Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin Read Free Book Online Page B

youthful corpse for general viewing as a matter of curiosity. At first Mats Israelsson had been kept in a barrel; after that, when public pressure had increased, he had been propped up vertically in a glass case. Mats stood there outside the mine, staring at the visitors for thirty years; even the famed “father of taxonomy,” Carl Linnaeus, came to see him.
    Each year the case had been opened to cut the growing hair on his head, but otherwise the mine worker had been left alone. Finally, in 1749, some kind-hearted clergyman had buried Mats Israelsson’s body under the floor inside Stora Kopparberg Church. But …
    The intern started to feel impatient.
    … in the beginning of the 1860s, when the church floor was being relaid, Fet-Mats had been found again, his appearance still just as youthful. This time his body was placed in a wooden box and put aside in the main office of the mine. The mine worker stood there collecting dust until 1930. Then he was buried one last time, and was given a granite memorial.
    When the body was placed in the coffin, more than 250 years had passed since that March day in 1677, but Mats Israelsson’s eyes had still been open and clear. Some said that there was something in his eyes that expressed a vague amazement. Others maintained that the only thing you could see in the miner’s eyes had been centuries of sorrow.
    T he intern added a short sentence in the notebook:
    Copper vitriol???
    The corpse could have been in the mine for a long time.
    In that case, how would the police go about finding out who the murder victim was?
    The intern sat for a long time, thinking, chewing his pen until it broke; he sighed at his own incompetence. Then he simply typed the words “post mortem identification” into the search engine on the Net and looked at the hits sullenly.
    The first one was about some advice from the Medical Products Agency about identifying unknown tablets and capsules. Scrolled. There, down a bit: “Blood banks help identify victims of tsunami,” an old news article. He clicked on it and read:
    An extra session of parliament decided yesterday that the PKU registry may be used to identify Swedes who died in the disaster in Asia. The registry is primarily necessary to identify dead children, who may lack dental records.
    Dental records.
There it was. They searched dental records, of course.
    The intern felt his headache fade slightly. Here he actually had his very own source: the dad of an old friend from high school, who ran a private dental practice at Karlaplan, in the posh part of Stockholm.
    He dug out the number, called, and ended up at reception. Just after he’d been transferred, he could hear the whistle of a dentist drill slowing down.
    “Dental records? Listen … we have nothing to do with those. That’s handled by specialists at the National Board of Forensic Medicine … and I have no idea how far back their registry goes.”
    His friend’s dad sounded a bit stressed.
    “So how do you contact the specialists, then?”
    The sound of steps, as the dentist walked away from the phone; then a door closed.
    “Well … you’ll have to call them, I guess.”
    The intern sighed.
    “No, wait … Listen! There’s actually a guy I happen to know a little up at the National Board—he was pretty strange even when we were at school …”
    “Yes?”
    “If you want, maybe I could check with him when I’m finished?”
    It was less than half an hour before the dentist called back with an excited voice:
    “Listen to this. The Falun police, along with the help of the national police, have requested the dental records of every Swede who has disappeared or been missing all the way back to the midfifties. They haven’t had a single match. They also requested help from Interpol for an international search. Nothing there, either. Apparently the National Board has established that it could be a case of a corpse from who knows how far back … They said something about the body