‘He didn’t want children?’
‘Sailors, Inspector Fors. What sort of men used to become sailors in the old days?’
Malin nods, pauses for a moment before going on. ‘So who was the boy’s father if it wasn’t Palmkvist?’
‘I made it ashore afterwards. The third night in the storm, just when we thought it was easing, it started up again. I tried to hold on to Juan but he slid out of my grasp. It was night and it was dark and the wind was blowing like the worst night of winter. The sea was opening up for us, roaring out its hunger, it had us in its grip, it wanted to devour us, and even though . . .’
Weine Andersson’s voice cracks. He raises his healthy arm to his face, bows his head and sobs.
‘. . . even though I was holding on as hard as I could, he slid out of my arms. I could see the terror in his eyes, as he vanished down into the blackness . . . there was nothing I could do . . .’
Malin waits.
Lets Weine Andersson collect himself, but just when she thinks he’s ready for the next question, the old man in front of her starts to cry again.
‘I lived on,’ he says, ‘. . . alone after that, there was no other choice for me . . . I don’t think.’
Malin waits.
She watches the sadness draining out of Weine Andersson.
Then, without her having to ask, he says, ‘Palmkvist was concerned about the rumour about Rakel Karlsson. It started before we even set off. But I knew, and a lot of other people knew who fathered the child she was expecting.’
‘Who? Who was it?’
‘Have you ever heard of a man called Cornerhouse-Kalle? He was the father of her boy, and they say he was the one who beat Blackie so he ended up in the wheelchair.’
Malin feels a warm glow course through her body. A warmth that is icy cold.
55
Ljungsbro People’s Park, early summer 1958
See the way he moves.
Tense muscles, dark eyes.
How the others shy away, how they steer their bodies aside instinctively when he comes with her, her and her or her.
How unending he is, Kalle.
How the sweet smells of the summer evening mingle with the sweat of the dancers’ bodies, weekly toil being driven out, the expectations of the flesh, the blood coursing through the body, making it tender with longing.
He’s seen me.
But he’s waiting.
Warming up his dancing so that he’s ready. Stand up straight, Rakel, stand up straight.
The band on the stage, the smell of sausages and vodka and lust. One, two, three . . . most of the others fat with the chocolate they eat from the conveyor belt, but not you, Rakel, not you. You’re plump in all the right places, so stand up straight, stick out your breasts just for him as he dances past with her or her.
He’s the beast.
Raw lust.
He’s violence. The directionless, original blow, the one who doesn’t know what flight is, the one who stands firm, obstinate, the one who has no voice or place in chocolate-land.
And tonight Kalle will dance with you, Rakel. Imagine, dancing with Kalle . . . Tonight it will be Rakel dancing the last dance with Kalle, the one who gets to smell the sweat on his shirt.
Then there is a break. The human mice stream into the evening; coloured lanterns and queues for sausages, quarter-bottles emptied, motorcycles over near the entrance, the almost tough guys and their broads, and Kalle walking past the queue, licking the mustard from the sausage and swallowing; the chocolate-fat girl by his side sways and now he sees me, breaks free from her and walks towards me but not yet, not yet. I turn round, head for the toilets, force my way into the Ladies and all the while I feel his steps, his eager, dark breathing behind me.
Not yet, Kalle.
I strut for no man.
‘Democratic dance’, says the sign. Men asking women to dance, women asking men.
And the women are at him, the man. The only one in the room who deserves the title.
But he denies them.
Looks over at me.
Shall I? I strut for no man. Then he is dancing again, it is someone else’s body in his arms but it is me he is leading across the dance floor.
Now it is the gentlemen’s turn to ask.
I turn down him, him, him and him.
Then Kalle comes.
I am pressed up against the wooden panelling.
He takes my hand. He doesn’t ask, takes it, and I shake my head.
He pulls me out.
But no.
‘Dancing, Kalle,’ I say, ‘is something you’ll have to do with all those common chocolate girls.’
And he lets go of my hand, catches her beside me and then round, round, until the music falls silent and I am standing by the entrance to the park and see him walking, see him pass arm in arm with her, her or her.
Kalle, I whisper, quietly so no one hears.
I linger, the sound of disappearing motorcycle engines, of drink fading into dreams and headaches. Lanterns are extinguished, the band pack their things in the bus.
I know you’re coming back, Kalle.
The canal is rippling quietly, it’s black now, night, and not starlit; high above veils of cloud have swept in across the sky and are hiding the light of the stars, the moon.
How much time has passed?
An hour?
You’ll come.
Are you finished with her, Kalle?
Because there you come, rounding the bend and you look so slight as you leave the yellow wooden façade of the bridge-keeper’s cottage behind you.
But you’re no boy.
That’s not why I’m waiting here in the damp, gentle cool of a June night, that isn’t why I feel so warm, so warm as you grow larger before my eyes.
Your shirt is unbuttoned.
The hair on your chest, your black eyes, all the power in your body directed at me.
‘So you’re still here.’
‘I’m still here.’
And you take my hand, lead me along the road, past the newly built villas and lead me off to the left along the forest track.
What do I think will happen?
What am I expecting?
Your hand.
