Summertime Death (12 page)

Behzad Karami standing in front of Malin in the living room. His back is covered by a showy fire-breathing dragon.

‘I clean whenever the hell I feel like it. It’s none of your business, you pi . . .’

‘Say it,’ Zeke snarls. ‘Make my day. Finish what you were going to say.’

‘Zeke, calm down. Sit down on the bed, Behzad.’

The rough wallpaper is full of scorch-marks and stains, and on the bed is a torn pink sheet. The blinds are pulled down over the view of Berga’s rooftops. A huge flat-screen television is screwed to one wall, and the stereo and speakers take up most of the free floor space. The tiny kitchen is oddly clean, as if it has recently been used and scrubbed very, very thoroughly.

Behzad Karami sinks onto the bed, rubbing his eyes, says: ‘For fuck’s sake, couldn’t you have come a bit later, what the hell do you want?’

‘A girl was raped yesterday. She was found in the Horticultural Society Park,’ Malin says.

‘Don’t suppose you know anything about it?’ Zeke says.

And Behzad Karami looks down at the green lino floor, shakes his head and says: ‘We didn’t rape Lovisa, and I haven’t raped anyone else either. Get it? When the hell are you going to get it?’

His voice.

Suddenly afraid.

Behind the muscles and tattoos he’s just a boy, yet also a man who feels ashamed when people around town whisper behind his back, judged by the public court of a provincial city.

‘That’s him, the one who raped . . .’

‘Bloody animal. That’s what they’re like, those . . .’

‘Where were you the night before last?’

‘I was at my parents’. We’ve got family over from Iran. Check with them. Seven people can tell you I was there until five o’clock in the morning at least.’

‘And after that?’

‘Then I came back here.’

Josefin who remembers nothing. Was she attacked before or after the cinema? What time?

‘You came straight back here?’

‘I just said so.’

‘Why should we believe you?’ Zeke says, patting Behzad on the head.

‘What about Ali, do you know what he was doing then?’

‘No. No idea. Are you going to fuck about with him as well?’

Malin can see Zeke getting angry, how he’s trying to stop himself hitting Behzad Karami. Instead he says in a loud voice: ‘So you didn’t go down to the Horticultural Society Park after the party? Didn’t hide there waiting for a girl to go past?’

Malin takes a step back, out into the hall. She goes into the little kitchen, a completely different world from the rest of the flat; cupboard doors gleaming white, albeit worn.

She runs her hand over the draining board, smells her hand, lemon-scented detergent. She opens a cupboard, finds an unopened bottle of bleach.

She can hear Zeke roaring in the living room.

Knows that Zeke’s anger can be so terrifying that it forces out truths, admissions of guilt where you least expect them.

‘You’re mad, you fucking pig.’

Zeke’s eyes black as he comes out into the hall and finds her in the kitchen.

‘We’re done here,’ he says. ‘Aren’t we?’

‘Not quite,’ Malin says, and goes back in to Behzad Karami.

He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily.

‘The kitchen. How come it’s so clean?’

‘Mum did it the day before yesterday.’

‘One last thing: do you know where we can get hold of Ali?’

‘Try his dad’s flower shop on Tanneforsvägen. Interflora. He’s helping out over the summer.’

The car’s air conditioning is straining.

Malin at the wheel.

Zeke singing along loudly to the choral song filling the car.

Sundsvall church choir sings Abba.

The winner takes it all, the winner takes . . .

Zeke’s voice isn’t as gruff when he sings as when he talks. Malin has learned to put up with the music, partly because she has begun to see the point of singing in a group, but mainly because she can see what the music, and the sense of belonging, does for Zeke, the way he can switch in a matter of minutes from an adrenalin-pumped alpha male to a cheery, tuneful, almost harmonious man.

They’re heading towards Tannefors.

Past the deserted skateboard ramps at Johannelund, the scorched yellow grass of the forgotten little fields between the river and the blocks of flats, then they cross the Braskens bridge. Down to the left the mismatched buildings of the Saab factory huddle in the heat.

Aeronautics industry.

Actually a weapons industry.

But the pride of the city, nonetheless.

