Unspoken (26 page)

Suddenly a faint singing could be heard in the church, and everyone turned their heads to look back toward the entrance. The tones of the traditional Lucia song grew louder, and the white-clad figure of Lucia appeared in the doorway. Slowly she walked forward, wearing a long white dress. On her head was a wreath with candles. Behind her walked the brides-maids, two by two, with tinsel wrapped around their waists. They each held a lit candle. Behind them came the star boys, wearing paper cones on their heads.

The glow of the candles made it a magical spectacle, as the young people dressed in white walked forward, singing in their clear voices. A star boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven sang so beautifully in a loud and lovely voice that Knutas felt tears fill his eyes. In the middle of the solo, his cell phone began vibrating in the inside pocket of his jacket. Cautiously he pulled out the phone and held it up to his ear. It was hard to make out what Karin Jacobsson was saying on the other end. He managed to squeeze past the other people sitting on the pew and went out to the entryway.

“This better be important. I’m here watching my daughter in the Lucia celebration at the cathedral,” he said.

“Fanny Jansson was found dead out on Lojsta Heath.”

It took almost an hour to reach the site. Jacobsson and Knutas took the 142 down to Hejde and then headed out to Lojsta Heath. Old limestone farm buildings stood at the turnoff into the woods. A flock of black sheep with shaggy winter coats was crowded together at the fence, staring at them as they drove past.

A police car was waiting to show them the way. They bumped over the unpaved forest road, which was normally used only by tractors. The snow on the ground between the trees was untouched, and there was no wind. The low mixed forest had dense undergrowth, with withered ferns, heather, and lingonberry bushes. Here and there a few remaining berries shone bright red among the snow-covered hillocks. At the end of the road the forest opened into a clearing where another police car was parked. A short distance away, near an embankment, crime scene tape had been put up. The air was cold and fresh.

Fanny’s body lay in a hollow beneath several thick spruce trees covered with heavy green moss.

The site was relatively protected. The girl was fully dressed in dark riding pants, a short quilted jacket that was unbuttoned, and a brown woolen sweater that was torn at the neck. Her face was dark against the snow. Her beautiful long hair, which was spread out on the ground, seemed strangely alive. Her eyes were wide open, staring up at the sky. When Knutas took a closer look, he noticed that there were red specks in the whites of her eyes. Dark bruises covered her throat.

Her body had been found by a woman who was out riding. She had fallen off her horse when it was startled by a fox. The horse had wandered off and led her to the clearing. The woman had hurt her back in the fall, and she was also in such a state of shock that she had been taken to the hospital in Visby.

On their way back to the city, Knutas’s cell phone started ringing. The third call was from Johan.

“What happened?” said the familiar voice on the phone.

“Fanny Jansson has been found dead,” said Knutas wearily.

Jacobsson was driving the car so he could devote all his attention to answering the journalist’s questions.

“Where?”

“In a wooded area out on Lojsta Heath.”

“When?”

“At eight thirty this morning.”

“Who found her?”

“A woman who was out horseback riding.”

“Was she murdered?”

“All indications are that she was, yes.”

“How?”

“I can’t go into that right now.”

“How long has she been there?”

“That’s something the ME will have to determine. I can’t answer any more questions. We’re going to hold a press conference later today.”

“When?”

“Sometime this afternoon. You’ll have time to get here.”

Johan and Peter landed right after lunchtime at Visby airport. The cab ride into town didn’t take long.

Police headquarters in Visby had changed radically since they were last there. The ice blue metallic facade had been replaced with a soft beige stucco. The rooms were now bright and airy, and they had been decorated in a typically Nordic style that was very tranquil, with natural materials and muted shades of white and blue.

The old and rather shabby room in which they had previously held press conferences was nothing but a memory. The journalists were now shown into a spacious room on the ground floor with rows of stainless steel chairs facing a podium. Thin curtains hung in front of the windows that faced the drab wall of another building. The press had already started setting up their microphones at the podium. Johan counted four reporters from competing TV networks.

