Summertime Death mf-2

by Mons Kallentoft

  Their eyes are full of tears.

  And they’re crying for me, Malin.

  You can do so much, Malin.

  You can make their tears stop. Or at least take a different path.

  Just take a brief moment to catch your breath before pressing on.

  Tove is holding her dad’s hand, the pressure in her ears is giving her a headache as, metre by metre, the plane descends towards the runway, the lights of the houses in the forests outside the windows are growing, a strip of brightness is still lingering on the horizon and Tove wonders if the world is disappearing over there, but knows that it carries on for an eternity, that life on this planet is a vast cyclical motion, no matter what anyone might say.

  Mum.

  I’ve missed her.

  A vibration in the plane as the wheels touch the tarmac. Lights from the hangars.

  Dad squeezing my hand.

  I wonder if she brought Markus?

  I haven’t really missed him much. What does that mean?

  ‘Back on Swedish soil!’ Dad says, and he looks happy. ‘Now to see if your mum’s made it on time, or if she’s still at work.’

  Their bags.

  Janne hates this part of travelling.

  But there they are. Almost the first ones to appear, nothing got held up in the transfer between Heathrow and Stansted.

  Their baggage.

  Everything as it should be.

  ‘Come on, Tove.’

  It’s nice to come home.

  Malin stares at the automatic doors.

  Taps her sandal-clad feet on the white stone floor, around her she can see happy people, expectant, focused.

  She runs her hands over her dress, pushes her hair behind her ears, feels that she needs to go to the toilet but doesn’t want to go off now, the plane landed a while back and they should be here.

  Now.

  And the door opens once more.

  There.

  There they are, and she goes towards them, running, and she can see that they’re tired, but when Tove catches sight of her the tiredness disappears and Tove runs towards her and Malin runs and the air lifts and their bodies meet.

  Hands, arms around each other.

  Malin picks her daughter up.

  How much do you weigh now?

  Three thousand, one hundred and forty-three grams when you emerged from me.

  And now?

  Malin looks at Janne.

  He’s standing behind the luggage trolley, seems unsure of what to do now. Malin puts Tove down, beckons him over and then they stand in the arrivals hall, feeling a warmth warmer and more genuine than any summer could ever conjure up.

  PART THREE

  You need to come, before now stops

  On the way towards the final room

  I haven’t finished yet.

  I know what needs to happen now.

  Nothing can stop this summer from burning, nothing can stop our love from coming back.

  The world, our world, will be pure and free and we shall whisper the mute snakes’ words in each other’s ears, feel how they make us big, invincible.

  He must disappear, be wiped out, and you will dare to come back again.

  Everything will be white. Burning white, and innocent.

  No one will be allowed to stop me.

  Claws scratching storeroom shelves, spiders’ legs moving over your face.

  My summer angels.

  They can rest now, and soon they’ll have the company and love of someone who shares their history. And the very same love that I shall also receive.

  I shall find another girl. She will be you.

  Everything will be put right. It won’t hurt. Because soon there will be no pain any more.

  47

  Tove safely returned.

  She’s sleeping under a freshly laundered white sheet in her bedroom and Malin thinks that it’s as if she’s never been away, as if Indonesia and Bali and bombers and undercurrents and the other side of the world have stopped existing, even as a possibility.

  A mute drive from Nyköping, Tove sleeping in the back seat, she and Janne united in an eternal wordlessness, a silence that never becomes uncomfortable, but which feels more lonely that real loneliness.

  Intermittent words.

  ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Are the forest fires under control?’

  ‘It’s starting to resemble a firestorm in places.’

  Janne came upstairs with them, carrying Tove’s large green Samsonite case, Malin offered him tea and to her surprise he accepted, said he could ring for a taxi home whenever he felt like it.

  Tove had dropped off before the water had boiled and they drank their tea in the kitchen, as the sound of a man and woman arguing rose from the street, and once they had fallen silent the only sound was the ticking of the Ikea clock.

  Just gone half past three now.

  ‘We were never good at that,’ Janne says as he puts his empty mug on the draining board.

  ‘Good at what?’

  Malin is standing as close as she dares, doesn’t want to scare him off.

  ‘At arguing.’

  Malin can feel anger rising up inside her, but suppresses the pointless emotion and manages to locate her calm, her longing again.

  ‘Sometimes it feels like we never had time to really get started.’

  ‘Maybe we didn’t.’

  ‘It’s probably good to do a bit of shouting every now and then.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  Then Malin tells him about the case she’s working on, that she feels like heaven or earth has opened up and released a desperate evil on the city, and that she doesn’t know how to stop it.

  ‘Just like the fires,’ Janne says. ‘It seems like they don’t know how to get to grips with the flames.’

  Then they stand silently in the kitchen for a while before Janne moves out into the hall.

  ‘Do you mind if I call for a taxi?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  Janne picks up the receiver.

