In the Darkness Read Online Free

roughly what we’d have anticipated, anyway.’
    ‘The car had been cleaned and hoovered inside,’ said Karlsen, ‘the dashboard had been polished. Wax and cleaning stuff everywhere. He left home to sell it.’
    ‘And his wife didn’t know who the prospective purchaser was,’ Sejer recalled.
    ‘She knew nothing at all, but that was par for the course in that household.’
    ‘No one phoned asking for him?’
    ‘No. He told her quite suddenly that he had a purchaser. She thought it was strange. He’d scraped and saved to get that car, tinkered with it for months, treated it like his baby.’
    ‘Maybe he needed money,’ said Sejer urgently, rising. He began to pace. ‘We’ve got to find that buyer. I wonder what happened between them. According to his wife he had a hundred kroner in his wallet. We ought to go through the car again, someone sat in it and drove it several kilometres, a murderer. He must have left something behind!’
    ‘The car’s been sold,’ Karlsen put in.
    ‘Wouldn’t you just know it.’
    ‘9 p.m.’s pretty late to go showing off a car,’ said Skarre, a curly-haired man with an open face. ‘It’s bloody dark in October at nine in the evening. If I were going to buy a car I’d want to see it in daylight. It could have been planned. A kind of trap.’
    ‘Yes. And if you want to test drive a car, you head out of town. Away from people.’ Sejer scratched his chin with well-clipped nails. ‘If he was stabbed on the fourth of October, he’s been in the river six months,’ he said, ‘is that consistent with the state of the body?’
    ‘The pathologists are being difficult about that,’ said Karlsen. ‘Impossible to date that sort of thing, they say. Snorrasson told of a woman who was found after seven years, and she was as good as new. Some lake in Ireland. Seven years! The water was freezing cold, pure preservation. But we can assume it happened on the fourth of October. It must have been quite a strong person, I should have thought, judging by the results.’
    ‘Let’s look at the stab wounds.’
    He selected a photograph from the folder, went to the board and clipped it in position. The picture showed Einarsson’s back and bottom; the skin had been thoroughly washed and the stab wounds left crater-like depressions.
    ‘They do look rather strange, fifteen stab wounds, half of which are to the lower back, bottom and abdomen, and the remainder in the victim’s right side, directly above the hip, delivered with great force by a right-handed person, striking from above and slicing downwards. The knife had a long, thin blade, very thin in fact. Perhaps a fishing knife. Altogether a strange way to attack a man. But you remember what the car looked like, don’t you?’
    All at once he strode over and hauled Soot out of his chair. His bag of goodies fell to the floor.
    ‘I need a victim,’ Sejer said. ‘Come here!’ He pushed the officer over to the desk, took up position behind him and grabbed the plastic ruler. ‘It could have happened something like this. This is Einarsson’s car,’ he said, pushing the young policeman over on to the desktop. His chin just reached the far edge. ‘The bonnet is up, because they’re busy looking over the engine. The killer pushes the victim on to the engine and holds him down with his left arm while he stabs him fifteen times with his right. FIFTEEN TIMES.’ He wielded the ruler and prodded Soot’s bottom as he counted aloud: ‘One, two, three, four,’ he moved his hand and stabbed him in the side, Soot squirmed a bit, as if he was ticklish, ‘five, six, seven – and then he stabs him in the nether regions …’
    ‘No!’ Soot leapt up in horror and crossed his legs.
    Sejer stopped, gave his victim a small push and sent him back to his chair as he fought to suppress a smile.
    ‘It’s a lot of times to strike with a knife. Fifteen stabs and a whole lot of blood. It must have spurted out everywhere, over the killer’s clothes,