Karin Fossum: Eva's Eye

“I used to fish here,” said one of the boys on the path. He’d never seen a dead body in all his seventeen years. He didn’t really believe in death, just as he didn’t believe in God, because he’d never seen either of them. He hunched his chin into the collar of his jacket and shivered. From now on anything was possible.

The postmortem report arrived a fortnight later. Inspector Konrad Sejer had called five people to a conference room situated in one of the trailers behind the courthouse. They’d been erected there in more recent times owing to lack of space, a row of offices hidden from the public and which most people had never seen, apart from the unhappy souls who came into more intimate contact with the police. Some things had already been established. They knew the man’s identity, they’d got that right away because the name Jorun was engraved on his wedding ring. A file from the previous October contained all the information about the missing Egil Einarsson, aged thirty-eight, address: Rosenkrantzgate 16, last seen on October 4 at nine in the evening. He left a wife and a six-year-old son. The file was thin, but would soon get thicker. The new photographs fattened it up well, and they weren’t pretty. A number of people had been interviewed when he’d disappeared. His wife, coworkers, and relations, friends, and neighbors. None of them had much to say. He wasn’t exactly whiter than white, but he had no enemies, at least, none that they knew of. He had a regular job at the brewery, went home to his dinner every day, and spent most of his spare time in his garage, tinkering with his beloved car, or with his mates at a pub on the south side. The pub was called the King’s Arms. Einarsson was either a poor sod who’d been the victim of some desperado wanting money — heroin had taken a firm grip, seeing the potential in this cold, windswept town — or he had a secret. Perhaps he was in debt.

Sejer peered down at the report and rubbed his neck. It always impressed him the way criminal pathologists managed to pull together a semi-rotten mass of skin and hair, bones and muscles, and turn it into a complete human being with age and weight and physical attributes, condition, previous complaints and operations, dental hygiene and hereditary disposition.

“Remnants of cheese, meat, paprika, and onion in the stomach,” he said aloud. “Sounds like pizza.”

“Can they be sure after six months?”

“Yes, of course. When the fish haven’t eaten it all. That sometimes happens.”

The man called Sejer was made of solid stuff. He was in his forty-ninth year, his forearms were already reasonably tanned, he’d rolled up his shirtsleeves and the blood vessels and sinews were conspicuous beneath the skin, making them look like seasoned wood. His face was well defined and a little sharp, his shoulders straight and broad, his good overall color gave the impression of something that was well used, but which would also endure. His hair was spiky and steel-colored, almost metallic, and very short. His eyes were large and clear, their irises the color of wet slate. That was how his wife Elise had once described them years before. He’d found her description charming.

Karlsen was ten years his junior and slight by comparison. At first glance he could give the impression of being a dandy, without solidity or weight: he had a waxed mustache and a high, impressively bouffant head of hair. The youngest and sprightliest of them, Gøran Soot, was struggling to open a bag of jelly babies without making too much of a rustling noise. Soot had thick, wavy hair, a compact, muscular body, and a fresh complexion. Taken on its own, each part of his body was a feast for the eye, but all together they were rather too much of a good thing. He, however, was unaware of this interesting fact. Seated by the door was Chief Inspector Holthemann, taciturn and gray, and behind him a female officer with close-cropped fair hair. At the window, with one arm propped on the sill, sat Jacob Skarre.

“How are things with Mrs. Einarsson?” Sejer asked. He cared about people, knew that she had a young son.

Karlsen shook his head. “She seemed a bit bewildered. She asked if this meant she’d get the life insurance money at last, and then broke down in despair because the first thing she’d thought about was the cash.”

“Why hasn’t she had anything?”

“We had no body.”

“I’ll take that up with the appropriate person,” said Sejer. “What have they been living on these past six months?”

“Social security.”

Sejer shook his head and flipped through the report. Soot stuffed a green jelly baby into his mouth, only its legs protruding.

“The car,” Sejer went on, “was found at the municipal dump. We rooted through the rubbish for days. In fact he was killed in a completely different location, possibly by the river. Then the killer got into the car and drove it to the rubbish tip. It’s extraordinary if Einarsson really has been in the water for six months and hasn’t turned up until now. That’s quite some time the murderer has been clinging to the hope that he would never surface again. Well, now he’s had a reality check. I imagine it’ll be quite a hard one, too.”

“Did he get caught up on something?” Karlsen wondered out loud.

“Don’t know. It’s a bit strange, that, the riverbed is pure gravel, it’s not long since it was dredged. He may have been swept in toward the bank and got caught up on something there. His appearance was roughly what we’d have anticipated, anyway.”

“The car had been cleaned and vacuumed inside,” said Karlsen, “the dashboard had been polished. Wax and cleaning stuff everywhere. He left home to sell it.”

“And his wife didn’t know who the prospective purchaser was,” Sejer recalled.

“She knew nothing at all, but that was par for the course in that household.”

“No one phoned asking for him?”

“No. He told her quite suddenly that he had a purchaser. She thought it was strange. He’d scraped and saved to get that car, tinkered with it for months, treated it like his baby.”

“Maybe he needed money,” said Sejer urgently, rising. He began to pace. “We’ve got to find that buyer. I wonder what happened between them. According to his wife he had a hundred kroner in his wallet. We ought to go through the car again, someone sat in it and drove it several kilometers, a murderer. He must have left something behind!”

“The car’s been sold,” Karlsen put in.

“Wouldn’t you just know it.”

“Nine P.M.’s pretty late to go showing off a car,” said Skarre, a curly-haired man with an open face. “It’s damn dark in October at nine in the evening. If I were going to buy a car I’d want to see it in daylight. It could have been planned. A kind of trap.”

“Yes. And if you want to test drive a car, you head out of town. Away from people.” Sejer scratched his chin with well-clipped nails. “If he was stabbed on the fourth of October, he’s been in the river six months,” he said. “Is that consistent with the state of the body?”

“The pathologists are being difficult about that,” said Karlsen. “Impossible to date that sort of thing, they say. Snorrasson told of a woman who was found after seven years, and she was as good as new. Some lake in Ireland. Seven years! The water was freezing cold, pure preservation. But we can assume it happened on the fourth of October. It must have been quite a strong person, I should have thought, judging by the results.”

“Let’s look at the stab wounds.”

He selected a photograph from the folder, went to the board, and clipped it in position. The picture showed Einarsson’s back and bottom; the skin had been thoroughly washed and the stab wounds left craterlike depressions.