Summertime Death (24 page)

‘Sure, but it was still just something Lollo Svensson said in passing.’

‘Everybody knows that dykes play football.’

‘Can you hear what you sound like, Zeke? You sound completely bloody mad.’

‘But am I wrong?’

‘You call, Zeke. The number’s 140160.’

The phone rings three, four times before someone answers Zeke’s call.

His face is tense, and Malin is curious to hear how he’s going to approach Pia Rasmefog with his questions. She’s read interviews with the Dane in the
Correspondent
, and from what she’s read, she’s a tough nut who doesn’t let anyone get the better of her.

‘Yes, hello,’ Zeke says, and Malin can hear that his voice is hoarser than usual, the tone is higher and he’s nervous, unsure of how to approach Rasmefog.

‘This is Detective Inspector Zacharias Martinsson from the Linköping Police. I’d like to ask you a few questions, is now a good time?’

His choice of words milder than usual.

‘Great. Well, you see, the women’s football team has cropped up in the investigation into the murder of Theresa Eckeved . . . How it’s cropped up? . . . Well, I’m afraid I can’t reveal . . . no, no particular player, just in general . . . yes, perhaps . . . but . . . yes, of course, it might seem prejudiced, but please, calm down . . . this is actually a very serious crime that we’re investigating,’ and then, suddenly, Zeke takes charge of the conversation, and Pia Rasmefog appears to understand that they have to ask, seeing as ‘the women’s football team’ has cropped up in the investigation, albeit only on the periphery.

‘Is there any player that you believe could have a tendency towards violence? More than anyone else. No? Anyone who’s been behaving differently over the last few days? Not that either? Nothing that you think could be of interest to us?’

Zeke takes the phone from his ear, the conversation is evidently over.

‘Fucking furious. She didn’t even answer the last question.’

Karim Akbar absorbs the light from the photographers’ flashes, as the cameras’ clicking lenses call out: ‘You exist! You’re special!’

Sullen and angry journalists in rows in front of him, dressed lightly in the summer heat, yet still in that typical, scruffy, bohemian journalist style that Karim hates.

He hasn’t given them much, and Daniel Högfeldt and that hot-tempered woman from
Aftonbladet
in particular are critical of the silence.

‘So you can’t answer that question?’ Daniel Högfeldt almost shouted. ‘Because you don’t want to jeopardise the investigation? Don’t you think the general public in this city has a right to know as much as possible seeing as there’s a murderer on the loose? People are frightened, that much is obvious, so what right do you have to withhold information?’

‘There’s no suggestion that we’re withholding information.’

‘Are the cases connected?’

The woman from
Aftonbladet
.

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘But is that one of your theories?’

‘It’s one of a number of possibilities.’

‘So what’s your theory?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that.’

‘Is Louise Svensson a suspect in either case?’

‘No, not at the moment.’

‘So the search warrant wasn’t called for?’

Karim closes his eyes. Waits a couple of seconds, then hears a new voice: ‘But you must have something to go on?’

He opens his eyes just as one of the journalists says: ‘According to our information, she’s a lesbian. Do you suspect a sexual connection of that kind?’

‘No comment.’

Worse than usual today, more excitable than ever before. Suddenly he wants to get away from the podium, back to the jetty of the house in Västervik. He has to give them something just to get them to shut up.

So he says the words, and the moment they leave his mouth he knows it was a mistake.

‘Our investigation has led us to look into the LFC women’s football team.’

‘Why?’

‘Do you suspect a lesbian connection?’

‘I can’t . . .’

‘Is it just prejudice within the police force that has led you to turn your attention to the women’s team?’

‘Any particular player?’

‘How do you think this will affect the general attitude towards women’s football?’

Questions flying at him like bullets, like jagged shrapnel from something exploding.

Shit, Karim thinks. Then he shuts his eyes for a moment again, thinking about his family, his eight-year-old son, who learned to swim just last week.

The kiosk at the beach outside Sturefors is closed.

