Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

  The pendulum in front of my eyes.

  The curtains, the leather-bound volumes in the bookcases, the etchings of rural scenes. This room is like England.

  The pendulum.

  Isn’t that just something they do in films?

  It smells stale here, couldn’t she have aired it first? Or maybe put some perfume on?

  This peculiar sofa is comfortable, Josefin thinks, trying to concentrate on the pendulum, but her thoughts keep wandering off, her eyes flickering around the people in the room.

  The woman police officer.

  Malin.

  She’s standing behind the psychologist lady.

  What’s her thing? She seems calm, but anyone can see how twitchy she is under the surface. Well, maybe not twitchy, exactly, but definitely pretty manic or something.

  She’s staring at me. Stop staring! Maybe she can read my mind, because she’s stopped staring now.

  The policeman with the shaved head is sitting on the black, lacquered chair by the window. Calm, but dangerous. He’s the dad of that hockey player. And then Mum, terrified. I’m not scared, is she scared that her little girl is going to get dirty? I’m no angel, Mum, stop thinking that.

  And the psychologist lady.

  Looking irritated. She’s noticed I’m not concentrating.

  ‘Look at the pendulum and listen to my voice.’

  What, has she said something? Josefin thinks, and says: ‘I’ll try harder.’

  The psychologist lady says: ‘Take deep breaths,’ and I take deep breaths, ‘follow the swing of the pendulum,’ and I follow the swing of the pendulum, ‘feel yourself drifting off,’ and I feel myself drifting off.

  Eyelids closing.

  Dark, but still light.

  But hang on.

  Where am I now?

  At last, Malin thinks, as she sees Josefin Davidsson disappear inside herself, responding to Viveka Crafoord’s commands.

  She’s written a list of questions for Viveka, who has made it very clear that she, and she alone, would talk to Josefin during the session. That it could be difficult otherwise, and that this wasn’t like an ordinary conversation, you had to follow images and words instead of subjects.

  Viveka puts the pendulum on the desk.

  The sound of cars out in Drottninggatan seeps into the room.

  You can hear the five of us, our breathing, Malin thinks, how they are becoming one. Zeke’s face is expressionless, Malin knows how sceptical he is about this, even if he’d never admit that now that it’s happening.

  Viveka takes down the list of questions from the top shelf of the bookcase.

  ‘Can you hear me, Josefin? I’d like to ask you some questions. Do you think you might be able to answer them?’

  A white, echoless room.

  A strange voice, my own voice.

  ‘Ask questions if you want.’

  ‘I’ll ask questions.’

  ‘I’m tired, I want to sleep.’

  ‘The Horticultural Society Park,’ the strange voice says, and a pure white light shines in through a hole in the wall, the windows go black and then disappear.

  ‘I woke up there.’

  ‘What happened before you woke up?’

  ‘I was asleep. Before I was asleep I was at the cinema.’

  The light is fading now, the room turns grey and a dark figure is coming towards me, it might be a wolf or a dog or a hare or a person, but what sort of person walks on all fours?

  ‘Take the dog away.’

  ‘Was it a dog that put you to sleep?’

  ‘It’s gone now.’

  ‘Who put you to sleep?’

  ‘Mummy.’

  The room is white again and I am alone, and up in the ceiling there are storage shelves, like giant lights. I see myself sleeping there, a pair of floating hands are patting me on the back, it smells like a swimming pool, like a dewless summer’s morning.

  ‘A pair of hands.’

  ‘Put you to sleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A man’s hands, or a woman’s?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you remember the start of the evening?’

  The walls of the room disappear, I see myself cycling through a small piece of woodland, on a tarmac path, on my way through the forest in Ryd down into the city, I don’t know why I’ve chosen that route, why?

  ‘I went through a forest.’

  ‘Which forest?’

  ‘The wrong forest. Why?’

  The strange voice, the nuisance voice, a woman’s voice, older than most.

