Summertime Death

‘Can we get the prosecutor to hold him for a bit longer?’

‘I doubt it, I spoke to him a short while ago and the evidence is far too weak to hold him on grounds of reasonable probability.’

‘Better to let him go,’ Sven says, ‘and watch what he gets up to. What about Louise Svensson? Anything new there?’

‘We’ve been checking on her regularly. But she’s just been working on her farm,’ Malin says. ‘And I’ve got my doubts about Visnic.’

‘OK, we’ll carry on tomorrow,’ Sven says, looking at Malin with a frown.

‘Something you wanted to tell us, Malin?’

‘No. Just a feeling.’

‘So . . .’

‘It can wait,’ Malin says.

And Sven lets it go, saying: ‘And we still don’t know who called in about Josefin Davidsson. And we still don’t have any idea what happened to her bike.’

Tove isn’t answering the phone. Not her mobile, and not the landline at home.

Where is she?

Malin is sitting at her desk, feeling her anxiety get the better of her. She’s just called Markus and he said she left his house two hours ago, that they’d spent the day swimming at Tinnis.

Tove.

I told you to be careful.

Malin gets up, goes out to the car.

Malin opens the door of the flat, runs up the stairs. Calls: ‘Tove! Tove, are you home?’

Silence.

Silent rooms.

Kitchen empty.

Living room empty.

Tove’s bedroom empty.

Bathroom empty.

‘Tove! Tove!’

Malin opens the door to her bedroom. Tove, please be lying on the bed.

55

Karim Akbar takes the hot cup of espresso from the machine and looks around the kitchen. The stainless-steel draining board that was specially ordered to cover the whole area under the glassy tiles his wife had picked out from one of the international interior design magazines she usually picks up from Presstop down in Trädgårdstorget. The doors were also ordered specially, painted in a colour known as British racing green, and the table and chairs are oak, bought from Room in Stockholm.

No migraine.

Just a feeling that he had to be alone.

He thinks about the book he should be writing, but which he will probably never manage to produce.

He doesn’t even believe his thesis about integration himself.

The house in Lambohov is silent.

Is there anything more silent than a home in summer when the people who inhabit it are somewhere else?

He and his wife have been arguing more and more since the spring. About nothing, and he’s noticed that their son is getting upset, is wary in their company, reluctant to talk, and Karim feels sorry for him but doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t have the energy to do anything. All the masks he has to wear, at work, in other official situations and here at home, have exhausted him beyond mere exhaustion.

Why do we argue?

Karim breathes in the smell of their home, as its nooks and crannies become visible in the dim light.

She isn’t happy. That much is clear. She finds fault everywhere and maybe she finds me offensive? No. But I irritate her and that in turn makes me irritated.

Their son.

In his formative years.

I, we, mustn’t mess him up.

And Karim thinks of his father, and how he found him hanging in the flat in Nacksta one summer’s day, almost as hot as today.

I was twelve years old.

I learned what despair was. But I refused to believe that even love has its limits.

I go too far sometimes, Waldemar Ekenberg thinks as he sprays water over the roses in the back garden of his house in Mjölby.

His wife is in the kitchen. Making a salad to go with that evening’s barbecue, the pork has been marinating since the morning, the wine open to breathe, no wine box crap here.

But do I go too far?

My colleagues have reported me, suspects have reported me, but nothing has ever come of it and I deliver the goods, more than other people, and with a case like this one? With a bastard like that on the loose, no one cares if someone suffers a bit as long as no one really gets hurt.

That’s what being human is.

Sometimes you get squeezed by circumstances, that’s just the way it is. You just have to accept it, just like most suffering.

The woman in the kitchen wanted children.

I wasn’t that fussed, Waldemar thinks. But God knows, they tried. Test tubes all over the place, wanking into little pots in dimly lit bathrooms with a cheap porn magazine in his lap.

Then she hit forty-five and all that stopped.

They share that fate with a lot of other couples.

And here I stand in our garden. The sky getting darker. Stars lighting up in distant galaxies. Earthly life huddling together, and I can honestly say that I still love her.

Per Sundsten is standing at the hotdog kiosk in Borensberg. Built in the fifties, it’s the archetypal Swedish kiosk with an adjoining waiting room for bus passengers. He’s ordered a pork-burger with cheese, and is planning to take it down to the Göta Canal to eat it in peace and quiet as he watches the boats, before heading home to his flat in Motala.

The advantages of the single life.

I do what I want with my time. No one to tell me what to do.

‘There you go.’

The kiosk owner, an immigrant, hands him the burger, the cheese almost running down the sides of the meat.

He sits down on a bench overlooking the canal.

A man and woman, about the same age as him, go past on a blue yacht. They’re sitting in the cockpit drinking wine, and they wave to him and he takes a sip of his Pucko chocolate milkshake and waves back.

Ekenberg is crazy.

But at the same time it’s reassuring to have him by his side. He knows how to do this. I’m probably better suited to the Financial Crime Unit in Stockholm.

Motala. Not too dissimilar to Kalmar, where he grew up, an old industrial town now full of drugs and problems, but still with the appearance of a small-town idyll. But hardly the best place for a thirty-year-old to live.

The case they’re working on. He can’t get a grip on any of it. The threads are running together and it feels as though he’s mostly a passenger, that he doesn’t have anything to contribute.

Fors.

She’s driven and manic and a bit scary. She almost seems frightened of herself. But if anyone can solve this case it’s her.

He takes a bite of the fried meat.

Another boat goes past.

A man is sitting in the cockpit. He looks lonely, Per thinks.

Zeke shovels another mouthful of plaice into his mouth. His wife looks at him, then she looks down at the kitchen table, with a pointed glance at the holiday brochures opened at various destinations: Sunny Beach in Bulgaria; Crete; Costa Dorada. Dreams packaged as dreams.

‘I can’t begin to think about that at the moment. About going anywhere.’

She’s sitting opposite him, pointing at Sunny Beach.

‘This one’s supposed to be cheap. What do you think?’

‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’

The kitchen suddenly seems extremely small, the brown pine units are crowding in on me, Zeke thinks, and he wants to escape into the garden, but she’s not about to let go.

‘Lennart and Siv went to Crete last summer. They said it was lovely. And it’s easy to get deals now that the weather’s so good here.’

‘This fish is good. Plaice is always good at this time of year.’

‘Or what do you think about Spain? That’s still the classic, after all.’

She leafs through one of the brochures.

‘How about Rimini?’

He looks at her. Martin’s mother, his wife. Who are you? he thinks. The investigation, the heat, the light, the dust, and Karin Johannison’s legs under white fabric in the car. Everything creates new perspectives, making him a stranger in his own life.

Karin Johannison is standing naked by the swimming pool on the terrace behind the house, one of the largest in Ramshäll, the garden not overlooked at all thanks to the mature shrubs. The evening smells of sulphur and pine resin.

Kalle in front of the television in the living room.

He’s watching one of those old films on TCM that he’s so fond of, a Frank Capra comedy.

They had the pool installed back in the spring, they’d both wanted one for years.

They have help maintaining it, a neighbour put them onto a woman who looks after pools. She comes when they aren’t at home, cleans it up, adjusts the chlorine levels, and Karin has never met her, but Kalle says she seems to know what she’s doing, although she never says much and always wants to be paid in cash.

Whatever.

She thinks about what Martinsson said in the car.

About him.

Almost ten years older, and she’s often wondered what he had against her, but she believed him, that there would be no more bad feeling from now on. And the way he looked at me. I could have stopped the car and done what people do at the side of the road.

A long hot crazy summer.

Heat all around me.

Heat within me.

I know how to escape it, Karin thinks, and pushes off with her feet, sailing through the air before her body cleaves the surface and everything becomes cool and miraculously silent.

Malin has crept in beside Tove.

She was lying in bed, still tired after the flight. Malin woke her, told her off: ‘The battery in my mobile ran out, I just met up with Julia and we got an ice cream from Bosse’s, then did some people-watching in Stora torget. Mum, it’s no big deal.’

And Tove fell asleep again. Malin was feeling tired too. In the kitchen she drank half a tumbler of tequila, thinking that they were finally getting somewhere now, that soon this would all be over. And she sensed how worried she was.

Then she went back in to Tove.

Took off all her clothes but her underwear.

Crept under the sheet and felt her daughter’s warm skin and the gentle vibrations from her beating heart, reason enough to carry on fighting, living.

56

Saturday, 24 July

What are we going to do with all these people? The ones who can’t control their desires, the ones who damage other people because they themselves have been damaged?

A bloody big camp up in Norrland.

A suicidal cliff of desire.

Chemical castration.

Real castration.

Electronic surveillance.

It’s early in the morning and Per Sundsten can’t work out what he thinks as he and Waldemar Ekenberg follow a still sleepy Arto Sovalaski through the hall of his red wooden cottage on the outskirts of Linghem, a dormitory suburb just to the east of Linköping. They just passed through a neatly tended garden, parched like everything green, with gooseberry bushes in close formation along the gravel path leading to the house.

‘I know why you’re here. And on a Saturday and all. Shouldn’t you be having a day off?’

‘At least we didn’t have to have a morning meeting,’ Per says, watching Arto Sovalaski shuffle in front of them. Possibly the most exhausted man in the world, his face wrecked from drink and smoking, with no trace at all of any dreams for the future.

The stench of sweat in the house.

‘We shouldn’t be working,’ Per goes on, ‘but right now Linköping has been visited by the big bad.’

Arto Sovalaski, the last name on the list of known sex offenders in their district.

His torso covered by a stained yellow T-shirt with a picture of a digger on the front.

‘Do you work?’

Waldemar’s question as they enter the living room and Arto Sovalaski has settled onto the yellow and brown patterned sofa, the only piece of furniture in the room. Bottles and overflowing ashtrays all over the wooden floor.

‘No, I got an early pension.’

Well, thinks Per, I daresay no one really wants to have you around. Four rapes in four months ten years ago in different places, Växjö, Karlstad, Örebro, and one here in Linköping. Since then, nothing.

‘So you know why we’re here?’

‘Yes, it’s happened before when there’s been some sex-related crime in the city. Then you come running. But you can clear off again, because I was away when it happened, visiting friends over on Öland. Call them.’

Waldemar goes closer.

Not again, Per thinks.

But Waldemar backs down this time.

‘Have you got the number for your friends?’

‘Sure.’

Ten minutes later they’re sitting in the car on the way back in to the city, Arto Sovalaski’s alibi confirmed by a drunk Finn on the other side of the Kalmar Sound.

‘Well, that’s that line of inquiry exhausted,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says. ‘Let’s get back to the station and put the squeeze on Suliman one last time before he gets out.’

‘They let him go last night,’ Per says.

‘Did they, now?’ Waldemar says. ‘Did they, now?’

A bit of a lie-in.

They indulged themselves seeing as it’s Saturday, and it’s nine o’clock when Malin goes downstairs to meet Zeke

The second Saturday of this case. Just over a week has passed since the eruption. But it feels like several years, as if they’re dealing with a drawn-out plague.

The heat hasn’t improved. It may even be a bit worse.

The grey stone façade of the church is quivering in the air, fading into a sickly yellow nuance, and the quiver in the air means that Malin can’t make out the inscription.

Zeke, where are you?

He called ten minutes ago as he was passing Berga, so he should be here by now.

Tove still asleep up in the flat.

Malin walks down the street, taking a look in the windows of the St Lars gallery, at the colourful paintings by artists like Madeleine Pyk and Lasse Åberg. She doesn’t know much about art, but what she sees hanging on the walls of the gallery makes her feel ill.

Vera Folkman.

How broken is she?

Damaged, damaged goods. We should put in a claim for the damage.

Like that couple in the US who adopted a little girl from Ukraine who turned out to have learning difficulties. The story goes that they sent her back in a FedEx box and that she froze to death en route, in a plane ten thousand metres above the ground.

A car horn.

Zeke.

The next minute she’s sitting in the air-conditioned cool of the car. She breathes out. Doesn’t notice the white van parked at the top of Ågatan.

