Earth Storm_The new novel from the Swedish crime-writing phenomenon_Malin Fors

by Mons Kallentoft

  Murdered.

  Nadja Lundin.

  Anti-racist.

  Missing.

  Murdered?

  Julianna Raad.

  Anti most things, had sent threatening letters to Åkerlund.

  All this at the same time.

  ‘Did she have any enemies?’ Elin asks. ‘Had anyone threatened her?’

  Bror Lundin throws his arms out.

  ‘Do you think she’d tell me something like that? She doesn’t listen to me at all. To anyone.’

  ‘Have you got her laptop, her mobile?’

  ‘Yes, they’re here, you can have them.’

  Malin nods, and studies the kitchen behind Bror Lundin. Shiny appliances in brushed steel, gleaming white cupboards. The antithesis of her kitchen at home on Ågatan.

  She goes out onto the terrace. Looks over towards the vegetable garden, Nadja’s, presumably. Thinks about what her father has just said about his daughter. Sixteen years old. She sounds very similar to Tove. Tove was stubborn, read a lot of books, and had very definite ideas about everything. And she could be dogmatic and foolhardy too.

  Thank God it isn’t Tove who’s missing. But Tove could easily have been Nadja.

  Malin stands still. Almost imagines she can see the shadow of someone sitting in the lotus position.

  ‘We’re going to find you,’ Malin says quietly to herself.

  Find me. I’m not dead yet.

  Mum, Dad.

  I’m alive, and you have to find me.

  Nadja Lundin’s internal whispers move through the ground, make their way through the vegetation and out into the night, up into the darkest corners of the Milky Way before returning to earth, to Malin Fors, as weary, swirling thoughts in a summer house in Svartmåla, not far from Linköping.

  Find me.

  Before the clock stops ticking.

  She could still be alive, Malin thinks. She’s found the path through the mess now, can see that someone has dragged a body through the house and out through a side door.

  Where the forest begins.

  Then nothing.

  If Nadja Lundin is still alive, then they need to hurry.

  Malin feels that now.

  Feels Nadja Lundin breathing, feels her heart beat.

  It’s a new feeling, a feeling that’s simultaneously hot and cold, a feeling that is her: incredibly brittle, yet strong at the same time.

  ‘Don’t give up,’ Malin whispers. ‘Don’t give up.’

  Malin looks at the photograph of Nadja Lundin.

  Bror Lundin has just given it to her.

  An aluminium frame containing a photograph of a beautiful girl with a nose-ring and dark, intelligent eyes. Long brown hair. A badge of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt depicted as a death’s head.

  It used to be Olof Palme, Malin thinks. Now Reinfeldt, or the Sweden Democrats’ Jimmie Åkesson.

  Everything must be silenced, nothing must be said.

  Everything must be said.

  Nothing is worth any reflection.

  A car stops out in the driveway.

  Karin, perhaps. God, she must be exhausted by now.

  Or the dogs.

  It’s the dogs, and within minutes four Alsatians push past her, she can feel the musty smell of their fur, can hear their nostrils sniffing.

  She doesn’t wish their handler good luck. Because what could such a wish conjure forth from the dark face of the forest?

  A dead girl?

  PART 2

  Waking death

  [In silence]

  Daniel. Your back, your skin, you.

  I’m sweating, you’re sweating, what we are together is sweating. Are we something more than people now, in this moment when we’re both lost in each other?

  You want to whisper, talk, but I hush you.

  There must be only silence here.

  The dogs bark in the darkness.

  Divers search the blackness of the lake.

  Where’s Nadja?

  The young, courageous girl, and Malin wishes she could remove Nadja from this moment with Daniel, but she won’t go. This night belongs to her, too, and Daniel notices, notices that Malin is somewhere else.

  Where are you, Nadja?

  Tove is sleeping in a tent, in a mouldy sleeping bag.

  That’s what she’s doing.

  How dark is it where you are, Nadja?

  I know you’re alive.

  Malin moves against Daniel, faster now, yes, like that, it will soon be over, but her body wins, thank God her body wins.

