Earth Storm_The new novel from the Swedish crime-writing phenomenon_Malin Fors
Page 1
Contents
About the Author
Also by Mons Kallentoft and published by Hodder & Stoughton
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Part 1: A love of longing
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part 2: Waking death
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part 3: At the end of longing and the start of everything
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Epilogue
About the Author
Mons Kallentoft grew up in the provincial town of Linköping, Sweden, where the Malin Fors series is set. The series is a massive European bestseller and has been translated into over twenty languages. Before becoming a novelist, Mons worked in journalism; he is also a renowned food critic. His debut novel, Pesetas, was awarded the Swedish equivalent of the Costa Book Award.
Mons has been married to Karolina for over twenty years, and they live in Stockholm with their daughter and son.
Also by Mons Kallentoft
and published by Hodder & Stoughton
Midwinter Sacrifice
Summertime Death
Autumn Killing
Savage Spring
The Fifth Season
Water Angels
Souls of Air
Visit Mons’ website at www.monskallentoft.se and his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/MonsKallentoft and follow him on Twitter @Kallentoft
www.hodder.co.uk
Originally published in Swedish in 2014 as Jordstorm by Bokförlaget Forum
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Hard Boiled company 2014
English translation Copyright © Neil Smith 2018
The right of Mons Kallentoft to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 77644 7
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
www.hodder.co.uk
Prologue
[In silence]
The worms are slithering around me. I try to move my arms, but the wood stops them. It is wood, isn’t it?
I don’t remember how I ended up here.
My head has stopped aching. But it was aching when I woke up. And the skin around my nose and mouth stung.
I can breathe, and I can scream. The air could run out at any moment.
I’ve been here for many hours now, but how long? A day? Twenty-four hours? Probably no longer. A second feels like an hour, which feels like a day.
I’m trying not to be frightened, because this must be a dream.
There’s a smell of earth, of damp earth drying.
I’m lying stretched out, no other position is possible.
The planks get in my way if I try to raise my head. Splinters catch in my forehead when I move it from side to side. I’m not naked, though. Trousers, a top, cloth against my skin.
Unless it is actually my skin, and I just think it’s cloth?
My body stings, and there’s blood running down my cheeks, making my hair sticky under my head. I’ve got cuts on my body. Did somebody hurt me?
I fall asleep and wake up. Make an effort not to panic.
The first time I woke up I did that. I strained, kicked, and screamed, and scraped with my fingernails until my fingertips were raw. I screamed until I couldn’t breathe. But my screams bounced back into me, and when I stretched my legs I felt my feet hit a barrier.
There are barriers on all sides. And I hit them and push at them, but don’t get anywhere. I know that now.
I’m tired, I want to sleep.
Maybe I’m already dead?
I’ve got something to drink, there’s a cold plastic tube above my mouth. If I suck it I get water, and I drink, which must mean I’m not dead, because the dead don’t drink. Do they?
Sometimes I imagine I can hear footsteps from above, and think I can hear voices.
But now everything is black and silent, like deaf and blind people’s lives must be. As if someone had hollowed out my eye sockets and inner ears and filled them with earth.
I have to get out of here.
Someone has to find me.
Because the water will run out. The air.
Hunger is making me nauseous. Dissolving my thoughts before they take shape.
Ticking. What’s that ticking sound I can hear? I’m not wearing a watch.
I move, push once again, and scream, but get nowhere, and I yell: ‘Rescue me! Rescue me!’
Who the hell put me here? How did I get here?
Blood from my forehead mixes with my tears.
Someone has to help me.
I close my eyes, and in my thoughts I am carried up, up across the fields, away towards a city in darkness.
PART 1
A love of longing
1
Sunday, 14 May, Monday, 15 May
Malin Fors is sitting at the kitchen table in her flat on Ågatan, looking out at the tower of St Lar
s Church. The black spire, topped with a cross, is lit up against the encroaching night. The ground around the church has been dug up, and it looks as if the entire building is slowly sinking into its own grave. The rain earlier in the spring crept into the foundations, and now the water needs to be drained.
