Summertime Death (42 page)

No van in sight.

She cycles straight to Markus’s house, determined, focused, just like Mum. Just like Mum, she thinks.

Zeke is sitting in the shade of a sickly yellow Festis umbrella in the outdoor café at Tinnis. He’s just peeled the plastic from a meatball sandwich. Malin wanted to take a swim at lunchtime, and he protested at first, didn’t they have more important things to think about than swimming?

But she insisted.

Said she couldn’t deal with the gym in this heat.

Wanted to go swimming, and she insisted in a way that was almost manic, in a way that only Malin can be: controlled, but still intense and relentless. He has learned to listen to her when she’s like this, knows she’s trying to find meanings and signifiers that can lead them on.

The sun has free rein over the clear sky.

The trees on the far side are shading the outdoor pool, and the indoor pools are shut off, empty while work is being done on them.

He doesn’t feel like swimming.

Too many people. And even more at lunchtime.

Pools like this never feel clean, no matter how much chlorine they have in them. They met a woman on the way out when they arrived at the pool. She was dressed in white and carrying a black bag in one hand and a test-tube holder in the other. Presumably something to do with pool maintenance.

But it doesn’t matter, Zeke thinks, taking a bite of the sandwich. Even if they have the strictest hygiene standards, I still don’t want to go swimming here.

Malin doesn’t care.

She’s standing in her red costume on what looks like a sugar lump, ready to dive in.

The water of the pool rinsing her body.

Cool, take long strokes, feel the chlorine cleaning her skin, lungs, another stroke, it’s supposed to hurt or it isn’t doing any good. The red balls of the lane marker become a red line as she speeds up.

She breathes and her muscles lurch and she takes another stroke, and little by little she fights her way to the edge, maybe thirty metres away now.

The clag in her head has disappeared.

Nothing but clarity and the sting of lactic acid.

Made it.

She puts a hand up on the tiles, breathes out, sees Zeke sitting under the parasol up at the café.

She pulls herself up, sits on the edge with her feet in the water, breathing, feeling strangely clean, as if the sweat and the dust had gone for ever, as if she has become something new, better. She feels reborn, and the surface of the water sparkles in a thousand shades of blue, and all of a sudden it hits her with shattering clarity.

The Eckeveds’ pool.

The water at the beach.

The Glyttinge pool.

Sofia Fredén’s summer job last year here at Tinnis.

Josefin Davidsson’s summer job, and the article in the
Correspondent
saying there was a problem with the water around the time when she was working at Glyttinge.

Drops like a thread, purity like a mantra.

Violence as a tragic rosary.

Zeke stands up as she comes over to his table.

‘Can I borrow your mobile? I need to make a call, right away.’

Zeke takes out his mobile, his movements slow in the heat, and a group of children in rubber rings are shrieking from the edge of the pool, too scared to jump and shouting to their parents for encouragement, for reassurance that jumping in isn’t dangerous.

Three rings before the call’s answered.

‘Sigvard Eckeved.’

‘Hello, this is Malin Fors. There’s something I forgot to ask. Do you have someone who looks after the pool for you? You mentioned that someone came last spring?’

‘You mean the one who comes out here?’

‘Yes.’

Zeke looks at her, his eyes fixed, expectant, as Malin squeezes the water from her hair with her free hand. There’s a delay before she gets an answer.

‘Well, a woman used to come each spring to check the water purifier. Your phone rang yesterday while I was telling you about it. But I didn’t really think it was important. You’re looking for a man anyway, aren’t you?’

‘You said it was a woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Her name’s Elisabeth.’

‘Surname?’

‘No idea. To be honest, I’m afraid I always paid her in cash. The first time I gave my number to a neighbour and she called me. The way it works is that she calls to ask when she should come. I never got a number for her. Pretty much the way it works with Polish cleaners. But, like I said, this spring I took care of it myself.’

‘OK. Thanks. Can I have your neighbour’s name and number?’

Silence.

‘I’m afraid not. He died of a heart attack a year ago.’

‘His wife, would she have the number?’

‘He was single. But the new neighbours may have kept her on. Maybe they’ve got her number?’