He was grateful that he had been entrusted with the task of reporting for all the news programs on Swedish TV. There hadn’t even been any discussion about it. After Johan’s highly praised reporting on the homicides last summer, the national editors had no doubts: Johan Berg was the man for the job. He was pleased that his report would be aired on all the news programs that evening. He felt a great satisfaction knowing that he would be reaching so many viewers and have such an impact.

He took a seat in the front row while Peter set up his camera. His colleagues from the local media greeted him. He recognized some of them from press conferences that summer.

A moment later Anders Knutas, Karin Jacobsson, Martin Kihlgård, and Lars Norrby all took seats on the podium.

“Welcome,” Knutas began. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas, and I’m in charge of this investigation.”

He introduced the others and then went on.

“As you already know, the body of Fanny Jansson was found in a remote wooded area on Lojsta Heath. Her body was found around eight thirty this morning by an individual who was out horseback riding. Fanny Jansson was murdered. The injuries that she sustained could not have been self-inflicted, so there is no question of suicide, as we had previously speculated.”

“What were her injuries?” asked Johan.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” replied Knutas curtly.

He sighed a bit. In spite of the fact that he had barely started on what he had intended to say, the questions had already begun. A number of hands were waving in the air. He had a hard time dealing with the eternal impatience of journalists.

“We’ll answer your questions in a moment,” he said, “but first I want to present some of the facts.”

He had no intention of allowing them to run the show. The reporters lowered their hands.

“The body had been lying at the site for some time. We don’t yet know how long. Fanny Jansson was fully dressed when she was found, and there are no signs of sexual assault. The crime scene has been cordoned off, and the area is being searched by our technicians. An ME will be here tomorrow to examine the body. The area will be kept under guard until the body can be moved and the technical investigation has been completed. That is all I have to say at the moment. Do any of you want to add anything?”

He gave his colleagues an inquiring look, but they shook their heads.

“Then we’ll take questions.”

“How long has the body been there?”

“It could be a matter of weeks, meaning the entire time that Fanny has been missing. But we’re not at all sure about that. We’ll have to wait for the ME’s report.”

“Was any sort of weapon found?”

“I have no comment.”

“Can you say anything about how she was killed?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Did the perpetrator leave any clues?”

“I can’t divulge that, out of consideration for the ongoing investigation.”

“Does Fanny Jansson have any connection to the place where she was found?” asked Johan.

“Not as far as we know.”

“Was she murdered at the site, or was she moved there?”

“We have reason to believe that she was killed somewhere else and that her body was later moved to the wooded area.”

“What makes you think that?”

“As I said earlier, I can’t divulge anything about any evidence or other information found at the crime scene,” said Knutas with forced composure.

“Who found the body?”

“A local woman. I don’t want to give her name.”

“Are there any witnesses?”

“It’s possible. We haven’t yet started interviewing anyone who lives in the area. But we’re going to appeal to the public for information. We want to talk to anyone who may have seen or heard anything suspicious, especially during the last few weeks, in connection with the place where the body was found. No information will be considered too insignificant. Everything is of interest.”

Knutas gave them the number for the police hotline and the press conference was over.

That evening Johan presented live reports on all the news broadcasts, giving the television viewers the latest update. He and Peter had a late supper at their hotel and then went to bed.

Again Emma didn’t answer her phone when Johan tried to call her. It had now been more than a week since they had last talked to each other. Her friend Viveka had explained to him that Emma was ill and wanted to be left alone. He would just have to wait until she decided to call.

The ME was expected on Gotland the following day, but that evening Sohlman was able to present to the investigative team a preliminary report along with some visual images.

“It’s difficult to say how long she has been lying there, but her body is quite well preserved, as you can see, as a result of the cold weather. The perpetrator also covered the body with moss, so no animal got to her. Fanny was fully dressed when she was found, but her sweater was torn at the neck. Her clothing will be examined more closely when the ME arrives, but we’re leaving her body where it is until he gets here tomorrow. I can make an educated guess and say that she died from lack of oxygen. Do you see the red specks in the whites of her eyes and the bruises on her neck? Without going out on a limb, we can assume that she was strangled.

