Summertime Death (13 page)

‘So who uses dildos?’ he says.

Malin thinks, not answering Zeke’s question, preferring to leave it open and let Zeke see the connection for himself.

‘Someone who’s been chemically castrated? Someone suffering from impotence? Someone who just feels like it? Lesbians?’

‘Lesbians,’ Malin says, lingering over the word to let Zeke realise what she means.

‘So that’s what you’re thinking?’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘Lovelygirl on Theresa’s Facebook page. Nathalie. And Josefin? Do you think she’s lesbian as well?’

‘No. But the perpetrator could be. A definite line of inquiry, anyway.’

Zeke nods.

‘So who else would use a dildo?’

‘I can’t think of anyone else.’

‘Maybe some unlucky bastard who’s lost his crown jewels altogether?’

‘You reckon?’ Malin says.

‘How can we know? Or else the scum in Berga have come up with a new way of humiliating women,’ Zeke says.

Malin stares in front of her.

Sees how Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami filled Josefin Davidsson with cheap wine, then took turns raping her on a sofa with a blue-painted dildo. Sees them laughing, exhibiting the very worst of masculinity, even though they’re scarcely more than boys.

That’s racist, Malin thinks.

Shrugs off the image of the boys.

Malin and Zeke sit in silence beside each other on the sofa. Breathing in the air, cool and dry, looking out at the heat, at the way it’s making the air in the police station car park vibrate and snake.

Tove and Janne in Bali, cooler than here.

It’s ten past nine and Malin is sitting at her kitchen table, eating a dish of soured milk and oat-grits. She’s so tired she couldn’t even be bothered to slice a banana.

Hot in the flat.

No air conditioning.

She raised the dildo idea with Sven over the phone, he thought it sounded like a lead worth pursuing, and said that he’d get some uniforms to check places where you could buy blue dildos on the net, in parallel with Karin’s work: ‘That’s how people buy that sort of stuff these days, isn’t it?’

Daniel Högfeldt.

She thought for a while that there could be something more than just the physical between them, and maybe there is, but mostly it’s this: the way their paths cross, day after day, until they meet up in his or her flat. But not tonight, he’s still in the city, Malin knows that much, and not in this heat, this isolation. Her own sweat is enough, and exhaustion is making every muscle wither and buckle, and she’s missing Tove and Janne so badly that it’s on the point of turning into grief.

Her mobile rings.

It’s in the living room.

Malin puts the spoon down, gets up, hurries through to find it. Guesses that something’s wrong.

Karim Akbar’s number.

‘Malin here.’

‘Malin, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Just because there’s been a rape, you start harassing local immigrants?’

How could he know?

‘We . . .’

‘No excuses, Malin. Take a look at the
Correspondent
’s website, it’s all there in black and white.’

‘Hang on, Karim, calm down.’

‘And now every single bloody media organisation in the country is calling me for an opinion.’

Karim’s in his element.

Malin can’t work out if he’s genuinely angry or just pretending to be, and is actually happy to get some media coverage in the news drought. All his articles and appearances are controversial, but politically safe in the attitude towards integration that he represents. What’s Karim’s long-term goal? A ministerial post? But he doesn’t even belong to a political party.

Her computer is on in the bedroom.

Click, click, click.

The
Correspondent
’s website.

A photograph of Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami standing outside the blocks of flats in Berga.

Headline:
No Evidence: Police Harassing Immigrants.

The caption to the picture:
We had nothing to do with the rape in the Horticultural Society Park, but the police are hassling us just because we’re immigrants.

Daniel’s tabloid angle:
The
Correspondent
has tried to obtain a statement from representatives of the Linköping Police today, but no one was available
.

A blatant lie to fit the story.

And you’ve been in my bed?

And doubtless will be again.

‘Are you still there, Malin?’

There must have been a two-minute silence on the line, quite unlike Karim.

‘I’m here, Karim. It was just an idea, one of many leads, you can see that, can’t you?’

