The Fire Witness

Frippe nods.

‘If it happened as soon as that, there wouldn’t be any marks.’

Joona forces himself to look on while the two doctors conduct a thorough external examination of the body. He can’t help thinking of his own daughter, who isn’t much younger than this girl, lying still and inscrutable in front of him.

A network of yellow veins has started to show through the white skin. Around her neck and down her thighs the veins look like a pale river system. Her previously flat stomach has become rounder and darker.

Joona watches them work, registers the two doctors’ actions, sees Nils Åhlén cut calmly through her white underpants and pack them for analysis, listens to their conversation and conclusions, but is at the same time back at the crime scene in his mind.

Nils states that there is a total absence of defensive injuries, and Joona hears him discuss the lack of soft tissue damage with Frippe.

There are no signs of a fight or other abuse.

Miranda waited for the blows to her head, she didn’t try to run, didn’t put up any resistance.

Joona thinks back to the bare room where she spent her last hours as he watches the two men pulling out strands of hair by the root for comparative tests, and filling EDTA tubes with blood.

Nils scrapes beneath her fingernails, then turns towards Joona and clears his throat sharply: ‘No traces of skin … she didn’t defend herself.’

‘I know,’ Joona says.

When they start to examine the injuries to her skull, Joona moves closer and stands where he can see everything.

‘Repeated blows to the head with a blunt object is the probable cause of death,’ Nils says when he sees how closely Joona is watching.

‘From the front?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes, from the front, slightly off to one side,’ Nils replies, pointing at the bloody hair. ‘Compression fracture of the temporal bone … We’ll do a digital tomography scan, but I assume that the large blood vessels on the inside of the skull have been detached and that we’ll find fragments of bone in the brain.’

‘Just like with Elisabet Grim, we’re bound to find trauma to the cerebral cortex,’ Frippe says.

‘Myelin in the hair,’ Nils says, pointing.

‘Elisabet had broken blood vessels in her skull, and blood and cerebrospinal fluid had run into her nasal cavity,’ Frippe says.

‘So you think they were killed at roughly the same time?’ Joona says.

‘Close together,’ Frippe nods.

‘They were both attacked from the front, both have the same cause of death,’ Joona says. ‘The same murder weapon, and …’

‘No,’ Nils interrupts. ‘They were killed with different implements.’

‘But the hammer …’ Joona says, almost inaudibly.

‘Yes, Elisabet’s skull was crushed with the hammer,’ Nils says. ‘But Miranda was killed with a rock.’

Joona stares at him.

‘She was killed with a rock?’

43 (#ulink_3801a3bc-cb2f-57b0-8f25-cee7b12e4c6f)

Joona stayed in the pathology lab until he had seen Miranda’s face behind her hands. The notion that she hadn’t wanted to be seen after death is still lingering. He had felt a peculiar unease when they forced her hands away.

Now he’s sitting at Gunnarsson’s desk in Sundsvall police station reading the preliminary forensic report. Yellow light is streaming through the blinds. A woman is sitting a short distance away in the glow of a computer screen. The phone rings and she mutters irritably as she looks at the number on the display.

One wall is covered with maps and pictures of Dante Abrahamsson, the missing boy. The bookcases on the other walls are full of files and piles of paper. The photocopier rumbles almost nonstop. A radio is switched on in the staffroom, and when the pop music falls silent Joona hears the announcement for the third time.