Summertime Death

Table of Contents

Originally published in Swedish in 2008 as Sommardöden by Natur och Kultur

English translation © Neil Smith 2012

The right of Mons Kallentoft to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For my mother.

And for Karolina, Karla and Nick.

Prologue

Östergötland, Sunday, 25 July

In the final room

I’m not going to kill you, my summer angel.

I’m only going to let you be reborn.

You’ll become innocent again. All the dirt of history will vanish, time will deceive itself and everything that was good will reign in alone.

Or else I really will kill you, have killed you, so that love can arise again.

I tried not to kill, but that made rebirth impossible: the substance remained, clinging obstinately to material, and everything shameful vibrated within you and me like a hot black worm.

Pupated evil. Shredded time.

I tried in various ways, feeling my way, but I couldn’t get there.

I scrubbed, washed and cleaned.

You, my summer angels. You saw snow-coloured tentacles, tearing spiders’ legs, and rabbits’ claws.

I watched over you, gathered you in and took you.

I’m there now.

He’s sitting on the sofa.

His gut is open and rippling black snakes are sliding out onto the floor.

Can you see him?

Now he can’t hurt anyone any more, so say that you want to, say that you dare to come back. No oak floorboards will ever creak again, no alcohol fumes will ever make the air glow with anxiety.

The world is burning this summer.

The trees are transformed into withered black sculptures, monuments to our failures and our inability to love one another, to understand that we are one another.

We are the same, fire and me. Destroying so that life can arise again.

Someone has captured vipers, thrown them into an open oil-drum, poured on some petrol and set light to it.

The mute creatures crawl as they burn, making vain attempts to escape the pain.

Stop crawling, little girl.

I drove past the burning forest just an hour or so ago. I heard you beating against the inside of the car, ready to come out, come back, pure and free from anyone else’s guilt.

She thought she knew something about me.

So foolish.

But don’t be scared. The person you still need to be.

This is how it is: no one can live in fear, only in trust. Death is the penalty for anyone who deprives another person of the ability to trust.

That sort of trust is a close neighbour of love, which means that it’s a close neighbour of death and the white spiders’ legs. We needed you in spite of what you did, in spite of that. You owned our world. We couldn’t escape even though it was the only thing we wanted, and we went to you sometimes because we had no choice. It has haunted me, this enforced seeking after darkness. I know now that I will never be able to choose anything except wishing myself harm.

But when you are reborn, that curse will be lifted.

So it will all be over soon.

Everything will be clear, pure.

White and light.

You will feel nothing within you, just as we once did.

You are shaking and twisting on the floor.

But don’t be scared.

Only love will be reborn. Innocence.

And then we will cycle together along the bank of the canal, in a summer that lasts for ever.

PART ONE

Love reborn

1

Thursday, 15 July

What’s that rumbling, rolling sound?

Something trying to escape?

It’s the sound of rain coming. Thunder. Finally, a drop of water upon the earth.

But Malin Fors knows better. The heat of this summer is devoid of mercy, has made up its mind to dry all the life out of the ground, and rain will be a long time coming.

Through the noise of the lingering customers, Malin can hear the pub’s air-conditioning unit rumble like thunder, shuddering, protesting at having to work such long, demanding shifts, that there doesn’t seem to be any end to the overtime this summer. The entire contraption seems on the point of collapse, its joints clattering, saying: ‘Enough, enough, enough. You’ll just have to put up with the heat or slake your thirst with beer. Not even a machine can go on indefinitely.’

Is it time to go home?

She is sitting alone at the bar. Wednesday has turned into Thursday and it is just after half past one. The Pull & Bear stays open all summer and the dozen or so customers occupying the tables have fled the draining heat of the tables outside and taken refuge in the blissful cool indoors.

Bottles on shelves in front of mirrors.

Tequila. Cask-matured. Shall I order a single? A double?

Condensation on glasses of freshly poured beer. The smell of sweat and rancid old spilled alcohol is clearly noticeable in the smoke-free air.

She sees her face in the mirrors around her in the bar, from countless angles as it is reflected and then reflected again in the mirror in front of her and the one behind her, above the green leather sofa.

A thousand reflections, but still one and the same face. Skin slightly tanned, her prominent cheekbones framed by a blonde page-boy cut, shorter than usual because of the summer heat.

Malin had gone down to the pub when the film on television ended. It was something French about a dysfunctional family where one of the sisters ended up killing everyone. Psychological realism, the announcer had said, and that could well be right, even if people’s actions seldom have such clear-cut and obvious explanations in reality as they did in the film.

The flat had felt too empty, and she hadn’t been tired enough to sleep, but awake enough to feel loneliness dripping down the walls in almost the same way she felt the sweat running down her back under her blouse. The increasingly tired wallpaper in the living room, the Ikea clock in the kitchen, whose second-hand had suddenly fallen off one day in May, the blunt knives that could do with being honed back to finger-slicing sharpness, all of Tove’s books in the bookcase, her latest purchases lined up on the third shelf. Titles that would be advanced for anyone, but improbably difficult for a fourteen-year-old.

The Man Without Qualities. Buddenbrooks. The Prince of Tides.

Hello, Tove? Can’t you hear Marian Keyes calling you?

Reading.

Infinitely better than a lot of things a fourteen-year-old could come up with.

Malin takes a gulp of her beer.

Still doesn’t feel tired.

But lonely? Or something else?

Summer lethargy at the police station, no work to tire her out, or by which she could be swallowed up. She had spent all day wishing something would happen.

But nothing had happened.

No bodies had been discovered. No one had been reported missing. No summer rapes. Nothing remarkable at all, apart from the heat and the forest fires that were raging up in the Tjällmo forests, resisting all attempts to put them out, and devouring more and more hectares of prime forest with every passing day.

She thinks about the fire brigade, working flat-out. About all the volunteers. A few police cars there to direct the traffic, but nothing for her or her partner, Zeke Martinsson, to do. When the wind is in the right direction she can smell the smoke from the fires, which seems only fitting seeing as the whole of Linköping is enveloped in a hellish heat, day and night alike, in the hot winds from the south that have parked themselves on top of the southern half of the country, as if they had been screwed down onto the landscape by the prevailing area of high pressure.

The hottest summer in living memory.

Malin takes another mouthful of beer. Its bitterness and coolness ease the residual heat in her body.

Outside the city is sweaty, tinted dull sepia, pale-green and grey. Linköping is empty of people, and only those who have to work or have no money or no place to escape to are left in the city. Most of the university students have gone back to their home towns. The streets are eerily empty even in the middle of the day, businesses stay open only because they have to, seeing as the summer temps have already been taken on. Only one business is booming: Bosse’s Ice Cream, homemade ice cream sold from a hole in the wall on Hospitalsgatan. Day after day there are queues outside Bosse’s; it’s a mystery how everyone gets there without being visible anywhere along the way.

It’s so hot that you can’t move.

Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty degrees, and the day before yesterday a new local record was reached, forty-three point two degrees at the weather-station out on the plain at Malmslätt.

Record-breaking heatwave!

Old record smashed.

This summer unlike any other.

There’s a cheerfulness in the tone, an energy in the headlines of the Östgöta Correspondent that isn’t matched by the pace of life in this heat-stricken city.

Muscles protesting, sweat dripping, thoughts muddied, people searching for shade, coolness, the city drowsy, in sympathy with its inhabitants. A dusty, smoky smell in the air, not from the forest fires but from grass that’s slowly burning up without flames.

Not a single drop of rain since Midsummer. The farmers are screaming disaster, and today the Correspondent published an article by its star reporter, Daniel Högfeldt, in which he interviewed a professor at the University Hospital. The professor said that a manual labourer in this sort of heat needs to drink between fifteen and twenty litres of water a day.

Manual labourers?

Are there any of those left in Linköping these days?

There are only academics. Engineers, computer experts and doctors. At least that’s what it feels like sometimes. But they aren’t in the city at the moment.

A gulp of her third beer lets her relax, even though she is really in need of a pick-me-up.

The pub’s customers disappear one by one. And she can feel loneliness swelling inside her.

Tove with her bag in the hallway eight days ago, full of clothes and books, some of the new ones she’d bought. Janne behind her in the stairwell, Janne’s friend Pecka down in the street in his Volvo, ready to take them to Skavsta Airport.

She had lied several days before they left when Janne asked if she could drive them, saying that she had to work and couldn’t take them. She wanted to be short with Janne, to show her disapproval that he was insisting on taking Tove with him all the way to Bali, on the other side of the fucking planet.

Bali.

Janne had won the trip in the public employees’ holiday lottery. First prize for the heroic fireman.

A summer dream for Tove. For Janne. Just father and daughter. Their first real trip together, Tove’s first trip outside Europe.

Malin had been worried that Tove wouldn’t want to go, that she wouldn’t want to be away from Markus, her boyfriend, or because Markus’s parents, Biggan and Hasse, might have plans that involved her.

But Tove had been pleased.

‘Markus will manage,’ she had said.

‘And what about me, how am I going to manage without you?’

‘You, Mum? It’ll be perfect for you. You’ll be able to work as much as you like, without feeling guilty about me.’

Malin had wanted to protest. But all the words she could have said felt lame, or, worse still, untrue. How many times did Tove have to make her own meals, or go and put herself to bed in an empty flat simply because something at the station demanded Malin’s full attention?

Hugging in the hall a week or so ago, bodies embracing.

Then Janne’s firm grip on the handle of the bag.

‘Take care.’

‘You too, Mum.’

‘You know I will.’

‘Bye.’

Three voices saying the same word.

Hesitation.

Then it had started up again, Janne had said silly things and she was upset when the door finally closed on them. The feelings from the divorce twelve years ago were back, the lack of words, the anger, the feeling that no words were good enough and that everything that was said was just wrong.

Not with each other. Not without each other. This single sodding love. An impossible love.

And she had refused to admit to herself how put out she felt by their holiday, like a very young girl being abandoned by the people who ought to love her most.

‘See you when I pick you up from the airport. But we’ll speak before that,’ she had said to the closed grey door.

She had been left standing alone in the hall. They had been gone five seconds and already she felt an infinite sense of loss, and the thought of the distance between them had been unbearable and she had gone straight down to the pub.

Drinking to get drunk, just like I’m doing now, Malin thinks.

Downing a shot of tequila, just like I’m doing now.

Making a call on my mobile, just like I’m doing now.

Daniel Högfeldt’s clear voice over the phone.

‘So you’re at the Pull?’

‘Are you coming or not?’

‘Calm down, Fors. I’m coming.’

Their two bodies facing each other, Daniel Högfeldt’s hairless chest beneath her hands, slipping moistly under her fingertips. I am marking you, Malin thinks, marking you with my fingerprints and why have you got your eyes closed, look at me, you’re inside me now, so open your eyes, your green eyes, cold as the Atlantic.

Their conversation in the pub just ten minutes before.

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘No, do you?’

‘No.’

‘So what are we waiting for?’

They took their clothes off in the hall. The church tower a black, immovable shape in the kitchen window.

And the sounds.

The ringing of the church bell as it struck two, as Malin helped him out of his worn white T-shirt, the cotton stiff and clean, his skin warm against her breasts, his words: ‘Take it slow, Malin, slow,’ and her whole body was in a hurry, starting to itch and ache and hurt and she whispered: ‘Daniel, it’s never been more urgent than it is now,’ thinking, you think I’ve got you for slow? I’ve got myself, other people for that. You, Daniel, you’re a body, don’t try to smooth-talk me, I don’t fall for that sort of thing. He pushed her into the kitchen, the crippled Ikea clock ticking tick tock and the church grey-black behind them, the tree branches brittle with drought.

‘That’s it,’ he said, and she was quiet, spreading her legs and letting him get closer and he was hard and rough and warm and she fell back on the table, her arms flailing, that morning’s half-full mug of coffee sliding off onto the floor and shattering into a dozen pieces on the linoleum.

She pushed him away.

Went into the bedroom without a word.

He followed her.

She stood at the window and looked out at the courtyard, at the street beyond, at the few hesitant lights in the windows of the buildings.

‘Lie down.’

He obeyed.

Daniel’s body naked on the bed, his cock sticking up at a slight angle towards his navel. The gun cabinet with her service revolver on the wall next to the window, Daniel closing his eyes, reaching his arms up towards the pine bed-head, and she waited a moment, allowing the ache of longing to become real pain before moving towards him, before she let him in again.

I dream that the snakes are moving again, somewhere. How a girl the same age as you, Tove, is moving though the green-black trees of something that seems to be a park at night, or a forest beside a distant, black-watered lake, or shimmering blue water that smells of chlorine. I imagine her drifting across yellowed grass, as far, far away a water-sprinkler wisps corrosive drops above a freshly cut lilac hedge.

I dream that this is happening, Tove.

It is happening now and I get scared and stiffen as someone, something creeps out of its hiding place in the darkness, rushing up behind her, knocking her to the ground and the roots of the surrounding trees wrap around her body, snaking deep within her like warm, live snakes, whose slithering bodies are full of hungry, ancient streams of lava.

She screams.

But no sound comes out.

And the snakes chase her across a wide-open plain that was once verdant but is now reduced to a charred, flaking skin. The ground is cracked and from the jagged depths bubbles a stinking, hot, sulphurous darkness that whispers with a scorching voice: We will destroy you, little girl. Come. We shall destroy you.

I scream.

But no sound comes out.

This is a dream, isn’t it? Tell me it’s a dream, Tove.

I reach out my hand across the sheet beside me but it’s empty.

Janne, you’re not there, your warm warmth.

I want you both to come home now.

Even you have gone, Daniel. Taken your cool warmth and left me alone with the dream and myself in this depressing bedroom.

I think it was a bad dream, but perhaps it was good?

2

Tove and Janne are eating bacon and eggs on a spacious balcony with a view of Kuta Beach, and not even the memory of the terrorist bombs remains.

Tove and Janne are tanned and rested and their radiant smiles reveal shining white teeth. Janne, muscular, has already taken a morning swim in the cooled hotel pool. As he got out of the water a beautiful Balinese woman was waiting on the edge with a freshly laundered and ironed towel.

Tove is beaming fit to match the sun.

Smiles even more broadly at her father and asks:

‘Dad, what are we going to do today? Eat rice with honey and nuts in a Buddhist temple of ivory-white marble? Like the pictures in the brochures?’

Malin adjusts her Ray-Bans with one hand, and the image of Janne and Tove vanishes. Then she takes a firmer grip on the handlebars of her bicycle as she pedals past the Asian fast-food stall on St Larsgatan just before Trädgårdstorget, thinking that if you only let your thoughts go, they can come up with all sorts of things, conjuring up images of anyone at all, making caricatures of even the people that you know and love most.

The self-preservation instinct. Let your subconscious make parodies of your loss and anxiety and jealousy.

It’s no more than a quarter past seven and Janne and Tove are in all probability on the beach now.

And Janne doesn’t even like honey.

Malin presses the pedals down, picking up an almost imperceptible smell of smoke in her nostrils, the city tinted slightly yellow by her sunglasses.

Her body is starting to wake up.

But she feels a resistance. It feels as if it’s going to be even hotter today. She didn’t want to look at the thermometer in the kitchen window at home. The tarmac is oily under the wheels, it feels as if the ground might crack open at any moment and release hundreds of glowing worms.

A cycling summer.

Nothing’s any distance away inside the city. At this time of year everyone who can cycles in Linköping, unless the heat just gets too much. She prefers the car, but somehow all the talk about the environment in the papers and on television must have got to her. Think of future generations. They have the right to a living planet.

At this time of day Malin is completely alone on the streets, and in the plate-glass windows of H&M in the square there are adverts for the summer sale, the words flame-red above pictures of a famous model whose name Malin realises she ought to know.

SALE.

Heat on special offer this year. Stocks are way too high.

She stops at a red light near McDonald’s at the corner of Drottninggatan, adjusts her beige skirt and runs her hand over her white cotton blouse.

Summer clothes. Ladylike clothes. They work OK, and in this heat skirts are always better than trousers.

Her pistol and holster are concealed beneath a thin cotton jacket. She recalls the last time she and Zeke were out at the firing range, the way they frenetically fired off shot after shot at the black cardboard shapes.

The burger chain is in a building from the fifties, a grey stone façade with concave white balconies. On the other side of the street sits the heavy brown building from the turn of the century where the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord has her clinic.

The shrink.

She saw right through me.

Malin remembers what Viveka said to her during a conversation they had had towards the end of a murder investigation.

‘What about you, why are you so sad?’ Then: ‘I’m here if you want to talk.’

Talk.

There were already far too many words in the world, far too little silence. She never called Viveka Crafoord about herself, but had called several times in connection with cases where she wanted ‘psychological input’, as Viveka herself put it. And they’d had coffee several times when they’d bumped into each other around town.

Malin turns around.

Looks back towards Trädgårdstorget, towards the flashy new bus-stops and containers full of reluctant flowers on the patterned paving, the red-plastered façade of the building containing the seed shop and Schelin’s café.

A pleasant square, in a pleasant city.

A plastered façade, shielding insecure people. Anything can happen in this city, where old and new collide, where rich and poor, educated and uneducated are in fact constantly colliding with each other, where prejudices about those around you are aired like bedclothes. Last week she had been in a taxi with a middle-aged taxi-driver who had had a go at the city’s immigrant community: ‘Spongers. They don’t do a stroke of work, we should use them as fuel for the incinerator at Gärdstad, then we’d get some use out of them.’

She had wanted to get out of the car, show her ID, tell him she was going to arrest him for incitement to racial hatred, the bastard, but she had stayed silent.

A black man in green overalls is walking across the square. He is equipped with a pair of long-handled pincers to save him having to bend over to pick up litter and cigarette ends. The bottles and cans have already been taken care of by Deposit-Gunnar or another of the city’s eccentrics.

Malin looks in front of her, as St Larsgatan forms a straight line out of the centre of the city, only turning when it reaches the edge of the smartest district, Ramshäll.

Hasse and Biggan live there, Markus’s parents. Close to the hospital, both of them doctors.

The light turns green and Malin pedals onwards.

The beer and tequila from last night have left no trace in her body. Nor has Daniel Högfeldt. He crept out while she was asleep, and if she knows him at all he’ll be in the newsroom now, cursing the lack of news, waiting for something to happen.

Malin cycles past the medical school, hidden behind leafy maples, and a hundred metres off to the right, at the end of Linnégatan, she can make out the Horticultural Society Park. Beyond the school the buildings thin out, making way for a car park, beyond which lies the Hotel Ekoxen, generally regarded as the best in the city. But Malin turns the other way, down towards the entrance of the Tinnerbäck Swimming Pool. Tinnis, as the pool is known locally, opens at seven, and in the car park by the entrance there are just two cars. An elderly red Volvo estate and an anonymous white van, possibly a Ford.

She jumps off her bike, parks it in the stand beside the doors, and takes her bag from the rack on the back.

There’s no one at the desk by the turnstile.

Instead there’s a note on the smeared glass: ‘The pool opens at 7.00 a.m. Free entry before 8.00 a.m.’

Malin goes through the turnstile. The sun is just creeping above the stands of the Folkungavallen Stadium further down the road, hitting her in the face, and in just a few seconds the relative cool of morning is forced out by an angry heat.

Before her Malin sees the twenty-five-metre pool, the abandoned indoor pool, the bathing area in the lake and the grass slopes surrounding it. Water everywhere. She longs for the water.