  ‘Why was it the wrong forest?’

  ‘Because something was lying in wait for me.’

  ‘What was in the forest?’

  ‘Something.’

  ‘Which forest?’

  A force pushing me down, there’s only me now, and I fall asleep, wake up to the rumbling sound of a car.

  ‘Then I went in a car.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the storage shelves that were in the ceiling just now.’

  ‘You got to a storeroom?’

  My body on a bunk. The scrubbing, it stings, and it stinks. And what is this body doing with me, its teeth are shining, it’s cutting and my whole body hurts, stop pressing, stop pressing.

  ‘Stop pressing, STOP PRESSING, STOP PRESSING, STOP DOING THAT.’

  The voice, the stranger: ‘It’s all right, you’re safe here, you can wake up now.’

  I’m back in the white room, the dark figure disappears and I creep out, wandering through the wall, waking up in a summerhouse, it’s morning, and a nice person wakes me up, even though I’m not asleep. Is the person nice?

  ‘I fled, I was awake, but I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Who found you in the park?’

  ‘Maybe a person. WAS IT A PERSON?’

  ‘You can wake up now. Wake up.’

  Black.

  Open eyes.

  The police officer, the police officer, Mum with gentle eyes and the psychologist lady. They all have one thing in common. They all look confused.

  Josefin Davidsson and her mother have left the clinic. Zeke has stretched out on the chaise longue and he looks ready to begin the first of many therapy sessions.

  Viveka is sitting behind her desk, Malin by the window. She’s looking down at the cars on Drottninggatan, as they seem almost to dissolve in the dull light.

  ‘Well, that was a great help,’ Zeke says. ‘Well, almost, anyway.’

  ‘If I understood that right,’ Malin says, ‘she was attacked in a forest, driven to a storeroom somewhere, where she was abused until she managed to escape and found her way to the Horticultural Society Park?’

  ‘She was probably sedated in the forest,’ Viveka says.

  ‘But she didn’t say anything about who did it?’ Zeke says.

  ‘Not a damn thing,’ Malin adds.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Viveka says. ‘But interviews conducted under hypnosis seldom give straight answers. The consciousness never wants to remember the very worst things.’

  ‘You tried your best,’ Malin says.

  ‘Can we try again? In a couple of days?’

  Zeke converted, he seems to believe in this now.

  ‘I don’t think there’d be much point,’ Viveka says. ‘The memory is connected to the instinct for self-preservation. She’s shut off again now.’

  Malin feels tired.

  Wants to get home to Tove.

  Wishes this investigation would finally get somewhere.

  Anywhere, almost.

  51

  The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 6.15. The second hand is firmly attached, yet still seems somehow lost as it goes around. A summing-up meeting instead of a morning meeting.

  The investigating team gathered around the table.

  All of them tired, the greasy skin of their faces damp with sweat, their clothes crumpled and dirty from fine summer dust.

  The run-through has just started.
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br />   Malin has told them about Svea Svensson and Sture Folkman, and about the hypnosis of Josefin Davidsson.

  Bad news from Karin Johannison. The forensic examination of Suliman Hajif’s flat didn’t come up with anything. His computer contained a whole load of porn, but nothing to connect him to the murders in any way.

  Blue Rose had sold thirty-four dildos, and one of the police constables had identified ten sites on the net that sold the same model. So, without a confession or some new evidence, they were stuck as far as Suliman Hajif was concerned.

  ‘How could we have missed checking out Blue Rose at the start of this?’ Zeke says.

  ‘We assumed that everyone bought that sort of toy on the internet,’ Malin says. ‘None of our heat-addled brains even considered that tragic little shop.’

  ‘Mistakes happen in every case,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘We could have saved Forensics some work. But there’s no way we can get anywhere with Blue Rose’s customers. Of course we can ask them to contact us, but that won’t get us anywhere. No one’s going to come forward and say they bought a dildo. I think we can all agree on that, can’t we? Hajif. Are we making any progress there?’

