Midwinter Sacrifice

3

In a way, it’s nice hanging up here.

There’s a good view and my frozen body is swaying pleasantly in the wind. I can let my thoughts meander wherever they like. There’s a calm here that I’ve never experienced before, that I never imagined might exist. My voice is new, my gaze too. Maybe I’m now the person I never had a chance to be.

The horizon is growing lighter and the Östgöta plain is grey-white; it looks endless, the view only broken by clusters of trees encircling small farms. The snow is drifting in waves across the meadows and fields, pasture interchangeable with bare soil, and down there, far from my dangling feet, a young man in grey overalls stands beside a police car, looking anxiously and expectantly, almost relieved, towards the approaching vehicle. Then he turns his eyes towards me, somehow watchful, as if I might run off or something.

The blood has solidified in my body.

My blood has solidified in the heavens and the stars and far out in the most distant galaxies. Yet I am still here. But I need not breathe any more, and that would be tricky anyway, considering the noose around my neck. When the man got out of his car and approached in his red jacket – God knows what he was doing out here so early – he screamed, then he muttered, Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fucking hell, oh God.

Then he rushed to his phone and now he’s sitting in the car shaking his head.

God: yes. I tried with Him once but what could He offer me? I see it everywhere: this faithless invocation that people start up as soon as they get involved in anything they imagine is related to darkness.

I’m not alone now, there are infinite numbers of people like me all around, but it still isn’t crowded, there’s room for all of us, more than enough room; here, in my infinitely expanding universe, everything is simultaneously shrinking together. Becoming clear, yet still strangely murky.

Of course it hurt.

Of course I was scared.

Of course I tried to escape.

But deep within me I knew my life was done. I wasn’t happy, but I was tired, tired of moving in circles around what I had been denied, what I, nevertheless, somewhere in my innermost being, still wanted to have, still wanted to participate in.

People’s movements.

Never my movements.

That’s why it’s pleasant hanging here naked and dead in a lonely oak tree out on one of the most fertile acres in the country. I think the two lights on the car that’s heading this way along the road are beautiful.

There was never any beautiful before.

Maybe it’s just for us dead?

It’s lovely, so lovely not to be troubled by all the worries of the living.

The cold has no smell. The naked, bloody body above Malin’s head is slowly swinging back and forth, the oak a reluctant, creaking gallows whose sounds mingle with the rumble of an idling car engine. The skin has come loose in great flaps over the bulging stomach and across the back, and the bleeding flesh, frozen, is a confusion of dull shades of red. Here and there on the limbs, apparently at random, the wounds are deep, concave, as though carved by a knife in slices from the body. The genitals appear to have been left untouched. The face lacks contours, is a blue-black, swollen, frozen mass of beaten fat. Only the eyes, wide open and bloodshot, almost surprised or hungry, yet simultaneously full of hesitant fear, let on that this is a human face.

‘He must weigh at least a hundred and fifty kilos,’ Zeke says.

‘At least,’ Malin replies, thinking that she has seen that look on murder victims before, how everything becomes primal again when we are faced with death, how we revert to the new human being we once were. Scared, hungry, but right from the outset capable of surprise.

She usually reacts this way when confronted by scenes like this. Rationalises them away, with the help of memories and things she’s read, tries to match up what her eyes are seeing with what she’s gleaned from studies.

His eyes.

Most of all she sees fury in them. And despair.

The others are waiting over by the patrol car. Zeke told the uniformed officer to sit and wait in the car.

‘No need for you to stand out here freezing. He’ll keep on hanging where he’s hanging.’

‘Don’t you want to talk to the man who found him?’ The officer looked over his shoulder. ‘That’s who found him.’

‘We’ll take a look first.’

Then this swollen frozen body in this lonely oak; a gigantic overgrown baby that someone, or more than one, has tortured the life out of.

What do you want with me? Malin wonders. Why have you dragged me out here on this godforsaken morning? What do you want to tell me?

The feet, blue-black, the toes turning black, swing against all the whiteness.

The eyes, Malin thinks. Your isolation. It’s like something moving across the plain, across the town, and into me.

First the obvious.

The branch is five metres above the ground, no clothes, no blood in the snow, no tracks in the thin covering around the tree, apart from the really fresh ones from a pair of boots.

From the man who found you, Malin thinks. One thing is certain: you didn’t get up here by yourself; and the injuries on your body, someone else must have given you those. And you probably didn’t get them here, otherwise the ground beneath you would be covered in blood. No, you froze for a good while somewhere else, so long that your blood turned solid.

‘You see those marks on the branch?’ Zeke says, looking up at the body.

‘Yes,’ Malin replies. ‘Like someone’s torn the bark off.’

‘I swear, the man who did this must have used a crane to get him up into the tree, then tied the noose afterwards.’

‘Or people,’ Malin says. ‘There may have been more than one.’

‘No tracks between here and the road.’

‘No, but it was a windy night. The ground changes by the minute. Loose snow, bits of ice. It’s changing all the time. How long would any track last? Quarter of an hour. An hour. No longer.’

‘We’re still going to have to get the forensics team to check the ground.’

‘They’re going to need the biggest heater on the planet,’ Malin says.

‘Well, that’s their business.’

‘How long do you reckon he’s been hanging there?’

