Midwinter Sacrifice (33 page)

Presumably Zeke has no idea.

He probably gets a sore backside at the very thought of the Cloetta Centre.

‘The father’s a sales executive for Saab,’ Sven goes on. ‘Spends three hundred days travelling each year. Places like Pakistan and South Africa.’

‘Any friends?’ Malin asks.

‘None that the father could name.’

‘Börje?’ Johan Jakobsson, anxiety in his voice.

‘You know how it is. Taken off active duties until the incident has been investigated.’

‘It’s open and shut,’ Malin says. ‘He fired in self-defence. Those replicas look exactly like the real thing.’

‘I know,’ Sven says. ‘But when was anything that simple, Fors?’

Room ten of ward five in Linköping University Hospital is dark, apart from the light cast by the reading lamp above the bed.

Sivert Norling is sitting in a green armchair in the gloom by the window. He is a tall, gangly man, and even in the dim light Malin can see that his blue eyes are hard. His hair is cropped and his legs stick out across the floor. Beside him sits his wife, Birgitta. She’s blonde, dressed in jeans and a red blouse that makes her face, already red from crying, look even more swollen.

In the bed lies the boy, Andreas Norling.

He seems vaguely familiar to Malin, but she can’t place him.

The boy’s leg is in traction, and his eyes are cloudy with painkillers and narcotics, but according to the doctors he can manage some questions.

Zeke and Malin are standing beside his bed, and a uniformed officer is sitting on guard outside the door.

The boy refused to say hello when they came in, and now he has defiantly turned his head away from them, his black hair looks like angry streaks of ink across the white pillow.

‘You’ve got something to tell us,’ Malin says.

The boy lies there silent.

‘We’re investigating a murder. We’re not saying you did it, but we have to know what happened out at that tree last night.’

‘I haven’t been near any tree.’

The boy’s father gets up, shouts, ‘Now you just have the common damn decency to tell them what you know. This is serious. It’s not some bloody game.’

‘He’s right,’ Malin says calmly. ‘You’re in a whole lot of trouble, but if you talk to us perhaps things will get a bit easier for you.’

Then the boy looks at Malin. She tries to calm him with her eyes, persuade him that everything will all be all right, and maybe he believes her, maybe he decides that none of it matters.

He starts to talk.

About how they read in the paper about midwinter sacrifices, and how cool it sounded, and how he had been at home with his mum when the murder must have been committed, how they didn’t have anything to do with that, that was murder, after all, and how he had been so tired of his flatulent dog and how his friend Sara Hamberg had said they could get some pigs from hers, and that their friend Henrik Andersson had an old EPA tractor with a flatbed trailer that they could use, and how he had found a site on the net all about sacrifices, and that Rickard Skoglöf, who they had read about in the paper, was the man behind the site. And that he was some sort of Æsir wizard and had encouraged them in several odd emails and one thing had led to another, it had become sort of unstoppable, as if some weird force was driving them to do it.

‘We drank some cans, got hold of some knives. I didn’t think there’d be so much sodding blood. It was like, wow, so much blood. It was pretty cool. But God it was cold.’

His mum begins to cry again.

His dad looks like he’d like to apply some corporal punishment.

The night is black behind the hospital window.

‘Was Rickard Skoglöf with you?’

The boy shakes his head. ‘No. Only those weird emails.’

‘And Valkyria Karlsson?’

‘Who?’

‘Why did you run?’ Malin asks. ‘And why did you take aim at Detective Inspector Svärd?’

‘I don’t know,’ the boy replies. ‘I didn’t want to get caught. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?’

‘Someone ought to drop a bomb on Hollywood,’ Zeke mutters.

‘What did you say?’ The boy suddenly interested.

‘Nothing. Just thinking out loud.’

‘One more question,’ Malin says. ‘Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson, do you know them?’

‘Know them? Jocke and Jimmy? No, but of course I know who they are. Bastards, both of them.’

‘Did they have anything to do with this?’

‘Not a thing. I’d never have anything to do with them if I could help it.’

