The Sandman

88

Joona walks into a white-tiled room with a long wash basin along one wall. Water is running from an orange hose into a drain on the floor. The body from the hunting cabin in Dalarna is lying on a plastic-covered autopsy table. Its sunken brown chest has been sawn open and yellow liquid is trickling slowly down into the stainless-steel trough.

‘Tra la la la laa – we’d catch the rainbow,’ Nils Åhlén sings to himself. ‘Tra la la la laa – to the sun...’

He pulls out a pair of latex gloves and is just blowing into them when he sees Joona standing in the doorway.

‘You ought to record a forensic album,’ Joona smiles.

‘Frippe’s a very good bassist,’ Åhlén replies.

The light from the powerful lamps in the ceiling reflects off his pilot’s glasses. He’s wearing a white polo-neck under his doctor’s coat.

They hear rustling footsteps from the corridor, and moments later Carlos Eliasson comes in, with pale-blue shoe covers on his feet.

‘Have you managed to identify the dead man?’ he asks, stopping abruptly when he catches sight of the corpse on the table.

The raised edges make the autopsy table look like a draining board where someone’s left a piece of dried meat, or some strange, blackened root. The corpse is desiccated and distorted, its severed head placed above the neck.

‘There’s no doubt that it’s Jeremy Magnusson,’ Åhlén replies. ‘Our forensic dentist – who plays the guitar, by the way – has compared the body’s oral characteristics with Magnusson’s dental records.’

Åhlén leans over, takes the head in his hands and opens the wrinkled black hole that was Jeremy Magnusson’s mouth.

‘He had an impacted wisdom tooth, and—’

‘Please,’ Carlos says, beads of sweat glinting on his forehead.

‘The palate has gone,’ Åhlén says, forcing the mouth open a bit further. ‘But if you feel with your finger—’

‘Fascinating,’ Carlos interrupts, then looks at the time. ‘Do we have any idea how long he was hanging there?’

‘The drying process would probably have been impeded slightly by the low temperatures,’ Åhlén replies. ‘But if you look at the eyes, the conjunctiva dried out very quickly, as did the undersides of the eyelids. The parchment-like texture of the skin is uniform, apart from round the neck where it was in contact with the rope.’

‘Which means...?’ Carlos says.

‘The post-mortal process forms a sort of diary, an ongoing life after death, as the body changes... And I would estimate that Jeremy Magnusson hanged himself...’

‘Thirteen years, one month and five days ago,’ Joona says.

‘Good guess,’ Åhlén says.

‘I just got a scan of his farewell note from Forensics,’ Joona says, taking out his mobile.

‘Suicide,’ Carlos says.

‘Everything points to that, even if Jurek Walter could feasibly have been there at the time,’ Åhlén replies.

‘Jeremy Magnusson was on the list of Jurek’s most likely victims,’ Carlos says slowly. ‘And if we can write off his death as suicide...’

An indefinable thought is flitting through Joona’s mind. It’s as if there were some sort of hidden association tucked away in this conversation – one he can’t quite grasp.

‘What did he say in the note?’ Carlos asks.

‘He hanged himself just three weeks before Samuel and I found his daughter Agneta in Lill-Jan’s Forest,’ Joona says, bringing up the image of the dated note that Forensics had sent him.

He took his life in the belief that everyone he loved had been taken from him. If he had only put up with loneliness for a little longer, he would have got his daughter back. Agneta Magnusson lived on for several more years before her heart finally stopped. She was cared for in a long-stay ward at Huddinge Hospital, under constant supervision.