Summertime Death (27 page)

‘The fuss with the football team has died down,’ Karim says. ‘That’s one advantage when things move so fast, no one has time to linger over things that don’t matter. But it was clumsy of me.’

A team-building confession, a bit of rhetoric for the officers on the case. One tiny little mistake, but you’ll forgive me, respect me again. Won’t you?

I respect you, Karim. You’re a better police chief than most.

Sven speaks up.

‘Still nothing from Yahoo! or Facebook. Evidently they’re very restrictive when it comes to giving out information. Yahoo! claim they need an American court order. Facebook haven’t even replied. And Louise Svensson’s computer was completely clean. She could have cleared it out, seeing as she was expecting us to turn up.’

Sven takes a deep breath.

‘We’re still trying to identify possible manufacturers of the dildo, but so far we’ve haven’t got anything definite.’

Then he rubs a hand over his head.

‘How do you suggest we proceed?’

Sven is head of the preliminary investigation, but it feels as if responsibility for the case is fluid, snaking to and fro across the room like hot, hot tar, so hot that no one wants to burn their fingers on it.

The air-conditioning unit groans.

Shudders.

And falls silent.

‘Shit! Just when it had started working at last! Things are going to heat up again,’ Zeke says.

And they all wait for Sven to make a proposal, lead them further, and he starts to speak.

‘Sundsten and Ekenberg. You take the door-to-door around Frimis, and talk to Sofia Fredén’s colleagues at the hotel. Malin and Zeke, get hold of the kiosk owner, and maybe you could check if Josefin Davidsson has remembered anything by now? Just some quick questions? And we’ll have to hope that a witness turns up, someone who saw or heard something, or that they come up with something about Sofia Fredén in Mjölby that can move us on. Otherwise we’ll just have to wait for Forensics to give us something. Well, those are the lines I see ahead of us. Anyone else?’

Silence around the table.

‘Right then,’ Karim says. ‘Let’s get to work.’

‘A shadow.’

Zeke standing beside Malin’s desk. Trying out the word.

‘Something like that,’ Malin says. ‘A shadow of a person. Or a person driven towards utter transparency.’

‘Or a lack of transparency,’ Zeke says.

‘Then there are the different sorts of wounds that were inflicted on the girls,’ Malin says.

‘Seems almost like a sort of curiosity about violence,’ Zeke says.

‘Cleanliness. All that scrubbing.’

‘As if the killer wanted to purify them.’

‘Is Josefin Davidsson still in hospital?’

‘We’ll have to check. Otherwise she’s probably at home.’

Zeke waits by Malin’s desk as she rings.

Waits until she hangs up and says: ‘She’s at home.’

‘Do you think she’ll be able to remember anything now?’

‘No,’ Malin says. ‘But we’ll give it a try.’

Malin thinks of Maria Murvall, who must be able to remember being attacked in the forest, but who has squeezed her whole being into a corner, letting her consciousness act as the basis for a life that’s been stripped down, a life that’s really no better than most animals’.

Is that what evil can do to a person?

Apparently.

Then Malin’s phone rings.

Ebba in reception.

‘There’s someone who wants to talk to you, Malin. Says he wants to be anonymous, he’s got a very strong accent. Says it’s about the girls.’

‘Put him through.’

The voice, the accent, the prejudices that arise at once. He sounds, even though Malin doesn’t want to think it, stupid, speaking in scarcely intelligible Swedish: ‘You know that fucker Behzad Karami, he hasn’t got a fucking alibi, his family are just lying, he was somewhere that night, and last night too, I know. You have to check him again, they’re lying to you. He often does strange things at night, he just disappears.’

How can you know that? Malin thinks, and says: ‘What’s your name?’

No number on the display, the man, or rather the youth, is probably ringing from a public phone.

‘I don’t have a name.’

‘Hang on . . .’

Click.

Malin turns towards Zeke. A questioning look in his eyes.

‘Behzad Karami just reappeared in the case. We should check him out again.’

‘OK, but where do we start? With Behzad Karami, Slavenca Visnic or Josefin Davidsson?’

Malin throws up her hands.

‘Which one do you think would have air conditioning at home?’

