Summertime Death (29 page)

‘You were there then,’ Zeke said. ‘Then you vanished. Where did you go? Most people would have stayed.’

‘I couldn’t bear all those upset people. And I’ve seen dead bodies before. It was better to open up in Hjulsbro instead. The girl in the ground didn’t exactly make people want to buy anything.’

Slavenca Visnic more friendly now. ‘As I’m sure you can understand. When I work, I just want to sell as many ice creams as I can.’

‘You didn’t see anyone behaving suspiciously on the beach at Stavsätter?’

Slavenca Visnic thought about it.

‘No.’

‘And you can’t tell us anything about Josefin Davidsson? Did you have an argument? That was what she implied.’

‘She probably thought I argued with her. I’m sure she was taking ice cream and sweets, maybe she was giving them away to her friends. I lost a lot of stock on the days that she worked, even though there weren’t many people about then. If you remember, they had a problem with bacteria in the pool? The
Correspondent
made a big deal of it. They had to shut the pool for a few days.’

Malin tried to remember the article, but it must have passed her by.

‘So she got the sack?’

‘Let’s put it this way: I was pleased she resigned, even though she was the only person I had for the Glyttinge pool.’

‘Did the fact that she was stealing make you angry?’

‘No, not at all. That sort of thing just happens.’

‘And there’s no one who can give you an alibi?’

Malin asked again, she knew where she wanted to go with the question, and Slavenca Visnic gave her a long, weary look, as if to show that she knew what game they were playing.

‘I have no husband. No children. I lost my family a long time ago. Since then I’ve made up my mind to look after myself. Other people just mean a whole lot of disappointment, Detective Inspector.’

Slavenca Visnic closed the back doors of the Fiat.

Turned to face them.

‘If you haven’t got any more questions, I think I’ll head off now. Make the most of the busiest time of day at the Glyttinge pool.’

‘Blue,’ Malin says. ‘Does the colour blue mean anything particular to you?’

‘I like white,’ Slavenca Visnic replied. ‘The purest colour.’

Slavenca Visnic is standing by the hotdog kiosk in Ljungsbro, eating a 150g cheeseburger. She realised how hungry she was as she was driving away from the forest, past Vreta Kloster golf club.

The hot food and hot air are making her sweat, but she doesn’t mind the heat; anyone who lived through the wartime winters in Sarajevo knows what real cold is, and would never complain about a bit of heat.

The town is quiet around her. Everyone’s probably gone to the beach.

The cops could think what they liked about her. They think they can put everything right, the woman, Malin Fors, in particular gave that impression: that she wants to put everything right.

And then I show up in their investigation.

Connections.

The lifeline of their work.

It had to happen sooner or later, Slavenca Visnic thinks, feeling the melted cheese sticking to her teeth as her stomach fills with food: the ridiculous privilege of being able to eat your fill when you’re hungry, a privilege that few people in this country could ever understand or appreciate.

The girls.

Things like that happen. Spoiled little girls can get their fingers burned. Who knows why anyone does what they do?

War, it’s everywhere, and it never ends.

All you can do as a human being is to try to create a reality for yourself that you can live with.

Slavenca Visnic throws the last of the burger in the bin by the kiosk counter. Gets in her car and drives away. Outside the big supermarket the newspaper headlines are all talking about the same thing.

Summertime death strikes again!

That’s what the
Correspondent
’s headline says about the fate that got me.

Our summer angels, that’s what the radio presenter with the warm voice calls me, us.

I didn’t want to believe it at first.

But then you came, Sofia, gliding towards me, around me, in a thousand different ways at once, and you told me that you doubted it at first, that fear and other feelings, many of them nameless, meant that you refused to accept your situation at first, that you wanted to scream: not me, I’m too young, I haven’t had a chance to live, and now I want to scream it too, now as we drift here together above the burning forest.

The smoke and fires.

The burning treetops are a volcano.

The machines and people and animals are like little pinpricks of despair down there, fragments of life trying to stop the flames taking over, trying to force the destructive power back into the meandering badgers’ tunnels under the ground.

