Summertime Death (19 page)

Tove in Bali.

I shan’t think about that.

Burdens.

And then Malin looks at Theresa again.

Her scrubbed-clean mouth lies open, as if she had been suffocated with de-oxygenated air, as if someone wanted to stop her words getting out, or maybe just demonstrate the importance of oxygen, that it means everything, that the earth, from which we come, is all that we have.

On the other side of the cordon people are starting to move away now that the uniformed officers have made a note of their names and asked the preliminary questions, and a few of them gaze longingly up towards the shuttered ice cream kiosk.

Sometimes, Malin thinks, a police investigation is all about the art of the impossible.

Up in the meadow a cow is lowing, as a gathering breeze stirs the grass. The smell of smoke from the forest fires doesn’t reach here, but Malin can still sense the crackling in the air, how millions of possibilities have been set in motion.

‘Malin!’ the summer-temp journalist calls after her as she heads off towards the meadow. ‘What have you got for me?’

‘No more than you can see for yourself,’ Malin says without stopping.

The journalist is wearing a large pair of sunglasses, and they make her look stupid.

‘Was she murdered?’

Damn stupid question.

‘Well, she didn’t bury herself.’

Two of the people from the beach, a man and a woman in their thirties, are standing by the kiosk, in front of the brightly coloured poster of the various ice creams, pulling their jeans on over their bathing suits.

Malin goes over to them and they give her a look that says that they’d rather be left alone, and the man says: ‘We’ve already said what we saw, that we came here to go swimming, and then some mutt found her.’

Mutt?

A cartoon word.

‘One question, about the kiosk,’ Malin says. ‘Is it usually open? Do you come swimming here often?’

She hates it when this happens, when the questions fall out of her in the wrong order, but often it leads to decent answers, there’s something disarming in the uncertainty revealed by clumsily posed questions.

‘We come swimming here every so often,’ the man says. ‘The only problem is that the kiosk is normally shut, apparently because the woman who runs it has several others and can’t get the staff.’

‘The woman?’

‘Yes. I think her name’s Slavenca, from Bosnia or somewhere like that. She can be pretty unpleasant when she feels like it, almost like she doesn’t want any customers. She was here earlier, she disappeared just before you lot showed up.’

‘Thanks,’ Malin says.

Down by the body Karin Johannison is working against the clock, trying to get finished before darkness falls, but there are still several hours’ work ahead of her and her recently arrived assistant. Malin knows that they have a floodlight in their Volvo. But maybe they won’t have to set it up tonight. The summer night will smile on them, a gentle smile that will make their work easier, their careful search for details and clues on the body and in the vegetation around it that could lead them all closer to the truth.

Karin looks up at Malin.

Waves.

And her eyes are tired, they’ve lost a little of their obvious sparkle, maybe they’re already in Bali, those eyes.

Bali.

Island of beauty and violence.

A place where rebirth is possible.

The house where I grew up.

The bricks seem to be dripping off the façade in the heat, uncovering memories, intimations.

And lies.

But which lies?

Zeke at the wheel, focused.

They aren’t going faster than the prescribed thirty, and the hedge around Malin’s childhood home is drooping more than before, as though it’s made up its mind to give up in the heat of summer.

No one at home in the house.

Who lives there now? What are their memories?

I circle around those memories, Malin thinks. They’re still inside me, like electrical will-o’-the-wisps, timeless flares in my consciousness, in all that is me, my actions and somehow my future as well.

What am I so scared of?

I’m both trapped by and running from everything that once was, refusing to let go because I think that those days can explain something to me today.

Air it all out.

Throw out all those old clothes. They aren’t coming back.

Mum and Dad in Tenerife.

With every passing day Malin is more and more convinced that her parents are hiding something, and now, now, in this moment as they drive past her childhood home in Sturefors to notify a couple of unsuspecting parents of a death, she feels it more clearly than ever. Her past conceals something, and without finding out what that secret is she will never be whole.

And then the house is gone from view. Withdrawn into memory.

