The Demon of Dakar - Kjell Eriksson [27]
Lindell gave him a long look. Sammy shot her an amused glance but kept his mouth closed.
“Anyone reported missing?”
“Nada,” Sammy Nilsson said. “I’ve checked the records six months back. But I’ve put a notice on the Web. We’ll see what that brings.”
If only the dead could speak, Lindell thought and smiled.
“I don’t think he was a regular working stiff,” Sammy said.
“You’re thinking of his hands?”
Sammy nodded.
“One of his thumbnails was black and blue,” Lindell said.
“Which can happen to the manager of a golf course,” Ottosson said.
“What about his teeth?” Lindell asked.
“Good overall, according to the medical examiner, but some poorly executed dental work in his youth. Perhaps done overseas.”
Lindell nodded.
“We’ll have to hope for evidence recovered along the riverbank,” she said after a moment’s silence, and then got up from the table.
“Is anyone hungry?” she asked, but did not wait for an answer. Instead, she whisked out of the room, after first snatching her pad of paper.
“Why almost naked?” she said under her breath, while she took the elevator to the foyer of the new police station building. Though it had been inaugerated last fall, Lindell had not really grown accustomed to it yet. In spite of everything, she missed their old quarters. Of course, everything here was much airier and more functional, but something was missing. No one else had expressed any longing for Salagatan, so Lindell had kept her nostalgic musings to herself.
She continued to ply herself with questions during the rapid walk downtown. She followed Svartbäcksgatan along the river. Like in the area of Lugnet, where the corpse had been discovered, the wild ducks were chattering at the water’s edge and terns were screeching up above.
The removed tattoo was important, that much was clear. If the victim had lived in Uppsala and was reported missing within the next day or two, and the identity could be determined, relatives and friends questioned, then it should not prove difficult to find out what the tattoo had looked like and perhaps where and by whom it had been done.
Then the act of taking the trouble of removing it would be undermined. In addition, the maneuver would turn out to be a way of putting the tattoo in focus, giving it a gravity that it would otherwise not have possessed. In other words, in Lindell’s view, it was an irrational act.
She glanced at her watch. None of the restaurants that she passed had appealed to her and now she was suddenly pressed for time. In the pedestrian zone she instead bought a “Kurt,” which was what one of her colleagues for some reason called a thick hot dog on a bun. She washed it down with a Festis fruit drink.
As she stood in the street with people walking by, entertained by what she at first took to be a performance troupe but that turned out to be a group of devotees of the evangelical church Livets Ord, her thoughts about the removed tattoo returned and she became increasingly convinced that its removal was largely a symbolic act.
She listened for a while to the heavenly choir and thereafter to a short testimonial by a member of the congregation. He was talking about Jesus, who else? He looked happy, almost ecstatic, as he triumphantly related how he had become a whole person through his Lord, Jesus Christ.
“I lived in poverty …!” he shouted.
“What do you make now?” someone in the audience shouted back.
The speaker was momentarily thrown off-kilter, but then resumed his preaching.
Lindell headed back to the station. Walking had become her way of trying to improve her condition. At her last checkup, the doctor had pronounced her fitness level terrible.
This had the result that she often ate lunch on her own. None of her colleagues had any desire to rush around town at her speed.
Back at her office, sweaty and barely full, she again rifled through the reports pertaining to the murder. What shall I call him for the moment? she wondered and picked a new notepad off the shelf.
“Jack” she wrote spontaneously on the first page. It was a pad of graph paper but this did not distract