– I saw your preliminary report, Jenny, said Viken jovially.
When in the world did he start calling me that? she wondered as she returned his smile, and gave Roar Horvath a quick nod. He responded with a wink. That was okay; it showed that he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. Evidently he wanted to carry on in the same vein that she had found so charming at the Christmas do. Concentration, she said to herself, and then repeated it a couple of times.
– Cause of death confirmed? Viken wanted to know.
– We’ve got three, possibly four causes, each of which individually would have been fatal, she began, pointing with her scalpel at the throat, which was open in two places. – The belt that was tied around her throat has occluded both the arteries and veins, since the face is pale and not swollen. What’s more, the groove made by the belt is horizontal, which indicates that she was strangled before she was hung up in the position in which she was found. She lifted a flap of the skin on the neck to one side. – Here you can see fractures in both the thyroid cartilage and the lingual bone. That shows how much force was used to tighten the belt.
The two officers bent to examine the gaping throat. Jennifer picked up a pair of tweezers and indicated the damaged areas she had described.
– Beneath the skin there are three linear accumulations of blood, which appear to come from the belt, and then this deeper groove.
– Which means?
– It might indicate that she was strangled several times. The perpetrator appears to have loosened the belt and then tightened it again, a little harder each time.
– A macabre form of entertainment, Viken observed. – And yet you say that strangulation was not necessarily the cause of death?
Jennifer lifted up the dead woman’s head. – She was hit four or five times, laterally, from above.
– These look like injuries I’ve seen from being hit with a hammer, Roar Horvath volunteered.
Jennifer shook her head. – This was done with something bigger and heavier.
– A stone? Viken suggested.
– Possibly, but in that case one with a flat and finely chiselled surface. Possibly attached to a handle. Jennifer pointed. – Note these linked, rather circular fracture lines in the occipital bone. A fairly large and evenly bowed fragment has been impressed into the surface of the brain, causing severe contusion and massive loss of blood. It means we can say with some degree of certainty that she was alive when these blows were delivered. We’ll be opening the skull later today. What we expect to see then is that the power of these blows has shaken the whole brain backwards and forwards. The victim was obviously lying on the floor with the right temple facing downwards. We can see the scrape marks here on the base of the scalp.
– So that’s why you presume that something with a handle was used. Viken lowered his head slightly, a habit when drawing a conclusion that Jennifer had previously noticed. – And the third possible cause of death?
She took two steps to the side. – Numerous punctiform haemorrhages in the bowel mucosa, she said, pointing with her scalpel into the open belly. – Something similar here. She moved her scalpel to the thoracic cavity and scraped at a membrane surrounding the lung. – The blood is also unusually pale red, which we often find in cases of death from hypothermia. The question is whether the other wounds killed her, or whether she managed to freeze to death. The temperature in that factory was obviously well below freezing.
She straightened up and fastened her gaze on Viken.
– Additionally you can see these two marks in the neck, which must be from a hypodermic. She had heroin in her blood, but it was not given intravenously, and there are no other needle marks on her body.
– Ergo the heroin was used to sedate her or keep her passive, said Viken.
Jennifer raised one of the body’s hands. – There is superficial scratching here, which might indicate that she was handcuffed before she was found. She described a circle round each wrist. – Note also the tips of the right thumb and forefinger.
– Oil? Horvath asked.
– It turns out to be soot. But nothing was found in the vicinity that was either burnt or sooted. She laid the dead arm back on the table. – And then of course there are the eyes, as you can see from the report.
She raised both eyelids. The exposed eyeballs were almost black from the coagulated blood that had gathered there. Viken bent forward, and she handed him a magnifying glass and a torch. While he was standing there examining the punctured eyes, she glanced over at Roar Horvath. He was wearing a suitably serious expression for the occasion, and she was glad to see this sign that he was adult enough not to start flirting there and then. He didn’t look particularly stylish, in his green lab coat and with the paper hat pulled down over his ears. It made his face seem rounder, the nose stick out more. But he had that dimple in his chin – it was, as she had noticed before he put on the face mask, even more prominent in the light from the ceiling – and he was so entertaining, had made her laugh out loud more than once at the Christmas party, and even more afterwards. And he was by no means the worst lover she had ever gone to bed with; far from it. She hadn’t taken him for an Adonis that evening either, since she had been stone-cold sober from the moment she arrived to the moment she left, as she had to confess to herself with both pride and shame. That was why she had offered to drive him home, since he lived on the same side of town. Or at least, not in the completely opposite direction, as it turned out. Concentration, Jennifer, she warned herself again. You’re at work now.
– To sum up, I conclude that Mailin Bjerke died from such extensive trauma to the brain that the medulla oblongata was severed, which led to the cessation of the respiratory and circulatory functions. Prior to this she had been repeatedly choked, but the evidence indicates that she did not die of this. As you know, in cases involving this kind of asphyxiation, it can take up to five minutes for death to occur. At the time of her death she was almost certainly severely hypothermic, but this in itself is not the likely cause of death. As for the presence of heroin in the blood, the concentration was so low that the effect of it must have worn off several hours before she died.
Viken handed the torch and the magnifying glass to Roar Horvath. – Stabbed with a pointed object, he observed as his younger colleague leaned over to examine the damage to the eyes. – Repeatedly. But with something rather less sharp than the needle of a hypodermic. To what purpose?
– Prevent the victim from seeing, Horvath offered.
– Much easier, surely, simply to blindfold her.
Jennifer said: – I have some information that might be worth taking a closer look at.
As ever, Viken had that openly scrutinising look in his eyes, which he made no attempt to disguise. Probably something that’s bound to happen when you’ve worked as a detective for decades, she thought. Roar Horvath straightened up and looked at her as well. It didn’t bother her. She had long since accepted that she didn’t have the figure of a twenty year old. She consoled herself with the thought that there were a surprising number of advantages to having passed forty, and felt the heat begin to prickle in her cheeks. Which was not one of them. Not even when she was a little girl had she blushed as much as she had started doing recently.