Summertime Death mf-2

by Mons Kallentoft

‘They were pressurising me and I wanted to give them something, and stupidly that was what came out. But on the other hand: maybe something will come of all this fuss.’

  Sven Sjöman comes over to them.

  He can’t suppress his smile when he sees the screen.

  ‘We could issue a retraction?’ he says.

  ‘No damn retractions,’ Karim says. ‘Just let it go.’

  Karim’s skill at manipulating the media has always impressed Malin in the past, his ability to find just the right place under the spotlight.

  But this . . .

  What a ridiculous blunder.

  It makes us look like something from the Stone Age.

  Like the riot squad hitting gays over the head. I think you’re going to, you think I’m going to, I believe you’re going to do it, you do it, then I do it too . . .

  The things we ruin with our words. Prejudices laid bare, confirming and empowering evil.

  This heat is making all our brains overheat, Malin thinks as she walks back to her desk. Our brains are boiling so hard that they don’t work any more.

  She looks at Karim from a distance.

  His trim frame, clad in his linen suit, huddled on his office chair, radiating a new sort of tiredness that she’s never seen before, as if he’s fed up with this whole media game, with the ridiculous little exchanges of information and opinion, as if he’s just longing for clarity, for black and white.

  Good luck, Karim, Malin thinks. It’s millions of years since the world was black and white, now it consists of millions of colours, most of them hideous and scary, but many of them heart-breakingly beautiful, reasons to feel gratitude for every new day on the planet.

  Then her phone rings.

  ‘Fors.’

  ‘This is Viktoria Solhage. I’ve just seen on the internet. You can imagine how disappointed I am. Can’t you?’

  ‘Viktoria. I . . .’

  ‘There’s already more than enough prejudice, Malin Fors. I trusted you.’

  ‘Viktoria . . .’

  Click.

  Silence. Nothing more.

  Just the thought that everything was going to hell.

  32

  The air conditioning doesn’t reach all the way down here, not even the ventilation seems to be working and the small windows out onto the yard may be open but the air they’re letting in is so hot that it doesn’t seem to contain any oxygen.

  The gym in the basement of the police station.

  One of Malin’s favourite places in the world.

  Has to come down in spite of the heat.

  Has to come down, even on a day like today when the gym is reminiscent of one of the outer circles of hell, and the freshly painted yellow walls are turning fiery orange because the salt of her sweat is clouding her sight.

  Ten minutes on the treadmill just now.

  Her white vest soaked through.

  She thought she was going to faint.

  Thinks about Nathalie Falck. Wants to talk to her again, but what could she say that wasn’t said last time? Time must be allowed to do its work. Time they don’t have.

  One dumbbell in each hand, fifteen kilos, up and down, up and down, fifteen reps, then rest.

  The muscles in her upper arms are long and sinuous and stronger than they look.

  I’m so exhausted in this heat that I feel like throwing up, almost. She’s done it before, thrown up in the vomit-green bin by the door of the gym.

  Usually alone down here.

  Most of the others use gyms down in the city.

  But Malin likes the sense of being underground. Sometimes Johan Jakobsson keeps her company when he has time between school-runs and feeling guilty about anything and everything. She can see how family life is draining him, how he’s starting to get wrinkles in his once so boyishly smooth forehead.

  Tove.

  I’m thirty-four.

  I wouldn’t mind, I ought to have more wrinkles in my forehead. Even if I don’t like the ones I’ve got.

  Shit.

  I’m going to exercise away all the crap that this summer has brought with it.

  Tove.

  Home soon.

  Janne. How can I miss you so, when it’s more than ten years since we last lived together?

  I see you from a distance.

  Your shortcomings pale, have paled over the years, haven’t they? Away from each other, we’ve grown together. Can love work like that?

  Her lie about not being able to drive them to the airport. Skavsta, Ryanair to London, then a direct flight to Bali with some British charter airline.

  Their farewell in the hall back home in the flat twelve days ago is like a scene in a film now, soundless, scentless. She and Janne reserved towards each other, all three of them oddly quiet, as if years of longing and loss suddenly became apparent there in the hall and the looming distance between them.

  What could have been.

  She hugged and kissed Tove, Janne, then the usual farewell phrases, the feeling that new ones were called for, a sort that people had never said before.

  What do we do now?

  That’s what she thought, and she noticed Janne’s clumsiness when he opened his mouth, saying: ‘You should have come too.’

  And at that moment she wanted to hit him, jump on him and beat the shit out of him, while at the same time wanting to sit on an aeroplane resting her head on his shoulder, Tove asleep by her side, the two of them awake in a comforting, whispering simplicity.

  But instead she said: ‘Janne, for God’s sake. You know that’s impossible,’ and she could feel that she had said, whispered, screamed those words a thousand times before, that they had become their mutual invocation, a sort of truth simply because they had been spoken and thought enough times, and Tove shouldn’t have to hear this tired crap.

  Tove horribly aware beside Janne, horribly conscious of the subtexts.

  What are we doing to you, darling child?

  They had left the flat, Janne’s friend Pecka beeping on the horn impatiently down in the street. An agitated farewell. A bad omen.

