Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

1

Thursday, 2 February

Love and death are neighbours.

Their faces are one and the same. A person need not stop breathing in order to die, and need not breathe in order to be alive.

There are never any guarantees where death or love are concerned.

Two people meet.

Love.

They make love.

And they love and they love and then, after a while, the love runs out, just as abruptly as it first appeared, its capricious source blocked by circumstances, internal or external.

Or else love continues until the end of time. Or else it is impossible from the start, yet still unavoidable.

And is this sort of love, this last sort, is it really nothing but a nuisance?

That’s just what it is, thinks Malin Fors as she stands in her dressing gown by the kitchen sink, fresh from the shower, spreading butter on a slice of wholemeal bread with one hand, and lifting a cup of strong coffee to her lips with the other.

Six fifteen, according to the Ikea clock on the whitewashed wall. Outside the window, in the glow of the streetlamps, the air seems to have solidified into ice. The cold embraces the grey stone walls of St Lars Church, and the white branches of the maples seem to have given up long ago: not another night of temperatures below minus twenty; better to kill us outright and let us fall dead to the ground.

Who could love this sort of cold?

A day like this, Malin thinks, is not meant for the living.

Linköping is paralysed, the city’s streets draped limply upon the crust of the earth, the condensation on the windows making the houses blind.

People didn’t even make the effort to get to the Cloetta Centre last night for the ice hockey, just a couple of thousand instead of the usual full house.

I wonder how Martin’s getting on? Malin thinks, her colleague Zeke’s son, a local lad, a forward with a chance of a place in the national team and a career as a professional. She can’t actually summon up much interest in ice hockey, but if you live in this town it’s pretty much impossible to avoid hearing about events on the ice.

Hardly anyone about.

The travel agent’s on the corner of St Larsgatan and Hamngatan mocks with its posters for one exotic destination after the other; the sun, beaches, the unnaturally blue skies belong to another planet, a habitable one. A lone mother is wrestling with a twin buggy outside the Östgöta Bank, the children nestled in black bags, almost invisible, sleepy, obstinate, yet still so unimaginably vulnerable. Their mother slips on patches of ice hidden under a powder of snow, she lurches but drives herself on as though there were no other option.

‘Winters here are the devil’s work.’

Malin can hear her father’s words within her, his justification a few years ago for the purchase of a three-room bungalow in a retirement village on Tenerife: the Playa de la Arena, just north of Playa de las Américas.

What are you doing right now? Malin thinks.

The coffee warms from within.

You’re probably still asleep, and when you wake up it’ll be warm and sunny. But here, the frost reigns unchallenged.

Should I wake Tove? Thirteen-year-olds can sleep for ages, right round the clock if they’re given the chance, and in a winter like this it would be lovely to hibernate for a few months, not having to go out, and waking up fully restored when the temperature creeps above zero.

Tove can sleep. Let her tall, gangly body rest.

Her first class doesn’t start until nine. Malin can see it all in her mind’s eye. How her daughter forces herself to get up at half past eight, stumbles to the bathroom, showers, gets dressed. She never wears make-up. And then Malin sees Tove skip breakfast, despite all her cajoling. Maybe I should try a new tactic, Malin thinks: Breakfast is bad for you, Tove. Whatever you do, don’t eat breakfast.

Malin drinks the last of the coffee.

The only time Tove ever gets up early is when she wants to finish one of the mass of books she devours almost obsessively; she has unusually advanced taste for her age. Jane Austen. How many Swedish thirteen-year-olds apart from Tove would read something like that? But, on the other hand… She’s not quite like other thirteen-year-olds, never has to try hard to be top of the class. Maybe it would be good if she did have to make more effort, encounter a bit of real resistance?

Time has run on, and Malin wants to get to work, doesn’t want to miss the half hour between quarter to seven and quarter past when she is almost certain to be on her own in Police Headquarters and can plan the day ahead undisturbed.

In the bathroom she takes off the dressing gown. Tosses it on to the yellow synthetic floor.

The glass in the mirror on the wall is a little bowed, and even though it makes her height of 1.70 metres appear slightly squashed she still looks slim; athletic and powerful and ready to meet whatever crap comes her way. She’s met it before, crap, she’s dealt with it, learned from it and moved on.

Not bad for a thirty-three-year-old, Malin thinks, her self-confidence doing its job: There’s nothing I can’t deal with, and then the doubt, the old fixed belief: I haven’t amounted to much, and won’t now, and it’s my fault, all my own fault.

Her body. She concentrates on that.

Pats her stomach, takes in a deep breath so that her small breasts stick out, but just as she sees the nipples pointing forward she stops herself.

Instead she quickly bends down and picks up the dressing gown. She dries her blonde pageboy with the dryer, letting her hair fall over her prominent but soft cheekbones, forming a pelmet above her straight eyebrows, because she knows that emphasises her cornflower-blue eyes. Malin pouts her lips, wishes they were bigger, but maybe that would look odd beneath her short, slightly snub nose?

In the bedroom she pulls on a pair of jeans, a white blouse and a loose-knit black polo-neck sweater.

Glancing at the hall mirror, she adjusts her hair, reassuring herself that the wrinkles around her eyes aren’t too visible. She puts on her Caterpillar boots.

Because who knows what lies ahead?

Maybe she’ll have to head out into the countryside. The thick, synthetic down jacket she bought from a branch of Stadium in Tornby shopping centre for eight hundred and seventy-five kronor makes her feel like a rheumatic spaceman, her movements sluggish and clumsy.

Have I got everything?

Mobile, purse in her pocket. Pistol. Her constant companion. The gun was hanging on the back of the chair next to the unmade bed.

By the mattress with space for two, plus enough room for a decent gap, a gap for sleep and loneliness during the very darkest hours of night. But how can you find someone you can put up with if you can’t even put up with yourself?

She has a picture of Janne beside the bed. She usually tells herself that it’s there to make Tove happy.

In the photograph Janne is suntanned and his mouth is smiling, but not his grey-green eyes. The sky behind him is clear, and beside him a palm tree is swaying gently in the wind, while in the background you can make out a jungle. Janne is wearing a light blue UN helmet and a camouflage cotton jacket bearing the logo of the Swedish Rescue Services; he looks like he wants to turn round, to make sure that nothing’s about to jump out at him from the dense vegetation.

Rwanda.

Kigali.

He’s told her about dogs eating people who weren’t even dead yet.

Janne went, goes, has always gone as a volunteer. At least that’s the official version.

To a jungle so dense that you can’t hear the sound of the heart of darkness beating, to mined and blood-drenched mountain roads in the Balkans, trucks with sacks of flour rumbling past mass-graves, poorly concealed by sand and scrub.

And it was voluntary from the start, for us.

The short version: a seventeen-year-old and a twenty-year-old meet in a bog-standard disco in a bog-standard small town. Two people with no plans, similar but different, but with some shared essence, ideas that work for both of them. Then, after two years, the event to be avoided at all costs happens. A thin membrane of rubber breaks and a child starts to grow.

‘We have to get rid of it.’

‘No, this is what I’ve always wanted.’

Their words slip past each other. Time runs out and their daughter arrives, the sunbeam to end all sunbeams, and they play happy families. A few years pass and a silence falls. Things turn out differently from the way they were planned, if they were planned at all, and each of those involved moves off in his or her own direction, without rhyme or reason.

No explosions, just a damp squib leaving a long trail into history, and even further into the soul.

The serfdom of love, Malin thinks.

Bittersweet. As she thought back then, after they’d separated, when the removal van was heading for Stockholm and the Police Academy, when Janne moved to Bosnia: If I become really good at getting rid of evil, then goodness will come to me.

Surely it could be as simple as that?

Then love might be possible again. Mightn’t it?

On her way out of the flat Malin feels the pistol pressing against her ribcage. She carefully opens the door to Tove’s bedroom. She can make out the walls in the darkness, the rows of books on the shelves, can sense Tove’s oddly proportioned teenage body under the turquoise duvet. Tove sleeps almost soundlessly, has done ever since she was two. Before that her sleep was disturbed, she used to wake several times a night, but then it was as if she realised that silence and calm were necessary, at least at night, as if the two-year-old instinctively knew that a person needs to keep the night free for dreams.

Malin leaves the flat.

Goes down the three flights of stairs to the door of the building. With every step she feels the cold come closer. It’s practically below zero in the stairwell.

Please let the car start. It’s almost cold enough to freeze the petrol to ice.

She pauses at the door. The chill mist is drifting in waves through the streetlamps’ cones of light. She wants to run back upstairs, go into the apartment, tear off her clothes and creep back into bed. Then it comes again, her longing for Police Headquarters. So: pull the door open, run to the car, fumble with the key, open the door, throw yourself in, start the engine and drive off.

The cold takes a stranglehold when she walks out; she imagines she can hear the hairs in her nose crackle with every breath, and feels her tear-ducts grow treacly, but she can still read the inscription above one of the side doors of St Lars: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’.

Where’s the car? The silver Volvo, a 2004 model, is in its place, opposite the St Lars Gallery.

Padded, bulky arms.

With difficulty Malin gets her hand into the pocket where she thinks the car keys are. No keys. The next pocket, then the next. Damn. She must have left them upstairs. Then she remembers: they’re in the front pocket of her jeans.

Her stiff fingers ache as she thrusts them into the pocket. But the keys are there.

Open now, bloody door. The ice has somehow spared the keyhole and soon Malin is sitting in the driver’s seat swearing: about the cold, about an engine that merely splutters and refuses to start.

She tries again and again.

But the car refuses.

Malin gets out. Thinks: I have to take the bus, which way does it go?

Damn, it’s cold, fucking bloody car-fucker, then her mobile rings.

A clawed hand on the angry plastic gadget. She can’t be bothered to see who it is.

‘Hello, Malin Fors.’

‘It’s Zeke.’

‘My fucking car won’t start.’

‘Calm down, Malin. Calm down. Just listen. Something big’s happened. I’ll tell you when I see you. Be with you in ten minutes.’

Zeke’s words hang in the air. From his tone of voice Malin can hear that something serious has indeed happened, that the coldest winter in living memory just got a few degrees less forgiving, that the cold has just shown its true face.

2

German choral music blasts through the car as Zacharius ‘Zeke’ Martinsson keeps a firm grip on the wheel and drives past the detached houses on the outskirts of Hjulsterbro. Through the side window he glimpses the red and green gables of the rows of generously proportioned houses. The painted wood is covered with frost and the trees that have grown tall in the thirty years since the houses were built look emaciated and malnourished in the cold. But, even so, the whole area looks unusually cosy and well-cared-for; it looks prosperous.

The doctors’ ghetto, Zeke thinks. That’s how the area is known in town. And it is undeniably popular among the doctors at the hospital. Opposite, on the other side of the main Sturefors road, on the far side of a car park, are the squat white blocks of flats in Ekholmen, home to thousands of immigrants and Swedes at the bottom of the pecking order.

Malin sounded tired, but not newly woken. Perhaps she slept badly. Maybe I should ask if anything particular has happened? No, best let it be. She only gets cross if you ask how she is. Zeke tries to keep his mind off what they are on their way to. Doesn’t even want to know what it’s going to look like. They’ll see soon enough, but the boys in the patrol car sounded seriously shaken, and no wonder, if it was as bad as they said. He’s got good at this over the years, delaying, postponing the crap even if it sometimes hits him hard.

Johannelund.

The boys’ league football pitches down by the Stångån River are covered with snow. Martin used to play there for the Saab team before he decided to concentrate full-time on ice hockey. I’ve never been much of a football dad, Zeke thinks, and now, now things are starting to go really well for the boy, I hardly have the energy to get to his matches. Last night was terrible. Even though they beat Färjestad 4-3. No matter how I try, I just can’t love that game, its overblown toughness.

Love, Zeke thinks, is either there or it isn’t. Like my love of choral music.

They practise two evenings a week, Da Capo, the choir he’s been a member of since he dared himself to go almost ten years ago. Concerts maybe once a month, a trip to some festival once a year.

Zeke likes the undemanding nature of his relationships within the choir; no one cares what anyone else does the rest of the time, they meet, they talk and then they sing. Sometimes, when he’s standing with the others, surrounded by song in a bright church hall, he imagines that it might really be possible to belong to something, to be part of something bigger than his own insignificant self. As if there were a simplicity and self-evident joy to the singing that couldn’t possibly contain anything evil.

Because it’s a question of holding evil at bay, as best you can.

On their way towards evil now. That much is clear.

The Folkungavallen Stadium. The next rung in the ball-game ladder. The football stadium was run down, ripe for redevelopment. The Linköping women’s team is one of the best in the country, a group of women bought for the purpose, including a lot of national players, but who have never succeeded in winning over the town’s inhabitants. Then the swimming pool. The new buildings beside the multistorey. He turns into Hamngatan, past the big shops, Hemköp and åhléns, and then he can see Malin standing there shivering outside her door. Why isn’t she waiting inside?

She is huddled but still seems somehow indefatigable as she stands with her arms round her body, her whole being sort of anchored to the ground in spite of the cold, in the certainty that this is the start of another day where she can devote herself to what she’s best suited to.

And she really is suited to it, to police work. If I’d done anything wrong, I wouldn’t want her after me, Zeke thinks, and he whispers to himself, ‘Right, Malin, fuck it, what’s today got in store for us then?’

The choral music turned down to a minimum. One hundred whispering voices in the car.

What can a human voice tell us? Malin thinks.

Zeke’s voice has a hoarseness like no other Malin has ever heard, a tempered, demanding tone that vanishes when he sings, but which became even more pronounced when he just told her what had happened:

‘Apparently it’s a bloody awful sight,’ he says, the hoarseness making his words sharper, ‘according to the boys in the car when they called in. But when is it ever anything else?’

Zeke is sitting beside her, behind the wheel of his Volvo, his eyes fixed on the slippery road ahead.

Eyes.

We depend on them. Ninety per cent of the impressions that make up our image of the world around us come from our eyes. What we can’t see almost doesn’t exist. Anything can be hidden away in a cupboard and it’s gone. Problem solved, just like that.

‘Never,’ Malin says.

Zeke nods his clean-shaven head. Perched on an unusually long neck, his skull doesn’t seem to belong to his short, sinewy body. His skin is stretched over his cheekbones.

Malin can’t see his eyes from where she’s sitting. But she trusts her memory of them.

She knows those eyes. Knows that they sit deep in his cranium, and are usually calm. In their dull grey-green colour there is always a polished, almost bottomless light that is harsh and gentle at the same time.

At forty-five, he’s got a lot of the calmness that experience brings, although the years have somehow made him more restless, implacable, or, as he said to her after a few too many beers and shorts at the Christmas party: ‘It’s us against them, Malin. Sometimes, no matter how sad it sounds, we have to use their methods. That’s the only language a certain type of man understands.’ He said it without bitterness or satisfaction, it was simply a statement.

Zeke’s restlessness isn’t visible, but she can feel it. What on earth must he go through at Martin’s games?

‘… a bloody awful sight.’

It had taken eleven minutes from when Zeke had phoned for him to pick her up outside her flat. His blunt assertion made her shiver even more, at the same time making her feel strangely elated, against her will.

Linköping through the windscreen.

The avaricious city, in spite of its size, the veneer over its history strangely thin.

What had once been a factory city and a marketplace for farmers soon became a university city, the factories largely shut down, the residents cajoled into education, into colleges, into the university, and soon the most self-aware city in the country was rising from the plains, with the most remarkable inhabitants in the country.

Linköping.

The city as though born in the 1940s, the city as an insecure academic with a past that must be swept under the carpet at all costs. With people who want to be better than they are, and put on dresses and suits to go and drink coffee in the city centre on Saturdays.

Linköping.

An excellent city to get ill in.

Or, even better, to get burned in.

The University Hospital is home to the pre-eminent burns unit in the country. Malin was there once, in connection with a case, dressed in white from head to toe. The conscious patients were screaming or moaning, the tranquillised dreaming of not having to wake up.

Linköping.

Domain of flyboys. The home of the aeronautics industry. Steel crows croaking in the air: the Flying Barrel, Draken, Viggen, Jas. It all bubbles up and spills over and suddenly the newly wealthy are strolling the streets, their technology companies sold to the Americans.

Then there are the surrounding plains and forests. Home to all those whose genes cannot accommodate rapid change, those whose coding protests, refuses. Those who feel that they never have their feet on firm ground.

Janne. Are you one of them?

Is it that our coding doesn’t work at the same pace?

Indians of the primal forests. People in communities like Ukna, Nykil and Ledberg. You can see the natives in tracksuit bottoms and clogs alongside the doctors and engineers and test pilots out at Ikea on Saturdays. People forced to live side by side. But if their coding objects? If loving your neighbour is impossible? In the fracture between then and now, between here and there, inside and outside, sometimes violence is born as the only option.

They drive past Skäggetorp.

Happy white houses from the building boom of the sixties, around a deserted centre, their rented apartments now housing people from far away. People who know how it feels when your uniformed torturers knock on the door at night, who have heard machetes whine through the air just as dawn is waking the jungle, people who are not exactly the toast of the Immigration Office.

‘Do we want to go through Vreta Kloster, or shall we take the Ledberg road?’

‘This isn’t really my territory,’ Malin replies. ‘But it should be straight on, I think. So, how was the match last night?’

‘Don’t… Those red seats there are torture on the backside.’

Zeke drives past the turning for the Ledberg road and carries on towards Vreta Kloster.

Off to the east Lake Roxen opens out. Covered in ice, like a misplaced glacier, and ahead of them, beyond the lake, the villas on Vreta Kloster’s millionaires’ row clinging to the slope rising from the reeds. The locks on the Göta Canal alongside, waiting for the summer’s hobby sailors and canal boats full of rich American tourists.

The clock on the dashboard: 7.22.

A bloody awful sight.

She wants to tell Zeke to put his foot down, but stays quiet, closing her eyes instead.

By this time people have usually started to arrive at the station, and she would be saying good morning to the others in the Investigation Section of Linköping’s Crime Unit from her place behind her desk in the open-plan office. She could work out their mood, identify precisely which tone would apply that day. She would think, Good morning, Börje Svärd. You’ve been up and walked your dogs; it’s never too cold to show your Alsatians a bit of love, is it? There’s dog hair on your sweater, on your jacket, in your own ever-thinning hair. Your dogs’ barks are like voices to you. And how do you cope, really? What must it be like to see someone you love suffer the way your wife suffers every day?

Good morning, Johan Jakobsson. Trouble getting the kids to bed last night? Or are they ill? There’s a winter vomiting bug going around. Have you been up cleaning sick all night, you and your wife? Or did you experience the simple joy of children falling asleep early and happy? Is your wife dropping them off today, and you picking them up? You’re on time, you’re always on time, Johan, even if there’s never enough time. And the worry, Johan, I can see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice, it never goes. I know what it means because I’ve got it as well.

Good morning, boss. And how is Inspector Sven Sjöman today? Be careful. That stomach is far too big, in quite the wrong way. A heart-attack stomach, as the doctors at the University Hospital say. A widow-making stomach, as they joke in the staffroom of the intensive care unit before bypass operations. Don’t look at me in that beseeching way, Sven; you know I always do my best. Be careful. I need everyone who believes in me to stay believing, because it’s so easy to have doubts, even if our driving force is far greater than we might think. And then his words, advice: You’ve got a talent for this, Malin, a real talent. Look after it. There are many talents in the world, but there aren’t many realised ones. Look at what’s in front of you, but don’t rely on your eyes alone, rely on your gut feeling, Malin. Rely on your instincts. An investigation consists of a mass of voices, the sort you can hear, and the sort you can’t. Our own, and others’. You have to listen to the soundless voices, Malin. That’s where the truth is hidden.

Good morning, Karim Akbar. You know that even the youngest, most media-friendly police chief in the country needs to stay on the right side of us ground troops? You glide through the room in your well-pressed, shiny Italian suits and it’s always impossible to guess which way you’ll go. You never talk about your Skäggetorp, about the orange panel-fronted blocks in Nacksta up in Sundsvall, where you grew up alone with your mother and six brothers and sisters after you fled Turkish Kurdistan and your father had committed suicide in his despair at never finding a decent job in his new country.

‘Malin, what are you thinking? You look like you’re miles away.’

Now Zeke’s words are the crack of a whip and Malin is yanked back from her game, back to the car, back to their progress towards the incident, towards the violence that exists in the cracks, back to the winter-bitten landscape.

‘Nothing,’ she replies. ‘I was just thinking about how nice and warm it must be in the station right now.’

‘You’ve got this cold weather on the brain, Malin.’

‘How could I not get it on the brain?’

‘If you harden yourself against it, it’ll go away.’

‘The cold?’

‘No, thinking about it.’

They pass Sjövik’s fruit farm. Malin points through the window, towards the frost-covered greenhouses. ‘Now, over there,’ she says, ‘you can buy tulips in spring. Tulips in every colour you can think of.’

‘Wow,’ Zeke says. ‘I can hardly contain myself.’

The lights of the patrol car were shining like flickering coloured stars against the white field and sky.

They approach slowly, and the car seems gradually to reel in metre after metre of cold, of snow-covered field, of the site’s evident suitability for loneliness. Metre by metre, crystal by crystal, they get closer to their goal, a tussock, a swelling in the ground, an event that stems from an event that demands the attention of the present moment. The wind whips against the windscreen.

The Volvo’s wheels slide over the cleared road, and some fifty metres from the play of the lights a solitary oak stands out hazily against the horizon, grey-white tentacles becoming a scrambling poisonous spider on the white sky, the fine tracery of branches a net of memories and suggestions. The oak’s coarsest branches bend down towards the ground, and slowly the cold lets go of the veils that have thus far concealed what bends them from Zeke and Malin’s eyes.

There’s a figure outside the patrol car. Two heads in its rear window. A green Saab pulled up haphazardly a few metres away.

A protection barrier set up around the tree, almost reaching to the road.

And then in the tree. The not exactly great sight.

Something to make your eyes doubt what they see.

For voices to talk about.

3

In a way, it’s nice hanging up here.

There’s a good view and my frozen body is swaying pleasantly in the wind. I can let my thoughts meander wherever they like. There’s a calm here that I’ve never experienced before, that I never imagined might exist. My voice is new, my gaze too. Maybe I’m now the person I never had a chance to be.

The horizon is growing lighter and the Östgöta plain is grey-white; it looks endless, the view only broken by clusters of trees encircling small farms. The snow is drifting in waves across the meadows and fields, pasture interchangeable with bare soil, and down there, far from my dangling feet, a young man in grey overalls stands beside a police car, looking anxiously and expectantly, almost relieved, towards the approaching vehicle. Then he turns his eyes towards me, somehow watchful, as if I might run off or something.

The blood has solidified in my body.

My blood has solidified in the heavens and the stars and far out in the most distant galaxies. Yet I am still here. But I need not breathe any more, and that would be tricky anyway, considering the noose around my neck. When the man got out of his car and approached in his red jacket – God knows what he was doing out here so early – he screamed, then he muttered, Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fucking hell, oh God.

Then he rushed to his phone and now he’s sitting in the car shaking his head.

God: yes. I tried with Him once but what could He offer me? I see it everywhere: this faithless invocation that people start up as soon as they get involved in anything they imagine is related to darkness.

I’m not alone now, there are infinite numbers of people like me all around, but it still isn’t crowded, there’s room for all of us, more than enough room; here, in my infinitely expanding universe, everything is simultaneously shrinking together. Becoming clear, yet still strangely murky.

Of course it hurt.

Of course I was scared.

Of course I tried to escape.

But deep within me I knew my life was done. I wasn’t happy, but I was tired, tired of moving in circles around what I had been denied, what I, nevertheless, somewhere in my innermost being, still wanted to have, still wanted to participate in.

People’s movements.

Never my movements.

That’s why it’s pleasant hanging here naked and dead in a lonely oak tree out on one of the most fertile acres in the country. I think the two lights on the car that’s heading this way along the road are beautiful.

There was never any beautiful before.

Maybe it’s just for us dead?

It’s lovely, so lovely not to be troubled by all the worries of the living.

The cold has no smell. The naked, bloody body above Malin’s head is slowly swinging back and forth, the oak a reluctant, creaking gallows whose sounds mingle with the rumble of an idling car engine. The skin has come loose in great flaps over the bulging stomach and across the back, and the bleeding flesh, frozen, is a confusion of dull shades of red. Here and there on the limbs, apparently at random, the wounds are deep, concave, as though carved by a knife in slices from the body. The genitals appear to have been left untouched. The face lacks contours, is a blue-black, swollen, frozen mass of beaten fat. Only the eyes, wide open and bloodshot, almost surprised or hungry, yet simultaneously full of hesitant fear, let on that this is a human face.

‘He must weigh at least a hundred and fifty kilos,’ Zeke says.

‘At least,’ Malin replies, thinking that she has seen that look on murder victims before, how everything becomes primal again when we are faced with death, how we revert to the new human being we once were. Scared, hungry, but right from the outset capable of surprise.

She usually reacts this way when confronted by scenes like this. Rationalises them away, with the help of memories and things she’s read, tries to match up what her eyes are seeing with what she’s gleaned from studies.

His eyes.

Most of all she sees fury in them. And despair.

The others are waiting over by the patrol car. Zeke told the uniformed officer to sit and wait in the car.

‘No need for you to stand out here freezing. He’ll keep on hanging where he’s hanging.’

‘Don’t you want to talk to the man who found him?’ The officer looked over his shoulder. ‘That’s who found him.’

‘We’ll take a look first.’

Then this swollen frozen body in this lonely oak; a gigantic overgrown baby that someone, or more than one, has tortured the life out of.

What do you want with me? Malin wonders. Why have you dragged me out here on this godforsaken morning? What do you want to tell me?

The feet, blue-black, the toes turning black, swing against all the whiteness.

The eyes, Malin thinks. Your isolation. It’s like something moving across the plain, across the town, and into me.

First the obvious.

The branch is five metres above the ground, no clothes, no blood in the snow, no tracks in the thin covering around the tree, apart from the really fresh ones from a pair of boots.

