The Fire Witness

‘Sorry, I’m sorry …’

Daniel’s chin trembles, and the corners of his mouth droop as tears well up in his eyes, and he turns away and starts to sob loudly, his whole body shaking.

‘She murdered your wife with a hammer and …’

Daniel hits the back of his head against the radiator so hard that his glasses fall into his lap.

‘Get out of here,’ the doctor says sharply. ‘Not another word. This was a mistake, there won’t be any further conversations.’

42 (#ulink_9fbba151-c707-53bb-bb47-637929beec2a)

The car park outside the district hospital in Sundsvall is almost empty. The long building makes a desolate impression in the gloomy light. Dark brown bricks interspersed with white windows that look blind to the world. Joona walks straight through some low bushes towards the main entrance.

The reception counter in the foyer is unstaffed. He waits for a while at the darkened desk until a cleaner stops.

‘Where’s the pathology department?’ Joona asks.

‘Two hundred and fifty kilometres north of here,’ the cleaner says good-naturedly. ‘But if you want the pathologist, I can show you the way.’

They walk together through deserted corridors, then take a large lift down into the bowels of the hospital. It’s cold, and the floor has cracked in several places.

The cleaner pulls open a pair of heavy metal doors, and at the far end of the corridor is a sign: Department of Clinical Pathology and Cytology.

‘Good luck,’ the man says, and gestures towards the door.

Joona thanks him and carries on along the corridor alone, following the tracks left on the linoleum floor by trolley wheels. He passes the laboratory, opens the door to the post-mortem room, and walks straight into the white-tiled space with a stainless-steel table at its centre. The light from the fluorescent lamps is overwhelming. A door hisses, and two people wheel a trolley in from the cold store.

‘Excuse me,’ Joona says.

A thin man in a white coat turns around. A pair of white-framed pilot’s glasses glint in the light. Senior pathologist Nils ‘the Needle’ Åhlén from Stockholm, and a very old friend of Joona’s. The man next to him is his young apprentice, his dyed dark hair hanging in clumps over the shoulders of his coat.

‘What are you doing here?’ Joona asks cheerfully.

‘A woman from National Crime called and threatened me,’ the Needle replies.

‘Anja,’ Joona says.

‘I got really scared … she snapped at me and said that Joona Linna couldn’t be expected to go all the way up to Umeå to talk to a pathologist.’

‘But we’re taking the opportunity to go to Nordfest seeing as we’re here,’ Frippe explains.

‘The Haunted are playing at Club Destroyer,’ Nils smiles.

‘I can see why that would sway the balance,’ Joona says.

Frippe laughs, and Joona notices the worn leather trousers beneath his coat, and the cowboy boots with bright blue shoe covers over them.

‘We’re done with the woman … Elisabet Grim,’ Nils says. ‘The only thing of any real note is probably the wounds to her hands.’

‘Defence wounds?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes, but on the wrong side,’ Frippe says.

‘We can take a look in a while,’ Nils says. ‘But first it’s time to give Miranda Ericsdotter a bit of attention.’

‘When did they die – can you say?’ Joona asks.

‘As you know, body temperature sinks …’

‘Algor mortis,’ Joona says.

‘Exactly, and that reduction follows a curve that levels out when it reaches room temperature …’

‘He knows that,’ Frippe says.

‘So, taking that, together with the hypostasis and rigor mortis, we can say that the girl and the woman died at roughly the same time, late on Friday.’

Joona watches them roll the trolley over to the examination table, count to three, and then lift the light body in its sealed bag. When Frippe opens the bag, a rancid smell of wet bread and old blood spreads through the room.

The girl is lying on the table in the position she was found in, with her hands over her face and her ankles crossed.

Rigor mortis is caused by an increase in calcium in the motionless muscles, resulting in two different types of protein starting to combine. It almost always starts in the heart and diaphragm. After half an hour it can be detected in the jaw, and in the neck after two hours.

Joona knows it’s going to take a lot of force to move Miranda’s hands from her face.

Odd ideas suddenly start to float through his head. The possibility that it might not be Miranda behind those hands, that her face might have been altered, that her eyes might have been damaged or removed.

‘We haven’t received a formal request to examine her,’ Nils Åhlén says. ‘Why has she got her hands over her face?’

‘I don’t know,’ Joona replies quietly.

Frippe is carefully photographing the body.

‘I assume we’re talking about a comprehensive post-mortem examination, and that you’ll want a forensic statement?’ Nils says.

‘Yes,’ Joona replies.

‘We should really have a secretary when we’re dealing with a homicide,’ the pathologist mutters as he walks around the body.

‘You’re moaning again,’ Frippe smiles.

‘Yes, sorry,’ Nils says, and stops for a moment behind Miranda’s head before moving on.

Joona thinks of how the German-language poet Rilke wrote that the living were obsessed with drawing distinctions between the living and the dead. He claimed that there were other beings, angels, which didn’t notice any difference.

‘The hypostasis indicates that the victim has been left lying still,’ Nils mutters.

‘I believe Miranda was moved directly after the murder,’ Joona says. ‘The way I read the blood-spatter pattern, her body would have been limp when it was placed on the bed.’