She’s just seen him on the local news. His eyes flicking to and fro, showing an uncertainty that Malin has never seen before, as if the camera were devouring him. ‘At this point we can’t say for certain . . . we are continuing to investigate . . . no connection . . .’
Karim Akbar had called in from holiday. Wondered if he ought to come in, look after the hyenas, as he put it to Sven.
Sven’s reply: ‘Take your son fishing, Karim. Write your book.’
Then she reads an article about the heatwave. About a stream of deaths among elderly inhabitants in sheltered accommodation, how home helps have found several elderly clients dead from heart attacks; how they can’t cope with the heat or the dry atmosphere of the air conditioning. One district nurse quoted as saying: ‘It’s terribly hot in our patients’ flats. They’re having trouble drinking enough fluids and regulating their body temperature. And we don’t even have time for our regular rounds when so many people are on holiday.’
Malin turns off the computer and goes into the living room, stands by the open window and listens to the buzz of conversation from the pub on the ground floor.
Go down?
No, not today.
Even if her whole body is screaming for a tequila.
Instead she goes into the bedroom, lies on the bed and closes her eyes.
The harsh daylight lingers in the form of burning pricks of light on her retinas, but from the darkness around her a figure emerges.
Malin sees Nathalie Falck in the cemetery, her mouth is moving but it’s not Nathalie’s voice, it’s Peter Sköld’s over the phone.
Two youngsters united in a lie.
But they’re old enough to know that they have the right to silence, that if they just stay quiet they can make the police’s job practically impossible.
Someone who stays silent can get away with pretty much anything. Language is the greatest enemy of the guilty.
Malin opens her eyes again.
She hears the voices from the pub, livelier than any she has heard so far today, but she can’t make out any words in the chatter. She closes her eyes. Feels Daniel’s body against hers, his weight. Maybe I should . . .
No.
Sleep instead.
Tired as hell.
In a room in the University Hospital, Josefin Davidsson lies under a thin white sheet, willing her conscious mind to remember what her body remembers, what has happened to her. Her parents are still sitting in armchairs by the window, looking out over the flickering lights of Linköping, also wondering: what happened in the Horticultural Society Park? Or somewhere else? What secrets are concealed by the scorched grass and bark and leaves, the night and the darkness? At the same time they long to be far away, at home in their perfectly ordinary beds.
I want to remember, Josefin thinks, but I don’t remember anything.
Do I want to remember? What happened still exists, even though I can’t remember it, doesn’t it?
Soon I’ll be able to go home.
I shall lie on the porch and try to remember, I shall whisper to myself: remember, remember, remember!
The earth above me, does it have any memories?
I know why I’m here now.
Where I am.
I’m Theresa.
It must be night up there. I can’t hear any voices of people swimming.
And I’m sleeping here, aren’t I?
How did this happen?
Why am I sleeping here?
What are my dreams now?
Tove’s voice is in the room, in the dream.
‘Look after yourself, Mum, I’ll be home soon.’
From a hiding place deep within Malin’s sleep, the voice says the words she wants to hear.
‘I’ll be home soon.’
What would I be without you, Tove?
Without both of you?
And then Tove is standing there by her bed, holding her arms out to her, and Malin is going to embrace her but then Tove is almost gone again, her gangly body is transparent now, like a scarcely visible hologram, something vague for her memory and sense of loss to cling onto.
Come home, darling.
Don’t disappear from me. Promise me that.
11
Thursday, 15–Friday, 16 July
It must be some homeless badger moving about at the dark edge of the forest.
The pines and birches are swaying, on parade, as a faint nocturnal wind sweeps in from the Baltic, across the skerries and rocks of the archipelago.
What are you digging for?
Is there something buried under the ground? Or are you just trying to find your way back to your sett, to the meandering tunnels you call home?
A black and white striped back. A scrabbling sound. What is it, hiding in the forest?
Karim Akbar is sitting on the porch steps of the cottage his family is renting for three weeks. St Anna’s archipelago, Kobbholmen, your own rowing boat out here from the jetty in Tattö, and then the great Swedish stillness. Hotter than ever this year.
Seven thousand kronor a week.
Swedish, more Swedish, most Swedish. The charcoal is still glowing after the evening’s barbecue. A jetty of their own, with a view from the wooden planks out across the narrow channel that leads to open sea. Inside the cottage his family, wife and eight-year-old son, is sleeping. This is paradise for him, and he ought to be sleeping by her side now, but does she want him there?
Sometimes he wonders. It’s as if their life, and he himself, isn’t enough for her. As if she wants something else. She doesn’t say so in words, but with distance, or perhaps merely an absence of presence whenever he approaches her.
But I shan’t get any physical peace now, Karim thinks. I want to bring order to what’s happening in the city.
The girls.
One disappeared. One lost.
And then Sven Sjöman’s face on the television screen. His brow wet with sweat, his hair a mess.
