‘Hans here.’
Her voice at the other end of the line isn’t as alert as usual and he can hear the sound of traffic in the background.
‘This is Malin. Tove’s mum.’
‘Hi, Malin. How are you coping with the heat? Haven’t melted yet?’
‘Half of me has just dissolved onto the pavement.’
Hasse chuckles. At least she’s got a sense of humour.
‘How’s Tove getting on in Bali?’
‘She’s having a great time.’
‘Markus is at our summer cottage outside Torshälla, but he’ll be home when Tove gets back.’
‘I was thinking that you might be able to help me with something, Hasse.’
‘OK. Fire away, Malin.’
‘I could do with finding out if there’s anyone in the city who has lost his penis.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Lost his . . .’
‘Sorry, I heard you, Malin.’
‘It’s to do with the rape of that girl.’
‘The one who was found in the Horticultural Society Park?’
‘Yes.’
‘The information you’re after is confidential, Malin.’
‘I know.’
‘Sorry, Malin, I can’t help you. It’s illegal to reveal the details of anyone’s medical notes.’
‘I know that too, Hasse.’
He sounded shattered, Malin thinks, tired, when I asked. Those long operations must be draining. Malin puts her mobile in the front pocket of her skirt, during the day its pale-blue fabric has gained some light brown stains and Malin wonders if you can get jeans that would be thin enough to put up with in this heat.
The pub downstairs is as tempting as ever. Crazy to live in the same building as a pub.
Sitting at the bar, alone, along with everyone else.
Getting happily, hazily melancholic.
Drink a chilled beer, its bitter, sharp coolness, the alcohol going to your head and filling its nooks and crannies with miraculous emptiness.
But no.
Not now.
The key in the door of the flat.
A stale smell, clothes and everything else just one big mess.
Malin stops, looks at herself in the mirror.
Heat wrinkles?
Whatever, they’re certainly new, those little lines in the skin around her eyes.
I’m thirty-four, Malin thinks. And I still don’t recognise my own reflection, I still don’t know who I’m looking at.
They come to her again. Like summer ghosts.
Janne.
Tove.
And Daniel Högfeldt.
And she is consumed by a sudden painful sense that life is over, even while she’s slaving away at it.
17
Saturday, 17–Sunday, 18 July
Her voice fills the bedroom. She’s talking about the girls.
It doesn’t really matter what she says.
It’s the movement of her voice, its vitality, that’s the important thing.
The presenter on local P4. Her friend.
Helen Aneman must be working evenings now, unless she works at pretty much any time of day.
‘And to all you girls out there in Linköping. Please, don’t take any risks. Whatever you’re doing, don’t go out alone. We don’t know what this summer has let loose.’
Then Helen introduces a track and Malin lies on her bed with the blinds closed, listening to her friend’s voice in the relative darkness.
She sounds sexy.
Alone, but not tragic, as if she were waiting for someone to come to her in the studio and take her away.
Her prince charming? Well, why not?
The music starts. A hard-rock track. The words of the lyrics mean nothing. Malin is jerked back, gets up, slamming one hand down on the radio’s off-switch.
Sven Sjöman called half an hour ago, just after nine o’clock.
‘You’re going to see Nathalie Falck?’
‘I called her. We’re meeting up in a little while. She sounded reluctant, to say the least.’
‘It’s good that you’re working, Malin.’
‘So you don’t think I’ve got anything better to do?’
‘No, actually I don’t, Fors.’
The defiance in Nathalie Falck’s dark eyes.
The lies beyond the defiance.
Or truth withheld.
Nathalie agreed to meet her after some persuasion, but maintained in a razor-sharp voice that she had nothing to add.
Chosen location: the cathedral.
‘I can meet you in the cathedral at ten. I go there sometimes.’
‘Is it open that late?’
‘They don’t lock the doors before eleven in the summer. Some new accessibility thing. And it’s cool in there.’
And now they’re sitting in one of the brown-painted wooden pews towards the front, near the modern painted altarpiece, and above their heads grey stones of different shades reach upward to form an arch, stones that have spent centuries trying to disprove the law of gravity.
Nathalie is wearing a black vest and skirt. She radiates a courage and determination that Malin wishes she could have had as a teenager.
‘What do you want to know?’ she asks without looking at Malin.
‘Yes, what do I want to know? Why don’t you tell me? I’m sure you haven’t told us everything that might be of interest to us. Nice skirt, by the way.’
‘Don’t try to manipulate me. It isn’t a nice skirt. H&M crap.’
‘Who’s Lovelygirl?’
Malin looks for a reaction in the girl sitting beside her.
Nothing.
‘I don’t know any Lovelygirl.’
‘It’s an alias on . . .’
‘I’ve seen it on Theresa’s Facebook page. Don’t know who it is.’
That came a bit too quickly, Malin thinks.
‘You’re sure?’
No answer.