‘Let’s start with Josefin,’ Zeke replies. ‘Besides, Visnic is proving rather difficult to get hold of, to put it mildly.’

‘Doesn’t Karim live out this way?’ Zeke asks, wiping the little beads of sweat from his upper lip. They look like tiny, burned blisters.

‘Yes, they’ve got a villa here somewhere,’ Malin replies, thinking that Josefin Davidsson was incredibly lucky to get away with her life.

They park by the school. Josefin Davidsson lives with her parents in one of the terraced houses in Lambohov.

The red-painted wooden houses are small, unassuming family dreams, clinging together in rows, with neatly tended front gardens and hedges that have grown tall over the years since the houses were built.

‘I think Karim’s son goes to school there,’ Malin says as they walk slowly towards the houses. They stop outside number twelve, go into the little garden and ring the bell, but hear nothing from inside. So Malin takes hold of the ring hanging from the mouth of the gilded lion adorning the green front door instead, and just as she knocks the door opens and Josefin peeps out through the gap.

‘Hello. Oh, it’s you. What do you want?’

‘We’d like to ask you some questions,’ Malin says. ‘We want to see what you remember. Or if you can remember anything else?’

‘Come in.’

Josefin opens the door.

She’s wearing a loose, pale-pink dress that hangs limply about her body, her hair wet after what Malin assumes must have been a shower. The bandages on her arms and legs are dry and clean.

She walks into the house ahead of them, leading them past a kitchen with white cupboards and on into a living room where two burgundy-coloured Chesterfield sofas sit facing one another. Outside there’s a patio with a hammock and plastic garden furniture. The room is hot and smells faintly of smoke and sweat and freshly made caramel.

Malin and Zeke sit down beside each other and Josefin settles down opposite them. You look older here at home, Malin thinks, as if the ornate furniture and cheap Wilton rugs are stealing life from you.

‘I can’t remember anything,’ Josefin says. ‘And, really, why would I want to?’

She knits her hands in her lap, they go white and she turns away to look at the garden.

‘Are your mum and dad out?’ Malin asks.

‘They’re at work.’

She looks back at them.

‘They could be here, get compassionate leave if you’d rather not be alone.’

‘Then they’d get less money. And they’d probably rather work.’

‘You don’t mind being left on your own?’

‘No, I don’t remember anything, so what would I be afraid of? That it could happen again? That’s not very likely.’

The person who hurt you, Malin thinks. I’m afraid of them, and so should you be. You should be afraid, but you’re sensible, what good would being afraid do? The chance of the perpetrator coming after you is small, and if he or she wanted you dead, then you wouldn’t be here.

‘Why did you go to the cinema on your own?’ Malin asks. ‘People usually go with a friend, don’t they?’

‘I like going on my own. Talking just spoils the experience of the film.’

‘OK. Try to remember. What did you do that evening, what happened? Try to get an image, a word, a smell, anything at all, in your head. Please, just try.’

Malin tries to sound as persuasive as she can, but there’s an undertone: Remembering is possible. And it would help us.

And Josefin shuts her eyes, concentrating, but soon opens them again and looks at Malin and Zeke with a sigh.

‘Sorry,’ she says.

‘What about your dreams?’ Malin asks. ‘Anything from them?’

‘I never remember my dreams,’ Josefin replies.

On the way out Malin stops in the hall, looking at her face in the mirror. Through the door on her left she sees Josefin put a saucepan of water on an old Cylinda stove.

Without knowing why, Malin goes into the kitchen and puts her hand on Josefin’s shoulder.

‘How are you going to spend the summer?’ she asks, and Josefin starts and turns around.

‘I’m going to take it easy. I was supposed to be working in the kiosk at the pool in Glyttinge, but I resigned after just three days. I’d rather have the time off instead.’

Malin stiffens.

‘So you know Slavenca Visnic?’

Josefin laughs.

‘I don’t think anyone knows that woman.’

‘She was supposed to be working for Slavenca Visnic, but resigned after just three days.’

Malin is trying not to sound too excited about the connection.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘And she had an idea about where Slavenca might be, didn’t think she’d gone abroad.’

‘Where, then?’

