The Black Path by Åsa Larsson Page B

his shiny pink skin, like a pig’s, and her thoughts bounced back to Inna Wattrang and her burned ankle.
    I must ring Pohjanen, she thought.
    Krister Eriksson put Tintin on the lead. She was dancing around his feet, whimpering with expectation.
    “She always gets so excited,” said Krister, disentangling himself from the lead. “You still have to hold her back, otherwise she searches a bit too quickly, and then she might miss something.”
    Krister Eriksson and Tintin went into the house alone. Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson plowed around the corner and looked in through the window.
    Anna-Maria Mella went and sat in her car and rang Lars Pohjanen. She told him about the missing cord.
    “Well?” she said.
    “The burn mark around her ankle could certainly be the result of a wire conducting electricity through her body,” said Pohjanen.
    “The end of a cord, split and wound around her ankle?”
    “Definitely. And you use the other end of the cord to transmit the electricity.”
    “Has she been tortured?”
    “Maybe. It could also be a game that got out of hand, of course. Not very common, but it has happened. There’s one more thing.”
    “Yes?”
    “There are traces of stickiness on her ankles and wrists. You should get the technicians to check the furniture in the house. She’s been taped, it could just be that her hands and feet were taped together. But she could have been bound to a piece of furniture, bedposts or a chair or…Just hang on.”
    It took a minute. Then she heard the doctor’s hoarse voice again.
    “I’ve just put my gloves on and I’m looking at her now,” he said. “There’s a tiny but distinct mark on her neck.”
    “The mark from the other part of the electric cable,” said Anna-Maria.
    “A lamp cord, you said?”
    “Mmm.”
    “Then there should be traces of copper where the epidermis has melted. I’ll take a tissue sample and do a histology test, then you’ll know for sure. But that’s probably what happened. Something certainly interrupted the rhythm of her heart. And she ended up in a state of shock. That would explain the fact that she’d chewed her tongue, and the marks of her own nails on her palms.”
    Sven-Erik Stålnacke knocked on the car window and pointed at the house.
    “I’ve got to go,” said Anna-Maria. “I’ll call you later.”
    She got out of the car.
    “Tintin’s found something,” said Sven-Erik.
    Krister Eriksson was standing in the kitchen with Tintin. She was tugging at the lead, barking and scrabbling madly at the floor.
    “She’s marking something there,” said Krister Eriksson, pointing to a spot on the kitchen floor between the sink and the stove. “I can’t see anything, but she seems convinced.”
    Anna-Maria looked at Tintin, who was now howling with frustration at not being allowed to get to her goal.
    The floor was covered with turquoise linoleum with an Oriental design. Anna-Maria walked over and looked closely at it. Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson accompanied her.
    “I can’t see anything,” said Anna-Maria.
    “Nope,” said Fred Olsson, shaking his head.
    “Could there be something underneath the floor covering?” wondered Anna-Maria.
    “There’s definitely something,” said Krister Eriksson; it was all he could do to hold on to Tintin.
    “Okay,” said Anna-Maria, checking her watch. “We’ve got time to have lunch at the tourist station while we’re waiting for the technicians.”
             
    By two-thirty in the afternoon the scene-of-crime team had taken up the linoleum floor covering. When Anna-Maria Mella, Sven-Erik Stålnacke and Fred Olsson got back to the house, it was lying in the hallway, rolled up and wrapped in paper.
    “Look at this,” said one of the technicians to Anna-Maria, pointing at a tiny nick in the wood that had been underneath the linoleum.
    In the little nick there was something brown that looked like dried blood.
    “That dog must have one hell of a