Midwinter Sacrifice (4 page)

‘At least,’ Malin replies, thinking that she has seen that look on murder victims before, how everything becomes primal again when we are faced with death, how we revert to the new human being we once were. Scared, hungry, but right from the outset capable of surprise.

She usually reacts this way when confronted by scenes like this. Rationalises them away, with the help of memories and things she’s read, tries to match up what her eyes are seeing with what she’s gleaned from studies.

His eyes.

Most of all she sees fury in them. And despair.

The others are waiting over by the patrol car. Zeke told the uniformed officer to sit and wait in the car.

‘No need for you to stand out here freezing. He’ll keep on hanging where he’s hanging.’

‘Don’t you want to talk to the man who found him?’ The officer looked over his shoulder. ‘That’s who found him.’

‘We’ll take a look first.’

Then this swollen frozen body in this lonely oak; a gigantic overgrown baby that someone, or more than one, has tortured the life out of.

What do you want with me? Malin wonders. Why have you dragged me out here on this godforsaken morning? What do you want to tell me?

The feet, blue-black, the toes turning black, swing against all the whiteness.

The eyes, Malin thinks. Your isolation. It’s like something moving across the plain, across the town, and into me.

First the obvious.

The branch is five metres above the ground, no clothes, no blood in the snow, no tracks in the thin covering around the tree, apart from the really fresh ones from a pair of boots.

From the man who found you, Malin thinks. One thing is certain: you didn’t get up here by yourself; and the injuries on your body, someone else must have given you those. And you probably didn’t get them here, otherwise the ground beneath you would be covered in blood. No, you froze for a good while somewhere else, so long that your blood turned solid.

‘You see those marks on the branch?’ Zeke says, looking up at the body.

‘Yes,’ Malin replies. ‘Like someone’s torn the bark off.’

‘I swear, the man who did this must have used a crane to get him up into the tree, then tied the noose afterwards.’

‘Or people,’ Malin says. ‘There may have been more than one.’

‘No tracks between here and the road.’

‘No, but it was a windy night. The ground changes by the minute. Loose snow, bits of ice. It’s changing all the time. How long would any track last? Quarter of an hour. An hour. No longer.’

‘We’re still going to have to get the forensics team to check the ground.’

‘They’re going to need the biggest heater on the planet,’ Malin says.

‘Well, that’s their business.’

‘How long do you reckon he’s been hanging there?’

‘Impossible to say. But no longer than the first hours of darkness. Someone would have seen him during the day.’

‘He could have been dead long before that,’ Malin says.

‘That’s Johannison’s job.’

‘Anything sexual?’

‘Isn’t everything, Fors?’

Her surname. Zeke uses it when he’s joking, when he answers a question he thinks is unnecessary or stupid, or just stupidly formulated.

‘Come on, Zeke.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything sexual involved here. No.’

‘Good, we agree on that, then.’

They head back towards the cars.

‘Whoever did this,’ Zeke says, ‘must have a bloody huge sense of purpose. Because no matter how you go about it, it’s no easy thing to get that body up here and into the tree.

‘You’d have to be absolutely livid,’ he adds.

‘Or really sad,’ Malin replies.

‘Sit in our car instead. It’s still warm.’

The uniforms clamber out of the patrol car.

The middle-aged man in the back seat looks meaningfully at Malin and makes an effort to move.

‘You can stay,’ she says, and the man sinks down, still tense, his thin eyebrows twitching. His entire body seems to be saying one single thing: How the hell do I explain this? What was I doing out here at this time of day?

Malin sits next to him, Zeke gets into the front.

‘That’s better,’ Zeke says. ‘Much better in here than out there.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ the man says, looking at Malin, his blue eyes wet with worry. ‘I shouldn’t have stopped, bloody stupid of me, I should just have kept going.’

Malin puts her hand on the man’s arm. The padding under the red fabric sinks beneath her fingers.

‘You did the right thing.’

‘You see, I’d been—’

‘It’s okay,’ Zeke says, turning towards the back seat. ‘Just take it easy. You can start by telling us your name.’

‘My name?’

‘Yep.’ Malin nods.

‘I’m having an affair—’

‘Your name.’

‘Liedbergh. Peter Liedbergh.’

‘Thank you, Peter.’