  Fuck the crap out of me, Daniel.

  Fuck the crap out of me the way the world fucks the crap out of all of us. Let me become one and the same person. What do I find in you?

  Do it now.

  Now.

  And they surrender at the same time, and Malin rolls off him, trying to breathe.

  Daniel.

  His warm body, moist skin.

  Close to mine.

  This doesn’t need words, she thinks, and slumps onto the bed, onto the white sheet, falls asleep and wakes up and falls asleep again inside what is actually a dream.

  26

  When Malin opens her eyes in the morning she doesn’t know where she is at first.

  At home in Ågatan, or in Daniel’s flat on Sturegatan?

  She stares up at the ceiling.

  It’s low, close to her eyes, depressing, not high and full of plaster detailing, and she breathes out. She wanted to wake up at home today.

  Home, nowhere else.

  She reaches out her hand. Daniel isn’t there.

  He was here during the night, wasn’t he? He must have gone to the newsroom. She calls out to him, but gets no response.

  A short while later she’s standing in the kitchen. Her new laptop is switched on, and she’s reading Nadja Lundin’s article about refugee children travelling alone on the Dagens Nyheter website. She argues strongly in favour of their rights, and excoriates the local councils that have refused to accept them. And condemns people living in fancy houses who don’t want the children living near them because they think the value of their homes will decrease.

  One paragraph reads:

  ‘If we should feel one thing for these children, it is sympathy, and if we can’t feel sympathy, we should consider that we have to take care of the children as a matter of national pride. That is how we should be, as Swedes. The Swedes we know we can be: full of love, not hate like the Sweden Democrats.’

  Sixteen years old.

  What sort of thoughts did I have when I was sixteen? How did I express myself? I was interested in boys and clothes and getting hold of something to drink at the weekend.

  Not even Tove was as precocious, as wise as Nadja Lundin. Unless Tove was even wiser. She had a different sense of proportion, she wasn’t so obviously combative.

  But they’re clearly cut from the same cloth.

  Malin clicks to open Nadja’s blog. Finds pictures of Peder Åkerlund. Of other Sweden Democrat councillors.

  Pictures from a demonstration against racism that took place in the main square last autumn. Julianna Raad among the sea of people. Do you know each other?

  Beneath the picture of Peder Åkerlund it says: ‘The biggest idiot in Linköping?’

  High and low, considered and impulsive, all at the same time.

  Your disappearance and Peder Åkerlund’s murder are connected, Nadja, I’m almost certain of that. Unless I’m just imagining things, seeing a link that isn’t there? But your paths have been too close to crossing for these cases to be entirely separate.

  What does Julianna know?

  Peder Åkerlund on Nadja’s blog, the two of you, each other’s opposites in every way, yet you could still almost be replicas of one another.

  She sees an entry on the blog about the Democratic Republic of Congo. About the systematic rape of young children and women in the eastern part of the country. Pictures from mountain villages. Another post about two missing aid workers from Chile who
were apparently trying to identify and prosecute a group of rapists.

  Tove.

  You’re a long way from that part of the country, but there’s violence even where you are. Stay alert, Malin thinks, don’t get involved, because if you get involved, someone will break into your tent or cabin at night and abduct you.

  You might never come home again.

  Malin switches the laptop off and takes out her mobile. Rings Tove’s number.

  The call fails.

  She tries again, closes her eyes, and in her mind’s eye she sees Tove walking through a jungle, carrying a naked baby. The child’s skin is as black as crude oil, its head hanging limply to one side, and Malin knows that the child is dead. Tove is resolute rather than sad, and she walks right through Malin as the ringtone echoes down the line, ten rings before the connection fails.

  Tove.

  You don’t usually answer; do you even know that I’m calling? I’d really like to talk to you now.

  Have you been in touch with your dad? Should I call him?

  No.

  And she makes her way out of the flat. Heavy movements, bearing no trace of the vitality of spring.

  27

  Karin Johannison looks tired; the bags under her eyes seem to be making their way down towards her cheeks. But her eyes are full of fire.

