Midwinter Sacrifice

21

Tuesday, 7 February

It is just after midnight.

Daniel Högfeldt presses the door button on the wall and the main door to the Correspondent’s offices swings opens to the sound of manic squeaking. He’s happy, job well done.

He looks down Hamngatan as he takes a breath of the icy air.

He called Malin. To ask about the case, and to ask about . . . yes, what was he going to ask her about?

Even though his thick jacket is done up to the neck, the cold wins in just a few seconds and forces its way through the fabric.

He heads home quickly along Linnégatan.

At St Lars Church he looks up at the darkened windows of Malin’s flat, thinks of her face and eyes, and of how little he knows about her, and what he must look like to her: a fucking irritating journalist, a male chauvinist with some sort of irresistible sex appeal and charm. A body that does the job well enough when her own body needs fulfilment.

Fucking.

Hard or soft.

But people have to fuck.

He walks past H&M and thinks about the distance in that ‘people’. Fucking isn’t something you or I do, ‘people’ do it; an alien entity separate from our bodies.

The phone-call from Stockholm today.

Flattery and coaxing, promises.

Daniel wasn’t surprised.

Am I done with this dump now?

The front page of the Correspondent confronts Malin from the hall floor as she stumbles towards the kitchen on tired, stiff legs, freshly showered and dressed.

In spite of the darkness she can read the headline, which, in its urgent, tabloid manner, bears Daniel Högfeldt’s unmistakable signature: POLICE SUSPECT RITUAL KILLING.

You made the front page, Daniel. Congratulations.

An archive picture of a serious Karim Akbar, a statement given over the phone late yesterday evening: I can neither confirm nor deny that we are investigating secret networks of people who follow the Æsir belief-system.

Secret networks? The Æsir belief-system?

Daniel has interviewed Professor Söderkvist, who claims to have been questioned by the police for information, and that he had explained ritual killings to them during the day.

Then a screenshot of a website about the Æsir faith, and a passport photograph of a Rickard Skoglöf from Maspelösa, who is identified as a central character in such circles. Rickard Skoglöf was unavailable for comment yesterday evening.

A fact box about midwinter sacrifices.

Nothing else.

Malin folds the paper and puts it on the kitchen table, and makes a cup of coffee.

Her body. Muscles and sinews, bones and joints. Everything aches.

Then the sound of a car-horn down in the street.

Zeke. Are you here already?

Jönköping, we’ll set off early. Zeke’s final words as he dropped her off outside her flat.

The Ikea clock on the wall says quarter to seven.

I’m the one who’s late.

What exactly is this winter doing to me?

Zeke at the wheel of the green Volvo. Tired shoulders, limp hands. German choral music in a minor key fills the car. The pair of them are equally tired. The E4 cuts through white-clad fields and the frozen landscape of the plain.

Mobilia outside Mantorp, a retail park, Tove’s favourite outing, Malin’s nightmare. Mjölby, Gränna, Lake Vättern as a strip of white hope in front of a horizon where nuances of grey meet other nuances of grey, forming a confusion of cold and darkness, an eternal lack of light.

Zeke’s voice comes as a liberation, loud enough to drown out the music.

‘What do you think about this Old Norse stuff?’

‘Karim seemed fairly positive about it.’

‘Mr Akbar. What do factory-farmed police chiefs like him know about anything?’

‘Zeke. He’s not that bad.’

‘No, I suppose not. Mr Akbar presumably has to give the impression that we’re making progress. And the holes in the window, have you had any more thoughts about them now you’ve had time to sleep on it?’

‘No idea. Maybe they’ll lead to something. But what, I don’t know.’ Malin thinks that this is just like every big investigation, that obvious connections are hidden somewhere close to them, just out of reach, mocking them.

‘When was Karin going to have her analysis of the glass finished?’

‘Today or tomorrow.’

‘Just one thing,’ Zeke goes on. ‘The more I think about Ball-Bengt up there in the tree, the more it all feels like some sort of pagan invocation.’

‘I’ve been feeling the same,’ Malin says. ‘Well, it remains to be seen if there are any links to Valhalla or anything else.’

Malin rings the doorbell of Rebecka Stenlundh’s flat. She lives on the second floor of a yellow-brick block in the hills just south of Jönköping.

The view from the flat must be wonderful, and in the summer the area must be lush with the green of all the birch trees. Even the garages a little way down towards the road look attractive, with orange-painted doors, surrounded by well-maintained hedges.

The place where Rebecka Stenlundh lives is neither one thing nor the other. Not lovely, but nice enough, a here where children could grow up in decent surroundings.

Not a dumping-ground for social service cases and immigrants. The sort of place where people live out their lives unobserved, largely unnoticed and unwanted, but still well thought of. A life on the fault-line, close to the boundary of dysfunction. Malin is just as surprised every time she finds herself in a place like this, by the fact that they still exist. The quiet happiness of the old Social-Democratic ‘people’s home’. Two point three swings and slides per child.

No answer.

It is just after nine o’clock; perhaps they should have called and announced their arrival, but does she even know about what happened to her brother?

‘No, we’ll just head over there.’ Zeke’s words.

‘We might be bringing bad news.’

‘Wasn’t she told before his name was made public?’

‘No one knew he had a sister then, and it’s a long time since the papers showed that level of consideration.’

Malin rings the bell again.

The rattle of locks on the neighbour’s door.

An old woman’s face, friendly, smiling. ‘Are you looking for Rebecka?’

‘Yes, we’re from Linköping Police,’ Malin says, and Zeke holds up his ID.

‘From the police? Goodness.’ The old woman screws up her eyes in alarm. ‘I hope she isn’t involved in any unpleasantness? I can’t imagine that she is.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Zeke says in his gentlest voice. ‘We’d just like to talk to her.’

‘She works down in the ICA supermarket. Try there. She’s the manageress. You’ve never seen a nicer ICA shop. I can promise you that. And you should see her son. You won’t meet a nicer boy. He’s always helping me with one thing or another.’

Just as they are heading towards the automatic doors of the ICA shop, Zeke’s phone rings.

Malin stops beside him, listens to him talk, sees him frown.

‘Yes, okay, so it checks out, then?’

Zeke hangs up.

‘They’ve found that business with the axe in the archive,’ he says. ‘What the old man told you seems about right. Lotta, Rebecka, saw it all. She was eight years old at the time.’

Vegetables and fruit in neat rows, and a smell of food that makes Malin hungry. Signs with beautiful lettering, every corner well-lit, everything announcing: this is a clean shop.

The old woman was right, Malin thinks. Nothing shabby or slapdash, just an apparent desire to give people something pleasant in their everyday lives. Someone wanting to make a bit of extra effort for other people. Showing a bit of consideration must surely be good for business. Anyone would want to return to this shop.

A middle-aged woman at the till, plump, with blonde, tightly permed hair.

Rebecka?

Zeke’s voice: ‘Excuse me, we’re looking for Rebecka Stenlundh.’

‘The boss. Try over at the butcher’s counter. She’s marking up the meat.’

Over at the butcher’s counter a thin woman is crouched down, her dark hair in a net, her back bowed under a white coat with the red ICA logo.

It looks like she’s hiding behind that coat, Malin thinks, as if someone’s going to attack her from behind, as if the whole world wishes her ill and you can never be too careful.

‘Rebecka Stenlundh?’

The woman spins round on her wooden sandals. A pleasant face: gentle features, brown eyes with a thousand friendly nuances, cheeks with skin that radiates health and a light suntan.

Rebecka Stenlundh looks at them.

Then one of her eyebrows twitches, and her eyes shine bright and clear.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ she says.