All books burn. Linköping found that out on the night of 20 September 1996, when the old library burned down.
Thousands of books were destroyed. Some of them were the last copies in existence, and are now gone for good.
Buried by the world.
By the flames.
Börje Svärd never reads books. Unless they’re about guns or dogs. He tried with military history, but not even that managed to spark his interest. His wife Anna used to read several books a week until her MS began to affect her optical nerves and made it impossible for her to read without getting a splitting headache. Then she switched to listening to audiobooks.
Börje Svärd walks through the vast space of the new library, his long coat slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. He left his hat at home today. It’s just past one o’clock, and he can almost feel his thoughts taking flight, up towards the bare wooden beams in the roof.
How many books are there here?
Young people and pensioners are sitting reading in the egg-shaped chairs by the windows facing the park. They’re not in direct sun, so the temperature by the glass is probably very agreeable now.
He’s here to meet Nancy Hårdstål and Javier Riva. Peder Åkerlund’s former girlfriend, and the dark-skinned man whose success in love is supposed to have driven Peder towards right-wing extremism.
He managed to get hold of Nancy Hårdstål’s number and gave her a call. She said they were both at the library, revising for an economics exam. He’d find them downstairs, so where the hell is the staircase?
Börje suddenly feels smothered by all the books. Their passivity.
What sort of activity is reading books? Or writing them? When you could be hunting or grooming dogs or making love? Having sex. That’s far better. Reading books is what you do when you’re too ill to do anything else. There has to be something abnormal about trying to escape the world by reading, or, even worse, thinking you could capture the world and the people in it with words.
Over there.
The staircase.
Let’s see what these two are like, Börje thinks, and quickens his pace. Sees a dark-skinned guy with dreadlocks and large eyes sitting next to a red-haired girl with defined features. She’s wearing a tight T-shirt that fits her curvaceous figure perfectly.
Nancy Hårdstål looks at the detective who called earlier. What an idiot. But presumably there are women his age who like that kind of thing. Think he’s a real man.
Mum would like him.
He’s standing beside the fixed desk, has just introduced himself. He didn’t want to say what this was about, and Nancy can see that he’s nervous, as if he’s just been told something unpleasant.
He fetches a chair and sits down next to them, then he looks at her and says: ‘I’ve got some bad news.’
A burglary, Nancy thinks.
‘Your ex-boyfriend, Peder Åkerlund, was found dead this morning, probably murdered. You might have read online about a body being found out in Ljungsbro, near Heda?’
Nancy hears what he’s saying. But the detective’s words don’t seem able to shape themselves into meaning.
She hasn’t read about any bodies, she never looks at the news sites, you always find out anything you need to know sooner or later.
Then she hears Javier say: ‘What the hell …?’
‘Peder Åkerlund has been found murdered,’ the police officer, Börje, repeats, and Nancy understands what he’s saying, and her first reaction makes her feel ashamed, but it’s genuine and she can’t help it.
She thinks and feels: Good, he’s gone, I won’t have to deal with him any more. Javier sits silent and contained beside her, and she needs to pretend to be sad, but how do you do that?
‘That’s awful, is it really true?’ she says. And she tries to squeeze out a tear, but fails. ‘I’m really shocked.’
‘How was he murdered?’ Javier asks, but the detective doesn’t want to answer that, and asks instead: ‘I understand that he reacted badly when you broke up with him.’
Nancy gives up trying to be sad.
So he really is dead?
Gone?
Just like that.
‘He went mad when I met Javier. Turned into a racist and wouldn’t leave us alone. To start with he used to call and email several times a day, then a bit less often, but still a lot. I very nearly went to the police.’
‘But you didn’t?’ the detective asks, leaning towards her, and she can’t help thinking that his moustache really is very off-putting. Why would anyone want a thing like that?
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I suppose I was a bit scared of him. Thought he and his friends might hurt Javier.’
‘He was a racist,’ Javier says, and she can hear the anger in his voice, a very dark anger that’s only there occasionally, and which frightens her.
‘There are lots of them about, sadly,’ he goes on in a milder voice.
‘What about his conversion?’
Javier snorts.
‘I never believed a word of it.’
‘How about you?’ The detective turns towards Nancy.
‘He seemed to have changed. But he still used to hang out with some of them.’
‘Did he ever threaten you?’ the police officer asks.
‘No, he was just a bloody nuisance,’ Nancy says. ‘Has he really been murdered?’
She thinks: Murder. Here? In Linköping? Sure, it happens, but not to anyone I know. It only happens to alcoholics, and people who get in the way of nutters and sex-mad lunatics.
A young man a few desks away is trying to listen to their conversation.
Peder.
Dead.
It’s not real. And suddenly she misses his awfulness, his wounded pride, the phone calls in the middle of the night.
He’s never going to phone them again.
‘Did you used to argue with him often?’ the police officer asks, directing the question at both of them.
What’s Javier going to say? she wonders. That they ended up having a fight just a few months ago? Is he going to mention that?