Daniel Högfeldt’s voice: ‘Do you think Theresa Eckeved is still alive?’
And the way Sven’s opinion on the matter was clear from the look in his eyes, not the same as the opinion his words expressed.
‘We are taking it for granted that she isn’t dead.’
For God’s sake, Sven, ‘We are taking it for granted that she’s alive’!
News.
Cameras.
This is a good profile-building opportunity, Karim thinks. But the house out here is nice, restful, and maybe I’m tired of all the pictures, the words?
When did that happen?
Hasn’t even started writing his book.
Can’t be bothered to be politically correct, and in that case it’s better to let the pen lie.
The badger shuffles through the forest.
I want to get to the girls. Something’s underway. Something dark. And I want to be there when it emerges into the light.
The kebab is rumbling around his stomach, the charred edges of the lamb trying to find a way back up.
Janne woke up early when he had to dash to the toilet.
That evening’s restaurant had been the worst so far.
Greasy rice, bad meat, but Tove seemed to like her calamari. She’s sleeping now, they each have their own narrow bed on a white stone floor. The aluminium railing of the balcony is still warm from the day’s sun, and the sea is a hundred metres away, along a road lined with pubs, restaurants, souvenir shops and temples. The Balinese in their colourful fabrics seem unconcerned at the exploitation, the air thick with incense as they march past in their religious processions about which he doesn’t understand the first thing.
But that’s what civilisation looks like here, and the early Balinese morning is mild. The wine he drank with dinner has made his system unsettled, and he can’t get back to sleep.
The hotel restaurant is dark.
The pool too.
Faint music from a bar that’s still open, but not so loud that he can’t hear Tove’s breathing, and he thinks that she br
eathes just like Malin in her sleep, slow and steady, but every now and then the rhythm is broken by something like a whimper, not anxious or troubled, but relieved, as if something within them was finding its natural tone.
The nocturnal heat quite different from Africa.
Tropical night in the rainy season. There’s nothing like it.
When the rain crashes down and you can feel the fungus growing on your skin, the way the splashing of the raindrops can’t hide the evil that’s after you, moving through the leaves, the insects, the trees.
There’s always something that comes between people.
Religion.
Like in Bosnia.
Tribal loyalty.
Like in Rwanda.
And always politics, money, ambition and game-playing.
And often people like me. The willing cleaners. The ones who show up in the immediate wake of the catastrophe.
Things that have happened, recently and long ago. They collide, one way or another, in a moment of history, and then everything changes direction. An explosion of violence and you just have to deal with it.
A warm wind on his face.
Africa.
Cold wind.
Balkans.
A raw, damp cold that he will always carry with him.
Her voice on the phone just now, the poor, crackling line. The same tired performance as so many times before, their words, the things they say without saying anything at all.
What have I done?
Malin.
What the hell have we done? What are we doing?
It’s time to stop messing about and to start playing the game seriously.
Janne goes in from the balcony. Lies down on his bed next to his daughter. Listens to her breathing.
Malin is dreaming of a cold wind whistling through tightly packed ground. Of a tiny little creature whimpering and trying to find its way into her hands.
She dreams of an open field made of sky and fluffy clouds.
She dreams that she’s swimming in the sea with Tove and Janne, and alongside them swims a fourth person, faceless but not frightening, more like the incarnation of everything good that a person can be, if only in a warm summer’s dream.
Sven Sjöman’s wife Sonja looks at her husband. The way his stomach seems to spill across the mattress, the increasingly deep wrinkles on his face, and she listens to his snoring, the way it seems to get louder with each passing year, with every kilo added to his stomach. But one minor miracle: she accepts the snoring, it has become a part of her, her life, them.
She usually wakes up at three o’clock or so.
Lies there quietly beside him and looks out between the drawn curtains, how the garden outside, its shapes, assume different guises according to the season.
The darkness of summer is relative.
The trees, apples and pears and plums, are clearly visible, not even imagination can turn them into anything but trees.
She usually pretends to be asleep when he creeps out of bed to go down to his woodwork room in the basement. She knows he wants to think that she’s asleep, that he’d never leave her alone in bed if she let him know she was awake.
He bought a new lathe in June.
There’s going to be a lot of bowls. He’s started selling them in the craft shop at the castle.
In August they’re going to Germany.
Sven reluctant, increasingly resistant to long journeys as the years pass, while she is keener.
‘We should go to Australia. Go and see how Joakim’s doing.’
‘Nineteen hours on a plane? The lad’ll be home for Christmas. Isn’t that enough?’
Driving down to Germany.
Minor roads.
Hotels where no one else ever seems to have stayed.
Sven.
They’ve been married more than thirty years.
She sees his anxiety in his sleep, the girls, all the terrible things she read about in the paper, all the things he refuses to talk about.
Zeke Martinsson has woken up, is in the kitchen of his villa in Landeryd, waiting for the coffee machine.
