Summertime Death (21 page)

Malin had spoken to Sven over the phone, and he had given them permission to proceed: ‘Search the house, but you and Zeke shouldn’t go alone, who knows what she might do if it turns out you’re right.’

Sven had also said that at long last, ‘and far too fucking holiday-late’, they had got hold of the list of calls made from Theresa’s mobile, and that she had called Nathalie Falck a lot, Peter Sköld occasionally, and no one else except her parents. ‘She seems to have been a bit of a loner,’ Sven said. They hadn’t heard anything from either Yahoo! or Facebook, and Forensics were still working on identifying the dildo. A quick search on the net had come up with more than nine hundred manufacturers.

Malin thinks about Josefin Davidsson. About the hypnosis that she hasn’t had time to sort out. Must get around to doing that.

The prosecutor.

A recently appointed young man named Torben Eklund.

Malin looks through the windscreen.

But instead of the city she sees her face, her eyes, the look in them, and she wonders what happens to that look with the passage of time, and then she gets scared, feeling a chill run through every vein and capillary, an ice-cold and sharp sting of stardust. That isn’t my face in the windscreen, she thinks, it’s Theresa Eckeved’s face, and Malin knows what she wants, what her lifeless white skin, her clear, radiant, colourless eyes want.

Her mouth is moving.

What happened?

Who?

What, how?

I am putting my trust in you, Malin Fors, to bring me some peace.

Then the face is gone, replaced by Malin’s own familiar features. The face and features that are somehow just as they are.

Josefin Davidsson pulls the thin white sheet tighter around her body, not wanting to see the bandages and think about the wounds, but knowing that they’re there whether she likes it or not.

She notices the chemical smell of the hospital room, and the pain she can’t remember the cause of. But she realises that that memory, buried somewhere deep within her, is important.

She could have gone home on Friday. But she wanted to stay over the weekend, and they let her. The doctor understood when she said that she liked how peaceful it was here.

She’s watched television out in the dayroom. Read on the newspaper websites, the
Correspondent
and others, that they’ve found a girl’s body at a beach out near Sturefors.

I have to get to my memories, Josefin thinks, and the sky outside the window is growing pale, late afternoon blue and empty, just like her memory. But it’s there, they did it in biology, memories are like electricity, and a person can remember everything that’s ever happened to them under the right circumstances.

But do I want to remember?

Am I scared that he or she or they are going to come back?

No.

I’d be dead if that was what they wanted.

The hospital cotton is soft, so soft, and she shuts her eyes, drifts off to sleep even though the room is full of the brightest light and bubbling life.

‘No problem. I’ll sign a search warrant straight away.’

Torben Eklund’s voice as neutral as his office in the courthouse on Stora torget, his grey face thin but still bearing an inexplicable double chin.

‘How’s the investigation going?’ he asks.

‘Forward, slowly,’ Malin replies.

‘We have extremely limited resources over the summer,’ Torben Eklund goes on. ‘That’s why I’ve decided to leave responsibility for the preliminary investigation with the police.’

‘That suits us fine,’ Zeke says.

Lawyers, Malin thinks. What in the world would make anyone want to become one of them?

Torben Eklund is the same age as me, but already middle-aged.

A black-faced clock on an unpainted brick wall, the white hands showing 17.25.

Then it hits her.

Maybe in the eyes of young girls I’m already middle-aged. And after that comes death. Doesn’t it?

A blue and white police car behind them.

Evening is falling slowly over the road and the forest seems to regain some of its lost verdure, a false nuance, the colour of a blunt knife.

They’re leading the way in the Volvo, three uniforms in the car behind: two factory-farmed recent graduates, lads with bulging muscles and an attitude that suggests they can sort out all the crap society might throw at them. Malin can never understand how that sort of bloke ever gets past the admissions board, but presumably they know how to give all the right answers. She’s seen the websites for people wanting to join the police: This is what they want to hear. And sure, the answers fit and if you’re smart it can work. The third uniform is an old hand called Pettersson, now working part-time because of a bad back, and sometimes Malin can see that he’s in some discomfort, his fingers tensing as he channels the pain from his nerves out into his fingertips so that he can go on.

