Midwinter Sacrifice (15 page)

Ball-Bengt?

And the evening is destructively hard and cold and she leaves the grove, walking the length of the cemetery wall and then along Vallavägen and down towards the old water tower and the Infection Clinic.

She walks past her parents’ apartment.

‘You won’t forget . . .’

There’s something not right. There’s a reddish light up in one of the apartment’s windows. Why is there a light in the apartment?

I never forget to turn off the lights.

20

The stairwell: she leaves the light on.

She takes out her mobile, is about to dial her parents’ number – whoever is up there will get a shock – but then she remembers that her parents had the phone disconnected.

She doesn’t use the lift.

She climbs the three flights of stairs as silently as she can in her Caterpillar boots, feeling sweat break out on her back.

The door hasn’t been broken open, there’s no visible evidence.

Light behind the glass of the door.

Malin puts her ear to the door and listens. Nothing. She looks in through the letterbox; the light seems to be coming from the kitchen.

She tries the door-handle.

Should I draw my pistol?

No.

The hinges creak as she pulls the door open, voices, muffled, from her parents’ room.

Then the voices fall silent, and instead the sound of bodies moving. Have they heard her?

Malin marches firmly across the hall, hurrying down the passageway to her parents’ bedroom.

Pulls the door open.

Tove on the green bedspread.
Me, that’s me
. Tove fumbling with her jeans, trying to find the buttons with fingers that won’t obey.

‘Mum.’

Beside the bed a long-haired, skinny boy trying to pull on a black T-shirt with some hard rock logo on it. His skin is unnaturally white. As if he’s never been out in the sun his whole life.

‘Mum, I—’

‘Not a word, Tove. Not a single word.’

‘I . . .’ the boy says in a voice that has hardly broken. ‘I . . .’

‘And you can keep quiet too. Both of you, quiet. Get dressed.’

‘We are dressed, Mum.’

‘Tove. I’m warning you.’

Malin leaves the bedroom, shuts the door behind her, shouts, ‘Come out when you’re dressed.’

Feels like shouting a whole load of things, but what? Can’t shout: Tove, you were a mistake, a condom that broke, and do you want to do the same as me? Do you think it’s fun being a teenage mother, even if you do love your kid?

Whispers and giggling from the bedroom.

Two minutes later they come out. Malin is standing in the hall, and points to the sofas in the sitting room.

‘Tove, sit down there. And you, who are you?’

Handsome, Malin thinks, but pale. But, good God, he can’t be more than fourteen, and Tove, Tove, you’re a little girl.

‘I’m Markus,’ the pale boy says, pushing his hair out of his face.

‘My boyfriend,’ Tove calls from the sofa.

‘Yes, I worked that out,’ Malin replies. ‘I’m not that stupid.’

‘I go to Ånestad school,’ Markus says. ‘We met at a party a few weekends ago.’

What party? Has Tove been to a party?

‘Have you got a surname, Markus?’

‘Stenvinkel.’

‘You can go now, Markus. We’ll have to see if we ever meet again.’

‘Can I say goodbye to Tove?’

‘Put on your coat and go.’

‘Mum, I’m actually in love with him.’

The front door closes as Tove says the words.

‘That’s a bit serious.’

Malin sits on the sofa opposite Tove. The sitting room is dark around them. She closes her eyes and sighs.

Then starts to feel angry again.

‘In love? You’re thirteen, Tove. What could you possibly know about love?’

‘As much as you, apparently.’

And the anger vanishes as quickly as it came.

‘Studying with Filippa, Tove? Did you have to lie?’

‘I thought you’d be angry.’

‘What about? About you wanting a boyfriend?’

‘No, because I haven’t said anything. And because we were here. And, well, because I’ve got something you haven’t.’

These last words cut straight to Malin’s core, with no warning, and rather than think about what her daughter had just said, she chose to say, ‘You have to be careful, Tove. This sort of thing can lead to no end of problems.’

‘That’s what I was afraid of, Mum, that you’d only see the problems. Do you think I’m stupid enough not to realise that you and Dad had me by mistake? I mean, who’d be mad enough to have a child at that age otherwise? I’m not that careless.’

‘What are you saying, Tove? You weren’t a mistake. Whatever makes you say that?’

