Хеннинг Манкелль - The Man from Beijing

She reached for a transparent plastic bag. It contained a leather boot.

‘We can assume that it was on the foot,’ she said. ‘Obviously, an animal can have pulled it off in order to get at the foot itself. But what worries me is that the shoelaces were undone.’

Sundberg recalled that the other boot was tightly tied and on the man’s other foot. The leg belonged to Lars Andrén.

‘Is there anything else you’ve established?’

‘Not yet, it’s too soon.’

‘Can you come with me? I need your help.’

They left the tent and went to the house where the unknown boy was lying with two other persons who were probably Hans-Evert and Elsa Andersson. The silence inside was deafening.

The boy was lying in bed, on his stomach. The room was small, with a sloping roof. Sundberg gritted her teeth in order not to burst out crying. His life had barely begun, but before he could take another breath it had ended.

They stood there in silence.

‘I don’t understand how anybody can commit such a horrendous attack on a small child,’ said Valentina eventually.

‘Can you see how many stab wounds he has?’ said Sundberg.

The doctor leaned forward and directed the bedside lamp at the body. It was several minutes before she answered.

‘It seems that he has only one wound. And it killed him instantly.’

‘Can you explain further?’

‘It would have been quick. His spine has been cut in two.’

‘Have you had time to examine the other bodies?’

‘As I’ve said, I’m waiting for backup.’

‘But can you say off the top of your head how many of the other victims died from a single blow?’

At first Valentina didn’t seem to understand the question. Then she tried to recall what she had seen.

‘None of them, I think,’ she said slowly. ‘Unless I’m much mistaken, all the others were stabbed repeatedly.’

‘And no single wound would have been fatal?’

‘It’s too soon to say for sure, but probably not.’

‘Many thanks.’

The doctor left. Sundberg searched through the room and the boy’s clothes in the hope of finding something to indicate who he was. But found nothing, not even a bus pass. She went downstairs and out into the garden to the rear of the house overlooking the frozen lake. She tried to work out the significance of what she had discovered. The boy had died from a single blow, but all the rest had been subjected to more systematic violence. What could that mean? She could think of only one plausible explanation: whoever killed the boy hadn’t wanted him to suffer. Everyone else had been subjected to violence that was a sort of extended torture.

She gazed at the distant mountains, veiled in mist beyond the lake. He wanted to torture them, she thought. Whoever wielded that sword or knife wanted them to know that they were going to die.

Why? She had no idea. She was distracted by the sound of rotor blades approaching and went to the front of the house. A helicopter was descending over the wooded hillsides and soon landed in a field, whipping up a cloud of snow. Tobias Ludwig jumped out, and the helicopter set off again immediately, heading south.

Sundberg went to meet him. Ludwig was wearing city shoes, and as he trudged through the snow it came well over his ankles. He looked to Vivi like a confused insect stuck in the snow and flapping violently with its wings.

They met on the road as Ludwig was brushing himself down.

‘I’m trying to get my head around it,’ he said. ‘What you told me, that is.’

‘You have to see them. Sten Robertsson is here. I’ve done as much as I can in the way of resources. But now it’s up to you to make sure we get all the help we need.’

‘I still can’t get my head around it. Lots of dead old people?’

‘There’s a boy who’s the odd one out. He’s young.’

She went through the houses for the fourth time that day. Ludwig kept groaning as he accompanied her from crime scene to crime scene and came to the tent where the leg was. The doctor was nowhere to be seen. Ludwig shook his head helplessly.

‘What on earth has happened? Surely only a madman could have done anything like this.’

‘We don’t know if it was just one. There could have been several of them.’

‘Madmen?’

‘Nobody knows.’

He looked hard at her.

‘Do we know anything at all?’

‘Not really.’

‘This is too big for us. We need help.’

Robertsson came walking along the road towards them.

‘This is horrendous, horrific,’ said Ludwig. ‘I doubt anything like this has ever happened before in Sweden.’

Robertsson shook his head. Sundberg eyed the two men. The feeling that this was urgent, that something even worse might happen if they didn’t act quickly enough, became even stronger.

‘Get going on those names,’ she said to Tobias Ludwig. ‘I really need your help.’

Then she took Robertsson by the arm and led him off along the road.

‘What do you think?’

‘I’m scared. Aren’t you?’

‘I don’t have time to think about it.’

Sten Robertsson screwed up his eyes.

‘But you’re onto something, aren’t you? You always are.’

‘Not this time. There could have been ten of them, we just don’t know at the moment. We have absolutely nothing to go on. You’ll have to be present at the press conference, by the way.’

‘I hate talking to journalists.’

‘Too bad.’

Robertsson left. She was about to go and sit down in her car when she noticed that Huddén was waving to her. He was approaching and had something in his hand. He must have found the murder weapon, she thought. That would be a stroke of luck.

But Huddén was not carrying a weapon. He handed over a plastic bag. Inside it was a thin red ribbon.

‘The dog found it. In the forest. About thirty yards from the leg.’

‘Any footprints?’

‘They’re looking — but when the dog found the ribbon, he showed no sign of wanting to follow a trail.’

She lifted the bag and peered closely at it.

‘It’s thin,’ she said. ‘It seems to be silk. Did you find anything else?’

‘No, that’s all. It seemed to sparkle in the snow.’

She handed back the bag.

‘Well, we have something at least,’ she said. ‘At the press conference we can announce that we have nineteen dead bodies and a clue in the form of a red silk ribbon.’

‘Maybe we’ll find something else.’

When Huddén had left she sat in her car to think. Through the windscreen she could see Julia being led away by a woman from the home-help service. Ignorance is bliss, thought Sundberg.

She closed her eyes and let the list of names scroll through her mind. She still couldn’t connect the various names to the faces she had now seen on four different occasions. Where did it start? she wondered. One house must have been the first, another one the last. The killer, whether or not he was alone, must have known what he was doing. He didn’t pick the houses haphazardly, he made no attempt to break into the day traders’ house, or that of the senile woman.

She opened her eyes and gazed out through the windscreen. It was planned, she thought. It must have been. But can a madman really prepare for that kind of deed? Surely it doesn’t add up.

She poured out the last few drops of coffee from her Thermos. The motive, she thought. Even a lunatic must have a motive. Perhaps inner voices urge him to kill everybody who crosses his path. But would those voices point him to Hesjövallen of all places? If so, why? How big a role was played by coincidence in this drama?

The boy may be the key, she thought. He doesn’t live in the village. But he dies even so. Two people who have lived here for twenty years are still alive. Then it dawned on her — something Erik Huddén had said. Did she remember correctly? What was Julia’s surname?