Midwinter Sacrifice (17 page)

‘We got a last-minute deal. This cold drives me crazy. We got home on Friday.’

Malin finishes her coffee and stands up. ‘I think that was everything,’ she says. ‘Yes, I think so.’

24

Have I forgiven you, sister?

It didn’t start with you, and it doesn’t end with you. So what is there to forgive, really?

Arrange your apples in rows, raise your child the way we never were. Give him love. Mark your flesh with it.

I can’t watch over you. But I can drift about and see you, wherever you choose to run.

I devoured Maria Murvall’s friendliness like sandwiches made from ready-sliced loaves, like smoked sausage, like unsalted butter. I washed the way she told me to, I ironed my trousers, I listened to what she said, believed in her theories about dignity. But how dignified was what happened in the forest?

How clean?

How pure?

You ought to be drifting with me, Maria, instead of sitting where you sit.

Shouldn’t you?

Shouldn’t we all drift and glide about, like that green Volvo down there on the motorway?

Huskqvarna.

Lawnmowers and hunting rifles. Shotguns for all manner of prey and a matchstick troll looking out over Lake Vättern. The artist, John Bauer, drowned in those waters when his boat capsized. No trolls saved him. Is he resting in one of his dense forests now?

No music in the car. Malin refused. And the coughing of the engine reminds her to turn on her mobile.

It rings at once.

‘You have one new message . . .’

‘This is Ebba Nilsson. Social worker. You tried to get hold of me last night. I’m home all morning, so feel free to call me back.’

Add number. Call.

One, two, three rings.

No answer again? Ah.

‘Yes, hello. Who is this?’

A shrill voice, like a larynx compressed by fat. Malin can see Ebba Nilsson before her: a short, round woman close to retirement.

‘This is Malin Fors from Linköping Police. We keep missing each other.’

Silence.

‘And what do you want?’

‘Bengt Andersson. You were his social worker for a while.’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’ve heard about what’s happened?’

‘I haven’t been able to avoid it.’

‘Can you tell me anything about Bengt?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid,’ Ebba Nilsson says. ‘I’m sorry. While I was working in Ljungsbro he only came to see me once. He was incredibly quiet, but that wasn’t so strange. He hadn’t had things easy . . . and of course looking the way he did.’

‘There’s nothing in particular that we should know?’

‘No, I don’t think so, but the girl who came after me got on well with him, or so I heard.’

‘Maria Murvall?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’ve been trying to get hold of her. But the number we’ve got has been disconnected. Do you know where she is now?’

Silence on the line.

‘Oh, dear Lord,’ Ebba Nilsson eventually says.

‘Sorry?’

Zeke takes his eyes off the road, looks at Malin.

‘You were about to say something?’

‘Maria Murvall was raped up in the woods by Lake Hultsjön a few years ago. Didn’t you know?’

Rita Santesson: ‘Nothing that I want to go into.’

Maria.

Murvall.

The name, it was familiar.

The Motala Police case. I remember now. I should have made the connection.

Maria Murvall.

Was she the only one who cared, Bengt?

Even your sister turned her back on you.

The logic of emotions.

A swirl of snow blows across the road.

Was she the only one who cared, Bengt?

And she was raped.

25

Hultsjön Forest, late autumn 2001

What are you doing in the forest all on your own?

This late, little girl?

No mushrooms at this time of year, and too late for berries.

Dusk is falling.

Tree trunks, undergrowth, branches, treetops, leaves, moss and worms. They’re all getting ready for the most intimate abuse.

Child-killers. Rapists. Is it one man? Or several? A woman, women?

They creep up on you as you walk through the forest, whistling. The eyes. They see you. But you don’t see them.

Or are they waiting further on, the eyes?

Darkness is falling fast now, but you aren’t scared, you could walk this track with your eyes blindfolded, getting your bearings by smell alone.

The snakes, spiders, everything that decays.

An elk?

A deer?

You turn round, still, silence falls over the forest.

Walk on. Your car is waiting by the road; soon you’ll see Hultsjön lazing in the last of the evening light.

Then everything gets dark.

Footsteps on the track behind you.

