58

‘Do you think Maria Murvall knew that Bengt Andersson and her half-brother had the same father? That that was why she took him on?’ Zeke’s voice is muffled by the food they are eating.

Malin takes a bite of her chorizo.

The fast-food joint at the Valla roundabout. Best sausage in the city.

The car is idling with the heater on, and behind them sit the yellow-brick council blocks and student accommodation of Ryd, quiet, as if aware of their position on the housing hierarchy; here live only people who don’t have enough dosh, short-term, or for life, unless they win the lottery.

In the other direction is the motorway, and on the far side of some thin clumps of trees the buildings of the university. How scornful they must seem to a lot of the people living in Ryd, Malin thinks. There they sit every day like images of unattainable dreams, missed opportunities, bad choices, limitations. The architecture of bitterness, perhaps.

But not for everyone. Far from everyone.

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘I don’t know,’ Malin replies. ‘Maybe she felt there was a connection. Instinctively. Or else she knew.’

‘Female intuition?’ Zeke is chuckling.

‘Well, we can’t exactly ask her,’ Malin says.

Play with a scorpion and it will sting you. Stick your hand in an earth and the badger will bite you. Tease a rattlesnake and it will bite. The same with darkness: force darkness into a corner and it will attack.

But the truth.

Which is it?

She whispers the word to herself as she and Zeke cross the yard to Rakel Murvall’s house. Behind them the sun is sinking towards the horizon; the transition between light and dark is swift and cold.

They knock.

The mother has doubtless seen them coming, thinking, Not again.

But she opens.

‘You two?’

‘We’d like to come in,’ Zeke says.

‘Surely you’ve been here quite enough already.’

Rakel Murvall moves her thin body, backs up and stops in the hall with her arms by her sides, yet still oddly dismissive. Thus far, but no further.

‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ Malin says. ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle. He was the father of your son Karl.’

Her eyes turn black, keener. ‘Where have you heard that?’

‘There are tests,’ Malin says. ‘We know.’

‘That makes Karl the half-brother of the murder victim,’ Zeke says.

‘What do you want to know? That I invented the entire story of that sodomite sailor when his ship sank? That I gave myself to Cornerhouse-Kalle in the park one night? I wasn’t the only one who did that.’

Rakel Murvall looks at Zeke with calm derision in her eyes, then she turns round. Goes into the living room and they follow her and the words crack from her mouth like the end of a whip.

‘He never knew, Kalle, that he was the boy’s father. But Karl, I had him called that so that I’d never forget where he came from.’

You, Malin thinks, you never let him forget. In your own way.

Her eyes full of coldness now. ‘What do you think it was like for me to have the boy here on my own? The sailor’s boy, he’s the sailor’s boy, they swallowed that, the chocolate hags round here.’

‘How did Karl find out?’ Zeke asks. ‘Did the boys and Blackie treat him badly?’

‘He came and sat out here with some posh necklace for my seventieth birthday. He thought he was really something, so I told him how it was, that your father, he was Cornerhouse-Kalle, that’s what I said to him. The computer expert! Pah! He was standing right where you are now.’

The old woman backs away. Raises a hand towards Malin and Zeke, waving, as if to say, Shoo, shoo, shoo.

‘If you say anything about this to the boys I’ll haunt you till you wish you’d never been born.’

She isn’t afraid of threatening the police, Malin notes. Ghosts that have to be fended off at all costs. And you’re still the one steering developments, Rakel. What does that mean?

Through her kitchen window Rakel Murvall watches the two police officers go back to their car. Sees them stepping in their own footprints. She feels her anger subside, her aggression become serious reflection. Then she goes out into the hall and picks up the phone on the little table.

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