Summertime Death

Janne.

He worked for the Swedish Rescue Services Agency in Bosnia. She knows he saw all manner of horrors down there, but he’s never really talked about it.

Silence.

Memory loss.

They’re more than just cousins.

Siblings, maybe.

The road leads into the smoke.

There are cars lined up along the edge of the forest road leading into the inferno, into the fire. The edge of the fire is just north of Lake Hultsjön, so they drive through Ljungsbro and take the Tjällmo road up through the densely grown forest, the same road they drove back on during the winter they were working on the Bengt Andersson case.

Neither of them mention this as they drive across the desiccated, tormented plain and the dust flies up across the road in thick veils.

Instead Zeke put on his beloved German choral music, deep chanting from some choir that has put new words to a Wagner opera.

High volume.

Dystopian, Malin thinks. Perfect for a bad horror film.

The noise is only turned down when she calls Sundsten and asks him to follow up on Behzad Karami.

‘We’ll sort it. We’ve finished the door-to-door around the Railway Park and Frimis. No one saw anything. But most people are asleep at that time of day.’

Then she calls Sven Sjöman and tells him about the new connection.

‘Good. At last.’

Then they are approaching the fire, veils of smoke drifting over the car, the once blue sky now grey and angry, and they can feel the heat gradually rising inside the car, a heat that makes them want to turn back and flee before their skin starts to scorch, boil, char, as their brains picture catastrophic scenarios for their bodies. The smell is getting stronger and stronger, a charred world, the stench of flesh burned alive and the plaints of trees being consumed by greedy flames.

They turn off onto the gravel road they’re now driving down, as that is where the bright red fire engine they are following turns off. Above them a helicopter is circling with a water scoop, and then it heads in over the fire, disappearing from view. People with soot-stained faces, their eyes hidden behind goggles, walking along the road.

‘What sort of car has she got?’ Zeke says, his hands firm on the wheel, the car heading slowly towards the core of the fire, burned-out trees around them, dust and ash swirling through the air.

‘A Fiat van, according to the registration office, white.’

‘Haven’t seen one like that yet.’

An ambulance parked in a small sidetrack, two firemen standing beside it, inhaling what must be oxygen from large yellow canisters.

And this is the inferno you can’t wait to get back to, Janne.

People with blankets in their hands. Beating them on the ground where the smoke is rising. Further ahead they can make out flames through the trees.

‘There’ve never been fires like this in Östergötland before,’ Zeke says. ‘They’re battling to stop it coming back to life again. Did you know, a fire blazing at its worst can jump more than fifty metres from treetop to treetop? Almost like an explosion, and that’s when it gets really dangerous. That’s when firemen get trapped, circled by the fire.’

So far no one has been killed, no firemen, and no volunteers.

Just let it stay that way, with only the creatures of the forest losing their lives.

They meet a fire engine, one of the smaller ones, and Malin recognises two of Janne’s colleagues in the front seat but can’t remember their names. They recognise her and nod.

‘Tough guys,’ Zeke says.

‘I guess so,’ Malin says.

The line of parked cars breaks up, fewer volunteers here, firemen from five districts running to and fro in the forest, moving in and out of the burned vegetation. And then they see it, the white Fiat.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says.

‘The number matches,’ Malin says.

And they park close to the Fiat, open the doors of the Volvo and the roar and the heat from the inferno, almost invisible ahead of them in the forest, hits them, the air full of a prickling smell of sulphur and burned meat, the noise of the fire a dark whistling, as if God himself were trying to sound the alarm.

The heat almost unbearable.

Summer plus fire equals sauna.

‘Not even a Finn could put up with this,’ Zeke says, as if he could read Malin’s mind.

‘Fuck, no. It must be at least forty-five degrees up here.’

Cries and shouting from the fire, two low banks of smoke separating, and a woman, the same height as Malin, with soot-blackened clothes and a filthy smeared face emerges between two charred maples.

‘Slavenca Visnic, I presume,’ Zeke says.

‘At your disposal, I guess,’ the woman says.

36

Slavenca Visnic, Sarajevo and district, January 1994

They rarely come at night, the explosions, but occasionally they do, ripping the children from sleep, and I have to hold Miro’s little three-year-old body close to mine, Kranska in her dad’s arms, her frightened eyes staring at me, as if I could save her if the will of God directed the Serbs’ grenades at our flat, our house.

Distant explosions, getting closer.

Making the floorboards creak.

My son’s warm skin against mine under the blanket, I can feel it though his pyjamas, just like I can hear his heart racing, and the rhythm reminds me of my own inadequacy, because he knows that not even his mum can cure real fear. All four of us are sitting in bed together, sleep is impossible, but we’re breathing together, our breath mingling and becoming one, and even though the war raging out there is merciless, elevated to the status of a religion, we still believe that nothing can touch us, that we’re safe in our cocoon, spun of love and dreams, our home.

One day at the market.

The rifles on Snipers Alley missed me on the way home.

But an incendiary grenade had struck the roof of the building, burrowing down two floors and exploding in the flat below ours, and the flames must have consumed you quickly from beneath and the whole building was a blazing torch when I returned. People held me, their hot hands hard against my body and I wanted to go in, in to you, because I knew you were burning in there, and I wanted to burn with you.

Not even the slightest trace of you was left.

Nothing.

The phosphorous fire of an incendiary grenade really is that mercilessly hot. I slept on the charred remains of our love and our dreams, I slept there one night, trying to remember your smells, your sounds, faces and voices, the way your skin felt, but all I could feel was the stinging smell of fire and ash, all I could hear was the sound of rifle fire and howitzers as they continued their mournful song.

I woke the next morning with cold rain beating against my bare neck. I walked right into the forest, not caring if I got shot or caught up in the front line, and the clouds hung over the hills and they captured me after a few kilometres.

Their touch, the men’s touch, didn’t exist, no matter what they did to me, and what they planted inside me was a monster, nothing more.

I lay on a floor and everything that wasn’t light was dark, the world yellow-black, yet still completely colourless.

I wanted them to kill me.

But how could they do that? I was already dead. And in my dreams your faces, your voices would come.

Go, Mum, go. Your path isn’t finished yet. And I loved and hated you because I was alive, because you came from your new place just to tell me that.

I wanted to be with you, weave a new cocoon of impenetrable, everlasting love. I wanted to weave warm threads of love around your three hearts, to bring them back, to make them beat for ever.

37

‘Who’d live in a fucking dump like this?’

As Waldemar Ekenberg says this he yanks open the door of a block of flats in Ekholmen.

In the car on the way there: ‘So how are we going to play this?’

Per Sundsten can hear the influence of English on his Swedish, hates the way his language is tainted by American cop shows.

Waldemar’s voice smoother now, focused.

‘There’s no point pussyfooting around with Pakis like them. They’ve got a low pain threshold, so we just apply pressure.’

‘Apply pressure?’

‘Yeah, you know.’

Per knew. His older colleague’s racist vocabulary, his generalisations about the people they were on their way to see, all of this upset him, but he said nothing, this wasn’t the time to worry about that sort of thing, the crimes so serious that everything else could wait, and sometimes they were obliged to step onto the wrong side of the law to uphold it, it’s been like that in every culture, in all ages, ever since Hammurabi inscribed his eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

I’m not naïve, Per thinks, just not as cynical as the man he had realised that Waldemar was during the course of the day.

In itself, there was nothing wrong with cynicism.

But the prejudices. You could get by fine without them. Everybody has a dirty streak, as Per likes to put it, no one’s entirely blameless, no matter what their background or skin colour.

The block of flats in Ekholmen where Behzad Karami’s parents live.

Graffiti on the walls, badly sprayed tags on peeling paint.

And this was where Behzad Karami is supposed to have been at a party on the night that Josefin Davidsson was attacked. His parents live on the first floor, no lift.

Sundsten and Ekenberg ring the doorbell.

A pause.

A chain on the door.

A woman’s face through the gap.

Waldemar is panting beside Per, out of breath from the stairs, says ‘POLICE!’ as he holds up his ID.

‘Let us in,’ he says, and his voice leaves no room for doubt, and the door closes and then opens again.

‘I bet you’re growing potatoes in the living room,’ Waldemar says, and laughs. ‘Either that or cannabis, eh?’

In the living room there’s a large, black leather sofa along one wall, heavy curtains, deep-red velvet, hanging by the windows, garish paintings of ?Tehran on the patterned brown wallpaper.

‘Looks like a brothel,’ Waldemar says to the dark-skinned man sitting on the sofa. Per thinks that the man looks ready to be bullied, must know why they’re there, but also that he’s been lying, trying to deceive them. Per can see the lies in the tension in his face, the look in his eyes, not anxious, just restless, the way a liar’s eyes look. He has a pleasant face, his features serene in spite of his large nose and what look like acne scars on his cheeks. He isn’t a large man, and the home gives the impression of being well-kept, cherished, and Per imagines that Ekenberg has noticed the same thing, and that that’s where he’s going to focus his violence.

‘Sit down, why don’t you?’ Waldemar says to Karami’s wife in a thick Östergötland accent, and she sinks down, and her thin body, swathed in shiny dark cloth, seems to disappear into the sofa.

‘Well, then,’ and without further ado Waldemar picks up a vase from the top of the television and throws it at the wall, sending shards of porcelain across the room, over the faces and clothes of the Karamis.

The woman cries something unintelligible in Arabic or Persian or whatever it is.

The man: ‘What the hell are you doing?’

And Waldemar picks up a family photograph, drops it on the floor and crushes it with the heel of his heavy shoes.

‘Shut up!’ he shouts. ‘You don’t get away unpunished if you lie to the police.’

‘Am I supposed to have lied to you?’

Per is standing silently in the doorway, wants to intervene, tell Waldemar that that’s enough, to pull himself together, this isn’t how we do things, but he can see from Karami that he’s close to breaking, that he’s fond of his possessions.

‘Your son,’ Waldemar yells. ‘He wasn’t here the night Josefin Davidsson was raped, as you claimed! I bet there wasn’t even a family party going on at all. So where was he? What was he doing? NOW!’

A samovar flies into the radiator under the window onto the balcony, a clanking sound as the thin metal breaks.

‘Do you think I’d betray my son? He was here. We had a party.’

And Waldemar overturns the coffee table with a force that shocks Per, then he’s in front of Arash Karami, striking him across the nose and causing little trickles of blood to pour from both nostrils.

‘Do you really imagine I haven’t had to deal with worse than this? Well? This is nothing.’

Karami’s words are scornful when he’s collected himself again. He spits at Waldemar, his eyes full of deep loathing.

And Waldemar strikes again, then again, and Per is about to jump in and stop him when the wife starts yelling on the sofa, in heavily accented Swedish.

‘He wasn’t here. We had a party, but he never came. We don’t know what he does, but he never comes here any more. Find him, and tell him to come home more often.’

Waldemar calms down, stopping just before dealing a fourth blow.

‘So you don’t know what he gets up to?’

The Karamis sit in silence, Arash Karami’s left hand pressing the bridge of his nose, trying to stem the flow of blood.

Neither of them answers Waldemar’s question.

‘Do you know what? I believe you. You haven’t the faintest idea what your Paki son does, because he does some completely fucked up stuff. Doesn’t he? Christ, you can’t even raise your own kids properly.’

Waldemar heads towards the door, Per takes a step back, says in a calm voice: ‘You realise there’s no point reporting this. There are two of us who can confirm that Arash put up a struggle when we tried to take him to the station for questioning.’

The wife is sitting in tears on the sofa, and Arash Karami doesn’t even deign to look at them.

‘Fucking towel-heads,’ Waldemar says. ‘Lying to the police.’

Outside the building, in the relentless heat from a sun that seems to have gone mad, Waldemar says to Per: ‘That went well, you playing good cop, me bad cop. And we didn’t even plan it in advance.’

Really bloody well, Per thinks, suddenly feeling sick.

But.

They got what they wanted.

Per feels his face getting hot, the same feeling as when his mother found out he’d been stealing from her purse when he was little.

Brutality.

In the course of his few short years as a police officer he’s seen it all too often.

38

How does anyone survive what Slavenca Visnic has been through without losing their mind?

Abuse running like a poisonous thread through history. Does violence stem from abuse? Is time really a sort of volcanic ground that regularly erupts into violence? Huge explosions, with smaller intermittent sighs.

Maybe, Malin thinks, as she watches Slavenca Visnic’s Fiat van disappear among the cars along the gravel road through the ash-covered forest.

Slavenca Visnic hadn’t been surprised to see her and Zeke appear in the forest, and had been completely open with them, as if she had nothing to hide, as if the fact that one of the victims had been found near her kiosk in Stavsätter and another victim had worked for her was in no way compromising.

Once Slavenca Visnic had said hello to them she washed herself with water from a greyish white container that she had brought with her, scrubbing the soot from her face with strongly scented detergent as Malin and Zeke waited. Slavenca Visnic was demonstrating with her actions that she worked to her own agenda, and neither Malin nor Zeke protested. Malin coughed as the smoke irritated her eyes and nose. Once the dirt was gone from Slavenca Visnic’s face you could see that she must once have been beautiful, but that was long ago now, as experience and work had aged her prematurely.

‘I realised that you’d want to talk to me,’ Slavenca Visnic said once she’d finished washing and had put on a clean T-shirt. Firefighters and volunteers were running past them, dragging hoses and steaming blankets. Helicopters were still circling overhead, and the relentless sound of the rotors made them raise their voices.

‘You know,’ Slavenca Visnic said, ‘it’s like the fire comes from under the ground, like the flames and embers are bubbling up from the centre of the earth.’

Malin noted that she spoke almost without any trace of an accent, thinking: You must have fought really hard for that.

Slavenca Visnic took a drink of water from the tap of her water tank.

‘Thirsty?’

‘No,’ Zeke said, before going on: ‘You know why we’re here?’

‘I see the papers and the internet, I listen to the news. I’m not stupid.’

‘Theresa Eckeved was found buried at the beach where you’ve got one of your kiosks. Josefin Davidsson, who was found raped in the Horticultural Society Park, worked for you at the start of July.’

‘I can understand why the connection would interest you,’ Slavenca Visnic said, wiping some beads of sweat from her forehead. ‘But there’s nothing behind the connection. Nothing at all.’

‘Have you got alibis for the night between Thursday and Friday last week, and the night between Saturday and Sunday?’

Malin wanted to see if a direct question would rouse any reaction.

Slavenca Visnic laughed.

‘No, I’m always alone in the evenings, but I got home late from the fires, so someone can prove where I was then, but not during the night. You can’t think I had anything to do with this?’

Fresh laughter.

Almost mocking, as if Zeke and Malin knew pathetically little of the evil that Slavenca Visnic had encountered in excess.

‘What about last night?’

‘I was at home, sleeping. I’ve shut the kiosks for the time being. I want to help fight the fires. And it’s impossible to get staff. No teenager wants to spend the summer standing in a kiosk selling ice cream. They’re spoiled, the whole lot of them. Just look at Josefin Davidsson, she gave up after just three days, and that left me without anyone for Glyttinge.’

‘Did it annoy you when she gave up?’

Zeke’s voice practically neutral.

‘Stupid question. Everyone can do as they like. Can’t they?’

‘Within the bounds of the law,’ Zeke replied.

‘I heard about the latest murder on the radio,’ Slavenca Visnic said. ‘And I can tell you straight that you won’t find any connection with that girl.’

‘You like fire? Is that why you want to help out here?’

Malin’s turn to be provocative.

‘I hate fire. I want to eradicate it.’

Flattery, Malin. That makes them talk.

Another of Sven’s mantras.

‘I know what you’ve been through,’ Malin said. ‘And I admire the fact that you’re standing here now. That you’ve built up your own business.’

‘I didn’t have a choice.’

‘You didn’t notice anything suspicious out at Stavsätter? Anything at all?’

‘Nothing. Until that dog started digging her up.’

‘You were there then,’ Zeke said. ‘Then you vanished. Where did you go? Most people would have stayed.’

‘I couldn’t bear all those upset people. And I’ve seen dead bodies before. It was better to open up in Hjulsbro instead. The girl in the ground didn’t exactly make people want to buy anything.’

Slavenca Visnic more friendly now. ‘As I’m sure you can understand. When I work, I just want to sell as many ice creams as I can.’

‘You didn’t see anyone behaving suspiciously on the beach at Stavsätter?’

Slavenca Visnic thought about it.

‘No.’

‘And you can’t tell us anything about Josefin Davidsson? Did you have an argument? That was what she implied.’

‘She probably thought I argued with her. I’m sure she was taking ice cream and sweets, maybe she was giving them away to her friends. I lost a lot of stock on the days that she worked, even though there weren’t many people about then. If you remember, they had a problem with bacteria in the pool? The Correspondent made a big deal of it. They had to shut the pool for a few days.’

Malin tried to remember the article, but it must have passed her by.

‘So she got the sack?’

‘Let’s put it this way: I was pleased she resigned, even though she was the only person I had for the Glyttinge pool.’

‘Did the fact that she was stealing make you angry?’

‘No, not at all. That sort of thing just happens.’

‘And there’s no one who can give you an alibi?’

Malin asked again, she knew where she wanted to go with the question, and Slavenca Visnic gave her a long, weary look, as if to show that she knew what game they were playing.

‘I have no husband. No children. I lost my family a long time ago. Since then I’ve made up my mind to look after myself. Other people just mean a whole lot of disappointment, Detective Inspector.’

Slavenca Visnic closed the back doors of the Fiat.

Turned to face them.

‘If you haven’t got any more questions, I think I’ll head off now. Make the most of the busiest time of day at the Glyttinge pool.’

‘Blue,’ Malin says. ‘Does the colour blue mean anything particular to you?’

‘I like white,’ Slavenca Visnic replied. ‘The purest colour.’

Slavenca Visnic is standing by the hotdog kiosk in Ljungsbro, eating a 150g cheeseburger. She realised how hungry she was as she was driving away from the forest, past Vreta Kloster golf club.

The hot food and hot air are making her sweat, but she doesn’t mind the heat; anyone who lived through the wartime winters in Sarajevo knows what real cold is, and would never complain about a bit of heat.

The town is quiet around her. Everyone’s probably gone to the beach.

The cops could think what they liked about her. They think they can put everything right, the woman, Malin Fors, in particular gave that impression: that she wants to put everything right.

And then I show up in their investigation.

Connections.

The lifeline of their work.

It had to happen sooner or later, Slavenca Visnic thinks, feeling the melted cheese sticking to her teeth as her stomach fills with food: the ridiculous privilege of being able to eat your fill when you’re hungry, a privilege that few people in this country could ever understand or appreciate.

The girls.

Things like that happen. Spoiled little girls can get their fingers burned. Who knows why anyone does what they do?

War, it’s everywhere, and it never ends.

All you can do as a human being is to try to create a reality for yourself that you can live with.

Slavenca Visnic throws the last of the burger in the bin by the kiosk counter. Gets in her car and drives away. Outside the big supermarket the newspaper headlines are all talking about the same thing.

Summertime death strikes again!

That’s what the Correspondent’s headline says about the fate that got me.

Our summer angels, that’s what the radio presenter with the warm voice calls me, us.

I didn’t want to believe it at first.