Tove stretches out in bed, her mum’s bed, it’s still nice to sleep there sometimes.

She’s meeting Markus later, and today she’s going to tell him, it’s over, that she still likes him, just not like that, and that they can still be friends.

But he won’t want that.

She sits up.

Just from the light creeping through the gaps in the Venetian blinds she can tell this is likely to be the hottest day since she got home from Bali.

They ring the bell of Vera Folkman’s flat on Sturegatan. She lives on the first floor, but there’s no answer, the whole flat gives a strangely abandoned impression from the outside.

‘Gone, baby, gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Damn, it’s hot already. Hotter by the second.’

The longer they stand outside the flat, the more they become aware of a smell coming from inside.

‘It smells of animal crap,’ Zeke says.

‘Maybe she keeps cats in there?’

‘Well, whatever it is, it stinks.’

‘Maybe she’s in Australia,’ Malin says, turning on her heel and starting to go back downstairs. ‘She could have left her pets inside.’

‘It’s probably cooler there than it is here, even in Alice Springs,’ Zeke says.

‘That’s supposed to be the hottest place in the world.’

‘Wrong. Linköping’s the hottest place in the world.’

Tove sitting firmly on her bicycle.

Her pink top tight against her body.

The world sleepy and yellow through her sunglasses.

She pedals past Tinnis, but instead of heading up Ramshällsbacken she turns off towards the hospital, heading back down towards the Hotel Ekoxen. She has a funny feeling that someone’s following her, that someone’s watching her, trying to get closer. But she carries on pedalling, getting slightly out of breath, and she thinks it must be her nerves ahead of her conversation with Markus that are making her twitchy.

She’d felt it ever since she got her bike from the stand down by the church.

But where were the eyes?

She looked around, nothing suspicious, nothing different, just fewer people in this hot, summertime empty city.

And now she is coasting down towards the hotel, and turns around, and isn’t that the same van that was parked outside the flat? At home? The one that drove past her outside Markus’s yesterday?

Scared now.

And she stops at the hotel.

Opens the gate leading to the airy, yellowing Horticultural Society Park.

That was where they found one of the girls.

But at least the van can’t follow me in there.

A dark figure behind the wheel. Who?

She’s cycling fast, her daughter, and I mustn’t give myself away, I shall take her like I took the others, it will be quick.

She mustn’t see me and she’s stopped at the gate of the park and she looks scared.

But I’m nothing to be scared of.

I’m just going to see to it that you start living again. I’m an angel-maker. That’s what I am.

But she disappears.

Cycles into the park. She must have seen me. I drive past, pulling my cap down over my face. Time, my time, our time, will soon be here. Hands firm on the wheel now.

What time?

Tinnis, over there. That’ll do.

Shall I call Mum?

No.

The van goes past, it doesn’t stop, and the person inside it wearing a cap drives on.

I’m just twitchy.

There must be hundreds of white vans in Linköping.

Hardly anyone in the park. She cycles back to the gate by the hotel.

No van in sight.

She cycles straight to Markus’s house, determined, focused, just like Mum. Just like Mum, she thinks.

57

Zeke is sitting in the shade of a sickly yellow Festis umbrella in the outdoor café at Tinnis. He’s just peeled the plastic from a meatball sandwich. Malin wanted to take a swim at lunchtime, and he protested at first, didn’t they have more important things to think about than swimming?

But she insisted.

Said she couldn’t deal with the gym in this heat.

Wanted to go swimming, and she insisted in a way that was almost manic, in a way that only Malin can be: controlled, but still intense and relentless. He has learned to listen to her when she’s like this, knows she’s trying to find meanings and signifiers that can lead them on.

The sun has free rein over the clear sky.

The trees on the far side are shading the outdoor pool, and the indoor pools are shut off, empty while work is being done on them.

He doesn’t feel like swimming.

Too many people. And even more at lunchtime.

Pools like this never feel clean, no matter how much chlorine they have in them. They met a woman on the way out when they arrived at the pool. She was dressed in white and carrying a black bag in one hand and a test-tube holder in the other. Presumably something to do with pool maintenance.

But it doesn’t matter, Zeke thinks, taking a bite of the sandwich. Even if they have the strictest hygiene standards, I still don’t want to go swimming here.

Malin doesn’t care.

She’s standing in her red costume on what looks like a sugar lump, ready to dive in.

The water of the pool rinsing her body.

Cool, take long strokes, feel the chlorine cleaning her skin, lungs, another stroke, it’s supposed to hurt or it isn’t doing any good. The red balls of the lane marker become a red line as she speeds up.

She breathes and her muscles lurch and she takes another stroke, and little by little she fights her way to the edge, maybe thirty metres away now.

The clag in her head has disappeared.

Nothing but clarity and the sting of lactic acid.

Made it.

She puts a hand up on the tiles, breathes out, sees Zeke sitting under the parasol up at the café.

She pulls herself up, sits on the edge with her feet in the water, breathing, feeling strangely clean, as if the sweat and the dust had gone for ever, as if she has become something new, better. She feels reborn, and the surface of the water sparkles in a thousand shades of blue, and all of a sudden it hits her with shattering clarity.

The Eckeveds’ pool.

The water at the beach.

The Glyttinge pool.

Sofia Fredén’s summer job last year here at Tinnis.

Josefin Davidsson’s summer job, and the article in the Correspondent saying there was a problem with the water around the time when she was working at Glyttinge.

Drops like a thread, purity like a mantra.

Violence as a tragic rosary.

Zeke stands up as she comes over to his table.

‘Can I borrow your mobile? I need to make a call, right away.’

Zeke takes out his mobile, his movements slow in the heat, and a group of children in rubber rings are shrieking from the edge of the pool, too scared to jump and shouting to their parents for encouragement, for reassurance that jumping in isn’t dangerous.

Three rings before the call’s answered.

‘Sigvard Eckeved.’

‘Hello, this is Malin Fors. There’s something I forgot to ask. Do you have someone who looks after the pool for you? You mentioned that someone came last spring?’

‘You mean the one who comes out here?’

‘Yes.’

Zeke looks at her, his eyes fixed, expectant, as Malin squeezes the water from her hair with her free hand. There’s a delay before she gets an answer.

‘Well, a woman used to come each spring to check the water purifier. Your phone rang yesterday while I was telling you about it. But I didn’t really think it was important. You’re looking for a man anyway, aren’t you?’

‘You said it was a woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Her name’s Elisabeth.’

‘Surname?’

‘No idea. To be honest, I’m afraid I always paid her in cash. The first time I gave my number to a neighbour and she called me. The way it works is that she calls to ask when she should come. I never got a number for her. Pretty much the way it works with Polish cleaners. But, like I said, this spring I took care of it myself.’

‘OK. Thanks. Can I have your neighbour’s name and number?’

Silence.

‘I’m afraid not. He died of a heart attack a year ago.’

‘His wife, would she have the number?’

‘He was single. But the new neighbours may have kept her on. Maybe they’ve got her number?’

Sigvard disappears from the line. A minute later he’s back, and rattles off a number. Malin memorises it.

‘Thanks.’

‘What’s this about?’

‘I don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘We’ll have to see.’

She ends the call and turns towards Zeke.

‘Do you remember what Sture Folkman’s daughter’s name was, the one who committed suicide?’

‘Aronsson never said when we talked to her,’ Zeke says. ‘But I remember from the report. Elisabeth. The only reason I remember is that that was the name of my first girlfriend.’

Malin turns and heads quickly for the changing room, making sure that the phone number is still in her head.

It’s there.

Like an image, the number in glowing pink neon on a worn house-front in Los Angeles.

Zeke doesn’t move, looking out over the Tinnerbäck pool, looking at the people trying to make something good of the heatwave, with these temperatures. The children with their rubber rings the very definition of innocence.

Markus was sad at first.

Not that he cried, but Tove could see him withdraw into himself, his shoulders slumping, his eyes restless. They were sitting at the kitchen table and the sunlight was reflecting off the stainless-steel fridge freezer, making her squint. They’d had sandwiches and milk, talked about how they were going to spend the rest of the holidays. Markus had been taking it for granted that they’d spend all the time together, maybe going out to his parents’ summer cottage, and eventually Tove managed to say it, and when she did her voice didn’t sound the way she’d wanted it to.

‘I want us to break up.’

Like the crack of a whip. Far too abrupt, not remotely gentle.

The words felt brutal in their unambiguous simplicity, and Markus was shocked.

‘What did you say?’

‘I want . . .’

‘I thought . . .’

‘It just feels like I want to be free this year, and it doesn’t, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like it did at the start . . . it would be better if we could be friends.’

The words out of her mouth fast, as if they were burning her.

‘I want to be able to concentrate on my schoolwork.’

Markus said nothing.

As if he were letting the words sink in, as if their meaning were gradually taking hold within him. But what could he say?

‘I missed you when you were in Bali,’ he said.

‘But I didn’t miss you.’

And with those words his sadness changed into anger, and he stood up and shouted at her: ‘Couldn’t you have said this before you went? That you wanted to break up? Now I’ve spent all summer waiting, not even looking at anyone else at parties!’

‘Stop shouting!’

‘This is my house, I’ll shout as much as I like!’

And Tove had had enough, she got up from the bench and ran out into the hall, slipping on her flip-flops and opening the door.

He called after her: ‘Come back, I didn’t mean to get cross,’ and Tove felt twenty years older, grown-up, when she heard how upset he sounded.

But she still shut the door behind her.

Heard the little sucking sound as it closed.

And then the sound of her own breathing, adrenalin coursing through her body, making her feel giddy.

Let her cycle off. Let her go.

I met your mother just now in Tinnis.

You’re a constant source of worry to her.

So just come to me.

Become an angel.

A cleansing angel of resurrection.

Innocence reborn.

She’s angry as she rushes out of the house.

Slamming the door.

Doesn’t look in my direction, doesn’t see the van parked a little way up the hill.

Peace, come and find peace.

Soon you’ll never have to be angry again.

Death is over there.

Watch out, Tove, watch out, you don’t want to be one of us.

We drift and we roar in unison in your ear, but our angels’ voices don’t reach your eardrums.

Stop, stop!

But you’re not listening.

You’re fleeing discomfort, towards a warmth that you think exists somewhere.

Hear what we’re saying.

Stop.

But you’re deaf to our voices, they’re no more than vibrations in the noise of your inner ear.

Instead you keep pedalling, cycling angrily straight into the catastrophe.

Right into the fire, down, down, into the lowest of all circles.

Who can save you there?

Not us.

Your mum?

Maybe in the end the whole thing will come down to whose love is the greatest?

58

‘Water, Zeke, that’s the connection in this case.’

Malin was talking fast as they headed back to the car parked outside the pool, and she explained what she meant, how all the girls were somehow connected to pools, and had been scrubbed clean with manic frenzy, and how even the smells corresponded, the bleach on all three girls, and the smell of chlorine from the swimming pools.

Malin felt almost feverish in the car park, as reality, air, buildings, cars, heat, sky all seemed to be tumbling around her, but she pulled herself together.

‘So you mean we should be looking for someone who does swimming-pool maintenance?’

Zeke more open-minded than sceptical.

‘Yes, one in particular.’

‘One in particular?’

‘Soon, Zeke. Soon.’

Zeke breathed out deeply.

‘Where do we start? Here?’

‘Why not?’

As they went back in again Malin called the number she’d been given by Sigvard Eckeved, but the neighbour wasn’t aware of any pool-maintenance woman, saying: ‘I take care of all that myself’, and now they’re sitting in a cramped, hot room with yellow tiled walls next to the café talking to the manager of the Tinnerbäck pool, a Sten Karlsson, a bundle of muscle in lifeguard’s trunks and a red vest with the pool’s logo, a sea lion with a ball.

The desk in front of them is littered with papers.

‘Paperwork isn’t my strong point,’ Sten Karlsson says apologetically. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘We’d like to know who looks after pool maintenance.’

‘Our lifeguards and our technician. The lifeguards keep things clean with nets and pool bottom cleaners, and the technician makes sure that all the technical stuff works.’

