There was no reason for Lindell to remain engaged, at least not on site. She promised to forward all forensic information.
‘She’s unknown,’ Marksson said. ‘I think that’s shit.’
It was true. They had hair, blood, and skin, even a photograph, but no identity. They had a foot but no name.
She read through Morgansson’s report on the saw one more time. It was in good condition, purchased at Såma in Uppsala, as evidenced by a small sticker. The blade and chain were basically new, the teeth only slightly worn. The oil on the chain was of vegetable origin, probably originating in a twenty-litre container in the tractor garage. Analysis would show if it matched the traces of oil recovered from the foot. There had not been any traces of blood on the blade, but some under the hood where the chain wound around a cog. Lindell had no idea what the interior mechanism of a chainsaw looked like but tried to imagine it.
There was also sawdust inside the hood, most likely from a pine tree. Lindell had immediately been struck by the macabre fact that Frisk had presumably continued to use the saw after he had finished chopping up his girlfriend. Wouldn’t a natural reaction have been to want to get rid of the tool? Morgansson believed that after the deed Frisk had at least changed out the blade and chain. She would check if Frisk had been a customer at Såma recently.
In the southern end of the shed there were large quantities of firewood – some fifteen or twenty cubic metres, Marksson estimated. Frisk had needed his chainsaw.
In the northern end of the shed there was a cordwood saw with a hydrolic piston. Marksson had explained how it worked. Lindell had shiveringly imagined Frisk first cutting the woman in two before he completed his work with the chainsaw.
Tobias Frisk had cleared away all of her belongings. There was not a single feminine item of clothing, no make-up or forgotten tampon in the bathroom, no extra toothbrush, no notes, not even doodles in the pads of paper they found in the bookshelf, no newspapers or books that looked out of place. There were several old scorecards in a Yahtzee box but only two sets of initials: TF and LM. Frisk’s neighbour confirmed that they had had a habit of playing a game of Yahtzee from time to time, most recently a couple of years ago.
There was no computer in the house. Lasse Malm claimed there had never been one. Tobias Frisk hardly even watched television. The only program he tried to catch was the evening news at seven-thirty.
What did the man do all evening, Lindell wondered. He hardly watched any TV, he didn’t surf the Web, his entire book collection consisted of some twenty books, there were no magazines testifying to any special interest, and he did not appear to have had much of a social life. According to one source he visited his mother once a week, always on a Sunday. He had no siblings.
According to the neighbours along the Avenue, he seldom or rarely received any visitors. Lindell’s impression of an exceptionally isolated existence, dominated by routine, was growing ever more vivid.
‘He liked to fish’ and ‘Fishing was his thing’ were the two comments from his neighbours that indicated any interest. They had also uncovered a sizeable collection of fishing tools. Marksson had deemed the collection ‘above average for an amateur’.
They had a photograph. Either he had overlooked it in his sorting or kept it as a memento. One fact that Morgansson had noted in his report was that there was no camera in the house. Had the woman brought the photograph with her?
Frisk’s passport lay in a kitchen drawer along with some insurance documents, old bills, and the latest statement about how much in retirement funds he had managed to accumulate. The passport, which had been issued in April 2002, had two stamps. Frisk had entered Turkey on June 12th of the same year, and left a week later.
On the wall above the telephone in the kitchen, there was a list of telephone numbers. It consisted of thirteen names, of which five were work-related. All six neighbours were represented, as well as ‘Mum’ and ‘Mum’s property manager’. They called the latter. He was a property manager in the area where Frisk’s mother lived and he explained that Frisk had called him a couple of times to do small jobs in Frisk’s mother’s flat.
Thirteen names. Thirteen numbers. Nothing that so much as whispered a way to proceed. Lindell had never seen anything like it.
The wage stubs from Ahlén’s Bakery were neatly filed in a folder, where the past five tax returns appeared in order. He did not make a particularly good salary – barely 250,000 in 2004 – but on the other hand the house was his and very likely paid off. He did not appear to have lived a particularly extravagant life and could probably put away a couple of kronor every month.
Marksson had already called Frisk’s employer on Saturday and told him what happened to Frisk, but had not said anything about him being a suspected killer. Conny Ahlén was quite naturally shocked. The news was completely unexpected. According to Ahlén there was nothing in Frisk’s behaviour to account for suicide. Quite the opposite; Frisk had been in good spirits all autumn. He had not been sick a single day since his holiday in July. He had been given a raise in September, ‘for everyone who works five years.’ Ahlén and Frisk had gone out for a bite to eat together in connection with this event. Everything had been hunky-dory, at least on the surface.
When asked if Frisk had had any girlfriends, Conny Ahlén had at first given a vague answer that there may have been some lady friends in his life a couple of years ago, but then changed his mind and said that he could not recall Frisk ever mentioning women. ‘To be perfectly honest, we actually used to joke about Tobias. We called him “the island hermit”.’
All of the bakery employees had bank accounts at the Föreningssparbanken in Östhammar, and Marksson would check the dead man’s balance and potential debts as soon as the bank opened in the morning.
Lindell and Marksson were naturally focused on the unknown woman. All signs pointed to the fact that Frisk had blown his own brains out. Now what remained was trying to establish if he had also taken another person’s life. They would never be able to charge him, and Lindell felt almost relieved. He had meted out his own punishment and in this he had made the same assessment as Torsten Andersson: the ultimate punishment.
They had blood, hair, and skin, and a Stihl. That was all, and it would probably last them a long time.
Lindell took out a fresh composition book and wrote ‘Bultudden’ in large letters on the front.
At the top of the first page she wrote a question. It read: ‘How did they meet?’ The answer was not self-evident. Frisk had most likely not visited the area – south-east Asia – which they believed the woman was from. All neighbours shook their heads, all equally certain and not a little astonished at the question of whether Frisk had ever travelled to Thailand, Malaysia, or Bali. ‘When he was in Turkey, he was homesick every minute,’ Thomas B. Sunesson told Marksson.
Lindell tossed a couple of sentences onto the page, paused for a few seconds, staring unseeing at the wall before her where she had a map of Uppland, smiled to herself, and then wrote intensively, turning the page and continuing.
The telephone rang. She glanced at the display and ignored the signals.
After filling two entire sides with what many would regard as hieroglyphics, Lindell put her pen down and read through what she had written. Her conclusion was that if Tobias Frisk had not travelled abroad and met the woman there, the situation must have been reversed: She was already in Sweden when they met.
Two scenarios struck her as most plausible. Either she had come to this country in the company of another Swedish man or else she had worked in Sweden and thus encountered her future slayer.