But then you came, Sofia, gliding towards me, around me, in a thousand different ways at once, and you told me that you doubted it at first, that fear and other feelings, many of them nameless, meant that you refused to accept your situation at first, that you wanted to scream: not me, I’m too young, I haven’t had a chance to live, and now I want to scream it too, now as we drift here together above the burning forest.

The smoke and fires.

The burning treetops are a volcano.

The machines and people and animals are like little pinpricks of despair down there, fragments of life trying to stop the flames taking over, trying to force the destructive power back into the meandering badgers’ tunnels under the ground.

Is their struggle succeeding?

Malin in the Volvo heading along the road down there on the surface, down towards Ljungsbro, out onto the withered plain where soon all the plants will have shrivelled into soft fossils of what could once have been verdant life.

You seem to trust her, Theresa.

If you trust her, then so do I.

You said it had got easier for you now, now that there are two of us. But for me everything is still so hard, even if I seem to have been less distraught about my state than you.

We drift side by side, wingless, but it still seems to fit, somehow, this idea of us being summer angels. Unquiet angels, not your standard bookmark angels, but girls who somehow want to get back what was taken away from them.

We’re clean now, aren’t we?

I like words. The way they’re mine now. And I like drifting in a world that can be free of memories for as long as I like, as long as I manage to keep my thoughts away from those hands, those white hands as they squeezed my neck, and the scrubbing that I could still somehow feel, and the smell of bleach, the fear I had time to feel before everything disappeared, only to reappear again, albeit in a far more unfathomable way.

I want to remember who I was, who I could have become.

Older.

I am.

But never will be.

‘Zeke. Hypnosis can make you remember things, can’t it?’

His hands have a firm grip on the steering wheel as they drive past Ikea and the retail warehouses out at Tornby. She reaches for the stereo, turning down the choral music. The people in the car parks are moving slowly in the sun, but are still heading determinedly towards the air conditioning of the shops.

‘So they say. But I’ve never heard of us ever using that method. It sounds a bit dodgy, if you ask me.’

‘But this isn’t a joke. It could work.’

‘I know what you’re thinking, Malin.’

‘We only have access to five per cent of our memories, at most,’ Malin says.

‘Have you been watching the Discovery Channel again?’

‘Shut up, Zeke.’

He grins at her.

‘Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road.’

‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ Zeke says. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

39

‘So, you little black-haired worm,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says as he pushes Behzad Karami up against the wall of his one-room flat. ‘Did you really think you’d get away with lying to the police? One of your so-called friends has ratted on you. What were you doing last night? The night between Wednesday and Thursday, the night between Saturday and Sunday? You raped and murdered them. Didn’t you?’

Behzad Karami still cocky.

Still convinced he can handle this.

But you’re in the shit, Per Sundsten thinks. He’s going to beat everything he wants to know out of you.

‘Did you get a taste for little girls when you gangbanged that fourteen-year-old last winter? Huh?’

‘We didn’t . . .’

Waldemar pushes Behzad Karami back, thumping him against the wall again.

Then his voice softens: ‘Don’t try that with me. You know you raped those girls. Did you get a taste for it? And then it went wrong? And you ended up killing . . .?’

His voice gets louder with every word and then he punches Behzad Karami in the stomach. He folds in half like a flick-knife.

Behzad Karami gradually collapses down the wall, and Waldemar takes a few steps back, his pupils enlarged from the adrenalin.

‘I need a piss,’ he says. ‘Keep an eye on this sack of shit for me.’

Behzad Karami gasps for air, finds it and takes five deep breaths before turning to look imploringly at Per.

Don’t look at me, Per thinks. I can’t do a thing to stop him, I don’t want to, because what if he’s right?

‘It would be best if you just told him what you were doing,’ Per says in his very gentlest voice. ‘Christ, he even scares me. And he never gives up.’

‘He’s mad.’

‘Come on. Tell us. Then everything will feel better.’

‘Will you believe me?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

Behzad Karami is panting, but the colour has returned to his face.

‘On whether you’re telling the truth.’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth.’

‘I suppose you’ll just have to try us.’

Per looks down at Behzad Karami, bent, but not yet broken.

‘Try us,’ Per says, and then Waldemar is back in the room again.

‘So, the little shit has found his senses again, has he? Good. I’ll just have to see to it that he loses them again.’

‘Do what the fuck you like.’

‘I’m going to,’ Waldemar says, then kicks hard twice at Behzad Karami’s left shoulder, and Per sees the shoulder dislocate under the yellow and red T-shirt, and the scream that rises to the ceiling of the room and squeezes out through the window is full of primal pain, a scream of self-preservation crackling out from the core of the brain, out through the larynx and tongue.

‘So it hurts, then,’ Waldemar whispers into the ear of the whimpering, recumbent Behzad Karami. He puts his arm on his shoulder, gently, and presses down slightly, and Behzad Karami screams again, not so loudly this time, and Per can see from his whole bearing that he’s close to collapse.

Why resist?

Because that’s your role?

Because you did it?

‘Wait, I’ll tell you, I’ll show you my secret.’

Behzad Karami is sitting on the sofa with his left arm twisted backwards, over the back of the sofa.

Waldemar behind him.

‘Don’t make a fuss, you little shit.’

And Waldemar pulls Behzad Karami’s arm back, and there’s a clicking, meaty sound as the shoulder pops back in, and the scream that comes from Behzad Karami’s mouth is as primal as before, but this time contains the relief of an entire body.

‘Fucking wimp.’

Waldemar grins.

Per wants to get out of the flat, go home, wants this day to be over, but it isn’t over, not yet, not by a long way.

The warm, grey-black water of the Stångån River.

The fish sluggish, lethargic down there, maybe they can feel their flesh changing form as the temperature of the water rises, Per Sundsten thinks.

Nowhere to flee. And if the heat is almost making the water stop being water, then what do the fish do? Float up to the surface, lifeless, swollen guts upmost, the shiny silver of their scales dulled by the murky liquid.

The football pitches of Johannelund, their netless goals waiting for a cooler season, until someone feels like kicking a ball again, it’s too hot now, impossible, dangerous.

‘If I show you, you have to believe me. I’ve got nothing to do with any of that shit.’

Behzad Karami in handcuffs in the back seat of the car. They’re on their way to the allotments in Johannelund, down by the river. That was where he wanted to take them, refusing to explain why.

‘Nothing to do with any of that shit.’

The words echo in Per’s head as they walk along the well-tended gravel path that weaves between the allotments. The water sprinklers are working overtime, trying to keep the grass lawns green, and save the currants and gooseberries as best they can. The allotment owners are hiding in the shade of parasols or under the porches of their colourful little cottages.

That shit.

If you reduce murder and violence to shit you can handle it, and that means you can live with whatever you or someone else has done. Live with the fact that we human beings occasionally choose to treat our fellows in that way.

Waldemar calm.

Behzad Karami asked to be let out of the handcuffs up by the car, and Waldemar agreed to his request.

‘If you run, I’ll shoot you.’

His voice ice-cold, and Behzad Karami nodded.

‘Not that I have any idea what you want to show us here.’

Waldemar more sceptical with every step.

‘You’d better have something for us.’

‘I’ve got something for you,’ Behzad Karami says as he speeds up. ‘We’re heading to the last plot, down on the left.’

Hot, Per thinks as he treads along a sunny section of the path. Unhealthily hot, and Ekenberg is sweating alongside him, yet still largely unbothered by the heat.

An old man of steel.

Made by a dark, one-track steel that’s no longer manufactured.

Then Behzad Karami opens the gate to the last allotment on the left. The grass is less well-kept, the cottage an untouched white-painted shack, apparently uninhabited.

They go into the small plot and Per notices the pedantically well-kept flower beds, the bushes, they look like raspberry canes, and they’re planted in perfect rows, no mature fruit yet.

‘There.’

Behzad Karami points at the bushes.

‘What do you mean, there?’

Per wants to get his question in before Waldemar loses his grip.

‘I was here those nights when you wanted to know what I was doing.’

It’s going to blow, here it comes, Per thinks, Waldemar’s going to go mad. But instead he sighs, and there’s no violence.

‘These are my blackberry bushes. I grow blackberries, when I was little back in Tehran my grandfather used to take me to the souk with him and eat blackberries. I wanted to grow my own, it makes me feel better, sort of. A good feeling in my stomach. Like when I was little with Grandfather, just the two of us.’

‘So you were here watering them?’

Per sceptical.

‘No, guarding them.’

‘Guarding them?’

‘Yes, otherwise the deer eat the berries before they’re ripe. I was sitting in the cottage, on guard. They jump over the fence and eat the berries.’

‘You were on guard?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you haven’t told anyone about this?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I bought the allotment with my own money.’

‘But why couldn’t you tell anyone?’

‘That I’m growing blackberries? My mates would think I’d gone mad, that I was queer or something.’

‘Queer?’

‘Everybody knows that only queers grow things.’

They watch Behzad Karami’s back as he disappears along the path up to the car park.

‘I believe him,’ Waldemar says.

‘But it still isn’t a proper alibi.’

Then they go from allotment to allotment, asking if anyone saw Behzad Karami in his shack, and several confirm that they’ve seen light from the cottage in recent nights, but they haven’t been able to tell if it was him inside.

Behzad Karami showed them the cottage before they let him go.

Hardly any furniture, just an Ikea bed in one corner, no mattress or sheets or pillow, just a grey blanket neatly folded at one end. The bare yellow floorboards covered in burn marks from cigarettes, the air inside as dense and suffocating as a freshly gutted elk’s stomach during the autumn hunt.

‘Blackberries,’ Per says as they get back to the car. ‘Can it really be that simple?’

‘Everyone knows that,’ Waldemar says. ‘Arabs are crazy about blackberries. It’s because they can’t drink and don’t get enough pussy.’

40

‘Mum?’

Tove’s voice from thousands of miles away, the sound like a mirage in Malin’s inner ear, loss that time and distance are making more like grief with each passing minute.

‘Mum, are you there?’

The living room closes around Malin, the weather forecast promising heat, heat, heat. Don’t want you to call, Tove, don’t want that, can’t you and Dad get it into your thick heads, into your wonderful, cherished hearts, I don’t want you to call several times a day?

‘I’m here, Tove. I’m here.’

And Malin slumps onto the sofa, turning down the volume of the television with her free hand.

‘Mum, is everything OK?’

I’m the one who’s supposed to ask that, Malin thinks.

‘Yes, everything’s fine, darling. How are things with you?’

Wants to say: You’re flying home tomorrow morning. I’ll pick you up. But she lets Tove talk.

‘We went to an elephant farm today, outside a city in the middle of the jungle called Ubud.’

‘Did you have a ride?’

‘We both did, Dad and me.’

‘And you’re back at the hotel again now?’

‘Yes, we’ve just got back from a fish restaurant. It’s already one o’clock in the morning. We went swimming today as well. It wasn’t too windy, so the yellow flag was out. The undercurrents aren’t so dangerous then.’

Undercurrents.

Dangerous.

They’ve been in Bali for two weeks, but Tove is already talking as if she’s lived there half her life.

‘Take care when you go swimming.’

‘Of course I take care. What do you think?’

‘I’m just worried, Tove.’

A deep sigh from the other side of the world.

‘There’s no need, Mum. We won’t have time to go swimming again. Do you want to talk to Dad?’

‘If he wants to.’

Crackling on the line, calls in the background from someone who must be Janne, then breathing, long breaths that she knows all too well, which for a second send a warmth through her body, a resigned, sad, but still excited warmth.

Janne.

You bastard.

Why, why couldn’t we make it?

‘Hi, Malin.’

His voice, what does she want from it? Solace? Context. Even though the voice can’t give her that.

‘How are you both?’

‘Paradise exists, Malin. Here.’

‘I believe you. So you’re not looking forward to coming home?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘You went for a ride on elephants?’

‘Yes, you should have seen her. Beaming with joy as she bounced along.’

Enough, Malin thinks. No more now.

‘How are the fires?’

‘We were out there today,’ Malin says. ‘It looks pretty bad, not under control yet. But there are a lot of volunteers helping out.’

‘Our flight leaves bloody early tomorrow morning,’ Janne says.

‘I know,’ Malin says. ‘And you’re still up so late,’ wanting to say: I miss you so much my heart feels like it’s withering away. My loss is turning into grief, Janne, a strange grief for the living, and every human being can only cope with a fixed amount of grief before they die, and mine is close to overflowing. But instead she says: ‘Make sure you check in on time.’

‘OK. We’d better get to bed now.’

‘Bye.’

A click on the line.

Silence. Warmth.

Solace and context. What can give me that?

Malin had planned to wait until tomorrow, but rings Viveka Crafoord now.

‘Come on over. You’ve got half an hour. We can put off lighting the barbecue for a bit.’

Viveka Crafoord.

Psychoanalyst.

She wants to treat Malin, free of charge, but the very thought of Viveka’s paisley-patterned chaise longue frightens Malin. She can’t bear the thought of touching even the edges of her sadness, let alone its innermost core. So instead there’s a bit of vague talk about her parents in Tenerife whenever she and Viveka bump into each other in the city and go for coffee. The fact that she doesn’t miss them. Their apartment. Her mother’s cheap rugs and ability to dress up her own life, making herself look more important than she is. Viveka polite, listening with interest, but convinced that Malin is just skimming the surface, and is stubbornly and suspiciously holding shut all the doors that lead inside her.

‘And what do you think Janne thinks?’ Viveka had asked.

‘About what?’

‘Well, about the way you talk to him, for instance?’

‘I’ve never given it much thought.’

Viveka’s country cottage is in Svartmåla, a sought-after, middle-class village some ten kilometres south of the city.

Malin had trouble finding the house, meandering around the idyllic cottages in the Volvo, unwilling to stop and ask the way.

Then she came to a little turning down towards the lake, its shimmering water ice-white and fiery pink beyond pines and firs.

A simple green mailbox bearing the name ‘Crafoord’ in the shade of some tall maples.

Malin turned off, and couldn’t help smiling as she pulled up in front of the obviously bespoke, architect-designed house with its two irregular floors, lots of glass, grey-stained wood. The house looked like a prototype for the sort of tasteful, costly but restrained architecture that people who are used to having money love. Viveka’s house must be the most exclusive in the area. And with the best location, right on the water, presumably with its own jetty and beach.

‘A microclimate,’ Viveka says, leaning back in the teak bench. ‘Don’t ask me how it happens.’

They’re sitting at the back of the house, on an airy terrace with a view of the lake, Stora Rängen. Perennials and rhododendrons are crowding in on Viveka’s husband, Hjalmar, as he stands at the barbecue with his broad back to them some ten metres away, on green-stained decking laid over grey Öland stone. It’s undeniably cooler on the terrace, maybe five degrees lower than anywhere else, as if the greenery and water in the vicinity somehow magically lowered the temperature.

Just like the summerhouse in the Horticultural Society Park, Malin thinks.

But in there it was hotter.

Malin was right, below a granite outcrop is a motorboat tied up at a jetty, and two aluminium designer sun-loungers on a man-made beach. Malin breathes in the smell of marinated pork sizzling on the hot grill. Bean salad on the table in front of them. She runs her arm over the teak armrest of her chair, its oiled, polished finish making her feel calm.

What does your husband do? Malin wonders. But she doesn’t ask Viveka.

She just thinks how nice this huge man with the gentle face is. Then she looks into Viveka’s face, hardly any wrinkles even though she must be fifty-five or so, no traces of grief, the signs of a good life. And Malin is struck by how little she actually knows about her. Do they have children? Then there is the fact that she has been welcomed out here in spite of the reason for her visit.

‘So what do you think about what I said on the phone?’

She had explained about the case she was working on, and of course Viveka had read the paper, seen the news on television. ‘I’d like to hear your thoughts about the perpetrator.’

‘Let’s eat first.’

And shortly after that a dish of plump sausages and pork chops appears on the table, and they talk about the heat and drink a robust, sweet red wine that suits the meat perfectly. Just one glass for Malin, and Hjalmar becomes nicer with every word, and he explains that he works as a management consultant, freelance after many years with McKinsey in Stockholm.

And then the meal is over as quickly as it began and Hjalmar withdraws: ‘There’s a match on.’ And Viveka throws out her arms, saying: ‘He’s mad about football.’

And Malin realises that darkness has fallen over the terrace and that the only light over the lake is the glow of the moon, and the hopeful lights of a few houses on the far shore.

The approach of night seems to whisper to them, and Malin lets Viveka talk.

‘I’m sorry, Malin. From what little I know, it’s impossible for me to say anything specific. I did a course on profiling when we lived in Seattle, and I’d guess you’re dealing with something of a loner who has a complicated relationship with his mother. But that’s almost always the case. He lives in Linköping, probably grew up here, seeing as he seems to feel safe in the places where he commits these acts and leaves his victims. And he’s obsessed with cleanliness and making his victims appear pure. But you’ve already worked that out for yourself. But why this obsession with cleanliness? Something to do with virginity? Who knows? Maybe this individual feels sullied somehow. Violated. Sexually. Or some other way. Maybe he’s trying to recreate a form of innocence.’

‘Anything else? You say he, but could it be a woman?’

‘Possibly. But it’s probably a man, or a masculine woman. Maybe themselves the victim of abuse. There’s always that possibility.’

‘And the wounds?’

‘The fact that they’re different might suggest that the perpetrator is finding his way by trial and error. As if he or she wants to come up with some sort of formula.’

‘That thought had occurred to me as well.’

‘If I were you, I’d start looking into the histories of people who’ve cropped up since things started to heat up. The key to this is in the past. As to why this is happening now, only they can know that. That’s if they even know.’

Malin’s mobile rings.

She looks at the display. Wants to take the call, but leaves it, brushes it aside. Viveka doesn’t comment on her behaviour, and merely says: ‘He probably has a job, but few friends.’

‘Thanks, Viveka,’ Malin says.

Then she brings up the real reason she’s there.

‘If I wanted to question a witness under hypnosis, would you be prepared to be responsible for it?’

‘Of course I would, Malin.’

For the first time Malin sees Viveka look excited, expectant.

‘As long as the witness agrees, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.’

They sit in silence.

Some broken laughter across the water, and the sound of splashing.

‘Take a swim,’ Viveka says. ‘You can borrow a costume from me. You can stay the night. In the guest cottage. Hjalmar makes really good scrambled eggs for breakfast.’

Malin thinks for a moment.

The number on her phone.

‘I’d love a swim. But then I have to get home.’

And the memory of the warm water of Stora Rängen courses through her as one hour later she is lying in Daniel Högfeldt’s bed and feeling his hard, heavy, rhythmic body above hers, how he thrusts, groans, thrusts, thrusts hard and deep inside her, how she becomes water, no feelings, memories or future, directionless drops, a body that is a still night of dreams worth dreaming, an explosion that is sometimes the only thing a human being’s trillions of cells needs.

If only to be able to put up with themselves.

41

Wednesday, 21 July

His skin.

It’s glowing as if it’s been oiled in the thin dawn light forcing its way in through the gap at the bottom of the roller-blind. When she came to him last night she didn’t say a word, silently pushing him towards the bedroom, and now she is leaving just as soundlessly, getting dressed in his hallway, silently so as not to wake him.

