The Black Path by Åsa Larsson Page A

thought, walking back into the hallway.
    On a white bureau in the hall stood an old lamp. It would have looked kitsch anywhere else, but it fitted in well here, thought Anna-Maria. The base was made of porcelain. It had a painted landscape on it that looked as if it might be from the German Alps, with a mountain in the background and a magnificent stag in the foreground. The shade was the color of cognac, with a fringe. The switch was just below the lightbulb fitting.
    Anna-Maria tried to switch it on. When it didn’t work, she discovered that it wasn’t because the bulb had gone, but because the electric cord was missing.
    In the base of the lamp there was just a hole where the cord had been.
    What have they done with it? she wondered.
    Maybe they’d bought the lamp at a flea market or in an antique shop, and it was already like that. Perhaps they’d put it on the bureau thinking they’d fix it soon, it could stand there for the time being.
    Anna-Maria had thousands of things like that at home. Things they were going to fix any year now. But in the end, you just got used to the defects. The front of the dishwasher, for example. It had been made in the same style as the kitchen cupboards, but it had come loose about a hundred years ago and now the door of the dishwasher was too light for the spring. The whole family had got used to loading and unloading the dishwasher with one foot on the door so that it wouldn’t close by itself. She did the same thing in other people’s houses without even thinking about it. Robert’s sister always laughed at her when Anna-Maria was helping load their machine.
    Perhaps they’d just moved the lamp and the cord had got caught between the wall and a piece of furniture, and been pulled out. But that could be dangerous. If the cord was still plugged in, but not attached to the lamp.
    She thought about the fire risk and then she thought about Gustav, her three-year-old, and about all the plastic covers on the sockets at home to keep them child-safe.
    She got a fleeting picture in her head of Gustav when he was eight months old, and crawling everywhere. What a nightmare. A plug in a socket with a broken cord lying on the floor. The copper wires clearly visible inside the plastic covering. And Gustav, whose main method of investigating the world around him was putting things in his mouth. She quickly pushed the picture aside.
    Then it struck her. Electric shock. She’d seen several during her career. God, there was that guy who’d died five years ago. She’d gone along to confirm that it was an accident. He’d been standing on the draining board in his bare feet, fiddling with a ceiling light. The skin on the soles of his feet had been badly burned.
    Inna Wattrang had a circular burn around her ankle.
    You could imagine someone ripping an ordinary cord out of a lamp, thought Anna-Maria. Opening it up and removing the plastic covering and winding one of the copper wires around someone’s ankle.
    She flung the door open and shouted to her colleagues. They came striding quickly through the deep snow.
    “Bloody hell!” she yelled. “She died here! I’m sure of it! Call in Tintin and Krister Eriksson.”

    Krister Eriksson, inspector and dog handler, arrived at the scene almost an hour after his colleagues had rung him. They’d been lucky; he was often out and about on duty with Tintin.
    Tintin was a black Alsatian bitch. An excellent tracker dog, good at finding dead bodies. Eighteen months earlier she’d found a murdered priest in Nedre Vuolusjärvi; someone had wound an iron chain around his body, then sunk it in the lake.
    Krister Eriksson looked like some kind of alien. His face had been badly burned in an accident when he was a youngster. He had no nose, just two holes in his face. His ears looked like a mouse’s ears. He had no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. His eyes looked very strange, because his eyelids had been reconstructed using plastic surgery.
    Anna-Maria looked at