“It was falling off him when we were cutting off the remains of the plastic,” he explained. “When the immune system stops working, bacteria spreads from the stomach and intestines throughout the entire body and starts to consume it. Certainly aided in this case by all the bacteria in the surrounding trash. Can you see those fluid-filled pustules beneath the epidermis here and here?” He pointed a gloved finger at the body. “That’s where the cells have started to leak.”

“What does that tell you about the time of death?” Jeppe came and stood next to Anette by the table, tapping a ballpoint pen against his notebook.

She could smell the cigarette he had smoked right before they walked into the Teilum Building to attend Malthe Sæther’s autopsy. Even now, in these surroundings, bending over the body of a dead young man, the smell of smoke triggered her urge to light one up, too.

Nyboe checked to make sure the Dictaphone in his hand was turned off. He was addressing them, not filling in his report.

“It’s hard to say precisely. There are a lot of factors to consider. The abdomen and face are still only mildly swollen with methane gasses, rigor mortis is subsiding, and the decay process is slowly beginning. That means death took place more than twenty-four and less than thirty-six hours ago. However, the body was wrapped in plastic, and—am I correct in understanding this?—might have been lying in a trash can or a dumpster before it was found in the silo?”

“There is some evidence to suggest that,” Anette confirmed.

“It’s still cold out at night, all the way down to around freezing. If he was in a trash container outside, wrapped in plastic, that may have delayed decomposition. Do we know when he was last seen alive?”

“I contacted his girlfriend, Josephine, to notify her,” Anette said with a nod. “Their registered address is here in Copenhagen, but she lives in Odense part-time. She says she talked to him on the phone Friday at around five p.m. After their phone call, we don’t have any confirmed signs of life from him. Not yet, anyway.”

Nyboe pointed to the bent neck and tucked-up legs.

“If you look at the body’s position, there are signs that rigor mortis occurred while he was lying in the trash container. But again, it’s a little hard to determine after all the bruising from the claw.”

“If he was transported out to the incineration plant by a garbage truck—and that’s the most likely scenario, because it’s hard to gain access to the waste silo other than via the trash chutes—then the body would also have been squeezed by the compactor in the garbage truck,” Jeppe added.