So you don’t believe in violence? Malin thinks. Why don’t I trust you?
My own prejudices.
But, on the other hand, she remembers the article in Expressen. And how he sued the newspaper.
‘Nadja Lundin,’ she says. ‘Do you know her?’
Suliman Hajif looks at Malin, clearly surprised.
‘I don’t know anyone called Nadja,’ he says. ‘Who is she?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Zeke says.
Suliman Hajif suddenly gets to his feet, and the imam tries to stop him, tugging cautiously at the white fabric of his kaftan, but Suliman stands up and stares down at Malin and Zeke, and says: ‘Is this all you’ve got? You call me here and insinuate that I’m involved in a murder? What right do you have to bother me?’
And Malin feels like snapping back: Murder. Of a man you’re said to have threatened.
What the hell do you think?
She feels Zeke’s hand on her knee. He squeezes it gently.
Easy. Don’t lose your cool now, Malin.
Suliman Hajif storms out of the room, leaving Malin, Zeke, and Samudra sitting on the floor.
‘Forgive him his youth,’ the imam says.
Malin nods.
‘We might need to speak to him again,’ Zeke says. ‘Or with some of his friends.’
Outside the mosque Malin feels that the world is spinning far too fast. She can’t make sense of anything.
She forgot to ask Suliman if he was the man in the hoodie outside Folkunga School, the man Elin called to tell her about. She’d meant to ask, just to see his reaction. But why would he be that man?
She turns her face to the sky. Low, dark clouds are skimming the rooftops now. Rain soon, no question.
Nadja.
Peder Åkerlund.
Connections.
Visible and invisible.
How does this fit together?
It does fit together. All the particles of the earth are linked to each other.
We all come from the same earth, and shall all be laid to rest in the same.
Until then, we have to cope with living alongside one another.
And she sees Nadja Lundin in her mind’s eye.
A lonely face surrounded by even lonelier darkness.
30
I’m so hungry. And the tube is still empty.
My muscles are cramping, I need water.
I’m whispering now. Hoarse. I don’t think I can last much longer.
I whisper, but nothing can be heard.
My room has walls of silence and a ceiling of stillborn words.
How did I come up with that?
I breathe in my own sentences.
Everything ends, I can feel it.
The clock is ticking. There’s a rushing sound in my ears, and it hurts so much when my calves tighten.
So hurry up. Hurry up.
31
The rain lashes the metal frame of the car. The noise drowns out the radio, the newsreader talking about their case.
Malin turns up the volume.
‘The police suspect that the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Nadja Lundin is connected to the murder of former local councillor for the Sweden Democrats, Peder Åkerlund. At a press conference this morning Göran Möller, who is leading the preliminary investigation, has confirmed that there is evidence to suggest that the two cases are linked …’
Göran evidently handled the press conference well.
She lowers the volume again, and soon there’s nothing but her and the roar of the rain, the sound of the engine a distant hum.
It’s lunchtime, but she isn’t hungry. She’s on her way to the forests of Svartmåla.
The dog units.
She was blunt with Zeke: she needed to go out there on her own. Try to make sense of her thoughts.
Malin drives along the main road for twenty minutes before turning off onto a forest road. She knows the patrols set out from there that morning.
They’re searching deeper and deeper into the forest.
She pulls in behind the three police cars that are parked in a clearing. Puts on her yellow raincoat, remembers coming to these woods after Peter betrayed her, how she burned all the crap he’d given her, including that ridiculous oilskin coat.
She gets out of the car. Walks off into the forest, calling: ‘Nadja, Nadja, Nadja.’
But she knows there’s no point. There’s no Nadja to hear her cries, and that’s not why she’s calling. She’s calling out because she’s missing something, because the forest and people and earth are silent.
The raindrops are cold and refreshing on her face. Like the beads of condensation on a glass of beer.
‘Nadja, Nadja.’
Why would someone want to hurt you?
You and Peder Åkerlund. Was Karin wrong about the tyre tracks? What if it’s just a coincidence?
She can hear the dogs now. Barking. Getting closer to her.
Then she sees the first one, an Alsatian, and its waterproof-clad handler.
Then a second animal.
A third.
And their handlers.
Malin looks down at her feet. Beneath her the ground is starting to turn to mud.
One of the dogs pulls free and rushes towards her, as its handler cries: ‘Stop! Stop!’
Malin flinches, but the dog suddenly stops, recognises her, wants to say hello. And in the rain Malin reaches down with her hand, feels the tongue against her skin.
‘Have you found anything?’ she asks the first dog’s handler.
‘Nothing. I don’t think she’s anywhere around here. We’d have found her by now.’
‘She’s alive,’ Malin says.
The three men in front of her hold their dogs close to them, the looks on their faces indicating that they don’t agree with her.
Nadja Lundin is dead.
Dead in the way that only young girls can be dead, with a feeling that this is wrong, yet still predictable. As if this tragedy were written into the passage of her life right from the start, and that all they are really doing in this godforsaken forest is locating and confirming that.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Not even an elk,’ the third handler says, pulling the hood of his raincoat tighter over his head.
