Read The Man from Beijing for Free Online

name. We must find out who he is. Make sure this list is copied, but don’t hand it out.”
    “This is beyond belief,” said Huddén. “Eighteen people.”
    “Nineteen. The boy’s not on there.”
    She produced a pen and added “unidentified boy” to the bottom of the list.
    Then she gathered the freezing-cold and mystified reporters into a semicircle on the road.
    “I’ll give you a brief statement,” she said. “You can ask questions, but we don’t have any answers at the moment. There’ll be a press conference later today in Hudiksvall. Provisionally at six o’clock. All I can say for now is that several very serious crimes were committed here during the night. I can’t give you any more details.”
    A young girl, her face covered in freckles, held up her hand.
    “But surely you can tell us a bit more? It’s obvious that something terrible has happened when you cordon off the whole village.”
    Sundberg didn’t recognize the girl, but the logo on her jacket was the name of a big national newspaper.
    “You can ask as many questions as you like, but I’m afraid that for technical reasons connected with the investigation, I can’t tell you any more for the moment.”
    One of the television reporters thrust a microphone under her nose. She had met him many times before.
    “Can you repeat what you’ve just said?”
    She did so, but when he tried to ask a follow-up question she turned her back on him and left. She didn’t stop walking until she came to the last of the tents that had been pitched. She suddenly felt very ill. She stepped to one side and took a few deep breaths, and only when she no longer felt the need to throw up did she approach the tent.
    Once, during one of her first years as a police officer, she had fainted when she and a colleague had entered a house and found a man hanging there. She would prefer not to have that happen again.
    The woman squatting down at the side of the leg looked up when Sundberg entered. A powerful spotlight made it very warm inside the tent. Sundberg introduced herself.
    “What can you tell me?”
    Valentina Miir, probably in her forties, spoke with a pronounced foreign accent. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” she said. “You come across limbs that have been pulled off or severed, but this one …”
    “Has somebody been trying to eat it?”
    “The probability is that it’s an animal, of course. But there are aspects that worry me.”
    “Such as?”
    “Animals eat and gnaw at bones in a particular way. You can usually be more or less sure which particular animal has been involved. I suspect it was a wolf in this case. But there’s something else you ought to see.”
    She reached for a transparent plastic bag. It contained a leather boot.
    “We can assume that it was on the foot,” she said. “Obviously, an animal can have pulled it off in order to get at the foot itself. But what worries me is that the shoelaces were undone.”
    Sundberg recalled that the other boot was tightly tied and on the man’s other foot. The leg belonged to Lars Andrén.
    “Is there anything else you’ve established?”
    “Not yet, it’s too soon.”
    “Can you come with me? I need your help.”
    They left the tent and went to the house where the unknown boy was lying with two other persons who were probably Hans-Evert and Elsa Andersson. The silence inside was deafening.
    The boy was lying in bed, on his stomach. The room was small, with a sloping roof. Sundberg gritted her teeth in order not to burst out crying. His life had barely begun, but before he could take another breath it had ended.
    They stood there in silence.
    “I don’t understand how anybody can commit such a horrendous attack on a small child,” said Valentina eventually.
    “Can you see how many stab wounds he has?” said Sundberg.
    The doctor leaned forward and directed the bedside lamp at the body. It was several minutes before she answered.
    “It seems that he has only one