Someone pulling your legs from under you, pressing you down on to the damp ground, hot and sweet breath on your neck. So many hands, so much force.

It doesn’t matter what you do. Snake-fingers, spider-legs, they eat through your clothes, the black roots of the trees stifle your screams, tying you for ever to the silence of the earth.

The worms crawl up the inside of your thighs, sticking out their claws, tearing your skin, your insides.

How coarse, how hard is a tree trunk?

Flesh and skin and blood. How hard?

No.

Not like that.

No one hears your screams in the black vegetation. And if they heard your screams, would they come?

No one is listening.

There is no salvation.

Only the damp, the cold and the pain, the relentless harshness that burns in you, tearing apart everything that is you.

For ever silent.

Sleep, dream, wake.

The sweet breath in the air you are breathing in the forest night. Naked body, bleeding body, doomed to wander the edge of the forest around Hultsjön.

You must have walked a long way.

You were breathing. The night-chill fled in panic when you crept out on to the road. The car headlights.

You had walked so far.

The lights grow, blind, corrode.

Is it death that is coming? Evil?

Again?

It came yesterday, didn’t it, with quick steps it ran up, from where it lay hidden behind scarred bushes.

26

‘Maria Murvall.’

Zeke rubs his fingers against the steering-wheel.

‘I knew I’d heard the name before. Shit. Me and names. She was the girl who was raped up by Hultsjön four years ago. A really nasty case.’

‘Motala Police.’

‘Right on the boundary, so they took it. They found her wandering about on a road almost ten kilometres from where it happened. Some truck-driver taking a load of shingle to a building site up in Tjällmo found her. She’d been torn to shreds, badly beaten as well.’

‘And they never caught him.’

‘No. I think it even got on to
Crimewatch
. They found her clothes and the place where it must have happened, but nothing else.’

Malin shuts her eyes. Listens to the sound of the engine.

A man hanging in a tree.

His concerned social worker raped four years ago. Wandering the forest.

Cornerhouse-Kalle. The debauched, mad father.
A real man’s man
.

And it all keeps popping up in the investigation, all mixed up, yet it still fits together, somehow.

Coincidence?

Try the theory out on Zeke.

‘Bengt Andersson. He must have come up during that investigation. If she really did care as much about him as everyone says.’

‘Must have done,’ Zeke says, pointing at a car they are overtaking. ‘I’ve been thinking about getting one of those Seats. They’re owned by Volkswagen these days.’

I know, Zeke, Malin thinks. Janne must have told me ten times or more when he got on to the subject of his cars.

‘Isn’t the car you’ve got now good enough?’

‘Murvall,’ Zeke says. ‘Isn’t that name familiar for some other reason as well?’

Malin shakes her head.

‘Me and names, Malin,’ Zeke says.

‘I’ll call Sjöman and ask him to order over the case files from Motala Police. Nordström there will get it sorted at once.’

Just as they are turning into Police Headquarters, the third social worker on the list calls, the one who took over after Maria Murvall.

‘It’s awful, what’s happened. Dreadful. Bengt Andersson was depressed, withdrawn. At one meeting he just mumbled, “What does keeping clean matter? What does keeping clean matter?” If I’m honest, I never drew any connection to the rape. But perhaps there was a link? But the rapist? Bengt Andersson? He wasn’t that sort of person. A woman can tell.’

Malin gets out of the car, her face forming an involuntary grimace as the cold hits her skin.

‘At any rate, I never got as close to him as Maria Murvall. She evidently cared about him outside her work as well, she got him to pull himself together. Almost like a big sister, as I understand it.’

They walk into the station.

Sjöman is standing at Malin’s desk, waving a bundle of fax paper in the air.

Their colleague in Motala evidently hadn’t needed to be asked twice.

Sven Sjöman is talking in a strained voice. Malin and Zeke are standing beside him. Malin wants to tell him to calm down, to think of his heart.

‘Bengt Andersson was one of the people the Motala force interviewed in connection with the rape of Maria Murvall. He had no alibi for that night, but none of the evidence found at the scene, nor anything else, ever pointed to him. He was just one of twenty-five of Maria’s clients who were questioned.

