Later that morning Victoria is trying to scrub the smell from her skin, but it seems to be ingrained.
It had been worse than she could have imagined.
At dawn she picks the lock to Fredrika’s room and when the girl wakes up Victoria is sitting astride her.
‘Give me the tape,’ she hisses quietly so as not to wake Fredrika’s room-mates, while Fredrika tries to defend herself.
Victoria has a firm grip on her hands.
‘No way,’ Fredrika says, but Victoria can hear how frightened she is.
‘You seem to be forgetting that I know who you are. I’m the only person who knows who was behind those masks. Do you really want Daddy to know what you did to us?’
Fredrika realises that she has no choice.
Victoria goes upstairs to the media room and makes two copies of the tape. She’s going to drop one of them in the postbox at the bus station, addressed to herself out in V?rmd?. She’s planning to keep the other copy in reserve to send to the papers in case they ever try anything with her again.
Svartsj?landet – Crime Scene
FOR THE SECOND time in two weeks, Jeanette Kihlberg was having to investigate the murder of a young boy.
Hurtig had called that morning, and she had driven straight out to Svartsj?landet to lead the investigation. The body had been found by an elderly couple who were out exercising.
Unlike the boy at Thorildsplan, this time they had a good idea of the boy’s identity. His name was Yuri Krylov, a Belarussian boy who had been reported missing in early March when he disappeared from an immigration centre outside Upplands V?sby. According to the migration board he had no relatives, either in Sweden or back home.
Jeanette walked down to the jetty where the boy’s body lay. The stench caught in her nose. After a long period in the water, his body fat had transformed into a rancid, stinking, almost putty-like consistency. She knew the body had been attacked by flies after just a few hours in the water, and there were yellowish-red beads around the corners of his eyes, nose and mouth. Fly eggs that had hatched into larvae after a few days, so-called corpse maggots. The skin of the boy’s hands and feet had absorbed so much water that it had come loose and looked like gloves and socks.
‘Damn it’ was all she managed to say, before leaving the jetty and walking over to Ivo Andri?.
‘Can you tell me what you’ve got so far?’ she asked, even though she knew that he wouldn’t be able to give her all the relevant information until after the post-mortem examination.
The prosecutor, von Kwist, had that morning consented to a detailed forensic post-mortem in the Yuri Krylov case, the most elaborate type of post-mortem conducted in Sweden, reserved for the most serious crimes.
Ivo Andri? scratched his head. ‘Bodies left lying in water assume a characteristic pose, with their head, arms and legs hanging down and their back raised. That means that the head decays most rapidly, because of the amount of blood that gathers there.’
Jeanette nodded.
‘And when I pressed the ribcage, I discovered that there wasn’t enough water in the lungs to indicate that he’d drowned, which –’
‘– means he was already dead when he was put into the water,’ Jeanette concluded.
Ivo Andri? smiled. ‘And it isn’t unusual for bodies that have decayed in water to show signs of attack from fish. As you must have noticed, that’s what’s happened in this instance. The boy’s eyes have been partially eaten. And his face has large haematomas around the edges of the jaw and chin.’
‘What about the genitals?’
‘This boy’s genitals have also been removed.’
Ivo Andri? went on to explain that this had been done with the same precision as before. And, once again, the body showed evidence of extreme violence. There was extensive subcutaneous bleeding on the back that suggested that this boy, too, had been whipped.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if the body also contains high quantities of Xylocain adrenalin,’ the medical officer concluded. Jeanette hoped the forensic chemistry lab would be able to analyse the samples quickly.
She realised that they were probably dealing with the same perpetrator, and so were investigating a double murder.
How many more boys would die before this was over?
The only significant evidence they had found were two shoe prints, one large and one much smaller, almost a child’s, and some tyre tracks from a vehicle of some sort. Forensics had taken casts, but these would only be useful when they had something to compare them with.
Some hundred metres from the place where the body had been found, ?hlund had noted that the same vehicle had scraped a tree, so if it was the perpetrator’s car, the car was blue.
Someone out there was abducting children no one would miss, then abusing them so severely that they died. Even though there had been a lot of coverage in the press, and they had asked the public for help identifying the boy from Thorildsplan, the tip-off lines had remained silent.
But an item on TV3’s Crimewatch programme had led to a considerable number of disturbed individuals claiming responsibility for the crime. Often that sort of coverage could assist a case that had ground to a halt, but on this occasion it had only wasted valuable time. All of the callers were men who, were it not for various political decisions, ought to have been in psychiatric institutions and receiving professional help. But instead they were wandering the streets of Stockholm, suppressing their demons with drink and drugs.
Welfare state – yeah, right! she thought.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
‘FORGET FURUG?RD!’ WAS all von Kwist said on the phone.
‘What? What do you mean?’ Jeanette Kihlberg got up and went over to the window. ‘But the guy’s extremely … I don’t understand this at all.’
‘Furug?rd has an alibi and has nothing to do with this. I told you we should steer clear of him. It was a serious mistake on my part to listen to you.’
Jeanette could hear how upset the prosecutor was, and could see his bright red face before her.
‘Furug?rd’s in the clear,’ he went on. ‘He has an alibi.’
‘Really? So what is it?’
Von Kwist said nothing for a moment, then went on.
‘What I’m about to tell you is confidential and must stay between you and me. I am merely conveying a fact. Is that understood?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘The Swedish international force in Sudan, that’s all I can say.’
‘And?’
‘Furug?rd was recruited in Afghanistan, and has been stationed in Sudan all spring. He’s innocent.’
Jeanette didn’t know what to say.
‘Sudan?’ was all she managed to get out. She felt utterly impotent.
Back to square one. No suspect for the murders, and only one victim identified.