– Cause of death?
– You want a provisional answer? The markings on the neck show that the strap has been pulled tight.
– Choked?
– Yes, but not necessarily to death. She may have been alive when the skull was crushed.
Flatland pushed the snuff bag back into place with the tip of his tongue.
– On the floor at the back by the wall there’s an area with a lot of bloodstaining.
Jennifer peered over at the dark corner he was pointing to. – In other words, she was dragged from over there and hung from this pillar by the neck. In addition, her eyes are, as you can see, covered in marks from being jabbed by some sharp object. Didn’t you say they looked to be damaged in the video on her mobile?
Flatland gave a quick nod of assent.
– Before she was choked and had her skull crushed, Jennifer concluded, – she could have been sitting here in the freezing cold staring blindly out in front of her.
2
Thursday 25 December
THE SKY ABOVE Oslo was filled with orange and gold-grey wrinkles, but over the hills in the north it was still almost black. Jennifer Plåterud glanced at her wristwatch as she let herself in to the Pathological Institute. The time was 8.15. Even before the finding of the body, the case had attracted a lot of media attention, and now things were about to get a hundred times worse. She couldn’t bear lagging behind, had to deliver her results before people began asking for them. And yet there was another reason why she had chosen to go to work even before the Devil had put his boots on.
She hung her coat up in the cloakroom, found a clean outfit and pulled on the trousers, shirt, coat, hat and mask. Three minutes later, she was opening the door to the autopsy room. Going through that door was a signaclass="underline" take off one way of thinking and feeling about the world, and put on another.
But on that particular morning she remained standing in the darkness inside. Images from the factory the afternoon before had pursued her all through Christmas Eve, forcing their way in through the light sleep she fell into now and then. Christmas dinner had been postponed for almost two hours, but no one expressed any annoyance when she took her place at the table without the slightest indication of what she had just been doing, and she didn’t think it showed on her either. For twenty-five years, more than half her life, she had practised medicine, the last fifteen of them mainly on dead bodies; it had become routine a long time ago. But arriving at that crime scene, stopping in the gallery of that factory and seeing the naked young woman lying there in the sharp light…
At the table, she had managed to look as if she ate with a hearty appetite, and afterwards things took their usual course. The boys pretended that they no longer looked forward to opening their presents, hid their expectations behind slow yawns, punching away on their mobile phones and generally giving the impression that there were a thousand other things more important. As for Ivar, he was a picture of pride as he served out the rib and sausages, and enjoyed himself even more afterwards as he sat down with a glass of cognac and starting handing out the packages arranged under the tree, reading out the tos and froms, usually with some comment about what could possibly be hidden inside that lovely wrapping paper – maybe a collapsible bike, or I’m guessing this is a fire engine – and astonished delight when he unwrapped her present to him, a pullover he had himself tried on in H&M few days earlier. She didn’t begrudge him his childlike joy in Christmas.
With an almost inaudible sigh, she closed off the stream of thoughts, switched on the light in the autopsy room and went to work.
After a quick lunch, she hurried over to her office and wrote a preliminary post-mortem report. Reading through it afterwards, she found herself mentally searching for something that was not to be found in the succession of strictly descriptive terminological sentences. She couldn’t shake off the thought that there was something she ought to have seen. Twenty-nine-year-old woman, she summarised. Fair-haired, regular features. She didn’t know much about the dead woman, no more than what she had already read in the newspapers. A psychologist, almost completed her PhD despite her young age. Jennifer struggled to abstract something that wasn’t connected to her appearance or what she already knew about her. Choked, she repeated to herself, and beaten to death; the eyes…
Suddenly she knew what it was. She picked up her phone and opened the call list.
To begin with, Jennifer’s characterisation of human types on the Hippocratic model was not seriously meant. Naturally she had never believed that it really was the four bodily fluids that determined a person’s temperament and character, but it amused her to assert that this theory, with its origins several centuries before the birth of Christ, was every bit as scientific as the Freudian waffle that certain psychiatrists continued to promote twenty centuries after that same birth. In time, however, she had come to believe that Hippocrates’ categorisation, as developed by Galen and by doctors of the Renaissance period, accorded strikingly well with the people she had come across in her life. Almost unnoticed, the irony that had accompanied her interest in the theory had faded away, until a time came when she had to confess to herself that she believed in it almost without reservation. People’s inner worlds could be arranged in such a way as to give her the illusion of comprehending the incomprehensible. And over the years, her categorisations grew more and more sophisticated. She came to believe that a person’s temperament and character did not necessarily derive from one of these four categories alone. For example, she regarded herself as first and foremost sanguine, a bon vivant who didn’t easily let things get her down; but she had to admit that she was also much under the sway of the choleric. Mercurial anger could at any moment descend on her like a sly dog, even on days when she couldn’t explain it away as a result of hormonal fluctuations. It was reassuring then to think of it as the accumulation of bile, no matter how metaphorically meant.
Detective Chief Inspector Hans Magnus Viken from the Department of Violent Crimes was another choleric, she had soon realised. She didn’t yet know whether this was combined with the melancholic, which would be typically Norwegian, or with the phlegmatic, which would actually be equally typically Norwegian. When he telephoned her at about two o’clock, she knew at once what he wanted.
Viken was not the kind of detective to rely on reports. He had to carry out the investigation himself. In and of itself this was a good quality, but she wasn’t altogether sure she liked him looking over her shoulder in the autopsy room. She had to admit he had a certain talent, even if the so-called ‘bear murders’ the year before had done fairly serious damage to his reputation. But he wasn’t the only one to have to give an account of himself in the wake of that investigation. The section head involved had to find something else to do, and several others had handed in their resignations. Viken, however, wasn’t the type to let something like that get to him. He’d hung on and survived, and would probably stay with the department until they had to carry him out, thought Jennifer. He even had the guts to apply for the post of section leader that fell vacant as a result of that infamous case. She liked that kind of obstinacy, every bit as much as she disliked his know-all attitude.
He arrived at 3.10, opened wide the door of the room and strode in, a disposable cap balanced on his head. He probably wants it to look like a mitre, she had time to think before she noticed who he had brought along with him. She swore silently. Viken was one thing. She knew more or less where she had him. And for a choleric he kept his temper under good control. On top of that he was susceptible to flattery, which made it easy to disarm him. As for the man who appeared in the doorway behind him, she did not want him there under any circumstances. He was much younger than the detective chief inspector. Younger than her, too. Much too young. Not much past thirty-five. She felt herself blushing. She hadn’t seen him since the Christmas party. Not since the night after the Christmas party, to be more precise. He’d sent her a couple of text messages, even including one on Christmas Eve. Mostly she wanted to forget the whole thing. And not forget the whole thing. But she had to avoid letting Roar Horvath get too close to her. At least at work.