Not many people about. Linköping has been as quiet as usual for a Sunday evening.
The digital clock above the new Ikea table says 23.14. The red numbers glow in the darkness as she feels the evening’s events linger inside her.
She was working the evening shift. Just after seven o’clock they received a report about a domestic in a flat in Skäggetorp. When they got there they found a woman in her fifties, so drunk she could barely stand, brandishing a knife. Her husband was lying in the floor in a pool of blood. The woman was so out of it that she didn’t know what she’d done.
Yet another drunk shipped off to hospital with severe injuries, and another one to Hinseberg Prison.
Alcohol, wreaking havoc again.
And Malin can’t help thinking it could have been her in that flat, if she hadn’t joined the police, and if it hadn’t been for the people who had tried to guide her in the right direction over the years.
She runs her hands over her face, feels her taut skin, then lets her fingertips play across the deepening wrinkles around her eyes.
She sees those wrinkles in the mirror every morning. She likes them, knows there’s no point fighting the lines that time wants to engrave on your face.
No grey hair yet, and she can still keep her body in shape.
She exercises, exercises, exercises. Runs, swims, lifts weights, and she fucks. More than she’s done for years.
She thinks about what she and Daniel do in bed.
They don’t make love, they fuck. The former would be far too dangerous.
Daniel.
The man who’s moved in and out of her life.
She’d like to be gentler with him, take things nice and slowly, but what they do in bed, on the kitchen table, in the car, and plenty of other places, isn’t making love.
The pattern of their behaviour is purely physical. At first Daniel wanted to be more tender, but that didn’t work. It was as if they were holding back, retreating before the attack had even started.
So they set all gentleness aside.
And now we’re like animals, Malin thinks, even though what we do has absolutely nothing to do with reproduction. He knows she can’t have any more children, and it doesn’t seem to bother him. Doesn’t seem to want any of his own, even if she has trouble believing that.
She sees Daniel’s face before her, his brown eyes, sharp nose, and the laughter lines that have become more prominent.
As if he were happy.
As if we were happy.
Are we happy?
I’m fine with the way things are, she thinks, with the two of us keeping our separate flats. But Daniel lives here almost all the time. He works a lot, like tonight, working the night shift on the paper. He works hard in the newsroom at the Östgöta Correspondent, they’ve got far too few staff after years of financial crisis, and they’re buying in more and more material from freelancers.
And he doesn’t drink much either. Even if he’s in no way teetotal. It’s as if he understands when she’s in a vulnerable state, when she’s thirsty as hell and can’t bear to see anyone else drink, and then he abstains.
She wants a drink now.
There’s a bottle in a cubbyhole under the rubbish bin.
Drink.
And she longs for him, more than she really dares to, longs for Tove, who’s so far away, and that longing saves her, because there’s something solid in the emotion.
Malin sits down on the sofa in the living room, reaches for the remote on the table, and turns the television on. Zaps through the channels.
Celebrities. A load of rubbish.
She thinks about the Eurovision Song Contest. The final took place the previous weekend. Every single newspaper had led with Eurovision news.
And she hated it.
People on television talked about pop songs as though they were the most important thing in the world, and she felt ashamed when she heard them. Is this what we choose to do with our wealth and freedom of speech?
She and Daniel sat on the sofa watching the spectacle.
‘General education,’ he said. ‘Current affairs. This is Sweden now, whether you like it or not.’
‘The world’s totally fucked, and all we’re doing is singing?’
‘Chill out, Malin.’
She felt like smashing him in the head with the bowl of crisps, then realised that he was right.
Why get worked up?
There was no point fighting against it.
Like her wrinkles.
She switches the television off.
Thinks: You make me chill out, Daniel. You calm me down, make me less restless, but you also make me feel more alone.
She wishes he were there with her. Would like to feel his arm around her shoulders, his hand on her cheek. And then they’d fuck. Maybe tenderness and sexuality should be kept separate. Maybe that’s how you make a relationship work.
He usually leaves little messages for her. Hidden in places where she’s bound to find them sooner or later. Most recently a note under the coffee maker. ‘I love you,’ it said.
