Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

51

Plants that need watering, post that needs sorting, taps that need checking. Dust that needs sweeping up, a freezer that needs defrosting, a bedspread that needs straightening, and then the memories that need suppressing, events that need forgetting, suspicions that need denying, broken promises that need forgiving and love that needs to be remembered for ever.

Is that possible?

13.45, a few hours after Bengt Andersson’s funeral.

Malin is moving through her parents’ apartment. Remembers when she was last here. Tove, just like her, on her parents’ bed, the same unsuspecting determination, the same naïve openness with her own body.

But still.

Malin laughs to herself. She has to give Tove full marks for her ingenuity in her hunt to find a love-nest for her and Markus in this cold. The two of them are at a matinée, a new action film based on the long-forgotten adventures of some comic-book hero from the fifties, updated for modern tastes: more violence, more – but just as chaste – sex, and a more obvious and happier ending. Ambiguity is the enemy of security, and security is necessary for success at the box-office.

Every age, Malin thinks, gets the stories it deserves.

The smell of her parents’ apartment.

It smells of secrets.

In the same way as the hunting cabin in the forest, although it was clearer and cooler in the forest night, not as impenetrable and personal as here. You get twisted, Malin thinks, around your own axle if you spend too long in the past. At the same time, you’re done for if you don’t dare touch it. Psychotherapists know all about that.

Malin sinks into the sofa in the sitting room.

Feels exhausted and thirsty: Dad keeps his drink in the cupboard above the fridge in the kitchen.

Twist the soul.

Fine furniture that isn’t really that fine.

‘You’ll water the plants, won’t you?’

I’ve already watered them.

The plants. Smells. The smell of cabbage bake.

Of lies. Even here? Just like in Rakel Murvall’s house in Blåsvädret. Just weaker, vaguer here. Have to go out there again, Malin thinks, have to go there and squeeze the secrets from the floorboards and walls.

Her mobile rings out in the hall.

It’s in her jacket pocket, and she gets up from the sofa, runs out, fumbles.

International call.

‘Hello, Malin.’

‘Malin, Dad here.’

‘Hello, I’m in the apartment, I’ve just watered the plants.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But that’s not why I’m ringing.’

He wants something, but doesn’t dare say, the same feeling as last time. Then her father takes a deep breath, and lets the air out before he starts to speak.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘we’ve been talking about Tove coming out here, and it must be her half-term break soon? Perhaps that would be a good time?’

Malin takes the phone from her ear and holds it out in front of her, and shakes her head.

Then she pulls herself together. Puts the phone to her ear.

‘In two weeks.’

‘Two weeks?’

‘Yes, it’s half-term in two weeks. There’s just one problem.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We haven’t got the money for a flight. I don’t have any spare and Janne had to pay for a new boiler just before Christmas.’

‘Yes, we talked about that, your mum and I. We can pay for her ticket. We went to a travel agent today, and there are cheap flights via London. Maybe you could get some time off as well?’

‘Impossible,’ Malin says. ‘Not at such short notice. And we’ve got a difficult case right now.’

‘So what do you think?’

‘It sounds like a great idea. But of course you’ll have to talk to Tove first.’

‘She can go swimming here, go horse-riding.’

‘She knows what she wants to do and what she doesn’t. Don’t worry about that.’

‘Will you talk to her?’

‘Call her yourself. She’s at the cinema right now, but she should be home by ten.’

‘Malin, can’t you talk-’

‘Okay, okay. I’ll talk to her, then I’ll call you back. Tomorrow.’

‘Don’t wait too long. Those tickets won’t last.’

52

The voices.

Let them fly.

Listen to them all in the investigation.

Let them have their say. Then they’ll lead you to your goal.

The hall of Niklas Nyrén’s flat is full of transparent packs of biscuits, round, beige raspberry dreams, chocolate tops, chocolate balls that used to be called nigger-balls, and the green rug is covered in biscuit crumbs. There was a dark blue Volvo estate outside in the drive, parked far too close to a letterbox.

Be careful, Malin thought as she rang the doorbell. If the boys did it, he could have helped them with the body.

Niklas Nyrén leads her into the flat, into the tidy living room which is entirely dominated by a big red sofa in front of a wall-mounted flat-screen television.

There’s nothing in the flat to suggest that Niklas Nyrén is anything but a completely ordinary middle-aged man.

He’s wearing jeans and a green polo-neck sweater, his face is round and his stomach bulges out above his belt. Too much standing still. Too much driving, and too much of a taste for his own products.

‘I was going to ring you,’ Niklas Nyrén says, and his voice is oddly dark to belong to someone with a weight problem; his voice ought to be higher, hoarser.

Malin doesn’t answer, and sits down on an imitation Myran chair at the little dining table by the window facing the Cloetta factory.

‘You had some questions?’ Niklas Nyrén says, sitting down on the sofa.

‘As you know, Joakim Svensson’s name has cropped up in connection with the investigation into the murder of Bengt Andersson.’

Niklas Nyrén nods. ‘I find it hard to imagine that the boy could be involved. He just needs to learn a few manners, get a few male role-models too.’

‘You get on well with him?’

‘I try,’ Niklas Nyrén says. ‘I try. I had a pretty crap childhood myself, and I wanted to help the lad. He’s got keys to this flat. I want to show him I’ve got faith in him.’

‘Crap in what way?’

‘Nothing I want to talk about. But Dad was a hard drinker, if I can put it like that. And Mum wasn’t exactly affectionate.’

Malin nods.

‘And the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week, what were you doing then?’

‘Margaretha was here, and I’m pretty sure Jocke was watching that film with Jimmy. Like they said.’

‘Jimmy? You know Jimmy Kalmvik?’

Niklas Nyrén gets up, goes over to the window and looks out at the factory.

‘They’re joined at the hip, those two. If you want a decent relationship with one of them, you have to build bridges in various directions. I usually try to come up with things I think they’ll like.’

‘And what do they like?’

‘What do boys like? I took them to a skateboarding show in Norrköping. We went to Mantorp Park. I let them drive my car on the gravel track out by the old I4. Hell, I even took them to the rifle range once last summer.’

You probably don’t have to be too careful, Malin. Niklas Nyrén exudes thoughtlessness, unless he’s just playing naïve?

‘Do you hunt?’

‘No, but I used to shoot as a sport. Small-bore rifle. Why?’

‘I’m not going to get into trouble now, am I?’ Niklas Nyrén is hunting through a wardrobe in his white-painted bedroom. ‘You don’t have to have a gun cabinet for a small-bore rifle, do you?’

‘I think you probably should.’

‘Here it is.’ Niklas Nyrén holds a narrow, almost spindly, black rifle out to Malin, who loses her train of thought when she sees the weapon. No one is going to touch it until forensics have taken a look.

‘Just put it on the bed,’ she says, and Niklas Nyrén looks perplexed and lays the gun on his bed.

‘Do you have any freezer-bags?’ Malin says.

‘Yes, in the kitchen. That’s where I keep the ammunition as well.’

‘Good,’ Malin says. ‘Go and get both of them. I’ll wait here.’

Malin sits down on the bed beside the gun. Breathes in the sour, stale air and looks at the pictures on the walls: Ikea prints of different sorts of fish, in cheap frames.

Malin shuts her eyes and sighs.

Joakim Svensson has a key to the flat.

He and Jimmy Kalmvik must have taken the rifle some time when Niklas Nyrén was off on one of his sales trips, and gone up to Bengt Andersson’s flat and fired a few shots just to scare him, to tease him. The little sods, Malin thinks, then stops herself. Testosterone and circumstances can cause a great deal of trouble for teenage boys, and someone who sees themselves as abandoned and downtrodden often ends up treading on others.

Malin opens her eyes to see Niklas Nyrén coming back from the kitchen.

In one hand he has a packet of freezer-bags, and in the other a box of ammunition.

‘I usually use rubber bullets,’ he says. ‘Damn. I was sure this box hadn’t been opened. But someone must have opened it. There are three bullets missing.’

Disappointment transforms Niklas Nyrén’s face into a grimacing mask.

Put pressure on the Ljungsbro bullies and get them to confess that they fired shots at the window of Bengt Andersson’s flat? Put a bit more pressure on them and get them to say even more?

If there is anything more to tell?

However much I want to go in one direction, it’s too early yet, Malin thinks.

She presses harder on the accelerator pedal, on her way right across the snow-covered plain towards Maspelösa. She’s already decided to wait, see what fingerprints Karin finds on the rifle, which is in the boot, wrapped up in a blanket. But Malin can’t help playing with the idea. Shouldn’t I turn round and go and put some pressure on Jimmy Kalmvik? I can do that on my own, child’s play compared to the Murvalls. No, better to let Karin do her thing, work out if the rubber bullets in Bengt Andersson’s flat come from Niklas Nyrén’s rifle, and, if so, present the boys with hard facts. The uniforms can take their fingerprints, and Karin can match them against any she may have found.

Rickard Skoglöf’s address is in her mobile, but it’s not easy to find the house, and Malin spends a while driving among fields until she finds the little farm.

She stops.

The grey stone buildings are huddled against the cold, snow on the thatched roofs, and there is light coming from the windows of the main house.

Æsir nutters, Malin thinks, before she knocks. I can deal with them on my own as well.

It only takes a few seconds before the man who must be Rickard Skoglöf opens the door, wearing a kaftan and with his hair and long beard in one great tangle. Behind him a white-clad woman’s form moves, presumably that of Valkyria Karlsson.

‘Malin Fors, Linköping Police.’

‘He must have been relieved of duty, that other one, after the shooting,’ Rickard Skoglöf says with a smile as he lets her into the house. A damp warmth hits Malin, and she can hear the crackle of an open fire somewhere in the house.

‘You can go in there.’

Rickard Skoglöf points to the left, into the living room, where a huge computer screen shimmers on a shiny desk.

Valkyria Karlsson is sitting on the sofa, her feet drawn up under a white nightgown.

‘You,’ she says as Malin walks into the room. ‘The one who interrupted me.’

Rickard Skoglöf comes in, carrying three steaming cups on a plate.

‘Herbal tea,’ he says. ‘Good for the nerves. If that’s ever a problem.’

Malin doesn’t reply, takes a cup and sinks on to the black office chair in front of the computer. Rickard Skoglöf stays on his feet after giving a cup to Valkyria.

‘Does it feel good,’ Malin says, ‘encouraging young people to do idiotic things?’

‘What do you mean?’ Rickard Skoglöf laughs.

Malin gets an urge to throw the hot tea in his leering face, but controls herself.

‘Don’t play stupid. We know you sent emails to Andreas Norling, and who knows what else you might have got other people to do.’

‘Oh, that. I read about that in the Correspondent. I never thought they’d go through with it.’

‘Have you had any contact with Jimmy Kalmvik? Or a Joakim-’

‘I don’t know any Jimmy Kalmvik. I presume that’s one of the teenagers the paper mentioned, the ones who had been tormenting Bengt Andersson. I want to say once and for all that I, the two of us, had nothing to do with that.’

‘Nothing,’ Valkyria says, stretching out her legs on the sofa, and Malin notices that her toenails are painted with luminous orange varnish.

‘I’m going to confiscate your hard drive right now,’ Malin says. ‘If you protest I’ll get a warrant to search the whole house within hours.’

Rickard Skoglöf is no longer grinning, looks afraid.

‘Go. Go. You’ll never get us, you police bitch.’

Tove comes home just after six o’clock. She slams the door shut, and it’s impossible to tell if it’s because she’s happy or upset.

A reasonable Sunday, Malin thinks as she waits for Tove to come into the living room.

The rifle is at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science; Karin and her colleagues will check the weapon first thing tomorrow morning. Rickard Skoglöf’s hard drive is safely secured at the station. Johan Jakobsson and the IT experts can get going on that, check if the bastard Æsir prophet had goaded anyone else to do anything really, really stupid, like murdering Bengt Andersson. If he has, there ought to be traces in his computer of emails and so on. Who knows how much more crap this winter, this landscape, can throw up?

Tove is standing in front of Malin, smiling, and her face and eyes are calm, free of anxiety and restlessness.

‘Was the film good?’ Malin asks from her place on the sofa.

‘Hopeless,’ Tove says.

‘But you seem happy.’

‘Yes, Markus says he can have dinner here with us tomorrow. Is that okay?’

Tove sits down on the sofa and takes a crisp from the bowl on the table.

‘He’s very welcome.’

‘What are you watching?’

‘Some documentary about Israel and Palestine and double agents.’

‘Isn’t there anything else on?’

‘Bound to be. Have a look.’

Malin passes the remote to Tove, who zaps through the channels until she finds the local channel. Linköping have beaten Modo away, and Martin Martinsson scored three goals, and there are rumours that scouts from the NHL were at the match.

‘I went round to Grandma and Grandad’s earlier today.’

Tove nods.

‘Grandad rang. He was wondering if you’d like to go and see them during half-term?’

Malin waits for a reaction, wants a smile to spread over Tove’s lips, but instead she looks worried.

‘But we can’t afford the plane ticket?’

‘They’re paying.’

Tove looks even more worried.

‘I don’t know if I want to go, Mum. Will they be upset if I say no?’

‘You can do what you want, Tove. Exactly what you want.’

‘But I don’t know.’

‘Sleep on it, darling. You don’t have to make a decision before tomorrow or Tuesday.’

‘It’s hot there, isn’t it?’

‘At least twenty degrees,’ Malin says. ‘Like summer.’

There are apples hanging in the trees and a boy, two boys, three, four boys are running around in a verdant garden. They fall and the grass colours their knees green, and then there’s just one single boy left and he falls but gets up again and runs. He runs until he reaches the edge of the forest, then hesitates for a while before summoning his courage and heading into the darkness.

He runs between the tree trunks and the sharp branches on the ground cut his feet but he doesn’t allow himself to feel any pain, he doesn’t stop to fight the monsters roaring in the deep holes left by the roots of toppled trees.

Then the boy is standing by Malin’s bed. He presses her ribcage up and down with even movements, helping her to breathe in the yellow air of the morning.

He whispers in her sleeping, dreaming ear, What’s my name, where am I from?

53

Monday, 13 February

A sullen morning mist over the city, the fields.

The investigation practically going in circles.

A weapon to examine.

Information on a hard drive to check this morning.

No wind over a desolate snow-covered field, nothing happening, just exhausted police officers sleeping or waking. Börje Svärd in his bed, alone under washed-out blue-flowered covers, his two Alsatians let in from their run on either side of the bed, and in the room at the end of the landing two of the nightshift’s carers are turning his wife, and he makes an effort to fend off the sound of their activity.

Johan Jakobsson in his terraced house in Linghem, sitting, dozing on a sofa with his three-year-old daughter in his lap, a Lorenga & Masarin cartoon on the television, headphones over his daughter’s ears. When are you going to learn that sleeping is nice? The previous day had been spent talking to the other youngsters who had been out in the field for the animal sacrifice. They had alibis for the night that Bengt Andersson was killed, they were just confused in the way that young people so often are. It turned into yet another day of hard slog, another day when he had to leave his family to its own devices.

Zacharias Martinsson is sleeping snuggled up to his freezing wife, the window in the bedroom open a crack, a draught that promises a cold. Sven Sjöman on his back in bed out in his villa, snoring loudly and audibly, his wife in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in front of her on the table, absorbed in Svenska Dagbladet; she likes getting up before Sven sometimes, even if it doesn’t happen often.

Even Karim Akbar is asleep in bed, lying on his side, breathing in and out, then he coughs and reaches out an arm for his wife, but she isn’t there, she’s sitting on the toilet with her face in her hands, wondering how she’s going to sort everything out, what would happen if Karim knew.

Forensics expert Karin Johannison is awake, sitting astride her husband, her hair swinging back and forth, helping herself to her own body and consuming him beneath her, flesh that is more hers than his, because what else would she really want him for?

And Malin Fors is awake too. She is sitting behind the steering-wheel of her car. Focused.

The third line of inquiry in the investigation into Bengt Andersson’s murder needs pushing, needs whipping, needs to have its back flayed.

Malin is freezing.

The car never seems to be able to warm up properly on mornings like this. Through the windscreen she sees the slender stone tower of Vreta Kloster, and beyond it lies Blåsvädret, and there, alone in her kitchen, sits Rakel Murvall with a cup of boiled coffee, looking out of the window and thinking that it would be good if the boys came home soon, workshops shouldn’t stand idle.

Malin parks outside Rakel Murvall’s house. The white wooden building seems more tired than last time she was here, as if it were starting to give way, both to the cold and to the person within. The path to the house has been cleared of snow, as if a red carpet were about to be unfurled.

She’s bound to be up, Malin thinks. Surprise her. Come when she least expects it.

Just like Tove she slams the car door behind her, but she knows why: it’s all about building up a feeling of determination, aggression, superiority that will make the mother obstinate, get her to open up, tell her stories, the ones Malin knows that she has to tell.

She knocks.

Pretends that Zeke is standing beside her.

Light yet oddly heavy steps behind the door, and the mother opens, her thin grey cheeks surrounding the sharpest eyes Malin has ever seen on a human being, eyes that somehow use her up, making her flat, apathetic and scared.

She’s over seventy, what can she do to me? Malin thinks, but knows that she’s wrong: she’s capable of doing absolutely anything.

‘Inspector Fors,’ Rakel Murvall says in a welcoming tone of voice. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘You could let me in, it’s cold out here. I have a few more questions.’

‘But do you expect any more answers?’

Malin nods. ‘I think you’ve got all the answers in the world.’

Rakel Murvall steps aside and Malin goes in.

The coffee is hot and just strong enough.

‘Your boys aren’t exactly little lambs,’ Malin says, settling more comfortably on the rib-backed chair.

She sees first vanity, then anger flit across Rakel Murvall’s eyes.

‘What do you know about my boys?’

‘I’m really here to talk about your fourth boy.’

Malin pushes her coffee cup aside, looks at Rakel Murvall, fixing her with her gaze.

‘Karl,’ Malin says.

‘Who did you say?’

‘Karl.’

‘I don’t hear much from the boy.’

‘Who was his father? Not the same as the other boys. That much I do know.’

‘You’ve spoken to him, I see.’

‘I’ve spoken to him. He said his father was a sailor and that he drowned while you were pregnant.’

‘You’re right,’ Rakel Murvall says. ‘Off Cape Verde, the eighteenth of August, 1961. The M/S Dorian, she went down with all hands.’

‘I think you’re lying,’ Malin says.

But Rakel Murvall merely smiles, before going on: ‘Peder Palmkvist was his name, the sailor.’

Malin stands up.

‘That was all I wanted to know for the moment,’ Malin says, and the old woman stands up too and Malin sees her eyes take command of the whole room.

‘If you come here again I’ll have you for harassment.’

‘I’m only trying to do my job, Mrs Murvall, that’s all.’

‘Boats sink,’ Rakel Murvall says. ‘They sink like stones.’

Malin drives past the Murvall family’s petrol station. The Preem sign is switched off, the windows of the shop gape at her blackly, and the derelict foundry on the site is just begging to be torn down.

She passes Brunnby and Härna, doesn’t want to see the building housing Ball-Bengt’s flat. From the road only the roof can be seen, but she knows which building it is.

The landlord has probably cleared the flat by now; your things, the few that could be sold, have probably gone for auction and the money been sent on to the State Inheritance Fund. Rebecka Stenlundh, your sister by blood, if not legally, won’t inherit the little you had.

Has someone else taken over your flat, Ball-Bengt? Or are the rooms lying empty, waiting for you to come home? Maybe you’re home now, at last? Dust settling on the windowsills, taps rusting shut, slowly, slowly.

She drives under the aqueduct, past the school and picks up her mobile, thinking, I’ll have to skip the morning meeting.

‘Johan? It’s Malin.’

‘Malin?’

Johan Jakobsson’s voice over the mobile, still sleepy, probably only just arrived for the meeting.

‘Can you check something for me, before you get to work on Rickard Skoglöf’s hard drive?’

Malin asks Johan to check the loss of the ship, the names of the sailors.

‘It’s too old to be in the database of the National Administration for Shipping and Navigation,’ Johan says.

‘That sort of thing must be on various websites. Someone must be interested enough in it?’

‘Bound to be. The heroes of the merchant navy probably have admirers who make sure they aren’t forgotten. If not, the information should be held by the Shipping Federation.’

‘Thanks, Johan. I owe you one.’

‘Don’t make any promises until you know that I can come up with something. Then it’s time for the hard drive.’

Malin hangs up as she turns into Vretaliden care home.

Malin doesn’t make herself known at reception, but even though she walks quickly through the lobby she recognises the smell of unperfumed disinfectant, how its chemical unnaturalness makes the whole place seem depressed. In a home, Malin thinks, you use disinfectant that smells of lemons or flowers, but not here. And this is home for some people. People who really deserve a different smell than this.

She takes the lift up to ward three, and walks along the corridor towards Gottfrid Karlsson’s room.

She knocks.

‘Yes, come in.’ The voice faint but still powerful.

Malin opens the door, walks in slowly, sees the thin body under a yellow blanket in bed. Before she has time to say anything the old man opens his mouth.

‘Miss Fors. I was hoping that you would come back.’

Malin thinks that everyone waits for the truth to come and pay them a visit, that no one comes with the truth or helps it along of their own volition. But perhaps this is the nature of truth: is it not a sequence of elusive, shy occurrences rather than any one powerful supposition? That fundamentally there is only a perhaps?