‘I can see that.’

‘And they were the suspects in the Lovisa Hjelmstedt case.’

‘I know, Malin, but surely you can see how bad this looks?’

‘Enjoy the attention,’ Malin says.

Karim laughs, but his laughter is hollow and tired.

The phone on the table in front of Malin.

It’s glowing.

Who the hell does Karim Akbar think he is, sticking his nose into their work?

It is not the job of a police chief to micro-manage an investigation, but Karim has never really been able to stick to the boundaries, and an unspoken pact has developed among the detectives in the Crime Unit: let Karim do what he likes, and we’ll get on with our work. Because Karim isn’t short of good qualities, and he actually has complete confidence in his officers. And he’s good for the police in Linköping, his fondness for the media has focused attention on the work of the police in the city, and this attention has been rewarded with an increased budget from higher up.

Everything, Malin thinks, lying back on the sofa, absolutely everything can be traced back to this bloody mediatocracy, celebrity culture, the rapturous elevation of the mediocre, the uninteresting into a form of religion. Our souls have no peace, Malin thinks, so we take an interest in Nothing.

Hair colours.

Skirt length.

Who’s fucking who.

Celebrity weddings, divorces, collagen injections, sex scandals . . .

Well, thank God Tove doesn’t care.

Karim.

Friends with the Minister for Integration. They share the same view of immigrants: make demands, be tough, but woe betide anyone else, any non-immigrant, if they should happen to say something negative – then the air grows thick with verbal detonations.

Malin takes a deep breath of the air in the flat, the smell of a long hot summer where evil has started to make its move.

Sometimes she imagines evil as a shapeless black beast moving through the undergrowth and city alike. Who the beast is waiting for, who it might be, are as yet unknown.

She switches off the television.

Gets up.

Goes out of the flat.

Vague ideas of what she wants.

The pub downstairs is open, the clattering air conditioning audible out in the street.

Call Daniel? Shout at him? Fuck him? Make use of his damn cock. Drink herself senseless. But there’s nothing worse than having to work with a hangover, and they have to work tomorrow, even though it’s Saturday.

Call Zeke and see if he fancies going for a beer?

Call Helen from the local radio station; it’s been ages since they met up.

In the sky above her a third of the moon is glowing against a thousand pale stars, and she can see them stretching out their hands to each other without ever quite reaching.

‘Zeke here.’

He answers on the third ring.

His voice gruff, as if he’s just woken up.

‘It’s me, I was just wondering if you fancy a beer and a chat about the case. I can’t relax, what do you think?’

Thinks: I sound manic.

Lonely?

No question.

Just as I am.

‘Malin, it’s half past nine, you ought to be in bed getting your strength back for tomorrow. We’ve got a lot to do. I was on my way to bed, so no beer for me. We have to work tomorrow, you know that.’

‘Did you say half past nine?’

‘Exactly, Fors.’

Silence on the line.

‘But you can come out here if you like. We can have a chat. Gunilla can make us some tea and sandwiches, we’ve got Kinda gherkins.’

Zeke’s wife.

Niceness and normality personified.

A pharmacist at the chemist’s on the main square.

Too nice.

‘Thanks, but no thanks, Zeke. I don’t want to intrude. See you first thing in the morning.’

‘Good night, Malin.’

She’s left standing on the pavement with her phone in her hand.

Shall I go into the pub?

In again and up to the flat?

Call Tove, Janne?

Her skin is crawling, and not because of the heat.

Damn this thirst. This urge. I know it doesn’t do a bloody bit of good.

Then in her mind’s eye she sees Josefin Davidsson in her hospital bed. Her face contorted with nightmares, with suppressed memories.

Shortly afterwards Malin is walking across Trädgårdstorget, perfectly aware of where she’s going. The evening is slipping slowly into night and the square’s only open-air terrace is empty, a dark-skinned waiter is collecting the ashtrays, there are no glasses to clear on any of the tables.

