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place to live if you were a priest? The reporters standing in for the summer traveled up and examined the police’s work. They were young and hungry and wouldn’t be fobbed off with “for reasons connected with the investigation… no comment at this stage.” The press had kept up a stubborn interest for two weeks.
    “It’s getting so you have to turn your damned shoes over and shake them before you put them on,” Sven-Erik had said to the chief of police. “Just in case some bloody journalist comes tumbling out with his sting at the ready.”
    But as the police weren’t getting anywhere, the news teams had eventually left the town. Two people who had been crushed to death at a festival took over the headlines.
    The police had worked on the copycat theory all summer. Someone had been inspired by the murder of Viktor Strandgård. At first the national police had been very reluctant to do a profile of the perpetrator. There was no question of dealing with a serial killer, as far as anyone knew. And it wasn’t at all certain that this was a copycat murder. But the similarities with the murder of Viktor Strandgård and the demands in the media had finally brought a psychiatrist from the national police profiling team up to Kiruna, interrupting her holiday to do so.
    She’d had a meeting with the Kiruna police one morning at the beginning of July. There had been a dozen or so sitting and sweating in the conference room. They couldn’t risk anyone outside hearing the discussion, so the windows were kept shut.
    The psychiatrist was a woman in her forties. What struck Sven-Erik was the way she talked about lunatics, mass murderers and serial killers with such serenity and such understanding, almost with love. When she cited real-life examples she often said “that poor man” or “we had a young lad who…” or “luckily for him he was caught and convicted.” And she talked about a man who’d been in a secure psychiatric unit for years, and had then been well enough to be released and was now on the right medication, living an orderly life, working part-time for a firm of decorators, and had a dog.
    “I can’t emphasize strongly enough,” she’d said, “that it’s up to the police to decide which theory you wish to work on. If the murderer is a copycat I can give you a plausible picture of him, but it’s by no means certain.”
    She’d given a PowerPoint presentation and encouraged them to interrupt if they had questions.
    “A man. Aged between fifteen 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.