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

by Mons Kallentoft

  She seems absorbed by her own dullness, the way a lot of sober alcoholics can be. Then they start drinking again, simply as a way to put up with themselves.

  Malin is lying in bed next to Daniel. He wanted to have sex, but she pushed him away, just wanted to feel his warm body against her skin. He’s asleep now, with his arm around her. Breathing heavily, and he smells good, and she could lie like this for ever.

  She’s tried calling Tove again. The call didn’t get through.

  So she called the aid agency instead, but only got an answerphone message giving their office hours.

  The darkness of the bedroom contains anxiety, monsters.

  Longing.

  And Tove’s silence.

  What if she’s lying somewhere, her body cut to shreds, screaming, but no one can hear her?

  Malin pulls free from Daniel. Goes out into the kitchen. Opens the cupboard under the sink and reaches in, right to the back. Pulls off the loose wooden panel, fishes out the bottle of tequila she hid there.

  She’s thinking about Tove.

  Where are you?

  An amputated tongue.

  Screams, but no one to hear.

  Malin opens the bottle. Puts it to her lips.

  And she feels the warm liquid inside her. Wonderful at first, then it becomes nothing but blunt violence against everything that could be her.

  39

  Suliman Hajif turns off the lights in Linköping mosque before locking the door and heading out into the darkness of early night.

  He’s emailed his contacts in Syria. He does that via an encryption program he’s installed on one of the mosque’s computers. The old imam doesn’t understand things like that, and for some reason he appears to trust me, Suliman thinks.

  Two guys in Ryd. Eighteen years old. They’re travelling to Turkey tomorrow. Then they’ll carry on from there, and, if everything goes according to plan, before the summer comes to an end they’ll have blown themselves to pieces along with dozens of Assad’s supporters.

  It’s no more complicated than that.

  There’s so much confusion, so much weak-mindedness to exploit.

  ‘Why waste your lives here, when you could die a martyr’s death in a holy war?’

  ‘Get to paradise.’

  ‘Have all the women you want. Like the Prophet says.’

  They swallow everything I say, Suliman Hajif thinks as he walks towards the forest behind the mosque. He’s going to cut through the woods and then head home to Berga down the narrow path behind the blocks of flats in Ekholmen.

  There’s a madman on the loose in the city.

  He looked at the Correspondent’s website just now, as well as the online editions of Aftonbladet and Expressen.

  Their reporters have gone crazy over the story, and there are pictures of the little whore on all the sites, right at the top: Where’s Nadja?

  Hope the whore is dead. Then there’d be one less, at least.

  The forest is dark, and he switches on the little torch on his mobile, and shines it down at the ground so he doesn’t trip over or step in a hole.

  His kaftan isn’t particularly practical, nor is his beard, actually. It sometimes itches badly, just like the kaftan, but he wants to dress like the person he is, knows how important that is in the young men’s eyes.

  He can see the path now.

  The street lamp.

  The black van parked just beyond the cone of light.

  What’s it doing here at this time of night?

  I recognise it. Where have I seen it before?

  His stomach clenches with fear, and then he hears a rustling sound, feels something cold against his nose, a sharp, acrid smell, and there’s no time for him to put up a fight before he collapses onto the twigs, moss, and damp ground.

  He drops his mobile.

  But his eyes work in the dark.

  And he sees the treetops etched against the starry sky as he is dragged through the forest, then pulled upright, his head lolling from side to side, the world is shades of black and grey, and he hears the door of the van close. Above him the sky is low and black now, and he tries to scream, but his tongue won’t obey him.

  It’s as if it’s never been part of his mouth.

  PART 3

  At the end of longing and the start of everything

  [In silence]

  The Östergötland Plain is moving in the night.

  The ploughed furrows twine around each other, becoming so deep that no starlight can reach the soil hidden at the bottom.

  The ears of the plain are full of earth.

  There’s nothing to hear the knife slicing through flesh.

  There’s nothing to hear the screams from the coffin.

  On a sofa in the city, a man and a woman are sobbing, their grief as endless as the movements of the ground. An anxious father walks up and down inside a flat, his wife driven into a dreamless sleep by alien substances.

  The air will soon run out.

  The water ran out a long time ago.

  The girl feels it in her cramps.

  She tries to fill her lungs, scrape the wood, but her fingernails are no longer there, just open, stinging wounds and a feeling of never being able to breathe again.

  A breath.

  Another breath.

  She wants to escape from herself, become one with the earth beyond the wood.

  But that’s impossible. There’s only one reality here.

  So she plays a word game. Thinks of a colour that becomes a thing that becomes a feeling that becomes a nothing.

  The nothing that existed before a tiptoeing death.

  40

  Wednesday, 17 May

  Brush teeth, brush teeth, brush teeth, and be happy.

  Malin has switched on the light in the bathroom. She’s looking at her teeth in the mirror, as they are covered by more and more froth from the toothpaste.

  Not be sad.

  She moves the hand holding the toothbrush manically, to and fro, trying to get rid of the taste of alcohol in her mouth, the stench, the shame at having given in. She swallowed two mouthfuls, then tipped the rest of the tequila down the sink and slipped quietly out into the stairwell to drop the bottle down the rubbish chute.