‘Are all your lifeguards employed on contracts?’ Malin asks, feeling herself getting impatient as she doesn’t get the answer she wants.

‘Yes.’

‘Is any of them in charge of the chemical side of things?’

‘No, we’ve contracted that out.’

‘So that was the woman I saw,’ Zeke says. ‘She was here about an hour ago, wasn’t she?’

‘That’s right. We have a woman who looks after the chemical balance of the water.’

‘Who is she?’

The question bursts out of Malin.

‘Her name’s Elisabeth. I don’t know her surname. Her company is called, hang on . . .’

Elisabeth.

The same woman?

Is Elisabeth Vera Folkman? Acting under her dead sister’s name? And, if so, what does that actually mean? If she is Vera Folkman, what have her experiences done to her, what have they made her do?

Sten Karlsson is searching through the sheets of paper on his desk.

‘Hang on. Here it is!’

He holds up an invoice. Linköping Water Technicians Ltd.

‘Sexy name, eh?’

Malin snatches the invoice from Sten Karlsson’s hand.

Reads the address, phone number.

‘Do you know where she was going after here?’ Malin asks.

‘No idea. She’s pretty mysterious.’

Sten Karlsson points at the invoice.

‘She leaves those without a word, except for saying that she wants to be paid in cash. But I can tell you one thing. She knows her job. We’ve had her for two years, and the water in the pools has been top quality since then.’

Malin and Zeke are standing together outside Sten Karlsson’s office. Malin is holding a note containing the details of the company: name, address and company number.

‘Number 17, Johanneslundstigen,’ Zeke says. ‘I’ve never heard of a Johanneslundstigen.’

Malin reads the phone number: 013 13 02 66.

Calls the number.

An automated reply.

‘The number 013 17 02 66 is not in use . . .’

‘Fuck,’ Malin says.

‘Call directory inquiries,’ Zeke says. ‘Ask them.’

‘118 118!’

The perky operator’s voice annoys Malin.

‘That’s right, that number isn’t in use.’

‘No, there’s no Johanneslundstigen in Linköping.’

‘Of course, I’ll put you through to the tax office.’

After a long pause someone else answers. The tax office is pretty much closed on a Saturday in July. Then another long wait to be transferred. Then a new woman’s voice, formal and bureaucratic, as she might have expected. Zeke is pacing up and down beside her now, sweat on his forehead.

‘Did you say Linköping Water Technicians Ltd, registration number 5-987689?’

‘That’s right,’ Malin says.

‘There’s no company registered under that number, or that name. Sorry.’

Malin ends the call once she’s made a note of the woman’s direct number.

She feels the heat constricting her chest, her heart beating hard under her ribs. How long can you keep a false company running? One year? Two? Three? Maybe longer, if you do it properly. But who knows how long she’s been in the city. Unless she really has been in Australia, like Sture Folkman said? And came home two years ago with the very worst baggage imaginable?

‘Someone has a hell of a lot to hide,’ she says, and Zeke smiles, his whole face radiating confidence.

They drive out to the pool at Glyttinge in silence.

Slavenca’s kiosk appears to be empty, and from the front it looks as though it’s closed for good. In the car park the smell of smoke is very noticeable, the wind is coming from the north-west, blowing the charred smell towards them, particle by particle.

The owner of the Glyttinge pool.

Hakan Droumani.

A man in his fifties of Mediterranean appearance, his accent hard to pin down. He’s very cheerful, business booming in a summer like this, offering Malin and Zeke coffee in the pool’s little café, in the same building as the changing rooms with a view of the main pool.

Quick questions, answers.

‘Yes, her name’s Elisabeth. Surname? No idea. If I know anything about her? No. Her company is Water Technology, Linköping, Ltd . . . cash, always cash, that’s fine by me, of course, no account number on the invoices, but business accounts cost money so I suppose she’s trying to cut costs . . .’

By the pool stands a woman in a burka, ready to jump in.

Hakan Droumani laughs.

‘That’s the only full clothing I allow.’

‘You’ve never had any reason to call her? Like back in June, for instance, when there was a problem with the water?’

‘She called me. Health and Safety leaked it to the Correspondent before they said anything to me. But otherwise I’ve never had any reason to call her.’

Malin makes another call to directory inquiries, to the woman in the tax office: ‘doesn’t exist . . . sorry . . .’

‘Where do we go from here?’

Malin puts her mobile in her pocket and looks questioningly at Zeke. All around them in the car park outside the Glyttinge pool people are walking slowly past, on their way to or from cool relief.

‘We can try Vera Folkman’s flat again.’

Zeke’s voice full of certainty. He’s turned Malin’s theory about how things are connected into a truth, even though they don’t know that yet.

‘OK,’ Malin says. ‘If Vera Folkman is this Elisabeth.’

‘It could be a matter of urgency,’ Zeke says.

And they look at each other, two detectives made scruffy by the summer, feeling how violence is approaching, how they’re being drawn towards its core, the eye of the hurricane, the ultimate eruption of the volcano.

She feels her stomach tighten.

That isn’t fear.

But she doesn’t manage to convince herself.

Zeke puts a hand on her shoulder.

‘Relax, Malin,’ he says. But not even Zeke’s voice can reach deep enough inside her to suppress her anxiety.

Now you’re going into the library.

Thousands of books in there, sentences, words, characters, each one more meaningless than the last, each story more mendacious than the last.

But you love books, don’t you?

Their spines, the escape they offer.

You can’t escape.

I’ll be waiting here for you.

Are you going to go through the park?

Or along the road?

My cleansing angel.

My summertime angel.

I shall bring life to you, that’s what I’ll do.

59

Tove loves the library.

The nice new one that was built after the old one burned down one cold January night.

She loves all the space above the books, and how the greenery outside takes over the room through the huge windows facing Slottsparken, and the smell of old books, a bit musty but still full of excitement and dreams, suggesting that the planet and all the life on it can be made clear; the smell of mystery, enticing but also, in some indefinable sense, dangerous.

She’s sitting in one of the black Egg chairs that are lined up facing the park, immersed in The Great Gatsby again, in the parties and Jay and Daisy’s passion, so different from her and Markus’s infatuation that never turned into love. Unless it’s going to?

Am I going to regret it?

And try to recreate a feeling that might never really have existed?

She must have read the book five times now. Precocious was how her Swedish teacher described her essay in school.

Sure.

She can sit here for hours, vanishing among the words, watching the day turn to afternoon, then early evening. Nice weather outside, but then it always is.

Outside in the park some dark-skinned men in green overalls are raking up leaves, they’ve given up early this year, the leaves.

Turning the pages.

Do a bit of reading before I go home and get something to eat.

Zeke’s finger on the bell of Vera Folkman’s flat on Sturegatan. The heat in the stairwell is oppressive, the glass in the windows seems to bow and it feels as if hungry flames are rising from the floor and trying to burn the skin of Malin’s legs.

No answer, and they stand silently in front of the door for a while. A smell of decay.

‘Shall we break in?’

Malin says the words more as a challenge than a question, doesn’t want to leave any room for doubt.

‘We can’t, Malin. You know that.’

‘So what are we going to do, then? How the hell are we going to find her? She’s like mist, smoke, a shadow. Whatever you like.’

‘Calm down, Malin. Just calm down.’

‘Sorry. It’s this heat, it’s driving me mad.’

‘Let’s go back to the station. See what we can come up with. We need a meeting.’

‘OK. Let’s do that.’

Before she gets in the Volvo Malin calls Tove, wants to find out what she’s doing, check that she’s OK.

A birch tree provides a bit of shade and in the car Zeke reaches for the cold-air vent by the rear-view mirror.

Tove answers after just one ring.

‘Mum, I’m in the library reading. You’re lucky I forgot to switch my phone off. You’re not supposed to have them on in here, but I don’t think I’ve disturbed anyone.’

‘Aren’t you with Markus?’

‘I broke up with Markus today.’

You didn’t tell me, Malin thinks, even if I saw it coming, why didn’t you tell me, Tove? And she wants to reprimand her daughter, ask: why didn’t you tell me you were going to break up? But when could she have told me?

There’s never any time.

Hence Tove’s silence, her secrecy.

And because of something else. Another explanation that makes Malin’s gut ache, an explanation that she shies away from.

Malin had been expecting them to break up, but so suddenly?

But perhaps things like that always happen suddenly? Like a revelation?

‘Mum, are you there? I said I broke up with Markus today.’

‘Was he upset?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it rough?’

‘I don’t know, Mum, I felt relieved afterwards.’

‘Tove, let’s talk more this evening. I’ll see you at home.’

There are so many books, Tove thinks as she walks through the bookcases in her hunt for something to take out. And so little time to read them.

She pulls out a book from the shelf, it’s called Prep, American, about a school for rich kids.

Tove has read about it in a magazine.

It’s supposed to be good, and five minutes later she leaves the library with the book in her hand.

Food?

I’m not hungry, and Mum won’t be home and it’s no fun eating alone.

The men in overalls with rakes have left the park, and the shadows under the trees over by the car park towards the castle looks inviting.

I’ll lie there and do some reading, Tove thinks. What else am I going to do?

You’re coming closer to me now.

Am I really going to be so fortunate that you’re going to lie down in the grass under the oak tree, in the shade, so close to me?

You’re steering your bicycle towards me.

I can go up to you if you’re lying there, just five metres away, and I can take you with me. No one need notice anything.

Tove leans her bike against the tree, looks over at the car park but doesn’t notice the van, half hidden as it is behind some low bushes. She’s longing to get into the book, among the words and letters, into the fiction.

She takes her towel out of her bag, lays it out on the grass and lies down on her side, opens the book and starts reading.

The sounds of the city in the background. The siren of an ambulance, cars, and the hum of a choir of hundreds of ventilation units. The indistinct sound of voices.

A sliding door opening.

Soon the sounds of the city are stifled by the rhythm of the words in her head.

I’m heading towards you now.

No one can see anything, it’s early afternoon but we’re alone here, and I’m going to take you.

No one by the castle, or the county administration office, or in the park.

Or on the path to the library, or inside the big glass windows, and I am approaching your rebirth. I shall take you with me to him for the final act.

They’ll say that I’m mad.

And maybe I am not really myself.

But I shall do this now.

Fill you with nothing.

The tarmac of the car park becomes grass under my feet, I’m close to you now, we’re sharing the shade. The ether in my hand, a soaked rag, and my white clothes are spotless and you don’t hear me and I’m kneeling on your orange towel, putting the rag over your nose.

What’s this?

A sharp, bitter smell and something damp burning against her nose and Tove twists around, but her body doesn’t want to, why doesn’t her body want to, and in the corner of her eye she can see a white figure, feeling the weight of someone’s arm and the edges of the world start to dissolve and I’m sleepy, so sleepy, but I can’t fall asleep here, not here, not now, and I can feel something dragging me over the grass, then something harder, tarmac? And then my sight disappears and the world becomes a dream before everything goes black and cold, dreamless and empty.

Before the world becomes mute, wordless, and therefore ceases to exist.

The heavens quake.

And as if in an enchanting dream, full of whiteness, she reaches out one hand against a transparent white film, and feels the film tremble before she pulls her hand back, resting, dreaming herself still in the world, nightmaring herself alive again.

60

Fire is everywhere.

It’s jumping from treetop to treetop, thundering as it tears everything in its path into burning fragments.

This summer is hot.

But the hell in the forest is even hotter. Slowly the fire has spread down towards Lake Hultsjön, and Janne and his colleagues have their backs to the lake, their hoses snaking through the vegetation, zigzagging through the still living soil down to the warm water of the lake, where generators are driving great pumps.

He slept on the floor of the fire engine last night, in the empty space where the hoses are usually kept, the night singing all around him, crackling and rumbling and stinking of smoke, of cremated animals and insects, of soil turned to ash.

The flames an unquiet wall some hundred metres away from them. Approaching faster and faster. Human beings against fire, fire against human beings.

He’s wet with sweat, feels like tearing off his clothes and fleeing the heat into the water of the lake.

The fire is the beast.

They stand firm, sticking their gushing knives right into its throat.

