Summertime Death mf-2

by Mons Kallentoft

  A bloody big camp up in Norrland.

  A suicidal cliff of desire.

  Chemical castration.

  Real castration.

  Electronic surveillance.

  It’s early in the morning and Per Sundsten can’t work out what he thinks as he and Waldemar Ekenberg follow a still sleepy Arto Sovalaski through the hall of his red wooden cottage on the outskirts of Linghem, a dormitory suburb just to the east of Linköping. They just passed through a neatly tended garden, parched like everything green, with gooseberry bushes in close formation along the gravel path leading to the house.

  ‘I know why you’re here. And on a Saturday and all. Shouldn’t you be having a day off?’

  ‘At least we didn’t have to have a morning meeting,’ Per says, watching Arto Sovalaski shuffle in front of them. Possibly the most exhausted man in the world, his face wrecked from drink and smoking, with no trace at all of any dreams for the future.

  The stench of sweat in the house.

  ‘We shouldn’t be working,’ Per goes on, ‘but right now Linköping has been visited by the big bad.’

  Arto Sovalaski, the last name on the list of known sex offenders in their district.

  His torso covered by a stained yellow T-shirt with a picture of a digger on the front.

  ‘Do you work?’

  Waldemar’s question as they enter the living room and Arto Sovalaski has settled onto the yellow and brown patterned sofa, the only piece of furniture in the room. Bottles and overflowing ashtrays all over the wooden floor.

  ‘No, I got an early pension.’

  Well, thinks Per, I daresay no one really wants to have you around. Four rapes in four months ten years ago in different places, Växjö, Karlstad, Örebro, and one here in Linköping. Since then, nothing.

  ‘So you know why we’re here?’

  ‘Yes, it’s happened before when there’s been some sex-related crime in the city. Then you come running. But you can clear off again, because I was away when it happened, visiting friends over on Öland. Call them.’

  Waldemar goes closer.

  Not again, Per thinks.

  But Waldemar backs down this time.

  ‘Have you got the number for your friends?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Ten minutes later they’re sitting in the car on the way back in to the city, Arto Sovalaski’s alibi confirmed by a drunk Finn on the other side of the Kalmar Sound.

  ‘Well, that’s that line of inquiry exhausted,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says. ‘Let’s get back to the station and put the squeeze on Suliman one last time before he gets out.’

  ‘They let him go last night,’ Per says.

  ‘Did they, now?’ Waldemar says. ‘Did they, now?’

  A bit of a lie-in.

  They indulged themselves seeing as it’s Saturday, and it’s nine o’clock when Malin goes downstairs to meet Zeke

  The second Saturday of this case. Just over a week has passed since the eruption. But it feels like several years, as if they’re dealing with a drawn-out plague.

  The heat hasn’t improved. It may even be a bit worse.

  The grey stone façade of the church is quivering in the air, fading into a sickly yellow nuance, and the quiver in the air means that Malin can’t make out the inscription.

  Zeke, where are you?

  He called ten minutes ago as he was passing Berga, so he should be here by now.

  Tove still asleep up in the flat.

  Malin walks down the street, taking a look in the windows of the St Lars gallery, at the colourful paintings by artists like Madeleine Pyk and Lasse Åberg. She doesn’t know much about art, but what she sees hanging on the walls of the gallery makes her feel ill.

  Vera Folkman.

  How broken is she?

  Damaged, damaged goods. We should put in a claim for the damage.

  Like that couple in the US who adopted a little girl from Ukraine who turned out to have learning difficulties. The story goes that they sent her back in a FedEx box and that she froze to death en route, in a plane ten thousand metres above the ground.

  A car horn.

  Zeke.

  The next minute she’s sitting in the air-conditioned cool of the car. She breathes out. Doesn’t notice the white van parked at the top of Ågatan.

  Tove stretches out in bed, her mum’s bed, it’s still nice to sleep there sometimes.

  She’s meeting Markus later, and today she’s going to tell him, it’s over, that she still likes him, just not like that, and that they can still be friends.

  But he won’t want that.

  She sits up.

  Just from the light creeping through the gaps in the Venetian blinds she can tell this is likely to be the hottest day since she got home from Bali.

