Summertime Death (34 page)

‘Malin. How’s the apartment?’

‘I haven’t had time to go.’

‘But . . .’

‘I was joking, Dad, the plants are fine. How’s Mum?’

‘Oh, the same as usual, I suppose.’

They’ve reached the door to the block of flats. Zeke presses the entryphone, sweat dripping onto his wrist. Malin sees her reflection in the glass of the door, a vague image impossible to bring into focus.

‘Did you want anything in particular, Dad?’

The first time he’s called in over a week.

‘No.’

So why are you calling? Malin thinks. Seeing as you’re evidently completely uninterested in anything that’s happening to me and Tove.

A buzzing sound from the door.

‘Dad. Good to talk to you. But I’m on my way into a meeting.’

‘Don’t worry, Malin. I’ll call again another day.’

A minute later Malin is standing in a lift that’s shaking its way up through the building floor by floor. She can see her face clearly in the mirror in the lift, how the heat seems to be bringing out more wrinkles.

Parents, she thinks. What the hell are they good for?

‘Everything has its price.’

Svea Svensson’s voice hoarse after many long years of smoking, her face shrunken with wrinkles, hair grey, in thin strips above her green eyes, eyes watchful but well-meaning, as if the pupils are hiding a desire to let go of the secrets held in the electrical byways of the brain.

Her flat is on the top floor of the tallest block at the start of Tanneforsvägen.

Period furniture crammed into the living room, baroque chairs made in the fifties, an empire-style sofa, Wilton carpets and prints of Johan Krouthén paintings on silvery grey wallpaper, porcelain ornaments and a carriage clock that has just struck six.

Through the small windows of the living room they can see the Östgöta plain spreading out beyond the rooftops of the city as it unfurls towards Ljungsbro. They can make out the hot waters of Lake Roxen, almost see the steam rising over on the horizon, how it envelops the tormented, scorched fields in a fleeting, invisible mist that hides the obstinate remnants of life that are still clinging on.

The pillars of smoke from the forest on one side have gathered into an angry black cloud that doesn’t know which way to go in the absence of wind.

It looks as if the world is standing still, Malin thinks, just as Svea Svensson repeats: ‘Everything has its price. If life has taught me anything, it’s that.’

Zeke and Malin each slumped in a baroque chair.

Svea Svensson on the sofa behind the coffee table, her mouth moving, the words shaping a history that should never have needed to be told, but which is nonetheless all too common.

Zeke: ‘Can you tell us about Louise’s life as a child?’

‘Is it important?’

Malin: ‘It’s important.’

‘I’ll start at the very beginning. If that’s all right? Before she was born. Back when I was a little girl?’

‘Start wherever you’d like to,’ Zeke says, and the words start pouring from Svea’s mouth, as if they had missed the sound they made.

‘When I was seven years old my father left my mother and me. We lived on my grandfather’s farm, Övraby, outside Brokind, in one of the old outhouses. My father was a travelling salesman and one day he didn’t come home, and Mother found out that he had a new woman in Söderköping. We were short of money, so Mother took a job as a cook on an estate thirty kilometres away, down towards Kisa. I stayed behind with my grandparents, and I remember that time as the happiest days of my life. Then Mother met a new man. He had a shoe shop in Kisa, lived in a flat over the shop, and Mother and I moved in there. After just three nights he came into my room, I can remember his cold hands pushing the covers off me, and it happened again and again, and one night Mother appeared in the doorway while he was doing it, and she looked for a while before carrying on to the toilet, as if nothing had happened.

‘Do I blame her?

‘No.

‘Where would we have gone? Grandfather had had a stroke, the farm was gone.

‘So he had his way, the shoe shop bastard, and I left when I was seventeen, I ended up in Motala, in the kitchen at the factory, and I met a man in the Town Hotel.

‘He was a travelling salesman, just like my father, although he sold industrial chemicals, and he got me pregnant, and I gave birth to Louise. And when she was eight years old he left us alone with the flat in Motala. He’d got a new woman in Nässjö.

