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seen her name written down.
    Why didn’t she get the same level of respect as the other senior officers? She was better qualified and had a higher rate of closed cases than most of them. Each year, when their rates of pay were adjusted, she received black-and-white evidence that she was still below the average salary for someone of her level. Ten years of experience were forgotten while new officers were promoted and others advanced.
    Could the lack of respect really be because she was a woman?
    The train stopped at Gullmarsplan. A lot of passengers got off and she sat down on an empty seat at the end of the carriage before it filled up with new passengers.
    She was a woman in a position where most of her colleagues were men. Women weren’t senior officers in the police. They didn’t take command, not at work, and not on the football pitch. They weren’t decisive, bossy or dominant like her.
    The train shuddered, left Gullmarsplan and pulled out onto the Skanstull Bridge.
    Jan, she thought. One of the guys.

Kronoberg – Police Headquarters
     
    BY THE THIRD day after the discovery on Kungsholmen nothing new had come to light that could lead the investigation forward, and Jeanette was feeling frustrated. In the register of missing children there was no one who, at first glance at least, matched the dead boy. Of course there were hundreds, possibly thousands of undocumented children in Sweden, but unofficial contacts within the church and the Salvation Army had indicated that they weren’t aware of anyone who might match the victim.
    The City Mission in Gamlastan had no information to offer either. But someone who worked for their nightly outreach programme told them that a number of children usually gathered beneath the Central Bridge.
    ‘They’re incredibly elusive, those kids,’ the male charity worker lamented. ‘When we’re there they come out and grab a sandwich and a mug of soup, then disappear again. It’s perfectly obvious that they don’t really want to have anything to do with us.’
    ‘Isn’t there anything social services can do?’ Jeanette asked, even though she already knew the answer.
    ‘I doubt it. I know they were down there a month or so ago, and all the kids scattered and didn’t come back for a couple of weeks.’
    Jeanette Kihlberg thanked him for the information and wondered if a visit to the bridge might turn something up, if she could manage to persuade one of the kids to talk to her.
    The door-to-door inquiries around the teacher-training college had been completely useless, and the time-consuming work of contacting refugee centres had now been expanded to cover the whole of central Sweden.
    But no one was missing a child who might match the mummified boy who’d been found in the bushes by the metro station. Åhlund had been through hours of security camera footage from the station and the neighbouring college, but hadn’t found anything unusual.
    At half past ten she called Ivo Andrić at the Institute of Pathology in Solna.
    ‘Tell me you’ve got something for me! We’ve ground to a halt here.’
    ‘Well.’ Andrić took a deep breath. ‘Here’s what I’ve got. The first thing is that all his teeth have been removed, so there’s no point calling in a forensic orthodontist to check his dental records. Secondly, the body’s completely desiccated, mummified, in fact …’
    He fell silent, and Jeanette waited for him to go on.
    ‘I’ll start again. How do you want it? Technical terminology or something more comprehensible?’
    ‘Whatever you think best. If there’s anything I don’t understand I’ll ask, and you can explain.’
    ‘OK. Well, if a dead body is left in a dry environment at a high temperature, with relatively good ventilation, it dries out fairly quickly. Which means that there’s basically no decay. And in extreme cases of drying – such as this one – it’s difficult, not to say impossible, to remove the skin, especially from the skull. The facial