Midwinter Sacrifice

27

The call from Karin Johannison came through when Malin had just got into her car and turned the ignition key.

‘Malin? Karin here. I think I know what caused those holes in the glass now.’

Malin sinks into the icy car seat. In just a second she feels cold air spreading through the car, and longs desperately for it to warm up.

‘Sorry, I was about to drive off. What have you found?’

‘I can safely say that they weren’t made by grit or stones, the edges are far too smooth for that. The holes have also caused some very large cracks, considering their size, so I think it’s impossible that anyone threw anything through the window.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘They’re bullet-holes, Malin.’

Holes in glass.

A new door opening.

‘Are you sure?’

‘As sure as I can be. An extremely small-calibre weapon. There’s no soot or powder on the holes, but that’s often the case with glass. But it could also mean they were made by an air-rifle.’

Malin sits in silence, thoughts running through her head.

A small-calibre weapon. Was someone trying to shoot Bengt Andersson?

Air-rifle. Boys getting up to mischief?

Forensics didn’t find anything odd in Bengt Andersson’s flat. No bullet wounds in his body.

‘In that case they must have been rubber bullets. Could that sort of ammunition have caused any of Bengt Andersson’s injuries?’

‘No, they cause a very particular type of bleeding. I’ve seen it before.’

Engine noise.

Malin, alone in her car, on her way to see a mute, raped woman.

‘Malin, you’ve gone quiet,’ Karin’s voice comes over the phone. ‘Have you gone off the road?’

‘It’s just me thinking,’ Malin says. ‘Could you go back to Bengt Andersson’s flat and see if you can find anything new? Take Zeke with you.’

Karin sighs, then says, ‘I know what you’re looking for, Malin. You can rely on me.’

‘Will you tell Sven Sjöman?’

‘He’s had an email already.’

What is it I, we, can’t see? Malin thinks as she presses the accelerator.

This police officer, senior physician Charlotta Niima thinks, must be ten years younger than me, and the way she looks at you, through you, watchful and weary at the same time, as if she could do with a decent holiday away from all this cold. Same thing with her body: athletic, but still slow in its movements, hesitant in front of me somehow. Hiding behind matter-of-factness.

She’s pretty, but she’d probably hate that word. And behind the penetrating eyes? What do I see there? Sorrow? But that must be to do with her work. What can’t she have seen? Just like me. It’s all a matter of compartmentalising, turning on and off like any other piece of machinery.

The black-framed glasses make Charlotta Niima look stern, but together with her big, red, permed hair, the glasses give her a slightly crazy look.

Maybe you have to be crazy to work with crazy people? Malin thinks. Unless you have to be entirely uncrazy?

There’s something manic about Dr Niima, as if she maybe uses her patients’ illnesses to keep her own problems under control.

Prejudices.

The hospital is housed in three whitewashed fifties buildings in a fenced-in area on the edge of Vadstena. Through the windows of Dr Niima’s room Malin can see the ice-covered Vättern, frozen almost to the bottom: stiff fish panting below the ice, trying to force their way through a viscous, treacherous liquid. Soon we won’t be able to breathe under here.

On the left, beyond the fence, she can make out the red-brick walls of the convent.

Birgitta. Prayer. Saints. Convent life.

She’s here alone. Woman to woman. Zeke didn’t protest.

The old madhouse, famous across the plain as a dumping ground for the lost, has been rebuilt as private apartments. Malin drove past the white art nouveau building on her way into the town. The white façades of the madhouse looked grey, and the drooping black branches of trees in the surrounding parkland must have heard a thousand madmen scream at night.

How could anyone choose to live in a place like that?

‘Maria has been here almost five years now. She hasn’t spoken once in that time.’ Niima’s voice, sympathetic, intimate, yet still distant. ‘She doesn’t express any wishes at all.’

‘Does she look after herself?’

‘Yes, she washes and eats. Goes to the toilet. But she doesn’t talk, and refuses to leave her room. The first year we had her under watch, and she tried to hang herself from the radiator a few times. But now, as far as we can determine, she isn’t suicidal.’

‘Could she live in a flat outside the hospital? With proper support?’

‘She fights if we try to get her out of her room. I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s completely incapable, in our evaluation, of surviving out in wider society. She appears to view her whole body as a sort of prosthesis, a replacement for something she’s lost. She’s methodical in her daily hygiene, and puts on the clothes we lay out for her.’

Dr Niima pauses before going on.

‘And she eats, three meals a day, but not enough to put on any weight. Complete control. But we can’t get through to her. Our words, even us as people, it’s like we don’t exist. Acutely autistic people can demonstrate similar symptoms.’

‘Drugs?’

‘We’ve tried. But none of our chemical keys has managed to break through Maria Murvall’s complex locking mechanisms.’

‘And why no men?’

