‘Anything useful?’
The woman shook her head. ‘Not yet. Obviously there are a lot of footprints; we’ll take impressions of some of the best ones. But don’t get your hopes up.’
Jeanette slowly approached the bushes where the body had been found, wrapped in a black garbage bag. The boy, a young adolescent, was naked, and had stiffened in a sitting position with his arms around his knees. His hands had been bound with duct tape. The skin on his face had turned a yellow-brown colour, and looked almost leathery, like old parchment.
His hands, in contrast, were almost black.
‘Any signs of sexual violence?’ She turned to Ivo Andri?, who was crouched down in front of her.
Ivo Andri? was a specialist in unusual and extreme cases of death.
The Stockholm police had called him early that morning. Because they didn’t want to cordon off the area around the metro station any longer than necessary, he had to work fast.
‘I can’t tell yet. But it can’t be ruled out. I don’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions, but from my experience you don’t usually see this sort of extreme injury without there being evidence of sexual violence as well.’
Jeanette nodded.
She leaned closer and noted that the dead boy looked foreign. Arabic, Palestinian, maybe even Indian or Pakistani.
The body was visible in some bushes just a few metres from the entrance to the Thorildsplan metro station on Kungsholmen, and Jeanette realised that it couldn’t have remained unseen for very long.
The police had done their best to protect the site with screens and tarpaulins, but the terrain was hilly, which meant it was possible to see the crime scene from above if you were standing some distance away. There were several photographers with telephoto lenses standing outside the cordon, and Jeanette almost felt sorry for them. They spent twenty-four hours a day listening to police-band radio and waiting in case something spectacular happened.
But she couldn’t see any actual journalists. The papers probably didn’t have the staff to send these days.
‘What the hell, Andri?,’ one of the police officers said, shaking his head at the sight. ‘How can something like this happen?’
The body was practically mummified, which told Ivo Andri? that it had been kept in a very dry place for a long time. Not outside in a wet Stockholm winter.
‘Well, Schwarz,’ he said, looking up, ‘that’s what we’re going to try to find out.’
‘Yes, but the boy’s been mummified, for fuck’s sake. Like some damn pharaoh. That’s not the sort of thing that happens during a coffee break, is it?’
Ivo Andri? nodded in agreement. He was a hardened man who was originally from Bosnia, and had been a doctor in Sarajevo during the almost four years of the Serbian siege. He had witnessed a great many unpleasant things throughout his long and eventful career, but he had never seen anything like this before.
There was no doubt at all that the victim had been severely abused, but the odd thing was that there were none of the usual self-defence injuries. All the bruises and haematomas looked more like the sort of thing you’d see on a boxer. A boxer who had gone twelve rounds and been so badly beaten that he eventually passed out.
On his arms and across his torso the boy had hundreds of marks, harder than the surrounding tissue, which, when taken as a whole, meant that he had been subjected to an astonishing number of blows while he was still alive. From the indentations on the boy’s knuckles, it seemed likely that he had not only received but had also dealt out a fair number of punches.
But the most troubling thing was the fact that the boy’s genitals were missing.
He noted that they had been removed with a very sharp knife.
A scalpel or razor blade, perhaps?
An examination of the mummified boy’s back revealed a large number of deeper wounds, the sort a whip would make.
Ivo Andri? tried to picture in his mind’s eye what had happened. A boy fighting for his life, and when he no longer wanted to fight someone had whipped him. He knew that illegal dogfights still happened in the immigrant communities. This might be something similar, but with the difference that it wasn’t dogs fighting for their lives but young boys.
Well, one of them at least had been a young boy.
Who his opponent might have been was a matter of speculation.
Then there was the fact that the boy hadn’t died when he really should have. Hopefully the post-mortem would reveal information about any traces of drugs or chemicals, Rohypnol, maybe phencyclidine. Ivo Andri? realised that his real work would begin once the body was in the pathology lab back at the hospital in Solna.
At noon they were able to put the body in a grey plastic bag and lift it into an ambulance for transportation to Solna. Jeanette Kihlberg’s work here was done, and she could go on to headquarters, at the other end of Kungsholmen. As she walked towards the car park a gentle rain started to fall.
‘Fuck!’ she swore loudly to herself, and ?hlund, one of her younger colleagues, turned and gave her a questioning look.
‘My car. It had slipped my mind, but it broke down on the way here and now I’m stranded. I’ll have to call a tow truck.’
‘Where is it?’ her colleague asked.
‘Over there.’ She pointed at the red, rusty, filthy Audi twenty metres away from them. ‘Why? Do you know anything about cars?’
‘It’s a hobby of mine. There isn’t a car on the planet that I couldn’t get going. Give me the keys and I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it.’
?hlund started the car and pulled out onto the road. The creaking and screeching sounded even louder from outside, and she assumed she would have to call her dad and ask for a small loan. He would ask her if ?ke had found a job yet, and she would explain that it wasn’t easy being an unemployed artist, but all that would probably change soon.
The same routine every time. She had to eat humble pie and act as ?ke’s safety net.
It could all be so easy, she thought. If he could just swallow his pride and take a temporary job. If for no other reason than to show that he cared about her and realised how worried she was. She sometimes had trouble sleeping at night before the bills were paid.
After a quick drive around the block the young police officer jumped out of the car and smiled triumphantly.
‘The ball joint, the steering column, or both. If I take it now I can start on it this evening. You can have it back in a few days, but you’ll have to pay for parts and a bottle of whisky. How does that sound?’
‘You’re an angel, ?hlund. Take it and do whatever the hell you like with it. If you can get it working, you can have two bottles and a decent reference when you go for promotion.’
Jeanette Kihlberg walked off towards the police van.
Esprit de corps, she thought.
Kronoberg – Police Headquarters