Because what would she say to him?

That was nice?

Do you want to go to the cinema?

A romantic dinner, just the two of us?

He’s lying there, just a few metres away, but he’s still present within her as a feeling, a closeness, yet also distance.

A dildo.

A double distance. It must be like being filled with something that has nothing to do with human life, it must be the perfect tool for someone who wants movement, yet who also wants to stay where they are.

Malin leaves Daniel Högfeldt’s flat, creeping through the hall, convinced he’s awake somewhere behind her.

I hear you leave, Malin. Let you leave.

The bedroom is hot and the damp of our bodies is still in the sheets, the sweat under me both yours and mine.

Trying to get you to stay would be impossible. What could I say? Would I even be able to sound like I meant what I said? You’re too complicated for me, Malin. Too many contradictions, far too smart.

Obvious and straightforward.

Like a pane of glass on a summer’s day.

And a bit stupid, but with a good heart. That’s the kind of woman I want. Unless the truth is the exact opposite. That I want you. But I don’t know how to say it. Either to you, or to myself.

Home, shower, drink coffee, change clothes, miss Tove, Janne, enough regret to make her sick, and before she knows what’s happened Karim is standing by a whiteboard summarising the state of the investigation into the attack of Josefin Davidsson and the murders of Theresa Eckeved and Sofia Fredén.

Tove’s coming home tonight.

I want to focus on that, Malin thinks. But it will have to wait.

The morning meeting, nine o’clock as usual.

The detectives in the room tired, their faces somehow furrowed by the summer heat and the violence, the human actions that it’s their job to get to grips with. If not to understand, then to make reasonably manageable, and contextualise them for both the public and themselves.

‘The press are going crazy,’ Karim says. ‘They’re crying out for information about the case, but we can’t let ourselves be influenced by that. So, where shall we start? How are things going with the various lines of inquiry?’

‘We questioned Behzad Karami and his parents yesterday,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says. ‘The anonymous tip-off was right. They were lying about the family party. Behzad claims he was standing guard over his blackberry canes in an allotment down by the river, and I think he’s telling the truth, even if there are no witnesses who can state categorically that he was there. But they’ve seen lights on in the small cottage on the allotment on the nights in question.’

‘What about you, Sundsten?’

Sven Sjöman pants as he says the words, his face deep red.

‘It seems to make sense.’

‘Seems?’

‘We can’t be absolutely certain. But the likelihood is that it’s the truth. We’re waiting to hear who made the call claiming that Behzad was involved. We really need to talk to them.’

‘So how are we going to get hold of them?’

‘With difficulty. But Telia are trying to give us the location the call was made from. It was on their network, and we might be able to draw some conclusions based on people we know who are acquainted with Behzad. They’re pretty familiar faces to you here in Linköping, after all.’

‘Good. What about the list of known sex offenders?’

‘We got hold of three more of them yesterday. All in the clear.’

‘And nothing new about the person who called in about Josefin Davidsson?’

‘No,’ Malin says. ‘That feels like a thousand years ago now.’

‘In all likelihood it was just a passer-by who didn’t want anything to do with us,’ Sven says, before going on. ‘OK. Well, the news from Mjölby is that the interviews with Sofia Fredén’s parents and close friends haven’t turned up anything. Sofia seems to have been an ambitious young woman, good at school, never involved in anything stupid. And Forensics haven’t come up with anything from the crime scene. But we’d guessed as much, hadn’t we? Whoever is doing this is obsessively clean and careful. There were traces of bleach on Sofia Fredén’s body. And the traces of paint found in her vagina are identical to those found in the earlier victims. And the cause of death was strangulation. Forensics are looking at her computer, and the lists of calls to and from her mobile are on their way.’

Sven lets his words sink in.

Nothing is easy in this case, they’re not getting anything for free.

‘And still nothing from Facebook or Yahoo!. They seem to be mainly concerned with protecting the confidentiality of their clients.’

‘There’s nothing we can do to pressurise them? What about the courts?’ Zeke wonders.

‘We could certainly make a legal request. But they could always appeal. And it’s hard to know where the information would be. Who do you hold responsible for a server on the Cayman Islands?’

Sven changes the subject.

‘As far as the dildo is concerned, Forensics have ruled out three hundred and fifty models. That’s if it is even a dildo.’

‘What about Sofia Fredén’s wounds?’ Zeke asks. ‘Has Karin been able to say exactly what caused them?’

‘Animal claws. But apparently it’s impossible to say which animal.’

‘Louise Svensson keeps rabbits on her farm,’ Malin says. ‘And rabbits have claws.’

‘Loads of people in this city have rabbits and other animals with claws,’ Sven says. ‘And you can buy those necklaces of animal claws at any market.’

Malin nods.

‘I know, it was a long shot.’

‘Anything else?’

Sven turns to face Malin and Zeke.

‘We spoke to Slavenca Visnic,’ Malin says. ‘And there’s a connection between her and two of the girls. She has no alibi, but we haven’t got anything concrete.’

Malin explains the connections, that Theresa was found near one of the kiosks and that Josefin had worked at another one, which could mean something to the case, or could just as easily be coincidence, even if that would be unusual.

‘It makes me uneasy,’ Malin says.

‘Synchronicity has driven loads of officers mad,’ Per Sundsten says. ‘Connections that exist but that turn out to be completely meaningless. So where do we go with that?’

‘We’ll bear it in mind, but we carry on working without any preconceptions.’

‘Hardcore police work,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s what counts now.’

‘I’d like to talk to Theresa Eckeved’s friend, Nathalie Falck, again,’ Malin says. ‘It feels as if she’s not telling us everything we ought to know. Maybe she’ll talk now, seeing as things have got worse. I don’t think we’d get anything more from Peter Sköld, her supposed boyfriend.’

‘Talk to her,’ Karim says. ‘From where we are now, we’ve got nothing to lose.’

‘And we’ve just received the file about Louise “Lollo” Svensson from the archive,’ Zeke says, and Malin gives him an angry glance, wondering why he hadn’t mentioned it.

‘Calm down, Malin,’ Zeke says. ‘No need to get excited,’ and the others laugh, and the laughter relieves the tension in the room, making the sense of hopelessness less pervasive, as they seem to clamber one circle higher away from the investigative hell they are all in.

‘I only got them five minutes before the meeting. Otherwise I would have shown you first.’

Zeke usually gets annoyed when Malin goes off on her own track, and on the rare occasions when he has done so she gets unreasonably cross, cursing him and behaving like a unfairly treated child.

‘I wouldn’t dare do anything else.’ And now they’re all laughing again, at my expense, Malin thinks, but there’s warmth in their laughter, a pleasant warmth, not like this tormenting summer heat. And Malin thinks they could do with this laughter, she needs it, needs to hear that someone isn’t taking this so incredibly seriously.

‘Shut up, Zeke,’ and by now even Sven is laughing, until Zeke clears his throat and seriousness settles across the room once more.

‘Evidently her mother accused her step-father of abusing her, but the case never got anywhere. She must have been twelve at the time, if these dates are right.’

‘Not surprising,’ Malin says. ‘Just think, this sort of crap always comes up.’ Then Malin thinks about what Viveka Crafoord said: that the perpetrator could well have been the victim of abuse. Isn’t that always the case? One way or another. That one act of abuse leads to another. The trail goes as far back through history as human life itself.

‘OK, but we can’t question her again because of that,’ Sven says. ‘We’ve leaned on her enough as it is, and there are almost as many sordid backgrounds and family histories as there are people.’

Karim looks focused, and Malin can see the thoughts racing through his head. The image of his own father must be in there, committing suicide in his despair at his failure to find a place in Swedish society, the father who died bitter in a way that you, Karim, would never allow yourself to be, and Malin thinks of the cliché her mother always used to trot out at the slightest failure or disappointment: ‘It’s not what happens that matters, it’s how you deal with it.’

Then the words of the philosopher Emile Cioran come to mind: ‘Nothing reveals the vulgar man better than his refusal to be disappointed.’

Are you the most disappointed person in the world, Mum?

Tenerife.

But back to the present.

‘Hypnosis,’ Malin says. ‘I’d like to question Josefin Davidsson under hypnosis,’ and now it’s Zeke’s turn to look angry, questioning: What’s this? I knew you were thinking about it, but we could have discussed it first.

‘We all know that it’s possible to remember things under hypnosis that you don’t otherwise remember. I’m friends with Viveka Crafoord, the psychoanalyst, and she’s offered to conduct an interview with Josefin under hypnosis, free of charge.’

Waldemar Ekenberg laughs.

‘Well,’ he goes on to say, ‘sounds like a good idea.’

‘This mustn’t get out to the press. They’ll say that we’re desperate,’ Karim says. ‘And we don’t want that.’

‘Discretion is assured,’ Malin says. ‘Viveka works under an oath of confidentiality.’

Zeke has got over his sudden annoyance.

‘Will her parents agree?’

‘We don’t know until we ask.’

‘And Josefin?’

‘Ditto.’

‘If it happens, and if it works, it could help us move forward,’ Sven says.

‘It could be the breakthrough we need,’ Karim adds.

‘So what are we waiting for?’ Waldemar asks. ‘Get the girl to the fortune-teller!’

And Malin doesn’t know what to say, can’t decide if the hard-case from Mjölby is joking or means what he says. A joke to smooth things over: ‘Hocus-pocus,’ Malin says, getting up from her chair. ‘OK, I’m going to go and stick some pins in a voodoo doll, Waldemar, so watch out.’

Ekenberg comes over to her desk after the meeting.

What does he want? Malin wonders.

‘Fors,’ he says, ‘you look happy.’

‘Happy?’

‘Yes, you know, like you’ve just been fucked. Where do you go if you want to get a fuck in this town?’

And once again Malin doesn’t know what to say, or do, hasn’t felt so surprised since she was three years old and took a drink from a cup of hot water, thinking it was juice.

Shall I punch him on the chin?

Then she pulls herself together.

‘You sack of shit. There isn’t a woman in this city who’d touch you even with gloves on. Get it?’

Ekenberg was already on his way out.

Grinning to himself, Malin thinks.

Don’t let yourself be provoked, we’ve got more important things to deal with.

But he was right.

She could still feel Daniel Högfeldt inside her.

Would like to suppress the smile spreading over her lips.

42

‘That’s absolutely out of the question.’

Josefin Davidsson’s father, Ulf, is sitting on the burgundy sofa in the living room of the row-house in Lambohov, moving his toes anxiously back and forth over the mainly pink rug. His suntanned face is round, his hair starting to thin and his wide nose is peeling.

‘Hypnosis,’ he goes on. ‘You read about people getting stuck like that. And Josefin needs to rest.’

His wife Birgitta, sitting beside him on the sofa, is more hesitant, Malin thinks. She’s evidently trying to read the situation, trying to follow her husband so as not to annoy him. Their roles are clearer now than the first time she met them at the hospital. They declined the offer of protection for Josefin, saying she needed peace and quiet more than anything else. Birgitta Davidsson is a neat little woman in a blue floral dress. So neat that she dissolves in your khaki-clad presence, Ulf. Doesn’t she?

Zeke from his seat beside Malin: ‘The psychoanalyst who would conduct the hypnosis, Viveka Crafoord, is very experienced.’

‘But do we really want Josefin to remember?’

Ulf Davidsson’s words less adamant now.

Malin pauses, answers no in her mind, it would be just as well for your daughter if she didn’t remember, she’ll be fine without any conscious memory of what happened. But she says: ‘It’s vitally important for the investigation. Two girls have been murdered, and we have no witnesses. We need all the help we can get.’

‘And you’re sure it’s the same man?’

‘Absolutely certain,’ Zeke replies.

‘It doesn’t feel right,’ Ulf Davidsson says. ‘Too risky.’

‘You’re right, darling,’ Birgitta Davidsson says. ‘Who knows how she might feel if she could remember?’

‘We have no idea when the murderer is going to strike again,’ Zeke says. ‘But sooner or later it will happen. So asking these questions under hypnosis is absolutely . . .’

Zeke is interrupted by a thin but clear voice from upstairs.

‘Isn’t anyone going to ask me? Ask me what I want?’

A look of irritation crosses Ulf Davidsson’s face.

‘We’re your parents. We’ll decide what’s best for you.’

‘So you’d like to be questioned under hypnosis?’

Josefin Davidsson comes downstairs and sits in an armchair, the white bandages covering her wounds a sharp contrast to her bright red summer dress.

‘I would.’

‘You . . .’

‘It’s not going to happen.’

‘But Dad, I . . .’

‘Be quiet.’

And the room falls still, the only sound the vibration of a bumblebee’s wings as it tries to get out through an open window, but keeps missing, again and again, flying into the glass instead with a short bumping sound each time.

‘We’re trying to find . . .’

‘I know what you’re trying to find. The devil himself could be out there for all I care, because you’ll have to find him without upsetting my daughter more than is absolutely necessary.’

‘You’re such a damn hypocrite, Dad,’ Josefin says. ‘When I told you that you could probably get compassionate leave to be here with me, you both took it. And went straight off to the golf course.’

‘Josefin!’ her mother cries. ‘That’s enough!’

‘I’m begging you,’ Malin says.

‘Me too, Dad. I’m going to do it, no matter what you want.’

In the space of a second Ulf Davidsson suddenly looks fifteen years older, as if he’s staked out any number of principles and opinions over the years, but has always had to back down in the end.

‘It’s the right thing to do, Dad. And if I remember something that helps them catch the killer, you’ll be a big hero.’

‘You don’t know what you’re asking for,’ Ulf Davidsson says to his daughter. The look in his eyes is clear, but sad. ‘You don’t know what you’re asking for. But OK. If hypnosis is what you want, hypnosis is what you’ll get.’

On the way back to the car park.

The sun like the ice-blue core of a gas flame in the sky, the sort of light that sunglasses have no effect against. The ground seems to be sweating, even though it’s so dry Malin imagines it could spontaneously combust. There’s also the smell of the forest fires, tickling her nose and making her whole being feel slightly anxious. Phrases of gratitude in the house they’ve just left.

‘Thanks. You’re doing the right thing.’

Reassurance: ‘It isn’t dangerous. It will be good for her to remember.’

Practicalities: ‘We’ll be in touch when I’ve spoken to Viveka Crafoord. Hopefully this evening. Tomorrow at the latest. We’ll be in touch, make sure we can contact you.’

And now Viveka on the other end of the line, in her house out in Svartmåla.

‘I’m just back from a dip in the lake.’

Daniel Högfeldt’s body.

The waters of Stora Rängen.

The key is in the past.

‘She’s agreed to be hypnotised. And her parents have given their consent.’

‘When?’

‘Whenever suits you.’

‘Where?’

‘Same thing.’

‘How about seven o’clock this evening in my clinic?’

‘Perfect. As long as nothing else comes up.’

Nathalie Falck is standing with a rake in her hand, its spray of teeth like a dying treetop against the blue summer sky, almost white with the heat.

They’re standing among the graves at the far end of the cemetery, from where they can see the roof of the supermarket in Valla, and hear the cars out on the main road, forcing their way through the dense air.

‘I use a grass rake for the gravel,’ Nathalie says. ‘It’s easier than using the other sort.’

‘It’s looking good,’ Malin said, gesturing at the gravel path up towards the chapel where they hold the burial services. ‘You’re very conscientious.’

‘Yes, I suppose it’s unusual to be conscientious.’

Zeke silent by Malin’s side, in the shade of an old oak, the flowers on most of the graves scorched and crisp, prematurely withered in the cruel heat.

‘I can see you looking at the flowers. But we can’t water them fast enough. Not in this heat.’

Malin nods.

‘It is hot,’ she says. Then she asks: ‘You haven’t told us everything, have you?’

‘How can you know that?’

‘Just a gut instinct. Two girls of your age are dead, murdered, so it’s time to talk.’

‘I haven’t got anything to tell you.’

‘Yes you have,’ Malin says. ‘We both know that.’

Nathalie Falck shakes her head lightly.

‘No.’

‘OK,’ Zeke says. ‘What were you doing on the night between Monday and Tuesday?’

‘I was at home. Mum and Dad can tell you.’

‘Two girls,’ Malin says. ‘Theresa. Aren’t you upset that she’s dead?’

Nathalie Falck shrugs her shoulders, but Malin can see her eyes slowly fill with tears. Then she pulls herself together.

‘OK,’ she says.

‘OK, what?’ Zeke says, and Malin can feel him trying not to sound angry and aggressive.

‘Calm down, Zeke. Let her tell us.’

Nathalie Falck takes a few steps into the shade before sitting down on the grass by the oak tree.

‘I read in the paper that you searched Lollo Svensson’s house. But the article didn’t say everything. You ought to know that I had a thing with her, well, I went with her, just like Theresa did. I presume that’s what you want to know, if you didn’t already know.’

Malin and Zeke are staring at each other.

So maybe that was what Theresa was doing when she said she was with Peter Sköld? Is that what he wouldn’t tell them?

Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson.

So, you’re back in the case again.

And are you Lovelygirl as well?

‘Is Louise Svensson the same person as Lovelygirl on Theresa’s Facebook page?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

Lollo.

A hot fog drifting into the meandering byways of the case, taking shape, disappearing, sweeping on and taking shape again.

A shadow.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says.

‘And it didn’t occur to you that we ought to know this?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘But you still . . .’ Malin stifles her words, swearing inwardly. All this silence they have to fight against, all this life that has to be kept secret, to elevate it somehow, as if all this damn silence were holy water.

‘But now you know,’ Nathalie Falck says with a smile. ‘I just didn’t think it was anything to do with you. It’s private.’

‘How do you mean, went with her?’

‘Had sex with her out at her farm. She’d give you money. And in case you’re wondering about Peter Sköld, he’s got a boyfriend in Söderköping. He was spending time with him whenever he said he was with Theresa. And Theresa was with me instead.’

‘Were you and Theresa a couple?’

‘No. Not my type.’

Not ‘your type’, Malin thinks.

‘We had sex a few times, every now and then,’ Nathalie Falck says. ‘But only as friends.’

Zeke’s words to Sven Sjöman: ‘Get a patrol car out to Lollo Svensson’s farm outside Rimforsa, and bring her in for questioning straight away. She had a sexual relationship with Theresa Eckeved.’

Pause.

The hot, clammy interior of the car as he opens the door in the cemetery car park.

‘I know, Sven. We can always hold her on corruption of a minor.’

Don’t be too hard on her now.

See her as the person she really is.

Lollo, there’s nothing wrong with her. Unless perhaps there is? Something wrong with her?

I remember her hands on my skin, the way she gave me money afterwards, the taste of her swollen, moist crotch, and her words, whispering: Theresa, Theresa, Theresa, and the words turned to cotton wool among the flowery sheets, to the forest outside her window, to the dark expanse of the sky adorned with hopeful stars.

And she gave in to my tongue, and I had nothing against that, because I had so much to learn about the body that I no longer have.

Angels.

Like me, like Sofia.

Are we the eternal virgins?

Is she Lovelygirl, Malin?

Or is Slavenca Lovelygirl?

You’ll have to work that out on your own.

So listen to Lollo, try to understand why she does what she does, why she is the way that she is.

I can feel your excitement, Malin.

The way you think you’ve caught a scent of the truth.