Malin approaches the bed.

Gottfrid Karlsson pats the blanket next to him. ‘Come and sit here, Miss Fors, beside an old man.’

‘Thank you,’ Malin says, and sits down.

‘I’ve had the reports of your case read out to me,’ Gottfrid Karlsson says, looking at Malin with almost blind eyes. ‘Terrible things. And the Murvall brothers seem to be particularly delightful. I must have missed them just before I left. But of course I know about their mother and father.’

‘What was their mother like?’

‘She never made much fuss. But I remember her eyes, and I used to think, There goes Rakel Karlsson, and that woman is not to be messed with.’

‘Karlsson?’

‘The same surname as me. Karlsson is probably the most common name on the plain. Yes, that was her name before she married Blackie Murvall.’

‘And Blackie?’

‘A drinker and a braggart, but deep down he was probably just scared. Not like Cornerhouse-Kalle. Different mettle entirely.’

‘And her son, she had a son before her marriage to Blackie, didn’t she?’

‘I seem to remember something of the sort, although his name escapes me. I think his name was… Ah well. Some names disappear from memory. As if time were erasing things inside my head. But one thing I do remember: the boy’s father was shipwrecked while she was still pregnant.’

‘How was she with the boy? It must have been difficult?’

‘You never used to see the child.’

‘Never saw him?’

‘Everyone knew he existed, but you never saw him. You never saw him out and about with her.’

‘And then?’

‘He must have been two years old when she married Blackie Murvall. But, Miss Fors, there were rumours.’

‘What sort of rumours?’

‘I’m not the one to talk to about that. You should talk to Weine Andersson.’

Gottfrid Karlsson puts his old hand on Malin’s.

‘He lives in Stjärnorp care home. He was on the Dorian when she sank. He can give you a few facts straight from the horse’s mouth.’

The door of the room opens and Malin turns round.

Sister Hermansson.

Her short curly hair seems to be sticking straight up, and today, now that she must have swapped her thick glasses for contact lenses, she looks a good ten years younger.

‘Detective Inspector Fors,’ she says. ‘How dare you?’

54

‘No one, not even the police, can come and see any of my residents unannounced.’

‘But-’

‘No one, Inspector Fors, no one. And that includes you.’

Sister Hermansson dragged Malin to the little nurses’ station out in the corridor, then went on the attack.

‘The residents here can appear stronger than they are, but most are weak, and at this time of year, when the cold is at its worst, we often lose several in quick succession, and then things get very anxious for my…’

To start with Malin got angry. Residents? Didn’t that mean that this was their home? That they could do as they liked? But then she realised that Hermansson was right, and if she didn’t make the effort to protect the old people, who else would?

Malin apologised before she left.

‘Apology accepted,’ Hermansson said, and looked visibly pleased.

‘And you should change your disinfectant,’ Malin added.

Hermansson looked at her quizzically.

‘Well, you use unperfumed. There are hypoallergenic perfumed disinfectants that smell much nicer and probably don’t cost much more.’

Hermansson thought for a moment.

‘Good idea,’ she said, and began to look through some papers as if to underline the fact that the conversation was over.

And now Malin is heading towards her car over in the car park, when her mobile rings.

She jogs back to the lobby, and, inside the chemical-scented warmth once more, pulls out her phone.

‘We were right. The Shipping Federation had it on its database.’ Johan Jakobsson sounds very pleased with himself.

‘So an M/S Dorian sank, and there was a Palmkvist on board who drowned?’

‘Exactly. He wasn’t among the men rescued in lifeboats.’

‘So some of them did survive?’

‘Yes, it looks like it.’

‘Thanks, Johan. Now I really do owe you one.’

Ruins.

And a lake where the ice seems to have settled for good. Malin takes her eyes off the road for a few seconds to glance at Lake Roxen. Cars driving along a ploughed path over the metre-thick ice slip across in relative safety, and on the other side of the lake, far off in the distance, smoke is streaming from the chimneys of postage-stamp-sized cottages.

Stjärnorp Castle.

It burned down in the 1700s, was rebuilt, and to this day is still the residence of the Douglas family, and it still reeks of money.

The castle could hardly be more gloomy. It’s a grey-stucco two-storey stone building with shrunken windows, facing a practically featureless courtyard flanked by unadorned outhouses. The ruins of the old castle slumber alongside, like a permanent reminder of how badly things can turn out.

The old people’s home is on the edge of the estate, just beyond the bend where the road finally disentangles itself from the forest and opens up to the view of the lake.

The three-storey building is whitewashed, and Malin estimates that there can’t be more than thirty old people living here, and how quiet it must be, only a few random cars driving past.

She parks in front of the entrance.

What sort of Hermansson figure am I going to run into here?

Then she thinks of that evening, how Tove has invited Markus to dinner; she hopes she makes it back okay. She looks up at the building, thinking, Weine Andersson, there’s a chance there may be a problem with dinner.

Weine Andersson is sitting in a wheelchair by a window with a view straight out over Lake Roxen.

When Malin reported at reception the elderly nurse seemed pleased at her visit. The nurse didn’t seem bothered, and certainly not annoyed, by the fact that Malin was a police officer on duty. Instead she said, ‘That’ll cheer Weine up. He doesn’t get many visitors.’ Then a pause: ‘And he likes young people.’

Young people? Malin thought. Do I still qualify as that? Tove’s a young person. Not me.

‘His right side is paralysed. A stroke. It hasn’t affected his speech, but he gets upset a lot.’

Malin nodded and went in.

The bald man in front of her has sailor’s tattoos on both hands. On the lame hand, supported by a sling, someone has etched an anchor, and filled in the rough outline with ink.

His face is wrinkled and the skin covered with liver-spots, one eye is blind, but the good one seems to make up for it in brightness.

‘Yes,’ he says, his eye firmly fixed on Malin. ‘I was on board that ship. I shared a cabin with Palmkvist. It would be going a bit far to say we were friends, but we came from the same parts so it was natural that we spent a lot of time together.’

‘He drowned?’

‘Off Cape Verde we got caught up in a storm. No worse than many others, but the ship was hit by a huge wave. We started to list and in just half an hour we had sunk. I swam for it and got into a lifeboat. We spent four days out in that storm before we were picked up by the M/S Francisca. We survived by drinking rainwater.’

‘Weren’t you frozen?’

‘It was never cold. Just dark. Not even the water was cold.’

‘And Palmkvist?’

‘I never saw him. I think he was caught in the galley when the first wave hit. It probably filled up with water straight away. I was on watch up on the bridge.’

Malin can see it all in front of her.

The ship lurches.

A young man wakes up with a jolt, then everything is black and the water rises, comes closer in the darkness, like a mass of octopus tentacles; she sees how the cabin door is shut tight from the pressure on the other side, how his mouth, nose, head are covered, and how he finally gives up. Inhales the water and lets himself sink into a soft mist where there is nothing but peace and a warmer darkness than the one he has just left.

‘Did Palmkvist know he was going to be a father?’

Weine Andersson can’t suppress a chuckle. ‘I heard those rumours when I got home. But I can tell you for a fact that Palmkvist wasn’t the father of Rakel Karlsson’s boy. He wasn’t interested in women in that way.’

‘He didn’t want children?’

‘Sailors, Inspector Fors. What sort of men used to become sailors in the old days?’

Malin nods, pauses for a moment before going on. ‘So who was the boy’s father if it wasn’t Palmkvist?’

‘I made it ashore afterwards. The third night in the storm, just when we thought it was easing, it started up again. I tried to hold on to Juan but he slid out of my grasp. It was night and it was dark and the wind was blowing like the worst night of winter. The sea was opening up for us, roaring out its hunger, it had us in its grip, it wanted to devour us, and even though…’

Weine Andersson’s voice cracks. He raises his healthy arm to his face, bows his head and sobs.

‘… even though I was holding on as hard as I could, he slid out of my arms. I could see the terror in his eyes, as he vanished down into the blackness… there was nothing I could do…’

Malin waits.

Lets Weine Andersson collect himself, but just when she thinks he’s ready for the next question, the old man in front of her starts to cry again.

‘I lived on,’ he says, ‘… alone after that, there was no other choice for me… I don’t think.’

Malin waits.

She watches the sadness draining out of Weine Andersson.

Then, without her having to ask, he says, ‘Palmkvist was concerned about the rumour about Rakel Karlsson. It started before we even set off. But I knew, and a lot of other people knew who fathered the child she was expecting.’

‘Who? Who was it?’

‘Have you ever heard of a man called Cornerhouse-Kalle? He was the father of her boy, and they say he was the one who beat Blackie so he ended up in the wheelchair.’

Malin feels a warm glow course through her body. A warmth that is icy cold.

55

Ljungsbro People’s Park, early summer 1958

See the way he moves.

Tense muscles, dark eyes.

How the others shy away, how they steer their bodies aside instinctively when he comes with her, her and her or her.

How unending he is, Kalle.

How the sweet smells of the summer evening mingle with the sweat of the dancers’ bodies, weekly toil being driven out, the expectations of the flesh, the blood coursing through the body, making it tender with longing.

He’s seen me.

But he’s waiting.

Warming up his dancing so that he’s ready. Stand up straight, Rakel, stand up straight.

The band on the stage, the smell of sausages and vodka and lust. One, two, three… most of the others fat with the chocolate they eat from the conveyor belt, but not you, Rakel, not you. You’re plump in all the right places, so stand up straight, stick out your breasts just for him as he dances past with her or her.

He’s the beast.

Raw lust.

He’s violence. The directionless, original blow, the one who doesn’t know what flight is, the one who stands firm, obstinate, the one who has no voice or place in chocolate-land.

And tonight Kalle will dance with you, Rakel. Imagine, dancing with Kalle… Tonight it will be Rakel dancing the last dance with Kalle, the one who gets to smell the sweat on his shirt.

Then there is a break. The human mice stream into the evening; coloured lanterns and queues for sausages, quarter-bottles emptied, motorcycles over near the entrance, the almost tough guys and their broads, and Kalle walking past the queue, licking the mustard from the sausage and swallowing; the chocolate-fat girl by his side sways and now he sees me, breaks free from her and walks towards me but not yet, not yet. I turn round, head for the toilets, force my way into the Ladies and all the while I feel his steps, his eager, dark breathing behind me.

Not yet, Kalle.

I strut for no man.

‘Democratic dance’, says the sign. Men asking women to dance, women asking men.

And the women are at him, the man. The only one in the room who deserves the title.

But he denies them.

Looks over at me.

Shall I? I strut for no man. Then he is dancing again, it is someone else’s body in his arms but it is me he is leading across the dance floor.

Now it is the gentlemen’s turn to ask.

I turn down him, him, him and him.

Then Kalle comes.

I am pressed up against the wooden panelling.

He takes my hand. He doesn’t ask, takes it, and I shake my head.

He pulls me out.

But no.

‘Dancing, Kalle,’ I say, ‘is something you’ll have to do with all those common chocolate girls.’

And he lets go of my hand, catches her beside me and then round, round, until the music falls silent and I am standing by the entrance to the park and see him walking, see him pass arm in arm with her, her or her.

Kalle, I whisper, quietly so no one hears.

I linger, the sound of disappearing motorcycle engines, of drink fading into dreams and headaches. Lanterns are extinguished, the band pack their things in the bus.

I know you’re coming back, Kalle.

The canal is rippling quietly, it’s black now, night, and not starlit; high above veils of cloud have swept in across the sky and are hiding the light of the stars, the moon.

How much time has passed?

An hour?

You’ll come.

Are you finished with her, Kalle?

Because there you come, rounding the bend and you look so slight as you leave the yellow wooden façade of the bridge-keeper’s cottage behind you.

But you’re no boy.

That’s not why I’m waiting here in the damp, gentle cool of a June night, that isn’t why I feel so warm, so warm as you grow larger before my eyes.

Your shirt is unbuttoned.

The hair on your chest, your black eyes, all the power in your body directed at me.

‘So you’re still here.’

‘I’m still here.’

And you take my hand, lead me along the road, past the newly built villas and lead me off to the left along the forest track.

What do I think will happen?

What am I expecting?

Your hand.

Suddenly it is unfamiliar. Your smell, your shadow are unfamiliar. I don’t want to be here, in the forest. I want you to let go of my hand.

Let go.

But you squeeze even tighter and I follow you into the darkness, Kalle, even though I no longer know if I want to.

You’re panting.

Talking about drink, muttering words and your smells mingle with the forest’s; it’s full of life but also of decay, of things that disappear.

Let go, let go.

I say the words now. But you pull me on, you tug and you drag and you are strong, you are just as raw as I expected.

Are you a lion? A leopard? A crocodile? A bear?

I want to get away.

I am Rakel.

Over-confident.

Panting.

Then you stop, black bands around us, and you turn round and I try to pull away but you catch my arm, pick me up, and there is no humanity in what you are. Gone is the light, gone is the dream.

Quiet, whore. Quiet.

And I am down on the ground now, no, no, no, not now, not like this and you hit me on the mouth and I scream but all I can feel is the taste of iron and something hard and powerful and long forcing its way upwards.

There, lie still now, here comes Kalle.

The ground cuts into me, burning.

Was this what I wanted so badly? Longed for?

I am still Rakel, and I strut for no man.

Kalle.

I can be like you, only sly.

You are breaking me, but I no longer protest, I lie nicely and it’s odd how I can shrink this moment to nothing.

I break, I was broken and your weight means I can’t breathe, but even so, you don’t exist.

Then you’re done.

You get up. I see you fasten your trousers, hear you mutter, Whore, whore, they’re all whores.

Branches snap, you stumble, mumble, then the silence tells me you are gone.

But the night has just begun.

The darkness condenses around my midriff, two hands stretch up into the air, break through the clear, shimmering film and decide that here, here there will be life.

I feel it even then.

That in me is growing all the pain and torment of what it means to be human.

I crawl on the wet ground.

The branches writhe, the tree trunks mock, the twigs, leaves, moss eat me.

I huddle down. But then I get up.

Stand up.

And my back is straight.

56

Monday evening; Tuesday, 14 February

‘Let’s shake hands.’

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

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

‘Welcome.’

‘Thanks for inviting me.’

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

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

‘You’ll have to excuse…’

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

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

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

Tove comes out of the kitchen.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I think I might have overdone the parmesan…’

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

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

Hang on now. What’s this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Help.

No. No.

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

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

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

‘Isn’t he sweet?’

‘He’s very well behaved.’

‘But not too much.’

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

‘What do you mean, Mum?’

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

‘I’ll call Grandad tomorrow.’

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

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

Have to sleep, have to sleep.

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

She wants to stroke Tove’s hair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And the DNA test?’

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

Zeke comes up to her desk.

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

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

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

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

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

57

Collins Mechanics AB, outside Vikingstad.

The tarmac car park stretches about a hundred metres from the edge of a dense forest to a security lodge and the heavy boom blocking the only opening in a ten-metre-high fence crowned with perfect coils of barbed wire.

The company supplies components to Saab General Motors. One of the few successful companies on the plain, three hundred people work on the automated construction of car parts. Just a few years ago there were seven hundred, but it is impossible to compete with China.

Ericsson, NAF, Saab, BT-Trucks, Printcom: they have all cut back or disappeared completely. Malin has noticed the changes that happen to areas when manufacturing industry is shut down: violent crime increases, as does domestic abuse. Despair is, contrary to what many politicians might say, a close neighbour of the fist.

But after a while everything reverts in a peculiar way to how it was before. Some people get new jobs. Others are put on training courses or forced or persuaded to take early retirement. They become either artificially necessary, or finished, and end up on a fault-line, on the edges of the society that the Murvall family wants no part in, at any cost. Other than on their own terms.

The realisation that one is used up, Malin thinks. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to be faced with that conclusion. Being unwanted, unneeded.

Beyond the impenetrable fence lie windowless, hangar-like white factory buildings.

It looks like a prison, Malin thinks.

The guard in the lodge is dressed in a blue Falck uniform, and his face lacks any distinct boundary between cheeks, chin and neck. In the middle of all that skin, creation deigned to introduce a couple of grey, watery eyes that stare sceptically at Malin as she holds up her police ID.

‘We’re looking for a Karl Murvall. I gather he’s IT manager here.’

‘For what purpose?’

‘It doesn’t matter what purpose,’ Zeke says.

‘You have to state-’

‘Police business,’ Malin says, and the watery-eyed man looks away, makes a call, nods a couple of times before hanging up.

‘You can go to main reception,’ he says.

Malin and Zeke walk along the road leading to the entrance. They walk past enclosed production halls, a walk of several hundred metres, and halfway along there are a couple of open doors; worn pulleys hang in their hundreds from beams in the roof, as if they have long been idle and are just waiting to be used. A revolving etched-glass door beneath a ceiling held up by metal beams leads into the reception area. Two women are seated behind a mahogany counter; neither of them appears to notice their arrival. On their left is a broad marble staircase. The room smells of lemon-scented disinfectant and polished leather.

They walk up to the counter. One receptionist looks up.

‘Karl Murvall is on his way down. You can wait on those chairs over by the window.’

Malin turns round. Three red Egg armchairs on a brown carpet.

‘Will he be long?’

‘Only a minute or so.’

Karl Murvall comes down the staircase twenty-five minutes later, dressed in a grey jacket, yellow shirt and a pair of too short dark blue jeans. Malin and Zeke get up when they catch sight of him and go to meet him.

Karl Murvall holds out his hand, his face expressionless. ‘Detective Inspectors. To what do I owe this honour?’

‘We need to talk in private,’ Malin says.

Karl gestures towards the armchairs. ‘Here, perhaps?’

‘Maybe a conference room,’ Malin says.

Karl Murvall turns round and starts to walk up the stairs, looking over his shoulder to make sure Malin and Zeke are following him.

He taps in a code on the lock of a glass door, and it slides open to reveal a long corridor.

Inside one of the rooms they pass can be heard the loud, whirring sound of fans behind a frosted-glass door. A dark shadow behind the door.

‘The server room. The heart of the whole operation.’

‘And you’re responsible for that?’

‘That’s my room,’ Karl Murvall says. ‘I’m in control in there.’

‘And that was where you were working the night Bengt Andersson was murdered?’

‘That’s right.’

Karl stops at another glass door, taps in another code. The door slides open, and round a ten-metre-long oak table are a dozen black Myran chairs, and in the middle of the table a dish of shiny red winter apples.

‘The committee room,’ Karl says. ‘This should do.’

‘Well?’

Karl Murvall is sitting opposite them, his back pressed against his chair.

Zeke squirms on his.

Malin leans forward. ‘Your father wasn’t a sailor.’

The expression on Karl Murvall’s face doesn’t change, not one single muscle tenses, no anxiety in his eyes.

‘Your father,’ Malin continues, ‘was a Ljungsbro legend by the name of Karl Andersson, also known as Cornerhouse-Kalle. Did you know that?’

Karl Murvall leans back. Smiles at Malin, not scornfully, but an empty, lonely smile.

‘Nonsense,’ he says.

‘And if that’s true, then you and Bengt Andersson are, I mean, were, half-brothers.’

‘Me and him?’

Zeke nods. ‘You and him. Didn’t your mother ever tell you?’

Karl Murvall clenches his jaw. ‘Nonsense.’

‘You don’t know anything about this? That your mother had a relationship with Cornerhouse-’

‘I don’t care who was my father or not. I’ve left all that behind me. You have to accept that. You have to appreciate how hard I’ve had to fight to get where I am today.’

‘Can we take a DNA sample from you so that we can compare it with Bengt Andersson’s? Then we’d know for sure.’

Karl Murvall shakes his head. ‘It’s just not interesting.’

‘Really.’

‘Yes, because I know. You don’t need to do any tests. Mum told me. But because I’ve tried to leave my other half-brothers and their life behind me, I really don’t care about any of that.’

‘So you are Bengt Andersson’s half-brother?’ Zeke asks.

‘Not any more. Now he’s dead. Isn’t he? Was there anything else? I have another meeting I need to get to.’

On the way back to the car Malin looks over at the edge of the dark forest.

Karl Murvall didn’t want to talk about his stepfather, didn’t want to talk about what it was like growing up in Blåsvädret, didn’t want to say anything about his relationship with his brothers, his sister. ‘Not another word. You’ve got what you wanted. What do you know about what it’s like being me? If there’s nothing else you want to know, duty calls.’

‘But Maria?’

‘What about Maria?’

‘Was she as kind to you as she was to Ball-Bengt? Kinder than Elias, Adam and Jakob? We understand that she was kind to Bengt. Did she know that you were his half-brother?’

Silence.

Karl Murvall’s grey cheeks, little twitches at the corners of his mouth.

The boom across the entrance opens and they walk out.

Farewell, prison, Malin thinks.

Duty.

How miserable it can make a place.

Karl Murvall is also Rebecka Stenlundh’s half-brother, she his half-sister.

But that isn’t my duty, Malin thinks. They’ll have to discover that for themselves, if they don’t already know. Rebecka Stenlundh would probably rather be left in peace.

58

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

Malin takes a bite of her chorizo.

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

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

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

But not for everyone. Far from everyone.

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

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

‘Female intuition?’ Zeke is chuckling.

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

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

But the truth.

Which is it?

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

They knock.

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

But she opens.

‘You two?’

‘We’d like to come in,’ Zeke says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

59

Britta Svedlund has stood up, her eyes fixed on Joakim Svensson and Jimmy Kalmvik, who are just entering her office at Ljungsbro school. The room is vibrating with her anger and there is a thick smell of coffee and nicotine.

