Midwinter Sacrifice (21 page)

‘That there are still people living like that in Sweden today,’ she says. ‘Completely shut off from everything. It’s anachronistic in an almost bizarre way.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Zeke says. Then he reaches for the first explanation that seems to come into his mind. ‘It’s benefits,’ he says. ‘It’s all because of bloody benefits. I bet the whole lot of them are getting unemployment benefit, social support and everything else too. And the child support for a horde of kids like that must amount to a small fortune every month.’

‘I’m not so sure about benefits,’ Malin says. ‘Maybe they don’t get anything. But anyway. This is the twenty-first century. In Sweden. And here’s a family that seems to live entirely according to its own rules.’

‘They muck about with engines and hunt and fish while we work our backsides off. Do you expect me to feel any sympathy for them?’

‘Maybe for the children. Who knows what their lives are like?’

Zeke stands still, evidently thinking.

‘Living outside society isn’t that unusual, Malin. In fact it isn’t even anachronistic. Look at those people in Borlänge, Knutby, Sheike, and half of sodding Norrland. They’re all around us, and as long as they don’t upset the consensus too much, no one cares. Let them live their miserable lives in peace, and everyone else can live a normal life. The poor, the mad, the immigrants, the handicapped. No one cares, Malin. Except to get validation of the normality of their own lives. And who are we anyway to have opinions about how other people choose to live? It might be more fun than we think.’

‘I don’t want to think that,’ Malin says. ‘At any rate, as far as Bengt Andersson is concerned, they’ve got a motive.’

They head off towards the car.

‘Nice sort of people, anyway, the Murvalls,’ Zeke says as he turns the key in the ignition.

‘You could see the fury in Adam Murvall’s eyes,’ Malin says.

‘There are several of them, they could have done it together. And shooting at his window with rubber bullets? No problem for gentlemen like them. We’ll have to get a warrant so we can check their guns. But they may have more without licences. I dare say they’ve got the contacts to get hold of weapons and ammunition.’

‘Do you really think we’ve got enough evidence to get a warrant? There’s not really anything concrete, in legal terms, to suggest that they might be involved.’

‘Maybe not. We’ll have to see what Sjöman says.’

‘He was so incredibly angry. Adam Murvall.’

‘Imagine it was your sister, Malin, wouldn’t that make you angry?’

‘I haven’t got any brothers or sisters,’ Malin says. Then she adds, ‘I would have been livid.’

31

From a distance, and seen from above like this, Lake Roxen looks like a flattened greyish-white eiderdown. The trees and shrubs, almost tremulous, are pressed down along the edge of the lake, and the fields in front of it, cropped, wind-blasted, wait for a warmth that it is hard to believe will ever come.

White bricks and brown woodwork, stacked boxes in the best tradition of the 1970s, four privileged dwellings gathered together on a hillside above a steep slope.

They have knocked on the door with the lion’s head, polished jaws gaping open.

The first time they spoke to Fredrik Unning, Malin was convinced he had something to say that he was frightened to come out with, and now she’s certain, and with every step she takes towards the house expectation grows within her.

What is hidden in here?

They will have to be careful. Zeke beside her is restless, his breath misting from his mouth, his head bare, open for the cold to dig its stubby, infected claws into.

Rattling behind the door.

A crack that widens to an opening with Fredrik Unning’s thirteen-year-old face behind it, his slightly pudgy, unexercised body in a light blue Carhartt T-shirt and grey army-style trainers.

‘You’ve been ages,’ he says. ‘I thought you were coming straight away.’

If only you knew, Malin thinks, how well you’ve just summarised what a lot of people think about the police, Fredrik.

‘Can we come in?’ Zeke asks.

Fredrik Unning’s room is on the third floor of the house. The walls are covered in skateboarding posters. Bam Margera from
Jackass
hangs in the air high above a concrete ramp, and on a reproduction of a vintage poster a young Tony Alva glides along a Los Angeles backstreet. Thin white curtains shield the view out of windows that stretch from floor to ceiling, and the pink carpet is stained in places. In one corner is a stereo that looks new, a floor-mounted flat-screen television with at least a forty-five-inch screen.