Afternoon meeting.

Karim Akbar clears his throat and looks around the meeting room with empty eyes, perhaps trying to find a dancing mote of dust in the air to focus on.

Malin has just outlined her suspicions about Vera Folkman, about the pools, about the false information about her company, a company that may not even exist. She’s explained that they haven’t been able to find her, that she’s ‘like the smoke from the forest fires, you can’t see it, but you know it’s there’.

‘We’ve got her flat under surveillance,’ Sven Sjöman says from his chair beside Zeke. The blinds are open, the playground behind them deserted, the nursery still closed for the summer. ‘Does anyone have any other ideas of how to get hold of her?’

‘We don’t even know if this Elisabeth is actually Vera Folkman,’ Karim says.

‘We’ll have to assume that she is,’ Malin says.

‘We’re keeping an eye out for white vans,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s what she drives. But there are loads of them in the city.’

‘And we’re checking to see if there are any registered companies with similar names,’ Malin says.

‘Any other ideas?’ Sven says once more. ‘We haven’t got enough to go into her flat, you know that, Malin. Even if the smell might suggest that she’s maltreating animals in there.’

Malin thinks: it’s starting to fit, Sven, the voices of this case are telling us that, aren’t they? And then the other maxim: It’s desire that kills.

Waldemar Ekenberg and Per Sundsten are silent.

Silent as only police officers who’ve caught a scent of the truth in a meeting room can be.

‘We spoke to the last sex offender on the list this morning. Nothing,’ Per says.

‘As much of a dead-end as Suliman Hajif and Louise Svensson. And Slavenca Visnic, she’s been busy with her kiosks, although apparently they lost her this morning.’

‘And she drives a white van,’ Per says. ‘So in theory Slavenca Visnic could be this Elisabeth.’

‘We saw the interior of her van in the forest,’ Malin says. ‘She didn’t have anything in there that could be connected to pool maintenance. No chemicals, nothing. And the manager at Glyttinge would have recognised her from the kiosk outside.’

‘Check again, just to make sure,’ Sven says. ‘You take that, Sundsten.’

Then Waldemar’s voice, full of scepticism: ‘Could a woman really have done this? Dildo or not? Doesn’t this go against a woman’s nature?’

‘Prejudice,’ Malin says. ‘There’s no shortage of female thugs and sex offenders in the past, and most of them were the victims of abuse themselves, just like Vera Folkman.’

‘And Slavenca Visnic,’ Per says.

‘I think we should put the squeeze on Suliman Hajif again,’ Waldemar says, but no one has the energy even to comment on his suggestion, and Malin shuts out the others’ voices, thinking about what it must be like to be Vera Folkman, thinking about synchronicity, how the pools and all the other connections in the case could be coincidence. And maybe Vera Folkman isn’t even this Elisabeth?

People who are people who are people who are one and the same person.

A desire to dissolve, to be reborn as someone else.

A person as drifting smoke, above a charred landscape. Personified as one single feeling, one single characteristic.

Love and evil.

False company names.

The desire to be invisible.

Cold white hands.

But how?

‘Come on,’ Karim pleads. ‘No ideas about Vera Folkman?’

And where are you now? Malin thinks.

Where am I?

Why is it dark, and what’s this over my eyes? My head aches and I feel sick, but that isn’t the biggest problem, there’s something worse, but what? I’m breathing, Tove thinks, and this is a dream, and she remembers the shade under the tree, the paper of the book under her fingers, but what sort of dream is this, what does it want with me? Markus, is that you, and she can feel how she’s breathing, recognises the smell of detergent and she tries to get up, but her legs are stuck.

She tries to push herself up with her arms, but they’re stuck, and Mum, Mum, Mum where are you, I can’t be dead already, is this my grave Mum? and Tove tries to scream but no sound comes out of her mouth.

Cloth in her mouth.

Why would I have cloth in my mouth if I were dead?

Or if I were dreaming?

Malin looks out across the office.

It’s just gone six o’clock.

Where has the afternoon gone?

Writing reports.

Looking through the register of companies to try to find any with names resembling Linköping Water Technicians.

Nothing.

You are out.

Waiting for one of the patrols to call in with something positive.

But that never happened.

The search for Vera Folkman and the surveillance on her flat has led nowhere, the shadow remains a shadow. And Slavenca Visnic seems to have gone up in smoke, she isn’t at any of her kiosks, and the patrol that went up to the fires couldn’t find her either.

One piece of news, though. Andersson in Forensics rang. Facebook had finally got back to him. Confirming that Lovelygirl was Louise Svensson, they’d managed to trace her IP number.

She spoke to Janne over the phone.

He called her. Said that they’d had to run from the fire down by Hultsjön, that one of their generators had been lost to the flames, that a hunting cottage had burned down and that a few idiots came close to being cut off by the fire in their attempts to save the cottage.

The Murvall brothers’ cottage, the brothers in the fire. The Bengt Andersson case.

‘I’m so damn tired, Malin.’

‘Go home and sleep.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘They need me here. And I’m filled with this anxiety that I can’t shake off.’

‘Me too.’

Janne’s restlessness.

Hultsjön. That was where everything came to a head last winter in connection with another case. That was where evil caught up with Maria Murvall.

The same evil?

No.

But who knows?

When we get hold of Vera Folkman she’ll have to provide DNA samples that can be compared with those of Maria Murvall’s attacker. Slavenca Visnic? I’ve already asked Karin to take care of that.

The clock on the computer says 18.52.

She calls home, hoping Tove will answer.

But no.

Her mobile.

Five rings, then the answering service.

Anxiety. Hardly unexpected, Malin thinks as she quickly shuts down her computer and leaves the station.

61

Vera Folkman, Motala, Klockrike, 1977–1985

When the room gets too cold and I hear the floorboards creaking out on the landing I try to think of summer instead of the monster.

The summer, like when Elisabeth and I are cycling along the canal, and the warm wind catches our thin fair hair and I see your white cotton dress pressed tight to your body, stroking your skin more and more and more with each pedal, and you’re my big sister, I try to keep up with you but for you there’s no contest. You stop and wait for me. The light falls through the oak leaves of the ancient trees along the canal and you’re standing beside your red bicycle smiling at me.

Was I cycling too fast? I didn’t mean to. You go first, I’ll be right behind you, you don’t have to keep looking back, I’ll be there, making sure nothing bad happens.

I’m twelve, you’re fourteen.

You are the whole of my summertime world and we go skinny-dipping together, there’s no embarrassment between us, and if we cycle far enough along the path that runs along the shore of Lake Vättern we can get to places where we can be on our own. Where the summer can drive the pain from our bodies.

Where he can’t reach us.

We share the secrets of the darkness, you and I, sister.

He comes just as often to each of us, and I want to scream and you want to scream, but he puts his long white fingers on our lips, then fingers his way down and we let it happen, because what else can we do?

It is his house and we are stuck in his life.

And it hurts so much and I want to scream, but instead I cry and I hear you cry in the hours when light is about to return, when the pink-painted panelling in our room takes shape again and our whole bodies ache.

A spider is weaving its web across the window in the moonlight, the spider’s legs are white and outside in the garden his rabbits are scratching in their cages.

We can never wash ourselves thoroughly enough.

Soap isn’t enough. We find washing-up liquid under the sink in the kitchen and in the garage we find blue bottles containing a milky liquid that smells like his breath, and the liquid stings inside us, gives us more sores, but somehow it feels good to spoil what he wants to take from us. As if there can never be enough pain, and he is so strong, so hard and his fingers so cold, his whole being is determination.

You choose not to see, Mum, why won’t you see anything? Because surely you must see?

He’s our dad.

We’re his children.

And he comes in the night and there is no way out except deeper in.

How wonderful the summer is.

The wind as we speed along the bank of the canal. The way we pretend it isn’t painful to sit on the saddle. The way we still have each other and how our love might yet conquer his fingers, all of him.

And then you see, Mum.

You choose to see, and you take us to Grandma, to her two-room flat in Borensberg, and you argue and fight and I’m scared that he’s going to come after us, but he doesn’t come and it takes a long time before I realise that he will always be with us anyway.

We huddle in the two-room flat we move into in Klockrike.

I’m thirteen when we go to the doctor, speechless meetings where no one asks for an explanation, cold steel implements inside me, and I see the distance and the sympathy, but also the fear and derision in their eyes.

It’s me they’re looking at.

The reincarnation of the monster must be driven out.

And I am living proof of how painful it is to live, a pain that few want or dare to look in the eye.

You fall silent, sister.

Turn fifteen and sixteen on cakeless birthdays and we kept to the trees on the edge of school, kept to ourselves as if everyone knew, as if there were no solace in being with the others, and the summers are colourless, windless, and we lie beside each other on the floor on the hottest days and you say nothing, don’t answer when I ask if we can go for a bike ride.

The hospital. You’re sitting on a bed in the corner. You’re there several times.

I call your name.

You’ve gone home from school before me and I call your name when I get home.

Elisabeth, I call in the hall, but you don’t answer.

The living room is empty and I want to go out again, run away from there, cycle with the wind to another world, away from this rotten little flat where we try to cling to our lives.

But not you.

The bathroom smells of damp, the white tiles are loose, but the hooks in the ceiling for the drying frame above the bath are strong enough to hold your weight.

The white rope is wrapped twice around your neck, your face winter blue, panic-stricken, and your eyes, my blue eyes trying to burst from their sockets. Your thin blond hair hanging down over your naked and unnaturally clean body, your feet in the air, still.

Small cuts on your lower arms and shins. As if you changed your mind and tried to get free.

Yellow piss on the bottom of the bathtub.

No water from the shower. I missed the water then. Wanted it to be gushing, full of life.

I went over and held you, my dear sister, dreaming that you and I would wait for each other again, sharing the secrets of the darkness once more. But you were mute and cold and I could hear my own wailing, the way it sounded like a distillation of loneliness.

I held you up, hugged you hard, and felt our lost love flow between us.

You aren’t scared any more, sister, I asked, are you?

But you didn’t answer.

There was no innocence left in that moment.

And I promised you, myself, us, that one day I would put all this right.

That the world, our love, would be reborn one day.

62

Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson, Skogalund Farm, June 2007

You were the one who let him in, Dad.

If you hadn’t left me and Mum, he’d never have crossed our threshold, come into my life, in under my sheets, into me, in, in, in.

He wanted me to call him Daddy, Daddy, that fucking bastard Folkman.

He came at night.

The floorboards creaked when he came.

And he said: Louise, I’m just going to touch you a bit down there, feel me, the way I feel, and then he would come, his hands were cold, all of him was cold and hard and stank of vodka.

Sometimes, on the nights when the floorboards never creaked, I used to think about you, Dad, and how you vanished, replaced us with other girls, the woman that Mum said you’d met who had two children that you adopted.

Forget him, Mum said.

We don’t exist for him.

And I hated you on the nights when he came.

And all the other nights. And I hate you now.

But still: the only thing I ever wanted to happen was for a shiny silver car to pull up outside the house and you would get out of the car and embrace me, saying: I’ve come to take you away with me, from now on everything’s going to be all right, you’re my daughter and I’m going to love you the way a father should.

You never came.

When I got older I used to take the car and go down to Nässjö, where you lived then, and I would sit in the car outside your house and watch you coming and going, sometimes I would see your new wife’s daughters, grown up now, just like me, and when I saw you together I could see that you loved them, a misplaced love, what should have been my love.

My love.

You never noticed my car.

The way I used to follow you.

But you must have guessed it was me who made the anonymous phone calls, that I was the one who never dared to speak on the other end of the line.

What could I say, Dad?

Because even if I had seen you, you were only a smell, a touch, an image, a voice from when I was little, and I longed for you here at Skogalund, I longed to see your silver Vauxhall coming up the drive, to see you instead of him come into my room in the cellar, among my toys.

You were going fishing that day, like so many times before.

You were starting to get old.

I parked some distance from the isolated jetty and walked over to you.

I was child, girl and woman, all at the same time.