On the way down in the lift Malin asks Zeke, ‘Shall we bring in Skoglöf?’

‘What for? Incitement to animal cruelty?’

‘You’re right. We’ll leave him be for the moment. But we should probably have another talk with him and Valkyria Karlsson. Who knows what they might have got other people to do?’

‘Yes, and Johan can talk to the other kids who were out in the field.’

‘Okay. But we’ve only got one more thing to do today,’ Malin says.

‘What’s that?’

‘We’re going to see Börje.’

The white-painted kitchen cupboards shine, newly polished, and the table is covered with an orange and black Marimekko tablecloth. Above it hangs a PH designer lamp.

The whole kitchen of Börje Svärd’s house exudes calm, and the room has an aesthetic quality far beyond anything Malin imagines she might ever achieve. The entire house is the same: considered, restful, beautiful.

Börje is sitting at the end of the table. Beside him his wife, Anne, seems to be almost clinging to an armchair-like blue wheelchair, the features of her face somehow rigid. Her laboured breathing fills the room, tormented, obstinate.

‘What the hell was I supposed to do?’ Börje says.

‘You did the right thing,’ Zeke says.

‘Absolutely,’ Malin agrees.

‘So you say he’ll be okay, no lasting damage?’

‘Completely, Börje, the bullet hit him exactly where it should have.’

‘Bloody awful, though,’ Börje says. ‘Attacking animals like that.’

Malin shakes her head. ‘Madness.’

‘I suppose I’ll be off a couple of weeks,’ Börje says. ‘It usually takes a while.’

A gurgling sound, followed by some lighter noises from the wheelchair.

Language?

‘She says,’ Börje explains, ‘that it’s time we put a stop to these awful things.’

‘Yes, it really is high time,’ Malin says.

‘What happened at work today, Mum?’ Tove asks. ‘You seem tired?’

Tove reaches for the pan of mashed potato on the kitchen table.

‘Yes, what did happen? Some youngsters, not much older than you, who’d done a load of stupid things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Really, really stupid things, Tove.’

Then Malin eats a large forkful of potato before going on: ‘Promise me you’ll never do anything stupid, Tove.’

Tove nods. ‘What’s going to happen to them now?’

‘They’ll be called in for questioning, then social services will probably have to take care of them somehow.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, Tove. Just take care of them, I suppose.’

50

Sunday, 12 February

Now the bell in the chapel is tolling eleven, eleven times, and then it starts ringing, and it is ringing for me, informing the district that Ball-Bengt Andersson is now being laid to rest, and in the ringing is the story of my life, the apparently wasted series of breaths that was mine. But oh, oh, how you deceive yourselves. I knew love, at least once, even if I was suspicious of it.

Although it is true: I was a lonely person, but not the loneliest.

And now they are going to talk about me. Then I shall burn. On a Sunday and everything! They made an exception for me, violent as my demise was.

But it doesn’t matter, that part of me is past, only the mystery remains, and for its sake parts of me are preserved. I am a blood group, a complete code, I am the person lying in the white-painted pine coffin in the Chapel of the Resurrection’s orange room, just the other side of Lambohov, on the way to Slaka.

A hundred metres away, along an underground tunnel, the oven awaits, but I’m not scared of the flames; they aren’t eternal or hot, just a fashion to wear for today.

I’m no longer angry with anyone, but I wish Maria could have a little peace. She was friendly towards me, and that ought to mean something.

You look so serious, sitting there in your pews. There are only two of you: Malin Fors and a representative of Fonus funeral services, Skoglund, the man who made me look nice for my picture in the
Correspondent.
Beside the coffin stands a woman, her priest’s collar chafing her neck, and she wants to get this over and done with; death and loneliness of my variety scare her. That’s how much faith she has in her god, in his or her goodness.

So get on with it, get it over with.

I drift on.

The pain hasn’t dissipated, and it’s as capricious as ever, but I’ve learned one thing: in death I own language.