Fredrik Unning sits on the edge of the bed, focused on them this time, his previous nonchalance vanished, and gone too are his parents; his insurance broker father has taken his boutique manager wife on a little trip to Paris. ‘They go there every now and then. Mum likes shopping and Dad likes the food. It’s nice to be on my own.’

Empty pizza boxes in the kitchen, half-eaten Gorby pies, fizzy-drink bottles and an overflowing bag of rubbish in the middle of the floor.

Malin is next to Fredrik Unning on the bed, Zeke by the biggest window in the room, a dark silhouette against the light.

‘Do you know anything about Bengt Andersson that we ought to know?’

‘If I tell you anything, no one else will find out that I was the one who told you, will they?’

‘No,’ Malin says, and Zeke nods in agreement, adding, ‘This will stay between us. No one will know where the information came from.’

‘They never left him alone,’ Fredrik Unning says, staring at the curtains. ‘They were always getting at him. It was like an obsession.’

‘Getting at Bengt Andersson?’ Zeke over by the window. ‘Who was getting at him?’

And Fredrik Unning gets scared again, his body slumps, moves away from Malin and she thinks how fear has become increasingly common around her over the years, how person after person seems to have understood that silence is always safest, that every word uttered carries the potential for danger. And maybe they’re right.

‘Bengt,’ Fredrik Unning says.

‘Who? It’s okay,’ Malin says. ‘You can do it.’

And her words help Fredrik to relax.

‘Jocke and Jimmy. They were always making fun of him, Ball-Bengt.’

‘Jocke and Jimmy?’

‘Yes.’

‘What are their real names? Jocke and Jimmy?’

Fresh hesitation. Fresh fear.

‘We need to know.’

‘Joakim Svensson and Jimmy Kalmvik.’ Fredrik Unning says their names in a firm voice.

‘And who are they?’

‘They’re in year nine in my school, they’re real bastards. Big and mean.’

Shouldn’t you be at school now? Malin thinks, but she doesn’t ask.

‘What did they do to Ball-Bengt?’

‘They used to follow him, tease him, shout things at him. And I think they messed up his bike, and threw things at him, stones and stuff. I think they might even have poured some sort of sludge through his letterbox.’

‘Sludge?’ Zeke asking.

‘Flour, dirt, water, ketchup, anything, all mixed together.’

‘And how do you know this?’

‘They forced me to join in sometimes. Otherwise I’d get beaten up.’

‘Did you get beaten up?’

Shame in Fredrik Unning’s eyes, fear: ‘They won’t find out that I’ve told you, will they? The bastards torture cats as well.’

‘In what way?’

‘They catch them and stick mustard up their backsides.’

Brave lads, Malin thinks.

‘Have you seen them do that?’

‘No, but I’ve heard it from other people.’

Zeke from the window, his voice like the crack of a whip. ‘Might they have shot through his window with a rifle? Did you join in with that as well?’

Fredrik Unning shakes his head. ‘I’ve never done anything like that. Anyway, where would they get the gun from?’

Outside the clouds have thinned slightly, and through a few cracks some tentative rays of light are spreading across the greyish-white ground, making it clear and vibrant, and in her mind’s eye Malin can see what the Roxen must look like in summer from up here, in warm light, when the rays have full access to a completely blank surface. But sadly a winter like this one doesn’t make it easy to think of warmth.

‘Bloody hell,’ Zeke says. ‘Those two sound pretty tough, Jocke and Jimmy. Serious hard cases.’

‘I feel sorry for Fredrik Unning,’ Malin says.

‘Sorry for him?’

‘You must have noticed how lonely he is? He must have been prepared to do anything to hang out with the tough kids.’

‘So they didn’t force him?’

‘I don’t doubt that they did. But it’s not that simple.’

‘It doesn’t sound like they come from bad backgrounds.’

Fredrik Unning’s words a short while before: ‘Jimmy’s dad works on oil platforms and his mum’s a housewife. Jocke’s dad’s dead and his mum works as a secretary.’

Malin’s phone rings. Sven Sjöman’s name on the screen.

‘Malin here.’

She tells him about their visit to the Murvalls, and about what they’d learned from Fredrik Unning.

‘We’re thinking of going to talk to Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson right away.’

‘We need to have a meeting,’ Sven says. ‘They’ll have to wait an hour or two.’