It was an early autumn day, chilly but sunny, and you caught sight of me in the forest and you knew who I was, you knew straight away, and when I came out onto the jetty you shouted at me: ‘Get lost, I don’t want anything to do with you, get lost, I’m going fishing.’

One of the oars was still on the jetty, long and hard, with a metal-edged blade.

Did you know who you were letting in? I wanted to ask. I came here to get your love, I wanted to say.

‘Get lost,’ you yelled.

The oar.

At the reading of your will it emerged that you’d left everything you owned to your new wife and her children.

I got five thousand, three hundred and twenty kronor in the end.

63

‘Tove? Tove? TOVE! TOVE! Tove? Tove.’

Malin is going through the flat, running, walking, searching room after room, but Tove isn’t there, not under the sheets of her own bed, nor in Malin’s bed, nor in the wardrobe or kitchen cupboards, how the hell would she ever fit in a kitchen cupboard?

Fuck it’s hot.

‘Tove!’

Don’t panic now, Fors, don’t panic, and she sits down on one of the chairs in the kitchen, feeling the sweat on her scalp, and the mantra inside her: Think, think, think.

Not at Markus’s.

Call them anyway.

She takes out her mobile, calls the number. Hasse answers.

Evidently unaware that they’ve broken up.

‘No, Malin, she’s not here. You don’t know where she is?’

No time for small-talk.

‘Hasse, my other phone’s ringing. I’ve got to go.’

Friends?

Which ones are still in the city? Who did she have ice cream with? Julia? Call Julia.

Malin runs into the bedroom, turns on the computer, looks up Julia Markander in the online directory.

‘Hi, Julia. This is Malin, Tove’s mum, is Tove with you? She’s not? Do you have any idea where she could be?’

Filippa and Elise.

Staying in the country.

The clock on the computer says 19.37.

She should have been here by now, or have let me know.

Shit.

Don’t panic now, Fors, and suddenly she is struck for the first time by how shabby her bedroom is, how yellow the wallpaper has got over the past six months, and the curtains look scruffy and old-fashioned with their mauve and yellow pattern, and the lack of plants and pictures on the walls makes the room look sterile.

There are hospital rooms with more charm.

Focus.

Janne. Could she have gone to see Janne? But he’s in the forest.

Maybe she’ll be home soon. Maybe she’s been to the cinema.

But she would have let me know, Tove does things properly and knows that her mother would be worried to death considering what’s been happening in the city.

Anxiety.

The very worst could have happened.

You should never appear at press conferences.

Who knows what it might trigger off in the heads of the nutters?

She calls Janne.

Three rings before he answers.

‘Janne here. Malin?’

‘Tove. I think she’s missing.’

He can hear that she’s serious from her voice.

‘I’m on my way,’ Janne says. ‘The fire will have to manage without me for a while.’

Malin sinks onto the sofa in the living room, rubbing her eyes, thinking: how the hell could this have happened?

How much do you weigh, little summer angel?

Forty-five kilos?

Not more.

I rolled you up in a rug in the van, and carried it over my shoulder into the room that we’re in now.

I’m in no hurry.

You’re sleeping on a wooden bunk, carry on sleeping, it’s always hard to know how much ether to use. On the one called Josefin I used a different substance, one that vanishes without trace from the body, and I brought her here to this room, my room, and when she was lying on the bunk I scrubbed her clean. I used bleach, and I rubbed so hard, but not too hard, I took care not to damage her skin, because of course you’d need that.

I took her in the forest at Ryd.

As she was cycling home.

They still haven’t found the bike.

I waved at her to stop, and she did, then she got scared when she saw my masked face and put up a struggle, but she soon fell asleep.

The cuts and marks on her lower arms. I made them with the scissors I got for my tenth birthday, as I scrubbed and cleaned and purified her, she smelled of bleach and of course I could have got her even cleaner with the swimming pool chemicals, but those can be traced. Then I took all my clothes off and strapped on the blue, letting the rabbit claws scratch freely, I turned my fingers into white spiders’ legs and she woke up and stared at my mask and she screamed, but she was tied down.

Tied down.

Just like you, my little summer angel.

And then I used the blue nothing.

In and out and she seemed to fade away, and I screamed at her to stay, that if you were to have a chance of coming back, my dear sister, she had to be here, and I soon realised that it was pointless.

She wasn’t, and never would be you.

That simple bitch could never accommodate you, and maybe this was the wrong room?

I gave her some of the mixture.

Carried her out.

She was bleeding after the nothing.

I let her go down by Tinnerbäcken. She must have walked to the park. She hadn’t seen me and she was allowed to live, seeing as she could never be you.

But the one lying on the bunk now, with the caged rabbits and boxes of white spiders’ legs, she can be you, she can be the possibility of resurrected love.

I know how it all has to happen now.

What about us?

Why did you kill us?

Don’t kill her, let her live. She’s not supposed to drift like us, not yet, show mercy, do you hear? Let the hot lava of violence withdraw into the underworld, it’s flowed far enough now, give yourself up, show your face, who you really are, people will understand what unlove has done to you, that it’s impossible to make an empathetic person out of someone who has confronted the monster where there should have been love.

Janne in the hall of the flat, sweaty, face streaked with soot, wearing white cotton trousers and a yellow T-shirt with the words ‘Kuta Beach’.

They hugged, but failed to press away each other’s anxiety.

His question just now: ‘Have you called the police?’

And they laughed and then fell silent, fear and anxiety like molten tin solidified in the air, suffocating, destructive.

‘Call now, get the search going.’

And Malin calls the station, is put through to the duty desk, Löving, and she explains what’s happened and he says: ‘We’ll put out an alert at once, don’t worry, we’ll have everyone on this right away.’

Zeke.

Malin thinks. I ought to call Zeke, and he answers and breathes heavily down the phone, and she knows that he knows, that he feels it with his whole body, just don’t let it be too late, and Janne is standing beside her looking worried, as if he’s wondering what’s going on.

‘I’m heading out, Malin. And I’ll call the others.’

‘What others?’

‘Sundsten and Ekenberg. Sjöman. Karim.’

‘But where are you going to look?’

‘Everywhere, Malin. Everywhere. I’ll take Folkman’s flat.’

‘She’s got her.’

‘Yes. Probably. I’ll make sure everyone takes their service weapons with them.’

‘I’ll take mine.’

They hang up.

‘Come on,’ Malin says to Janne once she’s fetched her pistol from the gun cabinet in the bedroom, the holster hidden under a thin white cotton jacket.

‘We’ll go back to yours, see if she’s there.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Quarter past nine.’

‘She’d be back by now if she went to the seven o’clock showing at the cinema.’

‘Shouldn’t one of us stay here in case she comes?’

Right thinking, Janne, but wrong.

‘We’re doing this together,’ Malin says. ‘She’s our daughter.’

Then Malin writes a note and leaves it on the hall floor.

TOVE, CALL US!

Mum and Dad

64

Something’s approaching.

I’m awake, my head is thumping, enough for me to know that I’m awake. Where am I?

I’m lying on something hard and I can’t move, what’s that scratching behind me, and the smell, it stinks here and I’m not at home, where’s my book, did I fall asleep under the tree?

My whole body aches.

Tove tries to pull her arms up, but they’re tied down.

Something’s approaching.

A faceless face, a nothing face and now I’m screaming, but there’s cloth in my mouth, I can feel it.

Close.

I strain and pull.

Mum.

Dad.

Then cold against my nose, and sleep, miraculous sleep. I want to get away from here.

Because I am just falling asleep, aren’t I?

Nothing else?

The house, in a remote patch of woodland just outside Malmslätt, is smothered with scaffolding. The yellow wooden façade is being replaced, the rot has finally won, and Malin looks at the cars, one, two, three, four wrecks, God only knows what make.

Janne’s hobby.

Doing them up and selling them.

Making a bit of extra money.

The only problem is that he never sells any of the cars. There are four American cars in perfect condition sitting in the workshop and garage. He never drives them, never puts them on show, he just has them.

She never understood the cars.

Thought they were about as unsophisticated as anything could possibly be.

White trash. And it was only years later that she realised that it was her mother’s distaste for anything that could be regarded as unrefined haunting her, that she had unconsciously adopted her mother’s attitudes and that this had influenced her relationship with the only man on the planet she can categorically state that she has loved.

They lived here together.

Before the catastrophe.

Before the divorce. Before Bosnia and all the other godforsaken places Janne has been.

You keep the house, Janne.

We won’t be there when you get home.

Gathering this ‘we’ together now. This is what we do. Janne opens the front door and they call into the darkness of the house: Tove, Tove, but their shouts don’t sound very persuasive.

Janne turns on the lights.

We are here, this is where we ought to live together.

They go from room to room in this house, looking for their daughter, but she isn’t there, she isn’t anywhere.

‘What do we do now?’

Janne’s question directed at the kitchen sink, a glass of water in his hand.

‘We drive around.’

‘Shouldn’t we just wait at home to be there when she gets home?’

‘Do you really believe that’s going to work, Janne? Waiting drives me mad. We’ll drive around. Looking for her. In parks, anywhere.’

‘You don’t think she could have gone somewhere else?’

‘Not Tove, you know that as well as me, Janne.’

The kitchen lamp flickers, hesitates before there’s a small pop and it goes out.

They stand opposite each other in the darkness.

‘Fucking hell,’ Janne says, then clutches her tightly to him.

Zeke is sitting in his car on Sturegatan, outside Vera Folkman’s flat.

Dark as a bat-cave up there.

He’s been up and rung the bell.

Like the grave.

And the smell.

Cadaverous, more noticeable now.

No sign of her, no sign of Tove.

My problems with Martin and his ice hockey.

Luxury problems.

What the hell am I sitting here for? There could be something up there that could help us. Tove might even be up there.

Malin. I’m doing this for you.

And Zeke gets out of the car, crosses Sturegatan and goes into the building.

The stench from the flat is overwhelming now.

Something’s died in there.

An image in Zeke’s mind: a gutted stomach, steaming entrails pouring out.

I can blame concern about sanitation.

Then the lights go on in the stairwell, heavy breathing, someone carrying something heavy up the stairs.

Is that you coming now? Zeke wonders and creeps halfway up the next flight of steps, pressing against a bare stone wall, listening to his own breathing, his heart beating faster and faster.

Janne and Malin drive past the library. The building a dark shape in Slottsparken.

This was where she was the last time I spoke to her, Malin thinks, and says: ‘She goes there a lot.’

Jane doesn’t answer, looking instead up at the park, but he doesn’t see Tove’s bicycle in the shadows against one of the trees.

‘Let’s head out to Skäggetorp,’ Malin says.

Slavenca Visnic’s flat deserted.

Janne asks: ‘Who lives here?’

‘A woman connected to the case.’

She told him about Vera Folkman on the way back from his, that she’s got a terrible feeling that the very worst has happened, or is in the process of happening.

The look of panic in Janne’s eyes.

This time he needs to save himself. No one else, and he looks tired standing there in the heat, in the light of a streetlamp in Skäggetorp, his cheeks still smeared with soot, his frame somehow diminished by lack of sleep.

‘You need to sleep,’ Malin says.

‘How could I possibly sleep now?’

‘I can drive you home.’

‘Malin, leave it. Let’s carry on.’

Waldemar Ekenberg pushes open the door of Behzad Karami’s allotment cottage and Behzad Karami leaps up from the bed when he sees who his visitor is.

Waldemar raises a hand.

‘Calm down. I just wanted to see if you were alone.’

Behzad Karami sits down again.

‘Do you want some?’

He points at the bottle of vodka on the floor.

‘Thanks,’ Waldemar says.

Behzad Karami pours out two glasses of vodka.

‘Well, cheers.’

‘I didn’t think your sort drank.’

‘I drink.’

‘The fucker’s taken the daughter of one of our colleagues now. Can you imagine?’

‘Did you come to apologise?’

Waldemar downs the vodka before putting the glass back on the floor.

‘There’s no room for apologies in this world, lad. Never forget that.’

The person carrying something heavy has stopped outside Vera Folkman’s door. Panting, trying to revert to more regular breathing.

