Читать книгу The Nightmare - Ларс Кеплер - Страница 17

Joona Linna is sitting in his car on Fleminggatan, on his way to the Karolinska Institute in Solna, thinking about Carl Palmcrona’s hanging body, the tense washing-line, the briefcase on the floor.

In his mind Joona tries adding the two circles of shoeprints on the floor around the dead man.

This case isn’t over yet.

Joona turns onto Klarastrandsleden. He drives along the side of the canal where the trees have already woven their leafy baskets, leaning into the water, sinking their branches into the smooth, mirror-like surface.

In his mind’s eye he sees the housekeeper, Edith Schwartz, again – every detail, the veins on the large hands holding the bags of shopping, and the way she said that there are helpful people everywhere.

The Department of Forensic Medicine is situated among the trees and neat lawns of the large Karolinska Hospital campus, a red-brick building at Retzius väg 5, surrounded by large buildings on all sides.

Joona pulls into the empty visitors’ car park. He notes that senior pathologist Nils Åhlén has driven over the kerb and parked his white Jaguar in the middle of the lawn next to the main entrance.

Joona waves to the woman in reception, who responds by giving him the thumbs-up, and he carries on along the corridor, knocks on Nils Åhlén’s door and walks in. As usual, The Needle’s office is utterly free from superfluous objects.

The blinds are drawn, but the sunlight is still filtering in between the blades. The light reflects off all the white surfaces, but sinks into the expanses of brushed grey steel.

The Needle is wearing his white-framed aviator glasses and a white polo-neck under his white coat.

‘I’ve just issued a parking ticket to a badly parked Jaguar outside,’ Joona says.

‘Good,’ Nils says.

Joona stops in the middle of the floor and becomes serious. His eyes turn silvery dark.

‘So, how did he die?’ he asks.

‘Palmcrona?’

‘Yes.’

The phone rings and The Needle nudges the post-mortem report towards Joona.

‘You didn’t have to come all the way out here to get an answer to that,’ he says before picking up the receiver.

Joona sits down opposite him on the chair with a white leather seat. The post-mortem on Carl Palmcrona’s body is finished. Joona leafs through it, stopping to read different passages at random.

74. Kidneys weight a total of 290 grams. Smooth surface. Tissue grey-red. Consistency firm, elastic. Clear delineation.

75. Urinary ducts appear normal.

76. Bladder empty. Mucous membrane pale.

77. Prostate normal size. Tissue pale.

The Needle nudges his aviator glasses up his narrow, bent nose, then ends the phone call and looks up.

‘As you can see,’ he says with a yawn, ‘there’s nothing unexpected. Cause of death is asphyxia … With a full-blown hanging, of course, it’s rarely a matter of suffocation in the common sense, but of a blockage of the arteries.’

‘The brain suffocates because the supply of oxygenated blood stops.’

The Needle nods.

‘Arterial compression, bilateral constriction of the carotid arteries, and of course it happens very fast, he would have been unconscious within a matter of seconds …’

‘But he was still alive before he was hanged?’ Joona asks.

‘Yes.’

The Needle’s thin face is clean-shaven and gloomy.

‘Can you estimate the height of the drop?’ Joona asks.

‘There are no fractures in the cervical spine or the base of the skull – so I’d guess ten, twenty centimetres.’

‘Right …’

Joona thinks about the briefcase and the prints from Palmcrona’s shoes. He opens the report again and leafs through to the external examination: the skin of the neck and the estimated angles.

‘What are you thinking?’ The Needle asks.

‘I’m wondering if there’s any chance he was strangled with the same cord, and then just strung up from the ceiling.’

‘No,’ Nils replies.

‘Why not?’ Joona asks quickly.

‘Why not? There was only one groove, and it was in perfect condition.’ Nils begins to explain, ‘When a person is hanged, the rope or cord obviously cuts into the throat, and …’

‘But a perpetrator could also know that,’ Joona interrupts.

‘It’s practically impossible to reconstruct, though … you know, with a real hanging the groove around the neck forms the shape of an arrowhead, with the point uppermost, just by the knot …’

‘Because the weight of the body tightens the noose.’

‘Exactly … and for the same reason the deepest part of the groove should be exactly opposite the point.’

‘So he died from being hanged,’ Joona concludes.

‘No question.’

The tall, thin pathologist bites his bottom lip gently.

‘But could he have been forced to commit suicide?’ Joona asks.

‘Not by force – there’s no sign of that.’

