Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

In the darkness

Are you coming? Are you coming with love?

Sketches, notes, and my little black book with little black words, pictures of now, of the future, of the past, of blood.

I’m not mad. It’s only a part of me that’s given in, that’s come loose. What good did it do, talking to that psychologist?

It’s in the wardrobe at home, the notebook; here there are only crumbs, apples and everything that needs doing, that’s already done and needs doing again.

Let me in, do you hear? It’s cold out here. Let me in.

Why are you laughing? You laughter is tearing me apart.

It’s cold and damp. I want to go home. But this is probably my home now.

I want to join in and play.

Receive some love.

That’s all.

29

Wednesday, 8 February

Daniel Högfeldt’s bedroom.

What am I doing here?

Are those his hands on my body? He’s eager, firm, caresses, nips, slaps. Does he hit me? Oh, let him. Let him scratch a little, it might as well hurt a bit.

I give way. Let it happen. His body is hard and that’s enough, I don’t give a damn who he is.

Grey walls. My hands near the chrome headboard, he nibbles at my lips, his tongue in my mouth and he pumps and pumps.

Sweat. Minus thirty-four degrees.

Tove, Janne, Dad, Mum, Ball-Bengt, Maria Murvall.

Daniel Högfeldt on top of me, in charge. Do you think I’m yours, Daniel? We can pretend that if you like.

It hurts. And it’s nice.

She takes control, rolls away from him, forces him down on the mattress. Clambers on, in.

Now, Daniel. Now.

I disappear into the lovely pain. And it’s wonderful.

Can’t that be enough?

Malin is lying next to Daniel, twists herself up into a sitting position. Looks at the sleeping muscular body beside hers. Gets up, puts on her clothes, leaves the flat.

It’s five o’clock. Linköping deserted.

She walks towards Police Headquarters.

I heard you, Malin, I was awake, but you didn’t notice.

I wanted to keep you here, I wanted that. It’s so damn cold out there, I wanted to say that I wanted you to stay. Even the very toughest, people who seem hard, need warmth, everyone does.

There’s nothing original in warmth.

But it still means everything.

I dig and root about in people’s lives, try to uncover their secrets. There’s no warmth in that, but I still like doing it.

How did I get like this?

The Murvall brothers.

Adam, Jakob, Elias.

Malin has their files in front of her on the desk, leafing through them at random, reading, drinking coffee.

Three people. Poured into almost the same mould.

The brothers’ police records read like the report of a boxing match.

Round one: shoplifting, hash, souped-up mopeds, driving without a licence, obstruction of official duties, break-ins in kiosks, thefts from Cloetta trucks.

Round two: assault, fighting in bars.

Round three: poaching, extortion, stealing boats, possession of illegal weapons. Small-bore rifles, Husqvarna.

Then after that it’s like the match is over.

The last notes in the brothers’ files are some ten years old.

So what’s happened to the Murvall brothers? Have they calmed down? Got families? Gone straight? Got smarter? Never the last of these. It doesn’t happen. Once a gangster, always a gangster.

Which one is worst?

Notes, extracts from interviews.

The youngest brother, Adam. A hash-smoking petrol-head with violent tendencies, if the file is to be believed. He beat one of the drivers at Mantorp horse-trotting track until he was pouring with blood, after he failed to win a race that Adam had high hopes of.

Illegal betting? No question. Three months in Skänninge secure unit. Two elk poached in February. One month in Skänninge. Beating up his girlfriend. Suspicion of attempted rape. Six months.

The middle brother, Jakob. Illiterate, according to the files. Dyslexic. Prone to violent outbursts. And what does someone like that do? Hits a teacher in year seven, breaks the arm of a contemporary outside the kiosk in Ljungsbro. Juvenile institution. Dealing hash in the playground when he returned, broke a policeman’s jaw when they came to pick him up. Six months in Norrköping, extortion of businesses in Borensberg, drink-driving. One year in Norrköping. Then nothing. As if whatever was wrong suddenly stopped.

The eldest brother, Elias. A perfect example. Some sort of talent for football, in the reserve team as a thirteen-year-old, until he broke into the kiosk at Ljungsbro IF and was expelled from the club. Causing death by dangerous driving when he hit a tree, drunk. Six months in Skänninge. Grievous bodily harm in the Hamlet restaurant. He smashed a beer-glass into another customer’s head. The man lost the sight in one eye.

‘Slow-witted, easily led, insecure.’ The psychologist’s words. Slow-witted? Insecure? Did people really write things like that?

Little sister Maria.

So these are your brothers, Maria? The ones who put up the posters in your room? Adam? In their language, his language, I suppose that’s a sign of concern.

Bengt’s blue body in the tree.

The revenge of three brothers?

Round four: murder?

Malin rubs her eyes. Sips her third cup of coffee.

She hears the door of the office open, feels a cold draught.

Zeke’s voice, rasping and tired: ‘Early today, Fors? Or just a very long night?’

Zeke puts on the radio.

Low volume.

‘Interesting reading, isn’t it?’

‘They seem to have settled down,’ Malin says.

‘Or they just got a bit smarter.’

Zeke is about to say something else, but his voice is hidden by the sound of the radio. The song that is playing fades out, then an annoying jingle, then Malin’s friend’s voice: ‘That was…’

Helen.

She grew up out there, Malin thinks. Almost the same age as the brothers. Maybe she knows them? I could call her. I’ll call her.

‘Hello, Malin.’

The voice as soft and sexy over the phone as on the radio.

‘Can you talk?’

‘We’ve got three minutes and twenty-two seconds until this track is over. But I can give us twice as long if I don’t bother to talk before the next one.’

‘I’ll get straight to the point, then. Did you know three brothers by the name of Murvall, who grew up out in Vreta Kloster?’

‘The Murvall brothers. Sure. Everyone knew them.’

‘Infamous?’

‘You could say that. They were always known as “the crazy Murvall brothers”. They were pretty nasty. But all the same… there was something tragic about them. You know, they were the ones who everyone knew would never turn into anything, but who rage and rebel against the system. You know, the ones who are sort of on the periphery right from the start. Who are, I don’t know, maybe doomed always to be outside normal society, knocking to get in. They were branded, somehow. They lived in Blåsvädret. The worst, most windswept hellhole on the whole plain. That was Murvall family territory. I wouldn’t be surprised if they still live there.’

‘Do you remember Maria Murvall?’

‘Yes. She was the one who was going to make something of herself. She was in the parallel class to me.’

‘Did you hang out with her?’

‘No, she was sort of on the sidelines as well, somehow. As if she were branded the same way, like her good grades were almost, I don’t know, it sounds awful, but a meaningless attempt to break free. Her brothers protected her. There was one boy who tried to bully her about something, I forget what, and they sandpapered his cheeks. Two horrible wounds, but he didn’t dare tell anyone who did it.’

‘And the father?’

‘He did odd jobs. Blackie, that was his name. He was actually quite fair, but everyone called him Blackie. He had some sort of accident, broke his back and ended up in a wheelchair. Then he drank himself to death, although I think he’d already made a start on that. I’m pretty sure he broke his neck when he rolled down the stairs in their house.’

‘Mother?’

‘There were rumours that she was some sort of witch. But I dare say she was just an ordinary housewife.’

‘A witch?’

‘Gossip, Malin. A shitty little rural dump like Ljungsbro lives off rumour and gossip.’

The voice on the radio.

‘And this next track is for my good friend Malin Fors, the brightest star of Linköping Police.’

Zeke chortles.

‘Carry on the good work, Malin. Soon you’ll be world-famous. Right now she’s investigating the case of Bengt Andersson, which everyone in the city has such an interest in. If you know anything about the case, call Malin Fors at Linköping Police. Anything at all could help them.’

Zeke is chuckling louder now. ‘You’re going to get such a torrent of calls.’

The music starts.

‘Country Boy’ by Eldkvarn.

‘This is my love song. This is my time on earth…’

Plura Jonsson’s voice, tremulous with longing and sentimentality.

‘… I am what I am… a country boy, call me a country boy…’

What am I? Malin thinks.

A country girl?

Not out of love. Maybe out of obligation.

30

As the song on the radio ends, the phone on Malin’s desk rings.

‘That’s a bit quick,’ Zeke says.

‘Could be anything,’ Malin says. ‘Doesn’t have to be about the case.’

The phone seems to vibrate on its next ring, demanding to be taken seriously.

‘Malin Fors, Linköping Police.’

Silence on the line.

Breathing.

Malin makes a quick gesture to Zeke, holding up her hand.

Then a gruff voice that’s only recently broken: ‘I was the one with the computer game.’

Computer game? Malin ransacks her memory.

‘Playing Gnu Warriors.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You came to ask me about-’

‘Now I remember,’ Malin says, and sees Fredrik Unning sitting in the basement of the smart house, joystick in hand, sees the father looking at his son, aloof.

‘Yes, I asked you if there was anything else we ought to know.’

‘Yes, that’s right. I heard on the radio.’

The same fear in his voice now as there was in his eyes then. A quick, fleeting feeling, gone as soon as it appeared.

‘And you know something?’

‘Can you come out here, you and that other bloke?’

‘We’re heading out towards Ljungsbro later today. It may take a while, but we’ll be there.’

‘No one needs to know, do they? That you’re coming?’

‘No, we can keep this between us,’ Malin says, thinking, It depends on what you’ve got to say, of course. And it strikes her how easily she is prepared to lie outright to a young person, as long as it helps the investigation. And she knows she would hate to be treated like that. But still she says, ‘This is just between us.’

‘Okay.’

Then a click, and Zeke’s curious expression on the other side of the desk.

‘Who was that?’ he says.

‘Do you remember Fredrik Unning? The teenager playing computer games in that posh house?’

‘What, him?’

‘Yes, he’s got something to tell, but we’ll do the Murvalls first. Don’t you think?’

‘Murvalls,’ Zeke says, gesturing towards the door. ‘Now what could be troubling young Unning?’

‘When you cross this road property prices sink by thirty per cent,’ Zeke says, as they turn off at a deserted Preem garage on to the road leading to the collection of houses that goes by the horribly appropriate name of Blåsvädret, ‘windy weather’. The cold crackles through the melancholy outside the car. The chill seems to twist in the wind, picking up snow from the dead drifts, throwing it in transparent waves across the windscreen.

‘God, it’s windy,’ Malin says.

‘And the sky is white.’

‘Shut up, Zeke. Just shut up.’

‘I love it when you use platitudes, Malin, I just love it.’

An eerie place. That’s the immediate feeling.

Good to have Zeke alongside. Because if anything happens, he can switch in a fraction of a second. Like when that junkie whipped out a syringe and held it to her neck. She didn’t even have time to see what was happening, but Zeke lashed out and knocked the syringe from the junkie’s hand. Then she saw Zeke kick the man to the ground and carry on kicking him in the stomach.

She had to drag Zeke off to stop him.

‘Don’t worry, Fors, it’ll look like a couple of punches. But it’ll hurt more. He was trying to kill you, and we can’t have that, now, can we?’

Another, even more powerful, gust.

‘God, this is weird, there was hardly any wind on the main road. What is this?’

‘Blåsvädret is a Bermuda triangle,’ Zeke says. ‘Anything can happen here.’

One single street.

Blåsstigen, ‘windy way’.

Five red-painted wooden houses on one side, garages and workshops on the other, one breezeblock building with drawn blinds. Another larger whitewashed house further on at the end of the road, almost invisible through the swirling snow.

The houses in Blåsvädret that aren’t inhabited by the Murvall family are silent, their owners presumably at work. The clock on the dashboard says 11.30, almost lunchtime, and Malin feels her stomach rumble.

Food, please, not coffee.

The Murvall brothers live next to each other. The last two wooden houses and the breezeblock building are theirs, the white house their mother’s. The windows of the wooden houses are dark, and car wrecks are randomly strewn about the plots, half covered by snow and ice. But there are lights on behind the blinds of the brick building. A broken, bowed, black iron-railing rocks in the wind. The workshop opposite has heavy, rusty metal doors, and in front of it stands an old green Range Rover.

Zeke stops the car.

‘Adam’s house,’ Zeke says.

‘Okay, let’s see if he’s at home.’

They do up their jackets, get out. More wrecked cars. But not like Janne’s. These are wrecked beyond salvation; no loving hand will ever try to fix them up. In the drive is a green Skoda pick-up. Zeke peers at the back, running his glove through the snow, shakes his head.

The wind is howling beyond words, great angry gusts, with hidden little bursts of Arctic chill that easily and nonchalantly push through the fabric of their jackets, the wool of their jumpers.

Sand on the concrete steps. The bell doesn’t work and Zeke bangs on the door, but the house is silent.

Malin looks in through the green glass of the door. Vague shapes of a hallway, children’s clothes, toys, a gun cabinet, mess.

‘No one at home.’

‘Probably at work at this time of day,’ Malin says.

Zeke nods. ‘Maybe they’ve gone straight.’

‘It’s odd,’ Malin says, ‘do you see how the houses seem to belong together somehow?’

‘They’re one and the same,’ Zeke says. ‘Not physically, but if houses have souls, then these share one.’

‘Let’s go to the mother’s house.’

Even though the white wooden villa is just seventy-five metres down the road, it’s impossible to make out anything but the outline, and the white wood that occasionally shimmers through the surrounding whiteness.

They walk towards the house.

As they get close the gusts of snow and chilly haze disperse and they see that the whole garden is full of mature apple trees. Their branches sway darkly in the wind, and Malin breathes in through her nose, closing her eyes briefly and trying to pick up the smell of apple blossom and fruit that must be here in spring and autumn.

But this world is scentless.

She opens her eyes.

The building’s façade has settled and the crooked wood seems tired, yet somehow still defiant. Light is streaming through the windows.

‘Looks like Mum’s home,’ Zeke says.

‘Yes,’ Malin says, but before she can say more she is interrupted.

A man, tall and with at least a week’s worth of stubble around a well-defined mouth. He’s dressed in green overalls, and has opened the door of the white house. The man is standing on the porch and staring askance at them.

‘And who the fuck are you two? If you take another step on this property I’ll get my shotgun and blow your brains out.’

‘Welcome to Blåsvädret,’ Zeke says with an expectant smile.

‘We’re from the police.’

Malin holds up her ID as they approach the man on the porch.

‘Can we come in?’

And now she sees them.

All the people, the family watching them through the windows of the white house: tired women, children of various ages, a woman in a shawl with deep-set black eyes, a sharp nose and thin white hair draped over the shiny skin of her cheeks. Malin looks at the faces, the half bodies behind the windows, and thinks that it’s as if the bits of these people that she can’t see had grown together. That this family’s thighs, knees, shins and feet were bundled together, inseparable, different, yet somehow superior.

‘What do you want with us?’ The man on the porch throws the words at them.

‘And who do we have the honour of talking to?’

Zeke’s bluntness seems to have an effect.

‘Elias Murvall.’

‘Okay, Elias, let us in. Don’t leave us standing out here in the cold.’

‘We don’t let anyone in.’

From the house comes a sharp female voice, the mark of someone used to getting her own way.

‘Let the police in, now, boy.’

Elias Murvall steps aside, follows them into the hall, where they are hit by the smell of burned cabbage.

‘And you can take your shoes off.’ The woman’s voice again.

The hall is full of winter coats, garishly coloured children’s jackets, cheap padded jackets, an army raincoat. Ahead of her Malin can see a living room: period furniture on Wilton rugs, reproductions of Johan Krouthén’s sun-drenched Östgöta meadows. A misplaced computer screen of the latest, thinnest design.

Malin pulls off her Caterpillar boots, feeling exposed in her bare socks among these people.

The kitchen.

Around an enormous table laid for lunch in the middle of the room sits what must be the whole Murvall family, silent and expectant, more people than she saw in the windows, no longer grown together. Malin counts three women with small children, babies in their arms, children of various ages on other chairs; shouldn’t some of them be at school? Home schooling? Or are they still too young?

Two more men in the room, one with a neatly trimmed beard, the other clean-shaven. They’re dressed in the same sort of overalls as Elias who let them in, and they have the same powerful appearance. The clean-shaven one, who looks youngest, must be Adam. He is knocking a napkin on the table as if the tabletop were a door, his eyes such a dark blue that they are almost black like his mother’s. The middle brother, Jakob, thinning hair, sitting in front of the stove, his gut showing through his overalls, looks at them with hazy eyes, as if he’s encountered thousands of police officers who wanted something from him, all of whom he’s told to go to hell.

The mother is standing by the stove. The short, thin old woman is dressed in a red skirt and grey cardigan. She turns towards Malin.

‘On Wednesdays my family gets cabbage bake.’

‘Nice,’ Zeke says.

‘What do you know about that?’ the mother says. ‘Have you ever tasted my cabbage bake?’

At the same time she points with one hand at Elias, gesturing as if to say, Sit down at the table. Now!

Several of the children lose patience, jump down from their chairs and run out of the kitchen into the living room, then up the stairs.

‘Well?’ The old woman stares at Malin, then at Zeke.

Zeke doesn’t hesitate, in fact he even smiles slightly as he tosses the words into the room: ‘We’re here on account of the murder of a Bengt Andersson. He was one of the people questioned in connection with the rape of your daughter, Maria Murvall.’

And Malin, in spite of the incident the words refer to, feels a glow inside. This is what it should be like. Zeke is entirely unbowed, heads straight to the heart of the hornets’ nest. Commands respect. I forget sometimes, but I know why I admire him.

No one round the table moves.

Jakob Murvall leans languidly across the tabletop, takes a cigarette from a packet of Blend and lights it. A baby in one of the women’s laps whimpers.

‘We don’t know anything about that,’ the woman says. ‘Do we, lads?’

The brothers round the table shake their heads.

‘Nothing.’ Elias grins. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Your sister was raped. And someone who was questioned during the investigation has been found dead,’ Zeke says.

‘What were you all doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’ Malin asks.

‘We don’t have to tell you a fucking thing,’ Elias says, and Malin thinks that he says the words in an exaggeratedly tough voice, as if he doesn’t want to look weak in front of the others.

‘Well, yes you do, actually,’ Zeke says. ‘Your sister-’

Adam Murvall heaves himself up, throws out his arms and shouts across the table, ‘That bastard could very well have raped Maria. And now he’s dead, and that’s a fucking good thing.’

The colour of his eyes shifts from blue to black as he spits out the words.

‘Maybe she can get some peace now.’

‘Boy, sit down.’ The mother’s voice from the stove.

Now several of the babies are crying, and the women try to comfort them, and Elias Murvall pulls his brother down on to his chair.

‘That’s better,’ their mother says when silence has fallen once again. ‘I think the bake is ready now. And the potatoes.’

‘The old Æsir beliefs,’ Malin says. ‘Do you follow them?’

Scattered laughter from the adults round the table.

‘We’re proper men,’ Jakob Murvall says. ‘Not Vikings.’

‘Do you have guns in the house?’ Malin asks.

‘We’ve all got hunting rifles,’ Elias Murvall says.

‘How did you get licences for them, with your records?’

‘What, the sins of our youth? That’s a long time ago.’

‘Have you got a small-bore rifle?’

‘What guns we’ve got is none of your business.’

‘So you didn’t use a short-bore rifle to fire through the window of Bengt Andersson’s flat?’ Malin asks.

‘Has someone fired through his window?’ Elias Murvall says. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll be too bothered about that now, will he?’

‘We’d like to see your gun cabinet,’ Zeke says. ‘You do keep your guns in one, I presume? And we’ve got a lot of questions. We’d like to talk to you one by one. Either here and now, or down at the station. Your decision.’

The women are all looking at me, Malin thinks. Their eyes are trying to work out what I want, as if I might try to take something away from them that deep down they don’t really want anyway, but which they would defend to the death.

‘You can call my boys in for questioning. And if you want to see the gun cabinet you’ll have to come back with a warrant,’ the old woman says. ‘But right now, the Murvall boys are going to eat, so you can leave now.’

‘We’ll be wanting to talk to you as well, Mrs Murvall,’ Zeke says.

Rakel Murvall lifts her nose towards the ceiling. ‘Elias, show the police officers out.’

Malin and Zeke are standing in the cold outside the house, looking back at the façade, and the shapes behind the ever more fogged windows. Malin thinks how nice it is to have her shoes back on again.

‘That there are still people living like that in Sweden today,’ she says. ‘Completely shut off from everything. It’s anachronistic in an almost bizarre way.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Zeke says. Then he reaches for the first explanation that seems to come into his mind. ‘It’s benefits,’ he says. ‘It’s all because of bloody benefits. I bet the whole lot of them are getting unemployment benefit, social support and everything else too. And the child support for a horde of kids like that must amount to a small fortune every month.’

‘I’m not so sure about benefits,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe they don’t get anything. But anyway. This is the twenty-first century. In Sweden. And here’s a family that seems to live entirely according to its own rules.’

‘They muck about with engines and hunt and fish while we work our backsides off. Do you expect me to feel any sympathy for them?’

‘Maybe for the children. Who knows what their lives are like?’

Zeke stands still, evidently thinking.

