Another Time, Another Life by Leif G. W. Persson Read Free Book Online Page A

as he disappeared through the entryway with his bag and the walkie-talkie. While he was sprinting up the stairs he suddenly felt more exhilarated than he had in a long time.
    His delight was short-lived. Jarnebring stopped at the third floor to get an overview: rectangular stairwell, four apartments, two doors at an angle to each other at each end. The name of the victim was Eriksson and his door was farthest away. To the left of it was an ornate brass plate with the surname of the person who had called central command and introduced herself as “Mrs. Westergren, Ingrid Westergren.”
    Jarnebring tiptoed up to the door to Eriksson’s apartment. Silent as a grave, not a movement anywhere. He carefully tried the door handle. The door was locked, and when he bent down to peep in through the mail slot, at the same time as he loosened the holster strap that secured his service weapon, in the corner of his eye he saw a faint dent not half an inch long in the dark glazed wood on Mrs. Westergren’s door. Because the dent was at a level with Eriksson’s door handle and the door lacked a doorstop, he realized at once what had happened.
    The perpetrator or perpetrators had not tried to break into Mrs. Westergren’s, as she had told the radio dispatcher. On the other hand it was probable that someone had thrown open Eriksson’s door in great haste, whereupon his door handle had struck Mrs. Westergren’s door. Without thinking about it, he buttoned the strap on his pistol handle again, carefully opened the mail slot slightly, and peeked in.
    He had done this a hundred times before during his life as a police officer, and on a few occasions it had struck him that this might just be his last action on the job, because he might find himself looking straight into the barrels of a shotgun. But he did not think that way very often; fortunately he did not have that disposition. And it hadn’t happened now. What he saw was good enough.
    There was a light on in the hall. Straight ahead was a living room behind a pair of open, glazed double doors.
    In the living room there was a couch, and in front of the couch a coffee table, approximately twenty or twenty-five feet from the outside door. The coffee table had been overturned and there was a lot of blood on the light parquet floor. Squeezed between the couch and the coffee table was a motionless man on his stomach. It was not a comfortable position, and you didn’t need to be a police officer like Jarnebring to figure out that the man had not chosen to lie down there voluntarily.
    Oh shit, thought Jarnebring, straightening up. People never can behave decently to each other.
    Then he tapped out the hinges on the door and went into the apartment.
    First he made sure the victim really was dead. He was, even if he did not appear to have been dead for very long. He had bled heavily from both his nose and mouth. His shirt was soaked through with blood from a wound that seemed to be high up on the left side of his back.
    Probably stabbed with a knife, thought Jarnebring. Lungs, heart, major organs were penetrated; trying to resuscitate him would be wasted effort, he thought.
    Then he straightened up, drew his service weapon, and carefully searched through the apartment to make certain that the victim was notonly dead but also alone at home. Three rooms, hall, kitchen, bathroom, separate toilet, a large clothes closet, a total of about a thousand square feet, strikingly clean and neat, and there was nothing to suggest anything other than that the victim had had sole use of the apartment.
    Jarnebring was careful about where he set his feet, and he kept his fingers under control the whole time out of consideration for the crime technicians, but this didn’t prevent him from peeking under the bed, behind the shower curtain in the bathroom, and in the darkest corners of the clothes closet. He had found more than one perpetrator that way over the years.
    But not this time, this time it was empty.
    The