Page 46 of Hidden in Memories
She pushes Morris away so she can breathe again.
“I was here first,” she informs him. He couldn’t care less.
She feels better when he rubs his nose against her cheek, as if he understands that she needs consolation.
Wednesday, March 31
34
It has been only two days since the murder of Charlotte Wretlind, but Daniel is already exhausted. The first forty-eight hours are the most important. The time has been filled with short and long interviews, background checks, and the mapping of various people linked to the victim.
An intense search for the murder weapon is ongoing.
It’s always like this at the beginning of a homicide investigation, and he is starting to feel it. The first wave of adrenaline is ebbing away; the lack of sleep is taking its toll. It is hard for the body to be in a constant state of readiness, and to try to keep a thousand things in his mind at once.
Always with the nagging feeling that they should be doing more, should be in several places at the same time.
Daniel would really prefer to move into the station in order to get everything done, but that’s out of the question when he has Ida and Alice to consider. Yesterday he didn’t get home until nine, and Ida’s cool greeting made it very clear that she wasn’t happy.
It is now seven thirty in the morning, and they have gathered in the conference room again. Today the prosecutor will also be participating in the digital briefing, as will the forensic pathologist in Umeå, who against all the odds has managed to conduct the autopsy in record time.
An hour later the pathologist, a clean-shaven young locum, has gone through the results. He has confirmed that the primary cause of death was the violent blow that severed Charlotte Wretlind’s windpipe. If that hadn’t killed her, then the many stab wounds to the rest of her body definitely would have ended her life. There was no possibility of the victim surviving her injuries, and the perpetrator must have had a clear intention to murder her.
Such extreme violence cannot be explained away.
Finally the pathologist described the other injuries in detail, and showed a number of photographs that made everyone in the room politely decline the buns that Raffe has brought along.
The time of death was probably sometime after midnight on Sunday.
The pathologist leaves the meeting. The National Forensic Center is very busy, and the fact that the autopsy was carried out so quickly is nothing short of a miracle.
Birgitta Grip must have put them under a great deal of pressure to prioritize this case.
Daniel glances at the clock. As soon as they’re done here, he wants to go to Copperhill and track down Paul Lehto. The information about the argument between him and Charlotte could be critical.
Yesterday evening after speaking to Henry Sylvester, they had asked about Lehto in reception, but had been told that he was off sick. They have to get a hold of him today, however ill he is.
“We found out something very interesting,” Hanna says, as if she knows exactly what Daniel is thinking. She tells the group about the quarrel.
“We need to follow up on that,” Grip says. “Someone from reception could definitely have accessed the suite.”
“Do we know any more about how the attacker got in?” Daniel asks. “The door wasn’t damaged, and we don’t know whether Charlotte let him in.”
He’s given this a great deal of thought, and they have discussed it more than once.
“We’ve checked everyone who went in and out,” Anton says. “The information came from the hotel. They log every card that is issued, which means they can see who was there. According to their data, no one apart from Charlotte and members of the housekeeping team were in the suite before the murder.”
Carina looks up from her papers. Today she is in Östersund. She looks tired. She is usually positive and energetic, but right now her expression is strained. Presumably she was as adversely affected by the pathologist’s photos as everyone else in the meeting.
“We found fingerprints on the card reader on the wall,” she says. “Where you insert the key card. Prints that don’t belong to the victim.”
Daniel tries to picture the suite.
When you open the door, the card reader is on the left, about three feet up from the floor. A key card is required to make the lights work. This is standard in most hotels, with the aim of protecting the environment and not wasting electricity.
“Can you expand on that, Carina?”
“There were fingerprints from someone other than the cleaners who, according to the information we were given, had been inside the Silver Suite,” she clarifies. “This could of course be because the cleaners didn’t wipe down the surface after previous guests ...”
