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

by Mons Kallentoft

  Instead she soaks up the spring morning.

  Nothing new from the aid agency. Nor from the Foreign Office, and she’s doing her best to turn Tove’s disappearance into a dream, a non-fact, and as her heart begins to beat faster in time with her rapid pace, she can feel that she’s almost succeeding. She can hear nothing but birds. Their heartfelt song.

  Only Zeke and Johan are there before her when she walks through the door, then she hears her mobile buzz.

  She stops on the way to her desk, takes out her phone, clicks to open the text.

  A sudden chill runs through her body.

  Geographical coordinates.

  Then a poem:

  You might find beneath the earth

  Something hidden inside a curse.

  Don’t pause to worry,

  You need to hurry.

  Malin calls the others over.

  ‘I’ve just had a new message.’

  She shows them her mobile. The message is from a concealed number.

  ‘Pull up those coordinates, Johan,’ Zeke says. ‘Malin and I will head out there at once.’

  From the corner of her eye Malin sees Elin Sand arrive at the station.

  ‘We’ll take her along,’ Malin says. ‘There might be a lot of digging.’

  She raises her voice: ‘You’re coming with us, Elin. Hurry up.’

  Johan taps at his computer and brings up the coordinates on his screen, then a picture.

  It shows a location just south of Linköping.

  Grävlingskorset, outside Bankekind.

  Is there any folklore connected to this place like there was with Stenkullamotet? Is there another enchanted oak tree? Malin wonders. She isn’t aware of anything, nor are the others.

  The game goes on.

  Someone who seems to be able to do anything, to be everywhere.

  ‘Come on, we’re going,’ she calls out.

  Perhaps they can still save Nadja?

  ‘Johan,’ Malin says calmly. ‘I want you to look through old cases of child abuse that might have been reported by Social Services. Specifically the sort where it looks like someone has tried to keep a child quiet. A child that would now be somewhere between eighteen and forty-five.’

  ‘You mean shutting a child in a cupboard, that sort of thing?’

  ‘Something like that. But broader than that, slaps across the mouth, muzzles, things like that.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And see if you can find out where that text came from.’

  Zeke and Elin are standing by their desks gathering their things, strapping on their service weapons.

  ‘Hurry up!’

  A few minutes later the three of them are sitting in a police car, and Malin calls Karin to tell her to meet them at Grävlingskorset.

  It takes them a few minutes to identify where the ground has recently been disturbed. It’s an area of bare earth approximately one square metre in size, in the shade of a large birch tree, hidden behind a clump of trees some distance from one of the three roads that meet at Grävlingskorset.

  It takes them half an hour to dig down one metre, and they’re sweating in the heat and sunlight, cursing the dust that swirls up from the dry earth. But they go on digging.

  Because they know there’s something here.

  Nadja.

  Perhaps the answer to our questions is hiding underground.

  Perhaps you’re here.

  Zeke’s spade is the first to hit something hard.

  Should we be more careful? Malin thinks, wiping the sweat from her brow. He could have left a bomb here. Some other sort of trap. Who knows what a mind like that could come up with?

  ‘It’s a coffin,’ Karin says. ‘Like the last one.’

  Carefully they clear around the coffin. Karin finishes the job. Using a brush she removes the last of the soil before lifting the coffin out of the grave with gloved hands.

  ‘I’m going to open it right away. The rest of you get back. At least twenty metres.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Malin says. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘My turn to risk my life,’ Karin says.

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘Let her do it,’ Elin says, and Zeke looks as if he’s going to protest, but stops himself.

  ‘OK,’ Malin says.

  She, Zeke, and Elin go and stand on the other side of the road, taking cover behind a stone wall.

  ‘Heads down,’ Karin calls. ‘And keep them down.’

  Malin crouches down beside Zeke. He rubs the top of his shaved head. Clenches his jaw. But there’s no trace of fear in his eyes.

  No anxiety.

  This needs to be done.

  ‘You can come out now,’ Karin cries. ‘Be careful. Try not to disturb the ground any more than we already have.’

  They walk back to her, and she points down at the open coffin on the ground beneath the birch tree.

  Blue and grey flesh.

  The sight is easier now, the second time.

  ‘It’s a human tongue,’ Karin says. ‘My guess is that it’s Suliman Hajif’s. The cut seems to match.’

  As if this were the most normal situation in the world, Malin asks: ‘Any message?’

  ‘Not in the coffin, but possibly inside the tongue,’ Karin replies, and Elin Sand says: ‘I never want to get used to this.’

  ‘You won’t need to,’ Zeke says. ‘We’ve got to put a stop to this madness.’

  Karin is now crouched down beside the coffin, pulling at the tongue with a pair of tweezers.

  Then she takes a scalpel from a pink case Malin hasn’t seen before and carefully cuts the blue-grey flesh, into what seems to be a cavity.

  She puts the scalpel back in the case. Picks up the tweezers again, and pulls out a damp, bloody piece of paper. She puts it down on the lid of the coffin, unfolds it using the tweezers, as casually as if she’d never done anything else, as if this was what she was born to do.

