Midwinter Sacrifice

39

The cabin, Malin.

The forest.

Things crawling between the tree trunks out there in the cold.

The brothers and the mother.

Were they the ones who hurt me, Malin? Who shot through my window, who strung me up in a tree? Who gave my body all its injuries?

They’re resisting. Trying to keep what’s theirs.

Or was it the young lads?

The believers?

The questions never stop.

Talk to the young boys’ parents, Malin, I know that’s what you’re going to do now, you and Zacharias. Find clarity. Come closer to the truth that you think you seek.

Somewhere out there is the answer.

Somewhere, Malin.

Follow the plan.

Move according to the prearranged plan. Don’t let go of anything until you know for sure.

Without preconceptions, Malin.

Sven Sjöman’s favourite words.

Doors open wide, doors closed, like the one in front of her now.

Zeke’s finger on the doorbell, the flat’s little entrance hall painted red above them, light from the window next to the door, a kitchen, no one inside.

Pallasvägen.

Thirty or so similar blocks built some time in the late 1970s, to judge from the style, hidden out of the way on a patch of flat land beyond Ljungsbro’s communal bathing area, icy but well-gritted paths lined with winter-dead bushes, little snow-covered patches of grass in front of each entrance.

Like villas, only not, Malin thinks. Like pretend houses for people who can’t afford one. A form of living that is neither one thing nor the other. Do people become neither one thing nor the other if they live in places like this? Even the garages over by the shrub-edged car park make a confused, limp impression.

Joakim Svensson’s mum. Margaretha.

She’s at home, Malin thinks. So why isn’t she opening the door?

Zeke rings the bell again, and his breath clouds from his mouth, white against the black of the approaching evening.

The clock in the car said 17.15 when they pulled up over in the car park. The evening, and possibly the night, would be long.

The brothers in custody.

The cabin in the forest.

Then Malin hears footsteps coming downstairs behind the door. She hears a lock clicking, sees a crack in the door open.

All these people, Malin thinks, who peep out at the world through cracks in their front doors. What are you so frightened of?

Then she sees Bengt Andersson’s body in the tree.

The Murvall brothers.

Rakel.

Thinks that it’s probably best to keep your door closed, Margaretha. Then she says, ‘Margaretha Svensson? We’re from Linköping Police and we’d like to ask you some questions about your son. Can we come in?’

The woman nods and the crack opens. Her body is wrapped in a white towel, her curly blonde hair is wet and dripping on the floor. Introductions and handshakes.

‘I was in the bath,’ Margaretha Svensson says. ‘But come in, come in. You can wait in the kitchen while I put on some clothes.’

‘Is Joakim at home?’

‘No, Jocke’s out somewhere.’

The kitchen could do with some serious work: the white paint is peeling from the cupboards and the hotplates on the stove look worn, but the room is still pleasant, the brown polished table and mixture of chairs lending a calm dignity to its simplicity, and when the cold has released its hold of her nose Malin detects a definite smell of allspice.

They take off their jackets, sit down at the kitchen table and wait. On the worktop are a bottle of olive oil and a fruit bowl containing various packets of biscuits.

Five minutes.

Ten.

Then Margaretha Svensson comes back. Dressed in a red tracksuit top and white jogging pants, made up; she can’t be more than thirty-eight, forty at most, just a few years older than Malin, and she’s attractive, a good figure, probably goes to the gym.

She sits down at the table, and looks inquisitively at Malin and Zeke.

‘The head phoned and said you’d been to the school.’

‘Well, as you may be aware, your son and Jimmy Kalmvik used to bully Bengt Andersson, the murder victim,’ Malin says.

Margaretha Svensson lets the words sink in.

‘That’s what the head said. I had no idea. But it’s not impossible. Who knows what they get up to together?’

‘They spend a lot of time together?’ Zeke asks.

‘Yes, they’re like brothers,’ Margaretha Svensson says.

‘And you don’t know anything about what they might have done to Bengt Andersson?’

Margaretha Svensson shakes her head.

‘Could they have had access to any weapons?’

‘Knives and stuff, you mean? The kitchen drawers are full of them.’

‘Guns,’ Malin says.

Now Margaretha Svensson looks surprised. ‘I don’t think so. Absolutely not. Where would they have got a gun from?’

‘The Æsir faith,’ Zeke says. ‘Has Joakim ever shown any interest in that sort of thing?’

‘I can promise you he hasn’t a clue what it is. Taekwondo and skateboarding, on the other hand, he knows all there is to know about those.’

‘Can he drive?’ Malin asks.

Margaretha Svensson takes a deep breath and runs a hand through her wet hair.

‘He’s fifteen. Those two could be up to anything.’

‘They told us they were watching films here last Thursday, but that you weren’t at home?’

‘When I left at about seven they were here, and when I got home Jocke had fallen asleep. The film had finished, but the television was still on. That skateboarding film they always watch.’

‘Where had—’

‘I do aqua-aerobics in the local pool. Then I went back to my friend’s. You can have his number if you like. I was back by eleven thirty or so.’

‘Friend?’

‘My lover. His name’s Niklas Nyrén. I’ll give you his number.’

‘Good,’ Zeke says. ‘Does he have any contact with your son?’

‘He tries. Probably thinks the lad could do with a male role-model.’

‘Joakim’s father is dead, isn’t he?’ Malin asks.

‘He died in a road accident when Joakim was three.’

Then Margaretha Svensson straightens her back. ‘I’ve done my best to bring him up on my own, working full-time as an accounts assistant at a god-awful construction company, trying to make a decent person out of him.’