Suddenly it is unfamiliar. Your smell, your shadow are unfamiliar. I don’t want to be here, in the forest. I want you to let go of my hand.
Let go.
But you squeeze even tighter and I follow you into the darkness, Kalle, even though I no longer know if I want to.
You’re panting.
Talking about drink, muttering words and your smells mingle with the forest’s; it’s full of life but also of decay, of things that disappear.
Let go, let go.
I say the words now. But you pull me on, you tug and you drag and you are strong, you are just as raw as I expected.
Are you a lion? A leopard? A crocodile? A bear?
I want to get away.
I am Rakel.
Over-confident.
Panting.
Then you stop, black bands around us, and you turn round and I try to pull away but you catch my arm, pick me up, and there is no humanity in what you are. Gone is the light, gone is the dream.
Quiet, whore. Quiet.
And I am down on the ground now, no, no, no, not now, not like this and you hit me on the mouth and I scream but all I can feel is the taste of iron and something hard and powerful and long forcing its way upwards.
There, lie still now, here comes Kalle.
The ground cuts into me, burning.
Was this what I wanted so badly? Longed for?
I am still Rakel, and I strut for no man.
Kalle.
I can be like you, only sly.
You are breaking me, but I no longer protest, I lie nicely and it’s odd how I can shrink this moment to nothing.
I break, I was broken and your weight means I can’t breathe, but even so, you don’t exist.
Then you’re done.
&n
bsp; You get up. I see you fasten your trousers, hear you mutter, Whore, whore, they’re all whores.
Branches snap, you stumble, mumble, then the silence tells me you are gone.
But the night has just begun.
The darkness condenses around my midriff, two hands stretch up into the air, break through the clear, shimmering film and decide that here, here there will be life.
I feel it even then.
That in me is growing all the pain and torment of what it means to be human.
I crawl on the wet ground.
The branches writhe, the tree trunks mock, the twigs, leaves, moss eat me.
I huddle down. But then I get up.
Stand up.
And my back is straight.
56
Monday evening; Tuesday, 14 February
‘Let’s shake hands.’
Markus holds out his hand and Malin takes it. His grip is firm and decisive, has direction but is still not painfully hard.
Well-drilled, Malin thinks, and sees a man in a doctor’s white coat standing and practising handshakes with what is to be the perfect son.
‘Welcome.’
‘Thanks for inviting me.’
‘I don’t suppose we have as much space as your family,’ Malin says, throwing out her arm in the little hallway and wondering why she feels the need almost instinctively to make excuses in the company of Tove’s boyfriend.
‘This is lovely,’ he says. ‘I’d love to live so close to the centre.’
‘You’ll have to excuse . . .’
Malin wants to bite her lip, and then falls silent, but realises that she has to finish the sentence.
‘. . . the fact that I got a bit cross last time we met.’
‘I would have done as well,’ Markus says with a smile.
Tove comes out of the kitchen.
‘Mum’s made spaghetti with home-made pesto. Do you like garlic?’
‘Last summer we rented a house in Provence. There was fresh garlic growing in the garden.’
‘We mostly go on day trips in the summer,’ Malin says, then quickly: ‘Shall we sit down straight away? Or would you rather have something to drink first? A Coke, perhaps?’
‘I’m quite hungry,’ Markus says. ‘I’d be happy to eat now.’
Malin watches him shovelling it in. He’s trying to resist, to behave the way his parents must have tried to tell him, but Malin can see how he keeps losing the battle with teenage hunger.
‘I think I might have overdone the parmesan . . .’
‘This is great,’ Markus says. ‘Really good.’
Tove clears her throat. ‘Mum. I’ve been thinking about what Grandad said. It sounds great. Really good. But couldn’t Markus come too? We’ve spoken to his parents and they can get him a ticket.’
Hang on now. What’s this?
Then she sees herself and Janne before her. She’s fourteen, him sixteen. They’re lying on a bed in an unidentified room, fingers on the buttons of each other’s clothes. How shall we ever manage to be apart from each other for more than a couple of hours? The same feeling in Tove’s eyes now.
Expectant, but with a first suspicion that time is finite.
‘Good idea,’ Malin says. ‘They’ve got two extra bedrooms.’
Then she smiles. A teenage couple in love. With her mum and dad. On Tenerife.
‘It’s fine with me,’ she says. ‘But we’ll have to ask Grandad.’
Then Markus says, ‘Mum and Dad would like you to come to dinner some time soon.’
Help.
No. No.
Doctors’ coats and a stuck-up woman around a table. Practised handshakes. Apologies.
‘How lovely,’ Malin says. ‘Tell your parents that I’d love to come.’
When Markus has gone Malin and Tove are sitting at the kitchen table. Their bodies become black silhouettes reflected in the window facing the church.
‘Isn’t he sweet?’
‘He’s very well behaved.’
‘But not too much.’
‘No, Tove, not too much. But enough for you to watch out for him. The well-behaved ones are always the worst when it comes down to it.’
‘What do you mean, Mum?’
‘Nothing, I’m just rambling, Tove. He’s fine.’
‘I’ll call Grandad tomorrow.’
