‘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.’
‘Josefin Davidsson?’
The heat like a glowing net around her brain.
‘Who else, Fors, who else?’
‘What have we got?’
‘She’s fifteen years old, lives with her parents in Lambohov.’
As she clicks to end the call Malin looks through the green-tinted glass beside the front door, sees Sigvard Eckeved’s silhouette pacing anxiously back and forth in the hall.
7
Sigvard Eckeved, over the years
You came to us late, Theresa.
I was forty-two, your mum forty-one.
We did all the tests and the doctors said that there might be something wrong with you, but out you came to us one late February day, like a perfectly formed reminder of all that was good in the world.
For me you are smell, feeling, sound, breathing in our big bed at night.
You creep in tight and what am I to you? The same as you are to me. We are each other, Theresa.
They say that having children is an act of handing over, showing you a way out into life. Giving you to the world, and the world to you.
I don’t believe that for a moment.
You’re mine.
I am you, Theresa.
Together we are the world.
Children provide a step up to the emotional realisation that we human beings are one. A child is the most important bearer of that myth.
One’s own child, the person I am.
You’re two years old, running across the parquet floor of the living room, language is developing, you flail and point, consuming the world, we consume it together. Even if I sometimes tell you off, you come to me, searching in me for the world.
You’re four and a half and you hit out at me in anger.
Then you run through the years, further from me, but closer each time because you are leaving an impression within me.
You are twelve.
With love I creep into your room at night, stroking your cheek with my hand, breathing in the smell of your hair.
We’re on the side of the good guys, I think then.
You, I, your mum, our dreams and all the life we live together as one and the same.
The world is created through you.
You are fourteen.
Opinionated, stubborn, provocative, angry, but the embodiment of friendliness. You are the most beautiful person the world has ever seen.
I understand you, Theresa. Don’t think I don’t. I’m not stupid. I just don’t want to move too fast.
We are the same feeling, you and I.
The feeling of unending love.
8
The dark-skinned cleaner sweeps his mop back and forth over the speckled yellow linoleum floor, shadows become sunlight, which becomes shadow as his never still body moves across the sunlit window at the far end of the corridor of the hospital ward.
When the sun shines on it, parts of the floor seem to lift. A faint smell of disinfectant and sweat, the sweat emitted slowly by bodies at rest.
Ward ten.
A general ward. The seventh floor of the high-rise hospital building. Doors to some rooms stand open, pale pictures on greying, yellow-painted walls. Through the windows of the rooms Malin can see the city, sunburned and still, panting mutely, its enforced desolation.
Patients resting on their beds. Some wearing green or urine-yellow hospital gowns, others their own clothes. It isn’t hot inside the hospital, the rumbling ventilation units are obviously adequate, yet it still feels as though listlessness reigns supreme here as well, as though the sick were getting sicker, as though those who have to work through the summer can’t quite manage their allotted tasks.
A nurse materialises in a doorway.
Flowing red hair, freckles covering more than half her round face.
She looks at Malin and Zeke with big green eyes.
‘You’re from the police,’ she says. ‘It’s good that you got here so soon.’
Malin and Zeke stop in front of the nurse. Is it so obvious? Malin thinks, and says: ‘And the girl, Josefin Davidsson. Where can we find her?’
‘Room eleven. She’s in there with her parents. But first you need to talk to Doctor Sjögripe. If you go in here, she’ll be with you shortly.’
The red-haired nurse indicates the room she’s just come out of.
‘The doctor will be here in five minutes.’
The clock sticking out from the wall in the corridor says 12.25.
They should have got lunch on the way. Malin’s stomach rumbles with a gentle feeling of nausea.
They close the door behind them. Sit on wooden chairs in front of a desk, its grey laminate top covered with advertising folders and leaflets, yellow files. A window beside them looks onto a dark ventilation shaft. There are several anonymous files on the bookcase against the wall behind the desk.
Warmer in here.
Rumbling from the dusty, heart-shaped ventilation grille in the ceiling.
Five minutes, ten.
They sit in silence next to each other. Want to save their words, pull them out newly washed and clean later. For now, this silence is all that is needed. And what would they say?
What do you think about this?
We’ll have to see.
Has she been raped, or did the blood come from somewhere else? And the smell of bleach? The whiteness? The cleansed wounds?
The door opens and Doctor Sjögripe comes in, wearing a white coat.
She’s maybe fifty-five years old, cropped grey hair clinging to her head, making her cheeks, nose and mouth look sharper than they really are.
A pair of reading glasses with transparent plastic frames hangs around her neck. The cheap sort, for a pair of twinkling eyes. Intelligent, aware, self-confident, like only the eyes of someone who has had everything from the very start can be.
Both Malin and Zeke practically leap out of their chairs. Anything else was unthinkable.
