‘Not yet,’ Hurtig said. ‘But I’m afraid it looks alarmingly similar to our previous cases. The boy’s been embalmed; he looks alive, if a bit pale. Someone laid him out on a blanket so it looked like he was sunbathing.’
?hlund pointed towards the clump of trees beside the boules club.
‘Anything else?’
‘According to Andri?, the body could have been there for a couple of days, in theory, anyway,’ Hurtig replied. ‘I think that’s pretty unlikely, myself. I mean, he’s out in the open. And I’d certainly think it was a bit weird if I saw someone lying on a blanket in the middle of the night.’
‘Maybe no one walked past last night.’
‘Maybe, but all the same …’
Jeanette Kihlberg did what was expected of her, then asked Andri? to call her as soon as he finished his report.
Two hours after she first arrived at the crime scene she got back in the car to drive home, and realised how sore she was after the match.
As she was passing the Sickla roundabout she called Dennis Billing.
The commissioner sounded breathless. ‘I’m on my way home. How did things look out there?’
‘Another dead boy. How’s it going with Lundstr?m and von Kwist?’
‘I’m afraid von Kwist is unwilling to let us interview Lundstr?m. There’s not much more I can do right now.’
‘I see. Why’s he being so fucking unhelpful? Do they play golf together?’
‘Be careful, Jeanette. We both know that von Kwist is a very talented –’
‘Bullshit!’
‘Well, that’s just the way it is. I have to go now. Let’s talk tomorrow.’ Dennis Billing hung up.
As she turned right into Enskedev?gen and pulled up at a red light beyond the roundabout, her mobile rang.
‘Um … hello, my name’s Ulrika. You were looking for me?’
The voice sounded brittle. Jeanette realised it must be Ulrika Wendin.
‘Ulrika? Thanks for getting back to me.’
‘What was it you wanted?’
‘Karl Lundstr?m,’ Jeanette said.
There was silence on the line. ‘OK,’ the girl said eventually. ‘Why?’
‘I’d like to talk to you about what he did to you, and I was hoping you might be able to help me with that.’
‘Shit …’ Ulrika sighed. ‘I don’t know if I can bear to go through all that again.’
‘I understand that it’s difficult for you. But it’s for a good cause. You can help other people by telling me what you know. If he gets put away for what he’s been accused of, you’ll get some sort of justice.’
‘What’s he accused of?’
‘I can tell you all about it tomorrow, if you could see me then? Is it OK if I come by your place?’
Another silence, and Jeanette listened to the girl’s heavy breathing for a few seconds.
‘That’s probably OK … What time?’
Gamla Enskede – Kihlberg House
IT WAS WAY past midnight when Jeanette was woken by the phone.
It was Ivo Andri?.
He told her that by coincidence it turned out that one of the night cleaners at the pathology institute was a Ukrainian who had studied medicine at the University of Kharkov. As soon as the cleaner caught sight of the body he said it reminded him of Lenin. Ivo Andri? had asked him to elaborate, and the cleaner said he remembered reading something about a Professor Vorobyov who had been given the task of embalming Lenin’s corpse in the 1920s.
‘I checked online,’ Ivo said. Jeanette could hear the tiredness in his voice. ‘One week after Lenin’s death his body had started to show signs of decay. The skin was starting to turn darker, more yellow, and was getting mottled, with signs of fungal growth. The person charged with preserving the body was Vladimir Vorobyov, a professor at the Kharkov University Institute of Anatomy.’
Jeanette listened with fascination as Ivo Andri? explained the process.
‘First they removed the internal organs, washed the corpse with acetic acid, then injected the soft tissues with formaldehyde. After several days of intensive work they put Lenin into a glass bath and covered the body with a mixture of water and chemicals, among them glycerine and potassium acetate. I realised at once that whoever had embalmed the boy could have been following Vorobyov’s notes.’
The medical officer admitted that his initial assumption that it must have been done by someone with specialist knowledge had been overly hasty.
‘Nowadays it’s enough to have access to the Internet,’ he said, and sighed. ‘And, seeing as we can probably assume that the person responsible was also the perpetrator in the earlier cases, and that that person had access to large quantities of anaesthetic, it shouldn’t have been too difficult for them to get hold of the chemicals needed to embalm a body.’
The injuries were the same as on the two other boys. More than a hundred bruises, needle marks and wounds to his back.
As Jeanette expected, this boy’s genitals had also been removed. With a similarly sharp knife, and with the same precision.
Andri? concluded by saying that he had made a plaster cast of the boy’s teeth, which – miraculously enough – were intact, and was going to send it to the forensic odontologists for identification.
It was half past two by the time they hung up.
Someone out there has now committed three murders, Jeanette thought.
And they were unlikely to stop at that.
She felt frozen as she finally closed her eyes to get some more much-needed sleep. ?ke’s snoring wasn’t making it any easier, but she’d learned how to deal with that. She gave him a nudge, and he rolled over onto his side with a murmur.
By half past four Jeanette couldn’t bear lying there awake, twisting and turning, any longer, and went quietly down to the kitchen and put some coffee on.
While the machine was brewing she went down into the basement and filled the washing machine. She made herself a couple of sandwiches, got a cup of coffee, and went out into the garden.
Before sitting down she walked to the mailbox and got the newspaper.
Obviously the main story was the news about the boy at Danvikstull, and Jeanette almost felt like she was being stalked.
On the other side of the road, next to one of her neighbours’ mailboxes, stood an abandoned pram.
The morning sun coming through the hedge was blinding her, and she raised a hand to her eyes to see what was going on.
Movement from the bushes. A young man hurried across the street, doing his trousers up, and she realised he’d just had a pee in her hedge.
He went up to the pram, took out a newspaper and put it in her neighbour’s mailbox. Then he moved on to the next house.
A pram, she thought, as an idea occurred to her.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
THE FIRST THING Jeanette Kihlberg did when she got to the office was to call the main company responsible for delivering newspapers.
‘Hello, my name’s Jeanette Kihlberg, I’m calling from the Stockholm police. I need to find out who was on duty in the area around the teacher-training college on Kungsholmen on the morning of 9 May.’
The operator sounded nervous.
‘OK … that ought to be possible. What’s this about?’
‘Murder.’