Summertime Death

‘You mean, go and ask if there’s anyone who uses dildos and has ever exhibited any violent tendencies?’

Sven doesn’t answer.

‘Surely this is taking it too far, considering what we’ve actually got?’ Malin says. ‘Can’t we leave them alone in their own club? I might have a contact I can chase up.’

Sven stays silent.

‘You’re right, Malin. Check your contact,’ he says eventually, then clears his throat and says: ‘So what other theories have we got? Ah yes, whether or not anyone has lost his penis? That sort of thing is confidential, and a bit of a long shot.’

He says this without sentimentality, Malin thinks. As if it were just a nuisance to anyone who’s had this happen to them.

‘I’ll check a few of my contacts anyway,’ Malin says, and she can see a frown develop on Sven’s forehead.

‘Don’t try taking any illegal shortcuts now, Malin.’

She doesn’t answer.

Thinks: would we ever get anywhere if we didn’t take the occasional dodgy shortcut?

And Theresa? Where are you?

Am I under water? Is that green brown black wet stuff around me algae, water lilies? Are those pike teeth nibbling at my legs?

What does this dream want with me? Or am I really awake?

But if I am, then surely everything shouldn’t be black?

Am I blind?

Have my eyes burned out, but they can’t have done, because they don’t hurt. They’re intact, yet somehow not, and I try to blink but nothing happens, and why, Dad, why haven’t you come to shut my eyelids for me? Or are they shut? Or is just one of them open?

I want to close my eyes now. Get away from this place, all of this, and all the sounds, words I can’t understand, they’re like the devil’s language, the backwards speech on some worn-out heavy-metal record.

Turn off the voices.

Let go of my arms.

Let me move my arms and legs and feet and eyelids.

What do the voices want? The ones I can hear beneath me, no, above me, my hearing a space rising through the dream.

I’m stuck.

In this green, brown, black.

In damp plastic.

I don’t want to be blind.

No burning ants are going to crawl inside my open eyelids.

Why? Tell me why you haven’t come to take me home, Dad?

I want to wake up now. I’ve never had this sort of dream before.

I want to wake up, Mum. Dad.

I want to.

Not be blind.

Wake up, wake up, wake up.

But how?

Tell me, how can I wake up?

16

Soporific paperwork and unresolved discussions about the case after the morning meeting. Malin didn’t have time to call her contacts.

They’ve come into the city-centre and now the oxygen seems to be abandoning the air altogether under the parasols covering the tables outside the Gyllenfiket café, but at least the light is bearable in the shade.

There are two customers apart from Malin and Zeke, an elderly couple drinking coffee and eating slices from a whole loaf of coffee-bread. It is almost half past four and the heat has culminated in needle-sharp sunlight, and the scented particles from the forest fires have found their way across the city once more.

Iced coffee.

Con hielo.

They sip in silence, taking it in turns, and over by the windows of the Gränden shopping arcade a pigeon struts to and fro in front of a branch of Intersport. Inside the windows the beach balls and blow-up mattresses look more and more deflated by the second.

‘Can you smell it?’ Zeke wonders.

‘Yes,’ Malin says.

‘Do you think they can stop it?’

‘They’re bound to.’

Zeke nods.

‘Take a look around, Malin. You could almost imagine we were on our own in the city. Just us and our prey.’

‘My head feels like it weighs a couple of thousand kilos in this heat,’ Malin says. ‘It just doesn’t seem to want to think.’

‘Does your head ever want to?’

‘Very funny, Zeke.’

‘I saw a documentary on television last night,’ Zeke says. ‘Some wildlife programme. About some bloody spider that mates with its own offspring.’

‘Sounds like a good way for a species to wipe itself out.’

‘Somehow it still led to a sort of evolution,’ Zeke says. ‘Spiders with close-set eyes.’

A young woman walks past with a St Bernard dog on a lead, the dog’s huge body swaying back and forth, looking ready to pass out.

‘Zeke, I was thinking of having a word with Nathalie Falck this evening.’

‘Why not? Just be careful.’

Malin breathes in the summer air, feeling the heat in her lungs.

They go their separate ways at Trädgårdstorget, and when Zeke has disappeared from view Malin pulls out her mobile.

Senior Consultant Hans Stenvinkel sinks onto the uncomfortable chair in his hot office in ward nine of the University Hospital.

A five-hour operation just finished.

He was trying to save the leg of a motorcyclist who had crashed into a tractor outside Nässjö and been flown to Linköping by air ambulance. Time would tell if the young man would be able to keep his leg – the damage had been extensive, the leg split open from the knee to the hip, but the vascular surgeon had done his best.

Is that sweat dripping from my brow, or water from washing after the operation? Bloody hell, Hans thinks just as the phone rings.

Malin’s number.

What does she want?

The mother of his son Markus’s girlfriend, Tove. The tense but pleasant and evidently brilliant detective inspector. The distant, troubled, but after a couple of glasses of wine relaxed woman. Hasse has often thought when in her company that it’s as if she doesn’t really like doctors.

‘Hans here.’

Her voice at the other end of the line isn’t as alert as usual and he can hear the sound of traffic in the background.

‘This is Malin. Tove’s mum.’

‘Hi, Malin. How are you coping with the heat? Haven’t melted yet?’

‘Half of me has just dissolved onto the pavement.’

Hasse chuckles. At least she’s got a sense of humour.

‘How’s Tove getting on in Bali?’

‘She’s having a great time.’

‘Markus is at our summer cottage outside Torshälla, but he’ll be home when Tove gets back.’

‘I was thinking that you might be able to help me with something, Hasse.’

‘OK. Fire away, Malin.’

‘I could do with finding out if there’s anyone in the city who has lost his penis.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Lost his . . .’

‘Sorry, I heard you, Malin.’

‘It’s to do with the rape of that girl.’

‘The one who was found in the Horticultural Society Park?’

‘Yes.’

‘The information you’re after is confidential, Malin.’

‘I know.’

‘Sorry, Malin, I can’t help you. It’s illegal to reveal the details of anyone’s medical notes.’

‘I know that too, Hasse.’

He sounded shattered, Malin thinks, tired, when I asked. Those long operations must be draining. Malin puts her mobile in the front pocket of her skirt, during the day its pale-blue fabric has gained some light brown stains and Malin wonders if you can get jeans that would be thin enough to put up with in this heat.

The pub downstairs is as tempting as ever. Crazy to live in the same building as a pub.

Sitting at the bar, alone, along with everyone else.

Getting happily, hazily melancholic.

Drink a chilled beer, its bitter, sharp coolness, the alcohol going to your head and filling its nooks and crannies with miraculous emptiness.

But no.

Not now.

The key in the door of the flat.

A stale smell, clothes and everything else just one big mess.

Malin stops, looks at herself in the mirror.

Heat wrinkles?

Whatever, they’re certainly new, those little lines in the skin around her eyes.

I’m thirty-four, Malin thinks. And I still don’t recognise my own reflection, I still don’t know who I’m looking at.

They come to her again. Like summer ghosts.

Janne.

Tove.

And Daniel Högfeldt.

And she is consumed by a sudden painful sense that life is over, even while she’s slaving away at it.

17

Saturday, 17–Sunday, 18 July

Her voice fills the bedroom. She’s talking about the girls.

It doesn’t really matter what she says.

It’s the movement of her voice, its vitality, that’s the important thing.

The presenter on local P4. Her friend.

Helen Aneman must be working evenings now, unless she works at pretty much any time of day.

‘And to all you girls out there in Linköping. Please, don’t take any risks. Whatever you’re doing, don’t go out alone. We don’t know what this summer has let loose.’

Then Helen introduces a track and Malin lies on her bed with the blinds closed, listening to her friend’s voice in the relative darkness.

She sounds sexy.

Alone, but not tragic, as if she were waiting for someone to come to her in the studio and take her away.

Her prince charming? Well, why not?

The music starts. A hard-rock track. The words of the lyrics mean nothing. Malin is jerked back, gets up, slamming one hand down on the radio’s off-switch.

Sven Sjöman called half an hour ago, just after nine o’clock.

‘You’re going to see Nathalie Falck?’

‘I called her. We’re meeting up in a little while. She sounded reluctant, to say the least.’

‘It’s good that you’re working, Malin.’

‘So you don’t think I’ve got anything better to do?’

‘No, actually I don’t, Fors.’

The defiance in Nathalie Falck’s dark eyes.

The lies beyond the defiance.

Or truth withheld.

Nathalie agreed to meet her after some persuasion, but maintained in a razor-sharp voice that she had nothing to add.

Chosen location: the cathedral.

‘I can meet you in the cathedral at ten. I go there sometimes.’

‘Is it open that late?’

‘They don’t lock the doors before eleven in the summer. Some new accessibility thing. And it’s cool in there.’

And now they’re sitting in one of the brown-painted wooden pews towards the front, near the modern painted altarpiece, and above their heads grey stones of different shades reach upward to form an arch, stones that have spent centuries trying to disprove the law of gravity.

Nathalie is wearing a black vest and skirt. She radiates a courage and determination that Malin wishes she could have had as a teenager.

‘What do you want to know?’ she asks without looking at Malin.

‘Yes, what do I want to know? Why don’t you tell me? I’m sure you haven’t told us everything that might be of interest to us. Nice skirt, by the way.’

‘Don’t try to manipulate me. It isn’t a nice skirt. H&M crap.’

‘Who’s Lovelygirl?’

Malin looks for a reaction in the girl sitting beside her.

Nothing.

‘I don’t know any Lovelygirl.’

‘It’s an alias on . . .’

‘I’ve seen it on Theresa’s Facebook page. Don’t know who it is.’

That came a bit too quickly, Malin thinks.

‘You’re sure?’

No answer.

Nathalie huddles up, as if to say: thus far, but no further.

Malin falls silent. Lets the church’s faint knocking sounds take over for a few short moments.

‘Is it hard being different?’ she asks eventually, and she can see Nathalie Falck relax.

‘Do you think I’m different?’

‘Yes. It shows. In a good way.’

‘It’s not hard. It’s just different.’

‘Theresa is missing, Nathalie. You have to tell me what you know.’

And Nathalie Falck turns her round face towards Malin, looks her deep in the eyes.

‘But I don’t know anything else. I know Theresa, but I don’t know everything about her.’

Her pupils contract. A sign of lying.

But are you really, actually lying?

‘What about Josefin Davidsson, do you know her?’

‘You mean the girl in the park? Oh, come on! I’d never even heard of her until I read about her in the paper.’

By the entrance to the cathedral, some seventy-five metres behind them, someone turns a rack of postcards.

‘Why do you come here?’ Malin asks, recognising her own visits to the memorial grove up in the Old Cemetery, and thinking that Tove would never come here of her own accord, the library is her place.

‘I like the way it’s so peaceful. And big. There’s room for me in here, somehow.’

‘It’s certainly big.’

‘What do you think has happened to Theresa?’ Nathalie Falck asks.

‘I don’t know,’ Malin answers. ‘Do you?’

Then Nathalie points to the altarpiece, at the angular, painted figure of Christ.

‘Do you believe in virgin birth?’

Malin doesn’t know how to react to the question.

Virgin birth?

‘I mean,’ Nathalie Falck says, ‘what’s the point of innocence when everything pure and beautiful always ends up dirty? Is it actually possible to talk about such a thing as fucking innocence in the first place?’

It’s just after midnight when Malin lies down on her bed for the second time that evening. It’s just as hot and lonely as the rest of the flat.

She has the radio on.

Helen Aneman is talking about the heat and the forest fire, how one of the firemen from Mjölby who was taking part in the effort to put it out had been surrounded by flames on a gravel track and had been seriously injured.

‘He’s in the University Hospital right now, and I think we should all spare a thought for him and his family.’

Then music.

‘Into the Fire.’

Bruce Springsteen’s epic about the firemen who headed straight into the burning World Trade Center to save others. The wonderful thing about human beings: how we can instantly drop our responsibilities for family, friends, acquaintances, and sacrifice our lives for someone completely unknown to us, our neighbour.

May your strength give us strength

.

How the possibility of sacrifice makes us human.

May your hope give us hope

.

And she has read that the firemen who survived said that they never hesitated, never felt any fear, nor any sense of duty, just a feeling of being one and the same as those in need.

May your love give us love.

If people are reincarnated, let those firemen come back.

Then the song ends and she turns off the radio.

She shuts her eyes. Waits for sleep and dreams, but instead her thoughts race around her skull.

Nathalie Falck. Lovelygirl. What is it that Nathalie isn’t saying? Can’t do any more there. Let time do its work. Josefin. Her closed memory.

Norrköping and Linköping have lesbian women in the fire brigade, Janne has told her, but who are they? Maybe they could tell her something?

It’s a cavalcade of prejudices, this investigation.

Immigrant youths gang raping young girls.

Lesbian firefighters, police officers.

They had a quick discussion after the meeting, about the obvious facts: that there were plenty of dykes in the force, but that Petreaus was the only open homosexual in Linköping.

‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ Sven said. ‘Petreaus is on holiday. Don’t get her mixed up in this.’

‘You’re right,’ Zeke said. ‘All hell would break loose.’

Reality, unreality.

When did you last have your hair cut by a male hairdresser who wasn’t gay?

Which was more or less how Zeke could have put it.

Nathalie Falck.

She wants to look tough, but deep down she seems scared, shy, as if she’s spent the whole of her short life running, trying to get to grips with who she is. But perhaps that’s what we all do, Malin thinks. Try to get to grips with life, and most of us just about manage to keep our heads above water. It’s so much easier to run away from the pain and rush instead into the embrace of comfortable well-being.

The tequila is at the top of the cupboard above the fridge.

Her body is twitching for alcohol. Her stomach, heart, soul are whispering: warm us, sedate us, make us soft. Combat the heat with the heat of strong liquor. That’s who you are, Malin.

She breathes in the warm air.

A faint, faint smell of burning wood.

Thinks of the firemen: ‘Up the stairs, into the fire.’

18

Words unspoken.

They drift through the room like dead souls.

Intimations. But of what?

I never had any brothers or sisters, Malin thinks as she walks through her parents’ flat by the old Infection Park.

It’s just after eight o’clock, Sunday morning, the city even more desolate than on a normal morning. I’m the last person on earth, Malin had thought as she walked to the flat. All the others have burned up. She left her bike at home, wanted to get her body going by walking, stick one angry finger up at the heat.

She wants to water the plants before the morning meeting they agreed to have at half past nine, the need for overtime self-evident now: they can’t lose a second in this investigation. Up earlier than necessary in spite of the lack of sleep in the heat. In spite of the large shot of tequila she drank in two burning gulps.

Weakness in the face of desire. It’s always desire that gets out of control, it doesn’t matter what sort it is.

The flat.

Four rooms and a kitchen, on the third floor of a house built just after the turn of the last century. Four rooms full of furniture from the house in Sturefors, of memories, of intimations of disappointments, unfulfilled dreams and lies, but also of a negotiated love, her parents’ own particular love.

We stick together. But we have no respect for each other, we hate each other’s bodies, we each have no interest in the other, in their words, opinions, dreams, longings, but we shuffle along side by side with our secrets and lies, and as long as we do that then we still have something. Don’t we?

Like hell you do, Malin thinks.

She and Janne. How they really didn’t have in common any of the things you’re supposed to have in common. No interests. No hopes. But they had something that must have been there right from the start. An obvious love, as if together they manifested each other’s humanity, the fundamental goodness, faith and warmth that must always, always be life’s ultimate truth.

Everyday and reality.

Sorrow and pain.

Day after day they saw how their love wasn’t enough, how it clung on but fell apart, and not even Tove could hold them together.

A nameless catastrophe. And Janne was on his way to Bosnia along with the Rescue Services Agency. A fucking note on the table.

In our hour of need we stick together.

And he disappeared and she took Tove with her to Stockholm.

Love can remain but become impossible. The feeling that something very real between them still remains.

She curses that feeling. That’s a before-tequila feeling, the very worst of all. Or the next worst.

Unbearable.

Maybe I need something to believe in, Malin thinks.

You’ll water the plants, won’t you?

Dad’s mantra over the phone.

These rooms do something to me, Malin thinks, even though they’ve never been mine, they’re closed and open at the same time.

Is there a secret? Or is that just what I feel?

Never just a feeling.

Watering the plants.

The watering can has been Malin’s lot since her parents moved four years ago. She and Tove haven’t been to visit them, and they’ve only been back three times.

‘We won’t be home this summer, Malin.’

‘OK.’

‘You’ll do the watering, won’t you?’

She’s had that question a thousand times from her father, and a thousand times she’s said yes.

But most of the plants are dead now.

She’s put the survivors in boxes on the floor beside a shady wall in the living room, trying to spare them from the sun and the worst of the heat, even though the flat must produce a terrible static heat during the day, which turns chlorophyll pale.

Big pots.

Dry soil, dampened by the watering can.

She can feel her parents’ love in the flat, not their love for her, but for each other. Love as a deal, a sensible arrangement, a way to shut out the world.

Why? Malin thinks. Why do I feel such loss among these things?

She didn’t call Janne and Tove yesterday, and they didn’t call her.

She’s sitting on one of the worn wooden benches on the hill leading down from her parents’ building, fingering her mobile.

The fire brigade. Lesbians. The alien world of teenagers. Thousands of years between each generation.

Janne.

She fingers the keys as an unbearable ray of sunlight breaks through the foliage of the trees and she edges closer to the building.

Smoke in the air, just a hint, the fire is evidently spreading towards Lake Roxen. Is Lake Hultsjön going to burn? Really? Can a lake evaporate?

‘Janne here.’

He sounds lively. Restaurant noises in the background.

‘Is that you, Malin?’

‘It’s me. How are you both?’

‘Good, we’re having lunch. There’s a bloke who grills fish for you. Tove loves it.’

Fish.

She doesn’t usually love fish.

‘And you, how are you getting on?’

‘We’re struggling with that rape case I mentioned. That’s one of the reasons I’m calling.’

Silence on the line.

‘So how can I help?’

Malin gives a brief outline of the case, about the dildo and the lesbian line of inquiry.

‘So you want to know if I know anyone in the fire brigade who might be able to talk to you and tell you a bit about the lesbian community in Östergötland?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘No prejudices there, then. What about your own ranks?’

‘Sensitive, Janne. But what the hell are we supposed to do, there’s a fucking rapist on the loose, a really vicious one at that. And another girl’s gone missing. God knows where she is.’

She explains briefly about Theresa Eckeved, and how they really haven’t managed to come up with anything at all.

Another silence.

‘Janne, it could have been Tove.’

He says nothing at first, then: ‘Talk to Solhage down at the station. I’ll talk to her, she’s OK, and she’s working the whole of July.’

‘Thanks, Jan. Can I talk to Tove?’

‘She’s just gone up to the room, can you call back a bit later?’

When Malin has ended the call she turns her face to the sun, hoping to get some colour in her tired features, let the rays wipe out those horrible wrinkles, but after just a few seconds the heat is too much for her and she gets up from the bench, thinking: No one can control the passage of time, not me, and not you out there somewhere, whoever or whatever you are.

Malin walks up to the police station, careful to stay on the shady side of the street. Her legs are dragging behind her body, her sandals heavy on the tarmac, which feels almost sticky under their soles.