  She must have worked into the small hours out in Svartmåla.

  She’s standing next to the whiteboard in the meeting room, giving an account of her findings at the two scenes, and what she’s discovered about the murder victim, Peder Åkerlund.

  It’s just past eight o’clock, and they’re all there.

  Göran Möller, Johan Jakobsson, Waldemar Ekenberg, Elin Sand, Börje Svärd, and Zeke Martinsson.

  Twenty metres away, outside the window, the children at the nursery are playing in the spring sunshine. Some of them are wearing shorts, and look liberated, as if they’ve been released from the grip of a harsher season and are celebrating the fact that they can now do what they like.

  Malin is vaguely aware of the children’s excited cries. Their whoops of joy. The carefree way they’re milling about. And she feels envious. The fact that they seem completely free in their games, completely unfettered, down to their very souls.

  She hears Karin say that Peder Åkerlund had a high percentage of alcohol in his blood, about 1.1 parts per thousand, and that she’s found traces of ether around his mouth.

  Hydrochloric acid in his speech centre.

  The quickest way to kill him would have been to inject the acid directly into his cerebral cortex, that would have paralysed the muscles around his lungs and he would have died instantly. But when the acid was injected into the language centre of his brain via his pupils, it isn’t even certain that he would have lost consciousness at once. He could, according to Karin, have remained alive for a relatively long while after that sort of damage, fifteen minutes or more, while the acid spread through his brain tissue. He wouldn’t have felt any pain during the process, because the brain has no feeling. But the injection must have hurt. Presumably the eye was chosen as the easiest way to reach that part of the brain. The skull and frontal bone are impossible to penetrate with an ordinary syringe.

  Karin remains calm as she accounts for his injuries, factual, as if the brutality weren’t real, and Malin is grateful for that, because otherwise this would be unbearable.

  Karin takes a deep breath.

  ‘Judging by his injuries, I estimate that he was murdered at approximately three o’clock in the morning.’

  Karin remains standing beside the whiteboard. Awaiting the others’ reaction.

  But there isn’t time for that. Waldemar asks instead: ‘Hydrochloric acid. And ether. Where can you get hold of those?’

  ‘I’ve checked,’ Johan Jakobsson says. ‘You can buy them from hundreds of sites online. Both of them. It’s going to be hard to find out anything that way.’

  ‘Is it even worth trying?’ Göran Möller asks.

  Johan nods.

  ‘Once we’ve got a suspect. Otherwise it’s practically impossible to find out who in Linköping might have got hold of the two substances. I can check to see if Julianna Raad has bought anything like that. If she used her own name, of course.’

  Silence settles on the room. They all seem to be gathering their thoughts.

  ‘Åkerlund is supposed to have left his friend’s flat at half past one,’ Göran Möller says, and Malin thinks he looks alert today, that meetings like this must be like oxygen to him.

  But I really don’t know anything about him, she thinks.

  ‘So, an hour and a half from the time he left the flat until he was murdered,’ Göran Möller goes on. ‘He would have had time to get home.’

  ‘He could have fallen asleep somewhere. On a bench. He was seriously drunk,’ Elin Sand says.

  ‘Or else someone abducted him. Took him off somewhere.’

  Malin hears her own words. The way she pronounces them as if to test a potential explanation.

  ‘Are there any security cameras in the surrounding area? Along his probable route?’ Göran asks. ‘Could he have been filmed somewhere?’

  ‘We can check with the local council.’ Johan Jakobsson wrinkles his nose, then goes on: ‘There’s bound to be at least one camera.’

  ‘We ought to go door-to-door along any route he may have taken,’ Malin says.

  ‘Which leads us to the door-to-door enquiries in the area where his body was found,’ Göran Möller says. ‘Nothing, I’m afraid. Not a thing.’

  ‘No one noticed a vehicle?’ Börje asks.

  Göran shakes his head.

  A long silence spreads around the room.

  The detectives of the Linköping Violent Crime Unit know that these first few days are vital, they can’t have silence now. Because they also know that silence and undiscovered truths belong together.