The changing room smells variously of mould and disinfectant.

She pulls her red bathing suit over her thighs, feeling how taut they are, and thinking that her exercise regime is holding the years at bay, and that there can’t be many thirty-four-year-olds in better shape. Then she gets up, pulling the bathing suit over her breasts, and the touch makes her nipples stiffen under the synthetic fabric.

She shakes her arms. Pulls the goggles out of her bag. Too warm in the gym at the station these days. Better to swim.

She takes her wallet, pistol and mobile and goes out of the changing room towards the outdoor pool. She walks past the showers. She doesn’t want to shower even though she knows those are the rules, prefers the first water to touch her skin to be the water she’s going to be swimming in.

No holiday until the middle of August.

Her colleagues are taking their well-earned breaks now, in July, most of them, apart from Zeke and the duty officer and Detective Inspector Sven Sjöman.

Johan Jakobsson is with his wife and children at her family’s summer place by some lake outside Nässjö. Johan had a pained look on his face when he outlined his plans for the summer to Malin in the police-station kitchen.

‘Mother- and father-in-law have built another two little cottages, one for us and one for Petra, Jessica’s sister. With their own kitchen and bathroom, the whole works. Everything so that we don’t have a legitimate excuse not to go.’

‘Johan. You’re thirty-five. You should be able to do what you want.’

‘But Jessica loves it there. Wants the kids to have their own childhood memories of the place.’

‘Lots of arguments?’

‘Arguments? Like you wouldn’t believe. My mother-in-law is the most passive-aggressive person you can imagine. The victim mentality comes completely naturally to her.’

Johan had taken a gulp of his hot coffee, far too large a gulp, and was forced to spit it out in the sink when he burned his mouth.

‘Fuck, that was hot.’

Just like the summer.

Malin steps out onto the narrow concrete path that leads down to the banked seats that in turn form a staircase down towards the pool, feeling her bathing suit cut in between her buttocks.

Börje Svärd.

His wife, Anna, who has MS, is in a respite ward at the University Hospital. Three weeks away from the villa she had furnished with her assured taste, three weeks in a hospital room, entirely dependent on strangers. But dependency is nothing new for her, completely paralysed for years.

Börje himself on a much longed-for hunting trip in Tanzania, Malin knew he’d been saving up for it for several years.

She also knew that he had left his dogs at a kennels up on Jägarvallen, and it was the dogs he had chosen to talk about when he gave her a lift home one Friday evening towards the end of June.

‘Malin,’ he had said, his waxed moustache twitching. ‘I feel so damn guilty about leaving the dogs.’

‘Börje. They’ll be fine. The kennels in Jägarvallen has a good reputation.’

‘Yes, but . . . You can’t just leave animals like that. I mean, they’re like members of the family.’

In the weeks before he left, Börje’s body seemed to shrink under the weight of guilt, as if it were already regretting going.

‘Anna will be fine as well, Börje,’ Malin had said as they pulled up outside the door on Ågatan. ‘She’ll be well looked after at the University Hospital.’

‘But they don’t even understand what she says.’

She’d had the words ‘try not to worry about it’ on the tip of her tongue, but left them unsaid. Instead she had silently put her hand on Börje’s arm, and at the usual morning meeting the next day Sven had said:

‘Go, Börje. It’ll do you good.’

Börje, who would usually have been annoyed by a remark like that, had leaned back in his chair and thrown out his arms.

‘Is it so obvious that I’d rather not go?’

‘No,’ Sven had said. ‘It’s obvious that you should go. Go to Tanzania and shoot an antelope. That’s an order.’

Malin is down at the pool now, her nostrils full of the smell of chlorine. She walks along the long side towards the end where the starting blocks look like grey sugar lumps above the flaking black lane-markers. Beyond the pool stands a line of tall elms, their leaves yellowing, and she’s still alone at the pool, presumably none of the other people left in the city has the energy to get up so early?

Karim Akbar.

Police Chief.

Not as controversial in his choice of holiday as his choice of career. He, his wife and their eight-year-old son have rented a cottage outside Västervik. Three weeks’ holiday for Karim. But not really a holiday. He’s told Malin that he’s going to write a book about integration based on his own experiences, while his wife and son take day-trips and go swimming.

Malin already knows what the book will be about: the little Kurdish boy in the far too cramped flat in Nacksta up in Sundsvall. The father who committed suicide in his despair at being excluded from society. The son who takes revenge by studying law and becoming the youngest police chief in the country, the only one from an immigrant background. Articles in the press, appearances on television discussion programmes.

Malin climbs up onto the starting block. She likes swimming in the middle of the pool, where she isn’t troubled by the swell at the edges. She crouches down and carefully puts her towel and mobile down on the asphalt, hiding her pistol inside the towel and pulling on her goggles before getting ready to dive in.

Degerstad would be back from his course up in Stockholm in early September. Andersson is still off sick.

Malin stretches her ankles, feeling her body get ready to split the surface of the water, as her unconscious checks off every muscle, organ, cell and drop of blood from a list that is as long as it is quickly ticked off.

Muscles tensing. And off.

She doesn’t hear the mobile phone ringing, angrily announcing that something has happened, that Linköping has been woken from its hot summer lethargy.

One arm forward, the other back. Breathing every fifth stroke, swimming eighty lengths of the twenty-five metre pool, that’s the plan.

She vaults at the end of the first length, enjoying the response of her body, the fact that the hours in the gym at the station are showing results, the feeling that she is in control of her body, and not the other way around.

Of course it’s an illusion.

Because what is a human being if not a body?

Her body like a bullet in the water, the bathing suit like a red flash of blood. The surrounding buildings and trees as vague images when she breathes, otherwise not there at all.

She approaches the end, the first circuit of forty almost over, and she tenses her body for another turn when she hears a voice, a calm deep voice that sounds insistent.

‘Excuse me, sorry . . .’

She wants to swim, doesn’t want to stop and talk to anyone, answer any questions, wants to use her body and escape from all thought, from all . . . yes, what, exactly?

‘Your mobile . . .’

Could have been Tove. Janne.

She slows down instead of turning, her hands on the metal steps of the ladder.

A distant voice between her quick breaths, a face dark against the sun.

‘I’m sorry, but your mobile was ringing when I walked past.’

‘Thanks,’ Malin says as she tries to catch her breath.

‘Don’t mention it,’ the voice says, and the large, dark figure disappears, seeming to shrivel up in the sunlight blazing behind it. Malin heaves herself out of the pool, sitting on the edge with her feet still in the water. She reaches for her mobile over on the towel.

It’s waterproof, a fairly basic model.

Zeke’s number on the display.

A new message received.

Doesn’t feel like listening to it.

Zeke answers on the third ring.

‘Malin, is that you?’

‘Who else?’

‘The Horticultural Society Park,’ Zeke says. ‘Get there as fast as you can. You’re fairly close, aren’t you?’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Don’t know exactly. We got a call here at the station. See you at the playground up by Djurgårdsgatan as soon as you can get there.’

The words take the chill of the water from her body. Sun and heat, the tone in Zeke’s voice.

The cracks in the ground are opening up, Malin thinks. The time of glowing worms has arrived.

3

Malin hurries to the changing room with her towel around her neck, the wet footprints left by her feet on the concrete of the steps drying before she gets there.

She tears off the bathing suit, giving up any idea of showering off the chlorine from the pool. She puts on some deodorant but doesn’t bother to comb her hair. She pulls on her skirt, her white blouse, the holster and jacket and the white sneaker-style shoes.

Through the turnstile.

Onto the bicycle.

Breathing.

Now.

Now something is happening.

What’s waiting for me in the Horticultural Society Park?

Something has happened, that much is clear. Zeke’s words before he hung up, quickly telling her about the call received at the station fifteen minutes earlier, put through to his desk from reception, how the gender-neutral voice at the other end of the line had been indistinct, upset: ‘There’s a naked woman in the Horticultural Society Park, she’s sitting in the summerhouse by the playground. Something terrible must have happened.’

A naked woman.

In the largest park in the city.

The person who called hadn’t said anything about how old the woman was, nor whether she was alive or dead, nothing about anything really. A patrol had probably got there by now.

Maybe a false alarm?

But Malin could tell from Zeke’s voice that he was sure something serious was going on, that evil was on the move again, the indefinable dark undercurrent that flows beneath all human activity.

Who made the call?

Unclear. A panting voice.

No caller number had been indicated on Zeke’s phone, or out in reception.

Malin heads for the gate to the park beside the Hotel Ekoxen, cycling past the entrance to the hotel bar. They mostly have bus-loads of German tourists at this time of year, and as Malin rides past the dining room she can see the elderly Germans swarming around the breakfast buffet.

Over by the park’s open-air stage the large lawn is surrounded by fully grown oaks, and the park is a regular venue for sixth formers’ drunken parties in the spring. Malin imagines she can still pick up the smell of alcohol, vomit and used condoms. Down to the right is the summerhouse, which was built on the site of the park restaurant that burned down long ago.

The white paint of the patrol car is like a shimmering mirage further up the park.

Cycle faster.

She can feel the violence now. Has been in its vicinity often enough to recognise the traces left by its scent.

The patrol car is parked by the little summerhouse at the foot of a small hillock. Beside the car is an ambulance. In the background Malin can make out white blocks of flats with walkway balconies, and through the trees she can just make out a yellow stuccoed building from the turn of the century.

She folds out the bike’s footrest.

Takes in the scene. Makes it her own.

Close to her, behind a green-stained wooden fence, there are swings made of car tyres. There is a patch of sand with a climbing frame and three small spring-loaded rocking horses that look like cows. A sandpit.

Two uniformed police wearing outsized pilot glasses, beefy Johansson and rotund Rydström, wandering back and forth on the grass beyond the sandpit. They haven’t seen her yet, as she’s hidden by the patrol car as she approaches.

Comatose.

They should have heard her. Or noticed the paramedics waving in greeting from the bench where they are sitting on either side of an orange, blanket-wrapped bundle. A thickset older man, she knows his name is Jimmy Niklasson, and a young girl, blonde, around twenty or so.

She must be new.

Malin knows they’ve been having trouble finding women. A lot fall by the wayside on the physical tests.

Niklasson looks at Malin, worried.

The orange figure, the person between them on the bench.

Wrapped in a health service blanket, and they’re holding onto her, her head is covered by the blanket, head bowed, it’s as though there’s simultaneously something and nothing between them.

Malin walks slowly towards the bench.

Niklasson nods to her, the blonde girl does the same.

Johansson and Rydström have seen her, shouting across each other:

‘We think . . .’

‘She’s probably . . .’

‘. . . been raped.’

And when the words split the air and find their way across the playground and the park, the figure in the blanket looks up and Malin sees a young girl’s face, its features distorted with fear, with the insight that life can present you with dark gifts at any place and at any time.

Brown eyes staring at Malin.

Seeming to wonder: What happened? What’s going to happen to me now?

Dear God, Malin thinks. She’s no older than you, Tove.

‘Shut up,’ Malin shouts at the uniforms.

Where’s Zeke?

The girl has bowed her head again. Jimmy Niklasson removes his arm from her and stands up. The new blonde girl stays where she is. When Malin sees Niklasson coming towards her she wishes that Zeke had got to the scene first instead of her, that he could have dispensed the calming words that she will now have to give.

He’s good at calm, Zeke. Even if he’s also good at tempest.

Johansson and Rydström have come over as well, a wall of male flesh suddenly very close to her.

Rydström’s gravelly voice: ‘We found her over there, in the summerhouse, she was lying on the planks of the floor.’

Johansson: ‘We helped her up. But she was completely silent, we couldn’t get any response from her, so we called for an ambulance.’

‘Good,’ Malin says. ‘Good. Did you touch anything over there?’

‘No,’ Rydström says. ‘Just her. We sat her on the bench, exactly like she’s sitting now. We gave her the blanket we had in the back of the car. They brought more blankets with them.’

‘Are there any clothes over there?’

‘No.’

‘She’s bleeding from her genitals,’ Niklasson says, and his voice is strangely high for such a large man. ‘And as far as I can tell, she’s been beaten on her lower arms and shins. But she’s remarkably clean, almost like she’s been scrubbed.’

‘She smells of bleach,’ Rydström adds. ‘Her whole body is sort of white. The wounds on her arms and legs also seem to have been rinsed and cleaned up, very carefully.’

‘Get her into the ambulance,’ Malin says. ‘It’ll be calmer for her in there.’

‘She doesn’t want to,’ Niklasson says. ‘We’ve tried, but she just shakes her head.’

‘Does she seem to know where she is?’

‘She hasn’t said a word.’

Malin turns to Rydström and Johansson.

‘No one else was here when you got here?’

‘No. Like who?’ Johansson says.

‘The person who called in, for instance.’

‘There was no one here.’

Malin pauses.

‘You two,’ Malin says. ‘Cordon off the crime scene. Start by the fountain down there and draw a ring around us here.’

Malin sits down slowly on the bench. Careful not to invade the girl’s space, trying to get closer to her with friendliness.

‘Can you hear me?’ Malin asks, looking at her gleaming white skin, the wounds on her arms like neat islands. The girl looks as though she’s been outside naked through a whole cold winter’s night, in spite of the heat. There’s an innocence to her white skin, as if she has danced with the devil on the edge of death and somehow survived.

The girl remains still, mute.

A faint smell of bleach in Malin’s nostrils.

It reminds her of the pool at Tinnis.

The young paramedic on her other side is sitting in silence, doesn’t seem bothered that Malin hasn’t introduced herself.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’

Silence, but a very small sideways movement.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Can you remember?’

‘You don’t have to be afraid.’

But no reaction, no answer, nothing.

‘Stay with her,’ Malin says, getting up. ‘Don’t leave her alone.’

Down by the fountain the two uniformed officers are attaching the cordon tape to a tree, and Niklasson is busy inside the ambulance.

‘Can we take her to the hospital?’

The young paramedic’s voice is soft and amenable, soothing.

‘My name’s Ellinor, by the way. Ellinor Getlund.’

Malin holds out her hand.

‘Malin Fors, Detective Inspector. You’ll have to wait before taking her to hospital, even if she ought to go straight away. She might start to talk if she spends a bit more time here at the scene. I’m going to take a look around in there in the meantime.’

A summerhouse shaded by a tall oak.

Sweat under her blouse.

The clock on her mobile says 08.17.

Already it’s as hot as the fires of hell.

The summerhouse has its own microclimate. A strange, damp heat hits Malin as she steps cautiously into the open space. It must be a good five degrees warmer than outside even though there are no walls, it’s more a collection of pillars than a room.

Unnaturally warm in here.

As if the atmosphere had gathered together some particularly troublesome molecules in one place, as if an invisible devil were dancing in the air.

She looks down at her feet. Takes care not to stand in any footprints. A pool of blood some distance away, some smaller splashes of blood around it, together they almost form the shape of a body.

What?

Blood that’s flowed out of her.

A black shadow. What were you doing here at night?

You’re no older than my Tove. You ended up here even though you shouldn’t have.

No clothes, no traces of fabric that Malin can make out with her naked eye.

A mobile ringing, Ellinor Getlund’s measured voice behind Malin. The voice coming closer. Has she left the girl alone?

Malin crouches down. Breathing. Runs her hand over the floorboards, careful not to touch anything that their crime scene investigator and Forensics expert, Karin Johannison, might want to look at.

Sees the blood on the railing above the place where the girl was lying.

Did someone throw you over the railing? Or did you climb over it yourself?

Children’s voices in the background.

Ignore them. What are they doing here, so early?

Malin gets up and walks over to the railing. Marks made by loads of shoes on the other side, footprints, bushes some distance away, some broken branches. A tree, a rough pine slightly further in. Was that where you waited? Did you pull her into those bushes? Or did someone else leave those tracks? Entirely unrelated? Did it all happen in a completely different way?

Children.

Lots of them.

They’re laughing.

Saying: ‘Police. Ambulance.’

And then they scream, and scream again, and agitated women’s voices echo through the park, then Niklasson’s voice.

‘What the hell?’

Malin turns around.

Ten preschool children in yellow tunics. They’re howling now. Two teachers with surprised looks on their faces. A naked, beaten, wounded, but unnaturally clean girl moving towards them from the bench. The children sick with fear, as if they had suddenly infected each other with a virus of terror in the face of the strange, scary sight coming towards them.

The children are screaming out loud.

‘I told you to stay with her!’ Malin roars.

Ellinor Getlund heading after the girl, her mobile in one hand, the orange blanket, hastily plucked up from the gravel beside the bench, in the other.

The naked, glassy girl climbs over the fence around the swings, not caring about the wounds on her arms and legs, or the dried blood on the inside of her thighs. She walks across the sand. Sits down on one of the tyres and starts swinging back and forth, a pendulum motion that seems to be an obstinate attempt to obliterate time.

Her gleaming white body, the blood on her thighs somehow luminous.

Down by the fountain Rydström and Johansson are still fumbling with the cordon as if nothing had happened.

Where are you, Zeke? Malin thinks. I need you here right now.

4

Zeke standing cautiously beside Malin in the summerhouse.

He arrived just after they had got the girl down from the swing, wrapped her in the orange blanket and sat her down inside the ambulance. She climbed in without objecting.

The preschool children have made a collective retreat from the park. Once their initial fear had subsided they seemed mostly amused by the funny lady swinging without any clothes on, and wanted her to carry on, and some of them were upset when Malin and Ellinor Getlund helped the girl down.

Malin explained to one of the preschool teachers that the playground was a crime scene, but that they would probably be able to use it again tomorrow. The woman didn’t ask what had happened, and seemed mainly concerned with getting the children away from there as quickly as possible.

Zeke came running up the path from the fountain and the summerhouse. His clean-shaven head was nodding up and down and the beads of sweat in the wrinkles on his forty-five-year-old forehead became more obvious the closer he got. Light-blue shirt, light-blue jeans, beige linen jacket. Black hiking shoes, far too heavy for this weather, but very official.

Malin couldn’t help herself snapping as he stopped beside her, breathless. She was standing beside the car, and had just given Ellinor Getlund a severe reprimand.

‘At a crime scene you do what the police officer in charge tells you, and I told you to stay with her.’

Ellinor Getlund not backing down, asking instead: ‘When can we take her? She needs to get to hospital.’

‘When I tell you.’

‘But . . .’

‘No buts.’

To Zeke: ‘And what took you so bloody long?’

‘I ran out of petrol. As luck would have it I was only a couple of hundred metres from the Statoil garage. I haven’t run out of petrol for years. It’s this damn heat.’

‘The heat?’

‘It stops your brain working.’

‘True enough. I hope we don’t miss too much in this investigation.’

Malin told him what she knew, what she had seen in the summerhouse, then they went down there again together and now Zeke is standing beside her in the unwalled room, his thin face full of doubt.

‘We don’t know for sure if she’s been raped?’

‘No, but everything points towards that, don’t you think?’

‘Yes . . .’

‘And that it could have happened in those bushes.’

Zeke nods.

‘Or else someone hurt her somewhere else and left her here. God, it’s hot in here. Weird.’

‘I’d like you to talk to her,’ Malin says. ‘See if you can get her to say anything. I’ve got a feeling that we’re only going to be able to get her to talk here, nowhere else.’

The back of the ambulance is open.