  And she had gone straight to bed.

  No. She had gone straight to Daniel Högfeldt’s flat.

  Let him hold her tight against the chrome frame of his Mio bed.

  Then he had banged the sorrow out of her.

  And it was nice.

  Malin walks past the main hospital building on her way out of the police station.

  She spent a long time in the gym, then talked to Ebba in reception for half an hour, about the heat and teenage daughters, Ebba has twins, sixteen years old and a real handful.

  Then Malin had spent hours sitting at her desk, thinking, still sweating, catching up on her paperwork, reading the Immigration Agency file on Slavenca Visnic, which had been emailed to her by the young uniform Zeke had given the job to earlier in the day.

  That was quick, she had thought when she saw the email in her inbox. And then she had read the file on the screen, how Slavenca Visnic arrived in Sweden from Bosnia in 1994, after her husband and two children, four and six years old, were burned alive when their house in Sarajevo was hit by incendiary grenades, how she had been captured by Serbian troops when she tried to escape the inferno of the city. How they raped her for two weeks, how day and night lost all meaning, how she managed to escape, but refused to say how, wandering through the forests and along the roads at night until she reached Dubrovnik, where she had somehow managed to make her way to Italy, and had finally shown up in Ystad in the far south of Sweden.

  Pregnant.

  Abortion, eighth week, carried out in Norrköping.

  Malin had noticed at once that the timeline didn’t fit.

  The dates when she must have been raped by the Serbs, the date of the abortion.

  At least twenty-four weeks between them.

  Something alive.

  Something killed.

  So that something else can live.

  A picture of Slavenca Visnic, long dark hair, sha
rp features, tired and angry eyes. But determined.

  Is it you? Malin had thought then. Is it you? She thinks now, as she looks up at the windows of the hospital, points of light against the growing darkness of the evening sky.

  She carries on.

  Heavy steps.

  Down towards the Horticultural Society Park, towards the trees of the park, and their darkness.

  Malin walks along the path leading down to the summerhouse where Josefin Davidsson was found naked and disorientated, moving slowly, undressing herself in her thoughts and trying to capture what might have happened.

  You want young girls. You scrub them clean. What do you want from the girls? Their innocence? Why one dead, one alive? Did she run away from you? Josefin? The wounds you inflict are clean, and, on Theresa, even neatly trimmed. You want things to be as good as possible, is that it?

  Fear and loneliness.

  I don’t want to be here.

  Swings, not moving.

  The sound of the city in slow motion, sleepy. The smell of the forest fires still noticeable, but weaker tonight, the wind in the other direction.

  Something blue.

  Then a cracking sound from up in the trees, is there someone there? Is someone watching me? A bird of prey, perhaps?

  Malin turns around, a black shadow is moving rapidly towards her.

  What the hell?

  What the hell’s happening?

  Run away.

  It’s moving.

  I’m floating, shouting in your ear, but you hear nothing.

  I disappear.

  Don’t want to see hear know about this.

  But we’ll soon meet again.

  If you don’t listen to me, we’ll soon meet again.

  Sofia Fredén was reluctant to accept the job of dishwasher at Frimis, the old freemasons’ hotel and club, didn’t want to spend the summer working. But it was absurdly well paid, and easy to get to by train from Mjölby, the station just a stone’s throw from the hotel.

  Now she’s tired after a long shift in the heat and humidity.

  And she walks without thinking, with her brain somehow shut off, through the very darkest part of the Railway Park down towards the station, the lights of the city are close, nothing can happen to her here and in her ears she has the earplugs of her iPod, music downloaded from the net, Jens Lekman’s bombastic music, and it makes her feel slightly less tired.

  She walks past the grove of rowan bushes and maples and a large oak tree.

  Singing along.

  And Sofia Fredén doesn’t hear something start to move in the bushes behind her, doesn’t hear something approaching, just feels the force of an arm being wrapped around her from behind, and a second later she’s lying between four tall rowan bushes, on shitty, urine-stinking ground, deep within the darkness of the city, trying to save her own life.

  The deer vanishes. When the creature noticed Malin it turned and ran off towards the stage over by the Hotel Ekoxen.

  Malin’s heart is still pounding from the adrenalin.

  She goes inside the summerhouse. Sits down on one of the wooden benches, trying to piece together the fragments of the case she’s carrying inside her.

  People, places.

  Except they form nothing but a grey, shapeless mass, and a shiver of anxiety runs through her body, a shimmering whiteness that takes root deep in her diaphragm.

  It’s a good sign for Linköping that deer dare to venture so close to the centre.

  But something more than just deer is in motion, they’re not alone tonight.

  There are two of us now, Malin.

  But Sofia Fredén doesn’t yet know about her predicament.

  I’ll try to help her as best I can.

  But I’m afraid my fear means that I can scarcely look after myself.

  Please, Malin, kill off my anxieties. That’s one of the things that we human beings are supposed to do for each other.

  I know that now, as I drift up here.

  33

  Tuesday, 20 July

  The clock on the Tekniska Verken building says 05.42.

  Already bloody light.

