Summertime Death (41 page)

But do I go too far?

My colleagues have reported me, suspects have reported me, but nothing has ever come of it and I deliver the goods, more than other people, and with a case like this one? With a bastard like that on the loose, no one cares if someone suffers a bit as long as no one really gets hurt.

That’s what being human is.

Sometimes you get squeezed by circumstances, that’s just the way it is. You just have to accept it, just like most suffering.

The woman in the kitchen wanted children.

I wasn’t that fussed, Waldemar thinks. But God knows, they tried. Test tubes all over the place, wanking into little pots in dimly lit bathrooms with a cheap porn magazine in his lap.

Then she hit forty-five and all that stopped.

They share that fate with a lot of other couples.

And here I stand in our garden. The sky getting darker. Stars lighting up in distant galaxies. Earthly life huddling together, and I can honestly say that I still love her.

Per Sundsten is standing at the hotdog kiosk in Borensberg. Built in the fifties, it’s the archetypal Swedish kiosk with an adjoining waiting room for bus passengers. He’s ordered a pork-burger with cheese, and is planning to take it down to the Göta Canal to eat it in peace and quiet as he watches the boats, before heading home to his flat in Motala.

The advantages of the single life.

I do what I want with my time. No one to tell me what to do.

‘There you go.’

The kiosk owner, an immigrant, hands him the burger, the cheese almost running down the sides of the meat.

He sits down on a bench overlooking the canal.

A man and woman, about the same age as him, go past on a blue yacht. They’re sitting in the cockpit drinking wine, and they wave to him and he takes a sip of his Pucko chocolate milkshake and waves back.

Ekenberg is crazy.

But at the same time it’s reassuring to have him by his side. He knows how to do this. I’m probably better suited to the Financial Crime Unit in Stockholm.

Motala. Not too dissimilar to Kalmar, where he grew up, an old industrial town now full of drugs and problems, but still with the appearance of a small-town idyll. But hardly the best place for a thirty-year-old to live.

The case they’re working on. He can’t get a grip on any of it. The threads are running together and it feels as though he’s mostly a passenger, that he doesn’t have anything to contribute.

Fors.

She’s driven and manic and a bit scary. She almost seems frightened of herself. But if anyone can solve this case it’s her.

He takes a bite of the fried meat.

Another boat goes past.

A man is sitting in the cockpit. He looks lonely, Per thinks.

Zeke shovels another mouthful of plaice into his mouth. His wife looks at him, then she looks down at the kitchen table, with a pointed glance at the holiday brochures opened at various destinations: Sunny Beach in Bulgaria; Crete; Costa Dorada. Dreams packaged as dreams.

‘I can’t begin to think about that at the moment. About going anywhere.’

She’s sitting opposite him, pointing at Sunny Beach.

‘This one’s supposed to be cheap. What do you think?’

‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’

The kitchen suddenly seems extremely small, the brown pine units are crowding in on me, Zeke thinks, and he wants to escape into the garden, but she’s not about to let go.

‘Lennart and Siv went to Crete last summer. They said it was lovely. And it’s easy to get deals now that the weather’s so good here.’

‘This fish is good. Plaice is always good at this time of year.’

‘Or what do you think about Spain? That’s still the classic, after all.’

She leafs through one of the brochures.

‘How about Rimini?’

He looks at her. Martin’s mother, his wife. Who are you? he thinks. The investigation, the heat, the light, the dust, and Karin Johannison’s legs under white fabric in the car. Everything creates new perspectives, making him a stranger in his own life.

Karin Johannison is standing naked by the swimming pool on the terrace behind the house, one of the largest in Ramshäll, the garden not overlooked at all thanks to the mature shrubs. The evening smells of sulphur and pine resin.

Kalle in front of the television in the living room.

He’s watching one of those old films on TCM that he’s so fond of, a Frank Capra comedy.

They had the pool installed back in the spring, they’d both wanted one for years.