  They ring the bell of Vera Folkman’s flat on Sturegatan. She lives on the first floor, but there’s no answer, the whole flat gives a strangely abandoned impression from the outside.

  ‘Gone, baby, gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Damn, it’s hot already. Hotter by the second.’

  The longer they stand outside the flat, the more they become aware of a smell coming from inside.

  ‘It smells of animal crap,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Maybe she keeps cats in there?’

  ‘Well, whatever it is, it stinks.’

  ‘Maybe she’s in Australia,’ Malin says, turning on her heel and starting to go back downstairs. ‘She could have left her pets inside.’

  ‘It’s probably cooler there than it is here, even in Alice Springs,’ Zeke says.

  ‘That’s supposed to be the hottest place in the world.’

  ‘Wrong. Linköping’s the hottest place in the world.’

  Tove sitting firmly on her bicycle.

  Her pink top tight against her body.

  The world sleepy and yellow through her sunglasses.

  She pedals past Tinnis, but instead of heading up Ramshällsbacken she turns off towards the hospital, heading back down towards the Hotel Ekoxen. She has a funny feeling that someone’s following her, that someone’s watching her, trying to get closer. But she carries on pedalling, getting slightly out of breath, and she thinks it must be her nerves ahead of her conversation with Markus that are making her twitchy.

  She’d felt it ever since she got her bike from the stand down by the church.

  But where were the eyes?

  She looked around, nothing suspicious, nothing different, just fewer people in this hot, summertime empty city.

  And now she is coasting down towards the hotel, and turns around, and isn’t that the same van that was parked outside the flat? At home? The one that drove past her outside Markus’s yesterday?

  Scared now.

  And she stops at the hotel.

  Opens the gate leading to the airy, yellowing Horticultural Society Park.

  That was where they found one of the girls.

  But at least the van can’t follow me in there.

  A dark figure behind the wheel. Who?

  She’s cycling fast, her daughter, and I mustn’t give myself away, I shall take her like I took the others, it will be quick.

  She mustn’t see me and she’s stopped at the gate of the park and she looks scared.

  But I’m nothing to be scared of.

  I’m just going to see to it that you start living again. I’m an angel-maker. That’s what I am.

  But she disappears.

  Cycles into the park. She must have seen me. I drive past, pulling my cap down over my face. Time, my time, our time, will soon be here. Hands firm on the wheel now.

  What time?

  Tinnis, over there. That’ll do.

  Shall I call Mum?

  No.

  The van goes past, it doesn’t stop, and the person inside it wearing a cap drives on.

  I’m just twitchy.

  There must be hundreds of white vans in Linköping.

  Hardly anyone in the park. She cycles back to the gate by the hotel.

  No van in sigh
t.

  She cycles straight to Markus’s house, determined, focused, just like Mum. Just like Mum, she thinks.

  57

  Zeke is sitting in the shade of a sickly yellow Festis umbrella in the outdoor café at Tinnis. He’s just peeled the plastic from a meatball sandwich. Malin wanted to take a swim at lunchtime, and he protested at first, didn’t they have more important things to think about than swimming?

  But she insisted.

  Said she couldn’t deal with the gym in this heat.

  Wanted to go swimming, and she insisted in a way that was almost manic, in a way that only Malin can be: controlled, but still intense and relentless. He has learned to listen to her when she’s like this, knows she’s trying to find meanings and signifiers that can lead them on.

  The sun has free rein over the clear sky.

  The trees on the far side are shading the outdoor pool, and the indoor pools are shut off, empty while work is being done on them.

  He doesn’t feel like swimming.

  Too many people. And even more at lunchtime.

  Pools like this never feel clean, no matter how much chlorine they have in them. They met a woman on the way out when they arrived at the pool. She was dressed in white and carrying a black bag in one hand and a test-tube holder in the other. Presumably something to do with pool maintenance.

  But it doesn’t matter, Zeke thinks, taking a bite of the sandwich. Even if they have the strictest hygiene standards, I still don’t want to go swimming here.

  Malin doesn’t care.

  She’s standing in her red costume on what looks like a sugar lump, ready to dive in.