Zeke has his pistol in his hand, the safety catch is off, he moves down, the sound of the other person’s breathing loud enough to hide his footsteps.

Wait?

Or go now?

The stairwell is dark.

Why don’t they turn the lamp on again?

The jangle of keys?

And Zeke leaps down two steps, presses the illuminated red button and the landing outside Vera Folkman’s flat is bathed in light.

Zeke holds his gun in front of him.

‘Police! Don’t move! OK, down on your knees!’

The man on the landing looks scared and surprised, and next to him is a box with the Sony logo and a picture of a flat-screen television.

Shit, Zeke thinks as he lowers his weapon.

The Horticultural Society Park is completely deserted and Janne and Malin meet a patrol car on its way into the park as they are coming out.

They called home to the flat a moment ago.

No answer.

They drive out onto Hamngatan, past McDonald’s, and Malin asks Janne if he’s hungry.

‘I couldn’t keep anything down.’

His eyelids are practically hanging on his cheeks, how much sleep has he been getting? Two hours per night? Three?

‘You said she worked on pool maintenance?’

‘Yes, at least that’s what we think,’ Malin replies.

‘Well, you’d have to buy chemicals somewhere. Wouldn’t you?’

‘And?’

‘You get them from DIY stores. In large quantities. Maybe some DIY store has delivered stuff to her? To an address you don’t know about? To that company of hers?’

They glide past St Lars church.

Malin looks up at the flat. The windows are still black.

Zeke helped the man to carry the television. He lived on the fourth floor, and now the sweat is literally pouring from Zeke’s brow.

The man, a pensioner named Lennart Thörnkvist, had never even seen his neighbour, but commented on the smell: ‘That’s what dead bodies smell like in hot weather.’

And now Zeke is standing in front of Vera Folkman’s door again.

He looks at his watch.

Just a few minutes before midnight.

He gets set.

Kicks the door as hard as he can, but it doesn’t give way, nothing happens.

He takes out his pistol again.

Aims at the lock and fires.

A deafening echo. Zeke’s ears are ringing as he pushes the door open and the stench that hits him is unbearable.

A switch. Light.

An empty hall and scratching noises from inside the kitchen and what must be the only other room of the small flat.

He heads towards the room with his weapon drawn, glancing into the kitchen where he sees three rabbit cages stacked on top of each other, living creatures behind the bars.

Inside the room.

On the walls.

A sight that Zacharias Martinsson will never forget.

65

Sunday, 25 July

I’m busy with my bag.

I’m going to kill you. You can be resurrected. I am packing up, unpacking, the blue nothing, worms, rabbits’ claws, my white spiders’ legs and all the things that are me.

Incense and painted flowers.

Sacrificial offerings in my temple.

How it started? It’s always gone on. It’s been the meaning and purpose of my life. To the far side of the planet, to the parched interior of Australia, the beaches of Bali. Looking after pools for people with money.

But there is no escape from unlove.

Then one day I was driving my van through the city, along Hamngatan, and I saw a taxi. It was only a few weeks ago, actually. And there you were, sitting in the front seat, Dad. Old, but your eyes, and the fingers against the windscreen were the same, you were probably on your way to the hospital for some sort of tests.

And when I saw you, I knew.

Wisdom and innocence swept through my body and I was forced to begin, just so that what must be conquered could be conquered.

I’ve been feeling my way.

Fumbling in the darkness for the light.

You’re sleeping again, my summer angel.

You’re a long way down now, deep down in the darkness of dreams.

You’re hanging in the bathroom, sister.

I’m the one to find you, shake you, cry over you.

I’m the one who’s going to put everything right.

And then we can ride our bikes together, we can go skinny-dipping together in water that no one else knows about.

Rabbits, splayed open, nailed to the walls, their claws pulled out, red trickles of blood dripping from the paws, some of the animals still alive, their little lungs rising and falling frenetically, whimpering, then others that have been hanging for a long time, the shreds of their rotting bodies slipping down towards the polished pine floor.

A bed in one corner, discarded white surgical gloves, a bunk in the middle of the floor, and then rows of bottles of chemicals along the walls, pots of paint that must have been used to paint the flowers on the walls. Splashes of blood on the floor, bloody scalpels and a stench that is making Zeke giddy, he lowers his gun and goes over to the window, undoes the catch and opens it wide onto the leafy inner courtyard, and breathes, breathes, breathes.

He turns back to the room.

Bloody hell.

Like a picture by what’s-his-name, Francis Bacon.

But no Vera Folkman.

No Tove.

Janne fell fast asleep just after Zeke called them. Malin could see how he was trying to stay awake on the short drive from the Abisko roundabout to Sturegatan, but his body’s need of sleep got the better of him.

He’s asleep down in the car now.

His head leaning against the window.

What are you dreaming about now, Janne?

About when we were young?

When Tove came to us?

We’re a family. Why have we never been able to see it?

Instead we’ve rushed off in different directions. Yet still not far from each other.

They’re standing in the stairwell outside the flat, drinking coffee Per Sundsten picked up at the Statoil petrol station in Stångebro. Karin Johannison inside, searching for evidence, securing material.

Sven Sjöman’s breathing is heavy, his face furrowed with tiredness, Per and Waldemar Ekenberg are quiet, watchful, sleepy too. Karim Akbar is in the background, scratching his cheek.

It’s already three o’clock.

Soon dawn will be stroking Linköping’s rooftops, whispering: a new day is here, wake up people, come out into the heat.

Zeke tired, but still alert and keen. He is explaining for the third time: ‘I broke in. The smell was so awful that I suspected some sort of criminal activity had taken place in the flat.’

‘Don’t worry, Zeke,’ Sven repeats once more. ‘It’s fine. Those pool chemicals in there. We’re dealing with one and the same person.’

‘Now we just have to find Vera Folkman,’ Per says, and no one in the group of detectives wants to give voice to the obvious subtext: we have to find Vera Folkman, because then we’ll find Tove, Tove, our colleague Malin’s only daughter.

‘Any ideas?’

Malin shakes her head, not a no, but to shake off her drowsiness and she looks at the others, sees in their eyes how they’re screaming for rest, that none of them can think clearly, that they might miss the most obvious things, that they can’t let it all become too late just because of tiredness.

‘Anyone who wants to can get some sleep,’ Sven says. ‘We’re not being terribly constructive here.’

No one replies.

They slowly drink their coffee. Feeling valuable time slip by.

‘Fuck!’ Malin says, and Sven puts his arm around her shoulder.

‘We’ll sort this, Malin. It’s going to be OK,’ and at that moment Karin appears from inside the flat, holding up one of the chemical containers in one hand, and pointing at a label with the other.

‘This can, and several of the others, were delivered by Torsson’s DIY down on Tanneforsvägen. Maybe you should have a word with them? They might know something?’

I’m dreaming now.

Processions of people dressed in colourful clothes, gifts in their hands, they’re on the way to the temple to honour the dead. The incense is thick and they’re singing, and their song is full of sun and light.

I dream about you, Mum.

That you’ll be there when I wake up.

That you and Dad will be there.

Now I’m running across an open field, then through a forest and I can sense that there’s something you haven’t told me, Mum, and it’s something you should say now.

The room around me from when I was last awake is in the dream.

It isn’t a nice room.

Shutters, concrete walls, cages, walls painted with flowers and fear and I want to run through a forest now, a burning forest, and the vegetation is chasing me, wants to tear me to pieces, Mum, and I want to wake up, but something’s keeping me in the dream, a tickly smell is pushing me down into dreamlessness, Mum.

The home number of the owner of the DIY store is listed by directory inquiries.

Sometimes you get lucky, Malin thinks.

Her colleagues are staring at her, the stairwell fading around them and everything is focused on Malin and her conversation.

A sleepy, thick voice on the other end.

‘Yes, Palle Torsson?’

‘This is Malin Fors from Linköping Police.’

‘Say again?’

Malin repeats her name.

‘Has the shop been broken into?’

‘No, we need some information about a customer. Linköping Water Technicians. You’ve delivered supplies to them on Sturegatan.’

The sleepiness is gone from the voice now.

‘The pool girl,’ Palle Torsson says. ‘You don’t get many words out of her. But she always pays cash.’

‘Do you know anything about her? Have you ever delivered supplies anywhere apart from Sturegatan?’

‘Not that I know of. I can check the computer in the store tomorrow.’

‘Now,’ Malin says. ‘I’ll meet you at the shop and check. If you’re not there in ten minutes I’ll personally shove a paintbrush up your arse.’

Janne wakes up as they pull up outside the store.

The clock on the dashboard says 03.20 and daylight is starting to flicker, the hint of relief from the heat offered by night has gone and it must already be thirty degrees outside the car.

‘Where are we?’ Janne asks.

‘Wait here,’ Malin says.

‘I’m not waiting anywhere.’

The DIY store is a single-storey purpose-built construction, with a loading bay beside the entrance. Malin imagines that most of its customers must be other businesses.

No owner in sight, no Palle Torsson.

‘We’re doing this together,’ Janne says and Malin looks at him, then tells him what’s happened, what they found in Vera Folkman’s flat.

‘Here he comes,’ Janne says once Malin has finished, and she sees a black Toyota SUV stop in front of them and a small, thickset man in shorts and a light-blue T-shirt jumps out.

Malin and Janne get out of the Volvo and walk up to the man who must be Palle Torsson.

Zeke joins them from his own car.

They’ve split up once more. Sundsten and Ekenberg are carrying on the search, driving around to see what they can find, Sven and Karim on their way back to the station ‘to do some thinking’.

Malin holds out her hand to Palle Torsson. He takes it, but looks cross.

‘Can I ask what the hell this is about?’

His round cheeks are bouncing with irritation.

‘You can,’ Zeke says. ‘We’re hunting the murderer you must have read about in the paper. And now the trail has led us here.’

‘How?’

‘The computer,’ Malin says. ‘We need to look at it now.’

I put you on the bunk, you’ve been lying there for a long time now, my white van is outside, and we’re going to go to heaven on earth.

Do you believe in the Father?

Or is there only one father for each person?

Faith.

Is that with the Father?

Can you suck the faith out of someone?

You’re clean now. I’ve scrubbed you and you’re clean, so clean.

The blue nothing.

Are you heavier now? I’ll soon find out. I’m going to carry you again.

The computer screen flickers before Malin’s eyes.

She and Zeke and Janne are leaning over Palle Torsson’s shoulders. Accommodating now, as he clicks his way through a sales database.

The little office is behind the counter and the walls are covered with bookcases full of files. The yellow linoleum is peeling away from the floor by the walls.

‘Let’s see,’ Palle Torsson says. ‘Vera Folkman, Linköping Water Technicians. Seventeen Sturegatan. As far as I can see, there’s no other delivery address.’

‘Any phone number?’ Zeke asks.

‘No, sorry.’

‘Try under Elisabeth Folkman,’ Malin says.

Palle Torsson taps at the keyboard.

‘Sorry.’

‘Just Elisabeth.’

More tapping.

‘Bingo,’ Palle Torsson says quietly. ‘An Elisabeth Folkedotter has ordered supplies for Linköping Pool Maintenance. The address is out in Tornby, number 11 Fabriksvägen. There are loads of industrial units out there.’

Linköping Pool Maintenance.

No company registered under that name.

Seconds.

Minutes.

Hours.

How much time do we have?

Is it already too late?

Tove.

I don’t want to become one of the living dead, Malin thinks, and runs for the car.

66

There you lie.

We’re getting closer. I can hear you rocking to and fro, don’t be worried, it’s not far now.

Theresa.

I saw her by the pool in the garden, she was like you, sister, and I felt it might work.

I followed her.

Rang on the door, said I was there to check the water in the pool. Then it went the way it went, she struggled and I chased her and she screamed but no one heard her, and I hit her over the head with a metal case and she calmed down.

Then I took her to the warehouse. Made some careful cuts with a scalpel, trimmed her wounds, so carefully and neatly, wanted to do a good job, and I washed her with bleach and she woke up, Theresa, and I didn’t have my mask on and she stared straight at me and she shouldn’t have seen me, because if she was going to be transformed then she would have to start from a state of facelessness, wouldn’t she?