‘Living outside society isn’t that unusual, Malin. In fact it isn’t even anachronistic. Look at those people in Borlänge, Knutby, Sheike, and half of sodding Norrland. They’re all around us, and as long as they don’t upset the consensus too much, no one cares. Let them live their miserable lives in peace, and everyone else can live a normal life. The poor, the mad, the immigrants, the handicapped. No one cares, Malin. Except to get validation of the normality of their own lives. And who are we anyway to have opinions about how other people choose to live? It might be more fun than we think.’

‘I don’t want to think that,’ Malin says. ‘At any rate, as far as Bengt Andersson is concerned, they’ve got a motive.’

They head off towards the car.

‘Nice sort of people, anyway, the Murvalls,’ Zeke says as he turns the key in the ignition.

‘You could see the fury in Adam Murvall’s eyes,’ Malin says.

‘There are several of them, they could have done it together. And shooting at his window with rubber bullets? No problem for gentlemen like them. We’ll have to get a warrant so we can check their guns. But they may have more without licences. I dare say they’ve got the contacts to get hold of weapons and ammunition.’

‘Do you really think we’ve got enough evidence to get a warrant? There’s not really anything concrete, in legal terms, to suggest that they might be involved.’

‘Maybe not. We’ll have to see what Sjöman says.’

‘He was so incredibly angry. Adam Murvall.’

‘Imagine it was your sister, Malin, wouldn’t that make you angry?’

‘I haven’t got any brothers or sisters,’ Malin says. Then she adds, ‘I would have been livid.’

31

From a distance, and seen from above like this, Lake Roxen looks like a flattened greyish-white eiderdown. The trees and shrubs, almost tremulous, are pressed down along the edge of the lake, and the fields in front of it, cropped, wind-blasted, wait for a warmth that it is hard to believe will ever come.

White bricks and brown woodwork, stacked boxes in the best tradition of the 1970s, four privileged dwellings gathered together on a hillside above a steep slope.

They have knocked on the door with the lion’s head, polished jaws gaping open.

The first time they spoke to Fredrik Unning, Malin was convinced he had something to say that he was frightened to come out with, and now she’s certain, and with every step she takes towards the house expectation grows within her.

What is hidden in here?

They will have to be careful. Zeke beside her is restless, his breath misting from his mouth, his head bare, open for the cold to dig its stubby, infected claws into.

Rattling behind the door.

A crack that widens to an opening with Fredrik Unning’s thirteen-year-old face behind it, his slightly pudgy, unexercised body in a light blue Carhartt T-shirt and grey army-style trainers.

‘You’ve been ages,’ he says. ‘I thought you were coming straight away.’

If only you knew, Malin thinks, how well you’ve just summarised what a lot of people think about the police, Fredrik.

‘Can we come in?’ Zeke asks.

Fredrik Unning’s room is on the third floor of the house. The walls are covered in skateboarding posters. Bam Margera from Jackass hangs in the air high above a concrete ramp, and on a reproduction of a vintage poster a young Tony Alva glides along a Los Angeles backstreet. Thin white curtains shield the view out of windows that stretch from floor to ceiling, and the pink carpet is stained in places. In one corner is a stereo that looks new, a floor-mounted flat-screen television with at least a forty-five-inch screen.

Fredrik Unning sits on the edge of the bed, focused on them this time, his previous nonchalance vanished, and gone too are his parents; his insurance broker father has taken his boutique manager wife on a little trip to Paris. ‘They go there every now and then. Mum likes shopping and Dad likes the food. It’s nice to be on my own.’

Empty pizza boxes in the kitchen, half-eaten Gorby pies, fizzy-drink bottles and an overflowing bag of rubbish in the middle of the floor.

Malin is next to Fredrik Unning on the bed, Zeke by the biggest window in the room, a dark silhouette against the light.

‘Do you know anything about Bengt Andersson that we ought to know?’

‘If I tell you anything, no one else will find out that I was the one who told you, will they?’

‘No,’ Malin says, and Zeke nods in agreement, adding, ‘This will stay between us. No one will know where the information came from.’

‘They never left him alone,’ Fredrik Unning says, staring at the curtains. ‘They were always getting at him. It was like an obsession.’

‘Getting at Bengt Andersson?’ Zeke over by the window. ‘Who was getting at him?’

And Fredrik Unning gets scared again, his body slumps, moves away from Malin and she thinks how fear has become increasingly common around her over the years, how person after person seems to have understood that silence is always safest, that every word uttered carries the potential for danger. And maybe they’re right.

‘Bengt,’ Fredrik Unning says.

‘Who? It’s okay,’ Malin says. ‘You can do it.’

And her words help Fredrik to relax.

‘Jocke and Jimmy. They were always making fun of him, Ball-Bengt.’

‘Jocke and Jimmy?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are their real names? Jocke and Jimmy?’

Fresh hesitation. Fresh fear.

‘We need to know.’

‘Joakim Svensson and Jimmy Kalmvik.’ Fredrik Unning says their names in a firm voice.

‘And who are they?’

‘They’re in year nine in my school, they’re real bastards. Big and mean.’

Shouldn’t you be at school now? Malin thinks, but she doesn’t ask.

‘What did they do to Ball-Bengt?’

‘They used to follow him, tease him, shout things at him. And I think they messed up his bike, and threw things at him, stones and stuff. I think they might even have poured some sort of sludge through his letterbox.’

‘Sludge?’ Zeke asking.

‘Flour, dirt, water, ketchup, anything, all mixed together.’

‘And how do you know this?’

‘They forced me to join in sometimes. Otherwise I’d get beaten up.’

‘Did you get beaten up?’

Shame in Fredrik Unning’s eyes, fear: ‘They won’t find out that I’ve told you, will they? The bastards torture cats as well.’

‘In what way?’

‘They catch them and stick mustard up their backsides.’

Brave lads, Malin thinks.

‘Have you seen them do that?’

‘No, but I’ve heard it from other people.’

Zeke from the window, his voice like the crack of a whip. ‘Might they have shot through his window with a rifle? Did you join in with that as well?’

Fredrik Unning shakes his head. ‘I’ve never done anything like that. Anyway, where would they get the gun from?’

Outside the clouds have thinned slightly, and through a few cracks some tentative rays of light are spreading across the greyish-white ground, making it clear and vibrant, and in her mind’s eye Malin can see what the Roxen must look like in summer from up here, in warm light, when the rays have full access to a completely blank surface. But sadly a winter like this one doesn’t make it easy to think of warmth.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says. ‘Those two sound pretty tough, Jocke and Jimmy. Serious hard cases.’

‘I feel sorry for Fredrik Unning,’ Malin says.

‘Sorry for him?’

‘You must have noticed how lonely he is? He must have been prepared to do anything to hang out with the tough kids.’

‘So they didn’t force him?’

‘I don’t doubt that they did. But it’s not that simple.’

‘It doesn’t sound like they come from bad backgrounds.’

Fredrik Unning’s words a short while before: ‘Jimmy’s dad works on oil platforms and his mum’s a housewife. Jocke’s dad’s dead and his mum works as a secretary.’

Malin’s phone rings. Sven Sjöman’s name on the screen.

‘Malin here.’

She tells him about their visit to the Murvalls, and about what they’d learned from Fredrik Unning.

‘We’re thinking of going to talk to Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson right away.’

‘We need to have a meeting,’ Sven says. ‘They’ll have to wait an hour or two.’

‘But-’

‘We’ve got a team meeting in thirty minutes, Malin.’

The children are defying the cold.

The playground outside the windows of the meeting room is full of sluggish little moon-figures staggering about in their padded winter overalls. Blue children, red ones and one little orange warning child: be careful with me, I’m little, I might break. The assistants shiver in grey-blue fleece trousers, their breath like thick smoke. They jump on the spot when they’re not helping some little one who’s fallen over, flapping their arms round their bodies.

If this cold doesn’t give up soon, everyone will have to learn how to live with it. Like a broken back.

Börje Svärd’s report, people with links to Rickard Skoglöf. Interviews with kids who seem to live out their lives in front of a computer or as characters in role-playing games. ‘Anything but real life.’

The hesitation in Börje’s body. Malin can see it, smell it. As if all of life had given him just one single lesson: don’t take anything for granted.

The results of the background checks.

Rickard Skoglöf seemed to have had a normal upbringing in an ordinary working-class home in Åtvidaberg; his father worked at Facit until it was shut down, then at Adelnäs fruit farm, where his son had also worked during summer holidays when he was at secondary school. Two years in sixth form. Then nothing. Valkyria Karlsson grew up on a farm in Dalsland. She got two-thirds of the way through an anthropology course at Lund University after sixth form in Dals Ed.

Karim Akbar. Also hesitant, but nonetheless: ‘This Æsir angle. Keep digging, there’s something there.’

His voice a little too confident, as if he were taking on the role of the convinced, encouraging boss.

Johan Jakobsson hollow-eyed. Winter vomiting bug, long nights awake, changed sheets. New wrinkles in his brow every morning, deeper and deeper. Daddy, where are you? Don’t want to, don’t want to.

Malin shuts her eyes. Has no energy for this meeting. Wants to get out and work. To talk to Ljungsbro’s own teenage bullies, see what they know. Maybe they can give them some leads, maybe they got hold of a gun and are responsible for firing into Ball-Bengt’s flat, maybe their bad behaviour just got out of hand; who knows what two imaginative fifteen-year-olds are capable of?

Tove and Markus in her parents’ apartment.

On the bed.

Malin can see them in front of her.

‘And then we have the teenagers who made Bengt Andersson’s life a misery,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘You and Zeke will have to question them. Get them at school after this meeting. They ought to be there at this time of day.’

Sure, Sven, sure, Malin thinks, then says, ‘If they aren’t at school we’ll find out where they live, and we’ve got their mobile numbers.’

After the two lads, she wants to bring the Murvall brothers in for questioning, bring the old woman in and put some pressure on her. Listen to the wives.

The brothers.

The looks on the women’s faces.

No friendliness, just suspicion against the stranger. Alone, even if they stick together.

What is that sort of loneliness? Where does it come from? From the repeated unkindnesses of the world around them? From the fact that they keep getting no as an answer? From everybody. Or is that sort of loneliness granted to each of us? Is it within all of us, and, if it gets the chance to grow, does it simply overwhelm us?

The awareness of loneliness. The fear.

When did I first see that loneliness, that antipathy in Tove’s face? When did I first see anything other than pure kindness and joy in her eyes?

She was maybe two and a half. Suddenly there among the innocence and charm was an element of calculation and anxiety. The child had become a human being.

Loneliness. Fear. Most people manage to hold on to some of the child’s joy, the naivety, when they encounter other people, when they feel a sense of belonging. Manage to overcome the possibly innate loneliness. Like Fredrik Unning tried to do today. Reach out a hand, as if he had realised he was worth more than being left to his own devices by his parents and forced to go along with boys who would really rather have nothing to do with him.

Happiness is possible.

Like with Tove. Like with Janne, in spite of everything. Like with myself.

But the women round the Murvall family table? Where did their unadulterated joy disappear to? Where did it go? Can it have run out for good? Could it be true, Malin thinks, as Sven summarises the state of the investigation, that there is only a finite amount of happiness free of guile, and that every time some of that sort of happiness is lost, it is gone for good and replaced instead by muteness, hardness?

And what happens if we are forced to give in to loneliness?

What sort of violence might be born then? In that point of fracture? In that final exclusion?

The child holding out its arms to its mother, to a nursery-school assistant.

Look after me, carry me.

Of course I’ll carry you.

I won’t just abandon you.

‘Mum, I was thinking of staying at Dad’s tonight, is that all right?’

Tove’s message on her mobile. Malin listens to the message as she walks through the open-plan office.

Malin calls her.

‘It’s Mum.’

‘Mum, you got my message.’

‘I got it. It’s okay. How are you getting out there?’

‘I’ll go down to the station. His shift ends at six, so we can head out then.’

‘Okay, I’m probably going to be working late anyway.’

Sjöman’s words at the meeting: ‘I’ve already called them in for questioning. If the whole Murvall family doesn’t turn up here tomorrow, we can go and get them. But we haven’t got enough for a search warrant as far as the guns are concerned.’

When she ends the call to Tove, Malin calls Janne. Gets the answering service.

‘Is it right that Tove’s staying the night at yours? Just checking.’

Then she sits down behind her desk. Waits. Sees Börje Svärd hesitantly twisting the ends of his moustache on the far side of the room.

32

The façade of the main building of Ljungsbro school is matt grey, the low, dark-red-tiled roofs are covered by a thin layer of snow; small swirls of frozen moments, circular patterns etched on to several of the larger surfaces.

They park by the craft rooms, aquariums for handicrafts in a row of single-storey buildings along the road leading into town.

Malin looks into the rooms, empty, with dormant saws, lathes, firing and welding equipment. They walk past what must be a technology room; pulleys and chains hanging from the ceiling, one by one, as if ready for use. When she looks in the other direction she can just make out Vretaliden care home, and in her mind’s eye she sees Gottfrid Karlsson sitting in his bed, under an orange health service blanket, quietly driving her on: ‘What happened to Bengt Andersson? Who killed him?’

Malin and Zeke walk to the main building, past what must be the school dining room. Inside the frosted windows the staff are scrubbing pans and work surfaces. Zeke pulls open the door of the main entrance, eager to escape the cold, and in the large, airy space some fifty pupils are all talking at once, their breath fogging the windows on to the school grounds.

No one pays any attention to Malin and Zeke, their attention utterly absorbed by the conversations that belong to teenage life.

Tove’s world.

This is what it looks like.

Malin notices a thin boy with long black hair and an anxious look, talking to a pretty blonde girl.

On the far side of the room a sign above a glass door announces: Head’s Office.

‘Vamos,’ Zeke says as he catches sight of the sign.

Britta Svedlund, head of Ljungsbro school, has them shown in at once, perhaps the first time the police have been to the school in her time here.

But probably not.

The school is known to be problematic, and every year several of its pupils are sent to reform school, somewhere far out in the countryside, for further education in low-level criminality.

Britta Svedlund crosses her legs, her skirt riding up her thighs, revealing an unusual amount of black nylon, and Malin notes that Zeke has trouble controlling his eyes. He surely can’t imagine that the woman in front of them is beautiful, cigarette-wrinkled, worn and grey-haired as she is.

The male curse, Malin thinks, trying to get comfortable on her chair.

The walls of the office are lined with bookcases and reproductions of Bruno Liljefors paintings. The desk is dominated by an antiquated computer.

After listening to Malin and Zeke’s explanation of why they are there, Britta Svedlund says, ‘They’re leaving this spring, Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson, Jimmy and Jocke; they’ve only got a couple of months left and it’ll be a relief to be rid of them. Every year we have a few rotten eggs, and we get to send a few of them away. Joakim and Jimmy are craftier than that. But we do what we can with them.’

Malin and Zeke must have succeeded in looking curious, because Britta Svedlund goes on: ‘They never do anything illegal, or if they have, they’ve never been caught. They come from stable backgrounds, which is more than you can say about a lot of pupils at this school. No, what they do is bully people, students and staff alike. And they’re competitive. I swear that every lamp that gets broken in this school has been kicked in by them.’

‘We’ll need their parents’ phone numbers,’ Zeke says. ‘Home addresses.’

Britta Svedlund taps on her keyboard, then writes down their names, addresses and numbers on a piece of paper.

‘Here you are,’ she says, handing the note to Malin.

‘Thanks.’

‘And Bengt Andersson?’ Zeke asks. ‘Do you know about anything they may have done to him?’

Britta Svedlund is suddenly defensive. ‘How did you hear about this? I don’t doubt that it’s correct. But how do you know?’

‘I’m afraid we can’t tell you that,’ Malin replies.

‘To be honest, I don’t care what they get up to outside these walls. If I cared about what the students get up to in their own time, I’d go mad.’

‘So you don’t know,’ Zeke says.

‘Precisely. But what I do know is that they don’t play truant more than the exact amount that means they still get their grades, which are actually surprisingly good.’

‘Are they at school at the moment?’

Britta Svedlund taps at her keyboard.

‘You’re in luck. They’ve just started their woodwork class. They don’t usually miss that one.’

Inside the woodwork room there is a smell of fresh sawdust and scorched wood, with a background note of varnish and solvent.

When they walk into the room the teacher, a man in his sixties with a grey cardigan and matching grey beard, leaves one pupil at a lathe and comes over to meet them.

He holds out a hand covered in shavings and sawdust, then pulls it back with a smile, and Malin notices his warm blue eyes, which have evidently not lost their sparkle with age. Instead he raises his hand in a welcoming wave.

‘Well,’ he says, and Malin picks up a strong smell of coffee and nicotine on his breath, classic teacher’s breath. ‘We’ll have to greet each other like Indians. Mats Bergman, woodwork teacher. And behind me we have class 9B. I take it you’re from the police? Britta called and said you were on your way.’

‘That’s right,’ Malin says.

‘So you know who we’re looking for. Are they here?’ Zeke says.

Mats Bergman nods. ‘They’re right at the back, in the paint room. They’re working on a design for the petrol tank on a moped.’

Behind the teacher Malin can see the paint room. Squeezed into a corner, grey-green tins of paint on shelves behind shabby glass walls, two boys inside. They’re sitting down, so Malin can only see their blond hair.

‘Are they likely to be a problem?’ she wonders.

‘Not in here,’ Mats Bergman says, smiling again. ‘I know they can be rowdy outside, but they behave themselves in here.’

Malin pulls open the door to the glass-box paint room. The boys look up from their stools, their eyes dull at first, then watchful, tense and anxious, and she looks down at them with all the authority she can muster. A red skull painted on a black petrol tank.

Bullies?

Yes.

Shooters?

Possibly.

Murderers?

Who knows? She’ll have to leave that question open.

Then the boys get up; they’re both well-built, a head taller than her, both dressed in saggy hip-hop-style jeans and hooded jackets with designer logos.

Spotty teenage faces, they’re oddly similar in their puppyish look, bony cheeks, noses a bit too big, suggesting nascent lust and an excess of testosterone.

‘Who are you?’ one of them asks as he gets up.

‘Sit down,’ Zeke snarls behind her. ‘NOW!’

As if hit by a collapsing ceiling he is pressed back down on to the paint-spattered stool again. Zeke shuts the door and they leave a dramatic pause before Malin says, ‘I’m Malin Fors, from the police, and this is my colleague Zacharias.’

Malin pulls her ID from the back pocket of her jeans.

She holds it out to the boys, who are now looking even more anxious, as if they’re worried that a whole ocean of misdemeanours has caught up with them.

‘Bengt Andersson: we know you tormented him, bullied him and made fun of him. We want to know all about that, and what you were doing on the night between last Wednesday and Thursday.’

Terror in the boys’ eyes.

‘So who’s who? Jimmy?’

The one dressed in a blue hoodie nods.

‘Okay,’ Malin says. ‘Start talking.’

The other boy, Joakim Svensson, starts to make excuses. ‘What the fuck, we were just having a laugh. Cos he was so fat. Nothing wrong with that.’

Jimmy Kalmvik goes on: ‘He was, like, completely fucked up, chasing after balls every match. And he stank. Of piss.’

‘And that made it okay for you to torment him?’ Malin can’t hide the anger in her voice.

‘Sure.’ Jimmy Kalmvik grins.

‘We’ve got witnesses who say you vandalised Bengt Andersson’s home, and that you attacked him with stones and water-bombs. And now he’s been found murdered. I can take you in to the station here and now if you don’t talk,’ Malin says.

She falls silent and lets Zeke continue: ‘This is murder. Can you get that into your thick skulls?’

‘Okay, okay.’

Jimmy Kalmvik throws out his arms and looks at Joakim Svensson, who nods.

‘Attacked him? We threw stones at him, and we cut off the power to his flat, and sure, we put shit through his letterbox, but now he’s dead anyway so what does it matter?’

‘It might matter a very great deal,’ Zeke says in a calm voice. ‘What’s to say you didn’t go too far one day? That you got too close. That there was a fight. And you just happened to kill him? Try to see it from our side, boys. So what were you doing on Wednesday night?’

‘How would we have got him out there?’ Joakim Svensson says, then goes on: ‘We were at Jimmy’s, watching a DVD.’

‘Yeah, my mum was at her bloke’s. Dad’s dead so she’s got a new one. He’s all right.’

‘Can anyone confirm that?’ Malin asks.

‘Yes, we can,’ Joakim Svensson says.

‘No one else?’

‘Do you need anyone else?’

Teenage boys, Malin thinks. They switch between arrogance and fear in a matter of seconds. A dangerous mixture of overblown self-assurance and doubt. But still: Tove’s Markus seemed very different. What would Tove make of these two? They’re not exactly heroes in the Jane Austen mould.

‘You silly little sod,’ Malin says. ‘Murder. Got it? Not torturing cats. Of course we need it confirmed, you can be fucking sure of that. What did you watch?’

‘Lords of Dogtown,’ the two boys answer at once. ‘Fucking good film,’ Jimmy Kalmvik says. ‘It’s about blokes who are as sound as we are.’

Joakim Svensson grins.

‘And we’ve never tortured any cats, if that’s what you think.’

Malin looks over her shoulder.