Sigvard disappears from the line. A minute later he’s back, and rattles off a number. Malin memorises it.

‘Thanks.’

‘What’s this about?’

‘I don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘We’ll have to see.’

She ends the call and turns towards Zeke.

‘Do you remember what Sture Folkman’s daughter’s name was, the one who committed suicide?’

‘Aronsson never said when we talked to her,’ Zeke says. ‘But I remember from the report. Elisabeth. The only reason I remember is that that was the name of my first girlfriend.’

Malin turns and heads quickly for the changing room, making sure that the phone number is still in her head.

It’s there.

Like an image, the number in glowing pink neon on a worn house-front in Los Angeles.

Zeke doesn’t move, looking out over the Tinnerbäck pool, looking at the people trying to make something good of the heatwave, with these temperatures. The children with their rubber rings the very definition of innocence.

Markus was sad at first.

Not that he cried, but Tove could see him withdraw into himself, his shoulders slumping, his eyes restless. They were sitting at the kitchen table and the sunlight was reflecting off the stainless-steel fridge freezer, making her squint. They’d had sandwiches and milk, talked about how they were going to spend the rest of the holidays. Markus had been taking it for granted that they’d spend all the time together, maybe going out to his parents’ summer cottage, and eventually Tove managed to say it, and when she did her voice didn’t sound the way she’d wanted it to.

‘I want us to break up.’

Like the crack of a whip. Far too abrupt, not remotely gentle.

The words felt brutal in their unambiguous simplicity, and Markus was shocked.

‘What did you say?’

‘I want . . .’

‘I thought . . .’

‘It just feels like I want to be free this year, and it doesn’t, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like it did at the start . . . it would be better if we could be friends.’

The words out of her mouth fast, as if they were burning her.

‘I want to be able to concentrate on my schoolwork.’

Markus said nothing.

As if he were letting the words sink in, as if their meaning were gradually taking hold within him. But what could he say?

‘I missed you when you were in Bali,’ he said.

‘But I didn’t miss you.’

And with those words his sadness changed into anger, and he stood up and shouted at her: ‘Couldn’t you have said this before you went? That you wanted to break up? Now I’ve spent all summer waiting, not even looking at anyone else at parties!’

‘Stop shouting!’

‘This is my house, I’ll shout as much as I like!’

And Tove had had enough, she got up from the bench and ran out into the hall, slipping on her flip-flops and opening the door.

He called after her: ‘Come back, I didn’t mean to get cross,’ and Tove felt twenty years older, grown-up, when she heard how upset he sounded.

But she still shut the door behind her.

Heard the little sucking sound as it closed.

And then the sound of her own breathing, adrenalin coursing through her body, making her feel giddy.

Let her cycle off. Let her go.

I met your mother just now in Tinnis.

You’re a constant source of worry to her.

So just come to me.

Become an angel.

A cleansing angel of resurrection.

Innocence reborn.

She’s angry as she rushes out of the house.

Slamming the door.

Doesn’t look in my direction, doesn’t see the van parked a little way up the hill.

Peace, come and find peace.

Soon you’ll never have to be angry again.

Death is over there.

Watch out, Tove, watch out, you don’t want to be one of us.

We drift and we roar in unison in your ear, but our angels’ voices don’t reach your eardrums.

Stop, stop!

But you’re not listening.

You’re fleeing discomfort, towards a warmth that you think exists somewhere.

Hear what we’re saying.

Stop.

But you’re deaf to our voices, they’re no more than vibrations in the noise of your inner ear.

Instead you keep pedalling, cycling angrily straight into the catastrophe.

Right into the fire, down, down, into the lowest of all circles.

Who can save you there?

Not us.

Your mum?

Maybe in the end the whole thing will come down to whose love is the greatest?

‘Water, Zeke, that’s the connection in this case.’

Malin was talking fast as they headed back to the car parked outside the pool, and she explained what she meant, how all the girls were somehow connected to pools, and had been scrubbed clean with manic frenzy, and how even the smells corresponded, the bleach on all three girls, and the smell of chlorine from the swimming pools.