A figure wrapped in an orange blanket sitting on a stretcher, the young paramedic close, so close, as if she will never leave her. The girl has the blanket over her head, her head still bowed. The inside of the ambulance smells of hospital and disinfectant, tubes from oxygen cylinders run along the walls, and short cords with yellow corks hang down from the roof. A cardiac support machine is fixed to the internal wall.

Have you saved many lives? Malin wonders.

You can’t save the girl in here now.

Can anyone?

Zeke climbs in first. Malin just behind him, gesturing to Ellinor Getlund to get up. They sit down on either side of the girl.

Zeke turns to face her, and asks: ‘If you feel like lifting your head and looking at me, that’s fine. If you don’t, never mind.’

The girl sits motionless.

‘What happened here last night?’

‘Can you tell us?’

Silence that lasts several minutes.

‘Did somebody attack you here last night?’

Zeke runs a hand over his glistening scalp.

‘If you don’t want to say anything, you don’t have to. But it would be good if we knew your name.’

‘My name is Josefin Davidsson,’ the girl says.

Then she falls silent again.

The ambulance heads off towards the fountain, the brake lights hesitant as the vehicle turns towards the gate onto Linnégatan.

Josefin Davidsson said nothing more. Just her name.

What happened?

What were you doing in the park?

Your clothes. Where are they?

Has someone washed you?

Who are your parents?

Where do you live?

Who was the person who made the phone call? Who saw you first? Unless . . .

Their voices ever more desperate. Full of questions in the face of her silence. The words tumble around inside their increasingly warm heads: ‘My name. Josefin Davidsson.’

‘What now?’ Zeke says as the ambulance disappears from sight.

‘Now we wait for Karin.’

‘Johannison?’

Malin can hear the derision in Zeke’s voice. Thinks: Why do you dislike her so strongly, Zeke? Because she’s beautiful? Because she’s smart? Or because she’s rich, and rich is the same as better?

‘Bali. We’re going to be staying at the Bulgari resort in Uluwatu,’ Karin Johannison says as she scrapes flakes of blood from the railing. ‘I’m taking my holiday in August, so we’ll be there for a month, it’s at its best then.’

‘Janne and Tove are there at the moment.’

‘Oh, how lovely. Where are they?’

‘Some hotel on a beach called Kuta.’

‘That’s the best beach. Terribly touristy though.’

Malin considers how suntanned Karin is even though she’s been working indoors at the National Forensics Laboratory all summer. She looks as indecently fresh and alert as she always does, her blue eyes radiating a positive shimmer, her skin glowing with care. Her dress, expensive pink fabric draped around her body, contributes to the impression of genuine class.

Karin had already fine-combed the bushes and the grass beside the summerhouse. Picked up litter that she put into small marked bags.

‘I’ll try to get fingerprints. But there could be thousands here, or none at all. Wood’s difficult.’

‘I thought you could get prints from anything,’ Zeke says.

Karin doesn’t answer.

‘It might be like you said, Malin. That he attacked her over there in the bushes, and then dragged her here and bundled her over the railings. We’ll have to see what the doctors say about her injuries.’

‘We don’t even know if she was raped. Or if the perpetrator was male.’

Zeke’s voice is confrontational.

‘Time to go back to the station,’ Malin says, wondering what’s happened to Daniel Högfeldt. He or someone else from the Correspondent ought to have been here some time ago. But maybe their contacts in the force are on holiday. And maybe the call about the girl sounded too dull over the radio.

But he’ll be here soon enough, Daniel. As surely as summer. The hottest story of the season has arrived, hotter even than the forest fires.

Girl raped in Horticultural Society Park.

Beyond the cordon a group of curious onlookers has gathered. People dressed for summer, all of them wondering the same thing as they are: What’s happened?

Zeke leaves the car; one of the uniforms can drive it back to the station. Malin fetches her bicycle and looks towards the summerhouse one last time before she and Zeke leave the park.

The sun has climbed higher in the sky and now patches of light are falling into the circular space, the sunbeams seem to wallow in what has happened, seemingly trying to focus on it with their ever-changing interplay.

This is only the start, the sunbeams seem to be saying, this summer can still get even hotter, less forgiving. Just you wait, after us comes the darkness.

‘Are you coming, Fors?’

Zeke’s voice urgent and calm at the same time.

Finally a proper case to grapple with. And it’s summer. He doesn’t have any ice hockey to deal with.

Malin knows that his son, Martin, the big star of the Linköping Hockey Club, the pride of the city, is having a break from training for three weeks. Zeke hates hockey, but is so loyal to his son that he goes to every match during the season. But at this time of year there isn’t even any ice inside the Cloetta Centre.

The footpath out of the park runs between two blocks of flats, and is lined with flowerbeds, their plants wilting and losing their colour in the heat. Out on Djurgårdsgatan a number 202 bus goes past on its way to the University Hospital.

It’s hardly six hundred metres to the police station, Malin thinks. Yet here, so close to the physical heart of the law, a girl has been attacked and raped.

All security is just a chimera.

Four girls in their early teens fly past them on their bikes. Bathing gear on their parcel-racks.

On their way to cool down. To the pool out at Glyttinge, maybe? Or Tinnis?

Chatter and commotion. Summer holidays and something lurking behind a tree in the dark.

5

We’re going swimming, swimming, swimming, you say, have you seen my armbands, Mum, have you seen my rubber ring, where’s the rubber ring? I don’t want to sink, Mum.

I hear you.

You’re above my darkness but I don’t know if you hear me, hear me calling: Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad, where are you, you have to come and you have to come and get me and who are all these people shouting about swimming, about rubber rings, about ice cream?

But I felt the drops.

They’re lingering. What do the drops smell of? They have a different smell from how water usually smells. Do they smell of iron? Animal waste?

Your feet.

I hear them trampling on me.

Above.

And I think I’m lying down, but maybe I’m the one swimming, maybe the moist darkness around me is water. It must be water, I like water.

And now you’re playing.

Where’s my ball, Mum?

Shall I catch it for you? My arms can’t. They’re stuck by my sides and I try to move them, I try, but they seem stuck in whatever it is that surrounds me.

But why are you trampling on me?

I don’t want you to trample on me.

Where am I?

Where are you, Dad?

I can swim, I can float, but I’m not getting anywhere.

I can swim. But I can’t breathe.

My room is closed.

The nursery on the other side of the small park outside the crime team’s meeting room is closed for the summer. There are no children using the swings or the red-painted slide, no three-year-old hands digging in the dry sand of the sandpit.

The heat is barren, the city in summer almost the same.

Instead there are two decorators inside the nursery school’s windows. They’re both up ladders, bare-chested, and are rhythmically rolling pink paint onto one of the walls, much faster than it looks.

Happy colours.

Happy children.

Malin looks around the meeting room. Pale-yellow, fabric-textured wallpaper, a greying whiteboard on the short wall by the door. They were issued with new chairs back in the spring. There was a manufacturing fault on the old ones, and the new ones, of curved wood with black vinyl seats, are astonishingly even more uncomfortable than the old ones, and in the heat the vinyl sticks damply to the cloth covering your buttocks. The police station’s air conditioning can’t cope with providing a tolerable temperature.

The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 10.25. The morning meeting is severely delayed today because of the girl in the Horticultural Society Park.

How hot is it now?

Thirty-five degrees outside, thirty in here?

Opposite Malin sits a suffering Sven Sjöman. The patches of sweat under the arms of his brown checked shirt are now spreading towards his gut, which has grown even larger during the spring and early summer.

Be careful, Sven.

Heart attacks are common in the heat. But you’re sensible enough to move slowly. I know that much. If you have one defining feature, it’s that you’re sensible. You’re fifty-five years old, you’ve been in the police for thirty-three of them, and you’ve taught me all I know about this job.

Almost, anyway.

But most of all you’ve taught me to believe that I’m well-suited to detective work.

You’re the most talented officer I’ve ever worked with, Malin.

Do you realise what words like that mean, Sven?

Perhaps you do, otherwise you wouldn’t say them.

Zeke next to her. Pearls of sweat under his nose and on his brow. Her own scalp feels damp, like it does after she’s been to the gym.

‘Well, we make up the sum total of the Crime Department’s investigative unit this summer,’ Sven says. ‘So it’s entirely up to the three of us to make sense of last night’s events and work out what happened to the girl who says her name is Josefin Davidsson. Something else came in this morning. A girl by the name of Theresa Eckeved, fourteen years old, has been reported missing by her parents. I’ll take responsibility as lead investigating officer for both cases.’

‘Oh dear,’ Zeke says. ‘There’s a theme developing: girls.’

First nothing happens, Malin thinks, then nothing happens, and then everything happens all at once.

‘Missing,’ Malin says. ‘A fourteen-year-old? She’s probably just run away from home.’

‘Probably,’ Sven says. ‘Theresa Eckeved’s parents have told me what’s happened. But we’ll start with Josefin Davidsson.’

‘One thing at a time,’ Zeke says with a smile, and Malin can see that he has got some energy back in his over-heated, summer-weary, hard-working grey eyes. The whole thing is a bitter paradox, the way violence and suffering provide them with work and to that extent make them happy. Should I be feeling this happiness? Malin thinks.

Gloom and happiness, she thinks.

If I mix those two feelings up, what do I get? One of the nameless sensations that you are bound to experience as a police officer at some point. One of those emotions that makes you feel guilty, that makes you doubt the nature of humanity, not so much because of what you see and hear, but because of what it does to you.

Rape.

That gets you moving.

Murder.

And suddenly you’re bursting with energy.

‘Josefin Davidsson is currently being examined by doctors up at the University Hospital. They’ll work out whether she was raped, and they’ve appointed duty psychologists to give her support, and try to get her to talk.’

‘I checked,’ Malin said. ‘There are a hundred and twenty Davidssons in Linköping alone. We’ll have to put everyone we’ve got onto calling them all if she doesn’t talk and no one gets in touch.’

‘And we don’t know who called to say she was out in the park,’ Zeke says.

‘No. That could be tricky,’ Sven says. ‘The call probably came from a pay-as-you-go mobile. We all know how it is. It could have been a passer-by who doesn’t want anything to do with the police. Or someone involved in the attack. And none of Josefin Davidsson’s family has contacted us yet,’ he goes on. ‘Not a peep. We’ll have to organise door-to-door inquiries in the flats around the park. And when the doctors and psychologists have finished, you can try to question her at the hospital.’

‘Maybe she’s older than she looks,’ Malin says. ‘Allowed to be at home on her own when her parents are away.’

‘Which leads us to Theresa Eckeved,’ Sven says. ‘Her parents have been to Paris and Theresa wanted to stay at home in their villa out in Sturefors with her boyfriend.’

Malin shudders when she hears the words ‘villa’ and ‘Sturefors’.

Sturefors.

The suburb of Linköping where she grew up.

Thousands of images come flooding back to her. How her parents used to skirt around each other instead of walking side by side. How she used to run through the rooms, in the garden, always with a feeling of not knowing where she was, that reality was something utterly different to what she was experiencing, and that every corner, bush, word, inference concealed a secret. A longing to be grown up and the vain expectation that everything would look clearer then.

Her girlhood bedroom. Posters of Duran Duran.

Nick Rhodes.

See them walking hand in hand across the bridge at midnight.

Girls on film

.

‘But when they got home yesterday Theresa was gone, and when they called her boyfriend’s parents it turned out that he’d been at the family’s place in the country the whole time, without Theresa.’

Markus.

Tove.

She may not exactly have lied at the start of their relationship, but she concealed the truth. The lengths she went to to try and find her own place for a love she thought would make me angry. She didn’t even trust me that much. Thought I’d try to make her see sense. And I did as well. Convinced myself I was protecting you, Tove, but I wasn’t: I was only trying to stop you making the same mistakes as me. Bloody hell, I was twenty when I got pregnant with you, Tove. I couldn’t bear to see you enter the same confused place as me, the same sick, dual feeling of love and of being backed into a corner. So I didn’t trust you, thinking of myself, and you hid your first love from me.

What do you call that?

Failed motherhood. Nothing more, nothing less.

‘Didn’t they speak to her on the phone while they were in Paris?’

Zeke sounds tired again, sluggish hoarseness audible in his voice.

They must be regretting their trip, Malin thinks.

‘Apparently not,’ Sven says. ‘The girl didn’t answer her mobile, and she didn’t answer the landline at home, but they didn’t think that was particularly odd.’

‘No?’

‘A bit stroppy, evidently. Often lost her mobile.’

‘And how long were they in Paris?’ Zeke asks.

‘They set off six days ago.’

‘So she could have been missing almost a week now?’

‘And the parents don’t have any idea where she could be?’

‘Not when I spoke to them.’

Sven Sjöman adjusts his shirt before going on.

‘We’ll prioritise the girl in the park, but you’d still better start by going out to Sturefors. Talk to the parents, calm them down, refer to the statistics, tell them she’s likely to turn up soon.’

Sven gives them the address.

Only a block away from the house in which Malin grew up.

The same district.

The same early 1970s dream. Pools in some gardens. Generously proportioned houses with wood and brick façades, mature fruit trees in neat, precious lawns.

She hasn’t been out there since her parents sold the house and bought the flat by the old Infection Park. They’re still in Tenerife, even though they usually come home for the summer. But, as her father explained over the phone: ‘This year we’re staying on. Your mum’s just started playing golf and is going on a course this summer. It’s cheaper to do it then than in high-season in the winter.’

‘I’ll water the plants, Dad. They’re in safe hands.’

In actual fact there were very few plants still alive in her parents’ flat now, and it was far from certain that even those would survive the summer. But what could they expect? It’s been a year since they were last home. What are they really keeping the flat on for? Suddenly Malin wants to be there, longing for the chill she always feels there. It would actually be quite pleasant right now.

‘And the media,’ Malin says. ‘What are we going to do about them? We can probably expect them to leap on the cases of Theresa and Josefin like bloodthirsty gnats.’

‘No doubt,’ Sven says. ‘But we’ll lie low. So far we don’t know that a rape has been committed, and it could be a while before they find out about the report of the missing girl, couldn’t it? Maybe we’ll get twenty-four hours’ grace. And we might actually need the help of the public, maybe with both cases. We’ll have to see how things develop. Refer any inquiries to me. I’ll take care of the jackals while Karim is away.’

‘He’s bound to come in,’ Zeke says. ‘If things really heat up.’

‘No question,’ Malin says, then her phone rings.

Her mobile is in front of her on the grey tabletop, and the signal coming from it is angry, intrusive, as if it wants to remind them that their conversation is nothing but theories, that it is time for a bit of harsh reality.

Malin looks at the number on the display.

Answers.

Listens.

‘You’ll have to take that up with Sven Sjöman. He’s looking after press inquiries over the summer.’

She passes the phone to Sven, raising her eyebrows with a sardonic smile.

‘It’s Daniel . . . Daniel Högfeldt from the Correspondent,’ she says. ‘He wants to know about the girl who was raped in the park and the missing girl from Sturefors, and if we suspect any connection.’

6

A connection?

One girl is missing.

One girl has been attacked, possibly raped, in the Horticultural Society Park. A long shot? Hardly. It’s not impossible. Time, and their work, will turn up any connections if they exist.

But for now they’re keeping an open mind, as the cliché has it. For now they’re staring out at the tarmac of Brokindsleden through the windscreen, the cycle path alongside the main road empty and the heat snakelike, scentless. The air seems to be utterly still, shimmering, low in oxygen. The wheat-fields have been flattened by the heat, as if an immense hot fist had pressed the plants back into the ground and said to them: Don’t think that your lives are possible, not this summer, this year will be a year of burning.

Zeke’s hands at the wheel of the Volvo.

Steady.

Like his son Martin’s hands on his hockey stick.

At the end of the season Martin received an offer from the Toronto Maple Leafs, but he turned it down. His girlfriend is expecting a child and wants it to be born in Linköping. And the team’s main sponsors, Cloetta and Saab, joined forces and came up with a multi-million-kronor offer to persuade Martin to stay.

‘Now the lad’s rich,’ had been Zeke’s comment. ‘And he’ll get even richer if he moves to the States.’

And it had sounded as if Zeke wanted Martin to move, as if he’d had it up to here with ice hockey and glory and praise and money.

‘Ice hockey. What a fucking useless game.’

Malin had asked him what he thought about becoming a grandfather.

‘You must be excited, and proud.’ But Zeke had just muttered in reply. She had let the matter drop, once the baby was born he’d be beaming with joy, she was sure of that. The child would stroke his shaved head and say ‘prickle, prickle,’ and Zeke would love it.

Sturefors.

They are driving in silence, now approaching the edge of the small community.

Malin closes her eyes.

If the heat is scentless out there, what does the inside of the car smell like?

Air freshener and Aramis aftershave.

What do the gardens smell like now? What did they used to smell of?

Freshly mown grass.

A little girl’s feet moving over the blades of grass, drifting forward. Alone in the garden. It smells of Dad. Mum. I hear her shouting, following me through the house, complaining, and how Dad backs down and I want him to stand up for me, contradict her, let me know that I’m good enough.

And how he stands there limply next to Mum, his mouth open as she shouts at me, how his own hesitant protests disappear back into his mouth as she stubbornly carries on.

The wind in my hair as I cycle past the houses, along the streets on my way to school. My feet beneath me, feet pounding the jogging track.

This is a competition, everything is a competition.

And one night when you thought I was asleep, when I was lying outside your door, I remember it now, only now, in this air-conditioned car, I remember what you said, you said: She must never find out. This must stay a secret.

Mum’s sharp voice. The tone of someone who has never found her place in the world.

Dad, what is it that I must never know?

The boys’ football matches in the pitch behind the red-painted school-building. The red shirts of the home team.

Bodies, warm. The floodlights on. Bankeberg SK, Ljungsbro IF, LFF, Saab. All the teams, the boys, the girls alongside, under the covers down in the cellar, what if someone comes?

Lilac hedges. Wooden fences, stained green. Families trying to be families. Children who are children. Who go swimming, and who know that they will eventually follow in their parents’ footsteps.

Sturefors.

Low blocks of flats and villas situated close to the Stångån River. Most of them built in the late sixties and seventies. Some built by the families themselves, by craftsmen planning their own homes, others bought by engineers, teachers, civil servants.

No doctors out here then.

But there must be now.

Doctors and engineers behind the tall, yellowing hedges, behind the fences, behind the yellow and white bricks, the red-painted wooden façades.

Uncut lawns. Trees that are starting to bear fruit, and by every house little flowerbeds with plants that have either withered completely or are shrieking for water. Abandoning the city for the summer is an obvious choice for most people in Sturefors. Not so much for the thousands of immigrants who live in Ekholmen, the mass housing project they passed on the way out here.

‘You can turn off here,’ Malin says. ‘It’s the next road down.’

‘So you know this place?’

‘Yes.’

Zeke takes his eyes off the road for an instant, ignoring the sign on a white brick wall warning of children playing.

The speedometer shows thirty-five, five above the speed limit.

‘How come?’

Not even my closest colleague knows this about me, Malin thinks. And he doesn’t need to know either.

I’ve no intention of saying that I grew up in a neighbouring street, that I lived here from the time I came home from Linköping maternity unit until I left home, in this well-to-do but increasingly insular Sturefors. I have no intention of talking about Stefan Ekdahl, and what we did in Mum and Dad’s bed four months to the day after my thirteenth birthday. I have no intention of explaining how everything can be fine but sad at the same time. And do you know, Zeke, I have no idea how that happens, how that can be the case. And I have even less idea of why it might happen in the first place.

