Midwinter Sacrifice (24 page)

Adam Murvall nods and Malin can see he’s happy with the answer. Why does he care about Sjöman’s CV? Then it hits Malin: if Sjöman had been here for a while, he ought to have remembered the brothers.

Vanity, Malin, vanity.

‘What about the cars, then?’

‘Them? They’re just something we do.’

Adam Murvall sounds confident, his voice a well-oiled engine.

‘We take them apart and sell the good bits.’

‘Is that all you live off?’

‘We’ve got the petrol station as well. The one on the road down by the aqueduct. The Preem garage.’

‘And you make a living from that?’

‘More or less.’

‘Did you know Bengt Andersson?’

‘I knew who he was. Everybody knew that.’

‘Do you think he had anything to do with the rape of your sister?’

‘Shut up about that. Don’t talk about it.’

‘I have to ask, Adam, you know that.’

‘Don’t talk about Maria, her name shouldn’t be grunted by your sort.’

Sven makes himself comfortable, nothing in his body language giving any indication that he’s remotely upset by the insult.

‘Are you and your sister close? I’ve heard that you’re the one who visits her.’

‘Don’t talk about Maria. Leave her in peace.’

‘So that was why you wrote the note?’

‘This is nothing to do with you. We’ll sort this out ourselves.’

‘And what were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday?’

‘We ate dinner at Mother’s. Then I went home with my family.’

‘So that’s what you did? You didn’t hang Bengt up in that tree, then? Did you sort that out yourselves as well?’

Adam shakes his head. ‘Pig.’

‘Who? Me or Bengt? And was it you or one of your brothers who shot through the window into his living room? Did you creep down there one evening, just like you crept to Inspector Fors’s flat tonight? To leave a message?’

‘I don’t know anything about any shots through any damn windows. I’m not saying anything else now. You can keep on all night. From now on I’m saying nothing.’

‘Like your sister?’

‘What do you know about my sister?’

‘I know she was kind-hearted. Everyone says so.’

The muscles of Adam Murvall’s face relax slightly.

‘You know things don’t look good for you, don’t you? Threatening an officer, resisting arrest, obstructing an investigation. With your background, those are pretty serious charges.’

‘I didn’t threaten anyone. I was just handing over a letter.’

‘I know how angry you can get, Adam. Were you angry with that repulsive fat Bengt? The man who raped your sister? The man who ruined her kind heart? Well? Adam? Did you hang—’

‘I should have.’

‘So you—’

‘You think you know it all.’

‘What is it I don’t know?’

‘Go to hell.’ Adam Murvall whispers the words, before he slowly puts his finger in front of his mouth.

Sven turns off the tape recorder, gets up. He walks out of the room, leaving Adam Murvall alone behind him. He sits improbably straight-backed, as if his spine were one single beam made of steel, impossible to bend.

‘What do you think?’ Sven Sjöman looks round at them.

Karin Akbar watchful by the door.

‘There’s something that doesn’t fit,’ Malin says. ‘Something.’ But her brain can’t work out what.

‘He’s not denying it,’ Johan Jakobsson says.

‘They’re hard men,’ Zeke says. ‘Deny, admit? Never, either one would be giving in. It just isn’t an option for people like them.’

‘Sven’s decided to hold him. We’ll stick him in our coldest cell tonight, see if that softens him up,’ Karim says, and the group falls silent; no one knows if he’s serious or just joking.

‘That was a joke,’ he says. ‘What did you think? That I was going to turn this station into some Kurdish hellhole?’

Karim laughs. The others smile.

The clock on the viewing-room wall. The black hands indicate twenty past eleven.

‘I think,’ Malin says, ‘that it might be worth talking to the whole Murvall family. That’s what I think. Tomorrow.’

‘We can hold him for a week. The brothers and mother are due in tomorrow. We can bring the wives in as well.’

Behind the soundproofed glass Malin watches as two uniformed custody officers lead Adam Murvall out of the interview room, off to a cell in the detention unit.

The sky is crystal clear.

The Milky Way is smiling at humanity; the far-travelled light is dim yet simultaneously comforting and warm.

Malin is standing with Zeke in the car park, beside the black Mercedes belonging to Karim Akbar.

Almost midnight.