“She apparently offered some resistance, since her sweater was torn. I’m hoping that the perpetrator has left some evidence on her clothing—skin particles or saliva, for instance. The body was protected by the woods and the moss. It was also lying in a hollow, so we hope we can find some traces from the killer. We’ve taken scrapings from under her fingernails. There are skin particles that most likely came from him. Everything is being sent to SCL, as usual.

“When it comes to the location of the body, we can conclude that she was probably killed elsewhere and was then dumped in the woods. There are no traces of blood or anything else that might indicate the murder was committed at the site. We haven’t yet been able to examine the body, but we did discover one thing. She has cuts on her wrists.”

Sohlman clicked through the photographs until he found the pictures of Fanny Jansson’s hands. Cuts were clearly visible on both of her wrists.

“Someone has cut her here. She probably did it herself.”

“So she did try to kill herself, after all,” exclaimed Norrby.

“Well, I’m not so sure about that,” Sohlman objected. “I think it’s more likely that she was one of those girls who cut themselves. It’s not all that uncommon among teenage girls who are depressed. She had cut herself in other places as well, for instance behind her ears. The cuts are superficial, so there’s no question of a real suicide attempt. It’s possible that there are more cuts hidden under her clothing.”

“Why would she do that?” asked Wittberg.

“Girls who cut themselves do it because they don’t know how to handle their fears,” Jacobsson explained. “When they cut themselves, all their anxiety collects in that one spot. It’s also possible that they experience the pain and the blood as liberating. It’s something concrete and controllable. The moment they cut themselves, all their other anxieties disappear; their fear becomes concentrated in the part of their body that is being subjected to pain.”

“But why would she cut herself in such odd places?”

“Probably so that it wouldn’t be visible.”

Knutas switched on the lights and looked at his colleagues with a serious expression on his face.

“We now have two murders to investigate. The question is whether there is any connection between them. What does a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl have in common with an alcoholic man in his sixties?”

“As I see it, there are two obvious connections,” said Kihlgård. “First, alcoholism. Fanny’s mother drinks, and Dahlström was an alcoholic. Second is the racetrack. Dahlström bet on the horses, and Fanny worked at a stable at the trotting track.”

“Those are two reasonable connections,” said Knutas. “Is there anything else that might not be as obvious? Anyone?”

No one replied.

“All right,” he said. “That’s all for now. Both lines of inquiry need to be explored without bias.”

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14

It felt as if the dawn would never come on that cold December morning. Knutas was having oatmeal with his wife and children in the kitchen. They had lit candles, which made their shared breakfast a bit more pleasant. Lina and the kids had baked saffron rolls while he was out at the site where Fanny was found. He was going to need them. Today he had to pick up the ME at the airport and then drive back out to the forest clearing. He put on a wool sweater and got out his warmest winter jacket. The frost of the past few weeks was holding on.

The children were upset and worried, and they wanted to talk about Fanny’s murder. They had been greatly affected by the death, since Fanny wasn’t much older than they were and they knew her by sight. Knutas ran the palm of his hand over their cheeks as they stood at the front door on their way to school.

In the car on his way to the airport, he felt a cold sweat come over him, and he was overcome by such nausea that he had to pull over and stop for a moment. Everything swam before his eyes, and he felt a tight pressure in his chest. Occasionally he suffered from panic attacks, a form of anxiety, but it had been a long time since the last one. He opened the car door and tried to calm his ragged breathing. The images of Fanny’s body, combined with his worries about his own children, had apparently brought on this attack. With his type of work, it was impossible to protect his kids from all the shit he was forced to deal with: drunkenness, drugs, and violence. As his children were growing up, society seemed to be getting more and more brutal. It was probably worse in the big cities, but even here on Gotland the change was noticeable.