Daniel

Prologue Skåne, Southern Sweden, 1878

The crows were fighting. They dived towards the mud, flung themselves up again, and their cries cut through the wind. It had been raining a long time, this August of 1878. The restlessness of the crows was a portent of a long, hard winter. But one of the tenant farmers working below Kågeholm Castle, just north-west of Tomelilla, was bewildered by them. There was something strange about their agitation. And he had seen flocks of crows his whole life. Late in the afternoon he walked alongside a ditch that was filled with water. The crows kept squabbling, but when he approached too closely they fell silent and flapped off. And he, who had come to investigate what was bothering them, discovered at once what it was. A girl lay dead, half buried under the brushwood.

He realised at once that the girl had been murdered. Someone had stabbed her and slit her throat. But when he bent close over her face he noticed something odd, something that frightened him more than her slit throat. Whoever killed her had suffocated her with mud, which he had stuffed down her throat and into her nostrils. He had pressed so hard that he had broken her nose. The girl must have suffered an agonising death.

He ran back the same way he had come. Because it was obviously a murder, Chief Constable Landkvist in Tomelilla called for help from the investigative police in Malmö.

The dead girl’s name was Sanna Sörensdotter and she was regarded by all, including the parish pastor David Hallén, as mentally retarded. She had been missing from her home in Kverrestad for three days before her body was discovered.

According to the doctor who examined the corpse, Dr Madsen of Simrishamn, she had apparently been sexually molested. But since her body was in a state of decomposition and the crows had done considerable damage to it, he had to admit that the truth might well be something else.

Many rumours flourished as to who had murdered her. One of the simplest claimed that a Polish sailor had been seen in the area just before Sanna disappeared from her home. Although a bulletin was put out all over Sweden, and even in Denmark, the man was never found.

The murderer remained at large.

Only he knew what he had done.

And why.