Midwinter Sacrifice

12

No children in the nursery on a Saturday.

Empty swings. No sledges, no balls. The lights through the windows turned off. No games today.

‘Are you okay with this, Malin? You look worn out.’

Stop going on, Sven. I’m at work, aren’t I?

Zeke pulls a face from where he is sitting opposite her. Börje Svärd and Johan Jakobsson don’t look exactly happy, but then you’re not supposed to if you’re at work just after eight on a Saturday morning.

‘I’m okay. Just a bit of a party last night, that’s all.’

‘Well, I got to party with cheese puffs, crisps and a Pippi Longstocking DVD,’ Johan says.

Börje doesn’t say anything.

‘I’ve got a list here,’ Sven says, waving a sheet of paper in the air. He isn’t standing at the end of the table today. He’s sitting down. ‘These are the people who phoned to identify Bengt Andersson, Ball-Bengt. We can start by questioning them. See what they have to say about him. There are nine names on the list, all in Ljungsbro or close by. Börje and Johan, you take the first five. Malin and Zeke can take the other four.’

‘And the flat? His flat?’

‘Forensics are already there. As far as we could make out, none of the violence happened there. They’ll be done some time this afternoon. You can take a look after that if you like. Not before. When you’re finished with the names on the list, try his neighbours. He was on benefits, so there must be a social worker somewhere who knows about his case. But we probably won’t be able to get hold of them until Monday.’

‘Can’t we get it sorted any quicker?’ Zeke’s voice, impatient.

‘Bengt Andersson hasn’t been declared dead, or even officially identified yet,’ Sven says. ‘And until those two things happen, we have no authority to get access to any registers and databases containing the names of his doctor or social worker. But all the formalities ought to be sorted out on Monday.’

‘Okay, let’s get going,’ Johan says, standing up.

I want to sleep, Malin thinks. Sleep as deep as is humanly possible.

My room is black, closed. But I can still see everything.

It’s cold in here, but not as cold as in the tree out on the plain. But what do I care about the cold? And there is no wind here, no storm, no snow. I might miss the wind and snow, but I prefer the clarity that comes with a condition like mine. How much I know, how much I can do. Like finding words in a way that I never used to be able to.

And isn’t it funny that everyone is suddenly concerned about me? How they all see my face and want to demonstrate that they knew me? Before they would turn away when I showed my face in public, they would cross the street to avoid my gaze, to avoid coming close to my body, my – as they thought – dirty clothes, which they thought stank of sweat, of urine.

Depressing and repulsive.

And the kids who would never leave me alone. Who would plague me, tease me, bully me. Their mums and dads truly had let a thousand evil flowers bloom in their children.

I was hardly even good enough to laugh at. Even when I was alive I was a tragedy.

The chimney of the Cloetta chocolate factory.

You can’t see it from the roundabout beside the ancient abbey of Vreta Kloster, but you can see the smoke, whiter than white, as it climbs into a pretend-blue sky. The low morning clouds have drifted away and winter is getting bluer, the mercury sinks still further, the price you have to pay for the light.

‘Do we turn off here?’

There are signs to Ljungsbro in both directions.

‘Don’t know,’ Malin says.

‘Okay, we’re turning,’ Zeke says, twisting the wheel. ‘We’ll have to check the GPS when we get closer.’

Malin and Zeke drive through Vreta Kloster. Past the dormant sluice-gates and empty locks. Bars closed for winter. Villas with people moving behind the windows, trees that have been left to grow in peace. An ICA supermarket. There’s no music in the car. Zeke didn’t insist and Malin appreciates the relative silence.

They pass a bus stop and the village spreads out to their left, the houses disappearing down a slope, and in the distance Lake Roxen opens out. The car heads down past a piece of woodland, then a field opens up on their right and a few hundred metres on more houses cling to the side of a steep incline.

‘Millionaires’ row,’ Zeke says. ‘Doctors’ houses.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Not really.’

Kungsbro on another sign, Stjärnorp, Ljungsbro.