She walks along Drottninggatan, past the imposing residential blocks. Cars pass: a green Volvo, a white pick-up.

The black iron gate of the Horticultural Society Park beneath her hand, still warm from the day’s scorching sun, but not hot enough to burn.

Malin opens the gate and steps into the park, quite alone now, presumably no one dares to come here at this time of day now, after what’s happened.

Naked.

Raped.

Preschool kids approaching.

I don’t remember anything.

The beast, it could be here, Malin thinks as she moves slowly deeper and deeper into the park, past the well-tended flowerbeds and the fountain, the greenhouses along the fence, and then the summerhouse, the playground, the almost silent stream, a slight trickle of water, insignificant yet still full of voices, of hidden memories.

She can see the balconies on Djurgårdsgatan.

The thankless door-to-door inquiries.

No trace of the red bicycle, even though the uniforms have been down every possible route she could have taken into town.

Not many people left in the city, but even so, she must have screamed. Someone ought to have woken up. Did they move you here, Josefin? And, if so: where were you before then? Where were you taken?

Malin skirts around the summerhouse, fingering the tape of the cordon that has already been pulled down, and closes her eyes, seeing someone chasing a naked, wounded, scrubbed-clean young girl back and forth across the grass, how she’s tied up, gagged, how someone pushes a piece of blue plastic in and out of her, and how her memories close ranks, saying: Stop, no admittance! Grass beneath her body, hardly any dew in the heat, his, her, their bodies over you, muscles pressing you down with full force, the grass a bed you’ll never, ever be able to leave, ever be able to get up from.

Was that it?

Josefin Davidsson.

Maria Murvall.

Theresa Eckeved missing.

A connection?

Josefin.

You wandered about until you were found, but you’re still here with us.

And you’re free, yet somehow not.

Theresa.

Are you still here? Where are you?

I can hear a voice.

I don’t recognise it. But it’s asking me where I am.

I want to know where I am. Because if I know where I am, I can get away from here, get away from the cold and the dark and the lonely and find my way home.

Everything is black now.

And cold.

So please, ask where I am again. Let your voice be an audible beacon to show me the way out of fear and this dark dream.

Ask again, please.

Ask.

‘Theresa, where have you gone?’

Malin says the words out loud as she pauses beside the summerhouse.

Birdsong.

Faces. Peter Sköld, Nathalie Falck, Behzad Karami, Ali Shakbari, other faces without clear features, the one who made the phone call, others, and still others.

Have to talk to Nathalie again.

Who is Lovelygirl? Maybe she knows.

Malin crouches down.

Fumbles in the grass with her hand.

A badger rooting about.

Who are you, who would do something like this? What sort of despair are you in? What happened to you, to make you capable of doing this to Josefin? What do you want to tell me? Has a smouldering snake from hell been released into your verdant paradise? Maybe the inferno is here, now and for ever. And why so clean? What did you want to scrub away? Or scrub into being?

Time clusters together. The ground, memories, give way, the truth fleeing to protect its bearer.

How? Malin thinks.

How can I get you to want to remember, Josefin?

The stench of cremated forest.

Of cremated insects, animals, moss.

The forest now a penal colony for the wretched.

The stench of glowing worms teeming out of fire-ravaged ground. It’s strong in Malin’s nostrils, and if she could fly, glide over the plain and Lake Roxen and the forests around Tjällmo she would see the fire twinkling far below her. She would see the burning points of light and wonder if they were magma, or the truth, or brutality that has decided to seep out, as if some breaking point has been reached.

She would see the girls drifting and crackling like fireflies in the darkness.

Saturday working.

No question now, when their summer has taken a turn into unimagined, dark Dante-esque circles.

They have to work. None of their colleagues will be called in from their holiday unless it’s strictly necessary.

The smell of charred wood and extinguished lives is even more apparent in the morning.

But not intrusive, just different, almost pleasant, like a fire lit by the characters in one of Tove’s old picture books, a fire for children to warm their frozen hands around.