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could do whatever they wanted with him. You couldn’t find a more gentle horse. He was almost stupidly nice, you see. They would climb up on him when they were little and pull his mane and tug on his tail and things like that, and he let them do it. Well, he wasn’t exactly a youngster anymore, fifteen years old, so sooner or later he would have ended up at the butcher’s, but I like to think he still had a few more years left. Anyway, his life shouldn’t have ended the way it did. I never could have imagined this.”
    “No,” Knutas interjected sympathetically. “Do you know—”
    “I bought that horse after we had our first son, thought it would be fun for him to have a horse to ride, you know. We don’t have much else other than livestock out here in the country. Though we do have a dog, and she’s had several puppies, you know. And we almost always have kittens—that cat must have had four or five litters by now, so we’re going to have to get her fixed; well, you know what I mean. We also have rabbits, and baby rabbits, too. Well, the kids don’t have much else to occupy their time, and besides, they’re interested and they want to help out with the cows and calves, and that’s something a man has to be grateful for. The fact that they’re so interested.”
    “But—” Knutas ventured.
    The farmer took no notice and just kept on talking.
    “My oldest boy is sixteen and does the work of a full-grown hired hand when he comes home from school. Yes, he does. Every single day, too. He’s as reliable as the amen in church. We have forty milk cows and twenty-five calves. My brother and his wife also work on the farm; we own it together. They live in the other direction, where you turned off the road. They have three kids, so it’s a full house, and we take care of everything together. They’re away right now, on vacation in Majorca, but they’ll be back tomorrow, and I haven’t called to tell them about the horrible thing that’s happened. It would just upset them for no reason. It can just as well wait. But this whole thing is very unsettling, you know. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”
    Knutas stared at Jörgen Larsson, who barely managed to take a breath before more words came pouring out of him. They had reached the gate, and the farmer pointed a thick finger toward the narrow grove of trees.
    “The horse is lying over there, without a head. That’s really the worst thing I’ve ever seen. The bastard must have had a hell of a time cutting it off. I don’t know whether he sawed it off or hacked it off or what exactly he did.”
    “Where are the other horses?” barked Knutas to put an end to the farmer’s unrelenting torrent.
    “Oh, we took them inside. He might try to hurt them, too. You never know. Although we haven’t seen any cuts on them. We let the sheep stay out,” said Larsson apologetically. “They don’t seem to be bothered by much.”
    Knutas had given up trying to ask the farmer any questions, so he said nothing. That could wait until later.
    Larsson unhooked the latch and firmly shooed away the sheep that had crowded around his legs.
    The detectives tried to keep up with his long strides through the pasture.
    Over where the horse lay, a flock of crows was cawing above the cadaver.
    In the midst of that bucolic summer scene of the horse pasture, the green-clad hillside, and the glittering bay lay a muscular pony with a plump belly and flowing tail, but his neck ended in a huge bloody wound.
    “Who the hell would do something like this?” exploded Knutas.
    For once the farmer was at a loss for words.

 
    For TV reporter Johan Berg, the news situation looked anything but favorable on this Wednesday morning. There was absolutely nothing happening. He was sitting at his dust-covered desk in the small editorial office of Swedish TV in downtown Visby. He had paged through the morning newspapers and listened to the local radio station. He couldn’t help feeling impressed with how the editors had managed to fill the papers and the broadcasts, in spite of the fact that they didn’t contain even a shred of news. He had talked to Pia Lilja, the Gotland cameraperson with whom he was working during the summer, and told her that she could come in later. It was pointless for both of them to sit there twiddling their thumbs.
    Listlessly he sifted through several days’ worth of municipal documents and reports of proceedings, feebly hoping to find something.