Summertime Death (11 page)

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

And Malin sees it at once.

Peter Sköld is aware of the significance of silence.

Why?

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

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

‘Coffee, anyone?’

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

‘Thanks for getting here so early.’

The clock on the wall says twenty past eight.

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

Malin looks over at Peter Sköld.

What’s that I can see in his face?

Fear? Cynicism? Silence.

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

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

‘No, like what?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malin throws the words at Peter Sköld.

‘And who would that be, then?’

‘You tell us.’

‘There’s nothing to tell.’

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

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

Peter Sköld smiles.

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

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

‘We’re together, I told you.’

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

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

‘Your own way?’

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

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

His eyes. Malin looks into them.

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

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

‘Well . . .’

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

‘And Nathalie Falck?’ Malin asks.

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

‘What sort of music?’

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

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

‘I don’t know any Josefin.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you think he knows, Malin?’

‘Something, Zeke. Something.’

Teenage worlds.

Tove’s world.

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

Has that happened?

No.

Although.

No. Don’t lie to yourself, Malin.

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

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

That must be it.

It must be.

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

It is 9.00 a.m. exactly.

The morning meeting starting on time this Friday.

Beside him is Willy Andersson from Forensics.

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

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

‘Well?’ Zeke says.

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

Andersson.

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

Biology essays.

Yes, he probably is.

‘What else?’

Malin can hear the expectancy in her own voice.

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

‘How long?’

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

‘But?’

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

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

Willy Andersson clicks to open the page.

Theresa Eckeved’s face.

Innocent. But also hard.

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

‘Hello darling!’

‘You’re so beautiful.’

‘Suck me.’

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

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

‘Anything else?’

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

‘She’s got a Yahoo email account as well,’ Willy Andersson says. ‘But I can’t get into it.’

‘Are Yahoo likely to be any quicker than Facebook?’

‘I doubt it. I’ll try them both, and we’ll see.’

‘Get onto it,’ Sven says. ‘And make sure they know why it’s urgent.’

‘Nothing on MySpace? YouTube?’

Malin remembers the videos on YouTube a year or so ago of a teenage girl being raped and abused. It turned out to be her best friends torturing her.

Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck. Torturers?

‘Nothing on MySpace. I haven’t checked YouTube, but I can do some searches today.’

‘Get onto it,’ Sven says again. ‘Get onto it.’

‘And Peter Sköld and Nathalie Falck haven’t got their own pages either?’

‘No, not as far as I can see,’ Willy Andersson says, getting up, and his thin, beige cotton trousers hang slack around his skinny legs.

Andersson.

Forty years old.

Looks more like fifty.

‘Good work,’ Sven says.

‘It was pretty straightforward,’ Willy Andersson says as he unplugs the computer and puts it under his arm. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he says, and then he’s gone, and only the heat and the sound of the door closing linger in the meeting room.

‘So, you two. What are you up to?’

‘We’re going to see Behzad Karami.’

And a silence descends on the room. A quite specific silence that Malin recognises and likes, the silence in an investigation where the thoughts of the officers coalesce around an idea, a line of inquiry worth following up.

‘Lesbians,’ Sven says. ‘Could there be a lesbian angle to this case? That Lovelygirl on Facebook certainly gave the impression of being homosexual.’

‘And Nathalie Falck is pretty masculine,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks that he’s being prejudiced, but deep down she agrees. She can feel the suggestions in the room.

‘So, there could be a lesbian angle. Keep it in the back of your minds,’ Sven says.

‘Maybe Nathalie Falck knows who that Lovelygirl is?’ Malin says.

‘OK, time for the gangbangers,’ Zeke says, standing up. His eyes full of expectation.

A code.

We need a damn code for the lock.

It’s just after half past nine. They’re standing in the shade under the porch in front of the door of a run-down block of flats. The once-yellow brick of the façade has faded to ochre, and the surrounding grass and flowerbeds look as if no one cares or is paid enough to look after them. Cigarette ends, cans, broken green bottles.

Malin can see herself in the glass of the door, her face improbably long and her skin somehow glowing.

Berga.

Only a few kilometres from the centre of the city, and just seven hundred metres from Ramshäll.

Another world.

Unemployment.

Immigrants.

And the usual: single mothers trying to raise their children to be decent people, as best they can with underpaid jobs that swallow up ten hours a day.

Absentee fathers are no myth here.

Most of the inhabitants of Berga are probably at home, even though it’s summer.

Two blocks away from where they are now standing Malin found one of her old school friends, dead from a drugs overdose. In a small one-room flat on the first floor, her first year with the Linköping Police, when she moved back with Tove after graduating from the Police Academy.

A smell had been coming from the flat.

The neighbours had reported it.

And she and a colleague had gone around, and he had been lying on the floor beside the bed, the place an absolute tip, and he stank and his body must have swollen up but by the time they arrived it looked almost shrivelled.

Jimmy Svennson with three Ns.

He used to be quite a charmer. Pothead turned junkie turned dead.

What’s the smell now?

Scorched summer.

‘What are we going to do about the door, Malin?’

‘Wait until someone comes.’

‘You mean . . .’

‘I was joking, Zeke. A little morning joke,’ and Malin pulls her key-ring from the inside pocket of her pale-blue jacket, sticks the skeleton key in the lock and twists. ‘This sort of lock’s easy.’

Zeke looks at her admiringly.

‘I have to say, you’re bloody good at that, Fors.’

The stairwell smells of mould, and the lime-green walls are in serious need of a coat of paint.

No lift.

They’re panting by the time they reach the third floor.

‘Bet you he’s asleep,’ Zeke says as he presses the doorbell beside Behzad Karami’s door.

They ring again and again.

Malin calls Behzad Karami’s mobile number, there’s no landline listed.

There must be a terrible amount of ringing inside the flat.

She was off her face.

Then the voice on the mobile, with just a faint trace of an accent in his Östergötland Swedish even though Karami was already eight years old when he moved here.

‘Do you know what time it is, you bastard?’

‘This is Malin Fors. Police. If you open the front door, the ringing will stop.’

Zeke’s finger on the bell.

‘What?’

‘Open the door. We’re standing outside.’

‘Fuck.’

Over the phone Malin hears a body moving, then there’s rattling behind the door, Zeke’s finger ringing constantly now, and the sound of the doorbell getting louder and louder the more the door opens.

‘Good morning, Behzad. So you’ve gone and messed things up for yourself again, have you?’

Zeke’s voice full of distaste as he lets go of the bell.

Behzad Karami’s face puffy with sleep and possibly alcohol, and who knows what else? Tattooed torso, powerful shoulders, a choker of animal claws and teeth around his neck. Nineteen years old, his big, black, shiny BMW parked closer to the centre.

On the other hand.

After a spell in youth custody he was never found guilty of anything. And we couldn’t get him for the rapes, and maybe his ‘business’ is going well? What do I know? Malin thinks.

‘We’ll come in,’ Zeke says, and before Behzad Karami can protest Zeke has pushed him aside, stepped inside the hall and on into the single room.

Behzad Karami hesitant.

Branded since he sat in jail while they investigated whether or not the gangbang of the paralytic Lovisa Hjelmstedt could be classed as rape or serious sexual assault.

But the case had collapsed.

She agreed to it, and witnesses had seen her dancing with Behzad Karami and Ali Shakbari at the club, seen her leave with them of her own accord, even if she was so drunk by then that she could hardly walk.

‘Not done any cleaning for a while, Behzad?’ Zeke says. ‘But a mummy’s boy like you probably can’t manage that, eh? Keeping things clean?’