A man or woman in a hoodie.
Elin Sand is sitting on the toilet at the police station. She has to fold her legs uncomfortably to have room in the cramped space.
Life often makes her feel clumsy that way. As if her presence were troubling the world. And in that feeling is a sad loneliness.
Am I going to have to leave Linköping to stop feeling alone?
Is there any future for me and my desires here?
She leans forward.
Hydrochloric acid, injected directly into the brain.
What sort of sick individual would come up with an idea like that? What sort of sick soul could commit such an act?
A man in a hoodie.
Waiting for a girl whom the world had equipped with a conscience and the willpower to match it.
Malin, Elin thinks. I see you work, I want to be more like you, and I think I can do it. I want to listen to the voices of the investigation, the way you do.
I want to open myself up, she thinks, as one of her knees hits the pedestal beneath the basin. The porcelain hits a nerve and almost makes her cry out in pain.
She shuts her eyes.
Black on black.
Linköping has long been a playground for violence. The city’s memory is full of unsolved murders, murdered girls and boys.
There’s everything here, but is there anything here for me?
Elin Sand can’t help herself. She leaves the station, alone, and heads down to the building on Drottninggatan where Nadja Lundin’s parents live. Using the post office’s entry code, she goes inside and is soon standing outside their door, dripping with rain. She rings twice, and hears footsteps. The door opens, and Nadja’s mother is standing before her. She was quest
ioned by a couple of uniforms this morning. Nothing of interest emerged.
Elin holds out her ID.
‘Can I come in? I’d like to ask a few questions.’
A thin, once beautiful face.
They shake hands.
‘Beata.’
Now that face is edged with anxiety. The past twenty-four hours must have aged her at least ten years, Elin thinks.
She follows Beata Lundin into the sprawling apartment, past the golf bags in the hall.
The rooms smell of money. Designer furniture, genuine oil paintings on the walls, thick rugs on the floor.
‘My husband’s at work,’ Beata Lundin says. ‘He’s a game designer. He runs a business with thirty employees that supplies game platforms to the big companies.’
‘It looks like it’s going well.’
Beata Lundin nods as she sits down on a well-upholstered white sofa. In her white dress she almost drowns in a sea of fabric.
No question of coffee or anything else to drink.
Elin sits down in an armchair opposite her.
‘How can I help you?’ Beata asks.
And it strikes Elin that she doesn’t know what to ask. She came here because of her suspicions.
‘We’re going to find her,’ Elin says.
‘You came here just to say that?’
‘No. I’m wondering if you or your husband have ever seen anyone behaving in a suspicious manner in your vicinity when Nadja has been with you. A man in a black hoodie, for instance.’
Beata shakes her head.
‘No, never. So who might this man be?’
‘We don’t know.’
Beata takes a deep breath.
‘I know what she writes makes people angry. But I’m proud of it, of her. If everyone was like Nadja, the world would be a better place. She loves nature, everything that grows in the earth. When she explained yoga to me, and how it takes her closer to some sort of original state, I didn’t understand a thing. I’m more grounded. But we often make vegetarian dishes using the vegetables she’s grown. I know how to cook, and she wants to learn. Most of the time she thinks I’m an idiot, but when it comes to food she respects me.’
‘Her friend Sirje said Nadja could be a bit arrogant towards people at times.’
‘She’s a smart girl, and smart people are sometimes arrogant. Sure.’
‘Could she have made someone angry?’
‘When it comes down to it, she’s extremely kind. But the staff at the ICA supermarket near here probably think she’s a real nuisance. She keeps arguing with them about the fact that they should only sell organic vegetables.’
Elin smiles.
‘She wasn’t home when you got back?’
‘No. What an odd question.’
‘And your husband went off to the cottage at once to look for her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he call there first?’
‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘No particular reason,’ Elin Sand says.
Beata nods.
‘I admire him for being able to go to work at a time like this. I couldn’t do that.’ She goes on: ‘He goes mad if he can’t work. He loves those little pretend worlds where he can kill everything that moves and you’re allowed to be a hero.’
32
Malin makes her way along the rows of books in Linköping Central Library. Takes deep breaths, tries to draw air from up near the rafters of the twelve-metre-high ceiling.
Stories.
About life and death and everything in between.
Nadja Lundin is said to have enjoyed studying here. According to the head teacher Börje talked to.
And Malin inhales the smell of books, the pleasant, gently mildewed smell of learning.
The library is one of Tove’s favourite places in the city. She’s spent hours sitting here reading, dreaming herself away, perhaps. Malin has tried to call her again, but couldn’t get through. The line was completely dead, and Malin couldn’t help seeing her in front of her, raped, speechless, shaking with fear in the rain.
A fiction. Like almost all the novels in here.
Pointless fiction.
She goes downstairs. Catches sight of someone, a man in his mid-thirties with weakly defined features, short, bleached blond hair, and grey skin. A bandage around his arm.
A real bookworm.
He’s pushing a trolley laden with bound volumes, and stops every few metres to put books back on their shelves.