Thinking, as her feet move forward in turn: Exclusion leads to hate, and hate leads to violence.

Sexual exclusion, not chosen voluntarily.

It’s mostly young people who choose to stand aside, or believe that they’re choosing exclusion. No truly adult person chooses to stand on the sidelines, or at least very few. The passage of time brings with it the realisation that belonging is everything. You, me, we.

What do I belong to?

The divorce was the biggest mistake of my life, Malin thinks. How could we, Janne? In spite of everything, everything, everything.

Five hundred metres away Daniel Högfeldt is sitting at his desk, and has just printed out thirty, maybe forty, articles from the past twenty years about rapes in the city and the surrounding area, the results of a search in the paper’s digital archive.

He’s laid the articles out on his desk, they cover the whole surface, and side by side they make a frightening sight, the city seems to contain an active volcano of sexual violence against women, most of it within the family, but also cases that for some reason seem worse; of insane, starving men attacking women in the city’s parks, and occasionally men too, come to that, there’s one case of male rape down in the park by the railway station. Most of the cases seem to have been solved, but some must still rankle with the police: Maria Murvall, the case Malin is so hung up on, and the well-documented case of the woman who was raped and murdered outside the Blue Heaven nightclub. And more besides.

Shall I write an exposé about the unsolved cases? Daniel thinks. Shall I poke about a bit, read up on them all and write a gruesome series about Linköping’s recent history of rape, some diverting summer reading?

Something will come out of it.

But what?

In terms of statistics, Linköping is no worse than anywhere else, but it’s no better either, which is a fact that would give its inhabitants’ very well-developed sense of self-worth a serious kick.

One thing is certain.

There is violence and sexual hunger to write about. Violence and hunger to match this infernal heat.

Then Daniel closes his eyes for a few short seconds, the word heat makes him think of Malin, and he wonders what she’s doing at that moment. But no clear image resolves itself and he opens his eyes and thinks: I’ll drop these unsolved cases, but one day I’ll go even further back and see what hellish stories this dump is trying to hide.

But for the time being I have to concentrate on what’s happening here and now.

Malin’s white blouse is stained grey with sweat, she thinks that she must have another one in her locker in the changing room, otherwise she’s stuffed.

The police station up on the hill, the solid stone buildings around it, ochre-coloured cubes tormented by the sun, tired of the dust rising from the parched, bitter ground. Behind her the University Hospital, one of the few places in the city that’s still a hive of activity.

Solhage.

She was one of the stars of Linköping FC’s women’s team until they got serious and started buying players from all around the country. After that she couldn’t even get a place in the squad.

Must have been a bitter blow.

Best to give Janne a bit of time to call her before I get in touch.

But if you can handle being a woman in the pathetically macho world of the fire service, you can probably deal with being left out of a football team.

Not long till the morning meeting.

Once we’ve been through the state of the investigation I’ll give Solhage a ring.

19

‘It was actually quite a relief to give up football.’

‘So you weren’t bitter?’

‘Not in the slightest, I was tired of all that kicking, and it was all starting to get pretentious. I mean, commentators on television analysing the game and drawing little lines to show how someone runs. I mean, analysis is supposed to be saved for world affairs, isn’t it?’

Malin laughs.

The masts of the yachts in the lock are sticking up above the stone edge like poles, swaying back and forth and giving the illusion of a dying wind, only there is no wind. In the background Malin can see the yellow wooden façade of the lock-keeper’s cottage, and opposite her, in the shade of the parasol outside the canalside café bar in Vreta Kloster, sits Viktoria Solhage, smiling, a warm smile that softens her thin face framed by her long blonde hair.

The morning meeting hadn’t taken long.

She told them about her meeting with Nathalie Falck.

Otherwise there was nothing to report, nothing new from Karin and Forensics. Their colleagues in Mjölby had checked up on their sex offender, Fredrik Jonasson. His mother could give him an alibi.

They agreed that Malin should talk to Viktoria Solhage alone. Woman to woman.

The phone call to Viktoria Solhage. She hadn’t sounded at all put out.

‘Let’s meet at the canal café bar by the lock at a quarter past ten. I get Sundays off. I live out in Ljungsbro, and it’s a nice bike ride along the towpath. But I haven’t got long. I have to head up to the forest fire later, we’ve all been called in.’

Now the former football star is sitting in front of Malin and talking about the end of one part of her career and the start of the next. Viktoria Solhage was the first female firefighter in the city. Her appointment was controversial, and Malin remembers what Janne said at the time: ‘OK. She passed the tests. But how do I know if she’ll be able to carry me if I pass out in a sudden burst of smoke?’

She’s probably stronger than ninety per cent of the men in the service, Malin thinks as she looks at Viktoria Solhage’s bulging muscles.

‘Pull, for God’s sake, can’t you see that we’re going to hit the edge?’

‘I am fucking pulling!’

Voices from one of the boats in the lock.

Coffee and ice cream in the shade of a parasol, it would have been lovely if the temperature wasn’t already thirty-five degrees in the shade.

‘Janne called, like I said. I was annoyed at first, but what the hell, the important thing here is that no more young girls get raped, isn’t it?’

Viktoria Solhage screws up her nose, then her face becomes expressionless as she waits for Malin’s questions.

‘What do you think,’ Malin says. ‘Is there anyone in the city’s lesbian community who seems particularly aggressive?’

‘I daresay we can all be a bit aggressive, but that much . . .’ Viktoria Solhage shakes her head. ‘Dyke is synonymous with aggression to you lot, isn’t it?’

Malin feels herself blushing. Wants to put her sunglasses on and look away.

‘No, but you know how it is,’ Malin says.

‘How is it? Tell me.’

Malin gives Viktoria Solhage a beseeching look before going on: ‘There’s no one with particularly problematic baggage? Any childhood traumas that you know about? Anyone who was raped?’

‘No, most people keep that sort of thing to themselves, don’t they?’

‘But?’

‘Well, sometimes things can get a bit rough in bed, like they can for anyone. If only you knew. And sure, some girls fight with each other when they’re drunk, competing to see who can be toughest.’

‘Does anything ever get reported?’

‘No, we mostly keep things to ourselves. Maybe if someone went way over the line, but even then most of us would keep quiet. But everyone’s like that, aren’t they? No one calls the pigs . . . sorry, the police, unless they have to.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘As far as we’re concerned, I know why. The police don’t give a damn about what a few dykes do to each other, Malin Fors. There’s a deep mistrust of the police, you ought to know that.’

‘But you can’t think of anyone who’s been in a bad way, anyone who’s been unusually violent?’

Viktoria Solhage looks down into her coffee cup.

Takes a deep breath.

You want to say something, Malin thinks. But Viktoria Solhage hesitates, turns to look at the canal and the lock, and the gates that are slowly closing again.

‘Can you imagine being stuck in a little ditch like that all summer?’

‘You were about to say something, weren’t you?’

‘Okay.’

Viktoria Solhage turns to face Malin.

‘There is one girl,’ she says. ‘She seems to be dragging a lot of shit around, and there’s gossip about her being particularly violent. There’s a hell of a lot of rumours about what she went through as a child. If I were you, I’d probably take a look at her.’

‘What’s her name?’

Viktoria Solhage looks down at her cup again. Then she pulls out a pen and paper from her handbag, writes down a name, address and phone number.

‘Look,’ she says, pointing at the canal. ‘There they go.’

Malin turns around.

Sees the yachts in the next section of the canal, heading for the lock that leads to the little lake halfway down towards Lake Roxen.

‘Once they’re out in the Roxen,’ Malin says as she turns around again, ‘they’ll be free of the ditch. Good for them, eh?’

Viktoria Solhage smiles.

‘The canal isn’t called the divorce ditch without reason.’

Malin puts the piece of paper in the front pocket of her trousers.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘One last thing. Does the name Nathalie Falck mean anything to you?’

Viktoria Solhage shakes her head and says: ‘Promise me one thing, Malin. Don’t let this business turn into something that reinforces the image of lesbians as macho idiots.’

‘I promise,’ Malin says.

‘In Stockholm, at any rate in the centre of the city, people are very tolerant about the way other people want to live, but out here in the country it’s different. Most people have never even met anyone that they know is homosexual. You can imagine how much fun it would be if the city got the idea you were hunting a lesbian killer.’

‘I’ve got something we should follow up.’

Zeke’s voice hoarse over the mobile.

Malin has just waved goodbye to Viktoria Solhage, who disappeared along the towpath up towards Ljungsbro, and is now cursing her stupidity. The place where she left the car is no longer in shadow, and the sun is now baking its dark-blue frame.

It must be at least a hundred degrees in there.

And the damn light is cutting right through her sunglasses and seems to have made giving her a headache its only goal.

‘What did you say?’

As she says the words a dust-cloud drifts past, making her cough.

‘I’ve got something we should look into.’

‘What?’

No answer, instead: ‘Did you get anything from Solhage?’

‘A name. We’ll have to check her out. And you?’

‘I got a text message from an anonymous sender.’

‘We get those every day.’

‘Don’t try to be funny, Malin.’

Then Zeke reads aloud from his mobile.

‘Check Paul Anderlöv. A very unfortunate man.’

Silence.

So Hasse did it: ignored the law on confidentiality.

She hadn’t thought that he would.

‘Who do you think sent it?’ Malin asks.

Zeke snorts.

‘That’s something neither you nor I want to know. But I’m not stupid, Malin.’

‘So you know what it’s about?’

‘Yes. Like I said, I’m not stupid.’

The Volvo is hotter than a sauna.

A very unfortunate man.

Bloody hell, Malin thinks. Is this right? Shouldn’t he be left in peace?

One naked, wounded girl on a swing, one girl missing. Reality a grey, yellow, charred mess.

Malin is in her car on the way back to the city.

Outside the windscreen the plain is still, like a mirage conjured up by slowly smothered flames, as if a shimmering blue sky, stretched far too thin, has set fire to the fertile farmland that stretches all the way to the luminous horizon. The heat is hammering the ground with absolute confidence.

The open fields are drooping under the vault of the sky and the rye and corn are slowly burning up beneath the sun’s rays, the rape is curled towards the ground, pale yellow, whimpering as if every golden leaf were gasping for air and were just waiting to be buried with the worms.

They’re the only thing moving out here on the plain right now.

Glowing worms that have spilled out of the volcanic cracks shaken forth by evil.

Zeke is waiting in his car outside the house in Ryd. His engine idling, the air conditioning on full-blast.

The yellow-brick building near the centre is only three storeys high, yet still seems to contain the misery of the whole country in concentrated form, with its satellite dishes beside the windows, its cluttered balconies and outdoor spaces, and the general air of abandonment. The paths between the buildings are desolate, but the flats inside are teeming: refugees, drug addicts, social outcasts, the lowest status workers, people excluded from society.

But there are two worlds here.

Some of the blocks contain student flats: people with dreams, their lives ahead of them, and beyond some tall oaks Malin can just make out Herrgården, the science students’ bar and bistro.

Malin nods to Zeke through the side window and he opens the door and gets out.

‘So this is where the unfortunate Paul Anderlöv lives?’

‘This is where he lives,’ Zeke says.

‘How do we explain how we found out about him?’

‘We don’t,’ Malin replies.

20

The thing about pain is that it’s an eternal curse, because it wipes out time. It bestows an intimation of death and a stench of carrion upon a present that seems never-ending.

The physical pain disappeared long ago.

But psychological pain?

Medication.

But it doesn’t help, and nothing gets better with time, no, everything gets worse, the pain is always new and each time it is more assured, more arrogant.

I am pain, Paul Anderlöv thinks as he hears the doorbell ring.

And he gets up from his armchair, turns down the volume of Days of Our Lives on the television and makes his way out to the hall. Once again, he is struck by the fact that his body seems to have disappeared, become limp and saggy instead of hard like it was before.

Fourteen years since it happened.

But it could just as well have been yesterday.

Malin holds up her ID towards the unshaven man in the doorway, his face simultaneously sunken and swollen, his cropped hair thin on his scalp.

‘We’re from the police. We’d like to ask a few questions,’ Malin says. ‘Are you Paul Anderlöv?’

The man nods.

‘Can we take it out here?’ he goes on to say. ‘It’s a mess inside, and I don’t really like inviting people in. Has there been some sort of trouble in the neighbourhood?’

‘We’d prefer to come in,’ Zeke says in a voice that doesn’t leave any room for discussion.

And Paul Anderlöv backs down, showing them into a sparsely furnished living room with messy heaps of newspapers and motoring magazines. There’s a noticeable smell of smoke, vodka and spilled beer, and in the corners there are dustballs the size of sparrows.

Malin and Zeke sit down on a pair of chairs by the low coffee table.

Paul Anderlöv sinks into an armchair.

‘So, what do you want?’

He’s trying to sound tough, Malin thinks, but he just sounds resigned and tired and his green eyes are uncertain, tired beyond the limits of tiredness, and he’s sad in a way that Malin has never seen anyone sad before.

‘Have you heard about the rape in the Horticultural Society Park?’

When he hears the word rape it’s as if all the air and water and blood disappear from Paul Anderlöv’s body, as if he realises why they’ve come. His head sinks down towards his chest and he starts to shake and whimper. Malin looks at Zeke, who shakes his head, and they both realise that they’ve crossed a boundary, the boundary that justifies intrusions into people’s lives in the search for the truth.

Malin gets up.

She sits down next to Paul Anderlöv on the sturdy arm of the chair, put he pushes her away.

‘Go to hell,’ he says. ‘After all, I’ve been there long enough.’

Paul Anderlöv collects himself, seems to pull himself together, makes coffee, puts away a pair of white washing-up gloves as he asks them to take a seat in the kitchen, with a view of the civic centre in Ryd.

‘I’m not so stupid that I can’t work out the way you’re thinking,’ he says. Resignation in his voice, but also relief. Perhaps because he knows that they’re going to listen to him.

‘I read about the dildo and I understand perfectly well, and I’m not even going to comment on the fact that it’s idiotic and superficial and simplistic. But I understand your thinking. Could he be sexually frustrated? Mad?

‘Well, I’m not mad. Sexually frustrated? You bet I am, what do you think it’s like living like this, you should see what I look like down there,’ and Zeke looks involuntarily away from Paul Anderlöv and out of the window, but the shabby brick and panelled façade of the civic centre give little comfort and he notices a spider outside the window, and an almost invisible web stretching from one side of the frame to the other.

‘Anyway, how did you find me? Actually, I don’t even want to know. Maybe it was through Janne, your ex, Fors, I know him. We were in Bosnia together, in ’94. We’ve had a few beers together, talking about our time in the field, or rather: I talk about my memories to him. He’s as quiet as a broken car stereo.’

‘Janne hasn’t said anything about you.’

‘Oh, so it wasn’t Janne? No, I didn’t really think it would be.’

And Paul Anderlöv starts talking, and they listen.

‘It happened on a mountain road outside Sarajevo. I was one of the IFOR troops, and it was the sort of shitty, grey, rainy day when it was practically ordained that something was going to be fucked up. It was that sort of day, and it did get seriously fucked up; the jeep hit a mine that had been buried outside a village called Tsika. I remember an explosion, a great sucking explosion, and then I was lying in the road some twenty metres from something burning, and I could hear someone screaming and screaming and screaming, loud enough to bring down the mountains, and then I realised I was the one doing the screaming. Everything down there was just black, no pain, just black and empty.

‘Two men died.

‘One lost a leg.

‘And then there was me.

‘I’d happily have changed places with one of the others.

‘And now you show up, a couple of fucking cops, and what the hell do you know about anything? You know nothing.’

They let the silence do its work.

Then they ask the questions that have to be asked.

The cretinous, asinine questions.

From haze to clarity, as the poet Lars Forssell wrote, Malin thinks. From clarity to haze.

‘What were you doing on the night between Thursday and Friday?’

‘Have you ever met Josefin Davidsson?’

‘Can anyone give you an alibi?’

‘So you still have the desire even if the ability is gone. Did your frustration make something snap?’

‘So you weren’t in the Horticultural Society Park?’

‘But you do like teenage girls, then?’

Paul Anderlöv’s eyes are fixed to the Ikea clock, the same sort I’ve got in my kitchen, Malin thinks. But the second-hand still works on yours.

Paul Anderlöv doesn’t respond to Zeke’s insinuations.

Relinquishes the day to the unending ticking of the clock.

‘Why do I feel like a complete bastard, Zeke?’

The heat envelops them, forcing sweat from their pores, the sunlight reflected in the cars around them.

‘Because you are a bastard, Fors. A case like this one turns us all into bastards, Malin.’

‘The price of truth.’

‘Stop philosophising.’

Boundaries crossed, moved.

‘Lunch?’ Zeke says. ‘I could murder a pizza.’

Conya on St Larsgatan.

Best pizza in the city. Big, greasy, unhealthy.

The owner usually lets them off paying when he’s there.

‘Police, free of charge.’

Like an American cop film. Zeke loves it. Corrupt? Maybe a little, but the owner refuses to let them pay.

One of the many hard-working, frowned-upon immigrants in this city, Malin thinks as she takes a bite of her Capricciosa.

The piece of paper Viktoria Solhage gave her is on the table in front of her.

The name on it: Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson. An address, a phone number.

‘Louise,’ Zeke says. ‘Could a Louise have Lovelygirl as a nickname?’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t you think?’

‘Lovelygirl,’ Zeke says. ‘A healthy dose of self-irony?’

‘It’s a long shot, Zeke, to put it mildly,’ Malin says, feeling how the pizza is making her feel fatter and greasier with every passing second.

‘Lovelygirl,’ Zeke says once more. ‘Isn’t that what all men want, really? A Lovelygirl?’

‘Yes,’ Malin says. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Bloody good pizza,’ Zeke says, giving a thumbs-up in the general direction of the open kitchen.

The man standing by the pizza oven smiles, picking out ingredients from small plastic tubs and burying some of them in tomato sauce on a freshly spun base.

21

I’ve been lying here, fettered to time and this cold darkness for far too long now.

Where are you, Dad?

Just tell me, you’re not coming. Not now. Not ever. Or maybe sometime far, far in the future. I don’t want to be stuck here that long.

It’s horrid here. And I’m so frightened, Dad.

So just come.

Take me away from the voices.

Voices.

Like worms on top of me.

I’ve heard your fawning, bloated noises for ages now.

Your voices.

You’re happy about something.

Why?

I have no idea why you sound so happy, because here, here with me everything is damp and cold and the dream never seems to end. But maybe this isn’t a dream? Maybe it’s something else?

Swimming! Swimming!

Is that what you’re shouting?

I love swimming. Can I join in? Can we go swimming together? I’ve got a pool in my garden at home.

Am I in the pool now, with my eyes shut?

A dog is barking, but everything’s dark, so dark and, if I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d free myself from my muscles, my body, and then the being that is me would drift off.

But that isn’t allowed in this dream.

No.

So instead, your happy cries. Up there? That’s right, isn’t it?

Earth and sand and a wet chill, a damp plastic chill, the grains close but not actually inside.

Is this a grave?

Have I been buried alive?

I’m fourteen, so tell me, what would I be doing in a grave?

Swimmers.

More than usual on a Sunday.

