The Demon of Dakar (7 page)

A piece of whale carcass
that had washed ashore—that was how Haver had described the body, and Ann Lindell understood why as she studied the photographs that were arranged in a row on the table.

The feeling of revulsion was mixed with equal parts tingling anticipation.

“Do you believe me when I say that all investigators love a murder?” Ottosson had asked her many years ago. Back then she had dismissed his statement as absurd, now she was prepared to admit he was right.

Even the fact that she was given a reason to walk up to the wall map gave meaning to her life, and she studied it with the resolute concentration of a general, following the course of the Fyris river, memorizing new names and wondering if she had ever been to the Sunnersta hole, the old hillside gravel pit that had become a ski slope.

Her gaze traveled from the ridge to the river and located Lugnet. In the river, in the reeds, lay a human body that in Ola Haver’s eyes had been transformed to a lump of flesh.

The body had been discovered by two boys who had been throwing rocks at the wild ducks that lived in the reeds. One of the boys, eleven years of age, had stayed by the body while his friend had run across a paddock and up to the road in order to flag down a car.

When Haver later asked the eleven-year-old why he had remained behind, if he hadn’t found it creepy, the boy had replied that he didn’t want the birds pecking at the man.

Even though Lindell had lived in Uppsala for many years, she had never taken the road between Nåntuna and Flottsund. Fredriksson had said that it was a beautiful road, especially in spring. He liked to watch the birds that gathered along the Fyris river. In April, the northern lapwings held a great conference on the open fields by the Flottsund bridge.

“Then I know it’s spring,” Fredriksson said. He had two interests: birds and harness racing.

Ottosson even had a literary reference. He claimed that the Swedish writer Göran Tunström had written a novel that was partly set in this area, and that the book was worth reading. Ottosson offered to bring it in if anyone was interested, but no one responded.

Lindell let them talk without interrupting. Instead, she focused on her own tension, increasing her enjoyment.

“Could it be a boating accident?” Ottosson threw out, while he examined the police photographs. “Perhaps he fell overboard?”

He was leaning over the images.

“With his throat cut?”

“Yes, an outboard motor,” Ottosson said, and turned his head to give her a look that said: agree with me, let it be a tragic accident.

It took several seconds before Lindell understood what he meant.

“In his underwear and nothing else?” she said.

“No, of course not,” Ottosson muttered.

“Who is he?”

“He doesn’t really look Swedish,” Fredriksson said.

“What do you mean, Swedish?”

“Not born in Sweden, I mean,” Fredriksson said, his eyes twinkling at Lindell.

Lindell sighed, but it was more an expression of sympathy with Ottosson than exasperation. The spring had been catastrophic. Perhaps not from a weather perspective, which did not mean much to her, but professionally. Boring routine matters one after the other, with eruptions of youth violence in Gränby and Sävja, and a hooligan armed with a knife who had wreaked havoc in the downtown area for a few weeks, assaulting nighttime wanderers on their way home from the bars. He had been seized without drama, and by accident. It had turned out to be a mentally deranged individual who had been returned to the clinic from which he had come.

Summer had not been much better. She had spent her vacation at home, except for a weeklong visit to her parents in Ödeshög and a long weekend in a loaned summer cottage. That was the best of her four weeks off. Erik discovered insects, and together they immersed themselves in the lives of ants, beetles, and spiders. For him it was a new world while for her it was sheer antiphobia therapy.

She realized that he was starting to develop new needs, that he was becoming more active, curious, and engaged in the world around him, but also more demanding. It was no longer enough for him to have a piece of paper and some crayons or Legos. He wanted Ann to be engaged, overwhelming her with questions and thoughts. Sometimes she was not equal to these demands, grew tired, wanted most of all to stretch out on the sand by the small forest lake, read or simply ruminate with her gaze fixed on the pair of ospreys sailing over the water. She could not hand Erik over to someone else. It was only the two of them.