The tape of the cordon around the oak where they dug up Theresa Eckeved’s body as recently as yesterday is still taut, and there are very few bathers; one family with two small children. They’re sitting on a blanket down by the water, apparently unaffected by what has happened, by what to Malin seems to control and own this entire place, its air, its sounds.

Slavenca Visnic.

The owner of this kiosk, another one at the beach in Hjulsbro, and one outside the pool at Glyttinge: the county council provided them with that information. She runs all three as a trading company. But today the kiosk is closed, and Malin can understand why.

‘I wouldn’t have opened up either,’ she says to Zeke as they pace uneasily up and down in the morning heat in front of the kiosk, taking care to stay in the shade of the trees, sweaty enough already. Zeke’s white shirt is stuck to his body, and her beige blouse is faring no better.

‘No, people are staying away.’

‘Let’s go to Hjulsbro. She might be there.’

There was a mobile number on the licence documents. But no answer when they rang.

‘You go back to the car,’ Malin says, and Zeke looks at her, nods, then heads up the slope towards the meadow, where the heat seems to be creating a new sort of stillness, natural yet somehow frightening, as if the heat were making every living creature go into hibernation.

Malin goes down to the tree, bends over and steps under the tape of the cordon.

The hole in the ground.

No glowing worms, but still a feeling that the ground could open up at any moment, spewing out destructive masses of livid, liquid fire.

Theresa.

She isn’t here, but Malin can still see her face.

One eye open, the other closed. The strangulation marks around her neck. Her cleanly scrubbed white body and the dark wounds like lost planets in a shimmering, irregular cosmos.

And Malin wonders: How did you get here? Who would want to do this to you? Don’t be scared. I never, ever give up.

Promise me that, Malin Fors, promise that you’ll never give up trying to find the person who committed this ultimate act of abuse.

I’m trying to touch your warm, blonde hair, but my fingers, my hands don’t exist where you are, even if I can see you quite clearly from where I’m drifting in the sky just above you.

The girls.

Me. Nathalie.

Peter. You know so well what we had together. But you don’t realise what it means, not yet. Dad never understood, didn’t want to see, perhaps, what I was, am.

The same thing for you, Malin, with your dad, yet not quite. You blame your mum, thinking that she was in the way, muddying and diminishing his concern for you.

Maybe.

But it could be something else. Couldn’t it?

You’re far below me, Malin.

But still near.

But you’re a long way from one thing, Malin: certainty.

So don’t give up.

Because even if I know what happened, only you can convey the story to Mum and Dad, and show them the truth.

Maybe the truth could help them?

It doesn’t really make much difference to me any more.

Maybe I am the truth now. The only pure, clear truth that a person needs.

The wind is blowing through the leaves of the oak, rustling them. It’s a warm wind. But where are the connections, the threads twining together that can lead me, us, in the right direction?

The water of the lake almost seems to bubble in the heat. Boiling and stagnant, deadly poisonous yet still endlessly tempting: Jump in, and I’ll drag you down to the bottom of the lake.

What were you doing out here?

Not an intrinsically evil place, not really.

Malin sinks to her knees beside the hole, the former grave.

She touches the ground with her hand.

It turns her fingers brown. And the sun reflects off the water of the lake, which looks unnaturally clean in the cutting heat. The reflections are like lightning in her eyes, like sharpened knives in her retinas, but she doesn’t want to put on her Ray-Bans, wants to see reality just as it is.

Her blouse is sticking to her back.

‘Hello!’ A man’s voice. ‘You probably shouldn’t be in there.’

The man over on the blanket.

Law-abiding.

But he’s showing you respect, Theresa.

Malin stands up.

Pulls out her wallet from the front pocket of her denim skirt.

Holds up her ID.

‘Malin Fors. Police.’

‘I hope you get the bastard,’ the man says in her direction, his eyes staring somewhere up towards the pale green of the meadow.

The kiosk by the beach in Hjulsbro is closed as well. Even though it would surely have been possible to rake in some serious money on a day like this. There must be at least a hundred people lying on the slope down towards the river and the fast-flowing, grey-black water. The noise from the power station further downstream cuts the air, the turbines running on full, sending out a faint metallic smell into the air.

