Stalker

77

Skogskyrkogården, to the south of Stockholm, is a Unesco World Heritage site, and holds more than one hundred thousand graves. Erik and Joona walk along the well-tended paths, past the Woodland Chapel, and notice the yellow roses in front of Greta Garbo’s red headstone.

Block number 53 is located further away, close to the fence facing Gamla Tyresövägen. The cemetery workers have unloaded a digger on caterpillar tracks from a council truck, and have already dug out the earth above the coffin. The grass is lying alongside the heap of soil, a tangle of fibrous roots and plump worms.

Nils Åhlén and his assistant Frippe are approaching from the other direction, and the four of them greet each other in subdued voices. Frippe has had a haircut and his face looks a bit rounder, but he’s still wearing the same old studded belt and washed-out T-shirt with a black Hammerfell logo.

The cab of the digger rotates gently and the hydraulics hiss as the scoop sinks and moves forward, carefully scraping the soil from the lid of the coffin.

As usual Nils is giving Frippe a short lecture, this time about how ammonia, hydrogen sulphide and hydrocarbons are released when proteins and carbohydrates break down.

‘The final stage of the decomposition process leaves the skeleton entirely exposed.’

Nils signals to the digger driver to back away. Clumps of clay soil fall from the blade of the scoop. He slides down into the grave with his hand on the edge. The lid of the coffin has given way under the weight of the soil.

He scrapes around the edge of the coffin with a spade, then brushes it clean with his hands, inserts the blade of the spade under the lid and tries to prise it open, but the chipboard snaps. There’s no strength left in it, it’s like wet cardboard.

Nils whispers something to himself, tosses the spade aside and slowly starts removing it, piece by piece, with his hands. He passes the pieces to Frippe, until the contents of the grave are entirely uncovered.

The dead body isn’t remotely unpleasant, it just looks defenceless.

The skeleton in the coffin looks small, almost like a child’s, but Nils Åhlén assures them that it belonged to a grown woman.

‘One metre sixty-five tall,’ he murmurs.

She was buried in a T-shirt and briefs, the fabric is clinging to the skeleton, the curve of the ribcage is intact, but the material has sunk into the pelvis.

An image of a cobalt-blue angel is still visible on the T-shirt.

Frippe walks round the grave taking photographs from every angle. Åhlén has taken out a small brush which he uses to remove soil and fragments of chipboard from the skeleton.

‘The left arm has been chopped off close to the shoulder,’ Åhlén declares.

‘We’ve found the nightmare,’ Joona says in a low voice.

They watch Åhlén carefully turn the skull. The jaw has come loose, but otherwise the cranium is in one piece.

‘Deep incisions across the front of the cranium,’ Åhlén says. ‘Forehead, zygomatic bone, cheekbone, upper jaw… the incisions continue across the collarbone and sternum…’

‘The preacher’s back,’ Erik says with an ominous feeling in the pit of his stomach.

Nils Åhlén goes on brushing soil away from the body. Next to the hipbone he find a wristwatch with a scratched face. The leather strap is gone, turned to grey dust.

‘Looks like a man’s watch,’ he says, picking it up and turning it over.

The back is inscribed with Cyrillic letters. Åhlén takes out his mobile and takes a picture of the lettering.

‘I’ll send this to Maria at the Slavic Institute,’ he mutters.