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conversation at the other end being cut off with a click.
    I hope the old bastard heard that, she thought as she pulled on her leather boots. He’ll probably have gone by the time I get to the hospital.
    S he found Lars Pohjanen in the hospital security guards’ smoking room. He was slumped on a sturdy green seventies sofa. His eyes were closed, and only the glowing cigarette in his hand gave any indication that he might be awake, or even alive.
    “So,” he said without opening his eyes, “aren’t you interested in Viktor Strandgård, deceased? I would have thought this was just up your street, Mella.”
    “I’m supposed to be pushing paper until I have the baby,” she said, standing in the doorway. “But it’s better if I talk to you before you go, rather than nobody doing it.”
    He gave a croaky laugh that turned into a feeble cough, opened his eyes and fixed her with his piercing blue gaze.
    “You’re going to dream about him at night, Mella. Come and talk it through, otherwise you’re going to be running round with the pram interrogating suspects while you’re on maternity leave. Shall we?”
    He made an exaggerated gesture, inviting her into the autopsy room.
    T he room where the autopsies were held was very neat. A clean stone floor, three stainless-steel tables, red plastic boxes stacked according to size under the sink, two hand basins where Anna Granlund made sure there was a constant supply of spotlessly clean hand towels. The dissection table had been sluiced down and dried off. Out in the sluice room the dishwasher was running. The only thing that made you think of death was a long line of ID-marked transparent plastic jars containing gray or light brown bits of brain or internal organs, preserved in formalin so that tests could be carried out on them at a later stage. And Viktor Strandgård’s body. He was lying on his back on one of the tables. An incision ran across the back of his head from one ear to the other, and the whole of his scalp had been drawn away from his skull up over the forehead to expose his cranium. Two long wounds ran across his stomach and were held together with rough sutures. One had been made by the autopsy technician in order to allow an examination of the internal organs. There were also several short wounds on the body; Anna-Maria had seen marks like these before. Knife wounds. He was clean, stitched up and sluiced down, pale under the fluorescent lights. It bothered Anna-Maria to see his slender body lying naked on the cold steel table. She had kept her fleecy jacket on.
    Lars Pohjanen pulled on a green surgical gown, shoved his feet into his worn old clogs, which bore only vestiges of the white they had once been, and slipped on his thin, supple rubber gloves.
    “How are the kids?” he asked.
    “Jenny and Petter are fine. Marcus is suffering from a broken heart and is mostly just lying on his bed with his headphones on, developing tinnitus.”
    “Poor kid,” said Pohjanen with genuine sympathy, and turned to Viktor Strandgård.
    Anna-Maria wondered whether he meant Marcus or Viktor Strandgård.
    “Do you mind?” she asked, and took her tape recorder out of her pocket. “So the others can listen later.”
    Pohjanen shrugged his shoulders in agreement. Anna-Maria switched on the tape recorder.
    “Chronologically,” he said. “First a blow to the back of the head with a blunt instrument. You and I are not really in a position to try and turn him over, but you can see it on here.”
    He took out a computer slide and clipped it on to the X-ray light box. Anna-Maria looked at the images in silence, thinking of the black-and-white ultrasound pictures of her baby.
    “You can see the split in the skull here. And the subdural bleed. Just here.”
    The doctor’s finger traced a dark area on the pictures.
    “It might have been possible to save his life if he had suffered only the blow to the head, but probably not,” he said.
    “Your murderer is most likely