Buried Angels by Camilla Läckberg Page B

good girl, and then maybe you’d like to come over here and sit on my lap for a while. And find out how a real man feels …’ He laughed at his own joke and patted his fat thighs.
    Dagmar wrinkled her nose in disgust and turned back to the pilot.
    ‘Dagmar,’ she said. ‘My name is Dagmar.’
    ‘Dagmar,’ repeated the German. He pointed with an exaggerated gesture at his own chest. ‘Hermann,’ he said. ‘
Ich heisse Hermann.
’
    After a brief pause he raised his hand to touch the back of her neck, and she felt the little hairs on her arms stand on end. He said something else in German, and she turned to the fat man sitting across the table.
    ‘He says that he wonders what your hair looks like when it’s loose.’ The man again laughed loudly, as if he’d said something enormously funny.
    Dagmar instinctively put her hand up to her hair, which was gathered in a bun. Her blonde hair was so thick that she never managed to fasten it properly, and a few stray locks were always coming loose.
    ‘He’ll just have to keep on wondering. Tell him that,’ she said, and turned to go.
    The fat man laughed and uttered several long sentences in German. The pilot didn’t laugh, and as she stood there with her back to him, she felt his hand again touch the nape of her neck. With a tug he pulled out the comb and her hair came tumbling down her back.
    Her posture rigid, she slowly turned to face him. For a few moments she and the German pilot stared at each other, accompanied by the fat man’s roar of laughter. Between them a tacit understanding arose, and with her hair still loose, Dagmar walked up towards the house where the hooting and howling of the other guests shattered the peace of the summer night.

 
    Patrik was crouching down next to the big hole in the floor. The planks were old and rotting, and it was obvious that the floor needed to be replaced. So what they’d found underneath was all the more surprising. He felt an uneasy lump forming in the pit of his stomach.
    ‘Good thing you called us immediately,’ he said, without taking his eyes off the hole.
    ‘It’s blood, isn’t it?’ Tobias swallowed hard. ‘I don’t know what old blood looks like, and it might be tar or whatever. But considering …’
    ‘It does appear to be blood. Could you ring the tech team, Gösta? They need to come out here and take a closer look at this.’ Patrik stood up, grimacing when he heard how his joints creaked. A reminder that he wasn’t getting any younger.
    Gösta nodded and moved a short distance away as he tapped in a number on his mobile.
    ‘Do you think there’s something else … underneath there?’ asked Ebba, her voice quavering.
    Patrik realized at once what she was hinting at.
    ‘It’s impossible to say. We’re going to have to rip up the rest of the floor to see what we can find.’
    ‘It’s true that we could use some help with the renovation, but this wasn’t exactly what we had in mind,’ said Tobias with a hollow laugh. No one else laughed.
    Gösta finished his phone call and came back to join them. ‘The techs can’t come out here until tomorrow. So I hope you can stand to leave things the way they are until then. Nothing must be touched. You can’t do any cleaning or tidying up.’
    ‘We won’t touch anything. Why would we do that?’ said Tobias.
    ‘This is my chance to find out what happened,’ said Ebba.
    ‘Maybe we could sit down somewhere and have a little talk.’ Patrik backed away from the section of the floor that had been removed, but what he’d seen was already burned into his memory. For his part, he was convinced that it was blood. A thick layer of congealed blood, no longer red but dark with age. If his theory was right, it had to be more than thirty years old.
    ‘We can sit in the kitchen, that’s nice and neat,’ said Tobias, making a move to show Patrik the way. Ebba stayed where she was, along with Gösta.
    ‘Are you coming?’ Tobias turned to his wife.
    ‘You