She must smoke in here sometimes, Malin thought when she came in a few minutes before.

When the boys first caught sight of Malin and Zeke they backed away, wanting to run, but the head’s sharp stare held them where they were, is still holding them.

Earlier, when they were waiting for Joakim and Jimmy to come to her office from their English lesson, Britta Svedlund explained the philosophy behind her teaching.

‘You have to understand that it’s impossible to help everyone. I’ve always focused on the ones, not necessarily the most talented, but the ones who really want to learn. You can make pupils want more than they imagine, but some are hopeless and I’ve stopped wasting energy on them.’

You haven’t given up on Joakim and Jimmy yet, Malin thinks as she watches Britta Svedlund take command of the boys with her look. Even though they’re leaving this spring? Even though they’re old enough to take responsibility for what they do?

‘Sit down,’ Britta says, and the two boys sink on to a couple of chairs, cowering under her voice. ‘I’ve tried my best to protect you. And look what you’ve done.’

Malin moves so the boys can see her eyes. ‘Look at me,’ she says in an ice-cold voice. ‘Enough lies. We know you fired those shots through the window of Bengt Andersson’s flat.’

‘We haven’t-’

Britta Svedlund’s voice from the other side of the table: ‘HAVE SOME MANNERS,’ and then Jimmy Kalmvik starts talking, his voice shrill, anxious, as if it has been dragged out of adolescence and shifted back to a more innocent age.

‘Yes, we used that rifle to shoot at his flat. But he wasn’t at home. We took the rifle and cycled there and then we fired the shots. It was dark and he wasn’t at home. I swear. We scarpered at once. It was really creepy.’

‘It’s true,’ Joakim Svensson says calmly. ‘And we’ve got nothing to do with all that mad shit that happened to Ball-Bengt afterwards.’

‘And when did you fire the shots?’ Malin asks.

‘Just before Christmas, a Thursday.’

‘Will we go to prison now? We’re only fifteen.’

Britta Svedlund shakes her head wearily.

‘That depends on whether you co-operate or not,’ Zeke says. ‘Tell us anything you think could be of interest to us, and I mean everything.’

‘But we don’t know anything else.’

‘We don’t know shit.’

‘So you didn’t torment Bengt after that? Things didn’t get out of hand one evening? Well?’

‘Tell us what happened,’ Malin says. ‘We need to know.’

‘But we didn’t do anything else.’

‘And the night between Wednesday and Thursday the week before last? Before Ball-Bengt was found?’

‘We’ve already told you, we were watching Lords of Dogtown. It’s true!’ Desperation in Joakim Svensson’s voice.

‘You can go,’ Zeke says, and Malin nods in agreement.

‘Does that mean we’re free?’ Jimmy Kalmvik’s voice, naïve.

‘It means,’ Zeke says, ‘that you’ll be hearing from us again in due course. You don’t fire shots through someone’s window without there being consequences.’

Britta Svedlund looks tired, seems to be longing for whisky and a cigarette, seems happy that the boys have left her office.

‘God knows, I’ve really tried with those two.’

‘Maybe they can learn from this,’ Malin says.

‘Let’s hope so. Are you close to arresting anyone for the murder?’

Zeke shakes his head.

‘We’re following several lines of inquiry,’ Malin says. ‘We have to look into every possibility, every little chance, however improbable it might be.’

Britta Svedlund looks out through the window. ‘What’s going to happen to the boys now?’

‘They’ll receive letters calling them in for questioning, if the lead detective thinks it worth while.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Britta Svedlund says. ‘They have to be made to realise that what they did was wrong.’

Back at Police Headquarters Karim Akbar meets them in reception.

Irritation like a cloud over his head.

‘What have you two been up to?’

‘We’ve-’

‘I know. You’ve been out to see Rakel Murvall and bullied her with questions about who she had sex with forty-five years ago.’

‘We didn’t bully anyone,’ Zeke says.

‘According to her you did. She called and made a formal complaint. And she’s going to ring “the paper”, as she put it.’

‘She’s no-’

‘Fors, how do you think this is going to look? She’ll come across as a defenceless little old lady, and we’ll be monsters.’

‘But-’

‘No buts. We’ve got nothing to go on there. We have to leave the Murvalls alone. If you, both of you, don’t stop, Jakobsson will have to take over.’

‘Shit,’ Malin whispers.

Karim moves closer to her. ‘One day of peace and quiet, Fors, that’s all I ask.’

‘Shit.’

‘Suspicions, Fors, aren’t good enough any more. Almost two weeks have passed now. We need something concrete. Not a load of crap about who is whose brother and the fact that we’re bullying an old woman in the absence of anything better.’

The door to the open-plan office opens. Sven Sjöman. Resigned look.

‘The evidence isn’t strong enough to hold the Murvall brothers for the break-in at the weapons store in Kvarn. We have to let them go.’

‘For God’s sake, they had hand grenades from there. Hand grenades!’

‘Yes, but who’s to say they didn’t buy them from someone in the underworld? Poaching and possession of illegal firearms isn’t enough for the court to issue formal arrest warrants. And they’ve confessed.’

Then a voice from behind the reception desk. ‘Call for you, Malin.’

She takes the call at her desk, the phone cold and heavy in her hand.

‘Fors here.’

‘This is Karin Johannison.’

‘Hi, Karin.’

‘I’ve just got an email from Birmingham. They haven’t managed to get anything from that sample of Maria Murvall’s clothes, it was evidently too messed up, but they’re running another test. Something completely new.’

‘Nothing? What can we hope to get from the new test?’

‘You sound tired. Did what we came up with from the small-bore rifle help at all?’

‘Yes, it pretty much means we can shut down that line of inquiry.’

‘And?’

‘Well, what can I say, Karin. Kids, or rather teenagers, left to their own devices. That’s never a good idea.’

60

‘Mum, Mum.’

Malin hears Tove calling her from the kitchen, presumes she’s finished with her maths homework. Mathematics, yuk. Mathematics must be the language of things, seeing as it has never been mine.

‘Mum, come here.’

The teenager.

The child.

The almost adult.

The adult.

All four in one person, with a desire to define her place in the world, a world that doesn’t wait for you, and only reluctantly lets you have standing room. Even if you get a good education, Tove, it isn’t certain you’ll get a job. Become a doctor, a teacher, something secure. But is there anything secure? Follow your heart. Become whatever you like, as long as it’s what you really want. Your response so far: I don’t know. Maybe write books. So anachronistic. Write scripts for computer games instead, Tove. Do anything, just don’t be in too much of a rush, see the world, wait a while before having children.

But somehow you already know all that. You’re more sensible than I ever was.

‘What is it, Tove?’

Malin settles on the sofa, turns down the television and the newsreader moves his lips without making a sound.

‘Did you call Grandad?’

Shit. ‘No, didn’t we say you were going to call?’

‘I thought you were going to call?’

‘I don’t know, but either way we have to do it now.’

‘I’ll call him,’ echoes Tove’s voice from the kitchen, and Malin hears her pick up the phone, dial the number and wait before saying, ‘Grandad, it’s Tove… yes, that sounds great… tickes… when?… the twenty-sixth?… well, there’s something. You see, I’ve got a boyfriend… Markus… two years older… and I… thought maybe he could come too… yes, to stay with you… to Tenerife, his parents are okay about it… oh, I see… maybe you should talk to Mum… MUM, MUM, GRANDAD WANTS TO TALK TO YOU.’

Malin gets up and goes out to the kitchen. The smell of tonight’s dinner is still in the air.

She takes the receiver from Tove’s hand, puts it to her ear.

‘Malin, is that you?’

He sounds upset, his voice almost falsetto.

‘What do you mean by this? That some Markus should come too? Is this your idea? You always have to abuse the slightest little bit of faith anyone shows in you. Don’t you realise that you’ve spoiled everything now, when all we wanted was to give Tove the chance to come to Tenerife…’

Malin holds the receiver away from her. Waits. Tove is standing beside her, expectant, but Malin shakes her head, has to prepare her for the inevitable. She sees disappointment settle over Tove’s body, her shoulders drooping.

When she puts the phone to her ear again it has gone quiet.

‘Dad, are you there? Have you finished?’

‘Malin, whatever makes you put this sort of idea in Tove’s head?’

‘Dad. She’s thirteen. Thirteen-year-old girls have boyfriends that they want to spend their free time with.’

Then Malin hears a click.

She hangs up.

Puts an arm round Tove’s shoulders, whispers, ‘Don’t be sad, darling, but Grandad didn’t think it was a very good idea about Markus.’

‘Then I’ll stay at home,’ Tove says, and Malin recognises the defiance, as strong and defined as her own.

Some nights the bed is endlessly wide, some nights it contains all the loneliness in the world. Some nights it is soft and promising, when waiting for sleep is the best part of the day. Some nights, like this one, the bed is hard, the mattress an enemy that wants to force your thoughts into the wrong track, that seems to want to mock you for lying there alone, without another body to rest into and against.

Malin reaches out her hand and the empty space is as cold as the night outside the window, and it gets many times larger because she knows that the empty space is there even as she reaches out her hand to it.

Janne.

She thinks about Janne.

How he is starting to get older, how they are both getting older.

She feels like getting up, calling him, but he’ll be asleep, or at the station, or else… Daniel Högfeldt. No, not that sort of loneliness tonight, a much worse sort. Real loneliness.

Malin kicks off the covers. Gets out of bed.

The bedroom is dark, a meaningless and empty darkness.

She fumbles with her portable CD player on the desk. Knows which disc to insert. Puts in the earplugs.

Then she lies down again and soon Margo Timmins’s gentle voice is streaming through her head.

Cowboy Junkies. Before they got boring.

The abandoned woman alone, longing, but in the last verse triumphant: ‘… kinda like the few extra feet in my bed…’

Malin pulls out the earplugs, fumbles for the phone, dials Janne’s number and he answers on the fourth ring.

Silence.

‘I know it’s you, Malin.’

Silence.

‘Malin, I know it’s you.’

His voice is the only voice she needs, gentle and calm and safe. His voice is an embrace.

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No worries. You know I don’t sleep well.’

‘Same here.’

‘Cold night tonight, isn’t it? Maybe the coldest so far.’

‘Yes.’

‘Luckily the new boiler seems to be working.’

‘That’s good. Tove’s asleep. Nothing came of that plan with Markus and Tenerife.’

‘He got angry?’

‘Yes.’

‘They never learn.’

‘What about us, do we?’

But those aren’t the words that pass her lips. Instead: ‘You must be getting through a lot of oil this winter.’

Janne sighs down the line. Then he says, ‘Time to sleep, Malin. Goodnight.’

61

Wednesday, 15 February

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

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

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

POLICE REPORTED FOR HARASSMENT IN MURDER CASE.

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

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

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

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

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

Malin sits down at the kitchen table.

Opens the paper.

Rakel Murvall identifies her and Zeke in one quote.

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

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

A picture of Karim.

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

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

It looks as though the police have ground to a halt in their investigation of the murder. Chief of Police Karim Akbar did not want to comment on the state of the investigation, claiming instead that he could not talk about the case at the moment because of ‘the sensitive situation’. But according to the Correspondent’s source in Police Headquarters, the investigation has reached an impasse where the police have run out of new leads to explore.

Malin drinks the last of her coffee.

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

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

The area’s morning paper.

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

Daniel Högfeldt is sitting at his computer in the newsroom.

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

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

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

Daniel has spent two days in Stockholm.

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

Expressen.

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

Expressen.

Stockholm.

Not now. Not yet.

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

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

I wonder what Malin Fors is up to now.

I wouldn’t mind seeing her.

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

Expressen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘That’s okay,’ Karim says.

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

Alienation breeds exclusion.

Exclusion breeds violence.

Violence breeds… Yes, what?

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

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

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

The cold hits Karim when he opens the door.

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

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

Zeke pulls open the door of Police Headquarters.

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

The ice-hockey player’s dad.

Is that how they see me?

‘He’s playing, as far as I know.’

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

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

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

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

‘Have you seen the way I look?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Never desperate, Malin. Never.’

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

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

And then an email marked in red.

‘CALL ME.’

From Karin Johannison.

Why couldn’t she call herself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Was it a man or a woman?’

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

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

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

Malin smiles.

‘Why are you smiling?’

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

The two women sit in silence.

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

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

‘Why?’

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

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

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

Tove.

‘Hello, darling.’

‘Hi, Mum.’

‘Are you at school?’

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

‘I remember.’

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

Smart doctors.

They’d like to.

The same evening.

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

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

They hang up.

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

62

‘Are there stones left unturned?’ Zeke asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘I can’t see the whole thing properly right now. All the pieces, they don’t seem to fit together.’

The clock on the brick wall is slowly ticking towards twelve.

The office at the station is almost deserted. Zeke is sitting behind his desk, Malin on a chair next to it.

Desperate? Us?

Not desperate, but fumbling.

When Malin got back from the forensics lab they had an endless meeting where they went through the state of the investigation.

First the bad news.

The disappointment in Johan Jakobsson’s voice from his seat along one side of the table: ‘The penultimate folder on Rickard Skoglöf’s computer only contained a load of average porn, Hustler-style stuff. Fairly hardcore, but nothing remarkable. We’ve got one folder left with some sort of ingenious password mechanism, but we’re working on it.’

‘Let’s hope there are some secrets in there,’ Zeke said, and Malin could hear that his voice concealed the fervent wish that this whole thing would soon be over.

Then they stumbled about together. Tried to find the investigation’s voice, the common, cohesive thread. But no matter how they tried, they kept coming back to the start: the man in the tree and the people around him, the Murvalls, Maria, Rakel, Rebecka; the ritual, the heathen faith, Valkyria Karlsson, Rickard Skoglöf; and the vanishingly small chance that Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson might have done something really stupid during the few hours when only they could provide alibis for each other.

‘We know all that,’ Sven Sjöman said. ‘The question is, can we do much more with any of it? Are there any other paths that might be more productive? Can we see any other paths?’

Silence in the room, a long, painful silence.

Then Malin said, ‘Maybe we could tell the brothers that Bengt Andersson wasn’t the person who raped their sister? Maybe they’d have something else to say if they knew that?’

‘Doubtful, Malin. Do you think they would?’ Sven said.

Malin shrugged.

‘And they’ve been released,’ Karim Akbar said. ‘We can’t bring them in again just for that, and if we go out and talk to them now without anything more concrete, they’d doubtless make allegations that we’re harassing the whole family. The last thing we need is more bad publicity.’

‘No new tip-offs from the public?’ Johan tried.

‘Nothing,’ Sven said. ‘Total silence.’

‘We could make a new request,’ Johan said. ‘Someone must know something.’

‘The media are chewing us up already,’ Karim said. ‘We’ll have to manage without another request for information at the moment. It would only lead to more bad press.’

‘The National Criminal Investigation Department?’ Sven suggested. ‘Maybe it’s time to call them in. We have to admit that we’re not making any progress.’

‘Not yet, not yet.’ Karim sounding self-confident, in spite of everything.

They had left the meeting room with a general feeling that they were all waiting for something to happen, that they could really only follow developments, wait for whoever had hung Bengt Andersson in the tree somehow to make themselves visible again.

But what if he, she or they remained invisible? If the whole thing was a one-off?

Then they were stuck.

All the voices of the investigation had fallen silent.

But Malin remembered how she had felt out by the tree: that there was something left unfinished, that something was in motion out in the forests and the snow-swept plain.

And now the clock on the brick wall is almost at twelve. As it hits, Malin says, ‘Lunch?’

‘No,’ Zeke says. ‘I’ve got choir practice.’

‘You have? At lunchtime?’

‘Yes, we’ve got a concert in the cathedral in a few weeks’ time, so we’re squeezing in some extra practice.’

‘A concert? You haven’t mentioned it. Extra practice? You sound like a hockey player.’

‘God forbid,’ Zeke says.

‘Can I tag along?’

‘To choir practice?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure,’ Zeke says, nonplussed. ‘Sure, Malin.’

The assembly hall of the city museum smells musty, but the members of the choir seem happy enough in the large space. There are twenty-two of them today. Malin has counted them, thirteen women, nine men. Most of them are over fifty and they’re all well dressed and well ironed in typical provincial style. Coloured shirts and blouses, jackets and skirts.

The members have crowded together, standing in three rows on the stage. Behind them hangs a large tapestry with embroidered birds that seem to want to take off and drift around the room, up to the vaulted ceiling.

Malin is sitting in the back row, by the oak panelling, listening to the members tune up, giggle, chatter and laugh. Zeke is talking animatedly to a woman the same age as him, tall, with blonde hair and wearing a blue dress.

Nice, Malin thinks. Both her and the dress.

Then one woman raises her voice and says, ‘Okay, then, let’s get to work. We’ll start with “People Get Ready”.’

As if on command the members line up neatly, clear their throats one last time, and adopt the same look of concentration.

‘One, two, three.’

And then the singing, a harmonious sound, fills the hall and Malin is surprised at its gentle strength, and how beautiful it sounds when the twenty-two voices sing together as one single voice: ‘… you don’t need no ticket, you just get on board…’

Malin leans back in her chair. Closes her eyes, letting herself be embraced by the music, and when she looks up the next song has started and she can see that Zeke and the others really enjoy being up on stage, that they’re somehow united in their singing, in its simplicity.

And suddenly Malin feels an oppressive loneliness. She isn’t part of this, and she feels that this loneliness means something, that the sense of being an outsider somehow has a meaning beyond this room.

Over there is a door.

An opening into a closed room.

Intuition, Malin. Voices. What are they trying to tell me?

63

Bad deeds.

When do they start, Malin? When do they end? Do they go in circles? Are there more of them over time, or is the practice of evil constant? Is it diluted or enriched whenever a new person is born?

I can think about all this as I move over the landscape.

I look at the oak where I hung.

A lonely place. Perhaps the tree liked my company? The balls. I fetched the balls and threw them back, and they came back again and again and again.

Maria?

Did you know?

Was that the reason for your friendliness? The connection between us? Does it matter? I don’t think so.

Air beneath and above me, I reside in my own vacuum. All the dead around me whisper, Carry on, Malin, carry on.

It isn’t over yet.

I’m scared again.

Is there a way out?

There has to be.

Just ask the woman down there. The woman that black-clad person is approaching from behind, hidden behind a row of bushes.

The early evening is silent and cold and dark. The garage door refuses to open, creaking and squealing, and the sound seems to catch on the frozen air. She presses the button on the wall again; the key is where it should be and the power is on, that much is sure.

Behind her the buildings, the deep-frozen vegetation, lights in most of the windows. Almost everyone is home from work. The garage door won’t move. She’ll have to open it by hand. She’s done it once before. It’s heavy but not impossible, and she’s in a hurry.

Rustling in the bushes behind her. Maybe a bird. At this time of year? Maybe a cat? But don’t they stay indoors in this sort of cold?

She turns round and that’s when she sees it, the black shadow racing towards her, taking one two three four steps before it is on her and she flails with her arms, screaming but nothing comes out; something that tastes chemical pressed into her mouth and she tears and hits but the gloves on her hands turn her blows into caresses.

Look out of your windows.

Look at what’s happening.

He – because it must be a he? – is wearing a black balaclava and she sees the dark brown eyes, the rage and pain in his gaze, and the chemical smell is in her brain now, it’s soft and clear yet it still makes her disappear, her muscles relax and she can no longer feel her body.

She can see. But she is seeing double.

She sees the person, people standing over her. Are there several of you?

No, stop it, not like this.

But there’s no point fighting. As if everything has already happened. As if she is defeated.

The eyes.

His, hers, theirs?

They aren’t here, she thinks. The eyes are somewhere else, far away.

Sweet breath, warm, and it ought to be unfamiliar, but it isn’t.

Soon the chemical feeling reaches her eyes, then her ears. And pictures and sound are gone, the world is gone and she doesn’t know if she’s falling asleep or dying.

Not yet, she thinks. I’ve been drugged, haven’t I? His face there at home, my face.

Not yet, yet, yet, yet…

She is awake.

She knows that. Because her eyelids are open and her head is aching, even if it is completely dark. Or is she sleeping? Confused thoughts.

Am I dead?

Is this my grave?

I don’t want to be here. I want to go home, to my loved ones. But I’m not scared. Why aren’t I scared?

That sound must be an engine. A well-maintained engine that does its job with joy in spite of the cold. Her wrists and feet ache. It’s impossible to move them, but she can kick, tense her body in a bow and kick against the four walls of the space.

Shall I scream?

Of course. But someone, him, her, them, has taped her mouth shut, a rag between her teeth. What does it taste of? Biscuits? Apples? Oil? Dry, drier, driest.

I can fight.

Like I’ve always done.

I’m not dead. I’m in the boot of a car and I’m freezing and kicking, protesting.

Thump, thump, thump.

Can anyone hear me? Do I exist?

I hear you.

I am your friend. But I can’t do anything. At least not much.

Perhaps we can meet afterwards, when all this is over. We can drift side by side. We can like each other. Run round, round the scented apple trees in a season that is perhaps one eternal long summer.

But first: a car feeling its way forward, your body in the boot; the car stops in a deserted lay-by and you are drugged again, your kicks were too much; the car drives across the field and up into the very closest darkness.

64

Ramshäll.

The very brightest side of Linköping.

Perhaps the very finest part of the city, to which the door is closed to most people, where the most remarkable people live.

