IT WASN’T THE first time Fabian had smelled the sweet, sickly odour of decay, far from it. During his first few years as a police officer in Stockholm, he’d regularly responded to calls from people who had reacted to corpse stench in their stairwells, particularly in the summer. In this case, it was remarkable how faint the smell was. Particularly considering that most signs pointed to Evert Jonsson having lain undiscovered for over a month.
That it was the hottest time of the year only compounded the mystery. The stench should have been overwhelming enough to make the neighbours notice and call the police two weeks ago at the latest. Instead, it had taken until today, and the reason hadn’t been the smell but a letter from the local power company addressed to Evert Jonsson that one of his neighbours had found on her doormat when she went to fetch the morning paper.
If I were you, I’d check on Mr Jonsson next door, someone had scrawled across the envelope. And after that, I might possibly pick up the phone and call the police.
The reason the smell was so faint became obvious the moment he and Klippan stepped into the living room and saw the six-and-a-half-foot-long, cylindrical plastic cocoon in the middle of the room.
Klippan stopped halfway into the room and seemed incapable of doing anything other than shake his head. Fabian walked the last few steps over to the dark green plastic tent alone and squatted down to try to see what was in it. But although the sun had climbed high enough by then to shine straight in through the window, he couldn’t see through the plastic.
He turned to Klippan, who had clearly read his mind and was already holding out his Swiss army knife, with which Fabian cut a three-inch hole in the plastic.
Even though the hole was relatively small, the putrid stench hit him with such force he instinctively backed away, trying to avoid the worst of it. But it was too late. In seconds, the air in the room was so thick with the foetid smell, it was a good thing he’d skipped breakfast.
Klippan had managed to pull on a face mask and tossed him one, too, and although his nostrils still prickled and itched, it did take the edge off.
At least a couple of dozen white maggots had already crawled out of the hole and dropped onto the floor, where they were now fanning out in search of more food. How they had got into the seemingly hermetically sealed plastic cocoon in the first place was anyone’s guess. Granted, bacteria existed everywhere, but maggots could only appear where flies had laid eggs, and so far they hadn’t seen or heard a single fly, though it was surely only a matter of minutes now before the stench attracted swarms of them.
He leaned in and peered through the opening in the plastic but couldn’t see much beyond a pair of shins and feet mottled every shade of green, red and purple. In places, the decomposition was so far advanced the skin had turned black. Something greenish brown was growing on the inside of the plastic walls, and a viscous brown mixture of moisture and corpse juice had pooled at the bottom.
‘Talk to me,’ Klippan said. ‘What can you see?’
‘Pretty much what you might imagine. It’s too soon to tell if this is Evert Jonsson, but it’s certainly someone.’ Fabian stuck the knife into the hole and cut a three-foot horizontal slit, which made a large section of the plastic sheet curl outward, creating a large window into the cocoon.
Klippan took a step closer, squatted down and studied the body, which was on its back with its arms and neck tied to a thick metal pipe that ran through the cocoon like an axle, connected at each end to what appeared to be bicycle wheels.
‘No, this is too much.’ Klippan shook his head. ‘Not another case. Not when we’ve finally managed to wrap up two investigations and were about to focus all our resources on the Ica murder.’
The parts of the body not covered in maggots were dark and swollen to varying degrees – the eyeballs, for instance, and the tongue, which was too engorged to fit inside the mouth cavity. But the stomach was the worst, so distended it looked like it might burst and release its contents at any moment.
‘If you have to kill someone,’ Klippan went on, seemingly unable to stop shaking his head, ‘why not just get it done, like in the old days? Why do they have to make it so sick and bloody elaborate? Like that.’ He pointed to one of the victim’s wrists, where the strap had ripped off most of the skin, revealing parts of the skeleton. ‘Do you get how hard he must have struggled to free himself?’ He sighed. ‘Honestly, I don’t know how we’re going to do this. Another case on our desks will be the end of us. And if you ask me, this looks at least as complicated as the rest of them.’
Fabian nodded, though he was convinced Klippan couldn’t be more wrong. This wasn’t another case. In all likeliness, it was connected in the same way as all the other cases.