Summertime Death (2 page)

The hottest summer in living memory.

Malin takes another mouthful of beer. Its bitterness and coolness ease the residual heat in her body.

Outside the city is sweaty, tinted dull sepia, pale-green and grey. Linköping is empty of people, and only those who have to work or have no money or no place to escape to are left in the city. Most of the university students have gone back to their home towns. The streets are eerily empty even in the middle of the day, businesses stay open only because they have to, seeing as the summer temps have already been taken on. Only one business is booming: Bosse’s Ice Cream, homemade ice cream sold from a hole in the wall on Hospitalsgatan. Day after day there are queues outside Bosse’s; it’s a mystery how everyone gets there without being visible anywhere along the way.

It’s so hot that you can’t move.

Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty degrees, and the day before yesterday a new local record was reached, forty-three point two degrees at the weather-station out on the plain at Malmslätt.

Record-breaking heatwave!

Old record smashed.

This summer unlike any other
.

There’s a cheerfulness in the tone, an energy in the headlines of the
Östgöta
Correspondent
that isn’t matched by the pace of life in this heat-stricken city.

Muscles protesting, sweat dripping, thoughts muddied, people searching for shade, coolness, the city drowsy, in sympathy with its inhabitants. A dusty, smoky smell in the air, not from the forest fires but from grass that’s slowly burning up without flames.

Not a single drop of rain since Midsummer. The farmers are screaming disaster, and today the
Correspondent
published an article by its star reporter, Daniel Högfeldt, in which he interviewed a professor at the University Hospital. The professor said that a manual labourer in this sort of heat needs to drink between fifteen and twenty litres of water a day.

Manual labourers?

Are there any of those left in Linköping these days?

There are only academics. Engineers, computer experts and doctors. At least that’s what it feels like sometimes. But they aren’t in the city at the moment.

A gulp of her third beer lets her relax, even though she is really in need of a pick-me-up.

The pub’s customers disappear one by one. And she can feel loneliness swelling inside her.

Tove with her bag in the hallway eight days ago, full of clothes and books, some of the new ones she’d bought. Janne behind her in the stairwell, Janne’s friend Pecka down in the street in his Volvo, ready to take them to Skavsta Airport.

She had lied several days before they left when Janne asked if she could drive them, saying that she had to work and couldn’t take them. She wanted to be short with Janne, to show her disapproval that he was insisting on taking Tove with him all the way to Bali, on the other side of the fucking planet.

Bali.

Janne had won the trip in the public employees’ holiday lottery. First prize for the heroic fireman.

A summer dream for Tove. For Janne. Just father and daughter. Their first real trip together, Tove’s first trip outside Europe.

Malin had been worried that Tove wouldn’t want to go, that she wouldn’t want to be away from Markus, her boyfriend, or because Markus’s parents, Biggan and Hasse, might have plans that involved her.

But Tove had been pleased.

‘Markus will manage,’ she had said.

‘And what about me, how am I going to manage without you?’

‘You, Mum? It’ll be perfect for you. You’ll be able to work as much as you like, without feeling guilty about me.’

Malin had wanted to protest. But all the words she could have said felt lame, or, worse still, untrue. How many times did Tove have to make her own meals, or go and put herself to bed in an empty flat simply because something at the station demanded Malin’s full attention?

Hugging in the hall a week or so ago, bodies embracing.

Then Janne’s firm grip on the handle of the bag.

‘Take care.’

‘You too, Mum.’

‘You know I will.’

‘Bye.’

Three voices saying the same word.

Hesitation.

Then it had started up again, Janne had said silly things and she was upset when the door finally closed on them. The feelings from the divorce twelve years ago were back, the lack of words, the anger, the feeling that no words were good enough and that everything that was said was just wrong.

Not with each other. Not without each other. This single sodding love. An impossible love.

And she had refused to admit to herself how put out she felt by their holiday, like a very young girl being abandoned by the people who ought to love her most.

‘See you when I pick you up from the airport. But we’ll speak before that,’ she had said to the closed grey door.