Imagining that it will help you.

That hope is driving us both, isn’t it?

43

Waldemar Ekenberg is sitting at his temporary desk in the Crime Unit’s open-plan office. His longs legs, clad in green linen, are up on the desk and he’s drumming a pen against the arm of his office chair. Opposite him Per Sundsten is randomly surfing various news websites and bringing himself up to date with what’s being written about their murders.

Expressen: City of Terror.

Aftonbladet: What the Killer is Like.

Dagens Nyheter: A Swedish Serial Killer?

The Östgöta Correspondent: The Linköping Killer: Man or Woman?

He skims the articles, nothing new, nothing they don’t already know, interviews with people in the city, young girls swimming at Tinnis.

We’re scared. We don’t go out at night.

There’s a really weird atmosphere in the city.

I’ve got a fourteen-year-old daughter. I worry whenever she goes out.

Per lets the screensaver click in on his laptop, pictures of a beach in Thailand.

God, what wouldn’t I give to be there now? At that moment he sees Sven Sjöman heading towards their desks, from a distance it looks as though he’s shuddering as he makes his way through the office. Am I going to end up like that? Per thinks: so tired, and sort of slow? Sven’s body might be tired, but the look in his eyes is all the more alert, and Per can see that Sven has something important for them.

Two strangers, Sven thinks as he heads towards Per and Waldemar’s desks. Outsiders, even though they belong to the same force. The man of the future and the brute, the rumours that precede them both, Ekenberg a rotten egg who’s been lucky enough to get away with it.

Sven has seen a lot of men like Ekenberg during his years in the police. He’s always tried to keep away from them, or, as a senior officer, to get rid of them.

The ends do not justify the means.

Unless perhaps they do? In a case like this?

Sven recalls the girl’s body in the Railway Park. Her eyes white and blind, like a sightless deer, polished stones that have lost their shine, their beauty.

Sven stops at their desks, two pairs of eyes staring at him, one pair, Per’s, still seem to be somewhere else, but Waldemar’s exude concentration on the task at hand.

‘We’ve heard from Telia. The call has been localised to Mariavägen in Wimanshäll. There’s a Suliman Hajif living there, he cropped up alongside Karami in the gang rape case last winter, although he was never a suspect. The likelihood is that the two of them have fallen out somehow and Suliman just wants to make life difficult for Karami.’

The two outsiders have stood up.

‘We’re on our way,’ Waldemar says, and Sven sees his eyes turn black, the pupils expanding in anticipation of something that Sven would prefer not to express in words.

‘Take it easy now. Be careful.’

Per nods.

‘Who knows,’ he says. ‘We might be getting close.’

Ten minutes later they pull up on Mariavägen, outside a small, white block of flats, two storeys surrounded by a garden with unkempt apple trees.

The heat and light pounce on them as they get out of the car.

‘Sunglasses on,’ Waldemar grins.

The air conditioning just had time to get going, turned up to maximum, and now a difference in temperature of some twenty-five degrees lets the heat get a stranglehold on them, driven on by the light.

They approach the house along a gravel path almost completely covered by weeds.

‘Do you reckon he’s home?’

‘Probably,’ Waldemar says. ‘These lazy bastards usually sleep all day and do their dirty work at night.’

‘Listen, let’s take this a bit more calmly, OK?’

Waldemar doesn’t reply, pressing the buzzer for another flat, not Hajif’s.

No answer.

Four flats.

‘Do you know the postcode?’

‘Sorry, no idea. We can call in and find out.’

Flat number two, no answer, and from behind, Per sees the muscles in Waldemar’s back tense under his jacket as he takes aim at the door and slams into it with full force. The door gives in and Waldemar tumbles into the stairwell but stops himself from falling.

‘Now he knows we’re on our way.’

‘Don’t you just love bad landlords? That door should have been replaced years ago. Come on, quick.’

And they rush up the stairs to the first floor. No doors have opened to see where the noise came from.

Nothing but emptiness and silence and a grey-speckled stone floor and shabby pale-blue walls. Hajif’s front door is painted pink.

They ring the bell.

Sounds from inside the flat.

No peephole.

Steps approaching the door, then disappearing.

‘He’s on his way out,’ Waldemar says. ‘He’s going to run.’

And once again he throws himself at the door and this one too flies open without putting up much resistance, and in the narrow, messy hall stands a young man with a well-toned upper body and black hair in a ponytail. His dark eyes glare at them in surprise as he pulls on a pair of white sports underwear, his cock, pierced with a cock-ring, visible, half erect.

‘Listen, Paki, we need to talk to you. Nothing to get worked up about,’ Waldemar says, and Suliman Hajif pulls up his underwear, runs back into the flat, towards an open balcony door at the back of the building.

‘Get him!’ Waldemar yells, and Per rushes after Suliman Hajif, throwing himself at his legs just as he steps out onto the balcony, and the young man falls forward, headfirst, into the solid grey balcony railings, which give way and his body is dragged out, down, and he screams as he flails above the drop, the yellow grass four metres below.

‘You’re not going to fall,’ Per says as he fights to keep hold of Suliman Hajif on the balcony. He tries with all his strength to pull him up; he could break his neck in a fall like that, and then what good would he be?

Waldemar’s hand on one of Suliman Hajif’s feet.

They pull together, and up he comes, lying on his stomach and putting up no resistance as Waldemar cuffs him and drags him onto the white-lacquered wooden floor in the living room.

‘What the hell was that all about?’

Per is panting, catching his breath, and slaps Suliman Hajif on the back.

‘We just want to talk to you.’

‘Well, maybe not just that,’ Waldemar says.

He’s pulled open the doors of the built-in cupboards. Per turns around, sees piles of magazines, the inside walls of the cupboards covered with porn pictures, serious, hardcore stuff, women shackled to racks, women being whipped.

Sex toys neatly lined up.

Masks.

Whips.

Chastity belts.

And there, in splendid isolation on the bottom shelf of one of cupboards, a blue dildo. The paint flaking off its strangely transparent surface.

44

Interview Room One.

The dark-grey ceiling seems to be falling in on the even darker walls, a tape recorder on a black tabletop, Zeke and Malin on one side of the table, Lollo Svensson on the other, dressed in a white T-shirt with the words ‘Bitch Power’. Her face and the look in her eyes radiate defiance, and she hasn’t asked for a lawyer.

Malin thinks, feels, how best to open this lock, is there any way? She thinks that it’s probably impossible, before saying: ‘So, you like young girls?’

Lollo Svensson glares into Malin’s eyes, full of hatred now, but not towards me, Malin thinks, towards something else, and she thinks: if we can find the core of that hatred we can find the killer, the core of that hatred could be the core of this evil, this violence.

‘Young girls. How come?’

Zeke scratches his shaved head, says: ‘Do you want to look after them?

‘And then things got out of hand with Theresa and Sofia, but Josefin managed to escape? Is that it?’

Lollo Svensson stiff, her mouth a thin line, her lips stuck together with age-old glue.

‘Do you want to be nice to them? Have you got a special flat you take them to? Or a building somewhere on the farm? Nathalie Falck has been out to the farm. Was Theresa out there as well?’

Lollo Svensson clasps her hands.

Beads of sweat on her forehead, her top lip.

How can anyone be so angry?

And Malin asks: ‘Why are you so furious, Louise? What happened to you?’

‘None of your fucking business, Inspector.’

‘What about the report your mother made, the one in our archive? Nothing about that? Nothing you want to tell us?’

‘No, Mum made that up.’

A hissing voice, uneven sound levels on the tape recorder, cold white strings around Malin’s heart.

‘And the rabbits on your farm,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you normally pull their claws out?’

‘What a fucking sick question. I keep rabbits because I like them.’

‘Did you and Theresa email each other about where to meet?’ Malin asks. ‘Via her Yahoo! address?’

‘No.’

‘Did you leave messages on her Facebook page?’

‘I don’t know anything about any fucking book of faces.’

Fury in Lollo Svensson’s voice.

‘Lovelygirl? Is that you?’

‘I’ve already answered that question once.’

‘Take it easy now,’ Zeke says. ‘How many times did you and Theresa have sex?’

‘Am I under suspicion for something?’

‘We’ve got proof of corruption of a minor. Nathalie Falck has told us that she had a sexual relationship with you before her fifteenth birthday. And you know that we know you had a sexual relationship with Theresa Eckeved as well.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What about the others? Have you found any connection between me and the others?’

‘Why don’t you tell us?’ Malin says. ‘Tell us.’

‘How did you meet Sofia?’

‘I’ve never met Sofia Fredén. Never.’

‘And Theresa. Did you use a dildo? A blue one?’

Malin and Zeke are aware of the find in Suliman Hajif’s flat. Sundsten and Ekenberg are with him in the next room. Putting pressure on the little shit. Who knows, maybe the case is solved now? Karin and her Forensics team must be ecstatic about the dildo. Now they probably won’t have to dig out the right dildo from hundreds of possibilities. If it could even have been done. Maybe the truth will emerge on the other side of that black, depressing wall.

Suliman Hajif’s eyes full of fear.

You’re scared now, you little shit, Waldemar Ekenberg thinks.

And you’re right to be.

Because I don’t mean you well.

Interview Room Two is identical to Interview Room One, albeit its mirror image, and in the corridor outside you can switch between the two rooms, looking in on the confessional spaces through glass windows that appear as mirrors inside the rooms.

‘You raped and murdered Theresa Eckeved and Sofia Fredén. Josefin Davidsson managed to escape. We know it was you, we’ve got the dildo, the one which in all probability was used in these crimes.’

Per Sundsten’s voice amiable, factual.

‘It will feel better if you confess. Easier.’

‘And all that fucking porn. You need treatment, Suliman.’

‘I didn’t have anything to do with all that crap. I want my lawyer.’

‘He can come later on,’ Waldemar says. ‘We have the right to conduct a first interview with you on your own.’

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

‘I’ve already told you, I was at home taking it easy on all the nights you’re interested in. It’s too damn hot to go out.’

‘But no one can prove that, Suliman.’

The muscles in his arms are bulging under his beige custody shirt, at least two sizes too small.

‘And the porn?’

‘Hell, I like porn, and I like pushing dildos into girls. Fuck, I can get it up three times, at least, but they still want more after that.’

‘Where did you buy the dildo?’

‘None of your fucking business.’

‘You ratted on Behzad Karami. Why?’

Even Waldemar’s voice is factual.

‘He did it.’

‘Probably not. And how would you know? Perjury is punishable by two years in prison.’

‘He goes out at night. So it must be him. It could be, anyway.’

‘What’s gone wrong between the two of you?’

‘None of your business, pig.’

Waldemar gets up, takes two steps around the table before he pretends to stumble, and in his fall he manages to drag Suliman Hajif with him, and his nose hits the black tabletop with a loud cracking sound.

‘Damn, this floor’s slippery.’

And Suliman Hajif screams with pain, blood pouring from his nose, and Per expects to see Karim Akbar or Sven Sjöman come rushing into the room to put a stop to this, but no one comes, and instead Suliman is left sitting opposite them as the blood dripping from his nose stains his custody shirt.

‘We’re expecting the Forensics report on the dildo any time now,’ Waldemar says, back on his chair again. ‘And then we’ll know. So you may as well confess.’

‘I’ve got nothing to confess.’

Waldemar gets up again.

Suliman Hajif jerks back, raising his hands in self-defence.

The passageway between the interview rooms is dark and cool and damp, and the recessed halogen bulbs in the ceiling cast a pleasant glow. Karim and Sven are following the interviews with Suliman Hajif and Lollo Svensson at the same time, letting Ekenberg carry on, as long as he doesn’t go too far over the boundary.

‘What do you think?’

Karim’s face is open, wondering. With every case he has become more humble, more open in his attitude to his detectives’ work. As he has gained confidence in Malin, Zeke, Börje Svärd and Johan Jakobsson, he has relaxed, adopting a softer style of leadership than the one he had when he arrived: the omniscient boor.

Maybe he has realised that the work of investigation is in part a game, where curiosity and complete openness are a must if you want to see results? Maybe he has realised they really do have to work together to accomplish the tasks they are charged with? Or else he has understood that they are on their own, that they are on the front line against evil, that they have to look out for each other if they are to survive.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ Sven says. ‘Forensics are checking the dildo right now, and going through his flat. Karin Johannison is on duty, and she’s usually pretty quick. We’re also checking his computer. But that could take longer.’

‘And Louise Svensson?’

‘She’s about as damaged an individual as I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen before what that sort of damage can lead to.’

‘But do you think she did it?’

Sven doesn’t answer, but says: ‘Maybe we should have a word with her mother. Find out a bit about her background.’

Inside Interview Room One, Lollo Svensson suddenly spits in Malin’s face, but Malin keeps her cool and merely wipes the saliva away.

Obliged to continue the line of questioning.

A strong voice in this investigation.

Once she has wiped away the wet slime Malin says: ‘So asking about your dad is a sensitive issue. Sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘What’s he got to do with this?’

Her voice controlled now after her furious outburst at Malin’s last question.

‘The report I mentioned. Something happened when you were a child. Your dad, did he hurt you?’

‘Did he?’

Zeke trying to sound understanding, sympathetic, and he succeeds.

‘I’m not talking about that. I’ve spent my whole life trying to forget about it.’

Lollo Svensson calm now, as if she’s found a new personality somewhere inside.

‘Who can we talk to?’

‘Talk to Mum.’

Viveka Crafoord’s words, her voice: The key to this is in the past.

‘And how do we get hold of her?’

A name. An address.

‘Do you have to find out?’

‘We have to look into everything.’

‘I admit to having sex with those girls. But I was nice to them. Gentle. Friendly. And I gave them money afterwards. More than they expected.’

‘You don’t expect us to believe you? How many blue dildos can there be in this city?’

Waldemar is sitting down again, after thumping Suliman Hajif’s head on the table for a second time.

On his way back to his chair he looked in the mirror, at the face that seems to be withering away, ageing away from him, a little more each day. A face wearing a mask, and whatever is behind the mask burned out long ago as a result of giving in to instinct, giving in to the most basic urges.

Violence. Sexuality. The same thing. Aren’t they?

Waldemar knows: he’s given in to violence.

And he knows that he will never have the energy to do anything about it.

He’s not suited to therapy.

‘I didn’t have anything to do with this shit.’

Suliman Hajif sniffs, holding his shirtsleeve to his nose to stop it bleeding. He sobs, and says: ‘I’m innocent.’

Waldemar leans towards the tape recorder: ‘Interview with Suliman Hajif concluded. Time 16.17.’

Malin on her own in the toilet.

She’s finished peeing, but still she sits there, feeling the clammy seat against her buttocks.

She shuts her eyes, thinking.

Suliman Hajif will be held until Forensics have finished, until the dildo has been compared to the earlier evidence. And then? Twenty years in prison, in a secure hospital? Or back home to surf for more porn?

They let Lollo Svensson go home.

She had admitted to what they knew about her, but apart from that they had no evidence against her, and, as Sven said in the passageway outside the interview room once both interviews had been concluded: ‘There are limits to how much we can subject a person to with so little evidence. But we’ll be keeping an eye on her.’

‘I want to talk to her mother,’ Malin says.

Sven dubious.

‘Do we really want to upset an elderly lady because her daughter’s name has cropped up in a murder investigation?’

‘We need to find out what happened. It might lead to something. Viveka Crafoord said . . .’

Sven.

The way his face crumpled as he gave in to her.

‘OK. Zeke and Malin. Go and talk to her mother. Straight away. We need to look under that stone while it’s still warm. Look back in time.’

Sven didn’t realise how oddly he had expressed himself.

‘What about the hypnosis?’ Malin had asked. ‘We’re supposed to be doing that at seven.’

‘Can we do it later?’

‘It’ll be too late then.’

‘Yes, it will.’

‘And I’m picking Janne and Tove up from Nyköping just after midnight.’

Sven’s face then, she would have given her year’s wages for that look, how happy he seemed on her behalf, how he seemed to understand her anxiety and the way her loss had slid over into an inexplicable sense of grief.

Malin gets up from the toilet.

Pulls down her skirt.

Looks in the mirror.

Pale, in spite of all the sun this summer.

Tove and Janne.

Soon.

Soon you’ll be home again.

45

Zeke raises the can of Coca-Cola to his mouth and drinks before taking a huge bite of his flatbread roll. The prawn salad trickles like thick magma down the outside of the bread. Down by the river beside the Scandic Hotel two black Saab limousines stop and men in black suits get out and are guided into the hotel.

Zeke and Malin are standing at the hotdog kiosk by the fire station, near the roundabout leading out to Stångebro. Eating, recharging their batteries before their interview with Lollo Svensson’s mother, and Malin before her drive to Nyköping later that evening.

‘See them over there?’

Zeke points at the men in suits.

‘Bound to be representatives from some damn company or government here to look at another weapons system.’

‘Maybe they’re here to buy JAS fighters?’

‘I doubt it. No one wants that type of plane. They cost billions, and are already obsolete.’

‘I daresay you’re right.’

The owner of the kiosk, a swarthy man in his fifties, is brushing down his grill and doesn’t seem to be listening to their conversation.

‘All that advanced stuff they do out at Saab, who knows where the hell it ends up, and what damage it does.’

‘But it does good here,’ Malin says. ‘Loads of jobs.’

The kiosk owner evidently has been listening to their conversation, his voice sharply accented: ‘Excuse me. I overheard. My wife,’ he says from behind the counter, ‘she died in a missile attack in Fallujah. No one knows who fired it. Maybe there was something from Saab in the explosion, but what difference does it make? Saab, or someone else. Everyone makes their own decisions about what job they want to do.’

Zeke throws the last of the roll in the bin by the door.

‘Would you sell hotdogs to men like that?’ he asks the kiosk owner.

‘I’ll sell hotdogs to anyone who’s prepared to pay.’

They walk past the fire station towards the block of flats.

No red fire engines outside the polished glass doors.

Janne’s workplace.

He loves the station. It’s as much his home as his house near Malmslätt.

‘God, it’s sticky today,’ Zeke says. ‘Don’t you think it’s humid as hell?’

Malin doesn’t have time to reply before her mobile rings. She clicks to take the call without checking to see who the caller is.

‘Malin!’

Dad’s voice.

Not now.

But when else?

‘Dad!’

Zeke grins beside her.

‘How are you both?’

‘It’s really lovely down here.’

‘It’s hot as hell up here.’

‘You should see how green the golf courses are, and there are no problems getting a round.’

‘Tove and Janne are having a good time in Bali.’

‘Malin. How’s the apartment?’

‘I haven’t had time to go.’

‘But . . .’

‘I was joking, Dad, the plants are fine. How’s Mum?’

‘Oh, the same as usual, I suppose.’

They’ve reached the door to the block of flats. Zeke presses the entryphone, sweat dripping onto his wrist. Malin sees her reflection in the glass of the door, a vague image impossible to bring into focus.

‘Did you want anything in particular, Dad?’

The first time he’s called in over a week.

‘No.’

So why are you calling? Malin thinks. Seeing as you’re evidently completely uninterested in anything that’s happening to me and Tove.

A buzzing sound from the door.

‘Dad. Good to talk to you. But I’m on my way into a meeting.’