She looks at him. He looks back, and the expression on his face changes.
‘We never really argued. But he was bothering us, and we protested.’
‘Protested, how?’
‘We asked him to stop.’
‘And he did?’
‘He hasn’t bothered us at all in the last few months,’ Nancy says. ‘It was like he finally realised that our relationship was over, several years too late. And he was OK, really. Deep down. Just confused by the world. And he probably had changed for the better, in spite of everything.’
The truth, she thinks, is very different.
He’d started again. Worse than ever. A real stalker. But there’s no need for the police to know about that. And he was never OK. He was a selfish egomaniac.
‘Do you have any idea who might have murdered him? Did he have any enemies?’
‘He must have had thousands of enemies,’ Javier says. ‘With those vile beliefs of his. They’re not so easy to forget when you’re on the receiving end.’
‘We don’t really know who, though,’ Nancy says, smoothing her trousers. ‘But if you look online you’re bound to find a whole load of hatred.’
‘From him as well as other people,’ Javier adds.
She takes Javier’s hand, squeezes it, and the detective asks: ‘Where are you from?’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Nothing, probably. I’m just curious,’ the police officer says, and smiles again, very patiently.
‘From the West Indies. Dad’s from Trinidad, Mum Venezuela.’
The detective rubs his fingers together. Looks at them steadily.
‘You are telling me everything, aren’t you? Everything I need to know?’
‘Of course,’ Nancy says.
‘What were you doing yesterday evening and last night? Were you together?’
They l
ook at each other again, and Javier squeezes her hand hard.
‘We were around at mine,’ he says. ‘All night.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘We watched Sons of Anarchy on DVD.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A television series about a biker gang.’
‘I think I’ve seen it,’ the detective says, then falls silent, evidently thinking. ‘That’s all for now,’ he says eventually, but he just sits there looking at them, as if he can tell that they’re lying.
The truth.
I was at home, and Javier said he was at home. And as far as I know, that’s where he was.
Then the detective turns and leaves them alone with their economics.
Börje Svärd walks away from the attractive young couple, perfectly able to understand why Peder Åkerlund must have felt crushed. There aren’t many girls as beautiful as that in a small city like this. He would have been at a very vulnerable age, and all hell must have broken loose in his impressionable brain.
They’re lying, Börje thinks. That much is obvious.
We’ll have to see if that matters. We’ll find out whatever it is they’re lying about. Could they have wanted to be rid of him?
Very possibly.
He makes way for a man pushing a trolley laden with books and manuscripts. The man is staring down at the floor, doesn’t seem to have seen Börje, or to want to see him.
Pardon me, Börje thinks.
Then he emerges from beneath the ground, and out of the building full of books.
The fresh air feels good in his lungs.
A kilometre or so away, Malin and Zeke are each eating a hotdog with mashed potato at the Snoddas Grill, sitting on one of the benches on the grass beside the Statoil petrol station. The cars are going by on the Ryd roundabout, and there’s a smell of barbeques on the breeze blowing from the allotments in Valla, even though it’s still only early afternoon.
They’ve checked the websites of the Correspondent and the evening tabloids. They’re running hard with the story, now that the relatives have been informed. Publishing the name of the victim.
Former Racist Murdered! according to Aftonbladet.
Hate Crime? thunders Expressen.
Local Politician Murdered is the headline of a more nuanced article by Daniel Högfeldt, in which he actually highlights Åkerlund’s conversion.
The hotdog and mash taste good.
Karin has sent a team to Max Friman’s flat. He had no objection to letting them examine the place where Peder Åkerlund is supposed to have spent his last evening alive.
They might find something in the flat.
Anaesthetic.
Signs of a fight.
But Malin doubts it. Max Friman didn’t have to give them access to his flat at this stage of the investigation, and his willingness to cooperate despite his sarcasm and snide remarks seems to suggest that he wasn’t involved in the murder.
But what hasn’t he told them? There’s something. Maybe we’ll find an answer in the search of his flat.
In all likelihood Peder Åkerlund did spend the evening drinking there, then set off home towards Johannelund, taking a long walk to sober up, and somewhere along the way encountered the perpetrator, who killed him, and then dumped his body by the canal.
Malin eats the last piece of sausage, then tosses the tray, smeared with yellow and red spattered mash, in a nearby bin.
The naked body in the ditch.
The swollen skin around the mouth.
The lips that had spoken their last words.
14
Tess. Tess.
Karin Johannison feels like calling out to her daughter, summon her to her by invoking her name, but it merely bounces silent and lonely inside her, then out across the pathology lab in the basement.
Karin can almost feel the earth pressing against the walls, the way it wants to pour in through the concrete. She wants to get out, go home. But she’s got work that needs to be done.
How many times have I been down here on my own on an evening like this? With just a body for company?
Far too many times.
I should be with Tess, she thinks. I should be with Zeke.
The dead don’t scare her, they never have. Occasionally, early on, she might feel frightened of the violence, and its effect on the human body, but now that doesn’t frighten her either.
