside for the time being.’ Ivo gestures to the forensics team. ‘We’ll go in and check it out.’
Hurtig sits down on the step again, and Jeanette takes out her phone. ‘I’ll give ?hlund a call. I put him and Schwarz onto looking into Dürer.’
Hurtig nods. ‘I’ll yell if anything happens here.’
Jeanette walks over to the car. She’s just getting into the passenger seat when ?hlund answers.
‘How are you getting on? Anything interesting about Dürer?’
?hlund sighs. ‘The Danes aren’t being a massive help, but we’ve done our best.’
‘OK. Tell me.’
‘Dürer arrived in Denmark on the white buses when he was five. He’d been in the camp at Dachau.’
The Second World War? she thinks. A concentration camp, in other words. She quickly calculates Dürer’s age. He was seventy-eight when he died.
‘There were a number of Danes in Dachau, including Dürer’s parents, but they didn’t survive.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘According to the Danish tax office, for a long time he declared an income from pig farming. But it doesn’t look like the business went very well. Some years he doesn’t appear to have had any income at all. The farm was in Jutland, a place called Struer, and it was sold ten years ago.’
‘How did he end up in Sweden?’
‘Towards the end of the sixties he pops up in Vuollerim. And got a job as an accountant at a sawmill.’
‘Not as a lawyer?’
‘No, and that’s what’s a bit strange. I can’t find any evidence of him having any formal qualifications. No exams, no degree.’
‘And in all the years that he worked as a lawyer, no one ever thought to check him out and verify his professional credentials?’
‘No, not from what I can see. But he was being treated for cancer, and –’
Jeanette sees Ivo Andri? come out of the house and say something to Hurtig.
‘I’ve got to go now, we’ll continue later. Good work, ?hlund.’
She puts the phone back in her jacket and walks over to the waiting men.
‘Two dead dogs in the cellar. That’s where the smell’s coming from.’
Jeanette breathes out. It looks as if the pathologist is smiling, and she presumes that, just like her, he’s relieved that it’s not a human body this time.
‘The animals look like they’ve been slaughtered,’ he goes on. ‘But we haven’t found anything interesting to report about the rest of Hannah ?stlund’s home, at least not at first glance.’
‘OK, get back to me when you’ve taken a closer look at Jessica Friberg’s house,’ Jeanette says to Ivo as Hurtig nods to him and starts walking towards the car.
Swedenborgsgatan – S?dermalm
SOFIA ZETTERLUND IS sitting in the window of the little bar opposite the eastern exit from the Mariatorget metro station. She hasn’t yet recovered from her breakdown the previous day, and stares out at the bald horse-chestnut trees over an untouched plate of hash. In summer this is one of the leafiest streets in the city, but now all she can see are the gloomy skeletons of the trees. The branches stand out against the grey sky like the veins in a lung.
Soon the snow will be here, she thinks.
Instead of eating she leafs through a gossip magazine someone has left on the table. One article catches her eye, because it’s about a young woman she coached for a while. The pseudo-celebrity, nude model and now porn actress Carolina Glanz.
The article makes her lose her appetite even more. Miss Glanz, according to the magazine’s well-placed sources, has managed in the little more than a month to have her second breast enhancement, marry and then divorce a rich American, perform in a dozen films for a major porn producer, and write a book about it all. An autobiography. Twenty-two years old.
Sofia tosses the magazine aside and sits there for another ten minutes without touching her food. Tiredness and oversensitivity after several nights of disturbed sleep – or, rather, troubled wakefulness – are having a paralysing effect on her, and in the end she begins to pick at the plate in a feeble attempt to summon up some enthusiasm.
Although she asked for the egg to be raw, they’ve fried it. Raw egg, not fried. But they still got the order wrong.
She pushes the plate away, gets up and leaves the bar.
Pull yourself together now, she thinks as she checks that she remembered to pick up her purse. You’ve got a job to do.
As she crosses the street she catches sight of someone she recognises. Huddled up and wearing a dark coat and a red woolly hat.