No entrance fee to the beach at Stora Rängen, you just leave your car further up and walk over the meadow where Farmer Karlsman has been kind enough not to put any bulls this year.

He did that one summer a few years back, before the kiosk was here. They wrote about it in the Correspondent. But the farmer didn’t back down that year.

The visitors are so carefree, with their families, children and women and men all enjoying the heat and the dubious cooling effect of the warm water, protecting their skin with expensive sunblock, their eyes with even more costly glasses.

And now, Slavenca Visnic thinks, now they’re queuing at my kiosk, waiting impatiently for me to open up. Just hold on a bit, you’ll get your ice cream. The children so happy to be getting ice cream, you can’t buy more happiness than that for seventeen kronor.

Just hang on, be grateful that I’m here at all.

Aftonbladet? Expressen?

Sorry, no newspapers.

Who are you really, you whom society has left behind, you who don’t have anywhere else to go? We share that fate at least. In one sense, anyway.

Slavenca puts the key in the door of the beach kiosk, tells the crowd in front of the shutters to calm down, I’m about to open up, you’ll get your ice cream in a minute.

Beyond the people, almost naked, she can see the water of the lake, sees them strutting in the sun, thinks that the reflections make the surface of the water look like transparent skin. And the big oak tree over there by the lake. Always so secretive.

Her kiosk at the Glyttinge pool is closed.

Spoiled youngsters who don’t want summer jobs. Future ministers of leisure.

Sometimes she thinks that the whole of Sweden is one big leisure committee consisting of people who’ve always had it too good, who don’t have the faintest idea about sorrow.

Then she opens the shutters.

An ugly kid, eight years old or so, a girl, is at the front of the queue.

‘A Top Hat,’ she says.

‘I’m out of those,’ Slavenca says, and smiles.

A dog is barking down by the oak, on the patch of ground where the grass has somehow vanished and been replaced by bare earth.

The dog has just peed up against the tree, but now he’s frantic.

Standing to attention, marking that there’s something there, something hidden that needs to be found.

He barks and barks and barks.

His paws digging, digging, digging.

I can hear noises, barking.

Slowly, slowly they drag me out of my dream, up, up. I want to wake up now, I want to wake up.

But I’m not going to wake up. Am I?

Am I going to wake up, Dad?

I’m stuck in something much worse, much stranger than sleep. But how did I get here?

Someone has to tell me, tell everyone, tell Mum and Dad. They must be worried; I don’t usually sleep this late. And what are those other noises? It sounds like digging, and someone, a woman’s soothing voice saying: ‘OK, Jack, OK. Come here now,’ and the barking turns into whimpering, and someone says: ‘OK, stay there, then, stay there.’

Slavenca is taking a break from the relentless selling of ice cream, ignoring the next customer, leaving the surprised woman to stand there glaring into the kiosk, at the fridge full of drinks.

Don’t be in such a rush, she thinks. If it gets even hotter you’ll buy more ice cream and drinks.

She’s put her prices up and people complain about her charging twenty kronor for a Coke, seventeen for an ice lolly.

OK, so don’t buy them, then.

Bring your own drinks with you.

But if the ice cream company gets to hear about her raised prices she won’t be allowed to sell their products any more. So what, there are other suppliers. Anyway, I ought to be in the forest with the other volunteers, tackling the flames.

And that dog over there.

He shouldn’t be barking like that, shouldn’t be there.

He’s frantic, as if there’s a bitch on heat buried by that tree.

Mad dogs. Mad men. Desire can lead to anything.

And that ugly girl who was first in the queue, she’s looking down into the hole the dog’s digging.

What on earth does she think she’s going to see?

The wet and the dark are getting thinner, and that dog barking is getting louder, the voices have died out behind the barking and am I waking up now? The light up there, and the digging, and then my view is clear, but fuzzy, grainy, as if there were soil or sand in my open eye.

Am I free now?

Can I go home?

And I see a black dog, its nose and teeth, and he’s barking excitedly and I want to get up, but my body doesn’t exist.

And the dog disappears and instead there’s a girl, the same age as me, no, younger, and her face changes, distorts, and I see her mouth form a scream and I want to tell her to stop screaming, it’s only me, waking up at long last.

My body does exist, but do I?

Slavenca rushes out of the kiosk and down towards the girl and the dog, people are rushing over, all the bathers, and the scream is contagious, yes, even the water and the trees and the cows up in the meadow seem to be screaming.

‘Out of the way,’ Slavenca says, then she’s standing on the edge of the hole, looking down.

A girl’s open eye beneath thin plastic, blue, curious.

The life gone from those eyes long before.

You poor thing, she thinks.

She’s seen a lot of eyes like that, Slavenca, and all those mute memories come back to her now, lifeless memories of a life that never happened.

PART TWO

In the eyes of summer angels

On the way towards the final room

You were left to rest and wait close to purifying water.

Murdered, but perhaps not yet dead.

I know that rebirth is possible, that innocence can come back. It didn’t work with you, my earthbound angel, but it will work with someone else, because how else are the spiders’ legs to disappear, how else can I put a stop to the rabbits’ claws tearing away deep within me?

Our love couldn’t evaporate, no matter how much pain the hot summers brought with them, no matter how much the tentacles crept over our legs.

This city has masses of trees, parks and forests. I am there among the black, silvery trees. You are also there somewhere. I just haven’t found you yet.

I want to get there now, feel your breath on my cheek. I want to have you here with me.

So don’t be scared.

No one will ever be able to hurt you again.

22

The blue and white tape of the cordon. The steaming water of the lake in the early afternoon light, like the bare skin of the people standing in the shadows of the trees on the slope, on the other side of the tape, watching the police officers with curious, hungry eyes.

The uniforms are fine-combing the ground down towards the shore where Malin, Zeke and Sven Sjöman, together with Karin Johannison, the duty Forensics officer, are carefully freeing the body from the soil and transparent plastic. It’s unnaturally white, scrubbed, its cleansed wounds like the craters of dark, red-blue volcanoes in a dead human landscape, the greyish skin recently touched by hungry worms for the first time.

‘Careful, careful.’ Karin’s words, and they are careful, slow, keen to preserve any evidence that might be left in the location where the body was found.

Mingling with the bathers are the journalists, from local radio, television, from the papers, from the Correspondent. Daniel Högfeldt isn’t there, but Malin recognises the young female temp who interviewed her for a piece of coursework she was doing about crime-reporting at the journalism college back in the spring.

Where’s Daniel?

He doesn’t usually miss something like this.

But presumably even he gets Sundays off. And if that’s true, good luck to him.

The muffled sound of digital cameras.

Eyes eager to get closer, to document events so that they can be sold on.

Malin takes a deep breath.

Is it possible to get used to this heat?

No.

But it’s better than freezing cold.

Can nature self-combust as a result of events caused by human beings? Attack us in protest at all the stupid things we do to one another? In her mind’s eye Malin can see the trees on the meadow, the oaks and limes, tear their roots from the earth and furiously beat everyone to the ground with their sharp branches. Burying us with our wicked deeds.

The sweat is dripping from Zeke’s brow and Sven is panting, his heart-attack gut juddering up and down above his belt as he squats on the ground with a blank expression on his face.

‘It has to be Theresa Eckeved,’ he says. ‘It looks like she’s been wrapped in ordinary transparent bin bags.’

‘No chance of tracing them,’ Malin says.

The girl’s face scrubbed clean under the plastic, her body naked, as white as her face, almost entirely uncovered now, also scrubbed clean. There’s a deep open wound in the back of her head, and wounds as big as saucers on her arms, stomach, thighs, all cleaned and somehow trimmed at the edges, like neatly tended flowerbeds, blue-black, nurtured.

‘It’s her,’ Malin says, noting the stench of decay, no smell of bleach here. ‘I recognise her from the photographs. It’s her, no doubt about it.’

‘No doubt at all,’ Zeke agrees.

And Sven mutters: ‘Just because it’s hot as hell, surely the whole world doesn’t have to go to hell.’

Malin looks at the body.

‘It’s like someone’s cleaned her really, really carefully,’ Malin says.

‘Like someone wanted to make her, the wounds, as clean and neat as possible. Like with Josefin, only even more so.’

White skin, black wounds.

‘Yes,’ Zeke says. ‘Almost like a ritual.’

‘She doesn’t smell of bleach.’

‘No, she smells of decay,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks: You’re no older than Tove, what if it was you, Tove? What would I have done then? And then she sees herself sitting on the edge of her bed with her service pistol in her hand, raising it slowly to her mouth, ready to let a bullet explode her consciousness for ever.

Fear. You were scared, weren’t you?

You must have been scared.

How did you get there in the ground?

‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin says, and Zeke and Karin and Sven all look at her.

‘Just thinking out loud,’ Malin says. ‘How long has she been here?’

‘Considering how damp the skin is from the plastic it was wrapped in, and how the body has started to bloat in spite of the earth on top of it, I’d guess three days, maybe four. It’s impossible to say for sure.’

‘Three days?’ Zeke says. ‘She could have disappeared up to six days ago.’

‘I can’t say right now if she was moved here after she died,’ Karin says. ‘I’ll try to figure that out.’

‘So she could have been held captive somewhere for a couple of days,’ Sven says. ‘And then moved here.’

‘Someone might have seen something,’ Zeke says.

‘You think so?’ Malin says. ‘This is a pretty remote spot if you’re not here to go swimming.’

‘People, Malin. They’re always on the move, you know that as well as I do.’

Malin sees herself in the Horticultural Society Park the other night.

Did you see me then? You who did this?

You who are doing this, you’re trying to put something right, that has to be it. It must have been dark when you dragged the body down here, the trees bearing witness as you buried her in the ground. And why so close to the water where most people are? Maybe you wanted us to find her. What is it that you want from us?

‘How did she die?’ Malin asks, as an unexpectedly cold wind blows past her legs and out across the lake.

‘I don’t know yet,’ Karin replies. ‘The head injury was probably the cause of death, but as you can see there are clear strangulation marks around her neck.’

‘Sexual violence?’

‘No clear signs of penetration. But I’ll have to examine her more closely.’

Karin.

Smart, not to say driven, but her view of the dead is like an engineer looking at a machine.

‘It’ll be hard to find any forensic evidence,’ Karin says. ‘There must have been hundreds of people who came here to swim over the past few days. Any footprints or other evidence has probably disappeared by now.’

‘Unfortunately that’s all too likely,’ Sven says. ‘But the scene can probably tell us a fair bit about the perpetrator, if we just give it some thought.’

The perpetrator?

Malin thinks. You’re so sure about things, Sven. Just as sure as I am that that gut of yours is going to be the death of you if you don’t do something about it soon.

‘What do we think about a connection with Josefin?’ Malin asks.

‘They’re probably linked,’ Sven says. ‘Both girls scrubbed clean the same way. But we can’t be absolutely certain. Karin, you’ll have to check for traces of paint.’

I can see you and hear you, all you strangers, and I understand that you’re talking about me, but I don’t want to listen to your wretched words.

Wounds on my body.

Sexual violence.

Perpetrator.

Penetration?

No.

Captive, captive, dead.

Dead.

A blow to the head.

And who’s dead? Not me, I’m fourteen years old, do you hear? You don’t use words like dead about someone who’s just fourteen years old. I’ve got many years of life ahead of me, at least seventy, and I want those years.

I want them back.

Give them to me, Dad.

I refuse. Refuse.

I feel no pain and if I did have those wounds that you’re talking about then surely I’d be screaming?

But my voice.

It can’t be heard, but is audible nonetheless, and the words are different, it’s as if I’ve grown up in this dream and woken up with a new register.

Register?

I’d never use that word.

Let me be! Don’t touch me!

Let me sleep, dream myself away, let me be. What are you doing with me?

All the awful things I’ve been dreaming.

Go away, now.

Let me carry on sleeping.

I can see a face.

A woman’s face, it’s a thin, pleasant face framed with blonde hair that blends into the pale green of the trees, the blue of the sky.

She’s looking at me.

I want to get up, but it’s like I don’t exist. Don’t I exist? But if I didn’t exist, then you wouldn’t be talking about me, would you?

Malin crouching down over the girl.

One eye open, the other closed, almost pleading for sleep. The body still, almost pressed into the ground. Bruising around the neck.

The scrubbed body.

The neat, trimmed wounds.

Just like Josefin Davidsson in the Horticultural Society Park.

Sven may still have a few doubts, but it must be the same person, the same people, behind this. From now on these cases are one and the same.

Soil under the girl’s nails, the only trace of dirt.

You wanted to get away from here.

Didn’t you?

The girl in the pictures in the house in Sturefors.

Now here. A scared father trying to keep calm. An anxious mother giving them the photographs. And then what?

I promise you one thing, Theresa: I won’t give up until we’ve got him.

Or her.

Or him.

Or . . .

The mantra within Malin like a prayer, and she looks away from the girl’s single open eye and up at Sven. He’s making a plan, drawing up an internal checklist of how to move forward with this, everything that needs to be done and mustn’t be forgotten. Calling in off-duty officers, going door-to-door around every house within a two-kilometre radius, questioning all the people on the beach, today, yesterday and the day before, appearing in the media and pleading with anyone who might have seen something, the removal of the body, the wait for Karin’s report, informing the parents . . . telling them this unbearable news.

Malin knows whose job that will be. Sometimes they have someone with them when they break news like that, a priest or a counsellor, but often they do it themselves. And who knows how long it might take to rustle up a priest in the dog days of summer?

Tove in Bali.

I shan’t think about that.

Burdens.

And then Malin looks at Theresa again.

Her scrubbed-clean mouth lies open, as if she had been suffocated with de-oxygenated air, as if someone wanted to stop her words getting out, or maybe just demonstrate the importance of oxygen, that it means everything, that the earth, from which we come, is all that we have.

On the other side of the cordon people are starting to move away now that the uniformed officers have made a note of their names and asked the preliminary questions, and a few of them gaze longingly up towards the shuttered ice cream kiosk.

Sometimes, Malin thinks, a police investigation is all about the art of the impossible.

Up in the meadow a cow is lowing, as a gathering breeze stirs the grass. The smell of smoke from the forest fires doesn’t reach here, but Malin can still sense the crackling in the air, how millions of possibilities have been set in motion.

‘Malin!’ the summer-temp journalist calls after her as she heads off towards the meadow. ‘What have you got for me?’

‘No more than you can see for yourself,’ Malin says without stopping.

The journalist is wearing a large pair of sunglasses, and they make her look stupid.

‘Was she murdered?’

Damn stupid question.

‘Well, she didn’t bury herself.’

Two of the people from the beach, a man and a woman in their thirties, are standing by the kiosk, in front of the brightly coloured poster of the various ice creams, pulling their jeans on over their bathing suits.

Malin goes over to them and they give her a look that says that they’d rather be left alone, and the man says: ‘We’ve already said what we saw, that we came here to go swimming, and then some mutt found her.’

Mutt?

A cartoon word.

‘One question, about the kiosk,’ Malin says. ‘Is it usually open? Do you come swimming here often?’

She hates it when this happens, when the questions fall out of her in the wrong order, but often it leads to decent answers, there’s something disarming in the uncertainty revealed by clumsily posed questions.

‘We come swimming here every so often,’ the man says. ‘The only problem is that the kiosk is normally shut, apparently because the woman who runs it has several others and can’t get the staff.’

‘The woman?’

‘Yes. I think her name’s Slavenca, from Bosnia or somewhere like that. She can be pretty unpleasant when she feels like it, almost like she doesn’t want any customers. She was here earlier, she disappeared just before you lot showed up.’

‘Thanks,’ Malin says.

Down by the body Karin Johannison is working against the clock, trying to get finished before darkness falls, but there are still several hours’ work ahead of her and her recently arrived assistant. Malin knows that they have a floodlight in their Volvo. But maybe they won’t have to set it up tonight. The summer night will smile on them, a gentle smile that will make their work easier, their careful search for details and clues on the body and in the vegetation around it that could lead them all closer to the truth.

Karin looks up at Malin.

Waves.

And her eyes are tired, they’ve lost a little of their obvious sparkle, maybe they’re already in Bali, those eyes.

Bali.

Island of beauty and violence.

A place where rebirth is possible.

23

The house where I grew up.

The bricks seem to be dripping off the façade in the heat, uncovering memories, intimations.

And lies.

But which lies?

Zeke at the wheel, focused.

They aren’t going faster than the prescribed thirty, and the hedge around Malin’s childhood home is drooping more than before, as though it’s made up its mind to give up in the heat of summer.

No one at home in the house.

Who lives there now? What are their memories?

I circle around those memories, Malin thinks. They’re still inside me, like electrical will-o’-the-wisps, timeless flares in my consciousness, in all that is me, my actions and somehow my future as well.

What am I so scared of?

I’m both trapped by and running from everything that once was, refusing to let go because I think that those days can explain something to me today.

Air it all out.

Throw out all those old clothes. They aren’t coming back.

Mum and Dad in Tenerife.

With every passing day Malin is more and more convinced that her parents are hiding something, and now, now, in this moment as they drive past her childhood home in Sturefors to notify a couple of unsuspecting parents of a death, she feels it more clearly than ever. Her past conceals something, and without finding out what that secret is she will never be whole.

And then the house is gone from view. Withdrawn into memory.

The Polaroid picture of the dead Theresa Eckeved is in her pocket.

It’s her, Malin is certain of it.

Zeke before they got in the car: ‘You’ll have to show them the picture, Malin, I’m not doing it.’

She’s no older than Tove, and even though Malin tries to force away the image of her daughter, even though she keeps her eyes open, Tove’s face keeps taking the place of the dead girl’s in the picture.

Go away, away, Malin thinks, but to no avail.

You are all girls.

You are the only girl.

I’m going to get the bastard who did this. I’m going to understand.

Her finger on the doorbell, sweat on her brow, Zeke a step behind her, his sunglasses in his hand now, his eyes ready to show sympathy.

Tove, there once more.

Sounds behind the door.

What sounds?

The heavy steps of someone who has realised that the ultimate disaster is approaching? The point where life stiffens and changes into a sluggish, bitter-tasting mess where happiness is nothing more than an intellectual exercise.

I’m happy. I can do this.

And the door opens.

The man in front of her fully aware of the situation. The woman behind him, her mouth slightly open, her frightened blue eyes almost blistered by an evident lack of sleep.

There you are again, Tove, even though all of my attention ought to be focused on these two people in front of me. If I have one task in the world, it is to look after you. That’s the only one that seems obvious to me. And now, now that you’re a stubborn teenager, it’s clear that you don’t want me to look after you, apart from taking care of the practical details.

I will never stop looking after you, Tove.

I can’t.

Sigvard Eckeved opens the door wide, steps aside and his shoulders slump and his wife vanishes in the direction of the conservatory in a vain attempt to flee the truth, because it is the truth, their truth, which has come to their home, and they both know it.

‘Come in,’ Theresa’s father says. ‘Have you made any progress, got some more questions? Do you want coffee? Agneta,’ he calls into the house, ‘can you put some coffee on? We’re bound to have some ice, so we can get you both iced coffee. You can’t help wondering if this heat is ever going to let up.’

Malin lets him talk.

