Midwinter Sacrifice (39 page)

Then Malin hears a click.

She hangs up.

Puts an arm round Tove’s shoulders, whispers, ‘Don’t be sad, darling, but Grandad didn’t think it was a very good idea about Markus.’

‘Then I’ll stay at home,’ Tove says, and Malin recognises the defiance, as strong and defined as her own.

Some nights the bed is endlessly wide, some nights it contains all the loneliness in the world. Some nights it is soft and promising, when waiting for sleep is the best part of the day. Some nights, like this one, the bed is hard, the mattress an enemy that wants to force your thoughts into the wrong track, that seems to want to mock you for lying there alone, without another body to rest into and against.

Malin reaches out her hand and the empty space is as cold as the night outside the window, and it gets many times larger because she knows that the empty space is there even as she reaches out her hand to it.

Janne.

She thinks about Janne.

How he is starting to get older, how they are both getting older.

She feels like getting up, calling him, but he’ll be asleep, or at the station, or else . . . Daniel Högfeldt. No, not that sort of loneliness tonight, a much worse sort. Real loneliness.

Malin kicks off the covers. Gets out of bed.

The bedroom is dark, a meaningless and empty darkness.

She fumbles with her portable CD player on the desk. Knows which disc to insert. Puts in the earplugs.

Then she lies down again and soon Margo Timmins’s gentle voice is streaming through her head.

Cowboy Junkies. Before they got boring.

The abandoned woman alone, longing, but in the last verse triumphant: ‘. . . kinda like the few extra feet in my bed . . .’

Malin pulls out the earplugs, fumbles for the phone, dials Janne’s number and he answers on the fourth ring.

Silence.

‘I know it’s you, Malin.’

Silence.

‘Malin, I know it’s you.’

His voice is the only voice she needs, gentle and calm and safe. His voice is an embrace.

‘Did I wake you?’

‘No worries. You know I don’t sleep well.’

‘Same here.’

‘Cold night tonight, isn’t it? Maybe the coldest so far.’

‘Yes.’

‘Luckily the new boiler seems to be working.’

‘That’s good. Tove’s asleep. Nothing came of that plan with Markus and Tenerife.’

‘He got angry?’

‘Yes.’

‘They never learn.’

‘What about us, do we?’

But those aren’t the words that pass her lips. Instead: ‘You must be getting through a lot of oil this winter.’

Janne sighs down the line. Then he says, ‘Time to sleep, Malin. Goodnight.’

61

Wednesday, 15 February

Somehow the church seems to have grown accustomed to the cold. Got used to having its greying plaster covered by a thin layer of frost. But the trees are still protesting, and the pictures over in the travel agent’s windows, the ones of beaches and clear blue skies, are just as mocking.

There’s a smell of fresh baking. Malin was up early and had time to put some half-baked little baguettes in the oven. She’s already eaten two, with apricot jam and Västerbotten cheese, and now she’s sitting by the window in the flat.

Behind her on the kitchen table lies the
Correspondent
. She hasn’t even bothered to open the paper. It’s all there on the front page.

POLICE REPORTED FOR HARASSMENT IN MURDER CASE
.

The headline is a joke, Malin thinks as she sips her coffee and looks down towards Åhléns, with its window displays of padded jackets and hats.

But if the headline is a joke, the article itself is a very bad one, an outright lie.

. . . even though the police have no evidence at all that the Murvall family is involved in the murder of Bengt Andersson, they have visited 72-year-old Rakel Murvall’s home to interview her on no fewer than seven occasions. Only a year ago Rakel Murvall suffered a minor stroke . . . this looks very much like a clear case of harassment from the police . . .

Attributed to Daniel Högfeldt. So he’s hitting back. In full form. Hard. Where has he been?

A short article alongside, about the fact that the shots fired into Bengt Andersson’s flat have been cleared up, and that police are not linking them to the murder itself. A quote from Karim Akbar:
It is highly improbable that there is any connection
.

Malin sits down at the kitchen table.

Opens the paper.

Rakel Murvall identifies her and Zeke in one quote.