But I still pushed the blue nothing into her and I had my cold white spiders’ legs to help me, thin as they are, and I thought: I’m hugging you to me, and I wrapped my hands around her neck, but she didn’t become you.

I wrapped her in plastic.

Buried her by a fairly isolated patch of water. Maybe her clean, unblemished body could turn into you down there in the ground, sister?

But that animal, the dog, found her before that happened.

God, how I miss you.

My beloved.

I’m coming to you now.

You’re coming to me now.

You shall die.

You shall be reborn.

All available cars are on their way to Tornby.

Janne beside Malin, this is a police operation but she can’t push him away again. None of her colleagues has probably given it a moment’s thought.

Janne.

All the things we haven’t done together, and now we’re sharing this.

The Berg roundabout.

The sun painting the roofs of Skäggetorp with newly woken rays, the white blocks of flats almost beautiful in their hot, abandoned stillness.

They drive down the hill.

One hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty kilometres an hour.

Zeke behind them, but Malin can’t see any other cars.

We’re first. Janne is breathing hard but says nothing, the adrenalin must be pumping through him just like it is in me, but he’s used to it, who knows how many times he’s been in the vicinity of death while he was serving abroad? Maybe even in the forest up by Hultsjön as well? At the fires?

They turn into the Tornby industrial estate. Drive past the bloated retail boxes: Ikea, the Ikano Group, ASKO, Willy’s budget hypermarket, the Plantagen garden centre, and on into the estate, past the Vansito wholesale warehouse.

They turn off and number 11 Fabriksvägen is a single-storey red-brick warehouse, maybe thirty metres long, with four separate entrances along a worn concrete loading bay.

They stop, jump out of the car, run.

Which door?

They run from door to door, listening, looking for signs, but all the doors are unmarked.

The heat and the sharp light no longer exist, only sweat and the exhaustion that is slowly forcing its way through the adrenalin.

Sounds from inside one of the storerooms.

A scratching sound, dripping.

The sound of sirens approaching.

A closed metal shutter, locked. The sun has pressed its way upwards and the loading bay is bathed in light. Malin kneels beside the lock, tries to twist it open, but her hands are shaking.

‘Hang on,’ Zeke shouts, rushing up to Malin with his pistol drawn. ‘Stand back,’ and Zeke aims the gun at the lock and fires.

A bang, I can hear a bang, Tove thinks, and a dull rumbling sound. Where am I? And her head is throbbing and she can’t move her body, but it’s there.

Am I paralysed?

I can’t move.

Mum, is that you coming? Dad? To rescue me from this nightmare?

Something’s approaching again.

A sliver of light, is that a door opening? Am I being rescued?

Malin and Janne and Zeke have taken hold of the bottom of the shutter and are forcing it up, there’s no second door behind it and the sirens are close now, they shut off and Malin can hear police officers shouting to each other, calling out orders, Ekenberg and Sven Sjöman’s voices? Karim’s?

And the shutter is up.

Janne holds it up and Malin goes into the room with her weapon drawn, sees the empty bunk, the containers, Tove’s red top on the floor, sliced open, a book, her sunglasses and then the rabbit cages along the walls, the pots of paint, a box of white surgical gloves, boxes of chemicals everywhere, empty bleach bottles, scalpels, a dripping tap. The floor is stained with blood, the blood long since dried up, and thin strips of rotting, stinking flesh, the whole room smells of torture decay death.

Fuck, Malin thinks. Fuck.

You were here.

And she sees Janne slump to his knees, holding up the tattered remains of Tove’s top, holding it up to her, saying: ‘I bought her this.’

‘Fuck!’ Malin screams, before she sinks to the floor and starts to cry, with exhaustion, and despair as well, and Janne crawls towards her, wraps his arms around her and they breathe together, preparing themselves for whatever will come.

All around them uniformed officers, Sven and Karim talking to Zeke, who sees Waldemar’s car just arriving. Only Per Sundsten is missing, but perhaps he’s having a nap somewhere, gone home to Motala?

Malin gets up.

Janne behind her.

The other warehouse doors are open, evidently nothing inside that need concern them.

‘We got here too late,’ Sven says. ‘What the fuck do we do now?’

The bang.

It must be a rifle shot from the forest, some poacher out early.

But it could also be from you, my summer angel.

And you’d woken up.

We’ve left the fires behind us and I’ve sedated you again.

Now you can sleep peacefully in the van until we get there, until we reach the final room.

It’s not far now, I promise.

And there’s no need for you to be frightened.

You’re going to die, but only for a little while, and then you’ll be the most beautiful person ever.

Malin, Malin!

We’re shouting in chorus now, Sofia and me.

Think!

Think!

Sitting there, dejected and despairing on the tarmac outside the warehouse in Tornby.

Don’t listen to the others.

There’s still time to rescue her.

There’s still time to stop her becoming one of us.

Just think, and make us less scared, rescue Tove and grant us peace.

Let us rest soon, Malin.

You know where Tove is going, where Vera Folkman is going.

They’re on their way to the final room, they’re very nearly there, the white van is close now.

67

You need to be awake now.

I’m going to tie you up and you will see what I’m doing, if you can see it happen then you’ll dare to come back, because there’ll be no more fear, will there?

Beloved sister.

I’m parking the car outside the monster now.

He must be asleep.

It smells of summer out here, a summer’s morning, and on this day a summertime dream can start, my little summer angel.

I open the back doors.

You’re groaning, don’t wake up too soon now. You might as well see my face, what difference does it make, soon you will cease to exist, and I don’t think faces matter any more.

Tove squints.

The light is back again. Am I alive? Do I still exist, Mum? I think I’m alive, because my whole body aches. And someone’s pulling me, but it doesn’t hurt, it just gets hot hot hot when my body comes out in the sun.

Buildings all around.

Grey, concrete buildings, yellowing plants, 1950s buildings that I don’t recognise as I look at them upside down.

I have to run.

Get away from here.

But no matter how I try, my body doesn’t obey.

Mum.

Now it’s there again, the face, but it has features now, a woman’s rounded features.

Then she changes her mind.

Lifts me back into the darkness again.

I ring the doorbell.

And ring.

And ring.

Wait, wait, and you open, see me, try to close the door, but I’m stronger now, stronger, and I put my foot in the gap and you yell as I shove you into the flat, press you down on the sofa, tie you up and your cold white spiders’ fingers. I throw a blanket over you and you’re old now, but the meanness, the transparency in your grey eyes can never, ever disappear, Dad.

Wait.

I’ll go and get her.

From the van.

She needs to be watching when you die.

Your eyes are glaring wide-open in terror from your skull, it’s as if your eyelids have lost the ability to blink and the whole of your lair stinks of drink and piss and unwashed old man, but I know all about cleaning, Dad.

Wait here.

She’s heavy as I carry her over my shoulder and I had to put a rag in her mouth to stop her screaming and waking the whole block.

No one can see me now.

Finspång’s morning eyes are dead.

I close the door.

How long have I been sitting here now? Malin thinks. Far too long.

Her body is a single emotion moulded of many: anxiety, anger, exhaustion, despair, resignation, fury and heat. An overheated brain is worthless as an instrument of thought, as a rescuer in this hour of need.

The tarmac warm beneath her buttocks.

Malin hasn’t bothered to move into the shade, the sun is merciless even just before half past four in the morning.

Janne and Zeke are sitting in the shade, leaning against the wall of the warehouse next to each other, and Malin can see that they’re gathering their strength, recharging before the next act.

The final act?

Sven Sjöman crouching beside her.

‘Malin, have you got any ideas?’

His breath smells of coffee.

The voices, listen to the voices.

It’s desire that kills.

And Malin straightens up, certainty like a sudden strong jolt through her body and she flies up, shouting over to Janne and Zeke: ‘Come on, I know where she is!’

Sven steps back, letting Malin past as she races to the car.

‘Come on, for fuck’s sake!’

All around them officers have stopped what they were doing, as if the desperation in her voice has frozen time at that second and given them all a glimpse of eternity.

Sven called after them: ‘Where are you going, Malin?’

But she didn’t answer, didn’t want a whole fucking army to show up and set off something stupid if it wasn’t already too late. She didn’t want Sven to call the cretins in the Finspång station, who knew what sort of mess they could make of things.

No.

Now it’s me against you.

I know where you are now, Vera Folkman, and I know why you’re doing what you’re doing.

It’s a tragic madness, your madness. Two sisters, alone in the world together; they love each other endlessly. Do you think you can recreate your sister? your love for one another? It’s a beautiful madness, your madness. But it’s my task to destroy it, obliterate it.

It’s Janne’s task.

Zeke’s.

But most of all ours, Janne. We have a child, and we owe her a life.

Malin is sitting in the back seat of the car, Janne leaning on her shoulder. They’re forcing themselves to stay awake, saying things about the landscape as they pass through it to make sure that Zeke doesn’t fall asleep at the wheel.

‘The Roxen looks so inviting in the morning light.’

‘Vreta Kloster really is beautiful.’

‘We’re going to stop that bitch.’

At the start of the drive Malin explained that Vera Folkman must have taken Tove with her back to see her father, Sture Folkman, to conclude a dance of death that had been going on for far too long, which had created a summer that no one in the area would ever forget.

One hundred and fifty kilometres an hour as they pass the golf course in Vreta Kloster, after driving through a deserted early-morning Ljungsbro.

They pass the fires, the lines of cars, and they meet fire engines on their way back from there, their cabs full of exhausted men with soot-smeared faces, resignation in their eyes as if the fire and the heat were too strong for them, as if they had no choice but to capitulate to the flames and let the fire transform all the forests of Östergötland into a no-man’s-land.

‘Do you wish you were still there?’ Malin asks Janne, but he doesn’t answer.

Dark, burgundy-coloured wallpaper. A creaking wooden floor.

Him rendered immobile. You soon here on the floor.

I have everything in place now, sister.

So that you can be resurrected.

So that our innocence can be reborn in a radiant whiteness.

I am in the final room.

68

In the final room

I, Sture Folkman, was seventeen years old the first time I gave in to my lust.

Down by the factory in Ängelholm there was a kiosk where she, she was eleven or twelve, used to buy cigarettes for her mother.

Her white dress.

It covered no more than her thighs and it was a hot day, almost as hot as some days have been this summer.

She was walking along the path behind the factory and there were azaleas, the most beautiful I had ever seen, in bloom there.

I caught up with her.

Brought her down.

And she was hairless and I knew this was the first step of many for me, it couldn’t be stopped, I could see in her frightened eyes that deep down she loved it, loved me, just like all my girls came to, even if some of them got ideas in their heads later on. I kept rabbits in cages to make them happy. Girls love rabbits.

That white dress ended up spotted with blood.

I whispered in her ear as I held her by the throat.

Keep quiet about this, girl, or the devil will get you.

Shame comes before love.

Over the years other people’s shame has been my best ally. It was easiest and nicest when I had the girls in the house, God knows how excited I got, hearing my creaking footsteps at night when I was on the way to their room.

They were always full of anticipation.

Lying awake, waiting for me, for my lovely, long, dextrous fingers, for my wonderful presence.

I was always careful.

Pulling the covers from their bodies.

Caressing their young white glassy skin.

My own flesh and blood or someone else’s, it never mattered. I gave my love to all the girls who came my way.

You’re awake now, little girl, my beautiful summer angel.

We’re here now, in the final room, and she shall see me do this first.

I’ve hammered four big nails into the floor and tied you to them. And you can see in my direction now.

I’m sitting beside my dad on his sofa.

I’ve got my mask on, so my face lacks definition, I’m wearing my white spiders’ legs, holding the necklace of rabbit claws to his cheeks and I’m scratching and he’s screaming, the old man, but there isn’t really much life in him.

You’re looking away.

LOOK FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

And you look.

She’s naked and the mask is on again.

Her head is aching, but Tove can see the scene clearly, understands that she’s in a grotty flat, God knows where, and that a woman, naked, is sitting next to her dad and hurting him.