‘Don’t worry, Malin. I’ll call again another day.’

A minute later Malin is standing in a lift that’s shaking its way up through the building floor by floor. She can see her face clearly in the mirror in the lift, how the heat seems to be bringing out more wrinkles.

Parents, she thinks. What the hell are they good for?

‘Everything has its price.’

Svea Svensson’s voice hoarse after many long years of smoking, her face shrunken with wrinkles, hair grey, in thin strips above her green eyes, eyes watchful but well-meaning, as if the pupils are hiding a desire to let go of the secrets held in the electrical byways of the brain.

Her flat is on the top floor of the tallest block at the start of Tanneforsvägen.

Period furniture crammed into the living room, baroque chairs made in the fifties, an empire-style sofa, Wilton carpets and prints of Johan Krouthén paintings on silvery grey wallpaper, porcelain ornaments and a carriage clock that has just struck six.

Through the small windows of the living room they can see the Östgöta plain spreading out beyond the rooftops of the city as it unfurls towards Ljungsbro. They can make out the hot waters of Lake Roxen, almost see the steam rising over on the horizon, how it envelops the tormented, scorched fields in a fleeting, invisible mist that hides the obstinate remnants of life that are still clinging on.

The pillars of smoke from the forest on one side have gathered into an angry black cloud that doesn’t know which way to go in the absence of wind.

It looks as if the world is standing still, Malin thinks, just as Svea Svensson repeats: ‘Everything has its price. If life has taught me anything, it’s that.’

Zeke and Malin each slumped in a baroque chair.

Svea Svensson on the sofa behind the coffee table, her mouth moving, the words shaping a history that should never have needed to be told, but which is nonetheless all too common.

Zeke: ‘Can you tell us about Louise’s life as a child?’

‘Is it important?’

Malin: ‘It’s important.’

‘I’ll start at the very beginning. If that’s all right? Before she was born. Back when I was a little girl?’

‘Start wherever you’d like to,’ Zeke says, and the words start pouring from Svea’s mouth, as if they had missed the sound they made.

‘When I was seven years old my father left my mother and me. We lived on my grandfather’s farm, Övraby, outside Brokind, in one of the old outhouses. My father was a travelling salesman and one day he didn’t come home, and Mother found out that he had a new woman in Söderköping. We were short of money, so Mother took a job as a cook on an estate thirty kilometres away, down towards Kisa. I stayed behind with my grandparents, and I remember that time as the happiest days of my life. Then Mother met a new man. He had a shoe shop in Kisa, lived in a flat over the shop, and Mother and I moved in there. After just three nights he came into my room, I can remember his cold hands pushing the covers off me, and it happened again and again, and one night Mother appeared in the doorway while he was doing it, and she looked for a while before carrying on to the toilet, as if nothing had happened.

‘Do I blame her?

‘No.

‘Where would we have gone? Grandfather had had a stroke, the farm was gone.

‘So he had his way, the shoe shop bastard, and I left when I was seventeen, I ended up in Motala, in the kitchen at the factory, and I met a man in the Town Hotel.

‘He was a travelling salesman, just like my father, although he sold industrial chemicals, and he got me pregnant, and I gave birth to Louise. And when she was eight years old he left us alone with the flat in Motala. He’d got a new woman in Nässjö.

‘We lived on our own for a few years, just the girl and me. Then I met a new man, just like my mother had done, Sture Folkman by name. He bought and sold agricultural produce and we moved into his house down by the canal in Motala.

‘Louise never said anything.

‘I’ve often wondered why she didn’t tell me what was going on.

‘We’d been living there for three years when I found out what he was doing at night, what his cold hands were doing at night, what he was doing with his body.

‘Where could we go?

‘But I didn’t let him have his way.

‘I hit him on the head with a saucepan and we waited all night at the bus stop in the rain, Louise and I. It was a cold October night and the bushes and trees in the gardens around us turned into monsters, silhouettes of the devil’s children.

‘In the morning, just after it was light enough to make out the real shape of the bushes and trees, the bus came. It was heading for Linköping, and I’ve never been back to Motala since, and I’ve never seen the bastard since then. And my first husband, Louise’s father, drowned while he was out fishing.

‘I blame myself, you know, Inspectors.

‘I let my child down, my girl, and no matter what pain a person has suffered themselves, you must never turn your back on a child. And that’s what I did by not seeing.

‘We ended up in a hotel room near the station. I reported him to the police, but there was nothing they could do. The nice ladies in the social security office sorted out a flat for us, and I got a job in a café and Louise started school. But even so, ever since then everything has somehow always been too late.

‘I never let any man come into my home after that.’

Malin is pacing up and down beside the bed in her flat, freshly showered and wearing just her pants and bra. She’s laid three summer dresses out on the bedspread, wondering which one to choose: blue with white flowers, the short yellow one, or the longer white one that goes down to her ankles.

She chooses the yellow one, pulls it over her head and looks at herself in the hall mirror, and she thinks that anticipation is making her beautiful, or at least more beautiful than she has felt for ages.

The interview with Svea Svensson just an hour before. The words echoing inside her: cold hands on the covers, under the covers, snakes on her body.

She remembers what an old man said to her during a previous case: ‘Desire is what kills, Miss Fors. Desire is what kills.’

They had asked about Louise, if Svea Svensson knew anything about her daughter that she thought they should know, but Svea Svensson had refused to answer the question at all.

‘Is Sture Folkman still alive?’

Zeke’s question to Svea.

‘Sture Folkman is alive.’

‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘I think he lives in Finspång with his wife. He had a family.’

‘And?’

Malin could sense another story.

‘God help those poor people.’

And then silence, the lips clamped shut as if they’d let out enough memories for a lifetime.

Maybe the white dress after all?

No.

Malin looks around the flat, it looks tidy enough.

She goes down to the car in the car park by the church, starts the engine, sees from the clock that she’s early, it’s only half past seven, Tove and Janne’s plane lands at quarter to two. It takes at most an hour and a half to get to Skavsta. Even if she sticks to the speed limit. But she wants to be there in good time, and might as well be somewhere else with her longing.

As she drives up Järnvägsgatan towards the Berg roundabout, a face appears inside her, she doesn’t know why, but she knows the face is important.

Slavenca Visnic smiles as she opens the door of her flat in Skäggetorp.

And a minute later Malin is sitting with a glass of Fanta in her living room, trying to think of something to ask, and it’s as if the caution she felt just now, the watchfulness around a person featuring in a murder investigation, has blown away, leaving just a vague sense of significance.

‘What do you want to know?’

Slavenca Visnic doesn’t seem surprised by the visit, just curious about what Malin wants.

‘I don’t really know. I just wanted to ask you to try to think if there’s anything important that you might not have told us.’

‘What could that be? I just try to be a good citizen, mind my own business, that’s all.’

Malin can see how ridiculous her visit must seem to such a down-to-earth person as the woman before her.

‘Oh, well.’

‘Don’t worry. Finish your drink. I’ve got to go up to Glyttinge to collect the day’s takings, and have my evening swim. They start cleaning the water at half past nine, and if you swim at the far end of the pool it actually feels clean there then.’

‘An evening swim? Nice. I’m heading to Skavsta to pick up my husband and daughter.’

Malin regrets saying this at once, Slavenca Visnic lost her whole family, but her eyes show nothing but calm, warmth.

‘I’d like to show you something,’ Slavenca Visnic says. ‘Follow me.’

The next minute they’re sitting at a computer in her bedroom, the light of the screen flickering.

Slavenca Visnic has opened ten documents that look like pages of a child’s picture-book. On the pages she’s loaded the few pictures she has of her family, alongside short texts about her childhood, her children’s lives, the short lives they got to live.

Slavenca Visnic looks younger in the pictures, her face full of innocent anticipation and responsibility. The children in her arms, beautiful round faces beneath black hair that’s been allowed to grow long, her husband: a friendly, fluid face defined by a strong chin.

‘It feels good to keep busy doing this,’ Slavenca Visnic says. ‘Writing. Trying to recreate life the way it was when it was at its best, all that simple love.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Malin says.

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think they can ever come back?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ and Slavenca Visnic’s question seems entirely natural to Malin, as if resurrection from the dead were possible sometimes, at least for the love itself.

‘But some day you’ll get to meet them again,’ Malin says. ‘And their love is still here in this room. I can feel it.’

Slavenca Visnic shuts down her computer and follows Malin out into the hall.

‘Drive carefully, they’d probably prefer you to get there in one piece. Your husband and daughter.’

‘We’re divorced,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve been divorced more than ten years.’

46

Wednesday, 21–Thursday, 22 July

Shimmering dusk.

The day on its way into inescapable darkness, its death throes in shifting shades of yellow, red and orange.

Forest, open fields, water, red-painted houses huddling by the tree line, cars parked in driveways, light in windows, sometimes silhouettes behind the glass, people like dark dreams, hungry, still not ready to let go of the day.

But the day itself muttering: I’ve had enough. That’ll do.

The car creeps up to one hundred and twenty. Can go much faster than that.

A metal bird high up in the atmosphere, where the summer air is too thin to breathe. Soon on its way down, the metal cocoon protecting your bodies.

Keep your eyes on the road.

Dangerously tired.

And the tarmac is a snake sliding past Norrköping, Kolmården and on into the night.

Stockholm.

The road ends up there. Sometimes she wishes she were back there, in a larger setting, with more regular cases to fire up a detective’s soul.

A case like theirs.

Threads like unexploded shells, howling as they approach the ground, and all the police officers involved wait for the explosion, waiting for the truth to burst out and take shape before their eyes. But instead just an unexploded bomb lying in the meeting room and emitting a foul stench, in the open-plan office of the police station, a whistling sound that mocks them, reminding them of their shortcomings.

The media going crazy.

Karim Akbar getting softer each day, and simultaneously worse as a media performer, but better as a police chief.

Sven Sjöman.

Malin has never seen him so physically tired as he has been over the past few days. The heat is tearing the soul from his heavy body. Just let his heart hold out, Sven’s good heart.

Per Sundsten. It’s impossible to get a grip on him, who he is, what he wants, what he thinks. A good detective ought to know that sort of thing, Malin thinks, because if you’re sure of who you are and what you want, then your intuition can fly free, can’t it?

What do I want?

Who cares?

No, actually. I have to know.

Waldemar Ekenberg is more obvious than almost everyone else, his masculinity almost comically exaggerated. God knows what he’s got up to over the past few days, how much he has allowed the ends to justify the means. At some point time will catch up even with him.

And Zeke. The way they work together is possibly simpler and clearer now than ever, no nonsense about each of them going off and doing their own thing, a wordless trust in each other. It’s as if Zeke is holding back his tendency towards violence now that Ekenberg is part of the team, as if there has to be a constant balance between violence and empathy, as if this balance is essential if they are to twist the truth out of the clues.

And me.

I know what I’m doing.

Am I learning anything?

I’m slowly getting closer to the girls, that much is clear. If I can feel and understand their fear, maybe I can understand the person who harmed them.

The immigrant lads.

Karin Johannison not yet done with her examination of the dildo. But there’s a high probability that it matches the one used in the crimes, so maybe they’ll be able to take the day off tomorrow.

The lesbian line of inquiry.

A wicked man in Finspång. Where does this woman to woman love lead?

Slavenca Visnic. The kiosks. And the water.

The water.

Tomorrow will bring with it the hypnosis of Josefin Davidsson. Malin called Viveka Crafoord on her way home from their meeting with Svea Svensson, told her that they’d have to put it off, and Viveka had sounded disappointed, saying: ‘I think I can get something out of her, get her to talk.’

The road signs with numbers saying how great the distance between grief and longing is, how far it is until the distance is wiped out and only time remains.

Nyköping thirty-two.

Seventeen.

Skavsta.

Should I have brought Markus?

It didn’t even occur to me.

And Malin parks, goes into the arrivals hall, white beams seeming to float high up under a curved ceiling, a bare room full of peculiar dreams.

The clock on the wall says quarter past ten.

The plane is due in on time.

In two and a half hours the presence of love will replace grief, longing.

She’ll soon be there, Malin, your Tove.

We were up with her and Janne just now, and they were both asleep, exhausted by the long journey, by everything they have experienced.

They were both smiling.

It was a happy moment, just like you will be experiencing soon.

And us?

Sofia and I. We’re drifting somewhere below the ceiling of the arrivals hall, watching you and thinking that maybe it would be better if you were concentrating on us, on what has happened, instead of concentrating on your own nearest and dearest.

At least that’s what we’d like.

Worrying about your own concerns doesn’t disappear where we are. But it’s different, it encompasses more, it’s as if it encompasses everything that is or has been or ever will be.

Worrying about your own concerns becomes consideration for everyone.

Sofia and I are one and the same here. We are Josefin, Tove, and you. We are all girls and all who have been girls. But we’re boys as well.

Does that sound odd?

I can understand that, Malin. It’s all very strange, actually.

Where should you start?

Start with your nearest and dearest.

But who wouldn’t choose love, if the choice were between it and violence?

Can you hear me, Malin?

This is Sofia Fredén.

My mum and dad are sad, so sad, their sadness can never even be replaced by longing. Unless it can, if only time is allowed to pass? Now they’re sitting on the sofa in their flat in Mjölby. The television is on but they can’t see what’s on the screen.

Their eyes are full of tears.

And they’re crying for me, Malin.

You can do so much, Malin.

You can make their tears stop. Or at least take a different path.

Just take a brief moment to catch your breath before pressing on.

Tove is holding her dad’s hand, the pressure in her ears is giving her a headache as, metre by metre, the plane descends towards the runway, the lights of the houses in the forests outside the windows are growing, a strip of brightness is still lingering on the horizon and Tove wonders if the world is disappearing over there, but knows that it carries on for an eternity, that life on this planet is a vast cyclical motion, no matter what anyone might say.

Mum.

I’ve missed her.

A vibration in the plane as the wheels touch the tarmac. Lights from the hangars.

Dad squeezing my hand.

I wonder if she brought Markus?

I haven’t really missed him much. What does that mean?

‘Back on Swedish soil!’ Dad says, and he looks happy. ‘Now to see if your mum’s made it on time, or if she’s still at work.’

Their bags.

Janne hates this part of travelling.

But there they are. Almost the first ones to appear, nothing got held up in the transfer between Heathrow and Stansted.

Their baggage.

Everything as it should be.

‘Come on, Tove.’

It’s nice to come home.

Malin stares at the automatic doors.

Taps her sandal-clad feet on the white stone floor, around her she can see happy people, expectant, focused.

She runs her hands over her dress, pushes her hair behind her ears, feels that she needs to go to the toilet but doesn’t want to go off now, the plane landed a while back and they should be here.

Now.

And the door opens once more.

There.

There they are, and she goes towards them, running, and she can see that they’re tired, but when Tove catches sight of her the tiredness disappears and Tove runs towards her and Malin runs and the air lifts and their bodies meet.

Hands, arms around each other.

Malin picks her daughter up.

How much do you weigh now?

Three thousand, one hundred and forty-three grams when you emerged from me.

And now?

Malin looks at Janne.

He’s standing behind the luggage trolley, seems unsure of what to do now. Malin puts Tove down, beckons him over and then they stand in the arrivals hall, feeling a warmth warmer and more genuine than any summer could ever conjure up.

PART THREE

You need to come, before now stops

On the way towards the final room

I haven’t finished yet.

I know what needs to happen now.

Nothing can stop this summer from burning, nothing can stop our love from coming back.

The world, our world, will be pure and free and we shall whisper the mute snakes’ words in each other’s ears, feel how they make us big, invincible.

He must disappear, be wiped out, and you will dare to come back again.

Everything will be white. Burning white, and innocent.

No one will be allowed to stop me.

Claws scratching storeroom shelves, spiders’ legs moving over your face.

My summer angels.

They can rest now, and soon they’ll have the company and love of someone who shares their history. And the very same love that I shall also receive.

I shall find another girl. She will be you.

Everything will be put right. It won’t hurt. Because soon there will be no pain any more.

47

Tove safely returned.

She’s sleeping under a freshly laundered white sheet in her bedroom and Malin thinks that it’s as if she’s never been away, as if Indonesia and Bali and bombers and undercurrents and the other side of the world have stopped existing, even as a possibility.

A mute drive from Nyköping, Tove sleeping in the back seat, she and Janne united in an eternal wordlessness, a silence that never becomes uncomfortable, but which feels more lonely that real loneliness.

Intermittent words.

‘Did you have a good time?’

‘Are the forest fires under control?’

‘It’s starting to resemble a firestorm in places.’

Janne came upstairs with them, carrying Tove’s large green Samsonite case, Malin offered him tea and to her surprise he accepted, said he could ring for a taxi home whenever he felt like it.

Tove had dropped off before the water had boiled and they drank their tea in the kitchen, as the sound of a man and woman arguing rose from the street, and once they had fallen silent the only sound was the ticking of the Ikea clock.

Just gone half past three now.

‘We were never good at that,’ Janne says as he puts his empty mug on the draining board.

‘Good at what?’

Malin is standing as close as she dares, doesn’t want to scare him off.

‘At arguing.’

Malin can feel anger rising up inside her, but suppresses the pointless emotion and manages to locate her calm, her longing again.

‘Sometimes it feels like we never had time to really get started.’

‘Maybe we didn’t.’

‘It’s probably good to do a bit of shouting every now and then.’

‘You think?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know what to think.’

Then Malin tells him about the case she’s working on, that she feels like heaven or earth has opened up and released a desperate evil on the city, and that she doesn’t know how to stop it.

‘Just like the fires,’ Janne says. ‘It seems like they don’t know how to get to grips with the flames.’

Then they stand silently in the kitchen for a while before Janne moves out into the hall.

‘Do you mind if I call for a taxi?’

‘Go ahead.’

Janne picks up the receiver.

Malin goes towards him in the hall, and as he keys in the number of the taxi company she says: ‘You can stay here.’

Janne stops.

‘I prefer my own bed to your sofa, Malin.’

‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

‘You know it wouldn’t work, Malin.’

‘Why wouldn’t it work? Just go into the bedroom and lie down, it’s no harder than that.’

‘It’s stupid, Malin, what good would come of it? We’re all done with . . .’

Malin puts one index finger over his lips and his breath is warm against her skin.

Close to him now.

‘Shush, don’t say anything else. Can’t we just let tonight be tonight?’

Janne looks at her, and she takes his hand and leads him into the bedroom and he follows her without any further hesitation.

Hard or soft.

Punishment or reward.

That’s what physical love can be.

Janne’s chest against hers, one of her legs wrapped around his body and it was so long ago now, but she remembers exactly how his cock feels inside her, how it takes her over and how her body’s independent recognition makes her calm and feverish, knowing exactly how to move to be filled in a way that no one else fills her.

Drops of liquid merging into one.

Is that you or me breathing?

She shuts her eyes, then opens them and sees that Janne’s eyes are shut, as if they’re both trying to make their bodies believe that if they don’t look at each other, then this isn’t happening.

And they’re young again, far too young again, and a thin piece of rubber breaks and you are formed, Tove. Malin keeps her eyes on Janne, the lower half of her body is squirming, heating up with a pain that’s more pleasant than anything else she knows.

Awareness catches up with your body over the years.