Janne.

We’ve been divorced for more than ten years now, but have never managed to let go of each other. Mum and Dad have been married since prehistoric times but may well never have got close to each other.

‘I just know,’ she replies.

‘So you’re keeping secrets from me, Fors?’

‘Maybe that’s just as well,’ Malin says, as Zeke stops the car outside a white tile-clad house ringed by a low, white concrete wall.

‘Theresa Eckeved’s home. Feel free to get out, Miss.’

A pool glitters in the background. Neatly trimmed poplar-like bushes of a variety Malin can’t name surround the pool, and it looks as if there’s fresh compost in every bed.

Coffee and shop-bought cakes set out on a teak table, comfortable blue cushions behind their backs. In the ceiling of the conservatory, just beside the built-in open fireplace, a fan is whirring, bestowing a welcome coolness. A bucket of ice sits next to the coffee pot.

‘In case you’d like coffee con hielo,’ as Agneta Eckeved put it as she sat down at the table with them.

‘I’ll take mine hot,’ Zeke replied from his seat at the end of the table. ‘But thanks for the offer.’

Then Sigvard Eckeved’s words, as annoyed as they were anxious.

‘I can’t think why she’d want to deceive us.’

And in those words is an awareness that he no longer determines much in his daughter’s life, if anything at all.

The cakes smell sickly sweet in the heat, the coffee is too hot on the tongue.

Sigvard Eckeved’s voice is high, but has a deeper after-tone as he tells them what they already know: that they have been in Paris and that Theresa’s boyfriend was supposed to be here with her, but he has been at his family’s place in the country outside Valdemarsvik with his parents, that Theresa’s purse and mobile are missing, etc, etc. They let him finish, only interrupted by his wife’s short corrections and explanations; her voice considerably more worried. Do you know something? Malin wonders. Something that we ought to know?

When Sigvard Eckeved has finished, Zeke asks: ‘Do you have any pictures of Theresa? To help us, and for us to send around to other police stations if we need to?’

Agneta Eckeved gets up, walking away from them without a word.

‘She’s just run away, hasn’t she?’ Sigvard Eckeved says once his wife has disappeared inside the house. ‘She must have done? It couldn’t be anything else, could it?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin replies. ‘But she’ll turn up, you’ll see. In statistical terms, the probability of that is almost one hundred per cent.’

Then Malin thinks: If she doesn’t turn up, what will you do then with my encouraging words? But in that case my words here and now will be the least of your problems. Yet my words do more good now than harm then.

Agneta Eckeved comes back with a number of colourful packs of photographs in her hand.

She puts them on the table in front of Malin and Zeke.

‘Have a look and take whatever pictures you want.’

Everyone always says I’m a pretty girl.

But how can I believe them and trust that it’s not just something they’re saying, and anyway, I don’t care about being pretty.

Who the hell wants to be pretty?

Pretty is for other people.

I’m grown-up now.

And you spoke to me in a new way that made me blush, but it was cold in the water so no one noticed anything.

Dirt.

Is it dirty here? And where do the pictures come from? How can I see them, I don’t understand.

I’ve seen most of them before. They’re from this year, just a few of all the ones Mum takes so manically of us as a family. Stop taking pictures all the time, Mum.

Just come.

Come and get me.

I’m scared, Dad.

The beach in Majorca last summer.

Winter in St Anton, sun in a blue sky, perfect snow.

Christmas and Easter.

How can I see the pictures and hear what you’re saying even though I’m not there? And the water? What water? And why is it so sludgy, so thick, like frozen clay when it ought to be nice and warm against my body?

Give me the rubber ring, Mum!

‘She’s a very pretty girl, isn’t she?’

And then a female voice, a bit older.

Very pretty, don’t you think so, Reke? Reke? Who’s that?

I’m so tired, Dad. There’s something slippery and sticky against my skin.

Why aren’t you saying anything? I can see you at the table in the conservatory, how the sun reflected in the water of the pool throws patterns on your cheeks. But here, with me, where I am, it’s dark and cold and lonely. Damp.

I’m not supposed to be here. I realise that much.

I don’t want to be here. I want to be with you, I can see you but it’s like you don’t exist, as if I don’t exist.

Don’t I exist?

When I think about it I get scared in a way I’ve never been before. When I think about you, Dad, I feel warm.

But also afraid.

Why don’t you come?

Malin chooses a picture that shows Theresa Eckeved’s face clearly: small mouth, full lips, chubby teenage cheeks and lively, almost black eyes, medium-length dark hair.

No point asking what sort of clothes she had with her. What about how she usually dresses?

‘Jeans. And a shirt. Never skirts, not ever. She thinks they’re stupid,’ Agneta Eckeved says.

‘In the pictures she looks quite girly.’

‘Appearances can be deceptive. She’s a bit of a tomboy,’ Sigvard Eckeved says.

‘You don’t have any suspicions about where she might be? Any special friends?’ Zeke asks.

Both parents shake their heads.

‘She doesn’t have that many friends,’ Agneta Eckeved says. ‘I mean, she knows lots of people, but I wouldn’t say many of them are real friends.’

‘We’d like phone numbers for her boyfriend and any friends that you happen to have numbers for,’ Malin says. ‘And anyone else who means a lot to her. Teachers, sports coaches and so on.’

‘She’s never really liked sports,’ Sigvard Eckeved says. ‘But there’s a girl who used to come and swim here sometimes, some new friend who lives in the city. Do you remember her name, Agneta?’

‘Nathalie. But I’ve no idea what her surname might be.’

‘What about a phone number?’

‘Sorry, no. But her name is Nathalie. I’m sure about that.’

‘If you do remember, we’d like to know,’ Malin says.

‘Does Theresa have a computer?’ Zeke asks.

‘Yes. In her room. She doesn’t use it much.’

‘Can we take it with us? To check her emails and so on.’

‘Of course.’

‘Thanks,’ Zeke says. ‘That pool certainly looks very inviting,’ he says.

‘You’re welcome to have a swim,’ Sigvard Eckeved says.

‘We have to work.’

‘It does look nice,’ Malin says. ‘Cool.’

Stop the small talk.

Find me instead.

I’m missing.

I realise that now. That must be it. Otherwise you would have come, Dad. Wouldn’t you?

Do you think I’m here of my own free will?

You believed he was my boyfriend. How gullible can you be?

But I want to tell you how it is.

I’m yelling, but you still can’t hear me.

And the ringing, from the mobiles up there.

Stop trampling on me. Stop it.

‘Yes, Fors here.’

Malin is standing on the steps of the Eckeveds’ well-kept seventies’ dream. She managed to fish the phone out of her bag and answer on the third ring. Zeke is beside her, with Theresa’s Toshiba laptop under his arm.

‘Sjöman here. You can go to the hospital, ward ten. The doctors have finished examining her. And she’s feeling a bit better, she’s even managed to tell them who she is.’

‘Josefin Davidsson?’

The heat like a glowing net around her brain.

‘Who else, Fors, who else?’

‘What have we got?’

‘She’s fifteen years old, lives with her parents in Lambohov.’

As she clicks to end the call Malin looks through the green-tinted glass beside the front door, sees Sigvard Eckeved’s silhouette pacing anxiously back and forth in the hall.

7

Sigvard Eckeved, over the years

You came to us late, Theresa.

I was forty-two, your mum forty-one.

We did all the tests and the doctors said that there might be something wrong with you, but out you came to us one late February day, like a perfectly formed reminder of all that was good in the world.

For me you are smell, feeling, sound, breathing in our big bed at night.

You creep in tight and what am I to you? The same as you are to me. We are each other, Theresa.

They say that having children is an act of handing over, showing you a way out into life. Giving you to the world, and the world to you.

I don’t believe that for a moment.

You’re mine.

I am you, Theresa.

Together we are the world.

Children provide a step up to the emotional realisation that we human beings are one. A child is the most important bearer of that myth.

One’s own child, the person I am.

You’re two years old, running across the parquet floor of the living room, language is developing, you flail and point, consuming the world, we consume it together. Even if I sometimes tell you off, you come to me, searching in me for the world.

You’re four and a half and you hit out at me in anger.

Then you run through the years, further from me, but closer each time because you are leaving an impression within me.

You are twelve.

With love I creep into your room at night, stroking your cheek with my hand, breathing in the smell of your hair.

We’re on the side of the good guys, I think then.

You, I, your mum, our dreams and all the life we live together as one and the same.

The world is created through you.

You are fourteen.

Opinionated, stubborn, provocative, angry, but the embodiment of friendliness. You are the most beautiful person the world has ever seen.

I understand you, Theresa. Don’t think I don’t. I’m not stupid. I just don’t want to move too fast.

We are the same feeling, you and I.

The feeling of unending love.

8

The dark-skinned cleaner sweeps his mop back and forth over the speckled yellow linoleum floor, shadows become sunlight, which becomes shadow as his never still body moves across the sunlit window at the far end of the corridor of the hospital ward.

When the sun shines on it, parts of the floor seem to lift. A faint smell of disinfectant and sweat, the sweat emitted slowly by bodies at rest.

Ward ten.

A general ward. The seventh floor of the high-rise hospital building. Doors to some rooms stand open, pale pictures on greying, yellow-painted walls. Through the windows of the rooms Malin can see the city, sunburned and still, panting mutely, its enforced desolation.

Patients resting on their beds. Some wearing green or urine-yellow hospital gowns, others their own clothes. It isn’t hot inside the hospital, the rumbling ventilation units are obviously adequate, yet it still feels as though listlessness reigns supreme here as well, as though the sick were getting sicker, as though those who have to work through the summer can’t quite manage their allotted tasks.

A nurse materialises in a doorway.

Flowing red hair, freckles covering more than half her round face.

She looks at Malin and Zeke with big green eyes.

‘You’re from the police,’ she says. ‘It’s good that you got here so soon.’

Malin and Zeke stop in front of the nurse. Is it so obvious? Malin thinks, and says: ‘And the girl, Josefin Davidsson. Where can we find her?’

‘Room eleven. She’s in there with her parents. But first you need to talk to Doctor Sjögripe. If you go in here, she’ll be with you shortly.’

The red-haired nurse indicates the room she’s just come out of.

‘The doctor will be here in five minutes.’

The clock sticking out from the wall in the corridor says 12.25.

They should have got lunch on the way. Malin’s stomach rumbles with a gentle feeling of nausea.

They close the door behind them. Sit on wooden chairs in front of a desk, its grey laminate top covered with advertising folders and leaflets, yellow files. A window beside them looks onto a dark ventilation shaft. There are several anonymous files on the bookcase against the wall behind the desk.

Warmer in here.

Rumbling from the dusty, heart-shaped ventilation grille in the ceiling.

Five minutes, ten.

They sit in silence next to each other. Want to save their words, pull them out newly washed and clean later. For now, this silence is all that is needed. And what would they say?

What do you think about this?

We’ll have to see.

Has she been raped, or did the blood come from somewhere else? And the smell of bleach? The whiteness? The cleansed wounds?

The door opens and Doctor Sjögripe comes in, wearing a white coat.

She’s maybe fifty-five years old, cropped grey hair clinging to her head, making her cheeks, nose and mouth look sharper than they really are.

A pair of reading glasses with transparent plastic frames hangs around her neck. The cheap sort, for a pair of twinkling eyes. Intelligent, aware, self-confident, like only the eyes of someone who has had everything from the very start can be.

Both Malin and Zeke practically leap out of their chairs. Anything else was unthinkable.

Sjögripe.

The most blue-blooded family in the whole of Östergötland. The family estate at Sjölanda outside Kisa is a significant employer, one of the largest and most profitable agricultural businesses in the country.

‘Louise Sjögripe.’

Her handshake is firm, but not hard, feminine but with a certain pressure.

Doctor Sjögripe lets them sit down before taking her own seat behind the desk.

Malin has no idea what position Louise Sjögripe occupies in the family, but can’t help wondering. Doesn’t want to wonder. Gossip, gossip, think about why we’re here instead.

‘Considering the circumstances, Josefin Davidsson is doing fairly well now,’ Louise Sjögripe says. The way she says the words makes her voice sound hoarse.

‘What can you tell us? I’m assuming you conducted the examination?’

Zeke sounds slightly irritated, but not so as most people would notice.

Louise Sjögripe smiles.

‘Yes, I examined her and documented her injuries. And I’ll tell you what I think.’

‘Thank you, we’d be grateful, I mean pleased, if you could,’ Malin says, trying to look the doctor/aristocrat in the eyes, but the self-awareness they exude makes her look towards the window instead.

‘In all likelihood she has been abused. She couldn’t have caused the wounds on her arms and legs herself, and they weren’t caused in self-defence. Those don’t usually look, how can I put it, quite so regular. It’s as if someone has inflicted the injuries with a sharp object and then washed and cleaned them carefully.’

‘What sort of object?’ Malin wonders.

‘Impossible to say. A knife? Maybe, maybe not.’

‘And the bleeding from the vagina?’

‘Her hymen was broken by penetration, and the blood vessels on the inside of the vagina were damaged. Hence the bleeding. But that’s normal with a first penetration, so it’s likely that a relatively soft object was used, with a degree of caution.’

Louise Sjögripe takes a deep breath, not because what she has just said seems to trouble her, but to emphasise what she’s about to say.

‘There are no traces of sperm inside her. But the perpetrator doesn’t seem to have used a condom, because I found no sign of any lubricant. What I did find, however, were some very small, almost microscopic traces of something resembling blue plastic, as if Josefin Davidsson was penetrated by an object of some sort rather than a male member.’

‘And . . .’

Zeke tries to ask a question, but Doctor Sjögripe waves her hand in front of her face dismissively.

‘I’ve already sent the traces to National Forensics. I know the routine. I’ve also taken blood samples from the blood on her thighs. Nothing apart from her own.

‘And you don’t have to worry. I haven’t said anything about the girl’s injuries to her parents. They’re the details of a crime, so I’ll let you deal with that. I just discuss the medical situation with them.’

Malin and Zeke look at each other.

‘So she couldn’t have caused the injuries herself?’ Malin asks.

‘No. That would be practically impossible. The pain would be too great. The penetration? Probably not.’

‘And the blood tests?’ Malin wonders. ‘Was there anything unusual about them? Could she have been drugged?’

‘Our initial analysis didn’t show anything. But I’ve sent samples to the central lab for a more detailed examination, and that’s when we’ll find out if she had any foreign substances in her blood. But a lot of substances disappear quickly.’

‘What about the fact that she looked like she’d been scrubbed clean? She smelled of bleach.’

‘Someone’s washed her very carefully, you’re right. As if they wanted to make sure she was completely clean. There were no strands of hair or anything that could be linked in any way to the perpetrator by DNA testing, nothing on her entire body.’

‘Is it possible to isolate traces of any disinfectant that might have been used on her body?’

‘Probably. I took epidermal samples from her back and thighs. Those have gone off to the National Lab as well.’

‘So how is she now? In your opinion? Is she talking? At the crime scene she hardly said a word.’

‘She’s talking. Seems OK. And she genuinely doesn’t seem to remember anything about what happened.’

‘She doesn’t remember?’

‘No. Mental blocks aren’t unusual after a traumatic experience. And it’s probably just as well. Rape is one of the worst curses of our times. This spreading absence of norms. The lack of cultural respect for another person’s body, usually female. I mean, here in Linköping alone we’ve had two gang rapes in three years.’

You sound like you’re reciting an article, Malin thinks, and asks: ‘When did she start talking?’

‘While I was examining her. It hurt and she said ouch and then the words were somehow back. Until then she had been silent. She said her name and looked at the clock in the room. Then she wondered what she was doing in hospital and said that her parents were probably worrying.’

‘Is there any way of getting her to remember what happened?’

‘That’s not my area, Inspector Fors. I’m a doctor, not a psychologist. A specially trained psychologist spoke to her about an hour ago, but Josefin couldn’t remember anything. She’s with her parents in room eleven. You can go and see her now. I think she can cope with a few questions.’

Doctor Sjögripe opens a file, puts on the glasses hanging around her neck, and starts to read.

Room eleven is the embodiment of whiteness, lit by clear, warm light. Motes of dust drift through the air, dancing gently back and forth in the single room.

Mr and Mrs Davidsson are sitting on the edge of the bed on either side of Josefin, who is wearing a red and white flowered, knee-length summer dress with white bandages on her wounds, her skin almost as white as the bandages.

It could have been me sitting in their place, Malin thinks.

The three of them smile towards her and Zeke as they enter the room after knocking first. Josefin’s cheerful voice a moment before: ‘Come in!’

‘Malin Fors, Detective Inspector.’

‘Zacharias Martinsson, the same.’

The parents stand up. Introduce themselves.

Birgitta. Ulf. Josefin remains seated, smiling at them as though the previous night’s events hadn’t happened.

I’ve been like you, Malin thinks. Gone out on a warm summer’s evening, all alone. But nothing bad ever happened to me.

Fifteen.

Only one year older than Tove.

It could have been you on the bed, Tove. Me and Janne, your dad, beside you, distraught, me wondering what monster had done this and how I could get hold of him. Or her. Or them.

‘We’re looking into what happened to Josefin,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve got a number of questions that we’d like to ask.’

Nodding parents.

Then Ulf Davidsson speaks: ‘Well, we went to bed last night, me and Birgitta, without realising that Josefin hadn’t come home, and then this morning we assumed she was asleep in her room, and we didn’t want to wake her, and neither of us gave a thought to the fact that her bike wasn’t outside . . .’

‘I can’t remember anything,’ Josefin interrupts. ‘The last thing I remember is setting off from home on my bike. I was going to the cinema on my own. The late showing of X-Men 3.’

Her father: ‘Yes, we live in Lambohov. She usually cycles into town.’

Malin and Zeke look at each other.

At the parents.

Knowing which of them will do what.

‘Could I have a word with the two of you in the corridor while my colleague talks to your daughter?’ Zeke asks.

The parents hesitate.

‘Would that be OK?’ Malin asks. ‘We need to talk to you separately. Do you mind if I talk to you, Josefin?’

‘It’s fine,’ Birgitta Davidsson says. ‘Come on, Ulf,’ she says, heading towards the door after a long glance at her daughter.

Malin sinks onto the bed. Josefin makes room for her, although there is no need. The same girl who was sitting on the bench that morning, on the swing, but somehow not the same.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘I’m OK. The wounds hurt a bit. The doctor gave me some pills, so I can’t really feel it.’

‘And you don’t remember anything?’

‘No, nothing. Apart from leaving home on my bike.’

No bicycle in the Horticultural Society Park, Malin thinks. Where’s the bike got to?

‘Were you going to meet anyone?’

‘No. I remember that, because that was before I set off.’

‘Did you get to the cinema?’

Josefin shakes her head. ‘I don’t know. All that is sort of gone, until I woke up here, when the doctor was starting to examine me. That’s when I realised I was in hospital.’

She doesn’t remember me, Malin thinks. Or the park this morning.

‘Can you try to remember? For my sake?’

The girl closes her eyes.

Frowns.

Then she bursts out laughing.

Opens her eyes, saying: ‘It’s like a blank piece of paper! I can sort of see that someone must have hit me, in theory, but it’s like a big white blank, and that doesn’t feel bad at all.’