I can whisper a hundred words, scream thousand upon thousand of them. I can choose to be silent. I finally own my own story. Your mumbling means nothing.

Just listen.

Malin greeted the representative of the funeral company, Conny Skoglund, before she went into the chapel. They said hello under the sand-coloured arches, and after the pleasantries they stood beside each other in silent complicity before the bells started to ring and they went into the large hall. Light was flooding into the room in an almost indecent manner through the windows which confidently, as if jealous of their view of the park, stretched from floor to ceiling. It must be beautiful when it’s green outside, Malin thinks. Now it’s just unnaturally light.

They sit on either side, as if trying somehow to fill the empty room.

Alone in life.

Even more alone in death.

About a week since Bengt Andersson was found, and now his funeral is to take place. A single wreath on the coffin, from Ljungsbro Parish. The football club evidently thought it had done enough with the wreath at the crime-scene. Malin has a white narcissus in her hand, and the bells ring and ring and she thinks that if they ring much longer both she and funeral director Skoglund will go deaf. And the priest as well. She’s around thirty-five, red-haired and chubbily freckled, and now the bells stop ringing and a hymn pipes up instead, and when it’s over the priest starts talking.

She says what she has to say, and when she gets to the part where she has to add something personal she says, ‘Bengt Andersson was an unusual, normal person . . .’ and Malin wants to get up, hold her mouth shut until the platitudes stop pouring out of it, but instead she shuts off and without knowing how it happens she is placing the white narcissus on Ball-Bengt’s coffin as she thinks, We’ll get them, we’ll get him, you’ll have peace, I promise.

Malin Fors, if you think that I need ‘the truth’ in order to have peace, you’re mistaken, but you’re looking for it for your own sake, aren’t you?

You’re the one who needs peace and quiet, not me.

But that’s okay, we can be honest with each other, we don’t have to hide our intentions and other such tiresome nonsense.

Now he’s steering me down the path, the coffin is dark and warm and soon it will be even warmer.

His name is David Sandström, forty-seven years old, and everyone wonders how he can do a job like this. Corpse-burners aren’t very well regarded, not much better than fatties who hit their own father over the head with an axe. But he’s happy in his work, it’s solitary, he doesn’t have to worry about the living, and there are other advantages that don’t need to be mentioned now.

We’re inside the room containing the oven; it’s big and spacious with sky-blue walls, located below ground with little windows up near the ceiling. The oven itself is entirely automated, the cremator just has to get the coffin on to a conveyor belt, then the doors open on a hearth that is lit by the press of a button.

Then I burn.

But not yet.

First David Sandström has to heave the coffin on to the conveyor belt, something that takes a great deal of effort.

God, it’s heavy. You have to slide them the last bit of the way from the trolley to the conveyor belt and it’s usually easy, but this one’s bloody heavy.

Bengt Andersson.

David knows how he died, lets him lie in the coffin, under the lid, doesn’t even want to look at him. Ideally they should be younger, he likes those ones, they grant him most peace.

There.

The coffin is on the conveyor belt.

He presses the button on the control panel, the door to the oven opens, he presses the next button and the flames lick hungrily for wood to bite into.

A bit more, just a bit.

Then the flames grab hold of the wood, and within ten seconds they have enveloped the coffin completely, and the door of the oven slowly returns to its starting point.

David Sandström pulls out his notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket. He takes out his special pen, then writes carefully on one of the last pages:
Bengt Andersson, 61 10 15-1923. No. 12,349.

I feel the fire.

It is every feeling. I am transforming now. I am vaporised, becoming the smoke climbing from the chimney of the crematorium, the burned-smelling particles that drift in across Linköping, the air that Malin Fors hungrily inhales as she crosses the car park outside Police Headquarters.

What remains is ashes that will be emptied into the memorial grove beside the chapel in the old cemetery.

All our ashes there are beacons for memory, and my ashes will be there so that anyone who, against all expectation, wants to remember me will have a place to go.

We turn to our memories and thus revisit our lives.

Not much of a consolation for the dead, is it?

But such are the habits of the living these days.