ASA LARSSON ~ THE SAVAGE ALTAR Read Free Page A

station?”
    “Well, no. We don’t know where she is. I left instructions to get somebody out there looking for her. There was nobody in the church when Tommy and Freddy got here.”
    “What did the technicians say?”
    “Look but don’t touch.”
    The body was lying in the middle of the central aisle. Anna-Maria stopped a little way from it.
    “Fucking hell,” she burst out.
    “I did tell you,” said Sven-Erik, who was standing just behind her.
    Anna-Maria pulled a little tape recorder from the inside pocket of her jacket. She hesitated for a moment. She usually spoke into it rather than making notes. But this wasn’t really her case. Maybe she ought to keep quiet and just sort of go along with Sven-Erik?
    Don’t go making everything so complicated, she told herself, and switched on the tape recorder without even looking at her colleague.
    “The time is five thirty-five,” she said into the microphone. “It’s the sixteenth, no seventeenth, of February. I’m standing in The Source of All Our Strength church and looking at someone who, as far as we know at the moment, is Viktor Strandgård, generally known as the Paradise Boy. The dead man is lying in the middle of the aisle. He appears to have been well and truly slit open, because he absolutely stinks and the carpet beneath the body is wet. This wetness is presumably blood, but it’s a little difficult to tell because he is lying on a red carpet. His clothes are also covered in blood and it isn’t possible to see very much of the wound in his stomach; it does seem, however, that some of his intestines are protruding, but the doctor can confirm that later. He’s wearing jeans and a jumper. The soles of his shoes are dry and the carpet under his shoes is not wet. His eyes have been gouged out….”
    Anna-Maria broke off and switched off the tape recorder. She moved round the body and bent over the face. She had been about to say that he made a beautiful corpse, but there were limits to what she could think aloud in front of Sven-Erik. The dead man’s face made her think of King Oedipus. She had seen the play on video at school. At the time she hadn’t been particularly affected by the scene where he put out his own eyes, but now the image came back to her with remarkable clarity. She needed to pee again. And she mustn’t forget about the car. Best get going. She switched on the tape recorder again.
    “The eyes have been gouged out and the long hair is covered in blood. There must be a wound to the back of the head. There is a cut on the right of the neck, but no bleeding, and the hands are missing…”
    Anna-Maria turned inquiringly to Sven-Erik, who was pointing toward the rows of chairs. She bent down with difficulty and looked along the floor among the chairs.
    “Oh, I see, one hand is lying three meters away under the chairs. But where’s the other?”
    Sven-Erik shrugged.
    “None of the chairs has been overturned,” she continued. “There are no indications of a struggle; what do you think, Sven-Erik?”
    “No,” replied Sven-Erik, who disliked speaking into the tape recorder.
    “Who took the photos?”
    “Simon Larsson.”
    Good, she thought. That meant they would have good pictures.
    “Otherwise the church is tidy,” she went on. “This is the first time I’ve been in here. There are hundreds of frosted lamps along those sections of the walls that are not made of glass bricks. How high would it be? Must be more than ten meters. Huge windows in the roof. Blue chairs in rows, straight as a die. How many people would fit in here? Two thousand?”
    “Plus the pulpit,” said Sven-Erik.
    He wandered round and allowed his gaze to sweep over every surface like a vacuum cleaner.
    Anna-Maria turned and looked at the pulpit towering behind her. The organ pipes soared upward and met their own reflection in the windows in the roof. It was an impressive sight.
    “There isn’t really very much more to add,” said Anna-Maria hesitantly, as if