‘I know, Mum. I’m thirteen, and thirteen-year-olds have boyfriends.’

‘The cinema with Sara, studying with Filippa . . . God, how stupid am I? How long have you been seeing each other?’

‘Almost a month.’

‘A month?’

‘It’s hardly surprising that you haven’t noticed anything.’

‘Why not?’

‘What do you think, Mum?’

‘I don’t know, tell me, Tove.’

But Tove doesn’t answer the question. Instead she says, ‘His name’s Stenvinkel. Markus Stenvinkel.’

Then they sit in silence in the darkness.

‘Markus Stenvinkel.’ Malin laughs, eventually. ‘God, he’s pale. Do you know what his parents do?’

‘They’re doctors.’

Better folk. The thought comes to Malin against her will.

‘Nice.’

‘Don’t worry, Mum. Actually, I’m hungry,’ Tove says.

‘Pizza,’ Malin says, slapping her hands down on her knees. ‘I’ve only eaten a couple of crispbreads tonight.’

Shalom on Trädgårdsgatan have the biggest pizzas in the city, the best tomato sauce, and the ugliest interior: plaster walls with amateur frescoes of nymphs; cheap, plastic patio tables.

They share a calzone.

‘Does Dad know about this?’

‘No.’

‘Okay.’

‘What do you mean?’

Malin takes a sip of her Cuba Cola.

Her mobile rings again.

Daniel Högfeldt’s name on the small display.

She hesitates, then clicks the call away.

‘Dad?’

‘It just feels important that you haven’t told him either.’

Tove looks thoughtful. She takes a bite of the pizza before saying, ‘Weird.’

A fluorescent light flickers above their heads.

There’s competition in love, Tove, Malin thinks. There’s competition and loss in everything.

21

Tuesday, 7 February

It is just after midnight.

Daniel Högfeldt presses the door button on the wall and the main door to the
Correspondent
’s offices swings opens to the sound of manic squeaking. He’s happy, job well done.

He looks down Hamngatan as he takes a breath of the icy air.

He called Malin. To ask about the case, and to ask about . . . yes, what was he going to ask her about?

Even though his thick jacket is done up to the neck, the cold wins in just a few seconds and forces its way through the fabric.

He heads home quickly along Linnégatan.

At St Lars Church he looks up at the darkened windows of Malin’s flat, thinks of her face and eyes, and of how little he knows about her, and what he must look like to her: a fucking irritating journalist, a male chauvinist with some sort of irresistible sex appeal and charm. A body that does the job well enough when her own body needs fulfilment.

Fucking.

Hard or soft.

But people have to fuck.

He walks past H&M and thinks about the distance in that ‘people’. Fucking isn’t something you or I do, ‘people’ do it; an alien entity separate from our bodies.

The phone-call from Stockholm today.

Flattery and coaxing, promises.

Daniel wasn’t surprised.

Am I done with this dump now?

The front page of the
Correspondent
confronts Malin from the hall floor as she stumbles towards the kitchen on tired, stiff legs, freshly showered and dressed.

In spite of the darkness she can read the headline, which, in its urgent, tabloid manner, bears Daniel Högfeldt’s unmistakable signature:
POLICE SUSPECT RITUAL KILLING
.

You made the front page, Daniel. Congratulations.

An archive picture of a serious Karim Akbar, a statement given over the phone late yesterday evening:
I can neither confirm nor deny that we are investigating secret networks of people who follow the Æsir belief-system
.

Secret networks? The Æsir belief-system?

Daniel has interviewed Professor Söderkvist, who claims to have been questioned by the police for information, and that he had explained ritual killings to them during the day.

Then a screenshot of a website about the Æsir faith, and a passport photograph of a Rickard Skoglöf from Maspelösa, who is identified as a central character in such circles.
Rickard Skoglöf was unavailable for comment yesterday evening
.

A fact box about midwinter sacrifices.

Nothing else.

Malin folds the paper and puts it on the kitchen table, and makes a cup of coffee.

Her body. Muscles and sinews, bones and joints. Everything aches.

Then the sound of a car-horn down in the street.

Zeke. Are you here already?

Jönköping, we’ll set off early.
Zeke’s final words as he dropped her off outside her flat.

The Ikea clock on the wall says quarter to seven.

I’m the one who’s late.

What exactly is this winter doing to me?

