Death By Water (25 page)

T
HE SKY ABOVE
Oslo was filled with orange and gold-grey wrinkles, but over the hills in the north it was still almost black. Jennifer Plåterud glanced at her wristwatch as she let herself in to the Pathological Institute. The time was 8.15. Even before the finding of the body, the case had attracted a lot of media attention, and now things were about to get a hundred times worse. She couldn’t bear lagging behind, had to deliver her results before people began asking for them. And yet there was another reason why she had chosen to go to work even before the Devil had put his boots on.

She hung her coat up in the cloakroom, found a clean outfit and pulled on the trousers, shirt, coat, hat and mask. Three minutes later, she was opening the door to the autopsy room. Going through that door was a signal: take off one way of thinking and feeling about the world, and put on another.

But on that particular morning she remained standing in the darkness inside. Images from the factory the afternoon before had pursued her all through Christmas Eve, forcing their way in through the light sleep she fell into now and then. Christmas dinner had been postponed for almost two hours, but no one expressed any annoyance when she took her place at the table without the slightest indication of what she had just been doing, and she didn’t think it showed on her either. For twenty-five years, more than half her life, she had practised medicine, the last fifteen of them mainly on dead bodies; it had become routine a long time ago. But arriving at that crime scene, stopping in the gallery of that factory and seeing the naked young woman lying there in the sharp light …

At the table, she had managed to look as if she ate with a hearty appetite, and afterwards things took their usual course. The boys pretended that they no longer looked forward to opening their presents, hid their expectations behind slow yawns, punching away on their mobile phones and generally giving the impression that there were a thousand other things more important. As for Ivar, he was a picture of pride as he served out the rib and sausages, and enjoyed himself even more afterwards as he sat down with a glass of cognac and starting handing out the packages arranged under the tree, reading out the tos and froms, usually with some comment about what could possibly be hidden inside that lovely wrapping paper –
maybe a collapsible bike
, or
I’m guessing this is a fire engine
– and astonished delight when he unwrapped her present to him, a pullover he had himself tried on in H&M few days earlier. She didn’t begrudge him his childlike joy in Christmas.

With an almost inaudible sigh, she closed off the stream of thoughts, switched on the light in the autopsy room and went to work.

After a quick lunch, she hurried over to her office and wrote a preliminary post-mortem report. Reading through it afterwards, she found herself mentally searching for something that was not to be found in the succession of strictly descriptive terminological sentences. She couldn’t shake off the thought that there was something she ought to have seen. Twenty-nine-year-old woman, she summarised. Fair-haired, regular features. She didn’t know much about the dead woman, no more than what she had already read in the newspapers. A psychologist, almost completed her PhD despite her young age. Jennifer struggled to abstract something that wasn’t connected to her appearance or what she already knew about her. Choked, she repeated to herself, and beaten to death; the eyes …

Suddenly she knew what it was. She picked up her phone and opened the call list.

To begin with, Jennifer’s characterisation of human types on the Hippocratic model was not seriously meant. Naturally she had never believed that it really was the four bodily fluids that determined a person’s temperament and character, but it amused her to assert that this theory, with its origins several centuries before the birth of Christ, was every bit as scientific as the Freudian waffle that certain psychiatrists continued to promote twenty centuries
after
that same birth. In time, however, she had come to believe that Hippocrates’ categorisation, as developed by Galen and by doctors of the Renaissance period, accorded strikingly well with the people she had come across in her life. Almost unnoticed, the irony that had accompanied her interest in the theory had faded away, until a time came when she had to confess to herself that she believed in it almost without reservation. People’s inner worlds could be arranged in such a way as to give her the illusion of comprehending the incomprehensible. And over the years, her categorisations grew more and more sophisticated. She came to believe that a person’s temperament and character did not necessarily derive from one of these four categories alone. For example, she regarded herself as first and foremost sanguine, a
bon vivant
who didn’t easily let things get her down; but she had to admit that she was also much under the sway of the choleric. Mercurial anger could at any moment descend on her like a sly dog, even on days when she couldn’t explain it away as a result of hormonal fluctuations. It was reassuring then to think of it as the accumulation of bile, no matter how metaphorically meant.

Detective Chief Inspector Hans Magnus Viken from the Department of Violent Crimes was another choleric, she had soon realised. She didn’t yet know whether this was combined with the melancholic, which would be typically Norwegian, or with the phlegmatic, which would actually be equally typically Norwegian. When he telephoned her at about two o’clock, she knew at once what he wanted.

Viken was not the kind of detective to rely on reports. He had to carry out the investigation himself. In and of itself this was a good quality, but she wasn’t altogether sure she liked him looking over her shoulder in the autopsy room. She had to admit he had a certain talent, even if the so-called ‘bear murders’ the year before had done fairly serious damage to his reputation. But he wasn’t the only one to have to give an account of himself in the wake of that investigation. The section head involved had to find something else to do, and several others had handed in their resignations. Viken, however, wasn’t the type to let something like that get to him. He’d hung on and survived, and would probably stay with the department until they had to carry him out, thought Jennifer. He even had the guts to apply for the post of section leader that fell vacant as a result of that infamous case. She liked that kind of obstinacy, every bit as much as she disliked his know-all attitude.

He arrived at 3.10, opened wide the door of the room and strode in, a disposable cap balanced on his head. He probably wants it to look like a mitre, she had time to think before she noticed who he had brought along with him. She swore silently. Viken was one thing. She knew more or less where she had him. And for a choleric he kept his temper under good control. On top of that he was susceptible to flattery, which made it easy to disarm him. As for the man who appeared in the doorway behind him, she did not want him there under any circumstances. He was much younger than the detective chief inspector. Younger than her, too. Much too young. Not much past thirty-five. She felt herself blushing. She hadn’t seen him since the Christmas party. Not since the night after the Christmas party, to be more precise. He’d sent her a couple of text messages, even including one on Christmas Eve. Mostly she wanted to forget the whole thing. And not forget the whole thing. But she had to avoid letting Roar Horvath get too close to her. At least at work.

