Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, and she was quiet, spreading her legs and letting him get closer and he was hard and rough and warm and she fell back on the table, her arms flailing, that morning’s half-full mug of coffee sliding off onto the floor and shattering into a dozen pieces on the linoleum.

  She pushed him away.

  Went into the bedroom without a word.

  He followed her.

  She stood at the window and looked out at the courtyard, at the street beyond, at the few hesitant lights in the windows of the buildings.

  ‘Lie down.’

  He obeyed.

  Daniel’s body naked on the bed, his cock sticking up at a slight angle towards his navel. The gun cabinet with her service revolver on the wall next to the window, Daniel closing his eyes, reaching his arms up towards the pine bed-head, and she waited a moment, allowing the ache of longing to become real pain before moving towards him, before she let him in again.

  I dream that the snakes are moving again, somewhere. How a girl the same age as you, Tove, is moving though the green-black trees of something that seems to be a park at night, or a forest beside a distant, black-watered lake, or shimmering blue water that smells of chlorine. I imagine her drifting across yellowed grass, as far, far away a water-sprinkler wisps corrosive drops above a freshly cut lilac hedge.

  I dream that this is happening, Tove.

  It is happening now and I get scared and stiffen as someone, something creeps out of its hiding place in the darkness, rushing up behind her, knocking her to the ground and the roots of the surrounding trees wrap around her body, snaking deep within her like warm, live snakes, whose slithering bodies are full of hungry, ancient streams of lava.

  She screams.

  But no sound comes out.

  And the snakes chase her across a wide-open plain that was once verdant but is now reduced to a charred, flaking skin. The ground is cracked and from the jagged depths bubbles a stinking, hot, sulphurous darkness that whispers with a scorching voice: We will destroy you, little girl. Come. We shall destroy you.

  I scream.

  But no sound comes out.

  This is a dream, isn’t it? Tell me it’s a dream, Tove.

  I reach out my hand across the sheet beside me but it’s empty.

  Janne, you’re not there, your warm warmth.

  I want you both to come home now.

  Even you have gone, Daniel. Taken your cool warmth and left me alone with the dream and myself in this depressing bedroom.

  I think it was a bad dream, but perhaps it was good?

  2

  Tove and Janne are eating bacon and eggs on a spacious balcony with a view of Kuta Beach, and not even the memory of the terrorist bombs remains.

  Tove and Janne are tanned and rested and their radiant smiles reveal shining white teeth. Janne, muscular, has already taken a morning swim in the cooled hotel pool. As he got out of the water a beautiful Balinese woman was waiting on the edge with a freshly laundered and ironed towel.

  Tove is beaming fit to match the sun.

  Smiles even more broadly at her father and asks:

  ‘Dad, what are we going to do today? Eat rice with honey and nuts in a Buddhist temple of ivory-white marble? Like the pictures in the brochures?’

  Malin adjusts her Ray-Bans with one hand, and the image of Janne and Tove vanishes. Then she takes a firmer grip on the handlebars of her bicycle as she pedals past the Asian fast-food stall on St Larsgatan just before Trädgårdstorget, thinking that if you only let your thoughts go, they can come up with all sorts of things, conjuring up images of anyone at all, making caricatures of even the people that you know and love most.

  The self-preservation instinct. Let your subconscious make parodies of your loss and anxiety and jealousy.

  It’s no more than a quarter past seven and Janne and Tove are in all probability on the beach now.

  And Janne doesn’t even like honey.

  Malin presses the pedals down, picking up an almost imperceptible smell of smoke in her nostrils, the city tinted slightly yellow by her sunglasses.

  Her body is starting to wake up.

  But she feels a resistance. It feels as if it’s going to be even hotter today. She didn’t want to look at the thermometer in the kitchen window at home. The tarmac is oily under the wheels, it feels as if the ground might crack open at any moment and release hundreds of glowing worms.

  A cycling summer.

  Nothing’s any distance away inside the city. At this time of year everyone who can cycles in Linköping, unless the heat just gets too much. She prefers the car, but somehow all the talk about the environment in the papers and on television must have got to her. Think of future generations. They have the right to a living planet.

  At this time of day Malin is completely alone on the streets, and in the plate-glass windows of H&M in the square there are adverts for the summer sale, the words flame-red above pictures of a famous model whose name Malin realises she ought to know.

  SALE.

  Heat on special offer this year. Stocks are way too high.

  She stops at a red light near McDonald’s at the corner of Drottninggatan, adjusts her beige skirt and runs her hand over her white cotton blouse.

  Summer clothes. Ladylike clothes. They work OK, and in this heat skirts are always better than trousers.

  Her pistol and holster are concealed beneath a thin cotton jacket. She recalls the last time she and Zeke were out at the firing range, the way they frenetically fired off shot after shot at the black cardboard shapes.

  The burger chain is in a building from the fifties, a grey stone façade with concave white balconies. On the other side of the street sits the heavy brown building from the turn of the century where the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord has her clinic.

  The shrink.

  She saw right through me.

  Malin remembers what Viveka said to her during a conversation they had had towards the end of a murder investigation.

