The Savage Altar

by Unknown

  “We’ll call it holiday, then,” she said without a hint of a smile. “And I’ll take the laptop and do some work from up there.”

  “Fine, it’s all the same to me,” said Måns, his voice heavy with regret. “After all, it’s your colleagues who’ll have a heavier workload. I’ll give Wickman’s to somebody else.”

  Rebecka forced herself not to clench her fists. Bastard. He was punishing her. Wickman’s was her client. She had brought in the business, she had developed an excellent relationship with them, and as soon as the tax arrears assessment was out of the way, they were going to start preparing the legal transfer of the small company to the younger members of the family. Besides which, they liked her.

  “Do whatever you think is appropriate,” she answered with an almost imperceptible shrug, and allowed her eyes to wander along the fringes of the Persian rug. “You can reach me via my e-mail address if anything comes up.”

  Måns Wenngren felt the urge to go up to her, grab hold of her hair, yank her head backwards and force her to look him in the eye. Or just give her a slap.

  She turned to leave the room.

  “So how are you getting up there?” he asked before she got through the door. “Do they have flights all the way up to Kiruna, or will you have to catch the reindeer caravan in Umeå?”

  “There are flights,” she replied neutrally.

  Just as if she had taken his question completely seriously.

  Inspector Anna-Maria Mella leaned back in her office chair and looked listlessly at the documents spread out in front of her. Stale and old. Investigations that had ground to a halt. Unsolved cases: robberies from shops, stolen cars—all several years old. She picked up the folder nearest to her. Domestic violence, a nasty one, but the woman had later withdrawn the charge and insisted that she’d fallen down the stairs.

  That was a bloody awful case, thought Anna-Maria, remembering the unpleasant photographs taken at the hospital.

  She picked up another file. Stolen tires from a firm down on the industrial estate. A witness had seen someone cutting the wire fence and loading the tires onto his Toyota Hilux, but during a later interview the witness was suddenly unable to remember a single thing. It was as clear as daylight that he’d been threatened.

  Anna-Maria sighed. There was no money for witness protection or anything else when it came to a few poxy tires being nicked. She typed “Toyota Hilux” into the computer and made a note of the owner’s name. Petty criminals, little tyrants who take whatever they want. It was more than likely that she would come across him in some other context in the future. She ran a multiple query on the owner. Convictions for assault and illegal possession of a firearm. He was also listed as a suspect several times.

  Pull yourself together, she told herself. Don’t just sit here opening and closing files and surfing databases.

  She put the tire theft to one side. They weren’t going to get anywhere with that one. The prosecutor might as well drop it. From the coffee machine outside her door she could hear the sound of a plastic cup dropping down and the loud whine as it was filled with that wretched instant machine coffee. For a while she hoped it might be Sven-Erik, and that he might come in with some news about Viktor Strandgård. But then she heard the steps disappearing down the corridor; it must be somebody else.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said half out loud, and reached for another folder from the pile.

  Her gaze immediately strayed away from the text and wandered aimlessly over the desk. She looked sadly at the mug of cold tea. The very thought of coffee almost made her throw up at the moment. But she’d never been a tea drinker either. It just stood there and went cold, every time. And Coke made her stomach too gassy.

  When the phone rang she snatched up the receiver. She thought it would be Sven-Erik, but it was Lars Pohjanen, the medical examiner.

  “I’ve finished the initial autopsy report,” he said in his rasping coffee percolator voice. “Do you want to come down?”

  “Well, Sven-Erik’s in charge of this one,” she said hesitantly. “And von Post.”

  Pohjanen’s voice became irritated.

  “I’ve no intention of hunting all over town for Sven-Erik, and his lordship the prosecutor can read the report. I’ll pack up and get back to Luleå, then.”

  “No, damn it. I’ll come,” said Anna-Maria, just as she heard the conversation at the other end being cut off with a click.

  I hope the old bastard heard that, she thought as she pulled on her leather boots. He’ll probably have gone by the time I get to the hospital.

  She found Lars Pohjanen in the hospital security guards’ smoking room. He was slumped on a sturdy green seventies sofa. His eyes were closed, and only the glowing cigarette in his hand gave any indication that he might be awake, or even alive.

  “So,” he said without opening his eyes, “aren’t you interested in Viktor Strandgård, deceased? I would have thought this was just up your street, Mella.”

  “I’m supposed to be pushing paper until I have the baby,” she said, standing in the doorway. “But it’s better if I talk to you before you go, rather than nobody doing it.”

  He gave a croaky laugh that turned into a feeble cough, opened his eyes and fixed her with his piercing blue gaze.

  “You’re going to dream about him at night, Mella. Come and talk it through, otherwise you’re going to be running round with the pram interrogating suspects while you’re on maternity leave. Shall we?”

  He made an exaggerated gesture, inviting her into the autopsy room.

