Inborn - Softcover

Yngve parked as close to the school entrance as possible. Two girls and a boy were standing outside the door as he approached, eager to get in.

They stared at him, intrigued.

The janitor opened the door for him.

‘I did as you told me to,’ Tic-Tac said, his voice shaking, a spasm seeming to twist his face. ‘I’ve been standing here the whole time.’

‘Can we come in, too?’ one of the girls behind Yngve asked. ’It’s so cold.’

‘No,’ he said with a firm voice.

‘What’s going on?’ the boy asked. ‘What’s happened?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ Yngve answered and closed the door. He turned to Tic-Tac. ‘Where is he?’

Tic-Tac pointed to the stairs. They moved along the hall, their wet shoes making squeaking noises on the floor. ‘I didn’t touch anything,’ Tic-Tac stuttered.

From halfway along the passage Yngve could see a leg and a shoe. As they approached the stairs, more and more of the body became visible. Thin legs, blue jeans. Dark-red stripes that seemed to form a neat pattern on the young boy’s skinny fingers. There was blood on his coat, too, and on his other hand, arm. On the stairs, the wall.

Tic-Tac was right, Yngve thought to himself. There really was blood everywhere.

Fredheim was a small place, but Yngve had seen a lot during his tenure as a police officer here. Body parts in ripped-apart cars, corpses that had been rotting away in the forest throughout the winter. He had seen what people looked like after they’d been hanging by a rope from the ceiling for a couple of weeks, images that sometimes haunted him on nights when sleep was hard to find.

But this…

The young boy’s face looked like mince. Skin, blood, muscle. Teeth coloured red.

‘It’s Johannes Eklund,’ Tic-Tac said.

‘How can you tell?’ Yngve asked without taking his eyes off the kid.

‘His coat,’ the janitor said. ‘The logo on his chest.’

Yngve spotted it now, sewn onto a pocket: an old plane in the middle of a turn, an ‘S’ and a ‘C’ on each wing.

‘He was the singer of Sopwith Camel,’ Tic-Tac added. ‘He had a stunning voice. You should have seen him last night. A genuine star.’

‘There was a show here yesterday?’

‘Yeah. In the auditorium. Opening night of the annual school theatre show.’

‘When?’

‘Between eight and ten, roughly.’

‘And you were here? You watched the show?’

Yngve turned to look at the janitor, who was scratching his left palm.

‘I watched a little bit of it, yes.

‘What time did you leave?’

He seemed to be thinking for a moment. ‘I don’t know, long before the show was over. I knew I had an early start today.’

‘So you didn’t lock the doors before you left?’

Tic-Tac shook his head violently. ‘There was no need. The doors lock automatically at eleven. Everyone should have made their way out by then.’

‘Evidently, not everyone did, though.’

The janitor didn’t reply.

‘What happens if someone does stay behind after eleven? Can they still get out?’

Tic-Tac hesitated for a moment, now scratching his left temple. ‘They can, of course, but it triggers the alarm, and if the alarm goes off, the security company will be here in minutes. We have two surveillance cameras on the outside wall as well, pointing towards the entrance, so it’s easy to find whoever’s responsible. And they get the bill.’

’The alarm didn’t go off last night, did it?’

‘No.’

‘So if people want to avoid triggering the alarm … can they?’

Again, the janitor appeared to be thinking. ’I guess people will find a way out of here, if they need to. But it’s never really been an issue. People know the rules. Plus, there’s a reminder ten minutes before eleven, a ding-dong sound that’s played for about thirty seconds over the school’s PA system. That always makes people hurry out.’

Yngve considered this for a moment while turning back to look at Johannes Eklund. Not even the persistent banging on the entrance door could persuade him to wrench his gaze away from what used to be the face of a good-looking young man. Yngve had seen pictures of Johannes in the Fredheim Chronicle.

‘Can you see who it is?’ he asked Tic-Tac. He coughed to clear his voice. ‘Let them in if they’re police or from the ambulance service. No one else can enter.’