  ‘What about you, why are you so sad?’ Then: ‘I’m here if you want to talk.’

  Talk.

  There were already far too many words in the world, far too little silence. She never called Viveka Crafoord about herself, but had called several times in connection with cases where she wanted ‘psychological input’, as Viveka herself put it. And they’d had coffee several times when they’d bumped into each other around town.

  Malin turns around.

  Looks back towards Trädgårdstorget, towards the flashy new bus-stops and containers full of reluctant flowers on the patterned paving, the red-plastered façade of the building containing the seed shop and Schelin’s café.

  A pleasant square, in a pleasant city.

  A plastered façade, shielding insecure people. Anything can happen in this city, where old and new collide, where rich and poor, educated and uneducated are in fact constantly colliding with each other, where prejudices about those around you are aired like bedclothes. Last week she had been in a taxi with a middle-aged taxi-driver who had had a go at the city’s immigrant community: ‘Spongers. They don’t do a stroke of work, we should use them as fuel for the incinerator at Gärdstad, then we’d get some use out of them.’

  She had wanted to get out of the car, show her ID, tell him she was going to arrest him for incitement to racial hatred, the bastard, but she had stayed silent.

  A black man in green overalls is walking across the square. He is equipped with a pair of long-handled pincers to save him having to bend over to pick up litter and cigarette ends. The bottles and cans have already been taken care of by Deposit-Gunnar or another of the city’s eccentrics.

  Malin looks in front of her, as St Larsgatan forms a straight line out of the centre of the city, only turning when it reaches the edge of the smartest district, Ramshäll.

  Hasse and Biggan live there, Markus’s parents. Close to the hospital, both of them doctors.

  The light turns green and Malin pedals onwards.

 
The beer and tequila from last night have left no trace in her body. Nor has Daniel Högfeldt. He crept out while she was asleep, and if she knows him at all he’ll be in the newsroom now, cursing the lack of news, waiting for something to happen.

  Malin cycles past the medical school, hidden behind leafy maples, and a hundred metres off to the right, at the end of Linnégatan, she can make out the Horticultural Society Park. Beyond the school the buildings thin out, making way for a car park, beyond which lies the Hotel Ekoxen, generally regarded as the best in the city. But Malin turns the other way, down towards the entrance of the Tinnerbäck Swimming Pool. Tinnis, as the pool is known locally, opens at seven, and in the car park by the entrance there are just two cars. An elderly red Volvo estate and an anonymous white van, possibly a Ford.

  She jumps off her bike, parks it in the stand beside the doors, and takes her bag from the rack on the back.

  There’s no one at the desk by the turnstile.

  Instead there’s a note on the smeared glass: ‘The pool opens at 7.00 a.m. Free entry before 8.00 a.m.’

  Malin goes through the turnstile. The sun is just creeping above the stands of the Folkungavallen Stadium further down the road, hitting her in the face, and in just a few seconds the relative cool of morning is forced out by an angry heat.

  Before her Malin sees the twenty-five-metre pool, the abandoned indoor pool, the bathing area in the lake and the grass slopes surrounding it. Water everywhere. She longs for the water.

  The changing room smells variously of mould and disinfectant.

  She pulls her red bathing suit over her thighs, feeling how taut they are, and thinking that her exercise regime is holding the years at bay, and that there can’t be many thirty-four-year-olds in better shape. Then she gets up, pulling the bathing suit over her breasts, and the touch makes her nipples stiffen under the synthetic fabric.

  She shakes her arms. Pulls the goggles out of her bag. Too warm in the gym at the station these days. Better to swim.

  She takes her wallet, pistol and mobile and goes out of the changing room towards the outdoor pool. She walks past the showers. She doesn’t want to shower even though she knows those are the rules, prefers the first water to touch her skin to be the water she’s going to be swimming in.

  No holiday until the middle of August.

  Her colleagues are taking their well-earned breaks now, in July, most of them, apart from Zeke and the duty officer and Detective Inspector Sven Sjöman.

  Johan Jakobsson is with his wife and children at her family’s summer place by some lake outside Nässjö. Johan had a pained look on his face when he outlined his plans for the summer to Malin in the police-station kitchen.

  ‘Mother- and father-in-law have built another two little cottages, one for us and one for Petra, Jessica’s sister. With their own kitchen and bathroom, the whole works. Everything so that we don’t have a legitimate excuse not to go.’

  ‘Johan. You’re thirty-five. You should be able to do what you want.’

  ‘But Jessica loves it there. Wants the kids to have their own childhood memories of the place.’

  ‘Lots of arguments?’

  ‘Arguments? Like you wouldn’t believe. My mother-in-law is the most passive-aggressive person you can imagine. The victim mentality comes completely naturally to her.’

  Johan had taken a gulp of his hot coffee, far too large a gulp, and was forced to spit it out in the sink when he burned his mouth.

  ‘Fuck, that was hot.’

  Just like the summer.

  Malin steps out onto the narrow concrete path that leads down to the banked seats that in turn form a staircase down towards the pool, feeling her bathing suit cut in between her buttocks.

  Börje Svärd.