  ‘Shall I tell you about Nadja Lundin?’ Karin eventually says, brushing her blonde hair back. ‘What I found out in Svartmåla?’

  Göran Möller nods.

  Malin is thinking what everyone in the room is thinking, the thought that struck her earlier: that these crimes are linked. The combined intuition of the officers in the room tells them that. Events like this don’t happen so close together in a city like Linköping without there being some sort of connection.

  One idea, one individual. Or both. The similarities between the victims. Politics, activism. The differences between them, even if they are supposed to have ended up on the same side.

  What if Nadja has been kidnapped for money? The Lundin family is very well off. But if that were the case, they ought to have received a ransom note or something of that sort.

  ‘Someone broke in at the back of the house. Tried to overpower her, and there was a struggle. I’ve found two types of blood, we can assume that one is Nadja’s. I’ve also found hairs from a number of different individuals. They’re being run through the DNA database as we speak.’

  A match would be like hitting the jackpot, Malin thinks. But she knows that’s unlikely. There aren’t that many people on the register, and this wasn’t an ordinary break-in. She can feel it.

  ‘And I found something else,’ Karin says. ‘Tyre tracks. Identical to the ones I found by the locks. I think they were made by a relatively large vehicle. A van, probably.’

  ‘So the cases are linked,’ Waldemar says.

  ‘It looks that way,’ Göran Möller says.

  ‘There’s a ninety-nine per cent chance that it’s the same vehicle. The pattern is an ordinary Michelin tyre, but the two tracks show the same signs of wear. Mind you, the vehicle doesn’t necessarily have to be involved in the murder and abduction.’

  ‘Good work, Karin. And I think we can assume that this vehicle is involved somehow.’

  ‘Do we have anything else to connect the cases?’ Börje wonders, and Johan clears his throat and says: ‘It looks like Peder Åkerlund was a frequent commentator on Nadja Lundin’s bl
og. Before his conversion.’

  I missed the comments this morning, Malin thinks. Probably didn’t know where to click.

  ‘And she had a picture of him on her blog,’ she adds.

  ‘There must be other points of connection that we’re not seeing,’ Elin Sand says.

  ‘We ought to interview more people from Sweden Democrat circles,’ Göran Möller says. ‘Spread the net more widely.’

  ‘I got a list of people Nadja Lundin knows from her dad,’ Malin says. ‘He made it clear that it wasn’t comprehensive, but it includes her teachers, a small number of good friends, and other people she was in touch with.’

  ‘Have we got her phone and computer?’ Waldemar asks.

  Malin nods.

  ‘Forensics are about to start work on them,’ Johan says. ‘They’re also checking Peder Åkerlund’s call log, and his computer. Julianna’s too. They’ve cracked the password to Åkerlund’s laptop, but haven’t found anything special so far. But there are a number of locked folders, and the Internet history has been erased.’

  ‘How does Julianna Raad fit into this?’ Waldemar asks.

  Malin went down to the custody unit before the meeting. Spoke to Julianna, who was calmer this time, almost like a different person. Her anger had been replaced by resignation. She was still refusing to answer questions, but did clarify one point: she was aware of Nadja Lundin, but didn’t know her. Julianna asked if the exchange of gunfire had been reported on the Correspondent’s website, and seemed pleased when Malin said that it had been. And Malin found herself thinking that this could be one of the voices of the investigation.

  ‘Her friend has given her an alibi,’ Elin says.

  ‘She wrote those threatening letters,’ Malin says. ‘And she opened fire on us. But I don’t think she killed Peder Åkerlund.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to have to put in a lot of hard graft on every line of inquiry,’ Göran Möller says. ‘We can’t rule anything out. Assume that these cases are linked, but bear in mind the possibility that they might not be. We don’t know anything for certain yet. We need to question more people, talk to everyone on that list Nadja’s father has given us. The dog patrol haven’t found anything in the forest around Svartmåla so far, but they’re going to carry on looking. The divers, however, have finished their search of the lake close to the house.’