  Is it lonelier to be with people who ought to love you, or to be buried alive?

  A car drives past behind them. A black van, Malin thinks before turning around.

  But it’s a white Mazda. A woman at the wheel. Malin makes a mental note of the registration number.

  She reads the message again.

  So you’ve buried her alive.

  Which means you’re alive, Nadja. Alive, and the very loneliest of people.

  55

  A thousand things to look for, check, work through.

  What’s most urgent?

  He doesn’t know why, but Johan Jakobsson puts everything else to one side and starts searching through the old files that have been digitised in recent years. He loses himself in his work, oblivious to the other people in the open-plan office.

  He tries search-words: child, abuse, social services, cupboard, muzzle. All of them at the same time: no matches.

  He removes cupboard and muzzle.

  Hundreds of matches.

  He adds broken teeth.

  Five matches.

  He opens the files, reads through them. The first concerns a small girl who was assaulted by her father in Ljungsbro twenty years ago. She had been given a recorder by her grandmother, and her father got fed up with the noise when he was drunk, and hit the girl in the mouth several times with the recorder.

  A case that’s over thirty years old catches Johan’s attention. A seven-year-old boy whose parents thought he talked too much.

  ‘He never shut up.’

  Eventually they started to hit him every time he spoke without permission. First on his body, then on his face as well. When the school reported his parents to Social Services, a medical examination found more than seventy bruises on the boy’s body. And he’d had a number of teeth knocked out. He ended up being placed in a foster home.

  A punch for a word, a word for a punch.

  Johan rests his head in his hands and feels the warmth of his own cheeks, thinks of his children, and how they’ve never come close to anything worse than a sharp reprima
nd, and how bad he feels on those occasions. He thinks of his daughter, it could be her who’s missing, and he feels grateful that they only have an illness to deal with, a terrible illness, but a manageable one.

  I need to show this case to Göran Möller, Johan thinks. We might be able to check the boy out. It’s a long shot, but it could be worth it. And it fits in with what that psychologist said.

  Göran Möller makes himself more comfortable in the chair that once belonged to Sven Sjöman. The white façade of the hospital is visible through the window behind him, people in the car park.

  Johan Jakobsson is sitting on the other side of the desk looking at Göran Möller’s strangely comforting face. He actually succeeds in spreading calm in spite of the pervading chaos, and Johan realises that he’s struck lucky with his new boss, that what drove him out of Helsingborg was just an unfortunate accident.

  Göran Möller is no racist.

  He’s a very capable police officer.

  ‘It might be worth looking into,’ he says. ‘But tread carefully. He’s probably living a perfectly ordinary life somewhere.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ Johan says.

  ‘Malin’s called,’ Göran says. ‘They’ve found what looks like Hajif’s tongue.’

  ‘Another message?’

  Göran Möller nods, and tells him what the note said.

  ‘That doesn’t leave us any the wiser,’ Johan says.

  ‘Malin’s sure he’s buried Nadja alive somewhere.’

  Johan Jakobsson says nothing for a few seconds. The thought of the girl lying shut inside a coffin is unbearable, the self-preservation instinct kicks in and the images of the inside of a dark box gain no purchase.

  What can I say?

  Johan looks at his boss. A decent man.

  ‘Have you had time to visit the regional museum yet?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ Göran Möller replies.

  ‘They’ve got a famous painting by Böcklin. “Isle of the Dead”.’

  ‘I’d like to see that. It feels a bit like we’re stuck on that island now.’

  Johan smiles.

  ‘Do you like it here?’ he asks.

  ‘This is a good team,’ Göran Möller says, and smiles back.

  Göran Möller looks around his office.

  He’s got some Goya reproductions on the walls. None of the difficult ones, just “The Nude Maja” and “The Clothed Maja”. He’s been to Madrid, where he was particularly struck by the brushwork in the painting of the naked woman. Two paintings of the same subject, different yet the same.

  Which is best?

  Loneliness, or being buried alive?

  Malin sounded agitated when she called. The new message doesn’t get them anywhere, and what have they actually got to go on?

  She was right.

  He suggested that she and Zeke go and see some of the parents of the men whose names Mehmet Khoni gave them. Perhaps that could help them make some progress.

  Malin sounded dubious, and repeated what her friend the psychologist had said.

  But psychologists are often wrong.

  Göran Möller closes his eyes. Feels something nagging at him from his memory, something just out of reach.

  He gets to his feet and leaves the station.

  56

  Malin watches Zeke talk to a woman in her mid-forties dressed in a black skirt and flowery red blouse. She sees them standing in a neat living room in a ground-floor flat in Ryd.

  She hears what they are saying, but can’t process the words. She’s completely absorbed by the dark rings below the woman’s eyes. The sorrow in her eyes when she opened the door to them just now. The way her whole being seems to have fled her body, or rather condensed into one single, immense emotion.

  Don’t let that be me, Malin thinks.

  Naturally, the woman doesn’t know anything that could help them with their case. She hadn’t even had any idea that her son was on his way to Syria. She knows nothing about Suliman Hajif. Malin can see that.

  Have there been any bitter recriminations against the people who were recruiting fighters?