  His wife, Anna, who has MS, is in a respite ward at the University Hospital. Three weeks away from the villa she had furnished with her assured taste, three weeks in a hospital room, entirely dependent on strangers. But dependency is nothing new for her, completely paralysed for years.

  Börje himself on a much longed-for hunting trip in Tanzania, Malin knew he’d been saving up for it for several years.

  She also knew that he had left his dogs at a kennels up on Jägarvallen, and it was the dogs he had chosen to talk about when he gave her a lift home one Friday evening towards the end of June.

  ‘Malin,’ he had said, his waxed moustache twitching. ‘I feel so damn guilty about leaving the dogs.’

  ‘Börje. They’ll be fine. The kennels in Jägarvallen has a good reputation.’

  ‘Yes, but . . . You can’t just leave animals like that. I mean, they’re like members of the family.’

  In the weeks before he left, Börje’s body seemed to shrink under the weight of guilt, as if it were already regretting going.

  ‘Anna will be fine as well, Börje,’ Malin had said as they pulled up outside the door on Ågatan. ‘She’ll be well looked after at the University Hospital.’

  ‘But they don’t even understand what she says.’

  She’d had the words ‘try not to worry about it’ on the tip of her tongue, but left them unsaid. Instead she had silently put her hand on Börje’s arm, and at the usual morning meeting the next day Sven had said:

  ‘Go, Börje. It’ll do you good.’

  Börje, who would usually have been annoyed by a remark like that, had leaned back in his chair and thrown out his arms.

  ‘Is it so obvious that I’d rather not go?’

  ‘No,’ Sven had said. ‘It’s obvious that you should go. Go to Tanzania and shoot an antelope. That’s an order.’

  Malin is down at the pool now, her nostrils full of the smell of chlorine. She walks along the long side towards the end where the starting blocks look like grey sugar lumps above the flaking black lane-markers. Beyond the pool stands a line of tall elms, their leaves yellowing, and she’s still alone at the pool, presumably none of the other people left in the city has the energy to get up so early?

  Karim Akbar.

  Police Chief.

  Not as controversial in his choice of holiday as his choice of career. He, his wife and their eight-year-old son have rented a cottage outside Västervik. Three weeks’ holiday for Karim. But not really a holiday. He’s told Malin that he’s going to write a book about integration based on his own experiences, while his wife and son take day-trips and go swimming.

  Malin already knows what the book will be about: the little Kurdish boy in the far too cramped flat in Nacksta up in Sundsvall. The father who committed suicide in his despair at being excluded from society. The son who takes revenge by studying law and becoming the youngest police chief in the country, the only one from an immigrant background. Articles in the press, appearances on television discussion programmes.

  Malin climbs up onto the starting block. She likes swimming in the middle of the pool, where she isn’t troubled by the swell at the edges. She crouches down and carefully puts her towel and mobile down on the asphalt, hiding her pistol inside the towel and pulling on her goggles before getting ready to dive in.

  Degerstad would be back from his course up in Stockholm in early September. Andersson is still off sick.

  Malin stretches her ankles, feeling her body get ready to split the surface of the water, as her unconscious checks off every muscle, organ, cell and drop of blood from a list that is as long as it is quickly ticked off.

  Muscles tensing. And off.

  She doesn’t hear the mobile phone ringing, angrily announcing that something has happened, that Linköping has been woken from its hot summer lethargy.

  One arm forward, the other back. Breathing every fifth stroke, swimming eighty lengths of the twenty-five metre pool, that’s the plan.

  She vaults at the end of the first length, enjoying the response of her body, the fact that the hours in the gym at the station are showing results, the feeling that she is in control of her body, and not the other way around.

  Of course it’s an illusion.

  Because
what is a human being if not a body?

  Her body like a bullet in the water, the bathing suit like a red flash of blood. The surrounding buildings and trees as vague images when she breathes, otherwise not there at all.

  She approaches the end, the first circuit of forty almost over, and she tenses her body for another turn when she hears a voice, a calm deep voice that sounds insistent.

  ‘Excuse me, sorry . . .’

  She wants to swim, doesn’t want to stop and talk to anyone, answer any questions, wants to use her body and escape from all thought, from all . . . yes, what, exactly?

  ‘Your mobile . . .’

  Could have been Tove. Janne.

  She slows down instead of turning, her hands on the metal steps of the ladder.

  A distant voice between her quick breaths, a face dark against the sun.

  ‘I’m sorry, but your mobile was ringing when I walked past.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Malin says as she tries to catch her breath.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ the voice says, and the large, dark figure disappears, seeming to shrivel up in the sunlight blazing behind it. Malin heaves herself out of the pool, sitting on the edge with her feet still in the water. She reaches for her mobile over on the towel.

  It’s waterproof, a fairly basic model.

  Zeke’s number on the display.

  A new message received.

  Doesn’t feel like listening to it.

  Zeke answers on the third ring.

  ‘Malin, is that you?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘The Horticultural Society Park,’ Zeke says. ‘Get there as fast as you can. You’re fairly close, aren’t you?’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Don’t know exactly. We got a call here at the station. See you at the playground up by Djurgårdsgatan as soon as you can get there.’