Outside the lathes and sanders and saws are in action as if nothing has happened. Someone is hammering frenetically at a box-like construction as she turns to face the boys again.

‘Have you ever fired a gun at Bengt Andersson’s flat?’

‘Us? A gun? Where would we have got that from?’

Innocent as lambs.

‘Are you interested in the Æsir belief-system?’ Zeke asks.

And they both look nonplussed. Stupid, or guilty, impossible to tell which.

‘Interested in what?’

‘The Æsir belief-system.’

‘What the fuck’s that?’ Jimmy Kalmvik says. ‘Believing in asses? Yeah, I believe in them.’

Full-blown chauvinist pigs, when they’re scarcely out of short trousers. Noisy, rowdy. But dangerous?

‘Torturing cats? So he blabbed, Unning,’ Jimmy Kalmvik says. ‘The little shit. He’s so fucking useless.’

Zeke leans over to him, his eyes looking like a snake’s. Malin knows what that looks like. She hears his voice, its gruffness as cold as the night approaching outside the windows.

‘If you touch Fredrik Unning I will personally see to it that you have to eat your own entrails. Shit and all. Just so you know.’

33

‘Yes, she can stay over.’

Janne’s text arrives at 20.15. Malin is tired, on her way home in the car from the gym at work, obliged to clear her head after a day full of too much human crap.

They went back to the station after talking to Ljungsbro’s bullies, and in the passenger seat beside Zeke she summarised the situation to herself.

Bengt Andersson is teased and bullied and possibly more than that by testosterone-charged little bastards. We’ll have to talk to their parents tomorrow. See where it comes from. Nothing to get them on so far. The offences against Bengt Andersson that they admitted to stopped being chargeable with his death, and may have been youthful mischief as much as anything else.

The shots through the living-room window.

Æsir nutters out on the plain. The murder apparently carried out as a heathen ritual.

And then the Murvall family casting its large shadow across the whole investigation. Weapons in a gun cabinet.

Maria Murvall silent and mute, raped. By whom? Bengt?

Malin wanted to answer no to that question. But knew that she couldn’t yet close any doors in any direction, to any room. Instead she had to try to get an overview of something impossible to get an overview of. Listen to the voices of the investigation.

What else was still to emerge from the darkness of the plain, the forests?

‘Yes…’

She sees the first word of the text.

Her concentration leaves the road for a few moments.

Yes.

We made that promise to each other once, Janne, but we didn’t manage to find a way through what lay before us. How over-confident can you get?

Malin parks and hurries up to the flat. She fries a couple of eggs, sinks into the sofa and turns on the television. She gets stuck on a programme about some excitable Americans competing to build the most perfect motorbike.

The programme cheers her up in an uncomplicated way, and after a couple of advertising breaks she realises why.

Janne could easily be one of those Americans, happy beyond belief to let go of routine, of his memories, and just devote himself to his real passion.

She sees the bottle of tequila on the table.

How did that get there?

You put it there, Malin, when you cleared the plate and the remains of your eggs.

Amber liquid.

Shall I have a bit?

No.

The motorbike programme is over.

Then the doorbell rings and Malin thinks it must be Daniel Högfeldt, transgressing the final boundary and turning up unannounced, like they were officially in a relationship.

Hardly, Daniel. But maybe.

Malin goes out into the hall and pulls open the door without checking through the peephole. ‘Daniel, you bastard…’

No.

Not Daniel.

Instead a man with blue-black eyes, a smell of engine oil, grease and sweat and aftershave. Burning eyes. They are screaming, almost in a fury, at her.

He stands outside the door. Malin looks into him: anger, despair, violence? He’s so much bigger than he was in the kitchen. What the hell is he doing here? Zeke, you should be here now. Does he want to come in?

Her stomach clenches, she feels scared, in a fraction of a second she starts to tremble, invisibly. His eyes. The door, have to shut the door, nothing puppyish about this man’s determination.

She slams the door, but no, a heavy black boot in the gap, a fucking boot. Hit it, kick it, stamp on it, but the steel toe-cap makes her stockinged feet useless, and the naked pain is hers instead.

He’s strong. He puts his hands in the gap and starts to push the door open.

No idea to try and stop him.

Maria Murvall. Is the same thing happening to me?

Scared.

A thought more than a feeling now.

Adam Murvall.

Did you hurt your sister? Is that where the look in your eyes comes from? Is that why you got so angry today?

Nothing but fear. Force it aside.

Where’s my jacket, with my pistol? But he’s just staring at me, smiling, leering, and then he stares again, confused, pulls his foot back, doesn’t force his way in, pulls his hands back, turns and leaves as quickly as he must have come.

Shit.

Her hands are shaking, her body twitchy with adrenalin, her heart racing.

Malin looks out into the stairwell. There’s a note on the stone steps, shaky handwriting: Let Murvall rest. You should leave us the fuck alone.

As if all this were a steak, or dough, or a tired old man. Then a vague threat. You should…

Now Malin feels it again, the fear, it bubbles up as the adrenalin runs out of her body and fear becomes terror, and fast, shallow breathing takes over. What if Tove had been at home? Then the anger of terror.

How the hell could he be so fucking stupid?

The man outside the door.

He could have taken me, just like that. Broken me.

I was alone.

She goes back to the sofa. Sinks down. Resists the temptation to drink tequila. Five minutes pass, ten, maybe half an hour before she pulls herself together and calls Zeke.

‘He’s just been here.’

‘Who?’

Suddenly Malin can’t say his name.

‘The one with blue-black eyes.’

‘Adam Murvall? Do you want a patrol?’

‘No, for heaven’s sake. He’s gone.’

‘Fuck, Malin. Fuck. What did he do?’

‘I think you could say that he threatened me.’

‘We’ll pick him up at once. Come in as soon as you’re ready to. Or do you want me to come and pick you up?’

‘I’ll be fine on my own, thanks.’

Three cars with blue lights, two more than just a few hours ago. Adam Murvall sees them through the window, they stop outside his house; he makes himself ready, knows why they have come, why he did what he did.

‘You have to say no.’

And a thousand other things. Little sister, big brother, events in the forest; if you persuade yourself of one truth, perhaps a different truth doesn’t exist?

‘Go and pay a visit to that female pig, Adam. Give her the note, then leave.’

‘Mother, I…’

‘Go.’

The doorbell rings. Upstairs Anna and the children are asleep, his brothers sleeping in their own houses. Four uniformed officers outside the door.

‘Can I put my jacket on?’

‘Are you arguing with us, you bastard?’

And the police are on him, he’s fighting for breath on the floor, they force him down and Anna and the children are standing on the stairs, screaming and shouting, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.

In the yard other policemen are holding his brothers back as they lead him like a chained wild dog to the waiting van.

Further off, in the illuminated window, stands Mother. He sees her, in spite of his bowed, stiff back.

34

The cold eats up the last of the anxiety and fear, and the effects of adrenalin have already worn off. The closer Malin gets to Police Headquarters, the more prepared she feels to face Adam Murvall now, and the other brothers tomorrow. Because however much they may want to live outside society, they have stepped into it now, and after that step there is no return, if there ever was.

When Malin walks past the old fire station, she comes to think of her mum and dad, without knowing quite why. How she gradually realised that her mother was always trying to make their home seem smarter than it was, but that the few trained eyes that set foot over their threshold must have realised that the rugs were of low quality, that the prints on the walls came from vast print-runs, that the whole décor was an attempt to appear significant. Unless it was something else?

Maybe I should ask you next time we meet, Mum? But you’d probably just push my question aside, even if you doubtless understood what I meant.

‘What an idiot,’ Zeke says.

Malin hangs her jacket on the back of the chair behind her desk, and the whole station is breathing expectation, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee is noticeable the way it usually is only in the mornings.

‘Not too smart, was it?’

‘Well, I’m not so sure,’ Malin says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re the ones setting the pace here. Have you thought about that?’

Zeke shakes his head. ‘Don’t make things more complicated than they already are. Are you okay?’

‘Oh, I’ll be fine.’

Two uniformed male officers come in from the staffroom, their cheeks glowing with warm coffee.

‘Martinsson,’ one of them calls. ‘Is your lad going to get a few goals against Modo?’

‘He was bloody good against Färjestad,’ the other one says.

Zeke ignores them, pretending that he’s busy, hasn’t heard.

Karim Akbar comes to Zeke’s rescue. Stops alongside him and Malin.

‘We’re bringing him in,’ Karim says. ‘Sjöman has arranged for the van to pick him up. They ought to be here any minute.’

‘What can we hold him on?’ Malin wonders.

‘Threatening a police officer in her own home.’

‘He rang on my door, and left a note.’

‘Have you got the note?’

‘Of course.’

Malin digs in her jacket pocket, pulls out the folded sheet of paper, holds it out to Karim, who carefully unfolds it and reads.

‘No problem,’ he says. ‘An obvious case of obstructing a criminal investigation, on the verge of threatening behaviour.’

‘It is,’ Zeke says.

‘This is directed at you personally, Malin. Any idea why?’

Malin sighs. ‘Because I’m a woman. I think it’s as simple as that. Have a go at the easily scared woman. Tiresome.’

‘Prejudice is always tiresome,’ Karim says. ‘It couldn’t be anything else?’

‘Not that I can think of.’

‘Where’s Sjöman?’ Zeke asks.

‘On his way in.’

A commotion over in reception.

Are they coming now? No, no flashing lights outside.

Then she sees him: Daniel Högfeldt, gesticulating, talking non-stop, but nothing can be heard through the bulletproof, soundproofed pane of glass between the open-plan office and reception, just a familiar face, a figure in a leather jacket who wants something, knows something, looks serious but who somehow always seems to be playing a game.

Alongside Daniel is the young photographer. She is taking picture after picture of Ebba the receptionist, and Malin wonders if her nose-ring could ever get caught in the camera, if her rasta plaits ever get in the way of the lens. Börje Svärd is trying to calm Daniel down, then he just shakes his head in resignation and walks away.

Daniel glances in Malin’s direction. Self-satisfaction washes across his face. Possibly also longing? Playfulness? Impossible to tell.

Fixed expression, Malin thinks.

‘Meet the press,’ Karim says, smiling at her as the skin on his face seems to change and become entirely new. Then he adds, ‘By the way, Malin. You look like it’s all getting to you. Is everything okay?’

‘Getting to me? You’d never say that to a male colleague,’ Malin says and turns towards her computer, trying to look busy.

Karim smiles again. ‘But Fors, it was just an innocent remark, no harm intended.’

Börje comes over to them. A look of faint amusement on his face, like someone who knows something no one else does, but isn’t telling.

‘The pride of the press corps. He wanted to know if Adam Murvall is suspected of the murder, or if we’re bringing him in for something else. He got angry when I said, “No comment.”’

‘Don’t annoy the press for no reason,’ Karim says. ‘They’re bad enough as it is.’ Then: ‘How does he know we’ve got something going on right now?’

‘Eight police, eight mobile phones,’ Zeke says.

‘Plus ten others,’ Malin says.

‘Plus ridiculously low wages,’ Karim adds, before leaving them and heading off towards Daniel.

‘What was that about?’ Börje says. ‘An attempt to show solidarity with the foot soldiers?’

‘Who knows?’ Zeke says. ‘Maybe he’s had an epiphany that’s gone beyond getting his own face noticed.’

‘He’s okay,’ Malin says. ‘Stop mucking about.’

Then blue lights do start to flash urgently outside the entrance and soon their gym-pumped colleagues are opening the doors of the white police van.

Muscles.

Iron fists on Adam Murvall’s upper arms, bent back and up, the metal of the handcuffs cutting into his wrists, then a jerk, and his body leans forward instinctively to protect itself. His head is bent downwards, and their blue-clad legs, black boots and the magnetic blue light make the snow-covered tarmac look like a star-studded sky. Camera flashes. Automatic doors opening. One sort of cold exchanged for another.

A shrill voice, woman or man?

‘Adam Murvall, do you know why you’ve been arrested?’

Do you think I’m stupid?

Then another door, a blue and beige pattern under his feet, voices, faces, the young girl, a couple of moustaches.

‘Take him into the interview room right away.’

‘Which one?’

‘One.’

‘We’re waiting for Sjöman.’

A firm male voice. He probably thinks his accent can’t be heard. But he’s just a fucking coon.

Through the window of the interview room Malin sees Sven Sjöman turn on the tape recorder, she hears him give the date and time and his own name and the name of the person being questioned and the case number.

She sees Sjöman sit down on the black-lacquered metal chair.

The room.

Four metres by four.

Grey walls covered in perforated acoustic panels. A large mirror that doesn’t fool anyone: behind that mirror I’m being watched. The ceiling is painted black with recessed halogen spots. Confidences are built up, broken, guilt is allocated, admitted. The truth will out, and the truth needs silence and calm.

No one is calmer than Sven.

He has the gift.

The ability to get strangers to feel trust, to make a friend of someone who is an enemy. Briefed: ‘What’s it like where they live? Inside their homes? Details, give me details!’

On the other side of the table: Adam Murvall.

Calm.

Hands in handcuffs in front of him on the polished silver tabletop, the beginnings of bruises just above the metal rings. In the relative gloom the colour of his eyes fades and for the first time Malin notices his nose, how it sticks out tentatively at the root, then juts out in a sharp tip before easing into two flared nostrils.

Not really a peasant’s nose.

Not a tap, as they say on the plain.

‘So, Adam,’ Sven says. ‘You couldn’t help yourself?’

Adam Murvall’s face doesn’t move an inch, he just shifts his hands, making a shrieking sound of metal on metal.

‘We don’t have to talk about that now. And not about your sister either. We can talk about cars, if you’d rather.’

‘We don’t have to talk at all,’ Adam Murvall says.

Sven leans forward over the table. With a voice that is the very essence of friendliness and confidence he says, ‘Come on, tell me a bit about all those cars you’ve got at home in your gardens. I dare say you get quite a bit of money from breaking them apart?’

35

Vanity, Malin. Find a way into their stories through vanity. Then they’ll open up, and once they’ve opened up things usually turn out okay.

Sven Sjöman.

A master at coaxing, at getting people to talk.

Adam Murvall thinks that this policeman has been at it for a long time, but not long in this city, because then he should have remembered me. Because he couldn’t have forgotten me. They usually never forget. Or is he pretending? Now they’re standing behind the mirror, staring at me; fine, go on staring, what do I care? You think I’m going to talk, but how can you even think that? Don’t bother with the cars, but, sure, if you’re wondering about the cars I can always talk about them; what’s so secret about the cars?

Adam reluctantly feels his antipathy slip a little.

‘You weren’t here ten years ago,’ Adam Murvall says. ‘Where were you then?’

‘Believe me,’ Sven says, ‘my career is very dull. Ten years ago I was a detective inspector in Karlstad, but then the wife got a job here and I had to make the best of it.’

Adam Murvall nods and Malin can see he’s happy with the answer. Why does he care about Sjöman’s CV? Then it hits Malin: if Sjöman had been here for a while, he ought to have remembered the brothers.

Vanity, Malin, vanity.

‘What about the cars, then?’

‘Them? They’re just something we do.’

Adam Murvall sounds confident, his voice a well-oiled engine.

‘We take them apart and sell the good bits.’

‘Is that all you live off?’

‘We’ve got the petrol station as well. The one on the road down by the aqueduct. The Preem garage.’

‘And you make a living from that?’

‘More or less.’

‘Did you know Bengt Andersson?’

‘I knew who he was. Everybody knew that.’

‘Do you think he had anything to do with the rape of your sister?’

‘Shut up about that. Don’t talk about it.’

‘I have to ask, Adam, you know that.’

‘Don’t talk about Maria, her name shouldn’t be grunted by your sort.’

Sven makes himself comfortable, nothing in his body language giving any indication that he’s remotely upset by the insult.

‘Are you and your sister close? I’ve heard that you’re the one who visits her.’

‘Don’t talk about Maria. Leave her in peace.’

‘So that was why you wrote the note?’

‘This is nothing to do with you. We’ll sort this out ourselves.’

‘And what were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday?’

‘We ate dinner at Mother’s. Then I went home with my family.’

‘So that’s what you did? You didn’t hang Bengt up in that tree, then? Did you sort that out yourselves as well?’

Adam shakes his head. ‘Pig.’

‘Who? Me or Bengt? And was it you or one of your brothers who shot through the window into his living room? Did you creep down there one evening, just like you crept to Inspector Fors’s flat tonight? To leave a message?’

‘I don’t know anything about any shots through any damn windows. I’m not saying anything else now. You can keep on all night. From now on I’m saying nothing.’

‘Like your sister?’

‘What do you know about my sister?’

‘I know she was kind-hearted. Everyone says so.’

The muscles of Adam Murvall’s face relax slightly.

‘You know things don’t look good for you, don’t you? Threatening an officer, resisting arrest, obstructing an investigation. With your background, those are pretty serious charges.’

‘I didn’t threaten anyone. I was just handing over a letter.’

‘I know how angry you can get, Adam. Were you angry with that repulsive fat Bengt? The man who raped your sister? The man who ruined her kind heart? Well? Adam? Did you hang-’

‘I should have.’

‘So you-’

‘You think you know it all.’

‘What is it I don’t know?’

‘Go to hell.’ Adam Murvall whispers the words, before he slowly puts his finger in front of his mouth.

Sven turns off the tape recorder, gets up. He walks out of the room, leaving Adam Murvall alone behind him. He sits improbably straight-backed, as if his spine were one single beam made of steel, impossible to bend.

‘What do you think?’ Sven Sjöman looks round at them.

Karin Akbar watchful by the door.

‘There’s something that doesn’t fit,’ Malin says. ‘Something.’ But her brain can’t work out what.

‘He’s not denying it,’ Johan Jakobsson says.

‘They’re hard men,’ Zeke says. ‘Deny, admit? Never, either one would be giving in. It just isn’t an option for people like them.’

‘Sven’s decided to hold him. We’ll stick him in our coldest cell tonight, see if that softens him up,’ Karim says, and the group falls silent; no one knows if he’s serious or just joking.

‘That was a joke,’ he says. ‘What did you think? That I was going to turn this station into some Kurdish hellhole?’

Karim laughs. The others smile.

The clock on the viewing-room wall. The black hands indicate twenty past eleven.

‘I think,’ Malin says, ‘that it might be worth talking to the whole Murvall family. That’s what I think. Tomorrow.’

‘We can hold him for a week. The brothers and mother are due in tomorrow. We can bring the wives in as well.’

Behind the soundproofed glass Malin watches as two uniformed custody officers lead Adam Murvall out of the interview room, off to a cell in the detention unit.

The sky is crystal clear.

The Milky Way is smiling at humanity; the far-travelled light is dim yet simultaneously comforting and warm.

Malin is standing with Zeke in the car park, beside the black Mercedes belonging to Karim Akbar.

Almost midnight.

He is smoking one of his rare cigarettes. His fingers look like they’re turning blue with the cold, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

‘You should take it a bit easier, Fors.’

The light from the stars fades.

‘A bit easier with what?’

‘With everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Just come down a gear or two, slow down.’

Malin stands still, waiting for the warmth of the moment to reappear, but it’s taking its time, it’s never going to come.

Zeke puts out his cigarette, hunts for his car keys.

‘Do you want a lift?’

‘No, I’ll walk,’ Malin says. ‘I need a bit of fresh air.’

Adam Murvall lies on his bunk in the police station, the blanket pulled round his muscular frame, and thinks of the words Blackie always used to say, over and over again like a mantra, when he used to sit drunk in his wheelchair in the kitchen.

The day you give in it’s over. Over, got it?

Blackie gave in. And he never even realised.

Then Adam Murvall thinks of Mother, of how she can rely on him like he has always been able to rely on her. She has somehow always stood like a wall between them and all the bastards.

Adam isn’t the sort who’d talk, and the children, they must be asleep by now, even if it took Anna a long time to get them off.

Adam Murvall sees seven-year-old Anneli’s thin ribcage rise and fall, he sees three-year-old Tobias’s wavy blond hair against a sheet with its pattern of blue sailing-boats, and he sees the little eight-month-old lad on his back in his cot. Then Adam falls asleep, dreaming about a dog standing outside a door in the middle of winter. It’s a crystal-clear night and the dog is barking so loudly that the rusty nails holding the door together shake. And Adam dreams that he is sitting at a nicely laid table in the kitchen of a big white house, and that a hand covered in the finest little veins pulls a leg off one of the roast chickens on the table, and how the same hand throws the leg out through the window to the dog.

He is still standing in the snow and barking.

The chicken leg makes him quiet.

Then the barking starts again.

A voice now: Let me in.

Don’t leave me out here.

I’m freezing.

36

Thursday, 9 February

It is no bad dream.

It is just how it is.

Janne is walking up and down in the living room. The young boys from the refugee camp in Kigali came to him again tonight, just now. They were carrying their hacked-off feet on their upturned hands, approaching his bed with them like bloody trophies. The dark red blood dripped on to his sheets, steaming and smelling freshly of iron.

He woke up in a soaking wet bed.

Sweat.

As usual.

It’s as if his body remembers the humid nights in the jungle and is adapting itself to the memory rather than the present.

