ASA LARSSON ~ THE SAVAGE ALTAR Read Free Page B

some idea might work its way up from her subconscious and creep out through a gap in the syllables as she spoke. “There’s something… something that makes me feel frustrated when I look at all this. Besides the fact that this corpse is in the worst state I’ve ever seen—”
    “Hey, you two! His lordship the assistant chief prosecutor is on his way up the hill.”
    Tommy Rantakyrö had stuck his head in through the doorway.
    “Who the hell rang him?” asked Sven-Erik, but Tommy had already disappeared.
    Anna-Maria looked at him. Four years ago when she became team leader Sven-Erik had hardly spoken to her for the first six months. He had been deeply hurt because she had got the job he wanted. And now that he’d found his feet as her second in command, he didn’t want to take that extra step forward. She made a mental note to give him a pep talk later. But now he’d just have to manage by himself. Just as Assistant Chief Prosecutor Carl von Post stormed in through the door, she gave Sven-Erik an encouraging look.
    “What the fuck is going on here?” yelled von Post.
    He yanked off his fur hat and his hand went up to his mane of curly hair from sheer force of habit. He stamped his feet. The short walk up from the car park was enough to turn his feet to ice in his smart shoes from Church’s. He strode up to Anna-Maria and Sven-Erik but recoiled when he caught sight of the body on the floor.
    “Oh, bloody hell,” he burst out, and looked anxiously down at his shoes to check whether he might have got them dirty.
    “Why didn’t somebody ring me?” he went on, turning to Sven-Erik. “From now on I’m taking over the investigation, and you can expect a serious talk with the chief if you’ve been keeping me in the dark.”
    “Nobody’s been keeping you in the dark, we didn’t know what had happened and we still don’t really know anything,” ventured Sven-Erik.
    “Crap!” snapped the prosecutor. “And what the hell are you doing here?”
    This was directed at Anna-Maria, who was standing in silence gazing at Viktor Strandgård’s mutilated arms.
    “I rang her,” explained Sven-Erik.
    “I see,” said von Post through clenched teeth. “So you rang her, but not me.”
    Sven-Erik said nothing, and Carl von Post looked at Anna-Maria, who raised her eyes and met his gaze calmly.
    Carl von Post clamped his teeth together so hard that his jaws ached. He’d always had a problem with this midget of a policewoman. She seemed to have her male colleagues on the Investigation squad by the balls, and he couldn’t work out why. And just look at her. One meter fifty at the most in her stocking feet, with a long horse’s face which more or less covered half her body. At the moment she was ready for a circus freak show with her enormous belly. Like a grotesque cube, she was as broad as she was tall. It just had to be the inevitable result of generations of inbreeding in those little isolated Lapp villages.
    He waved his hand in the air as if to waft away his sharp words and started on a new tack.
    “How are you feeling, Anna-Maria?” he asked, pasting on a gentle and sympathetic smile.
    “Fine,” she answered without expression. “And you?”
    “I reckon we’ll have the press round our ears in maybe an hour or so. It’ll be all hell let loose, so tell me what you know so far about the murder and the dead man; all I know is that he was a religious celebrity.”
    Carl von Post sat down on one of the blue chairs and pulled off his gloves.
    “I’ll let Sven-Erik tell you,” said Anna-Maria in a laconic but not unfriendly tone. “I’m supposed to be on desk duty until my time comes. I came along with Sven-Erik because he asked me to, and because two pairs of eyes see more than… well, you know all that. And now I need to pee. If you’ll excuse me.”
    She noticed with satisfaction the pained smile on von Post’s face as she went off to the bathroom. To think that the word “pee” could offend his ears