Pathologist Lars Pohjanen telephoned Inspector Anna-Maria Mella at 11.15 on the evening of Friday, 24 April.
“Have you got a moment?” he said.
“Of course,” Mella said. “Marcus rented a film; it’s supposed to be deep, profound even. But Robert fell asleep after a few minutes. He woke up just now and said, ‘Are they still sitting around nattering? Haven’t they solved the world’s problems yet?’ Then he fell asleep again.”
“Who is it?” Robert shouted, sounding distinctly drowsy. “I’m awake.”
“It’s Pohjanen.”
“This bloody film is just a gang of people lounging around on a park bench talking, going on and on nonstop,” Robert yelled, loud enough for Pohjanen to hear. “It’s Friday night, for Christ’s sake! What we need is a car chase or two, a few murders and a dollop of sex.”
Pohjanen chuckled.
“I apologize,” said Mella. “I got drunk one night and he made me pregnant.”
“They are not sitting on a park bench. Can you just shut up, please?” Mella’s eldest son Marcus said.
“What’s the film?” Pohjanen asked.
“The Lives of Others. It’s in German.”
“I’ve seen that,” Pohjanen said. “It was good. It made me cry.”
“Pohjanen says he cried when he saw it,” Mella advised Robert.
“Tell him I’m crying my eyes out as well,” Robert yelled.
“There you are, you see,” Mella said to Pohjanen. “The last time he cried was when Wassberg beat Juha Mieto in the 1980 Olympics. Can you be quiet now so I can hear what Pohjanen wants?”
“One hundredth of a second,” Robert said, touched by the memory of that famous skiing victory. “Fifteen kilometres, and he won by five centimetres.”
“Can’t you all shut up so I can watch this film?” Marcus said.
“Wilma Persson,” Pohjanen said. “I tested some water from her lungs.”
“And?”
“And I compared it with water from the river.”
Her son was looking daggers at Mella, who stood up and went into the kitchen.
“Are you still there?” Pohjanen said grumpily. Then he cleared his throat.
“Yes, I’m still here,” Mella said, sitting down on a kitchen chair and trying to ignore Pohjanen’s phlegmy wheezing.
“I… khrush, khrush… I sent the samples to the Rudbeck Laboratory in Uppsala. Told Marie Allen to push them through rapido. They… khrush… did a sequential analysis of the samples. Very interesting.”
“Why?”
“Well, this is cutting-edge technology. You can identify the genetic material in anything living in water. Bacteria, algae, that sort of thing. As you probably know, everything is made up of four building blocks. Even us humans. A person’s D.N.A. has three million of these building blocks in a particular sequence.”
Mella looked at the clock. First a profound film in German, then D.N.A. technology with Lars Pohjanen.
“Anyway, I don’t suppose you’re all that interested in such things,” Pohjanen said with a rattling squeak. “But I can confirm that the water in Wilma Persson’s lungs had entirely different algae and micro-organic flora from the water in the river where she was found.”
Mella stood up.
“So she didn’t die in the river,” she said.
“No, she didn’t die in the river,” Pohjanen said.