Zeke at the wheel of the green Volvo. Tired shoulders, limp hands. German choral music in a minor key fills the car. The pair of them are equally tired. The E4 cuts through white-clad fields and the frozen landscape of the plain.

Mobilia outside Mantorp, a retail park, Tove’s favourite outing, Malin’s nightmare. Mjölby, Gränna, Lake Vättern as a strip of white hope in front of a horizon where nuances of grey meet other nuances of grey, forming a confusion of cold and darkness, an eternal lack of light.

Zeke’s voice comes as a liberation, loud enough to drown out the music.

‘What do you think about this Old Norse stuff?’

‘Karim seemed fairly positive about it.’

‘Mr Akbar. What do factory-farmed police chiefs like him know about anything?’

‘Zeke. He’s not that bad.’

‘No, I suppose not. Mr Akbar presumably has to give the impression that we’re making progress. And the holes in the window, have you had any more thoughts about them now you’ve had time to sleep on it?’

‘No idea. Maybe they’ll lead to something. But what, I don’t know.’ Malin thinks that this is just like every big investigation, that obvious connections are hidden somewhere close to them, just out of reach, mocking them.

‘When was Karin going to have her analysis of the glass finished?’

‘Today or tomorrow.’

‘Just one thing,’ Zeke goes on. ‘The more I think about Ball-Bengt up there in the tree, the more it all feels like some sort of pagan invocation.’

‘I’ve been feeling the same,’ Malin says. ‘Well, it remains to be seen if there are any links to Valhalla or anything else.’

Malin rings the doorbell of Rebecka Stenlundh’s flat. She lives on the second floor of a yellow-brick block in the hills just south of Jönköping.

The view from the flat must be wonderful, and in the summer the area must be lush with the green of all the birch trees. Even the garages a little way down towards the road look attractive, with orange-painted doors, surrounded by well-maintained hedges.

The place where Rebecka Stenlundh lives is neither one thing nor the other. Not lovely, but nice enough, a
here
where children could grow up in decent surroundings.

Not a dumping-ground for social service cases and immigrants. The sort of place where people live out their lives unobserved, largely unnoticed and unwanted, but still well thought of. A life on the fault-line, close to the boundary of dysfunction. Malin is just as surprised every time she finds herself in a place like this, by the fact that they still exist. The quiet happiness of the old Social-Democratic ‘people’s home’. Two point three swings and slides per child.

No answer.

It is just after nine o’clock; perhaps they should have called and announced their arrival, but does she even know about what happened to her brother?

‘No, we’ll just head over there.’ Zeke’s words.

‘We might be bringing bad news.’

‘Wasn’t she told before his name was made public?’

‘No one knew he had a sister then, and it’s a long time since the papers showed that level of consideration.’

Malin rings the bell again.

The rattle of locks on the neighbour’s door.

An old woman’s face, friendly, smiling. ‘Are you looking for Rebecka?’

‘Yes, we’re from Linköping Police,’ Malin says, and Zeke holds up his ID.

‘From the police? Goodness.’ The old woman screws up her eyes in alarm. ‘I hope she isn’t involved in any unpleasantness? I can’t imagine that she is.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Zeke says in his gentlest voice. ‘We’d just like to talk to her.’

‘She works down in the ICA supermarket. Try there. She’s the manageress. You’ve never seen a nicer ICA shop. I can promise you that. And you should see her son. You won’t meet a nicer boy. He’s always helping me with one thing or another.’

Just as they are heading towards the automatic doors of the ICA shop, Zeke’s phone rings.

Malin stops beside him, listens to him talk, sees him frown.

‘Yes, okay, so it checks out, then?’

Zeke hangs up.

‘They’ve found that business with the axe in the archive,’ he says. ‘What the old man told you seems about right. Lotta, Rebecka, saw it all. She was eight years old at the time.’

Vegetables and fruit in neat rows, and a smell of food that makes Malin hungry. Signs with beautiful lettering, every corner well-lit, everything announcing:
this is a clean shop
.

The old woman was right, Malin thinks. Nothing shabby or slapdash, just an apparent desire to give people something pleasant in their everyday lives. Someone wanting to make a bit of extra effort for other people. Showing a bit of consideration must surely be good for business. Anyone would want to return to this shop.