She and Zeke sit down on the chairs to one side of the white sofa in the living room. The pool sits invitingly behind them. And Agneta and Sigvard Eckeved understand what Malin and Zeke’s positioning means and sit down on the sofa, not leaning back, leaning forward instead in an almost exaggerated show of interest, as if this exaggeration could hold the nightmare at bay.

‘We’ve found a young girl out at the beach at Stavsätter,’ Malin says.

‘It can’t be Theresa,’ Agneta says. ‘She’d never go swimming there, the pool . . . but I suppose she did used to cycle out there sometimes . . .’

‘The girl was murdered, and I’m very sorry to have to tell you that I think she’s your daughter.’

Theresa’s parents, the people in front of them, sink back into the sofa, the air somehow sucked out of them, and the woman whimpers when Malin takes the photograph out of the pocket of her blouse and puts it on the dark, polished, oak tabletop. Outside in the garden a crow is cawing anxiously, and a leaf falls from a bush, rippling the still surface of the pool.

‘Can you tell me if this is Theresa?’

She can feel how Zeke is forcing himself to stay in his seat, how he wants to rush out of the house, out into the garden and run away from the summer-still roads of this little villa community.

But he stays seated.

Confronting the present.

All the nameless emotions drift through the room like dark spirits and coalesce into just two words: grief. Pain.

Agneta Eckeved turns her head away; if she doesn’t look at the picture then it doesn’t exist, and everything it represents doesn’t exist either, and Sigvard Eckeved leans forward, sees his daughter, her closed eyes and her pale-yellow skin transparent from the absence of oxygen. She isn’t asleep, he’ll never stroke his daughter on the cheek as she sleeps and quietly whisper I’ll be here when you wake up, I’ll be here for you no matter what, no matter what pain this world throws at me, I’ll be here for you.

Instead just this photograph on the table.

Death.

The end.

‘It’s Theresa,’ he says and Agneta Eckeved turns her head even further away from the photograph and Malin can just see tears trickling down her cheeks, large, clear, justified tears.

‘It’s her,’ Sigvard Eckeved says.

Malin nods.

‘OK, now we know for sure,’ Zeke says.

Malin takes the picture from the table, holding it in her hand, somehow it doesn’t feel right to put it back in her pocket, just like that. Just putting away the picture of the dead girl, out of sight of her parents.

Then Agneta Eckeved says: ‘Put it away, the picture, will you? Just do it.’

Malin puts the picture away.

Sigvard Eckeved stands up.

Says: ‘I’ll see if the coffee’s ready.’

Then he stops and his body starts to shake.

The childhood home.

The white bricks.

The sound of cars.

‘What happens now?’

Sigvard Eckeved’s question, once he’s composed himself.

Malin knew what he meant, but chose instead to tell them about the formalities, that the coroner would have to examine the body before they could release it for burial, that they could see her if they wanted to, but that it wasn’t essential for them to go through any further formal identification.

Sigvard Eckeved listened to her until she had finished.

‘You misunderstood me,’ he said then. ‘I mean with us, what’s going to happen to us now?’

24

Mum, Dad.

I can see you in the house and you’re sad. But I can’t hear what you’re saying, why are you so sad? What’s happened? If you’re worried about me, don’t be, in a way it’s like I’ve just popped out for a bit.

But I think I might be ill.

That I’m asleep.

That I’ll come home when I wake up.

Mum’s lying on the bed, and you, Dad, you’re walking up and down in the conservatory, it must be hot in the sun.

You had a visit just now, I saw the woman, she was here with me a little while ago, looking at me so strangely, why? She put a photograph on the table at home, but I didn’t want to look at it.

Someone took a picture of me. I heard the sound of the camera.

I’m in an ambulance.

Am I ill?

I’m in a plastic bag, but it doesn’t feel as claustrophobic as before. I’m in the back, the bit where they put people who aren’t well. I can see myself lying there, how is that possible? I’m drifting, Mum, Dad, I can be in several places at once in this dream.

I’m alone, and I must be very ill, because how else could I be having this sort of dream?

Mum, Dad.

I’m alone and scared.

You, or someone else, must come and help me.

But don’t be sad.

I miss you so much, and that longing will never end, wherever you or I end up.

‘That was that.’

Zeke doesn’t look up from Brokindsleden, and she knows him, knows he wants to do something now, something active, wants to get on with something concrete so that he doesn’t go ‘crazy as a mad dog’, as he usually puts it.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Malin asks.

‘Let’s go and see Louise Svensson. Where does she live? You had it on a note.’

From the front pocket of her jeans Malin pulls out the piece of paper Viktoria Solhage gave her.

‘Viktoria Solhage said she liked to play rough.’

‘Let’s go. Where does she live?’

‘I think the address is some farm outside Rimforsa.’

‘Good, we’ll head out there now, before Sjöman has time to call a first meeting about the case.’

She wants to say: ‘But Zeke, is this right, we’ve got nothing on her, wouldn’t it be better to leave her in peace?’

But she doesn’t say those words.

‘Let’s get to grips with this bull-dyke,’ Zeke says.

His shaved head beside her, hard, impenetrable, like the look in his grey-green eyes when someone’s upset him.

‘What about Peter Sköld and Nathalie Falck? Do you think they’ll be upset when they hear what’s happened?’

‘I’m sure they will be,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe now Nathalie Falck will tell us what I think she knows.’

‘What do you think she knows?’

‘Something.’

‘It’s not easy to know what,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks of Peter Sköld, his father, and what seemed to be a shared silence between them.

Zeke has turned up the volume of the choral music.

The forest, pines and firs embracing them, the road a path through darkness, only opening up after several kilometres, when they emerge into a clearing that contains an empty, scorched yellow meadow where the grass has grown tall before withering in the heat and collapsing back onto the soil. Beyond the meadow the road disappears into the forest again, then opens out once more onto a rough, unploughed field. Beyond the field is a red-painted, two-storey farmhouse flanked by two barns whose wooden façades are worn and dusty and should have been painted years ago.

The whole of the world’s longing for rain seems to be concentrated on this place.

They park on the gravel in front of the farmhouse.

Three Alsatians rush up to the car, their barks loud when the music shuts off abruptly, the dogs jumping up at the windows, baring their teeth, and Malin can see the saliva running as they protect their territory.

Then a voice, a gruff woman’s voice through the noise of the dogs.

‘Easy now, easy.’

And the dogs obey the command in the voice, backing away and Malin sees the woman, maybe one metre eighty tall, dressed in dirty green overalls and a little cap from the farmers’ union that hardly covers her cropped hair.

Her eyes are black.

Angry.

How old is she? Forty-five? Fifty?

As Malin opens the car door she thinks, life has really fucked with you, hasn’t it? And now you’re getting your own back.

The woman in front of them in the farmyard seems to grow in the harsh light.

Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson, farmer, living alone out in the middle of the Rimforsa forests at Skogalund Farm, with just her dogs, a few pigs and some caged rabbits in one of the outhouses for company.

Malin and Zeke show their ID. The dogs growl over by the porch steps, ready to attack at any moment.

‘And what do you want?’

‘Your name,’ Malin says, ‘has cropped up in an investigation and we’d like to ask you some questions.’

Lollo Svensson steps closer to them.

The dogs show their teeth.

‘What fucking investigation?’

‘The one concerning the girl who was found raped in the Horticultural Society Park. And this morning a girl was found murdered at the beach at Stavsätter.’

‘So one of my sisters has been talking, then? Talking crap about me? Doesn’t surprise me. Most cunts are no better than your average fucking dick.’

‘I’m not at liberty to say . . .’

‘I get that, dear lady constable. So what do you want to ask?’

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

‘I was here at home.’

‘On your own?’

‘No, I had them with me.’

Lollo Svensson gestures towards the Alsatians. ‘But they can’t tell you what we were doing, can they?’

‘There’s no one else who can confirm that you were at home?’

Lollo grins at them.

‘Do you know Theresa Eckeved?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know a Nathalie Falck?’

‘Not her either. Never heard the name before.’

‘Lovelygirl? Does the name Lovelygirl mean anything to you?’

No noticeable reaction.

‘Lovelygirl? I don’t know any Lovelygirl.’

‘So you like to play rough,’ Zeke says. ‘What does that mean? Playing rough with young girls? Is that it?’

For God’s sake, Zeke, Malin thinks, but she knows what he’s doing, lets him get on with it.

But Lollo Svensson doesn’t let herself be provoked.

‘I haven’t got anything to do with any of that.’

‘Do you like tying people up, maybe cut them a bit, whip them? Is that the sort of thing you like, Louise?’

‘You should probably leave now if you haven’t got any more questions.’

‘And you brought a young girl back here and things went a bit wrong with the dildo, was that it? Or else she ran off when you were done, is that what happened?’

‘You should probably . . .’

Lollo Svensson takes three steps back, as if to mark her withdrawal, as if to say: ‘I’ve said what I’ve got to say, now you’re on your own.’

‘I’ve got to see to the pigs,’ she says. ‘The pigs can’t look after themselves, they’re weak, really weak, really pathetic, actually.’

‘Can we take a look around the barns? Inside the house?’

Malin waits for an answer.

‘You’re crazy, Inspector Fors. Like I’d let you in without a warrant? What a fucking joke.’

‘Do you know a girl called Josefin Davidsson? Or a Theresa Eckeved?’

Malin’s voice dry and sharp. Her blouse is sticking to her body, and God knows how hot Lollo Svensson must be in those overalls, and suddenly her large, solid frame slumps before their eyes.

‘I . . .’

‘So you had a bit of rough sex with them out here,’ Zeke says. ‘After you’d brought them out here, lured them out here. What with? Drink? The dogs? Horse riding? Have you got horses?’

No answer.

‘Do you normally use dildos on your girls?’

And when Malin hears Zeke say the word dildo she is filled with a sense that they are missing something obvious in the way they’ve been thinking about the dildo.

But what?

Lollo Svensson turns around and takes the dogs with her into the farmhouse, and Malin and Zeke are left standing beside the Volvo in the farmyard, inhaling the smell of summer forest and silence, of a loneliness so obvious that it makes the summer seem cool.

25

The car bumps unhappily along the gravel road.

‘What do you think?’

Zeke’s voice calmer now, not theatrically agitated or provocative any more.

The forest is closing in on the car, hundreds of pained shades of yellowish green, begging for rain.

‘I don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘I never cease to be amazed at what the forests around this city contain.’

She recalls last winter’s excursions, in connection with the case of Bengt Andersson and the Murvall brothers, and she can still feel the debilitating cold, how it sucked the air from her lungs as she forced her way through the trees towards the sound of death and evil deep within the forests around Hultsjön.

‘No, they’re full of surprises.’

‘Have we got enough for a search warrant?’

‘Probably; we won’t need much considering what’s happened. It might even be enough that she refused to let us in.’

‘I’m curious to see what’s inside that house,’ Malin says.

Young girls.

Their bodies, dead and alive, floating like unfettered manatees in endlessly bubbling water.

Get us up, help us, move us on.

Tove far away on the other side of the world, in paradise, but one with a snake – the Islamic extremists and their violence.

Away with the image, don’t think about her now.

Janne.

Running along a beach with his heart thumping in his body. Always leaving.

‘I want to know what’s hidden inside that house,’ Malin says.

‘Me too,’ Zeke says. At that moment Malin’s mobile rings.

Karin Johannison’s name on the display.

On the floor of Karin Johannison’s room a humidifier is fighting for decibel supremacy against a portable air-conditioning unit. The humidity is fighting an uneven battle against the cold, but together the two machines make Karin’s room the most bearable that Malin has been in for ages, even though there are no windows, and in spite of the mess of books and reports and files and journals all over the desk, the shelves and the floor.

Malin and Zeke are sitting on the two ladder-backed chairs Karin has for visitors, while she leans back in a futuristic black designer office chair, which she almost certainly bought herself with her own money, just like the humidifier and the air conditioner.

‘Nice chair,’ Malin says.

‘Thanks,’ Karin says. ‘It’s an Oscar Niemeyer, I got it off the internet from South America, some site in Brazil.’

‘Did you buy those contraptions there as well?’ Zeke asks. ‘They sound like they come from the Third World.’

Karin ignores Zeke’s insult and moves on to what they’ve come for, switching to her professional persona: ‘Theresa Eckeved had been penetrated, subjected to sexual violence. I couldn’t find any sperm, just traces of the same paint that was found inside Josefin Davidsson. In all likelihood, we’re talking about the same perpetrator.’

‘But it’s good to support the poor, isn’t it?’

Zeke couldn’t stop the words once they were on their way out of his mouth, and Malin can see in his eyes that he regrets them and is feeling foolish, and Karin continues to ignore Zeke, pretending that he hasn’t spoken.

She goes on: ‘She’s been carefully washed, and if she was scrubbed clean it was done thoroughly. I’ve found traces of bleach on her skin. Just like Josefin Davidsson.

‘The wounds have been cleaned, maybe with surgical spirit, maybe bleach, and the perpetrator has tidied up the edges with an extremely sharp implement, possibly a scalpel, but it’s impossible to say for sure.’

‘Like Josefin Davidsson’s wounds?’ Zeke asked.

What had been used, Malin wondered. A rough knife? A large spike? Or something brutal, like an animal’s tooth? If not these, then what?

‘Those were just cleaned,’ Karin says. ‘These have been trimmed at the edges.’

‘Trimmed?’

‘Yes, trimmed. The wound to her head wasn’t fatal. Nor any of the wounds to her body. She was strangled. The soil under her fingernails was identical with the soil on the beach, which suggests that she was murdered there.’

‘So she wasn’t moved there?’

‘Probably not.’

‘So she could have gone there with the perpetrator?’

‘What do I know, Malin?’

‘Her mum mentioned that she used to cycle up there sometimes,’ Zeke says. ‘Maybe Theresa was just taking an evening swim?’

‘How long was she in the ground?’ Malin asks.

‘A week, I’d say. Maybe a few days more. It’s impossible to say for certain.’

What were you doing out there? Malin thinks. It must have been late, and you were alone.

Evil is on the loose.

God help us.

God help all the girls who are still in Linköping this summer.

‘Do you know where the traces of paint came from?’

Zeke clear and focused now, his antipathy towards Karin set aside, stashed away somewhere inside himself.

‘No idea, but it’s the same object, no doubt about that. But I haven’t been able to identify the source of the paint. It’s not one of the more common ones used in Sweden. But you’re chasing the same perpetrator, you can be sure of that.’

‘Forensics have started looking at different makes of dildo.’

‘Good,’ Karin says. ‘There are any number of them. As far as I’m aware.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No traces of sperm, no hair, no skin, no strands of fabric, nothing, nothing, nothing,’ Karin says, unable to hide her dissatisfaction and annoyance that she can’t give them anything more, anything concrete to go on, anything to latch onto in their hunt for whatever is on the move out in the city.

‘Shit,’ Malin says.

‘You’ll get him,’ Karin says.

‘If it is a him,’ Malin says.

The smoke from the fires in the Tjällmo forest is noticeable in the car park in front of the police station and the National Forensics Lab where Karin works.

The forests north of Ljungsbro are burning now, and the fire is spreading. There are extra bulletins of both local television news programmes about the advance of the flames.

Are the fires deliberate?

Who started them?

Why have fires broken out in so many places at the same time?

Zeke gets into the driver’s seat of the Volvo.

Malin pauses by the door, hears him curse the heat inside the car and closes her eyes, trying to follow the smell of the fire up above the city, seeing in her mind’s eye how the heat presses the few people left, little more than dots, towards the tarmac, and she follows herself out over the plain, the scorched fields and the blue of Lake Roxen, and she sees the fires, the way they’re eating and jumping their way through the forest, leaping recklessly from treetop to treetop in an explosive dance, destroying pretty much everything in their path, but also creating the possibility of new life.

And Janne, wanting to be back home with the rest of his crew, wanting to put on his protective clothing and head out into the boiling, smoke-fogged darkness to save whatever can still be saved.

‘Malin, are you going to stand there all day?’

Soot, Malin thinks. Dirt. How long do firefighters have to scrub their faces after a day like this?

‘Malin!’

She jerks herself free of her thoughts and gets into the heat of the car.

I’m dead.

There’s no point fighting it.

The plastic, in spite of its dense darkness, is like cling-film around me, it can’t hold me here any longer. It never could, really, but somehow it feels safe. I understood my freedom when I was suddenly there with you, Mum and Dad, where I could see your despair, when I wanted to tell you that I’m here, in spite of everything, and that it’s sort of OK, even if I’m still scared and worried and sad that my life ended up being as short as it was.

But what does time matter?

Easy for me to say.

Mum and Dad.

I know that time will drag for you. There’s nothing that makes time drag more than pain.

And your pain will never pass.

It will change colour over the years, marking your bodies and the way you’re judged by the world.

You will become your grief, Mum, Dad, and maybe there’s some comfort in that. Because if you are your grief for me, then you are also me, and if you’re me, then we’re together. Don’t you think?

I want to comfort you, Dad.

Somehow I’ll find a way to let you know that I’m OK, as soon as I think I am.

Only one person can ease my anxiety, and she knows it.

I rise up towards the sky.

The heat that torments you all doesn’t exist for me. The heat isn’t even a smell here.

I drift down towards the Volvo, look into Malin Fors’s face. She doesn’t know it, but with each passing day the look in her blue eyes grows a bit more tired, but also a bit more certain.

Only the sadness is constant.

And the fear that she tries so vainly to hold at bay.

On the way to the prosecutor, one of the ones on duty over the summer, not particularly happy to be called in to the office on a Sunday afternoon. The same prosecutor who earlier rejected Sven Sjöman’s offer to relinquish legal responsibility for the preliminary investigation, saying that they would have to hold on to that responsibility themselves until they had made some progress.

Malin had spoken to Sven over the phone, and he had given them permission to proceed: ‘Search the house, but you and Zeke shouldn’t go alone, who knows what she might do if it turns out you’re right.’

Sven had also said that at long last, ‘and far too fucking holiday-late’, they had got hold of the list of calls made from Theresa’s mobile, and that she had called Nathalie Falck a lot, Peter Sköld occasionally, and no one else except her parents. ‘She seems to have been a bit of a loner,’ Sven said. They hadn’t heard anything from either Yahoo! or Facebook, and Forensics were still working on identifying the dildo. A quick search on the net had come up with more than nine hundred manufacturers.

Malin thinks about Josefin Davidsson. About the hypnosis that she hasn’t had time to sort out. Must get around to doing that.

The prosecutor.

A recently appointed young man named Torben Eklund.

Malin looks through the windscreen.

But instead of the city she sees her face, her eyes, the look in them, and she wonders what happens to that look with the passage of time, and then she gets scared, feeling a chill run through every vein and capillary, an ice-cold and sharp sting of stardust. That isn’t my face in the windscreen, she thinks, it’s Theresa Eckeved’s face, and Malin knows what she wants, what her lifeless white skin, her clear, radiant, colourless eyes want.

Her mouth is moving.

What happened?

Who?

What, how?

I am putting my trust in you, Malin Fors, to bring me some peace.

Then the face is gone, replaced by Malin’s own familiar features. The face and features that are somehow just as they are.

Josefin Davidsson pulls the thin white sheet tighter around her body, not wanting to see the bandages and think about the wounds, but knowing that they’re there whether she likes it or not.

