“I’ve got your number,” Larsson said. “And you can get hold of me at this number or at the station in Ostersund. Meanwhile, is there any thing you can tell me? Did Molin feel he was under threat? Any information could be of value. We don’t have much to go on. No witnesses, no apparent motive. Nothing at all, really. We’re ready to clutch at any straw.”
He listened to the response without comment. The police crime scene van drove up to the house. Larsson concluded the call, and made the number he’d traced in the gravel more obvious with the toe of his shoe.
The policeman who’d phoned from Boras had said something important. Molin had been scared. He had never explained why he was uneasy, but Lindman had no doubt. Molin had been scared all the time, wherever he had been, whatever he had done.
There were two forensic officers, both of them young. Larsson liked working with them. They were full of energy, meticulous, and efficient. Larsson watched them enter the house they were destined to investigate and try to take in the blood splattered over the walls and floor. As the young men donned their coveralls, Larsson began once more to think about what had happened.
He was clear about the main outline. It started with the death of the dog. Then the windows had been smashed, and tear gas canisters shot in. It wasn’t the tear gas canisters that had broken the windows. They had found some cartridges from a hunting rifle outside the house. The man who carried out the attack had been methodical. Molin was asleep when it all started—at least, it looked as if he’d been in bed at the time. He was naked when his body was found at the edge of the forest, but his sweater and pants were found soaked in blood at the bottom of the steps leading down from the front door. From the remnants they had found of the tear gas canisters it would seem that the place must have been filled with gas. Molin had run out of the house with his shotgun. He’d also managed to fire a few shots. Then he’d been stopped in his tracks. The gun was discarded on the ground. Larsson knew that Molin must have been more or less blind when he left the house. He would also have had great difficulty breathing. So Molin had been hounded out of his house, and had been incapable of defending himself as he staggered from the door.
Larsson picked his way carefully into the room leading off the living room. It contained the biggest riddle of all. In a bed lay a bloodstained doll, life-size. He thought at first it was some kind of sex toy used by lonely Molin, but the doll had no orifices. The loops on its feet suggested that it was used as a dancing partner. The big question was: why was it covered in blood? Had Molin moved into this room before the tear gas made it impossible for him to stay in the house? Even so, that wouldn’t have explained the blood. Larsson and the other detectives who had spent six days going through the house with a fine-toothed comb still hadn’t come up with a plausible explanation. Larsson was going to spend this day trying to work out once and for all why the doll was covered in blood. There was something about the doll that worried him. It concealed a secret and he wanted to know what it was.
He left the house to get some fresh air. His cell phone rang. It was the chief of police in Ostersund. Larsson told him the current state of affairs: that they were hard at work, but they hadn’t found anything new at the scene of the crime yet. Mrs. Tunberg was in Ostersund, talking to Artur Nyman, a detective sergeant and Larsson’s closest colleague. The chief of police was able to inform Larsson that Molin’s daughter, who was in Germany, would soon be on her way to Sweden. They’d also been in touch with Molin’s son, who worked as a steward on a cruise ship in the Caribbean.
“Any news about his second wife?” Larsson wondered.
The first wife, the mother of his two children, had died some years ago. Larsson had spent several hours looking into her death, but she’d died of natural causes. Besides, Molin and his first wife had been divorced for nineteen years. His second wife, a woman Molin had been married to while living in Borås, was proving difficult to trace.
Larsson went back into the house. He stood just inside the door and scrutinized the dried bloodstains on the floor. Then he took a couple of steps sideways and looked hard at them again. He frowned. There was something about the marks that puzzled him. He took out his notebook, borrowed a pencil from one of the forensic officers, and made a sketch. There were nineteen footprints in all, ten made by a right foot and nine by a left foot.
He went outside. A crow was disturbed and flew off. Larsson studied his sketch. Then he fetched a rake he knew was in the shed, and smoothed out the gravel in front of the house. He pressed his feet down into the gravel to reproduce the pattern he’d sketched in his notebook. Stepped to one side and studied the result. Walked all the way around, examining the marks from different angles. Then he carefully stepped into the footprints, one after the other, moving slowly. He did it again, faster now, with his knees slightly bent. The penny dropped.