  The room where the autopsies were held was very neat. A clean stone floor, three stainless-steel tables, red plastic boxes stacked according to size under the sink, two hand basins where Anna Granlund made sure there was a constant supply of spotlessly clean hand towels. The dissection table had been sluiced down and dried off. Out in the sluice room the dishwasher was running. The only thing that made you think of death was a long line of ID-marked transparent plastic jars containing gray or light brown bits of brain or internal organs, preserved in formalin so that tests could be carried out on them at a later stage. And Viktor Strandgård’s body. He was lying on his back on one of the tables. An incision ran across the back of his head from one ear to the other, and the whole of his scalp had been drawn away from his skull up over the forehead to expose his cranium. Two long wounds ran across his stomach and were held together with rough sutures. One had been made by the autopsy technician in order to allow an examination of the internal organs. There were also several short wounds on the body; Anna-Maria had seen marks like these before. Knife wounds. He was clean, stitched up and sluiced down, pale under the fluorescent lights. It bothered Anna-Maria to see his slender body lying naked on the cold steel table. She had kept her fleecy jacket on.

  Lars Pohjanen pulled on a green surgical gown, shoved his feet into his worn old clogs, which bore only vestiges of the white they had once been, and slipped on his thin, supple rubber gloves.

  “How are the kids?” he asked.

  “Jenny and Petter are fine. Marcus is suffering from a broken heart and is mostly just lying on his bed with his headphones on, developing tinnitus.”

  “Poor kid,” said Pohjanen with genuine sympathy, and turned to Viktor Strandgård.

  Anna-Maria wondered whether he meant Marcus or Viktor Strandgård.

  “Do you mind?” she asked, and took her tape recorder out of her pocket. “So the others can listen later.”

  Pohjanen shrugged his shoulders in agreement. Anna-Maria switched on the tape recorder.

  “Chronologically,” he said. “First a blow to the back of the head with a blunt instrument. You and I are not really in a position to try and turn him over, but you can see it on here.”

  He took out a computer slide and clipped it on to the X-ray light box. Anna-Maria looked at the images in silence, thinking of the black-and-white ultrasound pictures of her baby.

  “You can see the split in the skull here. And the sub
dural bleed. Just here.”

  The doctor’s finger traced a dark area on the pictures.

  “It might have been possible to save his life if he had suffered only the blow to the head, but probably not,” he said.

  “Your murderer is most likely right-handed,” continued Pohjanen. “Then, after the blow to his head, he receives these two stab wounds to the stomach and the chest.”

  He pointed to two of the wounds on Viktor Strandgård’s body.

  “It’s impossible to speculate about the height of the perpetrator from the blow to the back of the head, and unfortunately there are no clues from the stab wounds either. They were delivered from above, so it’s my guess that Viktor Strandgård was on his knees when he received those wounds. Either that, or the perpetrator is immensely tall, like an American basketball player. But I would presume that Strandgård suffered the blow to his head first. Bang.”

  The doctor smacked his own bald head to illustrate the blow.

  “The blow makes him fall to his knees—there are no grazes or hematomas on the knees, but the carpet was quite soft—and then the killer stabs him twice. That’s why the angle of entry is sloping from above. So it’s difficult to say anything about his height.”

  “So he died from the blow and the two stab wounds?” asked Anna-Maria.

  “Yes,” continued Pohjanen, suppressing a cough. “This stab wound through the wall of the rib cage splits the seventh rib bone on the left-hand side, opens the pericardium—”

  “The peri—?”

  “The heart sac, the right ventricle, the heart chamber. This causes a bleed into the heart and the right lung. With the second blow the knife cut through the liver and caused a bleed into the abdominal cavity and the peritoneum.”

  “Did he die immediately?”

  Pohjanen shrugged his shoulders.

  “What about the rest of his injuries?” asked Anna-Maria.

  “He sustained those after death. All this damage to the torso and belly with a sharp object. These blows came from directly in front and were delivered after the moment of death. I would guess that Viktor Strandgård was lying on his back at the time. There’s also this long gash which opened up the stomach.”

  He pointed at the long reddish blue wound in the stomach, which was now held together with rough stitches.

  “And the eyes?” asked Anna-Maria, gazing at the gaping holes in Viktor Strandgård’s face.

  “Look at this,” said Pohjanen, slotting in another X-ray plate. “Just here! Can you see this splinter that’s come away from the cranium right inside the eye socket? And here! I hardly noticed it at first, but then I rinsed out the socket and looked at the skull itself. There are marks where something has scraped against the skull on the edge of the eye sockets. The murderer pushed the knife into the eyes and twisted it. Gouged them out, you could say.”

  “What the hell was he trying to do?” exclaimed Anna-Maria with feeling. “And the hands?”

  “They were also removed after death. One was still at the scene.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Maybe on the wrist stumps, but it’s up to the forensic lab in Linköping to sort that out. I don’t hold out much hope, though. There are a couple of decent marks around the wrists where somebody has gripped them hard, but as far as I can see, there aren’t any prints. I think Linköping will say that the person who cut off the hands was wearing gloves.”

  Anna-Maria felt her courage fail. She was seized by a strong desire to catch the murderer. All of a sudden she felt as if she couldn’t bear it if the investigation was just shelved in some archive in a few years’ time. Pohjanen was right. She would probably dream about Viktor Strandgård.

