Chapter 13
Soon Kjell and Bill were being led in a broad circle around the car. Evidence on the ground was marked with numbered black flags.
“Here.” Gerd slowly lowered a creaking knee to the ground next to a few bloodstains the size of one-krona coins. “We’ll start here.”
Kjell blanched. “Is that Mikael’s?”
“We don’t know, but we’d like to find out.” Gerd waved over the dog, who wagged his big tail eagerly. “Shall we try it?”
“If there’s blood to track, Bill will find it,” Kjell said, instantly behaving as though he were at the center of the investigation.
Soon the two officers were trailing the old man and his dog, who kept his nose to the cold ground. His tail in the air, a flag of concentration.
“Here.” Kjell pointed at the slope. “We need to go up into this grove.”
There had been a thaw about a week earlier and most of the snow had melted, but then the cold returned. Here and there, the forest protected a patch of white; hard, crusty slabs.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” Kjell said. “There’ve been wild boar around recently. Do you hunt?”
“I don’t,” Gerd said. “But my husband used to.”
“I do,” Siri said. “But it’s been a while.”
Gerd and Kjell stared at her in surprise. Maybe she was kidding; Siri didn’t offer any more information. Instead she stopped next to a patch of snow the size of a dinner plate. In it was a footprint.
“What size shoes do you wear, Kjell?”
“Forty-one.”
“This one is a forty-three, at least. Larger, I’d say.” Siri compared it to her own boot. “Whoever was walking here has gigantic feet, compared to mine.”
Who doesn’t? Gerd thought, sticking another black evidence flag in the ground. Not far away, in a smaller patch of snow, they found an identical print.
“By the way, Kjell, what did you decide to do?” Gerd asked. “About the money, I mean.”
“I withdrew it all last week, and so did Frans Ljunggren. And Bengt Lindell too.”
“That must be an awful lot of money.”
“Oh yes, quite a bit.”
“I don’t want to know where you’re keeping it. But I hope it’s under lock and key, at least—”
“I’ve got a double lock on my front door, and I sleep with the shotgun next to my bed,” Kjell interrupted.
“…in a safe, for instance,” Gerd concluded wearily.
“With a shotgun around, it’s perfectly fine in the mattress.”
Siri kept her mouth shut.
The forest gave way to a crop field, and Bill stepped out into the frozen clearing nose-first, but then he returned to the edge of the woods and sat down with an excited gleam in his big eyes. A cold wind blew in over the land.
“All right. End of the line. The trail probably keeps going a ways into the field, but Bill can’t follow it any farther. And if he can’t do it, it must be pretty hard.”
Bill waited for a signal. When none came, he stood up and looked pleadingly back and forth between Gerd and Kjell, his tail wagging gently.
“What were you doing between twelve thirty and two thirty last night?” Gerd asked.
“Me?” Kjell raised an eyebrow. “I was sleeping, obviously.”
“Gerd.” Siri was staring at the ground a few meters away. “Here. More prints. But they’re going in the other direction. From the car he goes down there, then comes up here. Then he goes back to the car. And he’s not alone. Look at that, the print next to it. It’s smaller. See?”
Gerd nodded. She squinted across the field again. “There.” She pointed. “That house, over there. On the other side of this field. That must be where he was headed. To the Erikssons’ house. And then he comes back.”
“What’s their son’s name again?” Siri asked.
“Sander,” Gerd said. “Sander Eriksson.” She paused. “Maybe you could talk to them.”
“We have company,” Kjell informed them, sounding almost amused.
Reporters. They parked alongside the cordons and climbed out, hungry, cameras and microphones in hand. One of them dropped his notebook. The wind caught it and it sailed across the field. The reporter ran after it and the man with the camera followed. It looked like he was laughing.