Maybe it’s the case, Malin thinks, that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, assumes the guise of importance if the opportunity arises, whether large- or small-scale.

Look, we live here!

We can afford it, we’re the kings of the 013 area-code.

Markus’s parents’ house is in Ramshäll, among houses owned by Saab directors, successful entrepreneurs, well-heeled doctors and successful small businessmen.

The villas are almost in the middle of the city, clambering up a slope with a view of the Folkungavallen Stadium and Tinnis, a large communal outdoor swimming pool whose site every property developer in the country covets greedily. At the end of the slope the settlement disappears into the forest or rolls away in narrow streets down towards Tinnerbäcken pond where the dirty-yellow boxlike hospital buildings take over. Best of all is living on the slope, with a view, closest to the city, and that’s where Markus’s parents live.

Malin and Tove are walking side by side in the glow of the streetlamps, and their bodies cast long shadows along the well-gritted pavements. The residents would probably like to put up a fence around the whole area, or an electric fence with barbed wire and a security guard on the gate. Ideas of gated communities aren’t entirely alien to certain right-wing politicians on the city council. So a fence around Ramshäll isn’t perhaps as unthinkable as it might seem.

Stop. Thus far but no further. Us and them. Us against them. Us.

It doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes to walk from the flat to Ramshäll, so Malin decided to brave the cold, in spite of Tove’s protests: ‘Look, I’m coming with you. So you can walk with me.’

‘I thought you said it was going to be fun?’

‘It will be fun, Tove.’

On the way they walk past Karin Johannison’s villa. A yellow-painted house from the thirties with a wooden façade and a veranda.

‘It’s cold, Mum,’ Tove says.

‘It’s healthy,’ Malin says, and with every step she feels her restlessness subsiding, how she is preparing herself to get through the dinner.

‘You’re nervous, Mum,’ Tove suddenly says.

‘Nervous?’

‘Yes, about this.’

‘No, why would I be nervous?’

‘This sort of thing always makes you nervous. Going to someone’s house. And they are doctors.’

‘As if that makes any difference.’

‘Over there,’ Tove says, pointing along the street. ‘Third house on the left.’

Malin sees the villa, a two-storey building of white brick, surrounded by a low fence and with clipped shrubs in the garden.

Inside her the house expands. It becomes a fortified Tuscan hill-town, impossible for a lone foot-soldier to capture.

Inside the house there is a smell of warmth and bay leaves and the cleanliness that only a hard-working Polish cleaner can conjure forth.

The Stenvinkels are standing in the hall, they have shaken Malin by the hand and she is swaying, unprepared for the unrelenting friendliness.

Mum, Birgitta, is a senior physician at the Ear Clinic, and wants to be called Biggan, and it’s sooo lovely to meet Malin at laaast, when they’ve read so much about her in the Correspondent. Dad, Hans, a surgeon, wants to be called Hasse, hopes they like pheasant, because he got hold of a couple of lovely ones down at Lucullus. Stockholmers, upper middle class, brought to the back of beyond by their careers, Malin thinks.

‘Am I wrong,’ she asks, ‘but can I hear that you’re both from Stockholm?’

‘Stockholm? Does it really sound like it? No, I’m from Borås,’ Biggan says. ‘And Hasse’s from Enköping. We met when we were studying in Lund.’

I know their life history, Malin thinks, and we haven’t got further than the hall.

Markus and Tove have disappeared into the house, and now Hasse is leading Malin into the kitchen. On a sparkling stainless-steel worktop sits a misted cocktail shaker and Malin capitulates, doesn’t even contemplate trying to resist.

‘A martini?’ Hasse asks.

Biggan adds, ‘Watch out, though. He makes them very dry.’

‘Tanqueray?’ Hasse says.

‘Please,’ Malin replies, and minutes later she is standing with a drink in her hand and they say a toast, and the alcohol is clean and pure and she thinks that at least he knows his drink, Hasse.

‘We usually have an aperitif in the kitchen,’ Biggan says. ‘It livens up the atmosphere so.’

Hasse is standing by the cooker. With one hand he waves Malin over to him as his other hand opens the lid of a blackened, well-used cast-iron casserole.

The smell hits Malin as she approaches.

‘Take a look,’ Hasse says. ‘Have you ever seen such lovelies?’

Two pheasants swimming in a puttering yellow sauce and Malin feels hunger grip her stomach.

‘Well?’

‘That looks wonderful.’

‘Oops, that disappeared quickly,’ Biggan says, and at first Malin doesn’t understand what she means, then she sees the empty glass in her hand.

‘I’ll mix you another,’ Hasse says.

And as he is shaking the cocktail in the air Malin asks, ‘Does Markus have any brothers and sisters?’

Hasse stops shaking abruptly.

Biggan smiles before saying, ‘No. We tried for a long time. But then we had to give up.’

Then the ice rattles in the cocktail shaker again.

65

Her head.

It’s heavy, and the pain is like a fruit-knife thrust between the lobes of her brain. If you feel pain like that you don’t sleep. In dreams there is no physical pain. That’s why we love them, dreams.

No, no, no.

She remembers now.

But where’s the engine? The car? She isn’t in the car any more.

Stop it. Let me go. I’ve got someone who needs me.

Take this blindfold off my eyes. Take it off. Maybe we could talk about this? Why me?

Is there a smell of apples here? Is that earth under my fingers, cold but still warm earth, biscuit crumbs?

There’s a stove crackling.

She kicks in the direction the warmth is coming from, but strikes no metal; she tenses her back but doesn’t get anywhere. Only a dull thud, a vibration through her body.

I am… Where am I?

I’m lying on cold earth. Is this a grave? And I am dead, after all? Help me. Help me.

But it’s warm around me and if I was in a coffin there’d be wood.

Take this rope off, for God’s sake.

The rag in her mouth.

Strain hard enough and it might break, the rope. Twist back and forth.

Eventually the cloth is pulled away from her eyes.

A flickering light. A vaulted cellar? Earth walls? Where am I? Are those spiders and snakes moving around me?

A face. Faces?

Wearing a ski mask.

The eyes. Looking, yet not looking.

Now they’ve gone again, the faces.

Her body aches. But now is where the pain starts, isn’t it?

I wish I could do something.

But I am powerless.

I can only watch, and I will do, because the look in my eyes may give you some comfort.

I shall stay even if I would rather avert my gaze and disappear to all the places I can disappear to.

But I stay in the fear and the love and all the other feelings. It isn’t over yet, but do you have to do that? Do you imagine they’ll be impressed?

It hurts, I know, I had to feel the same. Stop it, stop it, I say, but I know, you can’t hear my voice. Do you think her pain will eradicate another pain? Will her pain open the doors? Mine didn’t, after all.

So I beg you: stop, stop, stop.

Did I say stop?

How can a single noise come out of my mouth when it is taped up, the rag pressed deep between my teeth?

She is naked. Someone tore off her clothes, splitting the seams with a knife and now someone brings a candle close to her shoulders and she is frightened, the voice mumbling, ‘This must, must, must happen.’

She screams.

Someone brings the candle close, close, and the heat is sharp and she screams as if she doesn’t know how to scream, as if the sound of her burning skin and the pain are one. She twists back and forth but gets nowhere.

‘Shall I burn your face off?’

Is that what the mumbling voice is saying?

‘Perhaps that would be enough. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to kill you then, because you won’t exist properly without a face, will you?’

She screams, screams. Soundlessly.

The other cheek. Her cheekbone burns. Circular movements, red, black, red, the colour of pain, and there is a smell of burned skin, her skin.

‘Shall I get the knife instead?

‘Hang on now.

‘Don’t faint, stay awake,’ the voice mumbles, but she wants to be gone.

The blade shines in the light, the pain has disappeared, adrenalin is pumping through her body and the only thing is her fear that she might never get away from here.

I want to get home to my loved ones.

He must be wondering where I am. How long have I been here? They must be missing me by now.

The knife is cold and warm and what is that warmth running down my thighs? A woodpecker with a steel beak is pecking at my breasts, eating its way down to my ribs. Let me vanish; my face burns when someone hits me in vain attempts to keep me awake.

But it doesn’t work.

I’m going now.

Whether you like it or not.

How much time has passed? I don’t know.

Are those chains rattling?

I’m tied to a post now with forest around me.

I’m alone.

Have you gone? Don’t leave me here alone.

I’m whimpering. I can hear it.

But I’m not freezing and I wonder when the cold stopped being cold.

When does pain stop hurting?

How long have I been hanging out here now? The forest is thick around me; dark but white with snow. There’s a little clearing, and a door leading down to a hole.

My feet don’t exist. Nor my arms, hands, fingers or cheeks. My cheeks are burning holes, and everything around me lacks any smell.

Away.

Away from here.

That’s all that’s left.

Away, away, away, at any cost.

But how can I run if I don’t have any feet?

Something is approaching again.

Is it an angel?

Not in this darkness.

No, it’s something black approaching.

‘What have I done?’

Is that what the black thing says?

‘I have to do this.’ That’s what the black thing says.

She tries to lift her head but nothing happens. She makes a real effort and there, there, she slowly lifts her head and the black thing is close now and is swinging a cauldron of boiling water backwards and she thinks herself away, and then the sound, someone roaring as the water is thrown at her.

But it doesn’t reach. No heat arrives, just a few drops of warmth.

Now the black thing itself again.

With a branch in its hand?

What’s that for?

Shall I scream?

I scream.

But not because anyone will hear me.

66

Candles are burning in the dining room and on the wall behind Hasse and Tove hangs a large oil painting by an artist called Jockum Nordström, who according to Biggan is supposed to have become some sort of big noise in New York. The painting is of a coloured man dressed in boy’s clothes against a blue background, and Malin thinks the painting looks naïve and mature at the same time; the man is alone but still anchored in a sort of context on the blue background, and in the sky drift guitars and billiard-cues.

The pheasant tastes good, but the wine is even better, a red from a region of Spain that Malin doesn’t know, and she has to exert all her willpower not to slug it down, it’s so good.

‘More pheasant, Malin?’ Hasse gestures towards the pot.

‘Have some more,’ Markus says. ‘It’ll make Dad happy.’

The conversation during the evening has covered everything from Malin’s work to weight-training, the reorganisation of the hospital and local politics and the ‘reaaally dull’ programme at the city’s concert house.

Hasse and Biggan. Equally politely and genuinely interested in everything, and no matter how Malin has tried, she hasn’t been able to find a single false note. They seem to like us being here, we aren’t intruding. Malin takes a sip of the wine. And they know how to get me to relax.

‘Great about Tenerife,’ Hasse says, and Malin looks at Tove across the table. Tove looks down.

‘Are the tickets all booked?’ Hasse asks. ‘We need an account number before you go so we can pay in some money. Remind me, will you?’

‘I…’ Tove begins.

Malin clears her throat.

Biggan and Hasse look at her anxiously and Markus turns towards Tove.

‘My dad changed his mind,’ Malin says. ‘I’m afraid they’ve got other guests that week.’

‘Their own grandchild!’ Biggan exclaims.

‘Why haven’t you said anything?’ Markus says to Tove.

Malin shakes her head. ‘They’re a bit odd, my parents.’

Tove breathes out, and Malin realises that the lie has made her feel relief, at the same time as she feels ashamed at not having the bravery, the honesty to come out with the simple truth: that it was Markus who wasn’t welcome.

Why am I lying? Malin thinks.

So as not to disappoint anyone?

Because I’m ashamed at my own parents’ social incompetence?

Because the truth hurts?

‘How strange,’ Hasse says. ‘Who could possibly be more welcome than their own granddaughter and her friend?’

‘It was an old business acquaintance.’

‘Well, never mind,’ Biggan says. ‘Now the two of you can come with us to Åre instead. As we suggested in the first place. I don’t mean to criticise Tenerife, but winter is for skiing!’

Malin and Tove are walking home along the well-lit villa-lined streets.

A cognac after the meal makes Malin’s mouth run away with her. Biggan had one, but Hasse didn’t, had to work the next morning. ‘A small martini and a glass of wine. No more than that if I’m going to be wielding a scalpel!’

‘You should have explained how things were to Markus beforehand.’

‘Maybe, but I-’

‘And now you’ve made me lie. You know what I think about that. And Åre, have they asked you to go to Åre? You could have mentioned that. Who am I really, you-’

‘Mum. Can’t you just be quiet?’

‘Why? I’ve got things I want to say.’

‘But you’re saying such stupid things.’

‘Why haven’t you mentioned Åre?’

‘Oh Mum, you know why. When was I supposed to tell you? You’re hardly ever at home. You’re always working.’

No, Malin feels like shouting at Tove. No, you’re wrong, but she stops and thinks. Is it really as bad as that?

They walk on in silence, past Tinnis and the Hotel Ekoxen.

‘Aren’t you going to say anything, Mum?’ Tove asks as they pass the City Mission’s charity shop.

‘They were nice,’ Malin says. ‘Not at all what I imagined.’

‘You imagine so much about people all the time, Mum.’

67

I’m bleeding.

Something is lifting me up, away from the post and down on to a soft, hairy bed.

I’m alive.

My heart is beating.

And the black thing is everywhere, laying cloth, wool on my body and it’s warm and the black thing’s voice, voices, say, ‘He died too soon. But you, you’re going to hang the way it’s supposed to be.’

Then the trees above me, I’m moving through the forest. Am I lying on a sledge? Can I hear the sound of runners over the crust of snow? I’m tired, so tired, and it’s warm.

It’s a real warmth.

It’s in my dream and in wakefulness.

But away from the warmth.

It kills.

And I don’t want to die.

The engine sound again. I’m in a car now.

In the sound of the engine, in its persistent running is a suspicion. That my body has one more chance, that it isn’t yet too late.

I breathe.

Welcome the pain from every battered and smashed body part, the tearing of my bleeding innards.

It is in pain that I exist now. And it will help me survive.

I am drifting here.

The field lies open. Between Maspelösa, Fornåsa and Bankeberg, at the end of an unploughed road covered by just a thin layer of snow, stands a lone tree, like the one I was hanging in.

The car with the woman in the boot stops there.

I wish I could help her now.

But she must do that herself.

The black thing has to open up. It has to help me out. Then I shall be an engine. I shall explode, I shall get away, I shall live.

The black thing opens the boot, heaves my body over the edge and down on to the snow by the exhaust.

It leaves me lying there.

A tree trunk, thick, ten metres away.

The stone is covered by snow, but I still see it. Is it my hands that are free, is it my hand, that swollen red lump I see to my left?

The black thing at my side now. Whispering about blood. About sacrifice.

If I twist to the left and then grab the stone and strike at what must be its head, it might work. That could get me away.

I am an engine and I am turning the key.

Now I ignite.

I exist again and I grip the stone, and the whispering stops; now I strike, I am going to get away and I strike myself away from here. Don’t try to fend me off, I strike, I want more, my will is what sits deep, deep down, it’s brighter than the darkness can manage to blacken.

Don’t try.

I strike at the blackness, and we roll around in the snow, and cold does not exist and it gets a tight grip on me, but I explode once more and then I strike. The stone against its skull and the blackness goes limp, glides off me, on to the snow.

I crawl up on to my knees.

Open field in all directions.

I get up.

In the darkness. I have been there.

I stagger towards the horizon.

I am on my way, away.

I drift beside you as you stumble on across the plain. You will arrive somewhere, and wherever you go, I will be there to meet you.

68

Thursday, 16 February

Johnny Axelsson puts both hands on the steering-wheel, feels the vibrations of the vehicle, how the cold is making the engine run unevenly.

Early morning.

Clouds of snow are drifting in across the road from the fields and farms, in shifting, almost blinding veils.

It takes nearly fifty minutes to get from Motala to Linköping, and at this time of year it can be dangerous as well, with the uncertain state of the roads, ice that comes and goes, no matter how much they salt them.

No, best to take it cautiously. He always goes via Fornåsa, much prefers that road to the main road through Borensberg.

And you never know what’s going to come out of the forest. He’s come close to hitting deer and elk before now.

But at least the roads are straight, built as they were to be able to function as runways in case of war.

But how likely is it that war will ever come?

Unless it’s already here.

Motala. Junkie capital of Sweden.

Few if any jobs, unless you want to work in the public sector.

But Johnny Axelsson grew up in Motala, and that’s where he wants to live. So what if he has to spend a couple of hours commuting? That’s a price he’s willing to pay to live somewhere he feels at home. When the job advert from Ikea appeared in the paper he didn’t hesitate. And he didn’t when he was offered the job either. Don’t be a burden. Contribute. Do the right thing. How many of his old friends are living off benefits? Still claiming unemployment even though their jobs disappeared ten years ago. God, we’re thirty-five, how can they even bear to think about it?

Go fishing. Out hunting. Play the pools. Watch trotting races. Do a bit of carpentry on the sly.

Johnny Axelsson drives past a red farmhouse. It’s close to the road and inside he can see an elderly couple. They’re eating breakfast, and in the light of the kitchen their skin looks golden, like two fish in an aquarium, safe and sound in the middle of the plain.

Keep looking ahead, Johnny thinks, the road, that’s what you should be concentrating on.

Malin goes straight to the coffee room when she gets to the station. The coffee in the pump-action flask is fresh.

She sits on a chair at the table by the window facing the inner courtyard. Only a white mass of snow at this time of year, a little paved area with a few dubious flower-beds in the spring, summer and autumn.

There’s a magazine on the table next to her. She reaches for it. Amelia. An old issue.

Headline: YOU’RE GREAT THE WAY YOU ARE! Headline on the next page: AMELIA’S LIPOSUCTION SPECIAL!

Malin closes the magazine, gets up and walks off to her desk.

There’s a yellow Post-it note on top of it, like an exclamation mark among the mess of paper.

From Ebba in reception:

Malin.

Call this number. She said it was important. 013-173928.

Nothing else.

Malin takes the note and walks out to reception, but Ebba isn’t there. Sofia is sitting on her own behind the counter.

‘Have you seen Ebba?’

‘She’s in the kitchen. She went to get coffee.’

Malin finds Ebba in the kitchen, sitting at one of the round tables, leafing through a magazine.

Malin holds up the note. ‘What’s this?’

‘There was a woman who rang.’

‘I can see that from the note.’

Ebba wrinkles her nose. ‘Well, she didn’t want to say why she was calling. But it was important, I understood that much.’

‘When did she call?’

‘Just before you got in.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Yes,’ Ebba says. ‘She sounded scared. And hesitant. She was sort of whispering.’

Malin tries to identify the number through Yellow Pages.

Nothing.

It must be ex-directory, and not even they could get round that without a load of time-consuming paperwork.

She calls.

No answer, not even an answer-machine.

But a minute later her phone rings.

She picks up the receiver. Says, ‘Yes, this is Malin Fors.’

‘Daniel here. Have you got anything new for me about the Andersson investigation?’

She gets cross, then strangely calm, as if she had been wanting to hear his voice, but pushes the thought aside.

‘No.’

‘The harassment accusation, any comment?’

‘Have you suddenly turned stupid, Daniel?’

‘I’ve been away a few days. Aren’t you going to ask where?’

‘No.’ Wants to ask, doesn’t want to ask.

‘I was in Stockholm. At Expressen, they were after me. But I turned them down.’

‘Why?’ The question pops out of her mouth.

‘So you do care after all? Never do what they expect you to, Malin. Never.’

‘Goodbye, Daniel.’

She hangs up, then the phone rings again. Daniel? No. Unknown number on the display, silence at the other end of the line.

‘Fors here. Who is this?’

Breathing, hesitation. Maybe fear. Then a soft but anxious female voice, as if it knows it’s speaking words that are forbidden.

‘Well,’ the woman says, and Malin waits.

‘My name is Viveka Crafoord.’

‘Viveka, I-’

‘I work as a psychoanalyst here in Linköping. It’s about one of my patients.’

Malin instinctively wants to tell the woman to stop, not to say anything else; she isn’t allowed to hear confidential information about a patient, just as this woman who calls herself Viveka Crafoord isn’t allowed to reveal it.

‘I’ve been reading,’ the woman says. ‘About the case you seem to be working on, the murder of Bengt Andersson.’

‘You mentioned-’

‘I think one of my patients… well, there’s something you need to know.’

‘Which patient?’

‘You’ll appreciate that I can’t say.’

‘But perhaps we can talk anyway?’

‘Not like this. But come to my practice at eleven o’clock today. It’s on Drottninggatan, number 3, opposite McDonald’s. The door-code is 9490.’

Viveka Crafoord hangs up.

Malin looks at the time on her computer screen: 7.44. Three and a quarter hours.

Martini and wine and cognac. She feels bloated.

Gets up and heads towards the stairs leading down to the gym.

How long have I been walking now?

Dawn has broken but it still isn’t day. I’m moving across the fields, but I’ve got no idea where I am.

I am an open wound, but the cold means that I can’t feel my body. I put one foot in front of the other, can’t get far enough away. Am I being hunted? Has the blackness woken up? Is it close to me?

Is that a colour, the blackness coming with its car? Is that the engine of darkness?

Turn off the light.

It’s blinding me. Be careful of my eyes.

They might be the only thing that’s left of me intact.

Eyes on the road, Johnny Axelsson thinks.

Eyes. Use them carefully and you’ll arrive safely.

Out in the patches of forest now.

The open fields are nice, but the cold and wind are making the visibility worse than usual, as if the earth were breathing and its air is turning to mist when it meets the chill atmosphere.