  ‘He has no alibi, but otherwise we haven’t got anything.’

  Malin can hear the exhaustion in Waldemar Ekenberg’s voice. He probably wishes he was back in his villa in Mjölby, with just his usual hooligans to bully.

  Another of their constables, Aronsson, had poked about in Sture Folkman’s personal history after Malin asked her to. According to the archive, one of the two daughters from his marriage to Gudrun Strömholm, Elisabeth, had committed suicide when she was seventeen. The officers investigating the case never had any doubt about the cause of death, and Forensics had given an unambiguous verdict. Elisabeth Folkman had hanged herself. Reason: unknown.

  No longer so unknown.

  Aronsson.

  The best constable in her year.

  She had also checked with the police in Nässjö about the fishing accident in which Louise Svensson’s father drowned.

  His body had been found floating beside a rowing boat out in the middle of a lake, Ryssbysjön, with a wound in his forehead. Gunnar Svensson was assumed to have tripped in the boat, hit his head on the railing and fallen overboard, unconscious. Traces of blood had been found on the railing.

  Sven tells them that they have finally and rather unexpectedly received a response from Yahoo! about the password to Theresa Eckeved’s email account, and that the only correspondence was ten emails to Lovelygirl, who, to judge by the content of the emails, was Louise Svensson. Her farm was mentioned by name. According to what they had got from the emails, no meeting had been arranged that could have coincided with the date of the murder. But there was still no answer from Facebook.

  You want to keep your grubby little secrets, Louise, Malin thinks. Presumably you hoped that we wouldn’t find out what you’ve been up to? And once we did find out, you went on trying to protect yourself, your memories, everything that you are.

  A lonely person living in the middle of the forest. But still a sex offender.

  Then Sven tells them that the Specialist Unit in Stockholm was working on a psychological profile of the perpetrator, but that it would take time because the whole department was on holiday at the same time, and the relief psychologist had a bad cold.

  ‘Psychologists, pah! Wimps,’ Waldemar says.

  Malin thinks about what Viveka Crafoord said about the killer’s profile, but keeps it to herself, it’s just idle speculation by Viveka based on non-existent evidence.

  ‘You’ll have to carry on with all lines of inquiry,’ Sven says. ‘Try to find new ones. Use every bit of intelligence you’ve got. Ekenberg, Sundsten, interview all the sex offenders you can get hold of.’

  Karim Akbar beside Sven, worried, knows that he’s the one who’s going to have to face the media again, trying to duck their questions without having anything substantial to give them. The press conference has been arranged for seven o’clock that evening.

  As they are all leaving the room Karim asks Malin to stay behind.

  He asks her to sit down again.

  ‘Malin,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to tell you how much I want to get back to the house down in Västervik and go swimming again.’

  He wants to talk to me about swimming?

  ‘Did you want anything in particular?’

  ‘Yes, I want you to take part in the press conference.’

  ‘The press conference? You know how much I hate things like that.’

  ‘That’s an order, Malin. If I haven’t got any new information for them, then at least I can give them a few minutes with the prettiest face in the Linköping Police.’

  Anger wells up inside Malin.

  At the same time she feels reluctantly flattered by Karim’s compliment.

  ‘Malin, joking aside, I don’t want to stand there on my own again with nothing to say. It would be nice if you could come along and say nothing as well. And helpful. It might calm them down a bit.’

  ‘So you don’t mean that stuff about being prettiest, then?’

  Karim grins.

  ‘Look in the mirror, Malin.’

  ‘Can we let them have the dildo?’

  ‘That it was the same model?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No, that could lead to everyone assuming that Suliman Hajif is guilty. He doesn’t deserve that yet. You saw the papers yesterday. That was bad enough.’

  The papers had been full of pictures of Suliman Hajif with his face blacked out. Headlines like: Summertime Killer Caught? Terror in Linköping.

