Summertime Death mf-2

by Mons Kallentoft

  The footpath out of the park runs between two blocks of flats, and is lined with flowerbeds, their plants wilting and losing their colour in the heat. Out on Djurgårdsgatan a number 202 bus goes past on its way to the University Hospital.

  It’s hardly six hundred metres to the police station, Malin thinks. Yet here, so close to the physical heart of the law, a girl has been attacked and raped.

  All security is just a chimera.

  Four girls in their early teens fly past them on their bikes. Bathing gear on their parcel-racks.

  On their way to cool down. To the pool out at Glyttinge, maybe? Or Tinnis?

  Chatter and commotion. Summer holidays and something lurking behind a tree in the dark.

  5

  We’re going swimming, swimming, swimming, you say, have you seen my armbands, Mum, have you seen my rubber ring, where’s the rubber ring? I don’t want to sink, Mum.

  I hear you.

  You’re above my darkness but I don’t know if you hear me, hear me calling: Mum, Mum, Dad, Dad, where are you, you have to come and you have to come and get me and who are all these people shouting about swimming, about rubber rings, about ice cream?

  But I felt the drops.

  They’re lingering. What do the drops smell of? They have a different smell from how water usually smells. Do they smell of iron? Animal waste?

  Your feet.

  I hear them trampling on me.

  Above.

  And I think I’m lying down, but maybe I’m the one swimming, maybe the moist darkness around me is water. It must be water, I like water.

  And now you’re playing.

  Where’s my ball, Mum?

  Shall I catch it for you? My arms can’t. They’re stuck by my sides and I try to move them, I try, but they seem stuck in whatever it is that surrounds me.

  But why are you trampling on me?

  I don’t want you to trample on me.

  Where am I?

  Where are you, Dad?

  I can swim, I can float, but I’m not getting anywhere.

  I can swim. But I can’t breathe.

  My room is closed.

  The nursery on the other side of the small park outside the crime team’s meeting room is closed for the summer. There are no children using the swings or the red-painted slide, no three-year-old hands digging in the dry sand of the sandpit.

  The heat is barren, the city in summer almost the same.

  Instead there are two decorators inside the nursery school’s windows. They’re both up ladders, bare-chested, and are rhythmically rolling pink paint onto one of the walls, much faster than it looks.

  Happy colours.

  Happy children.

  Malin looks around the meeting room. Pale-yellow, fabric-textured wallpaper, a greying whiteboard on the short wall by the door. They were issued with new chairs back in the spring. There was a manufacturing fault on the old ones, and the new ones, of curved wood with black vinyl seats, are astonishingly even more uncomfortable than the old ones, and in the heat the vinyl sticks damply to the cloth covering your buttocks. The police station’s air conditioning can’t cope with providing a tolerable temperature.

  The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 10.25. The morning meeting is severely delayed today because of the girl in the Horticultural Society Park.

  How hot is it now?

  Thirty-five degrees outside, thirty in here?

  Opposite Malin sits a suffering Sven Sjöman. The patches of sweat under the arms of his brown checked shirt are now spreading towards his gut, which has grown even larger during the spring and early summer.

  Be careful, Sven.

  Heart attacks are common in the heat. But you’re sensible enough to move slowly. I know that much. If you have one defining feature, it’s that you’re sensible. You’re fifty-five years old, you’ve been in the police for thirty-three of them, and you’ve taught me all I know about this job.

  Almost, anyway.

  But most of all you’ve taught me to believe that I’m well-suited to detective work.

  You’re the most talented officer I’ve ever worked with, Malin.

  Do you realise what words like that mean, Sven?

  Perhaps you do, otherwise you wouldn’t say them.

  Zeke next to her. Pearls of sweat under his nose and on his brow. Her own scalp feels damp, like it does after she’s been to the gym.