From the man who found you, Malin thinks. One thing is certain: you didn’t get up here by yourself; and the injuries on your body, someone else must have given you those. And you probably didn’t get them here, otherwise the ground beneath you would be covered in blood. No, you froze for a good while somewhere else, so long that your blood turned solid.

‘You see those marks on the branch?’ Zeke says, looking up at the body.

‘Yes,’ Malin replies. ‘Like someone’s torn the bark off.’

‘I swear, the man who did this must have used a crane to get him up into the tree, then tied the noose afterwards.’

‘Or people,’ Malin says. ‘There may have been more than one.’

‘No tracks between here and the road.’

‘No, but it was a windy night. The ground changes by the minute. Loose snow, bits of ice. It’s changing all the time. How long would any track last? Quarter of an hour. An hour. No longer.’

‘We’re still going to have to get the forensics team to check the ground.’

‘They’re going to need the biggest heater on the planet,’ Malin says.

‘Well, that’s their business.’

‘How long do you reckon he’s been hanging there?’

‘Impossible to say. But no longer than the first hours of darkness. Someone would have seen him during the day.’

‘He could have been dead long before that,’ Malin says.

‘That’s Johannison’s job.’

‘Anything sexual?’

‘Isn’t everything, Fors?’

Her surname. Zeke uses it when he’s joking, when he answers a question he thinks is unnecessary or stupid, or just stupidly formulated.

‘Come on, Zeke.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything sexual involved here. No.’

‘Good, we agree on that, then.’

They head back towards the cars.

‘Whoever did this,’ Zeke says, ‘must have a bloody huge sense of purpose. Because no matter how you go about it, it’s no easy thing to get that body up here and into the tree.

‘You’d have to be absolutely livid,’ he adds.

‘Or really sad,’ Malin replies.

‘Sit in our car instead. It’s still warm.’

The uniforms clamber out of the patrol car.

The middle-aged man in the back seat looks meaningfully at Malin and makes an effort to move.

‘You can stay,’ she says, and the man sinks down, still tense, his thin eyebrows twitching. His entire body seems to be saying one single thing: How the hell do I explain this? What was I doing out here at this time of day?

Malin sits next to him, Zeke gets into the front.

‘That’s better,’ Zeke says. ‘Much better in here than out there.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ the man says, looking at Malin, his blue eyes wet with worry. ‘I shouldn’t have stopped, bloody stupid of me, I should just have kept going.’

Malin puts her hand on the man’s arm. The padding under the red fabric sinks beneath her fingers.

‘You did the right thing.’

‘You see, I’d been-’

‘It’s okay,’ Zeke says, turning towards the back seat. ‘Just take it easy. You can start by telling us your name.’

‘My name?’

‘Yep.’ Malin nods.

‘I’m having an affair-’

‘Your name.’

‘Liedbergh. Peter Liedbergh.’

‘Thank you, Peter.’

‘Now you can go on.’

‘I’m having an affair, and I’d been with her in Borensberg and was going home this way. I live in Maspelösa and it’s the quickest route from there. I’ll admit that much, but I didn’t have anything to do with this. You can check with her. Her name is-’

‘We’ll check,’ Zeke says. ‘So, you were on your way home from a night of passion?’

‘Yes, and I came this way. They keep the road clear, and then I saw something odd in the tree, and stopped, and I got out, and, I mean, fuck. Fuck. Bloody hell.’

People’s movements, Malin thinks. Headlights shining in the night, flickering points of light. Then she says, ‘There wasn’t anyone here when you arrived? Did you see anyone?’

‘Quiet as the grave.’

‘Did you pass any other cars?’

‘Not on this road. But a kilometre or so before the turning I passed an estate car, I can’t remember what make.’

‘Number?’ Zeke’s hoarse voice.

Peter Liedbergh shakes his head. ‘You can check with her. Her name’s-’

‘We’ll check.’

‘You know. First I just wanted to carry on. But then, well, I know what you’re supposed to do in this sort of situation. I swear, I had nothing to do with it.’

‘We don’t imagine that you did,’ Malin says. ‘I, I mean we, think it’s pretty unlikely that you would have phoned if you were involved.’

‘And my wife, does my wife have to know?’

‘About what?’

‘I told her I was going to work. Karlsson’s Bakery, I do nights there, but that’s in the other direction.’

‘We won’t need to say anything to her,’ Malin says. ‘But she’ll probably find out anyway.’

‘What am I going to tell her?’

‘Tell her you took the scenic route. Because you felt too awake.’

‘She’ll never believe that. I’m usually completely exhausted. And in this cold.’

Malin and Zeke exchange a glance.

‘Anything else you think might be important to us?’

Peter Liedbergh shakes his head. ‘Can I go now?’

‘No,’ Malin says. ‘The forensics team will have to check your car, and take your footprints. We need to know they’re your footprints out there and not anyone else’s. And you can give your lover’s name to our colleagues.’

‘I shouldn’t have stopped,’ Liedbergh says. ‘It would have been better to leave him hanging here. I mean, someone would have found him sooner or later.’

The wind is increasing in strength, forcing its way through the synthetic padding of Malin’s jacket, through her skin, flesh, right into the smallest molecules of her marrow. The stress hormones kick in, helping the muscles to send pain signals to the brain, and her whole body aches. Malin imagines that this must be what it’s like to freeze to death. You never die of cold, but as a result of the stress, the pain the body experiences when it can’t maintain its temperature and goes into overdrive, trying to fool itself. When you’re really cold, you feel a warmth spreading through your body. It’s a terrible bliss: your lungs can no longer oxygenate the blood and you suffocate and fall asleep simultaneously, but you feel warm; people who’ve returned from this state say that it’s as though they’d drowned, sinking down, down, only to float up again on clouds so soft and white and warm that all fear vanishes. It’s a physiological trick, that softness, Malin thinks. It’s just death caressing us so that we’ll accept it.

A car approaches in the distance.

The technical team arriving already?

Hardly.

More likely the hyenas on the Östgöta Correspondent who’ve got wind of Picture of the Year. Is it him? Malin has time to wonder as the top of the oak creaks disconcertingly and she turns and sees the body quivering, and thinks, It can’t be much fun hanging there.

Just hang on and we’ll get you down.

4

‘Malin, Malin, what have you got for me?’

The cold seems to eat up Daniel Högfeldt’s words, muting the sound waves midway through the air. Even though he is wearing a padded jacket with a fur collar, there is something direct yet elegant about the way his body moves, his way of somehow owning and exercising power over the ground he’s walking on.

She meets his gaze, and she sees a glimpse of a mocking smile in it, a story beyond this moment, a secret history that he knows she doesn’t want anyone here to be aware of. And she sees the calculation: I know, you know, and I’m going to use that to get what I want, here and now. Extortion, Malin thinks. It won’t work on me. When are you going to play your trump card, Daniel? Now? Why not? It’s a good opportunity. But I won’t back down. We may be the same age, but we’re really not that similar.

‘Was he murdered, Malin? How did he get up in the tree? You have to give me something.’

Suddenly Daniel Högfeldt is very close; his straight nose seems to be almost touching hers. ‘Malin?’

‘Not another step. And I’m saying nothing. I don’t have to do anything.’

And the mocking smile in his eyes gets even clearer, but Daniel decides to retreat.

The photographer’s camera clicks as she moves about just beyond the cordon round the tree and body.

‘Not so close, you idiot,’ Zeke shouts, and from the corner of her eye Malin sees the two uniformed officers rush off towards the photographer, who slowly lowers her camera and backs away nearer their car.

‘Malin, he must have been murdered if you need to keep the site clean, so you have to say something. It doesn’t look like a suicide, if you ask me.’

She shoves Daniel aside, feels her elbow touch his, wants to go back and repeat the gesture again, but instead she hears him calling after her, and thinks, How the hell could I? How could I be so stupid?

Then she turns back to face the journalist from the Correspondent: ‘Not one step on to that field. Back to your car, and stay there, or, even better, get out of here. It’s cold and there’s nothing else going on; you’ve got pictures of the body, haven’t you?’

Daniel smiles a practised boyish smile, which, unlike his words, cuts right through the cold.

‘But Malin, I’m only doing my job.’

‘All that’s going to happen now is that the forensics team are going to turn up and start doing their job, that’s all. We’ll take it from there.’

‘I’m done,’ the photographer calls, and Malin thinks that she can’t be more than eight or nine years older than Tove, and how her bare fingers must ache.

‘She’s freezing,’ Malin says.

‘I dare say she is,’ Daniel says. Then he pushes past Malin towards the car without looking back.

When the thought first occurred to me, that she was actually going to help me down, I grew tired of hanging here. Because that is my state. I drift, and I am here. I am in one place, and everywhere. But this tree is no place of rest; perhaps rest will never come. I don’t know yet.

So, all these people in their padded clothes.

Don’t they see how vain they are?

Do they imagine they can keep out the cold?

Can’t they get me down now?

I’m tired of hanging around like this, of this game you’re playing with me down there in the snow below me. It’s fun watching how your steps in the snow become tracks, tracks I can amuse myself by following, round, round, like restless memories hidden in inaccessible synapses.

‘I can’t stand that man,’ Zeke says as the Correspondent’s car disappears off in the cold. ‘He’s like a cocaine-fuelled leech with ADHD.’

‘And that’s why he’s so good at his job,’ Malin says.

Zeke’s American-inspired metaphors turn up when you least expect them, and Malin has often wondered where they come from. As far as she knows, Zeke has never shown any fondness for American popular culture, and he probably hardly knows who Philip Marlowe is.

‘If he’s so fucking clever, what’s he doing on a local paper?’

‘Maybe he’s happy here?’

‘Yeah, right.’

Then Malin looks over at the body. ‘What do you think it’s like, hanging up there?’

The words hung in the cold air.

‘It’s just meat now,’ Zeke says. ‘Meat can’t feel anything. Whoever that person was, whatever sort of human being he was, he isn’t here any longer.’

‘Even so, he still has things to tell us,’ Malin says.

Karin Johannison, analyst, pathologist and researcher at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, with a part-time post as a crime-scene investigator with the Linköping Police, is flapping her arms around her heavily padded body, elegant even though conducting an inelegant gesture. Small fragments of feathers fly up in the air like misshapen snowflakes and Malin imagines that the jacket must have been incredibly expensive considering how well-padded its red fabric is.

Even in her fur hat and with cheeks red from the February chill, Karin is the spitting image of a slightly aged Riviera princess, like a middle-aged Françoise Sagan, without a cloud in her sky, far too attractive for the job she does. The suntan from her holiday in Thailand at Christmas is still lingering on her skin and sometimes, Malin thinks, I wish I could have been like Karin, married to money and the easy life.

They approach the body cautiously, stepping in footprints already there.

Karin is behaving like an engineer, pushing aside any thoughts of the naked human being in the tree in front of them, refusing to see the fat, the skin, what had once been the face, suppressing any empathy with the thoughts that might have passed through the swollen body’s brain, and which are now slowly settling over the city, the plain and the forests like an ominous murmur; a whimper that could perhaps only be silenced in one way, through an answer to the question: Who did it?

‘What do you see, Karin?’

I know, Malin thinks. You see an object, a screw or a nut, a narrative machine that needs to be analysed, that will be allowed to tell its innate story.

‘He can hardly have got up there by himself,’ Karin says, standing almost immediately below the body. She has just photographed the footprints around it, laying a ruler beside them, because even if they are in all likelihood merely their own and Peter Liedbergh’s they need to be checked.

Malin doesn’t answer. Instead she asks, ‘How long do you think he’s been dead?’

‘Impossible to know just by looking at him. I’m going to have to work without any preconceptions on this one. We’ll get answers to those questions in the post-mortem.’

The answer she was expecting. Malin thinks instead of Karin’s suntan, her plump jacket and how the wind is cutting straight through her own Stadium coat.

‘We need to take a look at the ground before we get him down,’ Karin says. ‘We’ll have to bring in the heater the army have got up in Kvarn, and erect a tent so we can get rid of all this snow.’

‘But won’t you just end up with a quagmire?’ Malin asks.

‘Only if we carry on too long,’ Karin replies. ‘They can probably have the heater here in a few hours. If they’re not on duty somewhere else, that is.’

‘He shouldn’t be left hanging there much longer,’ Malin says.

‘It’s minus thirty out here,’ Karin says. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to the body in this sort of cold.’

Zeke has kept the engine running and there is probably a forty-degree difference in temperature between the inside of the car and the air outside. Warm breath is turning to ice crystals on the side windows.

Malin gets into the passenger seat.

‘Quick, shut the door,’ Zeke snaps. ‘So, has Mrs Johannison taken charge of the situation?’

‘Kvarn. She’s getting the heater from there.’

Another two patrol cars have arrived, and through the tracery of the crystals Malin sees Karin direct the uniformed officers out in the field.

‘We might as well go now,’ Zeke says.

Malin nods.

As they drive back past Sjövik’s fruit farm Malin turns on the radio, tuning it to P4. An old friend of hers, Helen Aneman, presents a programme on that channel every day between seven and ten o’clock.

Her friend’s soft voice comes on as ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ fades out.

‘During that last track I took a look at the Correspondent’s site. This is no normal day in Linköping, dear listeners. And I don’t mean the cold. The police have found something in an oak tree in the middle of the plain, towards Vreta Kloster.’

‘That was quick,’ Zeke said over the noise of the radio.

‘He’s no slacker, Daniel,’ Malin says.

‘Daniel?’

‘If you feel like starting the day with something stomach-churning,’ the velvet voice on the radio says, ‘have a look at the pictures on the Correspondent’s website. A very unusual bird in a tree.’

5

Daniel Högfeldt leans back against his office chair and the responsive backrest dips towards the floor.

He rocks back and forth like he used to in Grandfather’s rocking-chair in the cottage out in Vikbolandet, the one that burned down soon after Grandma finally passed away at Vrinnevis Hospital in Norrköping. First Daniel looks out through the window at Hamngatan, then across the open-plan newsroom at his colleagues crouched over their computers, most of them completely indifferent to their work, happy with what they’ve got, and tired, so tired. If there’s one poison worse than all the others for journalists, Daniel thinks, it’s tiredness. It messes people up, ruins them.

I’m not tired. Not in the slightest.

He mentioned Malin in his article about the man in the tree: Malin Fors of Linköping Police did not want to give any…

Back and forth.

Just like most crime investigations he had covered.

The clatter of keyboards, the sound of people calling across the newsroom, and the smell of bitter coffee.

Several of his colleagues are so cynical it is affecting their productivity. But not him. It is a matter of maintaining respect for the people whose stories and mishaps are his daily bread.

A naked man in a tree. Hanged.

A blessing for anyone with newspaper pages to fill and sell.

But also something else.

The city will wake up. No question at all.

I’m good at what I do, because I know how to play the ‘journalistic game’, but also because I know how to keep my distance and how to play people.

Cynical?

Hamngatan was swept in winter outside.

Crumpled sheets in Malin Fors’s apartment. Only two blocks away.

Sven Sjöman’s wrinkled brow, his bulging gut, the denim shirt carelessly tucked into his brown wool trousers. His face as lifeless and grey as the jacket he is wearing, his thin hair the same colour as the whiteboard he is standing in front of. Sven prefers to keep meetings small, then to inform anyone else involved as and when. In his opinion, large meetings like they have in other police districts are never as productive.

He starts the way he usually does with a meeting of this sort, when they are about to start work on a big new case. The question who? needs to be answered, and it is his responsibility to set the question in motion, to give it a direction that will hopefully lead to the answer: him, her, them.

There is a deceptive emptiness, a trickling poison in the meeting room. Because all five of the officers assembled know that when that question is left hanging in the air, it can influence and change an entire community, a region, a country, a whole world.

The room is on the ground floor in one of the old military barracks in the A1-district that was rebuilt as the central police station about ten years ago when the regiment was disbanded: military out, law and order in.

Outside the barred windows is a ten-metre-wide, snow-covered lawn, then a playground, empty and desolate; the swings and climbing-frames are painted in primary colours but the white frost has turned them all into a collage of grey. Beyond the park, inside the nursery school’s large windows, Malin can see children playing, running to and fro, doing all the things that make up their world.

Tove.

It’s been a long time since you ran about like that.

Malin called her from the car, and Tove answered on her way out of the flat: ‘Of course I got up.’

‘Wrap up warm.’

‘What, do you think I’m stupid or something?’

Zeke: ‘Teenagers. They’re like horses on a racecourse. They never do what you want.’

Sometimes when they’ve been working on particularly violent cases, with pictures pinned up on the walls of the meeting room, they close the blinds to shield the children in the nursery, so that they don’t see the sort of thing they probably see on television every day, flickering past on an unguarded set, image added to image, as the child learns to trust its own eyes.

A slit throat. A burned corpse hanging from a lamppost, a swollen body in a flooded town.

And now Sjöman’s words, the same words as always, his gruff voice: ‘So, what do you think we’ve got here? Any ideas, anyone? There have been no new missing person reports, and if that was going to happen it would probably have happened by now. So what do we think?’ A question tossed into the room by a standing man to people sitting round an oblong table, his finger pressing the play button, words like music, like notes, hard and brittle between the four walls.

Johan Jakobsson speaks up, and it is obvious he has been waiting to hear his own voice, that he has been wanting to say something, anything, if only to put an end to his own tiredness.

‘It’s got ritual written all over it.’

‘We don’t even know for sure that he was murdered,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘We can’t be sure until Karin Johannison is finished. But we can presume that he was murdered. That much is clear.’

You don’t know anything for certain, Malin. Until you know. Until then: the virtue of ignorance.

‘It looks like a ritual.’

‘We have to keep an open mind.’

‘We don’t know who he is,’ Zeke says. ‘That would be a good start, finding out who he is.’

‘Maybe someone will call in. The pictures are in the paper already,’ Johan says, and Börje Svärd, who has been silent up to now, sighs.

‘Those pictures? You can’t see the face.’

‘How many people that overweight can there be round here? And before too long someone will wonder where that fat man has disappeared to.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ Malin says. ‘This city’s full of people that no one would notice if they went missing.’

‘But he looks different, his body-’

‘If we’re lucky,’ Sven interrupts Johan, ‘someone will call in. To begin with we’ll have to wait for the results of the search of the scene and for the post-mortem. We can start knocking on doors in the area, find out if anyone saw or heard anything, if anyone knows anything we ought to know. We have, as you’re well aware, one question that has to be answered.’

Sven Sjöman, Malin thinks. Four years left before he reaches sixty-five, four years left at risk of a heart attack, four years of overtime, four years of his wife’s tasty and lovingly prepared but dangerously fatty food. Four years of too little exercise. A widow-making stomach. But Sven is still the voice of reason in the room, the voice of experience, pushing no particular angle, stressing sensible, disinterested, mature methodology.

‘Malin, you and Zeke will be in charge of the preliminary investigation,’ Sven says. ‘I’ll see that you get the resources you need for the foot-work. And you two can help them as much as you have time for.’

‘I’d have been happy to take this on,’ Johan says.

‘Johan, we’ve got other things to do as well,’ Börje says. ‘We don’t have the luxury of concentrating on just one case.’

‘Is the meeting over?’ Zeke asks, pushing back his chair and standing up.

The moment they have all got to their feet the door opens.

‘You can all sit down again.’

Karim Akbar says these words with all the gravity his muscular, thirty-seven-year-old body can muster, then goes to stand beside Sven Sjöman and waits while the other four officers sink into their chairs again.

‘You appreciate how important it is,’ Karim says, and it strikes Malin that there isn’t a trace of an accent in his speech, despite the fact that he was already ten years old when he arrived in Sweden. He speaks clear, empty, standard Swedish.

‘How important it is,’ he repeats, ‘that we get this sorted out,’ and it sounds just like he’s talking about a dissertation that needs restructuring before a viva.

Hard work and application.

If you start on minus and want to get to double-plus, you can’t afford to leave anything to chance. Karim has written controversial opinion pieces in Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, perfectly chiselled to match the needs of the age. His opinions have upset a lot of people: immigrants must meet certain requirements; benefits need to be linked to linguistic ability in Swedish after just one year in the country. Exclusion can only become inclusion with a lot of effort.

His face appears regularly on television discussion programmes. Make demands, liberate people’s innate potential. Look at me, it can be done. I am living proof.

But what about the timid? Malin wonders. Those who were born diffident?

‘We know this is what our job is about. Solving crimes like this,’ Zeke says, and Malin sees Johan and Börje smiling furtively as Sven pulls a face that means: Calm down, Zeke, let him make his speech; just because you don’t make a fuss doesn’t mean that you’re nothing but a manual labourer for him. For God’s sake, haven’t you grown up, Martinsson?

Karim gives Zeke a look that says: Show me respect, and don’t use that tone, but Zeke doesn’t look away. So Karim goes on instead: ‘The press, the media, will make a big deal out of this, and I’m going to have to answer a lot of questions. We have to come up with the solution quickly; it’s a matter of showing how efficient the Linköping Police are.’

Malin thinks that it sounds like Karim’s words are being spoken by an automaton. No one talks like that in real life, and the competent individual in front of her is playing the role of a competent individual, when he would really prefer to relax and show… well, what?… his vulnerable side?

Then Karim turns to Sven. ‘Have you allocated resources?’

‘Fors and Martinsson are in overall charge. They have all necessary resources at their disposal. Jakobsson and Svärd will assist as much as they can. Andersson is off sick and Degerstad is still on her course in Stockholm. That’s the situation right now.’

Karim takes a deep breath, holding the air in his lungs for a long time before breathing out.

‘Okay, this is what we’re going to do. Sven, as usual you will have overall responsibility as primary investigator, and you other four can form a team. Everything else will have to wait. This has the very highest priority.’

‘But-’

‘This is how it has to be, Martinsson. I don’t doubt that you and Fors are very capable, but right now we need to focus our resources.’

Sven’s stomach seems to have grown even larger, the furrows on his brow even deeper.

‘Do you want me to contact the National Criminal Investigation Institute? We don’t yet know formally that he was even murdered.’

Karim is heading towards the door.

‘No National Crime. We’re going to sort this out ourselves. You’re to report to me every three hours, or whenever there are any new developments.’

The noise of the door slamming behind him echoes round the room.

‘You heard what he said. You can divide the work up between you and report back to me.’

The children playing on the other side of the nursery windows are gone. A yellow, Calder-inspired mobile is swaying gently beneath the checked curtains.

Blue, fat-mottled skin.

Beaten and alone in the ice-cold wind.

Who were you? Malin wonders.

Come back and tell me who you were.

6

Now they have erected a tent beneath me, its green colour turned grey by the evening. I know they are warm in there, but none of that warmth reaches me.

Can I even feel warmth any more? Could I ever? I lived in the land beyond, free in one way from your world, but what a freedom it turned out to be.

But I no longer have any need of your warmth, not as you understand it; there is warmth around me. I am not alone, or rather I am exactly that, alone, I am loneliness, I am the core of loneliness. Perhaps I was the core of loneliness when I was alive? The most basic substance of loneliness, the mystery whose solution we are approaching, the chemical reaction, the seemingly simple yet all-encompassing process in our brains that gives rise to perceptions which in turn give us consciousness, the precondition for the reality we believe to be our own. The lamps burn late in researchers’ laboratories. Once we have cracked that code, we will have cracked them all. Then we can rest. Laugh or scream. Stop. But until then?

Wandering, working, searching for the answers to all manner of questions.

It’s hardly surprising, the way you carry on.

The snow melts, trickling away, but you won’t find anything, so get rid of the tent, bring in a crane and get me down. I’m a strange fruit, I’m not supposed to hang here; it spoils the balance, and it’s starting to make the branch creak. Even the tree is protesting, can’t you hear it?

Well, exactly, you’re all deaf. Just think, how quickly we actually forget. Think what the meanderings of our thoughts can do to us, where they can lead us.

‘Mum, have you seen my eye-shadow?’

Tove’s voice from the bathroom sounds desperate, annoyed and resigned all at the same time, yet simultaneously full of a resolved, focused and almost frightening determination.

Eye-shadow? That hasn’t happened for a while. Malin can’t remember the last time Tove wore any make-up, and wonders what’s going on this evening.

‘Do you want eye-shadow?’ Malin calls from her place on the sofa. The news has just started, with the man in the tree as the third item, after a statement from the Prime Minister and some meteorological expert who says that the current spell of cold weather is conclusive proof of climate change, that we’re heading for a new ice age which is going to cover the whole of Sweden under metres of granite-hard crystals.

‘Why else would I be asking?’

‘Are you seeing a boy?’

There is silence from the bathroom, then a single ‘Damn’ when the make-up bag balanced on the bathroom cabinet evidently tumbles to the floor. Then: ‘It’s here. I found it, Mum.’

‘Good.’

A male reporter from the Östgöta newspaper is standing at the darkened crime-scene, floodlights illuminating the tree in the background, and you can just make out the body in the tree, but only if you know it’s there.

‘I’m standing in a frozen field several miles outside Linköping. The police have…’

Throughout the region people are watching the same pictures as me, Malin thinks. And they’re wondering the same thing: Who was he? How did he get there? Who did it?

In the eyes of the television viewers, I am the provider of television truth, I make sure that evil people are locked up behind bars. I am the person who is expected to transform anxiety to security, but things are never so simple in reality, outside the screen. Out here everything is a test card, rich in nuances where it is impossible to take in everything, where meaning is everywhere and nowhere, with a clock ticking away and everyone waiting for something new, something clearer, better, to take over.

‘Mum, can I borrow your perfume?’

Perfume?

She’s got a date, Malin thinks. Which would be a first. Then: Who? Where? When? A thousand questions, thoughts, anxieties in myriad forms run through her in a fraction of a second.

‘Who are you seeing?’

‘No one. Can I borrow your perfume?’

‘Of course.’

‘… the body is still hanging here.’

The camera moves to one side, and in the abrupt darkness above the tent the body sways back and forth and Malin wants to change the channel, but at the same time she wants to watch. Cut to that afternoon’s press conference. Karim Akbar in a well-pressed suit in the large meeting room in Police Headquarters, his black hair slicked back, his face serious, but his eyes can’t conceal how much he loves the spotlight, how it seems to validate him.