The smell of coffee, of waking up, of a new day spreading through the room.
The clock on the cooker says 05.23.
He almost always sleeps right through undisturbed, waking up early and fully rested.
The house is hot.
Must be twenty-eight degrees. His wife wanted to buy an air-conditioning unit for the bedroom, but this heat can’t last much longer, and then that would be ten thousand down the drain. But what’s ten thousand?
Martin’s going to earn millions. Just from playing a bit of ice hockey. Has already done so.
But everything’s good if it isn’t bad.
Brain surgeons earn nothing compared to ice hockey players. And nursing assistants?
The whole thing is just one big joke.
And the girls. Theresa and Josefin. What’s happening?
Those bastard gangbangers in Berga. Stupid kids with a completely sick imported view of women. They bring out the worst in me.
And Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck.
What are they hiding?
Zeke pours himself a mug of coffee. Sips at the hot drink, feeling his body wake up simply from breathing in the vapour through his nose. He puts the mug down on the kitchen table, goes out into the hall, opens the front door.
The garden is still. Flowers, bushes, trees. Like dark, frozen figures.
Dad spent ten years in Åleryd geriatric hospital before he was allowed to die. Stiff, locked inside himself by a Parkinson’s Disease that no medicine, old or new, could do anything about. Like a denuded tree in a garden.
Zeke creeps out in nothing but his underwear.
No neighbours at home, or up, if they happen to be home against all expectation. He opens the letterbox, puts his hand in and pulls out the Correspondent.
Looks down in the box for advertising flyers but it’s empty, just a few earwigs creeping into one corner.
He holds the paper up to the sky, at such an angle that he can make out the headlines in the dawn light, see the picture on the front page.
Pictures of Theresa Eckeved.
From the same sequence as the pictures they got from her parents yesterday.
Girl missing for a week . . . parents pleading for information . . .
Zeke folds the paper.
Coffee.
Must drink more coffee.
Make my brain pure and clear.
Today holds something important in store for me.
12
Peter Sköld has blond highlights in his hair, and he’s so thin, almost painfully skinny, and his father Sten, a man with determined green eyes and a sharply chiselled face, looks at his son with a pained expression when he crosses his bare legs as he sits down on the chair in the staffroom at the police station.
Neither of them seems tired, even though they must have set off early that morning from their place in the country.
And Malin sees it at once.
Peter Sköld is aware of the significance of silence.
Why?
Because you have things that belong only to you, don’t you, Peter?
Malin sits down and Zeke goes over to the coffee machine.
‘Coffee, anyone?’
But father and son decline and Malin, who has already kick-started the day with three mugs, also turns down his offer.
‘Thanks for getting here so early.’
The clock on the wall says twenty past eight.
‘It only takes an hour or so to get here, more or less,’ Sten Sköld says. ‘And now that Theresa’s gone missing it’s the least we can do.’
Malin looks over at Peter Sköld.
What’s that I can see in his face?
Fear? Cynicism? Silence.
‘So are you a couple, you and Theresa?’ Malin asks.
The answer comes quickly. Peter Sköld’s slender hand through his hair.
‘Yes.’
; Zeke sits down at the table with a steaming hot mug of coffee.
‘You don’t seem to spend much time with her,’ Sten Sköld says to his son.
‘Like you’d know about that? We’re together.’
‘Did you notice anything different the last time you met?’ Malin asks.
‘No, like what?’
‘That dance you mentioned, where you met for the first time. There have never been any dances like that,’ Malin says.
Peter Sköld’s eyes flit about before he looks up at the ceiling.
‘OK, we met in town. I didn’t want anyone to know I was the sort of kid who hangs out there sometimes.’
‘But you’re allowed to be in town, Peter.’
‘Am I? That’s not how it seems. Listen to me: we are together. But we didn’t meet the way I said. And I’ve spent the summer holiday in the country.’
‘Yes, he has,’ Sten Sköld says, a new firmness in his voice.
‘So you’re not meeting another friend when you say you’re going to meet Theresa?’
Malin throws the words at Peter Sköld.
‘And who would that be, then?’
‘You tell us.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘Are you sure?’ Zeke says. ‘Completely sure?’
‘What exactly are you getting at?’ Sten Sköld asks.
Peter Sköld smiles.
‘I haven’t got anything else to tell you.’
‘And you don’t know if Theresa met anyone else when she said she was going to meet you?’ Zeke asks.
‘We’re together, I told you.’
‘You don’t seem particularly worried that she’s missing.’
‘I am. I am worried. I just show it in my own way.’
‘Your own way?’
Peter Sköld sinks back in his chair, pushing his hair back from his forehead.
You little shit, Malin thinks. Fourteen years old? Fifteen? And already so . . . yes, what?
His eyes. Malin looks into them.
Shame. There’s shame in those eyes. And fear. I ought to be giving you a hug, but you’ve made that impossible now.
Summertime Death Page 8
