Summertime Death (44 page)

People who are people who are people who are one and the same person.

A desire to dissolve, to be reborn as someone else.

A person as drifting smoke, above a charred landscape. Personified as one single feeling, one single characteristic.

Love and evil.

False company names.

The desire to be invisible.

Cold white hands.

But how?

‘Come on,’ Karim pleads. ‘No ideas about Vera Folkman?’

And where are you now? Malin thinks.

Where am I?

Why is it dark, and what’s this over my eyes? My head aches and I feel sick, but that isn’t the biggest problem, there’s something worse, but what? I’m breathing, Tove thinks, and this is a dream, and she remembers the shade under the tree, the paper of the book under her fingers, but what sort of dream is this, what does it want with me? Markus, is that you, and she can feel how she’s breathing, recognises the smell of detergent and she tries to get up, but her legs are stuck.

She tries to push herself up with her arms, but they’re stuck, and Mum, Mum, Mum where are you, I can’t be dead already, is this my grave Mum? and Tove tries to scream but no sound comes out of her mouth.

Cloth in her mouth.

Why would I have cloth in my mouth if I were dead?

Or if I were dreaming?

Malin looks out across the office.

It’s just gone six o’clock.

Where has the afternoon gone?

Writing reports.

Looking through the register of companies to try to find any with names resembling Linköping Water Technicians.

Nothing.

You are out.

Waiting for one of the patrols to call in with something positive.

But that never happened.

The search for Vera Folkman and the surveillance on her flat has led nowhere, the shadow remains a shadow. And Slavenca Visnic seems to have gone up in smoke, she isn’t at any of her kiosks, and the patrol that went up to the fires couldn’t find her either.

One piece of news, though. Andersson in Forensics rang. Facebook had finally got back to him. Confirming that Lovelygirl was Louise Svensson, they’d managed to trace her IP number.

She spoke to Janne over the phone.

He called her. Said that they’d had to run from the fire down by Hultsjön, that one of their generators had been lost to the flames, that a hunting cottage had burned down and that a few idiots came close to being cut off by the fire in their attempts to save the cottage.

The Murvall brothers’ cottage, the brothers in the fire. The Bengt Andersson case.

‘I’m so damn tired, Malin.’

‘Go home and sleep.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘They need me here. And I’m filled with this anxiety that I can’t shake off.’

‘Me too.’

Janne’s restlessness.

Hultsjön. That was where everything came to a head last winter in connection with another case. That was where evil caught up with Maria Murvall.

The same evil?

No.

But who knows?

When we get hold of Vera Folkman she’ll have to provide DNA samples that can be compared with those of Maria Murvall’s attacker. Slavenca Visnic? I’ve already asked Karin to take care of that.

The clock on the computer says 18.52.

She calls home, hoping Tove will answer.

But no.

Her mobile.

Five rings, then the answering service.

Anxiety. Hardly unexpected, Malin thinks as she quickly shuts down her computer and leaves the station.

When the room gets too cold and I hear the floorboards creaking out on the landing I try to think of summer instead of the monster.

The summer, like when Elisabeth and I are cycling along the canal, and the warm wind catches our thin fair hair and I see your white cotton dress pressed tight to your body, stroking your skin more and more and more with each pedal, and you’re my big sister, I try to keep up with you but for you there’s no contest. You stop and wait for me. The light falls through the oak leaves of the ancient trees along the canal and you’re standing beside your red bicycle smiling at me.

Was I cycling too fast? I didn’t mean to. You go first, I’ll be right behind you, you don’t have to keep looking back, I’ll be there, making sure nothing bad happens.

I’m twelve, you’re fourteen.

You are the whole of my summertime world and we go skinny-dipping together, there’s no embarrassment between us, and if we cycle far enough along the path that runs along the shore of Lake Vättern we can get to places where we can be on our own. Where the summer can drive the pain from our bodies.

Where he can’t reach us.

We share the secrets of the darkness, you and I, sister.

He comes just as often to each of us, and I want to scream and you want to scream, but he puts his long white fingers on our lips, then fingers his way down and we let it happen, because what else can we do?

It is his house and we are stuck in his life.

And it hurts so much and I want to scream, but instead I cry and I hear you cry in the hours when light is about to return, when the pink-painted panelling in our room takes shape again and our whole bodies ache.

A spider is weaving its web across the window in the moonlight, the spider’s legs are white and outside in the garden his rabbits are scratching in their cages.

We can never wash ourselves thoroughly enough.

Soap isn’t enough. We find washing-up liquid under the sink in the kitchen and in the garage we find blue bottles containing a milky liquid that smells like his breath, and the liquid stings inside us, gives us more sores, but somehow it feels good to spoil what he wants to take from us. As if there can never be enough pain, and he is so strong, so hard and his fingers so cold, his whole being is determination.

You choose not to see, Mum, why won’t you see anything? Because surely you must see?

He’s our dad.

We’re his children.

And he comes in the night and there is no way out except deeper in.

How wonderful the summer is.

The wind as we speed along the bank of the canal. The way we pretend it isn’t painful to sit on the saddle. The way we still have each other and how our love might yet conquer his fingers, all of him.

And then you see, Mum.

You choose to see, and you take us to Grandma, to her two-room flat in Borensberg, and you argue and fight and I’m scared that he’s going to come after us, but he doesn’t come and it takes a long time before I realise that he will always be with us anyway.

We huddle in the two-room flat we move into in Klockrike.

I’m thirteen when we go to the doctor, speechless meetings where no one asks for an explanation, cold steel implements inside me, and I see the distance and the sympathy, but also the fear and derision in their eyes.

It’s me they’re looking at.

The reincarnation of the monster must be driven out.

And I am living proof of how painful it is to live, a pain that few want or dare to look in the eye.

