Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

  What’s this?

  A sharp, bitter smell and something damp burning against her nose and Tove twists around, but her body doesn’t want to, why doesn’t her body want to, and in the corner of her eye she can see a white figure, feeling the weight of someone’s arm and the edges of the world start to dissolve and I’m sleepy, so sleepy, but I can’t fall asleep here, not here, not now, and I can feel something dragging me over the grass, then something harder, tarmac? And then my sight disappears and the world becomes a dream before everything goes black and cold, dreamless and empty.

  Before the world becomes mute, wordless, and therefore ceases to exist.

  The heavens quake.

  And as if in an enchanting dream, full of whiteness, she reaches out one hand against a transparent white film, and feels the film tremble before she pulls her hand back, resting, dreaming herself still in the world, nightmaring herself alive again.

  60

  Fire is everywhere.

  It’s jumping from treetop to treetop, thundering as it tears everything in its path into burning fragments.

  This summer is hot.

  But the hell in the forest is even hotter. Slowly the fire has spread down towards Lake Hultsjön, and Janne and his colleagues have their backs to the lake, their hoses snaking through the vegetation, zigzagging through the still living soil down to the warm water of the lake, where generators are driving great pumps.

  He slept on the floor of the fire engine last night, in the empty space where the hoses are usually kept, the night singing all around him, crackling and rumbling and stinking of smoke, of cremated animals and insects, of soil turned to ash.

  The flames an unquiet wall some hundred metres away from them. Approaching faster and faster. Human beings against fire, fire against human beings.

  He’s wet with sweat, feels like tearing off his clothes and fleeing the heat into the water of the lake.

  The fire is the beast.

  They stand firm, sticking their gushing knives right into its throat.

  Afternoon meeting.

  Karim Akbar clears his throat and looks around the meeting room with empty eyes, perhaps trying to find a dancing mote of dust in the air to focus on.

  Malin has just outlined her suspicions about Vera Folkman, about the pools, about the false information about her company, a company that may not even exist. She’s explained that they haven’t been able to find her, that she’s ‘like the smoke from the forest fires, you can’t see it, but you know it’s there’.

  ‘We’ve got her flat under surveillance,’ Sven Sjöman says from his chair beside Zeke. The blinds are open, the playground behind them deserted, the nursery still closed for the summer. ‘Does anyone have any other ideas of how to get hold of her?’

  ‘We don’t even know if this Elisabeth is actually Vera Folkman,’ Karim says.

  ‘We’ll have to assume that she is,’ Malin says.

  ‘We’re keeping an eye out for white vans,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s what she drives. But there are loads of them in the city.’

  ‘And we’re checking to see if there are any registered companies with similar names,’ Malin says.

  ‘Any other ideas?’ Sven says once more. ‘We haven’t got enough to go into her flat, you know that, Malin. Even if the smell might suggest that she’s maltreating animals in there.’

  Malin thinks: it’s starting to fit, Sven, the voices of this case are telling us that, aren’t they? And then the other maxim: It’s desire that kills.

  Waldemar Ekenberg and Per Sundsten are silent.

  Silent as only police officers who’ve caught a scent of the truth in a meeting room can be.

  ‘We spoke to the last sex offender on the list this morning. Nothing,’ Per says.

  ‘As much of a dead-end as Suliman Hajif and Louise Svensson. And Slavenca Visnic, she’s been busy with her kiosks, although apparently they lost her this morning.’

  ‘And she drives a white van,’ Per says. ‘So in theory Slavenca Visnic could be this Elisabeth.’

  ‘We saw the interior of her van in the forest,’ Malin says. ‘She didn’t have anything in there that could be connected to pool maintenance. No chemicals, nothing. And the manager at Glyttinge would have recognised her from the kiosk outside.’

  ‘Check again, just to make sure,’ Sven says. ‘You take that, Sundsten.’

  Then Waldemar’s voice, full of scepticism: ‘Could a woman really have done this? Dildo or not? Doesn’t this go against a woman’s nature?’

  ‘Prejudice,’ Malin says. ‘There’s no shortage of female thugs and sex offenders in the past, and most of them were the victims of abuse themselves, just like Vera Folkman.’

  ‘And Slavenca Visnic,’ Per says.

  ‘I think we should put the squeeze on Suliman Hajif again,’ Waldemar says, but no one has the energy even to comment on his suggestion, and Malin shuts out the others’ voices, thinking about what it must be like to be Vera Folkman, thinking about synchronicity, how the pools and all the other connections in the case could be coincidence. And maybe Vera Folkman isn’t even this Elisabeth?

  People who are people who are people who are one and the same person.

  A desire to dissolve, to be reborn as someone else.

  A person as drifting smoke, above a charred landscape. Personified as one single feeling, one single characteristic.

  Love and evil.

  False company names.

  The desire to be invisible.

  Cold white hands.

  But how?

  ‘Come on,’ Karim pleads. ‘No ideas about Vera Folkman?’

  And where are you now? Malin thinks.

  Where am I?