‘She starts to cramp. Not always, but sometimes. Her brothers visit her occasionally. That goes okay. Brothers aren’t men.’

‘Any other visitors?’

Dr Niima shakes her head. ‘Her mother stays away. Her father died long ago.’

‘And her physical injuries?’

‘They’ve healed. But she had to have a hysterectomy. The things she had pushed inside her out in the forest did a great deal of damage.’

‘Is she in pain?’

‘Physical pain? I don’t think so.’

‘Therapy?’

‘You have to understand, Inspector Fors, it’s practically impossible to conduct therapy with someone who doesn’t speak. Silence is the soul’s most powerful weapon.’

‘So you think she’s somehow clinging on to herself through silence?’

‘Yes. If she talked, she’d lose her grip.’

‘This is where Maria lives.’

The female care assistant carefully opens the door, the third of seven in a corridor on the second floor of the building. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling make the linoleum floor of the corridor shine, and from inside one of the rooms comes a low groaning sound. Different detergent here to the old people’s home. Perfumed. Lemongrass. Like in the spa at the Hotel Ekoxen.

‘Let me go first and tell her who’s come to see her.’

Through the crack in the door Malin can hear the care assistant’s voice; it sounds like she’s talking to a child.

‘There’s a girl from the police who’d like to talk to you. Is that okay?’

No answer.

Then the care assistant comes back. ‘You can go in now.’

Malin opens the door wide, goes in through a little hall where the door to the shower and toilet is ajar.

A lunch tray with half-eaten food is on a table, there’s a television, a blue-green rug on the floor, a few motorbike and dragster posters on the walls.

And on a bed in one corner of the room, Maria Murvall. Her body seems not to exist, her whole being is a vanishing face surrounded by well-brushed blonde tresses.

You’re like me, Malin thinks. You’re a lot like me.

The woman on the bed takes no notice when Maria comes in. She sits still, her legs hanging over the edge of the bed, down to the floor; her feet are wearing yellow socks, her head is hanging forward. Her eyes are open; an empty yet strangely bright gaze, fixed on some indefinable point in the air filling the room.

Cascades of snow against the window-pane. It’s started to snow again. Maybe it will finally get a few degrees warmer.

‘My name is Malin Fors. I work as a detective inspector with the Linköping Police.’

No reaction.

Just silence and stillness in Maria Murvall’s body.

‘It’s very cold today. Windy, too,’ Malin says.

Idiot. Babbling. Better to get straight to the point. Do or die.

‘One of your clients at social services in Ljungsbro has been found murdered.’

Maria Murvall blinks, stays in the same position.

‘Bengt Andersson. He was found hanging in a tree. Naked.’

She breathes. Blinks again.

‘Was it Bengt that you ran into in the forest?’

A foot moving under yellow cotton.

‘I understand that you helped Bengt. That you tried extra hard for him to have a better life. Is that right?’

New cascades of snow.

‘Why did you care about him? Why was he different? Or were you like that with everyone?’

Words in the silence: Go now, don’t come here with your questions. Don’t you understand that I die if I listen to them, or, rather, the opposite, that I have to live if I answer. I breathe, but that’s all. And what does breathing mean anyway?

‘Do you know anything about Bengt Andersson that could help us?’

Why am I persisting with this? Because you know something?

Maria Murvall lifts her legs from the edge of the bed, shifts her spindly body to a lying position, her gaze following the same path as her body.

Just like an animal.

Tell me what you know, Maria. Use those words.

A black beast of prey in the forest. The same man as on a snow-clad, windswept plain?

Maybe?

No.

Unless?

Instead this: ‘Why do you think someone would want to hang Bengt Andersson in a tree in the middle of the Östgöta plain in the coldest winter in living memory?

‘Why, Maria? Didn’t he have enough to put up with as it was?

‘And who shot through his window?’

Maria shuts her eyes, opens them again. She breathes, resigned, as if breathing or not breathing had long ago lost their meaning. As if all that makes no difference at all.

Are you trying to comfort me?

What can you see that no one else sees, Maria? What can you hear?

‘Nice posters,’ Malin says before leaving the room.

In the corridor Malin stops the care assistant who is passing with a pile of orange handtowels in her arms.

‘Those posters on her walls, they don’t seem to belong here. Did her brothers put them up?’

‘Yes. I suppose they think they’ll remind her of home.’

‘Are her brothers here often?’

‘Just one of them. The youngest one, Adam. He comes every now and then, seems to feel guilty somehow that she’s here.’

‘Dr Niima said that more than one brother comes.’

‘No, just one. I’m sure.’

‘Did they get on particularly well?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe, seeing as he’s the one who visits. There was another one here once, but he couldn’t handle going into her room. He said it was too claustrophobic, that he couldn’t do it. He said it was just like a wardrobe, those were his exact words. Then he left.’