Midwinter Sacrifice

36

Thursday, 9 February

It is no bad dream.

It is just how it is.

Janne is walking up and down in the living room. The young boys from the refugee camp in Kigali came to him again tonight, just now. They were carrying their hacked-off feet on their upturned hands, approaching his bed with them like bloody trophies. The dark red blood dripped on to his sheets, steaming and smelling freshly of iron.

He woke up in a soaking wet bed.

Sweat.

As usual.

It’s as if his body remembers the humid nights in the jungle and is adapting itself to the memory rather than the present.

He creeps upstairs and peers into Tove’s room. She’s asleep inside, safe in the warm.

Markus is asleep in the guest room. He seems an okay kid, from what Janne could tell during their short meal, before Tove and Markus disappeared into Tove’s room.

He hadn’t said anything to Malin about Markus staying over. She didn’t seem to know, though he would always be able to say that he assumed she did. She would protest, but that’s okay, Janne thinks, as he creeps back downstairs again. Better that we keep an eye on them than the alternative, so they don’t have to sneak into his father-in-law’s flat.

His father-in-law?

Did I just think that?

But I did phone Markus’s dad to make sure it was okay with them.

He seemed friendly. Not full of himself like a lot of the doctors you run into at the hospital when you show up with an ambulance.

In the morning the Murvall family reports at Police Headquarters.

They arrive in the green Range Rover and a Peugeot minibus soon after eight.

The sun made the vehicles’ paint shine, as they spewed out people, as Malin thought it looked.

The Murvall clan: men, women, child after child besieging the foyer of Police Headquarters.

Restless chatter.

People on the fault-line.

Waiting not to do what the authorities asked of them: talk. A conscious mix of obstinacy and resignation in every movement, every expression, every blink. Shabby clothes, faded jeans, jumpers and jackets in shrill, unfashionable colours, all thrown together, dirt, stains, children’s snot as the glue holding it all together.

‘Gypsies,’ Börje Svärd whispered in Malin’s ear as they looked out on the scene from the office. ‘They’re like a band of gypsies.’

In the middle of the group sat the mother.

Somehow alone among all the others.

‘You have a fine family,’ Sven Sjöman says, drumming his fingers on the table of the interview room.

‘We stick together,’ the mother states. ‘Like in the old days.’

‘That’s unusual these days.’

‘Yes, but we stick together.’

‘And you have a lot of fine grandchildren, Mrs Murvall.’

‘Nine in total.’

‘It could have been more, perhaps. If Maria hadn’t—’

‘Maria? What do you want with her?’

‘What were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’

‘Sleeping. That’s what an old woman does at nights.’

‘And your sons?’

‘The boys? As far as I know, they were sleeping too.’

‘Did you know Bengt Andersson, Mrs Murvall?’

‘Bengt who, Inspector? I’ve read about him in the paper, if you mean the man they hung in the tree.’

‘They?’

‘Yes, I read that there was probably more than one of them.’

‘Like your sons.’

Malin looks into Sofia Murvall’s eyes. The bags beneath them hang way down on to her cheeks but her brown hair looks freshly washed, tied up in a neat ponytail at the back of her head. The meeting room is acting as an interview room.

Wife of Jakob, the middle brother. Four children, seven months to ten years. Exhausted from nursing, from sleepless nights, worn down to the bone.

‘Four children,’ Malin says. ‘You should count yourself lucky. I only got one.’

‘Can I smoke in here?’

‘Sorry, no. They’re very tough on that. But maybe I could make an exception, just this once,’ Malin says, and pushes her empty coffee cup across the table. ‘Use that as an ashtray.’

Sofia Murvall digs in the pockets of her grey hooded jacket, pulls out a packet of Blend Menthol and a free lighter from a haulage company. She lights a cigarette and the sweet, mint-like smell makes Malin feel sick, and she makes an effort to smile.

‘It must be tough out there on the plain.’

‘It isn’t always fun,’ Sofia Murvall says. ‘But who says it has to be fun all the time?’

‘How did you and Jakob meet?’

Sofia looks over her shoulder, takes a drag on the cigarette.

‘That’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Are the two of you happy?’

‘Really, really happy.’

‘Even after what happened to Maria?’

‘That didn’t make any difference.’

‘I can’t really believe that,’ Malin says. ‘Jakob and his brothers must have been incredibly frustrated.’

‘They looked after their sister, if that’s what you mean, and now they’re doing it again.’

‘Did they take care of the person they thought did it as well? When they strung up Bengt Andersson in the tree?’

There’s a knock on the door of the room.

‘Come in!’ Malin calls, and a newly recruited police constable called Sara looks through a gap in the door.

‘There’s a little boy crying out here. They’re saying he needs feeding. Is that okay?’

The expression on Sofia Murvall’s face doesn’t change.

Malin nods.

The woman who must be Adam Murvall’s wife carries in a fat, screaming baby and puts him in Sofia’s arms. The boy opens his mouth wide and scrambles towards the nearest nipple, and Sofia Murvall puts out her cigarette and the hoodie goes up, revealing a bare breast, a pink nipple that the boy stretches out for and catches.

Do you appreciate your happiness? Do you feel it?

Sofia strokes the boy’s head.

‘Are you hungry, darling?’ Then: ‘Jakob couldn’t have had anything to do with that. It’s impossible. He’s been asleep at home every single night, and he spends every day in the workshop. I can see him from the kitchen window whenever I look out.’

‘And your mother-in-law. Do you get on well with her?’

‘Yes,’ Sofia Murvall says. ‘You won’t find a better person.’

Elias Murvall is shut off, his memories a clamped clam-shell.

‘I’m not saying anything. I stopped talking to the police fifteen years ago.’

Sven Sjöman’s voice: ‘Oh, we’re not that bad, are we, especially for a tough guy like you?’

‘If I don’t say anything, how will you find out what I have or haven’t done? Do you really think I’m so weak that I’m going to give in to you?’

‘That’s just it,’ Sven says. ‘We don’t think you’re weak. But if you don’t say anything, things get difficult for us. Do you want things to be difficult for us?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Was it you who shot . . . ?’

Elias Murvall’s mouth is sealed with invisible surgical thread, his tongue limp, slack in his mouth. The room is silent, apart from the sound of the air-conditioning.

From her place in the observation room Malin can’t hear the noise, but she knows it’s there, a gentle mechanical hum: fresh air for people trapped indoors.

Jakob Murvall laughs at the question: ‘You think we had anything to do with that? You’re crazy, we’re law-abiding citizens now, we’ve kept quiet, within the bounds of the law. We’re just ordinary car mechanics.’

Börje Svärd: ‘Okay, what do you say about the rumours that you threatened anyone making an offer on houses for sale in Blåsvädret, that you threatened the estate agents?’

‘Rumours. That’s our stamping ground, and if we put in the highest bid, we get to buy, don’t we?’

‘The night between Wednesday and Thursday? I was in bed asleep next to my wife. Well, I wasn’t asleep all night, but I was there in bed, with my wife.’

‘Maria. You don’t even have the right to say her name. Got that, you fucking pig? Bengt Andersson . . . Maria . . . Ball-Bengt, that fucking abortion, she should have stayed away from him . . .’

Jakob Murvall stands up forcefully.

Then a male body collapsing, muscles losing all their strength.

‘She looked after him. She’s the gentlest, warmest person God ever blessed this fucking planet with. She was only looking after him a bit, can’t you understand that, you fucking pig? That’s what she’s like. No one can stop her. And if he thanked her by doing that in the forest, he deserved to die, and to go straight back down to hell.’

‘But you didn’t do it?’

‘What do you think, pig? What do you think?’