‘She might be up in the forest, at the fire. As a volunteer. Apparently she spoke of nothing but the forest fires when they started working together, said they probably needed help.’

‘I read in the
Correspondent
that there are about a hundred people helping out at the edge of the fires. With blankets and so on.’

‘That would make sense. Her family died in a fire in Sarajevo. A grenade attack on the building they lived in.’

Janne.

He worked for the Swedish Rescue Services Agency in Bosnia. She knows he saw all manner of horrors down there, but he’s never really talked about it.

Silence.

Memory loss.

They’re more than just cousins.

Siblings, maybe.

The road leads into the smoke.

There are cars lined up along the edge of the forest road leading into the inferno, into the fire. The edge of the fire is just north of Lake Hultsjön, so they drive through Ljungsbro and take the Tjällmo road up through the densely grown forest, the same road they drove back on during the winter they were working on the Bengt Andersson case.

Neither of them mention this as they drive across the desiccated, tormented plain and the dust flies up across the road in thick veils.

Instead Zeke put on his beloved German choral music, deep chanting from some choir that has put new words to a Wagner opera.

High volume.

Dystopian, Malin thinks. Perfect for a bad horror film.

The noise is only turned down when she calls Sundsten and asks him to follow up on Behzad Karami.

‘We’ll sort it. We’ve finished the door-to-door around the Railway Park and Frimis. No one saw anything. But most people are asleep at that time of day.’

Then she calls Sven Sjöman and tells him about the new connection.

‘Good. At last.’

Then they are approaching the fire, veils of smoke drifting over the car, the once blue sky now grey and angry, and they can feel the heat gradually rising inside the car, a heat that makes them want to turn back and flee before their skin starts to scorch, boil, char, as their brains picture catastrophic scenarios for their bodies. The smell is getting stronger and stronger, a charred world, the stench of flesh burned alive and the plaints of trees being consumed by greedy flames.

They turn off onto the gravel road they’re now driving down, as that is where the bright red fire engine they are following turns off. Above them a helicopter is circling with a water scoop, and then it heads in over the fire, disappearing from view. People with soot-stained faces, their eyes hidden behind goggles, walking along the road.

‘What sort of car has she got?’ Zeke says, his hands firm on the wheel, the car heading slowly towards the core of the fire, burned-out trees around them, dust and ash swirling through the air.

‘A Fiat van, according to the registration office, white.’

‘Haven’t seen one like that yet.’

An ambulance parked in a small sidetrack, two firemen standing beside it, inhaling what must be oxygen from large yellow canisters.

And this is the inferno you can’t wait to get back to, Janne.

People with blankets in their hands. Beating them on the ground where the smoke is rising. Further ahead they can make out flames through the trees.

‘There’ve never been fires like this in Östergötland before,’ Zeke says. ‘They’re battling to stop it coming back to life again. Did you know, a fire blazing at its worst can jump more than fifty metres from treetop to treetop? Almost like an explosion, and that’s when it gets really dangerous. That’s when firemen get trapped, circled by the fire.’

So far no one has been killed, no firemen, and no volunteers.

Just let it stay that way, with only the creatures of the forest losing their lives.

They meet a fire engine, one of the smaller ones, and Malin recognises two of Janne’s colleagues in the front seat but can’t remember their names. They recognise her and nod.

‘Tough guys,’ Zeke says.

‘I guess so,’ Malin says.

The line of parked cars breaks up, fewer volunteers here, firemen from five districts running to and fro in the forest, moving in and out of the burned vegetation. And then they see it, the white Fiat.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says.

‘The number matches,’ Malin says.

And they park close to the Fiat, open the doors of the Volvo and the roar and the heat from the inferno, almost invisible ahead of them in the forest, hits them, the air full of a prickling smell of sulphur and burned meat, the noise of the fire a dark whistling, as if God himself were trying to sound the alarm.

The heat almost unbearable.

Summer plus fire equals sauna.

‘Not even a Finn could put up with this,’ Zeke says, as if he could read Malin’s mind.

‘Fuck, no. It must be at least forty-five degrees up here.’

Cries and shouting from the fire, two low banks of smoke separating, and a woman, the same height as Malin, with soot-blackened clothes and a filthy smeared face emerges between two charred maples.