Midwinter Sacrifice

19

They walk quickly between the panelled, brick-coloured buildings. The ground crunches beneath their feet, the grey paving carefully gritted, but with patches of ice every now and then. The path between the silent, oblong buildings becomes a wind-tunnel where the cold can gather its strength and get up speed to hit their bodies. The cones of light from the lamps hanging above them sway in the wind.

The university.

Like a rectangular city within the city, laid out between Valla and the golf course and Mjärdevi Science Park.

‘I didn’t know academic life could seem so bleak,’ Zeke says.

‘It isn’t bleak,’ Malin says. ‘Just tough.’

She spent two years studying law part-time, with Tove crawling round her legs and Janne off in some jungle or on some mined road God knew where, and her patrol duties and nightshifts and night nursery, alone, alone with you, Tove.

‘Did you say C-block?’ The letter C shines above the nearest entrance. Zeke’s voice sounds hopeful.

‘Sorry, F-block.’

‘Fuck, it’s cold.’

‘This cold stinks.’

‘Maybe. But it still doesn’t seem to have any smell, does it?’

A single light is shining on the second floor of F-block. Like an outsized star in a reluctant sky.

‘He said to press B 3267 at the door, and he’d buzz us in.’

‘You’ll have to take your gloves off,’ Zeke says.

And a minute later they are standing in a lift on the way up, Professor Söderkvist’s voice vague and difficult to pin down over the speaker a few moments ago.

‘Is that the police?’

‘Yes, Inspectors Fors and Martinsson.’

A buzz, then warmth.

What was I expecting? Malin thinks as she settles on to an uncomfortable chair in the professor’s office. A creaky old man in a cardigan? A history professor doesn’t count as one of the really posh ones, the ones who make her so uncertain. But what about this one?

He’s young, no more than forty, and he’s attractive; maybe his chin’s a bit weak, but there’s nothing wrong with his cheekbones and his cool blue eyes. Well hello, Professor.

He is leaning back in an armchair on the other side of a pedantically tidy desk, apart from a messily opened packet of biscuits. The room is perhaps ten square metres in size, over-full bookshelves along the walls, and windows facing the golf course, silent and deserted on the far side of the road.

He smiles, but only with his mouth and cheeks, not with his eyes.

He is hiding one hand, the one he didn’t shake hands with, Malin thinks. He’s keeping it under the desk. Why are you doing that, Professor Söderkvist?

‘You had something you wanted to explain to us?’ Zeke says.

The room smells of disinfectant.

‘Midwinter sacrifice,’ the professor says, leaning even further back. ‘Have you heard of that?’

‘Vaguely,’ Malin says.

Zeke shakes his head and nods to the professor, who goes on.

‘A heathen ritual, something the people you would call Vikings used to do once a year round about this time of year. They made sacrifices to the gods for happiness and success. Or as a penance. To cleanse the blood. To be reconciled with the dead. We don’t know for sure. There’s very little reliable documentation about this ritual, but we can be sure that they made both animal and human sacrifices.’

‘Human sacrifices?’

‘Human sacrifices. And the sacrifices were hung in trees, often in open places so that the gods could get a good view of them. At least that’s what we believe.’

‘And you mean that the man in the tree on the Östgöta plain could be the victim of a modern midwinter sacrifice?’ Malin asks.

‘No, that’s not what I mean.’ The professor smiles. ‘But I do mean that there are undoubted similarities in the scenario. Let me explain something: there are residential courses and hotels in this country that organise harmless midwinter sacrifices at this time of year. With no connection to the darker sides of the sacrifice, they arrange lectures about Old Norse culture and serve food that they suppose would have been served in those days. Commercial mumbo-jumbo. But there are others who have a less healthy interest in those days, so to speak.’

‘A less healthy interest?’

‘I come across them occasionally during my lecture tours. The sort of people who evidently have difficulty living in our age, and who prefer to identify themselves with history instead.’

‘They live in the past?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Is this about the old Æsir beliefs?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. We’re talking about the pre-Norse period here.’

‘Do you know where they are, people like this?’

‘I don’t know that there are any specific societies. I’ve never been that interested in them. But they’re probably out there somewhere. I’m sure I’ve had nutters like that come and listen to me. If I were you I’d start by looking on the Internet. They may prefer to live in the past, but they’re extremely technologically literate.’

‘But you don’t actually know of any?’

‘Not in particular. There are never any records kept of who attends my open lectures. It’s like the cinema or a concert. You come, you watch and listen, then you go away again.’

‘But you know that they’re technologically literate?’

‘Isn’t everyone like that these days?’

‘What about on your courses here at the university?’

‘Oh, they never find their way here. And midwinter sacrifice gets little more than a mention in the greater scheme of things.’

Then the professor pulls out the hand he has been keeping hidden under the desk and strokes his cheek, and Malin can see angry scars criss-crossing the back of his hand.

The professor seems to lose his train of thought, and quickly lowers his hand.

