‘Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we’ve secured some partial footprints in the mud right at the edge, but to be honest, it’s mostly paw prints from the dog. Poor thing must have been frantic, judging from how it ran back and forth. But we can’t secure any prints in this muck and the macadam up on the road is obviously no better.’

‘What about tyre tracks?’

‘None down here. Hundreds up by the turning area. Nothing to be done there.’

‘Hair, skin, nails?’ Karen smiles as she asks the question, well aware what the answer is going to be.

‘CSI Noorö? Forget it.’

Sören Larsen gives her an inviting wave.

‘Feel free to come in and scour the mud for hairs yourself. We’re pretty much done here.’

‘Thanks, I’ll pass. But I wouldn’t mind taking a look at where the body was found.’

‘Be my guest,’ Larsen says and chivalrously holds up the police tape.

She walks behind him, studying the drag marks and prints he points out. Without his guidance, she wouldn’t have noticed them, or at least been unable to interpret what she saw.

‘He fell here, but you have to go over to the side a little to see the spot where he landed,’ Larsen says, pointing.

Karen has a brief moment of vertigo as she cranes her neck to look out over the edge. Her fear of heights is relatively new-found; at least, she has no memory of feeling her stomach flip when she was younger, of the fear of losing control and throwing herself over. The remnants of blood and probably the brain matter Sven Andersén mentioned are still visible, like a dark shadow, against the grey rock.

‘He was unlucky,’ Sören says behind her. ‘The murderer, I mean.’

Karen lets her eyes rove along the quarry walls. With a few exceptions, they are sheer and precipitous. From where she’s standing, she can only see protruding rocks in a handful of places. Almost anywhere else, a person pushed over the edge would have fallen straight into the freezing water. The thin film of ice covering it would have cracked and the body would have sunk in minutes. It would probably have resurfaced eventually, but we would have had to drag the entire lake long before then, Karen muses.

‘I guess so. Though Fredrik Stuub wasn’t particularly lucky, either,’ she observes grimly.

Chapter 10

10