He creeps upstairs and peers into Tove’s room. She’s asleep inside, safe in the warm.

Markus is asleep in the guest room. He seems an okay kid, from what Janne could tell during their short meal, before Tove and Markus disappeared into Tove’s room.

He hadn’t said anything to Malin about Markus staying over. She didn’t seem to know, though he would always be able to say that he assumed she did. She would protest, but that’s okay, Janne thinks, as he creeps back downstairs again. Better that we keep an eye on them than the alternative, so they don’t have to sneak into his father-in-law’s flat.

His father-in-law?

Did I just think that?

But I did phone Markus’s dad to make sure it was okay with them.

He seemed friendly. Not full of himself like a lot of the doctors you run into at the hospital when you show up with an ambulance.

In the morning the Murvall family reports at Police Headquarters.

They arrive in the green Range Rover and a Peugeot minibus soon after eight.

The sun made the vehicles’ paint shine, as they spewed out people, as Malin thought it looked.

The Murvall clan: men, women, child after child besieging the foyer of Police Headquarters.

Restless chatter.

People on the fault-line.

Waiting not to do what the authorities asked of them: talk. A conscious mix of obstinacy and resignation in every movement, every expression, every blink. Shabby clothes, faded jeans, jumpers and jackets in shrill, unfashionable colours, all thrown together, dirt, stains, children’s snot as the glue holding it all together.

‘Gypsies,’ Börje Svärd whispered in Malin’s ear as they looked out on the scene from the office. ‘They’re like a band of gypsies.’

In the middle of the group sat the mother.

Somehow alone among all the others.

‘You have a fine family,’ Sven Sjöman says, drumming his fingers on the table of the interview room.

‘We stick together,’ the mother states. ‘Like in the old days.’

‘That’s unusual these days.’

‘Yes, but we stick together.’

‘And you have a lot of fine grandchildren, Mrs Murvall.’

‘Nine in total.’

‘It could have been more, perhaps. If Maria hadn’t-’

‘Maria? What do you want with her?’

‘What were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’

‘Sleeping. That’s what an old woman does at nights.’

‘And your sons?’

‘The boys? As far as I know, they were sleeping too.’

‘Did you know Bengt Andersson, Mrs Murvall?’

‘Bengt who, Inspector? I’ve read about him in the paper, if you mean the man they hung in the tree.’

‘They?’

‘Yes, I read that there was probably more than one of them.’

‘Like your sons.’

Malin looks into Sofia Murvall’s eyes. The bags beneath them hang way down on to her cheeks but her brown hair looks freshly washed, tied up in a neat ponytail at the back of her head. The meeting room is acting as an interview room.

Wife of Jakob, the middle brother. Four children, seven months to ten years. Exhausted from nursing, from sleepless nights, worn down to the bone.

‘Four children,’ Malin says. ‘You should count yourself lucky. I only got one.’

‘Can I smoke in here?’

‘Sorry, no. They’re very tough on that. But maybe I could make an exception, just this once,’ Malin says, and pushes her empty coffee cup across the table. ‘Use that as an ashtray.’

Sofia Murvall digs in the pockets of her grey hooded jacket, pulls out a packet of Blend Menthol and a free lighter from a haulage company. She lights a cigarette and the sweet, mint-like smell makes Malin feel sick, and she makes an effort to smile.

‘It must be tough out there on the plain.’

‘It isn’t always fun,’ Sofia Murvall says. ‘But who says it has to be fun all the time?’

‘How did you and Jakob meet?’

Sofia looks over her shoulder, takes a drag on the cigarette.

‘That’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Are the two of you happy?’

‘Really, really happy.’

‘Even after what happened to Maria?’

‘That didn’t make any difference.’

‘I can’t really believe that,’ Malin says. ‘Jakob and his brothers must have been incredibly frustrated.’

‘They looked after their sister, if that’s what you mean, and now they’re doing it again.’

‘Did they take care of the person they thought did it as well? When they strung up Bengt Andersson in the tree?’

There’s a knock on the door of the room.

‘Come in!’ Malin calls, and a newly recruited police constable called Sara looks through a gap in the door.

‘There’s a little boy crying out here. They’re saying he needs feeding. Is that okay?’

The expression on Sofia Murvall’s face doesn’t change.

Malin nods.

The woman who must be Adam Murvall’s wife carries in a fat, screaming baby and puts him in Sofia’s arms. The boy opens his mouth wide and scrambles towards the nearest nipple, and Sofia Murvall puts out her cigarette and the hoodie goes up, revealing a bare breast, a pink nipple that the boy stretches out for and catches.

Do you appreciate your happiness? Do you feel it?

Sofia strokes the boy’s head.

‘Are you hungry, darling?’ Then: ‘Jakob couldn’t have had anything to do with that. It’s impossible. He’s been asleep at home every single night, and he spends every day in the workshop. I can see him from the kitchen window whenever I look out.’

‘And your mother-in-law. Do you get on well with her?’

‘Yes,’ Sofia Murvall says. ‘You won’t find a better person.’

Elias Murvall is shut off, his memories a clamped clam-shell.

‘I’m not saying anything. I stopped talking to the police fifteen years ago.’

Sven Sjöman’s voice: ‘Oh, we’re not that bad, are we, especially for a tough guy like you?’

‘If I don’t say anything, how will you find out what I have or haven’t done? Do you really think I’m so weak that I’m going to give in to you?’

‘That’s just it,’ Sven says. ‘We don’t think you’re weak. But if you don’t say anything, things get difficult for us. Do you want things to be difficult for us?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Was it you who shot…?’

Elias Murvall’s mouth is sealed with invisible surgical thread, his tongue limp, slack in his mouth. The room is silent, apart from the sound of the air-conditioning.

From her place in the observation room Malin can’t hear the noise, but she knows it’s there, a gentle mechanical hum: fresh air for people trapped indoors.

Jakob Murvall laughs at the question: ‘You think we had anything to do with that? You’re crazy, we’re law-abiding citizens now, we’ve kept quiet, within the bounds of the law. We’re just ordinary car mechanics.’

Börje Svärd: ‘Okay, what do you say about the rumours that you threatened anyone making an offer on houses for sale in Blåsvädret, that you threatened the estate agents?’

‘Rumours. That’s our stamping ground, and if we put in the highest bid, we get to buy, don’t we?’

‘The night between Wednesday and Thursday? I was in bed asleep next to my wife. Well, I wasn’t asleep all night, but I was there in bed, with my wife.’

‘Maria. You don’t even have the right to say her name. Got that, you fucking pig? Bengt Andersson… Maria… Ball-Bengt, that fucking abortion, she should have stayed away from him…’

Jakob Murvall stands up forcefully.

Then a male body collapsing, muscles losing all their strength.

‘She looked after him. She’s the gentlest, warmest person God ever blessed this fucking planet with. She was only looking after him a bit, can’t you understand that, you fucking pig? That’s what she’s like. No one can stop her. And if he thanked her by doing that in the forest, he deserved to die, and to go straight back down to hell.’

‘But you didn’t do it?’

‘What do you think, pig? What do you think?’

37

An army on the retreat, Malin thinks.

The Murvall clan is evacuating the foyer of Police Headquarters, taking their places in their vehicles, shivering in the cold.

Elias and Jakob help their mother up into the front seat of the minibus, but surely the old woman could manage on her own?

A minute ago she was standing in the entrance, a shawl round her head, eyes open so wide they threatened to fly out of their sockets.

She was shouting at Karim Akbar.

‘I’m taking my son Adam home with me.’

‘The officer in charge of the preliminary investigation-’

Karim was nonplussed by the old woman’s outburst, as sudden as it was taboo. He had been brought up to respect the elderly.

‘He’s coming home. Now.’

The rest of the family like a wall behind her, Adam’s wife at the front, the children around her, snuffling.

‘But-’

‘Well, I want to see him, at least.’

‘Mrs Murvall, your son can’t have any visitors. The officer in charge of the preliminary investigation, Sven Sjöman-’

‘The officer in charge of the preliminary investigation can go to hell. I’m seeing my boy. And that’s that.’

Then a smile that quickly became a grimace, her false teeth unnaturally white.

Defiance as theatre, as a game.

‘I’ll see what I can-’

‘You can’t do a thing, can you?’ And with that Rakel Murvall turned, raised one arm in the air and the retreat began.

The clock on the foyer wall says 14.50.

The meeting room. Too cold to open a window to remove the residual stink of menthol cigarettes.

‘Lisbeth Murvall is providing an alibi for her husband, Elias,’ Malin says.

‘They’re all giving alibis to each other,’ Zeke says. ‘One way or another.’

Johan Jakobsson: ‘And they don’t seem to have any connection to Bengt Andersson other than the fact that he was their sister’s client and figured in the investigation into her rape.’

‘We still ought to organise a search warrant for Blåsvädret,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘I want to know what they’ve got in those houses.’

‘Have we got enough for that?’ Karim Akbar, hesitant. ‘A motive, a few suspicions. That’s all we’ve got.’

‘I know what we have and haven’t got. But it’s enough.’

‘We’re only going to take a look,’ Börje Svärd says. ‘It won’t be too bad. Will it?’

Only your world turned upside down, Malin thinks. Otherwise not too bad. Says, ‘Sort out the warrants.’

‘Okay,’ Karim says.

‘I want to talk to Joakim Svensson’s and Jimmy Kalmvik’s parents,’ Malin says. ‘Someone has to confirm what they were doing on Wednesday evening, and maybe we can find out more about how they used to torment Bengt Andersson.’

‘The shots,’ Zeke says. ‘We still don’t know who fired those shots.’

‘Okay, this is what we do,’ Sven says. ‘First the search of Blåsvädret. Then you can talk to the boys’ parents.’

Malin nods, thinking that they’re going to need as much manpower as possible out in Blåsvädret. Who knows what those nutters might do.

Then she hears Fredrik Unning’s frightened voice: ‘This will stay between us…’ and she thinks back to her wretched responsibility to push that line of investigation as far as she can.

‘Well, off to Blåsvädret,’ Johan says, getting up.

‘If you dredge the shit properly, something always comes up,’ Börje says.

Shit? You know quite a bit about that, don’t you, Börje?

You’ve been in the shit when you lie awake next to your wife, listening to how hard it is for her to breathe, when her withering diaphragm can hardly lift her lungs.

You’ve felt it cover you, the suction pipe between your fingers at night in a dimly lit bedroom when she wants you to take care of her, not one of the nameless carers.

Yes, you know a whole lot about shit, Börje, but you also know that there are other things besides that.

In your own way you’ve been waiting for balls to fly over the fence so you can throw them back. But no one has ever laughed at you.

You’ve never had to be really, really hungry, Börje. Really lonely. Dangerously lonely. So lonely that you smash a freshly sharpened axe into your father’s head.

I drift across the plain, getting closer to Blåsvädret. From up here the little cluster of houses looks like tiny black spots on an endless white canvas, the tree where I hung a smudge of ash ten kilometres or so to the west. I sink lower, see the cars, the freezing police officers, how the Murvalls have gathered together in the kitchen in Rakel’s house, hear their curses, ill-contained anger. Do you understand the principle of the pressure-cooker, the uncooled reactor that explodes? Violence can only be contained for so long, and you are treading on that fault-line. Do you imagine that four uniformed officers outside their door can hold violence in?

In the workshop, the largest, the big white-brick building.

Malin and Zacharias, that’s his name, open the door to one of the inner rooms. It’s cold in there, just ten degrees, but you can still smell the smell.

Vanity has driven you here.

Or curiosity?

Or perhaps absolution, Malin?

You will wonder why the Murvalls didn’t clean up better, and your wondering will sow seeds of doubt within you. What is this? What animal doesn’t buckle in the end?

You will see the chains hanging from the ceiling, the pulleys that help people lift heavier weights than they could otherwise lift to the roof, to the sky.

You will see clotted remnants.

Feel the smell.

And then you will start to realise.

‘Do you see that, Zeke?’

‘I see it. And I’m getting the smell as well.’

The stench of engine oil that dominated the first big room of the workshop seems to have been blown away in this inner room.

‘Light, we need more light.’

The huge sliding iron doors separating the rooms have only just slid apart, easily and well-lubricated. You don’t feel their weight, Malin thought, noting the wheel marks leading right up to the doors.

The realm of ease: a well-lubricated sliding door.

And then the windowless room. The concrete floor stained, the chains hanging motionless from the beams in the roof, but which still sound like rattlesnakes, the pulleys, neat little planets right up in the roof. Steel worktops along all the walls, shining faintly in the darkness, and then the stench, of death and blood.

‘There.’

Zeke is pointing at the wall, at the circuit-breaker.

Seconds later the room is bathed in light. Zeke and Malin see the congealed blood on the floor, on the chains, the neat rows of knives placed on the polished steel worktops.

‘Fucking hell.’

‘Get forensics in here.’

‘Okay, we’re going to back out of here very carefully.’

Malin, Zeke and Johan Jakobsson are standing by the sink in the kitchen of Adam Murvall’s house. Uniformed police officers are emptying out the contents of the drawers in the living room, the floor of which is covered with newspapers, photos, placemats and cutlery.

‘So the whole inside room of the workshop looks like a slaughterhouse? They could have done it there?’ Johan asks.

Zeke nods.

‘And what have you found?’ Malin asks.

‘The entire cellar is full of meat. Big white freezers. Bags marked with the year and what cut it is: mince 2001, steak 2004, deer 2005. Same thing in all three houses. And presumably in the mother’s as well.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Only a lot of rubbish. Not much paperwork. They don’t seem the sort to keep that kind of documentation.’

They are interrupted by a cry from the four-car garage belonging to Elias Murvall’s house.

‘We’ve got something here.’

The happy voices of the new recruits. Did my voice sound like that nine years ago? Malin wonders. When I had just graduated from Police Academy and was doing my first shifts on patrol, back in my home town? Back for good?

Malin, Zeke and Johan rush out of Adam Murvall’s kitchen, sprint across the yard and out into the road, then over to the garage.

‘Here,’ one of the young uniformed officers calls, waving them over. His eyes are shining with excitement as he points to the flatbed of the Skoda pick-up.

‘The back of this looks like it’s been swimming with blood,’ he says. ‘Incredible.’

Hardly, Malin thinks, before she says, ‘Don’t touch anything.’

She doesn’t notice how the young man’s face goes from an expression of pride and happiness to the sort of itchy anger that only the arrogance of a superior officer can cause.

Börje Svärd walks with his stomach muscles clenched, feeling how their power spreads throughout his whole body.

The petrol pumps are well-maintained, he has to give these idiots that much. Nothing funny in the shop, nothing in the workshop. Well-managed and with an aura of competence. He would have been happy to leave his own car here.

Behind the shop is a small office, a few files on a shelf, a fax machine. And another door. Two strong padlocks, but not strong enough.

In the workshop Börje finds a heavy iron bar. Back to the office, where he pushes the bar behind the locks and presses down with all his weight. He hears the locks protest, and then, when he presses even harder with his chest, the metal gives way.

He looks inside the room. First he picks up the familiar smell of gun grease. Then he sees the rifles lined up against the walls.

Bloody hell, he thinks. Then it strikes him that petrol stations are always getting broken into. And if you keep weapons in your petrol station, you’re not particularly worried about that happening. Otherwise you’d keep them somewhere else.

He grins.

He can imagine the talk among the petty crooks: ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch the garage in Blåsvädret. The Murvall brothers are crazy as fuck, so watch out.’

Darkness is starting to fall over on the horizon, as a whirl of activity surrounds Malin. Uniforms, plain-clothes officers, blood, weapons, frozen meat. The family is gathered in Adam Murvall’s kitchen now that they are searching the old woman’s house.

Malin is thinking that there is something missing. But what? Then she realises. Daniel Högfeldt. He ought to be here.

But instead there is some other reporter whose name she doesn’t know. But the photographer is here, nose-ring and all.

Malin finds herself wanting to ask about Daniel, but that would be impossible. What reason would she have for asking?

Her mobile rings.

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Tove, darling, I’ll be home soon. Some serious stuff’s happening at work today.’

‘Aren’t you going to ask if I had a good time at Dad’s last night?’

‘Of course, did you-’

‘YES!’

‘Are you at home now?’

‘Yes. I thought I might catch the bus out to Markus’s.’

Through the hubbub she hears Johan: ‘Börje’s found a load of guns down at the petrol station.’

Malin takes a deep, cold breath. ‘To Markus’s? Good… do you think you could get something to eat there?’

38

Karin Johannison’s cheeks seem to absorb the glow from the floodlights and the brown nuances of her skin are emphasised by the wine-red fabric of her glamorous padded jacket. Not the same one she was wearing out at the tree, a different one.

Burgundy, Malin thinks, that’s how Karin would describe the colour.

Karin shakes her head as she approaches Malin, who is standing waiting by the entrance to the workshop.

‘As far as we can tell, it’s just animal blood, but it’ll take us several days to check every square centimetre. If you ask me, I think they slaughter animals in there.’

‘Recently?’

‘Most recently just a few days ago.’

‘It isn’t the season for hunting much right now.’

‘I don’t know about that sort of thing,’ Karin says.

‘But that’s never stopped some people hunting everything throughout the year.’

‘Poaching?’ Karin frowns, as if the very thought of padding about in the forest in minus thirty degrees with a rifle on her shoulder is seriously off-putting.

‘Not impossible,’ Malin says. ‘There’s money in it. When I lived in Stockholm I always used to wonder how there was so much fresh elk meat in the markets all year round.’

Karin glides away, her eyes fixed on the garage. ‘It looks like the same thing with the pick-up. But we don’t know yet.’

‘Animal blood?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks, Karin,’ Malin says, and smiles without really knowing why.

Karin takes offence.

She adjusts her cap so that her earlobes peep out, little concave earrings with three inlaid diamonds shimmering in each one.

‘Okay,’ Karin says, ‘when did we start thanking each other for just doing our jobs?’

The weapons are lined up in black bin-bags on the floor of the petrol-station shop.

Not the usual sort of shop, with hotdogs and groceries, but a hardcore garage, Malin thinks. A few dutiful chocolate bars and a rusty old cold-drinks cabinet rattling away in a corner are the only concessions made to a culture beyond engine oil, spare parts and motoring accessories.

Janne would like it.

Sporting rifles from Husqvarna.

Engravings of deer and elk, of men waiting in forest glades, flowers.

Shotguns from Smith & Wesson.

Pistols: Lugers, Colt and a SigSauer P225, standard issue for the police.

No Mausers. No air-rifles. No guns that could have been used to fire through Bengt Andersson’s window, Malin can see that much. In the gun cabinets up in the houses there were just shotguns and sporting rifles. Could the brothers have a stash somewhere else? Unless, in spite of all these weapons, they don’t actually have anything to do with the shots through the window? As they claim.

Most remarkable of all: two machine guns and a hand grenade.

It looks like an apple, Malin thinks, a misshapen apple in a mutated green colour.

‘I bet you those machine guns and the hand grenade come from the break-in at the weapons store up at Kvarn five years ago,’ Börje says. ‘Ten machine guns were stolen, and a box of grenades. I bet you anything that’s where they’re from.’

He coughs, and walks up and down the room.

‘They could start a war with all this lot,’ Zeke says.

‘Maybe they’ve already started one,’ Börje says. ‘When they strung Bengt Andersson up in that tree.’

Jakob and Elias Murvall are sitting on either side of their mother in the kitchen of her house, against a backdrop of drawers pulled open, crockery stacked up on the rag rugs.

The brothers are focused, as if they’re waiting for orders that have to be carried out, come what may. As if they’re at war, Malin thinks, just like Börje said, as if they’re about to clamber out of their trench and rush at the enemy’s lines. Rakel Murvall, their mother, like a matriarch between them, her jaw thrust forward slightly, her neck tilted back.

‘Malin and Zeke, you take it,’ Sven Sjöman had said. ‘Put them under pressure, drop a few threats.’

Uniformed officers in the hall outside, in the living room: ‘In case anything happens.’

Zeke beside Malin, opposite the trio. They agreed beforehand, the oldest trick in the book, good cop, bad cop. Zeke’s eyes, the wolf on the plain with the scent of frozen winter blood.

‘I’ll be bad cop.’

‘Okay. You’re okay with that?’

‘With you by my side, I’ll be rock-solid.’

Malin leans over the table, looking first at Jakob, then Elias, and then at their mother. ‘You’re in a great deal of trouble.’

None of them reacts, they just breathe heavily and in time, as if their lungs and hearts had the same rhythm.

Zeke goes on: ‘Five years each. Minimum. Breaking and entering, theft of weapons, possession of illegal firearms, poaching, and if we find traces of human blood then you’ll be charged with murder as well. If we find his blood.’

‘Breaking and entering? What breaking and entering?’ Elias Murvall says.

His mother: ‘Shh, not a word.’

‘You don’t think we can get you on the machine guns?’

‘Never,’ Elias whispers. ‘Never.’

Malin can see how something in Elias Murvall’s tone of voice pushes Zeke over the edge; she’s seen it before, how his floodgates seem to open and his entire being turns to action, a mix of muscles, adrenalin and the here and now. He flies round the table in a single movement. Grabs Elias Murvall by the neck and forces his head down on to the wooden tabletop, pressing so hard that his cheek turns white.

