Summertime Death (6 page)

Malin looks at the number on the display.

Answers.

Listens.

‘You’ll have to take that up with Sven Sjöman. He’s looking after press inquiries over the summer.’

She passes the phone to Sven, raising her eyebrows with a sardonic smile.

‘It’s Daniel . . . Daniel Högfeldt from the
Correspondent
,’ she says. ‘He wants to know about the girl who was raped in the park and the missing girl from Sturefors, and if we suspect any connection.’

A connection?

One girl is missing.

One girl has been attacked, possibly raped, in the Horticultural Society Park. A long shot? Hardly. It’s not impossible. Time, and their work, will turn up any connections if they exist.

But for now they’re keeping an open mind, as the cliché has it. For now they’re staring out at the tarmac of Brokindsleden through the windscreen, the cycle path alongside the main road empty and the heat snakelike, scentless. The air seems to be utterly still, shimmering, low in oxygen. The wheat-fields have been flattened by the heat, as if an immense hot fist had pressed the plants back into the ground and said to them: Don’t think that your lives are possible, not this summer, this year will be a year of burning.

Zeke’s hands at the wheel of the Volvo.

Steady.

Like his son Martin’s hands on his hockey stick.

At the end of the season Martin received an offer from the Toronto Maple Leafs, but he turned it down. His girlfriend is expecting a child and wants it to be born in Linköping. And the team’s main sponsors, Cloetta and Saab, joined forces and came up with a multi-million-kronor offer to persuade Martin to stay.

‘Now the lad’s rich,’ had been Zeke’s comment. ‘And he’ll get even richer if he moves to the States.’

And it had sounded as if Zeke wanted Martin to move, as if he’d had it up to here with ice hockey and glory and praise and money.

‘Ice hockey. What a fucking useless game.’

Malin had asked him what he thought about becoming a grandfather.

‘You must be excited, and proud.’ But Zeke had just muttered in reply. She had let the matter drop, once the baby was born he’d be beaming with joy, she was sure of that. The child would stroke his shaved head and say ‘prickle, prickle,’ and Zeke would love it.

Sturefors.

They are driving in silence, now approaching the edge of the small community.

Malin closes her eyes.

If the heat is scentless out there, what does the inside of the car smell like?

Air freshener and Aramis aftershave.

What do the gardens smell like now? What did they used to smell of?

Freshly mown grass.

A little girl’s feet moving over the blades of grass, drifting forward. Alone in the garden. It smells of Dad. Mum. I hear her shouting, following me through the house, complaining, and how Dad backs down and I want him to stand up for me, contradict her, let me know that I’m good enough.

And how he stands there limply next to Mum, his mouth open as she shouts at me, how his own hesitant protests disappear back into his mouth as she stubbornly carries on.

The wind in my hair as I cycle past the houses, along the streets on my way to school. My feet beneath me, feet pounding the jogging track.

This is a competition, everything is a competition.

And one night when you thought I was asleep, when I was lying outside your door, I remember it now, only now, in this air-conditioned car, I remember what you said, you said: She must never find out. This must stay a secret.

Mum’s sharp voice. The tone of someone who has never found her place in the world.

Dad, what is it that I must never know?

The boys’ football matches in the pitch behind the red-painted school-building. The red shirts of the home team.

Bodies, warm. The floodlights on. Bankeberg SK, Ljungsbro IF, LFF, Saab. All the teams, the boys, the girls alongside, under the covers down in the cellar, what if someone comes?

Lilac hedges. Wooden fences, stained green. Families trying to be families. Children who are children. Who go swimming, and who know that they will eventually follow in their parents’ footsteps.

Sturefors.

Low blocks of flats and villas situated close to the Stångån River. Most of them built in the late sixties and seventies. Some built by the families themselves, by craftsmen planning their own homes, others bought by engineers, teachers, civil servants.

No doctors out here then.

But there must be now.

Doctors and engineers behind the tall, yellowing hedges, behind the fences, behind the yellow and white bricks, the red-painted wooden façades.