‘We don’t yet know for certain that he was murdered.’

Microphones from TV4 in the foreground. A question from the mass of journalists; she recognises Daniel Högfeldt’s voice.

‘Why have you left the body hanging there?’

Daniel. What are you up to now?

Karim answers confidently. ‘For technical reasons concerned with the investigation. As yet we don’t know anything. We’re keeping an entirely open mind.’

‘Mum, have you seen my red polo-neck?’ Tove’s voice from her own room now.

‘Have you looked in the drawer?’

A few short seconds, then a triumphant voice. ‘Found it!’

Good, Malin thinks, then ponders what keeping an open mind means and is likely to mean: going round to every farm and cottage within a three-kilometre radius from the tree, knocking on the doors of farmers, commuters and workshy folk on sick leave.

‘Really? No, I haven’t noticed anything.’

‘I’m always asleep at that time of day.’

‘In this sort of cold I stay indoors.’

‘I keep myself to myself, it’s better that way.’

The same response for Johan and Börje as for her and Zeke: no one knows anything, no one has seen anything. It’s as if the hundred-and-fifty-kilo body flew up into the noose in the tree, parking itself on the end of the rope in anticipation of attention.

Back to the studio.

‘Naturally we’ll be following developments in Linköping.’ Pause. ‘In London…’

Then Tove is standing in the door to the living room.

‘I read about that on the net,’ she says. ‘Are you in charge of it?’

But Malin can’t answer her daughter’s question. Instead she just gawps when she sees her, the child who was lying in bed this morning; the little girl who went into the bathroom just quarter of an hour ago is transformed. She is wearing make-up and has tied up her hair, and something has happened, a hint of a woman has superimposed itself over her daughter’s appearance.

‘Mum? Mum, hello?’

‘You look lovely.’

‘Thanks, I’m going to the cinema.’

‘I’m working on the case.’

‘It’s a good thing I’m going to Dad’s tomorrow, so you can work late.’

‘Tove. Please. Don’t say that.’

‘I’m off now. I’ll be home by eleven. The last screening ends about then, but we’re having coffee first.’

‘Who are you going with?’

‘Anna.’

‘If I said I didn’t believe you, what would you say?’

Tove shrugs. ‘We’re going to see the new Tom Cruise film,’ then Tove gives the name of a film Malin has never heard of. Tove is as liberal in her choice of film as she is selective in her taste in books.

‘I haven’t heard of that one.’

‘Oh Mum, you don’t know anything about stuff like this.’

Tove turns and disappears from Malin’s sight, but Malin can hear her rummaging in the hall. She calls, ‘Do you need any money?’

‘No.’

And Malin wants to follow her, doesn’t believe any of this, but knows that she shouldn’t, can’t, won’t. Unless she will?

‘Bye!’

Anxiety.

Johan Jakobsson, Börje Svärd, Zeke: all parents are familiar with it, that anxiety.

It’s cold out.

‘Bye, Tove.’

And the flat closes around Malin.

She turns off the television with the remote.

Leans back on the sofa and takes a sip of her tequila, the one she poured herself after they’d eaten.

She and Zeke had been out to Borensberg and spoken to Liedbergh’s lover. The woman was around forty, neither beautiful nor ugly, just one of the mass of normal women with passions to live out, to fulfil. She offered them coffee and home-baked buns. She told them she was single and unemployed, how she tried to fill her days while applying for any jobs she thought she might stand a chance of getting. ‘It’s hard,’ Peter Liedbergh’s lover had said. ‘You’re either too old or you haven’t got the right qualifications. But something will turn up.’

The woman confirmed Liedbergh’s story. Then she shook her head. ‘It’s a good job he went that way. Who knows how long that man might have been left hanging there otherwise in this cold.’

Malin looked at the porcelain figurines arranged on the kitchen windowsill. A dog, a cat, an elephant. A little porcelain menagerie for company.

‘Do you love him?’ Malin asked.

Zeke shook his head instinctively.

But the woman didn’t take against the question.

‘Who? Peter Liedbergh? No, not at all.’ She laughed. ‘You know, it’s just something we women need, isn’t it, a bit of company?’

Malin sinks further into the sofa. She thinks about Janne, about how difficult he finds it to talk, how he sometimes feels like a black outline superimposed over her own. In the window she can see the tower of St Lars, and waits for the bells to ring, tries to hear if there are any whispering voices in the darkness.

If you weren’t deaf you would hear the sound of the branch breaking. You would hear the sound of fibres splitting, hear my body slicing through the cold and the air; you who are standing directly underneath would throw yourself to one side, but none of this happens. Instead all my many kilos land right on the tent, smashing the aluminium frame as if it were made of matchsticks, and the whole construction collapses and you who are standing there when I fall, you poor uniformed policeman, at first you notice something hitting you, then you feel my weight, and then you are flattened to the ground by my frozen hardness, and something inside you, you don’t know what, breaks, but you’re lucky, it’s only a bone, nothing the doctors can’t put right, your arm will be fine. I’m perfectly harmless in that respect, even now I’m dead.

Because you didn’t get me down, in spite of my pleas, I had to persuade the tree, and to be honest it was tired of having me hanging on the oldest of its branches. It’s ready to be cast off, the oak said, so go ahead and fall, fall on the tent, to the ground, and stir things up a bit down there.

And now I’m lying here on top of the screaming policeman, in a muddle of words, tent-pegs and canvas. The heater is roaring in my ear. I can’t feel its heat but I know it’s there. Beneath my hands I can feel the earth, made damp by your heat; pleasantly wet and nice, like the innards of something, anything.

Malin is woken by Tove’s voice.

‘Mum? Mum, I’m home. Don’t you think you should go to bed instead?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

Malin wakes slowly, grows doubtful. Whenever she had done anything silly, she always woke Dad to say that everything was all right. But before Malin has time to doubt Tove, her daughter says, ‘Have you been drinking, Mum?’

Malin rubs her eyes. ‘No, just a bit of tequila.’

The bottle in front of her, the half-bottle of cask-aged tequila, bought on the way home from the station, a third empty.

‘Okay, Mum,’ Tove says. ‘Shall I help you into bed?’

Malin shakes her head. ‘That only happened once, Tove. You only had to do that once. ONCE.’

‘Twice.’

Malin nods. ‘Twice.’

‘Well, goodnight, then,’ Tove says.

‘Sleep well,’ Malin says.

The clock on the sideboard says quarter to twelve. From behind Malin can see that Tove’s hair is now loose, and she looks like the little girl again.

A bit of tequila left in the glass. A lot more in the bottle. Another little one? No. No need. Malin gets up with an effort and stumbles towards the bedroom.

She can’t be bothered to get undressed and falls on to her bed.

And dreams dreams that might have been best undreamed.

7

Friday, 3 February

The jungle is at its most dense at night.

The damp, the insects, the damn wildlife, leaves, snakes, spiders, millipedes and mould growing in the sleeping-bag at night.

Then they land at the airport, endless masses of tiny lights, a starry sky on the ground and the Russian Tupolev plane plummeting straight down like a helicopter, the wings tear and he flaps with his soul in the cramped space, child and mother standing there, Tove, only little then, now: What are you doing here, Dad? You ought to be at home with me. I’m coming, I’m coming, and then they unload, break out of the plane’s innards: food, plumbing pipes, and they come towards them in the darkness; you can only see their eyes, thousands of eyes in the darkness, eyes to trust in, and the hungry scared muttering and the salvos from the automatic rifles. Back off or we’ll finish what the Hutus started. Back away and a millipede crawls over my leg, the mould grows, Kigali, Kigali, Kigali, the inescapable mantras of dream.

Get this fucking millipede away from me.

Janne, someone shouts. Tove? Malin? Melinda? Per?

Get this…

Someone cuts the leg off someone who’s still alive, throws it in a pot of boiling water and then eats first, before someone else lets their children share the rest. No one cares, but if you stole milk from anyone still fully alive the punishment is death.

Don’t shoot him, I say. Don’t shoot.

He’s hungry, he’s ten, his eyes are large and yellowish white; the pupils expand in time with the realisation that this ends here, now. I can’t even save you either.

Then you shoot.

Dog, dog, dog, Hutu, Hutu, Hutu, your cries echo, and your greed, your fucking bastard humanity makes me want to drown you all in the latrines we came here to build for your sake, so that typhoid and cholera and other shit wouldn’t kill you in numbers that even the Hutus couldn’t match.

Janne. Dad. Come home.

Has the rain-sheet broken?

It’s so fucking wet. How do the millipedes cope with all these drops?

Fuck, it stings, fucking savages, fucking things up for themselves.

Don’t raise that machete against me, don’t hit me, don’t hit me, no no no and the scream is in the room outside the dream now, outside sleep, in the wakefulness of his room, in his loneliness and the dream-soaked sheets.

He sits up in bed.

The screams echo round the walls.

His hand on the fabric.

Soaking wet. No matter how cold it gets out there, it still seems to be warm enough in here for him to break into a full sweat.

Something crawls over his leg.

The last remnant of the dream, Jan-Erik Fors thinks, before he gets up to fetch a new sheet from the linen cupboard in the hall. The cupboard is an heirloom. He and Malin bought the house, in its isolated forest setting a couple of kilometres north of Linköping, not far from Malmslätt, just after Tove was born.

The floorboards creak as he moves, alone, from the bedroom and out into the rest of the house.

The dogs are barking round Börje Svärd’s legs.

For the Alsatians there is no such thing as morning cold, not even at five o’clock in the morning; they’re just happy to see him, excited about being able to run around in the garden, chasing the sticks he throws in different directions for them.

Entirely unconcerned.

Unaware of naked beaten dead men in trees. Every conversation with people in the area yesterday was fruitless. Silence and blindness. As if people were ungrateful at having senses that functioned.

Valla.

The district of detached houses built in the forties and fifties, wooden boxes with assorted extensions illustrating the way life just kept getting better and better and better; when this city still worked for ordinary people, before a factory worker was forced to get a university education to look after a robot.

But some things work.

Inside the house they’re busy with her right now, the carers. They come once late at night to turn her, then they’re there, in Börje and Anna’s house, their home, all day and long into the evening, simultaneously more and less natural than the furniture, the wallpaper and the carpets.

MS. Multiple sclerosis. A few years after they got married Anna started to slur her speech. It progressed quickly after that. And now? The disease-modifying treatments came too late for her. Not a single muscle obeys her now, and Börje is the only person who can understand what she’s trying to say.

Darling Anna.

This business of the dogs is crazy, really. But there has to be some sort of breathing hole, something that is his own, uncomplicated, full of happiness. Pure. The neighbours have complained about the kennels, the barking.

Let them complain.

And the children? Mikael moved to Australia about ten years ago. Karin moved to Germany. To escape? Almost certainly. Who could bear to see their mother like that? How do I bear it?

But you do bear it.

Love.

They may well have said that she can have a place in a home whenever you want it.

When I want it?

Dogs, pistols. Concentrating on the target. The firing range acts as purification.

But Anna, for me you are still you. And as long as you are still that for me, maybe you can bear to be the same for yourself.

‘And then we open the garage.’

The spoon of cereal can’t seem to find its way into the one-year-old’s mouth, and for a moment Johan Jakobsson is brusque, holding the boy’s head still with his hand and slipping the spoon into the reluctant mouth, and the boy swallows.

There.

Their terraced house is in Linghem. That was what they could afford, and as far as Linköping’s dormitory villages are concerned, Linghem isn’t the worst. Homogenous, rural, middle-class. Nothing remarkable, but nothing visibly dreadful either.

‘Toot toot, here comes the lorry.’

From the bathroom he can hear his wife brushing their three-year-old daughter’s teeth, hear her screaming and fighting, and how his wife’s voice betrays the fact that she is on the brink of losing patience.

She asked him yesterday if he was working on the man in the tree and what was he supposed to answer? Lie and say no to keep her calm or tell it how it was: Yes, I’m working on that case.

‘He looks so lonely up there in the tree,’ his wife had said. ‘Lonely,’ and he hadn’t been able to think of anything to say to that. Because you don’t get much more alone than that.

‘Brrm, brrm, here comes a Passat.’

After that she got annoyed because he didn’t want to talk about it. The children were tired, out of control, until they collapsed for the night.

The children: they make him feel wiped out, their all-consuming will makes him exhausted, so tired. At the same time, they make him feel alive and adult. Life itself seems to go on somehow alongside the family. As if the crimes they investigate have nothing to do with the children. But they do. The children are part of the social body in which the crimes have taken place.

‘Open wide…’

Breakfast television on in the background. The first news bulletin of the day. They mention the case briefly.

I’m going to miss these moments, Sven Sjöman thinks, taking a break from sanding down in the woodwork room in the cellar of their house in Hackefors. I’m going to miss the smell of wood in the mornings when I retire. Of course, I can carry on having that smell afterwards, but it won’t be the same when I don’t have police work ahead of me. I know that. I find meaning in shoring up the others. It’s good to have young officers like Johan and Malin who aren’t yet fully formed. I can feel I’m having some influence on them. Malin, in particular, seems to be able to take in what I say and make something of it.

He usually sneaks down to the workshop in the mornings before Elisabeth has woken up. Sand down the leg of a chair, apply some varnish. Something small and simple to get the day going before the first coffee.

Wood is simple and obvious. With his skills, he can make it do whatever he wants, in contrast to the rest of reality.

The man in the tree. The scarred corpse falling on top of one of his officers. It’s as if everything is constantly getting worse. As if the boundary of violence is advancing relentlessly and as if people in their despair and fear and anger are capable of doing anything to each other. As if more and more people feel that they’re somehow out of reach; beyond their own and that of everyone else as well.

It’s easy to get bitter, Sven thinks. If you decide to mourn the fact that all decency and honour seem to have vanished into the darkness of history.

But you can’t mourn something like that. It’s better to be happy about each new day, about the fact that consideration and solidarity still seem able to hold the worst cynicism at bay.

Masks.

All these masks I have to put on.

Karim Akbar is standing in front of the mirror in his bathroom, freshly shaven. His wife has set off for school with their eight-year-old son, just as she usually does.

I can be many people, Karim thinks, depending what the situation demands.

He pulls a face. He conjures forth anger, he smiles, looks surprised, attentive, reserved, inquisitive, watchful.

Which of all of these am I really?

How easy it is to lose your own view of yourself when you sometimes think you can be anyone at all.

I can be the tough police officer, the successful immigrant, the media manipulator, the gentle father, I can be the man who wants to cuddle up with my wife, feel the warmth of her body beneath the sheets.

Feel love.

Instead of cold.

I can be the man who pretends that the fat body in the tree never existed, but my task right now is a different one: the man who gives him justice. If only in death.

‘What have you got planned?’

Malin’s question to Janne and Tove echoes in her head.

It’s just after eight. The day is fully awake now.

So far they haven’t called from the station, but Malin is expecting the call any minute. The debacle yesterday evening at the crime-scene, when the body fell out of the tree, is on the front page of the Correspondent.

This whole thing is like a farce, Malin thought when she glanced through the paper fifteen minutes ago, far too tired to read it properly.

Janne is standing in the hall next to Tove. He looks tired, the skin stretched tight across his sharp cheekbones, and his tall, muscular body seems to be hanging from a swaying gallows. Has he lost weight? And aren’t those a few mute grey hairs at his temples, scattered among the otherwise so glossy amber locks?

Tove off school, a study day, early Friday pick-up instead of late. Changes of shift. A jigsaw puzzle.

She sent Janne a letter in Bosnia when she had packed her and Tove’s belongings and moved into a small flat in the city, a stop on the road to Stockholm.

‘You can have the house. It suits you much better than me, you’ve got room for your cars. I’ve never liked the countryside that much, really. Hope you’re well, and not having to witness anything awful. Or put up with anything awful. We can work out everything else later.’

His answer came on a postcard.

‘Thanks. I’ll get a mortgage when I get home and buy you out. Do as you like.’

Do as you like?

I would have liked to have things the way they were before. Back at the start. Before it all became routine.

Because there are events and days that can drive people apart, breaking points. We were young, so young. Time, what did we know of that then, other than that it was ours?

Malin thinks about his dreams, the ones he always wants to talk about when they meet, but which she can never quite bear to listen to and he can never quite articulate even when she is trying to listen.

Instead Janne’s voice: ‘You’re looking tired, Malin. Don’t you think, Tove?’

Tove nods.

‘Working too much,’ Malin says.

‘The bloke in the tree?’

‘Mmm.’

‘You’ll have your work cut out this weekend, then.’

‘Did you come in the Saab?’

‘No, I used the Volvo. It’s got winter tyres. I haven’t bothered to change the others.’

Men are car fanatics. Most of them. And Janne in particular. He has four cars in the garage next to the house. Four cars in varying stages of decay, or restoration, as he would put it. She could never stand the cars, not even at the start; she couldn’t bear what they represented. What? A lack of willpower? Or imagination? Listlessness? Crass systematic thinking. Love demands something else.

‘What have you got planned?’

‘Don’t know,’ Janne says. ‘There’s not too much you can do in this sort of cold. What do you think, Tove? Shall we rent some films and get a load of sweets and lock ourselves in? Or do you want to read?’

‘Films sound good. But I’ve got some books as well.’

‘Try to get a bit of fresh air anyway,’ Malin says.

‘Mum. That’s not up to you.’

‘We can go to the firestation,’ Janne says. ‘Play a bit of fireman’s indoor hockey. Tove, what do you think, that would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

Tove looks up at the ceiling, then adds, as if not quite daring to trust her father’s sarcasm, ‘Not in a million years.’

‘Oh well. Films it is, then.’

Malin looks tiredly at Janne, and his grey-green eyes meet hers, he doesn’t look away, he never has. When he disappears he takes his perfect physique and his soul and goes to places where someone might need the help he thinks he can’t survive without giving.

Help.

The name he has given to flight.

When the flat, the house, everything got too cramped. And then over and over again.

She gave Janne a hug when he arrived today, held him tight and he responded, he always does and she wanted to keep hold of him, pull him to her for a long time, ask him to sit out the cold snap with them here, ask him to stay.

But instead she came to her senses, found a way of breaking free of him, as if he were the one who had initiated the embrace. A way of getting her muscles to ask quietly, ‘What are you doing? We’re not married any more and you know as well as I do that it’s impossible.’

‘And what about you, have you been sleeping okay?’

Janne nodded, but Malin could see that the nod concealed a lie.

‘I just sweat so much.’

‘Even though it’s so cold?’

‘Even though.’

‘Have you got everything, Tove?’

‘Yep, everything.’

‘Make sure you get some fresh air.’

‘Mum.’

Then they’re gone. Janne will bring her back tomorrow, Saturday evening, so we can have Sunday together.

What am I going to do now?

Wait for the phone to ring? Read the paper?

Think?

No. Thinking has a way of leading you into a very tangled forest.

8

‘He died of his head injuries. The perpetrator used a blunt object, repeatedly, almost as if in a frenzy, to beat in the cranium and the face until it became the shapeless mass of flesh it is now. He was alive when he received the blows, but in all likelihood lost consciousness fairly quickly. The perpetrator or perpetrators also appear to have used a knife.’

Karin Johannison is standing beside the blue body, which is lying on the cold steel of the pathology laboratory. Arms and legs and head stick out from the trunk like lumpy, irregular stumps. The torso is cut open, with the skin and fat folded into four flaps, revealing a jumble of guts. The skull has been sawn open, dutifully, at the back of the head.

It looks methodical and haphazard at the same time, Malin thinks. As if someone had been planning it for a long time, and then lost their composure.

‘I had to let him thaw out before I could start,’ as Karin had put it over the phone. ‘But once I got started it was pretty straightforward.’

Zeke is standing quietly beside Malin, apparently unconcerned; he’s seen death many times before and realises that it’s impossible to grasp.

Karin works with death, but she doesn’t understand it. Perhaps none of us does, Malin thinks. But most of us appreciate what death can encompass. Karin, Malin thinks, doesn’t understand a lot of what everything in this basement room is actually about; here she is useful, functional, as precise as the instruments she uses in her work. As precise as the room itself.

The most practical face of death.

White walls, small windows at ceiling height, stainless-steel cabinets and shelves along the wall holding textbooks and bandages, compresses, surgical gloves and so on. The linoleum floor is a bluish colour, easy to clean, hardwearing, cheap. Malin never gets used to this room, to its role and function, but she is nevertheless drawn to it.

‘He didn’t die from the rope,’ Karin says. ‘He was dead by the time he was hauled up into the tree. If he’d died of strangulation the blood wouldn’t have run to his head the way it did. With a hanging the blood vessels are shut off directly, to put it in layman’s terms, but here the physical blows made the heart pump faster, which accounts for the abnormal amount of blood.’

‘How long has he been dead?’ Malin asks.

‘You mean now?’

‘No, before he was strung up in the tree.’

‘I’d say at least five hours, maybe a bit longer. Considering there was no great quantity of blood in his legs even though he was found hanging.’

‘What about the blows to the body?’ Zeke says.

‘What about them?’

‘What have you got to say about them?’

‘Doubtless very painful, if he was conscious at the time, but they weren’t fatal. There are marks on the legs that show he was dragged, that someone hauled the body over damp ground. The wounds have dirt in them, and fragments of fabric. Someone undressed him after the beating, and then moved the body. At least that’s what I believe happened. He was finished off with a knife.’

‘And his teeth?’ Zeke asks.

‘In too poor a state to be useful, most of his teeth were broken.’

Karin takes hold of one of the wrists. ‘Do you see these marks here?’

Malin nods.

‘They were made by chains. That’s how they got him up into the tree.’

‘They?’

‘I don’t know. But do you imagine a single man could have done this, considering the amount of physical strength required?’

‘Not impossible,’ Malin says.

Zeke shakes his head. ‘We don’t know yet.’

The snow had concealed nothing.

The only thing Karin and her colleagues found were a few cigarette butts, a biscuit wrapper and an ice-cream wrapper that didn’t quite seem to belong in the field. Ice cream? Hardly at this time of year. And the wrappers and butts looked older, as if they’d been there several years. They, or he, or she, hadn’t left any traces behind them on the ground.

‘Did you find anything else?’

‘Nothing under the nails. No signs of a struggle. Which suggests he must have been taken by surprise. Have you had any tip-offs? Anyone who’s said anything?’

‘It’s been completely quiet,’ Malin says. ‘Nada, niente.’

‘Not missed by anyone, then,’ Karin says.

‘We don’t know that either yet,’ Zeke says.

If I were still able to talk the way you do, if I could get up and tell you, cure your deafness, I would tell you to stop with all these questions.

What good are they?

It is the way it is, it’s turned out the way it’s turned out. I know who did it, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, had time to see death coming, slow, quick, black.

Then it went white, death.

White as freshly fallen snow. White is the colour when the brain fades, an optimistic firework burst, shorter than a breath. And then, when vision returned to me again I could see everything, I was free and unfree at the same time.

So do you really want to know?

Do you really want to hear this story? I don’t think so. It is worse, nastier, darker, more merciless than you can imagine. If you carry on from here, you are choosing a path that leads right into the heart of the place where only the body, not the soul, can live and breathe, where we are chemistry, where we are code, the place outside, where the word feeling does not exist.

At the end of the path, in an apple-scented darkness clad in white, you will find waking dreams so black that they make this winter seem warm and welcoming. But I know that you will choose that path. Because you are human beings. And that is how you are.

‘How long will it take you to fix him up?’

‘Fix him up how?’

‘Ideally we need to get his face sorted out,’ Malin says. ‘So we can give a picture to the press. So that maybe someone will realise he’s missing, or at least recognise him.’

‘I understand. I’ll phone Skoglund at Fonus funeral services. He can probably help me with a quick reconstruction. We ought to be able to come up with something decent anyway.’

‘Call Skoglund. The sooner we have a picture the better.’

‘Okay, let’s go,’ Zeke says, and from the tone of his voice Malin knows he’s had enough. Of the body, of the sterile room, but mainly of Karin Johannison.

Malin knows that Zeke thinks Karin gives herself airs and graces, and maybe he’s also put out by the fact that she doesn’t ask about Martin like everyone else does, no matter where or when. And, for Zeke, Karin’s lack of interest in ice hockey and his son has become proof that she’s arrogant. He’s clearly tired of all the questions about Martin, but is still not happy if people don’t ask.

‘Do you use spray-tan?’ Zeke asks Karin when they’re on their way out of the lab.

Malin laughs, against her will.

‘No, I use a solarium to keep up my suntan from Thailand over Christmas,’ Karin says. ‘There’s a place on Drottninggatan that does spray-tans, but I don’t know. It seems so vulgar. Maybe just my face, though.’

‘Thailand? At Christmas?’ Zeke says. ‘Isn’t that the most expensive time? I’ve heard that people who really know Thailand go at other times.’

9

‘Malin, have you watered the plants? They won’t make it through the winter otherwise.’

The question is so obvious, Malin thinks, that there was really no need to ask it. And the explanation just as unnecessary: his tendency to be overtly pedagogical to promote his own interests.

‘I’m on my way to your flat to do it now.’

‘Haven’t you done it already?’

‘Not since we last spoke, no.’

She got the call just as she was leaving Police Headquarters, waiting for a green light at the corner of the cemetery and the old fire station. The Volvo had deigned to start today, even though it was just as cold.

It was like she knew it was Dad by the way the phone rang. Annoyed, lovable, demanding, self-centred, kind: give me all your attention, I’m not giving up until you answer, I’m not interrupting anything, am I?

The meeting of the investigating team had been largely concerned with waiting.

Waiting for Börje Svärd who was late, something to do with his wife.

Waiting for someone to ask about Nysvärd’s broken arm, injured when the body fell from the tree.

‘On sick-leave for two and half weeks,’ Sven Sjöman said. ‘He seemed cheerful enough when I spoke to him, just a bit shaken up still.’

‘It’s a bit bloody macabre, having a hundred-and-fifty-kilo frozen-solid corpse land on you,’ Johan Jakobsson said.