‘You fucking primitive,’ Zeke whispers. ‘I’m going to pluck the feathers from your arse and shove them right down your throat.’

‘Keep calm, Jakob,’ the mother says. ‘Keep calm.’

‘Did you kill him, you bastard, did you do it? Out there in the workshop? Like some fucking dog, then you strung him up in the tree for all to see, to show the whole of this fucking plain what happens if you mess with the Murvall family, is that how it was?’

‘Let go of me,’ Elias Murvall snarls, and Zeke presses harder. ‘Let go of me,’ he whimpers, and Zeke lets go, pulls his arms away.

That iron core, Malin thinks. You’d take the brothers on one by one or together if need be, wouldn’t you?

‘I understand,’ Malin says calmly when Zeke has returned to their side of the table. ‘If you couldn’t let go of the thought that Bengt might have raped your sister, if you wanted to do something about it, just because. People will understand.’

‘What do we care what people think?’ Jakob Murvall says.

Their mother leans back in her chair, folds her arms over her chest.

‘Not at all, Mother,’ Elias Murvall says.

‘Hasn’t it gone far enough now?’ Zeke says. ‘We’re bound to find Bengt’s blood in the pick-up and then we’ll have enough to charge you.’

‘You won’t find any of his blood there.’

‘You must have been so angry. Did you give in to it last Thursday? Was it time for revenge?’ Malin says in her gentlest voice, with her most sympathetic look in her eyes.

‘Take the boys for poaching and possession of firearms,’ the mother suddenly says. ‘But they don’t know anything about the rest of it.’

But you know, don’t you? Malin thinks.

‘But you know, don’t you?’

‘Me? I don’t know anything. But tell her about the hunting, boys, about the cabin by the lake, tell her so we can put an end to this nonsense.’

39

The cabin, Malin.

The forest.

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

The brothers and the mother.

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

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

Or was it the young lads?

The believers?

The questions never stop.

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

Somewhere out there is the answer.

Somewhere, Malin.

Follow the plan.

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

Without preconceptions, Malin.

Sven Sjöman’s favourite words.

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

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

Pallasvägen.

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

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

Joakim Svensson’s mum. Margaretha.

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

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

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

The brothers in custody.

The cabin in the forest.

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

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

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

The Murvall brothers.

Rakel.

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

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

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

‘Is Joakim at home?’

‘No, Jocke’s out somewhere.’

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

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

Five minutes.

Ten.

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

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

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

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

Margaretha Svensson lets the words sink in.

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

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

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

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

Margaretha Svensson shakes her head.

‘Could they have had access to any weapons?’

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

‘Guns,’ Malin says.

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

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

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

‘Can he drive?’ Malin asks.

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

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

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

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

‘Where had-’

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

‘Friend?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Can we see his room?’

‘Upstairs, straight ahead.’

Zeke stays at the table while Malin goes up.

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

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

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

Only for sleeping, Malin thinks.

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

The next house is another world.

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

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

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

Kalmvik.

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

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

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

Henrietta Kalmvik opens the door wide.

No hesitant little crack.

‘You’re from the police? Aren’t you?’

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

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

‘Yes. Nice, isn’t it?’

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

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

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

‘Sit down.’

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

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

‘Yes,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says.

And then the same questions they asked Margaretha Svensson.

The same answers, yet somehow not the same.

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

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

‘I suppose you want to see his room?’

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

They follow her once more.

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

‘His room.’

She steps aside.

Lets Zeke open the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Has he got a mobile out there?’

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

‘When will he be home?’

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

40

A voice at the other end of the line, the crackling makes the Norwegian unclear, dreamlike, as Zeke reverses out of the Kalmviks’ drive.

‘Yes, hello? You wanted Göran Kalmvik? He hasn’t been here for just over a week now. His shift ended last Thursday, and he’s not expected back for two weeks. I can’t hear you very well, not… Where he might be? At home… oh, I see… in that case I’ve no idea… yes, he works two weeks and is off for three.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Malin says when she has hung up. ‘Kalmvik’s dad isn’t on the rig. Hasn’t been there for over a week.’

‘Henrietta didn’t seem to have any idea about that,’ Zeke says. ‘What do you think it means?’

‘It could mean anything. That he was at home last week when Bengt Andersson was murdered and that he could have helped the boys if they managed to go a bit too far with one of their pranks against him. Or he’s been deceiving his wife and has a mistress or something even juicier somewhere else. Or maybe he’s just having some time off on his own.’

‘Is it Saturday he’s due home?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’ll be hard to get hold of him before that. Do you think Henrietta’s lying? That she’s only pretending not to know anything? Trying to protect him and their son?’

‘It didn’t look like it,’ Malin says. ‘I’d say not.’

‘Okay, let’s drop Kalmvik for now, Fors. Let’s brave the cold and darkness and go and take a look at the Murvalls’ cabin in the forest. It would be just as well to get a bit further with all this.’

Just as well, Malin thinks, closing her eyes and relaxing and letting the images in her head come and go as they like.

Tove on the sofa at home in the flat.

Daniel Högfeldt, bare-chested.

Janne’s picture beside the bed.

And then the image that forces all the others aside, that expands and burns into her consciousness, an image impossible to shift: Maria Murvall on her bed in her room in the hospital, Maria Murvall among dark tree trunks one raw, damp night.

The car headlights illuminate the forest road, the trees like frozen figures from a horror film around them, deserted summer cottages turned to black outlines, stiff dreams of good days by the water; frozen now like a light grey smudge in the pale moonlight filtering through the gaps in the veils of cloud.

The directions Elias Murvall gave them earlier in his mother’s house: ‘Hultsjön, then after Ljungsbro head towards Olstorp, past the golf course and on to the Tjällmo road. After ten kilometres you’ll get to the lake; the road to the other cottages is kept cleared, then you’ll have to walk. The path is marked out. But you won’t find anything there.’

Before that Jakob Murvall, suddenly talkative, as if his mother had pressed the play button. He went on about their organised hunting expeditions, about the sale of meat, about deer-traps, about how Russian millionaires were crazy about deer-traps.

‘We’ll head out there tonight. Now. Sjöman will have to sort out a warrant.’

Zeke hesitant. ‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow? The brothers are being taken into custody, they can’t do anything.’

‘No.’

‘But I’ve got choir practice tonight, Fors.’

‘What?’

‘Okay, okay, Malin. But we’ll deal with Joakim Svensson’s and Jimmy Kalmvik’s parents first,’ and this time the hoarseness of his voice betrayed his awareness that she would tease him for months if he let choir practice with Da Capo take precedence over an entirely new lead.

The warrant went through, Sven Sjöman called to confirm.

And now Zeke has one hand on the wheel as some choir led by Kjell Lönnå is blasting through ‘Swing it, Magistern!’ Choral music: the non-negotiable condition for them driving out to the cabin. Zeke is dealing with the ice, pushing the car on by accelerating, braking, accelerating. The ditches alongside the road like a white-edged abyss beside them. Malin peers out in search of animals’ glowing eyes: deer, elk, a stag that might decide to cross the road just as they approach. Few people can drive like Zeke, not with the uncompromising self-confidence of the professional driver, but with careful concentration on the goal: getting there.

They skirt round the lake, but get an idea of the frozen water continuing into the forest, narrowing to something like a river, leading right into the heart of darkness and night.

The clock on the dashboard reads 22.34. An ungodly hour for work like this.

Tove at home, never made it to Markus’s: ‘I heated up the rest of the stew. I’m fine, Mum.’

‘As soon as things calm down at work we’ll do something fun.’

Fun? Malin thinks as she sees the pile of snow ahead of them at the end of the road, how someone had forced a gap through the heap, and how reflecting patches fastened to the trees shine like stars in a line off into the distance.

What do you think is fun, Tove? It was easier when you were younger. We used to go to the swimming pool. And you’d rather go to the cinema with other people. You like shopping, but you’re not as crazy about it as other girls your age. Maybe we could go to a concert in Stockholm, you’d like that. We’ve talked about doing that before but never managed it. Or maybe go to the book fair in Gothenburg? But that’s in the autumn, isn’t it?

‘This must be the right place,’ Zeke says, switching off the engine. ‘I hope it’s not too far to walk. Fuck, it feels even colder tonight.’

The geography of evil.

What does it look like? What sort of topography?

It wasn’t far from here that traces of the attack on Maria Murvall were found, five kilometres to the west. None of her brothers knew what she was doing in the forest, no one mentioned the cabin then, the property they’ve got on loan free of charge from farmer Kvarnström for reasons no one wants to go into.

‘We look after it, simple as that.’

Maria in the forest.

Cut up from inside.

A chill autumn night.

Damp-dripping world.

Ball-Bengt in the tree.

The cold of the plain.

Branches like snakes, leaves and rotting mushrooms like spiders, and then the worms under your feet, sharp thorns that cut into the soles of your feet. Who’s that hanging there in the tree? Bats, owls, some fresh evil?

Is the geography of evil small outcrops of rock and shallow hollows? Half-grown forest, a woman with the tatters of black clothing hanging from her body, dragging herself along a deserted forest road at dawn.

Is the beast here in the forest?

Malin has time to think all this as she and Zeke pad through the snow towards the Murvall brothers’ cabin. They light up the trees with their pocket torches, the reflecting patches shine, making the black trees tremble in the utterly silent night, making the snow crystals on the ground twinkle like countless watchful lemmings’ eyes, little beacons for navigating through the unknown.

‘How far, Fors? It’s got to be at least minus fifteen and I’m still dripping with sweat.’

Zeke is walking ahead, heaving his way through the snow; no one has been this way since the last fall of snow, even if there are still earlier tracks to follow. Snowmobile tracks alongside.

The animals, Malin thinks. That must be how they get them out, by snowmobile.

‘Pretty tough going,’ Malin says, trying to instil a bit of courage in Zeke by showing that she shares his pain. ‘We must have trudged a good kilometre by now.’

‘How far was it supposed to be?’

‘They wouldn’t say.’

They stop next to each other, breathing out silently.

‘Maybe we should have waited?’ Malin says.

‘Let’s go on,’ Zeke says.

After thirty minutes of struggling against the snow and the cold the forest opens out into a small clearing in front of them, and at its centre stands a small house, probably several hundred years old, with drifts of snow up to the eaves.

They train their torches on the cabin; long shadows fall from the beams of light and the trees in the forest become a curtain of dark nuances behind the snow-covered roof.

‘Okay, let’s go in,’ Zeke says.

The key is hanging where the brothers said, on a hook under the soffit. The lock creaks in the cold.

‘I don’t suppose there’s any electricity,’ Zeke says as the door opens. ‘No point looking for a light switch.’

Cones of light dance across a single, frozen room. Neat, Malin thinks. Rag rugs on the floor, a gas stove on a simple wooden worktop, a camping table in the middle of the room, four chairs, candles, no lamps, and three double beds along the windowless end walls.

Malin goes over to the table.

Its top is stained with light oil.

‘Gun grease,’ she says, and Zeke mutters in agreement.

On a dresser beside the kitchen worktop stand tins of pea soup and ravioli and meatballs, and in a box alongside are bottles of spirits.

‘It reminds me somehow of a changing room,’ Zeke says.

‘Yes, it’s very neutral. No feeling.’

‘What were you expecting, Fors? They let us come out here precisely because we wouldn’t find anything.’

‘I don’t know. Just a feeling.’

A room without feelings. What is there beyond that?

If you have wicked hearts, deep down inside, you Murvalls, then what sort of damage have you done?

Then Zeke hushes her and Malin turns round, sees him put a glove to his lips and then point out through the door as they simultaneously put their hands over the beams of their torches.

The resulting darkness is unshakable.

‘Did you hear something?’ Malin whispers.

Zeke says, ‘Hmm,’ and they stand there in silence and listen. A dragging sound coming towards them: a limping animal? Wounded by a misplaced shot? Dragging its way into the clearing? Then it is quiet once more. Has the animal stopped? The Murvall brothers are in custody. The old woman? Not here, not now. Maybe she can change her shape? The bullies? But what would they be doing here?

Malin and Zeke creep towards the open door, lean out carefully from either side, look at each other, then the noise starts up again, but further away now, and they leap out, training their torches in the direction the sound is coming from.

Something black drifts quickly towards the edge of the forest; a meditative movement. A person?

A woman?

A teenage boy? Two teenage boys?

‘Stop!’ Zeke shouts. ‘Stop!’

Malin runs after it, following the black shape, but as she runs her boots cut through the crust of the snow and she stumbles, gets up again, runs, falls, gets up, hunting, calling, ‘Stop! Stop! Come back here!’

Zeke’s voice behind her, deadly serious: ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’

Malin turns round. She sees Zeke standing on the porch in front of the cabin, holding his pistol out, taking aim at the empty darkness.

‘Hopeless,’ Malin says. ‘Whatever it was, it’s long gone now.’

Zeke lowers his weapon. Nods.

‘And it came on skis,’ he says, pointing with his torch at the narrow tracks through the snow.

41

Friday, 10 February

Tove in Malin’s arms.

How much do you weigh now?

Forty-five kilos?

A good job Mum sometimes goes to the gym, isn’t it?

Her legs ache, but at least the warmth has started to return to her feet.

They followed the tracks for two kilometres. In the meantime a storm blew up over the forests around Hultsjön and by the time they reached the end of the trail it was as good as hidden by white powder. The tracks ended at a forest road, and it was impossible to tell if there had been a vehicle parked there waiting. There was no oil on the ground. And any tyre tracks had been obliterated by the snow.

‘Swallowed up by the forest,’ Zeke said, then he made a note of their position from his mobile.

‘It’s only five kilometres. It’ll be quicker to walk back to our car than wait for the station to send one.’

Tove was asleep on the sofa when Malin got home. The television was flickering and Malin’s first thought was to wake Tove, get her to put herself to bed.

But then, as she saw the figure stretched out on the sofa, tall and slim for her age, her fine blonde hair over the cushion and her closed eyes, peaceful mouth, she wanted to feel her daughter’s weight, the burden of living love.

She had to summon all her strength to move her, and was sure Tove would wake up, but eventually she was standing there in the silent, dark living room with Tove in her arms, and now she is staggering through the hall, pushing the door to Tove’s room open with her foot.

And then down on to the bed. But Malin loses her balance because of the uneven weight, she feels its warmth glide away from her and the body tumbles on to the mattress with a soft thud.

Tove opens her eyes. ‘Mum?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I just carried you in here to bed.’

‘Oh.’ Then Tove closes her eyes and falls asleep again.

Malin goes out into the kitchen. She stops by the sink and looks at the fridge. It is rumbling in the dark, the cooler-unit dripping tiredly.

What was it you weighed, Tove?

Three thousand, two hundred and fifty-four grams.

Four kilos, five, and so on, and for every kilo of body, less dependent, less a child, more adult.

Maybe the last time I carry her like that, Malin thinks, closing her eyes and listening to the sounds of the night.

Is the phone ringing in a dream? Or in the room outside the dream?

Either way, it’s ringing, and Malin reaches out a hand to the bedside table, to where the receiver ought to be, on the other side of the vacuum where she is now, the border between sleep and waking, where everything can happen, where for a few moments nothing can be taken for granted.

‘Malin Fors.’

She manages to sound firm, but her voice is hoarse, so hoarse.

Their nocturnal walk must have found its way into her lungs, but she feels fine otherwise, her body is where it should be, her head as well.

‘Did I wake you, Malin?’

She recognises the voice, but can’t quite place it at first. Who? I hear this voice a lot, but not over the phone.

‘Malin, are you there? I’m calling between two tracks and I haven’t got long.’

The radio. Helen.

‘I’m here. Still a bit sleepy, that’s all.’

‘Then I’ll get straight to the point. Do you remember you called me about the Murvall brothers? There’s something I forgot to tell you, something you might want to know. I read in this morning’s paper that you’re holding the three brothers, but it’s not clear whether it’s in connection with the murder or not, but then I remembered: there’s a fourth brother, their half-brother. He was a bit older, a real loner; his dad was some sailor who drowned, I think. Whatever. I remember the others used to stick together, but not him.’

A fourth brother, a half-brother.

Silence like a wall.

‘Do you know what his name was?’

‘No idea. He was a little older. That’s probably why I never really think of him as belonging with the others. You never used to see him much. It was a long time ago. Maybe none of this is right. I might be mixing things up.’

‘That’s a great help,’ Malin says. ‘What would I do without you? Time to meet up over a beer soon?’

‘That would be great, but when? We both seem to work too much.’

They hang up. Malin can hear Tove out in the kitchen, and gets out of bed, feeling a sudden longing for her daughter.

Tove at the kitchen table, eating breakfast, reading the Correspondent.

‘Those brothers, Mum, they seem really weird,’ she says with a frown. ‘Did they do it?’

Black or white, Malin thinks.

Done or not done.

In a way Tove’s right, it’s simple, yet still so incredibly more complicated, unclear and ambiguous.

‘We don’t know.’

‘Oh well. I suppose they’ll be locked up for the guns and poaching? And the blood, was it just animal blood, as that woman doctor says here?’

‘We don’t know yet. They’re working on it in the lab.’

‘And it says you’ve questioned two teenage boys. Who are they?’

‘I can’t say, Tove. Did you have a good time at Dad’s the other night, by the way?’

‘Yes, I said I did over the phone, don’t you remember?’

‘What did you do?’

‘Markus and Dad and I had something to eat, then we watched television until we went to bed.’

Malin feels her stomach clench.

‘Markus was there?’

‘Yes, he stayed the night.’

‘STAYED THE NIGHT?’

‘Yes, but it wasn’t like we slept in the same bed or anything. You didn’t think that, did you?’

Both Tove and Janne spoke to her that afternoon. Neither of them mentioned Markus. Not that he would be staying over, not that he would be eating with them, not even that Janne was aware of his existence.

‘I didn’t even know your dad knew about Markus.’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’

‘You said he didn’t know anything.’

‘But he does now.’

‘Why hasn’t anyone told me any of this? Why didn’t you say?’

Malin can hear how ridiculous her words sound.

‘You only had to ask,’ Tove says.

Malin shakes her head.

‘Mum,’ Tove says. ‘Sometimes you’re incredibly childish.’

42

‘There’s another brother.’

From his desk, Johan Jakobsson waves a sheet of paper when he sees Malin walk into the open-plan office in Police Headquarters. Her mobile conversation with Janne is still running through her head.

‘You could have said he was going to stay over.’

Janne had only just woken up, late getting to sleep after working the nightshift. But still clear and focused.

‘What happens in my home, Malin, is my business, and if you if aren’t keeping a close enough eye on Tove that she can keep things like this secret from you, maybe you need to have a bit of a think about your priorities in life.’

‘Are you preaching morals to me?’

‘I’m going to hang up now, okay.’

‘So you mean it’s Tove’s responsibility and not yours?’

‘No, Malin. YOUR responsibility, and you’re trying to push it off on to Tove. Goodbye. Call when you’ve calmed down.’

‘National registration records,’ Johan calls. ‘I got their file from the national registration office and it says there that Rakel Murvall has four sons; her eldest is called Karl Murvall. Must be a half-brother, because it says father unknown in the register. He’s in the phone book, lives down on Tanneforsvägen.’

‘I know about him,’ Malin says. ‘We need to talk to him as soon as possible.’

‘Meeting in three minutes,’ Johan says, pointing to the door to the meeting room.

Malin wonders if the children will be outside today. Let’s hope so; isn’t it a degree or so milder today?

There are no children playing outside the nursery, instead deserted swings, climbing-frames, sandpits and slides.

Karim Akbar has joined them for the meeting, dressed in a stern grey suit, sitting next to Sven Sjöman at the head of the table.

‘So far they’ve only found blood from elk and deer,’ Sven says. ‘But they’re hard at work in the lab. Until we’re done we need to keep all our options open as far as the Murvall brothers are concerned. If nothing else, at least we’ve dug up a bit of shit.’

‘Machine guns and hand grenades are more than a bit of shit,’ Börje Svärd says.

‘Speaking of weapons,’ Sven says. ‘According to the weapons experts at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, none of the weapons we found at the Murvalls’ could have been used to shoot rubber bullets into Bengt Andersson’s flat.’

‘Machine guns and hand grenades aren’t shit. But they’re not what we should be focusing on,’ Karim says. ‘Crime can deal with that.’

‘The question is, who did you see out in the forest?’ Sven says.

‘We don’t know,’ Malin says.

‘Whoever it was, they’ve got something to do with this,’ Zeke says.

‘Johan, tell us about the fourth brother,’ Sven says.

When Johan has told them what they know, silence settles over the table.

Questions hang in the air, until Zeke says, ‘None of the Murvalls has ever, not one single time, mentioned a half-brother. Did he grow up with them?’

‘Looks like it,’ Malin says. ‘Helen seemed to think so.’

‘Maybe he broke away,’ Johan says.

‘Some people might prefer a different sort of life to the one they offer,’ Börje adds.