In the evenings after he fell asleep, she sat down with a bottle of wine in a rusty hammock with ripped cushions, slowly swaying back and forth, thinking about her life. Normally she resisted these thoughts, but it was as if this setting, the isolation in the cottage, and the complete contrast to her daily life forced her to reflect. Perhaps also Erik’s new needs meant that her future looked more uncertain than before. During those unusually sunny days in the cottage she saw her lone responsibility for his development in stark relief. He would start school within a few years and she could only imagine what that would involve. Thereafter he would shortly become a teenager and she would be approaching fifty.

She read the first page
of the medical examiner’s report of the autopsy. The man had bled to death after suffering a knife wound of eleven centimeters across his throat. He was dead before he hit the water. His age was estimated at between forty and fifty, he was one hundred and eighty-six centimeters tall and weighed ninety-two kilograms, was in good physical condition and without any distinguishing physical characteristics, except for what Lindell took to be the remains of a tattoo on his upper right arm. A patch of skin about five centimeters in diameter had been removed from the arm. What remained was a small dark line of about half a centimeter, which was what made her think there had once been an entire tattoo. There were two possible explanations to the flaying: to make the identification of the victim more difficult, or else the tattoo could have a direct link to the murderer.

Lindell picked up the close-ups of the upper arm area.

“What should we think?” Fredriksson said. “Was he murdered here or did he float here on the current?”

“We have people on both sides of the river who are looking into it,” Lindell said, “but they haven’t found anything so far.”

“But how likely is it that a corpse can float down along the river without someone seeing it?”

“I don’t know, Allan,” Lindell said.

She stared at the photograph.

“Can’t you check with TattooJack or whatever their names are. There must be tattoo experts.”

“This isn’t much to show them,” Fredriksson said.

She pushed the photograph across the table without making eye contact.

“Check it anyway,” Lindell said.

“Sure, babe,” Fredriksson said.

Lindell gave him a long look. Sammy shot her an amused glance but kept his mouth closed.

“Anyone reported missing?”

“Nada,”
Sammy Nilsson said. “I’ve checked the records six months back. But I’ve put a notice on the Web. We’ll see what that brings.”

If only the dead could speak, Lindell thought and smiled.

“I don’t think he was a regular working stiff,” Sammy said.

“You’re thinking of his hands?”

Sammy nodded.

“One of his thumbnails was black and blue,” Lindell said.

“Which can happen to the manager of a golf course,” Ottosson said.

“What about his teeth?” Lindell asked.

“Good overall, according to the medical examiner, but some poorly executed dental work in his youth. Perhaps done overseas.”

Lindell nodded.

“We’ll have to hope for evidence recovered along the riverbank,” she said after a moment’s silence, and then got up from the table.

“Is anyone hungry?” she asked, but did not wait for an answer. Instead, she whisked out of the room, after first snatching her pad of paper.

“Why almost naked?” she said under her breath, while she took the elevator to the foyer of the new police station building. Though it had been inaugerated last fall, Lindell had not really grown accustomed to it yet. In spite of everything, she missed their old quarters. Of course, everything here was much airier and more functional, but something was missing. No one else had expressed any longing for Salagatan, so Lindell had kept her nostalgic musings to herself.

She continued to ply herself with questions during the rapid walk downtown. She followed Svartbäcksgatan along the river. Like in the area of Lugnet, where the corpse had been discovered, the wild ducks were chattering at the water’s edge and terns were screeching up above.

The removed tattoo was important, that much was clear. If the victim had lived in Uppsala and was reported missing within the next day or two, and the identity could be determined, relatives and friends questioned, then it should not prove difficult to find out what the tattoo had looked like and perhaps where and by whom it had been done.

Then the act of taking the trouble of removing it would be undermined. In addition, the maneuver would turn out to be a way of putting the tattoo in focus, giving it a gravity that it would otherwise not have possessed. In other words, in Lindell’s view, it was an irrational act.