She can’t remember the new recruits’ names, can’t be bothered to learn them, because who knows how long they’ll be staying? They probably want a transfer to Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö, where the real action is.

The farm in the clearing.

Has she guessed that they’re coming?

Has she cleared things up?

Away?

Zeke’s voice over the radio to the others: ‘Fors and I will go and knock, you get out and wait by the car. Understood?’

Silence. No barking.

Where are the dogs?

Then a yes from Pettersson.

‘Good,’ Zeke says as the car comes to a halt in the farmyard.

They get out.

A watchful silence.

They head for the porch steps.

Malin has the search warrant in her hand.

Has she taken refuge in the forest?

What’s in there?

In those closed rooms?

Malin looks over her shoulder.

They’re standing there, waiting but ready, almost hungry, Pettersson and the new recruits in their hot, dark-blue uniforms. The heat is still oppressive, but the sun has disappeared behind the barns, making it bearable.

‘A torture chamber,’ Zeke says. ‘What if she’s got a fucking torture chamber in there?’

Malin’s clenched fist against the white-painted wooden door.

No one coming to open it.

Someone aiming a weapon at them from somewhere inside?

Maybe. It could happen. Malin thinks the thought momentarily, remembers reading about American cops going out to desolate farms only to get shot, thinks of the officer who was shot and killed by a psycho in Nyköping. Malin knew him, he was in the year below her at the police academy, but they weren’t exactly close.

Another knock.

More silence.

Just the slight rustling of a wind-free forest, from life in motion around them.

‘She must have gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Unless she’s hiding in there.’

‘We’ll have to break the door down,’ Malin says.

‘Check if it’s locked first.’

And Malin slowly reaches her hand out to the door handle, pushes it down and the door swings open, as if someone had left it open for them, as if someone wanted them to go in.

A hall with rag-rugs and a stripped pine bench on bare pine floorboards.

Well-kept, Malin thinks. Cared for.

And silent.

She steps into the hall. Zeke behind her, she can feel his breath, warm, and she knows that he’s giving a sign to the others to spread out around the house and that one of them will watch the door behind them, ready to rush in if anything happens, if there’s any noise.

The kitchen.

Thoughtfully renovated, it must date from the forties, floral tiles and new rag-rugs. The gentle evening light is falling in narrow streaks through a net curtain. The coffee machine is on, the coffee freshly made, the oven is on, and there’s a smell of newly baked buns. Malin sees a tea towel on the worktop over a baking rack, the bulge suggesting coffee-bread, sweetly scented.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Zeke says.

Malin hushes him and they carry on into the house, to the living room, where the television is on, an episode of the old children’s classic,
Seacrow Island
, that Malin doesn’t recognise. Here again there is a sense of time standing still.

A computer on a desk.

They go up a creaking staircase to the upper floor. The walls are covered with tongue-and-groove panelling, on which Lollo Svensson has hung tinted lithographs of open fields and tractors. The bedroom, the only room upstairs, has whitewashed walls and light streaming in through a bay window, more rag-rugs on the scrubbed floor, everything looks sparklingly clean, as if she uses cleanliness to try to keep something away, or perhaps invite something in.

‘She’s here,’ Zeke says.

‘She’s here somewhere,’ Malin says. ‘I can feel it. She isn’t far away. There’s something here, something.’

And Malin goes back down the stairs, opens the door leading to the cellar and the smell of central heating-oil gets stronger with every step they take.

An oil-fired boiler, shiny and green, in an equally clean room. Cleaning products on a shelf. No bleach.

A door, a steel door ajar, as if it leads to a shelter.

Malin points at the door.

Zeke nods.

Malin opens the door, expecting to see Lollo Svensson hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by contraptions from a medieval torture chamber in complete contrast to the room upstairs, a contrast to the idyll that this old, homely farmhouse actually is.