A summer for swimming.

Small children paddling in the enclosed safe area this side of the jetty. Over-confident teenage boys diving far out into the flow and struggling to get back; their gangly, unfinished bodies scare Malin, they reek of potency.

‘That looks good,’ Zeke says, as he crouches at the top of the slope in the shade of a fir tree.

‘I wonder if it really cools you down. It must be thirty degrees in the water.’

‘Yes, and how clean is it?’

‘All this sweating makes you obsessed with cleanliness,’ Malin says, as she rubs a small leaf between her fingers, soft and almost cool on one side, rough and warm on the other.

The kiosk outside the Glyttinge pool turns out to be closed as well. The privately owned pool is a very successful investment during a summer like this one, and behind the fence Malin and Zeke can hear the noise of the bathers, their shouts and yelps, their happy laughter.

Behind them Skäggetorp, and Ryd not far away.

It’s not so strange that the pool is busy. In those areas, where the poor and the immigrants live, people are spending the summer in their flats.

‘We’ll try Slavenca Visnic at home. Maybe she isn’t well?’

‘It’s still odd,’ Malin says. ‘All three kiosks are closed. This is the time of year when they make their money. And if she isn’t going to be there herself, she ought to have employees, don’t you think?’

‘The same thought did occur to me, Malin.’

‘There’s something weird about it.’

‘What’s weird is this heat, Malin. Shall we take a dip? To clear our heads?’

‘Have you got anything to wear?’

‘Skinny dipping’s good enough.’

‘I can see the headline in the
Correspondent
: Naked detectives in Glyttinge pool.’

‘Mr Högfeldt would like that,’ Zeke says.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘What do I mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t mean anything, Malin. Relax.’

Slavenca Visnic’s flat on the ground floor of Gamlegården 3B in Skäggetorp is deserted as well.

The smell of the forest fires is very noticeable here, closer to the blaze, and the smoke seems to have filtered between the low, white-brick blocks of flats.

No one answered when they knocked on the door in the stairwell. No sounds from inside the flat, and now they’re standing in the little garden looking through the blinds into a gloomy room where only the furniture stands out: a sofa, a table, a couple of armchairs, and an almost empty bookcase, set out on what looks like oak parquet flooring.

‘Does this woman actually exist?’

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Zeke replies.

‘Maybe she’s gone away. Abroad. Or just for the day.’

‘Yes, but now, and with three kiosks?’

‘We’ll have to check her background. The Immigration Agency ought to know something. I’ll get one of the uniforms onto it,’ Malin says.

Then her mobile rings.

Sven Sjöman.

‘A woman who was out running on the jogging track in Ryd yesterday evening has called. Said she felt as if she was being watched, that someone was lying in wait, stalking her. If you’ve got time, go and talk to her.’

‘Sure. We’re done here.’

A name.

An address down on Konsistoriegatan, in the centre of the city.

Linda Karlå offers them chilled apple juice in the kitchen of her tastefully furnished two-room apartment. The flat is in a building dating from the thirties: beige stucco, well-kept, one of the oldest housing cooperatives in the city, with astronomical prices to match.

They sit with their drinks around the kitchen table, and Linda Karlå apologises for taking up their time. Zeke explains that they’re interested in anything that could be connected to the murder and the other attack.

‘I was out running,’ Linda Karlå says. ‘I run a lot. Not all that often in the forest in Ryd, and I don’t know why, but I suddenly got the feeling that someone was watching me, waiting for me deeper in the woods. I didn’t see anyone, but there was someone there. It could have been a man. Or a woman. I know I was being watched, and when I ran there was someone following me. There was a sort of snaking sound, at least that’s what I thought at the time. But I’m fast, so I made it to the car park.’

‘You didn’t see anything?’ Malin asks.

She makes sure that her voice sounds interested.

‘No. But there was someone there. I just thought maybe you’d like to know. Maybe he, whoever did it, lives in Ryd?’