She doesn’t want to remember.

Can’t.

An organism protecting itself. Hiding away the images, voices, sounds in a distant corner of its consciousness, inaccessible to what we think of as thought.

But the memories take root there, chafe, hurt, and send out tiny, unnoticed little shockwaves through the body, causing pain, stiffness, doubt and anxiety.

‘You don’t remember how you got these wounds? Or anyone washing you?’

‘No.’

‘And your bicycle, where did you leave it?’

‘No idea.’

‘What make is it?’

‘A red Crescent, three gears.’

‘You haven’t been in touch with anyone over the internet? Anyone who seemed odd?’

‘I don’t do that sort of thing. MySpace? Chat rooms? Really dull.’

Banging on the wall from the corridor. Malin has been expecting it.

Zeke’s words just a moment before: ‘Your daughter has been attacked and a blunt instrument has been inserted into her vagina. Probably with force.’

And Ulf Davidsson kicks the wall, clenches his fists, mutters something Zeke doesn’t understand. Birgitta Davidsson is silent beside her husband, staring into the door.

Then her words.

‘But she doesn’t remember, so it’s as if it didn’t happen, isn’t it? Like it doesn’t exist?’

Ulf Davidsson collects himself, stands still beside his wife, putting his arm around her shoulders.

‘No,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t exist.’

The family on the bed in front of them.

Questions recently asked still hanging in the air. The answers floating around them with the dust particles.

‘Everyone else is away for the summer, but we’re staying at home this year.’

‘Telephone numbers of any friends we ought to talk to?’

‘No, no special friends, really.’

‘Yes, we’re staying in the city, saving up for the winter, we’re going to Thailand.’

‘They don’t want to hear about . . .’

‘Any boyfriend?’

‘No.’

‘Anyone else who could have had something to do with this?’

‘Not that we can think of.’

‘No idea.’

‘No one in your closest circle of acquaintances? Family?’

‘No,’ Ulf Davidsson says. ‘Our families don’t live around here. And none of them would do anything like this.’

Two girls.

Theresa. Josefin.

And neither of them really seems to exist. They’re like shadows of dust in the summer city, invisible and nameless, almost grown-ups, insubstantial as the smoke from the forest fires.

Then a knock on the door.

It opens before anyone has time to say ‘come in’.

A sweeping mop. A huge black man in overalls that are too small for him.

‘Have to clean,’ he says before they can object.

In the corridor, on the way towards the lifts, they meet a middle-aged blonde woman wearing an orange skirt that Malin guesses is from Gudrun Sjödén.

Malin’s finger on the lift button.

‘That must be the psychologist,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you think she’ll get anything?’

‘No chance,’ Malin says, thinking that if they’re going to stand the slightest chance of solving this, Josefin Davidsson will have to remember, or else a witness will have to have seen something, or else Karin Johannison and her colleagues at the National Forensics Lab will have to come up with something really good.

Hypnosis, Malin thinks.

Anyone can remember anything under hypnosis, can’t they?

9

It’s half past one.

Indoctrinated children all around Malin.

The dry, cool air finds its way down her throat and out into her lungs, shocking her body, triggering its defence mechanisms even though the experience is pleasant. Harsh colours making her eyes itch: yellow, blue, green. A clown, pictures, numbers, and an artificial smell of frying.

But it’s cool in here.

And I’m hungry.

The tinted windows make the crashing daylight outside bearable, and I don’t have to wear those damn sunglasses, they impose a filter on reality that I hate. But you have to wear sunglasses out there. The light today is harsh, like having an interrogation lamp aimed right into your eyes, the beams like freshly honed knives right into your soul.

McDonald’s by the Braskens bridge, on the side of the river facing Johannelund. Malin doesn’t usually let the great Satan satisfy her hunger, but today, after their visit to the hospital, she and Zeke make an exception.

Kids with Happy Meals.

The walk from the hospital entrance to the car, parked in the sun on the wide-open car park, made them doubt it was actually possible to be outside at all in heat like this. Then the car, it must have been sixty degrees in its stuffy interior, hot as a sauna, with a protesting engine, a smell of hot oil and the air from the vents first hot, then cold, cold, cold.

The restaurant half full of families with children. Overweight immigrant girls behind the counter jostling each other, giggling and directing quick glances towards them.

‘Isn’t there any way of tracing the person who made the call about Josefin?’

Zeke aims the question into thin air.

‘Not according to Forensics. Pay-as-you-go. We’ll have to leave it as a question mark and move on. And hope whoever it was gets in touch again.’

Malin takes another bite of her Filet-O-Fish.

‘And the bicycle?’

‘Could have been stolen. Or it’s just somewhere else. She could well have been attacked in a completely different location, and moved to the Horticultural Society Park. Impossible to know until she remembers. We’ll have to get everyone to keep an eye out for the bike.’

Zeke nods.

‘Well, we can start by calling Theresa Eckeved’s boyfriend,’ Malin says once she’s taken another bite of greasy American fish.

‘You or me?’

‘I’ll call. You carry on eating.’

‘Thanks. Damn, this crap tastes really good when you’re hungry. Martin would go mad if he saw me eating this shit.’

‘Well, he can’t see you,’ Malin says, pulling the piece of paper with Theresa Eckeved’s boyfriend’s phone number from her pocket.

He answers on the fourth ring.

‘Peter.’

‘Is that Peter Sköld?’

A gravelly teenage voice, sullen, sarcastic.

‘Yes, who else? To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only person with this number.’

To the best of my knowledge?

Do teenagers really talk like that?

But maybe Tove would use that sort of phrase. A bit old-fashioned, affected.

‘My name is Malin Fors. I’m a Detective Inspector with Linköping Police. I’ve got a few questions about your girlfriend, Theresa. Have you got time to answer them?’

Silence on the line, as if Peter Sköld is working out if he can avoid being questioned.

‘Can you call back later?’

‘I’d rather not.’

Another silence.

‘What about Theresa? Her parents called and asked if she was here.’

A hint of anxiety in his voice.

‘They reported her missing to us, and she told her parents she was going to be with you. But presumably you already know that?’

‘I’ve been out in the country for a few weeks. We were going to meet up when I got back.’

‘But she is your girlfriend?’

‘Of course.’

The answer comes too quickly. Next question, pile on a bit of pressure, Malin.

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Before I left town. We had coffee in the shopping centre in Ekholmen.’

‘She’s very pretty, Theresa. How did you meet?’

‘Sorry?’

‘How did you meet?’

‘She, I mean, we . . .’

Peter Sköld falls silent again.

‘. . . met at a dance organised by both our schools.’

‘What school do you go to?’

‘Ekholmen.’

‘What year?’

‘Starting year nine soon. I’m fifteen.’

‘And where was the dance?’

‘Ekholmen. In our school hall. What is this? An interrogation?’

‘Not yet,’ Malin says.

You’re lying, she thinks. But why?

‘So she really is your girlfriend, then?’

‘I said so, didn’t I?’

‘And Nathalie? Do you know her?’

‘You mean Nathalie Falck?’

‘I mean Theresa’s friend Nathalie.’

‘Falck. I know her. She’s in the same year as me, in the other class. We’re not exactly close friends, but I know her.’

‘And she and Theresa are good friends?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Have you got her number?’

‘Hang on.’

A bleeping sound on the line.

‘It’s 070 315 20 23. Look, I’m supposed to be going fishing with my dad, is this going to take much longer?’

Memorise the number.

Then: ‘Why do you think she told her parents that she was going to be with you?’

‘How the hell should I know?’

The father’s voice on the phone now.

Impatient. Tired.

‘So she’s disappeared. I see. Well, the parents did sound worried. It’s damn near impossible to keep control of kids these days. There was never any question of them spending the holidays together. We’re out in the country. We like spending time together, just the family.’

Are they really going out with each other?

Yes, he says they are. ‘But they never stay the night with each other and so on, that’s what kids their age do, isn’t it? But yes, they certainly spend time together, at least Peter often says so, but you know how it is, I don’t really have the time or inclination to poke about in their private lives, so what do I know? She’s been around at ours once, I think, so I can’t really say if they’re together or not.’

Poke about, Malin thinks. Do it. Poke about as much as you can.

Otherwise they might go missing.

And who knows if they’ll come back?

Secret teenage lives.

My own.

Tove’s.

‘Good luck with the fishing,’ Malin concludes.

‘Fishing? I never go fishing, I always buy mine from the fishmonger in town.’

Noisy hamburger kids all around Malin as she calls the number she memorised a short while ago.

‘Can we come and talk to you?’

‘Sure, but I have to work.’

Nathalie Falck. Studied nonchalance, an alert tone to her voice. Self-confident. Answered on the second ring.

What is that voice hiding? What secret?

Sven Sjöman’s words.

An investigation consists of a mass of voices. Learn to listen to them, and you’ll find the truth.

That’s what you said, isn’t it, Sven? Something like that, anyway.

Peter Sköld’s voice. A liar’s voice? Malin wonders.

‘Nathalie, do you know Theresa Eckeved? Her parents have reported her missing.’

‘Yes, I know Theresa. So she’s missing? She’s probably just gone off somewhere for a while. She likes being by herself. And it’s not that damn easy to be left alone, is it?’

‘Where are you?’

‘At work, in the Old Cemetery.’

Zeke takes the key out of the Volvo and Malin can feel the fish-burger in her stomach, fermenting and trying to send sour gas back up, but she holds it down, would really rather forget that they ate lunch at the great Satan.

They get out of the car.

The wall of the Old Cemetery could do with painting, peeling grey strips are hanging down towards the tarmac of the car park. Opposite there are blocks of red-brick housing built in the late eighties. The buildings are quiet, almost constricted and uncomfortable in the heat. A balcony door on the first floor stands open, and when Malin listens carefully she can hear the stereo inside., Tomas Ledin singing stupidly about love and sex, but even though she doesn’t usually like it she likes it now, in this oppressive heat, because the music shows that there is still life in the city, and that an invisible hydrogen bomb hasn’t wiped out everything except evil.

Behind the wall grow tall maples, their foliage still green, but with a pale, dry nuance. Headstones in rows beyond them. Malin can’t see them, just knows they’re there.

The graves are old, just as the name suggests.

The cemetery shed is some hundred metres away, behind the memorial grove where Malin sometimes comes.

Malin and Zeke are wearing their sunglasses, walking along one of the cemetery’s raked paths, towards the figure up by the memorial grove that must be Nathalie Falck. She’s short and muscular, a white vest stretched across her ample, recently developed teenage chest, as she leans on a rake. Plump teenage cheeks, a ring in her nose and short, spiked black hair.

They introduce themselves and Zeke takes off his sunglasses, to build up a rapport, or at least to try to.

‘Good summer job. Must have been hard to get?’

‘Easy. And hot. No one wants to spend all summer pulling out weeds in the bloody cemetery. But I need the money.’

Nathalie Falck kicks her Doc Marten boots in the grass as she says the word money.

Then they ask about Theresa Eckeved.

‘So you don’t have any idea where she might have gone?’

‘No idea.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘About a week ago.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Had an ice cream on Trädgårdstorget.’

‘Did she seem different? Did you notice anything odd, anything unusual?’

‘No, not that I can think of.’

Nathalie Falck is making an effort to speak in a deep voice.

Sweat on her forehead. Down Malin’s back.

‘Are you worried?’ Malin asks.

‘No. Why should I be?’

‘She’s missing.’

‘She can look after herself.’

No anxiety in her voice, but her eyes? What are they saying?

‘I’m just going to have a fag,’ Nathalie says.

‘A bit of smoke doesn’t bother us,’ Zeke says. ‘And I’ve always thought the eighteen-year age-limit is silly.’

The packet of cigarettes emerges from her camouflage shorts.

A gesture in their direction: do you want one?

Hand gestures turning down the offer. Instead Malin asks: ‘Are you good friends?’

‘No. I wouldn’t say that.’

‘So did you meet at the dance? Like Peter and Theresa?’

‘What dance?’

‘One of the joint ones organised by Ekholmen school and Sturefors.’

‘There’ve never been any dances like that. Wherever did you get that idea?’

Malin and Zeke look at each other.

‘So how did you meet?’ Zeke asks.

‘In town. I don’t remember exactly where or when.’

In town.

Of course. Hundreds of youngsters drifting about in packs on Friday and Saturday evenings. Drifting, flirting, fighting, drinking.

On the third stroke it will be 10.00 p.m. precisely. Do you know where your child is?

No.

No idea.

‘So you don’t remember?’ Zeke says. ‘Was it long ago?’

‘Maybe a year or so ago. But I like her. We can talk about stuff.’

‘Like what?’

‘Most things.’

‘And you and Peter are in parallel classes at Ekholmen school?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re friends?’

‘Sort of. We talk at breaks. Have coffee sometimes.’

‘Do you know if Theresa had any other friends? Someone she might have gone to visit?’

Nathalie Falck takes a drag on her cigarette. Says: ‘Nope. But what do I know? Everyone has secrets, don’t they?’

‘She’s hiding something,’ Zeke says as he starts the car. ‘It’s obvious.’

The car hot as a blast furnace again.

‘So far everyone seems to be hiding something.’

‘A tough girl, that Nathalie. More like a bloke.’

‘Not particularly feminine, I’ll give you that.’

‘And Peter Sköld is lying through his teeth.’

‘Let’s get Theresa’s computer to Forensics before we do anything else,’ Zeke says. ‘There could be any amount of information on there. Emails. Websites she’s visited.’

‘And Josefin Davidsson?’

‘They should have finished the door-to-door now,’ Zeke says, putting his foot on the accelerator.

10

‘The door-to-door in the area around the park hasn’t turned up anything,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘No one saw anything, no one heard anything. The few people who were home, that is. As we know only too well, the city’s empty in July. And I’m afraid no witnesses have come forward, and our caller hasn’t been in touch again, so we can’t do much more except wait for Karin Johannison’s report and the results of the more detailed tests, and see if the bicycle turns up somewhere.’

The clock on the wall of the staffroom in the police station, just inside the detectives’ open-plan office, says five past five, the red second-hand moving in rheumatic slow motion up towards the top, and the whole day seems flat and tired of itself.

Seeing as there are only the three of them, they’re having their meeting in the staffroom.

It’s been a long day, Malin thinks as she watches Sven drink his coffee in deep black gulps. His mobile is switched off beside him, the message to reception abundantly clear: no more calls from the media. That was the first thing he said to Malin and Zeke when they got back to the station.

‘They’re completely mad. Since Högfeldt wrote that first piece they’ve been calling like crazy. I’ve spoken to Aftonbladet, DN, Expressen, Svenska Dagbladet and I don’t know how many others. Both local television news teams have been here, wanting an interview.’

‘Summer drought,’ Zeke says. ‘They can get a lot of mileage from a violent rape and a disappearance at the same time. Throw in the forest fires and their summer is saved.’

‘Did you mention the bicycle?’

‘Yes, I told the Correspondent that we’re looking for a red, three-gear Crescent. They’re publishing the details.’

‘When did Karin say the tests would be finished?’ Malin asks.

‘Tomorrow at the earliest. At least that’s what she said when I called a little while ago. No fingerprints on the wood in the summerhouse.’

‘Christ, she’s taking her time,’ Zeke says.

‘She’s usually always so quick,’ Malin says.

‘Karin knows how to do her job. We know that,’ Sven says. ‘So, what have you two managed to come up with about Theresa Eckeved?’

‘No one seems to have any ideas about where she could be,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve spoken to her supposed boyfriend and the only friend we’ve managed to get hold of, and they don’t know anything either.’

‘Supposed boyfriend?’ Sven says.

‘Yes, we can’t be too sure of that,’ Malin says. ‘These youngsters are hiding something from us. And the boyfriend’s lying.’

‘So how do you plan to find out what they’re hiding? And why he’s lying?’

Sven is suddenly authoritative, as if he wants to know the answers now, and not hear a plan for the investigation.

‘We’re working on it,’ Zeke says. ‘This heat isn’t helping.’

‘The heat’s the same for everyone.’

Then Sven softens slightly.

‘Well, so far it’s nothing but an ordinary missing person report.’

‘But she could have been missing for a week now. We really have to find more people who know Theresa and talk to them. And bring in the boyfriend, Peter Sköld, for questioning,’ Malin says. ‘He’s at his parents’ place in the country, near Valdemarsvik. We’ll have to get his father to bring him in.

‘And we’ve asked for a list of calls made from Theresa’s mobile. She hasn’t taken any money out of her bank account since the day her parents set off for Paris; they’ve already checked.’

‘Did she have a computer?’

‘Forensics have got it.’

‘Good. Kids spend half their lives online these days.’

Not Tove, Malin thinks. Not so far as I know.

‘And the attack and rape of Josefin Davidsson?’ Sven says. ‘What do you make of that? That has to be our main priority at the moment.’

‘We’re going to check if any known sexual offenders in the area have been released from prison or any care facility recently, they could have become active again,’ Zeke says. ‘We’ll have to look at old cases as well, see if there are any similarities.’

‘Good. What about gang rape, is that a possibility? Even if nothing at the crime scene suggests that?’

‘We don’t even know if she was attacked in the Horticultural Society Park at all,’ Zeke says. ‘As far as we know, she could have been attacked somewhere else entirely and just dumped there, couldn’t she?’

‘True,’ Sven says. ‘I forgot to say that the lab prioritised their detailed analysis of Josefin Davidsson’s blood test. Completely normal. No sign that she’d been drugged. But there are a number of substances that disappear from the blood in a matter of hours. And the skin samples didn’t give any clear results, apart from standard bleach and washing powder. The washing powder is probably from her clothes, and the bleach was used to clean her, so presumably the perpetrator was trying to erase any possible evidence. Karin’s examining the microscopic blue fragments that Doctor Sjögripe found inside Josefin Davidsson.

‘So, gang rape, any thoughts?’

Malin knows what Sven is aiming at with all his inferences and questions.

But he doesn’t want to say anything, wants them to come up with it, because however you put it, it’s going to sound racist.

In the end Zeke says it: ‘We’ll have to talk to Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami.’

Shakbari and Karami.

Guilty of having sex all night long with a hopelessly drunk girl. But they weren’t convicted of anything, and were released after their trial back in June.

‘She agreed to it.’

‘She wanted to, for fuck’s sake.’

On the kitchen table of a flat in Berga?

‘For fuck’s sake, she was up for it. She’s a slut.’

Impossible to prove the opposite. And when Sven takes another mouthful of his coffee Malin considers official truths, and unofficial ones. How the entire police force and media know that practically all gang rapes are committed by two or more young men from immigrant backgrounds, but no one writes or says anything stating that truth outright.

Non-truths.

Politically uncomfortable.

And then the problem isn’t there any more.

And if it isn’t there, it can’t be discussed.

Which leaves a problem that doesn’t exist and which therefore can never be solved.

And then there are girls like Josefin and Lovisa Hjelmstedt. That was her name, Shakbari and Karami’s victim.

Girls like Theresa Eckeved.

Theresa’s probably just gone off by herself somewhere.

Gone away.

Just like that.

When Malin sits down at her desk after the meeting her mobile rings.

Where is it?

There, in her bag.

‘Hi, Mum!’

‘Tove!’

Tove.

Malin can see her in front of her, the excitement in her blue eyes, her brown hair lifted by the breeze from the sea.

