The Black Path (7 page)

I can assume that any personal items that are here were hers, thought Anna-Maria.

There were a few microwave meals in the refrigerator. Three of the four bedrooms were completely untouched.

There’s nothing more to see here, she thought, walking back into the hallway.

On a white bureau in the hall stood an old lamp. It would have looked kitsch anywhere else, but it fitted in well here, thought Anna-Maria. The base was made of porcelain. It had a painted landscape on it that looked as if it might be from the German Alps, with a mountain in the background and a magnificent stag in the foreground. The shade was the color of cognac, with a fringe. The switch was just below the lightbulb fitting.

Anna-Maria tried to switch it on. When it didn’t work, she discovered that it wasn’t because the bulb had gone, but because the electric cord was missing.

In the base of the lamp there was just a hole where the cord had been.

What have they done with it? she wondered.

Maybe they’d bought the lamp at a flea market or in an antique shop, and it was already like that. Perhaps they’d put it on the bureau thinking they’d fix it soon, it could stand there for the time being.

Anna-Maria had thousands of things like that at home. Things they were going to fix any year now. But in the end, you just got used to the defects. The front of the dishwasher, for example. It had been made in the same style as the kitchen cupboards, but it had come loose about a hundred years ago and now the door of the dishwasher was too light for the spring. The whole family had got used to loading and unloading the dishwasher with one foot on the door so that it wouldn’t close by itself. She did the same thing in other people’s houses without even thinking about it. Robert’s sister always laughed at her when Anna-Maria was helping load their machine.

Perhaps they’d just moved the lamp and the cord had got caught between the wall and a piece of furniture, and been pulled out. But that could be dangerous. If the cord was still plugged in, but not attached to the lamp.

She thought about the fire risk and then she thought about Gustav, her three-year-old, and about all the plastic covers on the sockets at home to keep them child-safe.

She got a fleeting picture in her head of Gustav when he was eight months old, and crawling everywhere. What a nightmare. A plug in a socket with a broken cord lying on the floor. The copper wires clearly visible inside the plastic covering. And Gustav, whose main method of investigating the world around him was putting things in his mouth. She quickly pushed the picture aside.

Then it struck her. Electric shock. She’d seen several during her career. God, there was that guy who’d died five years ago. She’d gone along to confirm that it was an accident. He’d been standing on the draining board in his bare feet, fiddling with a ceiling light. The skin on the soles of his feet had been badly burned.

Inna Wattrang had a circular burn around her ankle.

You could imagine someone ripping an ordinary cord out of a lamp, thought Anna-Maria. Opening it up and removing the plastic covering and winding one of the copper wires around someone’s ankle.

She flung the door open and shouted to her colleagues. They came striding quickly through the deep snow.

“Bloody hell!” she yelled. “She died here! I’m sure of it! Call in Tintin and Krister Eriksson.”

Krister Eriksson, inspector and dog handler, arrived at the scene almost an hour after his colleagues had rung him. They’d been lucky; he was often out and about on duty with Tintin.

Tintin was a black Alsatian bitch. An excellent tracker dog, good at finding dead bodies. Eighteen months earlier she’d found a murdered priest in Nedre Vuolusjärvi; someone had wound an iron chain around his body, then sunk it in the lake.

Krister Eriksson looked like some kind of alien. His face had been badly burned in an accident when he was a youngster. He had no nose, just two holes in his face. His ears looked like a mouse’s ears. He had no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. His eyes looked very strange, because his eyelids had been reconstructed using plastic surgery.

Anna-Maria looked at his shiny pink skin, like a pig’s, and her thoughts bounced back to Inna Wattrang and her burned ankle.

I must ring Pohjanen, she thought.

Krister Eriksson put Tintin on the lead. She was dancing around his feet, whimpering with expectation.

“She always gets so excited,” said Krister, disentangling himself from the lead. “You still have to hold her back, otherwise she searches a bit too quickly, and then she might miss something.”

Krister Eriksson and Tintin went into the house alone. Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson plowed around the corner and looked in through the window.

Anna-Maria Mella went and sat in her car and rang Lars Pohjanen. She told him about the missing cord.

“Well?” she said.

“The burn mark around her ankle could certainly be the result of a wire conducting electricity through her body,” said Pohjanen.

“The end of a cord, split and wound around her ankle?”

“Definitely. And you use the other end of the cord to transmit the electricity.”

“Has she been tortured?”

“Maybe. It could also be a game that got out of hand, of course. Not very common, but it has happened. There’s one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“There are traces of stickiness on her ankles and wrists. You should get the technicians to check the furniture in the house. She’s been taped, it could just be that her hands and feet were taped together. But she could have been bound to a piece of furniture, bedposts or a chair or…Just hang on.”

It took a minute. Then she heard the doctor’s hoarse voice again.

“I’ve just put my gloves on and I’m looking at her now,” he said. “There’s a tiny but distinct mark on her neck.”

“The mark from the other part of the electric cable,” said Anna-Maria.

“A lamp cord, you said?”

“Mmm.”

“Then there should be traces of copper where the epidermis has melted. I’ll take a tissue sample and do a histology test, then you’ll know for sure. But that’s probably what happened. Something certainly interrupted the rhythm of her heart. And she ended up in a state of shock. That would explain the fact that she’d chewed her tongue, and the marks of her own nails on her palms.”

Sven-Erik Stålnacke knocked on the car window and pointed at the house.

“I’ve got to go,” said Anna-Maria. “I’ll call you later.”

She got out of the car.

“Tintin’s found something,” said Sven-Erik.

Krister Eriksson was standing in the kitchen with Tintin. She was tugging at the lead, barking and scrabbling madly at the floor.

