Midwinter Sacrifice

35

Vanity, Malin. Find a way into their stories through vanity. Then they’ll open up, and once they’ve opened up things usually turn out okay.

Sven Sjöman.

A master at coaxing, at getting people to talk.

Adam Murvall thinks that this policeman has been at it for a long time, but not long in this city, because then he should have remembered me. Because he couldn’t have forgotten me. They usually never forget. Or is he pretending? Now they’re standing behind the mirror, staring at me; fine, go on staring, what do I care? You think I’m going to talk, but how can you even think that? Don’t bother with the cars, but, sure, if you’re wondering about the cars I can always talk about them; what’s so secret about the cars?

Adam reluctantly feels his antipathy slip a little.

‘You weren’t here ten years ago,’ Adam Murvall says. ‘Where were you then?’

‘Believe me,’ Sven says, ‘my career is very dull. Ten years ago I was a detective inspector in Karlstad, but then the wife got a job here and I had to make the best of it.’

Adam Murvall nods and Malin can see he’s happy with the answer. Why does he care about Sjöman’s CV? Then it hits Malin: if Sjöman had been here for a while, he ought to have remembered the brothers.

Vanity, Malin, vanity.

‘What about the cars, then?’

‘Them? They’re just something we do.’

Adam Murvall sounds confident, his voice a well-oiled engine.

‘We take them apart and sell the good bits.’

‘Is that all you live off?’

‘We’ve got the petrol station as well. The one on the road down by the aqueduct. The Preem garage.’

‘And you make a living from that?’

‘More or less.’

‘Did you know Bengt Andersson?’

‘I knew who he was. Everybody knew that.’

‘Do you think he had anything to do with the rape of your sister?’

‘Shut up about that. Don’t talk about it.’

‘I have to ask, Adam, you know that.’

‘Don’t talk about Maria, her name shouldn’t be grunted by your sort.’

Sven makes himself comfortable, nothing in his body language giving any indication that he’s remotely upset by the insult.

‘Are you and your sister close? I’ve heard that you’re the one who visits her.’

‘Don’t talk about Maria. Leave her in peace.’

‘So that was why you wrote the note?’

‘This is nothing to do with you. We’ll sort this out ourselves.’

‘And what were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday?’

‘We ate dinner at Mother’s. Then I went home with my family.’

‘So that’s what you did? You didn’t hang Bengt up in that tree, then? Did you sort that out yourselves as well?’

Adam shakes his head. ‘Pig.’

‘Who? Me or Bengt? And was it you or one of your brothers who shot through the window into his living room? Did you creep down there one evening, just like you crept to Inspector Fors’s flat tonight? To leave a message?’

‘I don’t know anything about any shots through any damn windows. I’m not saying anything else now. You can keep on all night. From now on I’m saying nothing.’

‘Like your sister?’

‘What do you know about my sister?’

‘I know she was kind-hearted. Everyone says so.’

The muscles of Adam Murvall’s face relax slightly.

‘You know things don’t look good for you, don’t you? Threatening an officer, resisting arrest, obstructing an investigation. With your background, those are pretty serious charges.’

‘I didn’t threaten anyone. I was just handing over a letter.’

‘I know how angry you can get, Adam. Were you angry with that repulsive fat Bengt? The man who raped your sister? The man who ruined her kind heart? Well? Adam? Did you hang—’

‘I should have.’

‘So you—’

‘You think you know it all.’

‘What is it I don’t know?’

‘Go to hell.’ Adam Murvall whispers the words, before he slowly puts his finger in front of his mouth.

Sven turns off the tape recorder, gets up. He walks out of the room, leaving Adam Murvall alone behind him. He sits improbably straight-backed, as if his spine were one single beam made of steel, impossible to bend.

‘What do you think?’ Sven Sjöman looks round at them.

Karin Akbar watchful by the door.

‘There’s something that doesn’t fit,’ Malin says. ‘Something.’ But her brain can’t work out what.

‘He’s not denying it,’ Johan Jakobsson says.

‘They’re hard men,’ Zeke says. ‘Deny, admit? Never, either one would be giving in. It just isn’t an option for people like them.’

‘Sven’s decided to hold him. We’ll stick him in our coldest cell tonight, see if that softens him up,’ Karim says, and the group falls silent; no one knows if he’s serious or just joking.

‘That was a joke,’ he says. ‘What did you think? That I was going to turn this station into some Kurdish hellhole?’

Karim laughs. The others smile.

The clock on the viewing-room wall. The black hands indicate twenty past eleven.

‘I think,’ Malin says, ‘that it might be worth talking to the whole Murvall family. That’s what I think. Tomorrow.’

‘We can hold him for a week. The brothers and mother are due in tomorrow. We can bring the wives in as well.’

Behind the soundproofed glass Malin watches as two uniformed custody officers lead Adam Murvall out of the interview room, off to a cell in the detention unit.

The sky is crystal clear.

The Milky Way is smiling at humanity; the far-travelled light is dim yet simultaneously comforting and warm.

Malin is standing with Zeke in the car park, beside the black Mercedes belonging to Karim Akbar.

Almost midnight.

He is smoking one of his rare cigarettes. His fingers look like they’re turning blue with the cold, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

‘You should take it a bit easier, Fors.’

The light from the stars fades.

‘A bit easier with what?’

‘With everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Just come down a gear or two, slow down.’

Malin stands still, waiting for the warmth of the moment to reappear, but it’s taking its time, it’s never going to come.

Zeke puts out his cigarette, hunts for his car keys.

‘Do you want a lift?’

‘No, I’ll walk,’ Malin says. ‘I need a bit of fresh air.’

Adam Murvall lies on his bunk in the police station, the blanket pulled round his muscular frame, and thinks of the words Blackie always used to say, over and over again like a mantra, when he used to sit drunk in his wheelchair in the kitchen.

The day you give in it’s over. Over, got it?

Blackie gave in. And he never even realised.

Then Adam Murvall thinks of Mother, of how she can rely on him like he has always been able to rely on her. She has somehow always stood like a wall between them and all the bastards.

Adam isn’t the sort who’d talk, and the children, they must be asleep by now, even if it took Anna a long time to get them off.

Adam Murvall sees seven-year-old Anneli’s thin ribcage rise and fall, he sees three-year-old Tobias’s wavy blond hair against a sheet with its pattern of blue sailing-boats, and he sees the little eight-month-old lad on his back in his cot. Then Adam falls asleep, dreaming about a dog standing outside a door in the middle of winter. It’s a crystal-clear night and the dog is barking so loudly that the rusty nails holding the door together shake. And Adam dreams that he is sitting at a nicely laid table in the kitchen of a big white house, and that a hand covered in the finest little veins pulls a leg off one of the roast chickens on the table, and how the same hand throws the leg out through the window to the dog.

He is still standing in the snow and barking.

The chicken leg makes him quiet.

Then the barking starts again.

A voice now: Let me in.

Don’t leave me out here.

I’m freezing.