Then they see her.

She’s sitting on a chair behind a table-tennis table covered with colourful wooden toys, dolls and stuffed animals. She’s wearing a thin, pale-pink dress.

A doll’s house on a shelf. Removal boxes stacked against whitewashed concrete walls.

Lollo Svensson smiles at them, a different person now, her hard facial features soft, resignation manifested in the body that Malin recently thought might harbour the soul of a murderer.

Could it?

Your body? Harbour the soul of a murderer?

‘I knew you’d come back,’ Lollo whispers. ‘So I came down here and waited. Waiting for you to come.’

The soul of a murderer, Malin thinks. We all harbour one of those.

The forest seems to be breathing for Linda Karlå.

But with sick lungs.

Only now, in the evening, is it cool enough for running, even if it’s still too hot for most people. The running track in Ryd is deserted apart from her, her feet in new white Nike trainers drumming on the sawdust trail, the electric lighting above her not lit, she doesn’t know if they turn the lights on in summer, at this time of year it stays light late when there are no clouds in the sky.

Maybe it’s stupid to go running alone in the woods considering what’s happened. Before the police have caught the culprit. Who knows what could be lying in wait?

But she isn’t scared.

Air in her lungs.

Her breathing somehow enclosed within her body, her brain.

Her heart is racing, yet somehow controlled, as if she can direct the most important muscle in her body by sheer willpower.

She runs at least twenty kilometres each week. All year round, and she runs the Stockholm marathon and one abroad: when it feels rough in the winter she thinks about Tokyo, New York, London, Sydney, letting the trees become skyscrapers and crowds, her forty-one-year-old body is strong, so strong.

It would be dangerous for someone less well-trained to go running in this heat.

But she can handle it.

She actually thinks the Ryd track is too flat, it might be worth taking the car out to the hills of the Olstorp circuit.

Pressure in her chest.

Onwards, Linda, onwards.

The trees.

The sawdust.

The lights. The tree up ahead.

Its trunk unnaturally thick one metre above the ground.

Is it really a tree? A body? Behind the tree. Something waiting. For me.

Malin is standing in Lollo Svensson’s kitchen, waiting, listening. Trying to understand, because in Lollo’s words there is a hint of the feelings that will lead them in the right direction in this case.

The uniforms are back by the car out in the farmyard again, restless now that they’ve realised that the anticipated drama has become a yawn.

Malin and Zeke gave them the task of searching the barns and smaller outbuildings, but they didn’t come up with anything, just snuffling pigs and rabbits in cages and a load of clutter that must have been left behind by the farmer who sold the place to Lollo Svensson. The dogs were asleep in a fenced run, almost drugged by the heat, or something else. No signs of violence, of evil, just things, abandoned things, unfettered by memories, of no value except as pieces of a puzzle for the archaeologists of future civilisations.

‘I want to be left in peace,’ Lollo Svensson says. ‘That’s why I bought the farm. Can you understand that?’

She’s sitting on a ladder-backed chair at the kitchen table. Back to her cocky, blunt, unpleasant, butch self again. The gentle individual they found downstairs among the toys in the basement vanished the moment they came back upstairs.

A human wall, Malin thinks. A grey dressing gown over the pink dress. What’s happened to her? To you? How did you end up like this?

Malin sees herself in the kitchen.

Snooping about in the dark. In the most private things. In the pain. And she knows she’s good at it, and she knows she likes doing it.

Damn you, Fors.

How did you end up like this?

‘I didn’t have anything to do with the attacks on those girls. Are you going to talk to the whole fucking women’s football team now as well, then? There are supposed to be loads of dykes there, aren’t there? Go and talk to them!’

‘What about the toys in the basement? How do you explain those?’ Zeke doesn’t succeed in concealing his curiosity, a desire to understand that stretches far beyond their investigation.

‘I don’t explain them at all. They’re toys from when I was small. I get them out sometimes. Nothing odd about that.’

Linda Karlå is standing still on the sawdust trail. There’s something close by. But what?