  “What kind of knife was it?” she asked.

  “Some kind of biggish hunting knife. Too broad for a kitchen knife. It wasn’t double-edged.”

  “What about the blunt object that hit him on the back of the head?”

  “Could have been anything at all,” said Pohjanen. “A spade, a large stone…”

  “Isn’t it odd that he was hit from behind with a weapon and then stabbed from the front?” asked Anna-Maria.

  “You’re the detective,” said Lars Pohjanen.

  “Maybe there was more than one person,” wondered Anna-Maria out loud. “Anything else?”

  “Not at the moment. No drugs. No alcohol. And he hadn’t eaten for several days.”

  “What? Several days?”

  Anna-Maria herself found it necessary to eat every two hours.

  “He wasn’t dehydrated, so it wasn’t some kind of stomach bug or anorexia or anything like that. But he seems to have ingested only liquids. The lab will be able to tell you what else was in his stomach. You can switch off the tape recorder.”

  He passed over a copy of the preliminary autopsy report. Anna-Maria clicked off the tape recorder.

  “I don’t like guessing,” said Pohjanen, clearing his throat. “At least not when there’s a record.”

  He nodded in the direction of the tape recorder, which disappeared into Anna-Maria’s pocket.

  “But the cuts on the wrists were very neat,” he went on. “You’re looking for a hunter, Mella.”

  “So this is where you are,” came a voice from the doorway.

  It was Sven-Erik Stålnacke.

  “Yes,” replied Anna-Maria, and realized she was embarrassed in case her colleague thought she’d gone behind his back. “Pohjanen rang and he was just about to leave and…”

  She stopped, angry that she’d tried to explain herself and to make excuses.

  “That’s fine,” said Sven-Erik cheerfully. “You can tell me all about it in the car. We’ve got problems with our pastors. Hell, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. In the end I asked Sonja on the switchboard who’d phoned you. We need to go now.”

  Anna-Maria glanced questioningly at Pohjanen; he shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows at the same time, as if to say that their business was finished.

  “I see Luleå got hammered by Färjestad.” Sven-Erik smirked as a parting shot to the doctor, at the same time hustling Anna-Maria along with him.

  “Go on, rub it in,” sighed Lars Pohjanen, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette.

  The plane to Kiruna was almost full. Hordes of foreign tourists off to drive a dog team and spend the night on reindeer skins in the ice hotel at Jukkasjärvi jostled for space with rumpled businessmen returning home clutching their free fruit and newspapers.

  Rebecka sank down and fastened her seat belt. The murmur of voices, the synthetic ping as the signs lit up and went off overhead and the humming of the engines lulled her into a restless sleep. She slept for the whole journey.

  In her dream she is running across a cloudberry bog. It is a hot August day. The heat of the sun is making the moisture rise from the bog. Sweat and midge repellent are pouring down her forehead and into her eyes. It stings. There are tears in her eyes. A black cloud of midges creeps into her nostrils and ears. She can’t see. Someone is chasing her. They’re right behind her. And as always in her dreams, her legs won’t carry her weight. They have no strength and the bog is waterlogged. Her feet sink deeper and deeper into the peat moss and someone, or something, is chasing her. Now she can’t lift her foot. She’s sinking into the bog. She tries to shout for her mummy, but only a faint sound comes from her throat. Then she feels a hand, heavy on her shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, did I frighten you?”

  Rebecka opened her eyes and saw a flight attendant bending over her. The woman smiled a little uncertainly and took her hand from Rebecka’s shoulder.

  “We’re preparing to land in Kiruna; I’ll have to ask you to put the back of your seat into the upright position.”

  Rebecka’s hand flew up to her mouth. Had she been dribbling? Or worse, screaming? She didn’t dare look at her neighbor, but turned to look out into the darkness. It was down there. The town. It shone like a jewel glittering at the bottom of a well, its lights surrounded by the darkness of t
he mountains. It felt like a blow to the stomach and the heart.

  My town, she thought, the melancholy of seeing it again blending with happiness, rage and fear in a strange mixture.

  Twenty minutes later she was sitting in the rented Audi on the way down to Kurravaara. The village lay fifteen kilometers outside Kiruna. As a child she had often traveled the whole way from Kiruna down to the village on her kick sledge. It was a happy memory. Especially in the late winter when the road was covered with a wonderful layer of thick, shining ice, and nobody spoiled it with sand, salt or grit.

  The moon lit up the snow-covered forest around her. The snowdrifts along the sides of the road formed a frame.

  It’s not right, she thought, I shouldn’t have let them take this away from me. Before I go back I’m going to bloody well get the kick sledge out and have a go.

  From when should I have started to handle things differently? she thought as the car swept through the forest. If I could go back in time, would I have to go right back to the first summer? Or even further back? In that case it would have to be that spring. When I first met Thomas Söderberg. When he visited my class at the Hjalmar Lundbohm School. Even then I should have behaved differently. I should have seen through him. Not been so bloody naïve. The others in the class must have been much smarter than me. Why weren’t they tempted?