Midwinter Sacrifice

61

Wednesday, 15 February

Somehow the church seems to have grown accustomed to the cold. Got used to having its greying plaster covered by a thin layer of frost. But the trees are still protesting, and the pictures over in the travel agent’s windows, the ones of beaches and clear blue skies, are just as mocking.

There’s a smell of fresh baking. Malin was up early and had time to put some half-baked little baguettes in the oven. She’s already eaten two, with apricot jam and Västerbotten cheese, and now she’s sitting by the window in the flat.

Behind her on the kitchen table lies the Correspondent. She hasn’t even bothered to open the paper. It’s all there on the front page.

POLICE REPORTED FOR HARASSMENT IN MURDER CASE.

The headline is a joke, Malin thinks as she sips her coffee and looks down towards Åhléns, with its window displays of padded jackets and hats.

But if the headline is a joke, the article itself is a very bad one, an outright lie.

. . . even though the police have no evidence at all that the Murvall family is involved in the murder of Bengt Andersson, they have visited 72-year-old Rakel Murvall’s home to interview her on no fewer than seven occasions. Only a year ago Rakel Murvall suffered a minor stroke . . . this looks very much like a clear case of harassment from the police . . .

Attributed to Daniel Högfeldt. So he’s hitting back. In full form. Hard. Where has he been?

A short article alongside, about the fact that the shots fired into Bengt Andersson’s flat have been cleared up, and that police are not linking them to the murder itself. A quote from Karim Akbar: It is highly improbable that there is any connection.

Malin sits down at the kitchen table.

Opens the paper.

Rakel Murvall identifies her and Zeke in one quote.

They’ve been here seven times and forced their way in. The police show no respect, even to an old woman . . . But at least my boys are home again now . . .

The boys Mrs Murvall refers to are her sons, Elias, Adam and Jakob, who were released from custody yesterday when the accusations against them were found not to be sufficient to justify holding them any longer . . .

A picture of Karim.

His face captured in a slightly distorted pose. His eyes staring into the camera: Naturally, we are treating this complaint very seriously.

He’s not going to like that picture, Malin thinks.

It looks as though the police have ground to a halt in their investigation of the murder. Chief of Police Karim Akbar did not want to comment on the state of the investigation, claiming instead that he could not talk about the case at the moment because of ‘the sensitive situation’. But according to the

Correspondent’

s source in Police Headquarters, the investigation has reached an impasse where the police have run out of new leads to explore.

Malin drinks the last of her coffee.

Source in Police Headquarters? Who? Maybe more than one.

She suppresses an urge to screw up the paper; she knows Tove will want to read it. On the worktop sits the baking-tray with the baguettes. Two for Tove. She’ll be happy when she finds them.

The area’s morning paper.

Loved by almost everyone in the whole city; they know that from their opinion polls, from the tumult that ensues on the few occasions when the paper doesn’t appear because of problems at the printers. Sometimes it feels like people are hugging the Correspondent to death, that they have no distance from what it prints, or just don’t understand that the newspaper isn’t their own personal mouthpiece.

Daniel Högfeldt is sitting at his computer in the newsroom.

The love, the response from the readers is still mostly a positive thing. If he writes something good, he’ll get ten emails congratulating him instantly.

He’s happy with the pieces in today’s paper, and has rewarded himself with a fresh-baked cinnamon pastry from Schelin’s down in Trädgårdstorget. Bengtsson, one of the old guard, doesn’t have the energy to liven up his texts, and you need energy to cover a crime story like the murder of Bengt Andersson. Finely tuned energy to heighten the inherent drama. The city might be depressed, rendered mute by the cold. But from the emails he has received after those articles about the case, he can sense the disquiet, that fear is alive and well in Linköping, and there are the beginnings of anger that the police seem to be doing nothing.

‘We pay fifty per cent tax and the police still aren’t doing their job . . .’

Daniel has spent two days in Stockholm.

He stayed at the Hotel Anglais on Stureplan, with a view of all the swaggering fools around that ridiculous concrete mushroom.