‘Impossible to say. But no longer than the first hours of darkness. Someone would have seen him during the day.’

‘He could have been dead long before that,’ Malin says.

‘That’s Johannison’s job.’

‘Anything sexual?’

‘Isn’t everything, Fors?’

Her surname. Zeke uses it when he’s joking, when he answers a question he thinks is unnecessary or stupid, or just stupidly formulated.

‘Come on, Zeke.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything sexual involved here. No.’

‘Good, we agree on that, then.’

They head back towards the cars.

‘Whoever did this,’ Zeke says, ‘must have a bloody huge sense of purpose. Because no matter how you go about it, it’s no easy thing to get that body up here and into the tree.

‘You’d have to be absolutely livid,’ he adds.

‘Or really sad,’ Malin replies.

‘Sit in our car instead. It’s still warm.’

The uniforms clamber out of the patrol car.

The middle-aged man in the back seat looks meaningfully at Malin and makes an effort to move.

‘You can stay,’ she says, and the man sinks down, still tense, his thin eyebrows twitching. His entire body seems to be saying one single thing: How the hell do I explain this? What was I doing out here at this time of day?

Malin sits next to him, Zeke gets into the front.

‘That’s better,’ Zeke says. ‘Much better in here than out there.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ the man says, looking at Malin, his blue eyes wet with worry. ‘I shouldn’t have stopped, bloody stupid of me, I should just have kept going.’

Malin puts her hand on the man’s arm. The padding under the red fabric sinks beneath her fingers.

‘You did the right thing.’

‘You see, I’d been—’

‘It’s okay,’ Zeke says, turning towards the back seat. ‘Just take it easy. You can start by telling us your name.’

‘My name?’

‘Yep.’ Malin nods.

‘I’m having an affair—’

‘Your name.’

‘Liedbergh. Peter Liedbergh.’

‘Thank you, Peter.’

‘Now you can go on.’

‘I’m having an affair, and I’d been with her in Borensberg and was going home this way. I live in Maspelösa and it’s the quickest route from there. I’ll admit that much, but I didn’t have anything to do with this. You can check with her. Her name is—’

‘We’ll check,’ Zeke says. ‘So, you were on your way home from a night of passion?’

‘Yes, and I came this way. They keep the road clear, and then I saw something odd in the tree, and stopped, and I got out, and, I mean, fuck. Fuck. Bloody hell.’

People’s movements, Malin thinks. Headlights shining in the night, flickering points of light. Then she says, ‘There wasn’t anyone here when you arrived? Did you see anyone?’

‘Quiet as the grave.’

‘Did you pass any other cars?’

‘Not on this road. But a kilometre or so before the turning I passed an estate car, I can’t remember what make.’

‘Number?’ Zeke’s hoarse voice.

Peter Liedbergh shakes his head. ‘You can check with her. Her name’s—’

‘We’ll check.’

‘You know. First I just wanted to carry on. But then, well, I know what you’re supposed to do in this sort of situation. I swear, I had nothing to do with it.’

‘We don’t imagine that you did,’ Malin says. ‘I, I mean we, think it’s pretty unlikely that you would have phoned if you were involved.’

‘And my wife, does my wife have to know?’

‘About what?’

‘I told her I was going to work. Karlsson’s Bakery, I do nights there, but that’s in the other direction.’

‘We won’t need to say anything to her,’ Malin says. ‘But she’ll probably find out anyway.’

‘What am I going to tell her?’

‘Tell her you took the scenic route. Because you felt too awake.’

‘She’ll never believe that. I’m usually completely exhausted. And in this cold.’

Malin and Zeke exchange a glance.

‘Anything else you think might be important to us?’

Peter Liedbergh shakes his head. ‘Can I go now?’

‘No,’ Malin says. ‘The forensics team will have to check your car, and take your footprints. We need to know they’re your footprints out there and not anyone else’s. And you can give your lover’s name to our colleagues.’

‘I shouldn’t have stopped,’ Liedbergh says. ‘It would have been better to leave him hanging here. I mean, someone would have found him sooner or later.’

The wind is increasing in strength, forcing its way through the synthetic padding of Malin’s jacket, through her skin, flesh, right into the smallest molecules of her marrow. The stress hormones kick in, helping the muscles to send pain signals to the brain, and her whole body aches. Malin imagines that this must be what it’s like to freeze to death. You never die of cold, but as a result of the stress, the pain the body experiences when it can’t maintain its temperature and goes into overdrive, trying to fool itself. When you’re really cold, you feel a warmth spreading through your body. It’s a terrible bliss: your lungs can no longer oxygenate the blood and you suffocate and fall asleep simultaneously, but you feel warm; people who’ve returned from this state say that it’s as though they’d drowned, sinking down, down, only to float up again on clouds so soft and white and warm that all fear vanishes. It’s a physiological trick, that softness, Malin thinks. It’s just death caressing us so that we’ll accept it.

A car approaches in the distance.

The technical team arriving already?

Hardly.

More likely the hyenas on the Östgöta Correspondent who’ve got wind of Picture of the Year. Is it him? Malin has time to wonder as the top of the oak creaks disconcertingly and she turns and sees the body quivering, and thinks, It can’t be much fun hanging there.

Just hang on and we’ll get you down.