Van Veeteren thought back to what his friend Mahler had said the previous
evening: "Doing something at the right time is more important than what you
actually do . . ."
An unmissable hospital appointment is looming for Inspector Van Veeteren when a
corpse is found rolled in a rotting carpet by a young child playing in a local
beauty spot. Missing head and limbs, the torso is too badly decomposed for
forensic identification - bar one crucial detail . . .
Circumstantial evidence soon points to a local man, a double murderer who
disappeared 9 months before, shortly after being released