the neck and pushed her to the ground. Obviously while she was still clothed. Then she was pulled up again, carefully undressed, laid in place, and covered with the jacket."
"Any sign of sexual assault?"
"Don't know yet."
He proceeded to take her temperature, quite unperturbed, in the presence of everyone, and then squinted at the result.
"It's 30 degrees Celsius. Together with the blood spots under the skin and only a slight rigor mortis in the neck, I would estimate the time of death as being within the past ten to twelve hours."
"No," Sejer said. "Not if this isn't where she died."
"Are you doing my job for me?"
He shook his head. "There was a search made here this morning. A group of boys with dogs searched along this tarn for a little girl who was reported missing. They must have been here sometime between midday and 2 p.m. The body wasn't here then – they would have seen it. The little girl turned up by the way, in good shape," he said.
He looked about him, staring down at the mud with his eyes narrowed. Something tiny and pale-coloured caught his attention. He picked it up carefully between two fingers. "What's this?"
Snorrason peered into his hand. "A pill, or a tablet of some kind."
"Do you think you might find more in her stomach?"
"Quite possibly. But I don't see a pill bottle here."
"She could have carried them loose in her pocket."
"In that case we'll find powder in her dungarees. Bag it up."
"Do you recognise it?"
"It could be almost anything. But the smallest tablets are often the strongest. The lab will figure it out."
Sejer nodded to the men with the stretcher and stood watching them with his arms crossed. For the first time in a long while he raised his eyes and looked up. The sky was pale, and the pointed firs stood around the tarn like raised spears. Of course they would figure it out. He made himself a promise. They'd figure everything out.
Jacob Skarre, born and raised in Søgne in the mild Southland, had just turned 25. He had seen naked women plenty of times, but never as naked as the one by the tarn. It struck him just now, as he sat with Sejer in the car, that this one had made more of an impression than all the other corpses he had seen before. Maybe it was because she lay as if trying to conceal her nakedness, with her back to the path, head tucked down and knees drawn up. But they had found her anyway, and they had seen her nakedness. Turned her and rolled her over, pulled back her lips to look at her teeth, raised her eyelids. Took her temperature, as she lay on her stomach with her legs spread. As if she were a mare at auction.
"She was quite pretty, wasn't she?" he said, shaken.
Sejer didn't answer. But he was glad of the comment. He had found other young women, had heard other comments. They drove for a while in silence, staring at the road in front of them, but further in the distance they kept on seeing her naked body – the ripple of her backbone, the soles of her feet with a slightly redder skin, the calves with blonde hair on them – hovering above the asphalt like a mirage. Sejer had an odd feeling. This resembled nothing he had ever seen.
"You're on the night shift?"
Skarre cleared his throat. "Just till midnight. I'm doing a few hours for Ringstad. By the way, I heard you were thinking of taking a week's holiday – is that off now?"
"Looks that way."
He had forgotten all about it.
The missing persons list lay before him on the table.
Four names, two men, and two women, both born before 1960 and therefore not the woman they had found by Serpent Tarn. One was missing from the Central Hospital psychiatric ward, the other from a retirement home in the next town. "Height 155 centimetres, weight 45 kilos. Snow-white hair."
It was 6 p.m., and it might be hours before some anxious soul reported her missing. They would have to wait for the photos and the autopsy report, so there wasn't much that could be done until they had the woman's identity. He grabbed his leather jacket from the back of the chair and took the lift down to the first floor. Bowed gallantly to Mrs Brenningen at the front desk, recalling at the same moment that she was a widow and perhaps lived much the