Summertime Death (22 page)

Something is moving in the forest, even though everything’s still. Is that a crawling sound? A person? The smell of decay, or cleanliness? Thoughts fly through her head and on into her heart and stomach, forming themselves into fear.

No.

I’m not scared.

The forest is big, it’s making her small and alone even though it’s no more than a few hundred metres to the yellow blocks of flats and villas over in Valla on the other side of Vallavägen.

No movement over by the tree. But there’s someone there.

I’m sure.

And then she thinks of the girls again, the one they found murdered, the one they found raped and disorientated in the Horticultural Society Park, and she’s struck by how foolhardy it was of her to set out alone on a running track, now that real evil has shown its face in Linköping.

How stupid can you be, Linda?

A movement.

A person on the track?

Heading towards me?

Sweat on my white vest. My breasts hard under the sports bra.

I’m so scared that I can’t move.

Zeke is rocking from foot to foot in one corner of the farmyard.

No dildo. No sex toys at all.

The evening is still debilitatingly hot. Lollo Svensson is inside the farmhouse, watching them through the kitchen window, can’t seem to get shot of them soon enough. In the dull light the barns look crooked, almost ready to collapse under the weight of the mournful evening sky.

The dogs have started barking over in their run.

The car with the uniforms is disappearing down the gravel drive, soon no more than a misplaced noise from the dense forest, a pulse through old leaves and desiccated moss.

‘She’s mad,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you think she’s Lovelygirl?’

‘We’ll have to see what Forensics find on the computer.’

‘But is she mad?’

‘Because she likes looking at her old toys? I’m not sure. But she’s certainly different,’ Malin says. ‘Who knows what sort of crap she’s been through? And what wouldn’t a person do to survive?’

‘Can we find out?’

‘Do we need to?’

‘Do we want to?’

‘I don’t think she’s got anything to do with this,’ Malin says.

‘Me neither,’ Zeke says. ‘But she still hasn’t got an alibi.’

My heart.

Where is it?

There, holding all of my fear.

It’s about to burst beneath my ribs.

Linda Karlå is running, her trainers conquering metre after metre of the trail, as the forest twists around her.

Is someone chasing me?

It sounds like something enormous is slithering after me, as if the tree roots are lifting from the ground and trying to trip me up, burrow through me with a thousand sharp, calcified nodules, then hide me under a thin layer of soil, consuming me slowly, but I can run so fast.

Faster now.

The sound of hooves. Hooves?

She runs.

Finally the vegetation opens up.

The car park.

Her car on its own. No one following.

She throws herself into the residual heat of her Seat.

A deer?

Something else was watching me out there as well.

I’m sure of it, Linda Karlå thinks as she starts the car and drives away.

But what?

The sound of hooves disappearing into the forest. The darkness that was snapping at her heels.

Stora torget is vibrant with artificial light from the big open-air bars and the surrounding buildings. Mörners Inn, Stora Hotellet, Burger King, their chairs and tables set out on the tarmac and paving stones, the first of these boasting tall canopies that turn its customers’ conversation into indistinct chatter, a sound full of expectation and happiness.

It is just past ten o’clock.

A lot of people even though it’s a Sunday.

The air is still warm, but people are daring to venture out, eager for the condensation running down the outside of a well-filled glass. There is a rumbling sound from down on Ågatan, the whole street full of bars, and in the winter, spring and autumn there’s always trouble there at weekends. The
Correspondent
has printed acres of coverage about pub-related violence, but at the same time people need to let their hair down, and the concentrated nature of the location is manageable for the police. We know where things are likely to kick off, Malin thinks as she looks across at the seating areas.

Probably no one I know there.

And if anyone I do know should happen to be there, I don’t want to meet them.

Zeke dropped her off outside the flat, and under the cold water of the shower she felt how much she missed Tove, Janne, Daniel Högfeldt; she wanted to call him and tell him to come over, drive out some of what she’s seen today.

Let him work off some of her frustration.

But he didn’t answer and instead she lay down for a while on Tove’s bed, pretending to watch over her daughter, who is on the other side of the planet, in paradise, not far from crazy bombers.

And Tove’s scent, caught in the sheets.

And Malin began to cry.

Sad in a simple and obvious way about the way everything had turned out with her and Janne, with her and herself, and the unmentionable thing that the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord had glimpsed just by looking at her. But then Malin did what she always does. Forced herself back, the tears, all the sorrow, then got up and left the flat. Some types of loneliness are worse than anything else.

All the customers in the terrace bars. The chink of glasses. The twirling waitresses. There is still life in summertime Linköping, even if this heat, this evil, are doing their best to drive any sense of joy into the ground.

Shall I sit down here? Among everyone else?

She stands still, letting the evening enter her body.

Evil. Where does it start?

In front of her the square transforms into a volcanic landscape, as hot, glowing magma seeps out between the paving slabs in destructive black streams. Evil, a human undercurrent that history sometimes gathers up into an eruption, in one place, one person, in several people. You can become evil, or come close to it, sometimes so close that you can feel its breath, and then you realise that it’s the breath from your own lungs hitting you in the face. Malevolence, fear, the way Janne once told her after drinking too much whisky that he thought that war lay at the heart of human nature, that we are really all longing for war, that God is war and that violence is only the start, that the whole fucking world is just one vast act of abuse, a pain that will only end when humankind is wiped out.

‘We want war,’ Janne said. ‘There’s no such thing as evil. It’s just a made-up word, a pathetic attempt to give a name to the violence that’s bound to happen. You, Malin, you cops, you’re just fucking tracker dogs, you sniff about, trying to keep something utterly fundamental at bay.’

The magma is oozing and flowing around the feet of the people drinking beer in the square of this small city in this small, small corner of the world.