You fall silent, sister.

Turn fifteen and sixteen on cakeless birthdays and we kept to the trees on the edge of school, kept to ourselves as if everyone knew, as if there were no solace in being with the others, and the summers are colourless, windless, and we lie beside each other on the floor on the hottest days and you say nothing, don’t answer when I ask if we can go for a bike ride.

The hospital. You’re sitting on a bed in the corner. You’re there several times.

I call your name.

You’ve gone home from school before me and I call your name when I get home.

Elisabeth, I call in the hall, but you don’t answer.

The living room is empty and I want to go out again, run away from there, cycle with the wind to another world, away from this rotten little flat where we try to cling to our lives.

But not you.

The bathroom smells of damp, the white tiles are loose, but the hooks in the ceiling for the drying frame above the bath are strong enough to hold your weight.

The white rope is wrapped twice around your neck, your face winter blue, panic-stricken, and your eyes, my blue eyes trying to burst from their sockets. Your thin blond hair hanging down over your naked and unnaturally clean body, your feet in the air, still.

Small cuts on your lower arms and shins. As if you changed your mind and tried to get free.

Yellow piss on the bottom of the bathtub.

No water from the shower. I missed the water then. Wanted it to be gushing, full of life.

I went over and held you, my dear sister, dreaming that you and I would wait for each other again, sharing the secrets of the darkness once more. But you were mute and cold and I could hear my own wailing, the way it sounded like a distillation of loneliness.

I held you up, hugged you hard, and felt our lost love flow between us.

You aren’t scared any more, sister, I asked, are you?

But you didn’t answer.

There was no innocence left in that moment.

And I promised you, myself, us, that one day I would put all this right.

That the world, our love, would be reborn one day.

You were the one who let him in, Dad.

If you hadn’t left me and Mum, he’d never have crossed our threshold, come into my life, in under my sheets, into me, in, in, in.

He wanted me to call him Daddy, Daddy, that fucking bastard Folkman.

He came at night.

The floorboards creaked when he came.

And he said: Louise, I’m just going to touch you a bit down there, feel me, the way I feel, and then he would come, his hands were cold, all of him was cold and hard and stank of vodka.

Sometimes, on the nights when the floorboards never creaked, I used to think about you, Dad, and how you vanished, replaced us with other girls, the woman that Mum said you’d met who had two children that you adopted.

Forget him, Mum said.

We don’t exist for him.

And I hated you on the nights when he came.

And all the other nights. And I hate you now.

But still: the only thing I ever wanted to happen was for a shiny silver car to pull up outside the house and you would get out of the car and embrace me, saying: I’ve come to take you away with me, from now on everything’s going to be all right, you’re my daughter and I’m going to love you the way a father should.

You never came.

When I got older I used to take the car and go down to Nässjö, where you lived then, and I would sit in the car outside your house and watch you coming and going, sometimes I would see your new wife’s daughters, grown up now, just like me, and when I saw you together I could see that you loved them, a misplaced love, what should have been my love.

My love.

You never noticed my car.

The way I used to follow you.

But you must have guessed it was me who made the anonymous phone calls, that I was the one who never dared to speak on the other end of the line.

What could I say, Dad?

Because even if I had seen you, you were only a smell, a touch, an image, a voice from when I was little, and I longed for you here at Skogalund, I longed to see your silver Vauxhall coming up the drive, to see you instead of him come into my room in the cellar, among my toys.

You were going fishing that day, like so many times before.

You were starting to get old.

I parked some distance from the isolated jetty and walked over to you.

I was child, girl and woman, all at the same time.

It was an early autumn day, chilly but sunny, and you caught sight of me in the forest and you knew who I was, you knew straight away, and when I came out onto the jetty you shouted at me: ‘Get lost, I don’t want anything to do with you, get lost, I’m going fishing.’

One of the oars was still on the jetty, long and hard, with a metal-edged blade.

Did you know who you were letting in? I wanted to ask. I came here to get your love, I wanted to say.

‘Get lost,’ you yelled.

The oar.

At the reading of your will it emerged that you’d left everything you owned to your new wife and her children.

I got five thousand, three hundred and twenty kronor in the end.

‘Tove? Tove? TOVE! TOVE! Tove? Tove.’

Malin is going through the flat, running, walking, searching room after room, but Tove isn’t there, not under the sheets of her own bed, nor in Malin’s bed, nor in the wardrobe or kitchen cupboards, how the hell would she ever fit in a kitchen cupboard?

Fuck it’s hot.

‘Tove!’

Don’t panic now, Fors, don’t panic, and she sits down on one of the chairs in the kitchen, feeling the sweat on her scalp, and the mantra inside her: Think, think, think.

Not at Markus’s.

Call them anyway.

She takes out her mobile, calls the number. Hasse answers.

Evidently unaware that they’ve broken up.

‘No, Malin, she’s not here. You don’t know where she is?’

No time for small-talk.

‘Hasse, my other phone’s ringing. I’ve got to go.’

Friends?

Which ones are still in the city? Who did she have ice cream with? Julia? Call Julia.

Malin runs into the bedroom, turns on the computer, looks up Julia Markander in the online directory.

‘Hi, Julia. This is Malin, Tove’s mum, is Tove with you? She’s not? Do you have any idea where she could be?’

Filippa and Elise.

Staying in the country.

The clock on the computer says 19.37.

She should have been here by now, or have let me know.

Shit.

Don’t panic now, Fors, and suddenly she is struck for the first time by how shabby her bedroom is, how yellow the wallpaper has got over the past six months, and the curtains look scruffy and old-fashioned with their mauve and yellow pattern, and the lack of plants and pictures on the walls makes the room look sterile.

There are hospital rooms with more charm.