The Double Silence (Andas Knutas 7)

enjoy each other only a few times, her scent still lingered in his nostrils, her voice echoed in his head, and her lips still burned against his. Time could not wash away those memories. They were etched into him for all eternity. For him there had been nobody after her. Of course he’d met others; he’d had superficial relationships, but only for sex. He used to amuse himself by comparing all the others to her. The length of their hair, their fingers, nails, shoulders and collarbone. No one had a collarbone to match hers. As if created by God Himself. He recalled how he would run his fingertips along it, lightly, so lightly. Infinitely gentle. He could bring goose bumps to her skin. He felt sick at the thought of someone else touching her. Couldn’t bring himself to picture it.
    Then had come the death blow. One day she suddenly told him that he had to stop contacting her. Cold as ice, she cut the bond between them.Betrayed, that was how he felt. Betrayed. And he wasn’t going to take it any longer. He had lived with his loneliness. Carried his longing like a throbbing abscess in his chest.
    But at last he’d been given a sign. And it kept getting clearer. Soon it would be his turn. Again.

SEVERAL DAYS HAD now passed since Sam Dahlberg’s body was found on Stora Karlsö, and the police still had no lead on a possible suspect. The tech team had meticulously examined the cabin that the Dahlbergs had rented. Everyone in the group from Terra Nova had been interviewed again, and the police were now in the process of checking on their backgrounds. So far nothing out of the ordinary had surfaced. Nothing in their pasts had produced any leads that might help solve the case.
    Håkan Ek was the one who seemed the least emotionally stable, but that wasn’t really so strange. It was only natural for him to be worried about his wife, who still hadn’t returned. He’d been grilled several times by Knutas and Jacobsson, without result. Like a mantra, he just kept repeating what he’d told them before, over and over again. Finally they were forced to give up and let him go. It turned out that he’d been married twice before and had a child with each ex-wife. Knutas couldn’t figure the man out. He was evasive and difficult to pin down.
    It had been a huge undertaking to interview all the tourists who were on the island at the time the murder was committed. The local police had been assisted by two officers from the NCP, but Kihlgård had not yet found time to come over to Gotland himself. Not a single person who had been interviewed provided any information of value. Nobody had noticed anything suspicious. The homes of both couples in Terra Nova had been searched, and their neighbours, relatives and work colleagues had all been questioned. No one was able to give the police any leads.
    Knutas, Jacobsson and Wittberg were sitting dejectedly in Knutas’s office on Thursday morning, trying to come up with a new angle.
    ‘What if we focus solely on the murder of Dahlberg for a moment, and consider exactly what happened,’ suggested Jacobsson. ‘The fact that he was pushed off a cliff on Stora Karlsö. What does that indicate? What does it say about the perpetrator?’
    ‘First and foremost, it seems likely that they knew each other, or at least had been talking to each other before it happened,’ Knutas said.
    ‘And presumably it was not premeditated,’ interjected Wittberg. ‘If someone was planning a murder, would they really choose a place like that? First of all, somebody might have seen them at the site, or as they walked there. It’s really unfortunate that no one did, especially considering the fact that there were so many tourists on the island at the time.’
    ‘But it’s a fairly easy way of killing someone, don’t you think?’ replied Jacobsson. ‘No weapon is required, and there wouldn’t be any evidence left behind. And at such an inaccessible spot, the risk of being seen would be extremely small.’
    ‘So how likely does it seem that the killer was someone he didn’t know?’ asked Knutas. ‘Do you think he got into an argument with a stranger, who happened to have a murderous bent and who got so worked up that he threw Sam off the cliff?’
    ‘Not really. So the only option left is that it was someone he knew,’ said Jacobsson. ‘Could the killer be a woman?’
    ‘Yes. I have no doubt about that,’ said Wittberg. ‘Especially if he didn’t have any warning. Maybe he’d turned his