The Polaroid picture of the dead Theresa Eckeved is in her pocket.

It’s her, Malin is certain of it.

Zeke before they got in the car: ‘You’ll have to show them the picture, Malin, I’m not doing it.’

She’s no older than Tove, and even though Malin tries to force away the image of her daughter, even though she keeps her eyes open, Tove’s face keeps taking the place of the dead girl’s in the picture.

Go away, away, Malin thinks, but to no avail.

You are all girls.

You are the only girl.

I’m going to get the bastard who did this. I’m going to understand.

Her finger on the doorbell, sweat on her brow, Zeke a step behind her, his sunglasses in his hand now, his eyes ready to show sympathy.

Tove, there once more.

Sounds behind the door.

What sounds?

The heavy steps of someone who has realised that the ultimate disaster is approaching? The point where life stiffens and changes into a sluggish, bitter-tasting mess where happiness is nothing more than an intellectual exercise.

I’m happy. I can do this.

And the door opens.

The man in front of her fully aware of the situation. The woman behind him, her mouth slightly open, her frightened blue eyes almost blistered by an evident lack of sleep.

There you are again, Tove, even though all of my attention ought to be focused on these two people in front of me. If I have one task in the world, it is to look after you. That’s the only one that seems obvious to me. And now, now that you’re a stubborn teenager, it’s clear that you don’t want me to look after you, apart from taking care of the practical details.

I will never stop looking after you, Tove.

I can’t.

Sigvard Eckeved opens the door wide, steps aside and his shoulders slump and his wife vanishes in the direction of the conservatory in a vain attempt to flee the truth, because it is the truth, their truth, which has come to their home, and they both know it.

‘Come in,’ Theresa’s father says. ‘Have you made any progress, got some more questions? Do you want coffee? Agneta,’ he calls into the house, ‘can you put some coffee on? We’re bound to have some ice, so we can get you both iced coffee. You can’t help wondering if this heat is ever going to let up.’

Malin lets him talk.

She and Zeke sit down on the chairs to one side of the white sofa in the living room. The pool sits invitingly behind them. And Agneta and Sigvard Eckeved understand what Malin and Zeke’s positioning means and sit down on the sofa, not leaning back, leaning forward instead in an almost exaggerated show of interest, as if this exaggeration could hold the nightmare at bay.

‘We’ve found a young girl out at the beach at Stavsätter,’ Malin says.

‘It can’t be Theresa,’ Agneta says. ‘She’d never go swimming there, the pool . . . but I suppose she did used to cycle out there sometimes . . .’

‘The girl was murdered, and I’m very sorry to have to tell you that I think she’s your daughter.’

Theresa’s parents, the people in front of them, sink back into the sofa, the air somehow sucked out of them, and the woman whimpers when Malin takes the photograph out of the pocket of her blouse and puts it on the dark, polished, oak tabletop. Outside in the garden a crow is cawing anxiously, and a leaf falls from a bush, rippling the still surface of the pool.

‘Can you tell me if this is Theresa?’

She can feel how Zeke is forcing himself to stay in his seat, how he wants to rush out of the house, out into the garden and run away from the summer-still roads of this little villa community.

But he stays seated.

Confronting the present.

All the nameless emotions drift through the room like dark spirits and coalesce into just two words: grief. Pain.

Agneta Eckeved turns her head away; if she doesn’t look at the picture then it doesn’t exist, and everything it represents doesn’t exist either, and Sigvard Eckeved leans forward, sees his daughter, her closed eyes and her pale-yellow skin transparent from the absence of oxygen. She isn’t asleep, he’ll never stroke his daughter on the cheek as she sleeps and quietly whisper
I’ll be here when you wake up, I’ll be here for you no matter what, no matter what pain this world throws at me, I’ll be here for you
.

Instead just this photograph on the table.

Death.

The end.

‘It’s Theresa,’ he says and Agneta Eckeved turns her head even further away from the photograph and Malin can just see tears trickling down her cheeks, large, clear, justified tears.

‘It’s her,’ Sigvard Eckeved says.