She notices the chemical smell of the hospital room, and the pain she can’t remember the cause of. But she realises that that memory, buried somewhere deep within her, is important.

She could have gone home on Friday. But she wanted to stay over the weekend, and they let her. The doctor understood when she said that she liked how peaceful it was here.

She’s watched television out in the dayroom. Read on the newspaper websites, the Correspondent and others, that they’ve found a girl’s body at a beach out near Sturefors.

I have to get to my memories, Josefin thinks, and the sky outside the window is growing pale, late afternoon blue and empty, just like her memory. But it’s there, they did it in biology, memories are like electricity, and a person can remember everything that’s ever happened to them under the right circumstances.

But do I want to remember?

Am I scared that he or she or they are going to come back?

No.

I’d be dead if that was what they wanted.

The hospital cotton is soft, so soft, and she shuts her eyes, drifts off to sleep even though the room is full of the brightest light and bubbling life.

‘No problem. I’ll sign a search warrant straight away.’

Torben Eklund’s voice as neutral as his office in the courthouse on Stora torget, his grey face thin but still bearing an inexplicable double chin.

‘How’s the investigation going?’ he asks.

‘Forward, slowly,’ Malin replies.

‘We have extremely limited resources over the summer,’ Torben Eklund goes on. ‘That’s why I’ve decided to leave responsibility for the preliminary investigation with the police.’

‘That suits us fine,’ Zeke says.

Lawyers, Malin thinks. What in the world would make anyone want to become one of them?

Torben Eklund is the same age as me, but already middle-aged.

A black-faced clock on an unpainted brick wall, the white hands showing 17.25.

Then it hits her.

Maybe in the eyes of young girls I’m already middle-aged. And after that comes death. Doesn’t it?

26

A blue and white police car behind them.

Evening is falling slowly over the road and the forest seems to regain some of its lost verdure, a false nuance, the colour of a blunt knife.

They’re leading the way in the Volvo, three uniforms in the car behind: two factory-farmed recent graduates, lads with bulging muscles and an attitude that suggests they can sort out all the crap society might throw at them. Malin can never understand how that sort of bloke ever gets past the admissions board, but presumably they know how to give all the right answers. She’s seen the websites for people wanting to join the police: This is what they want to hear. And sure, the answers fit and if you’re smart it can work. The third uniform is an old hand called Pettersson, now working part-time because of a bad back, and sometimes Malin can see that he’s in some discomfort, his fingers tensing as he channels the pain from his nerves out into his fingertips so that he can go on.

She can’t remember the new recruits’ names, can’t be bothered to learn them, because who knows how long they’ll be staying? They probably want a transfer to Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö, where the real action is.

The farm in the clearing.

Has she guessed that they’re coming?

Has she cleared things up?

Away?

Zeke’s voice over the radio to the others: ‘Fors and I will go and knock, you get out and wait by the car. Understood?’

Silence. No barking.

Where are the dogs?

Then a yes from Pettersson.

‘Good,’ Zeke says as the car comes to a halt in the farmyard.

They get out.

A watchful silence.

They head for the porch steps.

Malin has the search warrant in her hand.

Has she taken refuge in the forest?

What’s in there?

In those closed rooms?

Malin looks over her shoulder.

They’re standing there, waiting but ready, almost hungry, Pettersson and the new recruits in their hot, dark-blue uniforms. The heat is still oppressive, but the sun has disappeared behind the barns, making it bearable.

‘A torture chamber,’ Zeke says. ‘What if she’s got a fucking torture chamber in there?’

Malin’s clenched fist against the white-painted wooden door.

No one coming to open it.

Someone aiming a weapon at them from somewhere inside?

Maybe. It could happen. Malin thinks the thought momentarily, remembers reading about American cops going out to desolate farms only to get shot, thinks of the officer who was shot and killed by a psycho in Nyköping. Malin knew him, he was in the year below her at the police academy, but they weren’t exactly close.

Another knock.

More silence.

Just the slight rustling of a wind-free forest, from life in motion around them.

‘She must have gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Unless she’s hiding in there.’

‘We’ll have to break the door down,’ Malin says.

‘Check if it’s locked first.’

And Malin slowly reaches her hand out to the door handle, pushes it down and the door swings open, as if someone had left it open for them, as if someone wanted them to go in.

A hall with rag-rugs and a stripped pine bench on bare pine floorboards.

Well-kept, Malin thinks. Cared for.

And silent.

She steps into the hall. Zeke behind her, she can feel his breath, warm, and she knows that he’s giving a sign to the others to spread out around the house and that one of them will watch the door behind them, ready to rush in if anything happens, if there’s any noise.

The kitchen.

Thoughtfully renovated, it must date from the forties, floral tiles and new rag-rugs. The gentle evening light is falling in narrow streaks through a net curtain. The coffee machine is on, the coffee freshly made, the oven is on, and there’s a smell of newly baked buns. Malin sees a tea towel on the worktop over a baking rack, the bulge suggesting coffee-bread, sweetly scented.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Zeke says.

Malin hushes him and they carry on into the house, to the living room, where the television is on, an episode of the old children’s classic, Seacrow Island, that Malin doesn’t recognise. Here again there is a sense of time standing still.

A computer on a desk.

They go up a creaking staircase to the upper floor. The walls are covered with tongue-and-groove panelling, on which Lollo Svensson has hung tinted lithographs of open fields and tractors. The bedroom, the only room upstairs, has whitewashed walls and light streaming in through a bay window, more rag-rugs on the scrubbed floor, everything looks sparklingly clean, as if she uses cleanliness to try to keep something away, or perhaps invite something in.

‘She’s here,’ Zeke says.

‘She’s here somewhere,’ Malin says. ‘I can feel it. She isn’t far away. There’s something here, something.’

And Malin goes back down the stairs, opens the door leading to the cellar and the smell of central heating-oil gets stronger with every step they take.

An oil-fired boiler, shiny and green, in an equally clean room. Cleaning products on a shelf. No bleach.

A door, a steel door ajar, as if it leads to a shelter.

Malin points at the door.

Zeke nods.

Malin opens the door, expecting to see Lollo Svensson hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by contraptions from a medieval torture chamber in complete contrast to the room upstairs, a contrast to the idyll that this old, homely farmhouse actually is.

Then they see her.

She’s sitting on a chair behind a table-tennis table covered with colourful wooden toys, dolls and stuffed animals. She’s wearing a thin, pale-pink dress.

A doll’s house on a shelf. Removal boxes stacked against whitewashed concrete walls.

Lollo Svensson smiles at them, a different person now, her hard facial features soft, resignation manifested in the body that Malin recently thought might harbour the soul of a murderer.

Could it?

Your body? Harbour the soul of a murderer?

‘I knew you’d come back,’ Lollo whispers. ‘So I came down here and waited. Waiting for you to come.’

The soul of a murderer, Malin thinks. We all harbour one of those.

27

The forest seems to be breathing for Linda Karlå.

But with sick lungs.

Only now, in the evening, is it cool enough for running, even if it’s still too hot for most people. The running track in Ryd is deserted apart from her, her feet in new white Nike trainers drumming on the sawdust trail, the electric lighting above her not lit, she doesn’t know if they turn the lights on in summer, at this time of year it stays light late when there are no clouds in the sky.

Maybe it’s stupid to go running alone in the woods considering what’s happened. Before the police have caught the culprit. Who knows what could be lying in wait?

But she isn’t scared.

Air in her lungs.

Her breathing somehow enclosed within her body, her brain.

Her heart is racing, yet somehow controlled, as if she can direct the most important muscle in her body by sheer willpower.

She runs at least twenty kilometres each week. All year round, and she runs the Stockholm marathon and one abroad: when it feels rough in the winter she thinks about Tokyo, New York, London, Sydney, letting the trees become skyscrapers and crowds, her forty-one-year-old body is strong, so strong.

It would be dangerous for someone less well-trained to go running in this heat.

But she can handle it.

She actually thinks the Ryd track is too flat, it might be worth taking the car out to the hills of the Olstorp circuit.

Pressure in her chest.

Onwards, Linda, onwards.

The trees.

The sawdust.

The lights. The tree up ahead.

Its trunk unnaturally thick one metre above the ground.

Is it really a tree? A body? Behind the tree. Something waiting. For me.

Malin is standing in Lollo Svensson’s kitchen, waiting, listening. Trying to understand, because in Lollo’s words there is a hint of the feelings that will lead them in the right direction in this case.

The uniforms are back by the car out in the farmyard again, restless now that they’ve realised that the anticipated drama has become a yawn.

Malin and Zeke gave them the task of searching the barns and smaller outbuildings, but they didn’t come up with anything, just snuffling pigs and rabbits in cages and a load of clutter that must have been left behind by the farmer who sold the place to Lollo Svensson. The dogs were asleep in a fenced run, almost drugged by the heat, or something else. No signs of violence, of evil, just things, abandoned things, unfettered by memories, of no value except as pieces of a puzzle for the archaeologists of future civilisations.

‘I want to be left in peace,’ Lollo Svensson says. ‘That’s why I bought the farm. Can you understand that?’

She’s sitting on a ladder-backed chair at the kitchen table. Back to her cocky, blunt, unpleasant, butch self again. The gentle individual they found downstairs among the toys in the basement vanished the moment they came back upstairs.

A human wall, Malin thinks. A grey dressing gown over the pink dress. What’s happened to her? To you? How did you end up like this?

Malin sees herself in the kitchen.

Snooping about in the dark. In the most private things. In the pain. And she knows she’s good at it, and she knows she likes doing it.

Damn you, Fors.

How did you end up like this?

‘I didn’t have anything to do with the attacks on those girls. Are you going to talk to the whole fucking women’s football team now as well, then? There are supposed to be loads of dykes there, aren’t there? Go and talk to them!’

‘What about the toys in the basement? How do you explain those?’ Zeke doesn’t succeed in concealing his curiosity, a desire to understand that stretches far beyond their investigation.

‘I don’t explain them at all. They’re toys from when I was small. I get them out sometimes. Nothing odd about that.’

Linda Karlå is standing still on the sawdust trail. There’s something close by. But what?

Something is moving in the forest, even though everything’s still. Is that a crawling sound? A person? The smell of decay, or cleanliness? Thoughts fly through her head and on into her heart and stomach, forming themselves into fear.

No.

I’m not scared.

The forest is big, it’s making her small and alone even though it’s no more than a few hundred metres to the yellow blocks of flats and villas over in Valla on the other side of Vallavägen.

No movement over by the tree. But there’s someone there.

I’m sure.

And then she thinks of the girls again, the one they found murdered, the one they found raped and disorientated in the Horticultural Society Park, and she’s struck by how foolhardy it was of her to set out alone on a running track, now that real evil has shown its face in Linköping.

How stupid can you be, Linda?

A movement.

A person on the track?

Heading towards me?

Sweat on my white vest. My breasts hard under the sports bra.

I’m so scared that I can’t move.

Zeke is rocking from foot to foot in one corner of the farmyard.

No dildo. No sex toys at all.

The evening is still debilitatingly hot. Lollo Svensson is inside the farmhouse, watching them through the kitchen window, can’t seem to get shot of them soon enough. In the dull light the barns look crooked, almost ready to collapse under the weight of the mournful evening sky.

The dogs have started barking over in their run.

The car with the uniforms is disappearing down the gravel drive, soon no more than a misplaced noise from the dense forest, a pulse through old leaves and desiccated moss.

‘She’s mad,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you think she’s Lovelygirl?’

‘We’ll have to see what Forensics find on the computer.’

‘But is she mad?’

‘Because she likes looking at her old toys? I’m not sure. But she’s certainly different,’ Malin says. ‘Who knows what sort of crap she’s been through? And what wouldn’t a person do to survive?’

‘Can we find out?’

‘Do we need to?’

‘Do we want to?’

‘I don’t think she’s got anything to do with this,’ Malin says.

‘Me neither,’ Zeke says. ‘But she still hasn’t got an alibi.’

My heart.

Where is it?

There, holding all of my fear.

It’s about to burst beneath my ribs.

Linda Karlå is running, her trainers conquering metre after metre of the trail, as the forest twists around her.

Is someone chasing me?

It sounds like something enormous is slithering after me, as if the tree roots are lifting from the ground and trying to trip me up, burrow through me with a thousand sharp, calcified nodules, then hide me under a thin layer of soil, consuming me slowly, but I can run so fast.

Faster now.

The sound of hooves. Hooves?

She runs.

Finally the vegetation opens up.

The car park.

Her car on its own. No one following.

She throws herself into the residual heat of her Seat.

A deer?

Something else was watching me out there as well.

I’m sure of it, Linda Karlå thinks as she starts the car and drives away.

But what?

The sound of hooves disappearing into the forest. The darkness that was snapping at her heels.

28

Stora torget is vibrant with artificial light from the big open-air bars and the surrounding buildings. Mörners Inn, Stora Hotellet, Burger King, their chairs and tables set out on the tarmac and paving stones, the first of these boasting tall canopies that turn its customers’ conversation into indistinct chatter, a sound full of expectation and happiness.

It is just past ten o’clock.

A lot of people even though it’s a Sunday.

The air is still warm, but people are daring to venture out, eager for the condensation running down the outside of a well-filled glass. There is a rumbling sound from down on Ågatan, the whole street full of bars, and in the winter, spring and autumn there’s always trouble there at weekends. The Correspondent has printed acres of coverage about pub-related violence, but at the same time people need to let their hair down, and the concentrated nature of the location is manageable for the police. We know where things are likely to kick off, Malin thinks as she looks across at the seating areas.

Probably no one I know there.

And if anyone I do know should happen to be there, I don’t want to meet them.

Zeke dropped her off outside the flat, and under the cold water of the shower she felt how much she missed Tove, Janne, Daniel Högfeldt; she wanted to call him and tell him to come over, drive out some of what she’s seen today.

Let him work off some of her frustration.

But he didn’t answer and instead she lay down for a while on Tove’s bed, pretending to watch over her daughter, who is on the other side of the planet, in paradise, not far from crazy bombers.

And Tove’s scent, caught in the sheets.

And Malin began to cry.

Sad in a simple and obvious way about the way everything had turned out with her and Janne, with her and herself, and the unmentionable thing that the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord had glimpsed just by looking at her. But then Malin did what she always does. Forced herself back, the tears, all the sorrow, then got up and left the flat. Some types of loneliness are worse than anything else.

All the customers in the terrace bars. The chink of glasses. The twirling waitresses. There is still life in summertime Linköping, even if this heat, this evil, are doing their best to drive any sense of joy into the ground.

Shall I sit down here? Among everyone else?

She stands still, letting the evening enter her body.

Evil. Where does it start?

In front of her the square transforms into a volcanic landscape, as hot, glowing magma seeps out between the paving slabs in destructive black streams. Evil, a human undercurrent that history sometimes gathers up into an eruption, in one place, one person, in several people. You can become evil, or come close to it, sometimes so close that you can feel its breath, and then you realise that it’s the breath from your own lungs hitting you in the face. Malevolence, fear, the way Janne once told her after drinking too much whisky that he thought that war lay at the heart of human nature, that we are really all longing for war, that God is war and that violence is only the start, that the whole fucking world is just one vast act of abuse, a pain that will only end when humankind is wiped out.

‘We want war,’ Janne said. ‘There’s no such thing as evil. It’s just a made-up word, a pathetic attempt to give a name to the violence that’s bound to happen. You, Malin, you cops, you’re just fucking tracker dogs, you sniff about, trying to keep something utterly fundamental at bay.’

The magma is oozing and flowing around the feet of the people drinking beer in the square of this small city in this small, small corner of the world.

Here I stand.

I have to embrace violence, love it the way that I understand love. Evil is scentless, soundless, is has no texture, yet at the same time it is every smell, every sound, and all the experiences of the world that a person can feel against their skin.

A buried girl.

A boy kicked to death after a party.

A thirty-three-year-old student blown into a thousand pieces on a bus.

A bomb buried in the sand of a beach in paradise.

I refuse, I refuse, I refuse to believe you, Janne.

But you’ve seen war.

Maybe a beer in the square?

No.

Your society isn’t mine.

Not tonight.

I’m Batman, Malin thinks. Damaged goods, yet trying to watch over something.

She carries on along Hamngatan, up towards the Hamlet bar. A hint of smoke from the forest fires reaches her nose. They’re still open, and she takes a seat at the bar, feeling safe there, surrounded by the decades-old wooden panelling.

Only her and a few of the closet alcoholics at a table in the corner.

The beer is cheap here.

‘Evening, Inspector,’ they call.

She nods in their direction as her beer appears in front of her.

‘And a tequila, double,’ she says to the bartender.

‘Sure thing, Malin,’ he says with a smile. ‘One of those evenings?’

‘You’ve no idea,’ Malin replies. ‘No idea.’

Daniel Högfeldt has switched off his phone, his articles about the murder ready for tomorrow. He’s gone into one of the paper’s conference rooms and is resting his body in one of the uncomfortable chairs.

Wants to be alone.

His body somehow demanding silence.

He thinks about Malin.

Where are you now?

We’re two unhappy souls moving around each other in this city and sometimes we meet and play a static game. For a while he mistook their game for love. But not any longer. He knows, or believes that he knows, exactly what he wants from Malin Fors. And what she wants from him. A conduit to relieve a mass of sexual energy, and that’s why they work so well together in bed: they want the same thing and they both know that the harder they play, the better.

But sometimes.

When she’s fallen asleep beside him and he’s lying there looking at her, he wonders.

Is she the one he’s been waiting for?

His?

No, don’t lay yourself open to that sort of disappointment. He doesn’t know much about her, but she has several photographs of her ex-husband Janne in her flat. He seems to be able to calm her down. Like her daughter.

Where are you now, Fors?

Daniel gets up.

Starts walking about the room restlessly, as if to combat the feeling that time is passing far too slowly.

There’s burning in her dreams.

It sometimes happens when she’s been drinking. Cold flames eating her legs, trying to pull her into the darkness, whispering: We’ll destroy you, Malin, destroy you, even if you listen to what we’ve got to say.

What do you want? What do you want to say?

Nothing, Malin, nothing. We just want to destroy you.

There are snakes in the dream, and animals with hooves and when she wakes up she remembers the dreams clearly, their constantly changing images, impossible to sort out.

There’s a boy in the dreams.

Malin doesn’t know who he is, but she forces him away, as if she had some sort of conscious consciousness even in the dream. That’s the darkest of dreams, like the one Janne has when he dreams about the children in Rwanda, the ones who’d had their hands cut off, the ones he fed in the hospital of the refugee camp. Their eyes. Six-, seven-, eight-year-old eyes full of wisdom about how life would turn out, about how it could have turned out.

And then the voice of the flames: So you think you can destroy us? Pride, vanity, avarice, a bonfire of all of those, Malin.

And she wakes up and screams at the voice of the flames, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, and she’s still drunk and can feel the beer and tequila dancing through her body, remembering how she wove her way across the square down towards St Lars’ Church, trying to read the inscription above the side door, and the way the words disappeared before her eyes, but she still knew what they said:

Blessed are the pure in heart,

for they shall see God

Then what?

Awake all night, thinking about Tove, longing for Tove, daydreaming about Janne’s familiar body, their original love, and completely wet down there when she finally got to thinking about Daniel Högfeldt.