Joona closes the report and drums on it with both hands, thinking that the housekeeper’s comment that other people were involved in Palmcrona’s death must have been just confused talk. But he can’t get away from the two different shoeprints Tommy Kofoed had found.

‘So you’re certain of the cause of death?’ Joona says, looking The Needle in the eye.

‘What were you expecting?’

‘This,’ Joona says, putting his finger in the post-mortem report. ‘This is exactly what I was expecting, but at the same time there’s something nagging at me.’

The Needle gives him a wry smile:

‘Take the report away and read it at bedtime.’

‘Yes,’ Joona says.

‘But I think you can probably let go of Palmcrona … suicide is about as exciting as this case gets.’

The Needle’s smile fades and he lowers his gaze, but Joona’s eyes are still sharp, focused.

‘I daresay you’re right,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ Nils replies. ‘I’m happy to speculate a bit, if you like … Carl Palmcrona was probably depressed, because his fingernails were ragged and dirty, his teeth hadn’t been brushed for a few days and he hadn’t shaved.’

‘I see,’ Joona nods.

‘You’re welcome to take a look at him.’

‘No need,’ he replies, and gets heavily to his feet.

The Needle leans forward and says with great alacrity, as if he’s been looking forward to this moment:

‘But this morning I got something considerably more interesting. Have you got a few minutes?’

He gets up from his chair and gestures for Joona to follow him. Joona goes with him into the corridor. A pale blue butterfly has got lost and is fluttering in the air ahead of them.

‘Has that young guy left?’ Joona asks.

‘Who?’

‘The one who was here before, with the ponytail and …’

‘Frippe? God, no. He’s not allowed to leave. He’s got the day off. Megadeth are playing in the Globe, with Entombed as the support act.’

They walk through a dimly lit room containing a stainless steel post-mortem table. There’s a strong smell of disinfectant. They carry on into a cooler room where the bodies are kept in refrigerated drawers.

The Needle opens another door and turns the light on. The fluorescent tubes flicker and illuminate a white-tiled room with a long, plastic-covered examination table with a double rim and drainage channels.

On the table is an extremely beautiful young woman.

Her skin is suntanned, her long, dark hair lies glossy and curly across her forehead and shoulders. It looks as if she’s gazing up at the room with a mixture of hesitancy and surprise.

There’s something almost cheeky about the set of her mouth, like someone who laughs and smiles a lot.

But there’s no sparkle in those big, dark eyes. Tiny dark-brown spots have already begun to appear.

Joona stops and looks at the woman on the table. He guesses she’s nineteen, twenty at most. No time at all since she was a young child sleeping with her parents. Then she turned into a half-grown schoolgirl, and now she’s dead.

Across the woman’s chest, on the skin above her breastbone, is a faint curved line, like a smiley mouth drawn on in grey, some thirty centimetres long.

‘What’s that line?’ Joona asks, pointing.

‘No idea. An impression from a necklace, perhaps, or a low-cut top. I’ll take a closer look later.’

Joona looks at the lifeless body, takes a deep breath, and – as usual when he is confronted by the absolute implacability of death – a gloom settles on him, a colourless loneliness.

Life is so terrifyingly fragile.

Her finger- and toenails are painted a pinkish-beige colour.

‘What’s so special about her, then?’ he asks after a few moments.

The Needle looks at him seriously, and his glasses glint as he turns back towards the body again.

‘The marine police brought her in,’ he says. ‘She was found sitting on the bed in the front cabin of a large motor cruiser that was drifting in the archipelago.’

‘Dead?’

Nils meets his gaze and says, with a sudden lilt in his voice:

‘She drowned, Joona.’

‘Drowned?’

The Needle nods and smiles brightly.

‘She drowned on board a boat that was still afloat,’ he says.

‘So someone found her in the water and brought her on board.’

‘Well, if that had happened I wouldn’t be taking up your valuable time,’ Nils says.

‘So what’s this all about, then?’

‘There’s no trace of water on the rest of the body – I’ve sent her clothes for analysis, but the National Forensics Lab aren’t going to find anything either.’

The Needle falls silent, glances through the preliminary external report, then glances at Joona to see if he’s managed to pique his curiosity. Joona is standing completely still, and his face looks completely different now. He’s looking at the dead body with an expression of intense concentration. Suddenly he takes a pair of latex gloves from the box and pulls them on. The Needle smiles happily to himself as Joona leans over the girl, then carefully lifts her arms and studies them.

‘You won’t find any signs of violence,’ Nils says, almost inaudibly. ‘It’s incomprehensible.’