An internal alarm clock rings and Malin is awake, wide awake, even though the clock on the bedside table says it’s 2.34 and her whole body is screaming for rest.
Malin twists and turns in bed, trying to get back to sleep, and she manages to shut out all thoughts of the investigation, of Tove, Janne and everyone else, but sleep still won’t come.
Have to sleep, have to sleep.
The mantra makes her more awake each time she thinks it, and in the end she gets up, goes out into the kitchen and drinks some milk directly from the carton, thinking how cross she used to get when Janne did that, how she thought it was disgusting and utterly uncivilised; and in another house, outside Linköping, Janne is lying awake and wondering if he’s ever going to stop dreaming and then, to get rid of his memories of the jungle and the mountain roads, he conjures up Malin’s and Tove’s faces in his mind’s eye and becomes calm and happy and sad, and thinks that only the people you really love can arouse such contradictory feelings inside you, and he pretends that his daughter is lying there, thinks about how she’s growing away from them, that he never wants to let her go; and in the flat in the city Malin is standing beside Tove’s bed and wondering if things could ever have been different or if everything was, is, already predetermined somehow.
She wants to stroke Tove’s hair.
But maybe that would wake her up? Don’t want to wake you, Tove, but I do want to hold you tight.
The early morning meeting was postponed yesterday, ‘No point if you aren’t here, Fors,’ as Sven Sjöman said over the phone.
The others’ breath is hanging heavy in the meeting room and they all seem more alert than her.
Maybe because they’ve had the results from the forensics lab?
The rubber bullets in Bengt Andersson’s flat were fired from the small-bore rifle found in Niklas Nyrén’s flat, and Joakim Svensson’s and Jimmy Kalmvik’s fingerprints were found on the weapon.
‘So there we have it,’ Sven says. ‘We know who fired the shots through Bengt Andersson’s window. Now Malin and Zeke can put some real pressure on our little tough guys and see if they’re hiding anything else. Get hold of them as soon as you can. They ought to be at school at this time of day.’
Then Malin tells them what she’s found out about the Murvall line of inquiry.
She can sense Karim Akbar’s scepticism as she explains the connection between Cornerhouse-Kalle and the family. So what if he was Karl Murvall’s father, what does that matter? What does it give us that we don’t already have? That we don’t already know?
‘Murvall’s a dead-end. We’ve got new paths to explore. We need more to go on with the Æsir angle; there must be something on the hard drive. Johan, how are you getting on with that? I see, you’ve got past the password, and found a load of protected files.’
But Malin persists: ‘It makes Karl Murvall Bengt Andersson’s brother. Something that presumably even he doesn’t know.’
‘If the old boy in Stjärnorp is telling the truth,’ Karim says.
‘We can easily check. We’ve got Bengt’s DNA, and we can take a sample from Karl Murvall, and then we’ll know.’
‘Steady on,’ Karim says. ‘We can’t just run round taking a load of integrity-compromising samples just because of what one man says. Especially if its significance for the investigation is, to put it mildly, questionable.’
After they had eaten last night she had called Sven and told him what Weine Andersson had revealed.
Sven had listened intently, and she didn’t know if he was pleased or irritated that she was working on her own angle on a Sunday. But then he said, ‘Good, Fors, we aren’t done with that line o
f inquiry yet. And the Murvall brothers are still in custody, under arrest for the other offences.’
And perhaps that’s why he now says, ‘Malin, you and Zeke can go and talk to Karl Murvall again, see what else he knows. He has an alibi for the night of the murder, but try to find out if he knows anything about this. He may have been lying about how much he knew last time you spoke to him. Start with that, and then go and put some pressure on Kalmvik and Svensson.’
‘And the DNA test?’
‘One thing at a time, Malin. Pay him a call. See what you get. And the rest of you, look under every single stone, try to find angles and corners in this case that we haven’t considered so far. Time is passing and you all know that the more time passes, the less chance there is of us catching the perpetrator.’
Zeke comes up to her desk.
He’s angry, the pupils of his eyes are small and sharp.
Now he’s annoyed that I went off without him yesterday. Isn’t he ever going to get used to it?
‘You could have called me, Malin. Do you think Karl Murvall knows about this? About Cornerhouse-Kalle?’
‘I’ve been wondering about that. He might know, but not properly, if you get what I mean.’
‘You’re too deep for me, Fors. Okay, let’s get out to Collins and have a chat with him. It’s Tuesday, he ought to be there.’
57
Collins Mechanics AB, outside Vikingstad.
The tarmac car park stretches about a hundred metres from the edge of a dense forest to a security lodge and the heavy boom blocking the only opening in a ten-metre-high fence crowned with perfect coils of barbed wire.
The company supplies components to Saab General Motors. One of the few successful companies on the plain, three hundred people work on the automated construction of car parts. Just a few years ago there were seven hundred, but it is impossible to compete with China.
Ericsson, NAF, Saab, BT-Trucks, Printcom: they have all cut back or disappeared completely. Malin has noticed the changes that happen to areas when manufacturing industry is shut down: violent crime increases, as does domestic abuse. Despair is, contrary to what many politicians might say, a close neighbour of the fist.
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