Norlander instinctively looked down at the circular scars on his hands. Stigmata.
‘Just tell us what you know.’
‘Not much to say,’ said Göran Andersson. ‘Breakfast, back to the books, bang. The feeling of blood running from your ears is a deeply unpleasant sensation. Mystical, almost.’
‘You have the cell next to Lordan Vukotic, don’t you?’
‘Had. I think they’ve shut that section down. I don’t know where I’ll be tonight.’
‘What is it you’re studying?’ Söderstedt asked.
His eyes turned back to the fair-skinned Finland Swede.
‘I’ve noticed a certain discrepancy between your respective interests,’ he said, good-naturedly.
‘You could say that,’ said Söderstedt, equally good-naturedly.
‘Art. Once I’ve studied art history, I’m going to start painting too. Theory and practice will become one.’
‘You keep yourself to yourself; Vukotic did the same,’ said Norlander. ‘Maybe that creates a kind of bond between you. Did you see him this morning?’
‘No,’ said Andersson. ‘We normally see each other at breakfast, but not today.’
‘He was seen at dinner at about half four yesterday afternoon. From then until lock-up around three hours later, no one seems to have seen him. Did you see him during that time?’
‘You’ve got to understand, I stay in my cell. That’s what I do. I eat in the canteen, I’m let out into the yard for a few minutes, I study in my cell. Nothing else.’
Söderstedt looked around. Was he the only one who had felt a slight hesitation in Göran Andersson’s reply?
‘You didn’t answer the question,’ was all he said.
Andersson was silent. Unmoving. The way that he had waited for his victims. And yet not. He shrugged.
‘If I was a different person today, if I wasn’t the person I’ve become, this would’ve been a bargaining position. Then, my friends, I would’ve started asking if it wasn’t time for release on temporary licence, or at least longer visiting times.’
It was silent in the bare little room. Four pairs of police eyes trained on an apparently transformed murderer’s.
‘But I am the person that I am now,’ he said. ‘Just before lock-up, I heard a faint moaning out in the corridor. Short, like something escaping through gritted teeth. I peered out and saw Lordan Vukotic dragging himself into his cell.’
‘What do you mean, “dragging”?’ asked Norlander.
‘He glanced towards my cell. His face looked the same as usual, but it was obvious that he was seriously injured. His legs were giving way under him. It was the look of death I saw.’
‘And you didn’t do anything about it?’
‘Look, I hate this world. I still don’t understand how I could’ve ended up here. I don’t want anything to do with it. If he chose not to report it himself, why should I?’
‘You haven’t changed as much as I thought,’ said Söderstedt.
‘What’s your understanding of why the injured Vukotic was blown up the next day, then?’ asked Norlander.
‘It’s quite obvious,’ said Göran Andersson, stroking his thin beard. ‘Someone was covering his tracks.’
And what tracks they turned out to be.
At about half five, a joint preliminary report from the forensic technicians and the medical examiner arrived. A long, difficult document came spilling out of the primitive fax machine in the little interrogation room in Kumla prison.
The medical examiner, Qvarfordt, had solved his autopsy puzzle. Viggo Norlander couldn’t quite get away from the image of the staring eye in the lump of material which had been scraped down from the wall. It looked accusingly at him while he struggled his way through the medical examiner’s report.
‘I don’t know how they’ve managed it,’ he eventually said, ‘but the fact is, they’ve worked out that Lordan Vukotic’s spleen was ruptured, his left tibia broken, and both shoulders pulled out of their sockets. In that condition, the explosion must’ve almost come as a relief.’
‘So he can hardly have been busy with his own explosive charge under the covers, then,’ said Bernt Nilsson.
‘By no means,’ said Söderstedt, fishing out the other part of the report, the forensic report. ‘They’ve found a microscopic detonation mechanism. Controlled remotely. And the explosives are assumed to have been some kind of solution. Liquid form. Though they don’t really know what it is, just that it’s extremely volatile.’
Four policemen, of different origin and different character, each digested this information.
The stout Viksjö, who evidently had the most well-trimmed digestive system, concluded: ‘Lordan Vukotic gets a real going-over yesterday evening. He crawls back to his cell and skips breakfast so that no one discovers he’s had a thrashing. After that, he’s blown into a thousand pieces with the help of a highly sophisticated explosive device. How should we interpret that?’
‘It could be banal, some scumbag with good knowledge of explosives beats him up for some trivial reason and then covers up their crime with another crime,’ said Bernt Nilsson. ‘Silence the victim, who’s also the only witness.’
‘Or it might not be banal at all,’ said Söderstedt. ‘That leaves us with two questions. Why did Vukotic try to cover up the fact that he’d been battered? And why was he killed, despite his silence?’
‘He’s got great backing in here, after all,’ said Nilsson. ‘He’s Rajko Nedic’s right-hand man, he’s got at least three thugs from the former Yugoslavia as protection. Why didn’t he turn to them?’
‘Because he was hiding his injuries from them,’ said Norlander, nodding. ‘Why?’
‘Because he’s talked,’ said Söderstedt, nodding. ‘He’s been tortured and squealed.’
‘On Nedic,’ said Viksjö, also nodding.
Eventually Bernt Nilsson also joined in, completing the nodding quartet.
‘And that’s what we weren’t meant to find out. That’s why he was wiped out so thoroughly. But they underestimated our technical competence.’
‘So why use such a sophisticated and clearly expensive explosive?’ asked Söderstedt.
‘If it’s that small – highly effective liquid and microscopic detonation device – then it’s presumably the only thing you can get into a high-security prison. Still, even now it should be impossible to smuggle a hydrogen bomb in behind the walls.’
Söderstedt sighed and waved the fax.
‘I can’t help quoting our chief forensic technician Brynolf Svenhagen: “Pearls before swine.”’
8
CHIEF FORENSIC TECHNICIAN Brynolf Svenhagen had a daughter. This daughter’s name was Sara. Sara worked for CID’s child pornography division. The child pornography division was, for the moment, unstaffed. Unstaffed didn’t mean that no one was working, however. Working was precisely what Chief Forensic Technician Brynolf Svenhagen’s daughter was doing.
Though she was working from home.
She had told her colleagues Gunnar Nyberg and Ludvig Johnsson, friends since childhood (and she quoted herself in the gloomy dusk): ‘I’m just going to relax. Unwind. There’s been a lot on for a bit too long now.’ The last part was true, the first false. She had lied. All the same, it was a white lie.
She ran her hand over her newly cropped blonde hair, clicking away with the mouse. She was connected to the central police computer. The intranet. She would be working for hours yet. She knew herself that well.
Though she didn’t recognise herself.
Suddenly, though not for the first time, she caught sight of her reflection in the computer screen. Yet again, her instinctive reaction was to think that she had ended up in the ‘Favourites’ folder in Internet Explorer, landing on yet another paedophile site.