Horny.

In the way you only get from alcohol, and she caressed herself and came without a sound once she’d disentangled herself from the sheet covering her body.

Can I sleep now?

But sleep wouldn’t come. Instead it was as if the orgasm lingered within her, making her heart race, and she pulled the sheet over her again, up over her face, and as the morning light gradually dawned beyond the blinds she played dead, turning herself into Theresa Eckeved, trying to feel her fear and despair, trying to feel her way towards what had happened, what had caused the volcano to erupt this time.

Her body felt alive.

Her blood was magma in her veins.

She was longing for more alcohol.

Then she thought about Maria Murvall. Lying in her room in Vadstena Hospital. About the evil that had put her there.

The same evil?

Her brain felt pickled.

The threads of the case spinning around.

A dildo? Blue?

A lesbian? Lollo Svensson. A sex offender? A damaged man? The football team? Prejudice, prejudice, prejudice. Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck. The person who made the call about Josefin Davidsson?

Silence. Possibilities, prejudices.

But what else are we supposed to go on? And what about Behzad Karami and Ali Shakbari out in Berga? Sodding bloody family alibis. One of the boys, or more than one, could have crossed a boundary and worked out that you liked it. The owner of the ice cream kiosk?

A thousand possibilities.

Drifting dust thrown into the air, needing to be gathered together to form a clear, black jewel.

The city demands it.

The papers.

The victims and their families.

And me.

But is there only one truth?

And with that thought her consciousness succumbed to sleep, and she slept dreamlessly for an hour before she woke up and a new day of the investigation into the tragic girls of Linköping could start.

29

Monday, 19 July

The last remnants of the previous evening’s alcohol seem to disappear as Malin’s body pierces the water of the Tinnerbäck pool.

Cooler.

The water ought to be cooler, but it would probably cost too much to keep the temperature lower in a summer as hot as this one. Four lengths will have to do, she can feel her body complaining at the effort, how it wants to rest but at the same time enjoy the relative cool.

Better than the boiling hot gym at the station.

Her body wakes up.

You could go mad not being able to go swimming in a summer like this. A couple of lifeguards with long-handled nets are fishing out prematurely fallen leaves from the pool. Malin looks at the lifeguards as she dries herself with her worn pink towel.

She skimmed the Correspondent before she left home.

Six pages about the murder of Theresa Eckeved, statements from Karim Akbar, pictures of the scene of the murder, of her parents’ house, but no statement from them. Photos of Theresa, her body wrapped in plastic, her passport, private pictures. Daniel Högfeldt had had help with the articles from wily old Harry Lavén.

The headline on the front page: Summertime Death.

Beneath it: Evil on the Loose in Linköping.

She was convinced Daniel had written the headlines himself. He must have worked like a madman yesterday, not wanting to take her call, realising that she wouldn’t want to talk about the case, but wanted something else instead.

Cock.

How harsh even the thought of the word sounds.

Malin gathers her things and heads off towards the changing room, feeling the clear, almost scarily blunt smell of chlorine, somehow cleaner than everything else.

You’re right, Daniel, she thinks. It’s come to the city.

Summertime death.

Reporters from what seems like every newsroom of any significance in the country have come to the city, flocking outside the entrance of the police station, journalists clutching notepads, tape recorders, photographers with their extra eyes, cars from Swedish Television and TV4, summertime death a summertime dream for those with papers to sell.

Malin forces her way through the sweaty huddle of reporters, sweaty herself after the bike ride up here, avoiding Daniel Högfeldt as he throws her a longing look and waves, calling: ‘Have you got anything for me, Malin? Have you got anything to go on?’

But Malin ignores him, ignores all of them, some faces familiar from previous cases.

In the entrance she is met by Karim Akbar, dressed in an immaculately pressed beige linen suit and a pale blue shirt that contrasts neatly with the slightly darker tone his skin has turned after all that sunbathing in Västervik.

Malin isn’t surprised to see him, but nor is she pleased. She knew he wouldn’t be able to stay away when there was a top-drawer media storm in the offing.

‘Malin,’ he says. ‘Good that you’re here. I felt I had to come in and manage the press conference, and keep an eye on the investigation.’

‘Welcome home,’ Malin says. ‘But the investigation’s under control. You know that Sven’s one of the force’s most experienced preliminary investigators. Aren’t you supposed to be writing a book over the summer?’

‘Forget the book, Fors. The press conference is at nine o’clock. They’ll have to wait outside until then.’

‘Do you know what you’re going to say, Karim?’

‘It’s quarter past eight. We’ll have to have a meeting right away. Martinsson and Sjöman are already here. Why are you . . .’

Karim stops himself.

Looks Malin deep in the eyes, right into her tiredness, and lets what he was about to say drop.

Instead: ‘How’s Tove getting on in Bali?’

Malin smiles: ‘Fine, last time I spoke to her. Thanks for asking. But it’ll be good to have her home again.’

‘I’m sure it will,’ Karim says.

And Malin knows that he wants to say something about the Islamists on the island, knows that he practically loathes them for making life difficult for anyone whose appearance suggests that they could be Arabic.

It is exactly half past eight.

The air conditioning in the meeting room is grumbling unhappily, the four of them sitting around the table, the blinds in the windows facing the playground pulled down to keep the light out.

Four officers.

A Monday morning, after a weekend at work for three of them. Tiredness is creeping up on her, in spite of the adrenalin that an important case always releases.

One police chief, one preliminary investigator and two inspectors, far too few for a case of this significance, and all four of them know it; and they know that holidays will be cancelled or colleagues from neighbouring districts called in. Or there’s another option.

Sven Sjöman is the first to speak: ‘There are far too few of us to handle this, we know that. My suggestion is that we call in National Crime, to save us interrupting our colleagues’ holidays or calling in people from other districts.’

‘Not National Crime,’ Karim says, and Malin knew that was what he was going to say. ‘I’ve checked with Motala, Mjölby and Norrköping. We can have Sundsten from Motala and Ekenberg from Mjölby. Norrköping is understaffed as it is, so they can’t let us have anyone. But Sundsten and Ekenberg will be here today, tomorrow at the latest. Börje’s in Africa and Johan’s away with his family, somewhere in Småland, I believe.’

‘Ekenberg,’ Zeke exclaims. ‘Do we really want that idiot here?’

Malin knows what Zeke means. Waldemar Ekenberg is infamous for being completely reckless in his work, and he’s also infamous for getting away with it in all the internal investigations that follow. But he isn’t without his admirers and supporters in the force: Waldemar Ekenberg certainly gets things done when they need to be done.

‘We have to take the people that are available,’ Sven says. ‘I shall be keeping an eye on Ekenberg personally.’

‘And Sundsten? Who’s that?’

‘Some bright young thing. He spent a year in crime in Kalmar before moving to Motala. Supposed to be pretty smart.’

‘Good,’ Zeke says. ‘We need all the help we can get.’

‘You’re right there,’ Malin says.

‘The more I think about these two cases,’ Zeke goes on, ‘the messier everything gets, sort of hazy. It’s a bit like looking at a fire, and just when you think you’ve fixed your eyes on a flame, it’s gone.’

Sven takes a deep breath, which makes him cough badly, turning his already red face a shade darker, and Malin worries that this heat is about to mess with Sven’s already hard-pressed heart.

‘So,’ Karim says. ‘What have we got and what do we know? Can you give me an update?’

‘Malin?’

Sven hasn’t recovered from his fit of coughing.

‘We have two crimes,’ Malin says. ‘Although we’re basically convinced we’re dealing with one and the same perpetrator.

‘On Thursday morning Josefin Davidsson was found, disorientated, in the Horticultural Society Park, raped with something that seems likely to have been a blue-coloured dildo. She had a number of wounds, probably inflicted by a knife. Her body was scrubbed clean with bleach, and the wounds carefully washed. She’s still in the University Hospital and doesn’t remember anything about what happened, or what led up to it. The sexual nature of the crime led us to check out a recently released sex offender, but he has a solid alibi. A door-to-door of the surrounding flats hasn’t given us anything. No one saw or heard anything. And no witnesses have come forward. The presumed use of the dildo led us to look into the possibility that the perpetrator is female, possibly from the city’s lesbian community, where the use of dildos could be fairly widespread. This line of inquiry led us to Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson, who refused us entry to her home, which is why we applied for a search warrant – the search was carried out yesterday. And produced absolutely nothing. She suggested in passing that presumably now we were going to talk to, quote, “the whole fucking women’s football team”. Forensics are checking her computer at the moment to see if there’s anything to go on there, for instance if she’s the person behind Lovelygirl on Theresa Eckeved’s Facebook page.’

Malin falls silent.

Hesitates.

Says nothing about the line of inquiry that led her and Zeke to the unfortunate Paul Anderlöv. Never mind. He should be left in peace.

Instead she goes on: ‘How we got to what we know is in the reports, although of course I’m protecting the identity of my sources. We’ve also checked out Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami. But they’ve got alibis as well, albeit provided by their families.’

‘I already know that,’ Karim snaps, evidently annoyed all over again at the suggestion of prejudice in this line of inquiry.

‘I’m just trying to update you, Karim,’ Malin says calmly. ‘So that you can make a splendid statement, sorry, truthful statement to the journalists.’

‘Let her carry on,’ Zeke says.

‘Then yesterday Theresa Eckeved was found murdered at the beach at Stavsätter. She had been buried, wrapped in ordinary transparent bin-bags, but a dog belonging to one of the bathers still managed to catch the scent. From a quick preliminary investigation Karin Johannison at National Forensics says that Theresa Eckeved was also abused with what seems to have been a blue dildo, which is why we’re fairly convinced that these cases are linked. The cause of Theresa Eckeved’s death was strangulation, but she had also received a blow to the head from a blunt object. She appears to have been killed at the beach. And she was scrubbed clean as well, according to Karin’s analysis, using bleach, just like Josefin Davidsson. And her wounds were obsessively cleaned, trimmed with a very sharp, and very precise object, possibly a scalpel.’

‘So we’ve got a lunatic on the loose in the city?’

Malin is taken aback by how blunt Karim is being, he doesn’t usually use such straightforward language.

‘Looks like it,’ Zeke says.

‘A person,’ Malin says. ‘Don’t use the word lunatic. A damaged, sick individual.’

And she thinks of the girls’ wounds, how they are similar yet different, as if they illustrated an almost tentative approach to violence.

‘A scalpel,’ Karim says, breaking her train of thought. ‘So who would have a scalpel?’

‘Possibly a scalpel,’ Malin says. ‘Possibly. A scalpel is chemical, clean, like chlorine. You can buy them from any chemist.’

‘Do we need to give Josefin Davidsson any protection?’ Karim goes on to ask.

‘If the killer wanted her dead, he would probably already have made sure of that,’ Sven says. ‘She didn’t seem to be in any fit state to escape, or to have actually done so.’

‘We’ll have to check with her parents,’ Karim says, before going on: ‘The pair of you have made a lot of progress.’

‘Yes, you have,’ Sven agrees.

‘But we haven’t got anywhere.’

Zeke drums his fingers on the table.

‘Zeke, she was only found yesterday,’ Sven says.

‘Theresa, yes, but we’ve had longer to work on Josefin Davidsson. And we still don’t even know who called us about her.’

And a silence spreads through the room, they all know that the first minutes, hours, days are the most important in any case, that an investigation becomes elusive with time, slippery, and can easily slide from the grasp of even the most experienced and talented detectives. If the truth remains hidden, it changes the lives of everyone involved for ever, in small but clearly perceptible ways.

‘Reinforcements are on their way,’ Sven says, ‘so we can pick up the pace. I suggest that we let Sundsten and Ekenberg check the alibis of all known sex offenders in the area.’ He goes on: ‘I’ve got the list ready. And we can get them to go door-to-door around the parents’ villa out in Sturefors. See if that turns up anything. Malin, Zeke? What are you going to do?’

‘We thought we might have a word with the owner of the ice cream kiosk. We couldn’t get hold of her yesterday, or, to be more accurate, she disappeared before we had a chance to talk to her.’

‘Good. Talk to her and see where it leads. What about the other people on the beach?’ Karim encouraging, almost imploring.

‘Nada. Niente,’ Zeke says. ‘And no other witnesses have come forward. Not one single tip-off. This whole city is in a fucking coma.’

‘Did she usually go swimming there?’ Sven asks.

‘Well, they’ve got their own pool,’ Malin says, ‘but Theresa’s mother did say that she sometimes cycled out there.’

‘Maybe she went for an evening swim?’

Malin nods.

‘How do you think we should play this with the press?’ Karim asks.

He’s asking us for help with the press. That’s a first, Malin thinks.

‘We can’t say anything, in case we jeopardise the inquiry,’ Zeke says.

‘We have to give them something,’ Sven says.

‘Tell them we’re working on the theory that the murder is connected to the girl who was found in the park. But not how or why we suspect that.’

Malin can hear that she sounds sure of her opinion as she speaks, even though she isn’t at all.

‘OK, that’s what we’ll do,’ Karim says.

‘The football team,’ Sven says. ‘The women’s football team. Give their coach a call. After all, Louise Svensson did mention the team. That has to mean something. And the suggestion of homosexuality in teenage girls. We need to follow up that line of inquiry.’

Malin makes a face.

‘She just said it in passing. She was being ironic. And my source didn’t say anything about the women’s team.’

‘Call her,’ Sven says. ‘Call anyway.’

‘What’s his name again, the coach?’ Zeke wonders.

‘Her,’ Sven says. ‘Something like Pia Rasmefog. Danish, evidently.’

Karim looks as if he’s thinking. Not about calling Pia Rasmefog, but something else.

‘Nervous about facing the hyenas?’

Zeke, smiling.

‘You know that’s my natural element, Martinsson.’

Karim almost alarmingly self-assured.

30

‘Does it really make sense to call Pia Rasmefog? Isn’t that just prejudice?’

Malin is sitting at her desk in the open-plan office.

‘You mean, is it prejudiced to look at the women’s football team because the attack and the murder both seem to have some sort of lesbian involvement?’

Zeke at his desk a few metres away, by the window looking out onto the car park. Cars shining in the light.

‘I don’t think it is, Malin. Because even if Lollo Svensson only mentioned them in passing when we searched her house, we still have to check it out, just to make sure. And Viktoria Solhage used to play football, so the team has cropped up more than once in this investigation.’

‘Sure, but it was still just something Lollo Svensson said in passing.’

‘Everybody knows that dykes play football.’

‘Can you hear what you sound like, Zeke? You sound completely bloody mad.’

‘But am I wrong?’

‘You call, Zeke. The number’s 140160.’

The phone rings three, four times before someone answers Zeke’s call.

His face is tense, and Malin is curious to hear how he’s going to approach Pia Rasmefog with his questions. She’s read interviews with the Dane in the Correspondent, and from what she’s read, she’s a tough nut who doesn’t let anyone get the better of her.

‘Yes, hello,’ Zeke says, and Malin can hear that his voice is hoarser than usual, the tone is higher and he’s nervous, unsure of how to approach Rasmefog.

‘This is Detective Inspector Zacharias Martinsson from the Linköping Police. I’d like to ask you a few questions, is now a good time?’

His choice of words milder than usual.

‘Great. Well, you see, the women’s football team has cropped up in the investigation into the murder of Theresa Eckeved . . . How it’s cropped up? . . . Well, I’m afraid I can’t reveal . . . no, no particular player, just in general . . . yes, perhaps . . . but . . . yes, of course, it might seem prejudiced, but please, calm down . . . this is actually a very serious crime that we’re investigating,’ and then, suddenly, Zeke takes charge of the conversation, and Pia Rasmefog appears to understand that they have to ask, seeing as ‘the women’s football team’ has cropped up in the investigation, albeit only on the periphery.

‘Is there any player that you believe could have a tendency towards violence? More than anyone else. No? Anyone who’s been behaving differently over the last few days? Not that either? Nothing that you think could be of interest to us?’

Zeke takes the phone from his ear, the conversation is evidently over.

‘Fucking furious. She didn’t even answer the last question.’

Karim Akbar absorbs the light from the photographers’ flashes, as the cameras’ clicking lenses call out: ‘You exist! You’re special!’

Sullen and angry journalists in rows in front of him, dressed lightly in the summer heat, yet still in that typical, scruffy, bohemian journalist style that Karim hates.

He hasn’t given them much, and Daniel Högfeldt and that hot-tempered woman from Aftonbladet in particular are critical of the silence.

‘So you can’t answer that question?’ Daniel Högfeldt almost shouted. ‘Because you don’t want to jeopardise the investigation? Don’t you think the general public in this city has a right to know as much as possible seeing as there’s a murderer on the loose? People are frightened, that much is obvious, so what right do you have to withhold information?’

‘There’s no suggestion that we’re withholding information.’

‘Are the cases connected?’

The woman from Aftonbladet.

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘But is that one of your theories?’

‘It’s one of a number of possibilities.’

‘So what’s your theory?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that.’

‘Is Louise Svensson a suspect in either case?’

‘No, not at the moment.’

‘So the search warrant wasn’t called for?’

Karim closes his eyes. Waits a couple of seconds, then hears a new voice: ‘But you must have something to go on?’

He opens his eyes just as one of the journalists says: ‘According to our information, she’s a lesbian. Do you suspect a sexual connection of that kind?’

‘No comment.’

Worse than usual today, more excitable than ever before. Suddenly he wants to get away from the podium, back to the jetty of the house in Västervik. He has to give them something just to get them to shut up.

So he says the words, and the moment they leave his mouth he knows it was a mistake.

‘Our investigation has led us to look into the LFC women’s football team.’

‘Why?’

‘Do you suspect a lesbian connection?’

‘I can’t . . .’

‘Is it just prejudice within the police force that has led you to turn your attention to the women’s team?’

‘Any particular player?’

‘How do you think this will affect the general attitude towards women’s football?’

Questions flying at him like bullets, like jagged shrapnel from something exploding.

Shit, Karim thinks. Then he shuts his eyes for a moment again, thinking about his family, his eight-year-old son, who learned to swim just last week.

The kiosk at the beach outside Sturefors is closed.

The tape of the cordon around the oak where they dug up Theresa Eckeved’s body as recently as yesterday is still taut, and there are very few bathers; one family with two small children. They’re sitting on a blanket down by the water, apparently unaffected by what has happened, by what to Malin seems to control and own this entire place, its air, its sounds.

Slavenca Visnic.

The owner of this kiosk, another one at the beach in Hjulsbro, and one outside the pool at Glyttinge: the county council provided them with that information. She runs all three as a trading company. But today the kiosk is closed, and Malin can understand why.

‘I wouldn’t have opened up either,’ she says to Zeke as they pace uneasily up and down in the morning heat in front of the kiosk, taking care to stay in the shade of the trees, sweaty enough already. Zeke’s white shirt is stuck to his body, and her beige blouse is faring no better.

‘No, people are staying away.’

‘Let’s go to Hjulsbro. She might be there.’

There was a mobile number on the licence documents. But no answer when they rang.

‘You go back to the car,’ Malin says, and Zeke looks at her, nods, then heads up the slope towards the meadow, where the heat seems to be creating a new sort of stillness, natural yet somehow frightening, as if the heat were making every living creature go into hibernation.