Malin nods.

‘OK, now we know for sure,’ Zeke says.

Malin takes the picture from the table, holding it in her hand, somehow it doesn’t feel right to put it back in her pocket, just like that. Just putting away the picture of the dead girl, out of sight of her parents.

Then Agneta Eckeved says: ‘Put it away, the picture, will you? Just do it.’

Malin puts the picture away.

Sigvard Eckeved stands up.

Says: ‘I’ll see if the coffee’s ready.’

Then he stops and his body starts to shake.

The childhood home.

The white bricks.

The sound of cars.

‘What happens now?’

Sigvard Eckeved’s question, once he’s composed himself.

Malin knew what he meant, but chose instead to tell them about the formalities, that the coroner would have to examine the body before they could release it for burial, that they could see her if they wanted to, but that it wasn’t essential for them to go through any further formal identification.

Sigvard Eckeved listened to her until she had finished.

‘You misunderstood me,’ he said then. ‘I mean with us, what’s going to happen to us now?’

Mum, Dad.

I can see you in the house and you’re sad. But I can’t hear what you’re saying, why are you so sad? What’s happened? If you’re worried about me, don’t be, in a way it’s like I’ve just popped out for a bit.

But I think I might be ill.

That I’m asleep.

That I’ll come home when I wake up.

Mum’s lying on the bed, and you, Dad, you’re walking up and down in the conservatory, it must be hot in the sun.

You had a visit just now, I saw the woman, she was here with me a little while ago, looking at me so strangely, why? She put a photograph on the table at home, but I didn’t want to look at it.

Someone took a picture of me. I heard the sound of the camera.

I’m in an ambulance.

Am I ill?

I’m in a plastic bag, but it doesn’t feel as claustrophobic as before. I’m in the back, the bit where they put people who aren’t well. I can see myself lying there, how is that possible? I’m drifting, Mum, Dad, I can be in several places at once in this dream.

I’m alone, and I must be very ill, because how else could I be having this sort of dream?

Mum, Dad.

I’m alone and scared.

You, or someone else, must come and help me.

But don’t be sad.

I miss you so much, and that longing will never end, wherever you or I end up.

‘That was that.’

Zeke doesn’t look up from Brokindsleden, and she knows him, knows he wants to do something now, something active, wants to get on with something concrete so that he doesn’t go ‘crazy as a mad dog’, as he usually puts it.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Malin asks.

‘Let’s go and see Louise Svensson. Where does she live? You had it on a note.’

From the front pocket of her jeans Malin pulls out the piece of paper Viktoria Solhage gave her.

‘Viktoria Solhage said she liked to play rough.’

‘Let’s go. Where does she live?’

‘I think the address is some farm outside Rimforsa.’

‘Good, we’ll head out there now, before Sjöman has time to call a first meeting about the case.’

She wants to say: ‘But Zeke, is this right, we’ve got nothing on her, wouldn’t it be better to leave her in peace?’

But she doesn’t say those words.

‘Let’s get to grips with this bull-dyke,’ Zeke says.

His shaved head beside her, hard, impenetrable, like the look in his grey-green eyes when someone’s upset him.

‘What about Peter Sköld and Nathalie Falck? Do you think they’ll be upset when they hear what’s happened?’

‘I’m sure they will be,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe now Nathalie Falck will tell us what I think she knows.’

‘What do you think she knows?’

‘Something.’

‘It’s not easy to know what,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks of Peter Sköld, his father, and what seemed to be a shared silence between them.

Zeke has turned up the volume of the choral music.

The forest, pines and firs embracing them, the road a path through darkness, only opening up after several kilometres, when they emerge into a clearing that contains an empty, scorched yellow meadow where the grass has grown tall before withering in the heat and collapsing back onto the soil. Beyond the meadow the road disappears into the forest again, then opens out once more onto a rough, unploughed field. Beyond the field is a red-painted, two-storey farmhouse flanked by two barns whose wooden façades are worn and dusty and should have been painted years ago.