She had been left standing alone in the hall. They had been gone five seconds and already she felt an infinite sense of loss, and the thought of the distance between them had been unbearable and she had gone straight down to the pub.

Drinking to get drunk, just like I’m doing now, Malin thinks.

Downing a shot of tequila, just like I’m doing now.

Making a call on my mobile, just like I’m doing now.

Daniel Högfeldt’s clear voice over the phone.

‘So you’re at the Pull?’

‘Are you coming or not?’

‘Calm down, Fors. I’m coming.’

Their two bodies facing each other, Daniel Högfeldt’s hairless chest beneath her hands, slipping moistly under her fingertips. I am marking you, Malin thinks, marking you with my fingerprints and why have you got your eyes closed, look at me, you’re inside me now, so open your eyes, your green eyes, cold as the Atlantic.

Their conversation in the pub just ten minutes before.

‘Do you want a drink?’

‘No, do you?’

‘No.’

‘So what are we waiting for?’

They took their clothes off in the hall. The church tower a black, immovable shape in the kitchen window.

And the sounds.

The ringing of the church bell as it struck two, as Malin helped him out of his worn white T-shirt, the cotton stiff and clean, his skin warm against her breasts, his words: ‘Take it slow, Malin, slow,’ and her whole body was in a hurry, starting to itch and ache and hurt and she whispered: ‘Daniel, it’s never been more urgent than it is now,’ thinking, you think I’ve got you for slow? I’ve got myself, other people for that. You, Daniel, you’re a body, don’t try to smooth-talk me, I don’t fall for that sort of thing. He pushed her into the kitchen, the crippled Ikea clock ticking tick tock and the church grey-black behind them, the tree branches brittle with drought.

‘That’s it,’ he said, and she was quiet, spreading her legs and letting him get closer and he was hard and rough and warm and she fell back on the table, her arms flailing, that morning’s half-full mug of coffee sliding off onto the floor and shattering into a dozen pieces on the linoleum.

She pushed him away.

Went into the bedroom without a word.

He followed her.

She stood at the window and looked out at the courtyard, at the street beyond, at the few hesitant lights in the windows of the buildings.

‘Lie down.’

He obeyed.

Daniel’s body naked on the bed, his cock sticking up at a slight angle towards his navel. The gun cabinet with her service revolver on the wall next to the window, Daniel closing his eyes, reaching his arms up towards the pine bed-head, and she waited a moment, allowing the ache of longing to become real pain before moving towards him, before she let him in again.

I dream that the snakes are moving again, somewhere. How a girl the same age as you, Tove, is moving though the green-black trees of something that seems to be a park at night, or a forest beside a distant, black-watered lake, or shimmering blue water that smells of chlorine. I imagine her drifting across yellowed grass, as far, far away a water-sprinkler wisps corrosive drops above a freshly cut lilac hedge.

I dream that this is happening, Tove.

It is happening now and I get scared and stiffen as someone, something creeps out of its hiding place in the darkness, rushing up behind her, knocking her to the ground and the roots of the surrounding trees wrap around her body, snaking deep within her like warm, live snakes, whose slithering bodies are full of hungry, ancient streams of lava.

She screams.

But no sound comes out.

And the snakes chase her across a wide-open plain that was once verdant but is now reduced to a charred, flaking skin. The ground is cracked and from the jagged depths bubbles a stinking, hot, sulphurous darkness that whispers with a scorching voice: We will destroy you, little girl. Come. We shall destroy you.

I scream.

But no sound comes out.

This is a dream, isn’t it? Tell me it’s a dream, Tove.

I reach out my hand across the sheet beside me but it’s empty.

Janne, you’re not there, your warm warmth.

I want you both to come home now.

Even you have gone, Daniel. Taken your cool warmth and left me alone with the dream and myself in this depressing bedroom.

I think it was a bad dream, but perhaps it was good?

Tove and Janne are eating bacon and eggs on a spacious balcony with a view of Kuta Beach, and not even the memory of the terrorist bombs remains.