Then waiting for someone to say what they all knew. That they had nothing to go on. Waiting for Skoglund the funeral director to finish his work, get the picture taken and sent out.

Börje: ‘What was it I said? That no one would recognise him from those first pictures.’

Waiting for waiting itself, all energy sucked out of tired police officers who know that the case is urgent but who can do little but throw up their hands and say, ‘We’ll see!’ When every citizen, every journalist, wants to hear the police recount what happened, and who did it.

Waiting for Karim Akbar, who was late as well, if only late answering the phone out in his villa in Lambohov. Waiting for his son’s stereo to be turned down in the background, then waiting for Karim’s voice to stop resounding from the speakerphone.

‘This isn’t good enough, you know that perfectly well. Sven, you’ll have to arrange another press conference tomorrow where you let them know what we’ve got so far. That’ll calm them down.’

And you get another chance to show off, Malin thinks. Then: but you do stand there and soak up the questions, the aggression, and make sure we can work in peace and quiet. And you do stand for something, Karim. You understand the power of the group when everyone has a well-defined role.

Sven’s tired words after Karim had hung up. ‘If only we were like Stockholm. With our own press officer.’

‘You’re the one who’s been on the media management course,’ Zeke said. ‘Couldn’t you do it?’

Laughter. Release. Sven: ‘I’m close to getting my pension and you want to throw me to the hyenas, Zeke? Thanks a lot.’

The red light turns green, the Volvo hesitates then rolls off along Drottninggatan into the city.

‘How’s Mum doing, Dad? The plants are fine, I promise.’

‘She’s having a nap. It’s twenty-five degrees and glorious sunshine down here. How is it up there?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Yes I do.’

‘Well I’m not going to tell you, Dad.’

‘Well, it’s sunny here in Tenerife, anyway. How’s Tove?’

‘She’s with Jan-Erik.’

‘Malin, I’m going to go now, otherwise it’ll get expensive. Don’t forget the plants.’

The plants, Malin thinks as she pulls up outside the ochre-coloured building on Elsa Brännströms gata where her parents have their four-room apartment. The plants must never be kept waiting.

Malin moves through her parents’ apartment, a ghost in her own past. The furniture she grew up with.

Am I really so old?

The smells, the colours, the shapes can all get me going, make me remember things that make me remember other things.

Four rooms: one for best, a dining room, a living room and a bedroom. Nowhere for their grandchild to stay the night. They took out the contract on the apartment when they sold the villa in Sturefors thirteen years ago. In those days the housing market in Linköping was very different. If your affairs were in order and you could afford a decent rent, you had options. Today there’s nothing, only shady deals can get you a contract. Or improbably good contacts.

Malin looks out of the sitting-room window.

From the third floor there is a good view of Infection Park, named after the clinic that was once housed in the barracks that have now been turned into housing.

The sofa she was never allowed to sit on.

The brown leather shines like new to this day. The table, lovely then, overblown now. The shelves full of books from Reader’s Digest. Maya Angelou, Lars Järlestad, Lars Widding, Anne Tyler.

The dining table and chairs. Having friends over, children who had to sit and eat in the kitchen. Nothing odd about that. Everyone did the same, and children don’t like sitting round the table anyway.

Dad, the welder, promoted to team-leader, then part-owner of a roofing company. Mum a secretary at the county administrative board.

The smell of people getting old. Even if Malin opened the window and aired the place the smell wouldn’t go. Maybe, she thinks, the cold might make the apartment scentless at best.

The plants are drooping. But none of them is actually dead. She won’t let it go that far. She looks at the framed pictures on the bureau, none of her or Tove, just her parents in different settings: a beach, a city, a mountain, a jungle. ‘Can you water the plants?’

Of course I can water them.

‘You can come down whenever you like.’

And how do we afford that?

She sits down on the armchair in the hall and the memory of the silent springs is in her body: she is five years old again, kicking her sandalled feet; there is water a little way away and behind her she can hear Mum and Dad’s voices, not shouting at each other exactly, but in their tone of voice there is a chasm, and the gap between their voices conceals all that is painful, all that the five-year-old in the chair near the water feels but does not yet have a name for.

Impossible love. The coolness of some marriages.

Does it ever get a name? That feeling?

Then she is back.

The watering can in her hand.

Plant by plant. Methodically, in a way her father the team-leader would appreciate.

I’m not hoovering, Malin thinks. Dustballs on the floor. When she used to hoover, as part of her tasks in exchange for pocket money on Saturdays, Mum would follow her round the house, checking that she didn’t knock against the furniture or door frames. When she was finished her mum would hoover again, hoovering the same places, right in front of her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

What can a child do?

What does a child know?

A child is shaped.

And then it is finished.

All the plants watered. Now they will live a bit longer.

Malin sits down on her parents’ bed.

It’s a Dux. They’ve had it for years, but would they be able to sleep in it if they knew what had happened in this bed, that this was where she lost, or rather made sure she got rid of, her virginity?

Not Janne.

Someone else.

Earlier. She was fourteen and alone at home while her parents were at a party, staying the night with friends in Torshälla.

Whatever. No matter what had happened in this bed, it wasn’t hers. She can’t walk through this apartment, alone or with other people, without a sense of loss. She gets up from the bed, forcing herself through the thick veils of longing that seem to hang in the air. What’s missing?

Her parents in pictures without frames.

In sun-loungers at the house on Tenerife. Three years since they bought it, but she and Tove have never been there.

‘You’re doing the watering?’

Of course I’m watering.

She has lived with these people, she comes from them, but even so the people in the pictures are strangers. Mum, mostly.

She empties the watering can in the kitchen sink.

There are secrets hidden in those drops, behind the green doors of the kitchen cupboards, in the freezer, rumbling away, full of last year’s chanterelles.

Shall I take a bag?

No.

The last thing she sees before she closes the door of her parents’ apartment behind her are the thick wool rugs on the floor of the sitting room. She sees them through the open double doors from the hall, average quality. They’re not as good as Mum always pretends they are. The whole room, the whole home is full of things that aren’t what they seem, veneers concealing a different veneer.

There’s a feeling here, Malin thinks, of never being quite good enough, of nothing ever being quite right. That we aren’t, that I’m not, good enough.

To this day she has difficulty with anything that’s truly good enough, with people who are supposed to be genuinely good enough. Not just rich like Karin Johannison, but doctors, the upper classes, lawyers, that sort of good. Faced with people like that, she sometimes senses her prejudices and feelings of inferiority rise to the surface. She decides in advance that people like that always look down on people like her, and she adopts a defensive posture.

Why?

To avoid being disappointed?

It’s better at work, but it can be stressful in her private life.

Thoughts are flying round Malin’s head as she jogs downstairs and out into the early, wretched, Friday evening.

10

Friday evening; Saturday, 4 February

Just a little one, one little beer: I deserve that, I want to watch drops of condensation almost freezing to ice on a chilled glass. I can leave the car here. I can pick it up tomorrow.

Malin hates that voice. She usually tells herself, as if to drown it out: There’s nothing worse than being hung over.

It’s easiest that way.

But sometimes she has to give in.

Just a little one, a little…

I want to wring myself out like a rag. And that’s when alcohol is useful.

The Hamlet restaurant is open. How far away is that? God, it’s cold. Three minutes if I jog.

Malin opens the door to the bar. Noise and steam hit her. There is a smell of grilled meat. But most of all it smells of promise, of calm.

The telephone rings.

Or does it?

Is it something else? Is it the television? Is it the church bell? The wind? Help me. My head. There is something in the front of my head and now it’s ringing again, and my mouth, I’m supposed to talk with it, but it’s so dry, where am I?

Then it stops ringing.

Thank God.

But then it starts again.

Sufficiently awake now to recognise the mobile phone. The hall floor. The rag rug. How did I get here? My jacket is lying next to me, unless it’s my scarf? The letterbox from below. Jacket. Pocket. Mobile. Sandpaper mouth. My pulse, a pulsating cyst, an electronic globe spinning in the front of my head. Malin digs in the pocket. There, there it is. She holds her head with the other hand, fumbling blindly, puts the phone to her ear, scarcely audible: ‘Fors, Malin Fors.’

‘This is Sjöman. We know who he is.’

Who he is? Tove, Janne. The man in the tree. Missed by no one.

‘Malin, are you there?’

Yes. Probably. But I don’t know if I want to be.

‘Are you okay?’

No, not okay. I gave in yesterday.

‘I’m here, Sven, I’m here. I’ve only just woken up, that’s all. Hang on a moment.’ She hears some more words as she shifts from lying to sitting: ‘… have you got a hangover, ah…’ Her head upright, black fog settles in front of her eyes, lifts, reappears as a vibrating pressure against her forehead.

‘A hangover? A small one. The sort people have on Sunday mornings.’

‘Saturday, Malin. And we know who he is.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Half seven.’

‘Shit. Sven. Oh shit. Well?’

‘They got the picture sorted yesterday. That funeral bloke, Skoglund, he did a good job. We sent it to the Correspondent and the news agencies, and the Correspondent put it up on their website at eleven and someone called straight away, and we’ve had more calls this morning. They all say the same name, so it should check out. His name’s Bengt. Surname Andersson. But, and this is the funny thing, they all call him by his nickname; only one person knew his real name.’

Her head. Pulse. Don’t put any lights on, no matter what. Focus on someone else’s pain instead of your own; it’s supposed to help. Group therapy. Or what was it someone said? The pain is always new, always different. Personal?

‘Ball-Bengt. They called him Ball-Bengt. From what people have said so far, his life seems to have been as miserable as his death. Can you be here in half an hour?’

‘Give me forty-five minutes,’ Malin says.

Quarter of an hour later, just out of the shower, in fresh clothes, the rumble of painkillers in her stomach, Malin switches on her computer. She leaves the blinds closed even if it is still dark outside. The computer is on the desk in her bedroom, the keyboard hidden in a tangle of dirty underwear and vests, bills, paid and unpaid, mocking payslips. She waits, types in her password, waits, opens her browser, then the Correspondent’s website.

The light from the screen makes her head throb.

Daniel Högfeldt has done a good job.

The man in the tree. His face blown up in the most prominent part of the site. He looks like a human being, the swellings and bruises just shades of grey on the black and white photograph, like blemishes covered by make-up rather than traces of a fatal attack. Skoglund, whoever he is, is almost able to bring the dead back to life. The amount of fat makes this man, Bengt ‘Ball-Bengt’ Andersson’s face shapeless. His chin, cheeks and brow hang together in a soft, round lump over his bones, making one big, plump mass. His eyes are closed, the mouth a small line, his upper lip full, but not the lower lip. Only the nose sticks out, hard, straight, noble, Ball-Bengt’s only stroke of luck in the genetic lottery.

Can I manage to read?

Daniel Högfeldt’s language.

Jaunty. Nothing for someone feeling sick and with a headache.

He probably knows more than we do. People call the papers first. To get the reward for a tip-off. So they can feel special. But who am I to blame them?

The Östgöta Correspondent can today reveal the identity of the man who…

The letters form themselves into burning arrows firing into her brain.

Bengt Andersson, 46, was known as ‘Ball-Bengt’. He lived in Ljungsbro, where he was regarded as something of an eccentric, a loner. He lived alone in a flat in the Härna district and had been on social security benefits for several years, unable to work because of mental health problems. Bengt Andersson got his nickname from the fact that he would go to Ljungsbro IF’s home games and stand on Cloettavägen, behind the fence at the end of the Cloettavallen pitch, and wait for the ball to be kicked over the fence.

Balls, Malin thinks. Balls in my head now.

I can kick, Dad, I can kick all the way to the apple tree! Mum’s voice: No balls in the garden, Malin, you might hit the roses.

Tove wasn’t interested in football.

A woman who wants to remain anonymous has told the Correspondent:

‘He was the sort of person everyone recognised, but no one really knew.

There’s someone like him in every community.’

Bengt Andersson was found on Friday…

Direct quotes, not reported speech: Daniel’s special trick for added immediacy.

Duplications. Repetitions.

When will we leave the dead alone?

Malin walks out of the door of the building. It is just as cold today. The wall of the church is a mirage, far, far away.

But today the cold is welcome, throwing its weight over her thoughts, wrapping her in a muffling fog.

The car isn’t where it is supposed to be.

Stolen. Her first thought.

Then she remembers. Her parents’ apartment.

‘You’ll water the plants, won’t you?’

Hamlet.

Can I have another beer? Anonymous there, an older crowd, and me.

Taxi? No, too expensive. It’ll take ten minutes to the police station if I hurry.

Malin starts walking. The walk will do me good, she thinks. The grit on the snowploughed pavement crunches under her feet. She can see bugs in front of her eyes. The gravel chips are bugs, an invasion that she has to crush with her Caterpillar boots.

She thinks about the fact that the man in the tree now has a name. That their work will be able to get started properly, and that they have to approach this with caution. What they came across out on the plain was no ordinary violence. It was something different, something worth being afraid of.

The cold was sharp against her eyes.

Sharp, cutting.

Have I got grasshoppers dancing in front of my eyes? she thinks. Unless the cold is forming crystals on the surface of my eyes. Just like yours, Ball-Bengt. Whoever you were.

11

What does this world do to a person, Tove?

I was twenty.

And we were happy, your dad and I. We were young and happy and we loved each other. The love of young people, pure and uncomplicated, clear and physical, and then there was you, our ray of sun to beat all rays of sun.

There was nothing beyond the three of us.

I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, apart from love the two of you. I could ignore his cars, how methodical he was, how different we were. It was like I had been given love, Tove; there was no doubt, no waiting, even though that was what everyone said, wait, take it slowly, don’t tie yourselves down, live a little first, but I had got a scent of life, from my love for you, for Janne, for our life. I was vain enough to want more of it, and I thought it would last for ever. Because do you know what, Tove? I believed in love and I still do, which is something of a miracle. But back then I believed in love in its purest, simplest form, what we could maybe call family love, cave love, where we simply warm one another because we are human beings together. The first sort of love.

We argued, of course. I longed for other things, of course. And of course we had no idea what to do with all our time. And of course I understood when he said he felt as if he were trapped in a hole in the ground, even if it was in paradise.

Then he came home one day with a letter from the Rescue Services Agency, saying that he had to report to Arlanda Airport the next day for a flight to Sarajevo.

I was so angry with him, your dad. I told him that if he went, then we wouldn’t be there when he got back. I said that you don’t abandon your family for anything.

So, my question to you, Tove: Can you understand why your father and I couldn’t manage back then?

We knew too much and too little at the same time.

12

No children in the nursery on a Saturday.

Empty swings. No sledges, no balls. The lights through the windows turned off. No games today.

‘Are you okay with this, Malin? You look worn out.’

Stop going on, Sven. I’m at work, aren’t I?

Zeke pulls a face from where he is sitting opposite her. Börje Svärd and Johan Jakobsson don’t look exactly happy, but then you’re not supposed to if you’re at work just after eight on a Saturday morning.

‘I’m okay. Just a bit of a party last night, that’s all.’

‘Well, I got to party with cheese puffs, crisps and a Pippi Longstocking DVD,’ Johan says.

Börje doesn’t say anything.

‘I’ve got a list here,’ Sven says, waving a sheet of paper in the air. He isn’t standing at the end of the table today. He’s sitting down. ‘These are the people who phoned to identify Bengt Andersson, Ball-Bengt. We can start by questioning them. See what they have to say about him. There are nine names on the list, all in Ljungsbro or close by. Börje and Johan, you take the first five. Malin and Zeke can take the other four.’

‘And the flat? His flat?’

‘Forensics are already there. As far as we could make out, none of the violence happened there. They’ll be done some time this afternoon. You can take a look after that if you like. Not before. When you’re finished with the names on the list, try his neighbours. He was on benefits, so there must be a social worker somewhere who knows about his case. But we probably won’t be able to get hold of them until Monday.’

‘Can’t we get it sorted any quicker?’ Zeke’s voice, impatient.

‘Bengt Andersson hasn’t been declared dead, or even officially identified yet,’ Sven says. ‘And until those two things happen, we have no authority to get access to any registers and databases containing the names of his doctor or social worker. But all the formalities ought to be sorted out on Monday.’

‘Okay, let’s get going,’ Johan says, standing up.

I want to sleep, Malin thinks. Sleep as deep as is humanly possible.

My room is black, closed. But I can still see everything.

It’s cold in here, but not as cold as in the tree out on the plain. But what do I care about the cold? And there is no wind here, no storm, no snow. I might miss the wind and snow, but I prefer the clarity that comes with a condition like mine. How much I know, how much I can do. Like finding words in a way that I never used to be able to.

And isn’t it funny that everyone is suddenly concerned about me? How they all see my face and want to demonstrate that they knew me? Before they would turn away when I showed my face in public, they would cross the street to avoid my gaze, to avoid coming close to my body, my – as they thought – dirty clothes, which they thought stank of sweat, of urine.

Depressing and repulsive.

And the kids who would never leave me alone. Who would plague me, tease me, bully me. Their mums and dads truly had let a thousand evil flowers bloom in their children.

I was hardly even good enough to laugh at. Even when I was alive I was a tragedy.

The chimney of the Cloetta chocolate factory.

You can’t see it from the roundabout beside the ancient abbey of Vreta Kloster, but you can see the smoke, whiter than white, as it climbs into a pretend-blue sky. The low morning clouds have drifted away and winter is getting bluer, the mercury sinks still further, the price you have to pay for the light.

‘Do we turn off here?’

There are signs to Ljungsbro in both directions.

‘Don’t know,’ Malin says.

‘Okay, we’re turning,’ Zeke says, twisting the wheel. ‘We’ll have to check the GPS when we get closer.’

Malin and Zeke drive through Vreta Kloster. Past the dormant sluice-gates and empty locks. Bars closed for winter. Villas with people moving behind the windows, trees that have been left to grow in peace. An ICA supermarket. There’s no music in the car. Zeke didn’t insist and Malin appreciates the relative silence.

They pass a bus stop and the village spreads out to their left, the houses disappearing down a slope, and in the distance Lake Roxen opens out. The car heads down past a piece of woodland, then a field opens up on their right and a few hundred metres on more houses cling to the side of a steep incline.

‘Millionaires’ row,’ Zeke says. ‘Doctors’ houses.’

‘Jealous?’

‘Not really.’

Kungsbro on another sign, Stjärnorp, Ljungsbro.

They turn off by a red-painted stable and a stone-built cowshed, no horses in sight. Only a few teenage girls in thermal clothes and moonboots carrying bales of hay between two outhouses.

They approach the houses along millionaires’ row.

When they reach the top of another hill they catch a glimpse of the Cloetta chimney.

‘You know,’ Zeke says, ‘I swear I can smell chocolate in the air today. From the factory.’

‘I’d better put the GPS on, so we can find where we’re going. The first name on the list.’

She didn’t want to let them in.

Pamela Karlsson, thirty-six years old, blonde pageboy cut, single, sales assistant at H &M. She lived in a council block just behind the hideous white Hemköp supermarket. Only four flats in the grey-painted wooden building. She spoke to them with the safety chain on, freezing in white vest and pants, evidently woken by them knocking at the door.

‘Do you have to come in? It’s such a mess.’

‘It’s cold out here in the stairwell,’ Malin said, thinking, A man has been found murdered, hanging in a tree, and she’s worried about a bit of mess. Oh well. At least she phoned.

‘I had a party yesterday.’

‘Another one,’ Zeke said.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ Malin said. ‘It really doesn’t matter to us if it’s a bit messy. It won’t take long.’

‘Well, okay.’ The door closed, the chain rattled, then the door opened again.

‘Come in.’

A one-room flat, sofa-bed, a small table, a tiny kitchenette. Furniture from Ikea, lace curtains and a stripped, rustic wooden bench, probably inherited. Pizza boxes, beer cans, a box of white wine. On the windowsill an ashtray, full to overflowing.

She saw Malin looking at the ashtray.

‘I don’t usually let them smoke in here. But I couldn’t make them go outside yesterday.’

‘Them?’

‘My friends. We were doing some surfing last night as we drank, and that was when we saw him and the request for people to call in. I phoned straight away. Well, almost straight away.’

She sat down on the bed. She wasn’t fat, but her vest bulged as she sat.

Zeke sat on a chair. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘Not much, except that he lives round here. And his name. Apart from that, nothing. Is it him?’

‘Yes, we’re almost certain.’

‘God, it was all everyone was talking about last night.’

False memories, Malin thought. Recollections of other people are juicy conversation topics at parties. Just wait till you hear what happened to a friend of a friend…

‘So you don’t know anything about who he was really?’

‘Not much. I think he was on the sick. And everyone called him Ball-Bengt. I thought it was because he was so fat, but the Correspondent said different.’

They left Pamela Karlsson with her mess and her headache and went on to an address on Ugglebovägen, an architect-designed villa on four levels, where every room seemed to have a view of the fields and, in the distance, Lake Roxen. A hollow-eyed insurance broker named Stig Unning opened the door after they knocked on the gilded lion’s head.

‘It was my son who made the call. You’ll have to talk to him, he’s down in the basement.’

The son, Fredrik, was playing a computer game. Thirteen maybe, thin, acne, dressed in jeans and an orange T-shirt that were too big for him. Dwarfs and elves were dying in droves on the screen.

‘You called us,’ Zeke said.

‘Yes,’ Fredrik Unning said without looking away from the game.

‘Why?’

‘Because I recognised the picture. I thought maybe there was some sort of reward. Is there?’

‘No, sorry,’ Malin said. ‘You don’t get paid for recognising a murder victim.’

A gnu was blown to pieces, a troll had its limbs torn off.

‘Should have called Aftonbladet instead.’

Bang. Dead, dead, dead.

Fredrik Unning looked up at them.

‘Did you know him?’ Malin asked.

‘No. Not at all. I mean, I knew his nickname, and I knew he stank of piss. No more than that.’

‘Nothing else we ought to know?’

Fredrik Unning hesitated and Malin saw a flash of fear cross his eyes before he once again fixed his gaze on the television screen and waved the joystick back and forth frenetically.

‘No,’ the boy said.

You know something, Malin thought.

‘Are you quite sure you haven’t got anything else to tell us?’

Fredrik Unning shook his head. ‘Nah, nothing. Not a damn thing.’

A red lizard dropped a huge rock on the head of a hulking great monster.

The third person on the list was a Pentecostal pastor, Sven Garplöv, forty-seven, who lived in a fairly average newly built villa on the other side of the Motala River, on the outskirts of Ljungsbro. White brick, white wood, white gables, white on white as if to keep sin away. On the way there they drove past the Cloetta factory, its corrugated roof like an angry sugar snake, its chimney pumping out promises of a sweet life.

‘That’s where they make chocolate wafers,’ Zeke said.

‘I wouldn’t say no to one right now,’ Malin said.

Even though they were in a hurry, the pastor’s wife, Ingrid, offered them coffee. The four of them sat on green leather sofas in the white-painted sitting room eating home-made biscuits, seven different sorts, as per tradition.

Butter in the biscuits. Just what she needed.

The pastor’s wife sat in silence as he talked.

‘I have a service today, but the congregation will have to wait. A sin of such a serious nature has to take precedence. He who waits to pray never waits for long. Wouldn’t you say, Ingrid?’

His wife nodded. Then she nodded towards the plate of biscuits.

They both helped themselves for the second time.

‘He was evidently a troubled soul. The sort of whom the Lord is fond, in His own way. We spoke about him briefly in the congregation once, and someone, I forget who, mentioned his name. We agreed that he was a very lonely man. He could have done with a friend like Jesus.’

‘Did you ever speak to him yourself?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean, did you ever invite him to your church?’

‘No, I don’t think that ever occurred to any of us. Our doors are open to everyone, although perhaps slightly more open to some people than others. I have to admit that.’

And now they are standing outside the front door of a Conn Dyrenäs, thirty-nine, who lives in a flat on Cloettavägen, right behind the football ground, Cloettavallen. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds for the door to open.

‘I heard you come,’ the man says.

The flat is full of toys, great drifts of them. Plastic in all manner of gaudy colours.

‘The kids,’ Conn Dyrenäs says. ‘They’re with their mother this weekend. We’re divorced. Otherwise they live with me. You miss them terribly when they’re not around. I tried to have a lie-in this morning, but still woke up at the same time as usual. I got up and surfed the net. Would you like coffee?’

‘We’ve just had some, so no, but thanks anyway,’ Malin says. ‘Are you quite sure it’s Bengt in the pictures?’

‘Yes, no doubt at all.’

‘Did you know him?’ Zeke asks.

‘No, but he was still part of my life.’

Conn Dyrenäs walks over to the balcony door, gesturing to them to follow.

‘You see that fence over there? He used to stand there waiting for the ball whenever Ljungsbro IF played at home. It didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, or freezing, or boiling hot in the summer. He was always there. Sometimes he used to stand there in winter, looking out at the deserted pitch. I guess he missed it. It was like he’d sorted out a job for himself, something to do with his time here on earth. He ran after the ball when it went over the fence. Well, maybe not ran. Lolloped. And then he would throw it back. People in the stands used to laugh. Okay, it did look funny, but my laughter always stuck in my throat.’

Malin looks at the fence, white in the cold, the roofed stand with the clubhouse behind it.

‘I kept thinking about asking him in for coffee one day,’ Conn Dyrenäs says. ‘So much for that idea.’

‘He seems to have been a very lonely person. You should have asked him in,’ Malin says.

Conn Dyrenäs nods, goes to say something, but remains silent.

‘What else do you know about him?’ Malin asks.

‘I don’t know much. There was a lot of gossip, though.’

‘Gossip?’

‘Yes, about his dad being mad. That he used to live in a house and one day smashed an axe into his father’s head.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, apparently.’

And Daniel Högfeldt hadn’t managed to dig that out?

‘But that could easily have been a load of rubbish. It must be a good twenty years since it happened. Maybe more. He was probably completely harmless. He had kind eyes. I could see that from here. You can’t see that on the pictures in the Correspondent, can you?’