  Malin goes towards him in the hall, and as he keys in the number of the taxi company she says: ‘You can stay here.’

  Janne stops.

  ‘I prefer my own bed to your sofa, Malin.’

  ‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

  ‘You know it wouldn’t work, Malin.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it work? Just go into the bedroom and lie down, it’s no harder than that.’

  ‘It’s stupid, Malin, what good would come of it? We’re all done with . . .’

  Malin puts one index finger over his lips and his breath is warm against her skin.

  Close to him now.

  ‘Shush, don’t say anything else. Can’t we just let tonight be tonight?’

  Janne looks at her, and she takes his hand and leads him into the bedroom and he follows her without any further hesitation.

  Hard or soft.

  Punishment or reward.

  That’s what physical love can be.

  Janne’s chest against hers, one of her legs wrapped around his body and it was so long ago now, but she remembers exactly how his cock feels inside her, how it takes her over and how her body’s independent recognition makes her calm and feverish, knowing exactly how to move to be filled in a way that no one else fills her.

  Drops of liquid merging into one.

  Is that you or me breathing?

  She shuts her eyes, then opens them and sees that Janne’s eyes are shut, as if they’re both trying to make their bodies believe that if they don’t look at each other, then this isn’t happening.

  And they’re young again, far too young again, and a thin piece of rubber breaks and you are formed, Tove. Malin keeps her eyes on Janne, the lower half of her body is squirming, heating up with a pain that’s more pleasant than anything else she knows.

  Awareness catches up with your body over the years
.

  The distance between feelings and thoughts of feelings disappears.

  She lies back.

  Soundlessly and heavy he follows her and her hands search his back, every square centimetre of skin a memory.

  She lets go.

  Becomes a woken child sleeping on its back with its arms above its head.

  Come back to me now.

  This is love.

  Promise not to disappear again.

  There you lie, dear Malin.

  In the dawn light I see your lips twitch, you’re dreaming, aren’t you?

  I’ve just pulled the sheet up over your body.

  We won’t speak about this tomorrow, or any other day. We’ll pretend it never happened.

  Goodbye, Malin.

  Janne leaves the flat, but first he takes Malin’s car keys from the chest of drawers in the hall. Goes down to the street.

  He opens the boot, takes out his case. Goes back upstairs and puts the keys back where he found them.

  The dawn is warm, and the grey stone of the church seems to vibrate in the thin blue light of the rising sun.

  A faint smell of smoke, hardly noticeable even to his trained nose.

  He heads towards the station. Pulling his case behind him.

  At the station he changes into his protective clothing and goes with the first engine up to the forest, to the fire, heading straight into the heat and fighting the inferno.

  Daniel Högfeldt happened to see Janne, Malin’s ex-husband, come out of the door of the building where she lives.

  A particular rhythm in his walk.

  Daniel was on his way to the newsroom, early. He’d woken up in the middle of the night and been unable to get back to sleep.

  Now he’s sitting at his desk and thinking about the rhythm in Janne’s movements, the way they exuded a softness and, oddly enough, love.

  I can never compete with that, Daniel thinks, opening a new document on his computer and tossing the heap of articles linked by the word ‘rape’ into the waste-paper basket.

  Can’t be bothered to do anything with them.

  Can’t be bothered even to sit here.

  I have to, Daniel thinks, fumbling his way back to feeling bothered, finding it again.

  And being bothered is not going to happen if he concentrates on the history of violent sexual assaults in Linköping. Someone else can do that. Maybe you, Malin?

  Last night’s dream.

  A boy by her bed crying Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, help me breathe.

  She cried back.

  Can’t you breathe?

  The boy replied.

  No, help me, Mummy.

  I’m not your mummy.

  You are my mummy. Aren’t you?

  No.

  Help me breathe.

  Why?

  Because I’m your brother.

  Can’t you breathe?

  No. You have to show me how.

  ‘It’s so hot. Has it been like this all the time?’

  Tove is drooping over a bowl of soured milk and cornflakes at the breakfast table. Malin is over by the sink, drinking her third mug of coffee, getting ready to force herself to eat a sandwich.

  ‘It’s been horribly hot, Tove. And they just said on television that it’s going to carry on like this.’

  ‘Great. Then I can go swimming.’

  ‘With Markus?’

  ‘With him, or a friend.’

  ‘You have to tell me who you’re going swimming with.’

  ‘Can’t I go swimming with who I want?’

  ‘Read the paper and you’ll see why I want to know what you’re doing.’

  Tove leafs through the Correspondent. They have several pages on the murders.

  ‘Police Silent’, says one headline.

  ‘Nasty,’ Tove says. She doesn’t ask whether her mum is working on the case, knows that she must be. ‘Do you think it’s the bloke you’ve got locked up?’

  ‘This one’s really nasty, Tove,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve got one man locked up. But you have to be careful. Don’t go out alone. And let me know where you are.’

  ‘You mean in the evenings?’