But you haven’t succeeded, Malin thinks. He seems largely to be a semi-criminalised, cruel bully.

And, as if she can read Malin’s thoughts, Margaretha Svensson says, ‘I know he isn’t the best-behaved kid on the planet, and he can be pretty impossible sometimes. But he’s tough, and I’ve encouraged that; he won’t let anyone try to put him down, and he stands up for himself. And that means he’s pretty well-prepared for all the battles he’s got ahead of him, doesn’t it?’

‘Can we see his room?’

‘Upstairs, straight ahead.’

Zeke stays at the table while Malin goes up.

The room smells musty. Lonely. Skateboarding posters. Hip-hop stars. Tupac, Outkast.

A bed, made, on a light blue fitted carpet, light blue walls. A desk. Malin checks the drawers, a few pens, some paper, an empty notebook.

She looks under the bed, but it’s empty, just a few dustballs over in the corner where the walls meet.

Only for sleeping, Malin thinks.

Then she thinks how good it is that Tove hasn’t met a boy like Joakim Svensson, that her doctor’s son is a dream compared to these tough boys out on the plain.

The next house is another world.

Even though it’s only five hundred metres from Margaretha Svensson’s flat.

A large breezeblock house from the seventies with a double garage, located right on a slope leading up to the Göta Canal, one of maybe ten outsized houses in a square around a well-maintained playground, a black Subaru jeep parked out on the street by the bushes.

Malin’s finger on the doorbell, the standard black and white model, their name written in shaky handwriting on a piece of paper behind the little plastic rectangle just beneath the button.

Kalmvik.

It’s dark and cold now; evening has arrived in Ljungsbro, and, as time passes, night creeps in with its even fiercer cold.

Joakim Svensson and Jimmy Kalmvik were alone in the flat from seven to half past eleven. How can they be sure that the boys really were in the flat then? That they didn’t sneak out and get up to anything? Could they have harmed Bengt Andersson in that time? Got him out to the tree? Or might Joakim Svensson have snuck out after his mum got home?

Nothing’s impossible, Malin thinks. And who knows how many films they may have seen for inspiration? Could the whole thing have been a boyish prank that got out of control?

Henrietta Kalmvik opens the door wide.

No hesitant little crack.

‘You’re from the police? Aren’t you?’

Big red hair, green eyes, sharp features. An elegant white blouse over stylish dark blue trousers: a woman in her mid-forties who knows what she looks good in.

‘Is that your car?’ Malin asks. ‘Out on the street?’

‘Yes. Nice, isn’t it?’

Henrietta Kalmvik leads them into the house, gesturing to them to hang up their jackets in the second of two halls. As Malin shrugs off her padded jacket she sees her almost glide over the parquet floor into the living room, where two white leather sofas frame a table whose legs look like a fat lion’s paws in red marble.

Henrietta Kalmvik sits down on the smaller of the sofas and waits for them.

There’s a pink Chinese rug on the floor. On the wall above the larger sofa hangs a mostly orange painting of a naked couple on a beach at sunset. Outside the window is a snow-covered pool lit up by a floodlight, and Malin thinks how nice it must be to take a morning swim out there when the weather’s warmer.

‘Sit down.’

And Malin and Zeke sit down next to each other on the larger sofa, the leather sinking beneath them. It feels like she’s disappearing into the soft padding. She notices a turned wooden bowl on the table, full of shiny green apples.

‘I presume the head of the school called you,’ Zeke says.

‘Yes,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says.

And then the same questions they asked Margaretha Svensson.

The same answers, yet somehow not the same.

Henrietta Kalmvik’s green eyes fixed on the pool outside the window as she says, ‘I gave up on Markus a long time ago. He’s impossible, but as long as he stays within the law he can do what he likes. He has his own room in the basement, with his own entrance, so he can come and go as he pleases. If you tell me he was tormenting Bengt Andersson, I’d say he probably was. And guns? Not impossible. He stopped listening to me when he was nine. He used to call me a “stupid fucking bitch” when he didn’t get what he wanted. And in the end I stopped trying. Now he comes home to eat. Nothing else. I do my own thing, I’m a member of the Lions, and the Jazz Club in town.’

Henrietta Kalmvik falls silent, as if she’s said all she has to say.

‘I suppose you want to see his room?’

She gets up and heads down some stairs leading to the basement.

They follow her once more.

In the basement they walk through a laundry room and another room containing a sauna and a large Jacuzzi, before Henrietta Kalmvik stops in front of a door.

‘His room.’

She steps aside.

Lets Zeke open the door.

The room is a mess, the king-size bed unmade, oddly positioned in the middle of the room. There are clothes scattered all over the stone floor, along with comic books and sweet wrappers and empty drinks cans. The white walls are bare and Malin thinks that very little light must get in through the windows.

‘Believe it or not,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says, ‘he likes being down here.’

They look in the chest of drawers, pick through the things on the floor.

‘Nothing out of the ordinary here,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you know where Jimmy is now?’

‘No idea. I dare say they’re just hanging about somewhere, him and Jocke. They’re like brothers, those two.’

‘And Jimmy’s father? Is there any chance we could talk to him?’

‘He works on an oil rig out in the North Sea. Somewhere off Narvik. He’s away three weeks, then home two.’

‘It must get lonely,’ Zeke says, closing the door to Jimmy Kalmvik’s room.

‘Not really,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says. ‘It suits us both not to be in each other’s pockets. And he earns an awful lot of money.’

‘Has he got a mobile out there?’

‘No, but you can call the oil rig itself if it’s urgent.’

‘When will he be home?’

‘Saturday morning. On the morning train from Oslo. But call the rig if it’s urgent.’