‘It’s pretty grim reading,’ Sjöman says, handing the papers to Zeke.

‘Reality is always worse than fiction,’ Zeke says.

‘She was, or rather is, the sister of the Murvall brothers,’ Sjöman goes on. ‘A gang of nutters out on the plain who were always causing trouble. Even if that was a long time ago now.’

‘The Murvalls! I knew it,’ Zeke says.

‘Must have been before my time,’ Malin says.

‘Tough bastards,’ Zeke says. ‘Really nasty.’

‘Evidently they found clothes in the forest with traces of DNA on them, but not enough to put together a profile.’

‘And on her body?’

‘It was raining that night,’ Sjöman says. ‘Everything got washed away, and evidently she was raped with a rough branch. She was scratched to hell, badly cut internally, it says here. They never worked out if she was penetrated any other way as well. There was no means of confirming it.’

Malin can almost feel the pain.

She raises her palms towards Sven. Thinks, That’s enough.

Maria Murvall. The angel of the lonely. What a lovers’ tryst you ended up having.

Malin can hear the words inside her. Wants to beat herself up, not be cynical now. Fors, don’t be cynical, never be cynical . . . Maybe I am already? Cynical?

‘She was never the same again,’ Sjöman continues. ‘According to the last notes, before the files were archived, she ended up in some sort of psychotic state. Apparently she’s in the secure unit at Vadstena Hospital. That’s the address given here, anyway.’

‘Have we checked?’ Malin asks.

‘Not yet, but that’s easily done,’ Zeke says.

‘Tell them it’s urgent police business if some doctor starts making a fuss.’

‘And we’ve had a message from Karin,’ Sven says. ‘She should have something for us later this afternoon about the holes in the glass.’

‘Good. I’m sure she’ll call when she’s done. What about the Old Norse angle?’ Malin asks.

‘Börje and Johan are working on it. They spoke to a Rickard Skoglöf and his girlfriend Valkyria Karlsson while you were down in Jönköping. They’re still following that angle.’

‘Did they get anything from those two?’

‘You never know,’ Sjöman says. ‘If you listen carefully, people may well say more than they think they are. We’re taking a closer look at them now.’

A woman doctor’s voice on the other end of the line.

‘Yes, we’ve got a Maria Murvall here. Yes, you can see her, but preferably no men, and as few people as possible. Oh, you’ll be coming in person, that sounds good.’

Then a long pause.

‘Just don’t expect Maria to say anything.’

27

The call from Karin Johannison came through when Malin had just got into her car and turned the ignition key.

‘Malin? Karin here. I think I know what caused those holes in the glass now.’

Malin sinks into the icy car seat. In just a second she feels cold air spreading through the car, and longs desperately for it to warm up.

‘Sorry, I was about to drive off. What have you found?’

‘I can safely say that they weren’t made by grit or stones, the edges are far too smooth for that. The holes have also caused some very large cracks, considering their size, so I think it’s impossible that anyone threw anything through the window.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘They’re bullet-holes, Malin.’

Holes in glass.

A new door opening.

‘Are you sure?’

‘As sure as I can be. An extremely small-calibre weapon. There’s no soot or powder on the holes, but that’s often the case with glass. But it could also mean they were made by an air-rifle.’

Malin sits in silence, thoughts running through her head.

A small-calibre weapon. Was someone trying to shoot Bengt Andersson?

Air-rifle. Boys getting up to mischief?

Forensics didn’t find anything odd in Bengt Andersson’s flat. No bullet wounds in his body.

‘In that case they must have been rubber bullets. Could that sort of ammunition have caused any of Bengt Andersson’s injuries?’

‘No, they cause a very particular type of bleeding. I’ve seen it before.’

Engine noise.

Malin, alone in her car, on her way to see a mute, raped woman.

‘Malin, you’ve gone quiet,’ Karin’s voice comes over the phone. ‘Have you gone off the road?’

‘It’s just me thinking,’ Malin says. ‘Could you go back to Bengt Andersson’s flat and see if you can find anything new? Take Zeke with you.’