‘Have you hurt yourself?’

‘We have cats at home. One of them had a bit of a turn when we were playing the other day. We took her to the vet. It turned out that she had a brain tumour.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Malin said.

‘Thank you. The cats are like children for Magnus and me.’

‘Do you think he’s lying about his hand?’

Malin can hardly hear Zeke’s voice in the wind-tunnel between the buildings.

‘I don’t know,’ Malin shouts.

‘Should we check him out?’

‘We can get someone to take a quick look.’

As she is shouting the words her phone starts to ring in her pocket.

‘Fuck.’

‘Let it ring. You can call back once we’re in the car.’

As they’re driving past McDonald’s on the Ryd roundabout, Malin calls Johan Jakobsson back, not caring that his wife might be trying to put the children to bed and that the sound of the phone ringing might keep them awake.

‘Johan Jakobsson.’

The sound of children playing up in the background.

‘Malin here. I’m in the car with Zeke.’

‘Right,’ Johan says. ‘I haven’t managed to find anything specific, but the idea of midwinter sacrifice pops up on a lot of sites. Mostly residential courses that—’

‘We know all that. Anything else?’

‘That’s what I was coming to. Apart from the courses I found a site belonging to someone calling himself a soothsayer. Soothsaying is apparently some sort of Old Norse magic, and it says that according to these particular traditions, every February you have to make a midwinter sacrifice.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Then I went on to a Yahoo group about soothsaying.’

‘A what?’

‘A discussion group on the Internet.’

‘Okay.’

‘It doesn’t have many members, but the man running the group gives an address outside Maspelösa as his home location.’

‘Maspelösa.’

‘Exactly, Fors. Not much more than ten kilometres from the crime-scene.’

‘Are you going to talk to him tonight?’

‘Because he’s got a website? It can wait till morning.’

‘Is that wise?’

‘Wise or not, unless the pair of you fancy driving out to Maspelösa now?’

‘We can do that, Johan.’

‘Malin, you’re mad. Go home to Tove.’

‘You’re right, Johan. It can wait. You two take it tomorrow.’

The kitchen worktop is cold to her touch, but still feels somehow warm.

Soothsaying.

Old Norse magic.

Unexplained, thus far, holes in a pane of glass.

Does all this belong together?

The Æsir belief-system.

Zeke had laughed to begin with, then his face had taken on a rather uncertain look, as if it had struck him that if a naked man can be found hanging in a tree on a cripplingly cold winter’s morning, then there could well be ‘nutters’ who live their lives according to Old Norse mythology.

But they had to follow several threads at once, looking under any stone where there might be something relevant. There were countless police investigations that had ground to a halt simply because the officers themselves had got hung up on one of their own theories, or, worse still, fallen in love with it.

Malin eats a couple of crispbread sandwiches with low-fat cheese before she sits down at her desk and starts phoning the people on the list she was given at Ljungsbro social services.

The clock on the computer says 21.12. Not too late to call.

A note from Tove in the hall.

I’ve gone to Filippa’s to study for a maths test tomorrow. Home by ten at the latest.

Maths? Didn’t she say geography? Filippa?

No answer anywhere; she left messages, her name and number, why she was phoning: Call me this evening or early tomorrow, as soon as you get this message. How busy could people be on a Monday evening? But, on the other hand, why not?

Theatre, cinema, a concert, evening classes, the gym. All the things people do to stop themselves getting bored.

Maria Murvall’s number was unobtainable. This number is no longer in use. Directory enquiries had no new number for her.

Half past nine.

Malin’s body is tired after her exercise; she feels the fibres of her muscles protest as they grow. How her brain is tired after the encounter at the university.

Maybe this will be a peaceful night? Nothing holds the nightmares at bay like exercise and concentration, but she can still feel the anxiety and restlessness, how impossible it is to stay inside the flat even though it is so cold outside.

She gets up, pulls on her jacket, her holster out of habit, and leaves the flat again. She walks up Hamngatan towards Filbytertorg, then carries on up towards the castle and the cemetery, where the snow-covered graves keep their owners’ secrets. Malin looks up at the memorial grove; she usually goes there to look at the flowers, trying to feel the presence of the dead and hear their voices, pretending that she can breach the dimensions, that she’s a superhero with fantastic powers.

The rustle of the wind.

The panting of the cold.

Malin stands still in the memorial grove.

The oaks are drooping. Frozen branches hang in the air like stiff black rain. A few nightlights are burning around her feet, a floral wreath makes a grey ring on the snow.

Are you here?

But everything is silent and empty and still.

I’m here, Malin.

Ball-Bengt?

And the evening is destructively hard and cold and she leaves the grove, walking the length of the cemetery wall and then along Vallavägen and down towards the old water tower and the Infection Clinic.

She walks past her parents’ apartment.

‘You won’t forget . . .’

There’s something not right. There’s a reddish light up in one of the apartment’s windows. Why is there a light in the apartment?

I never forget to turn off the lights.