“Late yesterday afternoon this body was brought in. Your guys told our duty officer that it was the body of a young man, just over twenty years old,” Stridner said.
“Yes, that’s right. Mattias Karlsson-”
“Wrong! The body I just finished the postmortem on this morning belongs to a middle-aged woman. Apparently thirty-five to forty-five years old. Height about one-point-five-five meters. Weight is hard to determine, but she was stocky. Bad teeth. She has had a child. European.”
The superintendent stared at the charred corpse. For a moment he felt dizzy, but it quickly passed.
“Finnish,” he managed to say.
Andersson heard his voice croaking. Stridner gave him a sharp look and snapped, “Finnish? That’s possible. Are you missing someone Finnish?”
“You can say that again! Pirjo Larsson, thirty-two years old. The description matches so far. She was von Knecht’s cleaning woman. What the hell is she doing here?”
“Well, she didn’t come here herself. You should be asking what she was doing there!”
There was no answer to that. He glared, but he had to agree with her. What was Pirjo doing in von Knecht’s office when the bomb went off?
She pulled up the sheet and said, “I’m going to wash up. You can wait in my office.”
He obediently slouched off.
“FINISHING UP Richard first, I can say that the identification is quite clear. The forensic odontologists didn’t doubt it for a second. The teeth matched perfectly. I’ve also checked the fracture of the right tibia. I managed to dig up thirty-five-year-old X rays taken after a skiing accident in St. Anton. Uncomplicated healing.”
She waved some large X rays in the air. Andersson had a hard time trying to look interested when his thoughts were hovering around another body. How was he going to get hold of Hannu? He’d have to borrow a phone.
“Excuse me. May I borrow your phone? I have two inspectors running all over town looking for the woman lying under the sheet out there.”
She nodded and gestured to the phone on her desk. Andersson got hold of a secretary who promised to track down Hannu Rauhala and Birgitta Moberg. She would call them back to headquarters at once for an urgent meeting with him.
Now he could pay better attention to Stridner’s continuing report. It had been proven beyond all doubt that it really was von Knecht who was crushed on the sidewalk on Tuesday evening. Seventy-two hours ago. Since then, he felt like he had aged three years.
Stridner’s pedagogical voice snapped him out of his reverie. “There were no other signs of violence other than the contusion on the back of his neck and the cut across the back of his hand. Other injuries resulted from the height of the fall. Oh, that’s right-I did do one slightly unnecessary thing. Just to satisfy my curiosity. Today I got preliminary results on the PAD I requested. There is a clear fat buildup in the liver. Our good Richard had apparently been drinking quite a bit lately.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“Yes. He was always careful of his appearance and stayed in good shape. He was precise about how much food and drink he consumed. I never saw or heard that he was highly intoxicated at any party during the years we knew each other. But of course, that was fifteen years ago.”
“What does that indicate?”
She sucked in her lower lip and seemed to ponder this a long time before she replied. “Hard to say. Most commonly people take to the bottle when they have problems they can’t solve. Especially men.”
Andersson guiltily thought of the strong beer he drank every evening, but decided quickly that he wasn’t an alcoholic. At his age it was good to relax in the evening with a beer or two. Or three. And it helped him sleep well. Although it did have some side effects. Unconsciously, he tried to suck in his stomach. Glumly, he looked at the pathologist and summarized the situation.
“So we have a healthy sixty-year-old man fresh out of the sauna. Physically in good shape, but with recent signs of increased alcohol intake. Blood alcohol content one-point-one. In his stomach a good lunch is being digested. At five-thirty one rainy and blustery November evening he goes out on his balcony, despite his great fear of heights. There he is struck on the back of the head, cut on the hand, and shoved over the balcony railing. And not a trace of the murderer! And you found nothing else on his body?”
The last sounded like a reproach. And it was. She shook her head, but stopped and cocked it to one side. She had a mischievous gleam in her eye.
“Well, maybe. The little charmer didn’t have so bad a cold that he wasn’t able to have sex the day before he died. It’s not a hundred percent certain, but I’m actually quite convinced that he did have it. Intercourse, that is.”
“The day before? Tell me about it!”
“On the tip of his penis, on the glans itself, I found a shallow cut four millimeters long. I’ve seen such things before. They occur during intercourse when the man gets a hair caught in between. The interesting thing is that the wound was no more than a day old. Of course a man can get a hair inside his foreskin without having sex, but that usually doesn’t cause injury. He would notice the hair before that happened. But during high arousal he usually doesn’t, as we know.”
Andersson nodded and said meditatively, “So on Monday or Tuesday he got laid in the marital bed. But not with his wife, since Sylvia was in Stockholm. Someone else. Who could it have been?”
“Now we’re talking about your job again, not mine,” said Stridner.
She smiled wanly and seemed pleased at the effect her discovery had on him. Possibly the flushed coloration of his face indicated that his blood pressure was getting a little too high.
“Are you taking medication for your hypertension?” she asked.
“My hyper. . What the hell does that have to do with von Knecht and Pirjo Larsson?”
When he realized what he had done, his blood ran cold. He had yelled at pathology professor Yvonne Stridner! That wasn’t good.
Her voice was low and absolutely ice cold when she replied, “Nothing. Except that you could have a cerebral hemorrhage and never solve Richard’s murder or find out what happened to the Finn. Was her name Pirjo?”
“Yes. Pirjo Larsson. Please forgive me for yelling. There’s a lot going on right now.”
“All the more reason to check your blood pressure and tend to your medication. That’s all the time I have for you right now.”
She turned on her computer screen and started to type, without looking at him.
Disgraced! He always felt stupid and disgraced when he was with Stridner. Everything was on her terms. He was like one of the poor graduate students. They had his full sympathy.
“Thanks a lot. See you later,” he said lamely.
Without looking up from her screen she muttered, “’Bye.”
So busy with her important work. He felt anger rising up inside him as he walked toward the exit. His temples were pounding, and he guiltily recalled that he hadn’t taken his blood pressure pill this morning. Maybe he should go to the health service and get his pressure checked. Still, it was a little late for that. Whew, who has time for this? That silly doctor. What did she know about blood pressure? Look at the state of the patients who came in contact with her. In their case there was no longer any blood pressure to talk about!
Invigorated by telling off Stridner in his mind, he got into his car and drove back to headquarters. It was lunchtime but he wasn’t at all hungry. The smell of grilled meat was still lingering in his nostrils.