Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

  Sigvard Eckeved remains seated on his chair, his face expressionless.

  ‘Look here,’ Karin says, waving them over, and under the towel are some twenty small patches surrounded by splashes. ‘The perpetrator tried to get rid of it. But I can promise you that this was where Theresa received that blow to the head.’

  ‘Can you get a blood-type or anything from that?’

  Zeke hopeful.

  ‘I’m afraid not. Nothing like that,’ Karin replies. ‘What you see here are just little ghosts of reality.’

  Malin is crouching beside Sigvard Eckeved again.

  ‘Who would have had any reason to be here?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s no one who comes to mind?’

  ‘No one. Sorry.’

  ‘No one?’

  ‘No, it could have been anyone.’

  ‘No gardener? No one like that?’

  ‘I usually do all the work myself. Together with my wife.’

  ‘And the pool?’

  ‘We have someone who comes in early May each year. When we fill it. But this year I did it myself. Last summer we had workmen here, doing improvements to the terrace.’

  Malin’s mobile rings from her jacket pocket.

  ‘Fors here.’

  ‘Malin? This is Aronsson. I’ve finished the expanded background check of Sture Folkman. Do you want me to go through it over the phone?’

  ‘I’m busy right now. Can we take it in an hour or so? Back at the station?’

  ‘Sure. There are a couple of slightly unclear things I want to sort out.’

  Malin puts the phone away.

  Sigvard Eckeved has started to cry, his whole body shaking, and Malin wants to help him but doesn’t know how, and instead she puts her hand silently on his arm and doesn’t say that everything will be all right, that it will all sort itself out.

  Don’t cry, Dad.

  I’m scared, but I’m OK.

  I was scared when it happened by the pool, out in the garden. It was awful, really awful.

  But everything’s coming together now.

  I can feel it.

  Evil.

  Even that has a pain threshold where everything cracks.

  When it becomes visible and can be driven back.

  When people can start to enjoy the summer again in peace and quiet, just like they imagined they would, with no pain.

  But first things need to reach a solution. What you call the truth needs to be revealed, however terrible it is.

  And you, Malin, you have a visit to make.

  You need to pay a visit to yourself. Maybe looking back can lead you forward. What do you think, Dad?

  I know you’re never going to forget me.

  As long as you remember me, I’ll be there wherever you are.

  And that’s a comfort, isn’t it?

  54

  The house is empty of people, but when Malin looks in through the living-room window and sees the mess of toys, she can hear the sound of children shouting, happy laughter, yelling and crying resulting from clashes about who gets the toy car, the stuffed animal, the crayon.

  A young family lives in the house in which she grew up.

  She told Zeke and Karin to go on ahead, said she wanted to walk around the area for a bit and that she’d get a taxi back. But Karin said that Zeke could go with her, and Zeke didn’t protest, just said, to Malin’s surprise: ‘That makes sense.’

  She rang the bell, but guessed no one was home, and now she’s walking around to the back of the house. The grass is scorched to ruination, probably not watered all summer, and the fence around the terrace is flaking, the wood dry, no one’s found time to oil it for several years.

  Dad would be upset if he could see this, Malin thinks. The pedant, Mr Careful, cheered on by Mum, Mrs Better Than She Really Is.

  Mum.

  Why couldn’t, why can’t you be happy with what you are? Excuses about the flat in Tenerife: ‘We were going to buy a house, but looking after a garden and pool is so much work.’

  The hedge between the garden and the neighbours, younger people living there as well now, and she remembers chasing a football around the lawn on her own on summer evenings, with Dad shouting at her not to hit the apple trees and currant bushes with the ball, and Mum lying in the hammock drinking chilled white wine and staring out into space rather than at her, looking as if she’d rather be somewhere else.

  Winter.

  Snowmen and secret paths through the snow, days and nights of darkness that never ended, her glowing cheeks, and how she used to fight with Ida, the neighbours’ daughter, once making her nose bleed, and she felt so bad afterwards, the violence made her feel sick.

  Mum and Dad’s silence. The way they would circle each other like silent snakes, Malin with a big black pit in her stomach, the sense that something had gone wrong and must be kept secret at all costs.

  What was it that I couldn’t see?

  Why was I so abrupt with Dad on the phone last time he rang?

  And she misses them at that moment. Sees them before her in the flat in Tenerife that she’s never been to, Mum in a flowery dress, Dad in a tennis T-shirt and shorts, eating breakfast on the terrace and talking about their neighbours, the neighbourhood, the weather, but never about her or Tove.

  Why don’t they care more about Tove?

  Dutiful love. The love of least resistance. She’s you, for God’s sake, Malin feels like shouting. You.

  She breathes in the warm summer air, feeling the years and all the unreachable memories take hold of the person she has become. She crouches down.

  What is it that I’m not seeing?

  Snow turning to water.

  She goes over to the terrace, looks in through the kitchen window and in spite of the glass she can hear a tap dripping.

  The kitchen is new, white Ikea cabinets, the Faktum range, shining in the relative darkness, the dining room off to the left, a table similar to the one they had, white-painted pine with uncomfortable, high-backed chairs.

