The Black Path Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the ice. But nobody in the arks close by had seen anything. She and her colleagues had asked around up at the mountain center, woken up the tourists who were there for the skiing and kept the people in the bar behind. Nobody could tell them anything about the woman. The owners of the ark where she’d been lying had also been traced. They had seemed genuinely shocked, and didn’t recognize the picture of the dead woman.
    Anna-Maria Mella tried to come up with likely scenarios. Obviously it’s possible for a person to go out running along snowmobile tracks while wearing makeup. Or maybe she was running along Norgevägen. A car stops. It’s somebody she knows. Somebody who asks if she’d like a lift. And then? She gets in the car and somebody hits her over the head? Or she goes along and takes a sauna, gets raped, fights back, gets stabbed.
    Or it might have been somebody she didn’t know. She’s running along Norgevägen. A man drives past her in a car. He turns around a little way ahead. Maybe he runs into her with the car and drags her into the backseat; that would make her easy to handle. And not a soul in sight. He drives her to a cottage…
    Anna-Maria turned her pillow over and told herself to try and get back to sleep.
    Maybe she wasn’t raped, she thinks. Maybe she was jogging along in the snowmobile tracks on the lake. Met some bloody lunatic with his body full of drugs and a knife in his pocket. There are people like that everywhere. Up on the marshes too. Every woman’s nightmare. Just happening to come across the wrong man at the very moment when the madness strikes.
    Stop it, she says to herself. No fully formed images in your head before you actually know anything.
    She needs to talk to the medical examiner, Lars Pohjanen. He’d traveled up from Luleå the previous evening. The question was whether they’d managed to do anything with the frozen body.
    Staying in bed was completely pointless. And why should she go back to sleep, anyway? She wasn’t tired, after all. Her head was stuffed full of adrenaline pumping, brain cells playing guessing games.
    She got up and got dressed. She was used to doing it in the dark, so she was quick and silent.

 
     
     
    I t was five past five when Anna-Maria Mella parked her red Ford Escort outside the hospital. The Securitas guard let her into the culvert that ran beneath the building. The ventilation pipes humming on the ceiling. Deserted corridors. A scruffy vinyl floor and the sound of automatic doors opening ahead of her. She met a caretaker, whizzing along on a kick scooter, otherwise everything was peaceful and quiet.
    The lights were out in the autopsy room, but in the smoking room Lars Pohjanen, the medical examiner, was lying on the battered 1970s sofa just as she’d hoped. He was lying with his back to the room, his thin body moving up and down in time with his laborious breathing.
    A few years ago he had undergone an operation for throat cancer. His technician, Anna Granlund, took care of more and more of his work. She sawed open the chest cavity, lifted out organs, took the necessary samples, put the organs back, sutured stomachs, carried Pohjanen’s bags, answered the telephone, put the most important calls through, which in principle meant those from his wife, made sure his lab coat was washed between shifts and wrote up his reports.
    By the side of the sofa, his battered clogs stood neatly side by side. Once upon a time they’d been white. In Anna-Maria’s imagination, Anna Granlund tucked the medical examiner in with the checked blanket that lay over him, placed his clogs tidily beside the sofa, removed the cigarette from his mouth and turned the light out before she went home.
    Anna-Maria took off her jacket and settled down in an armchair that matched the sofa.
    Thirty years’ collected dust, and completely permeated with smoke, she thought, pulling the jacket over her like a blanket. Nice.
    She fell asleep at once.
    Half an hour later she