  ‘Well, we make up the sum total of the Crime Department’s investigative unit this summer,’ Sven says. ‘So it’s entirely up to the three of us to make sense of last night’s events and work out what happened to the girl who says her name is Josefin Davidsson. Something else came in this morning. A girl by the name of Theresa Eckeved, fourteen years old, has been reported missing by her parents. I’ll take responsibility as lead investigating officer for both cases.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Zeke says. ‘There’s a theme developing: girls.’

  First nothing happens, Malin thinks, then nothing happens, and then everything happens all at once.

  ‘Missing,’ Malin says. ‘A fourteen-year-old? She’s probably just run away from home.’

  ‘Probably,’ Sven says. ‘Theresa Eckeved’s parents have told me what’s happened. But we’ll start with Josefin Davidsson.’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ Zeke says with a smile, and Malin can see that he has got some energy back in his over-heated, summer-weary, hard-working grey eyes. The whole thing is a bitter paradox, the way violence and suffering provide them with work and to that extent make them happy. Should I be feeling this happiness? Malin thinks.

  Gloom and happiness, she thinks.

  If I mix those two feelings up, what do I get? One of the nameless sensations that you are bound to experience as a police officer at some point. One of those emotions that makes you feel guilty, that makes you doubt the nature of humanity, not so much because of what you see and hear, but because of what it does to you.

  Rape.

  That gets you moving.

  Murder.

  And suddenly you’re bursting with energy.

  ‘Josefin Davidsson is currently being examined by doctors up at the University Hospital. They’ll work out whether she was raped, and they’ve appointed duty psychologists to give her support, and try to get her to talk.’

  ‘I checked,’ Malin said. ‘There are a hundred and twenty Davidssons in Linköping alone. We’ll have to put everyone we’ve got onto calling them all if she doesn’t talk and no one gets in touch.’

  ‘And we don’t know who called to say she was out in the park,’ Zeke says.

  ‘No. That could be tricky,’ Sven says. ‘The call probably came from a pay-as-you-go mobile. We all know how it is. It could have been a passer-by who doesn’t want anything to do with the police. Or someone involved in the attack. And none of Josefin Davidsson’s family has contacted us yet,’ he goes on. ‘Not a peep. We’ll have to organise door-to-door inquiries in the flats around the park. And when the doctors and psychologists have finished, you can try to question her at the hospital.’

  ‘Maybe she’s older than she looks,’ Malin says. ‘Allowed to be at home on her own when her parents are away.’

  ‘Which leads us to Theresa Eckeved,’ Sven says. ‘Her parents have been to Paris and Theresa wanted to stay at home in their villa out in Sturefors with her boyfriend.’

  Malin shudders when she hears the words ‘villa’ and ‘Sturefors’.

  Sturefors.

  The suburb of Linköping where she grew up.

  Thousands of images come flooding back to her. How her parents used to skirt around each other instead of walking side by side. How she used to run through the rooms, in the garden, always with a feeling of not knowing where she was, that reality was something utterly different to what she was experiencing, and that every corner, bush, word, inference concealed a secret. A longing to be grown up and the vain expectation that everything would look clearer then.

  Her girlhood bedroom. Posters of Duran D
uran.

  Nick Rhodes.

  See them walking hand in hand across the bridge at midnight.

  Girls on film

  .

  ‘But when they got home yesterday Theresa was gone, and when they called her boyfriend’s parents it turned out that he’d been at the family’s place in the country the whole time, without Theresa.’

  Markus.

  Tove.

  She may not exactly have lied at the start of their relationship, but she concealed the truth. The lengths she went to to try and find her own place for a love she thought would make me angry. She didn’t even trust me that much. Thought I’d try to make her see sense. And I did as well. Convinced myself I was protecting you, Tove, but I wasn’t: I was only trying to stop you making the same mistakes as me. Bloody hell, I was twenty when I got pregnant with you, Tove. I couldn’t bear to see you enter the same confused place as me, the same sick, dual feeling of love and of being backed into a corner. So I didn’t trust you, thinking of myself, and you hid your first love from me.

  What do you call that?

  Failed motherhood. Nothing more, nothing less.