Uncut lawns. Trees that are starting to bear fruit, and by every house little flowerbeds with plants that have either withered completely or are shrieking for water. Abandoning the city for the summer is an obvious choice for most people in Sturefors. Not so much for the thousands of immigrants who live in Ekholmen, the mass housing project they passed on the way out here.

‘You can turn off here,’ Malin says. ‘It’s the next road down.’

‘So you know this place?’

‘Yes.’

Zeke takes his eyes off the road for an instant, ignoring the sign on a white brick wall warning of children playing.

The speedometer shows thirty-five, five above the speed limit.

‘How come?’

Not even my closest colleague knows this about me, Malin thinks. And he doesn’t need to know either.

I’ve no intention of saying that I grew up in a neighbouring street, that I lived here from the time I came home from Linköping maternity unit until I left home, in this well-to-do but increasingly insular Sturefors. I have no intention of talking about Stefan Ekdahl, and what we did in Mum and Dad’s bed four months to the day after my thirteenth birthday. I have no intention of explaining how everything can be fine but sad at the same time. And do you know, Zeke, I have no idea how that happens, how that can be the case. And I have even less idea of why it might happen in the first place.

Janne.

We’ve been divorced for more than ten years now, but have never managed to let go of each other. Mum and Dad have been married since prehistoric times but may well never have got close to each other.

‘I just know,’ she replies.

‘So you’re keeping secrets from me, Fors?’

‘Maybe that’s just as well,’ Malin says, as Zeke stops the car outside a white tile-clad house ringed by a low, white concrete wall.

‘Theresa Eckeved’s home. Feel free to get out, Miss.’

A pool glitters in the background. Neatly trimmed poplar-like bushes of a variety Malin can’t name surround the pool, and it looks as if there’s fresh compost in every bed.

Coffee and shop-bought cakes set out on a teak table, comfortable blue cushions behind their backs. In the ceiling of the conservatory, just beside the built-in open fireplace, a fan is whirring, bestowing a welcome coolness. A bucket of ice sits next to the coffee pot.

‘In case you’d like coffee
con hielo
,’ as Agneta Eckeved put it as she sat down at the table with them.

‘I’ll take mine hot,’ Zeke replied from his seat at the end of the table. ‘But thanks for the offer.’

Then Sigvard Eckeved’s words, as annoyed as they were anxious.

‘I can’t think why she’d want to deceive us.’

And in those words is an awareness that he no longer determines much in his daughter’s life, if anything at all.

The cakes smell sickly sweet in the heat, the coffee is too hot on the tongue.

Sigvard Eckeved’s voice is high, but has a deeper after-tone as he tells them what they already know: that they have been in Paris and that Theresa’s boyfriend was supposed to be here with her, but he has been at his family’s place in the country outside Valdemarsvik with his parents, that Theresa’s purse and mobile are missing, etc, etc. They let him finish, only interrupted by his wife’s short corrections and explanations; her voice considerably more worried. Do you know something? Malin wonders. Something that we ought to know?

When Sigvard Eckeved has finished, Zeke asks: ‘Do you have any pictures of Theresa? To help us, and for us to send around to other police stations if we need to?’

Agneta Eckeved gets up, walking away from them without a word.

‘She’s just run away, hasn’t she?’ Sigvard Eckeved says once his wife has disappeared inside the house. ‘She must have done? It couldn’t be anything else, could it?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin replies. ‘But she’ll turn up, you’ll see. In statistical terms, the probability of that is almost one hundred per cent.’

Then Malin thinks: If she doesn’t turn up, what will you do then with my encouraging words? But in that case my words here and now will be the least of your problems. Yet my words do more good now than harm then.

Agneta Eckeved comes back with a number of colourful packs of photographs in her hand.

She puts them on the table in front of Malin and Zeke.

‘Have a look and take whatever pictures you want.’

Everyone always says I’m a pretty girl.

But how can I believe them and trust that it’s not just something they’re saying, and anyway, I don’t care about being pretty.

Who the hell wants to be pretty?

Pretty is for other people.

I’m grown-up now.