Eyes.

A deer?

No.

But.

But what the hell is that?

Johnny Axelsson changes down the gears and slows down, flashing his lights to scare the deer away from the verge, but hell, it isn’t a deer, it’s, it’s a…

What is it?

The car seems stuck to the road.

A what?

A person? A naked person? Oh fuck, fuck, what does she look like?

And what’s she doing here?

Out on the plain? Like this? In the morning?

Johnny Axelsson rolls past, stops, and in his rear-view mirror he sees the woman stagger past, how she doesn’t take any notice of the car, just carries on.

Wait, he thinks.

He’s in a hurry to get to work in the Ikea warehouse, but she can’t just carry on walking like that. It’s completely wrong.

He opens the car door, his body remembers how cold it is, and he hesitates, then runs after the woman.

He puts his arm on her shoulder and she stops, turns round and her cheeks, has she burned them or is it the cold, the skin on her stomach, where is it, and how can she walk on feet like that, they’re black, as black as the currants in his garden at home?

She looks past him.

Then into his eyes.

She smiles.

Light in her eyes.

And she falls into his arms.

The twelve-kilo dumbbell doesn’t want to leave the floor no matter how hard Malin tries to lift it.

Damn, that’s heavy, and I ought to manage at least ten reps.

Johan Jakobsson beside her, came down just after her and now he is driving her on, as if he wants them to drive out the bad news together.

Johan had managed to get into the last folder in Rickard Skoglöf’s hard drive last night at home, once the children had gone to bed. The only thing in the folder had been more pictures, of Rickard Skoglöf himself and Valkyria Karlsson in various sexual positions on a large animal skin, their bodies painted with patterns resembling tribal tattoos.

‘Come on, Malin!’

She raises the dumbbell, pushes it upwards.

‘Come on, damn it!’

But it won’t work. She lets the weight fall to the floor.

A dull rattle.

‘I’m going to do a bit of running,’ she tells Johan.

The sweat is pouring from her brow. The alcohol from dinner last night is being forced out, step by step, on the treadmill.

Malin looks at herself in the mirror as she runs, the sweat dripping down her brow; how pale she is even if the exercise is making her cheeks red. Her face. The face of a thirty-three-year-old. Lips that look plumper than usual because of the workout.

In recent years her face seems to have found itself, as if the skin has settled into its proper place over her cheekbones at last. The girlish quality she used to have has gone for good, no trace of it left after the exertion of the past few weeks. She looks at the clock on the wall: 9.24.

Johan has just gone.

Time for her to shower and then head off to Viveka Crafoord.

The internal phone rings.

Malin sprints across the room and picks up the receiver.

Zeke on the line. Agitated.

‘We’ve just had a call from A &E. A Johnny Axelsson has brought in a woman he found naked and badly beaten up out on the plain.’

‘I’m coming.’

‘She’s in a bad way, but according to the doctor I spoke to she evidently whispered your name, Malin.’

‘What did you say?’

‘The woman whispered your name, Malin.’

69

Viveka Crafoord will have to wait.

Everyone else will have to wait.

Apart from three.

Bengt Andersson.

Maria Murvall.

And now this other woman, found in exactly the same state.

The victims run out of the black forests, out across the white fields. Where’s the source of the violence?

Zeke is driving at seventy kilometres an hour; forty too fast. The stereo is silent. Nothing but the abrupt, stressed sounds of the engine. They’ve had to take a detour, there are roadworks; a frozen pipe must have burst.

Djurgårdsgatan, the trees of the Horticultural Society, grey and straggly, but still somehow sparkling. Lasarettsgatan and the pink-brick blocks of flats put up in the eighties.

Postmodernism.

Malin read the article about the architect in the Correspondent, in the paper’s series about the architecture of the city. The word struck her then as absurd, but she knew what the writer meant.

They swing up towards the hospital, the yellow façade of the main building faded by the sun, but the council’s money is needed for other things than replacing the cladding. They take a short cut over a traffic island, knowing that they really shouldn’t, that they’re supposed to drive round, a long way round, but today there just isn’t time.

And they’re in front of the entrance to the A &E department, braking as they swing round the turning circle. They park and run towards the entrance.

A nurse meets them, a short, stocky woman with close-set eyes that make her thin nose stick out from her head.

‘The doctor wants to talk to you,’ she says as she leads them down a corridor, past several empty treatment rooms.

‘Dr who?’ Zeke asks.

‘Dr Stenvinkel, he’s the surgeon who’s going to be operating on her.’

Hasse, Malin thinks, and at first she feels a resistance to meeting Markus’s dad on duty, then realises that it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.

‘I know him,’ Malin whispers to Zeke as they follow in the nurse’s wake.

‘Who?’

‘The doctor. Just so you know. He’s Tove’s boyfriend’s dad.’

‘It’ll be fine, Malin.’

The nurse stops in front of a closed door. ‘You can go in. No need to knock.’

Hans Stenvinkel is a different man now compared to last night. Gone is the easy-going social individual, and instead there is a strict, sombre and focused person sitting before them. The whole of his green-clad body exudes competence, and the way he greeted her was personal but formal; subtext: we know each other, but we’ve both got important work to do.

Zeke is squirming on his chair, evidently wound up by the authority of the room. How the person in the green jacket bestows a sort of worthiness to the whitewashed textured walls, the oak-veneer bookcase and the worn wooden top of the simple desk.

This is what it used to be like, Malin thinks, when people had respect for doctors, before the Internet made it possible for everyone to be an expert in their own ailments.

‘You can see her in a moment,’ Hans says. ‘She’s conscious, but she’ll have to be anaesthetised soon so that we can take care of her injuries. She needs a skin transplant. But at least we can do that here. We’re the best place in the country for dealing with burns.’

‘Frostbite?’ Zeke asks.

‘That too. But from a medicinal point of view, they’re more like actual burns. So I dare say that she couldn’t be in better hands.’

‘Who is she?’

‘We don’t know. She just keeps saying that she wants to see you, Malin, so I expect you know who she is.’

Malin nods in agreement. ‘Then it’s probably best that she gets to see me. If she’s up to it. We really need to find out who she is.’

‘I think she could handle a short conversation.’

‘Is her condition very serious?’

‘Yes,’ Hans says. ‘She couldn’t possibly have caused those injuries herself. She’s lost a lot of blood. But we’re giving her transfusions at the moment. We’ve relieved the shock with adrenalin. Burns and frost damage, like I said, knife wounds, cuts, compression injuries, and her vagina has been seriously wounded. It’s astonishing that she didn’t lose consciousness. You can’t help but wonder what sort of monster is running loose on the plain.’

‘How long could she have been out there?’

‘I’d say all night. The frost damage is severe. But we should be able to save most of her toes and fingers.’

‘Have you documented the injuries?’

‘Yes, exactly as you want them.’

It’s obvious from Hans’s voice that he’s done this before. With Maria Murvall?

‘Good,’ Zeke says.

‘And the man who came in with her?’

‘He left his number. He works at Ikea. We tried to get him to wait but he said, “The spirit of Ingvar, old IK himself, isn’t happy if you get to work late.” We couldn’t persuade him to stay.’

Then Hans looks her in the eye. ‘I’m warning you, Malin. She looks like she’s been through the fires of hell. It’s terrifying. You have to have incredible willpower to get through what she must have suffered.’

‘People tend to have a ridiculous amount of willpower when their survival is at stake,’ Zeke says.

‘Not always, not always,’ Hans replies, in a voice that sounds heavy and sad.

Malin nods to him, to indicate that she knows that he means. But do I? she wonders.

Who is she? Malin thinks, opening the door to the hospital room. Zeke is waiting outside.

A single bed against a wall, thin strips of light filtering through Venetian blinds and spreading across the grey-brown floor. A monitor is bleeping quietly, and two little red points of light on its screen shine like a pair of badger’s eyes in the gloom. Drip-stands with blood-bags and fluids, a catheter-bag, and then the figure on the bed under thin yellow blankets, her head reclining on a pillow.

Who is it?

The cheek facing Malin is covered with a bandage.

But who is it?

Malin approaches cautiously and the figure on the bed groans, turns her head towards her, and isn’t that something like a smile between the gaps in the bandages?

Hands wrapped in gauze.

The eyes.

I recognise them.

But who is it?

The smile is gone and the nose and eyes and hair become a memory.

Rebecka Stenlundh.

Bengt Andersson’s sister.

She raises her bandaged hand towards Malin, beckoning her to the bed.

Then a huge effort, all the words to get out at once, a whole sentence to finish, as if it were her last.

‘You have to take care of my boy if I don’t make it. See that he ends up somewhere good.’

‘You’re going to make it.’

‘I’m trying, believe me.’

‘What happened? Can you bear to tell me what happened?’

‘The car.’

‘The car?’

‘That’s where I was taken.’

Rebecka Stenlundh turns her head, laying her bandaged cheek on the pillow.

‘Then a hole. In the forest, and a post.’

‘A hole, where?’

‘In the dark.’

‘Where in the dark?’

Rebecka shuts her eyes in a negative, in a: ‘I have no idea.’

‘And then?’

‘Sledge, and car again.’

‘Who?’

Rebecka Stenlundh shakes her head slowly.

‘You didn’t see?’

She shakes her head again. ‘I was going to be hanged, like Bengt.’

‘Was there more than one?’

Rebecka shakes her head once more. ‘Don’t know, couldn’t see properly.’

‘And the man who brought you in?’

‘He helped me.’

‘So you didn’t see…’

‘I struck the blackness, I struck the blackness, I…’

Rebecka drifts off, shuts her eyes, mumbles, ‘Mum, Mum. Can we go and play under the apple trees?’

Malin puts her ear close to Rebecka’s mouth. ‘What did you say?’

‘Stay, Mum, stay, you’re not ill…’

‘Can you hear me?’

‘My boy, take…’

Rebecka falls silent, but she’s breathing, her chest is moving; she’s sleeping, or is unconscious, and Malin wonders if she’s dreaming, hopes that Rebecka can escape dreaming for many nights to come, but knows that she’s going to dream.

The machine beside her bleeps.

Glowing eyes.

Malin stands up.

Stands beside the bed for a while before leaving the room.

70

Zeke on his way to Ikea, Malin on her way up the stairs of number 3, Drottninggatan, million-year-old fossils embedded in the stone of the steps. Viveka Crafoord’s clinic is on the third floor of four.

No lift in the building.

Crafoord Psychotherapy: a brass sign with curling letters, in the middle of a brown-lacquered door. Malin tries the handle. The door is locked.

She rings the bell.

Once, then twice, then a third time.

The door opens and a woman in her forties looks out. Frizzy black hair and a face that is round and sharp at the same time. Her brown eyes sparkle with intelligence even though they are half covered by a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

‘Viveka Crafoord?’

‘You’re an hour late.’

She opens the door a little more and Malin can see how she is dressed. A suede waistcoat over a puffy lilac-blue blouse, which in turn hangs over an ankle-length, green-checked, velvet skirt.

‘Can I come in?’

‘No.’

‘You said-’

‘I’m seeing a client at the moment. Go down to McDonald’s and I’ll call you in half an hour.’

‘Can’t I wait here?’

‘I don’t want anyone to see you.’

‘Have you got…’

The door to the clinic closes.

‘… my mobile number?’

Malin lets the question hang in the air, thinks that it’s about time for lunch, and she now has the perfect excuse to partake of the American fast-food Satan.

She really doesn’t like McDonald’s. Has stuck absolutely to her decision never to take Tove there.

Baby carrots and juice.

We’re taking our responsibility seriously and helping to combat childhood obesity.

So stop selling fries, then. Fizzy drinks. Half a responsibility: how much is that worth?

Sugar and fat.

Malin opens the door reluctantly.

Behind her a bus drives into Trädgårdstorget.

One Big Mac and one cheeseburger later she feels ready to throw up. The restaurant’s garish colours and almost tangible smell of frying make her feel even worse.

Call now.

Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty.

Her mobile rings.

Answer quickly.

‘Malin?’

Dad? Not now, not now.

‘Dad, I’m busy.’

‘We’ve been thinking about the matter.’

‘Dad-’

‘Of course Tove is welcome to come down with her boyfriend.’

‘What? I told you, I’m-’

‘… so can you see if they still want to…’

Call waiting.

Malin clicks away from the call from Tenerife, takes the new one.

‘Yes?’

‘You can come up now.’

Viveka Crafoord’s consulting room is furnished like the library of an upper-class home at the turn of the last century. Books, Freud, metre after metre of shiny new leather book-spines. A black and white portrait of Jung in a heavy gold frame, thick rugs, a mahogany desk and a paisley-patterned armchair beside a chaise longue covered in leather the colour of oxblood.

Malin sits down on the chaise longue, turning down the invitation to stretch out and thinking how much Tove would like this room, its updated Jane Austen feeling.

Viveka is sitting in the armchair with her legs crossed.

‘What I’m about to tell you stays between us,’ she says. ‘You can never mention it to anyone. It must never find its way into a police report or any other form of documentation. This meeting never took place. Is that okay?’

Malin nods.

‘We’re both risking our professional reputations if this ever gets out. Or if anyone knows it came from me.’

‘If I act upon anything you tell me, I’ll just have to say it was my intuition.’

Viveka Crafoord smiles. But only reluctantly.

Then she is serious again and starts to talk.

‘Eight years ago I was contacted by a man, he was thirty-seven then, who said he wanted to get to grips with his childhood. Nothing unusual in that, but what was unusual about this case was that he made no progress at all for the first five years. He came once a week, he had a comfortable life, a good job. He wanted to talk, he said, about how things had been when he was little, but instead I got to hear about pretty much anything else. Computer programs, skiing, apple trees, various forms of faith. Everything apart from what he originally said he wanted to talk about.’

‘What was his name?’

‘I’m coming to that. Or I will, if it proves necessary.’

‘I think it might.’

‘Then something happened, three years ago. He refused to say what, but I think someone in his family was the victim of a violent crime, she was raped, and in some way it was as if this event had made him let go.’

‘Let go?’

‘Yes, and start talking. To begin with I didn’t believe him, but afterwards… It could have been something else as well.’

‘Afterwards?’

‘When he persisted.’

Viveka Crafoord shakes her head. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘you wonder why some people have children.’

‘I’ve thought the same thing.’

‘His father had been a sailor who died when he was still in his mother’s womb.’

That’s wrong, Malin thinks. His father was someone else…

But she lets Viveka Crafoord go on.

‘His earliest memory, the first thing we could reach together, was how his mother locked him in a wardrobe when he must have been about two. She didn’t want to be seen out with a child. Then his mother remarried, a violent man, and they had children. Three brothers and a sister. The new husband and the sons saw it as their duty to torment him, and the mother seems to have cheered them on. In the winter they locked him outside in the snow, naked, so he had to stand in the cold while they were all sitting eating in the kitchen. If he protested he was beaten, even more than usual. They beat him, cut him with knives, poured hot water over him, threw crumbs at him. The brothers seem to have crossed the boundary, encouraged by their father; children can be incredibly cruel if cruelty is encouraged. They don’t know it’s wrong. A selective sort of violence. Almost like a sect in the end. He was the eldest brother, but what use was that? Adults and children against a lone child. The brothers must have been damaged by the situation as well, become confused, hard, insecure, yet simultaneously determined, bound together in something that we all know deep down is wrong.’

You believe in goodness, Malin thinks, and asks, ‘How did he survive?’

‘Fantasy worlds. His own universe. Some hole in a forest, he never said where. Computer programs. Different faiths. Everything that we human beings clutch at to get a grip on life. Education. And by getting away from them. He managed it. He must have had immense internal strength. And a sister who seems to have cared about him. Even if she couldn’t do anything on her own. He talked about her, albeit fairly incoherently, about something that had happened in the forest. It was like he lived in parallel worlds, and had learned to distinguish between them. But then it was as if every time we met the horrors of his childhood took over more and more. He was quick to lose his temper.’

‘Violent?’

‘Never in here. But possibly elsewhere. They burned him with candles. He described a cabin in the forest where they tied him to a tree and burned him, then threw hot water over him.’

‘How could they?’

‘People can do anything to another human being when they somehow stop seeing them as a human being. History is full of examples. It’s nothing particularly unusual.’

‘And how does it start?’

‘I don’t know.’ Viveka Crafoord sighs. ‘In this case with the mother. Or even further back. I think it was her refusal to love him, combined with the fact that she needed him. I don’t know why she never had him adopted. Maybe his mother needed something to hate? Something to channel her fury at? Her hatred must also have been what fuelled the contempt of her husband and sons.’

‘Why didn’t she want to love him?’

‘I don’t know. Something must have happened.’

Viveka pauses.

‘During that last year he would lie on that chaise longue where you’re sitting now, crying and raging in turn. He would often whisper, “Let me in, let me in, I’m freezing.”’

‘And what did you do?’

‘I tried to comfort him.’

‘And now?’

‘He stopped seeing me about a year ago. The last time we met he stormed out. Lost his temper again. Yelled that no words could ever help, that only action could put everything right, and now he knew, he’d found out something, he yelled, said he knew what needed to be done.’

‘And you didn’t contact him again?’

Viveka Crafoord looks surprised. ‘All my treatments are voluntary,’ she says. ‘My patients have to come to me. But I thought you might be interested in this.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘His cup has overflowed. All his worlds have merged together. Anything could happen.’

‘Thank you,’ Malin says.

‘Do you want to know his name?’

‘I don’t need to.’

‘I thought as much,’ Viveka Crafoord says, and turns towards the window.

Malin gets up to leave.

Without looking at Malin, Viveka Crafoord asks, ‘What about you, how are you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s written all over you. You don’t often see it so clearly, but it’s like you’re carrying a sorrow, a loss, that you haven’t come to terms with.’

‘I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m here if you want to talk.’

Outside great snowflakes are sailing to the ground; Malin thinks that they look like the remnants of beautiful stars that were pulverised far out in space, billions of years ago.

71

Ljungsbro, 1961

The disgusting little shit.

I’m putting a terry nappy on him.

I’ve padded the inside walls of the wardrobe. I might toss him an apple, a bit of dry bread, but he doesn’t scream any more. If you hit a kid on the nose enough times he learns that screaming means pain, and that it doesn’t help.

So I shut him in.

He cries silently as I put his two and a half years in the wardrobe.

Post-natal depression.

Thanks a lot.

Child benefit.

Thanks a lot.

Drowned father. One thousand, six hundred and eighty-five kronor every month. They bought it, the authorities, seeing as it was so tragic. Fatherless. But I didn’t want to give him up and not get the money.

My lies aren’t lies because they’re mine alone. I am creating my own world. And the interloper in the wardrobe makes it real.

So I lock up.

And go off.

They sacked me from the factory when they saw my stomach; we can’t have that at the chocolate conveyor-belt, they said.

And now I lock the wardrobe and he cries and I want to open up and tell him that he only exists here because he doesn’t exist; choke on the apple, stop breathing, then perhaps you’ll get away. Fucking little brat. And yet not.

One thousand, six hundred and eighty-five old riksdaler a month.

I saunter through town to the grocer’s, and I hold my head high but I know how they whisper – Where’s she put the boy? Where’s the boy? – because they know you exist, and I feel like stopping and curtseying to the ladies, telling them that the boy, the sailor’s boy, I’ve got him in a dark, damp, padded wardrobe. I’ve even put in an air-vent, just like the one they put in the box when they kidnapped Lindbergh’s son; you probably saw the report in the Weekly News.

I am quiet around him, but still, somehow, words find their way into his head.

Mummy, Mummy

Mummy

Mummy

and those noises disgust me, they’re like damp snakes on a wet forest floor.

Sometimes I see Kalle. I named him after Kalle.

He looks at me.

He looks all wrong on his bicycle, and he’s given in to the bottle now, and the woman, the fair one, has borne him a son. What does he want that for? Does he imagine he can get any order to that bloodline? I’ve seen the boy. Blown up like a balloon, he is.

The secret is my revenge, a kiss blown through the air.

Don’t think you can get at me, Kalle. That you did get at me. No one gets at Rakel.

No one, no one, no one.

Then I open the wardrobe.

And he smiles.

The fucking little brat.

And I hit him to wipe the smile from his face.

72

I glide through the cold, the day as chalky-white as the fields below me. The tower of Vreta Kloster is a sharpened point on my way out to Blåsvädret and the Hultsjön forest.

The voices are everywhere. All the words they have spoken over the years twisted around each other to form a terrifying and beautiful web.

I have learned to distinguish the voices I want to hear, and I understand them all, even far beyond the apparent meaning of the words.

So who do I hear?

I hear the brothers’ voices: Elias, Jakob and Adam. How they resist, but still want to talk. I start with Elias, listen to what you have to say.

You must never show you’re weak.

Never, ever.

Like he did, the illegitimate one. He was older than me, Jakob and Adam, but he still blubbed in the snow, like a woman, like a weakling. If you show you’re weak, they’ll take you.

Which they?

The bastards. Everyone out there.

Sometimes, but I never say this to Mother or my brothers, I wonder what harm he really did. Why Mother hated him, why we had to hit him. I look at my own children and wonder what harm they could do, what harm Karl could really have done? What did Mother turn us into? Maybe you make children commit whatever cruelties you like.

But no, mustn’t think like that.