  ‘Didn’t they speak to her on the phone while they were in Paris?’

  Zeke sounds tired again, sluggish hoarseness audible in his voice.

  They must be regretting their trip, Malin thinks.

  ‘Apparently not,’ Sven says. ‘The girl didn’t answer her mobile, and she didn’t answer the landline at home, but they didn’t think that was particularly odd.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘A bit stroppy, evidently. Often lost her mobile.’

  ‘And how long were they in Paris?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘They set off six days ago.’

  ‘So she could have been missing almost a week now?’

  ‘And the parents don’t have any idea where she could be?’

  ‘Not when I spoke to them.’

  Sven Sjöman adjusts his shirt before going on.

  ‘We’ll prioritise the girl in the park, but you’d still better start by going out to Sturefors. Talk to the parents, calm them down, refer to the statistics, tell them she’s likely to turn up soon.’

  Sven gives them the address.

  Only a block away from the house in which Malin grew up.

  The same district.

  The same early 1970s dream. Pools in some gardens. Generously proportioned houses with wood and brick façades, mature fruit trees in neat, precious lawns.

  She hasn’t been out there since her parents sold the house and bought the flat by the old Infection Park. They’re still in Tenerife, even though they usually come home for the summer. But, as her father explained over the phone: ‘This year we’re staying on. Your mum’s just started playing golf and is going on a course this summer. It’s cheaper to do it then than in high-season in the winter.’

  ‘I’ll water the plants, Dad. They’re in safe hands.’

  In actual fact there were very few plants still alive in her parents’ flat now, and it was far from certain that even those would survive the summer. But what could they expect? It’s been a year since they were last home. What are they really keeping the flat on for? Suddenly Malin wants to be there, longing for the chill she always feels there. It would actually be quite pleasant right now.

  ‘And the media,’ Malin says. ‘What are we going to do about them? We can probably expect them to leap on the cases of Theresa and Josefin like bloodthirsty gnats.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Sven says. ‘But we’ll lie low. So far we don’t know that a rape has been committed, and it could be a while before they find out about the report of the missing girl, couldn’t it? Maybe we’ll get twenty-four hours’ grace. And we might actually need the help of the public, maybe with both cases. We’ll have to see how things develop. Refer any inquiries to me. I’ll take care of the jackals while Karim is away.’

  ‘He’s bound to come in,’ Zeke says. ‘If things really heat up.’

  ‘No question,’ Malin says, then her phone rings.

  Her mobile is in front of her on the grey tabletop, and the signal coming from it is angry, intrusive, as if it wants to remind them that their conversation is nothing but theories, that it is time for a bit of harsh reality.

  Malin looks at the number on the display.

  Answers.

  Listens.

  ‘You’ll have to take that up with Sven Sjöman. He’s looking after press inquiries over the summer.’

  She passes the phone to Sven, raising her eyebrows with a sardonic smile.

  ‘It’s Daniel . . . Daniel Högfeldt from the Correspondent,’ she says. ‘He wants to know about the girl who was raped in the park and the missing girl from Sturefors, and if we suspect any connection.’

  6

  A connection?

  One girl is missing.

  One girl has been attacked, possibly raped, in the Horticultural Society Park. A long shot? Hardly. It’s not impossible. Time, and their work, will turn up any connections if they exist.

  But for now they’re keeping an open mind, as the cliché has it. For now they’re staring out at the tarmac of Brokindsleden through the windscreen, the cycle path alongside the main road empty and the heat snakelike, scentless. The air seems to be utterly still, shimmering, low in oxygen. The wheat-fields have been flattened by the heat, as if an immense hot fist had pressed the plants back into the ground and said to them: Don’t think that your lives are possible, not this summer, this year will be a year of burning.

  Zeke’s hands at the wheel of the Volvo.

  Steady.

  Like his son Martin’s hands on his hockey stick.