He is smoking one of his rare cigarettes. His fingers look like they’re turning blue with the cold, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

‘You should take it a bit easier, Fors.’

The light from the stars fades.

‘A bit easier with what?’

‘With everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Just come down a gear or two, slow down.’

Malin stands still, waiting for the warmth of the moment to reappear, but it’s taking its time, it’s never going to come.

Zeke puts out his cigarette, hunts for his car keys.

‘Do you want a lift?’

‘No, I’ll walk,’ Malin says. ‘I need a bit of fresh air.’

Adam Murvall lies on his bunk in the police station, the blanket pulled round his muscular frame, and thinks of the words Blackie always used to say, over and over again like a mantra, when he used to sit drunk in his wheelchair in the kitchen.

The day you give in it’s over. Over, got it?

Blackie gave in. And he never even realised.

Then Adam Murvall thinks of Mother, of how she can rely on him like he has always been able to rely on her. She has somehow always stood like a wall between them and all the bastards.

Adam isn’t the sort who’d talk, and the children, they must be asleep by now, even if it took Anna a long time to get them off.

Adam Murvall sees seven-year-old Anneli’s thin ribcage rise and fall, he sees three-year-old Tobias’s wavy blond hair against a sheet with its pattern of blue sailing-boats, and he sees the little eight-month-old lad on his back in his cot. Then Adam falls asleep, dreaming about a dog standing outside a door in the middle of winter. It’s a crystal-clear night and the dog is barking so loudly that the rusty nails holding the door together shake. And Adam dreams that he is sitting at a nicely laid table in the kitchen of a big white house, and that a hand covered in the finest little veins pulls a leg off one of the roast chickens on the table, and how the same hand throws the leg out through the window to the dog.

He is still standing in the snow and barking.

The chicken leg makes him quiet.

Then the barking starts again.

A voice now: Let me in.

Don’t leave me out here.

I’m freezing.

36

Thursday, 9 February

It is no bad dream.

It is just how it is.

Janne is walking up and down in the living room. The young boys from the refugee camp in Kigali came to him again tonight, just now. They were carrying their hacked-off feet on their upturned hands, approaching his bed with them like bloody trophies. The dark red blood dripped on to his sheets, steaming and smelling freshly of iron.

He woke up in a soaking wet bed.

Sweat.

As usual.

It’s as if his body remembers the humid nights in the jungle and is adapting itself to the memory rather than the present.

He creeps upstairs and peers into Tove’s room. She’s asleep inside, safe in the warm.

Markus is asleep in the guest room. He seems an okay kid, from what Janne could tell during their short meal, before Tove and Markus disappeared into Tove’s room.

He hadn’t said anything to Malin about Markus staying over. She didn’t seem to know, though he would always be able to say that he assumed she did. She would protest, but that’s okay, Janne thinks, as he creeps back downstairs again. Better that we keep an eye on them than the alternative, so they don’t have to sneak into his father-in-law’s flat.

His father-in-law?

Did I just think that?

But I did phone Markus’s dad to make sure it was okay with them.

He seemed friendly. Not full of himself like a lot of the doctors you run into at the hospital when you show up with an ambulance.

In the morning the Murvall family reports at Police Headquarters.

They arrive in the green Range Rover and a Peugeot minibus soon after eight.

The sun made the vehicles’ paint shine, as they spewed out people, as Malin thought it looked.

The Murvall clan: men, women, child after child besieging the foyer of Police Headquarters.

Restless chatter.

People on the fault-line.

Waiting not to do what the authorities asked of them: talk. A conscious mix of obstinacy and resignation in every movement, every expression, every blink. Shabby clothes, faded jeans, jumpers and jackets in shrill, unfashionable colours, all thrown together, dirt, stains, children’s snot as the glue holding it all together.

‘Gypsies,’ Börje Svärd whispered in Malin’s ear as they looked out on the scene from the office. ‘They’re like a band of gypsies.’

In the middle of the group sat the mother.

Somehow alone among all the others.

‘You have a fine family,’ Sven Sjöman says, drumming his fingers on the table of the interview room.

‘We stick together,’ the mother states. ‘Like in the old days.’

‘That’s unusual these days.’

‘Yes, but we stick together.’

‘And you have a lot of fine grandchildren, Mrs Murvall.’

‘Nine in total.’