Is their struggle succeeding?

Malin in the Volvo heading along the road down there on the surface, down towards Ljungsbro, out onto the withered plain where soon all the plants will have shrivelled into soft fossils of what could once have been verdant life.

You seem to trust her, Theresa.

If you trust her, then so do I.

You said it had got easier for you now, now that there are two of us. But for me everything is still so hard, even if I seem to have been less distraught about my state than you.

We drift side by side, wingless, but it still seems to fit, somehow, this idea of us being summer angels. Unquiet angels, not your standard bookmark angels, but girls who somehow want to get back what was taken away from them.

We’re clean now, aren’t we?

I like words. The way they’re mine now. And I like drifting in a world that can be free of memories for as long as I like, as long as I manage to keep my thoughts away from those hands, those white hands as they squeezed my neck, and the scrubbing that I could still somehow feel, and the smell of bleach, the fear I had time to feel before everything disappeared, only to reappear again, albeit in a far more unfathomable way.

I want to remember who I was, who I could have become.

Older.

I am.

But never will be.

‘Zeke. Hypnosis can make you remember things, can’t it?’

His hands have a firm grip on the steering wheel as they drive past Ikea and the retail warehouses out at Tornby. She reaches for the stereo, turning down the choral music. The people in the car parks are moving slowly in the sun, but are still heading determinedly towards the air conditioning of the shops.

‘So they say. But I’ve never heard of us ever using that method. It sounds a bit dodgy, if you ask me.’

‘But this isn’t a joke. It could work.’

‘I know what you’re thinking, Malin.’

‘We only have access to five per cent of our memories, at most,’ Malin says.

‘Have you been watching the Discovery Channel again?’

‘Shut up, Zeke.’

He grins at her.

‘Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road.’

‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ Zeke says. ‘I’ll try to remember that.’

‘So, you little black-haired worm,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says as he pushes Behzad Karami up against the wall of his one-room flat. ‘Did you really think you’d get away with lying to the police? One of your so-called friends has ratted on you. What were you doing last night? The night between Wednesday and Thursday, the night between Saturday and Sunday? You raped and murdered them. Didn’t you?’

Behzad Karami still cocky.

Still convinced he can handle this.

But you’re in the shit, Per Sundsten thinks. He’s going to beat everything he wants to know out of you.

‘Did you get a taste for little girls when you gangbanged that fourteen-year-old last winter? Huh?’

‘We didn’t . . .’

Waldemar pushes Behzad Karami back, thumping him against the wall again.

Then his voice softens: ‘Don’t try that with me. You know you raped those girls. Did you get a taste for it? And then it went wrong? And you ended up killing . . .?’

His voice gets louder with every word and then he punches Behzad Karami in the stomach. He folds in half like a flick-knife.

Behzad Karami gradually collapses down the wall, and Waldemar takes a few steps back, his pupils enlarged from the adrenalin.

‘I need a piss,’ he says. ‘Keep an eye on this sack of shit for me.’

Behzad Karami gasps for air, finds it and takes five deep breaths before turning to look imploringly at Per.

Don’t look at me, Per thinks. I can’t do a thing to stop him, I don’t want to, because what if he’s right?

‘It would be best if you just told him what you were doing,’ Per says in his very gentlest voice. ‘Christ, he even scares me. And he never gives up.’

‘He’s mad.’

‘Come on. Tell us. Then everything will feel better.’

‘Will you believe me?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

Behzad Karami is panting, but the colour has returned to his face.

‘On whether you’re telling the truth.’

‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth.’

‘I suppose you’ll just have to try us.’

Per looks down at Behzad Karami, bent, but not yet broken.

‘Try us,’ Per says, and then Waldemar is back in the room again.

‘So, the little shit has found his senses again, has he? Good. I’ll just have to see to it that he loses them again.’

‘Do what the fuck you like.’

