Free The Last Pilgrim by Gard Sveen

the only skull he could positively identify at the moment was the small one.
    “Cecilia Lande,” Bergmann said quietly as he studied the photo of the skull on the screen. It was the only one that was intact after all these years in the ground. The two adult skulls were so cracked that they needed to be glued back together, but nobody’d had time to do that yet. The crime scene techs guessed that the two skulls had been shattered because they’d been shot in the head. But there was no entry hole in the smallest skull.
    Cecilia, Bergmann thought, staring at the gaping eye sockets of what had once been a child. You were only eight years old. He studied the photos, thirty of them altogether, taken from different angles so that he almost had a 360-degree view of the head.
    No hole or projectiles inside.
    Then something occurred to him.
    Were you buried alive?

CHAPTER 11
    Thursday, May 31, 1945
    The Stable
    Östermalm Police District
    Stockholm, Sweden
     
    Someone knocked on the door of Detective Inspector Gösta Persson’s office. Persson recognized the station chief’s characteristic knock and thought he’d just barge in without waiting for a go-ahead as he usually did. So Persson remained sitting with Kaj Holt’s case file in his lap and his feet on the desk, staring out the ancient windows. Another rainy day. It’ll probably be nicer this weekend, thought Persson as he swung his legs down from the massive hardwood desk. The station chief still hadn’t entered, which was very unlike him. Persson wasn’t stupid. He guessed that the chief must have people with him that he wanted to impress.
    “Come in,” he said, straightening his tie.
    The heavy door slowly opened.
    Persson put Holt’s case file down on the almost empty desktop. The chief tentatively approached across the old plank floor. Two men entered behind him.
    “Well, Gösta, my man,” said the station chief, but then he seemed to have a mental block. He stopped a couple of steps from the desk. Persson raised his eyebrows in anticipation. The chief’s tone revealed a feigned camaraderie that did not suit him. Persson reckoned that it was the man next to him who was making the chief uneasy. He was a tanned, tall fellow about Persson’s age, maybe a little younger, in a much too expensive suit and an overcoat that must have cost what Persson made in a month. The other man wore the same type of coat, and if Persson were to guess, he was no more than twenty years old. Judging by his childlike face, he would have had no problem fitting in with any middle school class. He made no attempt at a greeting, just looked around the room with his soaking wet hat on.
    “Well, Gösta. What exactly happened to that Norwegian . . . Holt?” asked the chief, nodding at the case file on the desk.
    Persson sighed.
    “Who knows?” he said.
    The taller of the two men behind the chief took a couple of steps across the floor and held out his hand to Persson, who made a move to get up and gave him a limp handshake. Although he only introduced himself as Håkan Nordenstam, Persson had already figured out who this man was and what he wanted, someone with an interest in making Holt’s death seem like nothing but a suicide, if not, indeed, the person who had killed the depressed Norwegian. The man with the baby face stood by the bookcase. He gave a slight nod when he noticed Persson watch him pick up a black ivory elephant. For an instant it looked as though he might drop it on the floor. His eyes met Persson’s and he smiled. Without averting his gaze he set the elephant statue back on the bookshelf.
    “Well . . . I had lunch with Kaj on Tuesday,” said Nordenstam. “And he was very . . . depressed.”
    “So you believe that he took his own life?” asked Persson.
    Nordenstam waved dismissively, apparently completely oblivious to Persson’s tone of voice, which held a hint of sarcasm. Enough to make the chief look even more uncomfortable than he already