Tove and Janne are tanned and rested and their radiant smiles reveal shining white teeth. Janne, muscular, has already taken a morning swim in the cooled hotel pool. As he got out of the water a beautiful Balinese woman was waiting on the edge with a freshly laundered and ironed towel.

Tove is beaming fit to match the sun.

Smiles even more broadly at her father and asks:

‘Dad, what are we going to do today? Eat rice with honey and nuts in a Buddhist temple of ivory-white marble? Like the pictures in the brochures?’

Malin adjusts her Ray-Bans with one hand, and the image of Janne and Tove vanishes. Then she takes a firmer grip on the handlebars of her bicycle as she pedals past the Asian fast-food stall on St Larsgatan just before Trädgårdstorget, thinking that if you only let your thoughts go, they can come up with all sorts of things, conjuring up images of anyone at all, making caricatures of even the people that you know and love most.

The self-preservation instinct. Let your subconscious make parodies of your loss and anxiety and jealousy.

It’s no more than a quarter past seven and Janne and Tove are in all probability on the beach now.

And Janne doesn’t even like honey.

Malin presses the pedals down, picking up an almost imperceptible smell of smoke in her nostrils, the city tinted slightly yellow by her sunglasses.

Her body is starting to wake up.

But she feels a resistance. It feels as if it’s going to be even hotter today. She didn’t want to look at the thermometer in the kitchen window at home. The tarmac is oily under the wheels, it feels as if the ground might crack open at any moment and release hundreds of glowing worms.

A cycling summer.

Nothing’s any distance away inside the city. At this time of year everyone who can cycles in Linköping, unless the heat just gets too much. She prefers the car, but somehow all the talk about the environment in the papers and on television must have got to her. Think of future generations. They have the right to a living planet.

At this time of day Malin is completely alone on the streets, and in the plate-glass windows of H&M in the square there are adverts for the summer sale, the words flame-red above pictures of a famous model whose name Malin realises she ought to know.

SALE.

Heat on special offer this year. Stocks are way too high.

She stops at a red light near McDonald’s at the corner of Drottninggatan, adjusts her beige skirt and runs her hand over her white cotton blouse.

Summer clothes. Ladylike clothes. They work OK, and in this heat skirts are always better than trousers.

Her pistol and holster are concealed beneath a thin cotton jacket. She recalls the last time she and Zeke were out at the firing range, the way they frenetically fired off shot after shot at the black cardboard shapes.

The burger chain is in a building from the fifties, a grey stone façade with concave white balconies. On the other side of the street sits the heavy brown building from the turn of the century where the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord has her clinic.

The shrink.

She saw right through me.

Malin remembers what Viveka said to her during a conversation they had had towards the end of a murder investigation.

‘What about you, why are you so sad?’ Then: ‘I’m here if you want to talk.’

Talk.

There were already far too many words in the world, far too little silence. She never called Viveka Crafoord about herself, but had called several times in connection with cases where she wanted ‘psychological input’, as Viveka herself put it. And they’d had coffee several times when they’d bumped into each other around town.

Malin turns around.

Looks back towards Trädgårdstorget, towards the flashy new bus-stops and containers full of reluctant flowers on the patterned paving, the red-plastered façade of the building containing the seed shop and Schelin’s café.

A pleasant square, in a pleasant city.

A plastered façade, shielding insecure people. Anything can happen in this city, where old and new collide, where rich and poor, educated and uneducated are in fact constantly colliding with each other, where prejudices about those around you are aired like bedclothes. Last week she had been in a taxi with a middle-aged taxi-driver who had had a go at the city’s immigrant community: ‘Spongers. They don’t do a stroke of work, we should use them as fuel for the incinerator at Gärdstad, then we’d get some use out of them.’

She had wanted to get out of the car, show her ID, tell him she was going to arrest him for incitement to racial hatred, the bastard, but she had stayed silent.

A black man in green overalls is walking across the square. He is equipped with a pair of long-handled pincers to save him having to bend over to pick up litter and cigarette ends. The bottles and cans have already been taken care of by Deposit-Gunnar or another of the city’s eccentrics.