They’ve been here seven times and forced their way in. The police show no respect, even to an old woman . . . But at least my boys are home again now . . .

The boys Mrs Murvall refers to are her sons, Elias, Adam and Jakob, who were released from custody yesterday when the accusations against them were found not to be sufficient to justify holding them any longer . . .

A picture of Karim.

His face captured in a slightly distorted pose. His eyes staring into the camera:
Naturally, we are treating this complaint very seriously.

He’s not going to like that picture, Malin thinks.

It looks as though the police have ground to a halt in their investigation of the murder. Chief of Police Karim Akbar did not want to comment on the state of the investigation, claiming instead that he could not talk about the case at the moment because of ‘the sensitive situation’. But according to the
Correspondent’
s source in Police Headquarters, the investigation has reached an impasse where the police have run out of new leads to explore.

Malin drinks the last of her coffee.

Source in Police Headquarters? Who? Maybe more than one.

She suppresses an urge to screw up the paper; she knows Tove will want to read it. On the worktop sits the baking-tray with the baguettes. Two for Tove. She’ll be happy when she finds them.

The area’s morning paper.

Loved by almost everyone in the whole city; they know that from their opinion polls, from the tumult that ensues on the few occasions when the paper doesn’t appear because of problems at the printers. Sometimes it feels like people are hugging the
Correspondent
to death, that they have no distance from what it prints, or just don’t understand that the newspaper isn’t their own personal mouthpiece.

Daniel Högfeldt is sitting at his computer in the newsroom.

The love, the response from the readers is still mostly a positive thing. If he writes something good, he’ll get ten emails congratulating him instantly.

He’s happy with the pieces in today’s paper, and has rewarded himself with a fresh-baked cinnamon pastry from Schelin’s down in Trädgårdstorget. Bengtsson, one of the old guard, doesn’t have the energy to liven up his texts, and you need energy to cover a crime story like the murder of Bengt Andersson. Finely tuned energy to heighten the inherent drama. The city might be depressed, rendered mute by the cold. But from the emails he has received after those articles about the case, he can sense the disquiet, that fear is alive and well in Linköping, and there are the beginnings of anger that the police seem to be doing nothing.

‘We pay fifty per cent tax and the police still aren’t doing their job . . .’

Daniel has spent two days in Stockholm.

He stayed at the Hotel Anglais on Stureplan, with a view of all the swaggering fools around that ridiculous concrete mushroom.

Expressen
.

He even got to meet the editor-in-chief, the fawning psychopath. But the whole thing felt wrong: sure, a bigger paper, higher salary, but so what?

Expressen
.

Stockholm.

Not now. Not yet.

First follow the example of that woman from the
Motala Paper
who dug up that scandal in the town hall and got the Great Journalism Award.

If I’m going to go to Stockholm, I’m going to arrive as a king, or at least a prince. Just like I am here.

I wonder what Malin Fors is up to now.

I wouldn’t mind seeing her.

Bound to be worn out from work, angry and horny. Just like I get when I’m working too much and sleeping too little. Human.

Expressen
.

I’ll email the chief editor today and turn them down.

The three-year-old resists as Johan Jakobsson tries to open her mouth. The blue tiles of the bathroom seem to be folding in on them, but that mouth is going to open.

‘We’ve got to brush our teeth,’ he says. ‘Otherwise the tooth troll will come.’ He tries to get his voice to sound both firm and happy, but realises that he mostly sounds whiny and tired.

‘Open wide,’ but she wants to run off and instead he holds her tight, and squeezes her jaw with his fingers, but not too hard.

Then she pulls free. Runs out of the bathroom, leaving Johan sitting on the toilet seat on his own. Fuck the tooth troll.

Work. When is this case going to open up? When is something going to jump out at them? Soon they’ll have been through the whole of Rickard Skoglöf’s hard drive and they haven’t found a thing. Sure, emails to the kids who hung the animals in the tree, and some other weird emails to other Æsir types, but nothing criminal. They’ve only got a couple more password-protected files to check.