Expressen.

He even got to meet the editor-in-chief, the fawning psychopath. But the whole thing felt wrong: sure, a bigger paper, higher salary, but so what?

Expressen.

Stockholm.

Not now. Not yet.

First follow the example of that woman from the Motala Paper who dug up that scandal in the town hall and got the Great Journalism Award.

If I’m going to go to Stockholm, I’m going to arrive as a king, or at least a prince. Just like I am here.

I wonder what Malin Fors is up to now.

I wouldn’t mind seeing her.

Bound to be worn out from work, angry and horny. Just like I get when I’m working too much and sleeping too little. Human.

Expressen.

I’ll email the chief editor today and turn them down.

The three-year-old resists as Johan Jakobsson tries to open her mouth. The blue tiles of the bathroom seem to be folding in on them, but that mouth is going to open.

‘We’ve got to brush our teeth,’ he says. ‘Otherwise the tooth troll will come.’ He tries to get his voice to sound both firm and happy, but realises that he mostly sounds whiny and tired.

‘Open wide,’ but she wants to run off and instead he holds her tight, and squeezes her jaw with his fingers, but not too hard.

Then she pulls free. Runs out of the bathroom, leaving Johan sitting on the toilet seat on his own. Fuck the tooth troll.

Work. When is this case going to open up? When is something going to jump out at them? Soon they’ll have been through the whole of Rickard Skoglöf’s hard drive and they haven’t found a thing. Sure, emails to the kids who hung the animals in the tree, and some other weird emails to other Æsir types, but nothing criminal. They’ve only got a couple more password-protected files to check.

His whole life feels like a clenched mouth right now. And Malin and Zeke just seem to get more and more frustrated. And Börje suspended. But presumably he’s with his wife, or the dogs, or at the firing range. Although maybe that’s the last thing he feels like doing right now.

Karim Akbar passes the five-hundred-kronor note across the counter of the dry-cleaner’s. He uses the one in the shopping centre in Ryd for two reasons: they open early, and they clean better.

Behind him the shopping centre: run-down and small. A Co-op shop, a newsagent’s, a combined key-cutting and shoe-repair shop, and a gift shop that seems to have been left untouched since it went bankrupt.

Three suits on thin hangers covered in plastic. One Corneliani, two Hugo Boss, ten white shirts in a neat pile.

The man behind the counter takes the note, thanks him and makes to hand him his change.

‘That’s okay,’ Karim says.

He knows that the man who runs the cleaner’s is from Iraq, and fled here with his family during Saddam’s time. Who knows what he went through? Once when Karim was leaving his suits the man wanted to talk about himself, about his engineering qualifications, about the man he could have been, but Karim pretended to be in a hurry. However much he admires the man for fighting for his family, he’s part of the problem, part of what makes him and almost everyone else of foreign extraction a second-class citizen, makes them the sort of people who run the services that the Swedes won’t touch. It ought to be forbidden for immigrants to run pizza restaurants and dry-cleaners, Karim thinks. That would get rid of the stereotype. The politically correct might object, but that’s the reality. But of course it would be impossible. What about me? I’m not the slightest bit better than him, even if I’m made out to be.

Alienation breeds exclusion.

Exclusion breeds violence.

Violence breeds . . . Yes, what?

The infinite distance between people. The Murvall family that want nothing more than to be left outside, in peace, and then there is everyone who dreams of being inside, to feel that they belong. Dreams and reality match up in far too few cases.

My dad, Karim thinks as he leaves the dry-cleaner’s. It was passive violence that drove him to his death.

But I never talk to anyone about him. Not even my wife.

The cold hits Karim when he opens the door.

His black Mercedes is glinting even in the gloomy winter light.

And then he thinks about the killers, or the killer, they’re hunting. What is it that they want? What are they trying to achieve?

Zeke pulls open the door of Police Headquarters.

Walks into reception and it smells of sweat and overworked radiators, and one of the uniformed officers standing by the steps to the basement calls out, ‘How’s it going with Martin, is he going to play the next match? Wasn’t there something to do with his knee?’