13

Malin is standing by the fence looking in at the football pitch, a grey-white field with some even greyer school buildings beyond. On the left is the clubhouse, a length of red wooden buildings with concrete steps leading to a green-painted door, and a hotdog kiosk bearing the Cloetta logo.

She sniffs the air. Maybe there is the slightest hint of cocoa?

Behind the kiosk is a tennis hall, a temple to the smarter sport.

She takes hold of the fence.

Through her black Thinsulate gloves she can’t tell how cold the metal is, and it seems to be just clumsy, lifeless wire. She shakes the fence, closes her eyes and can see green, can smell new-cut grass, expectation in the air as the first team run on to the pitch, cheered on by eight-, nine-, ten-year-old boys and pensioners with their flasks, and you, Ball-Bengt, alone behind the fence, outside.

How does anyone get to be so alone?

An axe in the head?

They’ll check your name in the records in the archive; it’s bound to turn up. The ladies in the archive are diligent, good at their job, so we’ll find you. We’ll be able to see you. Don’t doubt that.

Malin stretches her hands in the air. Catches the ball with her hands, before becoming heavy and motionless, before she stumbles backwards and to one side, thinking, They laughed at you, but not all of them, you and your hopeless attempts to catch the ball, your attempts to be part of these small occasions, the little things that make up life in a small community like this. Little did they understand that you were one of the ones who made this community what it is. You must have been a constant presence in many people’s lives, visible yet invisible, known yet unknown, a walking tragic joke that brightened up completely normal lives simply by being told over and over again.

They’ll miss you when spring comes. They’ll remember you. When the ball sails over the fence they’ll wish you were still there. Maybe then they’ll appreciate that that’s what having a nagging feeling at the bottom of your stomach feels like.

Is it possible to be any more alone than you? The butt of jokes when you were alive, unconsciously missed when you’re dead.

Then her mobile rings in her pocket.

She can hear Zeke’s voice behind her. ‘It’s probably Sjöman.’

And Sjöman it is. ‘No one else has called, even though he was some sort of local celebrity. Have you found anything?’

‘There are rumours of an axe to the head,’ Malin says.

‘A what?’

‘Rumour has it that he smashed an axe into his father’s head, sometime maybe twenty years ago.’

‘We’ll start looking,’ Sjöman says. Then he adds, ‘You can go to his flat if you want. Forensics have finished. They’re certain he wasn’t killed in the flat. Considering the level of violence used, there would have been at least some traces of blood left. But the Luminol test didn’t come up with anything. Edholm and a few others are knocking on doors. Härnavägen 21b, ground floor.’

Four sliced Skogaholm loaves on a speckled grey, laminated kitchen worktop. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling make the plastic packaging look wet and unwholesome, their contents a danger to health.

Malin opens the fridge door, to find what must be twenty packets of sausages, full-fat milk and several packs of unsalted butter.

Zeke looks over her shoulder. ‘A real gourmet.’

‘Do you think he lived off this?’

‘Yes,’ Zeke says. ‘It’s not impossible. That bread is basically nothing but sugar. And the sausage is fat, so they go together nicely. Typical bachelor diet.’

Malin shuts the fridge door. Behind the lowered blinds she can make out the shapes of a few children braving the cold and trying to create something with the frozen snow. It had to be pretty hopeless, the harsh substance resisting every attempt to mould it. They are all immigrant children. These white, two-storey council blocks, plastered concrete and flaking brown wood, had to be the absolute pits of Ljungsbro.

Muted laughter from outside. But still joyful, as if the cold can be mastered.

Maybe not the pits after all.

People live their lives. Happiness breaks out, shining points of magma in everyday existence.

A sofa with garish 1970s fabric against a wall of yellow and brown mottled wallpaper. A card table with a green felt top, a couple of rib-backed chairs, a bowed bed in one corner, its orange bedspread neatly tucked in on all sides.

Spartan, but not terrible. No mess of pizza boxes, no cigarette ends, no piles of rubbish. Loneliness kept neat and tidy.

In one of the living-room windows there were three small holes, taped over, with tape carefully placed across the cracks radiating from the holes.

‘Looks like someone’s been throwing stones at the windows,’ Zeke says.

‘Yes, looks like it.’

‘Do you think it means anything?’

‘There are lots of kids in places like this, and they’re always out playing. Maybe they just threw some gravel a bit too hard?’

‘Unless he had a secret admirer?’

‘Yeah, right, Zeke. We’ll have to get forensics to take a good look at that window, if they haven’t already done so,’ Malin says. ‘See if they can work out what made the holes.’

‘I’m surprised they didn’t take the pane with them,’ Zeke says. ‘But I dare say Johannison was here, and maybe she just didn’t feel like it.’

‘If Karin had been here, that glass would be in the lab by now,’ Malin says, heading towards a wardrobe in the alcove containing the bed.

Enormous gabardine trousers in various muted colours in a row, neatly hung up on hangers, washed, ironed.

‘This doesn’t make sense,’ Zeke says. ‘Everything’s neat, his clothes are washed, but he’s supposed to have smelled of dirt and urine.’

‘I know,’ Malin says. ‘But how do we know he actually did smell? Maybe he was just expected to? And then one person told another and so on, until it became accepted truth. Ball-Bengt, stinks of piss. Ball-Bengt, never washes.’

Zeke nods. ‘Unless someone’s been here since and cleaned.’

‘Forensics would have noticed.’

‘Are you sure?’

Malin rubs her forehead. ‘Well, I suppose it could be difficult to tell.’

‘And the neighbours? Didn’t any of them notice anything unusual?’

‘Not according to Edholm, who was in charge of the door-to-door.’

The last remnants of her headache are gone. Now there’s just the feeling of being a bit swollen and unwashed left, the feeling when the alcohol is on its way out of her body.

‘How long did Johannison say he’d been dead? Between sixteen and twenty hours? I suppose someone might have been here. Unless the dirt was just a myth.’

The hot chicken curry is on the stove, the smell of garlic, ginger and turmeric is spreading through the flat, and Malin is ravenously hungry.

Chopping, dicing, slicing. Frying and simmering.

The low-strength beer is poured. Nothing goes better with curry than beer.

Janne called a short while ago. Quarter past seven. They’re on their way. And now the sound of the key in the door and Malin goes out to meet them in the hall. Tove is oddly animated, as if she’s about to deliver a performance.

‘Mum, Mum! We watched five films this weekend. Five, and all but one of them were good.’

Janne is behind the lively Tove in the hall. Looking sheepish but still confident. When she’s with me I decide, and you know that. We had that discussion a long time ago.

‘What were they?’

‘They were all by Ingmar Bergman.’

So that was the plot, today’s version of the little acts they usually put on for her.

Malin can’t help laughing. ‘I see.’

‘And they were really good.’

Janne: ‘Are you making curry? Perfect in this weather.’

‘Okay, Tove. You think I’m going to fall for that! What films did you really see?’

‘We watched Wild Raspberries.’

‘Tove, it’s called Wild Strawberries. And you didn’t watch it.’

‘Okay. We saw Night of the Living Dead.’

What? Janne? Are you mad? Then her brain goes into reverse. Thinks: Living dead.

‘But we were down at the station as well,’ Janne says. ‘We did some weight-training.’

‘Weight-training?’

‘Yes, I wanted to try,’ Tove says. ‘I wanted to see why you think it’s so good.’

‘That curry smells delicious.’

The hours on the treadmill in the gym at Police Headquarters. Bench-presses, Johan Jakobsson standing above her: ‘Come on, Malin. Come on, you can do better than that.’

Sweating. Straining. Everything becoming sharp and clear. There’s nothing like physical exercise to give her new energy.

‘What about you, Mum? How’s work been? Are you working tonight?’

‘Not as far as I know. Anyway, I’ve made dinner.’

‘What is it?’

‘Can’t you tell from the smell?’

‘Curry. Chicken?’

Tove can’t hide her enthusiasm.

Janne with drooping shoulders.

‘Okay, I’d better be off,’ he says. ‘Speak to you during the week.’

‘Okay, speak to you then,’ Malin says.

Janne opens the door.

Just as he is about to go, Malin says, ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to stay and have some curry, Janne? There’s enough for you as well.’

14

Monday, 6 February

Malin rubs the sleep from her eyes.

Wants to kick-start the day.

Muesli, fruit, soured milk. Coffee, coffee, coffee.

‘Bye, Mum.’

Tove, all wrapped up in the hall, earlier than usual, Malin later. They stayed indoors all day yesterday, baking, reading. Malin had to suppress the impulse to go down to the station even though Tove said she could go to work if she wanted to.

‘Bye. Will you be at home when I get back tonight?’

‘Maybe.’

A door closing. The weather girl on TV4 last night: ‘… and it’s going to get even colder. Yes, that’s right, even colder air from the Barents Sea, settling over the whole country, right down to Skåne. Put on plenty of warm clothes if you absolutely have to go out.’

Have to go out?

Want to go out. Want to get on with this.

Ball-Bengt.

Who were you really?

Sjöman’s voice on her mobile, Malin holding on to the cold steering-wheel with one hand.

Monday people on their way to work, shivering in the bus shelters by Trädgårdstorget, breath rising from their mouths and winding into the air towards the haphazard collection of buildings round the square: the 1930s buildings with their sought-after apartments, the 1950s blocks with shops on the ground floor, and the ornate house from the 1910s on the corner where for decades there was a record shop, now closed down.

‘We had a call from an old people’s home in Ljungsbro, Vretaliden, and they’ve got a ninety-six-year-old man there who evidently told one of the carers a whole load of things about Ball-Bengt and his family. She was reading the paper to him, because his eyes aren’t good, and he suddenly started talking. The ward sister called, says she thinks we ought to talk to him ourselves. You may as well start off with that.’

‘Does the old man want to see us?’

‘Apparently.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Gottfrid Karlsson. The nurse’s name is Hermansson.’

‘First name?’

‘She just said Sister Hermansson. It’s probably best to go through her.’

‘Did you say Vretaliden? I’m on my way.’

‘Aren’t you going to take Zeke with you?’

‘No, I’ll go on my own.’

Malin brakes, does a U-turn, just completing it ahead of the 211 bus on its way to the University Hospital. The driver honks his horn and shakes his fist.

Sorry, Malin thinks.

‘Have they found anything in the archive?’

‘They’ve only just started, Malin. You know he isn’t on the computer. So now we’re looking elsewhere. We’ll see if anything turns up during the day. Call as soon as you can if you find out anything.’

Farewell pleasantries, then silence in the car, just the engine revving when Malin changes gear.

Vretaliden.

An old people’s home and sheltered housing in one, extended and modified over the years, strict 1950s architecture jammed together with 1980s postmodernism. The whole complex is in a hollow a hundred metres away from a school, just a few culs-de-sac and some red-roofed council houses between the two institutions. To the south is a field of strawberries belonging to Wester Horticulture, ending abruptly in a couple of glasshouses.

But everything is white now.

Winter has no smell, Malin thinks as she jogs across the home’s car park towards the main entrance, a glass box with a gently revolving door. Malin pauses. She worked at Åleryd nursing home one summer when she was sixteen, the year before she met Janne. She didn’t like it, and afterwards she explained it by thinking that she was too young to appreciate the old people’s weakness and helplessness, too inexperienced to look after them. And most of the practical work was off-putting. But she liked talking to the old folk. Playing at being a society lady when there was time, listening to them talk about their lives. A lot of them wanted to talk, to delve into their memories, those who could still speak. A question to get them started, and they were off, then just a few comments to keep the story going.

A white reception desk.

Some old men in wheelchairs that look like armchairs. Strokes? Late-stage Alzheimer’s? ‘You’ll water the plants, won’t you?’

‘Hello, I’m from Linköping Police, I’m looking for a Sister Hermansson.’

Old age smells strongly of chemicals and unperfumed cleaning products.

The young carer, with greasy skin and newly washed, rat-coloured hair, glances up at Malin with a look of sympathy.

‘Ward three. The lifts are over there. She should be at the nurses’ station.’

‘Thanks.’

While Malin is waiting for the lift she looks at the old men in the wheelchairs. One of them is drooling from the corner of his mouth. Are they supposed to be sitting there like that?

Malin goes across to the wheelchairs, takes out a tissue from the inside pocket of her jacket. She leans over towards the old man, wipes the saliva from his mouth and chin.

The nurse behind the desk stares, not in a hostile way, then smiles.

The lift pings.

‘There,’ Malin whispers in the old man’s ear. ‘That’s better.’

He gurgles quietly, as if in response.

She puts her arm round his shoulder. Then she dashes over to the lift. The door is closing; damn, now I’ll have to wait for it to come down again.

Sister Hermansson has short, permed hair which looks like crumpled wire-wool on her angular head. Her eyes are hard behind thick, black-rimmed glasses.

Maybe fifty-five, sixty years old?

She is standing in a white coat at the nurses’ station, a small space situated between two corridors of hospital rooms. She is standing legs apart, arms crossed: my territory.

‘Gottfrid Karlsson?’

‘I’m really not in favour of this. He’s old. In this sort of extreme cold, it doesn’t take much to stir up anxiety on the ward. And that’s not good for our old folk.’

‘We’re grateful for any help we receive. And he evidently has something to tell us?’

‘I doubt it. But the carer who was reading today’s Correspondent out loud to him insisted.’

Hermansson pushes past Malin and starts walking down the corridor. Malin follows, until Hermansson stops at a door, so abruptly that the soles of her Birkenstock sandals squeak.

‘Here we are.’

Then Hermansson knocks on the door.

A faint but crystal-clear: ‘Come in.’

Hermansson gestures towards the door. ‘Welcome to Karlsson’s territory.’

‘Aren’t you coming in?’

‘No, Karlsson and I don’t get on particularly well. And this is his business. Not mine.’

15

It’s nice lying here waiting, not longing for anything in particular, watching time pass, being as heavy as I am yet still able to drift about.

So here I go, flying out of the cramped mortuary box, out into the room, out through the basement window (I prefer going that way, even if walls are no obstacle).

And the others?

We only see each other if we both want to, so I’m mostly alone, but I know all the others, like molecules in a great big body.

I want to see Mum. But maybe she doesn’t know I’m here yet? I want to see Dad. I want to talk to them both, explain that I know that nothing is easy, talk to them about my trousers, about my flat, about how clean it was, about the lies, about the fact that I was someone, in spite of everything.

My sister?

She had enough problems of her own. I understood, understand that.

So I drift over the fields, over the Roxen, take the long way round to the beach and campsite in Sandvik, over Stjärnorp Castle, where the ruins seem somehow to glow white in the sunlight.

I drift like a song, like little German Nicole in the Eurovision Song Contest: ‘Ein bisschen Frieden, ein bisschen Sonne, das wünsch’ ich mir.’

Then over the forest, dark and thick and full of the very worst secrets. So you’re still here?

I’ve warned you. There are snakes slithering along a woman’s leg, their poisonous fangs biting her genitals bloody.

A glasshouse, a nursery, a vast field of strawberries where I sat as a lad.

Then I drift downwards, past the place of nasty kids. I don’t want to linger there, and on instead to Gottfrid Karlsson’s corner room on the third floor of Vretaliden’s oldest building.

He’s sitting there in his wheelchair, Gottfrid. Old and happy with the life he’s lived, and which he will carry on living for a few years yet.

Malin Fors is sitting opposite him, on a rib-backed chair, on the other side of a table. She is rather subdued, unsure whether the old man opposite has good enough eyesight to meet her gaze.

Don’t believe everything Gottfrid says. But most of it will do as ‘truth’ in your dimension.

The man opposite Malin.

Doses of creatine have made his nose broad and full and red; his cheeks are grey and sunken, but still full of life. His legs are bony under the thin beige fabric of the hospital trousers, his shirt white and well-ironed.

The eyes.

How much can he see? Is he blind?

The instinct of old people. Only life can teach us. When Malin sees him, memories of the summer in the nursing home come back to her. How some of the old people had come to terms with the fact that most of their life was behind them, and had found peace, while others seemed absolutely furious that it would all soon be over.

‘Please don’t worry, Miss Fors. It is Miss Fors, isn’t it? I can only see the difference between light and dark these days, so there’s no need for you to try to catch my gaze.’

One of the peaceful ones, Malin thinks, and leans forward, articulating clearly and speaking louder than usual.

‘So you know why I’m here, Gottfrid?’

‘Nothing wrong with my hearing, Miss Fors.’

‘Sorry.’

‘They read out the story in the paper to me, about the awful thing that’s happened to Cornerhouse-Kalle’s boy.’

‘Cornerhouse-Kalle?’

‘Yes, that’s what everyone called Bengt Andersson’s father. Bad blood in that family, bad blood; nothing wrong with the lad really, but what can you do with blood like that, with that bloody restlessness?’

‘Please, tell me more about Cornerhouse-Kalle.’

‘Kalle? By all means, Miss Fors. Stories are all I have these days.’

‘Then please, tell me the story.’

‘Cornerhouse-Kalle was a legend in this community. They say he was descended from the gypsies who used to stay on a patch of waste ground on the other side of the Motala River, over by Ljung, near the manor. But I don’t know about that. Or maybe what they said was true, that he was the son of the brother and sister at Ljung Manor, the ones everyone knew were together like that. That the gypsies were paid to raise him, and that’s why Cornerhouse-Kalle turned out the way he did.’

‘When was this?’

‘It was in the twenties, I think, that Kalle was born, or the early thirties. This area was different then. There was the factory. And the big farms and the estate. No more than that. Kalle was lost to the rest of us right from the start. You see, he was the blackest of black children. Not in his skin, but inside. As if the doubt had condemned him, as if uncertainty became a sorrow that drove him mad, a sorrow that sometimes made him lose his grip on time and place. They say it was him who set fire to the estate farm, but no one knows. When he was thirteen he could neither read nor write – the master had driven him out of the school in Ljung – and then the county sheriff got him for the first time, for stealing eggs from Farmer Tureman.’

‘Thirteen?’

‘Yes, Miss Fors, he must have been hungry. Perhaps the gypsies were fed up with him? Perhaps the smart folk at the manor had grown tired of paying? But what do I know? Things like that were impossible to find out, not as easy as nowadays.’

‘Things like?’

‘Paternity, maternity.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘Then Kalle disappeared, didn’t come back for many years. There were rumours that he’d gone to sea, was in prison, terrible things. Murder, rape, child abuse. No one really knew. But he hadn’t been to sea, or I would have known.’

‘How?’

‘I did my years in the merchant navy during the war. I know a sailor when I see one. And Cornerhouse-Kalle was no sailor.’

‘What was he, then?’

‘More than anything, he was a womaniser. And a drinker.’

‘When did he come back here?’

‘It must have been some time in the mid-fifties. For a while he worked as a mechanic in the factory garage, but that didn’t last long, then he got some short-term farm work. As long as he was sober, he did the work of two men, so they put up with him.’

‘Put up with what?’

‘With the women and the drink. There can’t have been many working women, maids or farmer’s wives who didn’t know Cornerhouse-Kalle. He was king of the dance floor at the People’s Park. What he couldn’t get into his head about numbers and letters, he made up for with his body. He had cloven hooves when he danced. He could turn on the charm like the devil. He took whatever he wanted.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Ah, that was probably his secret, Miss Fors. The secret that made him irresistible to women. He looked like a beast of prey in human form, he was physical appetite made flesh. Broad, coarse, dark, close-set eyes and a jaw that seemed chiselled from marble.’

Gottfrid Karlsson falls silent, as if to allow the image of coarse masculinity to sink in to young Miss Fors.

‘Men are no longer made like that, Miss Fors. Even if there are still a number of unpolished people around here.’

‘Why “Cornerhouse”?’

Gottfrid puts his liver-spotted, withered hands on the chair’s armrests.

‘It must have been at the end of the fifties, or early sixties. I was working as a foreman at Cloetta then. Kalle had somehow come into a sum of money and bought a plot with an old red wooden cottage on it, down by Wester’s, just a few hundred metres from here, by the bend, next to the tunnel under the main road, on what today is called Anders väg. The tunnel didn’t exist then, and where the road is now used to be a meadow. I put in an offer on the house myself, so I know. It was a large amount of money in those days. There had been a robbery at a bank in Stockholm, and there were rumours that that was where Kalle’s money came from.

‘He had met a woman by then, Bengt’s mother, Elisabeth Teodorsson, a woman so rooted in the soil that she seemed utterly unshakable, as if she would outlive the earth itself. But of course that didn’t happen.’

Then the old man in front of her sighs and closes his eyes.

The flow of words seems to have stopped.

Perhaps the effort of digging through his memories has made him tired? Or has the story itself made him tired? Then his eyes open and the light in the foggy pupils is bright.

‘From the moment he bought the house he was known as Cornerhouse-Kalle. Before that everyone knew who Kalle was, but now he got an extra name. I think that house was the start of the end for him; he wasn’t made for what you might call ordered circumstances.’

‘And then Bengt was born?’

‘Yes, 1961, I remember, but by the time he was born Cornerhouse-Kalle was behind bars.’

Gottfrid Karlsson closes his eyes again.

‘Are you tired?’

‘No, not at all, Miss Fors. I haven’t finished what I have to tell you yet.’

On her way out Malin stops at the nurses’ office.

Sister Hermansson is sitting on the bench by the wall, writing up figures on some sort of diagram.

She looks up. ‘Well?’

‘Good,’ Malin says. ‘It was good.’

‘Did you learn anything new?’

‘In a way.’

‘All those courses Gottfrid Karlsson took at the university after he retired have made him rather peculiar. So he may well have put ideas in your head. I presume he told you about the courses?’

‘No,’ Malin replies, ‘actually he didn’t.’

‘Then I should keep quiet,’ Hermansson says, and returns to her diagrams.

Down in the entrance the old men in the wheelchairs have gone.

When Malin emerges out of the revolving door and the cold hits her, Gottfrid Karlsson’s final words come back to her, as she knows they will do, over and over again.

She was on her way out when he put his hand on her arm.

‘Be careful now, Miss Fors.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Just remember one thing, Miss Fors. It is always desire that kills.’

16

The plot where the house, the cornerhouse, once stood.

The atmosphere now: middle-class pomp, a perfectly average, dull house. When could this pink-painted wooden villa with its factory-produced playful carvings have been built? 1984? 1990? Something like that. Whoever bought the house from Ball-Bengt knew what they were doing; presumably they bought cheap, sat out the recession, tore the house down, built a new bog-standard villa and sold up.

Did you build someone’s life away?

No.

Because what is a house, other than property, and what does property do other than impose responsibility? Rent your house, own nothing. The mantra of the poor, the broad-minded.

Malin has got out of the car, letting air into its suffocating staleness. Behind the stiff crowns of the birch trees she can make out the pedestrian tunnel under the Linköping road. A black hole where the hill on the far side becomes an impenetrable wall.

The house opposite is a much extended 1950s villa, as is the neighbouring house to the left. Who lives here now? No Cornerhouse-Kalle. No drunks. Any womanisers? Any abandoned fatties whose souls were never allowed to grow?

Hardly.

Salesmen, doctors, architects, people like that.

Malin walks up and down beside the car.

Gottfrid Karlsson’s voice: ‘Cornerhouse-Kalle beat up a man at the People’s Park. He did that a lot. Fighting was a way of life for him. But this time the other man lost an eye. He got six years for that.’

Malin walks over to the tunnel and the road and clambers up a slope via an unploughed cycle path. The aqueduct in the distance didn’t exist back then. Cars disappear and reappear through the fog. Malin can see the greenery, the summer glory, the canal boats gliding on the water over the road in the summer. There comes the world! And it isn’t yours, it isn’t yours. Your world will still be this little community, your loneliness, the laughter of the others as you chase errant balls.

‘Elisabeth made ends meet by sewing. She did adjustments for Slott’s ladies’ and gentlemen’s outfitters on Vasagatan. She took the bus every morning with Bengt on her arm and went to fetch the garments, then took them back on the bus in the evening. The drivers let her travel without paying. Then the boy got fat, and people said she used to let him eat butter and sugar just to keep him quiet while she was sewing.’

Malin stands at the railing above the pedestrian tunnel, looking down at the house, at the red cottage that once stood there. So small, but, for a boy, a whole universe, the stars in the night sky reminders of how transitory our lives are.

‘When Kalle got out Elisabeth was pregnant within a week or so. He was permanently intoxicated, old before his time. It was said that he was beaten by the other prisoners in the jail for something he had done in Stockholm. They said he had once grassed on someone to the police. But women were still just as crazy about him. He would spend Saturdays in the park. Skirts or fighting.’

Black tiles. Smoke from the chimney. Probably from an open fire.

‘Then Bengt’s sister Lotta was born. And it went on from there. Kalle drank and fought, he hit his wife and the boy, and the girl when she wouldn’t stop crying, but somehow they managed. Somehow. Kalle used to stand outside the bakery roaring at people as they walked past. The police let him be. He had got old.’

Malin goes back to the house, hesitating before she steps on to the driveway. There’s an ancient oak tree in the far corner of the plot. That oak must have been there in your time, Ball-Bengt, mustn’t it?

It was there in my time.

I used to run round that oak with my sister. We played there to keep Dad away, to force him to stay away with our laughter, our yelling, our childish shrieks.

Oh, how I ate.

As long as I ate there was hope; as long as there was food there was faith; as long as I ate there was no other reality but food; as long as I ate, my grief at what never was stayed in its dark hole.

But what good did all the running and eating do?

Instead it was Mum who disappeared. First the cancer took her liver, she spilled away from us within a month or so, and then, yes, what happened then… that was when the never-ending night began.

‘Social services should have taken the children away then, Miss Fors, when Elisabeth died. But they couldn’t do anything. Kalle wanted to keep them and that was the law. Bengt was perhaps twelve years old, the little girl, Lotta, six. As far as Bengt was concerned, it was probably already over by then. Damaged goods, fit only for throwing away. He was the loneliest of the lonely, the corner kid, a monster to stay away from. How do you talk to people who look at you like you’re a monster? I watched it happen from a distance, and if I have committed any sin, it was that I passed him by then, when he was somehow still there for real, if you understand my meaning, Miss Fors. When he needed me and the rest of us here.’