‘Do we know anything else about this Karl Murvall?’ Karim wonders. ‘Do we know where he works, for instance?’

‘Not yet,’ Malin says. ‘But we’ll know by the end of the day.’

‘And we can always ask the Murvall brothers, and their charming mother,’ Zeke grins.

‘I can try,’ Sven says, and laughs.

‘What about the Æsir angle?’ Karim looks round the team expectantly. ‘Considering the crime-scene, we can’t just let that go.’

‘In all honesty,’ Johan says, ‘we’ve been busy elsewhere. But we’re definitely going to look more closely into that.’

‘Carry on as much as you can now,’ Sven says. ‘Malin and Zeke, how did you get on talking to the parents of Joakim Svensson and Jimmy Kalmvik?’

‘To their mothers,’ Malin says. ‘Joakim Svensson’s father is dead, and Göran Kalmvik works on an oil rig. We didn’t get anything new, really. It still isn’t clear if the boys have an alibi for Wednesday evening. There’s also some confusion about where Kalmvik’s father actually is.’

‘Confusion?’ Sven asks. ‘You know what I think about that.’

So Malin explains why the boys’ alibi is doubtful, that they were alone in Joakim’s flat, and that Göran Kalmvik is away, but that his wife thinks he’s still on an oil rig out in the North Sea.

‘But he’ll be home tomorrow. Early. We thought we’d try to catch him then.’

‘And Margaretha Svensson’s lover? Might he have something to say about what her son gets up to? If he’s been trying to build up a relationship?’

‘We’re going to talk to Niklas Nyrén today. We prioritised the Murvalls’ cabin last night.’

‘Good. But make the fourth Murvall brother the priority for now. I’ll talk to the family.’

‘What, Karl? He moved away to the city.’ Rakel Murvall’s voice over the phone.

Moved away to the city? It’s only ten kilometres or so, but she makes it sound like the other side of the world, Sven Sjöman thinks.

‘Nothing worth talking about,’ Rakel Murvall says and hangs up.

‘Here it is,’ Zeke says, parking the car outside the white three-storey building on Tanneforsvägen, close to the Saab factory complex. The building was probably constructed in the forties, when Saab was expanding and they were building fighter planes in their hundreds in the city. A pizzeria on the ground floor promises a Capricciosa for thirty-nine kronor, and the ICA supermarket opposite has a special offer on Classic brand coffee. The pizzeria’s yellow sign is peeling, and Malin can hardly read the name: Conya.

They dash through the chill across the broad pavement, tugging open the unlocked door into the stairwell. On the noticeboard: third floor, Andersson, Rydgren, Murvall.

No lift.

At the landing of the second floor Malin can hear her heart beat faster, and she is starting to pant, and by the time they reach the third floor she is almost having trouble catching her breath. Zeke is panting alongside her.

‘It’s always such a shock,’ he says. ‘How bloody awful stairs are.’

‘Yes, the snow yesterday was nothing compared to this.’

Murvall.

They ring the bell, hear it ring behind the door. Silence from what seems to be an empty flat. They ring again, but there’s no answer.

‘Must be at work,’ Zeke says.

‘Shall we try the neighbours?’

Rydgren.

After two rings the door is opened by an elderly man with an outsized nose and deep-set eyes, and he looks at them suspiciously.

‘I’m not interested,’ he says.

Malin holds out her police ID.

‘We’re looking for Karl Murvall. He isn’t at home. Do you happen to know where he works?’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

The man is wary.

‘Do you know-’

‘No.’

The man slams the door shut.

The only other person who happens to be at home is an elderly lady who thinks they are from meals on wheels and have brought her lunch.

One by one the brothers are brought out of their cells, taken into the interview room, and answer Sven Sjöman’s questions.

‘I haven’t got a brother called Karl,’ Adam Murvall says, rubbing his forehead. ‘You can say we’re family if you like, and from your way of looking at it that’s probably right, but not the way I see it. He chose his own path, and we chose ours.’

‘Do you know where he works?’

‘I don’t have to answer that, do I?’

‘What do you think, Malin? Shall we wait in the pizzeria over lunch, see if he comes home to eat?’ They’re standing by the car, and Zeke is fumbling with the keys as he talks. ‘And it’s been a bloody age since I had pizza.’

‘Fine with me. Who knows, they may even know where he works.’

Inside the Conya pizzeria there is a smell of dried oregano and yeast. Not the usual woven wallpaper, but pink and green fabric and Bauhaus chairs around polished oak tables. A swarthy man with improbably clean hands takes their order.

I wonder if he’s the owner? Malin thinks. It’s no myth that immigrants have to start their own businesses if they want to make a living. What would Karim say about you? He’d probably call you a good example. Someone who hasn’t given up your responsibility for earning a living to other people, but actively trying to look after yourself.

The virtuous circle we all have to hope in. Your sons, Malin thinks, if you have any, will doubtless be among the best on their courses out at the university. Hope so.

‘What would you like to drink? It’s included in the price of lunch.’

‘Cola,’ Malin says.

‘Same here,’ Zeke says, and when he gets out his wallet to pay he pulls out his police ID.

‘Do you happen know a Karl Murvall who lives in one of the flats upstairs?’

‘No,’ the restaurant-owner says. ‘No one I know. Has he done something stupid?’

‘Not as far as we know,’ Zeke says. ‘We just want to talk to him.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Is this your place?’ Malin asks.

‘Yes, why do you ask?’

‘I just wondered.’

They sit down at a table with a view of the entrance to the flats. Five minutes later the man places two pizzas in front of them, the cheese has melted and the fat is floating in pools over the tomato sauce, ham and mushrooms.

‘Bon appétit,’ he says.

‘Great,’ Zeke says.

They eat, looking out at Tanneforsvägen, at the cars driving past, at the angry grey-white exhaust fumes falling heavily to the ground.

What would cause such a breach between people who share the same blood? Sven Sjöman wonders.

He has just finished questioning Jakob Murvall. His words have stuck in his head.

‘He lives his life. We live ours.’

‘But you’re still brothers.’

‘Brothers aren’t always brothers, are they?’

What makes people who ought to make each other happy, who ought to help each other, turn their backs on each other? Become something like enemies instead? People can fall out over any number of things: money, love, beliefs, pretty much anything. But family? Within a family? If we can’t even hold things together on a small scale, how on earth are we going to manage on a larger one?

It is half past one.

The pizza is sitting like sluggish concrete in their stomachs and they lean back against the flexible wicker backrests.

‘He’s not coming,’ Malin says. ‘We’ll have to come back tonight.’

Zeke nods. ‘I thought I might go back to the station. Write up the report from yesterday,’ he says. ‘Do you mind going out to Ljungsbro on your own to talk to Niklas Nyrén?’

‘Okay, I’ve got a few other things I want to check out,’ Malin says.

‘Do you need any help?’

‘I’m happy to go alone.’

Zeke nods. ‘Like you did with Gottfrid Karlsson in the home?’

‘Hmm.’

They wave in thanks at the restaurant-owner as they leave.

‘Pretty good pizza,’ Zeke says.

Karl Murvall is a human being, but he is at best uninteresting in the eyes of his family, that much is clear.

‘Karl?’

Elias Murvall looks at Sven Sjöman blankly.

‘Don’t talk about that jumped-up cry-baby.’

‘What did he do?’

Elias Murvall seems to consider this, to soften slightly. Then he says, ‘He’s always been different, he’s not like us.’

43

Malin’s vision clears as she gets closer to the tree in the field.

Doesn’t want to believe what her eyes are telling her.

The lonely tree in the field is no longer so alone. A green estate car with a roof-box is parked on the road, and on the snow, right where Bengt Andersson’s body must have fallen, stands a woman wearing a white sheet, no, she isn’t wearing anything, and she’s holding her arms out from her body, her eyes closed.

She doesn’t open her eyes even as Malin’s car approaches.

Not a single muscle of the woman’s face moves, and her skin is whiter than the snow, her pubic hair improbably black, and Malin stops the car and there is still no reaction from the woman.

Frozen to ice?

Dead?

Standing upright, but then Malin sees her ribcage moving gently in and out, and she seems to be swaying slightly in the wind.

Malin feels the midwinter open its door wide as she gets out of the car, how the season takes command of her senses, as if it were resetting her body and condensing the distance between impressions, thoughts and deeds. A naked woman in a field. This just gets madder and madder.

The car door slams shut, but it’s as if the noise was nothing to do with any effort she herself made.

The woman must be freezing, and Malin approaches in silence.

Closer, closer, and soon she is only a few metres from the woman, who stands with her eyes closed, breathing, holding her arms out. Her face is quite calm, and her hair, raven-black, is hanging down her back in a plait.

The plain around her.

It’s only just over a week since they found Ball-Bengt, but the police cordon has been pulled down and the snow that has fallen since then hasn’t managed to hide the evidence left by curious visitors: cigarette ends, bottles, sweet wrappers, hamburger boxes.

‘Hello!’ Malin calls.

No reaction.

‘Hello!’

Silence.

And Malin tires of the game, she knows who she has in front of her, remembers what Börje Svärd said after he and Johan Jakobsson went to see Rickard Skoglöf.

But what is she doing here?

Malin takes off her thick glove and taps the woman on the nose. Hard, twice, and the woman twitches, leaping back before yelling, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Valkyria? Malin Fors from Linköping Police. What are you doing out here?’

‘Meditating. And now you’ve disturbed me before I was finished. Do you have any idea how fucking irritating that is?’

It’s as if Valkyria Karlsson is suddenly aware of the cold. She walks round Malin and heads towards her car. Malin follows her.

‘Why here, of all places, Valkyria?’

‘Because this is where he was found murdered. Because this place has its own special energy. You must be able to feel it too.’

‘It’s still a bit odd, don’t you think, Valkyria, you have to admit that?’

‘No, it’s not odd at all,’ Valkyria Karlsson says, getting into the green estate, a Peugeot, and wrapping a long sheepskin coat around her naked body.

‘Did you and your partner have anything to do with this?’ Stupid question, Malin thinks. But stupid questions can provoke good answers.

‘If we did, I’d hardly tell you, would I?’

Valkyria Karlsson closes the car door, and soon Malin is watching the smoke from the exhaust slowly rise into the sky as the car disappears towards the horizon.

Malin turns towards the tree.

Thirty-five metres away.

She forces the image of the naked Valkyria out of her mind, will deal with her later; now she is going to do what she came here for.

Are you here, Bengt?

And she sees the body, swollen and blue, beaten to a pulp, alone, swaying in the wind.

What did all the curious sightseers who have been out here expect to see?

A drifting spirit?

A corpse? To feel the stench of violence, of death, the way it looks in their worst nightmares?

Tourists in a chamber of horrors.

Malin carefully approaches the tree again, lets her heart-rate slow, shutting out all sound, letting the day disappear and be replaced by what happened here, trying to fix the scene in her mind: a faceless person struggling with a sleigh, chains round the body, feet, pulleys like black moons against the starry sky.

Malin is standing right where the branch broke, where Valkyria Karlsson has just been meditating.

Someone has laid a bunch of flowers on the ground, a card inside a plastic sleeve fastened to the bouquet.

Malin picks up the flowers, grey with frost, and reads: ‘What are we going to do now, with no one to fetch our balls?’ Ljungsbro IF football team.

Now you miss him.

In death comes thanks, and after thanks, fire.

Malin closes her eyes.

What happened, Bengt, where did you die? Why did you die? Who had so much hatred? If it was even hatred?

However much I shout you can’t hear me, so I’m not even going to try, Malin Fors. But I am standing here beside you, listening to your words, and I’m grateful for all your efforts, all your trouble. But is it really that important?

Is this really the best thing that you could be spending your time doing?

Her naked white body.

She can make herself immune to the cold. I could never do that.

I know who had so much hatred.

But was it hatred?

Your question is justified.

Perhaps it was despair? Loneliness? Or anger? Or curiosity? A victim? A mistake?

Or perhaps something else, something much worse.

Can I make my words reach you? One single little word? In that case I would like it to be this word.

Darkness.

The darkness that arises when the soul never gets to see the light in another person, when it withers and eventually tries to save itself.

Malin sways with the wind, reaching for the broken branch, the part that is still attached to the tree, but she can’t reach, and in the gap, the space between what she wants and what she is capable of, it becomes clear to her.

This isn’t over for you, is it?

You want something, you want to have something, and this is how you show it.

What is it you want?

What can you get out of a naked body in a tree in a field tormented by winter?

What is it that is worth such longing?

Opposite the imposing yellow-brick façade of the Cloetta chocolate paradise, on the other side of a small park, is a row of houses built in the thirties, detached houses mixed with small blocks of flats, each flat with its own front door and staircase.

Niklas Nyrén lives in the block at the end of the street, in the middle flat of three.

Malin rings once, twice, three times, but no one answers.

In the car on the way back from the tree she called him on both his mobile and home numbers; no answer, but she still wanted to try.

But it’s pointless. Not at home.

Margaretha Svensson said he worked as a travelling salesman, selling biscuits, for one of Cloetta’s subsidiary companies, Kakmästaren.

He’s probably out seeing customers, Malin thinks. And has his mobile switched off.

She left a message on the answering service.

‘Hello, this is Malin Fors of Linköping Police. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Please call me on 070-3142022 as soon as you hear this.’

On her way back to the city Malin listens to P1 on the radio.

The television personality Agneta Sjödin has written another book, about a guru in India who meant a great deal to her.

‘In his company,’ Agneta Sjödin says, ‘I became a whole person. Meeting him was like opening a door and finding myself.’

The reporter, an aggressive alpha male to judge by his voice, makes fun of Agneta without her realising.

‘And who did you find in the incense-filled room, Agneta? A life coach, maybe, India’s answer to Runar?’

Then music.

In front of her Linköping seems to be resisting the early fall of darkness, shimmering warm lights on the horizon promising security, a safe place to raise children.

And there are worse places, worse cities, Malin thinks. It’s small enough to be as safe as you could ask for, while still being big enough, developed enough to give a scent of the outside world.

I felt that scent. Was going to stay in Stockholm. That would probably have been the right size for me in the long run. But a single mother in the police living in Stockholm? With no parents, with my daughter’s father and his parents two hundred kilometres away, no real friends?

The retail outlets clustered beside Ikea. Babyland, Car-World, BR Toys. The sign to Skäggetorp. Lights taking hold of me, lights that are reluctantly forming themselves into a sense of home.

Malin and Zeke ring on Karl Murvall’s door just after seven o’clock. Up at the station she told Johan Jakobsson and Börje Svärd about her visit to the crime-scene, and how Valkyria Karlsson had been there meditating in the cold.

Then she called Tove: ‘I’m going to be late again tonight.’

‘Can Markus come over?’

‘Sure, if he’d like to.’

I don’t want to be standing here at this door, Malin thinks. I want to go home and meet my daughter’s boyfriend. Will he even dare to turn up? All he’s seen of me was in Mum and Dad’s apartment, and how friendly was I then? And maybe he’s heard Janne’s version of my personality. But what would that be like?

It’s still quiet inside the flat. No mobile number on the net to call, not even an answer-phone on his home line.

Sven Sjöman on his questioning: ‘It’s like they’re denying his existence. Whatever’s at the bottom of it, it brings out the very worst in the Murvalls. I mean, it takes a lot for a mother to deny her son. It goes against nature, doesn’t it?’

‘He could be anywhere,’ Zeke says, as they stand in the stairwell facing the door.

‘On holiday?’

Zeke throws out his arms.

They turn and are just about to go down the stairs when they hear a car slow up and stop outside the front door.

Malin leans over and peers down at the car through one of the windows in the stairwell: a dark green Volvo estate, with a roof-box for skis that looks improbably pink in the light of the streetlamp. A thin-haired man in a black jacket opens the door, gets out and hurries into the building.

‘Karl Murvall,’ Zeke says, holding up his ID. ‘We’re from the police, and we’d like a word with you if that’s all right.’

The man stops. Smiles.

‘Yes, I’m Karl Murvall,’ he repeats. ‘Sure, come on in.’

Karl Murvall has the same strong nose as his half-brothers, only his is sharper.

He is short, with the beginnings of a pot-belly, and his whole appearance gives the impression that he’d like to sink through the floor, yet at the same time he exudes a peculiar, primitive power.

Karl Murvall puts his key in the lock, opens the door. ‘I read in the paper about my brothers,’ he says. ‘I realised that you’d want to talk to me sooner or later.’

‘You didn’t think of contacting us yourself?’ Zeke says, but Karl Murvall doesn’t seem bothered by his words.

‘Hang on, and I’ll let you in,’ he says instead, with a smile.

44

Karl Murvall’s flat.

Two rooms.

Improbably tidy. Sparsely furnished.

It looks like Bengt Andersson’s home, Malin thinks. Just as functional, with a bookcase, sofa, a desk by the window.

No ornaments, no plants, no decoration, nothing to disturb the simplicity, or rather the emptiness, apart from a bowl of fragrant yellow and red winter apples on the desk.

Books about computer programming, maths, Stephen King. An engineer’s bookcase.

‘Coffee?’ Karl Murvall asks, and it strikes Malin that his voice is lighter than his brothers’, and that he makes a milder, but nonetheless harder impression somehow. Like someone who has been through a lot, who has seen and heard a great deal. A bit like Janne, the way he looks when someone talks about the hardships they’ve endured on their walking holiday in the mountains, that mixture of derision and sympathy, and a hint of ‘just be glad you don’t know what you’re talking about’.

‘Too late in the day for me,’ Zeke says. ‘But Detective Inspector Fors here would probably like a cup.’

‘Please.’

‘Sit yourselves down in the meantime.’

Karl Murvall gestures towards the sofa and they sit down, hear him busying himself in the kitchen, and after five minutes or so he’s back with a tray of steaming cups.

‘I brought a third anyway, just in case,’ Karl Murvall says, putting the tray on the coffee table before sitting down on the office chair by the desk.

‘Nice flat,’ Malin says.

‘Well, how can I help you?’

‘Have you been at work all day?’

Karl Murvall nods. ‘Did you try to get me earlier?’

‘Yes,’ Malin says.

‘I work a lot. I’m IT manager out at the Collins factory in Vikingstad. Three hundred and fifty employees, and increasing amounts of computerisation.’

‘A good job.’

‘Yes. I did computer engineering at university, and it’s paid off.’

‘You could afford something bigger,’ Malin says.

‘Material things don’t really interest me. Property just means responsibilities. I don’t need anything bigger than this.’

Karl Murvall takes a sip of coffee before going on: ‘But that’s not why you’re here.’

‘Bengt Andersson,’ Zeke says.

‘The man in the tree,’ Karl Murvall says quietly. ‘Awful.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘I’ve known who he was ever since my childhood in Ljungsbro. The whole family knew of him.’

‘But no more than that?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t know he was questioned during the investigation into the rape of your sister?’

Without his tone changing, Karl Murvall replies, ‘Well, that’s only natural. He was one of her clients, and she cared about all of them. She got him to take care of his personal hygiene.’

‘Are you and your sister close?’

‘It’s very hard to be close to her.’

‘But before?’

Karl Murvall looks away.

‘Do you visit her?’

Silence again.

‘You and your brothers seem to have a strained relationship,’ Zeke says.

‘My half-brothers,’ Karl Murvall says. ‘We don’t have any contact at all. That’s correct.’

‘Why is that?’ Malin asks.

‘I got an education. I’ve got a good job and I pay my taxes. That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t sit well with my half-brothers. I presume they’re angry about it. They probably think I imagine I’m better than them.’

‘And your mum as well?’ Zeke goes on.

‘Maybe my mother most of all.’

‘You’re half-brothers. On your birth certificate it says that your father’s identity is unknown.’

‘I’m Rakel Murvall’s first child. My father was a sailor who disappeared in a shipwreck when she was pregnant. That’s all I know. Then she met him, their father, Blackie.’

‘What was he like?’

‘To begin with, a drunk. Then a crippled drunk. Then a dead drunk.’

‘But he took you on?’

‘I don’t understand what my childhood has to do with any of this, Detective Inspector Fors, I really don’t.’

And Malin can see the change in Karl Murvall’s eyes, how matter-of-factness turns to sadness, and then to anger.

‘Maybe you two ought to be therapists instead. Those people out on the plain live their lives, I live mine, and that’s just the way it is, all right?’

Zeke leans forward. ‘Just for the sake of formality: what were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’

‘I was at work. I had a big update of the system to install and it had to be done at night. The security guard at Collins can confirm that. But is that really necessary?’

‘We don’t know yet, but no, probably not.’

‘Were you working alone?’

‘Yes, I always do when it’s a difficult job. To be honest, no one else understands what needs doing, and they just get in the way. But the guard can confirm that I was there all night.’

‘What do you know about your brothers’ affairs?’

‘Nothing. And if I knew anything I wouldn’t tell you. They are my brothers, in spite of everything. And if you don’t look after each other within your own family, when else would you?’

As they are pulling on their jackets and getting ready to leave the flat, Malin turns to face Karl Murvall.

‘I noticed the roof-box on the car. Do you ski?’

‘I have it for carrying things,’ Karl Murvall says, before going on: ‘I don’t ski. Sport has never been my thing.’

