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Back Bad Apples Save as PDF
Chapters (65)
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  65. Acknowledgements

The cider-scented wind catches round my neck and I pull up my collar.

‘You ever seen anything like it?’ I ask.

‘What do you think?’ He pauses and says, ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.’

I wave that away.

‘What happens now?’

‘This place is locked down until the forensics team arrive tomorrow morning and take samples. Can’t do nothing else tonight. Keep an open mind, you hear.’

He walks me back to my Hilux. The tape surrounding the statue of Adolf-Fredrik Edlund flickers in the breeze and I wonder what he’d think of all this.

‘Who the hell performs root-canal surgery on a goddam moose?’ says Thord.

I have to smile.

‘The shit I have to deal with,’ he says.

‘That a quote?’

‘Don’t you even…’

I look around at the pumpkins for sale outside Konsum and the plastic skeletons hanging in the window of the pharmacy. Over on the dark side of the square there’s a large sign in the pop-up shop window written in red ink. ‘ALL MUST GO.’

‘This find going to be useful, Thord? The elk skulls?’

‘I don’t suppose so, I’m not that lucky. But it might be, I don’t know. I’ll talk to Annika Persson, check that the records are accurate. Maybe we’ll get fingerprints or DNA or fibres, something we can connect to the earlier crime scenes. Can talk to other witnesses, check who saw who going into the Hive with large bags. Probably includes a lot of people, but we can start with that. We’ve already checked the alibis of all dentists and dental students in the Kommun. But this could have been a vet or a student, it could have been anybody. Thing I’m relieved about is that we’ve only got one body. It’s in pieces, which is not ideal, but it’s just one. Got the call from the Sheriff and I thought to myself, oh no, who this time? But he or she don’t seem to have escalated, rather they seem to have gone backwards. From human victim to wild animals. And I for one pray to God that it stays that way.’

32

The town sparkles with frost.

I pass Visberg Grill, the two gamer twins sat in the window sharing a pineapple and crayfish pizza, and the night is silent. Down the hill, the asphalt still looks black but everything else is glazed. Ice crystals on thistles and dead birch branches. We’re leaving autumn behind.