‘I want us to break up.’
Like the crack of a whip. Far too abrupt, not remotely gentle.
The words felt brutal in their unambiguous simplicity, and Markus was shocked.
‘What did you say?’
‘I want . . .’
‘I thought . . .’
‘It just feels like I want to be free this year, and it doesn’t, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like it did at the start . . . it would be better if we could be friends.’
The words out of her mouth fast, as if they were burning her.
‘I want to be able to concentrate on my schoolwork.’
Markus said nothing.
As if he were letting the words sink in, as if their meaning were gradually taking hold within him. But what could he say?
‘I missed you when you were in Bali,’ he said.
‘But I didn’t miss you.’
And with those words his sadness changed into anger, and he stood up and shouted at her: ‘Couldn’t you have said this before you went? That you wanted to break up? Now I’ve spent all summer waiting, not even looking at anyone else at parties!’
‘Stop shouting!’
‘This is my house, I’ll shout as much as I like!’
And Tove had had enough, she got up from the bench and ran out into the hall, slipping on her flip-flops and opening the door.
He called after her: ‘Come back, I didn’t mean to get cross,’ and Tove felt twenty years older, grown-up, when she heard how upset he sounded.
But she still shut the door behind her.
Heard the little sucking sound as it closed.
And then the sound of her own breathing, adrenalin coursing through her body, making her feel giddy.
Let her cycle off. Let her go.
I met your mother just now in Tinnis.
You’re a constant source of worry to her.
So just come to me.
Become an angel.
A cleansing angel of resurrection.
Innocence reborn.
She’s angry as she rushes out of the house.
Slamming the door.
Doesn’t look in my direction, doesn’t see the van parked a little way up the hill.
Peace, come and find peace.
Soon you’ll never have to be angry again.
Death is over there.
Watch out, Tove, watch out, you don’t want to be one of us.
We drift and we roar in unison in your ear, but our angels’ voices don’t reach your eardrums.
Stop, stop!
But you’re not listening.
You’re fleeing discomfort, towards a warmth that you think exists somewhere.
Hear what we’re saying.
Stop.
But you’re deaf to our voices, they’re no more than vibrations in the noise of your inner ear.
Instead you keep pedalling, cycling angrily straight into the catastrophe.
Right into the fire, down, down, into the lowest of all circles.
Who can save you there?
Not us.
Your mum?
Maybe in the end the whole thing will come down to whose love is the greatest?
58
‘Water, Zeke, that’s the connection in this case.’
Malin was talking fast as they headed back to the car parked outside the pool, and she explained what she meant, how all the girls were somehow connected to pools, and had been scrubbed clean with manic frenzy, and how even the smells corresponded, the bleach on all three girls, and the smell of chlorine from the swimming pools.
Malin felt almost feverish in the car park, as reality, air, buildings, cars, heat, sky all seemed to be tumbling around her, but she pulled herself together.
‘So you mean we should be looking for someone who does swimming-pool maintenance?’
Zeke more open-minded than sceptical.
‘Yes, one in particular.’
‘One in particular?’
‘Soon, Zeke. Soon.’
Zeke breathed out deeply.
‘Where do we start? Here?’
‘Why not?’
As they went back in again Malin called the number she’d been given by Sigvard Eckeved, but the neighbour wasn’t aware of any pool-maintenance woman, saying: ‘I take care of all that myself’, and now they’re sitting in a cramped, hot room with yellow tiled walls next to the café talking to the manager of the Tinnerbäck pool, a Sten Karlsson, a bundle of muscle in lifeguard’s trunks and a red vest with the pool’s logo, a sea lion with a ball.
The desk in front of them is littered with papers.
‘Paperwork isn’t my strong point,’ Sten Karlsson says apologetically. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘We’d like to know who looks after pool maintenance.’
‘Our lifeguards and our technician. The lifeguards keep things clean with nets and pool bottom cleaners, and the technician makes sure that all the technical stuff works.’
‘Are all your lifeguards employed on contracts?’ Malin asks, feeling herself getting impatient as she doesn’t get the answer she wants.
‘Yes.’
‘Is any of them in charge of the chemical side of things?’
‘No, we’ve contracted that out.’
‘So that was the woman I saw,’ Zeke says. ‘She was here about an hour ago, wasn’t she?’
‘That’s right. We have a woman who looks after the chemical balance of the water.’
‘Who is she?’
The question bursts out of Malin.
‘Her name’s Elisabeth. I don’t know her surname. Her company is called, hang on . . .’
Elisabeth.
The same woman?
Is Elisabeth Vera Folkman? Acting under her dead sister’s name? And, if so, what does that actually mean? If she is Vera Folkman, what have her experiences done to her, what have they made her do?
Sten Karlsson is searching through the sheets of paper on his desk.
‘Hang on. Here it is!’
He holds up an invoice. Linköping Water Technicians Ltd.