‘Well, thanks for the coffee,’ Malin says.

‘Thanks,’ Zeke says.

‘But you didn’t touch yours,’ Karl Murvall says.

‘Maybe, but thanks anyway,’ Zeke says.

Malin and Zeke are standing side by side next to Karl Murvall’s estate. The back of the car is covered by blankets, and on top of the blankets is a large toolbox.

‘He can’t have had it easy, growing up out there,’ Malin says.

‘No, just thinking about it gives me nightmares.’

‘Do you want to go out to see Niklas Nyrén?’

‘Malin, we must have called him at least ten times. He’ll have to wait till tomorrow. Go home and rest. Go home to Tove.’

45

Saturday, 11 February

The train moves forward slowly.

Göran Kalmvik is lying on the bunk in his compartment. Letting his thoughts come and go.

When won’t there be anything to come home to? he thinks. You can be away so much that away becomes home. And I, at least, pick up things along the way.

It’s still dark outside the windows of the train, but he can’t sleep, in spite of the carriage’s regular dunking against the joints of the rails, in spite of the fact that he is alone in a first-class compartment, and in spite of the fact that the sheets are crisp, yet warm and soft and smell soporific and freshly laundered.

Statoil is paying the fare.

He wonders how much longer he can do this.

It’s time to pick a life. He’s forty-eight and has been living a double life for almost ten years now, lying right in Henrietta’s face every time he comes home.

But she never seems to suspect anything. She seems happy with the money, pleased at not having to work, just buying things.

It’s worse with the lad. He gets more distant every time he goes away.

And the stories from school. Can it really be him acting up like that?

Little sod, Göran Kalmvik thinks, as he rolls over. Is it really so hard to behave properly? He’s fifteen now, and has always had everything he wanted.

Maybe it would be better to pack up and leave? Move to Oslo. Give it a try.

Work is terrible at this time of year. So cold that something freezes deep inside you even if you’re just moving back and forth in the icy wind on the drilling platform at the top of the rig, and your body never has time to warm up between shifts, and no one can be bothered to talk as they work.

But the pay is good.

It’s worth having experienced people out on the rigs considering how much it costs every time production grinds to a halt. Pipes like cold snakes full of black dreams.

Soon Norrköping. Then Linköping.

Then home.

Quarter to six.

Henrietta won’t meet him from the train. She stopped doing that a long time ago.

Home.

Unless it has now become away.

46

Sleeping-cars from Oslo sent on from Stockholm down towards Copenhagen, a slow, steady train full of people dreaming or about to wake up.

It is 6.15. The train is due at sixteen minutes past, and the morning has only just started to make itself felt. It is almost even colder than last night. But she managed to get up, wanted to check if Göran Kalmvik was actually on the train as they had been told, and, if he was, find out exactly what his secrets were.

She has called the security guards at Collins. They checked their logs and confirmed that Karl Murvall was in the factory from 19.15 on Wednesday evening until 7.30 the following morning. He had worked all night on a big update which had gone according to plan. She had asked if there was any other exit, or if there was any way he could have got out, and the guard had sounded certain: ‘He was here all night. The main gate is the only way out. And the fence has sensors connected to our office. We would have noticed if anyone was messing about with it right away. And where. And he was up in the server room when we made our rounds.’

Dinner with Tove yesterday. They talked about Markus. Then they watched ten minutes of a Pink Panther film before Malin fell asleep on the sofa.

Now she can just make out the train coming over the Stångån bridge.

The Cloetta Centre like a UFO off to the left on the other side, and the chimney of Tekniska Verken obstinately struggling against the smoke, the lettering of the logo glowing red like eyes on an unsuccessful photograph.

The train appears to increase in size as it approaches, the engine now at the end of the platform, a grandiose projectile fashioned by engineers.

Malin is alone at the station. She wraps her arms round her padded jacket and adjusts her hat.

No Henrietta Kalmvik, Malin thinks. I’m the only one here to meet someone. And I’m hunting a murderer.

Only one train door opens, two carriages away, and Malin hurries over, feeling the frozen air tug at her lungs. Only one man gets out on to the platform, carrying two big red suitcases, one in each hand.

A weather-beaten face and a body that is heavy but still muscular, and his whole being radiates familiarity with cold and privation; his blue coat isn’t even done up.

‘Göran Kalmvik?’

The man looks surprised. ‘Yes, and who are you?’

The door of the carriage closes again, and the sound of the conductor’s whistle almost drowns out Malin’s voice as she says her name and title. When the whistle has faded away and the train has left the platform, she quickly explains why she is there.

‘So you’ve been trying to get hold of me?’

‘Yes,’ Malin says. ‘For a few explanations.’

‘Then you’ll know that I wasn’t out on the rig.’

Malin nods. ‘We can talk in my car,’ she says. ‘It’s warm. I left it running in neutral.’

Göran Kalmvik inclines his head. His expression is one of relief, tinged with guilt.

A minute later he is sitting beside her in the passenger seat, and his breath smells strongly of coffee and toothpaste, and he starts talking without her having to ask.

‘I’ve had a woman in Oslo for about ten years now. I’ve been lying to Henrietta for ten years; she still thinks I work three weeks and have two off, but it’s the other way round. I spend the missing week in Oslo, with Nora and her lad. I like him, he’s more straightforward than Jimmy. I’ve never really understood that boy.’

Because you’re never at home, Malin thinks.

‘And guns? Do you have any idea where Jimmy might have got hold of a gun?’

‘No, I’ve never been interested in that sort of thing.’

‘And you don’t know what he used to do to Bengt Andersson?’

‘Sorry.’

Because you’re never at home, Malin thinks again.

‘I’ll need the number of your woman in Oslo.’

‘Does Henrietta have to find out about any of this? I don’t know what I want. I’ve tried telling her, but you know how it can be. So if she has to find out…’

Malin shakes her head. As an answer, as an attempt to get Göran Kalmvik to shut up, and as a reflection on the other gender’s occasionally incurable weakness.

Malin is sitting in the car, watching Göran Kalmvik’s taxi disappear off towards Ljungsbro, past the miserable brick box of the supermarket.

She is thinking.

Letting the possibilities wander freely through her head, then takes out her mobile and calls Niklas Nyrén’s various numbers. But he doesn’t answer, hasn’t called back, and she wonders if he might be at Margaretha Svensson’s, clicks up her number from the list, then stops when she sees what time it is: 6.59. Saturday morning.

It can wait.

There have to be some limits, even in a murder investigation. Let the worn-out single mother sleep.

Then Malin drives home. Gets into bed after checking on Tove. And before she falls asleep the image of Valkyria Karlsson comes back to her, naked in the field, like an angel, perhaps one of the devil’s angels.

47

When does a case turn into a black waking dream?

When does the search for truth start to go in circles? When does the first doubt appear among the police officers working on the investigation, the feeling that we may not manage to solve this one, maybe this time the truth will elude us?

Malin knows.

It can happen early or late in a case, it can be there as a suspicion after a first phone-call. It can happen suddenly or build gradually, little by little. It can happen on a tired, early Saturday morning in a meeting room where five overworked officers who ought to be at home sleeping instead of drinking disgusting black coffee get to start the day with bad news.

‘We’ve just received the final report from forensics about the raid at the Murvalls’. They’ve been working round the clock on this one and what good has it done?’

Sven Sjöman looks miserable, standing at the end of the table.

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing but animal blood, elk, deer, wild boar, hares. Animal hair in the workshop. Nothing else.’

Shit, Malin thinks, even if she has known deep down all along.

‘So we’re stuck,’ Johan Jakobsson says.

Zeke nods. ‘Stuck in solid concrete, I’d say.’

‘We’ve got other lines of inquiry. The Æsir lead. Börje?’ Sven asks. ‘Anything new? Did you talk to Valkyria Karlsson after Malin found her out at the oak?’

‘We’ve tried to get her on the phone, and we’re aiming to catch up with her today,’ Börje Svärd replies. ‘We’ve also spoken to twenty other people with links to Rickard Skoglöf, but none of them seems to have the slightest connection to Bengt Andersson. But we still have one big question to answer: what was she doing out at the crime-scene? Like that? And why?’

‘Disorderly conduct,’ Johan says. ‘Isn’t that what meditating naked comes under?’

‘She wasn’t harming anyone,’ Malin says. ‘I called Göran Kalmvik’s woman in Oslo and she confirmed his story. And I’m hoping to talk to Niklas Nyrén today. It feels like he’s the only unturned stone left in this line of inquiry.’

‘Well, we’ll simply have to keep going,’ Börje says, and these words are no sooner out of his mouth than there’s a knock at the door, and before anyone has time to shout ‘come in’, police constable Marika Gruvberg opens the doors and looks in.

‘Sorry to interrupt. But a farmer’s found some animal carcasses hanging in a tree in a field. We’ve only just taken the call.’

Circles, Malin thinks.

Seven circles.

Everything points downwards.

Shades of greyish white keep changing and blurring, impossible to detect with the naked eye, and it’s hard to tell the difference between land and sky.

The animals are hanging in one of three pines in a small clump in the middle of a field between the Göta Canal and Ljung Church. Over by the canal the leafless trees are lined up in silent tribute, and some eight hundred metres to the east the white, coffin-like church building seems to be dispersing into the atmosphere, only held back by the dubious colours of the surrounding buildings, the ochre-coloured school, the buttercup-yellow head-teacher’s house.

The bodies seem drained of blood, hanging by their necks from the lowest branches of the smallest pine. The snow is flecked red with frozen blood that must have poured from the wounds in the animals’ bodies and throats. A Dobermann, a pig and a year-old lamb. The dog’s mouth has been held closed with black and yellow hazard-warning tape.

Under the tree, in the blood and snow, there are cigarette butts and other rubbish, and in the snow Malin can see marks left by a ladder.

The farmer, a Mats Knutsson, is standing beside her in padded green overalls.

‘I was taking a drive round my land in the car. I usually do at this time of year, just to keep an eye on things, and then I saw this in the tree; it looked odd from a distance.’

‘You haven’t touched anything, have you?’

‘I haven’t been anywhere near them.’

Zeke, increasingly suspicious of all life out on the plain.

‘The whole lot of them seem inbred,’ he snarled in the car on the way out to the crime-scene. ‘What the fuck does this mean?’

‘Well, it can’t be the Murvall brothers.’

‘No, they’re in custody.’

‘Could it be Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson?’

‘It’s possible. According to Fredrik Unning, they’ve tortured cats before.’

‘We’ll have to talk to them again.’

‘The same with Skoglöf and Valkyria Karlsson.’

A few metres beyond the branch where the animals are hanging, someone has written MIDWINTER SACRIFICE in the snow in uneven letters. Not using blood from the animals, but red spray-paint; Malin can see that much with her naked eye. Karin Johannison, who has just arrived, is crouched down, combing the ground with the help of a colleague Malin has never seen before, a young girl with freckles and tousled red hair under a turquoise hat.

Beyond the red lettering someone has urinated in the snow, spelling out the letters VAL, but then their bladder must have run dry.

Zeke, beside the tree, points up at the animals. ‘Their throats have been cut. Drained of blood.’

‘Do you think they were still alive?’

‘Not the dog. They can kick up a real fuss when their instincts kick in.’

‘The marks from the ladder,’ Malin says. ‘Between the bodies. These cleared patches in the snow must be from a metal ladder, and these holes in the crust of the snow where the feet went in.’

Börje Svärd is walking up and down as he talks into his mobile.

He ends the call.

‘You see that dog up there in the tree. He must have been completely bloody helpless towards the end. The bastards couldn’t even leave his mouth alone. As far as I can tell, he’s an excellent example of the breed, which means he was bought from a kennel, probably tagged. So we’ll be able to track down his owner from the tax register. So get him down. Now!’

‘I just need to finish off here first,’ Karin calls, looking up at them with a smile.

‘Well, hurry up,’ Börje says. ‘He shouldn’t be left hanging there.’

‘Will we need the heater again this time?’ Karin asks.

‘No fucking heater,’ Börje yells.

‘Not for the animals,’ Zeke says. ‘What do you think, Malin?’

Malin shakes her head. ‘It looks like we can get what we need here without it.’

They hear a vehicle approaching. They all recognise the sound of a police van and turn round. The van drives up as close as it can get on the road, and they see Karim Akbar get out and call in their direction.

‘I knew it, I knew it. That there was something in the Æsir angle. In what that professor said. In those believers.’

Someone taps on Malin’s shoulder and she turns round.

Farmer Knutsson is standing behind her, apparently unconcerned by the fuss. ‘Do you need me here, or can I go? The cows…’

‘Go on,’ Malin says. ‘We’ll call you if there’s anything else.’

‘And the animals?’ The farmer gestures towards the tree.

‘We’ll get them down.’

Just as she finishes the sentence she sees the car from the Correspondent in the distance.

Daniel, she thinks, where have you been?

But it isn’t Daniel who gets out of the car. Instead it’s the photographer with the nose-ring and a nicotine-wrinkled, grey-haired journalist whom Malin recognises: Bengtsson, an old hand, complete with a pipe and a genuine loathing of computers and word-processors.

Well, Malin thinks, Karim can take care of him, seeing as he’s here.

Shall I ask about Daniel? Malin thinks. But once more she brushes the thought aside. How would that look? And how much do I care?

‘Get the dog down at once,’ Börje says.

Malin can see the frustration and anger in his body, all the emotion he’s focusing on the dead dog in the tree.

She wants to say, Calm down, Börje, he can’t feel anything hanging up there, but she keeps quiet, thinks, Anything he felt is long gone now.

‘We’re done here,’ Karin says, and behind her Malin hears the click of the photographer’s camera, and how Bengtsson is interviewing Karim in his hoarse voice.

‘What conclusions do you…’

‘Groups of… connection… teenage boys…’

Then Börje rushes towards the animals in the tree, leaps up and tries to grab the dog, but he can’t reach his limp legs, flecked with small clumps of congealed blood.

‘Börje, for fuck’s sake,’ Malin says, but he jumps again and again and again, trying to break the law of gravity in his attempts to save the dog from his helpless hanging.

‘Börje,’ Zeke shouts. ‘Have you gone mad? They’ll be here with a ladder soon, then we can get the dog down.’

‘Shut up.’

And Börje catches hold of the dog’s back legs, his hands seem to stick to them and reluctantly the dog follows the weight of Börje’s body and the branch bends in an arching bow and the knot that held the dog in the tree gives way. Börje shouts, groans as he falls back into the red snow.

The dog lands beside him, his lifeless eyes wide open.

‘This winter’s sending everyone mad,’ Zeke whispers. ‘Completely fucking crazy.’

48

From the field Malin can see the forests where Maria Murvall was attacked and raped; the end of the trees is like a black band against the white sky. She can’t see the water, but knows that the Motala River runs over there, bubbling like an overgrown stream under its thick covering of ice.

On a map the forest doesn’t look anything much, a strip maybe thirty or forty kilometres across, stretching from Lake Roxen up towards Tjällmo and Finspång, and towards Motala in the other direction. But inside the forest it’s possible to disappear, get lost, run across things that are incomprehensible to human beings. It is possible to be wiped out among the mud and decaying leaves, the unpicked mushrooms on their way to becoming part of the undercurrent of the forest. Long ago people in these areas believed in trolls, fairies, goblins and cloven-footed monsters, all wandering among the trees and trying to lure people to their doom.

What do people believe in today? Malin wonders, looking over at the church tower instead of the forest. Ice hockey and the Eurovision Song Contest?

Then she glances at the animal bodies in the snow.

Börje Svärd with his earpiece in. He’s scribbling a number on a scrap of paper, then makes a call on his mobile.

Zeke on another phone.

Dennis Hamberg, a farmer outside Klockrike, has reported a break-in at his farm, very upset: ‘Two organically reared animals stolen, a young pig and a year-old lamb. I moved here from Stockholm to get involved with sustainable farming, and now this happens.’

The forest.

Black and full of secrets, a girl from a John Bauer painting staring into a lake at her own reflection. Is there someone creeping up behind her?

Then they are all sitting in the police van, the muffled sound of an engine idling in the background, a treacherous heat that makes them undo their padded jackets, thaw out, open up again. A quickly convened meeting out in the field: Malin, Zeke, Börje and Karim; Sven Sjöman at the station, busy with paperwork.

‘Well?’ Karim says. ‘Where do we go from here?’

‘I’ll take care of tracing the dog,’ Börje says. ‘It shouldn’t take long.’

‘The uniforms can go door-to-door,’ Zeke says. ‘And Malin and I will go and see the organic farmer and check out what Kalmvik and Svensson were up to last night. We can’t let go of anything yet.’

‘The connection looks pretty obvious, though,’ Karim says from the driver’s seat. ‘The ritual, increased clarity of purpose and carelessness.’

‘In cases like this the level of violence usually escalates,’ Malin says. ‘Experience suggests that. And to go from a human being to animals is hardly an escalation.’

‘Maybe,’ Börje says. ‘Who knows what goes on inside some people’s heads?’

‘Check out Rickard Skoglöf and Valkyria Karlsson as well,’ Karim says. ‘The Æsir stamp on this is quite clear.’

When the meeting is over Malin looks over at the forest again. She closes her eyes, sees a naked, unprotected human body on scratchy moss.

She opens her eyes, trying to force the image away.

Karin Johannison walks past, carrying a large, yellow sports bag.

Malin stops her.

‘Karin. The chances of analysing the DNA in traces of blood have got a lot better in recent years, haven’t they?’

‘You know they have, Malin. You don’t have to flatter me by pretending you don’t know. In the main British lab in Birmingham they’ve made huge progress. It’s unbelievable what they can find out from practically nothing.’

‘What about us?’

‘We haven’t got those resources yet. But we do sometimes send material over there for analysis.’

‘If I had a sample, could you sort that out?’

‘Of course. I’ve got a contact there. An Inspector John Stuart I met at a conference in Cologne.’

‘I’ll get back to you,’ Malin says.

‘Do,’ Karin says, then heads off with her bag over the rough snow, and despite the weight she still manages to look as elegant as a model on a Paris catwalk.

Malin walks away from the others along the road, pulls out her mobile and calls the exchange in the station.

‘Can you put me through to a Sven Nordström at Motala Police?’

‘Of course,’ the female receptionist says.

Three rings, then Nordström’s voice: ‘Nordström.’

‘This is Fors from Linköping.’

‘Hello, Malin. It’s been a while.’

‘Yes, but now I need your help. You know your rape case, Maria Murvall? The woman whose brothers have cropped up in our current case? Was she wearing any fragments of clothing when you found her?’

‘Yes, but the blood on them was so filthy that forensics said they couldn’t get anything out of it.’

‘According to Johannison here, they’ve come up with a lot of new techniques. And she’s got a contact in Birmingham who’s a bit of a wizard at this sort of thing.’

‘So you want to send the fragments of clothing to England?’

‘Yes. Can you see that they get to Karin Johannison at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science?’

‘It really ought to go through official channels.’

‘Tell that to Maria Murvall.’

‘We’ve got the samples in the archive. Karin will get them today.’

‘Thanks, Sven.’

Just as Malin hangs up Karin passes her in her car. Malin stops her.

Karin winds down the window.

‘You’ll be getting some material today, from Nordström in Motala. Get it to Birmingham as soon as you can. It’s urgent.’

‘What is it?’

‘Maria Murvall’s clothes. Or the remains of them.’

Margaretha Svensson is tired when she opens the door of her flat. There is a smell of coffee from the kitchen and she doesn’t seem surprised to see Malin and Zeke again, just gestures to them to come in and sit down at the kitchen table.

Is Niklas Nyrén here? Malin thinks, but if he was he would probably be sitting at the table or in the living room already. He would have been visible by now.

‘Would you like coffee?’

Malin and Zeke stop in the hall once they’ve shut the door behind them.

‘No thanks,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve just got a couple of quick questions.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Do you know what your son was doing yesterday evening and last night?’

‘Yes, he was at home. He and I had dinner with Niklas, then we all watched television together.’

‘And he didn’t go out at all?’

‘No, I know that for certain. He’s asleep upstairs at the moment. You can wake him and ask him.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Zeke says. ‘Is Niklas here now?’

‘He’s gone home. Went late last night.’

‘I’ve asked him to call me, I left messages.’

‘He told me. But he’s been so busy with work.’

A murder investigation, Malin thinks. A fucking murder investigation and people can’t even be bothered to call back. And they complain that the police are slow? Sometimes Malin wishes that people understood that the police are only the last link in a network covering the whole of society, where everyone, each and every one of us, has to do their bit to hold things together.

But everyone relies on everyone else doing their bit. And do nothing themselves.

SEP, as it’s called in Life, the Universe and Everything: Somebody Else’s Problem.

‘What do you think?’ Zeke asks as they head back to the car.

‘She’s telling the truth. He was at home last night. And Jimmy Kalmvik would hardly have done it on his own. Next stop the farmer.’

The group of buildings on a field a few kilometres outside Klockrike is covered in snow and cold, and the surrounding clusters of birches and a lovely dry-stone wall provide only slight protection for the garden in front of the newly built farmhouse.