Because that’s what Linköping is like, Malin thinks. Self-conscious, almost arrogant, wanting to be smart and a little bit exceptional, an exquisite little metropolis in the big wide world. A reluctant rural town, a provincial city with delusions of grandeur, but without any real self-awareness or sense of style. Which is why it’s hard to think of a more provincial provincial city than Linköping.

‘What are you thinking about, Malin?’

‘The city. How it’s actually pretty OK.’

‘Linköping? Has anyone said otherwise?’

As Zeke’s question hangs in the air Malin’s mobile rings, the call cutting through the car and into their ears.

‘I’m done with the tests, Malin. I’ve analysed what the doctors at the University Hospital found inside Josefin Davidsson.’

Karin Johannison’s voice.

Ice-cold, self-assured in the heat.

‘We’re on our way,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve just got to get something out of the way first.’

Most of the drops turn to steam, wiped out before they have time to land on the countless potted plants standing on the shelves beneath the florist’s limp red awning. The noisy whirr of the humidifier bores into Malin’s brain, but fades away when they step into the damp cool of the shop.

The tall, dark man behind the counter immediately assumes a watchful, hesitant posture; he recognises them, Malin’s sure of that.

Malin shows her ID.

The man nods but doesn’t say anything.

‘We’re looking for Ali Shakbari.’

‘What’s he done now?’

The man sounds resigned, but also annoyed.

‘Probably nothing,’ Malin says. ‘But we need to talk to him.’

The man points towards a door with a plastic window.

‘My son’s in the stockroom. You can go through.’

Ali Shakbari is standing at a bench screwed into white tiles, trimming some red roses. The whole room has a strange, pleasant perfume. When he catches sight of them he grows afraid, the look in his brown eyes oddly watery. You want to run, don’t you? Malin thinks.

‘Ali,’ Zeke says. ‘How are things?’

No answer, and Ali puts the secateurs down on the bench slowly, his thin, sinewy body in perfect shape under his white cotton overalls.

‘What were you doing the night before last?’

‘What do you mean?’

Defiant now.

Malin explains about Josefin being found in the Horticultural Society Park.

‘And you think I had something to do with it?’

‘We don’t think anything,’ Malin says. ‘So, what were you doing?’

‘Dad and I were cleaning the stockroom. We didn’t finish until 3.00 a.m. It’s so fucking hot that it’s easier to work at night.’

‘It’s true.’

Ali’s father is standing in the doorway to the stockroom, holding the door open and radiating authority.

‘Then I drove him home. He was home by about 3.30.’

Malin looks around the stockroom.

Every inch of the room is sparkling clean, well ordered.

Too clean? Malin thinks before picking up one of the red roses from the bench.

‘These are lovely,’ she says.

‘Finest quality,’ Ali Shakbari’s father says.

There are two sorts of people in the world. Hunters, and the hunted.

So far in this investigation those roles haven’t been fixed.

Are we the ones being hunted, drifting like motes of dust on the hot breeze? Malin wonders. So far we haven’t reached the point where we’re doing the stalking. Not yet. But maybe now, as a result of what I can see under the glass, in the hot light of the four lamps placed around the small but powerful microscope. The answer may lie in this blue substance, a blue truth.

The fragments are so tiny that they’re hard to focus on.

The edges of the tiny blue fragments almost jagged.

A windowless laboratory in the basement of the National Forensics Lab, which smells of chemicals and disinfectant. A humming noise from a fume cupboard.

Zeke’s heavy breathing beside Malin, Karin’s voice in her head:
I know what it was, Malin. What the doctors found inside her.

‘What you’re looking at is fragments of paint,’ Karin says. ‘The sort of paint that’s normally used to colour plastic.’

The blue fragments blur in front of Malin’s eyes. Floating.

Is the truth moving about somewhere down there?

Or something else?

A first clue.

A blue colour, dead particles moving, as if they had been buried alive under the glass.

Malin raises her head from the microscope and looks at Karin.

‘What could the paint have come from, what sort of object?’

Zeke sounds impatient, irritable because of July’s never-ending hot weather, or possibly just because Karin is in the room.

Karin’s voice is mild: ‘It’s impossible to say, it could be any one of a thousand things.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as a garden hose, the handle of a cheap mop, a salad server, a lamp-stand, a toy spade.’