And reading it made her happy, she believed it, and felt like calling him, but held back. Whispered in his ear that evening: ‘I found the note this morning.’
Nothing more.
She stifles a yawn and switches the television on again.
The late news.
A report of heavy fighting in Damascus, where a young Swede from Karlstad has died a martyr’s death. Some young men from Linköping have also been killed there, lured by manipulative radicals and their own ennui. The news presenter goes on to talk about a bomb in Egypt, the liberals being tortured in Libya, and the international success of a new Swedish computer war game.
Renewed fighting has broken out in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and she feels her stomach tighten.
Tove.
In western Congo. Doing voluntary work in a home for children whose parents have died or disappeared.
Hell on earth.
As you wrote in one of your emails.
But also paradise.
Everything all at once, you wrote, Tove. The jungle, beauty, love. Sickness, violence, hatred.
Tove had already spent several months in Rwanda, following in her dad Janne’s footsteps, but had found Rwanda too ‘organised’, and moved to Congo with the same relief agency.
Malin had protested, but knew there was no point, Tove did as she liked anyway. And Janne had backed her up, telling Malin on the phone: ‘She’ll realise what it means to be human once she sees what she’s going to see there.’
‘She doesn’t need that level of insight.’
Felt like saying: Look at how it changed you, Janne.
How had his time in Bosnia and Rwanda changed her ex-husband? He became more guarded. Resigned. As if he’d lost faith in what might be possible in this world.
Women assaulted.
Children eaten alive by ravenous dogs.
Children dying from curable infections.
Rendered mute by terror and loneliness.
And those are the things he wants Tove to experience.
There are thousands of kilometres between the east and west of Congo. Impenetrable jungle.
It’s a country where women are raped as a tool of war. And why should Tove be spared simply because she distributes a bit of medicine and food?
She wishes Tove were here with her. Would like to hear her talk, breathe, see her walk through the living room on her way to the kitchen to make a cup of tea.
She wants to be disturbed by Tove’s noise.
Yet Tove is nothing but silence now.
Sometimes she thinks that Tove might never come home again. That she’ll stay in Africa
for good.
Malin is lying in bed. The white cotton sheets are cool against her skin.
Pleasantly cool. But the pillow could be thicker, and when Daniel is here she often lies with her head on his chest.
She’s pulled the blind down, shutting out the light of the stars in the cloud-studded sky. She wants to sleep. But longing is keeping her awake.
She considers trying to read, maybe switching the radio on, but she never does that when she’s trying to sleep, and why would it work this time? She looks up at the ceiling, a dark ochre colour in the gloom.
Tove. Janne. Daniel.
All the people who come and go and sometimes linger in my life.
I don’t want to feel anything, she thinks.
Something is moving in Linköping tonight, and she knows that it’s going to have some sort of effect on her.
She lets herself become her longing. Pure longing, a feeling that makes her more tired than tired, and just after half past midnight, Malin Fors falls asleep.
She dreams about children left speechless with terror, human bodies coming together like animals, hands gently caressing cheeks.
Then her dreams end and she sleeps in total darkness.
2
The street lamps glow above the young man as he makes his way along Repslagaregatan, not far from the Correspondent’s offices, and only a few blocks from Malin Fors’s flat. The street is deserted, one of the few real backstreets in the centre of Linköping. The buildings are a mixture of two and three storeys tall. A brown-fronted office building, a sand-coloured block of flats, with a porcelain cat gazing out from one window.
Peder Åkerlund is tired. He’s dragging his feet. He’s drunk too much beer, but his head is still full of thoughts, ideas, and opinions.
You have to be smart. Say what people want to hear, but do the opposite.
They have to go.
They’re not like us.
They’re ruining Sweden.
Give Mother Svea back to us and send the rabble back to where they belong: Somalia, Iraq, Turkey, Bangladesh, Syria. Who cares where: they need to go, one way or the other. No means prohibited, any alliance permitted.
That’s what people are thinking. Far more of them than you’d imagine, Peder Åkerlund thinks, as he walks home. But you’re not allowed to say that.
Sometimes you have to side with the devil, he thinks.