  Doesn’t want Daniel to know anything.

  The drink was hot in her mouth, burned her tongue as if it were an open wound.

  She felt the alcohol spreading out through her body, and had to hold on to the cold draining board to stop herself from falling over. Her legs turned to cotton wool, the clock of St Lars Church struck one o’clock, and it was as if her body disappeared for a few brief seconds, and she started to float, no longer tied to the earth.

  And she wanted more of that feeling.

  But resisted.

  Because she knows that it could kill her, and that realisation makes her brush with increased frenzy, and her gums are bleeding, the taste of iron making its way beneath her tongue.

  Tove.

  She has to find a way of suppressing her anxiety.

  She spits. Holds her hand in front of her mouth, breathes out hard, then in through her nose. No smell.

  She turns the tap off, rinses her mouth, and goes into the bedroom. Sits down on the side of the bed, shakes Daniel.

  He wakes up slowly and opens his eyes. The whites are like small lights in the darkness, his breath heavy yet pleasantly sweet.

  ‘Is it morning?’ he asks, weary but not annoyed.

  Malin shakes her head.

  ‘Middle of the night.’

  She breathes on him, and he grimaces. Can he smell the alcohol? What would he say if he could? She hasn’t had a single drink since they got back together, so her problem has been a non-issue, it hasn’t needed discussion, and so they haven’t talked about it.

  Better without words.

  Words can uncork a bottle.

  ‘Have you brushed your teeth?’ Daniel asks.

  ‘Yes, my mouth felt disgusting.’

  ‘Shall we try
to get back to sleep?’

  ‘I want to talk,’ she says.

  And Daniel sits up, because she hardly ever wants to talk about anything, even though she knows that he finds her silence about most things difficult.

  ‘I want to talk about the case,’ she says. ‘There are loads of things we haven’t released to the media.’

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ Daniel says.

  ‘But I have to be able to tell you. I’ll go mad otherwise.’

  ‘Then I have to be able to write about it. You have your responsibilities, I have mine.’

  ‘We have to be able to talk about things.’

  Daniel leans over and takes her in his arms.

  ‘Talk,’ he says. ‘Say what you need to say.’

  And Malin knows he won’t write about anything she tells him, knows she can trust him, can’t she?

  ‘Thanks,’ she says.

  She pushes him away gently.

  ‘I feel a silence inside,’ she says. ‘As if something’s disappeared, as if I’m missing something.’

  Daniel says nothing, thereby encouraging her to go on.

  ‘It feels like the silence is connected to the case, but I don’t know how.’

  She tells him about Peder Åkerlund.

  The acid in the speech centre of the brain.

  The tongue.

  The message they found inside it.

  Daniel remains silent, lets her tell him at her own pace.

  When she’s finished, he says: ‘Sounds like you’re dealing with a real lunatic.’

  Malin nods.

  ‘And he’s not done yet.’

  ‘Have you got any suspects?’

  ‘We haven’t got anything,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve spoken to people who knew Nadja Lundin and Peder Åkerlund, but we haven’t found anything useful. And their relatives are all spotless.’

  She doesn’t mention the text Johan sent her a little while ago, telling her what he’s found out about Åkerlund’s duplicity. But does that actually change anything? OK, one of his opponents may have found out about it, or suspected it, like Julianna, and crossed the line in their fury. But there’s no need for Peder’s parents to know about that.

  But it fits somehow with the idea of a game. How everything has more than one side, can change and end up as anything. If there’s just the one perpetrator, he likes killing and displaying his victims, or kidnapping and killing them. Everything’s possible in this game, so the same applies to the case. Even the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern could be relevant.

  ‘What does the murderer want?’ Daniel wonders. ‘What could the motive be?’

  ‘I think he’s trying to say something,’ Malin says.

  ‘What, though?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  Then they sit in silence next to each other in the night.

  ‘You won’t write about this, will you?’ Malin asks after a while.

  ‘I promise.’ Daniel strokes her cheek. ‘This is more important.’

  And then Malin talks about Tove, and how worried she is that she can’t get hold of her.

  ‘I’ve got a contact I can call tomorrow,’ Daniel says, and sinks back on the bed, stretching his arm out, and she lies back on top of it. She falls asleep in a matter of minutes, while Daniel lies awake, feeling her weight against him, just as he sensed a faint trace of tequila on her breath a little while ago.

  He didn’t want to say anything.

  He knows what she is.

  And he loves her.

  The thing about people, he thinks, is that you can never have one thing without the other.

  Life and death always exist within the same body. And you have to dare to love them both.

  41

  ‘You’re going to die now.’

  Suliman Hajif hears the voice as if it were coming out of a tin can. Subdued, neither masculine nor feminine, without any real emotion, despite the fact that the words are repeated over and over again.

  ‘You’re going to die now.’

  His brain, his thoughts are perfectly clear, just as clear as the burning pain coursing through his lower body and up to his head, overwhelming everything but fear.