Nathalie huddles up, as if to say: thus far, but no further.
Malin falls silent. Lets the church’s faint knocking sounds take over for a few short moments.
‘Is it hard being different?’ she asks eventually, and she can see Nathalie Falck relax.
‘Do you think I’m different?’
‘Yes. It shows. In a good way.’
‘It’s not hard. It’s just different.’
‘Theresa is missing, Nathalie. You have to tell me what you know.’
And Nathalie Falck turns her round face towards Malin, looks her deep in the eyes.
‘But I don’t know anything else. I know Theresa, but I don’t know everything about her.’
Her pupils contract. A sign of lying.
But are you really, actually lying?
‘What about Josefin Davidsson, do you know her?’
‘You mean the girl in the park? Oh, come on! I’d never even heard of her until I read about her in the paper.’
By the entrance to the cathedral, some seventy-five metres behind them, someone turns a rack of postcards.
‘Why do you come here?’ Malin asks, recognising her own visits to the memorial grove up in the Old Cemetery, and thinking that Tove would never come here of her own accord, the library is her place.
‘I like the way it’s so peaceful. And big. There’s room for me in here, somehow.’
‘It’s certainly big.’
‘What do you think has happened to Theresa?’ Nathalie Falck asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Malin answers. ‘Do you?’
Then Nathalie points to the altarpiece, at the angular, painted figure of Christ.
‘Do you believe in virgin birth?’
Malin doesn’t know how to react to the question.
Virgin birth?
‘I mean,’ Nathalie Falck says, ‘what’s the point of innocence when everything pure and beautiful always ends up dirty? Is it actually possible to talk about such a thing as fucking innocence in the first place?’
It’
s just after midnight when Malin lies down on her bed for the second time that evening. It’s just as hot and lonely as the rest of the flat.
She has the radio on.
Helen Aneman is talking about the heat and the forest fire, how one of the firemen from Mjölby who was taking part in the effort to put it out had been surrounded by flames on a gravel track and had been seriously injured.
‘He’s in the University Hospital right now, and I think we should all spare a thought for him and his family.’
Then music.
‘Into the Fire.’
Bruce Springsteen’s epic about the firemen who headed straight into the burning World Trade Center to save others. The wonderful thing about human beings: how we can instantly drop our responsibilities for family, friends, acquaintances, and sacrifice our lives for someone completely unknown to us, our neighbour.
May your strength give us strength.
How the possibility of sacrifice makes us human.
May your hope give us hope.
And she has read that the firemen who survived said that they never hesitated, never felt any fear, nor any sense of duty, just a feeling of being one and the same as those in need.
May your love give us love.
If people are reincarnated, let those firemen come back.
Then the song ends and she turns off the radio.
She shuts her eyes. Waits for sleep and dreams, but instead her thoughts race around her skull.
Nathalie Falck. Lovelygirl. What is it that Nathalie isn’t saying? Can’t do any more there. Let time do its work. Josefin. Her closed memory.
Norrköping and Linköping have lesbian women in the fire brigade, Janne has told her, but who are they? Maybe they could tell her something?
It’s a cavalcade of prejudices, this investigation.
Immigrant youths gang raping young girls.
Lesbian firefighters, police officers.
They had a quick discussion after the meeting, about the obvious facts: that there were plenty of dykes in the force, but that Petreaus was the only open homosexual in Linköping.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ Sven said. ‘Petreaus is on holiday. Don’t get her mixed up in this.’
‘You’re right,’ Zeke said. ‘All hell would break loose.’
Reality, unreality.
When did you last have your hair cut by a male hairdresser who wasn’t gay?
Which was more or less how Zeke could have put it.
Nathalie Falck.
She wants to look tough, but deep down she seems scared, shy, as if she’s spent the whole of her short life running, trying to get to grips with who she is. But perhaps that’s what we all do, Malin thinks. Try to get to grips with life, and most of us just about manage to keep our heads above water. It’s so much easier to run away from the pain and rush instead into the embrace of comfortable well-being.
The tequila is at the top of the cupboard above the fridge.
Her body is twitching for alcohol. Her stomach, heart, soul are whispering: warm us, sedate us, make us soft. Combat the heat with the heat of strong liquor. That’s who you are, Malin.
She breathes in the warm air.
A faint, faint smell of burning wood.
Thinks of the firemen: ‘Up the stairs, into the fire.’
18
Words unspoken.
They drift through the room like dead souls.
Intimations. But of what?
I never had any brothers or sisters, Malin thinks as she walks through her parents’ flat by the old Infection Park.
It’s just after eight o’clock, Sunday morning, the city even more desolate than on a normal morning. I’m the last person on earth, Malin had thought as she walked to the flat. All the others have burned up. She left her bike at home, wanted to get her body going by walking, stick one angry finger up at the heat.
