Free Europa Blues by Arne Dahl

during the summer, but in the winter they’d happily eat a reindeer or two. The night before last, four of the wolverines in Skansen were clearly feeling quite wintery, because these little creatures – which don’t weigh more than about thirty kilos each, by the way – guzzled down a man, virtually every last bit of him. We’ve got some fibres from a pale pink suit, a section of his leg, complete with a piece of eight-millimetre red-and-purple polypropylene rope, plus a right index finger and this.’
    He held up a dog-eared playing card.
    The queen of spades.
    ‘We found traces of the probable basis for their greediness. Cocaine. An analysis of the flesh and blood samples showed the same: that our victim had recently consumed a pretty large amount of cocaine. Since the drug was in his blood, it added to the wolverines’ insatiability.
    ‘Everyone knows that the worst things always happen – in war, for example – under the influence of drugs. Apparently the animal kingdom isn’t much different from the human race in that respect. Put simply: the cocaine drove the wolverines crazy, and from what we can tell, they even managed to work their way through almost his entire skeleton, his head included. We haven’t found it yet, at least. Despite that, my father-in-law’s men from the lab have managed to produce both a DNA analysis and a usable fingerprint. Neither of them match anything in the Swedish databases, so we’ve sent them on to Interpol and Europol.
    ‘We didn’t find our man’s fingerprints on the wooden fence around the enclosure either. None of the fingerprints from the fence match any entries in the database. His finger, which was pretty cut up, was full of earth that we’ve managed to link to the soil in the southern corner of the wolverine enclosure – the area right beneath the viewing platform. We also found both blood and skin fragments from the victim in that area – in five letters which, from what we can tell, he scratched in the ground with his finger. The word, if it even is one, is: “Epivu”. Capital E, the rest lower case. Does that mean anything to anyone?’
    It didn’t.
    ‘No,’ said Chavez. ‘It didn’t mean a thing to us either. Or the Internet. Not one single hit.’
    ‘Moving on from the wolverine enclosure,’ Paul Hjelm continued. ‘Because of the rope around his leg, we automatically assumed he’d been carried there, either unconscious or already dead. I took too long to react, if I’m honest. I’d just come from the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital, where I’d been talking to a little girl who’d been shot just after 10 p.m. the night before. In Djurgården, not far from the eastern edge of Skansen. If we look at the path of the bullet and follow it back, you end up at the Skansen fence – parallel to the wolf enclosure. The lucky technicians had to expand their search to that enclosure too.
    ‘They eventually managed to find three things: firstly, our victim’s blood, high up on the fence – including on the barbed wire at the top and then also on the concrete wall beneath the viewing area on the other side. Secondly, they found a thick, broken neck chain, eighteen-carat gold, and finally, a 9mm Luger with a silencer. The magazine was empty. They did some sample shots. The gun’s a perfect match for the bullet taken from ten-year-old Lisa Altbratt’s upper arm. She’ll be absolutely fine, by the way.’
    ‘So in summary,’ Chavez took over. ‘Who is our man? He was wearing a pale pink suit and he had a thick gold chain around his neck; he snorts cocaine from the queen of spades and he’s armed with a silenced Luger. The print from his one remaining finger – the right index finger to be precise – is on all three of them: the card, the chain and the gun. It’s unambiguous. So who is he?’
    ‘Hit man?’ asked Nyberg.
    ‘Drug dealer?’ rejoined Norlander.
    ‘Porn star?’ Nyberg countered.
    ‘Pimp?’ Holm and Svenhagen blurted out in