‘We lived on our own for a few years, just the girl and me. Then I met a new man, just like my mother had done, Sture Folkman by name. He bought and sold agricultural produce and we moved into his house down by the canal in Motala.

‘Louise never said anything.

‘I’ve often wondered why she didn’t tell me what was going on.

‘We’d been living there for three years when I found out what he was doing at night, what his cold hands were doing at night, what he was doing with his body.

‘Where could we go?

‘But I didn’t let him have his way.

‘I hit him on the head with a saucepan and we waited all night at the bus stop in the rain, Louise and I. It was a cold October night and the bushes and trees in the gardens around us turned into monsters, silhouettes of the devil’s children.

‘In the morning, just after it was light enough to make out the real shape of the bushes and trees, the bus came. It was heading for Linköping, and I’ve never been back to Motala since, and I’ve never seen the bastard since then. And my first husband, Louise’s father, drowned while he was out fishing.

‘I blame myself, you know, Inspectors.

‘I let my child down, my girl, and no matter what pain a person has suffered themselves, you must never turn your back on a child. And that’s what I did by not seeing.

‘We ended up in a hotel room near the station. I reported him to the police, but there was nothing they could do. The nice ladies in the social security office sorted out a flat for us, and I got a job in a café and Louise started school. But even so, ever since then everything has somehow always been too late.

‘I never let any man come into my home after that.’

Malin is pacing up and down beside the bed in her flat, freshly showered and wearing just her pants and bra. She’s laid three summer dresses out on the bedspread, wondering which one to choose: blue with white flowers, the short yellow one, or the longer white one that goes down to her ankles.

She chooses the yellow one, pulls it over her head and looks at herself in the hall mirror, and she thinks that anticipation is making her beautiful, or at least more beautiful than she has felt for ages.

The interview with Svea Svensson just an hour before. The words echoing inside her: cold hands on the covers, under the covers, snakes on her body.

She remembers what an old man said to her during a previous case: ‘Desire is what kills, Miss Fors. Desire is what kills.’

They had asked about Louise, if Svea Svensson knew anything about her daughter that she thought they should know, but Svea Svensson had refused to answer the question at all.

‘Is Sture Folkman still alive?’

Zeke’s question to Svea.

‘Sture Folkman is alive.’

‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘I think he lives in Finspång with his wife. He had a family.’

‘And?’

Malin could sense another story.

‘God help those poor people.’

And then silence, the lips clamped shut as if they’d let out enough memories for a lifetime.

Maybe the white dress after all?

No.

Malin looks around the flat, it looks tidy enough.

She goes down to the car in the car park by the church, starts the engine, sees from the clock that she’s early, it’s only half past seven, Tove and Janne’s plane lands at quarter to two. It takes at most an hour and a half to get to Skavsta. Even if she sticks to the speed limit. But she wants to be there in good time, and might as well be somewhere else with her longing.

As she drives up Järnvägsgatan towards the Berg roundabout, a face appears inside her, she doesn’t know why, but she knows the face is important.

Slavenca Visnic smiles as she opens the door of her flat in Skäggetorp.

And a minute later Malin is sitting with a glass of Fanta in her living room, trying to think of something to ask, and it’s as if the caution she felt just now, the watchfulness around a person featuring in a murder investigation, has blown away, leaving just a vague sense of significance.

‘What do you want to know?’

Slavenca Visnic doesn’t seem surprised by the visit, just curious about what Malin wants.

‘I don’t really know. I just wanted to ask you to try to think if there’s anything important that you might not have told us.’

‘What could that be? I just try to be a good citizen, mind my own business, that’s all.’

Malin can see how ridiculous her visit must seem to such a down-to-earth person as the woman before her.

‘Oh, well.’

‘Don’t worry. Finish your drink. I’ve got to go up to Glyttinge to collect the day’s takings, and have my evening swim. They start cleaning the water at half past nine, and if you swim at the far end of the pool it actually feels clean there then.’

