the body of a young man, just over twenty years old,” Stridner said.
“Yes, that’s right. Mattias Karlsson—”
“Wrong! The body I just finished the postmortem on this morning belongs to a middle-aged woman. Apparently thirty-five to forty-five years old. Height about one-point-five-five meters. Weight is hard to determine, but she was stocky. Bad teeth. She has had a child. European.”
The superintendent stared at the charred corpse. For a moment he felt dizzy, but it quickly passed.
“Finnish,” he managed to say.
Andersson heard his voice croaking. Stridner gave him a sharp look and snapped, “Finnish? That’s possible. Are you missing someone Finnish?”
“You can say that again! Pirjo Larsson, thirty-two years old. The description matches so far. She was von Knecht’s cleaning woman. What the hell is she doing here?”
“Well, she didn’t come here herself. You should be asking what she was doing there!”
There was no answer to that. He glared, but he had to agree with her. What was Pirjo doing in von Knecht’s office when the bomb went off?
She pulled up the sheet and said, “I’m going to wash up. You can wait in my office.”
He obediently slouched off.
“FINISHING UP Richard first, I can say that the identification is quite clear. The forensic odontologists didn’t doubt it for a second. The teeth matched perfectly. I’ve also checked the fracture of the right tibia. I managed to dig up thirty-five-year-old X rays taken after a skiing accident in St. Anton. Uncomplicated healing.”
She waved some large X rays in the air. Andersson had a hard time trying to look interested when his thoughts were hovering around another body. How was he going to get hold of Hannu? He’d have to borrow a phone.
“Excuse me. May I borrow your phone? I have two inspectors running all over town looking for the woman lying under the sheet out there.”
She nodded and gestured to the phone on her desk. Andersson got hold of a secretary who promised to track down Hannu Rauhala and Birgitta Moberg. She would call them back to headquarters at once for an urgent meeting with him.
Now he could pay better attention to Stridner’s continuing report. It had been proven beyond all doubt that it really was von Knecht who was crushed on the sidewalk on Tuesday evening. Seventy-two hours ago. Since then, he felt like he had aged three years.
Stridner’s pedagogical voice snapped him out of his reverie. “There were no other signs of violence other than the contusion on the back of his neck and the cut across the back of his hand. Other injuries resulted from the height of the fall. Oh, that’s right—I did do one slightly unnecessary thing. Just to satisfy my curiosity. Today I got preliminary results on the PAD I requested. There is a clear fat buildup in the liver. Our good Richard had apparently been drinking quite a bit lately.”
“Does that surprise you?”
“Yes. He was always careful of his appearance and stayed in good shape. He was precise about how much food and drink he consumed. I never saw or heard that he was highly intoxicated at any party during the years we knew each other. But of course, that was fifteen years ago.”
“What does that indicate?”
She sucked in her lower lip and seemed to ponder this a long time before she replied. “Hard to say. Most commonly people take to the bottle when they have problems they can’t solve. Especially men.”
Andersson guiltily thought of the strong beer he drank every evening, but decided quickly that he wasn’t an alcoholic. At his age it was good to relax in the evening with a beer or two. Or three. And it helped him sleep well. Although it did have some side effects. Unconsciously, he tried to suck in his stomach. Glumly, he looked at the pathologist and summarized the situation.
“So we have a healthy sixty-year-old man fresh out of the sauna. Physically in good shape, but with recent signs of increased alcohol intake. Blood alcohol content one-point-one. In his stomach a good lunch is being digested. At five-thirty one rainy and blustery November evening he goes out on his balcony, despite his great fear of heights. There he is struck on the back of the head, cut on the hand, and shoved over the balcony railing. And not a trace of the murderer! And you found nothing else on his body?”
The last sounded like a reproach. And it was. She shook her head, but stopped and cocked it to one side. She had a mischievous gleam in