Malin felt almost feverish in the car park, as reality, air, buildings, cars, heat, sky all seemed to be tumbling around her, but she pulled herself together.

‘So you mean we should be looking for someone who does swimming-pool maintenance?’

Zeke more open-minded than sceptical.

‘Yes, one in particular.’

‘One in particular?’

‘Soon, Zeke. Soon.’

Zeke breathed out deeply.

‘Where do we start? Here?’

‘Why not?’

As they went back in again Malin called the number she’d been given by Sigvard Eckeved, but the neighbour wasn’t aware of any pool-maintenance woman, saying: ‘I take care of all that myself’, and now they’re sitting in a cramped, hot room with yellow tiled walls next to the café talking to the manager of the Tinnerbäck pool, a Sten Karlsson, a bundle of muscle in lifeguard’s trunks and a red vest with the pool’s logo, a sea lion with a ball.

The desk in front of them is littered with papers.

‘Paperwork isn’t my strong point,’ Sten Karlsson says apologetically. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘We’d like to know who looks after pool maintenance.’

‘Our lifeguards and our technician. The lifeguards keep things clean with nets and pool bottom cleaners, and the technician makes sure that all the technical stuff works.’

‘Are all your lifeguards employed on contracts?’ Malin asks, feeling herself getting impatient as she doesn’t get the answer she wants.

‘Yes.’

‘Is any of them in charge of the chemical side of things?’

‘No, we’ve contracted that out.’

‘So that was the woman I saw,’ Zeke says. ‘She was here about an hour ago, wasn’t she?’

‘That’s right. We have a woman who looks after the chemical balance of the water.’

‘Who is she?’

The question bursts out of Malin.

‘Her name’s Elisabeth. I don’t know her surname. Her company is called, hang on . . .’

Elisabeth.

The same woman?

Is Elisabeth Vera Folkman? Acting under her dead sister’s name? And, if so, what does that actually mean? If she is Vera Folkman, what have her experiences done to her, what have they made her do?

Sten Karlsson is searching through the sheets of paper on his desk.

‘Hang on. Here it is!’

He holds up an invoice. Linköping Water Technicians Ltd.

‘Sexy name, eh?’

Malin snatches the invoice from Sten Karlsson’s hand.

Reads the address, phone number.

‘Do you know where she was going after here?’ Malin asks.

‘No idea. She’s pretty mysterious.’

Sten Karlsson points at the invoice.

‘She leaves those without a word, except for saying that she wants to be paid in cash. But I can tell you one thing. She knows her job. We’ve had her for two years, and the water in the pools has been top quality since then.’

Malin and Zeke are standing together outside Sten Karlsson’s office. Malin is holding a note containing the details of the company: name, address and company number.

‘Number 17, Johanneslundstigen,’ Zeke says. ‘I’ve never heard of a Johanneslundstigen.’

Malin reads the phone number: 013 13 02 66.

Calls the number.

An automated reply.

‘The number 013 17 02 66 is not in use . . .’

‘Fuck,’ Malin says.

‘Call directory inquiries,’ Zeke says. ‘Ask them.’

‘118 118!’

The perky operator’s voice annoys Malin.

‘That’s right, that number isn’t in use.’

‘No, there’s no Johanneslundstigen in Linköping.’

‘Of course, I’ll put you through to the tax office.’

After a long pause someone else answers. The tax office is pretty much closed on a Saturday in July. Then another long wait to be transferred. Then a new woman’s voice, formal and bureaucratic, as she might have expected. Zeke is pacing up and down beside her now, sweat on his forehead.

‘Did you say Linköping Water Technicians Ltd, registration number 5-987689?’

‘That’s right,’ Malin says.

‘There’s no company registered under that number, or that name. Sorry.’

Malin ends the call once she’s made a note of the woman’s direct number.

She feels the heat constricting her chest, her heart beating hard under her ribs. How long can you keep a false company running? One year? Two? Three? Maybe longer, if you do it properly. But who knows how long she’s been in the city. Unless she really has been in Australia, like Sture Folkman said? And came home two years ago with the very worst baggage imaginable?