Are you both OK? she thinks.

I miss you even more now I hear your voice.

But at the same time, it’s good that you’re not in the city.

It must be past midnight. What are you doing up so late? You ought to be in bed.

But Malin holds back. Wants to show her trust.

‘How’s everything there, then?’

‘We went on a boat-trip today. To a little beach.’

‘Was it good?’

‘Yes, although the trip back was a bit boring, but I had a book with me. We’ve just been out to get some food.’

‘Is the food good?’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Loads of things cooked on skewers?’

It’s as if the distance is making our conversation more superficial than our conversations usually are, Malin thinks. How the words can be just as trivial across the kitchen table in the morning, but they gain tone, context and meaning from the fact that she and Tove are both there. As if all the intuitive contact disappears somewhere on the way between all the transmitters, cables and satellites.

‘Which book are you reading?’

‘Several. But I didn’t like Madame Bovary. It’s really old-fashioned.’

The sound of a xylophone in the background, a band playing in the hotel dining room?

‘Is that some sort of orchestra I can hear?’

‘They’re playing in the dining room. Is it hot at home?’

‘Boiling, Tove.’

‘It’s not too bad here. Do you want to talk to Dad?’

‘Why not.’

‘Malin?’

Janne’s voice.

‘Yes. So how are you both?’

‘Fine. But it’s hot. How are things at home?’

‘Hot, unbelievably hot. I’ve never known anything like it.’

‘You should be here with us. It’s nice here.’

Bali.

Be there, Malin thinks, just disappear from the heat here and those unfortunate girls?

The way he disappeared to Bosnia, to Rwanda, to Somalia, anywhere that didn’t involve the impossibility of their love. She has heard his voice a thousand times over crackling phone lines and felt her stomach clench and fill with a hot, black, anxious lump.

Sarajevo. Kigali. Mogadishu.

Janne’s voice on those crackling lines, a message of what could have been, a greeting from a life that never was.

The same thing now.

‘I read about the forest fires on the Correspondent’s website,’ Janne says. ‘They could do with me at home right now.’

And she gets angry. Thinks: I could do with you now. But you, we, never realised it. You always gave in to your damn restlessness. Will you ever grow up enough to put your foot down and say that this is my place on the earth? It doesn’t automatically follow that it’s grown-up to build latrines in a refugee camp or drive a truckload of flour along mined roads. Being grown-up can mean staying put.

The anger dissipates as rapidly as it blew up.

‘The others can cope, Janne.’

‘But it said that one fireman has been seriously injured.’

‘I miss you both,’ Malin says. ‘Give Tove a kiss from me. It’s time she was in bed.’

The Correspondent’s website.

The computer illuminates the bedroom, which would be completely dark without the flickering light from the screen.

The blinds closed tight, their jaws clenching to keep out the evening light.

Forest fires holding the area in their grip. One fireman injured when he tripped over on burning moss. Burns to his face and hands, that must be the one Janne had read about. The pictures in the paper are dramatic, with firemen like little clay figures in front of a huge wall of flame that is ready to set fire to them, burn them.

Daniel Högfeldt hasn’t called her again, but he called Sven five times during the day.

He links the cases in one article. And writes about them in separate pieces as well.

Summer Linköping is shaken after a violent rape in the Horticultural Society Park and the disappearance of . . .

Linköping shaken?

Sleepy, more like. Drowsy with heatstroke.

The articles are short on detail. They’re leaving things open for the time being.

Daniel and the media make their own evaluations. For them the cases are one and the same, Theresa’s disappearance no ordinary disappearance, the connection is good for them, even if Sven doesn’t want anyone to link the cases together and thus help conjure up an evil monster for summer in Linköping.

She’s just seen him on the local news. His eyes flicking to and fro, showing an uncertainty that Malin has never seen before, as if the camera were devouring him. ‘At this point we can’t say for certain . . . we are continuing to investigate . . . no connection . . .’

Karim Akbar had called in from holiday. Wondered if he ought to come in, look after the hyenas, as he put it to Sven.

Sven’s reply: ‘Take your son fishing, Karim. Write your book.’

Then she reads an article about the heatwave. About a stream of deaths among elderly inhabitants in sheltered accommodation, how home helps have found several elderly clients dead from heart attacks; how they can’t cope with the heat or the dry atmosphere of the air conditioning. One district nurse quoted as saying: ‘It’s terribly hot in our patients’ flats. They’re having trouble drinking enough fluids and regulating their body temperature. And we don’t even have time for our regular rounds when so many people are on holiday.’

Malin turns off the computer and goes into the living room, stands by the open window and listens to the buzz of conversation from the pub on the ground floor.

Go down?

No, not today.

Even if her whole body is screaming for a tequila.

Instead she goes into the bedroom, lies on the bed and closes her eyes.

The harsh daylight lingers in the form of burning pricks of light on her retinas, but from the darkness around her a figure emerges.

Malin sees Nathalie Falck in the cemetery, her mouth is moving but it’s not Nathalie’s voice, it’s Peter Sköld’s over the phone.

Two youngsters united in a lie.

But they’re old enough to know that they have the right to silence, that if they just stay quiet they can make the police’s job practically impossible.

Someone who stays silent can get away with pretty much anything. Language is the greatest enemy of the guilty.

Malin opens her eyes again.

She hears the voices from the pub, livelier than any she has heard so far today, but she can’t make out any words in the chatter. She closes her eyes. Feels Daniel’s body against hers, his weight. Maybe I should . . .

No.

Sleep instead.

Tired as hell.

In a room in the University Hospital, Josefin Davidsson lies under a thin white sheet, willing her conscious mind to remember what her body remembers, what has happened to her. Her parents are still sitting in armchairs by the window, looking out over the flickering lights of Linköping, also wondering: what happened in the Horticultural Society Park? Or somewhere else? What secrets are concealed by the scorched grass and bark and leaves, the night and the darkness? At the same time they long to be far away, at home in their perfectly ordinary beds.

I want to remember, Josefin thinks, but I don’t remember anything.

Do I want to remember? What happened still exists, even though I can’t remember it, doesn’t it?

Soon I’ll be able to go home.

I shall lie on the porch and try to remember, I shall whisper to myself: remember, remember, remember!

The earth above me, does it have any memories?

I know why I’m here now.

Where I am.

I’m Theresa.

It must be night up there. I can’t hear any voices of people swimming.

And I’m sleeping here, aren’t I?

How did this happen?

Why am I sleeping here?

What are my dreams now?

Tove’s voice is in the room, in the dream.

‘Look after yourself, Mum, I’ll be home soon.’

From a hiding place deep within Malin’s sleep, the voice says the words she wants to hear.

‘I’ll be home soon.’

What would I be without you, Tove?

Without both of you?

And then Tove is standing there by her bed, holding her arms out to her, and Malin is going to embrace her but then Tove is almost gone again, her gangly body is transparent now, like a scarcely visible hologram, something vague for her memory and sense of loss to cling onto.

Come home, darling.

Don’t disappear from me. Promise me that.

11

Thursday, 15–Friday, 16 July

It must be some homeless badger moving about at the dark edge of the forest.

The pines and birches are swaying, on parade, as a faint nocturnal wind sweeps in from the Baltic, across the skerries and rocks of the archipelago.

What are you digging for?

Is there something buried under the ground? Or are you just trying to find your way back to your sett, to the meandering tunnels you call home?

A black and white striped back. A scrabbling sound. What is it, hiding in the forest?

Karim Akbar is sitting on the porch steps of the cottage his family is renting for three weeks. St Anna’s archipelago, Kobbholmen, your own rowing boat out here from the jetty in Tattö, and then the great Swedish stillness. Hotter than ever this year.

Seven thousand kronor a week.

Swedish, more Swedish, most Swedish. The charcoal is still glowing after the evening’s barbecue. A jetty of their own, with a view from the wooden planks out across the narrow channel that leads to open sea. Inside the cottage his family, wife and eight-year-old son, is sleeping. This is paradise for him, and he ought to be sleeping by her side now, but does she want him there?

Sometimes he wonders. It’s as if their life, and he himself, isn’t enough for her. As if she wants something else. She doesn’t say so in words, but with distance, or perhaps merely an absence of presence whenever he approaches her.

But I shan’t get any physical peace now, Karim thinks. I want to bring order to what’s happening in the city.

The girls.

One disappeared. One lost.

And then Sven Sjöman’s face on the television screen. His brow wet with sweat, his hair a mess.

Daniel Högfeldt’s voice: ‘Do you think Theresa Eckeved is still alive?’

And the way Sven’s opinion on the matter was clear from the look in his eyes, not the same as the opinion his words expressed.

‘We are taking it for granted that she isn’t dead.’

For God’s sake, Sven, ‘We are taking it for granted that she’s alive’!

News.

Cameras.

This is a good profile-building opportunity, Karim thinks. But the house out here is nice, restful, and maybe I’m tired of all the pictures, the words?

When did that happen?

Hasn’t even started writing his book.

Can’t be bothered to be politically correct, and in that case it’s better to let the pen lie.

The badger shuffles through the forest.

I want to get to the girls. Something’s underway. Something dark. And I want to be there when it emerges into the light.

The kebab is rumbling around his stomach, the charred edges of the lamb trying to find a way back up.

Janne woke up early when he had to dash to the toilet.

That evening’s restaurant had been the worst so far.

Greasy rice, bad meat, but Tove seemed to like her calamari. She’s sleeping now, they each have their own narrow bed on a white stone floor. The aluminium railing of the balcony is still warm from the day’s sun, and the sea is a hundred metres away, along a road lined with pubs, restaurants, souvenir shops and temples. The Balinese in their colourful fabrics seem unconcerned at the exploitation, the air thick with incense as they march past in their religious processions about which he doesn’t understand the first thing.

But that’s what civilisation looks like here, and the early Balinese morning is mild. The wine he drank with dinner has made his system unsettled, and he can’t get back to sleep.

The hotel restaurant is dark.

The pool too.

Faint music from a bar that’s still open, but not so loud that he can’t hear Tove’s breathing, and he thinks that she breathes just like Malin in her sleep, slow and steady, but every now and then the rhythm is broken by something like a whimper, not anxious or troubled, but relieved, as if something within them was finding its natural tone.

The nocturnal heat quite different from Africa.

Tropical night in the rainy season. There’s nothing like it.

When the rain crashes down and you can feel the fungus growing on your skin, the way the splashing of the raindrops can’t hide the evil that’s after you, moving through the leaves, the insects, the trees.

There’s always something that comes between people.

Religion.

Like in Bosnia.

Tribal loyalty.

Like in Rwanda.

And always politics, money, ambition and game-playing.

And often people like me. The willing cleaners. The ones who show up in the immediate wake of the catastrophe.

Things that have happened, recently and long ago. They collide, one way or another, in a moment of history, and then everything changes direction. An explosion of violence and you just have to deal with it.

A warm wind on his face.

Africa.

Cold wind.

Balkans.

A raw, damp cold that he will always carry with him.

Her voice on the phone just now, the poor, crackling line. The same tired performance as so many times before, their words, the things they say without saying anything at all.

What have I done?

Malin.

What the hell have we done? What are we doing?

It’s time to stop messing about and to start playing the game seriously.

Janne goes in from the balcony. Lies down on his bed next to his daughter. Listens to her breathing.

Malin is dreaming of a cold wind whistling through tightly packed ground. Of a tiny little creature whimpering and trying to find its way into her hands.

She dreams of an open field made of sky and fluffy clouds.

She dreams that she’s swimming in the sea with Tove and Janne, and alongside them swims a fourth person, faceless but not frightening, more like the incarnation of everything good that a person can be, if only in a warm summer’s dream.

Sven Sjöman’s wife Sonja looks at her husband. The way his stomach seems to spill across the mattress, the increasingly deep wrinkles on his face, and she listens to his snoring, the way it seems to get louder with each passing year, with every kilo added to his stomach. But one minor miracle: she accepts the snoring, it has become a part of her, her life, them.

She usually wakes up at three o’clock or so.

Lies there quietly beside him and looks out between the drawn curtains, how the garden outside, its shapes, assume different guises according to the season.

The darkness of summer is relative.

The trees, apples and pears and plums, are clearly visible, not even imagination can turn them into anything but trees.

She usually pretends to be asleep when he creeps out of bed to go down to his woodwork room in the basement. She knows he wants to think that she’s asleep, that he’d never leave her alone in bed if she let him know she was awake.

He bought a new lathe in June.

There’s going to be a lot of bowls. He’s started selling them in the craft shop at the castle.

In August they’re going to Germany.

Sven reluctant, increasingly resistant to long journeys as the years pass, while she is keener.

‘We should go to Australia. Go and see how Joakim’s doing.’

‘Nineteen hours on a plane? The lad’ll be home for Christmas. Isn’t that enough?’

Driving down to Germany.

Minor roads.

Hotels where no one else ever seems to have stayed.

Sven.

They’ve been married more than thirty years.

She sees his anxiety in his sleep, the girls, all the terrible things she read about in the paper, all the things he refuses to talk about.

Zeke Martinsson has woken up, is in the kitchen of his villa in Landeryd, waiting for the coffee machine.

The smell of coffee, of waking up, of a new day spreading through the room.

The clock on the cooker says 05.23.

He almost always sleeps right through undisturbed, waking up early and fully rested.

The house is hot.

Must be twenty-eight degrees. His wife wanted to buy an air-conditioning unit for the bedroom, but this heat can’t last much longer, and then that would be ten thousand down the drain. But what’s ten thousand?

Martin’s going to earn millions. Just from playing a bit of ice hockey. Has already done so.

But everything’s good if it isn’t bad.

Brain surgeons earn nothing compared to ice hockey players. And nursing assistants?

The whole thing is just one big joke.

And the girls. Theresa and Josefin. What’s happening?

Those bastard gangbangers in Berga. Stupid kids with a completely sick imported view of women. They bring out the worst in me.

And Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck.

What are they hiding?

Zeke pours himself a mug of coffee. Sips at the hot drink, feeling his body wake up simply from breathing in the vapour through his nose. He puts the mug down on the kitchen table, goes out into the hall, opens the front door.

The garden is still. Flowers, bushes, trees. Like dark, frozen figures.

Dad spent ten years in Åleryd geriatric hospital before he was allowed to die. Stiff, locked inside himself by a Parkinson’s Disease that no medicine, old or new, could do anything about. Like a denuded tree in a garden.

Zeke creeps out in nothing but his underwear.

No neighbours at home, or up, if they happen to be home against all expectation. He opens the letterbox, puts his hand in and pulls out the Correspondent.

Looks down in the box for advertising flyers but it’s empty, just a few earwigs creeping into one corner.

He holds the paper up to the sky, at such an angle that he can make out the headlines in the dawn light, see the picture on the front page.

Pictures of Theresa Eckeved.

From the same sequence as the pictures they got from her parents yesterday.

Girl missing for a week . . . parents pleading for information . . .

Zeke folds the paper.

Coffee.

Must drink more coffee.

Make my brain pure and clear.

Today holds something important in store for me.

12

Peter Sköld has blond highlights in his hair, and he’s so thin, almost painfully skinny, and his father Sten, a man with determined green eyes and a sharply chiselled face, looks at his son with a pained expression when he crosses his bare legs as he sits down on the chair in the staffroom at the police station.

Neither of them seems tired, even though they must have set off early that morning from their place in the country.

And Malin sees it at once.

Peter Sköld is aware of the significance of silence.

Why?

Because you have things that belong only to you, don’t you, Peter?

Malin sits down and Zeke goes over to the coffee machine.

‘Coffee, anyone?’

But father and son decline and Malin, who has already kick-started the day with three mugs, also turns down his offer.

‘Thanks for getting here so early.’

The clock on the wall says twenty past eight.

‘It only takes an hour or so to get here, more or less,’ Sten Sköld says. ‘And now that Theresa’s gone missing it’s the least we can do.’

Malin looks over at Peter Sköld.

What’s that I can see in his face?

Fear? Cynicism? Silence.

‘So are you a couple, you and Theresa?’ Malin asks.

The answer comes quickly. Peter Sköld’s slender hand through his hair.

‘Yes.’

Zeke sits down at the table with a steaming hot mug of coffee.

‘You don’t seem to spend much time with her,’ Sten Sköld says to his son.

‘Like you’d know about that? We’re together.’

‘Did you notice anything different the last time you met?’ Malin asks.

‘No, like what?’

‘That dance you mentioned, where you met for the first time. There have never been any dances like that,’ Malin says.

Peter Sköld’s eyes flit about before he looks up at the ceiling.

‘OK, we met in town. I didn’t want anyone to know I was the sort of kid who hangs out there sometimes.’

‘But you’re allowed to be in town, Peter.’

‘Am I? That’s not how it seems. Listen to me: we are together. But we didn’t meet the way I said. And I’ve spent the summer holiday in the country.’

‘Yes, he has,’ Sten Sköld says, a new firmness in his voice.

‘So you’re not meeting another friend when you say you’re going to meet Theresa?’

Malin throws the words at Peter Sköld.

‘And who would that be, then?’

‘You tell us.’

‘There’s nothing to tell.’

‘Are you sure?’ Zeke says. ‘Completely sure?’

‘What exactly are you getting at?’ Sten Sköld asks.

Peter Sköld smiles.

‘I haven’t got anything else to tell you.’

‘And you don’t know if Theresa met anyone else when she said she was going to meet you?’ Zeke asks.

‘We’re together, I told you.’

‘You don’t seem particularly worried that she’s missing.’

‘I am. I am worried. I just show it in my own way.’

‘Your own way?’

Peter Sköld sinks back in his chair, pushing his hair back from his forehead.

You little shit, Malin thinks. Fourteen years old? Fifteen? And already so . . . yes, what?

His eyes. Malin looks into them.

Shame. There’s shame in those eyes. And fear. I ought to be giving you a hug, but you’ve made that impossible now.

‘OK, so tell us everything you know that might be of interest to us,’ Malin says.

‘Well . . .’

‘Hang on a minute,’ Sten Sköld says. ‘Is my son suspected of anything?’

‘And Nathalie Falck?’ Malin asks.

Peter Sköld smiles again, seems to consider his options before saying: ‘A school friend. Nothing more. We like the same sort of music, the three of us.’

‘What sort of music?’

‘Anything new,’ Peter Sköld says. ‘I really haven’t got anything else to say. Can we go now?’

‘Theresa is missing. A girl called Josefin has been raped,’ Malin says. ‘Tell us what you’re hiding. Now. Do you know Josefin?’

‘I don’t know any Josefin.’

‘My son has already said he’s told you what he knows,’ Sten Sköld says, standing up. ‘We’re going now, Peter.’

‘He hasn’t told us everything,’ Zeke says.

Once father and son have left the police station Malin and Zeke sit down at their desks.

‘He’s not telling us everything,’ Zeke repeats.

‘Maybe you wouldn’t either if you were him.’

‘Do you think his dad was holding him back?’

‘No. That father knows his son. I don’t think he was all that keen for Peter to say anything else.’

‘What do you think he knows, Malin?’

‘Something, Zeke. Something.’

Teenage worlds.

Tove’s world.

The way she didn’t tell Malin about Marcus to start with. How Malin had been hoping that their lives would somehow get more similar the older Tove got, that they would have more things in common.

Has that happened?

No.

