The Crow Girl Read Free Page A

something like that. Check with the college to see if they have surveillance cameras.’
    Hurtig nodded and lumbered off.
    Jeanette sighed and turned to one of the forensics officers who was examining the grass by the bushes.
    ‘Anything useful?’
    The woman shook her head. ‘Not yet. Obviously there are a lot of footprints; we’ll take impressions of some of the best ones. But don’t get your hopes up.’
    Jeanette slowly approached the bushes where the body had been found, wrapped in a black garbage bag. The boy, a young adolescent, was naked, and had stiffened in a sitting position with his arms around his knees. His hands had been bound with duct tape. The skin on his face had turned a yellow-brown colour, and looked almost leathery, like old parchment.
    His hands, in contrast, were almost black.
    ‘Any signs of sexual violence?’ She turned to Ivo Andrić, who was crouched down in front of her.
    Ivo Andrić was a specialist in unusual and extreme cases of death.
    The Stockholm police had called him early that morning. Because they didn’t want to cordon off the area around the metro station any longer than necessary, he had to work fast.
    ‘I can’t tell yet. But it can’t be ruled out. I don’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions, but from my experience you don’t usually see this sort of extreme injury without there being evidence of sexual violence as well.’
    Jeanette nodded.
    She leaned closer and noted that the dead boy looked foreign. Arabic, Palestinian, maybe even Indian or Pakistani.
    The body was visible in some bushes just a few metres from the entrance to the Thorildsplan metro station on Kungsholmen, and Jeanette realised that it couldn’t have remained unseen for very long.
    The police had done their best to protect the site with screens and tarpaulins, but the terrain was hilly, which meant it was possible to see the crime scene from above if you were standing some distance away. There were several photographers with telephoto lenses standing outside the cordon, and Jeanette almost felt sorry for them. They spent twenty-four hours a day listening to police-band radio and waiting in case something spectacular happened.
    But she couldn’t see any actual journalists. The papers probably didn’t have the staff to send these days.
    ‘What the hell, Andrić,’ one of the police officers said, shaking his head at the sight. ‘How can something like this happen?’
    The body was practically mummified, which told Ivo Andrić that it had been kept in a very dry place for a long time. Not outside in a wet Stockholm winter.
    ‘Well, Schwarz,’ he said, looking up, ‘that’s what we’re going to try to find out.’
    ‘Yes, but the boy’s been mummified, for fuck’s sake. Like some damn pharaoh. That’s not the sort of thing that happens during a coffee break, is it?’
    Ivo Andrić nodded in agreement. He was a hardened man who was originally from Bosnia, and had been a doctor in Sarajevo during the almost four years of the Serbian siege. He had witnessed a great many unpleasant things throughout his long and eventful career, but he had never seen anything like this before.
    There was no doubt at all that the victim had been severely abused, but the odd thing was that there were none of the usual self-defence injuries. All the bruises and haematomas looked more like the sort of thing you’d see on a boxer. A boxer who had gone twelve rounds and been so badly beaten that he eventually passed out.
    On his arms and across his torso the boy had hundreds of marks, harder than the surrounding tissue, which, when taken as a whole, meant that he had been subjected to an astonishing number of blows while he was still alive. From the indentations on the boy’s knuckles, it seemed likely that he had not only received but had also dealt out a fair number of punches.
    But the most troubling thing was the fact that the boy’s genitals were missing.
    He noted that they had been removed with a very