I know that I am not weak. I am nine, and I am standing at the entrance to the newly built, white-plastered building of Ljungsbro school, it’s early September and the sun is shining and the woodwork teacher, Broman, is standing outside smoking. The bell has gone and all the children rush to the entrance, me first, but just as I’m about to open the door Broman holds up first one arm, then the other, in the air and he shouts, STOP, NO FILTHY LITTLE BRATS IN HERE. And he shouts louder and louder and his words make the whole crowd of children stop, their little muscles frozen. He grins, grins, and everyone thinks they’re the little brats, and then he shouts, IT SMELLS FILTHY HERE, ELIAS MURVALL, IT SMELLS FILTHY, and that’s when the giggling starts, then laughter, and Broman’s cigarette-hoarse shouting, LITTLE BRAT. He shoves me to one side, holds me hard against the glass of one door with his hairy arm as he opens the other door and lets in the rest of the children and they laugh and go past and whisper, Little brat, shit, it smells of shit here, and I won’t put up with it. I make sure I explode, I open my mouth, and I bite, I dig my eye-teeth deep into Broman’s arm. I feel the flesh give way and just as he starts to scream I feel the taste of iron in my mouth and who’s crying now, you bastard, who’s crying now?

I let go.

They wanted Mother to come to the school and talk about what had happened.

That’s shit, she said, as she held me tight in the kitchen, we don’t do that sort of shit, Elias.

I am still drifting and listening. I’m high up now, where the air is too thin for human beings, and the cold is quick to destroy, but your voice is clear here, Jakob, so pure and radiantly clear, transparent like a window frame without glass.

Hit the bastard, Jakob, Dad yelled.

Hit him.

He’s not one of us, no matter what he might like to think.

He was skinny and thin and although he was twice my height I kicked him right in the stomach while Adam held him. Adam four years younger, but still stronger, run wild.

Dad in his wheelchair on the porch.

How it happened?

I don’t know.

They found him in the park one night. His back broken, his jaw too. Mother said he must have run into a real man there in the park and that it’s all over for Blackie now, and then she passed him another drink, let him drink himself to death, it’s high time, and oh how he drank. We would push him round the houses and he would rave in his drunkenness and try to stand up.

I was the one who found him when he fell downstairs. I was thirteen then. I came in from the garden where I’d been pulling unripe apples off the trees to throw at cars driving past on the road.

The eyes.

They were staring at me, white and dead, and his skin was grey instead of the usual red.

I was scared. Wanted to scream.

But instead I closed his eyes.

Mother came down the stairs, just out of the bath.

She stepped over the body, reached out to me and her hair was wet but still warm, and it smelled of flowers and leaves and she murmured in my ear, Jakob. My Jakob.

Then she whispered, If you have to do something, you don’t hesitate, do you? You know what has to be done, don’t you? And she hugged me tight, tight, and then I remember the church bells and the black-clad people on the patch of gravel in front of the church in Vreta Kloster.

The patch of gravel.

Edged with walls and remains from the twelfth century.

I’ve landed there now and I can see what you must have seen, Jakob. What did the sight do to you? But everything had already happened long, long before then, hadn’t it? And I think you’re doing what has to be done, just as I’m doing now.

But it isn’t your voice that’s strongest here. That’s Adam’s, and what he says sounds sensible and mad at the same time, as despairing and obvious as the winter cold.

What’s ours is ours, and no one can take it from us, Adam.

Mother’s voice with no space for me.

I was probably two the first time I realised that Dad hit him, that there was someone who was always there, but who was only there to be hit.

There is an obvious quality to violence that doesn’t exist in anything else. Drink your skull to pieces, smash a skull to pieces, smash to pieces, smash apart.

That’s how it is.

I smash things apart.

Mother.

She also likes things to be obvious.

Doubt, she says, isn’t for us.

It was different with the new kid.

He didn’t know.

Turkish. Came to our class in year five. From Stockholm. His mum and dad had got jobs in chocolate heaven. He must have thought he could mess me about. I was the little one, after all, the one on the edge, with all the stains on his clothes, the one you could, well, do what you liked with, just to prove you were someone in the new place.

So he hit me.

Or tried to.

He used some fucking judo technique and got me down, then he punched me until my nose started to bleed, and then, just when I was about to fly at him again, the teacher and the caretaker and the PE teacher, Björklund, showed up.

My brothers got to hear about it.

The Turk lived in Härna. We waited for him by the canal, under the birches by the water, hidden down the slope behind the tree trunks. The fool used to go home that way.

And he came, just as my brothers had planned.

They leapt up and knocked him off his bike and he was lying there in the gravel by the side of the canal, screaming and pointing at the tears in his jeans.

Jakob stared at him, Elias stared, and I stood by a birch tree and I remember wondering what was going to happen now, but I knew.

Elias started kicking the Turk’s bike, and when he tried to get up Jakob kicked him, first in the stomach and then in the mouth, and the Turk started whimpering and blood was coming out of the corners of his mouth.

And then I bent the bike frame and heaved the bike right out into the canal. And I ran up and kicked the Turk.

And I kicked.

Kicked.

Kicked.

His parents didn’t even report it to the cops.

They moved just a few weeks after that. At school they said they’d gone back to Turkey, but I don’t believe that. They were that other sort, Kurds. Like fuck would they have gone back.

On the way home from the canal I was sitting behind Elias on his Puch Dakota. I was holding on to his waist and the whole of his big body was vibrating, and Jakob was riding his moped next to us.

He smiled at me. I could feel warmth from Elias.

We were, we are, brothers.

One and the same.

Nothing odd about that.

73

It’s warm here. No one will find me.

The earth roof above me is a heavenly vault of its own. There are biscuit crumbs on the ground.

Is she hanging?

If not, I shall have to try again and again and again. Because if I get rid of the blood you’ll have to let me in. If I sacrifice it to you, you’ll let me in.

It was easier with him, Bengt. He was heavy, but not too heavy, and I drugged him by the car park up in Härna when he was walking past. I had my other car, the one I bought with a normal boot. Then the same as with her, brought out here by sledge.

But he died too soon.

The pulleys came from the factory. I’d disconnected the sensors in the server room before I cut a hole in the fence. Not easy. A coat on a hanger was me through the frosted glass when the guards walked past.

That night, in the forest, I took him. I drove out the blood, took away the blood, so you would let me in. I made it clean.

The chains, the noose. The sacrifice.

I had made a sacrifice for you.

But what happened with her?

I remember waking up in the field and she was gone. I snaked back to the car, crept in and managed to start it. I made my way back here.

But was she hanging in the tree?

Or was she somewhere else?

She must have been hanging. I drove out what was wrong, I made the sacrifice.

So you’ll soon be here to open the door.

You’ll be coming with love, won’t you?

What’s happened? What’s been done?

It smells of apples in my hole. Apples, biscuits and smoke.

The Philadelphia Church sign is illuminated in the middle of the day, as if to advertise: God is here! You just have to step inside and meet Him. The church building is right next to McDonald’s on the other side of Drottninggatan, and it has a faithful and well-heeled congregation. She remembers Free Church people from her sixth-form days. They were polite, wore fairly trendy clothes, but they were still geeks, or at least that was how she saw them. As if there were something missing. As if there were a remarkable hardness in all that fluff and softness. Like candy-floss with sharp tacks in.

Malin peers up the street.

Where’s Zeke?

She’s just called him, told him to pick her up outside the church, that they were going out to Collins to bring in Karl Murvall.

There’s the Volvo.

He pulls in, and before he has completely stopped the car Malin has opened the door and jumped into the passenger seat.

Zeke eager: ‘What did the psychologist say?’

‘I promised not to say.’

‘Malin,’ Zeke sighed.

‘But it was Karl Murvall who murdered Bengt Andersson and tried to murder Rebecka Stenlundh. There’s absolutely no doubt at all.’

‘How do you know that? Didn’t he have an alibi?’

Zeke is heading along Drottninggatan.

‘Female intuition. And what’s to say he couldn’t have disconnected the sensors with the help of the computer system, cut a hole in the fence surrounding Collins, and just crept out that night? That he didn’t sort out the business of the update beforehand?’

Zeke accelerates. ‘Okay, why not, maybe the sensors were controlled from inside that server room,’ he says. ‘But they saw him in the room.’

‘Maybe they only looked through the frosted glass,’ Malin says.

Zeke nods, says, ‘Family’s always worst, isn’t it?’

The gate at the entrance to the Collins site seems to have grown since they were last there, and the forest by the car park gives the impression that it’s got thicker, become more enclosed. The factory buildings slouch like the depressed barracks of an internment camp behind the fence, ready to be shipped off to China any day now, and filled with workers earning a hundredth of what those working inside currently earn.

You again, the guard at the gate seems to think. Won’t you ever stop asking me to open this hatch and let in the cold?

‘We’re looking for Karl Murvall,’ Malin says.

The guard smiles and shakes his head. ‘Then you’ve come to the wrong place,’ he says. ‘He was fired the day before yesterday.’

‘So he got fired. You don’t happen to know why? I don’t suppose you get to hear things like that?’ Zeke says.

The guard looks insulted. ‘Why does anyone get fired?’ he asks.

‘What do I know? You tell us,’ Zeke says.

‘In his case it was for strange and threatening behaviour against his work colleagues. Anything else you want to know?’

‘That’ll do,’ Malin says. She doesn’t feel up to asking about the night of the murder and the fence. Somehow Karl Murvall managed to get out that night.

‘Can’t we put out an alert for him?’ Malin asks Zeke as they are heading away from Collins’ car park towards the main road. They pass a lorry whose trailer is weaving alarmingly on the road.

‘No. You have to have something concrete to go on.’

‘I have.’

‘Which you can’t reveal.’

‘It’s him.’

‘You’ve got to come up with something else, Fors. You can always take him in for questioning.’

They pull out on to the main road, swerving to avoid a black BMW patrol car driving at least forty kilometres an hour too fast.

‘But we have to find him.’

‘Do you think he’ll be at home?’

‘We can always give it a try.’

‘Is it okay if I put on some music?’

‘Whatever you want, Zeke.’

Seconds later the car is filled with a hundred German voices.

‘Ein bisschen Frieden, ein bisschen Sonne…’

‘Eurovision classic as a choral work,’ Zeke shouts. ‘Always cheers you up, doesn’t it?’

It’s half past three by the time they ring on the door of Karl Murvall’s flat on Tanneforsvägen. The varnish on the door is peeling and for the first time Malin notices that the whole stairwell could do with some work; no one seems to look after the communal areas.

No one opens.

Malin looks in through the letterbox. Newspapers and post untouched on the floor.

‘We can’t ask for a sodding search warrant either,’ Malin says. ‘I can’t refer to what Viveka Crafoord told me, and just because Rebecka Stenlundh has been attacked doesn’t mean we can march in here.’

‘Where can he be?’ Zeke wonders in a loud voice.

‘Rebecka Stenlundh mentioned a forest and a hole.’

‘You don’t mean we have to go out in the forest again?’

‘Who else could we have seen that night? It must have been him.’

‘Do you think he’s staying in the hunting cabin?’

‘Hardly. But there’s something in the forest. I just know there is.’

‘No point waiting, then,’ Zeke says.

The world shrinks in the snow. Collapses into a dark space that contains everything under the atmosphere. Packed together into a sluggish black hole.

You’re hiding secrets, Malin thinks. You dark old Östgöta forest. The snow is harder than last time, the crust is bearing my weight. Maybe the cold has slowly turned the snow into ice? An ice age created in just a few months, forever changing the vegetation, the landscape, the tone of the forest. The trees around them are rough, abandoned ancient pillars.

One foot in front of the other.

Of all the children whom no one sees, who are abandoned, whose fathers and mothers don’t care about them, who are forsaken by the world, some will always fall out, go mad, and the world that deserted them will have to take the consequences.

In Karin’s Thailand.

In Janne’s Bosnia and Rwanda.

In Stockholm.

In Linköping.

In Ljungsbro, Blåsvädret.

It’s no more complicated than that, Malin thinks. Look after those who are small, those who are weak. Show them love. There is no innate evil. Evil is created. But I still believe that there is such a thing as innate goodness. But not now, not in this forest; goodness fled from here long ago. Here there is only survival.

Aching fingers in gloves that can’t be made thick enough.

‘Fuck, it’s cold,’ Zeke says, and it feels as if Malin’s heard him say that a thousand times in the past month.

Her legs are becoming less and less willing the more darkness descends, the more the cold seeps into her body. Her toes have vanished, as well as her fingers. Not even pain is left.

The Murvall cabin lies cold and deserted. The snowfall has erased any trace of ski tracks.

Malin and Zeke stand still in front of the cabin.

Listening, but there is nothing to hear, only an odourless, silent winter forest around them.

But I feel it, I feel it, you’re close now.

I must have nodded off, the stove is cold, no burning lumps of wood. I’m freezing, have to get the fire going again, so it’s warm when they come to let me in.

My hole is my home.

Has always been my only home. The flat on Tanneforsvägen was never home. It was just rooms where I slept and thought and tried to understand.

I get the wood ready, light a match, but my fingers slip.

I’m freezing.

But it has to be warm when they come to let me in, when I’m to receive her love.

‘There’s nothing here, Fors. Listen to me.’

The clearing in front of the cabin: a completely soundless place, encircled by trees, by the forest, and an impenetrable darkness.

‘You’re wrong, Zeke.’

There’s something here. Something moving. Is it evil? The devil? I can smell something.

‘It’s going to be completely dark in five minutes. I’m going back now.’

‘Just a bit further,’ Malin says, and starts walking.

They walk perhaps four hundred metres into the dense forest before Zeke says, ‘Okay, we’re going back.’

‘Just a bit further.’

‘No.’

And Malin turns round, walks back, never sees the clump of trees fifty metres further on, where grey smoke is starting to seep out of a narrow chimney in the roof of an earthen cellar.

The engine roars as the car gets going properly, just as they are passing the golf course at Vreta Kloster.

Peculiar, Malin thinks. They leave the flags out over the winter. I’ve never noticed them before. It’s like they’ve hung them out in someone’s honour.

Then she says, ‘Let’s go and see Rakel Murvall. She knows where he is.’

‘You’re mad, Malin. You’re not going within five hundred metres of the old woman. I’ll make sure of that.’

‘She knows where he is.’

‘That doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘No. She’s reported you for harassment. Turning up there now would be career suicide.’

‘Shit.’ Malin bangs the dashboard. ‘Take me back to my car. It’s in the multistorey near McDonald’s.’

‘You look energetic, Mum,’ Tove says from her place on the sofa, looking up from the paperback she’s reading.

‘What are you reading?’

‘The Wild Duck. Ibsen. A play.’

‘Isn’t it a bit odd, reading a play? Aren’t you supposed to watch them?’

‘It works if you’ve got a bit of imagination, Mum.’

The television is on: Jeopardy! Adam Alsing fat and over-familiar in a yellow suit.

How can Tove read proper literature with that on in the background?

‘Have you been out, Mum?’

‘Yep, in the forest, actually.’

‘Why?’

‘Zeke and I were looking for something.’

Tove nods, not worried about whether they found what they were looking for, and returns to her book.

He murdered Bengt Andersson. Tried to murder Rebecka Stenlundh.

Who is Karl Murvall? Where is he?

Damn Rakel Murvall.

Her sons.

A social science book is open on the table in front of Tove. The section heading is ‘The Constitution’, and it is illustrated with pictures of Göran Persson and an imam Malin has never seen before. People can be turned into anything at all. That’s it.

‘Tove. Grandad called today. You’d both be welcome to go. You and Markus, to Tenerife.’

Tove looks away from the television.

‘I don’t really want to go any more,’ she says. ‘And it would be hard to explain to Grandad that he has to play along with our lie that they were supposed to have other guests.’

‘Good grief,’ Malin says. ‘How can something so simple get so complicated?’

‘I don’t want to go, Mum. Do I really have to tell Markus that Grandad’s changed his mind?’

‘No.’

‘But what if we go some other time, and Grandad suddenly starts talking about how we didn’t want to go last time even though we’d been asked?’

Malin sighs. ‘Why not tell Markus how it really is?’

‘But how is it, though?’

‘That Grandad’s changed his mind but you don’t want to go.’

‘What about the lie? Doesn’t that matter?’

‘I don’t know, Tove. A little lie like that can’t cause too much trouble, can it?’

‘Well, in that case we could go then.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to go.’

‘No, but I could if I wanted to. It’s better for Grandad to be disappointed. Then maybe he’ll learn his lesson.’

‘So you’re going to Åre?’

‘Mmm.’

Tove turns away from Malin and reaches for the remote.

When Tove has gone to bed Malin sits alone on the sofa for a while before getting up and going into the hall, pulling on her holster and pistol, and then her jacket. Before leaving the flat she hunts through the top drawer of the chest in the hall. She finds what she’s looking for and puts it in the front pocket of her jeans.

74

Friday, 17 February

Linköping at midnight, on the night between Thursday and Friday, in the depths of February. The illuminated signs on the buildings in the centre struggle to match the streetlamps and lend a bit of apparent warmth to the streets where the thirsty and the lonely and the pleasure-seekers hurry between different restaurants and bars, clumsy polar explorers hunting for company.

No queues anywhere.

Too cold for that.

Malin’s hands on the wheel.

The city beyond the car windows.

The red and orange buses are idling in Trädgårdstorget; inside them sit teenagers on their way home, tired, but with expectation still in their eyes.

She turns the wheel and swings into Drottninggatan, towards the river, past the windows of the Swedish Real-Estate Agency.

The dream of a home.

Of views to wake up to.

There are dreams in this city, no matter how cold it gets. No matter what happens.

What do I dream of? Malin thinks.

Of Tove. Of Janne. Daniel.

My body can dream of him.

But what do I expect of myself? What longings do I share with those teenage girls on the bus?

The door to the block of flats opens; it isn’t even locked at night.

Malin goes cautiously up the stairs, silently, not wanting to announce her presence to anyone.

She stops outside Karl Murvall’s door.

Listens.

But the night is silent, and behind the door the floor is still covered by untouched newspapers.

She knocks.

Waits.

Then she sticks the skeleton key in the lock. Twists and turns and the lock opens with a soft click.

A stale smell, musty, but warm, the radiators turned up to stop them freezing. The conscientiousness of the engineer, the defiance of a certainty that must exist somewhere inside Karl Murvall: I’ll never live here again, so what does it matter if the radiators freeze?

But he could be here. There’s a very slight chance.

Malin stands still.

Listens.

Should I draw my pistol?

No.

Put on the lights?

I have to put on the lights.

Malin presses the switch by the bathroom door and the hall lights up. Jackets and coats hanging in a neat row under the hat-rack.

Listens.

Nothing but silence.

She goes quickly from room to room, then back to the hall.

All clear, she thinks.

She looks round the hall, pulls out the drawers of the chest. Gloves, a hat, some papers.

A wage-slip.

Fifty-seven thousand kronor.

The computer fantasy. But what does a bit of money mean?

Malin goes into the kitchen. Rifles through drawers, checks the walls, empty apart from a cuckoo-clock.

The clock says almost one. Don’t be startled if the clock chimes. Which it will do in a few minutes. The living room. Drawers full of more papers: bank statements, saved adverts, nothing that could be regarded as out of the ordinary.

Then it hits Malin: there are no wardrobes, no cupboards anywhere. Not in the hall, where they usually are in a flat like this.

Malin goes back out into the hall.

Only the painted-over signs of where they had once stood.

… she locked him in…

Malin goes into the bedroom. Flicks the switch but the room stays dark. There is a table-lamp on a desk by the window. The room faces the rear courtyard, and the light from a lamp outside casts a weak grey glow over the walls.

She turns on the table-lamp.

A dim cone of light on to a desktop covered with knife marks.

She turns round.

The sound of a car stopping in front of the building. A car door closing. She feels with her hand for her holster. The pistol, she usually hates it, but now she loves it. The front door of the building closing out in the stairwell. Malin creeps into the hall, listening to the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Then a key in a door on the floor below.

A door being closed carefully.

Malin breathes out.

Goes back to the bedroom and there she sees it, the wardrobe. It is at the foot of the bed. She switches on the wall-mounted lamp above the bed to get more light, and realises it has been set up to shine directly at the wardrobe.

A padlock on the handle.

Something locked in.

An animal?

With a practised hand Malin applies the skeleton key to the lock. It has a tricky mechanism and after three minutes of trying she feels herself breaking into a sweat.

But eventually the lock lets out a click and slips open. She carefully pulls the door towards her and looks inside.

I see you, Malin. Is it the truth you see? Does what you’re looking at make you feel safe or scared? Will you sleep better at night?

Look at him, look at me, at Rebecka, or Lotta, as she will always be to me. We are lonely.

Can your truth cure our loneliness, Malin?

Malin looks at the inside of the wardrobe, covered with wallpaper whose pattern represents a stylised tree full of green apples. On the bottom, beside a packet of plain biscuits, are various books about Æsir beliefs and psychoanalysis, a Bible, and a copy of the Koran. A black notebook.

Malin leafs through the book.

Diary entries.

Neat handwriting, letters so small that it’s hard to read.

About work at Collins.

Visits to Viveka Crafoord.

Further on in the book it’s as if something inside the writer has capsized, as if another hand is holding the pen. The writing becomes shaky, there are no dates any more, and the style is fragmented.

… in February it is midwinter…

… now I know, I know who has to be sacrificed…

And in various different places: Let me in.

At the back of the book is a detailed map. Blåsvädret, a field with a tree marked on it, close to the site where Ball-Bengt was found, and then a site in the forest, close to where the Murvalls’ cabin must be.