Malin goes down to the tree, bends over and steps under the tape of the cordon.

The hole in the ground.

No glowing worms, but still a feeling that the ground could open up at any moment, spewing out destructive masses of livid, liquid fire.

Theresa.

She isn’t here, but Malin can still see her face.

One eye open, the other closed. The strangulation marks around her neck. Her cleanly scrubbed white body and the dark wounds like lost planets in a shimmering, irregular cosmos.

And Malin wonders: How did you get here? Who would want to do this to you? Don’t be scared. I never, ever give up.

Promise me that, Malin Fors, promise that you’ll never give up trying to find the person who committed this ultimate act of abuse.

I’m trying to touch your warm, blonde hair, but my fingers, my hands don’t exist where you are, even if I can see you quite clearly from where I’m drifting in the sky just above you.

The girls.

Me. Nathalie.

Peter. You know so well what we had together. But you don’t realise what it means, not yet. Dad never understood, didn’t want to see, perhaps, what I was, am.

The same thing for you, Malin, with your dad, yet not quite. You blame your mum, thinking that she was in the way, muddying and diminishing his concern for you.

Maybe.

But it could be something else. Couldn’t it?

You’re far below me, Malin.

But still near.

But you’re a long way from one thing, Malin: certainty.

So don’t give up.

Because even if I know what happened, only you can convey the story to Mum and Dad, and show them the truth.

Maybe the truth could help them?

It doesn’t really make much difference to me any more.

Maybe I am the truth now. The only pure, clear truth that a person needs.

The wind is blowing through the leaves of the oak, rustling them. It’s a warm wind. But where are the connections, the threads twining together that can lead me, us, in the right direction?

The water of the lake almost seems to bubble in the heat. Boiling and stagnant, deadly poisonous yet still endlessly tempting: Jump in, and I’ll drag you down to the bottom of the lake.

What were you doing out here?

Not an intrinsically evil place, not really.

Malin sinks to her knees beside the hole, the former grave.

She touches the ground with her hand.

It turns her fingers brown. And the sun reflects off the water of the lake, which looks unnaturally clean in the cutting heat. The reflections are like lightning in her eyes, like sharpened knives in her retinas, but she doesn’t want to put on her Ray-Bans, wants to see reality just as it is.

Her blouse is sticking to her back.

‘Hello!’ A man’s voice. ‘You probably shouldn’t be in there.’

The man over on the blanket.

Law-abiding.

But he’s showing you respect, Theresa.

Malin stands up.

Pulls out her wallet from the front pocket of her denim skirt.

Holds up her ID.

‘Malin Fors. Police.’

‘I hope you get the bastard,’ the man says in her direction, his eyes staring somewhere up towards the pale green of the meadow.

31

The kiosk by the beach in Hjulsbro is closed as well. Even though it would surely have been possible to rake in some serious money on a day like this. There must be at least a hundred people lying on the slope down towards the river and the fast-flowing, grey-black water. The noise from the power station further downstream cuts the air, the turbines running on full, sending out a faint metallic smell into the air.

A summer for swimming.

Small children paddling in the enclosed safe area this side of the jetty. Over-confident teenage boys diving far out into the flow and struggling to get back; their gangly, unfinished bodies scare Malin, they reek of potency.

‘That looks good,’ Zeke says, as he crouches at the top of the slope in the shade of a fir tree.

‘I wonder if it really cools you down. It must be thirty degrees in the water.’

‘Yes, and how clean is it?’

‘All this sweating makes you obsessed with cleanliness,’ Malin says, as she rubs a small leaf between her fingers, soft and almost cool on one side, rough and warm on the other.

The kiosk outside the Glyttinge pool turns out to be closed as well. The privately owned pool is a very successful investment during a summer like this one, and behind the fence Malin and Zeke can hear the noise of the bathers, their shouts and yelps, their happy laughter.

Behind them Skäggetorp, and Ryd not far away.

It’s not so strange that the pool is busy. In those areas, where the poor and the immigrants live, people are spending the summer in their flats.

‘We’ll try Slavenca Visnic at home. Maybe she isn’t well?’

‘It’s still odd,’ Malin says. ‘All three kiosks are closed. This is the time of year when they make their money. And if she isn’t going to be there herself, she ought to have employees, don’t you think?’

‘The same thought did occur to me, Malin.’

‘There’s something weird about it.’

‘What’s weird is this heat, Malin. Shall we take a dip? To clear our heads?’

‘Have you got anything to wear?’

‘Skinny dipping’s good enough.’

‘I can see the headline in the Correspondent: Naked detectives in Glyttinge pool.’

‘Mr Högfeldt would like that,’ Zeke says.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What do I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t mean anything, Malin. Relax.’

Slavenca Visnic’s flat on the ground floor of Gamlegården 3B in Skäggetorp is deserted as well.

The smell of the forest fires is very noticeable here, closer to the blaze, and the smoke seems to have filtered between the low, white-brick blocks of flats.

No one answered when they knocked on the door in the stairwell. No sounds from inside the flat, and now they’re standing in the little garden looking through the blinds into a gloomy room where only the furniture stands out: a sofa, a table, a couple of armchairs, and an almost empty bookcase, set out on what looks like oak parquet flooring.

‘Does this woman actually exist?’

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Zeke replies.

‘Maybe she’s gone away. Abroad. Or just for the day.’

‘Yes, but now, and with three kiosks?’

‘We’ll have to check her background. The Immigration Agency ought to know something. I’ll get one of the uniforms onto it,’ Malin says.

Then her mobile rings.

Sven Sjöman.

‘A woman who was out running on the jogging track in Ryd yesterday evening has called. Said she felt as if she was being watched, that someone was lying in wait, stalking her. If you’ve got time, go and talk to her.’

‘Sure. We’re done here.’

A name.

An address down on Konsistoriegatan, in the centre of the city.

Linda Karlå offers them chilled apple juice in the kitchen of her tastefully furnished two-room apartment. The flat is in a building dating from the thirties: beige stucco, well-kept, one of the oldest housing cooperatives in the city, with astronomical prices to match.

They sit with their drinks around the kitchen table, and Linda Karlå apologises for taking up their time. Zeke explains that they’re interested in anything that could be connected to the murder and the other attack.

‘I was out running,’ Linda Karlå says. ‘I run a lot. Not all that often in the forest in Ryd, and I don’t know why, but I suddenly got the feeling that someone was watching me, waiting for me deeper in the woods. I didn’t see anyone, but there was someone there. It could have been a man. Or a woman. I know I was being watched, and when I ran there was someone following me. There was a sort of snaking sound, at least that’s what I thought at the time. But I’m fast, so I made it to the car park.’

‘You didn’t see anything?’ Malin asks.

She makes sure that her voice sounds interested.

‘No. But there was someone there. I just thought maybe you’d like to know. Maybe he, whoever did it, lives in Ryd?’

‘Maybe. If it is a he. And if it was him.’

‘Well, it terrified me, anyway.’

‘Best to stay away from the forest in Ryd for a while,’ Zeke says. ‘Go running on open streets until we’ve sorted this out.’

Linda Karlå looks relieved.

Almost surprised that they’re taking her fears seriously.

‘It’s really much nicer to go swimming at this time of year,’ she says. ‘There are so many good pools in the city.’

Outside the building, on the way back to the car, Zeke asks: ‘So what do you make of that?’

‘Yes, what the hell do I make of that?’ Malin says.

It’s just after two o’clock when they get back to the station. They grabbed lunch out at Ikea in Tornby, the warehouse full of people trying to escape the heat and pick up some summer bargains from the great Ingvar, purveyor of fine design to the masses.

Karim Akbar is standing, looking wretched, in front of the computer at the desk he’s had set up for him in the open-air office, in addition to the large office he has upstairs.

‘What’s up with him?’ Zeke says as he wipes the sweat from his brow and pulls his shirt away from his chest.

‘God knows,’ Malin says. ‘Do you think it’s got a bit cooler in here? They must have got the air conditioning going again.’

‘Perfect,’ Zeke says. ‘Can’t be more than twenty degrees.’

Karim waves them over to him.

Two windows open on the huge computer screen.

Aftonbladet and the Correspondent.

They’ve both put the football angle on their front pages.

Lesbian Killer? is Aftonbladet’s headline, above a picture of the team. The article starts: According to Police Chief Karim Akbar, the investigation is now focused on Linköping’s top-flight women’s football team . . .

The Correspondent: Crime and Prejudice? . . . what has led the police to turn their attention to the team is as yet unclear . . .

Both sites include quotes from Pia Rasmefog.

She’s furious that the team is the focus of this sort of attention without any concrete evidence being presented, that it seems to be because the crime appears to have a lesbian angle, and that one of the most widespread prejudices in society right now is that women’s football teams are always full of lesbian players. Still worse, according to Pia Rasmefog, is the suggestion that lesbian players would be extra violent, which is an insulting but widely held misapprehension.

‘This just shows how rigid the police are in their thinking, on a number of different levels,’ she tells Aftonbladet.

‘Holy shit,’ Zeke mutters. ‘How did you manage that, Karim?’

‘We made one call,’ Malin says. ‘As a result of someone mentioning the team in the course of our inquiries. But we aren’t focusing on them at all. What on earth did you say at the press conference?’

Malin turns towards Karim, expecting him to look embarrassed and angry, ashamed at his obvious mistake, but instead he just looks defiant.

‘I said that the team had cropped up in the investigation.’

‘Why did you say that?’

‘They were pressurising me and I wanted to give them something, and stupidly that was what came out. But on the other hand: maybe something will come of all this fuss.’

Sven Sjöman comes over to them.

He can’t suppress his smile when he sees the screen.

‘We could issue a retraction?’ he says.

‘No damn retractions,’ Karim says. ‘Just let it go.’

Karim’s skill at manipulating the media has always impressed Malin in the past, his ability to find just the right place under the spotlight.

But this . . .

What a ridiculous blunder.

It makes us look like something from the Stone Age.

Like the riot squad hitting gays over the head. I think you’re going to, you think I’m going to, I believe you’re going to do it, you do it, then I do it too . . .

The things we ruin with our words. Prejudices laid bare, confirming and empowering evil.

This heat is making all our brains overheat, Malin thinks as she walks back to her desk. Our brains are boiling so hard that they don’t work any more.

She looks at Karim from a distance.

His trim frame, clad in his linen suit, huddled on his office chair, radiating a new sort of tiredness that she’s never seen before, as if he’s fed up with this whole media game, with the ridiculous little exchanges of information and opinion, as if he’s just longing for clarity, for black and white.

Good luck, Karim, Malin thinks. It’s millions of years since the world was black and white, now it consists of millions of colours, most of them hideous and scary, but many of them heart-breakingly beautiful, reasons to feel gratitude for every new day on the planet.

Then her phone rings.

‘Fors.’

‘This is Viktoria Solhage. I’ve just seen on the internet. You can imagine how disappointed I am. Can’t you?’

‘Viktoria. I . . .’

‘There’s already more than enough prejudice, Malin Fors. I trusted you.’

‘Viktoria . . .’

Click.

Silence. Nothing more.

Just the thought that everything was going to hell.

32

The air conditioning doesn’t reach all the way down here, not even the ventilation seems to be working and the small windows out onto the yard may be open but the air they’re letting in is so hot that it doesn’t seem to contain any oxygen.

The gym in the basement of the police station.

One of Malin’s favourite places in the world.

Has to come down in spite of the heat.

Has to come down, even on a day like today when the gym is reminiscent of one of the outer circles of hell, and the freshly painted yellow walls are turning fiery orange because the salt of her sweat is clouding her sight.

Ten minutes on the treadmill just now.

Her white vest soaked through.

She thought she was going to faint.

Thinks about Nathalie Falck. Wants to talk to her again, but what could she say that wasn’t said last time? Time must be allowed to do its work. Time they don’t have.

One dumbbell in each hand, fifteen kilos, up and down, up and down, fifteen reps, then rest.

The muscles in her upper arms are long and sinuous and stronger than they look.

I’m so exhausted in this heat that I feel like throwing up, almost. She’s done it before, thrown up in the vomit-green bin by the door of the gym.

Usually alone down here.

Most of the others use gyms down in the city.

But Malin likes the sense of being underground. Sometimes Johan Jakobsson keeps her company when he has time between school-runs and feeling guilty about anything and everything. She can see how family life is draining him, how he’s starting to get wrinkles in his once so boyishly smooth forehead.

Tove.

I’m thirty-four.

I wouldn’t mind, I ought to have more wrinkles in my forehead. Even if I don’t like the ones I’ve got.

Shit.

I’m going to exercise away all the crap that this summer has brought with it.

Tove.

Home soon.

Janne. How can I miss you so, when it’s more than ten years since we last lived together?

I see you from a distance.

Your shortcomings pale, have paled over the years, haven’t they? Away from each other, we’ve grown together. Can love work like that?

Her lie about not being able to drive them to the airport. Skavsta, Ryanair to London, then a direct flight to Bali with some British charter airline.

Their farewell in the hall back home in the flat twelve days ago is like a scene in a film now, soundless, scentless. She and Janne reserved towards each other, all three of them oddly quiet, as if years of longing and loss suddenly became apparent there in the hall and the looming distance between them.

What could have been.

She hugged and kissed Tove, Janne, then the usual farewell phrases, the feeling that new ones were called for, a sort that people had never said before.

What do we do now?

That’s what she thought, and she noticed Janne’s clumsiness when he opened his mouth, saying: ‘You should have come too.’

And at that moment she wanted to hit him, jump on him and beat the shit out of him, while at the same time wanting to sit on an aeroplane resting her head on his shoulder, Tove asleep by her side, the two of them awake in a comforting, whispering simplicity.

But instead she said: ‘Janne, for God’s sake. You know that’s impossible,’ and she could feel that she had said, whispered, screamed those words a thousand times before, that they had become their mutual invocation, a sort of truth simply because they had been spoken and thought enough times, and Tove shouldn’t have to hear this tired crap.

Tove horribly aware beside Janne, horribly conscious of the subtexts.

What are we doing to you, darling child?

They had left the flat, Janne’s friend Pecka beeping on the horn impatiently down in the street. An agitated farewell. A bad omen.

And she had gone straight to bed.

No. She had gone straight to Daniel Högfeldt’s flat.

Let him hold her tight against the chrome frame of his Mio bed.

Then he had banged the sorrow out of her.

And it was nice.

Malin walks past the main hospital building on her way out of the police station.

She spent a long time in the gym, then talked to Ebba in reception for half an hour, about the heat and teenage daughters, Ebba has twins, sixteen years old and a real handful.

Then Malin had spent hours sitting at her desk, thinking, still sweating, catching up on her paperwork, reading the Immigration Agency file on Slavenca Visnic, which had been emailed to her by the young uniform Zeke had given the job to earlier in the day.

That was quick, she had thought when she saw the email in her inbox. And then she had read the file on the screen, how Slavenca Visnic arrived in Sweden from Bosnia in 1994, after her husband and two children, four and six years old, were burned alive when their house in Sarajevo was hit by incendiary grenades, how she had been captured by Serbian troops when she tried to escape the inferno of the city. How they raped her for two weeks, how day and night lost all meaning, how she managed to escape, but refused to say how, wandering through the forests and along the roads at night until she reached Dubrovnik, where she had somehow managed to make her way to Italy, and had finally shown up in Ystad in the far south of Sweden.

Pregnant.

Abortion, eighth week, carried out in Norrköping.

Malin had noticed at once that the timeline didn’t fit.

The dates when she must have been raped by the Serbs, the date of the abortion.

At least twenty-four weeks between them.

Something alive.

Something killed.

So that something else can live.

A picture of Slavenca Visnic, long dark hair, sharp features, tired and angry eyes. But determined.

Is it you? Malin had thought then. Is it you? She thinks now, as she looks up at the windows of the hospital, points of light against the growing darkness of the evening sky.

She carries on.

Heavy steps.

Down towards the Horticultural Society Park, towards the trees of the park, and their darkness.

Malin walks along the path leading down to the summerhouse where Josefin Davidsson was found naked and disorientated, moving slowly, undressing herself in her thoughts and trying to capture what might have happened.

You want young girls. You scrub them clean. What do you want from the girls? Their innocence? Why one dead, one alive? Did she run away from you? Josefin? The wounds you inflict are clean, and, on Theresa, even neatly trimmed. You want things to be as good as possible, is that it?

Fear and loneliness.

I don’t want to be here.

Swings, not moving.

The sound of the city in slow motion, sleepy. The smell of the forest fires still noticeable, but weaker tonight, the wind in the other direction.

Something blue.

Then a cracking sound from up in the trees, is there someone there? Is someone watching me? A bird of prey, perhaps?

Malin turns around, a black shadow is moving rapidly towards her.

What the hell?

What the hell’s happening?

Run away.

It’s moving.

I’m floating, shouting in your ear, but you hear nothing.

I disappear.

Don’t want to see hear know about this.

But we’ll soon meet again.

If you don’t listen to me, we’ll soon meet again.

Sofia Fredén was reluctant to accept the job of dishwasher at Frimis, the old freemasons’ hotel and club, didn’t want to spend the summer working. But it was absurdly well paid, and easy to get to by train from Mjölby, the station just a stone’s throw from the hotel.

Now she’s tired after a long shift in the heat and humidity.

And she walks without thinking, with her brain somehow shut off, through the very darkest part of the Railway Park down towards the station, the lights of the city are close, nothing can happen to her here and in her ears she has the earplugs of her iPod, music downloaded from the net, Jens Lekman’s bombastic music, and it makes her feel slightly less tired.

She walks past the grove of rowan bushes and maples and a large oak tree.

Singing along.

And Sofia Fredén doesn’t hear something start to move in the bushes behind her, doesn’t hear something approaching, just feels the force of an arm being wrapped around her from behind, and a second later she’s lying between four tall rowan bushes, on shitty, urine-stinking ground, deep within the darkness of the city, trying to save her own life.

The deer vanishes. When the creature noticed Malin it turned and ran off towards the stage over by the Hotel Ekoxen.

Malin’s heart is still pounding from the adrenalin.

She goes inside the summerhouse. Sits down on one of the wooden benches, trying to piece together the fragments of the case she’s carrying inside her.

People, places.

Except they form nothing but a grey, shapeless mass, and a shiver of anxiety runs through her body, a shimmering whiteness that takes root deep in her diaphragm.

It’s a good sign for Linköping that deer dare to venture so close to the centre.

But something more than just deer is in motion, they’re not alone tonight.

There are two of us now, Malin.

But Sofia Fredén doesn’t yet know about her predicament.

I’ll try to help her as best I can.

But I’m afraid my fear means that I can scarcely look after myself.

Please, Malin, kill off my anxieties. That’s one of the things that we human beings are supposed to do for each other.

I know that now, as I drift up here.

33

Tuesday, 20 July

The clock on the Tekniska Verken building says 05.42.

Already bloody light.

The black bicycle is weaving back and forth over the tarmac, the quickest route from the villa out in Stångebro is past the Cloetta Centre, through the tunnel under the railway and up through the Railway Park.

Hungover.

But I’m Superman, thinks Patrik Karlsson, as he pedals on towards the tunnel.