‘It could have been more, perhaps. If Maria hadn’t—’

‘Maria? What do you want with her?’

‘What were you doing on the night between Wednesday and Thursday last week?’

‘Sleeping. That’s what an old woman does at nights.’

‘And your sons?’

‘The boys? As far as I know, they were sleeping too.’

‘Did you know Bengt Andersson, Mrs Murvall?’

‘Bengt who, Inspector? I’ve read about him in the paper, if you mean the man they hung in the tree.’

‘They?’

‘Yes, I read that there was probably more than one of them.’

‘Like your sons.’

Malin looks into Sofia Murvall’s eyes. The bags beneath them hang way down on to her cheeks but her brown hair looks freshly washed, tied up in a neat ponytail at the back of her head. The meeting room is acting as an interview room.

Wife of Jakob, the middle brother. Four children, seven months to ten years. Exhausted from nursing, from sleepless nights, worn down to the bone.

‘Four children,’ Malin says. ‘You should count yourself lucky. I only got one.’

‘Can I smoke in here?’

‘Sorry, no. They’re very tough on that. But maybe I could make an exception, just this once,’ Malin says, and pushes her empty coffee cup across the table. ‘Use that as an ashtray.’

Sofia Murvall digs in the pockets of her grey hooded jacket, pulls out a packet of Blend Menthol and a free lighter from a haulage company. She lights a cigarette and the sweet, mint-like smell makes Malin feel sick, and she makes an effort to smile.

‘It must be tough out there on the plain.’

‘It isn’t always fun,’ Sofia Murvall says. ‘But who says it has to be fun all the time?’

‘How did you and Jakob meet?’

Sofia looks over her shoulder, takes a drag on the cigarette.

‘That’s nothing to do with you.’

‘Are the two of you happy?’

‘Really, really happy.’

‘Even after what happened to Maria?’

‘That didn’t make any difference.’

‘I can’t really believe that,’ Malin says. ‘Jakob and his brothers must have been incredibly frustrated.’

‘They looked after their sister, if that’s what you mean, and now they’re doing it again.’

‘Did they take care of the person they thought did it as well? When they strung up Bengt Andersson in the tree?’

There’s a knock on the door of the room.

‘Come in!’ Malin calls, and a newly recruited police constable called Sara looks through a gap in the door.

‘There’s a little boy crying out here. They’re saying he needs feeding. Is that okay?’

The expression on Sofia Murvall’s face doesn’t change.

Malin nods.

The woman who must be Adam Murvall’s wife carries in a fat, screaming baby and puts him in Sofia’s arms. The boy opens his mouth wide and scrambles towards the nearest nipple, and Sofia Murvall puts out her cigarette and the hoodie goes up, revealing a bare breast, a pink nipple that the boy stretches out for and catches.

Do you appreciate your happiness? Do you feel it?

Sofia strokes the boy’s head.

‘Are you hungry, darling?’ Then: ‘Jakob couldn’t have had anything to do with that. It’s impossible. He’s been asleep at home every single night, and he spends every day in the workshop. I can see him from the kitchen window whenever I look out.’

‘And your mother-in-law. Do you get on well with her?’

‘Yes,’ Sofia Murvall says. ‘You won’t find a better person.’

Elias Murvall is shut off, his memories a clamped clam-shell.

‘I’m not saying anything. I stopped talking to the police fifteen years ago.’

Sven Sjöman’s voice: ‘Oh, we’re not that bad, are we, especially for a tough guy like you?’

‘If I don’t say anything, how will you find out what I have or haven’t done? Do you really think I’m so weak that I’m going to give in to you?’

‘That’s just it,’ Sven says. ‘We don’t think you’re weak. But if you don’t say anything, things get difficult for us. Do you want things to be difficult for us?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Was it you who shot . . . ?’

Elias Murvall’s mouth is sealed with invisible surgical thread, his tongue limp, slack in his mouth. The room is silent, apart from the sound of the air-conditioning.

From her place in the observation room Malin can’t hear the noise, but she knows it’s there, a gentle mechanical hum: fresh air for people trapped indoors.

Jakob Murvall laughs at the question: ‘You think we had anything to do with that? You’re crazy, we’re law-abiding citizens now, we’ve kept quiet, within the bounds of the law. We’re just ordinary car mechanics.’