Why?

And she screams at me to look, but I don’t want to see this and she scratches his face again and he screams.

She gets up.

Her thin white surgical gloves are glowing in the weak light.

I can’t get up.

There’s a smell of bleach, the sort Mum uses to get rid of stains.

Mum, Dad. You have to hurry.

I can hear her in another room, drawers being opened, she’s looking for something, and the man tries to scream, but she’s put a rag in his mouth, just like mine.

Neither of us can move.

Neither of us can escape.

The knife.

The old kitchen knife that Elisabeth and I fantasised about stabbing him with, he’s still got it, the rough knife with the Bakelite handle.

I pull it from the block on the worktop.

Hold it. Think what a shame it was about Sofia Fredén. I saw her when she was working in the café at Tinnis last summer, and she used to move the same way you used to, Elisabeth, and with her I thought that if I do everything quickly and in one place then maybe I can achieve what I want through speed and shock tactics, like an explosion or a powerful chemical reaction. I scratched and cut her with the claws, the first one I did that to, but it didn’t mean anything. Rabbits are only animals, their love is meaningless.

I scrubbed her in the park. Worked fast.

But she just went limp in my arms when I pressed my hands around her neck.

She died without you coming back.

But, dear sister, you should know that I have never doubted. I know what I have to do now.

Just watch while you’re waiting.

Then come to me with love. You should know that I miss you.

She has a knife in her hand.

Tove sees the blade glint and she screams NOW LOOK as she sits down next to the man on the sofa that Tove thinks must be her father.

She holds the knife in the air.

Screams.

THIS IS NOTHING.

Then she stabs the knife into the man’s chest and stomach over and over again and his irises disappear into his head, his eyes go white and his whole body shakes and she stabs the knife into him over and over again and the blood sort of seeps out from the gap between his brown top and grey trousers.

He’s still now.

And I’m terrified, but I couldn’t be more present.

She takes one of his hands, Mum.

And then the knife again, she saws and cuts and the fingers fall off onto the floor, one by one by one, the blood, Mum, the blood.

Fingerless hands on the fabric of the sofa.

She’s done now.

Turns towards me, Mum.

I yank strain scream cry.

But nothing happens.

If you’re on your way, you need to hurry now.

69

Finspång.

The time is now a quarter past six, and the streets of the industrial community are still empty, Zeke takes a short cut the wrong way around a roundabout and comes close to running over a bleary-eyed paperboy.

The centre.

Grey buildings, a hotdog kiosk, trees shrinking away from the sun, the flowerbeds not as well tended here as in Linköping, but there’s still a feeling of summer idyll, as if the industrial town had come to terms with its transformation into a sleepwalker’s hideaway.

But something is happening.

‘Turn here,’ Malin shouts and her mobile rings, she knows it’s Sven Sjöman again, he’s called her mobile ten times, and tried them over the radio, but we’re doing this on our own.

‘Stop.’

And Zeke brakes hard and they throw the doors open and pour out of the car. Malin runs towards the building where Sture Folkman lives, pulling her pistol from the holster under her jacket, Zeke hot on her heels with his gun in his hand, Janne shadowing them, crouching, as if he were expecting enemy fire from the windows of the white block of flats.

They creep up the stairs.

Press close to the wall.

Malin puts her ear to the door, making a hushing sign, finger to her mouth, listening for any sounds from inside the flat.

Groaning noises.

A woman’s voice saying, there, there.

How to play this?

She’s put a blue thing around her waist, she’s cut open my trousers and pants with a knife and I’m naked now.

This isn’t happening.

Tell me this isn’t happening.

The fingers all around me, in a circle, like worms, like eyeless baby snakes.

I try to close my eyes and cry, but she holds my eyelids open the whole time, it’s like I have to see everything and my skin stings as if she’s rubbed it with something that burns.

Standing up, she rattles a necklace made of animal claws over me.

‘Do you see the fingers?’

Her face is covered by a mask, her hands wearing white rubber gloves and blood of the man on the sofa is oozing towards me now, it will soon reach me and it stinks of guts and iron and I don’t want it to touch me, away, away with the blood.

And what’s she doing now?

Talking, wondering.

‘What would be best?’

A curious, expectant voice.

‘The nothing, or spider-fingers around your neck?’

She looks up at the ceiling, as if she were seeking an answer.

It’s happening now.

I’m going to kill you and you will be resurrected.

The fingers are gone now.

Then we shall cycle with the wind in our hair to a water where love is eternal, where we can lie next to each other and believe that this world, this life wishes us well.

I shall put everything right.

There now, don’t be frightened.

I shall start by squeezing the life out of you, then I shall fill something with nothing one last time, and then you will look at him, at yourself, at the world, lying safe and open ahead of us.

You’ll see that I’ve put everything right.

Together we shall fly through the countryside like loving summer angels.

Malin!

Don’t wait any longer.

Go in!

It isn’t too late for Tove yet, the way it is for us. The truth, you’ve reached its front yard, and it’s behind that door.

The sight behind it is terrible to behold.

But you can do it, both of you, because your lives can be saved behind there, in the darkness.

See to it that this comes to an end.

Wipe out our fear and help us enjoy our insight, our freedom. Give our mums and dads the solace to be gained from putting a name, a face, to evil.

Open the door, Malin.

Do it now.

It’s high time.

My hands around your neck.

Stop wriggling.

It won’t take long and I understand that you’re scared, that it hurts, but you can come back as pure love, as the most beautiful person in the world.

Your skin is warm, so warm, and I press harder now.

Give up, give up, that’s right.

They hesitate.

Whisper soundlessly: ‘How are we going to play this?’

‘Burst in.’

‘But . . .’

No buts, no alternatives, and Malin takes a step back, kicks in the door with all her strength and four metres inside the flat she can see a bloody human beast standing crouched over a clean-scrubbed body on the floor, human fingers all around, the human beast’s hands around the neck of the body, the human beast like black organic magma, its veins filled with glowing worms and Tove on the floor and Malin screams:

‘LET GO! STOP!’

And holds the gun in front of her, takes aim and the human beast moves, looks at Malin, stares into her eyes, then turns towards Tove again.

Because that is you, isn’t it, Tove?

She looks into my eyes and I vanish, everything goes white and I seem to be drifting, Mum, is that you shouting, Dad, is that you I can hear?

Your eyes, you’re disappearing into them and something new arises.

They’re your eyes, sister, and you’re back, I look into your pupils and feel an endless love.

So the nothing wasn’t needed.

I squeeze and then I explode into sound.

Malin squeezes the trigger.

No time to fight, to lose, just reply to the volcano in kind, become part of the volcano.

Pulling the trigger again and again.

Zeke pulls his trigger.

Over and over again and the smell of blood merges with the smell of gunpowder and Janne screams: ‘Tove, Tove, stop firing!’ as he rushes into the living room, almost slipping on the blood on the floor, kicks, pushing aside the lifeless body that has collapsed on top of Tove before feeling her neck with two fingers, screaming ‘Fuck!’, and then he presses his mouth to Tove’s, forcing air into her lungs.

Malin and Zeke beside him.

The mutilated corpse on the sofa, its hands bloody stumps, face white, bloodless, the naked body next to Tove perforated by dozens of bullets, blood pumping out in gushes over the amputated fingers arranged in a circle, then Janne’s order: ‘Don’t just stand there, cut her loose!’

And without thinking Malin grabs a large knife with a black handle and cuts Tove free from the floor, rope by rope, Zeke swearing in the background: ‘This is the worst, the fucking worst thing I’ve ever seen.’

And Janne pumps in air, counts, pauses, pumps and Malin sits down beside him, stroking Tove’s forehead, pleading out loud: ‘Please, please, please, this can’t be happening,’ but nothing helps.

Janne breathing into her.

Lifeless.

Tove.

Where are you?

‘Come back, Tove,’ Malin whispers into her ear.

I’m here, Mum, I can see you, but I don’t know how to wake up.

I can see two girls drifting around your body and their mouths are forming words that I can’t hear, but I understand that they don’t want me with them, that they want me to go back.

Go back where?

Follow the voice, they say.

And I listen to you, Mum, come back, come back, come back, and I feel the air fill my lungs, images return to my eyes and I see you now, you and Dad, how the fear and grief in your eyes turns to joy and love, to life.

Malin and Janne sitting on either side of Tove.

She’s breathing, looking at them with conscious eyes.

They’re holding each other, holding Tove, in a soft embrace that all three of them promise themselves will never end, the blood moving beneath them, holding them together, forcing violence back, deep into the holes it emerged from.

Zeke has opened the blinds.

The final room is bathed in light.

Someone listening carefully can hear the song of the summer angels; a wordless song, an ancient murmur about unity and love and belonging, a song people have long forgotten, and therefore never expect to hear again.

But the song exists within the three people on the floor of the room.

The three people hugging each other.

Epilogue

On the outskirts of Linköping, Monday, 16 August

We are together up here, down here, everywhere, in all the spaces that are ours.

It’s good enough.

We are the eternally young girls, Linköping’s summer angels, and have forgotten the terror.

Our mums and dads are still sad, and not even time can offer any balm for their grief.

But they know what happened.

You know what happened now, Dad. And there is no blame.

And that will have to do.

We, we have each other.

We share everything.

Just the way it was planned.

We can be together now, Elisabeth.

And we can see him, how he suffers, suffers and suffers, where he is now.

Can we help him?

No.

Instead we drift along the banks of the canal, pretending to feel the wind in our hair, pretending to bathe, pretending and playing, and we are sisters, you and I.

And we always shall be.

Malin is lying in a hammock at the back of Janne’s house, watching him and Tove rake leaves that have fallen far too early. The scaffolding around the house is gone.

It’s a nice day, perhaps twenty degrees in the shade, the light mild, and up in the forests the fires are finally under control.

Karin Johannison has compared DNA samples from everyone involved in the case to those of Maria Murvall’s attacker, but there were no matches.

The same evil, but a different incarnation.

Why did it happen now? Why did Vera Folkman cross the line this hot summer?

Malin hasn’t found an answer to those questions. Lying awake at night she has thought: history contracted, volcanic ground fractured, and out flooded a concentrate of evil, tired of being held fettered and silent in a hidden darkness.

She called Josefin Davidsson. Josefin said she felt calmer after the hypnosis. They still don’t know who called in about her, no one ever came forward.

Malin bumped into Slavenca Visnic in the city. She said that she’d sold the kiosks and was going to move back to Sarajevo.

‘The time has come,’ she said.

Malin’s flat by St Lars’ Church has been rented out to a student for the autumn and winter. Tove and Malin’s things are still in boxes in the living room of Janne’s house.

Tove and Janne are moving through the garden, across grass that heavy rain has made green with life.

Flowers in a myriad colours have ventured forth, trusting that the heat has gone. Their petals are blowing in a gentle wind, confirming that this present is all that really exists.

Tove and Janne.

You’re my people, Malin thinks.

We’re each other’s people.

We belong together.

And that’s a gift that we’ll have to learn to live with.

Have you read

MIDWINTER SACRIFICE

Malin Fors’ first case?

Early one morning in the coldest winter in Swedish memory, police detective Malin Fors is called away from the warm flat she shares with her teenage daughter. The naked body of a man has been found hanging from a tree on the deserted, frozen plain outside the small university town of Linköping.

From the outset Malin is confronted with a host of unanswered questions: Who is the dead man? How did he end up in a tree? And where did the strange wounds on his body come from?

Malin and her team must search for the truth in a community that seems determined to keep its secrets, and follow in the frigid wake of a killer to the darkest corners of the human heart.

Out now in paperback and as an eBook

About the Author

Mons Kallentoft grew up in the provincial town of Linköping, Sweden, where the Malin Fors series is set. The series is a massive European bestseller and has been translated into over twenty languages. Before becoming a novelist, Mons worked in journalism; he is also a renowned food critic. His debut novel, Pesetas, was awarded the Swedish equivalent of the COSTA First Novel Award.

Mons has been married to Karolina for over twenty years, and they live in Stockholm with their daughter and son.