  A dripping tap.

  Water.

  Always this water.

  Chlorinated pools, beaches for summer swimming. The apparently aimless movements of girls working over the summer.

  What is it about water? Malin thinks. You want something to do with purity, with water, don’t you?

  Malin walks quickly away from the house, can’t get away fast enough.

  ‘What have you got against me, Zacharias?’

  Karin Johannison presses the accelerator and Zeke sees the white, long, lace-edged cotton skirt mould itself to her thigh, sees her fine, long blonde hair draped across her sharp cheekbones.

  ‘I haven’t got anything against you,’ Zeke says.

  ‘We work together so much,’ Karin says, ‘and it would be easier if we got on.’

  Zeke looks out through the windscreen, sits in silence watching the trees on the far side of the cycle path, and wonders why he instinctively dislikes Karin so much. Is it her money? The self-confidence that comes of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth? Is it her nonchalant manner? Or is the cause of his dislike somewhere inside him? A woman. Does he have a problem with the fact that she’s a woman, and so damn attractive, and that she doesn’t fit the image of what a Forensics expert should be?

  But that’s just my own prejudice, Zeke thinks. Then he realises what it is. Realises that he’s known ever since the first time he saw her. Impossible attraction means that you keep your distance. If I can’t have you, I can always make you feel bad, feel worthless, even if that’s the exact opposite of what I want.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Don’t know what?’

  ‘Why I’ve always been so abrupt with you. But that’s all over now.’

  Karin doesn’t say anything. But after a few long moments she takes her eyes off the road and looks at him with gratitude and warmth, and perhaps also desire.
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  Police Constable Aronsson has been blessed with an outsized bust that is scarcely contained within her grey police shirt, and Malin knows that she’s already a running joke among her male colleagues: Bustbuster, give us this day our daily breasts, making a clean breast of things . . .

  But Aronsson is smart and tenacious and has no delusions or testosterone-dreams about what the profession is or should be.

  She puts her notes down on Malin’s desk and Malin and Zeke lean forward in their chairs, listening carefully to what she has to say.

  ‘I’ve done the expanded background check on Sture Folkman, like you asked.’

  Aronsson’s face is gentle, but her unfortunately protruding top teeth make her less attractive than she would otherwise be.

  ‘He arrived here as a wartime evacuee from Finland. Evidently saw his whole family burned alive in Karelia. He ended up at a farm in the north of Skåne, outside Ängelholm. That’s where he took his school diploma.’

  Aronsson pauses for breath before going on: ‘He divorced his second wife in 1980. They had two daughters. One of them killed herself in 1985, the investigation seems to have been fairly straightforward if you read the report, she was found hanged and had apparently been in and out of psychiatric institutions for years.’

  Cold white hands under the covers.

  Stop, Dad, stop, I’m your daughter.

  There there, there there.

  Malin forces the image from her mind. Some men should be castrated and strung up in public.

  ‘And the other daughter lives in Australia? That’s what Folkman implied.’

  Aronsson shakes her head.

  ‘She lives here in the city. She’s been registered at an address in the Vasastan district for the past couple of years.’

  ‘Anything else on her?’

  ‘Her first name’s Vera. Forty-two years old. But I can’t find any other details anywhere.’

  A quick, improvised meeting about the state of the case.

  It is almost six o’clock, and they’re all tired from the heat, from many days’ intense hard work, and Malin wants to get home to Tove.

  Sven Sjöman at the end of Malin’s desk as quiet activity goes on around them in the office. Karim Akbar has already gone home, said he had a migraine. He’s never had one before, Malin thinks.

  ‘So Theresa Eckeved was probably murdered at home?’

  Sven’s voice slightly less tired than in previous meetings.

  ‘We’re not sure. But that’s where she was attacked. She may have been moved somewhere else before being buried at the beach,’ Malin says. ‘So the killer may have some connection to the house. But nothing has emerged from talking to the family and those close to them. And the parents’ alibis are watertight.’

  ‘Any other news?’

  ‘Vera Folkman. Her father, Sture, said she lives in Australia, but she’s registered here in Linköping. We’re thinking of going to see her first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Good,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘That’s just the sort of discrepancy that you have to look into to make any progress in cases like this.’

  ‘We know that talking to Vera Folkman is clutching at straws,’ Zeke says.

  Sven turns to look at Waldemar Ekenberg and Per Sundsten, who are sitting at the other end of the desk.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘We’re checking the last names on the list of sex offenders,’ Per says. ‘And we thought we’d talk to people close to Suliman Hajif. It doesn’t look like we’re going to get much further with Suliman.’

  ‘Can we get the prosecutor to hold him for a bit longer?’

  ‘I doubt it, I spoke to him a short while ago and the evidence is far too weak to hold him on grounds of reasonable probability.’

  ‘Better to let him go,’ Sven says, ‘and watch what he gets up to. What about Louise Svensson? Anything new there?’

  ‘We’ve been checking on her regularly. But she’s just been working on her farm,’ Malin says. ‘And I’ve got my doubts about Visnic.’

  ‘OK, we’ll carry on tomorrow,’ Sven says, looking at Malin with a frown.