Here I stand.

I have to embrace violence, love it the way that I understand love. Evil is scentless, soundless, is has no texture, yet at the same time it is every smell, every sound, and all the experiences of the world that a person can feel against their skin.

A buried girl.

A boy kicked to death after a party.

A thirty-three-year-old student blown into a thousand pieces on a bus.

A bomb buried in the sand of a beach in paradise.

I refuse, I refuse, I refuse to believe you, Janne.

But you’ve seen war.

Maybe a beer in the square?

No.

Your society isn’t mine.

Not tonight.

I’m Batman, Malin thinks. Damaged goods, yet trying to watch over something.

She carries on along Hamngatan, up towards the Hamlet bar. A hint of smoke from the forest fires reaches her nose. They’re still open, and she takes a seat at the bar, feeling safe there, surrounded by the decades-old wooden panelling.

Only her and a few of the closet alcoholics at a table in the corner.

The beer is cheap here.

‘Evening, Inspector,’ they call.

She nods in their direction as her beer appears in front of her.

‘And a tequila, double,’ she says to the bartender.

‘Sure thing, Malin,’ he says with a smile. ‘One of those evenings?’

‘You’ve no idea,’ Malin replies. ‘No idea.’

Daniel Högfeldt has switched off his phone, his articles about the murder ready for tomorrow. He’s gone into one of the paper’s conference rooms and is resting his body in one of the uncomfortable chairs.

Wants to be alone.

His body somehow demanding silence.

He thinks about Malin.

Where are you now?

We’re two unhappy souls moving around each other in this city and sometimes we meet and play a static game. For a while he mistook their game for love. But not any longer. He knows, or believes that he knows, exactly what he wants from Malin Fors. And what she wants from him. A conduit to relieve a mass of sexual energy, and that’s why they work so well together in bed: they want the same thing and they both know that the harder they play, the better.

But sometimes.

When she’s fallen asleep beside him and he’s lying there looking at her, he wonders.

Is she the one he’s been waiting for?

His?

No, don’t lay yourself open to that sort of disappointment. He doesn’t know much about her, but she has several photographs of her ex-husband Janne in her flat. He seems to be able to calm her down. Like her daughter.

Where are you now, Fors?

Daniel gets up.

Starts walking about the room restlessly, as if to combat the feeling that time is passing far too slowly.

There’s burning in her dreams.

It sometimes happens when she’s been drinking. Cold flames eating her legs, trying to pull her into the darkness, whispering: We’ll destroy you, Malin, destroy you, even if you listen to what we’ve got to say.

What do you want? What do you want to say?

Nothing, Malin, nothing. We just want to destroy you.

There are snakes in the dream, and animals with hooves and when she wakes up she remembers the dreams clearly, their constantly changing images, impossible to sort out.

There’s a boy in the dreams.

Malin doesn’t know who he is, but she forces him away, as if she had some sort of conscious consciousness even in the dream. That’s the darkest of dreams, like the one Janne has when he dreams about the children in Rwanda, the ones who’d had their hands cut off, the ones he fed in the hospital of the refugee camp. Their eyes. Six-, seven-, eight-year-old eyes full of wisdom about how life would turn out, about how it could have turned out.

And then the voice of the flames: So you think you can destroy us? Pride, vanity, avarice, a bonfire of all of those, Malin.

And she wakes up and screams at the voice of the flames, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, and she’s still drunk and can feel the beer and tequila dancing through her body, remembering how she wove her way across the square down towards St Lars’ Church, trying to read the inscription above the side door, and the way the words disappeared before her eyes, but she still knew what they said:

Then what?

Awake all night, thinking about Tove, longing for Tove, daydreaming about Janne’s familiar body, their original love, and completely wet down there when she finally got to thinking about Daniel Högfeldt.

Horny.

In the way you only get from alcohol, and she caressed herself and came without a sound once she’d disentangled herself from the sheet covering her body.

Can I sleep now?

But sleep wouldn’t come. Instead it was as if the orgasm lingered within her, making her heart race, and she pulled the sheet over her again, up over her face, and as the morning light gradually dawned beyond the blinds she played dead, turning herself into Theresa Eckeved, trying to feel her fear and despair, trying to feel her way towards what had happened, what had caused the volcano to erupt this time.

Her body felt alive.

Her blood was magma in her veins.

She was longing for more alcohol.

Then she thought about Maria Murvall. Lying in her room in Vadstena Hospital. About the evil that had put her there.

The same evil?

Her brain felt pickled.

The threads of the case spinning around.

A dildo? Blue?

A lesbian? Lollo Svensson. A sex offender? A damaged man? The football team? Prejudice, prejudice, prejudice. Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck. The person who made the call about Josefin Davidsson?

Silence. Possibilities, prejudices.

But what else are we supposed to go on? And what about Behzad Karami and Ali Shakbari out in Berga? Sodding bloody family alibis. One of the boys, or more than one, could have crossed a boundary and worked out that you liked it. The owner of the ice cream kiosk?

A thousand possibilities.

Drifting dust thrown into the air, needing to be gathered together to form a clear, black jewel.

The city demands it.

The papers.

The victims and their families.

And me.

But is there only one truth?

And with that thought her consciousness succumbed to sleep, and she slept dreamlessly for an hour before she woke up and a new day of the investigation into the tragic girls of Linköping could start.

The last remnants of the previous evening’s alcohol seem to disappear as Malin’s body pierces the water of the Tinnerbäck pool.

Cooler.

The water ought to be cooler, but it would probably cost too much to keep the temperature lower in a summer as hot as this one. Four lengths will have to do, she can feel her body complaining at the effort, how it wants to rest but at the same time enjoy the relative cool.

Better than the boiling hot gym at the station.