Page 24 of Hidden in Memories
“Go for it.”
There is no power play here. They are equals, and she knows that he would never show off at her expense.
Daniel summarizes the situation they encountered when they arrived at the hotel in the morning. He gives their first impressions of the crime scene, the brutality of the attack, the shock among the staff.
“Anything you’d like to add?” he asks Hanna.
She studies her notes. Daniel has already given an overview of the interviews conducted during the day, and the people they met. He hasn’t said anything about motive or possible perpetrators, but that will come later. They don’t know enough at this stage.
“I think you’ve covered most things,” she says.
“Okay.” Grip turns her attention to Carina, who is sitting opposite Hanna. “What can you tell us?”
Carina shares a number of photographs from the scene. The first, a close-up of Charlotte Wretlind from the waist upward, makes Anton cover his mouth with his hand. Hanna can see that their colleagues in Östersund are also affected.
Raffe gasps. “My God.”
“Indeed,” Carina agrees. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The body is on its way to the National Forensic Center in Umeå, but we can state that Charlotte Wretlind suffered several dozen knife wounds over her entire body. The one to the throat would have been enough to kill her.”
Carina shows more pictures of the body and the hotel room—all equally difficult to look at.
“So let’s talk about the perpetrator,” Grip says. “What’s your view, Carina? Man or woman?”
“We’ve managed to secure a partial shoe print. It seems as if the murderer stepped in the victim’s blood on the way out, then trod on the carpet. According to our measurements, we are looking for someone who wears a size forty-five shoe, which suggests it’s a man. The strength behind the blows with the knife also leads me in that direction, because there are so many and they’re so deep, but I’d like to hear what the forensic pathologists have to say.”
Hanna doesn’t think there can be any doubt about the killer’s gender. As soon as she saw the victim’s mutilated body, she was certain they were looking for a man. They have already established that there don’t seem to be any defensive wounds. That could be down to either the murderer’s physical superiority or that the victim was simply unable to defend herself in the face of acute danger. This is known as the freeze response, when a person is so afraid that they can’t move a muscle. It often happens to women, especially in assault cases. Hanna has come across it frequently in the past.
Grip nods. “Okay, so it sounds like a man with size forty-five shoes. That suggests someone who is quite tall, and presumably pretty strong. What else can we say?”
“He must have been covered in blood,” Carina says. “It went everywhere, all over the room. With the kind of close contact required to stab someone in this way, it would have been impossible for the perpetrator to avoid getting blood on his clothes.”
“So little chance of a discreet exit.” Daniel leans back on his chair. “If anyone saw him after he left the Silver Suite, it must have been obvious that he’d committed a crime.”
“It’s a big hotel,” Hanna points out. “They have over four hundred beds and one hundred and twenty members of staff in the high season. There should be witnesses who noticed him leaving the scene.”
“What about CCTV?” Raffe asks. “Could we be lucky enough to find that he was caught on film?”
“They’re gathering everything up and will send it over as soon as possible,” Hanna replies. “We mentioned it to the manager.”
“Carina, what can you tell us about the murder weapon?” Grip says.
“Obviously it’s a knife, probably an ordinary hunting knife, given the number and size of the wounds.”
“A hunting knife,” Raffe echoes. “Where do we even start?”
The question is rhetorical. Everyone knows that a large percentage of the population of Jämtland go hunting. If you hunt, you have a hunting knife as part of your basic equipment.
“That’s your problem,” Carina says dryly. “I just answered the question.”
“Thank you, Carina—that’s a good start,” Grip says.
Daniel folds his arms and looks around the table and at the screen. “It doesn’t seem like a very professional job. It’s too messy. If the main aim was to kill the victim, then the single blow to the throat would have been enough. Instead he seems to have stabbed her repeatedly, in a frenzy.”
Hanna agrees. There is something deeply aggressive about the whole thing, from the multiple stab wounds to the fact that Charlotte was attacked in bed.
“I don’t think it was just about taking her life,” she says. “It almost feels as if Charlotte Wretlind was being made to pay for something.”
A punishment.