  The prettiest face?

  So that’s where this crazy summer has got me?

  A role as a shop-window dummy.

  Twenty minutes later Malin and Karim are standing before a group of journalists in the foyer of the police station. Of the television stations only SVT is there, but there are several radio stations and maybe ten press reporters, a couple of photographers, presumably from the Correspondent and the TT news agency. Twice as many journalists just a couple of days ago, her summer angels are quickly becoming less interesting, selling fewer papers now that the investigation’s got bogged down.

  ‘We have spent the day pursuing a number of lines of inquiry,’ Karim says.

  There’s a crackle of flash photography before he goes on: ‘We’re expecting a breakthrough in the case shortly, but for the time being I don’t have any further information for you.’

  ‘What about you, Malin, can you tell us anything?’

  More flashes, and Malin squints.

  Daniel.

  She didn’t see him before, he must have been late arriving.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  And Malin sees the gang of reporters, the hunger in their eyes, the curiosity and exhaustion, just like their own, and before she knows it the words are pouring from her mouth: ‘Well, we’ve been in touch with a psychoanalyst who has put together a simple profile of the perpetrator. We’re probably dealing with someone who has themselves been the victim of abuse, who has a fragile ego, and a distorted self-image. A person who is part of society, yet still somehow separate. I can’t say any more than that.’

  ‘And the name of the psychoanalyst?’

  ‘I’m afraid we can’t reveal that.’

  Karim fills in this last remark, making the best of the fact that Malin is revealing information that no one else knows about, having evidently decided that there’s no harm in it.

  ‘The profile isn’t official, and was produced in haste, and they’re currently working on a more detailed profile at National Crime.’

  ‘What about Suliman Hajif? You’re still holding him? Any new evidence against him?’

  ‘We’re still holding him in custody.’

  ‘But you expect to be able to rule him out of the investigation?’

  ‘No comment,’ Karim says. ‘That’s all.’

  Several of the reporters want to intervi
ew Malin on her own, but she fends them off, saying: ‘My daughter’s waiting for me at home. I’m heading home to my daughter, sorry.’

  With a start she realised the cameras weres still rolling.

  ‘That’s off the record,’ she said.

  How stupid, Malin thought to herself. The last thing I need is to share personal details with the viewing public.

  Tove and Malin are finishing off the pizzas she picked up on the way home, no longer hot, but almost nicer in this heat now that they’re cold.

  Tove still tired after the flight home.

  She’s slept most of the day away, never got out for that swim, hasn’t even met Markus, but she’s spoken to him.

  ‘When are you going to see Markus?’ Malin asks as she stuffs the last of the pizza in her mouth.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Tove says curtly, and Malin can sense the end of the love-story in the dull tone of the word.

  A shame, Malin thinks, because I really do like Biggan and Hasse, Markus’s parents, I appreciate their dinners and their relaxed, cheerful company.

  ‘Did you miss him while you were in Bali?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mum. Can we talk about something else? Do you have to go on about Markus?’

  From inside the living room they can hear the start of the nine o’clock news on television.

  ‘I might be on it,’ Malin says, and Tove lights up.

  ‘This I have to see!’

  It’s the third item and they make a big deal of the profile in the absence of anything else. A close-up of Malin as she answers questions, and she thinks how old she looks, tired and washed out, wishes she’d put some make-up on or at least brushed her hair, but she did none of that in spite of Karim’s encouragement.

  ‘You look lovely, Mum,’ Tove says with a wry grin.

  ‘Thanks Tove, that warms the cockles of my heart.’

  ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘I wish!’

  Then another clip of Malin as they ask for an interview, as she brushes the camera aside with the words: ‘I’m heading home to my daughter.’

  ‘Damn it! Why didn’t they edit that comment out?’

  Tove gives her a curious look.

  ‘Why did you say that, Mum?’

  ‘I was careless.’