  Why is it dark, and what’s this over my eyes? My head aches and I feel sick, but that isn’t the biggest problem, there’s something worse, but what? I’m breathing, Tove thinks, and this is a dream, and she remembers the shade under the tree, the paper of the book under her fingers, but what sort of dream is this, what does it want with me? Markus, is that you, and she can feel how she’s breathing, recognises the smell of detergent and she tries to get up, but her legs are stuck.

  She tries to push herself up with her arms, but they’re stuck, and Mum, Mum, Mum where are you, I can’t be dead already, is this my grave Mum? and Tove tries to scream but no sound comes out of her mouth.

  Cloth in her mouth.

  Why would I have cloth in my mouth if I were dead?

  Or if I were dreaming?

  Malin looks out across the office.

  It’s just gone six o’clock.

  Where has the afternoon gone?

  Writing reports.

  Looking through the register of companies to try to find any with names resembling Linköping Water Technicians.

  Nothing.

  You are out.

  Waiting for one of the patrols to call in with something positive.

  But that never happened.

  The search for Vera Folkman and the surveillance on her flat has led nowhere, the shadow remains a shadow. And Slavenca Visnic seems to have gone up in smoke, she isn’t at any of her kiosks, and the patrol that went up to the fires couldn’t find her either.

  One piece of news, though. Andersson in Forensics rang. Facebook had finally got back to him. Confirming that Lovelygirl was Louise Svensson, they’d managed to trace her IP number.

  She spoke to Janne over the phone.

  He called her. Said that they’d had to run from the fire down by Hultsjön, that one of their generators had been lost to the flames, that a hunting cottage had burned down and that a few idiots came close to being cut off by the fire in their attempts to save the cottage.

  The Murvall brothers’ cottage, the brothers in the fire. The Bengt Andersson case.

  ‘I’m so damn tired, Malin.’

  ‘Go home and sleep.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They need me here. And I’m filled with this anxiety that I can�
�t shake off.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Janne’s restlessness.

  Hultsjön. That was where everything came to a head last winter in connection with another case. That was where evil caught up with Maria Murvall.

  The same evil?

  No.

  But who knows?

  When we get hold of Vera Folkman she’ll have to provide DNA samples that can be compared with those of Maria Murvall’s attacker. Slavenca Visnic? I’ve already asked Karin to take care of that.

  The clock on the computer says 18.52.

  She calls home, hoping Tove will answer.

  But no.

  Her mobile.

  Five rings, then the answering service.

  Anxiety. Hardly unexpected, Malin thinks as she quickly shuts down her computer and leaves the station.

  61

  Vera Folkman, Motala, Klockrike, 1977–1985

  When the room gets too cold and I hear the floorboards creaking out on the landing I try to think of summer instead of the monster.

  The summer, like when Elisabeth and I are cycling along the canal, and the warm wind catches our thin fair hair and I see your white cotton dress pressed tight to your body, stroking your skin more and more and more with each pedal, and you’re my big sister, I try to keep up with you but for you there’s no contest. You stop and wait for me. The light falls through the oak leaves of the ancient trees along the canal and you’re standing beside your red bicycle smiling at me.

  Was I cycling too fast? I didn’t mean to. You go first, I’ll be right behind you, you don’t have to keep looking back, I’ll be there, making sure nothing bad happens.

  I’m twelve, you’re fourteen.

  You are the whole of my summertime world and we go skinny-dipping together, there’s no embarrassment between us, and if we cycle far enough along the path that runs along the shore of Lake Vättern we can get to places where we can be on our own. Where the summer can drive the pain from our bodies.

  Where he can’t reach us.

  We share the secrets of the darkness, you and I, sister.

  He comes just as often to each of us, and I want to scream and you want to scream, but he puts his long white fingers on our lips, then fingers his way down and we let it happen, because what else can we do?

  It is his house and we are stuck in his life.

  And it hurts so much and I want to scream, but instead I cry and I hear you cry in the hours when light is about to return, when the pink-painted panelling in our room takes shape again and our whole bodies ache.

  A spider is weaving its web across the window in the moonlight, the spider’s legs are white and outside in the garden his rabbits are scratching in their cages.

  We can never wash ourselves thoroughly enough.

  Soap isn’t enough. We find washing-up liquid under the sink in the kitchen and in the garage we find blue bottles containing a milky liquid that smells like his breath, and the liquid stings inside us, gives us more sores, but somehow it feels good to spoil what he wants to take from us. As if there can never be enough pain, and he is so strong, so hard and his fingers so cold, his whole being is determination.

  You choose not to see, Mum, why won’t you see anything? Because surely you must see?

  He’s our dad.

  We’re his children.

  And he comes in the night and there is no way out except deeper in.

  How wonderful the summer is.

  The wind as we speed along the bank of the canal. The way we pretend it isn’t painful to sit on the saddle. The way we still have each other and how our love might yet conquer his fingers, all of him.

  And then you see, Mum.

  You choose to see, and you take us to Grandma, to her two-room flat in Borensberg, and you argue and fight and I’m scared that he’s going to come after us, but he doesn’t come and it takes a long time before I realise that he will always be with us anyway.