‘But—’

‘We’ve got a team meeting in thirty minutes, Malin.’

The children are defying the cold.

The playground outside the windows of the meeting room is full of sluggish little moon-figures staggering about in their padded winter overalls. Blue children, red ones and one little orange warning child: be careful with me, I’m little, I might break. The assistants shiver in grey-blue fleece trousers, their breath like thick smoke. They jump on the spot when they’re not helping some little one who’s fallen over, flapping their arms round their bodies.

If this cold doesn’t give up soon, everyone will have to learn how to live with it. Like a broken back.

Börje Svärd’s report, people with links to Rickard Skoglöf. Interviews with kids who seem to live out their lives in front of a computer or as characters in role-playing games. ‘Anything but real life.’

The hesitation in Börje’s body. Malin can see it, smell it. As if all of life had given him just one single lesson: don’t take anything for granted.

The results of the background checks.

Rickard Skoglöf seemed to have had a normal upbringing in an ordinary working-class home in Åtvidaberg; his father worked at Facit until it was shut down, then at Adelnäs fruit farm, where his son had also worked during summer holidays when he was at secondary school. Two years in sixth form. Then nothing. Valkyria Karlsson grew up on a farm in Dalsland. She got two-thirds of the way through an anthropology course at Lund University after sixth form in Dals Ed.

Karim Akbar. Also hesitant, but nonetheless: ‘This Æsir angle. Keep digging, there’s something there.’

His voice a little too confident, as if he were taking on the role of the convinced, encouraging boss.

Johan Jakobsson hollow-eyed. Winter vomiting bug, long nights awake, changed sheets. New wrinkles in his brow every morning, deeper and deeper.
Daddy, where are you? Don’t want to, don’t want to
.

Malin shuts her eyes. Has no energy for this meeting. Wants to get out and work. To talk to Ljungsbro’s own teenage bullies, see what they know. Maybe they can give them some leads, maybe they got hold of a gun and are responsible for firing into Ball-Bengt’s flat, maybe their bad behaviour just got out of hand; who knows what two imaginative fifteen-year-olds are capable of?

Tove and Markus in her parents’ apartment.

On the bed.

Malin can see them in front of her.

‘And then we have the teenagers who made Bengt Andersson’s life a misery,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘You and Zeke will have to question them. Get them at school after this meeting. They ought to be there at this time of day.’

Sure, Sven, sure, Malin thinks, then says, ‘If they aren’t at school we’ll find out where they live, and we’ve got their mobile numbers.’

After the two lads, she wants to bring the Murvall brothers in for questioning, bring the old woman in and put some pressure on her. Listen to the wives.

The brothers.

The looks on the women’s faces.

No friendliness, just suspicion against
the
stranger
. Alone, even if they stick together.

What is that sort of loneliness? Where does it come from? From the repeated unkindnesses of the world around them? From the fact that they keep getting no as an answer? From everybody. Or is that sort of loneliness granted to each of us? Is it within all of us, and, if it gets the chance to grow, does it simply overwhelm us?

The awareness of loneliness. The fear.

When did I first see that loneliness, that antipathy in Tove’s face? When did I first see anything other than pure kindness and joy in her eyes?

She was maybe two and a half. Suddenly there among the innocence and charm was an element of calculation and anxiety. The child had become a human being.

Loneliness. Fear. Most people manage to hold on to some of the child’s joy, the naivety, when they encounter other people, when they feel a sense of belonging. Manage to overcome the possibly innate loneliness. Like Fredrik Unning tried to do today. Reach out a hand, as if he had realised he was worth more than being left to his own devices by his parents and forced to go along with boys who would really rather have nothing to do with him.

Happiness is possible.

Like with Tove. Like with Janne, in spite of everything. Like with myself.

But the women round the Murvall family table? Where did their unadulterated joy disappear to? Where did it go? Can it have run out for good? Could it be true, Malin thinks, as Sven summarises the state of the investigation, that there is only a finite amount of happiness free of guile, and that every time some of that sort of happiness is lost, it is gone for good and replaced instead by muteness, hardness?

And what happens if we are forced to give in to loneliness?

What sort of violence might be born then? In that point of fracture? In that final exclusion?