He sat here talking to us.

With this book behind him, with everything inside him.

The whole world, at its very worst, was right here in front of us, and it managed to maintain its mask, it managed to cling to reality as we know it.

Malin can hear all his voices roaring. Out of the wardrobe, into the room, and on, into herself. A chill passes through her, a chill far worse than anything below zero outside the window.

Fault-lines.

Within and without.

The fantasy world.

The real world.

They meet. And right up to the end his consciousness knows what is required. Plays the game. I’ll escape: the last remnant for his mind to cling to before awareness and instinct become one.

Another map.

Another tree.

That’s where Rebecka was going to be hanged, isn’t it?

Don’t lose heart, Malin. It isn’t over yet.

I see Rebecka in her bed. She’s sleeping. The operation to transplant skin to her cheeks and stomach went well; maybe she won’t be as beautiful as she was before, but she’s long since abandoned vanity anyway. She isn’t in pain. Her son is sleeping on a bunk beside her bed, and new blood is pumping through her veins.

Karl isn’t doing so well.

I know. I ought to be angry with him, because of what he did to me. But he’s lying there in his cold earthen cellar, wrapped in blankets in front of a stove where the fire is fading and I can’t see anything but that he is the loneliest person on the planet. He doesn’t even have himself, and I always had that, even when I was at my most despairing and cut off Dad’s ear.

So I can’t be angry with such loneliness, because that would mean being angry with humanity, and that, if it isn’t impossible, is no consolation whatever. Fundamentally, we’re all basically good, we mean well, don’t we?

The wind is getting cold again.

Malin.

You have to go on.

I won’t get any peace until that wind has dropped.

Malin puts the book back.

She curses herself for leaving her fingerprints on it, but it doesn’t really matter now.

Who shall I call?

Zeke?

Sven Sjöman?

Malin pulls out her mobile, calls a number. It takes four rings before anyone answers.

Karin Johannison’s voice, full of sleep.

‘Yes, this is Karin.’

‘Malin here. Sorry to disturb you.’

‘No problem, Malin. I’m a light sleeper anyway.’

‘Can you come out to a flat at 34 Tanneforsvägen? Top floor.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’

Malin examines Karl Murvall’s clothes.

Finds several strands of hair.

She puts them in a freezer-bag she finds in the kitchen.

She hears another car pull up in front of the building. A door closing.

She whispers down into the stairwell, ‘Karin, up here.’

‘I’m coming.’

Malin shows Karin round the flat.

Back in the hall Karin says, ‘We’ll have to examine the wardrobe, then the rest of the flat.’

‘That’s not why I wanted to get you here first. It’s because of these. I want DNA tests on them.’

Malin holds up the bag containing the strands of hair.

‘Right away. And compare the results with the profile of Maria Murvall’s attacker.’

‘Are they Karl Murvall’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘If I head off to the lab now, the results will be ready first thing tomorrow.’

‘Thanks, Karin. As quick as that?’

‘It’s easy with perfect samples like this. We’re not completely useless, you know. Why is it so important?’

‘I don’t know, Karin. But somehow it’s definitely important.’

‘What about all this?’ Karin gestures at the rest of the flat.

‘You’ve got colleagues, haven’t you?’ Malin says. ‘Even if they’re not as sharp as you?’

As Karin pulls away from the pavement Malin calls Sven Sjöman. Passes it on. Sets in motion things that need to be set in motion.

75

The bedroom of the flat is lit up by the arc lights brought in by the forensics team.

Sven Sjöman and Zeke look tired as they search the wardrobe. Earlier, over the phone, Sjöman had asked her why she had gone to the flat and how she had got in. ‘Just a feeling. And the door was open,’ she had said, and Sven had left it at that.

Zeke pulls on a pair of plastic gloves and reaches for the notebook again, leafs through it, reads, then puts it down once more.

Malin showed Sven and Zeke the book with its writing and maps as soon as they arrived, explained and drew connections, told them what she’d done, that Karin had already been there, gave them an outline of what must have happened, of the events leading up to this point. She noticed them getting even more tired from what she told them, that the fact that they had only just woken up was getting in the way of her words, and that they weren’t really absorbing what she was saying, even if Sven was nodding as if to agree that this must be the truth.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says, turning to Malin. She’s sitting on the chair by the desk, longing for a cup of coffee.

‘Where do you think he is now?’

‘I think he’s in the forest. Somewhere out near the hunting cabin.’

‘We didn’t find him.’

‘He could be anywhere.’

‘He’s wounded. We know that. Rebecka Stenlundh said she hit him.’

A wounded animal.

‘We’ve put out a national alert,’ Sven says. ‘There’s also the possibility that he’s killed himself.’

‘Are we going to send dog-teams into the forest?’ Malin asks.

‘We’ll hold off until first thing in the morning. It’s too dark now. But the dogs can’t pick up scent in this cold, so maybe it isn’t such a great idea. The dog-handlers will know,’ Sven says. ‘We’ve got all our cars looking for him. And the only thing that suggests he’s in the forest are the marks on the maps in that notebook.’

‘That’s quite a lot,’ Malin says.

‘He wasn’t in the cabin late yesterday afternoon. If he’s injured he would have found his way somewhere at once where he can lie low. Which means that it’s highly unlikely that he’s in the cabin now.’

‘But he could be nearby.’

‘It will have to wait, Fors.’

‘Malin,’ Zeke says, ‘I agree with Sven. It’s five in the morning, and he wasn’t in the cottage as recently as early yesterday evening.’

‘Fors,’ Sven says, ‘go home and get some sleep. It would be best for everyone if you got some rest before tomorrow, and then we’ll take a thorough look at where he might be then.’

‘No, I-’

‘Malin,’ Sven says. ‘You’ve already gone too far, you have to get some rest.’

‘We’ve got to find him. I think…’

Malin lets the sentence die; they wouldn’t understand the way she’s thinking.

Instead she gets up and leaves the room.

On her way downstairs Malin bumps into Daniel Högfeldt.

‘Is Karl Murvall suspected of murdering Bengt Andersson and attacking Rebecka Stenlundh?’ As if nothing had happened.

Malin doesn’t answer.

Pushes past him down the stairs.

She’s tired and stressed, Daniel thinks, as he climbs the last steps up to the flat where two uniformed officers are on guard outside the front door.

Might be tricky getting in. But if you don’t try…

Malin didn’t seem bothered that I turned down Expressen.

But was I expecting her to be? We’re nothing more than fuck-buddies, are we? Something for the body, not the soul.

But you looked beautiful just now, Malin, when you pushed past me. So fucking beautiful and tired and exhausted.

The last step.

Daniel smiles at the uniformed officers.

‘Not a chance in hell, Högfeldt,’ the taller one says with a smile.

Sometimes when Malin thinks that sleep will be elusive it comes to her in just a minute or two.

The bed is warm beneath her in her dream.

The bed is the soft floor of a white room with transparent walls that are swaying in a warm breeze.

Outside the walls she sees them all as naked shadows: Mum, Dad, Tove, Janne. Zeke is there, and Sven Sjöman and Johan Jakobsson, Karim Akbar and Karin Johannison and Börje Svärd and his wife Anna. The Murvall brothers, Rebecka and Maria, and a fat figure lumbering with a football in his hands. Markus pops up, and Biggan and Hasse and the security guard at Collins, and Gottfrid Karlsson, Weine Andersson and Sister Hermansson, and the Ljungsbro bullies, Margaretha Svensson, Göran Kalmvik and Niklas Nyrén and lots, lots more; they’re all in the dream, like fuel for her memories, as navigation points for her consciousness. The people in the events of recent weeks are buoys anchored in an illuminated space that could be anything. And in the middle of that space beams Rakel Murvall, a black light radiating from her shadow.

The alarm clock on the bedside table rings.

A harsh, loud, digital noise.

The time is 7.35.

After an hour and a half, the time of dreams is over.

The Correspondent is lying on the hall floor.

They’re behind on developments for once, but probably only because of the inevitable delay caused by the printing process.

They’ve got everything on Rebecka Stenlundh, that she’s the sister of the murdered Bengt Andersson, but nothing about Karl Murvall, or that they carried out a raid on his flat last night.

The paper must have gone to press by then. But they’re bound to have it on the net. I can’t be bothered to look right now, and what could they have that I don’t already know?

Daniel Högfeldt has written several of the articles in the paper. As usual.

Was I too abrupt with him earlier? Maybe I ought to give him an honest chance to show who he is.

The water in the shower is warm against her skin, and Malin feels herself waking up. She gets dressed, stands by the draining-board to drink a cup of Nescafé made with water heated in the microwave.

Please, let us find Karl Murvall today, Malin thinks. Dead or alive.

Might he have killed himself?

Anything is possible now as far as he is concerned.

Might he commit another murder?

Did he rape Maria Murvall? Karin would soon have the results, some time today.

Malin sighs and looks out of the window at St Lars Church and the trees. The branches haven’t given in to the cold, they’re still sticking out defiantly in all directions. Just like the people at this latitude, Malin thinks, as she catches sight of the posters in the travel agent’s windows. This place really isn’t habitable, but we’ve managed to create a home for ourselves here nonetheless.

In the bedroom Malin pulls on her holster and pistol.

She opens the door to Tove’s room.

Most beautiful in all the world.

Lets her sleep.

Karim Akbar is holding tight on to his son’s hand, feeling the eight-year-old fingers through the glove.

They are walking along a gritted path towards the school. The blocks of flats in Lambohov, three and four storeys high, look like moon-bases, randomly scattered across a desolate plain.

Usually his wife walks their son to school, but today she said she had a headache, couldn’t possibly get up.

The case is cracked. They just have to catch him. Then, surely, this will all be over?

Malin has delivered. Zeke, Johan and Börje. Sven: their rock. What would I do without them? My role is to encourage them, keep them happy, and how feeble it is compared to what they do. Compared to the way they deal with people.

Malin. In many ways she’s the ideal detective. Instinctive, driven and, not least, a bit manic. Intelligent? Certainly. But in a good way. She finds short cuts, dares to take chances. But not rashly. Not often, at least.

‘What are you going to do at school today?’

‘I don’t know. Normal stuff.’

And they walk on together in silence, Karim and his son. When they reach the low, white-brick school building Karim holds the door open for him and his son disappears inside, swallowed up by the dimly lit corridor.

The Correspondent is in the postbox by the road.

Rakel Murvall opens her front door and steps on to the porch, notes that the cold is damp today, the sort that gives her aches. But she is accustomed to that sort of physical pain, thinking, When I die I shall fall down dead on the spot. I’m not going to hang around in some hospital, rambling and unable to keep control of my own shit.

She walks carefully through the snow, worried about her hip-joints.

The postbox seems a long way off, but it’s getting closer with every step.

The boys are still sleeping; soon they’ll be awake, but she wants to read the paper now, not wait for them to bring it in to her, or read the latest news on the screen in the living room.

She opens the lid, and there it is, on top of some half-covered dead earwigs.

Back inside she pours a cup of fresh coffee and sits down at the kitchen table to read.

She reads the articles about the murder of Bengt Andersson and the attack over and over again.

Rebecka?

I understand what has happened.

I’m not that stupid.

Secrets. Shadows from the past. My lies, now they’re seeping out of their leaking holes.

His father was a sailor.

As I always said to the boys.

Was everything a lie, Mother?

Questions that lead to other questions.

Was Cornerhouse-Kalle his father? Have you been lying to us all these years? What else don’t we know? Why did you and Dad get us to torment him? To hate him? Our own brother?

Maybe even more.

How did Dad fall down the stairs? Did you push him, did you lie about what happened that day as well?

Truths need to be stifled. No doubts must be sown. It isn’t too late. I can see a chance.

She, Rebecka, was found wandering the fields, naked, like Maria.

‘Well done, Malin.’

Karim Akbar applauds her as she walks into Police Headquarters.

Malin smiles. Thinks, Well done? What do you mean, well done? This isn’t over yet.

She sits down at her desk. Checks the Correspondent’s website.

They have a short piece about the raid at Karl Murvall’s flat, and the fact that a national alert has gone out. They don’t draw any conclusions, but mention the connections to the ongoing murder investigation, and the fact that his mother has complained about police harassment.

‘Great work, Malin.’

Karim stops beside her. Malin looks up.

‘Not quite according to the rulebook. But, between the two of us: it’s results that count, and if we’re ever going to get anywhere, we have to apply our own rules sometimes.’

‘We have to find him,’ Malin says.

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I want to harass Rakel Murvall.’

Karim stares at Malin, who looks back into the police chief’s eyes with all the seriousness she can muster.

‘Go,’ he says. ‘I’ll take responsibility for any repercussions. But take Zeke with you.’

Malin looks across the office. Sven Sjöman hasn’t come in yet. But Zeke is hovering restlessly over at his desk.

76

Silence in the car.

Zeke hasn’t said he wants music, and Malin likes hearing the monotonous sound of the engine.

The city outside the car windows is the same as it was two weeks ago, just as greedy as ever: Skäggetorp full of rigid life, the retail boxes at Tornby just as blunt, the snow-covered Lake Roxen just as compact, and the houses on the slopes of Vreta Kloster just as inviting with their radiant sense of wellbeing.

Nothing has changed, Malin thinks. Not even the weather. But then it occurs to her that Tove has probably changed. Tove and Markus. A new note has emerged from Tove, less contrary and inward, more outward and open, confident. It suits you, Tove, Malin thinks, you’re going to make a really great grown-up.

And maybe I should give Daniel Högfeldt the chance to prove that he’s more than just a shag-machine.

There are lights on in the houses of Blåsvädret. The brothers’ families are at home in their respective houses. Rakel Murvall’s white wooden home looms at the end of the road, isolated at the point where the road stops.

Clouds of snow are drifting to and fro around the house, and behind the pale veils of winter there are still secrets hidden, Malin thinks. You’d do anything to protect your secrets, wouldn’t you, Rakel?

Child benefit.

A child that you only kept for the money. A few meagre coins. But maybe not so meagre for you. Enough to live off, almost.

And why did you hate him so? What did Cornerhouse-Kalle do to you? Did he do something to you in the forest, just like someone did to Maria? To Rebecka? Did Cornerhouse-Kalle take you by force? Was that how you got pregnant? And so you hated the child when he arrived. And maybe you wanted to have him adopted? But then you had your brilliant idea and invented the story about the sailor and got child benefit. That must have been it. That he took you by force. And the child you had as a result had to pay.

Why else would you have hated your son so? The pattern runs through modern history. Malin has read about German women, raped towards the end of the war by Russian soldiers, who rejected their children. The same thing in Bosnia. And apparently also in Sweden.

Unless you loved Cornerhouse-Kalle and he treated you just like all the rest of his women? Like nothing? And that was enough to make you hate your son.

But I’m guessing the first explanation is the right one.

Unless you were tainted with evil, Rakel?

From the start.

Does such evil exist?

And money. The desire for money like a black sun over all life on this desolate, windy road.

The boy should have been allowed to have a different family, Rakel.

Then the anger and hate might have had an end; maybe your other boys could have been different. Maybe you too.

‘What an awful fucking place,’ Zeke says as they’re standing on the drive beside the house. ‘Can you see him standing here among the apple trees in the snow as a child? Freezing?’

Malin nods. ‘If there is a hell…’ she says.

Half a minute later they are knocking on the door of Rakel Murvall’s house.

They can see her in the kitchen, see her disappear into the living room.

‘She’s not going to open the door,’ Malin says.

Zeke knocks again.

‘Just a moment,’ they hear from inside the house.

The door opens and Rakel Murvall smiles at them.

‘Ah, the detectives. To what do I owe this honour?’

‘We have some questions, if you don’t mind-’

Rakel Murvall interrupts Zeke. ‘Come in, detectives. If you’re worried about my complaint, forget it. Forgive an old woman’s ill temper. Coffee?’

‘No thank you,’ Malin says.

Zeke shakes his head.

‘But do sit down.’ Rakel Murvall gestures towards the kitchen table.

They sit.

‘Where’s Karl?’ Malin says.

Rakel Murvall ignores her question.

‘He isn’t in his flat, or at Collins. And he’s been fired from his job,’ Zeke says.

‘Is he mixed up in any funny business, my son?’

Her son. She hasn’t used that word of Karl before, Malin thinks.

‘You’ve read the paper,’ Malin says, putting her hand on the copy of the Correspondent on the table. ‘You can put two and two together.’

The old woman smiles, but doesn’t answer. Then she says, ‘I’ve no idea where the lad might be.’

Malin looks out of the kitchen window. Sees a little boy standing naked in the snow and the cold, screaming with cheeks red with crying, sees him fall in the snow, waving his arms and legs, a frozen angel on the snow-draped ground.

Malin clenches her teeth.

Feels like telling Rakel Murvall that she deserves to burn in hell, that there are some things that can’t be forgiven.

In the official sense, her crimes fell under the statute of limitations long ago, but in the human, social, sense? In those terms, some things are never forgiven.

Rape.

Paedophilia.

Child abuse.

Withholding love from children.

The punishment for such things is a lifetime of shame.

And love of children. That is the first sort of love.

‘What really happened between you and Cornerhouse-Kalle, Rakel?’

Rakel turns to her, stares at Malin, and the pupils of the old woman’s eyes grow large and black, as if they were trying to convey a thousand years of female experience and torment. Then Rakel blinks, closing her eyes for a few seconds before saying, ‘That was so long ago. I can’t even remember. I’ve had so many worries over the years with the boys.’

An opening, Malin thinks, for the next question.

‘Haven’t you ever worried,’ she asks, ‘that your boys might find out that Cornerhouse-Kalle was Karl’s father?’

Rakel Murvall fills her own cup with coffee. ‘The boys have that knowledge.’

‘Have they? Have they really, Rakel? Being found out telling lies can ruin any relationship,’ Malin goes on. ‘And what power does the person who had to lie possess?’

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ Rakel Murvall says. ‘You’re talking a lot of nonsense.’

‘Am I really, Rakel?’ Malin says. ‘Am I really?’

Rakel Murvall closes the front door behind them.

Sits down on the red-painted rib-backed chair in the hall, looks at the photograph on the wall, of herself surrounded by the boys in the garden when they were young, Blackie in the picture too, before the wheelchair.

Fucking little brat. You must have taken that picture.

If you disappear, disappear for good, she thinks, then maybe my secrets can remain my own.

If he disappears there will only be one or two rumours left, and I can lock those away in a dark wardrobe. He needs to go now, it’s as simple as that. Be got rid of. Anyway, I’m so tired of him existing.

She picks up the receiver.

Calls Adam.

The little lad answers, his boy’s voice high and innocent.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello, Tobias. This is Grandma. Is your daddy there?’

‘Hello, Grandma.’

Then the line goes quiet, before an older, gruffer voice says, ‘Mother?’

‘You need to come over, Adam. And bring your brothers with you. I’ve got something important to tell you.’

‘I’m coming, Mother. I’ll tell the others.’

I used to cycle up here.

The forest was mine.

You would go hunting near me sometimes. I could hear your shots all year long, and even then I wished that you would come to me.

Mother, why were you so angry?

What had I done? What have I done?

Images and warmth. I am an angel under an apple tree of biscuit crumbs. The fire is warm again. It’s nice here in my hole, but I’m lonely. But I’m not scared of loneliness. Because you can’t be scared of what you are, can you?

I can sleep a bit longer here in my darkness. Then you’ll come and get me, to let me in. And then I’ll become someone else, won’t I? When you let me in.

‘What do we do now?’

Zeke is driving towards Vreta Kloster, the church like an ancient fortress on top of a hill maybe a kilometre away, the stables of Heda Riding Club on one side of the road, open fields on the other.

Malin wanted to knock on the brothers’ doors, ask them if they knew whose son their brother Karl was, but Zeke told her to think about it.

‘If they don’t know, the old woman has a right to her secrets, Malin. We can’t just blunder into her past and stir things up.’

And she knew that Zeke was right, in spite of the possible consequences of not telling them. If they stopped considering other people, no matter who they were, how could they ever demand consideration from anyone else?

In answer to Zeke’s question: ‘We wait for Sjöman’s search teams. They’re getting ready to go through the forest, but it’s too cold for the dogs. They’re taking a couple with them anyway, apparently.’

Then: ‘Do you think we should get up there first?’

‘No, Malin. We didn’t find anything yesterday, so how would we be able to find anything today?’

‘I don’t know,’ Malin replies. ‘We could take a look at where the body was found, and the site of the other tree. Well, where it ought to be, anyway.’

‘We’ve had a car looking since last night. We would have heard if they’d found anything.’

‘Have you got any better suggestions?’

‘None at all,’ Zeke says, and does a U-turn. They head back the same way they’ve just come, past the houses in Blåsvädret, where they see the brothers heading together towards their mother’s house.

‘How long do you think it’ll take Karin to have the results of the tests on Karl Murvall?’ Malin asks. ‘I want to know if he was the one who raped Maria Murvall.’

‘Do you think he did?’

‘No, but I want to know. I think she’s deceiving us again. I just don’t know how. But I know that she’d never have let us in if she didn’t have something to gain from it herself. She’s still directing this. And she’ll grasp at any straw to protect what she thinks of as hers.’

Malin takes a deep breath.

‘And to preserve her secrets.’

Adam, Elias and Jakob Murvall are sitting round the table in their mother’s kitchen. Sipping cups of freshly brewed coffee, eating biscuits their mother has just warmed in the oven after getting them out of the freezer.