She wants to water the plants before the morning meeting they agreed to have at half past nine, the need for overtime self-evident now: they can’t lose a second in this investigation. Up earlier than necessary in spite of the lack of sleep in the heat. In spite of the large shot of tequila she drank in two burning gulps.
Weakness in the face of desire. It’s always desire that gets out of control, it doesn’t matter what sort it is.
The flat.
Four rooms and a kitchen, on the third floor of a house built just after the turn of the last century. Four rooms full of furniture from the house in Sturefors, of memories, of intimations of disappointments, unfulfilled dreams and lies, but also of a negotiated love, her parents’ own particular love.
We stick together. But we have no respect for each other, we hate each other’s bodies, we each have no interest in the other, in their words, opinions, dreams, longings, but we shuffle along side by side with our secrets and lies, and as long as we do that then we still have something. Don’t we?
Like hell you do, Malin thinks.
She and Janne. How they really didn’t have in common any of the things you’re supposed to have in common. No interests. No hopes. But they had something that must have been there right from the start. An obvious love, as if together they manifested each other’s humanity, the fundamental goodness, faith and warmth that must always, always be life’s ultimate truth.
Everyday and reality.
Sorrow and pain.
Day after day they saw how their love wasn’t enough, how it clung on but fell apart, and not even Tove could hold them together.
A nameless catastrophe. And Janne was on his way to Bosnia along with the Rescue Services Agency. A fucking note on the table.
In our hour of need we stick together.
And he disappeared and she took Tove with her to Stockholm.
Love can remain but become impossible. The feeling that something very real between them still remains.
She curses that feeling. That’s a before-tequila feeling, the very worst of all. Or the next worst.
Unbearable.
Maybe I need something to believe in, Malin thinks.
You’ll water the plants, won’t you?
Dad’s mantra over the phone.
These rooms do something to me, Malin thinks, even though they’ve never been mine, they’re closed and open at the same time.
Is there a secret? Or is that just what I feel?
Never just a feeling.
Watering the plants.
The watering can has been Malin’s lot since her parents moved four years ago. She and Tove haven’t been to visit them, and they’ve only been back three times.
‘We won’t be home this summer, Malin.’
‘OK.’
‘You’ll do the watering, won’t you?’
She’s had that question a thousand times from her father, and a thousand times she’s said yes.
But most of the plants are dead now.
She’s put the survivors in boxes on the floor beside a shady wall in the living room, trying to spare them from the sun and the worst of the heat, even though the flat must produce a terrible static heat during the day, which turns chlorophyll pale.
Big pots.
Dry soil, dampened by the watering can.
She can feel her parents’ love in the flat, not their love for her, but for each other. Love as a deal, a sensible arrangement, a way to shut out the world.
Why? Malin thinks. Why do I feel such loss among these things?
She didn’t call Janne and Tove yesterday, and they didn’t call her.
She’s sitting on one of the worn wooden benches on the hill leading down from her parents’ building, fingering her mobile.
The fire brigade. Lesbians. The alien world of teenagers. Thousands of years between each generation.
Janne.
She fingers the keys as an unbearable ray of sunlight breaks through the foliage of the trees and she edges closer to the building.
Smoke in the air, just a hint, the fire is evidently spreading towards Lake Roxen. Is Lake Hultsjö
n going to burn? Really? Can a lake evaporate?
‘Janne here.’
He sounds lively. Restaurant noises in the background.
‘Is that you, Malin?’
‘It’s me. How are you both?’
‘Good, we’re having lunch. There’s a bloke who grills fish for you. Tove loves it.’
Fish.
She doesn’t usually love fish.
‘And you, how are you getting on?’
‘We’re struggling with that rape case I mentioned. That’s one of the reasons I’m calling.’
Silence on the line.
‘So how can I help?’
Malin gives a brief outline of the case, about the dildo and the lesbian line of inquiry.
‘So you want to know if I know anyone in the fire brigade who might be able to talk to you and tell you a bit about the lesbian community in Östergötland?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘No prejudices there, then. What about your own ranks?’
‘Sensitive, Janne. But what the hell are we supposed to do, there’s a fucking rapist on the loose, a really vicious one at that. And another girl’s gone missing. God knows where she is.’
She explains briefly about Theresa Eckeved, and how they really haven’t managed to come up with anything at all.
Another silence.
‘Janne, it could have been Tove.’
He says nothing at first, then: ‘Talk to Solhage down at the station. I’ll talk to her, she’s OK, and she’s working the whole of July.’
‘Thanks, Jan. Can I talk to Tove?’
‘She’s just gone up to the room, can you call back a bit later?’
When Malin has ended the call she turns her face to the sun, hoping to get some colour in her tired features, let the rays wipe out those horrible wrinkles, but after just a few seconds the heat is too much for her and she gets up from the bench, thinking: No one can control the passage of time, not me, and not you out there somewhere, whoever or whatever you are.
Summertime Death Page 12