  ‘Something you wanted to tell us, Malin?’

  ‘No. Just a feeling.’

  ‘So . . .’

  ‘It can wait,’ Malin says.

  And Sven lets it go, saying: ‘And we still don’t know who called in about Josefin Davidsson. And we still don’t have any idea what happened to her bike.’

  Tove isn’t answering the phone. Not her mobile, and not the landline at home.

  Where is she?

  Malin is sitting at her desk, feeling her anxiety get the better of her. She’s just called Markus and he said she left his house two hours ago, that they’d spent the day swimming at Tinnis.

  Tove.

  I told you to be careful.

  Malin gets up, goes out to the car.

  Malin opens the door of the flat, runs up the stairs. Calls: ‘Tove! Tove, are you home?’

  Silence.

  Silent rooms.

  Kitchen empty.

  Living room empty.

  Tove’s bedroom empty.

  Bathroom empty.

  ‘Tove! Tove!’

  Malin opens the door to her bedroom. Tove, please be lying on the bed.

  55

  Karim Akbar takes the hot cup of espresso from the machine and looks around the kitchen. The stainless-steel draining board that was specially ordered to cover the whole area under the glassy tiles his wife had picked out from one of the international interior design magazines she usually picks up from Presstop down in Trädgårdstorget. The doors were also ordered specially, painted in a colour known as British racing green, and the table and chairs are oak, bought from Room in Stockholm.

  No migraine.

  Just a feeling that he had to be alone.

  He thinks about the book he should be writing, but which he will probably never manage to produce.

  He doesn’t even believe his thesis about integration himself.

  The house in Lambohov is silent.

  Is there anything more silent than a home in summer when the people who inhabit it are somewhere else?

  He and his wife have been arguing more and more since the spring. About nothing, and he’s noticed that their son is getting upset, is wary in their company, reluctant to talk, and Karim feels sorry for him but doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t have the energy to do anything. All the masks he has to wear, at work, in other official situations and here at home, have exhausted him beyond mere exhaustion.

  Why do we argue?

  Karim breathes in the smell of their home, as its nooks and crannies become visible in the dim light.

  She isn’t happy. That much is clear. She finds fault everywhere and maybe she finds me offensive? No. But I irritate her and that in turn makes me irritated.

  Their son.

  In his formative years.

  I, we, mustn’t mess him up.

  And Karim thinks of his father, and how he found him hanging in the flat in Nacksta one summer’s day, almost as hot as today.

  I was twelve years old.

  I learned what despair was. But I refused to believe that even love has its limits.

  I go too far sometimes, Waldemar Ekenberg thinks as he sprays water over the roses in the back garden of his house in Mjölby.

  His wife is in the kitchen. Making a salad to go with that evening’s barbecue, the pork has been marinating since the morning, the wine open to breathe, no wine box crap here.

  But do I go too far?

  My colleagues have reported me, suspects have reported me, but nothing has ever come of it and I deliver the goods, more than other people, and with a case like this one? With a bastard like that on the loose, no one cares if someone suffers a bit as long as no one really gets hurt.

  That’s what being human is.

  Sometimes you get squeezed by circumstances, that’s just the way it is. You just have to accept it, just like most suffering.


  The woman in the kitchen wanted children.

  I wasn’t that fussed, Waldemar thinks. But God knows, they tried. Test tubes all over the place, wanking into little pots in dimly lit bathrooms with a cheap porn magazine in his lap.

  Then she hit forty-five and all that stopped.

  They share that fate with a lot of other couples.

  And here I stand in our garden. The sky getting darker. Stars lighting up in distant galaxies. Earthly life huddling together, and I can honestly say that I still love her.

  Per Sundsten is standing at the hotdog kiosk in Borensberg. Built in the fifties, it’s the archetypal Swedish kiosk with an adjoining waiting room for bus passengers. He’s ordered a pork-burger with cheese, and is planning to take it down to the Göta Canal to eat it in peace and quiet as he watches the boats, before heading home to his flat in Motala.

  The advantages of the single life.

  I do what I want with my time. No one to tell me what to do.

  ‘There you go.’

  The kiosk owner, an immigrant, hands him the burger, the cheese almost running down the sides of the meat.

  He sits down on a bench overlooking the canal.

  A man and woman, about the same age as him, go past on a blue yacht. They’re sitting in the cockpit drinking wine, and they wave to him and he takes a sip of his Pucko chocolate milkshake and waves back.

  Ekenberg is crazy.

  But at the same time it’s reassuring to have him by his side. He knows how to do this. I’m probably better suited to the Financial Crime Unit in Stockholm.

  Motala. Not too dissimilar to Kalmar, where he grew up, an old industrial town now full of drugs and problems, but still with the appearance of a small-town idyll. But hardly the best place for a thirty-year-old to live.

  The case they’re working on. He can’t get a grip on any of it. The threads are running together and it feels as though he’s mostly a passenger, that he doesn’t have anything to contribute.

  Fors.

  She’s driven and manic and a bit scary. She almost seems frightened of herself. But if anyone can solve this case it’s her.

  He takes a bite of the fried meat.