56

Monday evening; Tuesday, 14 February

‘Let’s shake hands.’

Markus holds out his hand and Malin takes it. His grip is firm and decisive, has direction but is still not painfully hard.

Well-drilled, Malin thinks, and sees a man in a doctor’s white coat standing and practising handshakes with what is to be the perfect son.

‘Welcome.’

‘Thanks for inviting me.’

‘I don’t suppose we have as much space as your family,’ Malin says, throwing out her arm in the little hallway and wondering why she feels the need almost instinctively to make excuses in the company of Tove’s boyfriend.

‘This is lovely,’ he says. ‘I’d love to live so close to the centre.’

‘You’ll have to excuse . . .’

Malin wants to bite her lip, and then falls silent, but realises that she has to finish the sentence.

‘. . . the fact that I got a bit cross last time we met.’

‘I would have done as well,’ Markus says with a smile.

Tove comes out of the kitchen.

‘Mum’s made spaghetti with home-made pesto. Do you like garlic?’

‘Last summer we rented a house in Provence. There was fresh garlic growing in the garden.’

‘We mostly go on day trips in the summer,’ Malin says, then quickly: ‘Shall we sit down straight away? Or would you rather have something to drink first? A Coke, perhaps?’

‘I’m quite hungry,’ Markus says. ‘I’d be happy to eat now.’

Malin watches him shovelling it in. He’s trying to resist, to behave the way his parents must have tried to tell him, but Malin can see how he keeps losing the battle with teenage hunger.

‘I think I might have overdone the parmesan . . .’

‘This is great,’ Markus says. ‘Really good.’

Tove clears her throat. ‘Mum. I’ve been thinking about what Grandad said. It sounds great. Really good. But couldn’t Markus come too? We’ve spoken to his parents and they can get him a ticket.’

Hang on now. What’s this?

Then she sees herself and Janne before her. She’s fourteen, him sixteen. They’re lying on a bed in an unidentified room, fingers on the buttons of each other’s clothes. How shall we ever manage to be apart from each other for more than a couple of hours? The same feeling in Tove’s eyes now.

Expectant, but with a first suspicion that time is finite.

‘Good idea,’ Malin says. ‘They’ve got two extra bedrooms.’

Then she smiles. A teenage couple in love. With her mum and dad. On Tenerife.

‘It’s fine with me,’ she says. ‘But we’ll have to ask Grandad.’

Then Markus says, ‘Mum and Dad would like you to come to dinner some time soon.’

Help.

No. No.

Doctors’ coats and a stuck-up woman around a table. Practised handshakes. Apologies.

‘How lovely,’ Malin says. ‘Tell your parents that I’d love to come.’

When Markus has gone Malin and Tove are sitting at the kitchen table. Their bodies become black silhouettes reflected in the window facing the church.

‘Isn’t he sweet?’

‘He’s very well behaved.’

‘But not too much.’

‘No, Tove, not too much. But enough for you to watch out for him. The well-behaved ones are always the worst when it comes down to it.’

‘What do you mean, Mum?’

‘Nothing, I’m just rambling, Tove. He’s fine.’

‘I’ll call Grandad tomorrow.’

An internal alarm clock rings and Malin is awake, wide awake, even though the clock on the bedside table says it’s 2.34 and her whole body is screaming for rest.

Malin twists and turns in bed, trying to get back to sleep, and she manages to shut out all thoughts of the investigation, of Tove, Janne and everyone else, but sleep still won’t come.

Have to sleep, have to sleep.

The mantra makes her more awake each time she thinks it, and in the end she gets up, goes out into the kitchen and drinks some milk directly from the carton, thinking how cross she used to get when Janne did that, how she thought it was disgusting and utterly uncivilised; and in another house, outside Linköping, Janne is lying awake and wondering if he’s ever going to stop dreaming and then, to get rid of his memories of the jungle and the mountain roads, he conjures up Malin’s and Tove’s faces in his mind’s eye and becomes calm and happy and sad, and thinks that only the people you really love can arouse such contradictory feelings inside you, and he pretends that his daughter is lying there, thinks about how she’s growing away from them, that he never wants to let her go; and in the flat in the city Malin is standing beside Tove’s bed and wondering if things could ever have been different or if everything was, is, already predetermined somehow.

She wants to stroke Tove’s hair.

But maybe that would wake her up? Don’t want to wake you, Tove, but I do want to hold you tight.

The early morning meeting was postponed yesterday, ‘No point if you aren’t here, Fors,’ as Sven Sjöman said over the phone.

The others’ breath is hanging heavy in the meeting room and they all seem more alert than her.

Maybe because they’ve had the results from the forensics lab?

The rubber bullets in Bengt Andersson’s flat were fired from the small-bore rifle found in Niklas Nyrén’s flat, and Joakim Svensson’s and Jimmy Kalmvik’s fingerprints were found on the weapon.

‘So there we have it,’ Sven says. ‘We know who fired the shots through Bengt Andersson’s window. Now Malin and Zeke can put some real pressure on our little tough guys and see if they’re hiding anything else. Get hold of them as soon as you can. They ought to be at school at this time of day.’

Then Malin tells them what she’s found out about the Murvall line of inquiry.

She can sense Karim Akbar’s scepticism as she explains the connection between Cornerhouse-Kalle and the family. So what if he was Karl Murvall’s father, what does that matter? What does it give us that we don’t already have? That we don’t already know?

‘Murvall’s a dead-end. We’ve got new paths to explore. We need more to go on with the Æsir angle; there must be something on the hard drive. Johan, how are you getting on with that? I see, you’ve got past the password, and found a load of protected files.’

But Malin persists: ‘It makes Karl Murvall Bengt Andersson’s brother. Something that presumably even he doesn’t know.’

‘If the old boy in Stjärnorp is telling the truth,’ Karim says.

‘We can easily check. We’ve got Bengt’s DNA, and we can take a sample from Karl Murvall, and then we’ll know.’

‘Steady on,’ Karim says. ‘We can’t just run round taking a load of integrity-compromising samples just because of what one man says. Especially if its significance for the investigation is, to put it mildly, questionable.’

After they had eaten last night she had called Sven and told him what Weine Andersson had revealed.

Sven had listened intently, and she didn’t know if he was pleased or irritated that she was working on her own angle on a Sunday. But then he said, ‘Good, Fors, we aren’t done with that line of inquiry yet. And the Murvall brothers are still in custody, under arrest for the other offences.’

And perhaps that’s why he now says, ‘Malin, you and Zeke can go and talk to Karl Murvall again, see what else he knows. He has an alibi for the night of the murder, but try to find out if he knows anything about this. He may have been lying about how much he knew last time you spoke to him. Start with that, and then go and put some pressure on Kalmvik and Svensson.’

‘And the DNA test?’

‘One thing at a time, Malin. Pay him a call. See what you get. And the rest of you, look under every single stone, try to find angles and corners in this case that we haven’t considered so far. Time is passing and you all know that the more time passes, the less chance there is of us catching the perpetrator.’

Zeke comes up to her desk.

He’s angry, the pupils of his eyes are small and sharp.

Now he’s annoyed that I went off without him yesterday. Isn’t he ever going to get used to it?

‘You could have called me, Malin. Do you think Karl Murvall knows about this? About Cornerhouse-Kalle?’

‘I’ve been wondering about that. He might know, but not properly, if you get what I mean.’

‘You’re too deep for me, Fors. Okay, let’s get out to Collins and have a chat with him. It’s Tuesday, he ought to be there.’

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