Part 10 (2/2)

She can't help smiling when she looks at the jar, and the cloudy liquid, the particles circling round.

The memory flashes through her, and her free hand goes involuntarily to one of the scars he left on her face, the deep cut just below her eyebrow.

Sometimes she thinks he must have seen something special in her, that that was why he spared her life, and sometimes she thinks that he simply considered death too easy he wanted her to live with the lies he had made her believe, in the h.e.l.l he had created for her.

She'll never know.

The only thing that is certain is that he chose not to kill her, and she chose to kill him.

She thinks of the darkness and the deep snow as she walks down the empty corridor of the Forensic Medicine Department.

'I hit him,' she whispers to herself.

She moistens her mouth, and in her mind's eye sees herself firing and hitting him in the neck, arm and chest.

'Three shots to the chest ...'

She changed her magazine and shot him again when he'd fallen into the rapids, she held the flare up and saw the cloud of blood spread out around him. She ran along the bank, shooting at the dark object, and carried on firing even though the body had been carried off by the current.

I know I killed him, she thinks.

But they never found his body. The police sent divers under the ice, and checked both banks with sniffer-dogs.

Outside the office is a neat metal sign bearing his name and t.i.tle: Nils hlen, Professor of Forensic Medicine.

The door is open, and the slight figure is sitting at his neat desk reading the newspaper with a pair of latex gloves on his hands. He's wearing a white polo-neck s.h.i.+rt under his white coat, and his pilot's sungla.s.ses flash as he looks up.

'You're tired, Saga,' he says amiably.

'A bit.'

'Beautiful, though.'

'No.'

He puts the newspaper down, pulls off the gloves and notices the quizzical look in her eyes.

'To save getting ink on my fingers,' he says, as though it were obvious.

Saga doesn't answer, just sets the jar down in front of him. The chopped-off finger moves slowly in the alcohol, through a cloud of wispy particles. A swollen and half-rotten index finger.

'So you think that this finger belonged to ...'

'Jurek Walter,' Saga says curtly.

'How did you get hold of it?' Nils hlen asks.

He picks up the jar and holds it up to the light. The finger falls against the inside of the gla.s.s as if it were pointing at him.

'I've spent more than a year looking ...'

To start with Saga Bauer borrowed sniffer-dogs and walked up and down both banks of the river, from Bergasjn all the way to Hysingsvik on the Baltic coast. She followed the sh.o.r.eline, combed the beaches, studied the currents of Norrfjrden all the way down to Vsterfladen, and made her way out to every island, talking to anyone who went fis.h.i.+ng in the area.

'Go on,' hlen said.

She looks up and meets his relaxed gaze behind the s.h.i.+mmering surface of his sungla.s.ses. His latex gloves are lying on the desk in front of him, inside out, in two little heaps. One is quivering slightly, either from a draught or because of the rubber contracting.

'This morning I was walking along the beach out at Hgmars,' she explains. 'I've been there before, but I gave it another go ... the terrain on the north side is quite tricky, a lot of forest on the cliffs at the headland.'

She thinks of the old man walking towards her from the other direction with an armful of silver-grey driftwood.

'You've gone quiet again.'

'Sorry ... I b.u.mped into a retired church warden ... he said he'd seen me the last time I was there, and asked what I was looking for.'

Saga went with him to the inhabited part of the island. Less than forty people live there. The warden's house is tucked behind the white chapel and freestanding bell tower.

'He said he found a dead body on the sh.o.r.e towards the end of April ...'

'A whole body?' hlen asks in a low voice.

'No, just the torso and one arm.'

'No head?'

'No one can live without a torso,' she says, and can hear how agitated her voice sounds.

'No,' hlen replies calmly.

'The warden said the body must have been in the water all winter, because it was badly swollen, and very heavy.'

'They look terrible,' hlen said.

'He brought the body back through the forest in his wheelbarrow, and laid it on the floor of the tool-shed behind the chapel ... but the smell drove his dog mad, so he had to take it to the old crematorium.'

'He cremated it?'

She nods. The crematorium had been abandoned for decades, but in the middle of the overgrown foundations was a sooty brick oven with a chimney. The warden used to burn rubbish in the oven, so he knew it worked.

'Why didn't he call the police?' hlen asked.

Saga thinks of the way the churchwarden's house stank of fried food and old clothes. His neck was streaked with dirt and the bottles of home-brew in the fridge had dirty marks from his fingers.

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