And you spoke to me in a new way that made me blush, but it was cold in the water so no one noticed anything.

Dirt.

Is it dirty here? And where do the pictures come from? How can I see them, I don’t understand.

I’ve seen most of them before. They’re from this year, just a few of all the ones Mum takes so manically of us as a family. Stop taking pictures all the time, Mum.

Just come.

Come and get me.

I’m scared, Dad.

The beach in Majorca last summer.

Winter in St Anton, sun in a blue sky, perfect snow.

Christmas and Easter.

How can I see the pictures and hear what you’re saying even though I’m not there? And the water? What water? And why is it so sludgy, so thick, like frozen clay when it ought to be nice and warm against my body?

Give me the rubber ring, Mum!

‘She’s a very pretty girl, isn’t she?’

And then a female voice, a bit older.

Very pretty, don’t you think so, Reke? Reke? Who’s that?

I’m so tired, Dad. There’s something slippery and sticky against my skin.

Why aren’t you saying anything? I can see you at the table in the conservatory, how the sun reflected in the water of the pool throws patterns on your cheeks. But here, with me, where I am, it’s dark and cold and lonely. Damp.

I’m not supposed to be here. I realise that much.

I don’t want to be here. I want to be with you, I can see you but it’s like you don’t exist, as if I don’t exist.

Don’t I exist?

When I think about it I get scared in a way I’ve never been before. When I think about you, Dad, I feel warm.

But also afraid.

Why don’t you come?

Malin chooses a picture that shows Theresa Eckeved’s face clearly: small mouth, full lips, chubby teenage cheeks and lively, almost black eyes, medium-length dark hair.

No point asking what sort of clothes she had with her. What about how she usually dresses?

‘Jeans. And a shirt. Never skirts, not ever. She thinks they’re stupid,’ Agneta Eckeved says.

‘In the pictures she looks quite girly.’

‘Appearances can be deceptive. She’s a bit of a tomboy,’ Sigvard Eckeved says.

‘You don’t have any suspicions about where she might be? Any special friends?’ Zeke asks.

Both parents shake their heads.

‘She doesn’t have that many friends,’ Agneta Eckeved says. ‘I mean, she knows lots of people, but I wouldn’t say many of them are real friends.’

‘We’d like phone numbers for her boyfriend and any friends that you happen to have numbers for,’ Malin says. ‘And anyone else who means a lot to her. Teachers, sports coaches and so on.’

‘She’s never really liked sports,’ Sigvard Eckeved says. ‘But there’s a girl who used to come and swim here sometimes, some new friend who lives in the city. Do you remember her name, Agneta?’

‘Nathalie. But I’ve no idea what her surname might be.’

‘What about a phone number?’

‘Sorry, no. But her name is Nathalie. I’m sure about that.’

‘If you do remember, we’d like to know,’ Malin says.

‘Does Theresa have a computer?’ Zeke asks.

‘Yes. In her room. She doesn’t use it much.’

‘Can we take it with us? To check her emails and so on.’

‘Of course.’

‘Thanks,’ Zeke says. ‘That pool certainly looks very inviting,’ he says.

‘You’re welcome to have a swim,’ Sigvard Eckeved says.

‘We have to work.’

‘It does look nice,’ Malin says. ‘Cool.’

Stop the small talk.

Find me instead.

I’m missing.

I realise that now. That must be it. Otherwise you would have come, Dad. Wouldn’t you?

Do you think I’m here of my own free will?

You believed he was my boyfriend. How gullible can you be?

But I want to tell you how it is.

I’m yelling, but you still can’t hear me.

And the ringing, from the mobiles up there.

Stop trampling on me. Stop it.

‘Yes, Fors here.’

Malin is standing on the steps of the Eckeveds’ well-kept seventies’ dream. She managed to fish the phone out of her bag and answer on the third ring. Zeke is beside her, with Theresa’s Toshiba laptop under his arm.

‘Sjöman here. You can go to the hospital, ward ten. The doctors have finished examining her. And she’s feeling a bit better, she’s even managed to tell them who she is.’