“She’s marking something there,” said Krister Eriksson, pointing to a spot on the kitchen floor between the sink and the stove. “I can’t see anything, but she seems convinced.”

Anna-Maria looked at Tintin, who was now howling with frustration at not being allowed to get to her goal.

The floor was covered with turquoise linoleum with an Oriental design. Anna-Maria walked over and looked closely at it. Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson accompanied her.

“I can’t see anything,” said Anna-Maria.

“Nope,” said Fred Olsson, shaking his head.

“Could there be something underneath the floor covering?” wondered Anna-Maria.

“There’s definitely something,” said Krister Eriksson; it was all he could do to hold on to Tintin.

“Okay,” said Anna-Maria, checking her watch. “We’ve got time to have lunch at the tourist station while we’re waiting for the technicians.”

By two-thirty in the afternoon the scene-of-crime team had taken up the linoleum floor covering. When Anna-Maria Mella, Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson got back to the house, it was lying in the hallway, rolled up and wrapped in paper.

“Look at this,” said one of the technicians to Anna-Maria, pointing at a tiny nick in the wood that had been underneath the linoleum.

In the little nick there was something brown that looked like dried blood.

“That dog must have one hell of a nose.”

“Yes,” said Anna-Maria. “She’s very good.”

“It has to be blood, given the dog’s reaction,” said the technician. “Linoleum is such fantastic stuff for floors. My mother had it on her floor, and it looked good for over thirty years. It heals itself, if it’s damaged.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if it’s damaged in some way, cut or something, it pulls itself back together so that it doesn’t show. It looks as if something sharp and pointed, a weapon or a tool, went straight through and cut into the wood underneath. Then the blood ran down into the nick. The linoleum knitted itself back together, and once you’ve cleaned the floor, there’s no trace. We’ll send the blood, if that’s what it is, for analysis and then we’ll know if it’s Inna Wattrang’s.”

“I’d put money on it,” said Anna-Maria. “This is where she died.”

It was eight o’clock on Sunday evening when Anna-Maria pulled on her jacket and rang Robert to tell him she was going to call it a day. He didn’t sound tired or annoyed, just asked if she’d eaten and said there was food ready to be warmed up for her. Gustav was asleep, they’d been out playing on the sledge. Petter had been with them too, despite the fact that he usually stayed indoors. Jenny had gone to a friend’s, he said, adding quickly that she was on her way home right now before Anna-Maria had even managed to think “school tomorrow.”

Anna-Maria was almost ridiculously happy. They’d been out in the fresh air having fun. They’d been enjoying themselves. Robert was a good father. It didn’t matter at all if everyone’s clothes were lying in a heap on the hall floor and dinner had only been half cleared away. She’d tidy up after them with a cheerful heart.

“Is Marcus home?” she asked.

Marcus was their eldest son. He was in his final year at high school.

“No, I think he’s staying over at Hanna’s. How did it go?”

“Fine. Really good. It’s only twenty-four hours, and we know who she is: Inna Wattrang, a big noise in Kallis Mining. It’ll be in the papers tomorrow. We’ve found the scene of the murder, although whoever did it tried to clean up after themselves and hide any traces. Even if the national crime squad ends up taking over, nobody can say we didn’t do a good job.”

“Was she stabbed with something?”

“Well yes, but that’s not all. The killer electrocuted her as well. The technicians were there this evening and they’ve found traces of sticky tape on one of the kitchen chairs, on the arms and the legs. And the same stuff on her ankles and wrists. Somebody taped her to the kitchen chair and gave her electric shocks.”

“Shit. What with?”

“With an ordinary lamp cord, I think; they’ve opened up the end of it, split the wires, wound one round her wrist, and placed the other on her neck.”

“And then he stabbed her to death.”

“Yes.”

“What’s it all about?”

“Don’t know. It could be a madman, or a hate crime. Could be a sex game of some kind that’s gone wrong somehow, although there doesn’t seem to be any semen inside her or on her clothing. There was something white and slimy around her mouth, but it was just vomit.”

Robert made a slightly distressed noise.

“Promise you’ll never leave me,” he said. “Just imagine being in a bar looking for somebody new…and then when you get home, she wants you to electrocute her.”

“You’re better off with me, I’m happy with the missionary position.”

“Good old honest boring sex.”

Anna-Maria cooed at him.

“I like good old boring sex,” she said. “If all the children are asleep when I get home…”

“Don’t try that one with me—you’ll have something to eat, then you’ll fall asleep on the sofa in front of
Six Feet Under
. Perhaps we ought to spice things up a bit.”

“We could buy a book about the Kama Sutra.”

Robert laughed on the other end of the phone. Anna-Maria was pleased. She’d made him laugh. And they were talking about sex.

I ought to do this more often, she thought. Flirt and joke with him.

“Exactly,” said Robert. “Positions like ‘The Flight of the Crane over the Vault of the Heavens’ or something like that, where I have to hang upside down and you do the splits.”

“Okay, forget it. I’ll be straight home.”

Anna-Maria had barely hung up when the telephone rang again. It was Alf Björnfot.

“Hi there,” he said. “Just wanted to let you know that Mauri Kallis is coming up tomorrow.”

Anna-Maria had to think for a second. She’d expected it to be Robert again, suddenly remembering to ask her to pick something up from the shops on the way home.

“Mauri Kallis as in Kallis Mining?”

“Yep. His secretary just rang me. Our colleagues in Stockholm called too. They’ve informed Inna Wattrang’s parents. Who were shocked, of course. Didn’t know she was up in Abisko, they said. But Inna Wattrang and her brother Diddi both work for Kallis Mining. And he owns some big place on Lake Mälaren where they both live. Her parents said they’d let her brother know and ask Mauri Kallis to come up and identify her.”