‘Now you can go on.’

‘I’m having an affair, and I’d been with her in Borensberg and was going home this way. I live in Maspelösa and it’s the quickest route from there. I’ll admit that much, but I didn’t have anything to do with this. You can check with her. Her name is—’

‘We’ll check,’ Zeke says. ‘So, you were on your way home from a night of passion?’

‘Yes, and I came this way. They keep the road clear, and then I saw something odd in the tree, and stopped, and I got out, and, I mean, fuck. Fuck. Bloody hell.’

People’s movements, Malin thinks. Headlights shining in the night, flickering points of light. Then she says, ‘There wasn’t anyone here when you arrived? Did you see anyone?’

‘Quiet as the grave.’

‘Did you pass any other cars?’

‘Not on this road. But a kilometre or so before the turning I passed an estate car, I can’t remember what make.’

‘Number?’ Zeke’s hoarse voice.

Peter Liedbergh shakes his head. ‘You can check with her. Her name’s—’

‘We’ll check.’

‘You know. First I just wanted to carry on. But then, well, I know what you’re supposed to do in this sort of situation. I swear, I had nothing to do with it.’

‘We don’t imagine that you did,’ Malin says. ‘I, I mean we, think it’s pretty unlikely that you would have phoned if you were involved.’

‘And my wife, does my wife have to know?’

‘About what?’

‘I told her I was going to work. Karlsson’s Bakery, I do nights there, but that’s in the other direction.’

‘We won’t need to say anything to her,’ Malin says. ‘But she’ll probably find out anyway.’

‘What am I going to tell her?’

‘Tell her you took the scenic route. Because you felt too awake.’

‘She’ll never believe that. I’m usually completely exhausted. And in this cold.’

Malin and Zeke exchange a glance.

‘Anything else you think might be important to us?’

Peter Liedbergh shakes his head. ‘Can I go now?’

‘No,’ Malin says. ‘The forensics team will have to check your car, and take your footprints. We need to know they’re your footprints out there and not anyone else’s. And you can give your lover’s name to our colleagues.’

‘I shouldn’t have stopped,’ Liedbergh says. ‘It would have been better to leave him hanging here. I mean, someone would have found him sooner or later.’

The wind is increasing in strength, forcing its way through the synthetic padding of Malin’s jacket, through her skin, flesh, right into the smallest molecules of her marrow. The stress hormones kick in, helping the muscles to send pain signals to the brain, and her whole body aches. Malin imagines that this must be what it’s like to freeze to death. You never die of cold, but as a result of the stress, the pain the body experiences when it can’t maintain its temperature and goes into overdrive, trying to fool itself. When you’re really cold, you feel a warmth spreading through your body. It’s a terrible bliss: your lungs can no longer oxygenate the blood and you suffocate and fall asleep simultaneously, but you feel warm; people who’ve returned from this state say that it’s as though they’d drowned, sinking down, down, only to float up again on clouds so soft and white and warm that all fear vanishes. It’s a physiological trick, that softness, Malin thinks. It’s just death caressing us so that we’ll accept it.

A car approaches in the distance.

The technical team arriving already?

Hardly.

More likely the hyenas on the
Östgöta Correspondent
who’ve got wind of Picture of the Year.
Is it him?
Malin has time to wonder as the top of the oak creaks disconcertingly and she turns and sees the body quivering, and thinks, It can’t be much fun hanging there.

Just hang on and we’ll get you down.

4

‘Malin, Malin, what have you got for me?’

The cold seems to eat up Daniel Högfeldt’s words, muting the sound waves midway through the air. Even though he is wearing a padded jacket with a fur collar, there is something direct yet elegant about the way his body moves, his way of somehow owning and exercising power over the ground he’s walking on.

She meets his gaze, and she sees a glimpse of a mocking smile in it, a story beyond this moment, a secret history that he knows she doesn’t want anyone here to be aware of. And she sees the calculation: I know, you know, and I’m going to use that to get what I want, here and now. Extortion, Malin thinks. It won’t work on me. When are you going to play your trump card, Daniel? Now? Why not? It’s a good opportunity. But I won’t back down. We may be the same age, but we’re really not that similar.

‘Was he murdered, Malin? How did he get up in the tree? You
have
to give me something.’