– I saw your preliminary report, Jenny, said Viken jovially.

When in the world did he start calling me that? she wondered as she returned his smile, and gave Roar Horvath a quick nod. He responded with a wink. That was okay; it showed that he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed. Evidently he wanted to carry on in the same vein that she had found so charming at the Christmas do.
Concentration
, she said to herself, and then repeated it a couple of times.

– Cause of death confirmed? Viken wanted to know.

– We’ve got three, possibly four causes, each of which individually would have been fatal, she began, pointing with her scalpel at the throat, which was open in two places. – The belt that was tied around her throat has occluded both the arteries and veins, since the face is pale and not swollen. What’s more, the groove made by the belt is horizontal, which indicates that she was strangled before she was hung up in the position in which she was found. She lifted a flap of the skin on the neck to one side. – Here you can see fractures in both the thyroid cartilage and the lingual bone. That shows how much force was used to tighten the belt.

The two officers bent to examine the gaping throat. Jennifer picked up a pair of tweezers and indicated the damaged areas she had described.

– Beneath the skin there are three linear accumulations of blood, which appear to come from the belt, and then this deeper groove.

– Which means?

– It might indicate that she was strangled several times. The perpetrator appears to have loosened the belt and then tightened it again, a little harder each time.

– A macabre form of entertainment, Viken observed. – And yet you say that strangulation was not necessarily the cause of death?

Jennifer lifted up the dead woman’s head. – She was hit four or five times, laterally, from above.

– These look like injuries I’ve seen from being hit with a hammer, Roar Horvath volunteered.

Jennifer shook her head. – This was done with something bigger and heavier.

– A stone? Viken suggested.

– Possibly, but in that case one with a flat and finely chiselled surface. Possibly attached to a handle. Jennifer pointed. – Note these linked, rather circular fracture lines in the occipital bone. A fairly large and evenly bowed fragment has been impressed into the surface of the brain, causing severe contusion and massive loss of blood. It means we can say with some degree of certainty that she was alive when these blows were delivered. We’ll be opening the skull later today. What we expect to see then is that the power of these blows has shaken the whole brain backwards and forwards. The victim was obviously lying on the floor with the right temple facing downwards. We can see the scrape marks here on the base of the scalp.

– So that’s why you presume that something with a handle was used. Viken lowered his head slightly, a habit when drawing a conclusion that Jennifer had previously noticed. – And the third possible cause of death?

She took two steps to the side. – Numerous punctiform haemorrhages in the bowel mucosa, she said, pointing with her scalpel into the open belly. – Something similar here. She moved her scalpel to the thoracic cavity and scraped at a membrane surrounding the lung. – The blood is also unusually pale red, which we often find in cases of death from hypothermia. The question is whether the other wounds killed her, or whether she managed to freeze to death. The temperature in that factory was obviously well below freezing.

She straightened up and fastened her gaze on Viken.

– Additionally you can see these two marks in the neck, which must be from a hypodermic. She had heroin in her blood, but it was not given intravenously, and there are no other needle marks on her body.

– Ergo the heroin was used to sedate her or keep her passive, said Viken.

Jennifer raised one of the body’s hands. – There is superficial scratching here, which might indicate that she was handcuffed before she was found. She described a circle round each wrist. – Note also the tips of the right thumb and forefinger.

– Oil? Horvath asked.

– It turns out to be soot. But nothing was found in the vicinity that was either burnt or sooted. She laid the dead arm back on the table. – And then of course there are the eyes, as you can see from the report.

She raised both eyelids. The exposed eyeballs were almost black from the coagulated blood that had gathered there. Viken bent forward, and she handed him a magnifying glass and a torch. While he was standing there examining the punctured eyes, she glanced over at Roar Horvath. He was wearing a suitably serious expression for the occasion, and she was glad to see this sign that he was adult enough not to start flirting there and then. He didn’t look particularly stylish, in his green lab coat and with the paper hat pulled down over his ears. It made his face seem rounder, the nose stick out more. But he had that dimple in his chin – it was, as she had noticed before he put on the face mask, even more prominent in the light from the ceiling – and he was so entertaining, had made her laugh out loud more than once at the Christmas party, and even more afterwards. And he was by no means the worst lover she had ever gone to bed with; far from it. She hadn’t taken him for an Adonis that evening either, since she had been stone-cold sober from the moment she arrived to the moment she left, as she had to confess to herself with both pride and shame. That was why she had offered to drive him home, since he lived on the same side of town. Or at least, not in the completely opposite direction, as it turned out.
Concentration, Jennifer
, she warned herself again. You’re at work now.

– To sum up, I conclude that Mailin Bjerke died from such extensive trauma to the brain that the medulla oblongata was severed, which led to the cessation of the respiratory and circulatory functions. Prior to this she had been repeatedly choked, but the evidence indicates that she did not die of this. As you know, in cases involving this kind of asphyxiation, it can take up to five minutes for death to occur. At the time of her death she was almost certainly severely hypothermic, but this in itself is not the likely cause of death. As for the presence of heroin in the blood, the concentration was so low that the effect of it must have worn off several hours before she died.

Viken handed the torch and the magnifying glass to Roar Horvath. – Stabbed with a pointed object, he observed as his younger colleague leaned over to examine the damage to the eyes. – Repeatedly. But with something rather less sharp than the needle of a hypodermic. To what purpose?

– Prevent the victim from seeing, Horvath offered.