  At the end of the season Martin received an offer from the Toronto Maple Leafs, but he turned it down. His girlfriend is expecting a child and wants it to be born in Linköping. And the team’s main sponsors, Cloetta and Saab, joined forces and came up with a multi-million-kronor offer to persuade Martin to stay.

  ‘Now the lad’s rich,’ had been Zeke’s comment. ‘And he’ll get even richer if he moves to the States.’

  And it had sounded as if Zeke wanted Martin to move, as if he’d had it up to here with ice hockey and glory and praise and money.

  ‘Ice hockey. What a fucking useless game.’

  Malin had asked him what he thought about becoming a grandfather.

  ‘You must be excited, and proud.’ But Zeke had just muttered in reply. She had let the matter drop, once the baby was born he’d be beaming with joy, she was sure of that. The child would stroke his shaved head and say ‘prickle, prickle,’ and Zeke would love it.

  Sturefors.

  They are driving in silence, now approaching the edge of the small community.

  Malin closes her eyes.

  If the heat is scentless out there, what does the inside of the car smell like?

  Air freshener and Aramis aftershave.

  What do the gardens smell like now? What did they used to smell of?

  Freshly mown grass.

  A little girl’s feet moving over the blades of grass, drifting forward. Alone in the garden. It smells of Dad. Mum. I hear her shouting, following me through the house, complaining, and how Dad backs down and I want him to stand up for me, contradict her, let me know that I’m good enough.

  And how he stands there limply next to Mum, his mouth open as she shouts at me, how his own hesitant protests disappear back into his mouth as she stubbornly carries on.

  The wind in my hair as I cycle past the houses, along the streets on my way to school. My feet beneath me, feet pounding the jogging track.

  This is a competition, everything is a competition.

  And one night when you thought I was asleep, when I was lying outside your door, I remember it now, only now, in this air-conditioned car, I remember what you said, you said: She must never find out. This must stay a secret.

  Mum’s sharp voice. The tone of someone who has never found her place in the world.

  Dad, what is it that I must never know?r />
  The boys’ football matches in the pitch behind the red-painted school-building. The red shirts of the home team.

  Bodies, warm. The floodlights on. Bankeberg SK, Ljungsbro IF, LFF, Saab. All the teams, the boys, the girls alongside, under the covers down in the cellar, what if someone comes?

  Lilac hedges. Wooden fences, stained green. Families trying to be families. Children who are children. Who go swimming, and who know that they will eventually follow in their parents’ footsteps.

  Sturefors.

  Low blocks of flats and villas situated close to the Stångån River. Most of them built in the late sixties and seventies. Some built by the families themselves, by craftsmen planning their own homes, others bought by engineers, teachers, civil servants.

  No doctors out here then.

  But there must be now.

  Doctors and engineers behind the tall, yellowing hedges, behind the fences, behind the yellow and white bricks, the red-painted wooden façades.

  Uncut lawns. Trees that are starting to bear fruit, and by every house little flowerbeds with plants that have either withered completely or are shrieking for water. Abandoning the city for the summer is an obvious choice for most people in Sturefors. Not so much for the thousands of immigrants who live in Ekholmen, the mass housing project they passed on the way out here.

  ‘You can turn off here,’ Malin says. ‘It’s the next road down.’

  ‘So you know this place?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Zeke takes his eyes off the road for an instant, ignoring the sign on a white brick wall warning of children playing.

  The speedometer shows thirty-five, five above the speed limit.

  ‘How come?’

  Not even my closest colleague knows this about me, Malin thinks. And he doesn’t need to know either.

  I’ve no intention of saying that I grew up in a neighbouring street, that I lived here from the time I came home from Linköping maternity unit until I left home, in this well-to-do but increasingly insular Sturefors. I have no intention of talking about Stefan Ekdahl, and what we did in Mum and Dad’s bed four months to the day after my thirteenth birthday. I have no intention of explaining how everything can be fine but sad at the same time. And do you know, Zeke, I have no idea how that happens, how that can be the case. And I have even less idea of why it might happen in the first place.