Sjögripe.
The most blue-blooded family in the whole of Östergötland. The family estate at Sjölanda outside Kisa is a significant employer, one of the largest and most profitable agricultural businesses in the country.
‘Louise Sjögripe.’
Her handshake is firm, but not hard, feminine but with a certain pressure.
Doctor Sjögripe lets them sit down before taking her own seat behind the desk.
Malin has no idea what position Louise Sjögripe occupies in the family, but can’t help wondering. Doesn’t want to wonder. Gossip, gossip, think about why we’re here instead.
‘Considering the circumstances, Josefin Davidsson is doing fairly well now,’ Louise Sjögripe says. The way she says the words makes her voice sound hoarse.
‘What can you tell us? I’m assuming you conducted the examination?’
Zeke sounds slightly irritated, but not so as most people would notice.
Louise Sjögripe smiles.
‘Yes, I examined her and documented her injuries. And I’ll tell you what I think.’
‘Thank you, we’d be grateful, I mean pleased, if you could,’ Malin says, trying to look the doctor/aristocrat in the eyes, but the self-awareness they exude makes her look towards the window instead.
‘In all likelihood she has been abused. She couldn’t have caused the wounds on her arms and legs herself, and they weren’t caused in self-defence. Those don’t usually look, how can I put it, quite so regular. It’s as if someone has inflicted the injuries with a sharp object and then washed and cleaned them carefully.’
‘What sort of object?’ Malin wonders.
‘Impossible to say. A knife? Maybe, maybe not.’
‘And the bleeding from the vagina?’
‘Her hymen was broken by penetration, and the blood vessels on the inside of the vagina were damaged. Hence the bleeding. But that’s normal with a first penetration, so it’s likely that a relatively soft object was used, with a degree of caution.’
Louise Sjögripe takes a deep breath, not because what she has just said seems to trouble her, but to emphasise what she’s about to say.
‘There are no traces of sperm inside her. But the perpetrator doesn’t seem to have used a condom, because I found no sign of any lubricant. What I did find, however, were some very small, almost microscopic traces of something resembling blue plastic, as if Josefin Davidsson was penetrated by an object of some sort rather than a male member.’
‘And . . .’
Zeke tries to ask a question, but Doctor Sjögripe waves her hand in front of her face dismissively.
‘I’ve already sent the traces to National Forensics. I know the routine. I’ve also taken blood samples from the blood on her thighs. Nothing apart from her own.
‘And you don’t have to worry. I haven’t said anything about the girl’s injuries to her parents. They’re the details of a crime, so I’ll let you deal with that. I just discuss the medical situation with them.’
Malin and Zeke look at each other.
‘So she couldn’t have caused the injuries herself?’ Malin asks.
‘No. That would be practically impossible. The pain would be too great. The penetration? Probably not.’
‘And the blood tests?’ Malin wonders. ‘Was there anything unusual about them? Could she have been drugged?’
‘Our initial analysis didn’t show anything. But I’ve sent samples to the central lab for a more detailed examination, and that’s when we’ll find out if she had any foreign substances in her blood. But a lot of substances disappear quickly.’
‘What about the fact that she looked like she’d been scrubbed clean? She smelled of bleach.’
‘Someone’s washed her very carefully, you’re right. As if they wanted to make sure she was completely clean. There were no strands of hair or anything that could be linked in any way to the perpetrator by DNA testing, nothing on her entire body.’
‘Is it possible to isolate traces of any disinfectant that might have been used on her body?’
‘Probably. I took epidermal samples from her back and thighs. Those have gone off to the National Lab as well.’
‘So how is she now? In your opinion? Is she talking? At the crime scene she hardly said a word.’
‘She’s talking. Seems OK. And she genuinely doesn’t seem to remember anything about what happened.’
‘She doesn’t remember?’
‘No. Mental blocks aren’t unusual after a traumatic experience. And it’s probably just as well. Rape is one of the worst curses of our times. This spreading absence of norms. The lack of cultural respect for another person’s body, usually female. I mean, here in Linköping alone we’ve had two gang rapes in three years.’
You sound like you’re reciting an article, Malin thinks, and asks: ‘When did she start talking?’
‘While I was examining her. It hurt and she said ouch and then the words were somehow back. Until then she had been silent. She said her name and looked at the clock in the room. Then she wondered what she was doing in hospital and said that her parents were probably worrying.’
‘Is there any way of getting her to remember what happened?’
‘That’s not my area, Inspector Fors. I’m a doctor, not a psychologist. A specially trained psychologist spoke to her about an hour ago, but Josefin couldn’t remember anything. She’s with her parents in room eleven. You can go and see her now. I think she can cope with a few questions.’
Doctor Sjögripe opens a file, puts on the glasses hanging around her neck, and starts to read.