‘I’m going to,’ Waldemar says, then kicks hard twice at Behzad Karami’s left shoulder, and Per sees the shoulder dislocate under the yellow and red T-shirt, and the scream that rises to the ceiling of the room and squeezes out through the window is full of primal pain, a scream of self-preservation crackling out from the core of the brain, out through the larynx and tongue.

‘So it hurts, then,’ Waldemar whispers into the ear of the whimpering, recumbent Behzad Karami. He puts his arm on his shoulder, gently, and presses down slightly, and Behzad Karami screams again, not so loudly this time, and Per can see from his whole bearing that he’s close to collapse.

Why resist?

Because that’s your role?

Because you did it?

‘Wait, I’ll tell you, I’ll show you my secret.’

Behzad Karami is sitting on the sofa with his left arm twisted backwards, over the back of the sofa.

Waldemar behind him.

‘Don’t make a fuss, you little shit.’

And Waldemar pulls Behzad Karami’s arm back, and there’s a clicking, meaty sound as the shoulder pops back in, and the scream that comes from Behzad Karami’s mouth is as primal as before, but this time contains the relief of an entire body.

‘Fucking wimp.’

Waldemar grins.

Per wants to get out of the flat, go home, wants this day to be over, but it isn’t over, not yet, not by a long way.

The warm, grey-black water of the Stångån River.

The fish sluggish, lethargic down there, maybe they can feel their flesh changing form as the temperature of the water rises, Per Sundsten thinks.

Nowhere to flee. And if the heat is almost making the water stop being water, then what do the fish do? Float up to the surface, lifeless, swollen guts upmost, the shiny silver of their scales dulled by the murky liquid.

The football pitches of Johannelund, their netless goals waiting for a cooler season, until someone feels like kicking a ball again, it’s too hot now, impossible, dangerous.

‘If I show you, you have to believe me. I’ve got nothing to do with any of that shit.’

Behzad Karami in handcuffs in the back seat of the car. They’re on their way to the allotments in Johannelund, down by the river. That was where he wanted to take them, refusing to explain why.

‘Nothing to do with any of that shit.’

The words echo in Per’s head as they walk along the well-tended gravel path that weaves between the allotments. The water sprinklers are working overtime, trying to keep the grass lawns green, and save the currants and gooseberries as best they can. The allotment owners are hiding in the shade of parasols or under the porches of their colourful little cottages.

That shit.

If you reduce murder and violence to shit you can handle it, and that means you can live with whatever you or someone else has done. Live with the fact that we human beings occasionally choose to treat our fellows in that way.

Waldemar calm.

Behzad Karami asked to be let out of the handcuffs up by the car, and Waldemar agreed to his request.

‘If you run, I’ll shoot you.’

His voice ice-cold, and Behzad Karami nodded.

‘Not that I have any idea what you want to show us here.’

Waldemar more sceptical with every step.

‘You’d better have something for us.’

‘I’ve got something for you,’ Behzad Karami says as he speeds up. ‘We’re heading to the last plot, down on the left.’

Hot, Per thinks as he treads along a sunny section of the path. Unhealthily hot, and Ekenberg is sweating alongside him, yet still largely unbothered by the heat.

An old man of steel.

Made by a dark, one-track steel that’s no longer manufactured.

Then Behzad Karami opens the gate to the last allotment on the left. The grass is less well-kept, the cottage an untouched white-painted shack, apparently uninhabited.

They go into the small plot and Per notices the pedantically well-kept flower beds, the bushes, they look like raspberry canes, and they’re planted in perfect rows, no mature fruit yet.

‘There.’

Behzad Karami points at the bushes.

‘What do you mean, there?’

Per wants to get his question in before Waldemar loses his grip.

‘I was here those nights when you wanted to know what I was doing.’

It’s going to blow, here it comes, Per thinks, Waldemar’s going to go mad. But instead he sighs, and there’s no violence.

‘These are my blackberry bushes. I grow blackberries, when I was little back in Tehran my grandfather used to take me to the souk with him and eat blackberries. I wanted to grow my own, it makes me feel better, sort of. A good feeling in my stomach. Like when I was little with Grandfather, just the two of us.’