The distance between feelings and thoughts of feelings disappears.

She lies back.

Soundlessly and heavy he follows her and her hands search his back, every square centimetre of skin a memory.

She lets go.

Becomes a woken child sleeping on its back with its arms above its head.

Come back to me now.

This is love.

Promise not to disappear again.

There you lie, dear Malin.

In the dawn light I see your lips twitch, you’re dreaming, aren’t you?

I’ve just pulled the sheet up over your body.

We won’t speak about this tomorrow, or any other day. We’ll pretend it never happened.

Goodbye, Malin.

Janne leaves the flat, but first he takes Malin’s car keys from the chest of drawers in the hall. Goes down to the street.

He opens the boot, takes out his case. Goes back upstairs and puts the keys back where he found them.

The dawn is warm, and the grey stone of the church seems to vibrate in the thin blue light of the rising sun.

A faint smell of smoke, hardly noticeable even to his trained nose.

He heads towards the station. Pulling his case behind him.

At the station he changes into his protective clothing and goes with the first engine up to the forest, to the fire, heading straight into the heat and fighting the inferno.

Daniel Högfeldt happened to see Janne, Malin’s ex-husband, come out of the door of the building where she lives.

A particular rhythm in his walk.

Daniel was on his way to the newsroom, early. He’d woken up in the middle of the night and been unable to get back to sleep.

Now he’s sitting at his desk and thinking about the rhythm in Janne’s movements, the way they exuded a softness and, oddly enough, love.

I can never compete with that, Daniel thinks, opening a new document on his computer and tossing the heap of articles linked by the word ‘rape’ into the waste-paper basket.

Can’t be bothered to do anything with them.

Can’t be bothered even to sit here.

I have to, Daniel thinks, fumbling his way back to feeling bothered, finding it again.

And being bothered is not going to happen if he concentrates on the history of violent sexual assaults in Linköping. Someone else can do that. Maybe you, Malin?

Last night’s dream.

A boy by her bed crying Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, help me breathe.

She cried back.

Can’t you breathe?

The boy replied.

No, help me, Mummy.

I’m not your mummy.

You are my mummy. Aren’t you?

No.

Help me breathe.

Why?

Because I’m your brother.

Can’t you breathe?

No. You have to show me how.

‘It’s so hot. Has it been like this all the time?’

Tove is drooping over a bowl of soured milk and cornflakes at the breakfast table. Malin is over by the sink, drinking her third mug of coffee, getting ready to force herself to eat a sandwich.

‘It’s been horribly hot, Tove. And they just said on television that it’s going to carry on like this.’

‘Great. Then I can go swimming.’

‘With Markus?’

‘With him, or a friend.’

‘You have to tell me who you’re going swimming with.’

‘Can’t I go swimming with who I want?’

‘Read the paper and you’ll see why I want to know what you’re doing.’

Tove leafs through the Correspondent. They have several pages on the murders.

‘Police Silent’, says one headline.

‘Nasty,’ Tove says. She doesn’t ask whether her mum is working on the case, knows that she must be. ‘Do you think it’s the bloke you’ve got locked up?’

‘This one’s really nasty, Tove,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve got one man locked up. But you have to be careful. Don’t go out alone. And let me know where you are.’

‘You mean in the evenings?’

‘All the time, Tove. I don’t even know if the person we’re trying to catch makes any distinction between day and night.’

‘Isn’t that a bit over the top?’

‘Don’t argue. If there’s one thing I know more about than you, it’s this.’

Malin can hear how disagreeable she sounds, the collected aggression of a debilitatingly hot summer, and she sees the look of surprise, fear and then sorrow on Tove’s face.

‘Sorry, Tove, I didn’t mean . . .’

‘I don’t give a damn what you meant, Mum.’

48

They’re on their way past Tjällmo, heading towards Finspång, driving past the fringes of the fires.

It is now half past nine. They skipped the morning meeting today. They can all meet up later instead.

She’s thinking about Janne.

Knows that he’s already in there, in the smoke, working and trying to fight the flames, to stop the fire spreading even further.

‘He’s there already, isn’t he?’

Zeke is holding onto the wheel of the Volvo with one hand, his eyes fixed firmly on the road as they pass a fire engine.

‘Couldn’t wait another second.’

‘You’re so similar, Malin, you know that?’

‘In what way?’

‘Loads of ways. But I suppose I mean the way you treat your work. You both love your work beyond reason, it’s your way of escaping from reality.’

‘Zeke. I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that last bit. How’s Martin’s pre-season training going?’

‘Great, I expect. He loves circuit training.’

‘Any more offers from the States yet?’

‘Apparently his agent is talking to a number of clubs. I daresay it’ll all work out once the baby’s here.’

Martin was picked for the national team for the first time back in May for the World Championships. Zeke travelled to Prague to see one of the matches, forced to go by his wife. Malin knows he hates flying almost as much as he hates ice hockey.

‘He’s going to be seriously rich, then,’ Malin says.

‘Yes, for hitting a damn puck and sliding about the ice on a pair of skates.’

‘For entertaining the rest of us, Zeke,’ Malin says, and considers her dreams for Tove: becoming a teacher or a lawyer, one of the nice, straightforward professions that all parents dream of for their children. Or an author, seeing as she reads like a maniac and writes essays for school that astonish her teachers.

‘Hockey’s for morons,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s all there is to it.’

‘Don’t be so hard on him.’

‘The lad can do what he likes, but there’s no way I’m ever going to love that game.’

The road forces its way through the forest.

The world around them is deserted, all the animals have long since fled the flames. Fifty minutes later they reach Finspång.

Home to the De Geer industrial empire.

A town built up around the production of cannons.

Neglected.

But a good place to raise children. And a good place to hide yourself away.

Their satnav leads them to the right place.

The street where Sture Folkman lives is an obscure cul-de-sac just behind a run of shops right in the centre of town, and number twelve is a three-storey block of flats. The ground-floor shop is occupied by the National Federation of Disabled Persons.

They park.

Take it for granted that the old man is home.

The door to the flats isn’t locked, Finspång so small that they don’t need coded locks, people free to come and go as they please all day long.

They read his name on the grey-green list of names in movable white lettering, he lives on the third floor.

‘That’s the bastard,’ Zeke says.

‘Take it easy now,’ Malin says. ‘He’s an old man.’

‘OK, so he’s old. But some crimes never go away, and can never be forgiven.’

‘Get lost,’ says a hoarse voice through the letterbox, and it contains a meanness, a malice that is evident in a way that Malin has never experienced before, and the pink walls of the stairwell seem to turn blood-red and collapse in on them as they stand there.

‘I don’t want anything. Get lost.’

‘We’re not selling anything. We’re from the Linköping Police, and we’d like to talk to you. Open the door.’

‘Get lost.’

‘Open up. Now. Or I’ll break the door in,’ and the man inside seems to hear that Zeke is serious and the door is unlocked and opened.

A tall, thin man with a bent back, his body frozen by what looks like Parkinson’s.

You didn’t do it, Malin thinks, but then they never really thought he had.

A long nose that distracts attention from a weak chin, and Sture Folkman stares right at them, his eyes grey and cold.

Cold as the tundra.

Cold as the Arctic.

Like a world without light, that’s how cold your eyes are.

Black gabardine trousers. A white nylon shirt and a grey cardigan in spite of the heat.

‘What the hell do you want?’

Malin looks at his hands.

Long, white, bloodless fingers dangling towards the rag-rugs in the hall, tentacles ready to feel their way up, in.

Green plush sofas.

Black and white photographs of family farms long since sold off.

Heavy red velvet curtains shutting out all the light. A bookcase with books about chemistry, and a complete set of the Duden encyclopaedia in German.

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

Sture Folkman’s response when they explained why they were there.

But Malin and Zeke still went into the living room, sitting down in a couple of armchairs, waiting.

Sture Folkman hesitated in the hall.

They heard him moving around in the kitchen, scrupulously clean, Malin noticed that as they went past, old-fashioned knives with Bakelite handles in a block on the draining board.

Then he came in to them.

‘Get lost.’

‘Not until you answer our questions.’

‘Get lost, back to Linköping. That’s where you said you were from, isn’t it? Fucking stuck-up dump. I was at your oh-so-wonderful hospital last month. Fucking shit urologist.’

He slumped onto a ladder-backed chair beside the bookcase.

‘I’ve never had any dealings with the cops.’

‘You should have done.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You subjected Louise Svensson to sexual abuse, repeatedly. There’s no point trying to deny it, we know all about it.’

‘I . . .’

‘And doubtless you went on to do the same to your new family. Where are they now?’

‘My last wife died four years ago. A brain tumour.’

‘And your two daughters?’

‘What do you want with them?’

‘Answer.’

‘She’s a long way away. In Australia.’

‘Do they live there?’

Sture Folkman doesn’t answer.

‘Do you know anything about the murders of young girls in Linköping?’

‘What would I know about that?’

‘Do you think Louise could have had anything to do with them?’

Sture Folkman knits his fingers, sniffs them, then lets his hands rest on his black trousers.

‘Have you got any other assaults on your conscience?’

Zeke sounds the way he always does just before he explodes, just before violence.

‘Well? Have you?’

‘Zeke.’

Sture Folkman raises his hands towards them, his white fingers a jagged fence.

‘What do you really want? What do you want?’

On the way back to the car Malin can see Zeke trembling with loathing and anger.

He tosses the keys to her.

‘You drive.’

And Malin sits behind the wheel as they leave Finspång behind them. They’re surrounded by dense forest when Zeke finally speaks.

‘He had a point, the old bastard. What were we doing there really?’

‘Following up on a line of inquiry, Zeke. That’s what we do. We look back in case it helps us move forward.’

‘But still. It feels so remote that it’s bordering on desperation.’

Malin doesn’t reply.

Instead she fixes her eyes on the road, thinking about what must happen to your soul if you get nightly visits from those white fingers throughout the years when your faith in other people assumes its final form.

It makes you watchful.

Scared.

A conviction that everyone probably wants to hurt you.

That everyone hates you.

An inability to fit in, instead an urge to seek out anything broken, to validate what’s broken within yourself.

Life as a lonely, aimless wanderer.

Everything that could be defined as self-esteem fingered to destruction.

Cracks in doors concealing a darkness into which you could tumble helplessly.

49

The beach outside Sturefors in the dying afternoon light. The heat is making Waldemar Ekenberg’s jacket stick to his body as he stands beneath the oak inside the cordon.

The holstered pistol is warm against his chest, not even metal shielded by cloth and shade can resist the heat.

Suliman Hajif is standing beside what was Theresa Eckeved’s grave, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, allowed not to wear custody clothing for this excursion. His hands are behind his back, the handcuffs fastened tight to make sure he doesn’t try anything.

The bathers have found their way back.

When they arrived the bathers stared in their direction from behind their sunglasses, now they’ve gone back to swimming. Presumably they think that the reason for their visit is too frightening to be allowed to blemish such a dreamy summer’s day as this: That was where they found her. It’s the police. It happened. How old was she? Fourteen. Summertime death. Over there, by that oak tree.

Only two boys, wearing identical blue swimming trunks, are standing outside the cordon and staring up at them through blue-tinted glass. The ice cream kiosk is closed, otherwise the boys would probably each be clutching a cone.

Inquisitive.

‘Off you go, now.’

Per Sundsten tries to make his voice sound authoritative.

Sven Sjöman hadn’t been convinced about their idea: taking him out to the crime scenes to get him to break down, confess.

‘His lawyer will have to go too.’

‘Sod the lawyer. We haven’t got time for that,’ Waldemar said. ‘The girls, Sjöman, think of the girls.’

‘OK, but take it easy. Nothing unnecessary.’

As he sat at his desk in the open-plan office, Sven hesitated, his face wrinkling with awareness of their excesses.

‘Get lost.’

And Waldemar fixes a stare on the boys until they lumber off, embarrassed, down the little beach and back into the water.

‘So this was where you buried her. And was this where you killed her as well?’

Suliman Hajif shakes his head, whispering: ‘My lawyer should be here.’

‘We tried to get hold of him,’ Waldemar says. ‘But he wasn’t answering the phone. He doesn’t give a damn about you.’

‘It would make sense to confess,’ Per says. ‘You’d feel better. Anytime now we’re expecting the results from Forensics, and then we’ll know it was you, and that it was your dildo that was used on these girls.’

Suliman Hajif shakes his head again.

Waldemar takes a step forward, grabs him by the neck, hard, but in a way that could look almost paternal to the other people on the beach.

‘So you’re playing the silent game, are you?’

A groan.

But no words.

‘Let’s go to the next one,’ Waldemar says, dragging Suliman Hajif with him, back the way from which they came.

Malin gets the call just as they’re passing the turning to Tornby.

Karin Johannison’s voice, excited behind the formal tone.

‘It’s the same paint. The paint on Suliman Hajif’s dildo matches the paint on the one used in the attacks.’

‘So it’s the same dildo?’

‘It isn’t possible to say that for sure. But certainly the same sort. As to whether the fragments of paint match the pieces that are missing from Suliman Hajif’s dildo . . . Well, I’ve tried, but there isn’t a hope in hell of doing that.’

Malin feels her stomach clench.

All due respect to the chances of matching the fragments. But how likely is it that two different dildos of the same model would turn up in the same investigation?

‘Any other traces on it?’

‘No.’

‘Any other news?’

‘Sorry Malin. No new evidence.’

The same dildo.

Synchronicity.

Freud.

On the way to Viveka Crafoord now for the session of hypnosis. Is that even necessary now?

‘Thanks, Karin. Are you going to call Sven Sjöman?’

‘Of course.’

‘So it’s the same dildo? OK, just the same model. But then it’s sorted, isn’t it?’

Waldemar elated behind the wheel of their blue Saab; Sundsten and Suliman Hajif in the back seat, they’ve just driven through the idyll of Sturefors. Beside them on the cycle path an elderly couple is wobbling along on a brand-new tandem.

‘We’ve got him here, we’re coming in. No, nothing. He hasn’t said a word.’

Without letting go of the wheel Waldemar turns to look at the back seat, saying: ‘OK, you randy little Paki, we’ve got you now.’

Then he turns into a side road and drives deep into the forest, and Per knows what’s going to happen now, doesn’t want it to happen, but lets it happen.

Zeke’s reaction to the information about the dildo: ‘So we don’t have to bother with the hypnosis? It’s as good as sorted now. We must be able to get a confession out of him now.’

‘It’s not sorted,’ Malin says without taking her eyes from the road. ‘We’ll go through with the hypnosis as planned. Josefin Davidsson is probably already at Viveka’s office. The best we can hope for is that we get ourselves a witness, and no matter what that witness says, it will give us more information, won’t it?’

Zeke nods.

Knows she’s right.

‘I want this case to be over,’ Zeke says. ‘I want the people living in the city to be able to read in tomorrow’s Correspondent that we’ve caught the bastard and that they can let their girls play wherever they like again, that they don’t have to be worried or frightened.’

Tove.

Am I worried?

No.

Actually, yes.

‘It’s coming, Zeke,’ Malin says. ‘In principle, the case is cracked. Now we just have to join all the dots.’

Waldemar Ekenberg clenches his fist and punches Suliman Hajif just under his ribs, the place that causes most pain without leaving any visible physical evidence.

Suliman Hajif collapses.

Per Sundsten is pretending to help, picking Suliman Hajif up, but only so he can be hit again.

The young man is still silent.

No words, just groaning as he lies on the ground, hands over his eyes, and the forest around the gravel road is still, the moss thick and yellow and dry on the ground, the maples have lost their chlorophyll, but life is clinging on in there, begging for rain.

‘You raped and murdered Theresa Eckeved and Sofia Fredén. Didn’t you? And you raped Josefin Davidsson. Didn’t you? You perverse little fucker. I’m going to kill you out here if you don’t confess.’

He must be able to hear from Ekenberg’s voice that he’s serious.

Suliman Hajif tries to get up, but his legs don’t want to obey, he lurches back and forth and Per can see the fear in his eyes.

Waldemar takes his pistol from its holster.

Crouches down beside Suliman Hajif and puts the barrel to his back.

‘It’s easy. We say you tried to escape and were forced to shoot to stop you. A double-murderer and rapist. No one’s going to wonder. People will thank us.’

Per unsure.

‘Get up!’ Waldemar screams.

And Suliman Hajif scrambles, tries to get up, screaming: ‘I can’t confess to something I didn’t do!’

The pistol against his temple now.

‘Don’t try to escape.’

Then Per takes a step forward, knocks the pistol from Waldemar’s hand.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘That’s enough. Get it? That’s enough.’

A wind blows through the maples’ shrivelled branches and a thousand yellow leaves decide to let go, falling like a golden rain over the scene in the forest.

‘I bought the dildo from Stene at Blue Rose,’ Suliman Hajif screams. ‘He said he’d sold dozens of them, so how do you know it was mine?’

‘Shit,’ Waldemar whispers, and Per thinks: You’re right there, Waldemar, you’re absolutely right.

‘Why the hell hasn’t anyone checked which dildos are sold in the only porn shop in the city? Fucking Internet. People still buy things in shops, don’t they?’

Per grabs Waldemar’s arm.

‘Calm down. This is a crazy summer. We’re under pressure from all sides. Sometimes you don’t see what’s right in front of your nose.’

A quarter of an hour later Waldemar is standing at the counter of Blue Rose on Djurgårdsgatan, the city’s long-established porn shop.

Stene, the owner, smiles with his puffy, stubbled face.

‘A blue dildo?’

Stene goes over to a shelf at the back of the dimly lit premises. Comes back with a pink and orange package in his hand, the blue object inside the pack half-obscured by the loud, shouting lettering: ‘Hard and Horny!’

‘These have been selling like hot cakes. I must have sold forty or so in the last eighteen months. None in the last month or so, mind you.’

Waldemar spits out a question: ‘Do you keep a list of your customers?’

‘No, are you mad? Nothing of the sort. Discretion is my watchword. And I have a bad memory for faces.’

‘Credit cards?’

‘Those bastards take seven per cent. Here it’s cash that counts.’

Malin pulls up in the car park of the Philadelphia Church and doesn’t bother to get a ticket from the machine. She and Zeke cross over Drottninggatan, ignoring how hungry they are and fighting the urge to stop in McDonald’s on the way.

They press the buzzer of number twelve Drottninggatan, and Viveka Crafoord lets them in.

In the treatment room, on the paisley-patterned chaise longue, sits Josefin Davidsson, her mother sitting nervously beside her.

Viveka is sitting in her leather chair behind the desk, her face lit up by the light falling from the window looking onto Drottninggatan. A strange, mystical light, Malin thinks.

‘OK,’ Josefin says. ‘I want to know what happened.’

You’re not the only one, Malin thinks.

50

The memory of violence.

It’s somewhere inside you, Josefin.

Synapses need to be connected to synapses, and then you’ll remember. But do you really want to remember?

We remember. We can see what happened to us, how we disappeared, we’d rather call it that, a disappearance, then how, after a lot of loneliness, we found each other in our shapeless space.

Sofia and I have each other.

Perhaps we’re in the beautiful place that exists before consciousness, unconsciousness? Before everything that human beings mistake for life?