But the mother? Elisabeth. When is a raised hand to fend off a blow the only power you have left? When your hands are so badly beaten that you can no longer sew?

Malin walks round the house.

She feels eyes watching her from within. How they stare at her, wondering who she is. Fine, you carry on staring. Newly planted apple trees, an idyll of scented flowers: do you know how easy it is for that to fall apart and vanish, never to reappear?

Mum, even if you haven’t got the strength, come back.

Was that your prayer, Bengt?

I can’t say anything more now.

Even we, I, have limits.

I want to drift now.

Drift and burn.

But I missed her, and I was worried about my sister; maybe that was why I fought back, I don’t know, to hold it together somehow. You can see the houses that surrounded ours. I could see how it was supposed to be, how it could be.

I loved him, my dad, that’s why I raised the axe that evening.

Piss kids, dirt kids. Scared kids, teased kids. Never-go-to-school kids. Alcoholic’s kids.

A girl, a little Lotta who has stopped talking, who smells of wee, who stinks of a misery that has no place in the newly polished Social-Democrats’ ‘people’s home’.

Two Caterpillar boots breaking the hard crust of the snow in the back garden of a dream villa, a door opening, a suspicious male voice: ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’

The young police officer, expecting the question, holds up her ID. ‘Police. I’m just taking a look at the plot. Someone who lived here a long time ago is under investigation.’

‘When? We’ve lived here since 1999.’

‘Don’t worry. It was a long time ago, before this house was even built.’

‘Do you mind if I go in? I’m letting in so much cold air.’

The salesman variety. Highlights in his hair even though he’s almost forty.

‘Go ahead. I’m almost done.’

A mother vaporised by cancer, a father who destroys anything that comes within arm’s length. A howl full of longing echoing from the history of this place, these forests and fields.

Gottfrid’s voice: ‘He took the axe, Miss Fors. He wasn’t even fifteen at the time. He waited in the house for Cornerhouse-Kalle to come home from one of his drunken fights. Then, when the old man opened the door, he hit him. The boy had sharpened the axe, but the blow wasn’t clean. The blade hit him on the ear, almost severing it from the head in one clean cut. They say it was dangling like a flap from just a few sinews. And Kalle ran out of the cottage, blood pouring down his neck, down his body. His screams echoed right across town that night.’

The snow is white, but Malin can sense the smell of Cornerhouse-Kalle’s alcohol-diluted blood. Can sense the smell of Ball-Bengt’s fourteen-year-old despair, his little sister Lotta in the bed she has wet herself in, her mouth open, eyes full of a terror that will probably never fade.

‘He never touched her. Even if there was talk of that as well.’

‘Who never touched her?’

‘Neither the old man, nor Bengt. I’m sure of that, even if neither of them escaped suspicion.’

Traces of blood running through history.

The girl was adopted. Bengt spent a year or so in a foster home, then was sent back to Kalle. His father was earless, with a bandage round his head and a white patch over the hole where his ear should have been.

Then the old man died early one spring. After a few furious years when they spent most of their time watching each other, him and Bengt. His heart gave out in the end. They found Ball-Bengt, who couldn’t have been much more than eighteen at the time. ‘He’d been living with the corpse for more than a month. Only going out to buy bread, apparently.’

‘And then?’

‘Social services organised the sale of the house. It was torn down, Miss Fors. And they put Bengt in a flat in Härna. Trying to draw a veil of forgetfulness over the whole affair.’

‘How do you know all this, Gottfrid?’

‘I don’t know much, Miss Fors. Everyone round here knew what I have just told you. But most of us are dead now, or have forgotten. Who wants to remember such terrible people? Remember the madmen?’

‘And after that, once they’d installed him in the flat?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve kept to myself these last ten years or so. He fetched balls. But he was clean and tidy the few times I saw him, so someone must have cared.’

Malin gets back in the car and turns the ignition.

In the rear-view mirror the tunnel quickly becomes a shrinking black hole. She breathes in, breathes out.

Someone may have cared, but who?

I close my eyes and feel Mum’s warm hands on my three-year-old body, how she nips my bulges, how she burrows her nose into my round belly and how it tickles and feels warm and I never want her to stop.

Carry on looking, Malin, carry on looking.

17

Zeke’s eyes are cold, annoyed when he meets her at the entrance of Police Headquarters. He has a go at her as they walk the few steps to her desk in the open-plan office. Johan Jakobsson nods from his own corner, Börje Svärd isn’t there.

‘Malin, you know what I think about you going off on your own. I tried to call but you had your mobile switched off the whole time.’

‘It felt urgent.’

‘Malin. It doesn’t take much longer to pick me up here than it does to find a whore on the Reeperbahn. How long would it have taken to come by here? Five minutes? Ten?’

‘A whore on the Reeperbahn? Zeke, what would the ladies in the choir say about that? Stop sulking. Sit down and listen instead. I think you’re going to like this.’

Afterwards, when Malin has told him about Bengt Andersson’s father, Cornerhouse-Kalle, and the world he created, Zeke shakes his head.

‘Human beings. Wonderful creatures, aren’t we?’

‘Have they got anywhere with the archive?’

‘No, not yet. But it’ll be easier now. They can focus on specific years. He has no criminal record, but that’s because he was only fourteen when it happened. We just need to get confirmation of what the old man said. It won’t take long now. And the death certificate was issued this morning. So I managed to get a name in social services in Ljungsbro, a Rita Santesson.’

‘Have you spoken to her?’

‘Only briefly over the phone.’

‘You didn’t go out there? Or pick me up. Now I’ll have to go back out there again.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Malin, you might go off on your own, but I don’t. We’re doing this together, aren’t we? Anyway, going out to Ljungsbro is fun.’

‘And the others?’

‘They’re following up the last of the door-to-doors, and they’re helping the domestic burglary unit after a break-in at some Saab director’s villa over the weekend. Apparently they stole a painting, some American, Harwool I think it was, worth millions.’

‘Warhol. So a theft from a director’s villa is more important than this?’

‘You know how it is, Malin. He was only a fat, lonely man on benefits. Not exactly the foreign minister.’

‘And Karim?’

‘The media have calmed down, so he’s calmed down. And a stolen Warhol might make it into Dagens Nyheter.’

‘Okay, let’s go and talk to Rita Santesson.’

Rita Santesson looks like she’s falling apart before their eyes. Her light green crocheted top is hanging off her skinny shoulders, and her legs are little more than two sticks in a pair of beige corduroy trousers. Her cheeks are sunken, her eyes watery from the strip-lighting, and her hair has lost any colour it may have once had. Reproductions of Bruno Liljefors prints hang on the yellow-painted fabric wallpaper: a deer in snow, a fox attacking a crow. The blinds are pulled down, as if to keep out reality.

Rita Santesson coughs, and with unexpected force throws a black file bearing Bengt Andersson’s name and ID number on to the worn pine top of the desk.

‘That’s all I have to give you.’

‘Can we take a copy?’

‘No, but you can take notes.’

‘Can we use your office?’

‘I need it to meet a client. You can sit in the staffroom.’

‘We’ll need to talk to you afterwards as well.’

‘We can do that now. As I said, I really don’t have much to tell you.’

Rita Santesson slumps down on to her padded chair. Gestures towards the orange plastic chairs, evidently for visitors.

She coughs, from deep in her lungs.

Malin and Zeke sit down.

‘So, what do you want to know?’

‘What was he like?’ Malin asks.

‘What he was like? I don’t know. The few times he was here he seemed distant. He was on antidepressants. Didn’t say much. Seemed withdrawn. We tried to get him to register for invalidity benefit, but he was strongly opposed to that. I suppose he still thought there was a place for him somewhere. You know, hope is the last thing that people let go of.’

‘Nothing else? Any enemies? People who didn’t like him?’

‘No, nothing like that. He didn’t seem to have any friends or enemies. As I said-’

‘Are you sure? Please, try to remember.’ Zeke’s voice, forceful.

‘Well, he did want to know about his sister. But that wasn’t part of our job. I mean, helping him to keep tabs on his family. I don’t think he dared contact her himself.’

‘Where does his sister live now?’

Rita Santesson points to the file. ‘It’s all in there.’

Then she gets up and gestures towards the door.

‘I’m seeing a client in a couple of minutes. The staffroom is at the end of the corridor. If you don’t have any more questions?’

Malin looks at Zeke. He shakes his head.

‘In that case…’

Malin gets up. ‘Are you certain there’s nothing else we ought to know?’

‘Nothing that I want to go into.’

Rita Santesson seems suddenly energised, the sickly tiger master of its cage.

‘Nothing you want to go into?’ Zeke bursts out. ‘He was murdered. Hung up in a tree like a lynched nigger. And you “don’t want to go into” something.’

‘Please don’t use that word.’ Rita Santesson purses her lips tight and shrugs, the movement making her whole body shake.

You hate men, don’t you? Malin thinks. Then she asks, ‘Who did he used to see before you?’

‘I don’t know, it should be in the records. There are three of us in this office. None of us has been here longer than a year.’

‘Can you give us the numbers of the people who used to work here?’

‘Ask in reception. They should be able to help.’

A sour smell of burned coffee and microwaved food. A flowery waxed cloth on an oval table.

Sombre reading. They pass the pages between them, taking turns to read, make notes.

Bengt Andersson. In and out of mental hospitals, depression, a loner, different contact names, a transit station for social workers on the way up.

Then something happens in 1977.

The tone of the notes changes.

Words like ‘lonely, isolated, in need of contact’ start to appear.

The same social worker throughout this period: Maria Murvall.

Now the sister appears in the notes. Maria Murvall writes: Bengt is asking after his sister. I checked the archive. His sister, Lotta, was first placed in a foster home, then adopted by a family in Jönköping. New name, Rebecka Stenlundh.

So Lotta had to become a Rebecka, Malin thinks, Andersson became Stenlundh. Rebecka Stenlundh, her name changed like a cat with new owners after the old ones got tired of it.

Nothing else about the sister, except: Bengt is worried about contacting his sister, a phone number, an address in Jönköping, jotted down in the margin. Then an unthinkable reflection: Why am I so concerned?

Maria Murvall.

I recognise that name. I’ve heard that name before.

‘Zeke. Maria Murvall. Don’t you think it sounds familiar?’

‘Yes, it does. Definitely.’

New words. In a good mood. After all my visits and constant nagging, I’ve sorted out his hygiene and cleaning. Now exemplary.

Then an abrupt end.

Maria Murvall replaced first by a Sofia Svensson, then an Inga Kylborn, then Rita Santesson.

They all form the same judgement: Shut off, tired, difficult to get through to.

The last meeting three months ago. Nothing odd about that.

They leave the folder with reception. A young girl with a nose-ring and jet-black hair smiles at them, and says, ‘Of course,’ when they ask for the phone numbers of Bengt Andersson’s social workers.

Five names.

Ten minutes later the girl hands them a list. ‘There you go. I hope it’s useful.’

Before they leave Malin and Zeke do up their jackets and pull on their hats, gloves and scarves.

Malin looks at the clock on the wall. The institutional sort, black hands on a greyish-white background: 15.15.

Zeke’s mobile rings.

‘Yes… yes… yes… yes.’

With the phone still in his hand Zeke says, ‘That was Sjöman. He wants us back for a group meeting at quarter to five.’

‘Has anything happened?’

‘Yes, some old boy from the history department at the university phoned. He evidently has some theory about what might have inspired the murder.’

18

Sven Sjöman takes a deep breath as he casts a quick glance at Karim Akbar, who is standing next to him in front of the whiteboard in the meeting room.

‘Midwinter sacrifice,’ he says, leaving a long pause before going on: ‘According to Johannes Söderkvist, Professor of History at the university, that was evidently some sort of ritual where people long ago sacrificed animals to the gods. And the sacrifices were hung in trees, hence the clear connection to our case.’

‘But this was a human being,’ Johan Jakobsson says.

‘I was coming to that. There were human sacrifices as well.’

‘So we may be dealing with a ritual murder, carried out by some sort of latter-day heathen sect,’ Karim says. ‘We’ll have to consider it as one of our theories.’

One of what theories? Malin thinks. She can see the headlines before her: SECT KILLING! HEATHEN GROUP REVEALED.

‘What did I say?’ Johan says. ‘It’s got ritual written all over it.’ No triumph in his voice, just a blunt statement of fact.

‘Do we know of any sects of that sort? Heathen sects?’ Börje Svärd throws the question across the room.

Zeke leans back. Malin can see scepticism spreading through his body.

‘We aren’t aware of any sects of that nature right now,’ Sven says. ‘But that isn’t to say that there aren’t any.’

‘If there are,’ Johan says, ‘they’ll be on the net.’

‘But going to such lengths,’ Börje says. ‘I mean, it’s pretty far-fetched.’

‘There are things in our society that we’d rather not think are possible,’ Karim says. ‘It feels like I’ve seen most of them.’

‘Johan and Börje,’ Sven says, ‘you start looking into this business of sacrifices and sects on the net, while Malin and Zeke talk to Professor Söderkvist and see what he’s got to say for himself. He’ll be expecting you this evening in the faculty.’

‘Okay,’ Johan says. ‘I can do this at home this evening. I think we can get a long way just by surfing around the net. If there’s anything out there. But that means we’ll have to drop the stolen painting.’

‘Drop it,’ Karim says. ‘This is bigger.’

‘It’s best not to have any preconceptions at all as far as this is concerned,’ Sven says.

‘Okay, what else?’ Karim, encouraging, almost parodically so.

‘We’ve sent the window-pane from his flat to the Laboratory of Forensic Science for analysis,’ Malin says. ‘If possible, we want to know what made those holes. According to Karin Johannison, the edge of the holes might be able to give us an answer.’

Karim nods. ‘Good. We can’t leave any stone unturned. What else?’

Malin tells them what she and Zeke have found out during the day, concluding with the fact that she spent the drive back from social services in Ljungsbro calling three of the numbers on the list, without getting any answer.

‘We ought to talk to his sister as well; she’s now known as Rebecka Stenlundh.’

‘Drive down to Jönköping tomorrow and try to get hold of her.’

‘But don’t expect too much,’ Sven says. ‘Considering the bloody awful start she got in life, anything could have happened to her.’

‘You’re not fucking trying.’

Johan Jakobsson is standing over her with his hands round the bar.

Seventy kilos.

The same as she weighs. Her back is pressed hard against the bench, the bar pushing down, down, down, as she fades away beneath the weight.

Sweat.

‘Come on, you weakling, try!’

She’s asked him to talk like that, call her a weakling, because otherwise he’d never say that sort of thing. He had trouble the first few times, Malin noticed, but now he sounds completely natural.

… three times, four, five, down, then six, seven, eight…

Her energy, so obvious just a few seconds before, is gone.

The curved armature in the ceiling above explodes, the room turns white, her muscles white, mute, Johan’s voice: ‘Try harder!’

And Malin pushes, but no matter how she pushes the bar is sinking towards her throat.

Then the pressure eases, the weight on her body disappears and the white walls and yellow ceiling come into view again, the apparatus in the windowless gym in the cellar, the smell of sweat.

She gets up. They are alone in the room. Most of their colleagues go to gyms in the centre of the city: ‘They’re better equipped.’

Johan is grinning. ‘That eighth one seems to be the problem,’ he says.

‘You shouldn’t have stepped in,’ Malin says. ‘I would have done it.’

‘You’d have crushed your windpipe if I’d held back any longer.’

‘Your turn,’ Malin says.

‘No more for me today,’ Johan says, tugging his sweaty, washed-out blue Adidas top away from his chest. ‘The kids.’

‘Yeah, blame the kids.’

Johan laughs as he walks away. ‘It’s only exercise, Malin. No more, no less.’

Then she is alone in the room.

She gets on to the treadmill. Turns up the speed, almost to maximum. Then she runs until her vision starts to go white again, until the world disappears.

Jets of warm water on her skin.

Closed eyes, black around her.

A conversation with Tove some hours before.

‘Can you heat up something from the freezer? Or there’s some curry left from the weekend. Dad didn’t quite manage to eat all of it.’

‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll sort something out.’

‘Will you be there when I get home?’

‘I might go and study with Lisa. We’ve got a geography test on Thursday.’

Study, Malin thinks. Since when did you have to do that?

‘I can test you if you like.’

‘Thanks, that’s okay.’

Shampoo in her hair, soap on her body, her breasts, unused.

Malin turns off the shower, dries herself, throws the towel in the wash-basket before taking her clothes out of her locker. She gets dressed, puts on the yellow and red Swatch Tove gave her for Christmas. Half past seven. Zeke would be waiting outside in the car. Best to hurry. The professor who is going to tell them about rituals probably doesn’t want to have to wait all evening for them either.

19

They walk quickly between the panelled, brick-coloured buildings. The ground crunches beneath their feet, the grey paving carefully gritted, but with patches of ice every now and then. The path between the silent, oblong buildings becomes a wind-tunnel where the cold can gather its strength and get up speed to hit their bodies. The cones of light from the lamps hanging above them sway in the wind.

The university.

Like a rectangular city within the city, laid out between Valla and the golf course and Mjärdevi Science Park.

‘I didn’t know academic life could seem so bleak,’ Zeke says.

‘It isn’t bleak,’ Malin says. ‘Just tough.’

She spent two years studying law part-time, with Tove crawling round her legs and Janne off in some jungle or on some mined road God knew where, and her patrol duties and nightshifts and night nursery, alone, alone with you, Tove.

‘Did you say C-block?’ The letter C shines above the nearest entrance. Zeke’s voice sounds hopeful.

‘Sorry, F-block.’

‘Fuck, it’s cold.’

‘This cold stinks.’

‘Maybe. But it still doesn’t seem to have any smell, does it?’

A single light is shining on the second floor of F-block. Like an outsized star in a reluctant sky.

‘He said to press B 3267 at the door, and he’d buzz us in.’

‘You’ll have to take your gloves off,’ Zeke says.

And a minute later they are standing in a lift on the way up, Professor Söderkvist’s voice vague and difficult to pin down over the speaker a few moments ago.

‘Is that the police?’

‘Yes, Inspectors Fors and Martinsson.’

A buzz, then warmth.

What was I expecting? Malin thinks as she settles on to an uncomfortable chair in the professor’s office. A creaky old man in a cardigan? A history professor doesn’t count as one of the really posh ones, the ones who make her so uncertain. But what about this one?

He’s young, no more than forty, and he’s attractive; maybe his chin’s a bit weak, but there’s nothing wrong with his cheekbones and his cool blue eyes. Well hello, Professor.

He is leaning back in an armchair on the other side of a pedantically tidy desk, apart from a messily opened packet of biscuits. The room is perhaps ten square metres in size, over-full bookshelves along the walls, and windows facing the golf course, silent and deserted on the far side of the road.

He smiles, but only with his mouth and cheeks, not with his eyes.

He is hiding one hand, the one he didn’t shake hands with, Malin thinks. He’s keeping it under the desk. Why are you doing that, Professor Söderkvist?

‘You had something you wanted to explain to us?’ Zeke says.

The room smells of disinfectant.

‘Midwinter sacrifice,’ the professor says, leaning even further back. ‘Have you heard of that?’

‘Vaguely,’ Malin says.

Zeke shakes his head and nods to the professor, who goes on.

‘A heathen ritual, something the people you would call Vikings used to do once a year round about this time of year. They made sacrifices to the gods for happiness and success. Or as a penance. To cleanse the blood. To be reconciled with the dead. We don’t know for sure. There’s very little reliable documentation about this ritual, but we can be sure that they made both animal and human sacrifices.’

‘Human sacrifices?’

‘Human sacrifices. And the sacrifices were hung in trees, often in open places so that the gods could get a good view of them. At least that’s what we believe.’

‘And you mean that the man in the tree on the Östgöta plain could be the victim of a modern midwinter sacrifice?’ Malin asks.

‘No, that’s not what I mean.’ The professor smiles. ‘But I do mean that there are undoubted similarities in the scenario. Let me explain something: there are residential courses and hotels in this country that organise harmless midwinter sacrifices at this time of year. With no connection to the darker sides of the sacrifice, they arrange lectures about Old Norse culture and serve food that they suppose would have been served in those days. Commercial mumbo-jumbo. But there are others who have a less healthy interest in those days, so to speak.’

‘A less healthy interest?’

‘I come across them occasionally during my lecture tours. The sort of people who evidently have difficulty living in our age, and who prefer to identify themselves with history instead.’

‘They live in the past?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Is this about the old Æsir beliefs?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. We’re talking about the pre-Norse period here.’

‘Do you know where they are, people like this?’

‘I don’t know that there are any specific societies. I’ve never been that interested in them. But they’re probably out there somewhere. I’m sure I’ve had nutters like that come and listen to me. If I were you I’d start by looking on the Internet. They may prefer to live in the past, but they’re extremely technologically literate.’

‘But you don’t actually know of any?’

‘Not in particular. There are never any records kept of who attends my open lectures. It’s like the cinema or a concert. You come, you watch and listen, then you go away again.’

‘But you know that they’re technologically literate?’

‘Isn’t everyone like that these days?’

‘What about on your courses here at the university?’

‘Oh, they never find their way here. And midwinter sacrifice gets little more than a mention in the greater scheme of things.’

Then the professor pulls out the hand he has been keeping hidden under the desk and strokes his cheek, and Malin can see angry scars criss-crossing the back of his hand.

The professor seems to lose his train of thought, and quickly lowers his hand.

‘Have you hurt yourself?’

‘We have cats at home. One of them had a bit of a turn when we were playing the other day. We took her to the vet. It turned out that she had a brain tumour.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Malin said.

‘Thank you. The cats are like children for Magnus and me.’

‘Do you think he’s lying about his hand?’

Malin can hardly hear Zeke’s voice in the wind-tunnel between the buildings.

‘I don’t know,’ Malin shouts.

‘Should we check him out?’

‘We can get someone to take a quick look.’

As she is shouting the words her phone starts to ring in her pocket.

‘Fuck.’

‘Let it ring. You can call back once we’re in the car.’

As they’re driving past McDonald’s on the Ryd roundabout, Malin calls Johan Jakobsson back, not caring that his wife might be trying to put the children to bed and that the sound of the phone ringing might keep them awake.

‘Johan Jakobsson.’

The sound of children playing up in the background.

‘Malin here. I’m in the car with Zeke.’

‘Right,’ Johan says. ‘I haven’t managed to find anything specific, but the idea of midwinter sacrifice pops up on a lot of sites. Mostly residential courses that-’

‘We know all that. Anything else?’

‘That’s what I was coming to. Apart from the courses I found a site belonging to someone calling himself a soothsayer. Soothsaying is apparently some sort of Old Norse magic, and it says that according to these particular traditions, every February you have to make a midwinter sacrifice.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Then I went on to a Yahoo group about soothsaying.’

‘A what?’

‘A discussion group on the Internet.’

‘Okay.’

‘It doesn’t have many members, but the man running the group gives an address outside Maspelösa as his home location.’

‘Maspelösa.’

‘Exactly, Fors. Not much more than ten kilometres from the crime-scene.’

‘Are you going to talk to him tonight?’

‘Because he’s got a website? It can wait till morning.’

‘Is that wise?’

‘Wise or not, unless the pair of you fancy driving out to Maspelösa now?’

‘We can do that, Johan.’

‘Malin, you’re mad. Go home to Tove.’

‘You’re right, Johan. It can wait. You two take it tomorrow.’

The kitchen worktop is cold to her touch, but still feels somehow warm.

Soothsaying.

Old Norse magic.

Unexplained, thus far, holes in a pane of glass.

Does all this belong together?

The Æsir belief-system.

Zeke had laughed to begin with, then his face had taken on a rather uncertain look, as if it had struck him that if a naked man can be found hanging in a tree on a cripplingly cold winter’s morning, then there could well be ‘nutters’ who live their lives according to Old Norse mythology.

But they had to follow several threads at once, looking under any stone where there might be something relevant. There were countless police investigations that had ground to a halt simply because the officers themselves had got hung up on one of their own theories, or, worse still, fallen in love with it.

Malin eats a couple of crispbread sandwiches with low-fat cheese before she sits down at her desk and starts phoning the people on the list she was given at Ljungsbro social services.

The clock on the computer says 21.12. Not too late to call.

A note from Tove in the hall.

I’ve gone to Filippa’s to study for a maths test tomorrow. Home by ten at the latest.

Maths? Didn’t she say geography? Filippa?

No answer anywhere; she left messages, her name and number, why she was phoning: Call me this evening or early tomorrow, as soon as you get this message. How busy could people be on a Monday evening? But, on the other hand, why not?

Theatre, cinema, a concert, evening classes, the gym. All the things people do to stop themselves getting bored.

Maria Murvall’s number was unobtainable. This number is no longer in use. Directory enquiries had no new number for her.

Half past nine.

Malin’s body is tired after her exercise; she feels the fibres of her muscles protest as they grow. How her brain is tired after the encounter at the university.

Maybe this will be a peaceful night? Nothing holds the nightmares at bay like exercise and concentration, but she can still feel the anxiety and restlessness, how impossible it is to stay inside the flat even though it is so cold outside.

She gets up, pulls on her jacket, her holster out of habit, and leaves the flat again. She walks up Hamngatan towards Filbytertorg, then carries on up towards the castle and the cemetery, where the snow-covered graves keep their owners’ secrets. Malin looks up at the memorial grove; she usually goes there to look at the flowers, trying to feel the presence of the dead and hear their voices, pretending that she can breach the dimensions, that she’s a superhero with fantastic powers.

The rustle of the wind.

The panting of the cold.

Malin stands still in the memorial grove.

The oaks are drooping. Frozen branches hang in the air like stiff black rain. A few nightlights are burning around her feet, a floral wreath makes a grey ring on the snow.

Are you here?

But everything is silent and empty and still.

I’m here, Malin.

Ball-Bengt?

And the evening is destructively hard and cold and she leaves the grove, walking the length of the cemetery wall and then along Vallavägen and down towards the old water tower and the Infection Clinic.

