Summertime Death (39 page)

A white van drives past her, slowly, presumably looking for an address, probably a gardener.

Finally, their white brick villa. The big apple trees look sad, the trunks look like they’re about to crack in the heat. The front door opens before she’s even had time to park her bike on the path.

Markus.

Thin and pale, and he smiles.

Tove smiles back, thinking: Hope my smile looks genuine. It’s good that he can’t see my eyes.

Then she thinks: Is it always like this? That when you aren’t in love any more everything is just flat? Isn’t there anything else?

Karin Johannison is in her office, feeling restless. She gets up, sits down, puts her feet up on the desk, her pink painted toenails perfectly matching the narrow pink stripes of her Prada sandals. She bought them in Milan back in the spring, when she and Kalle were there on a shopping trip.

Restless.

Karin doesn’t know why, but one of the reasons is probably that she and Kalle had sex like idiots all night, they had the windows open and the night heat, damp but somehow fresh, had made them wilder than usual.

She can feel him inside her still, wants him inside her now, is that why she can’t sit still?

They don’t really talk to each other much any more.

Not about anything.

And certainly not about the fact that they have never been able to have children, in spite of a thousand doctors and as many appointments. Instead they fuck. They’ve been doing that ever since they first met, and now their fucking is confirmation, that they’re OK, that they still look at each other, and Karin thinks that that gets them a long way, but only a child can get you all the way.

Wordless love is nothing to be afraid of. Words don’t get you far anyway.

But there’s something more than her residual lust that’s making her restless.

Have I missed something important?

Is that why I feel restless?

Karin sits down, switches on the computer, reads through her report about Josefin Davidsson. Watertight.

She reads through her report about Theresa Eckeved.

Probably murdered out at the beach.

Why?

No marks on the body to suggest it had been moved after death.

The soil under her nails matched the soil found at the scene, in both structure and content.

But.

Did I check all her nails? All the soil?

No.

I should have done. There could have been different soil under different nails.

Sloppy.

Heat-fuddled sloppiness.

I was probably rushing, wanted to get a report to Malin and the others as soon as possible, and I took it for granted that the soil was the same under all her nails.

Have to check now. As long as there’s still some soil left under the other nails.

She remembers the scrubbed clean body.

Scrubbed, but there were still traces of soil under the nails, even if they were scarcely visible. Why did the killer miss that? Unless it wasn’t there for the killer, in his or her dark tunnel.

She’s standing beside what was once me in other people’s eyes, scraping the soil from under the nails of my left middle and index fingers.

I know who the woman is, Dad.

What does she want now?

I’ve never got used to the chill of this room. The small windows up by the ceiling, the metal worktops, the stainless steel cabinets containing us, the drawer-like metal bed where I am lying now, and then there’s the smell of surgical spirit and a lack of fresh air. It’s a clean smell, clean, but heavy with sorrow and a feeling that this was how it all ended up, no more, no less.

What does she want with my fingers?

With the soil?

Must you be so methodical, efficient? That’s actually me lying there on the stainless steel, my body completely cold, scrubbed clean, the blood stiff in its veins.

But it’s still me.

Tell her, Dad.

I want her to stop treating me like an object. Do you hear, you, the one called Karin?

I want you to stroke me over the forehead, I want you to show that I am still someone as I lie there, but you’re working quietly and methodically, and that makes me even more scared.

Please.

Stroke my forehead.

Put my hair in place.

Show me that I’m still a person.

The air-conditioning unit in the lab has given up and the building’s own ventilation system can do little more than circulate the hot air from outside. For some tests, those requiring cold, this would be a disaster, and Karin has called the engineers.

But she doesn’t need cool for soil analysis and drops of sweat are beading on her forehead, she’s not wearing her white lab-coat and her pale-mauve sleeveless Ralph Lauren top is glowing under the neon lights.

The body down there just now.

She doesn’t know why, but before she pushed it back into the refrigerated cabinet she stroked the girl over the forehead. Several times. Calmly and carefully. Gently stroking her hand over Theresa’s brow. She’s never done anything like that before.

The sheet detailing the first soil analysis on the worktop.

The new sample in the microscope.

Her eye focuses.

She can see at once that they aren’t the same soil. The soil under these nails is from somewhere else. The soil under the nails of the other hand was sandy, its crystalline structure sharper.

She does other tests. This new soil is typical mineral-rich compost, the sort you buy in sacks from garden centres. This soil comes from a garden, or a park.

So, Karin thinks, she could have been moved after death, and if she were struggling to get away, scratching at the earth to get a grip and flee, she did it somewhere other than the beach. The soil from the beach could have got there as the body was pulled down the slope or put down on the ground.

But where?

Malin will probably think this is interesting, even if it doesn’t really mean anything at all.

Karin opens the curtain.

She can just make out the yellow-white façade of the hospital.

One week until her holiday.

I’ll end up getting ill if I don’t get away from here.

Karin looks around the lab. Test tubes, flasks, fume cupboards, eye-baths, all of it very sexy in an inexplicable way. She sees herself up on the worktop, her cotton skirt around her thighs, Kalle thrusting deep inside her.

As deep as he possibly can.

Markus a metre or so from Tove on the sofa in the recreation room.

Cooler down here, the indoor pool behind the glass empty for the summer.

‘In the summer you swim outside!’ Markus’s mum Biggan had said when Tove asked about it in June.

He wants her to come closer. He doesn’t need to say it, it’s obvious from his body language. But Tove doesn’t want to, wants to tell him that she has to go, but she doesn’t know where to start.

He’s going to be upset.

‘Come and sit next to me.’

His Iron Maiden T-shirt is just childish. Like all hard rock. As if he doesn’t want to grow up, even though their bodies do.