The ice-hockey player’s dad.

Is that how they see me?

‘He’s playing, as far as I know.’

Martin has had offers from NHL clubs, but nothing has worked out so far. They don’t quite seem to want to let him in yet. Zeke knows that ice hockey will make the lad rich sooner or later, rich in a way that’s hard to imagine.

But not even a hoard of pirate treasure would make him have any respect for the game itself. The padding, the tackles, the sense that it’s all make-believe.

Bengt Andersson isn’t make-believe. Nor is the evil that’s out there.

You can’t have a load of padding on, Zeke thinks, when you’re tackling the worst aspects of humanity. What we do is no game.

‘Have you seen the way I look?’

Karim Akbar is standing by the counter in the coffee room and holding up the photo of himself in the paper.

‘Couldn’t they have chosen a different one?’

‘It’s not that bad,’ Malin says. ‘It could have been worse.’

‘How? Have you seen what I look like? They’re just choosing pictures that give the impression we’re desperate.’

‘Forget it, Karim. You’ll probably be in the paper again tomorrow. Anyway, we aren’t desperate. Are we?’

‘Never desperate, Malin. Never.’

Malin opens up her email. Some of the usual administrative circulars, a bit of spam, and a message from Johan Jakobsson.

‘Nothing on the hard drive so far. Only a few more folders to check.’

And then an email marked in red.

‘CALL ME.’

From Karin Johannison.

Why couldn’t she call herself?

But Malin knows how it is. Sometimes it just seems easier to send an email.

She types a reply: ‘Have you heard anything?’

She presses send and it isn’t more than a minute before her inbox pings.

She opens the new email from Karin. ‘Can you come over?’

Answer: ‘I’ll be at the lab in ten minutes.’

Karin Johannison’s office at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science has no windows, apart from a glass partition on to the corridor. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling with simple bookcases, and on the desk are stacks of files. The yellow linoleum floor is covered with a thick, red, high-quality carpet that Malin knows Karin has brought in herself. The carpet makes the whole room noble and pleasant, in spite of all the mess.

Karin is sitting behind the desk, as impossibly fresh as ever.

She invites Malin to sit down, and she settles on to the small stool by the door.

‘I’ve had the results from Birmingham,’ Karin says. ‘And I’ve compared the results with Bengt Andersson’s profile. They don’t match. It wasn’t him who raped his Maria Murvall in the forest.’

‘Was it a man or a woman?’

‘We can’t tell. But we can tell that it wasn’t him. Did you think it was?’

Malin shakes her head. ‘No, but now we know.’

‘Now we know,’ Karin says. ‘And the Murvall brothers can be told. Do you think one of them killed Bengt Andersson? And would maybe want to confess if they found out they got it wrong?’

Malin smiles.

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘You’re good at chemistry, Karin,’ Malin says. ‘But you’re not quite so good at people.’

The two women sit in silence.

‘Why couldn’t you have told me this over the phone?’ Malin asks.

‘I just wanted to tell you in person,’ Karin replies. ‘It seemed better somehow.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re so shut off sometimes, Malin, tense. And we keep bumping into each other in the course of our work. It’s no bad thing to meet like this, in a calmer setting occasionally. Don’t you think?’

As she is walking out of the lab, Malin’s mobile rings.

Malin talks as she crosses the car park, past a garage with its doors closed, towards the parking spaces over by the bushes where her Volvo is parked next to Karin’s grey, shiny Lexus.

Tove.

‘Hello, darling.’

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Are you at school?’

‘On a break between maths and English. Mum, you remember that Markus’s parents want to have you over for dinner?’

‘I remember.’

‘Can you do tonight? They’d like to do it this evening.’

Smart doctors.

They’d like to.

The same evening.

Don’t they know that other people have busy lives?

‘Okay, Tove. I can manage that. But not before seven o’clock. Tell Markus I’m looking forward to it.’

They hang up.

As Malin opens the car door she thinks, What happens when you lie to your children? When you do your children harm? Does a star go out in the sky?