‘Sexy name, eh?’
Malin snatches the invoice from Sten Karlsson’s hand.
Reads the address, phone number.
‘Do you know where she was going after here?’ Malin asks.
‘No idea. She’s pretty mysterious.’
Sten Karlsson points at the invoice.
‘She leaves those without a word, except for saying that she wants to be paid in cash. But I can tell you one thing. She knows her job. We’ve had her for two years, and the water in the pools has been top quality since then.’
Malin and Zeke are standing together outside Sten Karlsson’s office. Malin is holding a note containing the details of the company: name, address and company number.
‘Number 17, Johanneslundstigen,’ Zeke says. ‘I’ve never heard of a Johanneslundstigen.’
Malin reads the phone number: 013 13 02 66.
Calls the number.
An automated reply.
‘The number 013 17 02 66 is not in use . . .’
‘Fuck,’ Malin says.
‘Call directory inquiries,’ Zeke says. ‘Ask them.’
‘118 118!’
The perky operator’s voice annoys Malin.
‘That’s right, that number isn’t in use.’
‘No, there’s no Johanneslundstigen in Linköping.’
‘Of course, I’ll put you through to the tax office.’
After a long pause someone else answers. The tax office is pretty much closed on a Saturday in July. Then another long wait to be transferred. Then a new woman’s voice, formal and bureaucratic, as she might have expected. Zeke is pacing up and down beside her now, sweat on his forehead.
‘Did you say Linköping Water Technicians Ltd, registration number 5-987689?’
‘That’s right,’ Malin says.
‘There’s no company registered under that number, or that name. Sorry.’
Malin ends th
e call once she’s made a note of the woman’s direct number.
She feels the heat constricting her chest, her heart beating hard under her ribs. How long can you keep a false company running? One year? Two? Three? Maybe longer, if you do it properly. But who knows how long she’s been in the city. Unless she really has been in Australia, like Sture Folkman said? And came home two years ago with the very worst baggage imaginable?
‘Someone has a hell of a lot to hide,’ she says, and Zeke smiles, his whole face radiating confidence.
They drive out to the pool at Glyttinge in silence.
Slavenca’s kiosk appears to be empty, and from the front it looks as though it’s closed for good. In the car park the smell of smoke is very noticeable, the wind is coming from the north-west, blowing the charred smell towards them, particle by particle.
The owner of the Glyttinge pool.
Hakan Droumani.
A man in his fifties of Mediterranean appearance, his accent hard to pin down. He’s very cheerful, business booming in a summer like this, offering Malin and Zeke coffee in the pool’s little café, in the same building as the changing rooms with a view of the main pool.
Quick questions, answers.
‘Yes, her name’s Elisabeth. Surname? No idea. If I know anything about her? No. Her company is Water Technology, Linköping, Ltd . . . cash, always cash, that’s fine by me, of course, no account number on the invoices, but business accounts cost money so I suppose she’s trying to cut costs . . .’
By the pool stands a woman in a burka, ready to jump in.
Hakan Droumani laughs.
‘That’s the only full clothing I allow.’
‘You’ve never had any reason to call her? Like back in June, for instance, when there was a problem with the water?’
‘She called me. Health and Safety leaked it to the Correspondent before they said anything to me. But otherwise I’ve never had any reason to call her.’
Malin makes another call to directory inquiries, to the woman in the tax office: ‘doesn’t exist . . . sorry . . .’
‘Where do we go from here?’
Malin puts her mobile in her pocket and looks questioningly at Zeke. All around them in the car park outside the Glyttinge pool people are walking slowly past, on their way to or from cool relief.
‘We can try Vera Folkman’s flat again.’
Zeke’s voice full of certainty. He’s turned Malin’s theory about how things are connected into a truth, even though they don’t know that yet.
‘OK,’ Malin says. ‘If Vera Folkman is this Elisabeth.’
‘It could be a matter of urgency,’ Zeke says.
And they look at each other, two detectives made scruffy by the summer, feeling how violence is approaching, how they’re being drawn towards its core, the eye of the hurricane, the ultimate eruption of the volcano.
She feels her stomach tighten.
That isn’t fear.
But she doesn’t manage to convince herself.
Zeke puts a hand on her shoulder.
‘Relax, Malin,’ he says. But not even Zeke’s voice can reach deep enough inside her to suppress her anxiety.
Now you’re going into the library.
Thousands of books in there, sentences, words, characters, each one more meaningless than the last, each story more mendacious than the last.
But you love books, don’t you?
Their spines, the escape they offer.
You can’t escape.
I’ll be waiting here for you.
Are you going to go through the park?
Or along the road?
My cleansing angel.
My summertime angel.
I shall bring life to you, that’s what I’ll do.
59
Tove loves the library.
The nice new one that was built after the old one burned down one cold January night.