  Grief.

  No one has the strength to feel anything but grief. He died for nothing. There’s nothing good down there. Just different types of bad.

  Zeke is still talking to the woman.

  We can’t waste any more time here, Malin thinks. We have to find Nadja, and she isn’t here, and Malin feels like a jumping jack that can’t control its own movements.

  In her mind’s eye she sees Peder Åkerlund’s mother in her wheelchair. Her useless legs. Fettered to a body she can’t escape.

  Broken bodies everywhere.

  Malin walks out of the flat and stands in the sunlight, trying her very best not to go mad.

  Göran Möller has found his way to the regional museum, and now he’s standing on the second floor of the yellow brick building, staring intently at the painting in front of him. It seems incredible that it’s here right now, Böcklin’s painting of a white figure approaching a rocky island.

  He doesn’t know why he’s come here. He felt an acute longing to see the masterpiece that is on loan for the museum’s exhibition of symbolist art.

  He spends a long time standing in front of the painting. Feels his knees begging him to change position, but he doesn’t move.

  The isle of the dead is remarkably empty.

  There are no dead there. Only their invisible souls.

  Unless the figure approaching the island is death?

  He thinks of their murderer as someone leaving the island to come back to life. Perhaps his actions are an attempt to bring himself to life?

  In which case, presumably he’s been trying for a long time?

  Göran Möller walks on. In one room he finds some old hunting scenes. Game being pursued by frothing dogs whose tongues loll out of their mouths.

  And suddenly Göran Möller remembers what it was he couldn’t grasp earlier, a conversation with a colleague a long time ago, ten years or more. The colleague had been telling him about a case he had worked on where they had found dogs that had been tortured. Kenneth Johansson in Karlstad, that was who it was. They sat next to each other at a Police Association dinner, and Kenneth had been upset about the dogs.

  Hadn’t one of the dogs had its tongue cut out?

  Göran Möller goes back to the “Isle of the Dead”.

  He knows that serial killers often start with animals, and move onto people later.

  Were you on the island? Göran thinks. Did you start on dogs there, and now you’re heading back across the water with people?

  Kenneth Johansson must have retired by now. But it might be worth contacting him.

  Malin asked Zeke to drop her off at the library after they’d seen the last of the parents. They can finally drop that line of investigation.

  The conversations were quite fruitless, and Malin had to struggle to pay attention.

  Now she’s sitting by the huge windows looking out on the Castle Park, sunk deep into one of the egg-shaped chairs she knows Tove loves sitting in.

  It’s not far from here to Folkunga School, just a hundred metres or so. Perhaps the man in the hoodie came past here on his way to loiter outside the school. It strikes her that the library keeps cropping up. Nadja spent a lot of time here. And Peder Åkerlund’s ex-girlfriend. The man that Julianna may have seen. And its proximity to Folkunga School.

  A game of coincidences.

  And she spins her chair around.

  Looks at the rows of books.

  She can feel Tove here, wishes she was with her. But that’s impossible.

  She stands up and goes over to the information desk. Behind the gleaming, curved wooden desk sits a red-haired woman the same age as her. Malin introduces herself, and the woman looks at her curiously.

  ‘I have to ask,’ Malin says. ‘Have you noticed any peculiar visitors in the past six months?’

  The woman smiles.

  ‘We have our fair share of oddb
alls, like all libraries.’

  ‘I’m thinking in particular about a man who usually goes around in a black hoodie. In his forties.’

  ‘Sorry,’ the woman says. ‘I haven’t noticed anyone matching that description.’

  ‘Not in the café either?’

  ‘No.’

  She pauses.

  ‘Your daughter was often here last summer,’ she goes on. ‘We discussed Jane Austen. She had some great things to say about her books. How is she these days?’

  And that’s when Malin snaps.

  She marches determinedly out of the library, heading in completely the wrong direction.

  57

  Malin is standing in front of the mirror in the toilets in the Hamlet bar. Can feel the beer and tequila coursing through her body.

  Hates her own weakness. But if she can’t give in now, when will she ever?

  Never.

  That’s the only answer.

  There’s nothing useful she can do with her anxiety, her fear. Nothing to be gained by meeting either grief or relief halfway.

  Better to suppress everything.

  That’s my duty.

  Not drinking.

  And she adjusts her clothes, kicks the toilet door several times, hard, breaking the veneer, until in the end there’s a hole right through it.

  Damn.

  Hope there’s no one standing outside.

  She opens the door, and the cloakroom outside the toilet is empty.

  She goes back to her booth in the restaurant. Looks over at the bar. She’s been drunk hundreds of times. She’s fallen off her chair, onto the floor, she’s made a fool of herself, and if she went over there now she’d feel ashamed. And she knows that shame is one of the feelings that keeps her away from alcohol.

  That she herself has two sides.

  If not more.

  The good police officer. The weak alcoholic.

  The loving mother.

  The mother who doesn’t take any responsibility at all.

  Tove must hate me, deep down. For everything I did and didn’t do when she was growing up.

  Malin sits back in her secluded wooden booth. Another beer and a fresh shot of tequila are standing in front of her.