Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

  The words take the chill of the water from her body. Sun and heat, the tone in Zeke’s voice.

  The cracks in the ground are opening up, Malin thinks. The time of glowing worms has arrived.

  3

  Malin hurries to the changing room with her towel around her neck, the wet footprints left by her feet on the concrete of the steps drying before she gets there.

  She tears off the bathing suit, giving up any idea of showering off the chlorine from the pool. She puts on some deodorant but doesn’t bother to comb her hair. She pulls on her skirt, her white blouse, the holster and jacket and the white sneaker-style shoes.

  Through the turnstile.

  Onto the bicycle.

  Breathing.

  Now.

  Now something is happening.

  What’s waiting for me in the Horticultural Society Park?

  Something has happened, that much is clear. Zeke’s words before he hung up, quickly telling her about the call received at the station fifteen minutes earlier, put through to his desk from reception, how the gender-neutral voice at the other end of the line had been indistinct, upset: ‘There’s a naked woman in the Horticultural Society Park, she’s sitting in the summerhouse by the playground. Something terrible must have happened.’

  A naked woman.

  In the largest park in the city.

  The person who called hadn’t said anything about how old the woman was, nor whether she was alive or dead, nothing about anything really. A patrol had probably got there by now.

  Maybe a false alarm?

  But Malin could tell from Zeke’s voice that he was sure something serious was going on, that evil was on the move again, the indefinable dark undercurrent that flows beneath all human activity.

  Who made the call?

  Unclear. A panting voice.

  No caller number had been indicated on Zeke’s phone, or out in reception.

  Malin heads for the gate to the park beside the Hotel Ekoxen, cycling past the entrance to the hotel bar. They mostly have bus-loads of German tourists at this time of year, and as Malin rides past the dining room she can see the elderly Germans swarming around the breakfast buffet.

  Over by the park’s open-air stage the large lawn is surrounded by fully grown oaks, and the park is a regular venue for sixth formers’ drunken parties in the spring. Malin imagines she can still pick up the smell of alcohol, vomit and used condoms. Down to the right is the summerhouse, which was built on the site of the park restaurant that burned down long ago.

  The white paint of the patrol car is like a shimmering mirage further up the park.

  Cycle faster.

  She can feel the violence now. Has been in its vicinity often enough to recognise the traces left by its scent.

  The patrol car is parked by the little summerhouse at the foot of a small hillock. Beside the car is an ambulance. In the background Malin can make out white blocks of flats with walkway balconies, and through the trees she can just make out a yellow stuccoed building from the turn of the century.

  She folds out the bike’s footrest.

  Takes in the scene. Makes it her own.

  Close to her, behind a green-stained wooden fence, there are swings made of car tyres. There is a patch of sand with a climbing frame and three small spring-loaded rocking horses that look like cows. A sandpit.

  Two uniformed police wearing outsized pilot glasses, beefy Johansson and rotund Rydström, wandering back and forth on the grass beyond the sandpit. They haven’t seen her yet, as she’s hidden by the patrol car as she approaches.

  Comatose.

  They should have heard her. Or noticed the paramedics waving in greeting from the bench where they are sitting on either side of an orange, blanket-wrapped bundle. A thickset older man, she knows his name is Jimmy Niklasson, and a young girl, blonde, around twenty or so.

  She must be new.

  Malin knows they’ve been having trouble finding women. A lot fall by the wayside on the physical tests.

  Niklasson looks at Malin, worried.

  The orange figure, the person between them on the bench.

  Wrapped in a health service blanket, and they’re holding onto her, her head is covered by the blanket, head bowed, it’s as though there’s simultaneously something and nothing between them.

  Malin walks slowly towards the bench.

  Niklasson nods to her, the blonde girl does the same.

  Johansson and Rydström have seen her, shouting across each other:

  ‘We think . . .’

  ‘She’s probably . . .’

  ‘. . . been raped.’

  And when the words split the air and find their way across the playground and the park, the figure in the blanket looks up and Malin sees a young girl’s face, its features distorted with fear, with the insight that life can present you with dark gifts at any place and at any time.

  Brown eyes staring at Malin.

  Seeming to wonder: What happened? What’s going to happen to me now?

  Dear God, Malin thinks. She’s no older than you, Tove.

  ‘Shut up,’ Malin shouts at the uniforms.

  Where’s Zeke?

  The girl has bowed her head again. Jimmy Niklasson removes his arm from her and stands up. The new blonde girl stays where she is. When Malin sees Niklasson coming towards her she wishes that Zeke had got to the scene first instead of her, that he could have dispensed the calming words that she will now have to give.

  He’s good at calm, Zeke. Even if he’s also good at tempest.

  Johansson and Rydström have come over as well, a wall of male flesh suddenly very close to her.

  Rydström’s gravelly voice: ‘We found her over there, in the summerhouse, she was lying on the planks of the floor.’

  Johansson: ‘We helped her up. But she was completely silent, we couldn’t get any response from her, so we called for an ambulance.’

  ‘Good,’ Malin says. ‘Good. Did you touch anything over there?’