We can just make out the people we once were, our space can assume whatever colour we like, and we can be exactly the people we want to be, wherever we like.

We’re with you, now, Josefin, in the lady psychologist’s room.

We need your memories.

Because somehow we need the closure provided by the truth in order to achieve real peace, to stop being scared of the dark. Because that’s what our space is like, it can adopt a colour that makes black seem like white.

Don’t be scared.

It’s just memories.

Of course. They’re your life, in one way, and we need them.

But remember one thing, Josefin. The only thing us summer angels really have is each other.

The pendulum in front of my eyes.

The curtains, the leather-bound volumes in the bookcases, the etchings of rural scenes. This room is like England.

The pendulum.

Isn’t that just something they do in films?

It smells stale here, couldn’t she have aired it first? Or maybe put some perfume on?

This peculiar sofa is comfortable, Josefin thinks, trying to concentrate on the pendulum, but her thoughts keep wandering off, her eyes flickering around the people in the room.

The woman police officer.

Malin.

She’s standing behind the psychologist lady.

What’s her thing? She seems calm, but anyone can see how twitchy she is under the surface. Well, maybe not twitchy, exactly, but definitely pretty manic or something.

She’s staring at me. Stop staring! Maybe she can read my mind, because she’s stopped staring now.

The policeman with the shaved head is sitting on the black, lacquered chair by the window. Calm, but dangerous. He’s the dad of that hockey player. And then Mum, terrified. I’m not scared, is she scared that her little girl is going to get dirty? I’m no angel, Mum, stop thinking that.

And the psychologist lady.

Looking irritated. She’s noticed I’m not concentrating.

‘Look at the pendulum and listen to my voice.’

What, has she said something? Josefin thinks, and says: ‘I’ll try harder.’

The psychologist lady says: ‘Take deep breaths,’ and I take deep breaths, ‘follow the swing of the pendulum,’ and I follow the swing of the pendulum, ‘feel yourself drifting off,’ and I feel myself drifting off.

Eyelids closing.

Dark, but still light.

But hang on.

Where am I now?

At last, Malin thinks, as she sees Josefin Davidsson disappear inside herself, responding to Viveka Crafoord’s commands.

She’s written a list of questions for Viveka, who has made it very clear that she, and she alone, would talk to Josefin during the session. That it could be difficult otherwise, and that this wasn’t like an ordinary conversation, you had to follow images and words instead of subjects.

Viveka puts the pendulum on the desk.

The sound of cars out in Drottninggatan seeps into the room.

You can hear the five of us, our breathing, Malin thinks, how they are becoming one. Zeke’s face is expressionless, Malin knows how sceptical he is about this, even if he’d never admit that now that it’s happening.

Viveka takes down the list of questions from the top shelf of the bookcase.

‘Can you hear me, Josefin? I’d like to ask you some questions. Do you think you might be able to answer them?’

A white, echoless room.

A strange voice, my own voice.

‘Ask questions if you want.’

‘I’ll ask questions.’

‘I’m tired, I want to sleep.’

‘The Horticultural Society Park,’ the strange voice says, and a pure white light shines in through a hole in the wall, the windows go black and then disappear.

‘I woke up there.’

‘What happened before you woke up?’

‘I was asleep. Before I was asleep I was at the cinema.’

The light is fading now, the room turns grey and a dark figure is coming towards me, it might be a wolf or a dog or a hare or a person, but what sort of person walks on all fours?

‘Take the dog away.’

‘Was it a dog that put you to sleep?’

‘It’s gone now.’

‘Who put you to sleep?’

‘Mummy.’

The room is white again and I am alone, and up in the ceiling there are storage shelves, like giant lights. I see myself sleeping there, a pair of floating hands are patting me on the back, it smells like a swimming pool, like a dewless summer’s morning.

‘A pair of hands.’

‘Put you to sleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘A man’s hands, or a woman’s?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you remember the start of the evening?’

The walls of the room disappear, I see myself cycling through a small piece of woodland, on a tarmac path, on my way through the forest in Ryd down into the city, I don’t know why I’ve chosen that route, why?

‘I went through a forest.’

‘Which forest?’

‘The wrong forest. Why?’

The strange voice, the nuisance voice, a woman’s voice, older than most.

‘Why was it the wrong forest?’

‘Because something was lying in wait for me.’

‘What was in the forest?’

‘Something.’

‘Which forest?’

A force pushing me down, there’s only me now, and I fall asleep, wake up to the rumbling sound of a car.

‘Then I went in a car.’

‘Where?’

‘To the storage shelves that were in the ceiling just now.’

‘You got to a storeroom?’

My body on a bunk. The scrubbing, it stings, and it stinks. And what is this body doing with me, its teeth are shining, it’s cutting and my whole body hurts, stop pressing, stop pressing.

‘Stop pressing, STOP PRESSING, STOP PRESSING, STOP DOING THAT.’

The voice, the stranger: ‘It’s all right, you’re safe here, you can wake up now.’

I’m back in the white room, the dark figure disappears and I creep out, wandering through the wall, waking up in a summerhouse, it’s morning, and a nice person wakes me up, even though I’m not asleep. Is the person nice?

‘I fled, I was awake, but I didn’t see anything.’

‘Who found you in the park?’

‘Maybe a person. WAS IT A PERSON?’

‘You can wake up now. Wake up.’

Black.

Open eyes.

The police officer, the police officer, Mum with gentle eyes and the psychologist lady. They all have one thing in common. They all look confused.

Josefin Davidsson and her mother have left the clinic. Zeke has stretched out on the chaise longue and he looks ready to begin the first of many therapy sessions.

Viveka is sitting behind her desk, Malin by the window. She’s looking down at the cars on Drottninggatan, as they seem almost to dissolve in the dull light.

‘Well, that was a great help,’ Zeke says. ‘Well, almost, anyway.’

‘If I understood that right,’ Malin says, ‘she was attacked in a forest, driven to a storeroom somewhere, where she was abused until she managed to escape and found her way to the Horticultural Society Park?’

‘She was probably sedated in the forest,’ Viveka says.

‘But she didn’t say anything about who did it?’ Zeke says.

‘Not a damn thing,’ Malin adds.

‘I’m sorry,’ Viveka says. ‘But interviews conducted under hypnosis seldom give straight answers. The consciousness never wants to remember the very worst things.’

‘You tried your best,’ Malin says.

‘Can we try again? In a couple of days?’

Zeke converted, he seems to believe in this now.

‘I don’t think there’d be much point,’ Viveka says. ‘The memory is connected to the instinct for self-preservation. She’s shut off again now.’

Malin feels tired.

Wants to get home to Tove.

Wishes this investigation would finally get somewhere.

Anywhere, almost.

51

The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 6.15. The second hand is firmly attached, yet still seems somehow lost as it goes around. A summing-up meeting instead of a morning meeting.

The investigating team gathered around the table.

All of them tired, the greasy skin of their faces damp with sweat, their clothes crumpled and dirty from fine summer dust.

The run-through has just started.

Malin has told them about Svea Svensson and Sture Folkman, and about the hypnosis of Josefin Davidsson.

Bad news from Karin Johannison. The forensic examination of Suliman Hajif’s flat didn’t come up with anything. His computer contained a whole load of porn, but nothing to connect him to the murders in any way.

Blue Rose had sold thirty-four dildos, and one of the police constables had identified ten sites on the net that sold the same model. So, without a confession or some new evidence, they were stuck as far as Suliman Hajif was concerned.

‘How could we have missed checking out Blue Rose at the start of this?’ Zeke says.

‘We assumed that everyone bought that sort of toy on the internet,’ Malin says. ‘None of our heat-addled brains even considered that tragic little shop.’

‘Mistakes happen in every case,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘We could have saved Forensics some work. But there’s no way we can get anywhere with Blue Rose’s customers. Of course we can ask them to contact us, but that won’t get us anywhere. No one’s going to come forward and say they bought a dildo. I think we can all agree on that, can’t we? Hajif. Are we making any progress there?’

‘He has no alibi, but otherwise we haven’t got anything.’

Malin can hear the exhaustion in Waldemar Ekenberg’s voice. He probably wishes he was back in his villa in Mjölby, with just his usual hooligans to bully.

Another of their constables, Aronsson, had poked about in Sture Folkman’s personal history after Malin asked her to. According to the archive, one of the two daughters from his marriage to Gudrun Strömholm, Elisabeth, had committed suicide when she was seventeen. The officers investigating the case never had any doubt about the cause of death, and Forensics had given an unambiguous verdict. Elisabeth Folkman had hanged herself. Reason: unknown.

No longer so unknown.

Aronsson.

The best constable in her year.

She had also checked with the police in Nässjö about the fishing accident in which Louise Svensson’s father drowned.

His body had been found floating beside a rowing boat out in the middle of a lake, Ryssbysjön, with a wound in his forehead. Gunnar Svensson was assumed to have tripped in the boat, hit his head on the railing and fallen overboard, unconscious. Traces of blood had been found on the railing.

Sven tells them that they have finally and rather unexpectedly received a response from Yahoo! about the password to Theresa Eckeved’s email account, and that the only correspondence was ten emails to Lovelygirl, who, to judge by the content of the emails, was Louise Svensson. Her farm was mentioned by name. According to what they had got from the emails, no meeting had been arranged that could have coincided with the date of the murder. But there was still no answer from Facebook.

You want to keep your grubby little secrets, Louise, Malin thinks. Presumably you hoped that we wouldn’t find out what you’ve been up to? And once we did find out, you went on trying to protect yourself, your memories, everything that you are.

A lonely person living in the middle of the forest. But still a sex offender.

Then Sven tells them that the Specialist Unit in Stockholm was working on a psychological profile of the perpetrator, but that it would take time because the whole department was on holiday at the same time, and the relief psychologist had a bad cold.

‘Psychologists, pah! Wimps,’ Waldemar says.

Malin thinks about what Viveka Crafoord said about the killer’s profile, but keeps it to herself, it’s just idle speculation by Viveka based on non-existent evidence.

‘You’ll have to carry on with all lines of inquiry,’ Sven says. ‘Try to find new ones. Use every bit of intelligence you’ve got. Ekenberg, Sundsten, interview all the sex offenders you can get hold of.’

Karim Akbar beside Sven, worried, knows that he’s the one who’s going to have to face the media again, trying to duck their questions without having anything substantial to give them. The press conference has been arranged for seven o’clock that evening.

As they are all leaving the room Karim asks Malin to stay behind.

He asks her to sit down again.

‘Malin,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to tell you how much I want to get back to the house down in Västervik and go swimming again.’

He wants to talk to me about swimming?

‘Did you want anything in particular?’

‘Yes, I want you to take part in the press conference.’

‘The press conference? You know how much I hate things like that.’

‘That’s an order, Malin. If I haven’t got any new information for them, then at least I can give them a few minutes with the prettiest face in the Linköping Police.’

Anger wells up inside Malin.

At the same time she feels reluctantly flattered by Karim’s compliment.

‘Malin, joking aside, I don’t want to stand there on my own again with nothing to say. It would be nice if you could come along and say nothing as well. And helpful. It might calm them down a bit.’

‘So you don’t mean that stuff about being prettiest, then?’

Karim grins.

‘Look in the mirror, Malin.’

‘Can we let them have the dildo?’

‘That it was the same model?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, that could lead to everyone assuming that Suliman Hajif is guilty. He doesn’t deserve that yet. You saw the papers yesterday. That was bad enough.’

The papers had been full of pictures of Suliman Hajif with his face blacked out. Headlines like: Summertime Killer Caught? Terror in Linköping.

The prettiest face?

So that’s where this crazy summer has got me?

A role as a shop-window dummy.

Twenty minutes later Malin and Karim are standing before a group of journalists in the foyer of the police station. Of the television stations only SVT is there, but there are several radio stations and maybe ten press reporters, a couple of photographers, presumably from the Correspondent and the TT news agency. Twice as many journalists just a couple of days ago, her summer angels are quickly becoming less interesting, selling fewer papers now that the investigation’s got bogged down.

‘We have spent the day pursuing a number of lines of inquiry,’ Karim says.

There’s a crackle of flash photography before he goes on: ‘We’re expecting a breakthrough in the case shortly, but for the time being I don’t have any further information for you.’

‘What about you, Malin, can you tell us anything?’

More flashes, and Malin squints.

Daniel.

She didn’t see him before, he must have been late arriving.

‘No.’

‘Nothing?’

And Malin sees the gang of reporters, the hunger in their eyes, the curiosity and exhaustion, just like their own, and before she knows it the words are pouring from her mouth: ‘Well, we’ve been in touch with a psychoanalyst who has put together a simple profile of the perpetrator. We’re probably dealing with someone who has themselves been the victim of abuse, who has a fragile ego, and a distorted self-image. A person who is part of society, yet still somehow separate. I can’t say any more than that.’

‘And the name of the psychoanalyst?’

‘I’m afraid we can’t reveal that.’

Karim fills in this last remark, making the best of the fact that Malin is revealing information that no one else knows about, having evidently decided that there’s no harm in it.

‘The profile isn’t official, and was produced in haste, and they’re currently working on a more detailed profile at National Crime.’

‘What about Suliman Hajif? You’re still holding him? Any new evidence against him?’

‘We’re still holding him in custody.’

‘But you expect to be able to rule him out of the investigation?’

‘No comment,’ Karim says. ‘That’s all.’

Several of the reporters want to interview Malin on her own, but she fends them off, saying: ‘My daughter’s waiting for me at home. I’m heading home to my daughter, sorry.’

With a start she realised the cameras weres still rolling.

‘That’s off the record,’ she said.

How stupid, Malin thought to herself. The last thing I need is to share personal details with the viewing public.

Tove and Malin are finishing off the pizzas she picked up on the way home, no longer hot, but almost nicer in this heat now that they’re cold.

Tove still tired after the flight home.

She’s slept most of the day away, never got out for that swim, hasn’t even met Markus, but she’s spoken to him.

‘When are you going to see Markus?’ Malin asks as she stuffs the last of the pizza in her mouth.

‘Tomorrow,’ Tove says curtly, and Malin can sense the end of the love-story in the dull tone of the word.

A shame, Malin thinks, because I really do like Biggan and Hasse, Markus’s parents, I appreciate their dinners and their relaxed, cheerful company.

‘Did you miss him while you were in Bali?’

‘I don’t know, Mum. Can we talk about something else? Do you have to go on about Markus?’

From inside the living room they can hear the start of the nine o’clock news on television.

‘I might be on it,’ Malin says, and Tove lights up.

‘This I have to see!’

It’s the third item and they make a big deal of the profile in the absence of anything else. A close-up of Malin as she answers questions, and she thinks how old she looks, tired and washed out, wishes she’d put some make-up on or at least brushed her hair, but she did none of that in spite of Karim’s encouragement.

‘You look lovely, Mum,’ Tove says with a wry grin.

‘Thanks Tove, that warms the cockles of my heart.’

‘Are you cold?’

‘I wish!’

Then another clip of Malin as they ask for an interview, as she brushes the camera aside with the words: ‘I’m heading home to my daughter.’

‘Damn it! Why didn’t they edit that comment out?’

Tove gives her a curious look.

‘Why did you say that, Mum?’

‘I was careless.’

Then the weather.

The heatwave is going to continue. No end in sight.

The policewoman.

Malin Fors.

In front of me on the television screen in my secret room. The storeroom shelves are stuffed and the stench doesn’t exist for me, just the heat, a hell that I have sought out and must find my way through.

I’ve seen her swim.

At Tinnis.

Cooling herself down in this inferno.

Does she think she knows who I am? That she can call some psychoanalyst and find out who I am?

And on television? Where anyone can see?

If anything in life was that fucking easy I’d have completed my one single task long ago.

We’d be together again.

None of us would need to be alone or scared any more.

I shall be like fire. Destroying, creating the possibility of new life.

This violation stops here, you’ve violated me, like everyone has always violated me.

You’re moving inside me.

And what I just saw must be a sign, mustn’t it, the scratching of white spiders’ legs with rabbits’ claws in the dust of the bed. Shall I rattle the rabbits’ claws above her neck? Is that what you want?

I’ll try with the claws. They’ll tear you again. I’ll scrub with the milky white, that’s what I’ll do. Your skin will be a white dress. Impossible to trace, of course. Like the dildo. I bought it with cash down in the city last year. He said he’d sold a lot of them. I knew it would come in handy.

I’ll show you. She will become you, you will become her.

You’re leading me in the right direction, Malin Fors. Pain breeds pain which breeds love again. You mentioned your daughter on television. Why? She must be your whole world. Isn’t she?

I just hope she’s the right age.

My summer angel.

The pure love of summertime angels.

I can see it in you.

You’re longing for resurrected love, just like me.

I’m going to escape my longing, and yours will begin.

Balance.

Maybe that’s what’s missing?

What I’ve been missing?

What we’ve been missing.

52

Friday, 23 July

See how Tove rides her bike down there, taking care not to get into trouble with other traffic, better to get there slowly than not get there at all.

The roof of the Hotel Ekoxen, the Horticultural Society Park like a green mirage, the water of the pool at Tinnis like a shimmering blue promise.

She’s going to meet someone, isn’t she?

Yes, I think so.

Us?

No.

I don’t want that, it would make me miserable.

Now she’s cycling across the bridge over Tinnerbäcken, then struggling up the slope towards Ramshäll.

That’s where the rich people live.

She isn’t rich.

No.

Now I can’t see her any more.

She’s beneath the canopy of the trees.

But you can sense that as well, can’t you, Sofia?

Yes, I can sense it.

She must be careful.

Careful.

Markus.

It’s odd. First she couldn’t be without him, then everything became sort of normal; not boring or anything, just normal. He didn’t exactly turn into a friend, but it wasn’t like it was at the start either.

Tove knew that she wouldn’t miss him in Bali, she just knew, and she knew what that meant.

It’s hotter at home that it was there.

And the light is ten times sharper.

It’s a good thing I’ve got good sunglasses.

Mum doesn’t like wearing sunglasses, she thinks they distort reality. I like it when the world gets a bit more yellow.

Her heart is pounding in her chest as she stands up to pedal up the hill into Ramshäll, past the brick villas and the big wooden houses occupied by the most prominent of the city’s inhabitants.

Markus’s mum and dad are people like that. Doctors, both of them. She’d liked that as well to start with; their big house, not at all like at home, it was a bit like one of the books she’d read: the girl of the people, the man better off, like a prince or duke.

But the house became normal as well, it wasn’t like in any of the books. Bali. That wasn’t normal.

On her way to the house and Markus now. He wanted to come up with something to do, and he must have been able to tell from her voice over the phone last night that she wasn’t sure. She thought about it last night as she was falling asleep. How she somehow can’t imagine seeing Markus the way she used to. Of course they can meet up, but not like that.

How to say that to him?

It’s like she means more to him.

A white van drives past her, slowly, presumably looking for an address, probably a gardener.

Finally, their white brick villa. The big apple trees look sad, the trunks look like they’re about to crack in the heat. The front door opens before she’s even had time to park her bike on the path.

Markus.

Thin and pale, and he smiles.

Tove smiles back, thinking: Hope my smile looks genuine. It’s good that he can’t see my eyes.

