Read The Blood Spilt for Free Online Page B

and fifty. Sorry.”
    She added the last word when she noticed their smiles.
    “We’d prefer ‘twenty-seven years and three months, delivers newspapers, lives with his mother and drives a red Volvo.’ ” someone had joked.
    She’d added:
    “And wears size 42 shoes. Okay, imitators are notable in that they can start off with an extremely violent crime. He won’t necessarily have been convicted of any kind of serious violent crime before. And that’s backed up by the fact that you’ve got fingerprints but no match in the register.”
    Nods of agreement around the room.
    “He might be on the register of suspects, or have been convicted of petty crimes typical of a person without limits. Harassment along the lines of stalking or hoax calls, or maybe petty theft. But if it is a copycat then he’s been sitting in his room reading about the murder of Viktor Strandgård for a year and a half. That’s a quiet occupation. That was somebody else’s murder. That’s been enough for him up to now. But from now on he’s going to want to read about himself.”
    “But the murders aren’t really alike,” somebody had interjected. “Viktor Strandgård was hit and stabbed, his eyes were gouged out and his hands were cut off.”
    She’d nodded.
    “True. But that could be explained by the fact that this was his first. To stab, cut, gouge with a knife gives a more, how shall I put it, close contact than the longer weapon that appears to have been used here. It’s a higher threshold to cross. Next time he might be ready to use a knife. Maybe he doesn’t like close physical proximity.”
    “He did carry her up to the church.”
    “But by then he’d already finished with her. By then she was nothing, just a piece of meat. Okay, he lives alone, or he has access to a completely private space, for example a hobby room where nobody else is allowed to go, or a workshop, or maybe a locked outhouse. That’s where he keeps his newspaper cuttings. He probably likes to have them on display, preferably pinned up. He’s isolated, bad at social contacts. It’s not impossible that he’s using something physical to keep people at a distance. Poor hygiene, for example. Ask about that if you have a suspect, ask if he has any friends, because he won’t have. But as I said. It doesn’t have to be a copycat. It could be somebody who just flew into a temporary rage. If we are unfortunate enough to have another murder, we can talk again.”
    Sven-Erik’s thoughts were interrupted as he passed a motorist exercising his dog by holding the lead through the open car window and making the dog run beside the car. He could see that it was an elkhound cross. The dog was galloping along with its tongue lolling out of its mouth.
    “Cruel bastard,” he muttered, looking in the rearview mirror.
    Presumably he was an elk hunter who wanted the dog in top form for the hunt. He considered turning the car around and having a chat with the owner. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to keep animals. It was probably shut in a run in the yard for the rest of the year.
    But he didn’t turn back. He’d recently been out to talk to a guy who’d broken an injunction banning him from going anywhere near his ex-wife, and was refusing to come in for an interview although he’d been sent for.
    You spend day after day arguing, thought Sven-Erik. From the minute you get up until you go to bed. Where do you draw the line? One fine day you’ll be standing there on your day off yelling at people for dropping their ice cream wrappers in the street.
    But the image of the galloping dog and the thought of its torn pads haunted him all the way into town.
    *                  *                  *                  
    Twenty-five minutes later Sven-Erik walked into Chief Prosecutor Alf Björnfot’s office. The sixty-year-old prosecutor was perched on the edge of his desk with a small child on his lap. The boy was