  ‘No,’ Rydström says. ‘Just her. We sat her on the bench, exactly like she’s sitting now. We gave her the blanket we had in the back of the car. They brought more blankets with them.’

  ‘Are there any clothes over there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s bleeding from her genitals,’ Niklasson says, and his voice is strangely high for such a large man. ‘And as far as I can tell, she’s been beaten on her lower arms and shins. But she’s remarkably clean, almost like she’s been scrubbed.’

  ‘She smells of bleach,’ Rydström adds. ‘Her whole body is sort of white. The wounds on her arms and legs also seem to have been rinsed and cleaned up, very carefully.’

  ‘Get her into the ambulance,’ Malin says. ‘It’ll be calmer for her in there.’

  ‘She doesn’t want to,’ Niklasson says. ‘We’ve tried, but she just shakes her head.’

  ‘Does she seem to know where she is?’

  ‘She hasn’t said a word.’

  Malin turns to Rydström and Johansson.

  ‘No one else was here when you got here?’

  ‘No. Like who?’ Johansson says.

  ‘The person who called in, for instance.’

  ‘There was no one here.’

  Malin pauses.

  ‘You two,’ Malin says. ‘Cordon off the crime scene. Start by the fountain down there and draw a ring around us here.’

  Malin sits down slowly on the bench. Careful not to invade the girl’s space, trying to get closer to her with friendliness.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Malin asks, looking at her gleaming white skin, the wounds on her arms like neat islands. The girl looks as though she’s been outside naked through a whole cold winter’s night, in spite of the heat. There’s an innocence to her white skin, as if she has danced with the devil on the edge of death and somehow survived.

  The girl remains still, mute.

  A faint smell of bleach in Malin’s nostrils.

  It reminds her of the pool at Tinnis.
>
  The young paramedic on her other side is sitting in silence, doesn’t seem bothered that Malin hasn’t introduced herself.

  ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  Silence, but a very small sideways movement.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Can you remember?’

  ‘You don’t have to be afraid.’

  But no reaction, no answer, nothing.

  ‘Stay with her,’ Malin says, getting up. ‘Don’t leave her alone.’

  Down by the fountain the two uniformed officers are attaching the cordon tape to a tree, and Niklasson is busy inside the ambulance.

  ‘Can we take her to the hospital?’

  The young paramedic’s voice is soft and amenable, soothing.

  ‘My name’s Ellinor, by the way. Ellinor Getlund.’

  Malin holds out her hand.

  ‘Malin Fors, Detective Inspector. You’ll have to wait before taking her to hospital, even if she ought to go straight away. She might start to talk if she spends a bit more time here at the scene. I’m going to take a look around in there in the meantime.’

  A summerhouse shaded by a tall oak.

  Sweat under her blouse.

  The clock on her mobile says 08.17.

  Already it’s as hot as the fires of hell.

  The summerhouse has its own microclimate. A strange, damp heat hits Malin as she steps cautiously into the open space. It must be a good five degrees warmer than outside even though there are no walls, it’s more a collection of pillars than a room.

  Unnaturally warm in here.

  As if the atmosphere had gathered together some particularly troublesome molecules in one place, as if an invisible devil were dancing in the air.

  She looks down at her feet. Takes care not to stand in any footprints. A pool of blood some distance away, some smaller splashes of blood around it, together they almost form the shape of a body.

  What?

  Blood that’s flowed out of her.

  A black shadow. What were you doing here at night?

  You’re no older than my Tove. You ended up here even though you shouldn’t have.

  No clothes, no traces of fabric that Malin can make out with her naked eye.

  A mobile ringing, Ellinor Getlund’s measured voice behind Malin. The voice coming closer. Has she left the girl alone?

  Malin crouches down. Breathing. Runs her hand over the floorboards, careful not to touch anything that their crime scene investigator and Forensics expert, Karin Johannison, might want to look at.

  Sees the blood on the railing above the place where the girl was lying.

  Did someone throw you over the railing? Or did you climb over it yourself?

  Children’s voices in the background.

  Ignore them. What are they doing here, so early?

  Malin gets up and walks over to the railing. Marks made by loads of shoes on the other side, footprints, bushes some distance away, some broken branches. A tree, a rough pine slightly further in. Was that where you waited? Did you pull her into those bushes? Or did someone else leave those tracks? Entirely unrelated? Did it all happen in a completely different way?

  Children.

  Lots of them.

  They’re laughing.

  Saying: ‘Police. Ambulance.’

  And then they scream, and scream again, and agitated women’s voices echo through the park, then Niklasson’s voice.

  ‘What the hell?’

  Malin turns around.

  Ten preschool children in yellow tunics. They’re howling now. Two teachers with surprised looks on their faces. A naked, beaten, wounded, but unnaturally clean girl moving towards them from the bench. The children sick with fear, as if they had suddenly infected each other with a virus of terror in the face of the strange, scary sight coming towards them.

  The children are screaming out loud.

  ‘I told you to stay with her!’ Malin roars.

  Ellinor Getlund heading after the girl, her mobile in one hand, the orange blanket, hastily plucked up from the gravel beside the bench, in the other.