  Why am I here? Suliman Hajif thinks, and he jerks his head and tries to get up, but that’s impossible because thick nails have been hammered through his shins and lower arms.

  Suliman Hajif didn’t hear the nail-gun.

  The quick, muffled sound as his unconscious body was nailed to the textured metal plates on the floor. But he feels the pain, and wants to scream, but can’t because his mouth is full of earth, and he feels thirsty, could drink a whole lake.

  Within him he sees eyes.

  Dead people’s eyes.

  People who see suicide bombers, the ones he sent, seconds before their bombs go off. People who realise they’re going to die, but who don’t have time to scream before they are torn to pieces, who never have the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, who never get to feel soothing hands against their skin before they pass on.

  They stare at him, challenging him.

  But they don’t want to kill him.

  They want to see the man circling around him inside the van with a glinting knife in his hand do it. The man who is moving closer and closer, like a hunting beast about to attack its prey.

  Suliman Hajif can feel how much the man is enjoying this moment, the power of this act. This isn’t some cold, emotional murder for the sake of survival.

  He comes closer to Suliman Hajif, sticks the knife into his bare legs again, slices across his stomach again, and twists the nails in his arms, watching his face contort.

  ‘Scream, scream,’ the man says. ‘Get it all off your chest. Reveal who you really are,’ and then Suliman Hajif feels fingers picking at his mouth, and the earth filling his mouth is pulled out in big, wet lumps, and he feels his tongue move again, but his screams are nothing but gurgles, and what can he say?

  All conviction is gone.

  The man is laughing at him now, and behind the black mask his eyes are ecstatic, and the man pulls the mask off, and Suliman sees a face, a smile, and there’s love in that smile, isn’t there?

  Is this what death looks like? Suliman thinks.

  Did you see a smile like that?

  Then the man holds his head against the floor, and Suliman Hajif tries to resist, but he’s too tired, too weak, not even the adrenaline of fear can help him now.

  His mouth is opened.

  He feels the knife push inside.

  Sees the gleam in the smiling eyes.

  The blade cuts into the root of his tongue. His head explodes, and he gurgles, roars, the sensation is impossible, he stares at his own tongue, and blood gushes down into his lungs and stomach.

  42

  Water, air.

  No water, only a little air, as if I’m breathing through a straw.

  A hissing sound when I breathe. I’m shaking. I’m so thirsty I could drink my own urine.

  I’m not struggling any more. There’s no reason to. That only makes me lose my mind.

  Perhaps no one will ever find me.

  A thought struck me. Was it the man in the hoodie outside the school who brought me here?

  Why?

  I don’t know, but I have a feeling I’m lying in a coffin that’s been buried out on the plain, or in a garden. I see a red house with white eaves, or a large tree, or a dense patch of woodland.

  Perhaps they’ll find me in ten years’ time.

  Decomposed, gone, apart from my skeleton, a skull with teeth that can be identified as mine: Nadja Lundin’s.

  I want water.

  Air.

  Otherwise I’ll die.

  I can hear something now.

  Footsteps above me?

  Silence.

  Then more steps.

  I put my mouth to the tube and suck moisture into my mouth, and I scream with happiness. Suck up the water.

  And the air.

 
It’s clearer again.

  I breathe and drink.

  How long?

  An hour?

  I drink it all.

  I breathe. The air gets stuffier again.

  TICK, TICK, TICK.

  I’m still alive.

  Do you hear?

  I’m alive.

  43

  Malin moves slowly through Linköping. The time is a quarter to seven, and at this time of the morning the city is strangely deserted. She walks up St Larsgatan towards Trädgårdstorget, past H&M. She sees the sale posters in the windows, they’re early this year, sales of summer clothing must have been slow.

  As she walks past the tobacconist’s she reads the previous day’s flysheets.

  Expressen: ‘Sweden Democrat Found Murdered, Girl Missing.’

  Aftonbladet: ‘The Canal Murder in Depth. Where is Nadja?’

  A small photograph of her beautiful face.

  Svenska Dagbladet: ‘Murder in Linköping.’

  Dagens Nyheter: ‘Hate-Murder in Linköping.’

  A red bus pulls up at its stop. A few people get out. Three of them are wearing traditional folk costumes. They’re holding Norwegian flags. Malin tries to read the looks on their faces. Is there terror in their expressions, anxiety?

  No.

  She sees only tiredness in the people in normal clothes, happiness is those who are dressed up. Here we are, showing off our culture!

  A few cars drive past. Some bicycles.

  She stops by the toy shop just beyond the tobacconist’s. Vast amounts of coloured plastic. Games, cars, advanced technical gadgets.

  You can play for a while.

  OK, Malin thinks. With your permission, we’ll dance to your tune.

  This is a game. You can have it your way. What is a game? It’s when you conjure up the world through imitation, in order to make it comprehensible, understand how it works, how its component parts fit together.

  Is that what you’re doing?

  Making the world comprehensible to yourself, manageable? You’re just trying to survive, aren’t you?

  She used to love playing on her own as a child. Going off with her things and conjuring up her own worlds, alone in her room in the house in Sturefors, alone with all her suspicions and ideas, all the betrayals.