She glanced at her watch. None of the restaurants that she passed had appealed to her and now she was suddenly pressed for time. In the pedestrian zone she instead bought a “Kurt,” which was what one of her colleagues for some reason called a thick hot dog on a bun. She washed it down with a Festis fruit drink.

As she stood in the street with people walking by, entertained by what she at first took to be a performance troupe but that turned out to be a group of devotees of the evangelical church Livets Ord, her thoughts about the removed tattoo returned and she became increasingly convinced that its removal was largely a symbolic act.

She listened for a while to the heavenly choir and thereafter to a short testimonial by a member of the congregation. He was talking about Jesus, who else? He looked happy, almost ecstatic, as he triumphantly related how he had become a whole person through his Lord, Jesus Christ.

“I lived in poverty …!” he shouted.

“What do you make now?” someone in the audience shouted back.

The speaker was momentarily thrown off-kilter, but then resumed his preaching.

Lindell headed back to the station. Walking had become her way of trying to improve her condition. At her last checkup, the doctor had pronounced her fitness level terrible.

This had the result that she often ate lunch on her own. None of her colleagues had any desire to rush around town at her speed.

Back at her office, sweaty
and barely full, she again rifled through the reports pertaining to the murder. What shall I call him for the moment? she wondered and picked a new notepad off the shelf.

“Jack” she wrote spontaneously on the first page. It was a pad of graph paper but this did not distract her. She immediately started to write out her thoughts on the significance of the tattoo. So far it was the only thing she could write about. All other facts were stated in the autopsy report. In time they would also receive the forensic findings.

Lindell produced half a page
of notes in her, for her colleagues, illegible handwriting. Despite this meager start she felt pleased, optimistic even. Perhaps it was the warmth of late summer, perhaps it was simply the joy of feeling so strong, that the relationship with Charles Morgansson, the newcomer in the unit, that had ended in the spring was now definitely behind her, without pain. No doubts, no hard feelings, nothing unresolved between them, at least not from her side.

They had met last fall and very carefully embarked on a relationship. Charles was a very sweet person, she said to those who asked, but too meek for Lindell’s taste. It took several months before they made love, and then it was not particularly passionate or even pleasurable. It was as if he apologized every time he initiated anything, and that wasn’t often. Ann realized very early that he had problems. For a while she even suspected that he wasn’t attracted to women, but she eventually concluded that it was his previous relationship in Umeå that still troubled him. Something had gone wrong. Perhaps that was the main reason he had moved to Uppsala, even though he claimed that his involvement in a traffic accident was the cause. Lindell didn’t really want to know. She did not want to play therapist.

Their brief and underwhelming liaison was a closed chapter, an experience that strangely enough had strengthened her confidence. Görel,
her friend and Erik’s loyal babysitter, had tried to console her but Ann had dismissed her attempts.

“If anyone needs consoling, it’s Charlie,” Ann said and Görel had told her she was merciless, but laughed.

She had followed their whole story and was pleased deep down that it was over.

“You don’t need a loser,” she said.

“Agreed,” Ann said, “I need …”

She could not bring herself to complete the sentence, because immediately an image of Edvard appeared. Edvard, her old love, gone from her life forever.

Görel realized that she was upset and guessed at the cause. She put an arm around Ann but was sensible enough not to make one of her sassy comments.

Lindell called Erik’s day care
and told Gunilla that she would be picking him up half an hour, or even a whole hour, later. The preschool teacher said that it was all right, but Lindell picked up a note of criticism in her gruff voice. The problem of parents not respecting the agree-upon dropoff and pickup times was something that came up at every parent-teacher meeting.

Lindell ended the call with the same feeling she always had: that she did not take good enough care of her son. He received everything he needed, and in fact enjoyed day care, but the feeling of inadequacy plagued her. To be both a police officer and a single mother was not an easy combination, but she sensed this was probably true for any single working parent. There was simply no good solution to the problem. All she could do was make the best of it. Lindell never worked on the weekends and very rarely worked evenings.