Midwinter Sacrifice

8

‘He died of his head injuries. The perpetrator used a blunt object, repeatedly, almost as if in a frenzy, to beat in the cranium and the face until it became the shapeless mass of flesh it is now. He was alive when he received the blows, but in all likelihood lost consciousness fairly quickly. The perpetrator or perpetrators also appear to have used a knife.’

Karin Johannison is standing beside the blue body, which is lying on the cold steel of the pathology laboratory. Arms and legs and head stick out from the trunk like lumpy, irregular stumps. The torso is cut open, with the skin and fat folded into four flaps, revealing a jumble of guts. The skull has been sawn open, dutifully, at the back of the head.

It looks methodical and haphazard at the same time, Malin thinks. As if someone had been planning it for a long time, and then lost their composure.

‘I had to let him thaw out before I could start,’ as Karin had put it over the phone. ‘But once I got started it was pretty straightforward.’

Zeke is standing quietly beside Malin, apparently unconcerned; he’s seen death many times before and realises that it’s impossible to grasp.

Karin works with death, but she doesn’t understand it. Perhaps none of us does, Malin thinks. But most of us appreciate what death can encompass. Karin, Malin thinks, doesn’t understand a lot of what everything in this basement room is actually about; here she is useful, functional, as precise as the instruments she uses in her work. As precise as the room itself.

The most practical face of death.

White walls, small windows at ceiling height, stainless-steel cabinets and shelves along the wall holding textbooks and bandages, compresses, surgical gloves and so on. The linoleum floor is a bluish colour, easy to clean, hardwearing, cheap. Malin never gets used to this room, to its role and function, but she is nevertheless drawn to it.

‘He didn’t die from the rope,’ Karin says. ‘He was dead by the time he was hauled up into the tree. If he’d died of strangulation the blood wouldn’t have run to his head the way it did. With a hanging the blood vessels are shut off directly, to put it in layman’s terms, but here the physical blows made the heart pump faster, which accounts for the abnormal amount of blood.’

‘How long has he been dead?’ Malin asks.

‘You mean now?’

‘No, before he was strung up in the tree.’

‘I’d say at least five hours, maybe a bit longer. Considering there was no great quantity of blood in his legs even though he was found hanging.’

‘What about the blows to the body?’ Zeke says.

‘What about them?’

‘What have you got to say about them?’

‘Doubtless very painful, if he was conscious at the time, but they weren’t fatal. There are marks on the legs that show he was dragged, that someone hauled the body over damp ground. The wounds have dirt in them, and fragments of fabric. Someone undressed him after the beating, and then moved the body. At least that’s what I believe happened. He was finished off with a knife.’

‘And his teeth?’ Zeke asks.

‘In too poor a state to be useful, most of his teeth were broken.’

Karin takes hold of one of the wrists. ‘Do you see these marks here?’

Malin nods.

‘They were made by chains. That’s how they got him up into the tree.’

‘They?’

‘I don’t know. But do you imagine a single man could have done this, considering the amount of physical strength required?’

‘Not impossible,’ Malin says.

Zeke shakes his head. ‘We don’t know yet.’

The snow had concealed nothing.

The only thing Karin and her colleagues found were a few cigarette butts, a biscuit wrapper and an ice-cream wrapper that didn’t quite seem to belong in the field. Ice cream? Hardly at this time of year. And the wrappers and butts looked older, as if they’d been there several years. They, or he, or she, hadn’t left any traces behind them on the ground.

‘Did you find anything else?’

‘Nothing under the nails. No signs of a struggle. Which suggests he must have been taken by surprise. Have you had any tip-offs? Anyone who’s said anything?’

‘It’s been completely quiet,’ Malin says. ‘Nada, niente.’

‘Not missed by anyone, then,’ Karin says.

‘We don’t know that either yet,’ Zeke says.

If I were still able to talk the way you do, if I could get up and tell you, cure your deafness, I would tell you to stop with all these questions.

What good are they?

It is the way it is, it’s turned out the way it’s turned out. I know who did it, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, had time to see death coming, slow, quick, black.

Then it went white, death.

White as freshly fallen snow. White is the colour when the brain fades, an optimistic firework burst, shorter than a breath. And then, when vision returned to me again I could see everything, I was free and unfree at the same time.

So do you really want to know?

Do you really want to hear this story? I don’t think so. It is worse, nastier, darker, more merciless than you can imagine. If you carry on from here, you are choosing a path that leads right into the heart of the place where only the body, not the soul, can live and breathe, where we are chemistry, where we are code, the place outside, where the word feeling does not exist.

At the end of the path, in an apple-scented darkness clad in white, you will find waking dreams so black that they make this winter seem warm and welcoming. But I know that you will choose that path. Because you are human beings. And that is how you are.

‘How long will it take you to fix him up?’

‘Fix him up how?’

‘Ideally we need to get his face sorted out,’ Malin says. ‘So we can give a picture to the press. So that maybe someone will realise he’s missing, or at least recognise him.’

‘I understand. I’ll phone Skoglund at Fonus funeral services. He can probably help me with a quick reconstruction. We ought to be able to come up with something decent anyway.’

‘Call Skoglund. The sooner we have a picture the better.’

‘Okay, let’s go,’ Zeke says, and from the tone of his voice Malin knows he’s had enough. Of the body, of the sterile room, but mainly of Karin Johannison.

Malin knows that Zeke thinks Karin gives herself airs and graces, and maybe he’s also put out by the fact that she doesn’t ask about Martin like everyone else does, no matter where or when. And, for Zeke, Karin’s lack of interest in ice hockey and his son has become proof that she’s arrogant. He’s clearly tired of all the questions about Martin, but is still not happy if people don’t ask.

‘Do you use spray-tan?’ Zeke asks Karin when they’re on their way out of the lab.

Malin laughs, against her will.

‘No, I use a solarium to keep up my suntan from Thailand over Christmas,’ Karin says. ‘There’s a place on Drottninggatan that does spray-tans, but I don’t know. It seems so vulgar. Maybe just my face, though.’

‘Thailand? At Christmas?’ Zeke says. ‘Isn’t that the most expensive time? I’ve heard that people who really know Thailand go at other times.’