But they haven’t had sex.

Markus has wanted to, and so has she, but they still haven’t. To start with they used to lie next to each other in the recreation room, under an itchy, brightly patterned, crocheted blanket, and she would hold him in her hand, but no more than that, and he would have his fingers on her pants, but no further.

The heat, different from the sort when she just looked at him, scared her.

She doesn’t know why.

The conversation had been short. Just after a morning meeting during which nothing new was raised.

Karin Johannison had told Malin that Theresa’s body might have been moved, and that there was high-quality compost under her fingers, and Malin had pointed out at once that if she had been moved from somewhere then the likeliest place was her home, the beds in the garden were full of new compost. It might be worth a look.

She and Zeke met up with Karin in the car park outside the National Forensics Laboratory, best to arrive together even though Karin was driving her own car, its boot full of the equipment needed for fieldwork.

They pull up outside Theresa Eckeved’s parents’ villa.

As they drove past Malin’s childhood home she looked the other way. It was as if the house was calling inaudibly to her, as if it wanted her to go there, and try to recreate what had existed a long time ago.

‘Secrets,’ the voices seemed to cry.

‘Come, and we’ll tell you some secrets.’

‘Are you coming?’ Zeke calls to Karin, frowning, his tone aggressive rather than impatient. Malin imagines that he might just be annoyed that Karin may have missed something that turns out to be important, but how many times have they overlooked things? Like the porn shop?

But no one is faultless. Things being overlooked are part of every investigation.

‘I’m coming. Could you maybe help me with one of my bags?’

Zeke goes over to Karin, picks up one of her large black bags and they head up a white paved path, the bushes not watered, forgotten.

They ring the bell and Sigvard Eckeved opens the door half a minute later.

Surprise and suspicion, but also anticipation.

Have you got him?

And Malin sees the hope in his green-blue eyes, a flash of life, and she says that they have reason to believe that their daughter may have been murdered in a different location from the beach and that they would therefore like to conduct a cursory search of the house, just to rule out the possibility that she was attacked at home.

‘You can’t imagine that I, we . . .’

‘Not for a second,’ Zeke says, and Sigvard Eckeved steps aside and his body is heavy, as if the true note of grief had penetrated his system and taken it over.

‘If it would help your inquiries, you’re welcome to burn the whole house down.’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘There are probably enough fires around here as it is.’

‘True enough,’ Sigvard Eckeved says. ‘Well, do whatever you need to. The wife’s in the city seeing her shrink.’

Malin is going through the beds around the terrace and pool, searching for clues, broken twigs, signs of a struggle, but all she can find are withered red roses that long ago gave up in the heat.

She’s out in the sun and has to keep wiping the sweat from her eyes and forehead. She can see Zeke on the other side of the lawn, where there’s a large vegetable patch between the lawn and the neighbour’s fence.

Karin inside the house.

Malin had just been thinking how well she fits in with this chic pool environment, in her skirt and her silly pale-mauve armless designer top.

Then Zeke calls out: ‘Over here!’

And Malin can hear from his voice that he’s confident, that he’s found something important.

‘She must have tried to escape next door.’

The vegetable patch is full of drooping potatoes, bolted carrots, rhubarb that no one bothered to pick. The signs of a struggle are obvious, almost solidified in the drought and lack of rain and absence of watering, and they can see footsteps, the way her body must have fallen into the plants, then how someone had tried to pull Theresa backwards and she had struggled, digging her fingers in the soil, trying to cling to life.

‘We need Karin,’ Zeke says. ‘Whatever she’s up to. I imagine she’s inside, in the cool.’

Sigvard Eckeved has slumped onto one of the chairs on the terrace, his daughter’s death even closer now, physically in their home, and it seems to Malin that he’s been struck with the realisation that they can’t possibly go on living here, now that this is/has become a place of violence.

Malin crouches down beside him.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says.

‘It’s OK,’ Sigvard Eckeved says, and Malin realises what this loss means for him, that things can’t get any worse, that there might even be some small comfort in the fact that his daughter was at home when she was attacked.

‘But I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How am I going to tell the wife? It’ll break her.’

Once Karin has finished in the vegetable garden she turns to Malin, who has been watching from the shade of a pear tree.

‘She most likely would have come from the pool,’ Karin says. ‘The perpetrator probably attacked her there and she tried to escape in this direction. I didn’t find anything inside, no traces of blood or anything.’

‘You’ll need to check around the pool.’

‘That’s where I’m heading next, Malin.’

A minute later Karin is going around the pool, and the water seems to simmer in the heat, inviting and off-putting at the same time in its ostentatious blueness. Karin sprays Luminol on the wooden decking and the stone edge of the pool, hoping that the liquid will make any traces of blood glow in the relative darkness as she goes along shading the ground with a blue towel.

‘I knew it,’ Karin says when she reaches the part of the pool closest to the garage. ‘I knew it,’ she repeats.

Malin hurries over, and Zeke emerges from inside the house.

Sigvard Eckeved remains seated on his chair, his face expressionless.

‘Look here,’ Karin says, waving them over, and under the towel are some twenty small patches surrounded by splashes. ‘The perpetrator tried to get rid of it. But I can promise you that this was where Theresa received that blow to the head.’

‘Can you get a blood-type or anything from that?’

Zeke hopeful.

‘I’m afraid not. Nothing like that,’ Karin replies. ‘What you see here are just little ghosts of reality.’

Malin is crouching beside Sigvard Eckeved again.

‘Who would have had any reason to be here?’

‘Who?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There’s no one who comes to mind?’

‘No one. Sorry.’

‘No one?’

‘No, it could have been anyone.’

‘No gardener? No one like that?’

‘I usually do all the work myself. Together with my wife.’