‘How are the biscuits, boys?’

Rakel Murvall is standing by the stove, with the Correspondent in her hand.

Appreciative noises from the table, and they listen to what their mother goes on to tell them, what she didn’t want to say until they had sat down and been given some coffee.

‘Martinsson and Fors,’ she says. ‘They’ve just been here, asking after Karl. If it wasn’t him who tortured and forced himself upon that girl in the paper, the one they found by the side of the road, why would they have come out here? What with the complaint of harassment I made and everything? Why would they risk it?’

She holds up the Correspondent to the boys.

Lets them read the headline, see the picture of the road.

‘The police are looking for Karl. And it says in the paper that they found the girl with exactly the same injuries as Maria. And if you look on the computer you’ll see that the police raided his flat last night.’

‘So it was him who took Maria in the forest?’ Adam Murvall spits out the words.

‘Who else could it have been?’ Rakel Murvall says. ‘He’s missing now. It must have been him, this was done the same way. Exactly the same way.’

‘His own sister?’

‘The bastard.’

‘Monster. He’s a monster. Just like he always was.’

‘But why would he do that?’ Doubt in Elias Murvall’s voice.

‘And why do we hate him so much? Have you ever wondered about that?’ Rakel pauses, then continues in a lower voice: ‘He was a monster right from the start, never forget that. And he hated her. Because she was one of us, and he wasn’t. Because he’s mad. You know yourselves how he used to hide away in the forest. And that hole of his is only five kilometres or so from where Maria was attacked, so it must have been him. It all fits.’

‘Five kilometres is a long way in the forest, Mother,’ Elias says. ‘We may have had suspicions about him before now, but even so, Mother.’

‘It all fits, Elias. He raped your own sister in the forest as if she were nothing. He destroyed her.’

‘Mother’s right, Elias,’ Adam says calmly, then takes a sip of his coffee.

‘It makes sense,’ Jakob says. ‘It all makes sense.’

‘Now you’ll do what’s expected of you, boys. For your sister. Won’t you, Elias? Boys?’

‘But what if the police are wrong?’

‘The cops are often wrong, Elias. But not this time, not this time. Stop arguing. What’s wrong with you, are you on his side or something?’

Rakel Murvall waves the paper in the air.

‘Are you on his side? Who else could it be? The whole thing fits. You have to give your sister some peace. Maybe she could come back if only she knew that the person who hurt her is gone.’

‘They’ll catch us, Mother, they’re going to catch us,’ Elias says. ‘And there are limits to what can be done.’

‘No there aren’t, boy,’ Rakel Murvall says. ‘There’s more sense in the henhouse than in that police station. And you know where he is. You’ll see, if you just do as I say. Listen…’

The oak on the plain where Bengt Andersson was found hanging would have looked like any other isolated tree, were it not for the broken branches.

But the oak will always be associated with what happened in that coldest of Februaries. In the spring the farmer will cut down the tree, doesn’t want to see any more flowers on the ground, any more curious visitors, any more meditating women. He will dig out all the roots he can find, not stopping until he knows for sure that no trace of the oak is left in the ground. But deep beneath the surface there will be a piece of root, and that root will grow and a new tree will spring up on the plain, a tree that will whisper the names of Ball-Bengt and Cornerhouse-Kalle and Rakel Murvall across the wide expanses of Östergötland.

Malin and Zeke are sitting in their car, staring at the tree.

The engine is running.

‘He’s not here,’ Zeke says.

‘He was here once,’ Malin replies.

The Range Rover’s interior smells of oil and engine grease, and its frame rattles as the vehicle passes through Ljungsbro at high speed, past the Vivo supermarket, the café and the Cloetta chocolate factory at the bottom of the hill, beside the bridge across the river.

Elias Murvall is sitting on his own in the back seat, twisting his hands, hears his voice say the words, even though he doesn’t want to: ‘What if she’s wrong? If he didn’t do it? Then we’ll always regret this. What fucking right have we got to-’

Adam Murvall turns round in the passenger seat up front.

‘He did it, the bastard. Raped Maria. It fits. We’re going to do this. What is it you always say, Elias? You must never show you’re weak? That’s what you say, eh? You must never show you’re weak. So don’t now. Watch yourself.’

And the vehicle lurches, sliding towards the ditch just before the Olstorp curve.

‘You’re right,’ Elias yells. ‘I’m not weak.’

‘Fuck it,’ Jakob Murvall shouts. ‘We’re doing this, no more talk. Understood?’

Elias leans back, soaking up the assurance in Jakob’s voice, in spite of his anger.

Elias breathes deeply, feeling the determination of the vehicle’s motion, as if it had been on its way to this very destination long before it was even made.

Elias turns round.

Looks down into the baggage compartment.

It holds a stained wooden box, and in the box three grenades from a break-in at a weapons store, freshly unearthed from their hiding-place under an outhouse floor; a hiding-place the police missed during their raid the other week.

‘Bloody lucky the cops didn’t find the grenades,’ Jakob said when Mother explained her plan to them back in the house.

‘You’re right there, Jakob,’ Mother said. ‘Bloody lucky.’

Malin and Zeke are wandering the plain, searching for another isolated tree.

But the trees they find show no signs of struggle. They are just lonely, windswept, frost-damaged trees.

Zeke is at the wheel as they head towards Klockrike, along a scarcely ploughed road by the edge of an apparently endless field, when Malin’s mobile rings.

Karin Johannison’s number on the display.

‘Malin here.’

‘Negative, Fors,’ Karin says. ‘Karl Murvall didn’t rape Maria Murvall.’

‘No similarities at all?’

‘He didn’t do it, that much is certain.’

‘Thanks, Karin.’

‘Was it that important, Malin? Did you really think it was him?’

‘I don’t know what I thought. But I do now. Thanks again.’ Malin ends the call.

‘He didn’t rape Maria Murvall,’ she says to Zeke, who receives the information without taking his eyes from the road.

‘So that case still isn’t solved,’ Zeke says, his voice gruff, a statement that sets Malin thinking.

The brothers walking towards Rakel’s house just after she and Zeke had left.

Brothers who don’t know that Karl didn’t rape Maria.

Who listen to their mother. Obey her.

A mother with secrets to keep.

And only one way of keeping them.

Zeke stops the car at yet another tree.

Roots, Malin thinks. Blood that has to be eradicated. Actions that must be avenged. That’s what we do.

And so he must be eradicated. Rakel doesn’t know we got hold of Karl’s DNA, that everything is going to come out.

Or else she knows deep down, but is suppressing the knowledge, grasping at one last imaginary straw.

If you force evil into a corner, it’ll attack…

‘I know why she let us in earlier,’ Malin yells, just as Zeke is opening the driver’s door. ‘Get us to the cabin, as fast as you can.’

77

The houses of Vreta Kloster line the road.

A sense of wellbeing shelters behind the façades, close but still far away.

After this journey she doesn’t want to come this way again for a thousand years.

They drive across the bridge down by Kungsbro and swing up towards Olstorp, past the Montessori school in Björkö where the blue- and pink-painted buildings, with their anthroposophically angular architecture, look just as browbeaten by the cold as every other building.

Hope they raise good people in there.

Janne had once talked of Tove going to a Montessori school but Malin refused, had heard that children who go to school in protected environments like that could rarely deal with the competition outside the security of the school walls.

Cutting out dolls.

Making their own books.

Learning that the world is full of love.

How much love is there up in the forest? How much dammed-up hate?

The car slides along the slippery road surface as Zeke hits the accelerator.

‘Just drive, Zeke. It’s urgent. I promise you, he’s out there somewhere.’

Zeke doesn’t ask, just concentrates on the car and the road, as they pass the turning to Olstorp and head on towards Lake Hultsjön.

They drive past the golf course, the flags still flying, and Malin imagines the flags as the brothers’ bodies blowing in the wind, the breeze their mother’s breath with the power to send them whichever way she pleases.

Jakob Murvall grips the wheel tighter, turns off on to the road leading to the summer cottages around Hultsjön, little white-painted shacks covered in cotton wool.

The green Range Rover swerves over the snow, ice crystals swirling out over the ditches, like the polished shards of a cluster bomb, but he manages to keep the vehicle on the road.

Elias hasn’t said anything more.

And Adam is sitting silent, focused, in the passenger seat.

We’re just doing what has to be done, Jakob thinks. Like we always do. Like we’ve always done. Like I did when I found Dad at the bottom of the stairs. I pulled myself together, even though I wanted to scream. I closed his eyelids, so Mother wouldn’t have to see those frightening eyes.

We do what we have to. Because if we let someone rape our sister without doing anything about it, what sort of people would that make us? There’d be no end to the crap that followed. What we’re doing now, it says stop, think again.

At the end of the track he stops the car.

‘Out with you,’ he yells, and the brothers jump out, and, if there was any doubt in Elias’s body, it’s gone now.

They’re all dressed in green jackets and dark blue trousers.

‘Come on,’ Jakob shouts, and Adam opens the back door and takes out the stained box, putting it on the ground as he shuts the door.

‘Ready,’ he calls. Then he puts the box carefully under his arm and they clamber across the heaped-up snow and on into the forest.

Jakob in front.

Then Elias.

Adam at the back with the box.

Jakob sees the trees around him. The forest where he’s been hunting so many times. He sees Mother at the table. Maria in bed the only time he could bear to visit her in Vadstena.

He thinks, Bastard. You bastard.

His brothers behind him.

They swear whenever their boots cut through the white crust, breaking up as it does under their rapid, heavy steps.

How can three grenades weigh so much, Adam thinks, yet still so little, when you consider the damage they can do?

He thinks of Maria in her room. How she always shies away when he visits, shrinking into a corner of the bed, and he has to whisper her name over and over again to get her to calm down. He doesn’t even know if she recognises him. She’s never said anything, but she allows him to be there, and after a while she’s no longer scared, accepts the fact that he’s in the room with her.

What then?

Then they sit there in the middle of her hurt.

Fuck it.

His boot crashes through the crust, sinks right down towards a root, and he has to pull hard to get it out again.

It was that bastard who did it.

To his own sister.

There’s no other option. Away, he has to be done away with. No reason for doubt. Doubt isn’t for us.

The box under his arm. He holds it tight. Doesn’t know what might happen if he drops it.

He’s short of breath. Sees his brothers ahead of him, feels the cold and remembers that time by the canal when the two of them took care of that Turkish fucker for him, when they showed that no bastard could get one over on us, we stick together; that means you too, Maria, and that’s why we have to do this.

Kicking, kicking, kicking.

Much more than that.

We’re grown-ups. And we have to behave like grown-ups.

Elias only ten metres or so ahead of him. Adam can still feel his body, the wind in his hair. He is still sitting behind him on a Puch Dakota moped, will always be sitting there.

There’s the vehicle.

The Murvall brothers’ Range Rover has been driven right into the bank of snow, and Zeke parks close behind, taking care to block it in.

They’ve called in, a helicopter is on its way. Malin to Sven Sjöman: ‘Trust me on this, Sven.’

But it takes time to get a helicopter in the air in this sort of cold, so they have to rely on themselves, on their legs. The dog-patrols have just left the station.

They scramble over the bank of snow, following the Murvall brothers’ tracks, head in among the trees, running, landing so hard on their feet that they break the crust of the snow, stumble, run again. Their hearts are pounding in their chests, their lungs are working overtime, overdosing on the cold white air, their bodies straining forward, forward, but not even adrenalin lasts for ever and soon they are stumbling more than running, as they listen to the forest, for the brothers, for signs of activity, of life, but neither of them can hear anything.

‘Shit,’ Zeke pants. ‘How far in do you think they are?’

‘A long way,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve got to go on.’

And Malin starts running into the forest, but the crust can’t take her hard, heavy footsteps and she falls, gets up, rushes on.

Her vision narrows to a tunnel.

‘He wasn’t the one who raped your sister,’ she wants to shout through the forest.

‘Don’t believe your mother. He didn’t rape her, he’s done some repulsive things, but not that. Let all this end now, it isn’t too late, whatever you think, whatever she’s beaten into you. He’s still your brother. Do you hear? Do you hear? He’s your own brother. And he didn’t rape your sister, we know that for certain.’

The tunnel closes.

I’ve got to get there, Malin thinks.

Screams, ‘He didn’t rape your sister,’ but she’s so short of breath that she can barely hear her own voice.

Never show your weakness, never show your weakness, never…

Elias mutters the words to himself like a mantra, thinking of all the times he’s showed his strength, how he smashed his fist into that teacher Brogren’s face when he called him a filthy brat from Blåsvädret.

Sometimes he wonders why everything’s turned out the way it has, why they’re on the outside, and the only answer he can find is that it was like that from the start. There were all the people with jobs, with proper lives, decent houses, and it was never, ever us, and the world let us know that.

Adam behind him.

Elias stops, turns round. Thinks how well he’s carrying the weight, his brother, and how his forehead glows pink in the winter light and the cold, how his skin seems healthier.

‘Keep hold of the box, Adam.’

‘I’ve got it,’ he replies, his voice tight.

Jakob walks silently ahead of him.

His steps are determined, his shoulders are drooping in his jacket, angled to the ground.

‘Fuck,’ Adam swears. ‘This snow’s really dodgy.’

He’s gone through yet again.

‘Let’s speed up,’ he says. ‘Get this over with.’

Elias says nothing.

There’s nothing more to talk about. Just one thing to get done.

They walk past the cabin.

Pass it without stopping, carry on across the clearing into the forest, even darker, even thicker than on the other side, and there the crust of the snow is thicker, more stable, but still it gives way every now and then.

‘He’s hiding over there,’ Elias says. ‘I know he is.’

‘I can smell smoke from the stove,’ Adam says.

Adam’s fingers holding the box are starting to cramp, shaking uncontrollably against the wood. He switches arms, flexes his fingers to get rid of the cramp.

‘A fucking hole in the ground. He’s no better than an animal,’ Jakob whispers.

Then he says out loud, ‘Now it’s Maria’s turn.’

He shouts the words into the forest, but the sound dies out against the tree trunks, the forest absorbing his voice.

Go on, Malin, go on. It isn’t too late yet. The helicopter has left the airfield at Malmslätt, it’s whirling its way towards you across the plain, the dogs in the patrols are scrabbling, barking, their numbed senses searching in vain.

Like you, Malin, I think enough is enough.

But even so.

I want Karl here beside me.

I want to drift beside him.

Take him away from here with me.

How is it possible to feel so tired?

Malin’s body is full of lactic acid and, even though the brothers’ tracks lead further into the forest, the two of them have to sit down and rest on the front steps of the cabin.

The whistling of the wind.

A whisper, above the noise of their bodies.

Their heads seem to be boiling, in spite of the cold. Breath rising like smoke from a dying fire out of Zeke’s mouth.

‘Fuck, fuck,’ Zeke says, as he catches his breath. ‘If only I was as fit as Martin.’

‘We have to go on,’ Malin pants.

They get up.

Chase off, deeper into the forest.

78

Are you coming?

Are you coming to let me in?

Don’t hit me.

Is it you? Or the dead?

Whoever’s out there, tell me you’re coming in friendship. Tell me you’re coming with love.

Promise me that.

Promise me that much.

Promise.

I hear you. You aren’t here yet, but you’ll be here soon. I lie on the floor, hearing your words out there as muffled cries.

‘We’ll let him in now,’ you cry. ‘Now he can be one of us. Now he can come in.’

It feels good.

I’ve done so much. There’s none of that other blood left. Surely we can ignore the bit that’s flowing through my veins?

You’re closer now.

You’re coming with her love.

You’re coming to let me in.

The door to my hole isn’t locked.

Elias Murvall sees the smoke rising from the little pipe above the bulge in the snow. Sees in his mind’s eye how Karl is cowering in there, scared, pointless.

He must have done it.

Doubt is a weakness.

We’re going to bite him, kick him, all that.

What Mother said must be right: that he was a monster from the very start, that all three of us felt it, that he raped Maria.

Karl found this hideaway himself, when he was ten and cycled up to the forest and the cabin without telling anyone, then he had proudly showed it to them, as if they were likely to be impressed by some ruddy hole in the ground. Blackie used to lock him inside, leave him there for days with nothing but water when they were at the cabin. It made no difference what time of year. Karl protested to start with; they had to drag him there, the old man and the brothers, but then he seemed to get used to it and even made himself at home in there, turning it into his own little hovel. It was no fun shutting him in there if he was happy with it, and for a while they considered filling it in, but no one could be bothered to go to that much effort.

‘Let the little bastard keep his grave, then,’ their old man bellowed from his wheelchair, and no one protested. They knew he was still using the hole; they would sometimes see the tracks of his skis leading to the cabin. Sometimes there were no tracks, so they assumed he came from the other direction.

Elias and Jakob get closer.

The bastard. Get rid of him.

The green-painted box in Adam’s hands is heavy and he follows their footsteps steadily through the white and black landscape.

‘Do you hear that, Zeke?’

‘What?’

‘Aren’t those voices up ahead?’

‘I don’t hear any voices.’

‘But there’s someone talking, I can hear it.’

‘Don’t be daft, Fors. On we go.’

What are you saying?

You’re talking about opening the door, that much I can understand. Opening and letting in.

‘You open, and I’ll let it go.’ This from Elias.

So it’s true. I’ve succeeded. I’ve done it, something is finally being put right.

But what are you waiting for?

‘First,’ he says, ‘you chuck one in, then the others, and last of all the box.’

Malin is racing, hearing voices now, but more like whispers whose meaning is impossible to determine from the sound waves moving through the trees.

Muttering.

Millennia of history and injustice summoned down into this moment.

Is the forest really opening up? Zeke isn’t keeping up with her pace. He’s hanging back, he’s panting, she thinks he’s about to fall. Then she pushes a bit harder, running between the trees, and the snow seems to disappear beneath her feet, proximity to the truth making her drift along.

Elias Murvall takes the first grenade out of the box. He sees Jakob standing by the door of the earth cellar, the smoke from the chimney like a veil behind him, the forest standing to attention, all the trunks goading him on: Do it, do it, do it.

Kill your own brother.

He destroyed your sister.

He isn’t a human being.

But Elias hesitates.

‘For fuck’s sake, Elias,’ Jakob yells. ‘Let’s do it. Chuck them in. Chuck them in! What the fuck are we waiting for?’

Elias, whispering, ‘Yes, what the hell are we waiting for?’

‘Chuck them in. Chuck them in.’ Adam’s voice.

And as Elias pulls the pin from the first grenade Jakob opens the metre-high wooden door to the hole.

You’re opening up, I can see the light. I’m one of you now.

At last.

You’re so kind.

First an apple, because you know I like them. It rolls towards me, green in the soft grey light.

I pick up the apple, it’s cold and green, then two more apples roll across my earthen floor, together with a square box.

So kind.

I pick up another apple, it’s cool and hard with the cold.

You’re here now.

Then the door closes again and the light vanishes. Why?

You said you were going to let me in.

I wonder when the light will return? Where does all the crashing light come from?

Zeke has fallen somewhere behind her.

What can she see up ahead? Her field of vision is like a shaky hand-held camera, the image lurches back and forth and what is it she sees?

Three brothers?

What are they doing?

They’re throwing themselves down in the snow.

And then a bang, and another and another, and a flash of fire shooting out from a bulge in the snow, and she throws herself to the ground, feels the cold force its way into each of her bones.

Weapons from a weapons store.

Hand grenades.

Fuck.

He’s gone now, Elias Murvall thinks. He no longer exists. I didn’t show any weakness.

Elias gets up on all fours, the noise from the explosion ringing in his ears, his whole head full of noise, and he sees Adam and Jakob getting up, and how the door of the hideaway has been blown off, and how the snow that covered its roof has become an impossibly white dust in the air.

Whatever must it look like inside?

Let a firecracker go off in a clenched fist…

Stick one up the arse of some fucking cat…

Bloodstained snow.

The stink of sweat, burned flesh. Of blood.

Who’s that screaming? A woman?

He turns round.

Sees a woman holding a pistol approach from the edge of the forest.

Her? How the fuck did she get here so quickly?

Malin has got up, is walking, pistol drawn, towards the three men who are all clambering to their knees, getting up, putting their hands above their heads.

‘You’ve killed your own brother,’ she yells. ‘You’ve killed your own brother. You think he raped your sister but he had nothing to do with it, you bastards,’ she yells. ‘You’ve killed your own brother.’

Then Jakob Murvall walks towards her.

He yells, ‘We haven’t killed anyone. We were coming to get him, we knew you were looking for him and when we got close to the hideaway it exploded.’

Jakob Murvall smiles.

‘He didn’t rape your sister,’ Malin yells.

The smile vanishes from Jakob Murvall’s lips; now he looks offended, misled, and Malin takes a swing with the pistol, allowing it to cleave the air as fast as it can before the barrel connects with his nose.

The blood pours from Jakob Murvall’s nostrils as he staggers forward, colouring the snow dark red, and Malin sinks to her knees and screams up into the air, she screams again and again but no one hears her cries, slowly turning into a howl just as a helicopter glides in above the clearing and stifles the sound coming from her lungs. The despair and pain and the fragments of human lives that the drowned-out howl contains will echo through the forests around Hultsjön for ever.

Can you hear the rumble?

The unquiet muttering.

The rustling from the moss.

That’s the dead whispering, the stories will say. The dead, and the dead who are yet living.