The party last night. They had a barbecue in his garden, his mum and dad away in the country, and now he’s on his way to his summer job at Frimis as a breakfast waiter.

Boiling eggs.

Laying tables.

Don’t put out any little Mazarin tarts if there are German tourists staying in the hotel. They take about a hundred each.

It’s hotter in the tunnel, but it only takes a few seconds.

Up past the station building.

The Railway Park.

Buildings from the turn of the last century all around, showy apartments, ten large rooms, doctors’ homes, he knows because he had a girlfriend there once, a nice doctor’s daughter called Cornelina.

What a fucking name!

Wonder if Sofia’s working the dishwasher today.

Past the bushes. And those trees that his mum always thinks are so beautiful.

But.

In the small clearing between the trees, in the dim light, there’s something there. There shouldn’t be anything there.

Patrik Karlsson stops.

Lays the bike down on the grass.

He feels sick from the wine box last night. But sicker still from what he sees.

His body lurches as he approaches.

There’s a body in there, in the clearing.

Turn around.

Can’t.

The body is naked, white, looks almost scrubbed, despite the blood from the wounds.

The face.

The eyes, wide-open. Grey blue white, far from alive.

Sofia.

From the dishwasher.

She won’t be working the dishwasher today, Patrik Karlsson thinks, before he lets out a stifled, involuntary scream.

‘It’s happened again.’

Zeke’s voice more tired than Malin has ever heard it before. Tired in a new way, not despairing but almost indifferent, and that scares Malin even more.

She’s seen that indifference in some older officers, and prays that neither she nor Zeke ends up like that, but not Zeke, never Zeke; that somehow innate sense of engagement in his hard, green eyes could never fade. Could it?

And he says it again.

And Malin, sitting up naked in bed on a sheet wet with sweat doesn’t want to absorb the words, and hopes they’ve found a living girl disorientated in a park, or anywhere, but she can hear from Zeke’s voice that this isn’t the case.

She was practically dragged from her dreamless sleep by the ringing of the phone.

It’s happened again.

They found Josefin on Thursday, Theresa on Sunday, and now, two days later, it’s time for another girl. Dead?

‘How bad?’

‘As bad as it could be.’

Malin clenches the fist that isn’t holding the phone.

‘This is fucking well not going to happen again.’

‘You’re right there,’ Zeke says. ‘It’s time we got this bastard now.’

It’s only two hundred metres from Malin’s flat to the latest crime scene.

She makes her way there along the shady side of St Larsgatan. Dragging her feet, doesn’t want to see what she knows she’s going to see.

No smell of smoke, the wind must be coming from a different direction again today. But Malin can still sense it somehow, the smoke, she can detect its resonance, a new tone settling over the city.

The heat.

The implacability of this summer.

Fear.

The awareness that something malevolent is on the loose.

Stay indoors, girls. Don’t go out. Go in groups, only in the light, be on your guard, cheat death, it could be anywhere, anywhere at all.

Violence like a suffocating arm around Linköping, this city of knowledge, a snake twisting around its proud industries, IT companies, university and hospitals, around its inhabitants, each one more remarkable yet also more scared than the last.

Fear is a parasite, expressing itself in violence, which will slowly, slowly consume the city’s joy in life. Unless, Malin thinks, we put a stop to this now.

She walks past the Correspondent’s offices on St Larsgatan.

Daniel almost certainly down in the Railway Park already.

Frimis.

Zeke said that both the victim and the lad who found her had summer jobs there.

The hotel’s façade like a faded medieval castle. And in there was where those ridiculous freemasons held their meetings. Karim is a member. And Zeke’s son, Martin, has given a talk to the old men about what it’s like being a top sports star.

Malin wants to think about anything at all apart from the sight that greets her when she turns the corner down towards the park: two patrol cars, uniformed police officers, cordons, journalists and photographers.

Low-growing bushes in tight clusters around the gravel paths.

An attractive grove of what, rhododendrons?

No, rowan bushes, maples, an oak.

Karin Johannison inside the grove.

Malin can just make out the red and orange flowers of a lovely dress that she’s seen Karin wear before.

Karin is crouched over the body.

‘Her name’s Sofia Fredén.’

Malin can hear the tiredness even in Karin’s voice. Not indifferent or despairing, more like sympathetic and involved, in a way that she’s never heard Karin before.

‘Another one,’ Karin says as she stands up and looks at Malin, her eyes full of sympathy as well, but also anger.

‘Another one,’ she repeats.

And Malin nods, looks down at the body, its eyes closed, and the scrubbed skin is glassy, almost transparent white, with deep gashes across the chest, neat in spite of the blood, but not the same as the injuries to Theresa or Josefin. The blood that’s poured from the wounds makes the body look oddly peaceful; the contrast between the white skin and the red has that effect.

A smell of bleach is in the air.

‘It almost looks like she’s glowing,’ Malin says. ‘Have you got any thoughts about the wounds? They’re different from before. And there’s more blood.’

‘The wounds?’ Karin says. ‘They’re different. They look like they were made by some sort of claws. A small bird, a guinea pig, maybe a rabbit or a cat. As to why there’s more blood? Maybe the killer didn’t have time to wash her or wait for the wounds to stop bleeding. We are in the middle of the city, after all.’

In Karin’s voice there’s none of the superiority that’s usually there, and it makes her more pleasant, humble.

Rabbit claws.

Are you still finding your way? If you can just get it right, then all this will sort itself out, all your wishes will be fulfilled?

The cages at Lollo Svensson’s farm.

‘It’s like he or she is still trying things out,’ Malin says to Karin. ‘Seeing as the wounds look different each time.’

‘Maybe, Malin. But what do I know?’

In the distance she can hear Daniel Högfeldt’s voice: ‘Malin, is it the same perpetrator?’

And Karin answers his question, albeit quietly, to Malin.

‘Particles of blue paint in the vagina, the body scrubbed clean, strangled. I can guarantee you that we’re dealing with one and the same perpetrator.’

Malin looks Karin in the eyes. She blinks slowly in response.

‘It could have been one of us, Malin, if we were younger.’

‘What about the lad who found her?’

‘He’s sitting in the Volvo with Zeke over in the car park.’

Patrik Karlsson is sitting terrified in the back seat of the car.

Seems to believe that they’re going to think it was him.

‘We don’t think you had anything to do with this, Patrik. Not for a second.’

The air conditioning in the car is roaring, one of the commonest and most welcome sounds of the summer.

‘We’ve already checked your alibi,’ Zeke says. ‘And we know that you worked together. Right now we’re just wondering if you can tell us anything about her that we ought to know?’

‘I only spoke to her a couple of times.’

His soft teenage cheeks move up and down.

‘She was always busy with the dishes. Used to say she wished she’d taken the job in the café at Tinnis instead, where she worked last summer.’

Tinnis.

What wouldn’t I give to go swimming right now?

‘I didn’t really know her. Sure, I thought she was pretty. But like I said, I was on my way to work and just happened to go past on my bike.’

Sofia, Malin thinks.

Just on her way home from work.

Did she just happen to walk past the perpetrator?

‘Do you know where Sofia lived?’

‘In Mjölby. She must have been on her way to catch the train.’

‘Mjölby?’

Malin closes her eyes.

We’re way behind, she thinks.

34

It’s the sort of day when she feels like drinking one, two, three, four beers for lunch, then carrying on drinking all afternoon with the help of a large bottle of tequila. But it never happens, because she never gives in to that sort of impulse. Instead: delayed morning meeting at the station.

An intent Karim Akbar at the head of the table, the whiteboard behind him giving off a dull glow, lit up by the daylight seeping in through the gaps in the lowered, tilted Venetian blinds.

Sven Sjöman is sitting to the left of Karim, bags under his eyes, his bulging stomach tight under a washed-out yellow cotton shirt and Malin knows he’s suffering in the heat, knows it’s much harder for him than other people to get through days like this. She noticed him getting more and more tired during the spring, but didn’t want to ask why, didn’t want to vocalise what was obvious, not wanting to think the thought of what would happen if he went off on sick-leave or if his heart somehow packed up.

Mentor.

You’ve been my mentor, Sven.

His mantra: Listen to the voices of an investigation, Malin. Hear what they’re trying to tell you. Which she has gradually, over the days, weeks, months and years, translated into: See the images, feel the clues, notice the patterns.

Zeke opposite Sven.

Ready to pounce again, his back straight, ready to deal with whatever shit gets thrown at him. Nothing can break me! A hungry look in his eyes, nothing to hide, an unveiled human being.

Their colleagues from Motala and Mjölby are taking part in the group meeting for the first time.

Sundsten. Per.

A younger, child-free version of Johan Jakobsson, slim and sinewy, sitting there with an open face beneath flaxen hair, wearing a crumpled white linen suit. A guileless but watchful look in his eyes, a sharp nose curving slightly towards his thin lips. He looks intelligent, Malin thinks.

Waldemar Ekenberg.

Long and faithful service.

A time-twisted police officer with an infamous weakness for excessive force. Cigarettes have left deep lines in his face and he’s thin, looks older than his fifty years. His hair is a lifeless grey, but the look in his grey-green eyes is still strangely vibrant: We’re going to get this bastard.

Karim begins: ‘Karin Johannison has confirmed that the traces of paint match the other victims. We’ll be getting a more detailed forensic report later today, tomorrow at the latest. So, we’re dealing with the same perpetrator. Or perpetrators.’

‘Well,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says, and his voice is thin and rattling. ‘We can hardly expect to find the perpetrator among her close acquaintances. There don’t seem to be any natural connections between the girls, do there?’

‘Hardly,’ Zeke interjects.

‘I’ve had time to get a good look at the case now,’ Per Sundsten says. ‘It’s like we’re dealing with some sort of shadow. Someone who exists, yet somehow doesn’t.’

Sven nods.

‘What do you think, Malin?’

The expectation that she’s going to say something wise, something that takes them a bit further.

‘There’s a pattern here. I just can’t see it yet. Have Sofia Fredén’s parents been told?’

Theresa Eckeved’s mother sinking to the hall floor, screaming.

Her father, some of his wits still about him, his whole being radiating the realisation: I’m only at the start of this nightmare.

‘Persson and Björk in Mjölby have taken care of that,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says. ‘They’re good, they’ll do it as well as anyone could. It’s an impossible task. And they’ll be questioning Sofia’s parents about her as well. Just the essentials.’

Task.

Malin tastes the word, twists and turns it, the way it creates a professional distance in an attempt to make this most human encounter bearable.

Then a quick overview of the situation from Per Sundsten.

The latest door-to-door inquiries around the villas of Sturefors had turned up nothing, and the convicted sex offenders that he and Ekenberg had had time to check out all had watertight alibis. Ten people on the list, five checked. ‘We’ll carry on with the others today. But I don’t really expect it to give us anything.’

‘We haven’t got hold of the owner of the kiosk yet,’ Malin says. ‘Seems to be away. All three kiosks are shut, in the middle of high season.’

‘The fuss with the football team has died down,’ Karim says. ‘That’s one advantage when things move so fast, no one has time to linger over things that don’t matter. But it was clumsy of me.’

A team-building confession, a bit of rhetoric for the officers on the case. One tiny little mistake, but you’ll forgive me, respect me again. Won’t you?

I respect you, Karim. You’re a better police chief than most.

Sven speaks up.

‘Still nothing from Yahoo! or Facebook. Evidently they’re very restrictive when it comes to giving out information. Yahoo! claim they need an American court order. Facebook haven’t even replied. And Louise Svensson’s computer was completely clean. She could have cleared it out, seeing as she was expecting us to turn up.’

Sven takes a deep breath.

‘We’re still trying to identify possible manufacturers of the dildo, but so far we’ve haven’t got anything definite.’

Then he rubs a hand over his head.

‘How do you suggest we proceed?’

Sven is head of the preliminary investigation, but it feels as if responsibility for the case is fluid, snaking to and fro across the room like hot, hot tar, so hot that no one wants to burn their fingers on it.

The air-conditioning unit groans.

Shudders.

And falls silent.

‘Shit! Just when it had started working at last! Things are going to heat up again,’ Zeke says.

And they all wait for Sven to make a proposal, lead them further, and he starts to speak.

‘Sundsten and Ekenberg. You take the door-to-door around Frimis, and talk to Sofia Fredén’s colleagues at the hotel. Malin and Zeke, get hold of the kiosk owner, and maybe you could check if Josefin Davidsson has remembered anything by now? Just some quick questions? And we’ll have to hope that a witness turns up, someone who saw or heard something, or that they come up with something about Sofia Fredén in Mjölby that can move us on. Otherwise we’ll just have to wait for Forensics to give us something. Well, those are the lines I see ahead of us. Anyone else?’

Silence around the table.

‘Right then,’ Karim says. ‘Let’s get to work.’

‘A shadow.’

Zeke standing beside Malin’s desk. Trying out the word.

‘Something like that,’ Malin says. ‘A shadow of a person. Or a person driven towards utter transparency.’

‘Or a lack of transparency,’ Zeke says.

‘Then there are the different sorts of wounds that were inflicted on the girls,’ Malin says.

‘Seems almost like a sort of curiosity about violence,’ Zeke says.

‘Cleanliness. All that scrubbing.’

‘As if the killer wanted to purify them.’

‘Is Josefin Davidsson still in hospital?’

‘We’ll have to check. Otherwise she’s probably at home.’

Zeke waits by Malin’s desk as she rings.

Waits until she hangs up and says: ‘She’s at home.’

‘Do you think she’ll be able to remember anything now?’

‘No,’ Malin says. ‘But we’ll give it a try.’

Malin thinks of Maria Murvall, who must be able to remember being attacked in the forest, but who has squeezed her whole being into a corner, letting her consciousness act as the basis for a life that’s been stripped down, a life that’s really no better than most animals’.

Is that what evil can do to a person?

Apparently.

Then Malin’s phone rings.

Ebba in reception.

‘There’s someone who wants to talk to you, Malin. Says he wants to be anonymous, he’s got a very strong accent. Says it’s about the girls.’

‘Put him through.’

The voice, the accent, the prejudices that arise at once. He sounds, even though Malin doesn’t want to think it, stupid, speaking in scarcely intelligible Swedish: ‘You know that fucker Behzad Karami, he hasn’t got a fucking alibi, his family are just lying, he was somewhere that night, and last night too, I know. You have to check him again, they’re lying to you. He often does strange things at night, he just disappears.’

How can you know that? Malin thinks, and says: ‘What’s your name?’

No number on the display, the man, or rather the youth, is probably ringing from a public phone.

‘I don’t have a name.’

‘Hang on . . .’

Click.

Malin turns towards Zeke. A questioning look in his eyes.

‘Behzad Karami just reappeared in the case. We should check him out again.’

‘OK, but where do we start? With Behzad Karami, Slavenca Visnic or Josefin Davidsson?’

Malin throws up her hands.

‘Which one do you think would have air conditioning at home?’

‘Let’s start with Josefin,’ Zeke replies. ‘Besides, Visnic is proving rather difficult to get hold of, to put it mildly.’

35

‘Doesn’t Karim live out this way?’ Zeke asks, wiping the little beads of sweat from his upper lip. They look like tiny, burned blisters.

‘Yes, they’ve got a villa here somewhere,’ Malin replies, thinking that Josefin Davidsson was incredibly lucky to get away with her life.

They park by the school. Josefin Davidsson lives with her parents in one of the terraced houses in Lambohov.

The red-painted wooden houses are small, unassuming family dreams, clinging together in rows, with neatly tended front gardens and hedges that have grown tall over the years since the houses were built.

‘I think Karim’s son goes to school there,’ Malin says as they walk slowly towards the houses. They stop outside number twelve, go into the little garden and ring the bell, but hear nothing from inside. So Malin takes hold of the ring hanging from the mouth of the gilded lion adorning the green front door instead, and just as she knocks the door opens and Josefin peeps out through the gap.

‘Hello. Oh, it’s you. What do you want?’

‘We’d like to ask you some questions,’ Malin says. ‘We want to see what you remember. Or if you can remember anything else?’

‘Come in.’

Josefin opens the door.

She’s wearing a loose, pale-pink dress that hangs limply about her body, her hair wet after what Malin assumes must have been a shower. The bandages on her arms and legs are dry and clean.

She walks into the house ahead of them, leading them past a kitchen with white cupboards and on into a living room where two burgundy-coloured Chesterfield sofas sit facing one another. Outside there’s a patio with a hammock and plastic garden furniture. The room is hot and smells faintly of smoke and sweat and freshly made caramel.

Malin and Zeke sit down beside each other and Josefin settles down opposite them. You look older here at home, Malin thinks, as if the ornate furniture and cheap Wilton rugs are stealing life from you.

‘I can’t remember anything,’ Josefin says. ‘And, really, why would I want to?’

She knits her hands in her lap, they go white and she turns away to look at the garden.

‘Are your mum and dad out?’ Malin asks.

‘They’re at work.’

She looks back at them.

‘They could be here, get compassionate leave if you’d rather not be alone.’

‘Then they’d get less money. And they’d probably rather work.’

‘You don’t mind being left on your own?’

‘No, I don’t remember anything, so what would I be afraid of? That it could happen again? That’s not very likely.’

The person who hurt you, Malin thinks. I’m afraid of them, and so should you be. You should be afraid, but you’re sensible, what good would being afraid do? The chance of the perpetrator coming after you is small, and if he or she wanted you dead, then you wouldn’t be here.

‘Why did you go to the cinema on your own?’ Malin asks. ‘People usually go with a friend, don’t they?’

‘I like going on my own. Talking just spoils the experience of the film.’

‘OK. Try to remember. What did you do that evening, what happened? Try to get an image, a word, a smell, anything at all, in your head. Please, just try.’

Malin tries to sound as persuasive as she can, but there’s an undertone: Remembering is possible. And it would help us.

And Josefin shuts her eyes, concentrating, but soon opens them again and looks at Malin and Zeke with a sigh.

‘Sorry,’ she says.

‘What about your dreams?’ Malin asks. ‘Anything from them?’

‘I never remember my dreams,’ Josefin replies.

On the way out Malin stops in the hall, looking at her face in the mirror. Through the door on her left she sees Josefin put a saucepan of water on an old Cylinda stove.

Without knowing why, Malin goes into the kitchen and puts her hand on Josefin’s shoulder.

‘How are you going to spend the summer?’ she asks, and Josefin starts and turns around.

‘I’m going to take it easy. I was supposed to be working in the kiosk at the pool in Glyttinge, but I resigned after just three days. I’d rather have the time off instead.’

Malin stiffens.

‘So you know Slavenca Visnic?’

Josefin laughs.

‘I don’t think anyone knows that woman.’

‘She was supposed to be working for Slavenca Visnic, but resigned after just three days.’

Malin is trying not to sound too excited about the connection.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘And she had an idea about where Slavenca might be, didn’t think she’d gone abroad.’

‘Where, then?’

‘She might be up in the forest, at the fire. As a volunteer. Apparently she spoke of nothing but the forest fires when they started working together, said they probably needed help.’

‘I read in the Correspondent that there are about a hundred people helping out at the edge of the fires. With blankets and so on.’

‘That would make sense. Her family died in a fire in Sarajevo. A grenade attack on the building they lived in.’