Europa Blues Read Online Free PDF Page B

all I’ve got for you.’
    Just then, they heard a shout from the hill. One of the forensic technicians was waving something he had fished out of a hole in the air. It looked like a wolverine turd.
    Paul Hjelm tried the phrase a few times. Wolverine turd. How many times had he said that in his life? Zero.
    ‘Probably a wolverine dick,’ Chavez whispered loudly.
    ‘Let’s just hope the wolverine wasn’t still in the hole,’ Hjelm half whispered back.
    As the technician struggled down the hill, Hjelm thought for a moment about association paths and their meanings. The technician made it over to his boss, who still had a stern look on his face. Brynolf Svenhagen took the object, twisting and turning it in his hands for a while before wandering over in the direction of Hjelm, Chavez and Qvarfordt. He held it out to old Qvarfordt, who peeped at it through inch-thick glasses and nodded.
    ‘Fantastic,’ was all he said.
    The stern Svenhagen reluctantly turned to his son-in-law and his equally detestable colleague. He held the object up for them.
    It was a finger.
    ‘Fantastic,’ Chavez said, without showing any desire to get a closer look at it. ‘Fingerprints,’ he added unnecessarily.
    Svenhagen turned on his heels. Chavez grabbed his flapping white arm and pulled it towards him. It looked like a foretaste of the football World Cup.
    ‘For God’s sake,’ Svenhagen said doggedly.
    ‘Can we go over the letters, Brunte? If it’s not too much to ask?’
    Brynolf Svenhagen nodded gravely.
    ‘We are policemen,’ Hjelm added helpfully.
    Svenhagen made yet another non-verbal expression of his distaste and then overcame himself. He led the two inspectors towards the edge of the wolverine enclosure, right next to the three-metre drop beneath the viewing area. The ground here was dark earth, and it was where the concentration of multicoloured fibres was greatest. They could also make out the only trace of blood – a darker spot which had been almost entirely soaked up by the earthy ground.
    ‘Tread carefully here,’ Svenhagen said.
    ‘How many wolverines were there?’ Hjelm asked.
    ‘Four.’
    ‘Four bestial creatures devoured a person and there’s hardly a trace of blood anywhere. Isn’t that strange?’
    Svenhagen paused and directed an icy-blue don’t-you-know-anything look at Hjelm.
    ‘It rained last night,’ he said, squatting down. ‘Fortunately, this is still here,’ he continued, pointing.
    In the ground directly beneath Brynolf Svenhagen’s index finger, Hjelm could make out some depressions. After some effort, he realised they were letters. Five of them. He worked his way through them.
    ‘Epivu?’ he said.
    ‘That’s what it looks like,’ Svenhagen confirmed. ‘Just don’t ask me what it means.’
    ‘Did he write it?’
    ‘We don’t know. The size of the letters is consistent with a human finger, I can say that much. And the number of fibres around here suggests that it might be where the actual … ingestion took place. If that’s the case, we might assume that our victim, with his hands and feet bound, wrote a last message. We’ve taken samples from the letters to see whether there’s any trace of blood or skin in the soil. Maybe that finger can help shed a little light on all of this.’
    ‘Have we got any idea at all about how he ended up here?’
    ‘No,’ Svenhagen replied. ‘Plenty of fingerprints on the fence, of course, but otherwise nothing. We’ll have to go through everything.’
    ‘If we assume he was the one who wrote “Epivu”, then he didn’t end up here without a head. How can a head disappear?’
    ‘There are several possibilities,’ Svenhagen replied, looking at Hjelm. Perhaps the man wasn’t the utter idiot he had previously assumed him to be. But Brynolf Svenhagen wasn’t someone who enjoyed having his preconceived notions overturned. If possible, that made him even harsher. He continued sternly: ‘The wolverines might simply have eaten it. It’s