‘Probably a wolverine dick,’ Chavez whispered loudly.
‘Let’s just hope the wolverine wasn’t still in the hole,’ Hjelm half whispered back.
As the technician struggled down the hill, Hjelm thought for a moment about association paths and their meanings. The technician made it over to his boss, who still had a stern look on his face. Brynolf Svenhagen took the object, twisting and turning it in his hands for a while before wandering over in the direction of Hjelm, Chavez and Qvarfordt. He held it out to old Qvarfordt, who peeped at it through inch-thick glasses and nodded.
‘Fantastic,’ was all he said.
The stern Svenhagen reluctantly turned to his son-in-law and his equally detestable colleague. He held the object up for them.
It was a finger.
‘Fantastic,’ Chavez said, without showing any desire to get a closer look at it. ‘Fingerprints,’ he added unnecessarily.
Svenhagen turned on his heels. Chavez grabbed his flapping white arm and pulled it towards him. It looked like a foretaste of the football World Cup.
‘For God’s sake,’ Svenhagen said doggedly.
‘Can we go over the letters, Brunte? If it’s not too much to ask?’
Brynolf Svenhagen nodded gravely.
‘We are policemen,’ Hjelm added helpfully.
Svenhagen made yet another non-verbal expression of his distaste and then overcame himself. He led the two inspectors towards the edge of the wolverine enclosure, right next to the three-metre drop beneath the viewing area. The ground here was dark earth, and it was where the concentration of multicoloured fibres was greatest. They could also make out the only trace of blood – a darker spot which had been almost entirely soaked up by the earthy ground.
‘Tread carefully here,’ Svenhagen said.
‘How many wolverines were there?’ Hjelm asked.
‘Four.’
‘Four bestial creatures devoured a person and there’s hardly a trace of blood anywhere. Isn’t that strange?’
Svenhagen paused and directed an icy-blue don’t-you-know-anything look at Hjelm.
‘It rained last night,’ he said, squatting down. ‘Fortunately, this is still here,’ he continued, pointing.
In the ground directly beneath Brynolf Svenhagen’s index finger, Hjelm could make out some depressions. After some effort, he realised they were letters. Five of them. He worked his way through them.
‘Epivu?’ he said.
‘That’s what it looks like,’ Svenhagen confirmed. ‘Just don’t ask me what it means.’
‘Did he write it?’
‘We don’t know. The size of the letters is consistent with a human finger, I can say that much. And the number of fibres around here suggests that it might be where the actual… ingestion took place. If that’s the case, we might assume that our victim, with his hands and feet bound, wrote a last message. We’ve taken samples from the letters to see whether there’s any trace of blood or skin in the soil. Maybe that finger can help shed a little light on all of this.’
‘Have we got any idea at all about how he ended up here?’
‘No,’ Svenhagen replied. ‘Plenty of fingerprints on the fence, of course, but otherwise nothing. We’ll have to go through everything.’
‘If we assume he was the one who wrote “Epivu”, then he didn’t end up here without a head. How can a head disappear?’
‘There are several possibilities,’ Svenhagen replied, looking at Hjelm. Perhaps the man wasn’t the utter idiot he had previously assumed him to be. But Brynolf Svenhagen wasn’t someone who enjoyed having his preconceived notions overturned. If possible, that made him even harsher. He continued sternly: ‘The wolverines might simply have eaten it. It’s really not so unlikely that they gobbled up the entire thing, cranium and teeth and cerebral cortex. Everything. Then of course it might be the case that he didn’t write those letters at all. You’ll have to check with the keepers, that’s your job. One of the wolverines might be called Epivu, what do I know?’
Hjelm didn’t let him go. He glanced around the rugged terrain.
‘So the skull could just as easily be here somewhere? We’ll have to keep looking. I assume you’ll be having to sift through plenty of wolverine shit in the near future. It might not be just one person, maybe those naughty wolverines gobbled up two or three or an entire football team.’
At the mention of wolverine droppings, Hjelm noticed the space between Svenhagen’s eyes twitch. The hyper-organised chief forensic technician clearly hadn’t thought that far ahead. It felt quite gratifying. These odd little power struggles which fill our social environment…
Why do we find it so difficult to spend time together without being transformed into children?
Svenhagen moved off. Hjelm looked at Chavez.
‘What do we have here?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Chavez answered, ‘but it’s certainly not normal.’
‘No,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘It’s certainly not normal.’
They went for a coffee in the cafe at the top of the museum’s observation tower. They sat there munching dry cheese sandwiches and looking down at the sun-drenched museum and the crowds growing in size with each moment that passed. Stockholm’s assembled pensioner corps seemed to be there, clutching lethal pieces of bread which would soon be transformed into monstrous, deadly lumps, responsible for the death of more seabirds than the country’s poachers combined.
Though that wasn’t exactly what Paul Hjelm and Jorge Chavez had on their minds. They were thinking about a murder.
If it was in fact a murder.
‘Underworld,’ Chavez said, trying in vain to bite through the slice of cheese in his sandwich. He wished he had bolt cutters for teeth.
‘Ellroy?’ Hjelm asked, staring blindly out at the magnificent view of Stockholm. ‘Which Ellroy?’
‘In one way or another, it’s the underworld,’ Chavez explained.
‘In one way or another, yes. But not in any way at all. This isn’t a simple drugs deal, it’s not a normal execution. If it was, we wouldn’t have this. This is something special. There’s a message here.’
‘Epivu?’
Hjelm shook his head but said nothing. Chavez continued to think aloud.
‘He was probably tied up and then thrown to the wolverines. Then he had time to write “Epivu”. But why did he do it? Why didn’t he try to get away instead? I mean, even a mediocre sportsman like Paul Hjelm can make it over the ditch without any real bother.’
‘His right groin,’ Hjelm said, taking a sip of his remarkably viscous coffee. ‘Pain in the right groin. Radiating to the knee.’
‘Sounds like cancer,’ said Chavez. ‘Groin cancer, the most dangerous kind. Ninety-seven per cent death rate according to the latest research.’
‘In his defence, it’s easier to jump in than out.’
‘If you get thrown in to a wolverine enclosure, you don’t just sit down and write in the ground with your fingers. That’s not the first thing you do. You try desperately to get out.’
‘But then even assassins aren’t likely to throw someone in to the wolverines and run off immediately. They’d probably stay there to watch. They’d probably be pointing a gun at you. They’d probably stop you from escaping. They’d probably stand there enjoying the show. Like some kind of gladiator games.’
‘Doesn’t that sound a bit complicated?’ asked Chavez. ‘You decide someone’s going to be killed. You tie that person up, take them into Skansen after hours, carry them through the animal park where straggling keepers might turn up at any moment, and you do all that just so you can throw them to the wolverines? Doesn’t sound like something you’d do unless you had a very specific reason for it.’
‘Which takes us right back to Ellroy,’ said Hjelm. ‘Who is this Ellroy?’
‘Or,’ Chavez shouted, slamming his coffee cup down with such force that the saucer broke into two neat half-circles, ‘or maybe they were chasing him and ended up in Skansen by chance.’