  The naked, glassy girl climbs over the fence around the swings, not caring about the wounds on her arms and legs, or the dried blood on the inside of her thighs. She walks across the sand. Sits down on one of the tyres and starts swinging back and forth, a pendulum motion that seems to be an obstinate attempt to obliterate time.

  Her gleaming white body, the blood on her thighs somehow luminous.

  Down by the fountain Rydström and Johansson are still fumbling with the cordon as if nothing had happened.

  Where are you, Zeke? Malin thinks. I need you here right now.

  4

  Zeke standing cautiously beside Malin in the summerhouse.

  He arrived just after they had got the girl down from the swing, wrapped her in the orange blanket and sat her down inside the ambulance. She climbed in without objecting.

  The preschool children have made a collective retreat from the park. Once their initial fear had subsided they seemed mostly amused by the funny lady swinging without any clothes on, and wanted her to carry on, and some of them were upset when Malin and Ellinor Getlund helped the girl down.

  Malin explained to one of the preschool teachers that the playground was a crime scene, but that they would probably be able to use it again tomorrow. The woman didn’t ask what had happened, and seemed mainly concerned with getting the children away from there as quickly as possible.

  Zeke came running up the path from the fountain and the summerhouse. His clean-shaven head was nodding up and down and the beads of sweat in the wrinkles on his forty-five-year-old forehead became more obvious the closer he got. Light-blue shirt, light-blue jeans, beige linen jacket. Black hiking shoes, far too heavy for this weather, but very official.

  Malin couldn’t help herself snapping as he stopped beside her, breathless. She was standing beside the car, and had just given Ellinor Getlund a severe reprimand.

  ‘At a crime scene you do what the police officer in charge tells you, and I told you to stay with her.’

  Ellinor Getlund not backing down, asking instead: ‘When can we take her? She needs to get to hospital.’

  ‘When I tell you.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No buts.’

  To Zeke: ‘And what took you so bloody long?’

  ‘I ran out of petrol. As luck would have it I was only a couple of hundred metres from the Statoil garage. I haven’t run out of petrol for years. It’s this damn heat.’

  ‘The heat?’

  ‘It stops your brain working.’

  ‘True enough. I hope we don’t miss too much in this investigation.’

  Malin told him what she knew, what she had seen in the summerhouse, then they went down there again together and now Zeke is standing beside her in the unwalled room, his thin face full of doubt.

  ‘We don’t know for sure if she’s been raped?’

  ‘No, but everything points towards that, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘And that it could have happened in those bushes.’

  Zeke nods.

  ‘Or else someone hurt her somewhere else and left her here. God, it’s hot in here. Weird.’

  ‘I’d like you to talk to her,’ Malin says. ‘See if you can get her to say anything. I’ve got a feeling that we’re only going to be able to get her to talk here, nowhere else.’

  The back of the ambulance is open.

  A figure wrapped in an orange blanket sitting on a stretcher, the young paramedic close, so close, as if she will never leave her. The girl has the blanket over her head, her head still bowed. The inside of the ambulance smells of hospital and disinfectant, tubes from oxygen cylinders run along the walls, and short cords with yellow corks hang down from the roof. A cardiac support machine is fixed to the internal wall.

  Have you saved many lives? Malin wonders.

  You can’t save the girl in here now.

  Can anyone? />
  Zeke climbs in first. Malin just behind him, gesturing to Ellinor Getlund to get up. They sit down on either side of the girl.

  Zeke turns to face her, and asks: ‘If you feel like lifting your head and looking at me, that’s fine. If you don’t, never mind.’

  The girl sits motionless.

  ‘What happened here last night?’

  ‘Can you tell us?’

  Silence that lasts several minutes.

  ‘Did somebody attack you here last night?’

  Zeke runs a hand over his glistening scalp.

  ‘If you don’t want to say anything, you don’t have to. But it would be good if we knew your name.’

  ‘My name is Josefin Davidsson,’ the girl says.

  Then she falls silent again.

  The ambulance heads off towards the fountain, the brake lights hesitant as the vehicle turns towards the gate onto Linnégatan.

  Josefin Davidsson said nothing more. Just her name.

  What happened?

  What were you doing in the park?

  Your clothes. Where are they?

  Has someone washed you?

  Who are your parents?

  Where do you live?

  Who was the person who made the phone call? Who saw you first? Unless . . .

  Their voices ever more desperate. Full of questions in the face of her silence. The words tumble around inside their increasingly warm heads: ‘My name. Josefin Davidsson.’

  ‘What now?’ Zeke says as the ambulance disappears from sight.

  ‘Now we wait for Karin.’

  ‘Johannison?’

  Malin can hear the derision in Zeke’s voice. Thinks: Why do you dislike her so strongly, Zeke? Because she’s beautiful? Because she’s smart? Or because she’s rich, and rich is the same as better?

  ‘Bali. We’re going to be staying at the Bulgari resort in Uluwatu,’ Karin Johannison says as she scrapes flakes of blood from the railing. ‘I’m taking my holiday in August, so we’ll be there for a month, it’s at its best then.’

  ‘Janne and Tove are there at the moment.’

  ‘Oh, how lovely. Where are they?’

  ‘Some hotel on a beach called Kuta.’