  ‘All the time, Tove. I don’t even know if the person we’re trying to catch makes any distinction between day and night.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit over the top?’

  ‘Don’t argue. If there’s one thing I know more about than you, it’s this.’

  Malin can hear how disagreeable she sounds, the collected aggression of a debilitatingly hot summer, and she sees the look of surprise, fear and then sorrow on Tove’s face.

  ‘Sorry, Tove, I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘I don’t give a damn what you meant, Mum.’

  48

  They’re on their way past Tjällmo, heading towards Finspång, driving past the fringes of the fires.

  It is now half past nine. They skipped the morning meeting today. They can all meet up later instead.

  She’s thinking about Janne.

  Knows that he’s already in there, in the smoke, working and trying to fight the flames, to stop the fire spreading even further.

  ‘He’s there already, isn’t he?’

  Zeke is holding onto the wheel of the Volvo with one hand, his eyes fixed firmly on the road as they pass a fire engine.

  ‘Couldn’t wait another second.’

  ‘You’re so similar, Malin, you know that?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Loads of ways. But I suppose I mean the way you treat your work. You both love your work beyond reason, it’s your way of escaping from reality.’

  ‘Zeke. I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that last bit. How’s Martin’s pre-season training going?’

  ‘Great, I expect. He loves circuit training.’

  ‘Any more offers from the States yet?’

  ‘Apparently his agent is talking to a number of clubs. I daresay it’ll all work out once the baby’s here.’

  Martin was picked for the national team for the first time back in May for the World Championships. Zeke travelled to Prague to see one of the matches, forced to go by his wife. Malin knows he hates flying almost as much as he hates ice hockey.

  ‘He’s going to be seriously rich, then,’ Malin says.

  ‘Yes, for hitting a damn puck and sliding about the ice on a pair of skates.’

  ‘For entertaining the rest of us, Zeke,’ Malin says, and considers her dreams for Tove: becoming a teacher or a lawyer, one of the nice, straightforward professions that all parents dream of for their children. Or an author, seeing as she reads like a maniac and writes essays for school that astonish her teachers.

  ‘Hockey’s for morons,’ Zeke says. ‘That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on him.’

  ‘The lad can do what he likes, but there’s no way I’m ever going to love that game.’

  The road forces its way through the forest.

  The world around them is deserted, all the animals have long since fled the flames. Fifty minutes later they reach Finspång.

  Home to the De Geer industrial empire.

  A town built up around the production of cannons.

  Neglected.

  But a good place to raise children. And a good place to hide yourself away.

  Their satnav leads them to the right place.

  The street where Sture Folkman lives is an obscure cul-de-sac just behind a run of shops right in the centre of town, and number twelve is a three-storey block of flats. The ground-floor shop is occupied by the National Federation of Disabled Persons.

  They park.

  Take it for granted that the old man is home.

  The door to the flats isn’t locked, Finspång so small that they don’t need coded locks, people free to come and go as they please all day long.

  They read his name on the grey-green list of names in movable white lettering, he lives on the third floor.

  ‘That’s the bastard,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Take
it easy now,’ Malin says. ‘He’s an old man.’

  ‘OK, so he’s old. But some crimes never go away, and can never be forgiven.’

  ‘Get lost,’ says a hoarse voice through the letterbox, and it contains a meanness, a malice that is evident in a way that Malin has never experienced before, and the pink walls of the stairwell seem to turn blood-red and collapse in on them as they stand there.

  ‘I don’t want anything. Get lost.’

  ‘We’re not selling anything. We’re from the Linköping Police, and we’d like to talk to you. Open the door.’

  ‘Get lost.’

  ‘Open up. Now. Or I’ll break the door in,’ and the man inside seems to hear that Zeke is serious and the door is unlocked and opened.

  A tall, thin man with a bent back, his body frozen by what looks like Parkinson’s.

  You didn’t do it, Malin thinks, but then they never really thought he had.

  A long nose that distracts attention from a weak chin, and Sture Folkman stares right at them, his eyes grey and cold.

  Cold as the tundra.

  Cold as the Arctic.

  Like a world without light, that’s how cold your eyes are.

  Black gabardine trousers. A white nylon shirt and a grey cardigan in spite of the heat.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’

  Malin looks at his hands.

  Long, white, bloodless fingers dangling towards the rag-rugs in the hall, tentacles ready to feel their way up, in.

  Green plush sofas.

  Black and white photographs of family farms long since sold off.

  Heavy red velvet curtains shutting out all the light. A bookcase with books about chemistry, and a complete set of the Duden encyclopaedia in German.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

  Sture Folkman’s response when they explained why they were there.

  But Malin and Zeke still went into the living room, sitting down in a couple of armchairs, waiting.

  Sture Folkman hesitated in the hall.

  They heard him moving around in the kitchen, scrupulously clean, Malin noticed that as they went past, old-fashioned knives with Bakelite handles in a block on the draining board.