Malin watches him for a while before going up to him.
She holds out her hand. Introduces herself, and he says his name so quickly that she doesn’t catch it.
‘Curator,’ he says. ‘I’m a curator and restorer here, but have time for a bit of librarian work as well.’
Malin holds out a photograph of Nadja Lundin.
‘Have you ever seen this girl here?’
The man nods.
‘Nadja,’ he says. ‘She comes here a lot. I often have to find books on different subjects for her. Most recently on the history of the Ottoman Empire. I think she was working on some sort of essay.’
‘Do you talk to her much?’
The man looks surprised.
‘Obviously I talk to her occasionally. She’s very friendly and cheerful. Most of the people who sit down here reading aren’t exactly extroverts.’
He doesn’t appear to have any idea of what has happened to Nadja, that she’s missing, possibly murdered. Presumably he doesn’t read the papers or watch television.
‘Would you say you know her well?’ Malin asks.
‘No, not at all.’
The man gestures vaguely towards the book trolley.
‘If you’ll excuse me?’
‘Of course, I don’t want to stop you,’ Malin says, and presses up against a bookcase so he can get past.
I’m not going to tell you, she thinks, and starts to walk towards the stairs, pushing past another man, keen to get out of this book-lined crypt.
Elin Sand has driven down to the library. Beata Lundin said it was one of her daughter’s favourite places. That’s enough for Elin. She wanted to go there, walk in Nadja’s footsteps, see what might crop up.
She called the station on the way. Asked Waldemar to check out Nadja’s dad particularly carefully. Something’s nagging at her. He could have driven out to the summer house and staged the whole thing, couldn’t he?
And now Elin is heading towards the spiral staircase leading down to the catacombs full of old books, the ones that survived the fire of 1996.
Someone’s coming up the stairs.
She sees who it is.
Malin.
And Malin looks at her, her jaw drops in surprise, then she says: ‘Looks like we had the same idea.’
The next minute they’re sitting in the library’s cafeteria with two cups of bitter, watery coffee in front of them.
She’s getting better and better, Malin thinks, looking at Elin Sand. Soon she’ll be a fully-fledged detective who can hear the most muffled voices, see the slightest details, the most opaque connections. The ones you sense rather than see with your eyes.
‘What do you make of all this?’ Malin asks.
‘I think there’s going to be some sort of explosion soon,’ Elin says. ‘It’s far too quiet considering how gruesome the murder was, and given that a sixteen-year-old girl has gone missing. The city ought to be simmering with fear, but everything’s completely calm. A very odd sense of calm.’
I’ve been thinking the same thing, Malin thinks.
It’s as if someone’s lying in wait, watching to see what we do. As if there are invisible eyes watching our every move.
But Malin doesn’t say any of this. Instead she says: ‘I think you’re right. Soon all hell is going to break loose. There’s a serious chance that something else is going to happen.’
She leaves a dramatic pause.
‘I’m convinced Nadja’s still alive.’
Elin Sand takes a sip of the
coffee.
Pulls a face.
‘Rat poison,’ she says. ‘Are you coming down to the gym instead?’
Malin nods.
‘Assuming nothing else happens.’
33
Johan Jakobsson can see Stella’s fingers quiver with her juvenile rheumatism, and his daughter grimaces with pain, and he feels like shouting out loud: Why? Why her?
The chemical hospital smell catches in his nose, and the speckled brown floor glints. The doctor is sitting on a metal stool, and Stella is lying on a paper-covered bed. The room is completely anonymous, as if all attention should be focused on the illness. The corridor outside has been decorated to appeal to children, with drawings of famous Swedish cartoon characters, but in here everything is serious. So much so that an eleven-year-old would notice.
They were given the initial diagnosis in a room not far from this one.
‘Your lives will never be the same again.’
Stella was pumped full of cortisone then, as well as anti-inflammatory tablets, and nothing seemed to help except the cortisone, which would slowly consume her from within.
Over the past six months he’s had to watch as his daughter learned what real pain is.
And he hasn’t been able to help her at all.
He knows that’s why she wanted him to wait outside the treatment room today. Because the only thing he has to offer her is his own mental anguish, and what good is that to her?
Someone’s toying with us, he thinks. God? But He doesn’t intervene in our lives. He deposits us on earth and leaves us to our own devices. But perhaps He feels like playing from time to time. And so He gives a child a painful, lifelong illness. Or some unforeseen talent.
I have trouble imagining a God who doesn’t want to control things, Johan thinks. Why else would He have the power?
Johan can’t bear to see Stella suffer. Can’t bear to see the tears welling up in her eyes.
Give me strength. But most of all, give me patience. The energy to find sympathy beyond my own pain.
‘All done,’ the doctor says. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’ he says, and Stella wipes her eyes on her sleeve.
Johan feels like punching the man. No more. No less.
Waldemar and Börje aren’t in the station when Malin and Elin arrive back. They’re probably out questioning people connected to Peder Åkerlund.
Earth Storm_The new novel from the Swedish crime-writing phenomenon_Malin Fors Page 12
