The Man From Beijing Read Free Page B

Huddén.
    ‘Well, are you going to show me?’
    They walked over to the dead body. Sundberg pulled a face and squatted down. ‘Has the doctor arrived?’
    ‘She’s on her way.’
    ‘She?’
    ‘Hugo has a sub. He’s going to be operated on. A tumour.’
    Vivi Sundberg momentarily lost interest in the body lying in the snow. ‘Is he ill?’
    ‘He has cancer. Didn’t you know?’
    ‘No. Where?’
    ‘In his stomach. Apparently it hasn’t spread. Anyway, he has a sub from Uppsala. Valentina Miir’s her name. If I’ve pronounced it right.’
    Huddén shouted to Ytterström, who was drinking coffee by one of the cars. He confirmed that the police doctor would be here at any moment.
    Sundberg started examining the body closely. Every time she was confronted by a corpse, she was overcome by the same feeling of pointless-ness. She was unable to awaken the dead, the best she could do was to expose the reasons for the crime and send the killer to a prison cell or to an asylum for the mentally ill.
    ‘Somebody has gone berserk,’ she said. ‘With a long knife. Or a bayonet. Possibly a sword. I can see at least ten wounds, nearly all of them potentially fatal. But I don’t understand the missing leg. Do we know who the man is?’
    ‘Not yet. All the houses appear to be empty.’
    Sundberg stood up and looked around the village. The houses seemed to return her attentive gaze.
    ‘Have you been knocking on doors?’
    ‘I thought I should wait. Whoever did this might still be around.’
    ‘You’re right.’
    She beckoned to Ytterström, who threw his empty cardboard cup into the snow.
    ‘Let’s go in,’ she said. ‘There must be people around. This isn’t a ghost town.’
    ‘There’s been no sign of anybody.’
    Sundberg looked again at the houses, the snowed-over gardens, the road. She drew her pistol and set off towards the nearest house; the two men followed. It was a few minutes past eleven.
    What the three police officers discovered was unprecedented in the annals of Swedish crime and would become a part of Swedish legal history. There were bodies in every house. Dogs and cats had been stabbed to death, even a parrot had had its head cut off. They found a total of nineteen dead people, all of them elderly except for a boy who must have been about twelve. Some had been killed while asleep in bed; others were lying on the floor or sitting on chairs at the kitchen table. An old woman had died with a comb in her hand, a man by a stove with an overturned coffee pot by his side. In one house they found two people locked in an embrace and tied together. All had been subjected to frenzied violence. It was as if a blood-laden hurricane had stormed through the village just as the old people who lived there were getting up. As the elderly in the country tend to rise early, Sundberg assumed the murders had taken place close to sunrise.
    Vivi Sundberg felt as if her whole head was being submerged in blood. She shook off her outrage, but felt very cold. It was as if she were viewing the dead disfigured bodies through a telescope, which meant that she didn’t need to approach too closely.
    And then there was the smell. Although the bodies had barely turned cold, they were already giving off a smell that was both sweet and sour. While inside the houses, Sundberg tried to breathe through her mouth. The moment she stepped outside, she filled her lungs with fresh air. Crossing the threshold of the next house was like preparing to face something almost unbearable.
    Everything she saw, one body after another, bore witness to the same frenzy and the same wounds caused by a very sharp weapon. The list she made later that day, which she never revealed to anybody, comprised brief notes on exactly what she had seen:
    House number one. Dead elderly man, half naked, ragged pyjamas, slippers, half lying on the staircase. Head almost severed from body, the thumb of the left hand three feet away. Dead elderly woman, nightgown, stomach