‘An evening swim? Nice. I’m heading to Skavsta to pick up my husband and daughter.’

Malin regrets saying this at once, Slavenca Visnic lost her whole family, but her eyes show nothing but calm, warmth.

‘I’d like to show you something,’ Slavenca Visnic says. ‘Follow me.’

The next minute they’re sitting at a computer in her bedroom, the light of the screen flickering.

Slavenca Visnic has opened ten documents that look like pages of a child’s picture-book. On the pages she’s loaded the few pictures she has of her family, alongside short texts about her childhood, her children’s lives, the short lives they got to live.

Slavenca Visnic looks younger in the pictures, her face full of innocent anticipation and responsibility. The children in her arms, beautiful round faces beneath black hair that’s been allowed to grow long, her husband: a friendly, fluid face defined by a strong chin.

‘It feels good to keep busy doing this,’ Slavenca Visnic says. ‘Writing. Trying to recreate life the way it was when it was at its best, all that simple love.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ Malin says.

‘Do you think so?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think they can ever come back?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ and Slavenca Visnic’s question seems entirely natural to Malin, as if resurrection from the dead were possible sometimes, at least for the love itself.

‘But some day you’ll get to meet them again,’ Malin says. ‘And their love is still here in this room. I can feel it.’

Slavenca Visnic shuts down her computer and follows Malin out into the hall.

‘Drive carefully, they’d probably prefer you to get there in one piece. Your husband and daughter.’

‘We’re divorced,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve been divorced more than ten years.’

Shimmering dusk.

The day on its way into inescapable darkness, its death throes in shifting shades of yellow, red and orange.

Forest, open fields, water, red-painted houses huddling by the tree line, cars parked in driveways, light in windows, sometimes silhouettes behind the glass, people like dark dreams, hungry, still not ready to let go of the day.

But the day itself muttering: I’ve had enough. That’ll do.

The car creeps up to one hundred and twenty. Can go much faster than that.

A metal bird high up in the atmosphere, where the summer air is too thin to breathe. Soon on its way down, the metal cocoon protecting your bodies.

Keep your eyes on the road.

Dangerously tired.

And the tarmac is a snake sliding past Norrköping, Kolmården and on into the night.

Stockholm.

The road ends up there. Sometimes she wishes she were back there, in a larger setting, with more regular cases to fire up a detective’s soul.

A case like theirs.

Threads like unexploded shells, howling as they approach the ground, and all the police officers involved wait for the explosion, waiting for the truth to burst out and take shape before their eyes. But instead just an unexploded bomb lying in the meeting room and emitting a foul stench, in the open-plan office of the police station, a whistling sound that mocks them, reminding them of their shortcomings.

The media going crazy.

Karim Akbar getting softer each day, and simultaneously worse as a media performer, but better as a police chief.

Sven Sjöman.

Malin has never seen him so physically tired as he has been over the past few days. The heat is tearing the soul from his heavy body. Just let his heart hold out, Sven’s good heart.

Per Sundsten. It’s impossible to get a grip on him, who he is, what he wants, what he thinks. A good detective ought to know that sort of thing, Malin thinks, because if you’re sure of who you are and what you want, then your intuition can fly free, can’t it?

What do I want?

Who cares?

No, actually. I have to know.

Waldemar Ekenberg is more obvious than almost everyone else, his masculinity almost comically exaggerated. God knows what he’s got up to over the past few days, how much he has allowed the ends to justify the means. At some point time will catch up even with him.

And Zeke. The way they work together is possibly simpler and clearer now than ever, no nonsense about each of them going off and doing their own thing, a wordless trust in each other. It’s as if Zeke is holding back his tendency towards violence now that Ekenberg is part of the team, as if there has to be a constant balance between violence and empathy, as if this balance is essential if they are to twist the truth out of the clues.

And me.

I know what I’m doing.

Am I learning anything?

I’m slowly getting closer to the girls, that much is clear. If I can feel and understand their fear, maybe I can understand the person who harmed them.