She walks past her parents’ apartment.

‘You won’t forget…’

There’s something not right. There’s a reddish light up in one of the apartment’s windows. Why is there a light in the apartment?

I never forget to turn off the lights.

20

The stairwell: she leaves the light on.

She takes out her mobile, is about to dial her parents’ number – whoever is up there will get a shock – but then she remembers that her parents had the phone disconnected.

She doesn’t use the lift.

She climbs the three flights of stairs as silently as she can in her Caterpillar boots, feeling sweat break out on her back.

The door hasn’t been broken open, there’s no visible evidence.

Light behind the glass of the door.

Malin puts her ear to the door and listens. Nothing. She looks in through the letterbox; the light seems to be coming from the kitchen.

She tries the door-handle.

Should I draw my pistol?

No.

The hinges creak as she pulls the door open, voices, muffled, from her parents’ room.

Then the voices fall silent, and instead the sound of bodies moving. Have they heard her?

Malin marches firmly across the hall, hurrying down the passageway to her parents’ bedroom.

Pulls the door open.

Tove on the green bedspread. Me, that’s me. Tove fumbling with her jeans, trying to find the buttons with fingers that won’t obey.

‘Mum.’

Beside the bed a long-haired, skinny boy trying to pull on a black T-shirt with some hard rock logo on it. His skin is unnaturally white. As if he’s never been out in the sun his whole life.

‘Mum, I-’

‘Not a word, Tove. Not a single word.’

‘I…’ the boy says in a voice that has hardly broken. ‘I…’

‘And you can keep quiet too. Both of you, quiet. Get dressed.’

‘We are dressed, Mum.’

‘Tove. I’m warning you.’

Malin leaves the bedroom, shuts the door behind her, shouts, ‘Come out when you’re dressed.’

Feels like shouting a whole load of things, but what? Can’t shout: Tove, you were a mistake, a condom that broke, and do you want to do the same as me? Do you think it’s fun being a teenage mother, even if you do love your kid?

Whispers and giggling from the bedroom.

Two minutes later they come out. Malin is standing in the hall, and points to the sofas in the sitting room.

‘Tove, sit down there. And you, who are you?’

Handsome, Malin thinks, but pale. But, good God, he can’t be more than fourteen, and Tove, Tove, you’re a little girl.

‘I’m Markus,’ the pale boy says, pushing his hair out of his face.

‘My boyfriend,’ Tove calls from the sofa.

‘Yes, I worked that out,’ Malin replies. ‘I’m not that stupid.’

‘I go to Ånestad school,’ Markus says. ‘We met at a party a few weekends ago.’

What party? Has Tove been to a party?

‘Have you got a surname, Markus?’

‘Stenvinkel.’

‘You can go now, Markus. We’ll have to see if we ever meet again.’

‘Can I say goodbye to Tove?’

‘Put on your coat and go.’

‘Mum, I’m actually in love with him.’

The front door closes as Tove says the words.

‘That’s a bit serious.’

Malin sits on the sofa opposite Tove. The sitting room is dark around them. She closes her eyes and sighs.

Then starts to feel angry again.

‘In love? You’re thirteen, Tove. What could you possibly know about love?’

‘As much as you, apparently.’

And the anger vanishes as quickly as it came.

‘Studying with Filippa, Tove? Did you have to lie?’

‘I thought you’d be angry.’

‘What about? About you wanting a boyfriend?’

‘No, because I haven’t said anything. And because we were here. And, well, because I’ve got something you haven’t.’

These last words cut straight to Malin’s core, with no warning, and rather than think about what her daughter had just said, she chose to say, ‘You have to be careful, Tove. This sort of thing can lead to no end of problems.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of, Mum, that you’d only see the problems. Do you think I’m stupid enough not to realise that you and Dad had me by mistake? I mean, who’d be mad enough to have a child at that age otherwise? I’m not that careless.’

‘What are you saying, Tove? You weren’t a mistake. Whatever makes you say that?’

‘I know, Mum. I’m thirteen, and thirteen-year-olds have boyfriends.’

‘The cinema with Sara, studying with Filippa… God, how stupid am I? How long have you been seeing each other?’

‘Almost a month.’

‘A month?’

‘It’s hardly surprising that you haven’t noticed anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘What do you think, Mum?’

‘I don’t know, tell me, Tove.’

But Tove doesn’t answer the question. Instead she says, ‘His name’s Stenvinkel. Markus Stenvinkel.’

Then they sit in silence in the darkness.

‘Markus Stenvinkel.’ Malin laughs, eventually. ‘God, he’s pale. Do you know what his parents do?’

‘They’re doctors.’

Better folk. The thought comes to Malin against her will.

‘Nice.’

‘Don’t worry, Mum. Actually, I’m hungry,’ Tove says.

‘Pizza,’ Malin says, slapping her hands down on her knees. ‘I’ve only eaten a couple of crispbreads tonight.’

Shalom on Trädgårdsgatan have the biggest pizzas in the city, the best tomato sauce, and the ugliest interior: plaster walls with amateur frescoes of nymphs; cheap, plastic patio tables.

They share a calzone.

‘Does Dad know about this?’

‘No.’

‘Okay.’

‘What do you mean?’

Malin takes a sip of her Cuba Cola.

Her mobile rings again.

Daniel Högfeldt’s name on the small display.

She hesitates, then clicks the call away.

‘Dad?’

‘It just feels important that you haven’t told him either.’

Tove looks thoughtful. She takes a bite of the pizza before saying, ‘Weird.’

A fluorescent light flickers above their heads.

There’s competition in love, Tove, Malin thinks. There’s competition and loss in everything.

21

Tuesday, 7 February

It is just after midnight.

Daniel Högfeldt presses the door button on the wall and the main door to the Correspondent’s offices swings opens to the sound of manic squeaking. He’s happy, job well done.

He looks down Hamngatan as he takes a breath of the icy air.

He called Malin. To ask about the case, and to ask about… yes, what was he going to ask her about?

Even though his thick jacket is done up to the neck, the cold wins in just a few seconds and forces its way through the fabric.

He heads home quickly along Linnégatan.

At St Lars Church he looks up at the darkened windows of Malin’s flat, thinks of her face and eyes, and of how little he knows about her, and what he must look like to her: a fucking irritating journalist, a male chauvinist with some sort of irresistible sex appeal and charm. A body that does the job well enough when her own body needs fulfilment.

Fucking.

Hard or soft.

But people have to fuck.

He walks past H &M and thinks about the distance in that ‘people’. Fucking isn’t something you or I do, ‘people’ do it; an alien entity separate from our bodies.

The phone-call from Stockholm today.

Flattery and coaxing, promises.

Daniel wasn’t surprised.

Am I done with this dump now?

The front page of the Correspondent confronts Malin from the hall floor as she stumbles towards the kitchen on tired, stiff legs, freshly showered and dressed.

In spite of the darkness she can read the headline, which, in its urgent, tabloid manner, bears Daniel Högfeldt’s unmistakable signature: POLICE SUSPECT RITUAL KILLING.

You made the front page, Daniel. Congratulations.

An archive picture of a serious Karim Akbar, a statement given over the phone late yesterday evening: I can neither confirm nor deny that we are investigating secret networks of people who follow the Æsir belief-system.

Secret networks? The Æsir belief-system?

Daniel has interviewed Professor Söderkvist, who claims to have been questioned by the police for information, and that he had explained ritual killings to them during the day.

Then a screenshot of a website about the Æsir faith, and a passport photograph of a Rickard Skoglöf from Maspelösa, who is identified as a central character in such circles. Rickard Skoglöf was unavailable for comment yesterday evening.

A fact box about midwinter sacrifices.

Nothing else.

Malin folds the paper and puts it on the kitchen table, and makes a cup of coffee.

Her body. Muscles and sinews, bones and joints. Everything aches.

Then the sound of a car-horn down in the street.

Zeke. Are you here already?

Jönköping, we’ll set off early. Zeke’s final words as he dropped her off outside her flat.

The Ikea clock on the wall says quarter to seven.

I’m the one who’s late.

What exactly is this winter doing to me?

Zeke at the wheel of the green Volvo. Tired shoulders, limp hands. German choral music in a minor key fills the car. The pair of them are equally tired. The E4 cuts through white-clad fields and the frozen landscape of the plain.

Mobilia outside Mantorp, a retail park, Tove’s favourite outing, Malin’s nightmare. Mjölby, Gränna, Lake Vättern as a strip of white hope in front of a horizon where nuances of grey meet other nuances of grey, forming a confusion of cold and darkness, an eternal lack of light.

Zeke’s voice comes as a liberation, loud enough to drown out the music.

‘What do you think about this Old Norse stuff?’

‘Karim seemed fairly positive about it.’

‘Mr Akbar. What do factory-farmed police chiefs like him know about anything?’

‘Zeke. He’s not that bad.’

‘No, I suppose not. Mr Akbar presumably has to give the impression that we’re making progress. And the holes in the window, have you had any more thoughts about them now you’ve had time to sleep on it?’

‘No idea. Maybe they’ll lead to something. But what, I don’t know.’ Malin thinks that this is just like every big investigation, that obvious connections are hidden somewhere close to them, just out of reach, mocking them.

‘When was Karin going to have her analysis of the glass finished?’

‘Today or tomorrow.’

‘Just one thing,’ Zeke goes on. ‘The more I think about Ball-Bengt up there in the tree, the more it all feels like some sort of pagan invocation.’

‘I’ve been feeling the same,’ Malin says. ‘Well, it remains to be seen if there are any links to Valhalla or anything else.’

Malin rings the doorbell of Rebecka Stenlundh’s flat. She lives on the second floor of a yellow-brick block in the hills just south of Jönköping.

The view from the flat must be wonderful, and in the summer the area must be lush with the green of all the birch trees. Even the garages a little way down towards the road look attractive, with orange-painted doors, surrounded by well-maintained hedges.

The place where Rebecka Stenlundh lives is neither one thing nor the other. Not lovely, but nice enough, a here where children could grow up in decent surroundings.

Not a dumping-ground for social service cases and immigrants. The sort of place where people live out their lives unobserved, largely unnoticed and unwanted, but still well thought of. A life on the fault-line, close to the boundary of dysfunction. Malin is just as surprised every time she finds herself in a place like this, by the fact that they still exist. The quiet happiness of the old Social-Democratic ‘people’s home’. Two point three swings and slides per child.

No answer.

It is just after nine o’clock; perhaps they should have called and announced their arrival, but does she even know about what happened to her brother?

‘No, we’ll just head over there.’ Zeke’s words.

‘We might be bringing bad news.’

‘Wasn’t she told before his name was made public?’

‘No one knew he had a sister then, and it’s a long time since the papers showed that level of consideration.’

Malin rings the bell again.

The rattle of locks on the neighbour’s door.

An old woman’s face, friendly, smiling. ‘Are you looking for Rebecka?’

‘Yes, we’re from Linköping Police,’ Malin says, and Zeke holds up his ID.

‘From the police? Goodness.’ The old woman screws up her eyes in alarm. ‘I hope she isn’t involved in any unpleasantness? I can’t imagine that she is.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Zeke says in his gentlest voice. ‘We’d just like to talk to her.’

‘She works down in the ICA supermarket. Try there. She’s the manageress. You’ve never seen a nicer ICA shop. I can promise you that. And you should see her son. You won’t meet a nicer boy. He’s always helping me with one thing or another.’

Just as they are heading towards the automatic doors of the ICA shop, Zeke’s phone rings.

Malin stops beside him, listens to him talk, sees him frown.

‘Yes, okay, so it checks out, then?’

Zeke hangs up.

‘They’ve found that business with the axe in the archive,’ he says. ‘What the old man told you seems about right. Lotta, Rebecka, saw it all. She was eight years old at the time.’

Vegetables and fruit in neat rows, and a smell of food that makes Malin hungry. Signs with beautiful lettering, every corner well-lit, everything announcing: this is a clean shop.

The old woman was right, Malin thinks. Nothing shabby or slapdash, just an apparent desire to give people something pleasant in their everyday lives. Someone wanting to make a bit of extra effort for other people. Showing a bit of consideration must surely be good for business. Anyone would want to return to this shop.

A middle-aged woman at the till, plump, with blonde, tightly permed hair.

Rebecka?

Zeke’s voice: ‘Excuse me, we’re looking for Rebecka Stenlundh.’

‘The boss. Try over at the butcher’s counter. She’s marking up the meat.’

Over at the butcher’s counter a thin woman is crouched down, her dark hair in a net, her back bowed under a white coat with the red ICA logo.

It looks like she’s hiding behind that coat, Malin thinks, as if someone’s going to attack her from behind, as if the whole world wishes her ill and you can never be too careful.

‘Rebecka Stenlundh?’

The woman spins round on her wooden sandals. A pleasant face: gentle features, brown eyes with a thousand friendly nuances, cheeks with skin that radiates health and a light suntan.

Rebecka Stenlundh looks at them.

Then one of her eyebrows twitches, and her eyes shine bright and clear.

‘I’ve been expecting you,’ she says.

22

‘Do you think he’s expecting us?’

Johan Jakobsson leaves the words hanging limply in the air as they pull into the drive.

‘Bound to be,’ Börje Svärd says, flaring his nostrils in a way that makes the brown hairs of his moustache vibrate. ‘He knows we’re coming.’

Three grey stone buildings in the middle of the Östgöta plain, a few kilometres outside a sleepy Maspelösa. The buildings seem almost suffocated by the snow piled in drifts against the already inadequate windows. The thatched roofs are pressed down by the weight of all the white. There are lights in the building to the left. A newly built garage, with shrubs planted all round it, has been squeezed in between two large oaks.

Only one problem: Maspelösa never wakes up, Johan thinks.

A few farms, some detached houses built in the fifties, a few council houses scattered across the open landscape: one of those settlements on the plain that life seems to have left behind.

They stop, get out, knock.

From the building opposite comes the sound of mooing. Then the sound of something banging on metal. Börje turns round.

The low, crooked door opens.

A head almost entirely covered in hair peers out of the darkness inside.

‘And who the hell are you?’

The beard shaggy, seeming to cover the whole of his face. But his blue eyes are as sharp as his nose.

‘Johan Jakobsson and Börje Svärd, Linköping Police. Can we come in? I presume you’re Rickard Skoglöf.’

The man nods. ‘ID first.’

They hunt through their pockets, have to take off their gloves and undo their coats to find their ID.

‘Happy now?’ Börje asks.

Rickard Skoglöf gestures with one hand as he pushes the door open with the other.

‘We’re born with the gift. It arrives in our flesh the moment we arrive in this dimension.’ Rickard Skoglöf’s voice is as clear as ice.

Johan rubs his eyes and looks round the kitchen. Low ceiling. The draining-board full of dirty plates, pizza boxes. Pictures of Stonehenge on the walls, Old Norse symbols, rune-stones. And Skoglöf’s clothes: obviously home-made trousers of black-dyed canvas and an even blacker kaftan-like affair hanging loosely over a fat stomach.

‘Gift?’

Johan can hear how sceptical Börje sounds.

‘Yes, the power to see, to influence.’

‘Soothsaying?’

The house is cold. An old eighteenth-century farmhouse that Rickard Skoglöf has renovated himself: ‘Got it cheap, but it’s bloody draughty.’

‘Soothsaying is the word for it. But you have to be careful about using the power. It takes as much life as it gives.’

‘So why a website about your sooth?’

‘My soothsaying. In our culture we’ve lost track of our roots. But I have comrades.’

Rickard Skoglöf crouches down and goes into the next room. They follow him.

A worn sofa against one wall, and a huge computer screen, switched off, set up on a shiny desk with a glass top, two whirring hard drives on the floor, a modern black leather office chair behind the desk.

‘Comrades?’

‘Some people who are interested in soothsaying and in our Old Norse forebears.’

‘And you have meetings?’

‘A few times a year. Most of the time we communicate on discussion forums and by email.’

‘How many of you are there?’

Rickard Skoglöf sighs. He stops and looks at them. ‘If you want to carry on talking you’ll have to come out to the barn with me. I have to feed Sæhrimnir and the others.’

Cackling hens run to and fro in an even colder space with badly plastered walls. There is a pair of new cross-country skis leaning in one corner.

‘You like skiing?’ Johan asks.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘But you’ve got a new pair of skis.’

Rickard Skoglöf doesn’t reply, just carries on towards the animals.

‘Bloody hell, it’s below freezing in here,’ Börje says. ‘Your livestock could freeze to death.’

‘No chance,’ Rickard Skoglöf says as he scatters food for the hens from a bucket.

Two pens along one wall.

A fat black pig in one, a brown and white cow in the other. They are both eating, the pig grunting happily at the winter apples he has just been given.

‘If you think I’m going to give you the names of the comrades who usually come to our meetings, you’re mistaken. You’ll have to find them yourselves. But it won’t do you any good.’

‘How do you know that?’ Johan asks.

‘Only harmless kids and old folk with no lives of their own are interested in this sort of thing.’

‘What about you? Haven’t you got a life of your own?’

Rickard Skoglöf gestures towards the animals. ‘The farm and these beasts are probably more of a life than most people have.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I’ve got the gift,’ Rickard Skoglöf says.

‘So what is this gift, Rickard? In purely concrete terms?’ Börje is staring intently at the canvas-clad figure in front of them.

Rickard Skoglöf puts down the bucket of feed. When he looks up at them his face is contorted with derision. He waves the question away with his hand.

‘So the power of soothsaying gives and takes life,’ Johan says. ‘Is that why you make sacrifices?’

The look in Rickard Skoglöf’s eyes gets even more weary.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘You think I’m the one who strung up Bengt Andersson in a tree. Not even that journalist who was here before you thought that.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

‘If I make sacrifices? Yes, I do. But not like you think.’

‘And what do we think?’

‘That I kill animals. And maybe people. But it’s the gesture that matters. The willingness to give. Time, labour. The unity of bodies.’

‘The unity of bodies?’

‘Yes, the act can be a sacrifice. If one is open.’

Like my wife and I do every third week? Johan thinks. Is that what you mean? Instead he asks, ‘And what were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’

‘You’ll have to ask my girlfriend,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘Right, the animals will be okay for a while now. They can stand a bit of cold. They’re not as feeble as other creatures.’

When they come out into the yard a young woman is standing barefoot in the snow with her arms raised away from her body. The cold doesn’t seem to bother her, she’s wearing just pants and a vest, and she has her eyes closed, her head raised to the sky, her black hair a long shadow down the white skin of her back.

‘This is Valkyria,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘Valkyria Karlsson. Morning meditation.’

Johan can see Börje losing his temper.

‘Valkyria,’ he yells. ‘Valkyria. Time to stop the mumbo-jumbo. We want to talk to you.’

‘Börje, for God’s sake.’

‘Oh, shout away,’ Rickard Skoglöf says. ‘It won’t help. She’ll be done in ten minutes. There’s no point trying to disturb her. We can wait in the kitchen.’

They walk past Valkyria.

Her brown eyes are open. But they see nothing. She’s millions of miles away, Johan thinks. Then he thinks about the act, of opening yourself to someone else, something else.

Valkyria Karlsson’s skin is pink with cold, her fingers somehow crystal clear. She is holding a cup of hot tea in front of her nose, inhaling the aroma.

Rickard Skoglöf is sitting at the table, grinning happily, evidently pleased that he is making things difficult for them.

‘What were you doing yesterday evening?’ Börje asks.

‘We went to the cinema,’ Rickard Skoglöf says.

Valkyria Karlsson puts down her cup.

‘The new Harry Potter,’ she says in a soft voice. ‘Entertaining nonsense.’

‘Did either of you know Bengt Andersson?’

Valkyria shakes her head, then looks at Rickard.

‘I’d never heard of him until I read about him in the paper. I have a gift. That’s all.’

‘What about last Wednesday evening? What were you doing then?’

‘We made a sacrifice.’

‘We opened ourselves at home,’ Valkyria whispers, and Johan looks at her breasts, heavy and light at the same time, breaking the law of gravity, floating under her vest.

‘So you don’t know of anyone in your circles who could have done this?’ Börje asks. ‘For heathen reasons, so to speak.’

Rickard Skoglöf laughs. ‘I think it’s time for you to leave now.’

23

The canteen of the ICA shop is pleasantly decorated, gently lit by an orange Bumling lamp. A smell of freshly brewed coffee permeates the room, while the almond tart is sticking to their teeth in a very pleasant way.

Rebecka Stenlundh is sitting opposite Malin and Zeke, on the other side of a grey laminate table.

In this light she looks older than she is, Malin thinks. Somehow the light and shadows emphasise her age, revealing almost invisible wrinkles. But everything she has been through has to show somewhere. No one escapes unblemished from that sort of experience.

‘This isn’t my shop,’ Rebecka says. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking. But the owner lets me do what I like. We’re the most profitable shop of this size in the whole of Sweden.’

‘Retail is detail,’ Zeke says in English.

‘Exactly,’ Rebecka agrees, and Malin looks down at the table.

Then Rebecka pauses.

You’re gathering your strength, Malin thinks. You’re taking a deep breath, in it goes, helping to prepare you to talk.

Then she starts to speak again: ‘I decided to leave everything to do with Mum and Dad and my brother Bengt behind. I decided I was bigger than that. Even if I hated my father in a lot of ways, I realised eventually, just after I turned twenty-two, that he couldn’t own me, that he had no right to my life. In those days I was hanging out with the wrong guys, I smoked, drank, sniffed glue, ate too much, all the while exercising so hard that my body could hardly take it. I dare say I would have started shooting up heroin if I hadn’t made that decision. I couldn’t be angry and scared and sad any longer. It would have killed me.’

‘You decided. Just like that?’ Malin is taken aback at how the words come out, almost angry, jealous.

Rebecka starts.

‘Sorry,’ Malin says. ‘I didn’t mean to sound aggressive.’

Rebecka clenches her jaw before going on. ‘I don’t think there’s any other way of doing it. I made up my mind, Officer. If you ask me, that’s the only way.’

‘And your adoptive parents?’ Zeke wonders.

‘I stopped seeing them. They were part of my old life.’

Wherever this case takes us, Malin thinks, it will be tied up with the warped logic of emotions; the sort of logic that makes someone torture another person and hang them up in a tree in the middle of a frozen plain.

Rebecka clenches her jaw again, then her face relaxes.

‘Unfair, I know. Of course it was. There was nothing wrong with them, but this was a matter of life and death, and I had to move on.’

Just like that, Malin thinks. What was it T.S. Eliot wrote?

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

‘Do you have family?’ Right question, Malin thinks. But I’m asking it for the wrong reason.

‘A son. A long time passed before I had a child. He’s eight now, he’s the reason I’m here. Have you got children?’

Malin nods. ‘A daughter.’

‘Then you know. Whatever happens, you want to be there for their sake.’

‘And the father?’

‘We’re divorced. He hit me once, by mistake really, I think, a hand flying out one night after a crayfish party, but that was enough.’

‘Did you have any contact with Bengt?’

‘With my brother? No, none at all.’

‘Did he ever try to contact you?’

‘Yes, he phoned once. But I hung up when I realised who it was. There was a before, and a now, and I was never, ever going to let them meet. Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

‘Not really,’ Malin says.

‘A week or so after he rang I had a call from some social worker. Maria, I think her name was. She asked me to talk to Bengt, even if I wouldn’t meet him. She told me how depressed he was, how lonely; she genuinely seemed to care, you know?’

‘So?’

‘I asked her never to call me again.’

‘One question, and it’s a harsh one,’ Malin says. ‘Did your father or Bengt ever abuse you sexually?’

Rebecka Stenlundh is remarkably calm.

‘No, nothing like that, ever. Sometimes I wonder if I’m suppressing something, but no, never.’

Then a long silence.

‘But what do I know?’

Zeke bites his lip. ‘Do you know if Bengt had any enemies, anything we ought to know?’

Rebecka Stenlundh shakes her head. ‘I saw the picture in the paper. It felt like everything printed there was about me, whether I liked it or not. You can’t escape, can you? Whatever you do, your past always catches up with you, don’t you think? It’s like you’re tethered to a post with a rope. You can move about, but you can’t get away.’

‘You seem to be managing very well,’ Malin says.

‘He was my brother. You should have heard his voice when he called. He sounded like the loneliest person on the planet. And I shut the door.’

A voice over the Tannoy: ‘Rebecka to the till, Rebecka to the till.’

‘What were you doing on Wednesday evening last week?’

‘I was with my son in Egypt. Hurghada.’

Hence the suntan, Malin thinks.

‘We got a last-minute deal. This cold drives me crazy. We got home on Friday.’

Malin finishes her coffee and stands up. ‘I think that was everything,’ she says. ‘Yes, I think so.’

24

Have I forgiven you, sister?

It didn’t start with you, and it doesn’t end with you. So what is there to forgive, really?

Arrange your apples in rows, raise your child the way we never were. Give him love. Mark your flesh with it.

I can’t watch over you. But I can drift about and see you, wherever you choose to run.

I devoured Maria Murvall’s friendliness like sandwiches made from ready-sliced loaves, like smoked sausage, like unsalted butter. I washed the way she told me to, I ironed my trousers, I listened to what she said, believed in her theories about dignity. But how dignified was what happened in the forest?

How clean?

How pure?

You ought to be drifting with me, Maria, instead of sitting where you sit.

Shouldn’t you?

Shouldn’t we all drift and glide about, like that green Volvo down there on the motorway?

Huskqvarna.

Lawnmowers and hunting rifles. Shotguns for all manner of prey and a matchstick troll looking out over Lake Vättern. The artist, John Bauer, drowned in those waters when his boat capsized. No trolls saved him. Is he resting in one of his dense forests now?

No music in the car. Malin refused. And the coughing of the engine reminds her to turn on her mobile.

It rings at once.

‘You have one new message…’

‘This is Ebba Nilsson. Social worker. You tried to get hold of me last night. I’m home all morning, so feel free to call me back.’

Add number. Call.

One, two, three rings.

No answer again? Ah.

‘Yes, hello. Who is this?’