They have help maintaining it, a neighbour put them onto a woman who looks after pools. She comes when they aren’t at home, cleans it up, adjusts the chlorine levels, and Karin has never met her, but Kalle says she seems to know what she’s doing, although she never says much and always wants to be paid in cash.

Whatever.

She thinks about what Martinsson said in the car.

About him.

Almost ten years older, and she’s often wondered what he had against her, but she believed him, that there would be no more bad feeling from now on. And the way he looked at me. I could have stopped the car and done what people do at the side of the road.

A long hot crazy summer.

Heat all around me.

Heat within me.

I know how to escape it, Karin thinks, and pushes off with her feet, sailing through the air before her body cleaves the surface and everything becomes cool and miraculously silent.

Malin has crept in beside Tove.

She was lying in bed, still tired after the flight. Malin woke her, told her off: ‘The battery in my mobile ran out, I just met up with Julia and we got an ice cream from Bosse’s, then did some people-watching in Stora torget. Mum, it’s no big deal.’

And Tove fell asleep again. Malin was feeling tired too. In the kitchen she drank half a tumbler of tequila, thinking that they were finally getting somewhere now, that soon this would all be over. And she sensed how worried she was.

Then she went back in to Tove.

Took off all her clothes but her underwear.

Crept under the sheet and felt her daughter’s warm skin and the gentle vibrations from her beating heart, reason enough to carry on fighting, living.

What are we going to do with all these people? The ones who can’t control their desires, the ones who damage other people because they themselves have been damaged?

A bloody big camp up in Norrland.

A suicidal cliff of desire.

Chemical castration.

Real castration.

Electronic surveillance.

It’s early in the morning and Per Sundsten can’t work out what he thinks as he and Waldemar Ekenberg follow a still sleepy Arto Sovalaski through the hall of his red wooden cottage on the outskirts of Linghem, a dormitory suburb just to the east of Linköping. They just passed through a neatly tended garden, parched like everything green, with gooseberry bushes in close formation along the gravel path leading to the house.

‘I know why you’re here. And on a Saturday and all. Shouldn’t you be having a day off?’

‘At least we didn’t have to have a morning meeting,’ Per says, watching Arto Sovalaski shuffle in front of them. Possibly the most exhausted man in the world, his face wrecked from drink and smoking, with no trace at all of any dreams for the future.

The stench of sweat in the house.

‘We shouldn’t be working,’ Per goes on, ‘but right now Linköping has been visited by the big bad.’

Arto Sovalaski, the last name on the list of known sex offenders in their district.

His torso covered by a stained yellow T-shirt with a picture of a digger on the front.

‘Do you work?’

Waldemar’s question as they enter the living room and Arto Sovalaski has settled onto the yellow and brown patterned sofa, the only piece of furniture in the room. Bottles and overflowing ashtrays all over the wooden floor.

‘No, I got an early pension.’

Well, thinks Per, I daresay no one really wants to have you around. Four rapes in four months ten years ago in different places, Växjö, Karlstad, Örebro, and one here in Linköping. Since then, nothing.

‘So you know why we’re here?’

‘Yes, it’s happened before when there’s been some sex-related crime in the city. Then you come running. But you can clear off again, because I was away when it happened, visiting friends over on Öland. Call them.’

Waldemar goes closer.

Not again, Per thinks.

But Waldemar backs down this time.

‘Have you got the number for your friends?’

‘Sure.’

Ten minutes later they’re sitting in the car on the way back in to the city, Arto Sovalaski’s alibi confirmed by a drunk Finn on the other side of the Kalmar Sound.

‘Well, that’s that line of inquiry exhausted,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says. ‘Let’s get back to the station and put the squeeze on Suliman one last time before he gets out.’

‘They let him go last night,’ Per says.

‘Did they, now?’ Waldemar says. ‘Did they, now?’

A bit of a lie-in.

They indulged themselves seeing as it’s Saturday, and it’s nine o’clock when Malin goes downstairs to meet Zeke

The second Saturday of this case. Just over a week has passed since the eruption. But it feels like several years, as if they’re dealing with a drawn-out plague.

