KLIPPAN, LILJA, AND MOLANDER were sitting around the table in silence, waiting for Tuvesson. The investigation had been going on for more than a week now, and the lack of sleep was starting to wear on them. No one had any energy to waste on words; instead they took the opportunity to close their eyes. The silence was finally broken by Klippan’s ringing phone. He glanced at it quickly, but then closed his eyes again.
“Aren’t you going to answer?” Molander said, but Klippan didn’t even look in his direction.
After a while, the caller hung up. Molander’s phone started ringing a few seconds later.
“Yes, this is Ingvar Molander. I see... Sure, no problem.” He handed the phone to Klippan. “It’s Berit.”
Klippan heaved a long sigh and took the phone. “Hi, dear... Because I’m at work, in the middle of a meeting... Yes, he’s working too and if he had known it was you he wouldn’t have answered, either.” Klippan shot Molander a look. “No, dear, I don’t have time right now. Did you check to make sure it isn’t just a blown fuse?”
Tuvesson entered with a travel mug in one hand.
“No, it’s not difficult at all,” Klippan continued, rolling his eyes. “Just check to see if the little red metal disks are still there or not. They’re not? Anyway, I have to go... Molander needs his phone.”
“No, I’m fine,” Molander said, receiving a threatening look from Klippan.
“Can’t you ask the neighbour or something? Bye.” Klippan hung up, sighed in relief, and handed Molander his phone. “Thanks so much.”
“No problem.”
“Shall we get going?” Tuvesson said. “As you know, we have another victim.”
“Have we identified the body?” Lilja asked.
“Her name is Ingela Ploghed, and she’s forty-four.”
“Is? Does that mean she’s still alive?” Molander wondered.
Tuvesson nodded, taking a sip of her coffee. “She’s being kept under sedation for the time being. As far as I understand, she’s in critical condition. She was found in Ramlösa Brunnspark around eight o’clock this morning, without any clothing on. She was seriously hypothermic and she’d lost a lot of blood.”
“Had she been stabbed?” Klippan asked.
“No, that’s the strange thing. She had no obvious external wounds — the blood was coming from her genitals.”
“Do we know why?” Molander asked.
“Not yet, but I’m going over to meet with the doctor as soon as we’re finished here.”
“Ploghed... Wasn’t she in the same class as everyone else?” Lilja asked.
Tuvesson nodded and walked over to the enlarged class photo to point at one of the girls. “This is her.”
“Do we have a more recent picture?” Klippan wondered.
“I was hoping you could find one.”
“What do we know about her?” asked Lilja.
“Not much at this point, except that she lived alone — no children or husband,” Klippan said, browsing through his notes. “In 2002 she had her stomach pumped after overdosing on sleeping pills in a suicide attempt.”
“If she survives this attack, we’ll have a witness for the first time, which is exactly what we need,” Tuvesson said, circling Ingela Ploghed’s face and marking it with a question mark. She looked at the photograph, her eyes roaming from student to student until she came to Fabian Risk. “I stopped by to see Risk this morning.”
“And how is the private eye?” Klippan asked.
“He’s probably going to be stuck in bed for a little while longer.”
“Did you ask him if...”
“Yes, and he couldn’t think of any other suspect besides Claes Mällvik, but he had a theory.” Tuvesson turned to face the others. “He thinks the entire crime scene was somehow staged to depict the killer and his motive.” She took out one of the pictures of the human-shaped moss under the glass plate and held it up for everyone to see. “I think he was suggesting that the impression is the perpetrator’s self-portrait.”
Klippan burst out laughing. “Wow! What kind of drugs do they have him on? It must be something stronger than Tylenol.”
None of the others laughed, and Klippan soon grew quiet as well. A resigned silence took over. There seemed to be a collective realization that the perpetrator was not just a few steps ahead of them — he’d lapped them. Tuvesson’s eyes wandered aimlessly among the pictures on the wall, which ranged from Jörgen’s sawed-off hands on the shower floor to the half-metre sun lens to the moss in the shape of a human. She felt tired and worn out, and was well aware that it showed, but she was too exhausted to care. All she was worried about was making sure they couldn’t see that she had accepted defeat. Deep down she had given up hope that they would ever solve the case in front of them, even though hopelessness was a mortal sin in her line of work and she would never admit it. She had always believed in her team and had felt absolutely certain that they would figure it out in the end; after all, they had succeeded in solving most of the cases assigned to them. But right now she completely lacked trust in her own and the others’ abilities — a lack of trust that would bring total destruction on the rest of their work if she allowed her doubt to show.
On her way in to the police station, she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about how she would eventually have to make the decision to close the investigation. She knew she would spend the rest of her life looking back on this case as the most abject failure of her career. It would be her fault that they never fulfilled their objective; she was the one who had made the fatal error of removing Fabian Risk from the case. She had even toyed with the idea of bringing him back on board, but decided that would be tantamount to declaring the rest of the team incompetent. All she could do now was live with the consequences and hope for the best.
“I don’t know how you’re feeling,” she said, mostly to break the silence, “but this is the most difficult and frightening case I’ve ever worked on, and it feels like we’re still so far from even getting close to solving it. But I don’t believe we are so far away. I’m sure that we’re closing in on him.” She looked into Lilja’s, Molander’s, Klippan’s eyes in turn. “However, we have to be prepared to think outside the box if we’re going to have even the smallest chance of solving this case. There are no dumb ideas anymore. Fabian’s suggestion that the moss could be a self-portrait might be the key to understanding the killer and discovering his motive.” She let her words sink in.
“Are we even sure it’s a man?” Lilja asked.
“No. As things stand it could just as easily be a female perpetrator.”
“Speaking of thinking outside the box,” said Molander. “Has anyone followed up on Link’s idea about the graffiti at Fredriksdal School?”
“Come on, that was almost thirty years ago!” Lilja said. “The school must have been renovated several times since then.”
“Apparently not,” Klippan said. “According to Link, the school is set to undergo its first true renovation next summer, so there’s a chance his theory could be true. How do we know for sure?”
“I suggest you go over to Fredriksdal and take a look,” said Tuvesson. “It seems like we don’t have anything to lose.”
Klippan nodded mutely.
“Irene, you’re coming with me. Ingvar, go to Ramlösa Brunnspark to investigate our new crime scene.”
They all gulped the last of the coffee from their mugs and stood up.
“There’s one thing we haven’t discussed,” Lilja said. “Jörgen and Glenn, the two class bullies, were the first victims. But now we’ve added Claes and this Ingela person to the list. How do they fit in? Does that mean everyone in the class is a potential victim?”
Tuvesson didn’t know how to respond. The same thought had occurred to her, but she had dismissed it, perhaps because it felt as frightening as it was impossible to answer. Or maybe she was just too tired.
“I suppose we ought to put everyone under police protection,” said Klippan.
“We don’t have the resources,” Tuvesson said. “We already have four men stationed at the hospital with Risk and Ploghed, and we’ll have four more working the next shift because they need twenty-four-hour security. I’ll call Malmö and see if they can help us out.” Deep down she knew that they wouldn’t be able to spare enough men. There was only one form of protection they could offer — capturing the killer.