The young man on the post-mortem slab.
She’s opened him up, checked all his organs, then sewn him back up. She found nothing unusual or noteworthy. She’s screened the area around his mouth for traces of different substances. There were remnants of tape, traces of pepper spray, some sort of compound, and it’s possible that he was sedated with ether.
Old-fashioned ether.
Using a cloth.
Whoever murdered him must have known what he or she was doing. Ether’s highly volatile. The fumes can make anyone in its vicinity drowsy, and it’s easy to administer an overdose. But it wasn’t the ether that killed Peder Åkerlund. If it had been, there would be signs of collapsed blood vessels in his lungs, as if someone had squeezed the air out of them, and there was nothing like that.
His death is still a mystery, and she’s about to open up his skull. It’ll take her another hour or so. Then her phone rings: Zeke’s number on the screen.
She can’t deal with him now.
But if it’s something to do with Tess?
No.
This business of being able to love and miss and long for a person, yet simultaneously not be able to talk to them. The way feeling can become too tangible, too easily transformed into aggression.
They’re home now, he texted an hour ago, and nothing can have happened. She clicks to reject the call. Wants to concentrate on this, so she doesn’t miss anything.
She turns her back on the corpse, on what used to be Peder Åkerlund. His parents were there a few hours earlier to identify the body. Two uniforms came down with them, but Karin showed them into the room herself. She had her white coat on, aware that it muffles emotions better than a uniform in situations like that.
The woman in her wheelchair.
Fortunately, the whole building has been made accessible.
The parents beside the body. The man with his hand on the woman’s shoulder, the woman rocking her upper body from side to side in her chair.
They both nodded without saying a word.
They took their time with their dead son, and Karin left them alone. Went out to the uniforms and watched through the windows in the door as the parents stroked their son’s cheeks.
After fifteen minutes they were done. Emerged from the room of their own accord.
‘That’s Peder,’ the woman said as she rolled past them, heading towards the lift.
Can you love a racist?
Should you love someone like that? Regardless of whether they’ve changed their views or not?
Love is the only thing we can do, Karin Johannison thinks. Meeting hate with hate only leads to violence and death. But sometimes you have to fight back. Protect the very core of your own life. But when? When do you resist? And what price must you be prepared to pay? Love, she wants to believe, is always bigger than hate, but she’s well aware that this isn’t always the case.
She fetches the bone saw from the cabinet under the narrow windows up by the ceiling. She takes a deep breath and becomes once again aware of how strongly the basement smells of chemicals and disinfectant. Sometimes the room feels like a grave. As if strange men were standing outside the little windows with spades in their hands, ready to shovel earth on top of her and bury her alive.
She raises the saw towards the skull. Peder Åkerlund’s hair has grown slightly during the course of the day.
She starts the saw. The shrill noise forces its way into her head, and she hates it.
She stops the saw before it bites into the bone of the skull.
Looks down at it.
Hang on.
She sw
itches the saw off, puts it down next to the body.
What am I looking at?
There’s something here.
There always is, she thinks.
In a laboratory three floors up in the same building, forensics specialist Axel Nydahl is sitting hunched over his desk. He’s a recent graduate, happy to have got the job, and there’s no one waiting for him at home. He’d be happy to work through the night, and now he’s searching for fingerprints on the envelopes and hate mail that were found in Peder Åkerlund’s flat earlier.
Carefully he brushes the paper with detection solution, then powder.
Then he waits.
It always takes a few minutes before anything appears, if anything is going to appear at all.
They’ve had the three letters translated. A lab assistant who fled Iraq ten years ago helped them.
Similar messages in each of them. No punches pulled. The right-wing extremist was shown no mercy.
You’re a faithless dog. You shall die the death of a thousand deaths.
We’re going to flay you alive. You most faithless of all infidels.
Cherish your head, because it will soon be separated from your body.
The envelopes. The letters.
Slowly a few fingerprints are appearing.
From one – no, two people. Axel Nydahl can see that immediately. Whoever wrote these letters, he or she wasn’t terribly careful.
Karin has found a pinprick in the middle of one of Peder Åkerlund’s pupils. A tiny, almost microscopic red swelling that only stands out from the rest of the pupil by being slightly paler. The pinprick seems to vibrate with life even though the body is dead. She’s certain it was made by the needle of a syringe.
She clears the area around the eye.
Picks up the saw again and starts to cut, cursing the noise once more.
And now the skull is open, and she looks down at the devastation in what used to be Peder Åkerlund’s brain.
Burn marks. Black patches in the brain tissue. A scorched smell.
Acid.
Sulphuric or hydrochloric acid.
Someone injected corrosive acid directly into Peder Åkerlund’s brain through his eye, burning up his soul from inside. If he was conscious when it happened, he must have suffered extreme pain, an intense flaring, burning sensation before everything went black and he died. But first his optical nerve would have burned out.
Earth Storm_The new novel from the Swedish crime-writing phenomenon_Malin Fors Page 6
