Читать книгу The Fire Witness - Ларс Кеплер - Страница 22

Joona goes over to the alcove and the door that no longer has a handle.

The lock and key are still in place.

He closes his eyes for a moment, then walks into the small room.

Everything is still, and brightly lit.

The warm air is heavy with the smell of blood and urine. He forces himself to inhale it to detect the other smells: damp wood, sweaty sheets, deodorant.

The hot metal of the lamps ticks. He can hear the muffled sound of barking through the walls.

Joona stands perfectly still and forces himself to look at the body on the bed. His eyes linger on every detail, even though he’d like nothing more than to hurry out, leave the building, and walk into the fresh air and shade of the forest.

Blood has run across the floor, and is spattered over the immoveable furniture and the pale biblical motifs on the walls. It’s sprayed across the ceiling and over to the toilet. A thin girl in the early stages of puberty is lying on the bed. She has been laid out on her back, with her hands covering her face. She’s wearing nothing but a pair of cotton pants. Her breasts are covered by her elbows, and her feet are crossed at the ankles.

Joona feels his heart beating, feels his own blood coursing through his veins to his brain, as his pulse roars in his temples.

He forces himself to look, register, and think.

The girl’s face is hidden.

As if she’s frightened, as if she doesn’t want to see the perpetrator.

Before the girl was positioned on the bed she was subjected to extreme violence.

Repeated blows with a blunt object to her forehead and scalp.

She’s only a young girl, and must have been horribly frightened.

A few short years ago she was just a child, but a chain of events has led her to this room, to this secure children’s home. Maybe she was just unlucky with her parents and foster parents. Maybe she thought she’d be safe here.

Joona studies every terrible detail until it feels as if he can longer bear it. Then he shuts his eyes for a few moments and thinks about his daughter’s face and the gravestone that isn’t hers, before opening his eyes again and carrying on with the examination.

The evidence suggests that the victim was sitting on the chair at the little table when the attacker struck.

Joona tries to identify the movements that led to this spatter pattern.

Every drop of blood falling through the air naturally assumes a round shape, and has a diameter of five millimetres. If the drop is smaller, that means that the blood has been subjected to external force that’s broken it into smaller drops.

And that’s when spatter pattern analysis comes in.

Joona is now standing on two protective mats in front of the small table, probably exactly where the murderer stood a few hours before. The girl was sitting on the chair on the other side of the table. Joona looks at the spatter pattern, turns around, and sees blood sprayed high up the wall. The implement has been swung backwards several times to gain momentum, and every time it changed direction for another blow, blood sprayed back from it.

Joona has already stayed longer at this crime scene than any other superintendent would have. But he isn’t finished yet. He goes back to the girl on the bed, stands in front of her, sees the stud in her navel, the lip-print on the glass of water, sees that she has had a birthmark removed below her right breast, sees the fine hairs on her shins, and a yellowed bruise on her thigh.

He leans cautiously over her. Her bare skin is emitting very faint heat now. He looks at the hands covering her face, and sees that she didn’t manage to scratch the perpetrator, there’s no skin under her fingernails.

He takes a few steps back, and then looks at her again. Her white skin. The hands over her face. There’s hardly any blood on her body. Only the pillow is bloody.

Apart from that she’s clean.

Joona looks around the room. Behind the door there’s a small shelf with two hooks for clothes beneath it. On the floor beneath the shelf are a pair of trainers with white socks tucked inside them, and a pair of washed-out jeans is hanging from one of the hooks, along with a black college sweater and a denim jacket. There’s a small white bra on the shelf.

Joona doesn’t touch the clothes, but they don’t appear to be bloody.

Presumably she got undressed and hung her clothes up before she was murdered.

So why isn’t her whole body covered with blood? Something must have protected her. But what? There’s nothing else here.