The heat hasn’t improved. It may even be a bit worse.

The grey stone façade of the church is quivering in the air, fading into a sickly yellow nuance, and the quiver in the air means that Malin can’t make out the inscription.

Zeke, where are you?

He called ten minutes ago as he was passing Berga, so he should be here by now.

Tove still asleep up in the flat.

Malin walks down the street, taking a look in the windows of the St Lars gallery, at the colourful paintings by artists like Madeleine Pyk and Lasse Åberg. She doesn’t know much about art, but what she sees hanging on the walls of the gallery makes her feel ill.

Vera Folkman.

How broken is she?

Damaged, damaged goods. We should put in a claim for the damage.

Like that couple in the US who adopted a little girl from Ukraine who turned out to have learning difficulties. The story goes that they sent her back in a FedEx box and that she froze to death en route, in a plane ten thousand metres above the ground.

A car horn.

Zeke.

The next minute she’s sitting in the air-conditioned cool of the car. She breathes out. Doesn’t notice the white van parked at the top of Ågatan.

Tove stretches out in bed, her mum’s bed, it’s still nice to sleep there sometimes.

She’s meeting Markus later, and today she’s going to tell him, it’s over, that she still likes him, just not like that, and that they can still be friends.

But he won’t want that.

She sits up.

Just from the light creeping through the gaps in the Venetian blinds she can tell this is likely to be the hottest day since she got home from Bali.

They ring the bell of Vera Folkman’s flat on Sturegatan. She lives on the first floor, but there’s no answer, the whole flat gives a strangely abandoned impression from the outside.

‘Gone, baby, gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Damn, it’s hot already. Hotter by the second.’

The longer they stand outside the flat, the more they become aware of a smell coming from inside.

‘It smells of animal crap,’ Zeke says.

‘Maybe she keeps cats in there?’

‘Well, whatever it is, it stinks.’

‘Maybe she’s in Australia,’ Malin says, turning on her heel and starting to go back downstairs. ‘She could have left her pets inside.’

‘It’s probably cooler there than it is here, even in Alice Springs,’ Zeke says.

‘That’s supposed to be the hottest place in the world.’

‘Wrong. Linköping’s the hottest place in the world.’

Tove sitting firmly on her bicycle.

Her pink top tight against her body.

The world sleepy and yellow through her sunglasses.

She pedals past Tinnis, but instead of heading up Ramshällsbacken she turns off towards the hospital, heading back down towards the Hotel Ekoxen. She has a funny feeling that someone’s following her, that someone’s watching her, trying to get closer. But she carries on pedalling, getting slightly out of breath, and she thinks it must be her nerves ahead of her conversation with Markus that are making her twitchy.

She’d felt it ever since she got her bike from the stand down by the church.

But where were the eyes?

She looked around, nothing suspicious, nothing different, just fewer people in this hot, summertime empty city.

And now she is coasting down towards the hotel, and turns around, and isn’t that the same van that was parked outside the flat? At home? The one that drove past her outside Markus’s yesterday?

Scared now.

And she stops at the hotel.

Opens the gate leading to the airy, yellowing Horticultural Society Park.

That was where they found one of the girls.

But at least the van can’t follow me in there.

A dark figure behind the wheel. Who?

She’s cycling fast, her daughter, and I mustn’t give myself away, I shall take her like I took the others, it will be quick.

She mustn’t see me and she’s stopped at the gate of the park and she looks scared.

But I’m nothing to be scared of.

I’m just going to see to it that you start living again. I’m an angel-maker. That’s what I am.

But she disappears.

Cycles into the park. She must have seen me. I drive past, pulling my cap down over my face. Time, my time, our time, will soon be here. Hands firm on the wheel now.

What time?

Tinnis, over there. That’ll do.

Shall I call Mum?

No.

The van goes past, it doesn’t stop, and the person inside it wearing a cap drives on.

I’m just twitchy.

There must be hundreds of white vans in Linköping.

Hardly anyone in the park. She cycles back to the gate by the hotel.