They turn off by a red-painted stable and a stone-built cowshed, no horses in sight. Only a few teenage girls in thermal clothes and moonboots carrying bales of hay between two outhouses.

They approach the houses along millionaires’ row.

When they reach the top of another hill they catch a glimpse of the Cloetta chimney.

‘You know,’ Zeke says, ‘I swear I can smell chocolate in the air today. From the factory.’

‘I’d better put the GPS on, so we can find where we’re going. The first name on the list.’

She didn’t want to let them in.

Pamela Karlsson, thirty-six years old, blonde pageboy cut, single, sales assistant at H&M. She lived in a council block just behind the hideous white Hemköp supermarket. Only four flats in the grey-painted wooden building. She spoke to them with the safety chain on, freezing in white vest and pants, evidently woken by them knocking at the door.

‘Do you have to come in? It’s such a mess.’

‘It’s cold out here in the stairwell,’ Malin said, thinking, A man has been found murdered, hanging in a tree, and she’s worried about a bit of mess. Oh well. At least she phoned.

‘I had a party yesterday.’

‘Another one,’ Zeke said.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ Malin said. ‘It really doesn’t matter to us if it’s a bit messy. It won’t take long.’

‘Well, okay.’ The door closed, the chain rattled, then the door opened again.

‘Come in.’

A one-room flat, sofa-bed, a small table, a tiny kitchenette. Furniture from Ikea, lace curtains and a stripped, rustic wooden bench, probably inherited. Pizza boxes, beer cans, a box of white wine. On the windowsill an ashtray, full to overflowing.

She saw Malin looking at the ashtray.

‘I don’t usually let them smoke in here. But I couldn’t make them go outside yesterday.’

‘Them?’

‘My friends. We were doing some surfing last night as we drank, and that was when we saw him and the request for people to call in. I phoned straight away. Well, almost straight away.’

She sat down on the bed. She wasn’t fat, but her vest bulged as she sat.

Zeke sat on a chair. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘Not much, except that he lives round here. And his name. Apart from that, nothing. Is it him?’

‘Yes, we’re almost certain.’

‘God, it was all everyone was talking about last night.’

False memories, Malin thought. Recollections of other people are juicy conversation topics at parties. Just wait till you hear what happened to a friend of a friend . . .

‘So you don’t know anything about who he was really?’

‘Not much. I think he was on the sick. And everyone called him Ball-Bengt. I thought it was because he was so fat, but the Correspondent said different.’

They left Pamela Karlsson with her mess and her headache and went on to an address on Ugglebovägen, an architect-designed villa on four levels, where every room seemed to have a view of the fields and, in the distance, Lake Roxen. A hollow-eyed insurance broker named Stig Unning opened the door after they knocked on the gilded lion’s head.

‘It was my son who made the call. You’ll have to talk to him, he’s down in the basement.’

The son, Fredrik, was playing a computer game. Thirteen maybe, thin, acne, dressed in jeans and an orange T-shirt that were too big for him. Dwarfs and elves were dying in droves on the screen.

‘You called us,’ Zeke said.

‘Yes,’ Fredrik Unning said without looking away from the game.

‘Why?’

‘Because I recognised the picture. I thought maybe there was some sort of reward. Is there?’

‘No, sorry,’ Malin said. ‘You don’t get paid for recognising a murder victim.’

A gnu was blown to pieces, a troll had its limbs torn off.

‘Should have called Aftonbladet instead.’

Bang. Dead, dead, dead.

Fredrik Unning looked up at them.

‘Did you know him?’ Malin asked.

‘No. Not at all. I mean, I knew his nickname, and I knew he stank of piss. No more than that.’

‘Nothing else we ought to know?’

Fredrik Unning hesitated and Malin saw a flash of fear cross his eyes before he once again fixed his gaze on the television screen and waved the joystick back and forth frenetically.

‘No,’ the boy said.

You know something, Malin thought.

‘Are you quite sure you haven’t got anything else to tell us?’