Suddenly Daniel Högfeldt is very close; his straight nose seems to be almost touching hers. ‘Malin?’

‘Not another step. And I’m saying nothing. I don’t
have
to do anything.’

And the mocking smile in his eyes gets even clearer, but Daniel decides to retreat.

The photographer’s camera clicks as she moves about just beyond the cordon round the tree and body.

‘Not so close, you idiot,’ Zeke shouts, and from the corner of her eye Malin sees the two uniformed officers rush off towards the photographer, who slowly lowers her camera and backs away nearer their car.

‘Malin, he must have been murdered if you need to keep the site clean, so you have to say something. It doesn’t look like a suicide, if you ask me.’

She shoves Daniel aside, feels her elbow touch his, wants to go back and repeat the gesture again, but instead she hears him calling after her, and thinks, How the hell could I? How could I be so stupid?

Then she turns back to face the journalist from the
Correspondent
: ‘Not one step on to that field. Back to your car, and stay there, or, even better, get out of here. It’s cold and there’s nothing else going on; you’ve got pictures of the body, haven’t you?’

Daniel smiles a practised boyish smile, which, unlike his words, cuts right through the cold.

‘But Malin, I’m only doing my job.’

‘All that’s going to happen now is that the forensics team are going to turn up and start doing their job, that’s all. We’ll take it from there.’

‘I’m done,’ the photographer calls, and Malin thinks that she can’t be more than eight or nine years older than Tove, and how her bare fingers must ache.

‘She’s freezing,’ Malin says.

‘I dare say she is,’ Daniel says. Then he pushes past Malin towards the car without looking back.

When the thought first occurred to me, that she was actually going to help me down, I grew tired of hanging here. Because that is my state. I drift, and I am here. I am in one place, and everywhere. But this tree is no place of rest; perhaps rest will never come. I don’t know yet.

So, all these people in their padded clothes.

Don’t they see how vain they are?

Do they imagine they can keep out the cold?

Can’t they get me down now?

I’m tired of hanging around like this, of this game you’re playing with me down there in the snow below me. It’s fun watching how your steps in the snow become tracks, tracks I can amuse myself by following, round, round, like restless memories hidden in inaccessible synapses
.

‘I can’t stand that man,’ Zeke says as the
Correspondent
’s car disappears off in the cold. ‘He’s like a cocaine-fuelled leech with ADHD.’

‘And that’s why he’s so good at his job,’ Malin says.

Zeke’s American-inspired metaphors turn up when you least expect them, and Malin has often wondered where they come from. As far as she knows, Zeke has never shown any fondness for American popular culture, and he probably hardly knows who Philip Marlowe is.

‘If he’s so fucking clever, what’s he doing on a local paper?’

‘Maybe he’s happy here?’

‘Yeah, right.’

Then Malin looks over at the body. ‘What do you think it’s like, hanging up there?’

The words hung in the cold air.

‘It’s just meat now,’ Zeke says. ‘Meat can’t feel anything. Whoever that person was, whatever sort of human being he was, he isn’t here any longer.’

‘Even so, he still has things to tell us,’ Malin says.

Karin Johannison, analyst, pathologist and researcher at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, with a part-time post as a crime-scene investigator with the Linköping Police, is flapping her arms around her heavily padded body, elegant even though conducting an inelegant gesture. Small fragments of feathers fly up in the air like misshapen snowflakes and Malin imagines that the jacket must have been incredibly expensive considering how well-padded its red fabric is.

Even in her fur hat and with cheeks red from the February chill, Karin is the spitting image of a slightly aged Riviera princess, like a middle-aged Françoise Sagan, without a cloud in her sky, far too attractive for the job she does. The suntan from her holiday in Thailand at Christmas is still lingering on her skin and sometimes, Malin thinks, I wish I could have been like Karin, married to money and the easy life.

They approach the body cautiously, stepping in footprints already there.

Karin is behaving like an engineer, pushing aside any thoughts of the naked human being in the tree in front of them, refusing to see the fat, the skin, what had once been the face, suppressing any empathy with the thoughts that might have passed through the swollen body’s brain, and which are now slowly settling over the city, the plain and the forests like an ominous murmur; a whimper that could perhaps only be silenced in one way, through an answer to the question: Who did it?