Malin, Zeke and Karin fall silent.

Josefin Davidsson penetrated without knowing it.

Theresa missing. Hints of lesbian activity on her Facebook page. Lovelygirl.

Does all of this fit together?

Nathalie Falck. Almost like a man. What do men have that women don’t?

What’s the voice?

Here and now.

Malin listens to the room. Something is taking shape in front of her eyes.

What are the girls in this investigation saying? Theresa, Josefin, Nathalie?

‘Such as a dildo,’ Malin says. ‘A dildo.’

And she doesn’t know where the words come from, but they’re there in the room.

‘Sure, such as a dildo,’ Karin responds. ‘Not at all impossible.’

‘How do we go about looking into this?’ Malin says, turning to face Karin. ‘Is it even possible to get any closer than guesswork?’

‘Manufacturers keep records. We can start by checking the most likely products, I mean the sorts of thing this paint could have been applied to. Such as a dildo.’

‘What do you think, Malin?’ Zeke asks.

‘I don’t know. But a dildo doesn’t seem unlikely. Her vagina wasn’t really injured, just penetrated. As if the object had been designed to do that.’

‘But surely it’s possible to cause damage with a dildo?’

‘Yes, if you’re hard-handed. But then, you can cause damage with anything.’

‘My experience is that the vagina almost always shows serious damage when hostile penetration occurs with an object that isn’t designed for the purpose,’ Karin says. ‘It could very well be a dildo. You can get both hard and soft models.’

‘You’re an expert?’ Zeke says.

‘No,’ Karin says. ‘But that much I do know.’

And then the realisation of where the paint came from, that it was scraped out from within Josefin. Malin thinks of Maria Murvall, the young girl who was raped in Tjällmo forest several years ago and now sits mute in a mental institution. The crass words in the report about her shredded innards, her body lying on the bed of her room in Vadstena last winter, when Malin visited in connection with another case.

Probability, Malin thinks. Forces herself back to concrete facts.

Thousands of things and their language, listen to the language of these things instead, to what they’re saying now. The air conditioning in the room splutters, a slow coughing sound spreading through the ventilation pipes before it falls silent and almost at once a debilitating heat starts to take over the room.

‘God, how stupid,’ Karin says. ‘Now it’s packed up and who knows how long they’ll take to fix it in the middle of the holidays like this, if there are any of them working at all.’

‘They’re probably working,’ Zeke says.

‘A dildo,’ Malin says. ‘That makes sense, even if our perpetrator could in theory have used pretty much anything.’

She says nothing about her earlier thought about a lesbian connection. But surely lesbians often use dildos? Or is that just prejudice? No, one of her classmates at Police Academy had proudly shown her her collection and given her detailed descriptions of dildo technique.

Zeke nods in agreement, no trace of doubt in his eyes.

‘I was thinking that I could get Forensics to check dildo manufacturers,’ Karin says. ‘See what sort of paint they use. It might take a while, but you’d be surprised how much even the strangest businesses know.’

Then Karin leans forward and puts her eye to the microscope, saying: ‘It really is a beautiful shade of blue, isn’t it? Clean and pure, like spring water.’

Outside the heat has taken a firm grip on the air, and the wind, insofar as there is any, is hot, dragging through already parched treetops. The smoke from the forest fires is pungent on the air, the wind must be coming from Tjällmo today.

The fires keep getting worse. This morning an elderly couple had to be evacuated from the house they’d lived in for sixty years.

The light seems to attack your eyes, any sunglasses that let you see anything at all are helpless against it. And she could really do with clear vision right now, to see all the connections that are scraping away at her consciousness like little shards of metal.

Malin and Zeke retreat to the lobby of the National Forensics Lab and its relative cool, where they sit down on one of the red Lammhult sofas, panting, unable to summon the energy to walk the hundred metres to the police station.

‘Shit,’ Zeke said. ‘I didn’t think it could get any hotter.’

‘Oh, it can,’ Malin says. ‘And this damn light. Even the thought of it gives me a headache.’

‘So, a dildo?’

‘I don’t know, Zeke. Maybe.’

Zeke runs a hand over his shaved head.