  The black bicycle is weaving back and forth over the tarmac, the quickest route from the villa out in Stångebro is past the Cloetta Centre, through the tunnel under the railway and up through the Railway Park.

  Hungover.

  But I’m Superman, thinks Patrik Karlsson, as he pedals on towards the tunnel.

  The party last night. They had a barbecue in his garden, his mum and dad away in the country, and now he’s on his way to his summer job at Frimis as a breakfast waiter.

  Boiling eggs.

  Laying tables.

  Don’t put out any little Mazarin tarts if there are German tourists staying in the hotel. They take about a hundred each.

  It’s hotter in the tunnel, but it only takes a few seconds.

  Up past the station building.

  The Railway Park.

  Buildings from the turn of the last century all around, showy apartments, ten large rooms, doctors’ homes, he knows because he had a girlfriend there once, a nice doctor’s daughter called Cornelina.

  What a fucking name!

  Wonder if Sofia’s working the dishwasher today.

  Past the bushes. And those trees that his mum always thinks are so beautiful.

  But.

  In the small clearing between the trees, in the dim light, there’s something there. There shouldn’t be anything there.

  Patrik Karlsson stops.

  Lays the bike down on the grass.

  He feels sick from the wine box last night. But sicker still from what he sees.

  His body lurches as he approaches.

  There’s a body in there, in the clearing.

  Turn around.

  Can’t.

  The body is naked, white, looks almost scrubbed, despite the blood from the wounds.

  The face.

  The eyes, wide-open. Grey blue white, far from alive.

  Sofia.

  From the dishwasher.

  She won’t be working the dishwasher today, Patrik Karlsson thinks, before he lets out a stifled, involuntary scream.

  ‘It’s happened again.’

  Zeke’s voice more tired than Malin has ever heard it before. Tired in a new way, not despairing but almost indifferent, and that scares Malin even more.

  She’s seen that indifference in some older officers, and prays that neither she nor Zeke ends up like that, but not Zeke, never Zeke; that somehow innate sense of engagement in his hard, green eyes could never fade. Could it?

  And he says it again.

  And Malin, sitting up naked in bed on a sheet wet with sweat doesn’t want to absorb the words, and hopes they’ve found a living girl disorientated in a park, or anywhere, but she can hear from Zeke’s voice that this isn’t the case.

  She was practically dragged from her dreamless sleep by the ringing of the phone.

  It’s happened again.

  They found Josefin on Thursday, Theresa on Sunday, and now, two days later, it’s time for another girl. Dead?

  ‘How bad?’

  ‘As bad as it could be.’

  Malin clenches the fist that isn’t holding the phone.

  ‘This is fucking well not going to happen again.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ Zeke says. ‘It’s time we got this bastard now.’

  It’s only two hundred metres from Malin’s flat to the latest crime scene.

  She makes her way there along the shady side of St Larsgatan. Dragging her feet, doesn’t want to see what she knows she’s going to see.

  No smell of smoke, the wind must be coming from a different direction again today. But Malin can still sense it somehow, the smoke, she can detect its resonance, a new tone settling over the city.

  The heat.

  The implacability of this summer.

  Fear.

  The awareness that something malevolent is on the loose.

  Stay
indoors, girls. Don’t go out. Go in groups, only in the light, be on your guard, cheat death, it could be anywhere, anywhere at all.

  Violence like a suffocating arm around Linköping, this city of knowledge, a snake twisting around its proud industries, IT companies, university and hospitals, around its inhabitants, each one more remarkable yet also more scared than the last.

  Fear is a parasite, expressing itself in violence, which will slowly, slowly consume the city’s joy in life. Unless, Malin thinks, we put a stop to this now.

  She walks past the Correspondent’s offices on St Larsgatan.

  Daniel almost certainly down in the Railway Park already.

  Frimis.

  Zeke said that both the victim and the lad who found her had summer jobs there.

  The hotel’s façade like a faded medieval castle. And in there was where those ridiculous freemasons held their meetings. Karim is a member. And Zeke’s son, Martin, has given a talk to the old men about what it’s like being a top sports star.

  Malin wants to think about anything at all apart from the sight that greets her when she turns the corner down towards the park: two patrol cars, uniformed police officers, cordons, journalists and photographers.

  Low-growing bushes in tight clusters around the gravel paths.

  An attractive grove of what, rhododendrons?

  No, rowan bushes, maples, an oak.

  Karin Johannison inside the grove.

  Malin can just make out the red and orange flowers of a lovely dress that she’s seen Karin wear before.

  Karin is crouched over the body.

  ‘Her name’s Sofia Fredén.’

  Malin can hear the tiredness even in Karin’s voice. Not indifferent or despairing, more like sympathetic and involved, in a way that she’s never heard Karin before.

  ‘Another one,’ Karin says as she stands up and looks at Malin, her eyes full of sympathy as well, but also anger.

  ‘Another one,’ she repeats.

  And Malin nods, looks down at the body, its eyes closed, and the scrubbed skin is glassy, almost transparent white, with deep gashes across the chest, neat in spite of the blood, but not the same as the injuries to Theresa or Josefin. The blood that’s poured from the wounds makes the body look oddly peaceful; the contrast between the white skin and the red has that effect.