  The water of the pool rinsing her body.

  Cool, take long strokes, feel the chlorine cleaning her skin, lungs, another stroke, it’s supposed to hurt or it isn’t doing any good. The red balls of the lane marker become a red line as she speeds up.

  She breathes and her muscles lurch and she takes another stroke, and little by little she fights her way to the edge, maybe thirty metres away now.

  The clag in her head has disappeared.

  Nothing but clarity and the sting of lactic acid.

  Made it.

  She puts a hand up on the tiles, breathes out, sees Zeke sitting under the parasol up at the café.

  She pulls herself up, sits on the edge with her feet in the water, breathing, feeling strangely clean, as if the sweat and the dust had gone for ever, as if she has become something new, better. She feels reborn, and the surface of the water sparkles in a thousand shades of blue, and all of a sudden it hits her with shattering clarity.

  The Eckeveds’ pool.

  The water at the beach.

  The Glyttinge pool.

  Sofia Fredén’s summer job last year here at Tinnis.

  Josefin Davidsson’s summer job, and the article in the Correspondent saying there was a problem with the water around the time when she was working at Glyttinge.

  Drops like a thread, purity like a mantra.

  Violence as a tragic rosary.

  Zeke stands up as she comes over to his table.

  ‘Can I borrow your mobile? I need to make a call, right away.’

  Zeke takes out his mobile, his movements slow in the heat, and a group of children in rubber rings are shrieking from the edge of the pool, too scared to jump and shouting to their parents for encouragement, for reassurance that jumping in isn’t dangerous.

  Three rings before the call’s answered.

  ‘Sigvard Eckeved.’

  ‘Hello, this is Malin Fors. There’s something I forgot to ask. Do you have someone who looks after the pool for you? You mentioned that someone came last spring?’

  ‘You mean the one who comes out here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Zeke looks at her, his eyes fixed, expectant, as Malin squeezes the water from her hair with her free hand. There’s a delay before she gets an answer.

  ‘Well, a woman used to come each spring to check the water purifier. Your phone rang yesterday while I was telling you about it. But I didn’t really think it was important. You’re looking for a man anyway, aren’t you?’

  ‘You said it was a woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Her name’s Elisabeth.’

  ‘Surname?’

  ‘No idea. To be honest, I’m afraid I always paid her in cash. The first time I gave my number to a neighbour and she called me. The way it works is that she calls to ask when she should come. I never got a number for her. Pretty much the way it works with Polish cleaners. But, like I said, this spring I took care of it myself.’

  ‘OK. Thanks. Can I have your neighbour’s name and number?’

  Silence.

  ‘I’m afraid not. He died of a heart attack a year ago.’

  ‘His wife, would she have the number?’

  ‘He was single. But the new neighbours may have kept her on. Maybe they’ve got her number?’

  Sigvard disappears from the line. A minute later he’s back, and rattles off a number. Malin memorises it.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘We’ll have to see.’

  She ends the call and turns towards Zeke.

  ‘Do you remember what Sture Folkman’s daughter’s name was, the one who committed suicide?’

  ‘Aronsson never said when we talked to her,’ Zeke says. ‘But I remember from the report. Elisabeth. The only reason I remember is that that was the name of my first girlfriend.’

  Malin turns and heads quickly for the changing room, making sure that the phone number is still in her head.

  It’s there.

  Like an image, the number in glowing pink neon on a worn house-front in Los Angeles.

  Zeke doesn’t move, looking out over the Tinnerbäck pool, looking at the people trying to make something good of the heatwave, with these temperatures. The children with their rubber rings the very definition of innocence.

  Markus was sad at first.

  Not that he cried, but Tove could see him withdraw into himself, his shoulders slumping, his eyes restless. They were sitting at the kitchen table and the sunlight was reflecting off the stainless-steel fridge freezer, making her squint. They’d had sandwiches and milk, talked about how they were going to spend the rest of the holidays. Markus had been taking it for granted that they’d spend all the time together, maybe going out to his parents’ summer cottage, and eventually Tove managed to say it, and when she did her voice didn’t sound the way she’d wanted it to.

  ‘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 did
n’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.