Fredrik Unning shook his head. ‘Nah, nothing. Not a damn thing.’

A red lizard dropped a huge rock on the head of a hulking great monster.

The third person on the list was a Pentecostal pastor, Sven Garplöv, forty-seven, who lived in a fairly average newly built villa on the other side of the Motala River, on the outskirts of Ljungsbro. White brick, white wood, white gables, white on white as if to keep sin away. On the way there they drove past the Cloetta factory, its corrugated roof like an angry sugar snake, its chimney pumping out promises of a sweet life.

‘That’s where they make chocolate wafers,’ Zeke said.

‘I wouldn’t say no to one right now,’ Malin said.

Even though they were in a hurry, the pastor’s wife, Ingrid, offered them coffee. The four of them sat on green leather sofas in the white-painted sitting room eating home-made biscuits, seven different sorts, as per tradition.

Butter in the biscuits. Just what she needed.

The pastor’s wife sat in silence as he talked.

‘I have a service today, but the congregation will have to wait. A sin of such a serious nature has to take precedence. He who waits to pray never waits for long. Wouldn’t you say, Ingrid?’

His wife nodded. Then she nodded towards the plate of biscuits.

They both helped themselves for the second time.

‘He was evidently a troubled soul. The sort of whom the Lord is fond, in His own way. We spoke about him briefly in the congregation once, and someone, I forget who, mentioned his name. We agreed that he was a very lonely man. He could have done with a friend like Jesus.’

‘Did you ever speak to him yourself?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean, did you ever invite him to your church?’

‘No, I don’t think that ever occurred to any of us. Our doors are open to everyone, although perhaps slightly more open to some people than others. I have to admit that.’

And now they are standing outside the front door of a Conn Dyrenäs, thirty-nine, who lives in a flat on Cloettavägen, right behind the football ground, Cloettavallen. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds for the door to open.

‘I heard you come,’ the man says.

The flat is full of toys, great drifts of them. Plastic in all manner of gaudy colours.

‘The kids,’ Conn Dyrenäs says. ‘They’re with their mother this weekend. We’re divorced. Otherwise they live with me. You miss them terribly when they’re not around. I tried to have a lie-in this morning, but still woke up at the same time as usual. I got up and surfed the net. Would you like coffee?’

‘We’ve just had some, so no, but thanks anyway,’ Malin says. ‘Are you quite sure it’s Bengt in the pictures?’

‘Yes, no doubt at all.’

‘Did you know him?’ Zeke asks.

‘No, but he was still part of my life.’

Conn Dyrenäs walks over to the balcony door, gesturing to them to follow.

‘You see that fence over there? He used to stand there waiting for the ball whenever Ljungsbro IF played at home. It didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, or freezing, or boiling hot in the summer. He was always there. Sometimes he used to stand there in winter, looking out at the deserted pitch. I guess he missed it. It was like he’d sorted out a job for himself, something to do with his time here on earth. He ran after the ball when it went over the fence. Well, maybe not ran. Lolloped. And then he would throw it back. People in the stands used to laugh. Okay, it did look funny, but my laughter always stuck in my throat.’

Malin looks at the fence, white in the cold, the roofed stand with the clubhouse behind it.

‘I kept thinking about asking him in for coffee one day,’ Conn Dyrenäs says. ‘So much for that idea.’

‘He seems to have been a very lonely person. You should have asked him in,’ Malin says.

Conn Dyrenäs nods, goes to say something, but remains silent.

‘What else do you know about him?’ Malin asks.

‘I don’t know much. There was a lot of gossip, though.’

‘Gossip?’

‘Yes, about his dad being mad. That he used to live in a house and one day smashed an axe into his father’s head.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, apparently.’

And Daniel Högfeldt hadn’t managed to dig that out?

‘But that could easily have been a load of rubbish. It must be a good twenty years since it happened. Maybe more. He was probably completely harmless. He had kind eyes. I could see that from here. You can’t see that on the pictures in the Correspondent, can you?’