Then she thinks: Is it always like this? That when you aren’t in love any more everything is just flat? Isn’t there anything else?

Karin Johannison is in her office, feeling restless. She gets up, sits down, puts her feet up on the desk, her pink painted toenails perfectly matching the narrow pink stripes of her Prada sandals. She bought them in Milan back in the spring, when she and Kalle were there on a shopping trip.

Restless.

Karin doesn’t know why, but one of the reasons is probably that she and Kalle had sex like idiots all night, they had the windows open and the night heat, damp but somehow fresh, had made them wilder than usual.

She can feel him inside her still, wants him inside her now, is that why she can’t sit still?

They don’t really talk to each other much any more.

Not about anything.

And certainly not about the fact that they have never been able to have children, in spite of a thousand doctors and as many appointments. Instead they fuck. They’ve been doing that ever since they first met, and now their fucking is confirmation, that they’re OK, that they still look at each other, and Karin thinks that that gets them a long way, but only a child can get you all the way.

Wordless love is nothing to be afraid of. Words don’t get you far anyway.

But there’s something more than her residual lust that’s making her restless.

Have I missed something important?

Is that why I feel restless?

Karin sits down, switches on the computer, reads through her report about Josefin Davidsson. Watertight.

She reads through her report about Theresa Eckeved.

Probably murdered out at the beach.

Why?

No marks on the body to suggest it had been moved after death.

The soil under her nails matched the soil found at the scene, in both structure and content.

But.

Did I check all her nails? All the soil?

No.

I should have done. There could have been different soil under different nails.

Sloppy.

Heat-fuddled sloppiness.

I was probably rushing, wanted to get a report to Malin and the others as soon as possible, and I took it for granted that the soil was the same under all her nails.

Have to check now. As long as there’s still some soil left under the other nails.

She remembers the scrubbed clean body.

Scrubbed, but there were still traces of soil under the nails, even if they were scarcely visible. Why did the killer miss that? Unless it wasn’t there for the killer, in his or her dark tunnel.

She’s standing beside what was once me in other people’s eyes, scraping the soil from under the nails of my left middle and index fingers.

I know who the woman is, Dad.

What does she want now?

I’ve never got used to the chill of this room. The small windows up by the ceiling, the metal worktops, the stainless steel cabinets containing us, the drawer-like metal bed where I am lying now, and then there’s the smell of surgical spirit and a lack of fresh air. It’s a clean smell, clean, but heavy with sorrow and a feeling that this was how it all ended up, no more, no less.

What does she want with my fingers?

With the soil?

Must you be so methodical, efficient? That’s actually me lying there on the stainless steel, my body completely cold, scrubbed clean, the blood stiff in its veins.

But it’s still me.

Tell her, Dad.

I want her to stop treating me like an object. Do you hear, you, the one called Karin?

I want you to stroke me over the forehead, I want you to show that I am still someone as I lie there, but you’re working quietly and methodically, and that makes me even more scared.

Please.

Stroke my forehead.

Put my hair in place.

Show me that I’m still a person.

The air-conditioning unit in the lab has given up and the building’s own ventilation system can do little more than circulate the hot air from outside. For some tests, those requiring cold, this would be a disaster, and Karin has called the engineers.

But she doesn’t need cool for soil analysis and drops of sweat are beading on her forehead, she’s not wearing her white lab-coat and her pale-mauve sleeveless Ralph Lauren top is glowing under the neon lights.

The body down there just now.

She doesn’t know why, but before she pushed it back into the refrigerated cabinet she stroked the girl over the forehead. Several times. Calmly and carefully. Gently stroking her hand over Theresa’s brow. She’s never done anything like that before.

The sheet detailing the first soil analysis on the worktop.

The new sample in the microscope.

Her eye focuses.

She can see at once that they aren’t the same soil. The soil under these nails is from somewhere else. The soil under the nails of the other hand was sandy, its crystalline structure sharper.

She does other tests. This new soil is typical mineral-rich compost, the sort you buy in sacks from garden centres. This soil comes from a garden, or a park.

So, Karin thinks, she could have been moved after death, and if she were struggling to get away, scratching at the earth to get a grip and flee, she did it somewhere other than the beach. The soil from the beach could have got there as the body was pulled down the slope or put down on the ground.

But where?

Malin will probably think this is interesting, even if it doesn’t really mean anything at all.

Karin opens the curtain.

She can just make out the yellow-white façade of the hospital.

One week until her holiday.

I’ll end up getting ill if I don’t get away from here.

Karin looks around the lab. Test tubes, flasks, fume cupboards, eye-baths, all of it very sexy in an inexplicable way. She sees herself up on the worktop, her cotton skirt around her thighs, Kalle thrusting deep inside her.

As deep as he possibly can.

Markus a metre or so from Tove on the sofa in the recreation room.

Cooler down here, the indoor pool behind the glass empty for the summer.

‘In the summer you swim outside!’ Markus’s mum Biggan had said when Tove asked about it in June.

He wants her to come closer. He doesn’t need to say it, it’s obvious from his body language. But Tove doesn’t want to, wants to tell him that she has to go, but she doesn’t know where to start.

He’s going to be upset.

‘Come and sit next to me.’

His Iron Maiden T-shirt is just childish. Like all hard rock. As if he doesn’t want to grow up, even though their bodies do.

But they haven’t had sex.

Markus has wanted to, and so has she, but they still haven’t. To start with they used to lie next to each other in the recreation room, under an itchy, brightly patterned, crocheted blanket, and she would hold him in her hand, but no more than that, and he would have his fingers on her pants, but no further.

The heat, different from the sort when she just looked at him, scared her.

She doesn’t know why.

53

The conversation had been short. Just after a morning meeting during which nothing new was raised.

Karin Johannison had told Malin that Theresa’s body might have been moved, and that there was high-quality compost under her fingers, and Malin had pointed out at once that if she had been moved from somewhere then the likeliest place was her home, the beds in the garden were full of new compost. It might be worth a look.

She and Zeke met up with Karin in the car park outside the National Forensics Laboratory, best to arrive together even though Karin was driving her own car, its boot full of the equipment needed for fieldwork.

They pull up outside Theresa Eckeved’s parents’ villa.

As they drove past Malin’s childhood home she looked the other way. It was as if the house was calling inaudibly to her, as if it wanted her to go there, and try to recreate what had existed a long time ago.

‘Secrets,’ the voices seemed to cry.

‘Come, and we’ll tell you some secrets.’

‘Are you coming?’ Zeke calls to Karin, frowning, his tone aggressive rather than impatient. Malin imagines that he might just be annoyed that Karin may have missed something that turns out to be important, but how many times have they overlooked things? Like the porn shop?

But no one is faultless. Things being overlooked are part of every investigation.

‘I’m coming. Could you maybe help me with one of my bags?’

Zeke goes over to Karin, picks up one of her large black bags and they head up a white paved path, the bushes not watered, forgotten.

They ring the bell and Sigvard Eckeved opens the door half a minute later.

Surprise and suspicion, but also anticipation.

Have you got him?

And Malin sees the hope in his green-blue eyes, a flash of life, and she says that they have reason to believe that their daughter may have been murdered in a different location from the beach and that they would therefore like to conduct a cursory search of the house, just to rule out the possibility that she was attacked at home.

‘You can’t imagine that I, we . . .’

‘Not for a second,’ Zeke says, and Sigvard Eckeved steps aside and his body is heavy, as if the true note of grief had penetrated his system and taken it over.

‘If it would help your inquiries, you’re welcome to burn the whole house down.’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘There are probably enough fires around here as it is.’

‘True enough,’ Sigvard Eckeved says. ‘Well, do whatever you need to. The wife’s in the city seeing her shrink.’

Malin is going through the beds around the terrace and pool, searching for clues, broken twigs, signs of a struggle, but all she can find are withered red roses that long ago gave up in the heat.

She’s out in the sun and has to keep wiping the sweat from her eyes and forehead. She can see Zeke on the other side of the lawn, where there’s a large vegetable patch between the lawn and the neighbour’s fence.

Karin inside the house.

Malin had just been thinking how well she fits in with this chic pool environment, in her skirt and her silly pale-mauve armless designer top.

Then Zeke calls out: ‘Over here!’

And Malin can hear from his voice that he’s confident, that he’s found something important.

‘She must have tried to escape next door.’

The vegetable patch is full of drooping potatoes, bolted carrots, rhubarb that no one bothered to pick. The signs of a struggle are obvious, almost solidified in the drought and lack of rain and absence of watering, and they can see footsteps, the way her body must have fallen into the plants, then how someone had tried to pull Theresa backwards and she had struggled, digging her fingers in the soil, trying to cling to life.

‘We need Karin,’ Zeke says. ‘Whatever she’s up to. I imagine she’s inside, in the cool.’

Sigvard Eckeved has slumped onto one of the chairs on the terrace, his daughter’s death even closer now, physically in their home, and it seems to Malin that he’s been struck with the realisation that they can’t possibly go on living here, now that this is/has become a place of violence.

Malin crouches down beside him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘It’s OK,’ Sigvard Eckeved says, and Malin realises what this loss means for him, that things can’t get any worse, that there might even be some small comfort in the fact that his daughter was at home when she was attacked.

‘But I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How am I going to tell the wife? It’ll break her.’

Once Karin has finished in the vegetable garden she turns to Malin, who has been watching from the shade of a pear tree.

‘She most likely would have come from the pool,’ Karin says. ‘The perpetrator probably attacked her there and she tried to escape in this direction. I didn’t find anything inside, no traces of blood or anything.’

‘You’ll need to check around the pool.’

‘That’s where I’m heading next, Malin.’

A minute later Karin is going around the pool, and the water seems to simmer in the heat, inviting and off-putting at the same time in its ostentatious blueness. Karin sprays Luminol on the wooden decking and the stone edge of the pool, hoping that the liquid will make any traces of blood glow in the relative darkness as she goes along shading the ground with a blue towel.

‘I knew it,’ Karin says when she reaches the part of the pool closest to the garage. ‘I knew it,’ she repeats.

Malin hurries over, and Zeke emerges from inside the house.

Sigvard Eckeved remains seated on his chair, his face expressionless.

‘Look here,’ Karin says, waving them over, and under the towel are some twenty small patches surrounded by splashes. ‘The perpetrator tried to get rid of it. But I can promise you that this was where Theresa received that blow to the head.’

‘Can you get a blood-type or anything from that?’

Zeke hopeful.

‘I’m afraid not. Nothing like that,’ Karin replies. ‘What you see here are just little ghosts of reality.’

Malin is crouching beside Sigvard Eckeved again.

‘Who would have had any reason to be here?’

‘Who?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There’s no one who comes to mind?’

‘No one. Sorry.’

‘No one?’

‘No, it could have been anyone.’

‘No gardener? No one like that?’

‘I usually do all the work myself. Together with my wife.’

‘And the pool?’

‘We have someone who comes in early May each year. When we fill it. But this year I did it myself. Last summer we had workmen here, doing improvements to the terrace.’

Malin’s mobile rings from her jacket pocket.

‘Fors here.’

‘Malin? This is Aronsson. I’ve finished the expanded background check of Sture Folkman. Do you want me to go through it over the phone?’

‘I’m busy right now. Can we take it in an hour or so? Back at the station?’

‘Sure. There are a couple of slightly unclear things I want to sort out.’

Malin puts the phone away.

Sigvard Eckeved has started to cry, his whole body shaking, and Malin wants to help him but doesn’t know how, and instead she puts her hand silently on his arm and doesn’t say that everything will be all right, that it will all sort itself out.

Don’t cry, Dad.

I’m scared, but I’m OK.

I was scared when it happened by the pool, out in the garden. It was awful, really awful.

But everything’s coming together now.

I can feel it.

Evil.

Even that has a pain threshold where everything cracks.

When it becomes visible and can be driven back.

When people can start to enjoy the summer again in peace and quiet, just like they imagined they would, with no pain.

But first things need to reach a solution. What you call the truth needs to be revealed, however terrible it is.

And you, Malin, you have a visit to make.

You need to pay a visit to yourself. Maybe looking back can lead you forward. What do you think, Dad?

I know you’re never going to forget me.

As long as you remember me, I’ll be there wherever you are.

And that’s a comfort, isn’t it?

54

The house is empty of people, but when Malin looks in through the living-room window and sees the mess of toys, she can hear the sound of children shouting, happy laughter, yelling and crying resulting from clashes about who gets the toy car, the stuffed animal, the crayon.

A young family lives in the house in which she grew up.

She told Zeke and Karin to go on ahead, said she wanted to walk around the area for a bit and that she’d get a taxi back. But Karin said that Zeke could go with her, and Zeke didn’t protest, just said, to Malin’s surprise: ‘That makes sense.’

She rang the bell, but guessed no one was home, and now she’s walking around to the back of the house. The grass is scorched to ruination, probably not watered all summer, and the fence around the terrace is flaking, the wood dry, no one’s found time to oil it for several years.

Dad would be upset if he could see this, Malin thinks. The pedant, Mr Careful, cheered on by Mum, Mrs Better Than She Really Is.

Mum.

Why couldn’t, why can’t you be happy with what you are? Excuses about the flat in Tenerife: ‘We were going to buy a house, but looking after a garden and pool is so much work.’

The hedge between the garden and the neighbours, younger people living there as well now, and she remembers chasing a football around the lawn on her own on summer evenings, with Dad shouting at her not to hit the apple trees and currant bushes with the ball, and Mum lying in the hammock drinking chilled white wine and staring out into space rather than at her, looking as if she’d rather be somewhere else.

Winter.

Snowmen and secret paths through the snow, days and nights of darkness that never ended, her glowing cheeks, and how she used to fight with Ida, the neighbours’ daughter, once making her nose bleed, and she felt so bad afterwards, the violence made her feel sick.

Mum and Dad’s silence. The way they would circle each other like silent snakes, Malin with a big black pit in her stomach, the sense that something had gone wrong and must be kept secret at all costs.

What was it that I couldn’t see?

Why was I so abrupt with Dad on the phone last time he rang?

And she misses them at that moment. Sees them before her in the flat in Tenerife that she’s never been to, Mum in a flowery dress, Dad in a tennis T-shirt and shorts, eating breakfast on the terrace and talking about their neighbours, the neighbourhood, the weather, but never about her or Tove.

Why don’t they care more about Tove?

Dutiful love. The love of least resistance. She’s you, for God’s sake, Malin feels like shouting. You.

She breathes in the warm summer air, feeling the years and all the unreachable memories take hold of the person she has become. She crouches down.

What is it that I’m not seeing?

Snow turning to water.

She goes over to the terrace, looks in through the kitchen window and in spite of the glass she can hear a tap dripping.

The kitchen is new, white Ikea cabinets, the Faktum range, shining in the relative darkness, the dining room off to the left, a table similar to the one they had, white-painted pine with uncomfortable, high-backed chairs.

A dripping tap.

Water.

Always this water.

Chlorinated pools, beaches for summer swimming. The apparently aimless movements of girls working over the summer.

What is it about water? Malin thinks. You want something to do with purity, with water, don’t you?

Malin walks quickly away from the house, can’t get away fast enough.

‘What have you got against me, Zacharias?’

Karin Johannison presses the accelerator and Zeke sees the white, long, lace-edged cotton skirt mould itself to her thigh, sees her fine, long blonde hair draped across her sharp cheekbones.

‘I haven’t got anything against you,’ Zeke says.

‘We work together so much,’ Karin says, ‘and it would be easier if we got on.’

Zeke looks out through the windscreen, sits in silence watching the trees on the far side of the cycle path, and wonders why he instinctively dislikes Karin so much. Is it her money? The self-confidence that comes of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth? Is it her nonchalant manner? Or is the cause of his dislike somewhere inside him? A woman. Does he have a problem with the fact that she’s a woman, and so damn attractive, and that she doesn’t fit the image of what a Forensics expert should be?

But that’s just my own prejudice, Zeke thinks. Then he realises what it is. Realises that he’s known ever since the first time he saw her. Impossible attraction means that you keep your distance. If I can’t have you, I can always make you feel bad, feel worthless, even if that’s the exact opposite of what I want.

‘I don’t know,’ Zeke says.

‘Don’t know what?’

‘Why I’ve always been so abrupt with you. But that’s all over now.’

Karin doesn’t say anything. But after a few long moments she takes her eyes off the road and looks at him with gratitude and warmth, and perhaps also desire.

Police Constable Aronsson has been blessed with an outsized bust that is scarcely contained within her grey police shirt, and Malin knows that she’s already a running joke among her male colleagues: Bustbuster, give us this day our daily breasts, making a clean breast of things . . .

But Aronsson is smart and tenacious and has no delusions or testosterone-dreams about what the profession is or should be.

She puts her notes down on Malin’s desk and Malin and Zeke lean forward in their chairs, listening carefully to what she has to say.

‘I’ve done the expanded background check on Sture Folkman, like you asked.’

Aronsson’s face is gentle, but her unfortunately protruding top teeth make her less attractive than she would otherwise be.

‘He arrived here as a wartime evacuee from Finland. Evidently saw his whole family burned alive in Karelia. He ended up at a farm in the north of Skåne, outside Ängelholm. That’s where he took his school diploma.’

Aronsson pauses for breath before going on: ‘He divorced his second wife in 1980. They had two daughters. One of them killed herself in 1985, the investigation seems to have been fairly straightforward if you read the report, she was found hanged and had apparently been in and out of psychiatric institutions for years.’

Cold white hands under the covers.

Stop, Dad, stop, I’m your daughter.

There there, there there.

Malin forces the image from her mind. Some men should be castrated and strung up in public.

‘And the other daughter lives in Australia? That’s what Folkman implied.’

Aronsson shakes her head.

‘She lives here in the city. She’s been registered at an address in the Vasastan district for the past couple of years.’

‘Anything else on her?’

‘Her first name’s Vera. Forty-two years old. But I can’t find any other details anywhere.’

A quick, improvised meeting about the state of the case.

It is almost six o’clock, and they’re all tired from the heat, from many days’ intense hard work, and Malin wants to get home to Tove.

Sven Sjöman at the end of Malin’s desk as quiet activity goes on around them in the office. Karim Akbar has already gone home, said he had a migraine. He’s never had one before, Malin thinks.

‘So Theresa Eckeved was probably murdered at home?’

Sven’s voice slightly less tired than in previous meetings.

‘We’re not sure. But that’s where she was attacked. She may have been moved somewhere else before being buried at the beach,’ Malin says. ‘So the killer may have some connection to the house. But nothing has emerged from talking to the family and those close to them. And the parents’ alibis are watertight.’

‘Any other news?’

‘Vera Folkman. Her father, Sture, said she lives in Australia, but she’s registered here in Linköping. We’re thinking of going to see her first thing tomorrow.’

‘Good,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘That’s just the sort of discrepancy that you have to look into to make any progress in cases like this.’

‘We know that talking to Vera Folkman is clutching at straws,’ Zeke says.

Sven turns to look at Waldemar Ekenberg and Per Sundsten, who are sitting at the other end of the desk.

‘What about you?’

‘We’re checking the last names on the list of sex offenders,’ Per says. ‘And we thought we’d talk to people close to Suliman Hajif. It doesn’t look like we’re going to get much further with Suliman.’