A shrill voice, like a larynx compressed by fat. Malin can see Ebba Nilsson before her: a short, round woman close to retirement.

‘This is Malin Fors from Linköping Police. We keep missing each other.’

Silence.

‘And what do you want?’

‘Bengt Andersson. You were his social worker for a while.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’ve heard about what’s happened?’

‘I haven’t been able to avoid it.’

‘Can you tell me anything about Bengt?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ Ebba Nilsson says. ‘I’m sorry. While I was working in Ljungsbro he only came to see me once. He was incredibly quiet, but that wasn’t so strange. He hadn’t had things easy… and of course looking the way he did.’

‘There’s nothing in particular that we should know?’

‘No, I don’t think so, but the girl who came after me got on well with him, or so I heard.’

‘Maria Murvall?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ve been trying to get hold of her. But the number we’ve got has been disconnected. Do you know where she is now?’

Silence on the line.

‘Oh, dear Lord,’ Ebba Nilsson eventually says.

‘Sorry?’

Zeke takes his eyes off the road, looks at Malin.

‘You were about to say something?’

‘Maria Murvall was raped up in the woods by Lake Hultsjön a few years ago. Didn’t you know?’

Rita Santesson: ‘Nothing that I want to go into.’

Maria.

Murvall.

The name, it was familiar.

The Motala Police case. I remember now. I should have made the connection.

Maria Murvall.

Was she the only one who cared, Bengt?

Even your sister turned her back on you.

The logic of emotions.

A swirl of snow blows across the road.

Was she the only one who cared, Bengt?

And she was raped.

25

Hultsjön Forest, late autumn 2001

What are you doing in the forest all on your own?

This late, little girl?

No mushrooms at this time of year, and too late for berries.

Dusk is falling.

Tree trunks, undergrowth, branches, treetops, leaves, moss and worms. They’re all getting ready for the most intimate abuse.

Child-killers. Rapists. Is it one man? Or several? A woman, women?

They creep up on you as you walk through the forest, whistling. The eyes. They see you. But you don’t see them.

Or are they waiting further on, the eyes?

Darkness is falling fast now, but you aren’t scared, you could walk this track with your eyes blindfolded, getting your bearings by smell alone.

The snakes, spiders, everything that decays.

An elk?

A deer?

You turn round, still, silence falls over the forest.

Walk on. Your car is waiting by the road; soon you’ll see Hultsjön lazing in the last of the evening light.

Then everything gets dark.

Footsteps on the track behind you.

Someone pulling your legs from under you, pressing you down on to the damp ground, hot and sweet breath on your neck. So many hands, so much force.

It doesn’t matter what you do. Snake-fingers, spider-legs, they eat through your clothes, the black roots of the trees stifle your screams, tying you for ever to the silence of the earth.

The worms crawl up the inside of your thighs, sticking out their claws, tearing your skin, your insides.

How coarse, how hard is a tree trunk?

Flesh and skin and blood. How hard?

No.

Not like that.

No one hears your screams in the black vegetation. And if they heard your screams, would they come?

No one is listening.

There is no salvation.

Only the damp, the cold and the pain, the relentless harshness that burns in you, tearing apart everything that is you.

For ever silent.

Sleep, dream, wake.

The sweet breath in the air you are breathing in the forest night. Naked body, bleeding body, doomed to wander the edge of the forest around Hultsjön.

You must have walked a long way.

You were breathing. The night-chill fled in panic when you crept out on to the road. The car headlights.

You had walked so far.

The lights grow, blind, corrode.

Is it death that is coming? Evil?

Again?

It came yesterday, didn’t it, with quick steps it ran up, from where it lay hidden behind scarred bushes.

26

‘Maria Murvall.’

Zeke rubs his fingers against the steering-wheel.

‘I knew I’d heard the name before. Shit. Me and names. She was the girl who was raped up by Hultsjön four years ago. A really nasty case.’

‘Motala Police.’

‘Right on the boundary, so they took it. They found her wandering about on a road almost ten kilometres from where it happened. Some truck-driver taking a load of shingle to a building site up in Tjällmo found her. She’d been torn to shreds, badly beaten as well.’

‘And they never caught him.’

‘No. I think it even got on to Crimewatch. They found her clothes and the place where it must have happened, but nothing else.’

Malin shuts her eyes. Listens to the sound of the engine.

A man hanging in a tree.

His concerned social worker raped four years ago. Wandering the forest.

Cornerhouse-Kalle. The debauched, mad father. A real man’s man.

And it all keeps popping up in the investigation, all mixed up, yet it still fits together, somehow.

Coincidence?

Try the theory out on Zeke.

‘Bengt Andersson. He must have come up during that investigation. If she really did care as much about him as everyone says.’

‘Must have done,’ Zeke says, pointing at a car they are overtaking. ‘I’ve been thinking about getting one of those Seats. They’re owned by Volkswagen these days.’

I know, Zeke, Malin thinks. Janne must have told me ten times or more when he got on to the subject of his cars.

‘Isn’t the car you’ve got now good enough?’

‘Murvall,’ Zeke says. ‘Isn’t that name familiar for some other reason as well?’

Malin shakes her head.

‘Me and names, Malin,’ Zeke says.

‘I’ll call Sjöman and ask him to order over the case files from Motala Police. Nordström there will get it sorted at once.’

Just as they are turning into Police Headquarters, the third social worker on the list calls, the one who took over after Maria Murvall.

‘It’s awful, what’s happened. Dreadful. Bengt Andersson was depressed, withdrawn. At one meeting he just mumbled, “What does keeping clean matter? What does keeping clean matter?” If I’m honest, I never drew any connection to the rape. But perhaps there was a link? But the rapist? Bengt Andersson? He wasn’t that sort of person. A woman can tell.’

Malin gets out of the car, her face forming an involuntary grimace as the cold hits her skin.

‘At any rate, I never got as close to him as Maria Murvall. She evidently cared about him outside her work as well, she got him to pull himself together. Almost like a big sister, as I understand it.’

They walk into the station.

Sjöman is standing at Malin’s desk, waving a bundle of fax paper in the air.

Their colleague in Motala evidently hadn’t needed to be asked twice.

Sven Sjöman is talking in a strained voice. Malin and Zeke are standing beside him. Malin wants to tell him to calm down, to think of his heart.

‘Bengt Andersson was one of the people the Motala force interviewed in connection with the rape of Maria Murvall. He had no alibi for that night, but none of the evidence found at the scene, nor anything else, ever pointed to him. He was just one of twenty-five of Maria’s clients who were questioned.

‘It’s pretty grim reading,’ Sjöman says, handing the papers to Zeke.

‘Reality is always worse than fiction,’ Zeke says.

‘She was, or rather is, the sister of the Murvall brothers,’ Sjöman goes on. ‘A gang of nutters out on the plain who were always causing trouble. Even if that was a long time ago now.’

‘The Murvalls! I knew it,’ Zeke says.

‘Must have been before my time,’ Malin says.

‘Tough bastards,’ Zeke says. ‘Really nasty.’

‘Evidently they found clothes in the forest with traces of DNA on them, but not enough to put together a profile.’

‘And on her body?’

‘It was raining that night,’ Sjöman says. ‘Everything got washed away, and evidently she was raped with a rough branch. She was scratched to hell, badly cut internally, it says here. They never worked out if she was penetrated any other way as well. There was no means of confirming it.’

Malin can almost feel the pain.

She raises her palms towards Sven. Thinks, That’s enough.

Maria Murvall. The angel of the lonely. What a lovers’ tryst you ended up having.

Malin can hear the words inside her. Wants to beat herself up, not be cynical now. Fors, don’t be cynical, never be cynical… Maybe I am already? Cynical?

‘She was never the same again,’ Sjöman continues. ‘According to the last notes, before the files were archived, she ended up in some sort of psychotic state. Apparently she’s in the secure unit at Vadstena Hospital. That’s the address given here, anyway.’

‘Have we checked?’ Malin asks.

‘Not yet, but that’s easily done,’ Zeke says.

‘Tell them it’s urgent police business if some doctor starts making a fuss.’

‘And we’ve had a message from Karin,’ Sven says. ‘She should have something for us later this afternoon about the holes in the glass.’

‘Good. I’m sure she’ll call when she’s done. What about the Old Norse angle?’ Malin asks.

‘Börje and Johan are working on it. They spoke to a Rickard Skoglöf and his girlfriend Valkyria Karlsson while you were down in Jönköping. They’re still following that angle.’

‘Did they get anything from those two?’

‘You never know,’ Sjöman says. ‘If you listen carefully, people may well say more than they think they are. We’re taking a closer look at them now.’

A woman doctor’s voice on the other end of the line.

‘Yes, we’ve got a Maria Murvall here. Yes, you can see her, but preferably no men, and as few people as possible. Oh, you’ll be coming in person, that sounds good.’

Then a long pause.

‘Just don’t expect Maria to say anything.’

27

The call from Karin Johannison came through when Malin had just got into her car and turned the ignition key.

‘Malin? Karin here. I think I know what caused those holes in the glass now.’

Malin sinks into the icy car seat. In just a second she feels cold air spreading through the car, and longs desperately for it to warm up.

‘Sorry, I was about to drive off. What have you found?’

‘I can safely say that they weren’t made by grit or stones, the edges are far too smooth for that. The holes have also caused some very large cracks, considering their size, so I think it’s impossible that anyone threw anything through the window.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘They’re bullet-holes, Malin.’

Holes in glass.

A new door opening.

‘Are you sure?’

‘As sure as I can be. An extremely small-calibre weapon. There’s no soot or powder on the holes, but that’s often the case with glass. But it could also mean they were made by an air-rifle.’

Malin sits in silence, thoughts running through her head.

A small-calibre weapon. Was someone trying to shoot Bengt Andersson?

Air-rifle. Boys getting up to mischief?

Forensics didn’t find anything odd in Bengt Andersson’s flat. No bullet wounds in his body.

‘In that case they must have been rubber bullets. Could that sort of ammunition have caused any of Bengt Andersson’s injuries?’

‘No, they cause a very particular type of bleeding. I’ve seen it before.’

Engine noise.

Malin, alone in her car, on her way to see a mute, raped woman.

‘Malin, you’ve gone quiet,’ Karin’s voice comes over the phone. ‘Have you gone off the road?’

‘It’s just me thinking,’ Malin says. ‘Could you go back to Bengt Andersson’s flat and see if you can find anything new? Take Zeke with you.’

Karin sighs, then says, ‘I know what you’re looking for, Malin. You can rely on me.’

‘Will you tell Sven Sjöman?’

‘He’s had an email already.’

What is it I, we, can’t see? Malin thinks as she presses the accelerator.

This police officer, senior physician Charlotta Niima thinks, must be ten years younger than me, and the way she looks at you, through you, watchful and weary at the same time, as if she could do with a decent holiday away from all this cold. Same thing with her body: athletic, but still slow in its movements, hesitant in front of me somehow. Hiding behind matter-of-factness.

She’s pretty, but she’d probably hate that word. And behind the penetrating eyes? What do I see there? Sorrow? But that must be to do with her work. What can’t she have seen? Just like me. It’s all a matter of compartmentalising, turning on and off like any other piece of machinery.

The black-framed glasses make Charlotta Niima look stern, but together with her big, red, permed hair, the glasses give her a slightly crazy look.

Maybe you have to be crazy to work with crazy people? Malin thinks. Unless you have to be entirely uncrazy?

There’s something manic about Dr Niima, as if she maybe uses her patients’ illnesses to keep her own problems under control.

Prejudices.

The hospital is housed in three whitewashed fifties buildings in a fenced-in area on the edge of Vadstena. Through the windows of Dr Niima’s room Malin can see the ice-covered Vättern, frozen almost to the bottom: stiff fish panting below the ice, trying to force their way through a viscous, treacherous liquid. Soon we won’t be able to breathe under here.

On the left, beyond the fence, she can make out the red-brick walls of the convent.

Birgitta. Prayer. Saints. Convent life.

She’s here alone. Woman to woman. Zeke didn’t protest.

The old madhouse, famous across the plain as a dumping ground for the lost, has been rebuilt as private apartments. Malin drove past the white art nouveau building on her way into the town. The white façades of the madhouse looked grey, and the drooping black branches of trees in the surrounding parkland must have heard a thousand madmen scream at night.

How could anyone choose to live in a place like that?

‘Maria has been here almost five years now. She hasn’t spoken once in that time.’ Niima’s voice, sympathetic, intimate, yet still distant. ‘She doesn’t express any wishes at all.’

‘Does she look after herself?’

‘Yes, she washes and eats. Goes to the toilet. But she doesn’t talk, and refuses to leave her room. The first year we had her under watch, and she tried to hang herself from the radiator a few times. But now, as far as we can determine, she isn’t suicidal.’

‘Could she live in a flat outside the hospital? With proper support?’

‘She fights if we try to get her out of her room. I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s completely incapable, in our evaluation, of surviving out in wider society. She appears to view her whole body as a sort of prosthesis, a replacement for something she’s lost. She’s methodical in her daily hygiene, and puts on the clothes we lay out for her.’

Dr Niima pauses before going on.

‘And she eats, three meals a day, but not enough to put on any weight. Complete control. But we can’t get through to her. Our words, even us as people, it’s like we don’t exist. Acutely autistic people can demonstrate similar symptoms.’

‘Drugs?’

‘We’ve tried. But none of our chemical keys has managed to break through Maria Murvall’s complex locking mechanisms.’

‘And why no men?’

‘She starts to cramp. Not always, but sometimes. Her brothers visit her occasionally. That goes okay. Brothers aren’t men.’

‘Any other visitors?’

Dr Niima shakes her head. ‘Her mother stays away. Her father died long ago.’

‘And her physical injuries?’

‘They’ve healed. But she had to have a hysterectomy. The things she had pushed inside her out in the forest did a great deal of damage.’

‘Is she in pain?’

‘Physical pain? I don’t think so.’

‘Therapy?’

‘You have to understand, Inspector Fors, it’s practically impossible to conduct therapy with someone who doesn’t speak. Silence is the soul’s most powerful weapon.’

‘So you think she’s somehow clinging on to herself through silence?’

‘Yes. If she talked, she’d lose her grip.’

‘This is where Maria lives.’

The female care assistant carefully opens the door, the third of seven in a corridor on the second floor of the building. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling make the linoleum floor of the corridor shine, and from inside one of the rooms comes a low groaning sound. Different detergent here to the old people’s home. Perfumed. Lemongrass. Like in the spa at the Hotel Ekoxen.

‘Let me go first and tell her who’s come to see her.’

Through the crack in the door Malin can hear the care assistant’s voice; it sounds like she’s talking to a child.

‘There’s a girl from the police who’d like to talk to you. Is that okay?’

No answer.

Then the care assistant comes back. ‘You can go in now.’

Malin opens the door wide, goes in through a little hall where the door to the shower and toilet is ajar.

A lunch tray with half-eaten food is on a table, there’s a television, a blue-green rug on the floor, a few motorbike and dragster posters on the walls.

And on a bed in one corner of the room, Maria Murvall. Her body seems not to exist, her whole being is a vanishing face surrounded by well-brushed blonde tresses.

You’re like me, Malin thinks. You’re a lot like me.

The woman on the bed takes no notice when Maria comes in. She sits still, her legs hanging over the edge of the bed, down to the floor; her feet are wearing yellow socks, her head is hanging forward. Her eyes are open; an empty yet strangely bright gaze, fixed on some indefinable point in the air filling the room.

Cascades of snow against the window-pane. It’s started to snow again. Maybe it will finally get a few degrees warmer.

‘My name is Malin Fors. I work as a detective inspector with the Linköping Police.’

No reaction.

Just silence and stillness in Maria Murvall’s body.

‘It’s very cold today. Windy, too,’ Malin says.

Idiot. Babbling. Better to get straight to the point. Do or die.

‘One of your clients at social services in Ljungsbro has been found murdered.’

Maria Murvall blinks, stays in the same position.

‘Bengt Andersson. He was found hanging in a tree. Naked.’

She breathes. Blinks again.

‘Was it Bengt that you ran into in the forest?’

A foot moving under yellow cotton.

‘I understand that you helped Bengt. That you tried extra hard for him to have a better life. Is that right?’

New cascades of snow.

‘Why did you care about him? Why was he different? Or were you like that with everyone?’

Words in the silence: Go now, don’t come here with your questions. Don’t you understand that I die if I listen to them, or, rather, the opposite, that I have to live if I answer. I breathe, but that’s all. And what does breathing mean anyway?

‘Do you know anything about Bengt Andersson that could help us?’

Why am I persisting with this? Because you know something?

Maria Murvall lifts her legs from the edge of the bed, shifts her spindly body to a lying position, her gaze following the same path as her body.

Just like an animal.

Tell me what you know, Maria. Use those words.

A black beast of prey in the forest. The same man as on a snow-clad, windswept plain?

Maybe?

No.

Unless?

Instead this: ‘Why do you think someone would want to hang Bengt Andersson in a tree in the middle of the Östgöta plain in the coldest winter in living memory?

‘Why, Maria? Didn’t he have enough to put up with as it was?

‘And who shot through his window?’

Maria shuts her eyes, opens them again. She breathes, resigned, as if breathing or not breathing had long ago lost their meaning. As if all that makes no difference at all.

Are you trying to comfort me?

What can you see that no one else sees, Maria? What can you hear?

‘Nice posters,’ Malin says before leaving the room.

In the corridor Malin stops the care assistant who is passing with a pile of orange handtowels in her arms.

‘Those posters on her walls, they don’t seem to belong here. Did her brothers put them up?’

‘Yes. I suppose they think they’ll remind her of home.’

‘Are her brothers here often?’

‘Just one of them. The youngest one, Adam. He comes every now and then, seems to feel guilty somehow that she’s here.’

‘Dr Niima said that more than one brother comes.’

‘No, just one. I’m sure.’

‘Did they get on particularly well?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe, seeing as he’s the one who visits. There was another one here once, but he couldn’t handle going into her room. He said it was too claustrophobic, that he couldn’t do it. He said it was just like a wardrobe, those were his exact words. Then he left.’

28

‘Are you there, Bengt?’

‘I’m here, Maria. Can you see me?’

‘No, I can’t see you, but I can hear you drifting.’

‘And there was me thinking that my drifting was silent.’

‘It is. But you know, I hear things others can’t hear.’

‘Were you scared?’

‘Were you?’

‘I think so, but after a while you realise that fear is pointless, and then it fades away. That’s what it’s like, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It isn’t too late for you, Maria. Not in the same way it is for me.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘It all fits together.’

‘It smells of loneliness here. Is that you or me?’

‘You mean the smell of apples? It’s neither of us. That’s someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘Them, him, her, all of us.’

‘The one who shot at your window?’

‘I remember getting home and seeing the holes, late, so late. I knew they were bullet-holes.’

‘But who shot them?’

‘I think they all shot at me.’

‘Are there more of them?’

‘If we all stick together then there are always more of us, aren’t there, Maria?’

Zeke is standing three metres behind Karin Johannison in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room of Bengt Andersson’s flat. His jacket is done up; the heat has been turned down to the minimum by the landlord, just enough to stop the water freezing and the pipes bursting. That’s happened in several places around the city this winter, peaking over Christmas when the smart folk disappeared to Thailand and wherever else they went, and their boilers slowed down, and bang! Water damage as a result.

I suppose my insurance premium will go up now, Zeke thinks.

Karin is kneeling on the floor, leaning over the sofa, picking at a hole in the stuffing with a pair of tweezers.

Zeke can’t help it, but when she leans forward like that, seen from the back, she looks quite acceptable, not to say desirable. Well proportioned. No question.

They drove out in silence. With his whole body he left her in no doubt that he would prefer not to have any small talk. And Karin concentrated on the road, but still seemed to want to talk, as if she had been waiting for a chance to be alone with him.

The hole that Karin is digging in is in a direct line from the window. But the hole could have been made by anything.

Then Karin twists and pulls her hand, saying, ‘That’s it, that’s it,’ and then triumphantly pulls out the tweezers.

She turns round, holding the tweezers towards him, and says, ‘If I look a bit longer, I promise I’m going to find a couple more of these little beauties.’

Malin is standing in the kitchen of her flat. She tries to shake off the image of Maria Murvall on her bed in that gloomy room.

‘You and Zeke carry on looking into the Murvall angle. But if the Æsir line suddenly needs more work, we’ll shift our focus on to that.’

Karim Akbar’s voice earlier at the run-through, sounding like the whole chain leading to Maria Murvall had been his idea. Nice to be able to concentrate on one thing, though.

Sven Sjöman: ‘We’ll have to pull out the Murvall brothers’ police records. And you and Börje, Johan, you carry on with the Æsir angle. Don’t leave any rune-stone unturned. And we’ll have to talk to Bengt Andersson’s neighbours again, check if they saw or heard anything unusual, now that we know the window was fired at.’

Rubber bullets.

Karin and Zeke had found three green bullets in the sofa. Presumably one for each hole. The right size to fit a small-calibre weapon, most likely a small-bore rifle.

Rubber bullets.

Too serious to be lads messing around. But maybe not completely serious either. Probably meant to cause pain. Torment. Just as you were tormented, Bengt.

Rubber bullets.

Impossible to say what sort of weapon the bullets were fired from, according to Karin: ‘You don’t get enough of an imprint from the barrel. Rubber’s more flexible than metal.’

Malin pours a splash of red wine into the stew bubbling in front of her.

Johan Jakobsson: ‘We questioned a few Æsir fanatics in the Kinda area today. As far as we could make out, they were just harmless, shall we say historically minded individuals. That professor at the university, he must be one of the biggest media-tarts I’ve ever come across. And he looks pretty clean. His boyfriend, a Magnus Djupholm, confirms the story about the cat.’

Media-tart.

The words made Karim prick up his ears, as if he had suddenly become aware of an ailment.

And they made Malin laugh to herself.

Johan had brought copies of the national evening tabloids, Aftonbladet and Expressen, to the meeting. Nothing on the front. But whole pages devoted to the professor, big pictures, ‘authority on Old Norse rituals’, describing how a midwinter sacrifice would take place, and implying that he thought it could happen again.

Sven was silent for almost the whole meeting.

Malin stirs the stew on the stove, inhaling the smell of white pepper and bay leaves.

Their murder is disappearing from the public consciousness. New murders, new scandals involving people on television, political manoeuvres.

What’s a hanging body in a tree worth when it’s no longer ‘new’? Ball-Bengt, you’re not news any more.

The front door opening into the hall.

Tove.

‘Mum, are you home?’

‘I’m in the kitchen.’

‘You’ve made dinner? I’m starving.’

‘Beef stew.’

Tove’s cheeks rosy, beautiful, the most beautiful cheeks in the world.

‘I saw Markus. We had coffee round his.’

A big white doctors’ villa in Ramshäll. Dad a surgeon, one of the ones in white and green, his mum a doctor in the ENT clinic. Two doctors: a common combination in this city.

The phone rings.

‘Can you get that?’ Malin says.

‘No, you get it.’

Malin picks up the phone from the wall where it’s attached.

‘Malin, Dad here. How are things?’

‘Good. But cold. I’ve been watering the plants.’

‘That’s not why I’m calling. Is everything all right?’

‘I just said it was. Everything’s fine.’

‘So it’s cold up there, isn’t it? We saw on TVSverige that there are radiators bursting in Stockholm.’

‘That’s been happening here too.’

He’s got something on his mind, Malin thinks. I wonder if he’ll manage to get it out. ‘Did you want anything in particular?’

‘Well, just that I… No, we can talk about it another time.’

Can’t be bothered to wheedle it out of him, can’t be bothered.

‘Whatever you like, Dad.’

‘Is Tove there?’

‘She just went into the bathroom.’

‘Well, it wasn’t important. Talk to you soon, bye for now.’

Malin is left standing with the phone in her left hand. No one can end a conversation as abruptly as her father. He’s there, then he’s gone.

Tove comes back into the kitchen.

‘Who was that?’

‘Grandad. He sounded a bit odd.’

Tove sits down at the table, looks out of the window. ‘All the clothes people have to wear at this time of year make them look ugly,’ she says. ‘They all look fat.’

‘Do you know what,’ Malin says. ‘There’s enough here for Janne as well. Shall we call and ask if he wants to come over?’

A sudden desire to see him. To touch something. Feel him. Just a whim.

Tove brightens up.

‘You call him,’ Malin says, and Tove’s smile vanishes as quickly as it arrived.

‘You’ll have to do that for yourself, Mum.’

One, two, three, four, five rings. No answer.

Maybe he’s on duty at the fire station.

At the station the operator says, ‘He’s off today.’

His mobile.

Janne’s mobile, straight to the answering service: ‘Hi, you’ve reached Janne. Leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you.’

No message.

‘Couldn’t you get hold of him?’

‘No.’

‘Just the two of us, then, Mum.’

Tove is asleep in bed.

It is just after half past eleven. Malin is wide awake on the sofa.

She gets up, looks into Tove’s room, at the perfect girl’s body under the covers, the chest rising and falling.

Brothers aren’t men.

An overflow of life.

Warm, warm blood circulating. Another body in another bed.

Janne, Janne, where are you? Come here. Come back. There’s meat stew on the stove.

Can’t. I’m driving sacks of flour over a mountain in Bosnia, the road’s been mined. They need my help, here.

We need you.

Malin goes into her bedroom. Is sitting quietly on the edge of the bed when her mobile rings.

She rushes out into the hall and finds her mobile in her jacket pocket.

‘Daniel Högfeldt here.’

First anger, then resignation, then hope.

‘Have you got anything for me?’

‘No, nothing new. What do you think?’

‘I think you’d be welcome to come round, if you’d like to.’

‘Are you home?’

‘Yes. Are you coming?’

Malin looks at herself in the hall mirror, sees how the contours of her face seem to get weaker the more she looks at it.

Why resist?

She whispers down the phone, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m coming.’

She drinks a large glass of tequila before leaving the flat. Leaves a note on the hall floor.

Tove

They called from work. I’ve got my mobile

Mum