Of course she had heard about the case, but it was only now that her interest was properly piqued about this man in early middle age who had been missing without a trace for more than four years. He had been found by a member of the public in southern Gotland, in a wooded area with few people around, which wasn’t remarkable in itself, given that he had been buried, and buried corpses weren’t usually left in places where just any old person would find them. That was the whole point of burying a body—to make sure it wasn’t found for the foreseeable future.

The fact that a crime had been committed was clear beyond all reasonable doubt—corpses hardly buried themselves. The cause of death was blunt trauma to the head, and the murder weapon was in the grave beside the body: the spade that it had to be assumed had been used to dig the grave.

To Sandra’s ears, it sounded like an execution—had the victim dug his own grave? Peter Norling was his name and prior to his disappearance he had never “been of interest to the police,” as they put it. That didn’t surprise Sandra. He looked nice in the photo—if you could judge a dog by its breed, which you usually could in the case of mafia-style executions, whether you were evaluating the victim or the executioner.

Norling owned a company that repaired cars. His own car—a company car—had been abandoned outside his place of work, where he had last been seen. It was featured in one of the photos in the article, and looked a bit tragic—almost rejected out there in the car park in the slush and grey, surrounded by police tape and with a big gap between it and all the other cars. The company logo was blurry in the photo—almost unreadable. But to her surprise, Sandra could picture the design of the logo and the name of the company. Why? she asked herself. She had never had any dealings with the company, and didn’t even know where their garage was. And it didn’t say where anywhere in the article either.

It was a terrible story. After spending the morning at the garage, he had popped out at lunchtime, never to be seen again. He left behind his wife and children, house and debts, but no life insurance policy had paid out since there was nothing to suggest he was dead. Or alive, for that matter—but the insurance companies were more inclined towards the former. The disappearance had been in early February 2014, so the family had lived with the uncertainty of what had happened to their father and husband for more than four years.