Although.

No. Don’t lie to yourself, Malin.

I don’t know if Tove is keeping secrets from me. God knows, I certainly annoy her. Sometimes, Malin thinks, I can see that she almost despises me and the life I lead.

Unless that’s something inside me instead? Am I being too hard on my daughter?

That must be it.

It must be.

Sven Sjöman slumped in his chair at the end of the table in the meeting room. His furrowed cheeks burning red from the heat and perhaps a night of too little sleep.

It is 9.00 a.m. exactly.

The morning meeting starting on time this Friday.

Beside him is Willy Andersson from Forensics.

In front of Andersson, Theresa Eckeved’s bulky white computer is whirring away. The internet cable hangs limply towards the floor yet still seems to have something to say to them.

Zeke and Malin are standing behind Willy Andersson, looking at the screen, and Malin thinks that he’s done a quick job, whatever he’s found.

‘Well?’ Zeke says.

‘She doesn’t use the computer very much,’ Willy Andersson says. ‘I haven’t found any pictures, just a couple of school essays about biology, and I can assure you that they aren’t of any interest.’

Andersson.

Is he capable of working out what’s of interest to us? Malin thinks.

Biology essays.

Yes, he probably is.

‘What else?’

Malin can hear the expectancy in her own voice.

‘She empties the memory cache regularly, so I haven’t been able to track her surfing habits very far back. The information might be on the hard drive, or maybe we could get it from the service provider’s servers, but that’ll take time.’

‘How long?’

‘Weeks. Information wiped from the cache is left as fragmentary traces on the hard drive. It takes time to build up any sort of comprehensible picture from them. And at this time of the summer the service providers won’t be terribly keen on going through their server logs.’

‘But?’

Malin can tell from Willy Andersson’s voice that he’s found something else.

‘From what I have been able to find in the memory cache and web browser, I can see that she has a Facebook page.’

Willy Andersson clicks to open the page.

Theresa Eckeved’s face.

Innocent. But also hard.

No notes. Only a few friends: Peter Sköld, Nathalie Falck. Only one who leaves comments: a certain Lovelygirl. Nothing more than an alias.

‘Hello darling!’

‘You’re so beautiful.’

‘Suck me.’

‘Can you find out who this Lovelygirl is?’ Malin wonders.

‘She’s a registered user, but she hasn’t got a page of her own,’ Willy Andersson replies. ‘I can get in touch with Facebook and see if they can give us any information that could help us identify her.’

‘Anything else?’

Sven sounds almost pleading, but there’s a note of relief in his voice. A Lovelygirl, something to go on.

‘She’s got a Yahoo email account as well,’ Willy Andersson says. ‘But I can’t get into it.’

‘Are Yahoo likely to be any quicker than Facebook?’

‘I doubt it. I’ll try them both, and we’ll see.’

‘Get onto it,’ Sven says. ‘And make sure they know why it’s urgent.’

‘Nothing on MySpace? YouTube?’

Malin remembers the videos on YouTube a year or so ago of a teenage girl being raped and abused. It turned out to be her best friends torturing her.

Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck. Torturers?

‘Nothing on MySpace. I haven’t checked YouTube, but I can do some searches today.’

‘Get onto it,’ Sven says again. ‘Get onto it.’

‘And Peter Sköld and Nathalie Falck haven’t got their own pages either?’

‘No, not as far as I can see,’ Willy Andersson says, getting up, and his thin, beige cotton trousers hang slack around his skinny legs.

Andersson.

Forty years old.

Looks more like fifty.

‘Good work,’ Sven says.

‘It was pretty straightforward,’ Willy Andersson says as he unplugs the computer and puts it under his arm. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he says, and then he’s gone, and only the heat and the sound of the door closing linger in the meeting room.

‘So, you two. What are you up to?’

‘We’re going to see Behzad Karami.’

And a silence descends on the room. A quite specific silence that Malin recognises and likes, the silence in an investigation where the thoughts of the officers coalesce around an idea, a line of inquiry worth following up.

‘Lesbians,’ Sven says. ‘Could there be a lesbian angle to this case? That Lovelygirl on Facebook certainly gave the impression of being homosexual.’

‘And Nathalie Falck is pretty masculine,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks that he’s being prejudiced, but deep down she agrees. She can feel the suggestions in the room.

‘So, there could be a lesbian angle. Keep it in the back of your minds,’ Sven says.

‘Maybe Nathalie Falck knows who that Lovelygirl is?’ Malin says.

‘OK, time for the gangbangers,’ Zeke says, standing up. His eyes full of expectation.

A code.

We need a damn code for the lock.

It’s just after half past nine. They’re standing in the shade under the porch in front of the door of a run-down block of flats. The once-yellow brick of the façade has faded to ochre, and the surrounding grass and flowerbeds look as if no one cares or is paid enough to look after them. Cigarette ends, cans, broken green bottles.

Malin can see herself in the glass of the door, her face improbably long and her skin somehow glowing.

Berga.

Only a few kilometres from the centre of the city, and just seven hundred metres from Ramshäll.

Another world.

Unemployment.

Immigrants.

And the usual: single mothers trying to raise their children to be decent people, as best they can with underpaid jobs that swallow up ten hours a day.

Absentee fathers are no myth here.

Most of the inhabitants of Berga are probably at home, even though it’s summer.

Two blocks away from where they are now standing Malin found one of her old school friends, dead from a drugs overdose. In a small one-room flat on the first floor, her first year with the Linköping Police, when she moved back with Tove after graduating from the Police Academy.

A smell had been coming from the flat.

The neighbours had reported it.

And she and a colleague had gone around, and he had been lying on the floor beside the bed, the place an absolute tip, and he stank and his body must have swollen up but by the time they arrived it looked almost shrivelled.

Jimmy Svennson with three Ns.

He used to be quite a charmer. Pothead turned junkie turned dead.

What’s the smell now?

Scorched summer.

‘What are we going to do about the door, Malin?’

‘Wait until someone comes.’

‘You mean . . .’

‘I was joking, Zeke. A little morning joke,’ and Malin pulls her key-ring from the inside pocket of her pale-blue jacket, sticks the skeleton key in the lock and twists. ‘This sort of lock’s easy.’

Zeke looks at her admiringly.

‘I have to say, you’re bloody good at that, Fors.’

The stairwell smells of mould, and the lime-green walls are in serious need of a coat of paint.

No lift.

They’re panting by the time they reach the third floor.

‘Bet you he’s asleep,’ Zeke says as he presses the doorbell beside Behzad Karami’s door.

They ring again and again.

Malin calls Behzad Karami’s mobile number, there’s no landline listed.

There must be a terrible amount of ringing inside the flat.

She was off her face.

Then the voice on the mobile, with just a faint trace of an accent in his Östergötland Swedish even though Karami was already eight years old when he moved here.

‘Do you know what time it is, you bastard?’

‘This is Malin Fors. Police. If you open the front door, the ringing will stop.’

Zeke’s finger on the bell.

‘What?’

‘Open the door. We’re standing outside.’

‘Fuck.’

Over the phone Malin hears a body moving, then there’s rattling behind the door, Zeke’s finger ringing constantly now, and the sound of the doorbell getting louder and louder the more the door opens.

‘Good morning, Behzad. So you’ve gone and messed things up for yourself again, have you?’

Zeke’s voice full of distaste as he lets go of the bell.

Behzad Karami’s face puffy with sleep and possibly alcohol, and who knows what else? Tattooed torso, powerful shoulders, a choker of animal claws and teeth around his neck. Nineteen years old, his big, black, shiny BMW parked closer to the centre.

On the other hand.

After a spell in youth custody he was never found guilty of anything. And we couldn’t get him for the rapes, and maybe his ‘business’ is going well? What do I know? Malin thinks.

‘We’ll come in,’ Zeke says, and before Behzad Karami can protest Zeke has pushed him aside, stepped inside the hall and on into the single room.

Behzad Karami hesitant.

Branded since he sat in jail while they investigated whether or not the gangbang of the paralytic Lovisa Hjelmstedt could be classed as rape or serious sexual assault.

But the case had collapsed.

She agreed to it, and witnesses had seen her dancing with Behzad Karami and Ali Shakbari at the club, seen her leave with them of her own accord, even if she was so drunk by then that she could hardly walk.

‘Not done any cleaning for a while, Behzad?’ Zeke says. ‘But a mummy’s boy like you probably can’t manage that, eh? Keeping things clean?’

Behzad Karami standing in front of Malin in the living room. His back is covered by a showy fire-breathing dragon.

‘I clean whenever the hell I feel like it. It’s none of your business, you pi . . .’

‘Say it,’ Zeke snarls. ‘Make my day. Finish what you were going to say.’

‘Zeke, calm down. Sit down on the bed, Behzad.’

The rough wallpaper is full of scorch-marks and stains, and on the bed is a torn pink sheet. The blinds are pulled down over the view of Berga’s rooftops. A huge flat-screen television is screwed to one wall, and the stereo and speakers take up most of the free floor space. The tiny kitchen is oddly clean, as if it has recently been used and scrubbed very, very thoroughly.

Behzad Karami sinks onto the bed, rubbing his eyes, says: ‘For fuck’s sake, couldn’t you have come a bit later, what the hell do you want?’

‘A girl was raped yesterday. She was found in the Horticultural Society Park,’ Malin says.

‘Don’t suppose you know anything about it?’ Zeke says.

And Behzad Karami looks down at the green lino floor, shakes his head and says: ‘We didn’t rape Lovisa, and I haven’t raped anyone else either. Get it? When the hell are you going to get it?’

His voice.

Suddenly afraid.

Behind the muscles and tattoos he’s just a boy, yet also a man who feels ashamed when people around town whisper behind his back, judged by the public court of a provincial city.

‘That’s him, the one who raped . . .’

‘Bloody animal. That’s what they’re like, those . . .’

‘Where were you the night before last?’

‘I was at my parents’. We’ve got family over from Iran. Check with them. Seven people can tell you I was there until five o’clock in the morning at least.’

‘And after that?’

‘Then I came back here.’

Josefin who remembers nothing. Was she attacked before or after the cinema? What time?

‘You came straight back here?’

‘I just said so.’

‘Why should we believe you?’ Zeke says, patting Behzad on the head.

‘What about Ali, do you know what he was doing then?’

‘No. No idea. Are you going to fuck about with him as well?’

Malin can see Zeke getting angry, how he’s trying to stop himself hitting Behzad Karami. Instead he says in a loud voice: ‘So you didn’t go down to the Horticultural Society Park after the party? Didn’t hide there waiting for a girl to go past?’

Malin takes a step back, out into the hall. She goes into the little kitchen, a completely different world from the rest of the flat; cupboard doors gleaming white, albeit worn.

She runs her hand over the draining board, smells her hand, lemon-scented detergent. She opens a cupboard, finds an unopened bottle of bleach.

She can hear Zeke roaring in the living room.

Knows that Zeke’s anger can be so terrifying that it forces out truths, admissions of guilt where you least expect them.

‘You’re mad, you fucking pig.’

Zeke’s eyes black as he comes out into the hall and finds her in the kitchen.

‘We’re done here,’ he says. ‘Aren’t we?’

‘Not quite,’ Malin says, and goes back in to Behzad Karami.

He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily.

‘The kitchen. How come it’s so clean?’

‘Mum did it the day before yesterday.’

‘One last thing: do you know where we can get hold of Ali?’

‘Try his dad’s flower shop on Tanneforsvägen. Interflora. He’s helping out over the summer.’

The car’s air conditioning is straining.

Malin at the wheel.

Zeke singing along loudly to the choral song filling the car.

Sundsvall church choir sings Abba.

The winner takes it all, the winner takes . . .

Zeke’s voice isn’t as gruff when he sings as when he talks. Malin has learned to put up with the music, partly because she has begun to see the point of singing in a group, but mainly because she can see what the music, and the sense of belonging, does for Zeke, the way he can switch in a matter of minutes from an adrenalin-pumped alpha male to a cheery, tuneful, almost harmonious man.

They’re heading towards Tannefors.

Past the deserted skateboard ramps at Johannelund, the scorched yellow grass of the forgotten little fields between the river and the blocks of flats, then they cross the Braskens bridge. Down to the left the mismatched buildings of the Saab factory huddle in the heat.

Aeronautics industry.

Actually a weapons industry.

But the pride of the city, nonetheless.

Because that’s what Linköping is like, Malin thinks. Self-conscious, almost arrogant, wanting to be smart and a little bit exceptional, an exquisite little metropolis in the big wide world. A reluctant rural town, a provincial city with delusions of grandeur, but without any real self-awareness or sense of style. Which is why it’s hard to think of a more provincial provincial city than Linköping.

‘What are you thinking about, Malin?’

‘The city. How it’s actually pretty OK.’

‘Linköping? Has anyone said otherwise?’

As Zeke’s question hangs in the air Malin’s mobile rings, the call cutting through the car and into their ears.

‘I’m done with the tests, Malin. I’ve analysed what the doctors at the University Hospital found inside Josefin Davidsson.’

Karin Johannison’s voice.

Ice-cold, self-assured in the heat.

‘We’re on our way,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve just got to get something out of the way first.’

13

Most of the drops turn to steam, wiped out before they have time to land on the countless potted plants standing on the shelves beneath the florist’s limp red awning. The noisy whirr of the humidifier bores into Malin’s brain, but fades away when they step into the damp cool of the shop.

The tall, dark man behind the counter immediately assumes a watchful, hesitant posture; he recognises them, Malin’s sure of that.

Malin shows her ID.

The man nods but doesn’t say anything.

‘We’re looking for Ali Shakbari.’

‘What’s he done now?’

The man sounds resigned, but also annoyed.

‘Probably nothing,’ Malin says. ‘But we need to talk to him.’

The man points towards a door with a plastic window.

‘My son’s in the stockroom. You can go through.’

Ali Shakbari is standing at a bench screwed into white tiles, trimming some red roses. The whole room has a strange, pleasant perfume. When he catches sight of them he grows afraid, the look in his brown eyes oddly watery. You want to run, don’t you? Malin thinks.

‘Ali,’ Zeke says. ‘How are things?’

No answer, and Ali puts the secateurs down on the bench slowly, his thin, sinewy body in perfect shape under his white cotton overalls.

‘What were you doing the night before last?’

‘What do you mean?’

Defiant now.

Malin explains about Josefin being found in the Horticultural Society Park.

‘And you think I had something to do with it?’

‘We don’t think anything,’ Malin says. ‘So, what were you doing?’

‘Dad and I were cleaning the stockroom. We didn’t finish until 3.00 a.m. It’s so fucking hot that it’s easier to work at night.’

‘It’s true.’

Ali’s father is standing in the doorway to the stockroom, holding the door open and radiating authority.

‘Then I drove him home. He was home by about 3.30.’

Malin looks around the stockroom.

Every inch of the room is sparkling clean, well ordered.

Too clean? Malin thinks before picking up one of the red roses from the bench.

‘These are lovely,’ she says.

‘Finest quality,’ Ali Shakbari’s father says.

There are two sorts of people in the world. Hunters, and the hunted.

So far in this investigation those roles haven’t been fixed.

Are we the ones being hunted, drifting like motes of dust on the hot breeze? Malin wonders. So far we haven’t reached the point where we’re doing the stalking. Not yet. But maybe now, as a result of what I can see under the glass, in the hot light of the four lamps placed around the small but powerful microscope. The answer may lie in this blue substance, a blue truth.

The fragments are so tiny that they’re hard to focus on.

The edges of the tiny blue fragments almost jagged.

A windowless laboratory in the basement of the National Forensics Lab, which smells of chemicals and disinfectant. A humming noise from a fume cupboard.

Zeke’s heavy breathing beside Malin, Karin’s voice in her head: I know what it was, Malin. What the doctors found inside her.

‘What you’re looking at is fragments of paint,’ Karin says. ‘The sort of paint that’s normally used to colour plastic.’

The blue fragments blur in front of Malin’s eyes. Floating.

Is the truth moving about somewhere down there?

Or something else?

A first clue.

A blue colour, dead particles moving, as if they had been buried alive under the glass.

Malin raises her head from the microscope and looks at Karin.

‘What could the paint have come from, what sort of object?’

Zeke sounds impatient, irritable because of July’s never-ending hot weather, or possibly just because Karin is in the room.

Karin’s voice is mild: ‘It’s impossible to say, it could be any one of a thousand things.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as a garden hose, the handle of a cheap mop, a salad server, a lamp-stand, a toy spade.’

Malin, Zeke and Karin fall silent.

Josefin Davidsson penetrated without knowing it.

Theresa missing. Hints of lesbian activity on her Facebook page. Lovelygirl.

Does all of this fit together?

Nathalie Falck. Almost like a man. What do men have that women don’t?

What’s the voice?

Here and now.

Malin listens to the room. Something is taking shape in front of her eyes.

What are the girls in this investigation saying? Theresa, Josefin, Nathalie?

‘Such as a dildo,’ Malin says. ‘A dildo.’

And she doesn’t know where the words come from, but they’re there in the room.

‘Sure, such as a dildo,’ Karin responds. ‘Not at all impossible.’

‘How do we go about looking into this?’ Malin says, turning to face Karin. ‘Is it even possible to get any closer than guesswork?’

‘Manufacturers keep records. We can start by checking the most likely products, I mean the sorts of thing this paint could have been applied to. Such as a dildo.’

‘What do you think, Malin?’ Zeke asks.

‘I don’t know. But a dildo doesn’t seem unlikely. Her vagina wasn’t really injured, just penetrated. As if the object had been designed to do that.’

‘But surely it’s possible to cause damage with a dildo?’

‘Yes, if you’re hard-handed. But then, you can cause damage with anything.’

‘My experience is that the vagina almost always shows serious damage when hostile penetration occurs with an object that isn’t designed for the purpose,’ Karin says. ‘It could very well be a dildo. You can get both hard and soft models.’

‘You’re an expert?’ Zeke says.

‘No,’ Karin says. ‘But that much I do know.’

And then the realisation of where the paint came from, that it was scraped out from within Josefin. Malin thinks of Maria Murvall, the young girl who was raped in Tjällmo forest several years ago and now sits mute in a mental institution. The crass words in the report about her shredded innards, her body lying on the bed of her room in Vadstena last winter, when Malin visited in connection with another case.

Probability, Malin thinks. Forces herself back to concrete facts.

Thousands of things and their language, listen to the language of these things instead, to what they’re saying now. The air conditioning in the room splutters, a slow coughing sound spreading through the ventilation pipes before it falls silent and almost at once a debilitating heat starts to take over the room.

‘God, how stupid,’ Karin says. ‘Now it’s packed up and who knows how long they’ll take to fix it in the middle of the holidays like this, if there are any of them working at all.’

‘They’re probably working,’ Zeke says.

‘A dildo,’ Malin says. ‘That makes sense, even if our perpetrator could in theory have used pretty much anything.’

She says nothing about her earlier thought about a lesbian connection. But surely lesbians often use dildos? Or is that just prejudice? No, one of her classmates at Police Academy had proudly shown her her collection and given her detailed descriptions of dildo technique.

Zeke nods in agreement, no trace of doubt in his eyes.

‘I was thinking that I could get Forensics to check dildo manufacturers,’ Karin says. ‘See what sort of paint they use. It might take a while, but you’d be surprised how much even the strangest businesses know.’