She loves all the space above the books, and how the greenery outside takes over the room through the huge windows facing Slottsparken, and the smell of old books, a bit musty but still full of excitement and dreams, suggesting that the planet and all the life on it can be made clear; the smell of mystery, enticing but also, in some indefinable sense, dangerous.
She’s sitting in one of the black Egg chairs that are lined up facing the park, immersed in The Great Gatsby again, in the parties and Jay and Daisy’s passion, so different from her and Markus’s infatuation that never turned into love. Unless it’s going to?
Am I going to regret it?
And try to recreate a feeling that might never really have existed?
She must have read the book five times now. Precocious was how her Swedish teacher described her essay in school.
Sure.
She can sit here for hours, vanishing among the words, watching the day turn to afternoon, then early evening. Nice weather outside, but then it always is.
Outside in the park some dark-skinned men in green overalls are raking up leaves, they’ve given up early this year, the leaves.
Turning the pages.
Do a bit of reading before I go home and get something to eat.
Zeke’s finger on the bell of Vera Folkman’s flat on Sturegatan. The heat in the stairwell is oppressive, the glass in the windows seems to bow and it feels as if hungry flames are rising from the floor and trying to burn the skin of Malin’s legs.
No answer, and they stand silently in front of the door for a while. A smell of decay.
‘Shall we break in?’
Malin says the words more as a challenge than a question, doesn’t want to leave any room for doubt.
‘We can’t, Malin. You know that.’
‘So what are we going to do, then? How the hell are we going to find her? She’s like mist, smoke, a shadow. Whatever you like.’
‘Calm down, Malin. Just calm down.’
‘Sorry. It’s this heat, it’s driving me mad.’
‘Let’s go back to the station. See what we can come up with. We need a meeting.’
‘OK. Let’s do that.’
Before she gets in the Volvo Malin calls Tove, wants to find out what she’s doing, check that she’s OK.
A birch tree provides a bit of shade and in the car Zeke reaches for the cold-air vent by the rear-view mirror.
Tove answers after just one ring.
‘Mum, I’m in the library reading. You’re lucky I forgot to switch my phone off. You’re not supposed to have them on in here, but I don’t think I’ve disturbed anyone.’
‘Aren’t you with Markus?’
‘I broke up with Markus today.’
You didn’t tell me, Malin thinks, even if I saw it coming, why didn’t you tell me, Tove? And she wants to reprimand her daughter, ask: why didn’t you tell me you were going to break up? But when could she have told me?
There’s never any time.
Hence Tove’s silence, her secrecy.
And because of something else. Another explanation that makes Malin’s gut ache, an explanation that she shies away from.
Malin had been expecting them to break up, but so suddenly?
But perhaps things like that always happen suddenly? Like a revelation?
‘Mum, are you there? I said I broke up with Markus today.’
‘Was he upset?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was it rough?’
‘I don’t know, Mum, I felt relieved afterwards.’
‘Tove, let’s talk more this evening. I’ll see you at home.’
There are so many books, Tove thinks as she walks through the bookcases in her hunt for something to take out. And so little time to read them.
She pulls out a book from the shelf, it’s called Prep, American, about a school for rich kids.
Tove has read about it in a magazine.
It’s supposed to be good, and five minutes later she leaves the library with the book in her hand.
Food?
I’m not hungry, and Mum won’t be home and it’
s no fun eating alone.
The men in overalls with rakes have left the park, and the shadows under the trees over by the car park towards the castle looks inviting.
I’ll lie there and do some reading, Tove thinks. What else am I going to do?
You’re coming closer to me now.
Am I really going to be so fortunate that you’re going to lie down in the grass under the oak tree, in the shade, so close to me?
You’re steering your bicycle towards me.
I can go up to you if you’re lying there, just five metres away, and I can take you with me. No one need notice anything.
Tove leans her bike against the tree, looks over at the car park but doesn’t notice the van, half hidden as it is behind some low bushes. She’s longing to get into the book, among the words and letters, into the fiction.
She takes her towel out of her bag, lays it out on the grass and lies down on her side, opens the book and starts reading.
The sounds of the city in the background. The siren of an ambulance, cars, and the hum of a choir of hundreds of ventilation units. The indistinct sound of voices.
A sliding door opening.
Soon the sounds of the city are stifled by the rhythm of the words in her head.
I’m heading towards you now.
No one can see anything, it’s early afternoon but we’re alone here, and I’m going to take you.
No one by the castle, or the county administration office, or in the park.
Or on the path to the library, or inside the big glass windows, and I am approaching your rebirth. I shall take you with me to him for the final act.
They’ll say that I’m mad.
And maybe I am not really myself.
But I shall do this now.
Fill you with nothing.
The tarmac of the car park becomes grass under my feet, I’m close to you now, we’re sharing the shade. The ether in my hand, a soaked rag, and my white clothes are spotless and you don’t hear me and I’m kneeling on your orange towel, putting the rag over your nose.
Summertime Death Page 34