  We huddle in the two-room flat we move into in Klockrike.

  I’m thirteen when we go to the doctor, speechless meetings where no one asks for an explanation, cold steel implements inside me, and I see the distance and the sympathy, but also the fear and derision in their eyes.

  It’s me they’re looking at.

  The reincarnation of the monster must be driven out.

  And I am living proof of how painful it is to live, a pain that few want or dare to look in the eye.

  You fall silent, sister.

  Turn fifteen and sixteen on cakeless birthdays and we kept to the trees on the edge of school, kept to ourselves as if everyone knew, as if there were no solace in being with the others, and the summers are colourless, windless, and we lie beside each other on the floor on the hottest days and you say nothing, don’t answer when I ask if we can go for a bike ride.

  The hospital. You’re sitting on a bed in the corner. You’re there several times.

  I call your name.

  You’ve gone home from school before me and I call your name when I get home.

  Elisabeth, I call in the hall, but you don’t answer.

  The living room is empty and I want to go out again, run away from there, cycle with the wind to another world, away from this rotten little flat where we try to cling to our lives.

  But not you.

  The bathroom smells of damp, the white tiles are loose, but the hooks in the ceiling for the drying frame above the bath are strong enough to hold your weight.

  The white rope is wrapped twice around your neck, your face winter blue, panic-stricken, and your eyes, my blue eyes trying to burst from their sockets. Your thin blond hair hanging down over your naked and unnaturally clean body, your feet in the air, still.

  Small cuts on your lower arms and shins. As if you changed your mind and tried to get free.

  Yellow piss on the bottom of the bathtub.

  No water from the shower. I missed the water then. Wanted it to be gushing, full of life.

  I went over and held you, my dear sister, dreaming that you and I would wait for each other again, sharing the secrets of the darkness once more. But you were mute and cold and I could hear my own wailing, the way it sounded like a distillation of loneliness.

  I held you up, hugged you hard, and felt our lost love flow between us.

  You aren’t scared any more, sister, I asked, are you?

  But you didn’t answer.

  There was no innocence left in that moment.

  And I promised you, myself, us, that one day I would put all this right.

  That the world, our love, would be reborn one day.

  62

  Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson, Skogalund Farm, June 2007

  You were the one who let him in, Dad.

  If you hadn’t left me and Mum, he’d never have crossed our threshold, come into my life, in under my sheets, into me, in, in, in.

  He wanted me to call him Daddy, Daddy, that fucking bastard Folkman.

  He came at night.

  The floorboards creaked when he came.

  And he said: Louise, I’m just going to touch you a bit down there, feel me, the way I feel, and then he would come, his hands were cold, all of him was cold and hard and stank of vodka.

  Sometimes, on the nights when the floorboards never creaked, I used to think about you, Dad, and how you vanished, replaced us with other girls, the woman that Mum said you’d met who had two children that you adopted.

  Forget him, Mum said.

  We don’t exist for him.

  And I hated you on the nights when he came.

  And all the other nights. And I hate you now.

  But still: the only thing I ever wanted to happen was for a shiny silver car to pull up outside the house and you would get out of the car and embrace me, saying: I’ve come to take you away with me, from now on everything’s going to be all right, you’re my daughter and I’m going to love you the way a father should.

  You never came.

  When I got older I used to take the car a
nd go down to Nässjö, where you lived then, and I would sit in the car outside your house and watch you coming and going, sometimes I would see your new wife’s daughters, grown up now, just like me, and when I saw you together I could see that you loved them, a misplaced love, what should have been my love.

  My love.

  You never noticed my car.

  The way I used to follow you.

  But you must have guessed it was me who made the anonymous phone calls, that I was the one who never dared to speak on the other end of the line.

  What could I say, Dad?

  Because even if I had seen you, you were only a smell, a touch, an image, a voice from when I was little, and I longed for you here at Skogalund, I longed to see your silver Vauxhall coming up the drive, to see you instead of him come into my room in the cellar, among my toys.

  You were going fishing that day, like so many times before.

  You were starting to get old.

  I parked some distance from the isolated jetty and walked over to you.

  I was child, girl and woman, all at the same time.

  It was an early autumn day, chilly but sunny, and you caught sight of me in the forest and you knew who I was, you knew straight away, and when I came out onto the jetty you shouted at me: ‘Get lost, I don’t want anything to do with you, get lost, I’m going fishing.’

  One of the oars was still on the jetty, long and hard, with a metal-edged blade.

  Did you know who you were letting in? I wanted to ask. I came here to get your love, I wanted to say.

  ‘Get lost,’ you yelled.

  The oar.

  At the reading of your will it emerged that you’d left everything you owned to your new wife and her children.

  I got five thousand, three hundred and twenty kronor in the end.

  63

  ‘Tove? Tove? TOVE! TOVE! Tove? Tove.’

  Malin is going through the flat, running, walking, searching room after room, but Tove isn’t there, not under the sheets of her own bed, nor in Malin’s bed, nor in the wardrobe or kitchen cupboards, how the hell would she ever fit in a kitchen cupboard?