Then Karin leans forward and puts her eye to the microscope, saying: ‘It really is a beautiful shade of blue, isn’t it? Clean and pure, like spring water.’

Outside the heat has taken a firm grip on the air, and the wind, insofar as there is any, is hot, dragging through already parched treetops. The smoke from the forest fires is pungent on the air, the wind must be coming from Tjällmo today.

The fires keep getting worse. This morning an elderly couple had to be evacuated from the house they’d lived in for sixty years.

The light seems to attack your eyes, any sunglasses that let you see anything at all are helpless against it. And she could really do with clear vision right now, to see all the connections that are scraping away at her consciousness like little shards of metal.

Malin and Zeke retreat to the lobby of the National Forensics Lab and its relative cool, where they sit down on one of the red Lammhult sofas, panting, unable to summon the energy to walk the hundred metres to the police station.

‘Shit,’ Zeke said. ‘I didn’t think it could get any hotter.’

‘Oh, it can,’ Malin says. ‘And this damn light. Even the thought of it gives me a headache.’

‘So, a dildo?’

‘I don’t know, Zeke. Maybe.’

Zeke runs a hand over his shaved head.

‘So who uses dildos?’ he says.

Malin thinks, not answering Zeke’s question, preferring to leave it open and let Zeke see the connection for himself.

‘Someone who’s been chemically castrated? Someone suffering from impotence? Someone who just feels like it? Lesbians?’

‘Lesbians,’ Malin says, lingering over the word to let Zeke realise what she means.

‘So that’s what you’re thinking?’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘Lovelygirl on Theresa’s Facebook page. Nathalie. And Josefin? Do you think she’s lesbian as well?’

‘No. But the perpetrator could be. A definite line of inquiry, anyway.’

Zeke nods.

‘So who else would use a dildo?’

‘I can’t think of anyone else.’

‘Maybe some unlucky bastard who’s lost his crown jewels altogether?’

‘You reckon?’ Malin says.

‘How can we know? Or else the scum in Berga have come up with a new way of humiliating women,’ Zeke says.

Malin stares in front of her.

Sees how Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami filled Josefin Davidsson with cheap wine, then took turns raping her on a sofa with a blue-painted dildo. Sees them laughing, exhibiting the very worst of masculinity, even though they’re scarcely more than boys.

That’s racist, Malin thinks.

Shrugs off the image of the boys.

Malin and Zeke sit in silence beside each other on the sofa. Breathing in the air, cool and dry, looking out at the heat, at the way it’s making the air in the police station car park vibrate and snake.

Tove and Janne in Bali, cooler than here.

It’s ten past nine and Malin is sitting at her kitchen table, eating a dish of soured milk and oat-grits. She’s so tired she couldn’t even be bothered to slice a banana.

Hot in the flat.

No air conditioning.

She raised the dildo idea with Sven over the phone, he thought it sounded like a lead worth pursuing, and said that he’d get some uniforms to check places where you could buy blue dildos on the net, in parallel with Karin’s work: ‘That’s how people buy that sort of stuff these days, isn’t it?’

Daniel Högfeldt.

She thought for a while that there could be something more than just the physical between them, and maybe there is, but mostly it’s this: the way their paths cross, day after day, until they meet up in his or her flat. But not tonight, he’s still in the city, Malin knows that much, and not in this heat, this isolation. Her own sweat is enough, and exhaustion is making every muscle wither and buckle, and she’s missing Tove and Janne so badly that it’s on the point of turning into grief.

Her mobile rings.

It’s in the living room.

Malin puts the spoon down, gets up, hurries through to find it. Guesses that something’s wrong.

Karim Akbar’s number.

‘Malin here.’

‘Malin, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Just because there’s been a rape, you start harassing local immigrants?’

How could he know?

‘We . . .’

‘No excuses, Malin. Take a look at the Correspondent’s website, it’s all there in black and white.’

‘Hang on, Karim, calm down.’

‘And now every single bloody media organisation in the country is calling me for an opinion.’

Karim’s in his element.

Malin can’t work out if he’s genuinely angry or just pretending to be, and is actually happy to get some media coverage in the news drought. All his articles and appearances are controversial, but politically safe in the attitude towards integration that he represents. What’s Karim’s long-term goal? A ministerial post? But he doesn’t even belong to a political party.

Her computer is on in the bedroom.

Click, click, click.

The Correspondent’s website.

A photograph of Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami standing outside the blocks of flats in Berga.

Headline: No Evidence: Police Harassing Immigrants.

The caption to the picture: We had nothing to do with the rape in the Horticultural Society Park, but the police are hassling us just because we’re immigrants.

Daniel’s tabloid angle: The Correspondent has tried to obtain a statement from representatives of the Linköping Police today, but no one was available.

A blatant lie to fit the story.

And you’ve been in my bed?

And doubtless will be again.

‘Are you still there, Malin?’

There must have been a two-minute silence on the line, quite unlike Karim.

‘I’m here, Karim. It was just an idea, one of many leads, you can see that, can’t you?’

‘I can see that.’

‘And they were the suspects in the Lovisa Hjelmstedt case.’

‘I know, Malin, but surely you can see how bad this looks?’

‘Enjoy the attention,’ Malin says.

Karim laughs, but his laughter is hollow and tired.

14

The phone on the table in front of Malin.

It’s glowing.

Who the hell does Karim Akbar think he is, sticking his nose into their work?

It is not the job of a police chief to micro-manage an investigation, but Karim has never really been able to stick to the boundaries, and an unspoken pact has developed among the detectives in the Crime Unit: let Karim do what he likes, and we’ll get on with our work. Because Karim isn’t short of good qualities, and he actually has complete confidence in his officers. And he’s good for the police in Linköping, his fondness for the media has focused attention on the work of the police in the city, and this attention has been rewarded with an increased budget from higher up.

Everything, Malin thinks, lying back on the sofa, absolutely everything can be traced back to this bloody mediatocracy, celebrity culture, the rapturous elevation of the mediocre, the uninteresting into a form of religion. Our souls have no peace, Malin thinks, so we take an interest in Nothing.

Hair colours.

Skirt length.

Who’s fucking who.

Celebrity weddings, divorces, collagen injections, sex scandals . . .

Well, thank God Tove doesn’t care.

Karim.

Friends with the Minister for Integration. They share the same view of immigrants: make demands, be tough, but woe betide anyone else, any non-immigrant, if they should happen to say something negative – then the air grows thick with verbal detonations.

Malin takes a deep breath of the air in the flat, the smell of a long hot summer where evil has started to make its move.

Sometimes she imagines evil as a shapeless black beast moving through the undergrowth and city alike. Who the beast is waiting for, who it might be, are as yet unknown.

She switches off the television.

Gets up.

Goes out of the flat.

Vague ideas of what she wants.

The pub downstairs is open, the clattering air conditioning audible out in the street.

Call Daniel? Shout at him? Fuck him? Make use of his damn cock. Drink herself senseless. But there’s nothing worse than having to work with a hangover, and they have to work tomorrow, even though it’s Saturday.

Call Zeke and see if he fancies going for a beer?

Call Helen from the local radio station; it’s been ages since they met up.

In the sky above her a third of the moon is glowing against a thousand pale stars, and she can see them stretching out their hands to each other without ever quite reaching.

‘Zeke here.’

He answers on the third ring.

His voice gruff, as if he’s just woken up.

‘It’s me, I was just wondering if you fancy a beer and a chat about the case. I can’t relax, what do you think?’

Thinks: I sound manic.

Lonely?

No question.

Just as I am.

‘Malin, it’s half past nine, you ought to be in bed getting your strength back for tomorrow. We’ve got a lot to do. I was on my way to bed, so no beer for me. We have to work tomorrow, you know that.’

‘Did you say half past nine?’

‘Exactly, Fors.’

Silence on the line.

‘But you can come out here if you like. We can have a chat. Gunilla can make us some tea and sandwiches, we’ve got Kinda gherkins.’

Zeke’s wife.

Niceness and normality personified.

A pharmacist at the chemist’s on the main square.

Too nice.

‘Thanks, but no thanks, Zeke. I don’t want to intrude. See you first thing in the morning.’

‘Good night, Malin.’

She’s left standing on the pavement with her phone in her hand.

Shall I go into the pub?

In again and up to the flat?

Call Tove, Janne?

Her skin is crawling, and not because of the heat.

Damn this thirst. This urge. I know it doesn’t do a bloody bit of good.

Then in her mind’s eye she sees Josefin Davidsson in her hospital bed. Her face contorted with nightmares, with suppressed memories.

Shortly afterwards Malin is walking across Trädgårdstorget, perfectly aware of where she’s going. The evening is slipping slowly into night and the square’s only open-air terrace is empty, a dark-skinned waiter is collecting the ashtrays, there are no glasses to clear on any of the tables.

She walks along Drottninggatan, past the imposing residential blocks. Cars pass: a green Volvo, a white pick-up.

The black iron gate of the Horticultural Society Park beneath her hand, still warm from the day’s scorching sun, but not hot enough to burn.

Malin opens the gate and steps into the park, quite alone now, presumably no one dares to come here at this time of day now, after what’s happened.

Naked.

Raped.

Preschool kids approaching.

I don’t remember anything.

The beast, it could be here, Malin thinks as she moves slowly deeper and deeper into the park, past the well-tended flowerbeds and the fountain, the greenhouses along the fence, and then the summerhouse, the playground, the almost silent stream, a slight trickle of water, insignificant yet still full of voices, of hidden memories.

She can see the balconies on Djurgårdsgatan.

The thankless door-to-door inquiries.

No trace of the red bicycle, even though the uniforms have been down every possible route she could have taken into town.

Not many people left in the city, but even so, she must have screamed. Someone ought to have woken up. Did they move you here, Josefin? And, if so: where were you before then? Where were you taken?

Malin skirts around the summerhouse, fingering the tape of the cordon that has already been pulled down, and closes her eyes, seeing someone chasing a naked, wounded, scrubbed-clean young girl back and forth across the grass, how she’s tied up, gagged, how someone pushes a piece of blue plastic in and out of her, and how her memories close ranks, saying: Stop, no admittance! Grass beneath her body, hardly any dew in the heat, his, her, their bodies over you, muscles pressing you down with full force, the grass a bed you’ll never, ever be able to leave, ever be able to get up from.

Was that it?

Josefin Davidsson.

Maria Murvall.

Theresa Eckeved missing.

A connection?

Josefin.

You wandered about until you were found, but you’re still here with us.

And you’re free, yet somehow not.

Theresa.

Are you still here? Where are you?

I can hear a voice.

I don’t recognise it. But it’s asking me where I am.

I want to know where I am. Because if I know where I am, I can get away from here, get away from the cold and the dark and the lonely and find my way home.

Everything is black now.

And cold.

So please, ask where I am again. Let your voice be an audible beacon to show me the way out of fear and this dark dream.

Ask again, please.

Ask.

‘Theresa, where have you gone?’

Malin says the words out loud as she pauses beside the summerhouse.

Birdsong.

Faces. Peter Sköld, Nathalie Falck, Behzad Karami, Ali Shakbari, other faces without clear features, the one who made the phone call, others, and still others.

Have to talk to Nathalie again.

Who is Lovelygirl? Maybe she knows.

Malin crouches down.

Fumbles in the grass with her hand.

A badger rooting about.

Who are you, who would do something like this? What sort of despair are you in? What happened to you, to make you capable of doing this to Josefin? What do you want to tell me? Has a smouldering snake from hell been released into your verdant paradise? Maybe the inferno is here, now and for ever. And why so clean? What did you want to scrub away? Or scrub into being?

Time clusters together. The ground, memories, give way, the truth fleeing to protect its bearer.

How? Malin thinks.

How can I get you to want to remember, Josefin?

The stench of cremated forest.

Of cremated insects, animals, moss.

The forest now a penal colony for the wretched.

The stench of glowing worms teeming out of fire-ravaged ground. It’s strong in Malin’s nostrils, and if she could fly, glide over the plain and Lake Roxen and the forests around Tjällmo she would see the fire twinkling far below her. She would see the burning points of light and wonder if they were magma, or the truth, or brutality that has decided to seep out, as if some breaking point has been reached.

She would see the girls drifting and crackling like fireflies in the darkness.

15

Saturday, 17 July

Saturday working.

No question now, when their summer has taken a turn into unimagined, dark Dante-esque circles.

They have to work. None of their colleagues will be called in from their holiday unless it’s strictly necessary.

The smell of charred wood and extinguished lives is even more apparent in the morning.

But not intrusive, just different, almost pleasant, like a fire lit by the characters in one of Tove’s old picture books, a fire for children to warm their frozen hands around.

No wind today, and for the time being at least the light is merciful, Malin thinks as she sees the flags hanging limply against their poles in front of the entrance to the police station, the large car park behind her almost empty, just a couple of cars with police markings ready for the hunt.

Malin drags herself through the heat.

Tired today.

Even at five to eight the heat is debilitating and she is sweating under her white jacket and T-shirt. She’s wearing a skirt again, couldn’t stand the thought of trousers, even if she hardly ever wears a skirt for work, it feels too feminine, too weak, too much like a statement. Her world is a masculine world. Whatever any feminists on the National Police Board might like to think.

So she usually wears trousers.

But not in this sort of heat. Not today.

She read about the forest fires on the Correspondent’s website over breakfast. A photograph of the blazing forest covered the first page, and other pages detailed the efforts of the fire brigade to put the fires out. Several hectares were alight. The fire had taken hold in the drought and wanted more, had become dependent on territory, on life. Fire crews from Linköping, Norrköping, Motala and Finspång were all battling in the dusty forests.

Janne wishes he were there.

Fire would be better than Bali. He wants to plough all of his longing into work, into firefighting, saving others instead of trying to understand himself, me, Tove. Us.

And then her investigation.

A page to itself.

A picture of a dildo with the text: Police suspect attacker used blue dildo. Prejudices. Karami. Shakbari. Speculation about Lovelygirl.

How the hell did word of the dildo leak out?

Karin Johannison? Sven Sjöman? Maybe Sven, under pressure from some journalist.

Oh well, it was out now.

The door of the police station glides open automatically. Ebba is sitting behind the reception desk, in early.

Says: ‘Good morning, Malin.’

Malin nods in response.

Zeke and Sjöman are at their desks, even though the morning meeting isn’t due to start for another hour.

Always this meeting, whenever they’re working. No matter whether it’s overtime or not.

They’re both studying various documents, but they still notice her arrival, looking up at her almost simultaneously, and Sven says: ‘Malin, so you thought you’d show up!’

Zeke happy to be in ahead of her for once.

‘Malin, welcome!’

Sven, wearing a creased pair of white linen trousers, is evidently also pleased to see her.

When she sees the look on Sven’s face, Malin decides not to mention her visit to the Horticultural Society Park last night, although she had been planning to, she knows that Sven likes it when you try to get the feel of a crime scene afterwards.

‘Did you go for that beer, Malin?’

No, Malin thinks, but I had a stiff tequila when I got home.

‘You’re looking a bit tired.’

Zeke crowing, grinning, friendly, almost paternal.

They start their morning meeting before nine.

They don’t bother with the meeting room again, one of the round tables in the staffroom will do, there are hardly any uniforms or civilian staff to disturb them today.

Sven looks more tired than usual, and Malin wonders where his new tiredness comes from, thinking that it must be the heat. She notices the fine sawdust on his hairy lower arms. The dust clings to his skin in little lumps and Malin thinks, Sven, you must have been up early this morning, working away in your basement, and maybe that’s just as well, what with these forest fires and sluggish investigations.

As if he could hear her thoughts, Zeke says: ‘That’s one hell of a blaze in the forests. It’s just getting worse and worse.’

‘Eighty firemen,’ Sven says.

‘And the fire’s heading for Lake Hultsjön,’ Malin adds, and silence falls in the staffroom as the three of them sip coffee from their caffeine-stained porcelain mugs.

‘OK, let’s get going,’ Sven says. ‘We’ve got a recently released rapist in the area whom we ought to check out. A Fredrik Jonasson living in Mjölby, thirty-two years old. Evidently he lives with his mother. Attacked a woman outside her flat. Attempted rape and violent assault.’

‘Mjölby can deal with that,’ Zeke says. ‘Are we going to check other sex offenders as well, or just the ones that have been released recently?’

‘We’ll start with this,’ Sven says. ‘We haven’t got the resources to do more right now, but I’ll make sure we have a list.’

‘What else?’ Malin says. ‘How are we going to deal with Behzad Karami and Ali Shakbari? We need to check Behzad’s alibi. Can we get some uniforms to talk to the people who are supposed to have been at the party? Have we got enough people for that? Or are we going to have to pull in someone from their holiday?’

‘Slow down, Fors,’ Sven says. ‘We’ve got no evidence at all against Shakbari and Karami.’

Karim must have spoken to him, but Sven would never hold back a line of inquiry just because Karim put pressure on him. Or the press.

‘Have we got enough people?’ Malin asks again. ‘Can we bring in anyone from Motala? Mjölby?’

The holidays were sacred, otherwise none of them would ever get any time off.

‘We can spare a couple of uniforms,’ Sven says. ‘They can check his alibi.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Jonfeldt and Bulow.’

Good blokes, Malin thinks. Young, single, but not gym-bunnies, not the riot-squad type. More like future detectives.

‘Do you really think they’re involved in this?’

Zeke sounds dubious.

‘Who knows?’ Malin says.

Thinks: I’ve heard their voices in this case, remembering Sven’s words: Listen, Malin. Listen to the voices of the investigation. Recently he’s elaborated on this: You have to listen if you’re going to learn anything, and if you learn something, you can get close to the truth. So close that you can touch it.

‘No news about Theresa either,’ Malin says. ‘Assuming nothing new came in last night? Unless Peter Sköld or Nathalie Falck has volunteered any new information?’

‘Complete silence. On all fronts,’ Sven says. ‘She could have been missing a week now.’

Then Sven changes tack.

‘What about the lesbian angle?’

Zeke no longer hesitant. Malin dubious now, though.

‘Just because we suspect that a dildo might have been used doesn’t mean that we have to track the movements of every lesbian in the city, does it? Because there’s some hint of a lesbian relationship on Facebook?’

‘No one’s suggesting that,’ Zeke says. ‘But it’s a line of inquiry that’s worth following up.’

‘In that case I’d like to talk to Nathalie Falck again,’ Malin says. ‘Alone.’

Zeke nods.

‘Makes sense,’ he says. ‘She didn’t seem to like blokes like me much.’

Sven mutters ‘yes’ before adjusting the belt of his linen trousers and saying: ‘Nothing new from Andersson in Forensics. Presumably he hasn’t found anything else, and he can’t have heard back from Facebook or Yahoo yet.’

Then Sven takes a deep breath before going on.

‘I checked where local lesbians hang out these days. There’s evidently some sort of club in Norrköping, Déjà Vu Delight. According to my sources, they haven’t got a club in Linköping.’

‘I suppose the market’s too small,’ Zeke says. ‘All the dykes probably run off to Stockholm as soon as they get the chance.’

‘Or even further than that,’ Malin adds.

‘What about the National Federation for Gay and Lesbian Rights? Is it worth contacting them?’ Zeke says.

‘They don’t have an office in the area,’ Sven says. ‘You’ll have to check out that club, Malin. Take a look, see what you can find out.’