His whole life feels like a clenched mouth right now. And Malin and Zeke just seem to get more and more frustrated. And Börje suspended. But presumably he’s with his wife, or the dogs, or at the firing range. Although maybe that’s the last thing he feels like doing right now.

Karim Akbar passes the five-hundred-kronor note across the counter of the dry-cleaner’s. He uses the one in the shopping centre in Ryd for two reasons: they open early, and they clean better.

Behind him the shopping centre: run-down and small. A Co-op shop, a newsagent’s, a combined key-cutting and shoe-repair shop, and a gift shop that seems to have been left untouched since it went bankrupt.

Three suits on thin hangers covered in plastic. One Corneliani, two Hugo Boss, ten white shirts in a neat pile.

The man behind the counter takes the note, thanks him and makes to hand him his change.

‘That’s okay,’ Karim says.

He knows that the man who runs the cleaner’s is from Iraq, and fled here with his family during Saddam’s time. Who knows what he went through? Once when Karim was leaving his suits the man wanted to talk about himself, about his engineering qualifications, about the man he could have been, but Karim pretended to be in a hurry. However much he admires the man for fighting for his family, he’s part of the problem, part of what makes him and almost everyone else of foreign extraction a second-class citizen, makes them the sort of people who run the services that the Swedes won’t touch. It ought to be forbidden for immigrants to run pizza restaurants and dry-cleaners, Karim thinks. That would get rid of the stereotype. The politically correct might object, but that’s the reality. But of course it would be impossible. What about me? I’m not the slightest bit better than him, even if I’m made out to be.

Alienation breeds exclusion.

Exclusion breeds violence.

Violence breeds . . . Yes, what?

The infinite distance between people. The Murvall family that want nothing more than to be left outside, in peace, and then there is everyone who dreams of being inside, to feel that they belong. Dreams and reality match up in far too few cases.

My dad, Karim thinks as he leaves the dry-cleaner’s. It was passive violence that drove him to his death.

But I never talk to anyone about him. Not even my wife.

The cold hits Karim when he opens the door.

His black Mercedes is glinting even in the gloomy winter light.

And then he thinks about the killers, or the killer, they’re hunting. What is it that they want? What are they trying to achieve?

Zeke pulls open the door of Police Headquarters.

Walks into reception and it smells of sweat and overworked radiators, and one of the uniformed officers standing by the steps to the basement calls out, ‘How’s it going with Martin, is he going to play the next match? Wasn’t there something to do with his knee?’

The ice-hockey player’s dad.

Is that how they see me?

‘He’s playing, as far as I know.’

Martin has had offers from NHL clubs, but nothing has worked out so far. They don’t quite seem to want to let him in yet. Zeke knows that ice hockey will make the lad rich sooner or later, rich in a way that’s hard to imagine.

But not even a hoard of pirate treasure would make him have any respect for the game itself. The padding, the tackles, the sense that it’s all make-believe.

Bengt Andersson isn’t make-believe. Nor is the evil that’s out there.

You can’t have a load of padding on, Zeke thinks, when you’re tackling the worst aspects of humanity. What we do is no game.

‘Have you seen the way I look?’

Karim Akbar is standing by the counter in the coffee room and holding up the photo of himself in the paper.

‘Couldn’t they have chosen a different one?’

‘It’s not that bad,’ Malin says. ‘It could have been worse.’

‘How? Have you seen what I look like? They’re just choosing pictures that give the impression we’re desperate.’

‘Forget it, Karim. You’ll probably be in the paper again tomorrow. Anyway, we aren’t desperate. Are we?’

‘Never desperate, Malin. Never.’

Malin opens up her email. Some of the usual administrative circulars, a bit of spam, and a message from Johan Jakobsson.

‘Nothing on the hard drive so far. Only a few more folders to check.’

And then an email marked in red.

‘CALL ME.’

From Karin Johannison.

Why couldn’t she call herself?

But Malin knows how it is. Sometimes it just seems easier to send an email.

She types a reply: ‘Have you heard anything?’

She presses send and it isn’t more than a minute before her inbox pings.