The house is constructed of sandstone, with green shutters over the windows. In front of the porch, painted Mediterranean blue, stands a Range Rover.

It ought to smell of lavender, thyme and rosemary, but instead it smells of ice. At the end of the avenue leading to the house is a gate where someone has put up a sign saying: ‘Finca de Hambergo’.

The green-painted door of the house opens and a man in his forties with bleached hair puts his head out.

‘Thanks for coming so quickly. Come in.’

The ground floor of the house is a single open room, hall, kitchen and living room in one. When Malin sees the stone walls, the patterned tiles, the open kitchen cupboards, terracotta floor and earth colours, she feels transported to Tuscany or Majorca. Or Provence, maybe?

She’s only been to Majorca, and the buildings didn’t look like this. The flats where she and Tove were staying looked more like an overblown version of the council blocks in Skäggetorp. But nonetheless, she knows from interior design magazines that this is what the dream of the south looks like for a lot of people.

Dennis Hamberg notices them staring.

‘We wanted it to look like a mixture of an Andalusian finca and an Umbrian villa. We moved here from Stockholm to start an organic farm. We really wanted to move further away, but the kids needed a Swedish school, so they’re at secondary school in Ljungsbro. And my wife got a good job as head of PR for Nygårds Anna in Linköping. I went through a hell of a lot in the nineties and just wanted some peace and security.’

‘Where are your family now?’

‘In town, shopping.’

And you’ve got the urge to talk to someone, way out here on a desolate winter plain, Malin thinks.

‘And the break-in to the barn?’

‘Of course. Follow me.’

Dennis Hamberg pulls on a black Canadian Goose parka and leads them across the yard to a red-painted barn, and points to the marks left by a crowbar in the door frame.

‘This is where they got in.’

‘More than one?’

‘Yes, there are loads of footprints inside.’

‘Okay, we’ll have to try not to stand on them,’ Zeke says.

Prints from trainers and heavy boots. Military? Malin wonders.

In the barn there are several cages of rabbits. There’s a single lamb in a pen, and in a square of concrete a black sow lies suckling something like ten piglets.

‘Iberico. Pata Negra from Salamanca. I’m going to make ham.’

‘This was where they took a pig?’

‘Yes, they took one of the young ones. A lamb too.’

‘And you didn’t hear anything?’

‘Not a sound.’

Malin and Zeke look round, then go back out into the yard, followed by Dennis Hamberg.

‘Do you think there’s any chance I’ll get the animals back?’ he says.

‘No,’ Zeke says. ‘They were found hanged in a tree outside Ljung this morning.’

The muscles in Dennis Hamberg’s face seem to wither away instantly, his whole body shudders, then he pulls himself together and tries to get a grip on something that seems completely incomprehensible.

‘What did you say?’

Zeke repeats what he said.

‘But things like that don’t happen here.’

‘It looks like they do,’ Malin says.

‘We’ll be sending out a forensics team to conduct a search.’

Dennis Hamberg looks across the fields, pulling his hood over his head.

‘Before we moved here,’ he says, ‘I never knew how windy it could get. Sure, it’s windy in Egypt, on the Canary Islands, in Tarifa, but not like this.’

‘Do you have a dog?’ Malin asks.

‘No, but we’re going to get cats before summer.’ And then Dennis Hamberg thinks for a moment before asking, ‘The animals, will I have to identify them?’

Malin looks away, over the fields, and can hear from Zeke’s voice that he’s suppressing a laugh.

‘Don’t worry, Dennis,’ he says. ‘We can assume the animals are yours. But if you’d like to identify them, I’m sure that can be arranged.’

49

Börje Svärd clenches his fists in his pockets, feeling something approaching, something intangible. It’s there in the air he breathes, and he recognises it. It’s a feeling that something’s about to happen, that an event has meaning for him in a way that goes far beyond his understanding.

The condensation on the windscreen increases with every breath.

The owner of the Dobermann, according to the tax register, is called Sivert Norling, and he lives at 39 Olstorpsvägen in Ljungsbro, on the side of the river where the roads lead up towards the forests near Hultsjön. It only took a few minutes to find out the owner’s name, thanks to some helpful people in Stockholm.

Start with this.

The whole of his police instinct feels it. Closest, most possible. Skoglöf and Valkyria Karlsson will have to wait.

And now he and Johan Jakobsson are there. He wants to see what the bastard looks like, if it was the owner who did it. Either way, you have to keep a closer eye on your dog than to let a group of nutters get hold of it.

The whitewashed wooden house is squeezed in between other similar seventies constructions. The apple and pear trees are fully grown and in the summer the hedges are presumably tall enough to stop prying eyes.

‘No point waiting,’ Börje says. ‘You never know. We might be getting close.’

‘So how are we going to do it?’ Johan wonders.

‘We ring the bell.’

‘Okay. That would be a start.’

They get out of the car, open the gate in the fence and go up the steps. Ring the bell.

They ring three, four times before they hear sluggish steps inside the house.

A lad in his late teens opens. He’s wearing black leather trousers, has long black hair hanging over pierced nipples. His skin is as white as the snow in the garden and the cold doesn’t seem to bother him.

‘Yeah?’ he says, and looks blearily at Börje and Johan.

‘Yeah?’ Börje says. ‘Are you Sivert Norling?’ he asks, holding up his police ID.

‘No, that’s the old man.’

‘And you are?’

‘Andreas.’

‘Can we come in? It’s cold out here.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘What do you want?’

‘Your dog. A Dobermann. Is it missing?’

‘I haven’t got a dog.’

‘According to the tax office you do.’

‘It’s the old man’s dog.’

Johan looks at the boy’s hands. Small dots of red.

‘I think you’d better come with us,’ he says.

‘Can I put a top on?’

‘Yes-’

Without warning the boy takes a step back and slams the door with full force.

‘Shit,’ Börje shouts, rattling the door. ‘You check the back and I’ll take the front.’

They draw their weapons, split up, sticking close to the wall, their jackets catching on uneven planks.

Johan crouches, creeps under the windows along the terrace; the stained green planks creak beneath his feet. He reaches his arm up and tests the handle of the terrace door.

Locked.

Five minutes pass, then ten. Silence from inside the house, no one seems to be moving in there.

Börje sticks his head up, tries to see through the window into what must be a room. Darkness within.

Then Börje hears a noise from the door beside the garage, and it flies open and the boy races out with something black in his hand. Shall I take him? Börje has time to think, but he doesn’t shoot him, instead starts chasing the boy as he sprints off down the road between the houses.

Börje chases the boy towards the centre of town and the Motala River, then into a street off to the left. There are children playing in a garden. His heart is racing fit to burst but with every step he gets a bit closer.

The boy is growing in his vision in front of him. The gardens seem to get bigger then smaller in turn to each side of him. His shoes drum on the gritted streets, left, right, left. The boy must know these streets like the back of his hand.

Tired now.

They’re both running slower.

Then the boy stops.

Turns round.

Aims the black thing at Börje, who throws himself to the ground, towards a heap of snow.

What the fuck is he doing, the idiot, does he know what he’s forcing me to do?

The heaped snow is sharp and cold.

Before him Börje Svärd sees his wife, motionless in bed, his dogs, excitable as he approaches their run; he sees the house and the children far away in distant countries.

He sees a boy before him, holding a gun aimed at him.

Torturing dogs. A child. The Dobermann’s taped-up mouth.

Fingers closed around a trigger. The boy’s, his own.

Aim for the leg. The shin. Then he’ll go down, and there’s no vein to tear open so he won’t bleed to death.

Börje fires and the sound is short and powerful and before him on the road the boy collapses, as if someone had pulled his legs out from under him.

Johan heard the noise from the front of the house and rushed round.

Where did they go?

Two directions.

Johan runs upwards and then left. Are they round that corner?

Heavy breathing.

Cold in his lungs, then he hears the shot.

Shit.

And he runs towards the direction of the sound.

And he sees Börje creeping towards a body lying in the middle of the gritted street. Blood is running from a leg, a hand clawing at the snow, reaching for the wound. The boy’s black hair like an array of shadow on the white snow.

Börje gets up, kicks something black away from the body.

Then the body starts to make a noise; a scream of pain, despair and fear, maybe also confusion, cuts through the walls of the residential area.

Johan runs up to Börje.

‘He stopped and took aim at me,’ Börje pants through the screaming. Then he points at the weapon in the snow. ‘A fucking plastic replica. The sort of thing you can buy from a thousand websites. But how the hell was I supposed to see that?’

Börje crouches down next to the boy, says, ‘Take it easy now. It’ll get sorted.’

But the boy carries on screaming, holding his leg.

‘We have to get an ambulance out here,’ Johan says.

Malin looks out over the empty playground.

Thinks: What’s going on round here? Why is all this happening now? She doesn’t know why, but maybe it’s because a breaking point has been reached, and something is collapsing right now, in a torrent of violence and confusion.

Young people.

Drifts of confused young people.

And it doesn’t seem to fit.

‘They’ve operated on him. We’ll talk to him later.’ Sven Sjöman’s weary voice. ‘His dad confirms that it was their dog, that he bought it for the boy.’

‘What else did the father have to say?’ Zeke asks.

‘That the boy wasn’t at home last night, that he’s spent the last few years living in a world of computer games, Internet, death metal and, as his father put it, “a general interest in the occult”.’

‘Poor sod,’ Zeke says, and Malin can see that he seems to be reflecting. Maybe he’s getting a bit of sensible perspective and thinking that his anxieties before Martin’s matches are ridiculous, that he knows his worries are silly and that he really ought to get over them, once and for all. There are ten thousand dads in Linköping who’d love to have a son like Martin. And when’s the next home match?

Presumably Zeke has no idea.

He probably gets a sore backside at the very thought of the Cloetta Centre.

‘The father’s a sales executive for Saab,’ Sven goes on. ‘Spends three hundred days travelling each year. Places like Pakistan and South Africa.’

‘Any friends?’ Malin asks.

‘None that the father could name.’

‘Börje?’ Johan Jakobsson, anxiety in his voice.

‘You know how it is. Taken off active duties until the incident has been investigated.’

‘It’s open and shut,’ Malin says. ‘He fired in self-defence. Those replicas look exactly like the real thing.’

‘I know,’ Sven says. ‘But when was anything that simple, Fors?’

Room ten of ward five in Linköping University Hospital is dark, apart from the light cast by the reading lamp above the bed.

Sivert Norling is sitting in a green armchair in the gloom by the window. He is a tall, gangly man, and even in the dim light Malin can see that his blue eyes are hard. His hair is cropped and his legs stick out across the floor. Beside him sits his wife, Birgitta. She’s blonde, dressed in jeans and a red blouse that makes her face, already red from crying, look even more swollen.

In the bed lies the boy, Andreas Norling.

He seems vaguely familiar to Malin, but she can’t place him.

The boy’s leg is in traction, and his eyes are cloudy with painkillers and narcotics, but according to the doctors he can manage some questions.

Zeke and Malin are standing beside his bed, and a uniformed officer is sitting on guard outside the door.

The boy refused to say hello when they came in, and now he has defiantly turned his head away from them, his black hair looks like angry streaks of ink across the white pillow.

‘You’ve got something to tell us,’ Malin says.

The boy lies there silent.

‘We’re investigating a murder. We’re not saying you did it, but we have to know what happened out at that tree last night.’

‘I haven’t been near any tree.’

The boy’s father gets up, shouts, ‘Now you just have the common damn decency to tell them what you know. This is serious. It’s not some bloody game.’

‘He’s right,’ Malin says calmly. ‘You’re in a whole lot of trouble, but if you talk to us perhaps things will get a bit easier for you.’

Then the boy looks at Malin. She tries to calm him with her eyes, persuade him that everything will all be all right, and maybe he believes her, maybe he decides that none of it matters.

He starts to talk.

About how they read in the paper about midwinter sacrifices, and how cool it sounded, and how he had been at home with his mum when the murder must have been committed, how they didn’t have anything to do with that, that was murder, after all, and how he had been so tired of his flatulent dog and how his friend Sara Hamberg had said they could get some pigs from hers, and that their friend Henrik Andersson had an old EPA tractor with a flatbed trailer that they could use, and how he had found a site on the net all about sacrifices, and that Rickard Skoglöf, who they had read about in the paper, was the man behind the site. And that he was some sort of Æsir wizard and had encouraged them in several odd emails and one thing had led to another, it had become sort of unstoppable, as if some weird force was driving them to do it.

‘We drank some cans, got hold of some knives. I didn’t think there’d be so much sodding blood. It was like, wow, so much blood. It was pretty cool. But God it was cold.’

His mum begins to cry again.

His dad looks like he’d like to apply some corporal punishment.

The night is black behind the hospital window.

‘Was Rickard Skoglöf with you?’

The boy shakes his head. ‘No. Only those weird emails.’

‘And Valkyria Karlsson?’

‘Who?’

‘Why did you run?’ Malin asks. ‘And why did you take aim at Detective Inspector Svärd?’

‘I don’t know,’ the boy replies. ‘I didn’t want to get caught. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’

‘Someone ought to drop a bomb on Hollywood,’ Zeke mutters.

‘What did you say?’ The boy suddenly interested.

‘Nothing. Just thinking out loud.’

‘One more question,’ Malin says. ‘Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson, do you know them?’

‘Know them? Jocke and Jimmy? No, but of course I know who they are. Bastards, both of them.’

‘Did they have anything to do with this?’

‘Not a thing. I’d never have anything to do with them if I could help it.’

On the way down in the lift Malin asks Zeke, ‘Shall we bring in Skoglöf?’

‘What for? Incitement to animal cruelty?’

‘You’re right. We’ll leave him be for the moment. But we should probably have another talk with him and Valkyria Karlsson. Who knows what they might have got other people to do?’

‘Yes, and Johan can talk to the other kids who were out in the field.’

‘Okay. But we’ve only got one more thing to do today,’ Malin says.

‘What’s that?’

‘We’re going to see Börje.’

The white-painted kitchen cupboards shine, newly polished, and the table is covered with an orange and black Marimekko tablecloth. Above it hangs a PH designer lamp.

The whole kitchen of Börje Svärd’s house exudes calm, and the room has an aesthetic quality far beyond anything Malin imagines she might ever achieve. The entire house is the same: considered, restful, beautiful.

Börje is sitting at the end of the table. Beside him his wife, Anne, seems to be almost clinging to an armchair-like blue wheelchair, the features of her face somehow rigid. Her laboured breathing fills the room, tormented, obstinate.

‘What the hell was I supposed to do?’ Börje says.

‘You did the right thing,’ Zeke says.

‘Absolutely,’ Malin agrees.

‘So you say he’ll be okay, no lasting damage?’

‘Completely, Börje, the bullet hit him exactly where it should have.’

‘Bloody awful, though,’ Börje says. ‘Attacking animals like that.’

Malin shakes her head. ‘Madness.’

‘I suppose I’ll be off a couple of weeks,’ Börje says. ‘It usually takes a while.’

A gurgling sound, followed by some lighter noises from the wheelchair.

Language?

‘She says,’ Börje explains, ‘that it’s time we put a stop to these awful things.’

‘Yes, it really is high time,’ Malin says.

‘What happened at work today, Mum?’ Tove asks. ‘You seem tired?’

Tove reaches for the pan of mashed potato on the kitchen table.

‘Yes, what did happen? Some youngsters, not much older than you, who’d done a load of stupid things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Really, really stupid things, Tove.’

Then Malin eats a large forkful of potato before going on: ‘Promise me you’ll never do anything stupid, Tove.’

Tove nods. ‘What’s going to happen to them now?’

‘They’ll be called in for questioning, then social services will probably have to take care of them somehow.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, Tove. Just take care of them, I suppose.’

50

Sunday, 12 February

Now the bell in the chapel is tolling eleven, eleven times, and then it starts ringing, and it is ringing for me, informing the district that Ball-Bengt Andersson is now being laid to rest, and in the ringing is the story of my life, the apparently wasted series of breaths that was mine. But oh, oh, how you deceive yourselves. I knew love, at least once, even if I was suspicious of it.

Although it is true: I was a lonely person, but not the loneliest.

And now they are going to talk about me. Then I shall burn. On a Sunday and everything! They made an exception for me, violent as my demise was.

But it doesn’t matter, that part of me is past, only the mystery remains, and for its sake parts of me are preserved. I am a blood group, a complete code, I am the person lying in the white-painted pine coffin in the Chapel of the Resurrection’s orange room, just the other side of Lambohov, on the way to Slaka.

A hundred metres away, along an underground tunnel, the oven awaits, but I’m not scared of the flames; they aren’t eternal or hot, just a fashion to wear for today.

I’m no longer angry with anyone, but I wish Maria could have a little peace. She was friendly towards me, and that ought to mean something.

You look so serious, sitting there in your pews. There are only two of you: Malin Fors and a representative of Fonus funeral services, Skoglund, the man who made me look nice for my picture in the Correspondent. Beside the coffin stands a woman, her priest’s collar chafing her neck, and she wants to get this over and done with; death and loneliness of my variety scare her. That’s how much faith she has in her god, in his or her goodness.

So get on with it, get it over with.

I drift on.

The pain hasn’t dissipated, and it’s as capricious as ever, but I’ve learned one thing: in death I own language.

I can whisper a hundred words, scream thousand upon thousand of them. I can choose to be silent. I finally own my own story. Your mumbling means nothing.

Just listen.

Malin greeted the representative of the funeral company, Conny Skoglund, before she went into the chapel. They said hello under the sand-coloured arches, and after the pleasantries they stood beside each other in silent complicity before the bells started to ring and they went into the large hall. Light was flooding into the room in an almost indecent manner through the windows which confidently, as if jealous of their view of the park, stretched from floor to ceiling. It must be beautiful when it’s green outside, Malin thinks. Now it’s just unnaturally light.

They sit on either side, as if trying somehow to fill the empty room.

Alone in life.

Even more alone in death.

About a week since Bengt Andersson was found, and now his funeral is to take place. A single wreath on the coffin, from Ljungsbro Parish. The football club evidently thought it had done enough with the wreath at the crime-scene. Malin has a white narcissus in her hand, and the bells ring and ring and she thinks that if they ring much longer both she and funeral director Skoglund will go deaf. And the priest as well. She’s around thirty-five, red-haired and chubbily freckled, and now the bells stop ringing and a hymn pipes up instead, and when it’s over the priest starts talking.

She says what she has to say, and when she gets to the part where she has to add something personal she says, ‘Bengt Andersson was an unusual, normal person…’ and Malin wants to get up, hold her mouth shut until the platitudes stop pouring out of it, but instead she shuts off and without knowing how it happens she is placing the white narcissus on Ball-Bengt’s coffin as she thinks, We’ll get them, we’ll get him, you’ll have peace, I promise.

Malin Fors, if you think that I need ‘the truth’ in order to have peace, you’re mistaken, but you’re looking for it for your own sake, aren’t you?

You’re the one who needs peace and quiet, not me.

But that’s okay, we can be honest with each other, we don’t have to hide our intentions and other such tiresome nonsense.

Now he’s steering me down the path, the coffin is dark and warm and soon it will be even warmer.

His name is David Sandström, forty-seven years old, and everyone wonders how he can do a job like this. Corpse-burners aren’t very well regarded, not much better than fatties who hit their own father over the head with an axe. But he’s happy in his work, it’s solitary, he doesn’t have to worry about the living, and there are other advantages that don’t need to be mentioned now.

We’re inside the room containing the oven; it’s big and spacious with sky-blue walls, located below ground with little windows up near the ceiling. The oven itself is entirely automated, the cremator just has to get the coffin on to a conveyor belt, then the doors open on a hearth that is lit by the press of a button.

Then I burn.

But not yet.

First David Sandström has to heave the coffin on to the conveyor belt, something that takes a great deal of effort.

God, it’s heavy. You have to slide them the last bit of the way from the trolley to the conveyor belt and it’s usually easy, but this one’s bloody heavy.

Bengt Andersson.

David knows how he died, lets him lie in the coffin, under the lid, doesn’t even want to look at him. Ideally they should be younger, he likes those ones, they grant him most peace.

There.

The coffin is on the conveyor belt.

He presses the button on the control panel, the door to the oven opens, he presses the next button and the flames lick hungrily for wood to bite into.

A bit more, just a bit.

Then the flames grab hold of the wood, and within ten seconds they have enveloped the coffin completely, and the door of the oven slowly returns to its starting point.

David Sandström pulls out his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. He takes out his special pen, then writes carefully on one of the last pages: Bengt Andersson, 61 10 15-1923. No. 12,349.

I feel the fire.

It is every feeling. I am transforming now. I am vaporised, becoming the smoke climbing from the chimney of the crematorium, the burned-smelling particles that drift in across Linköping, the air that Malin Fors hungrily inhales as she crosses the car park outside Police Headquarters.

What remains is ashes that will be emptied into the memorial grove beside the chapel in the old cemetery.

All our ashes there are beacons for memory, and my ashes will be there so that anyone who, against all expectation, wants to remember me will have a place to go.

We turn to our memories and thus revisit our lives.

Not much of a consolation for the dead, is it?

But such are the habits of the living these days.