‘So, gang rape, any thoughts?’
Malin knows what Sven is aiming at with all his inferences and questions.
But he doesn’t want to say anything, wants them to come up with it, because however you put it, it’s going to sound racist.
In the end Zeke says it: ‘We’ll have to talk to Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami.’
Shakbari and Karami.
Guilty of having sex all night long with a hopelessly drunk girl. But they weren’t convicted of anything, and were released after their trial back in June.
‘She agreed to it.’
‘She wanted to, for fuck’s sake.’
On the kitchen table of a flat in Berga?
‘For fuck’s sake, she was up for it. She’s a slut.’
Impossible to prove the opposite. And when Sven takes another mouthful of his coffee Malin considers official truths, and unofficial ones. How the entire police force and media know that practically all gang rapes are committed by two or more young men from immigrant backgrounds, but no one writes or says anything stating that truth outright.
Non-truths.
Politically uncomfortable.
And then the problem isn’t there any more.
And if it isn’t there, it can’t be discussed.
Which leaves a problem that doesn’t exist and which therefore can never be solved.
And then there are girls like Josefin and Lovisa Hjelmstedt. That was her name, Shakbari and Karami’s victim.
Girls like Theresa Eckeved.
Theresa’s probably just gone off by herself somewhere.
Gone away.
Just like that.
When Malin sits down at her desk after the meeting her mobile rings.
Where is it?
There, in her bag.
‘Hi, Mum!’
‘Tove!’
Tove.
Malin can see her in front of her, the excitement in her blue eyes, her brown hair lifted by the breeze from the sea.
Are you both OK? she thinks.
I miss you even more now I hear your voice.
But at the same time, it’s good that you’re not in the city.
It must be past midnight. What are you doing up so late? You ought to be in bed.
But Malin holds back. Wants to show her trust.
‘How’s everything there, then?’
‘We went on a boat-trip today. To a little beach.’
‘Was it good?’
‘Yes, although the trip back was a bit boring, but I had a book with me. We’ve just been out to get some food.’
‘Is the food good?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Loads of things cooked on skewers?’
It’s as if the distance is making our conversation more superficial than our conversations usually are, Malin thinks. How the words can be just as trivial across the kitchen table in the morning, but they gain tone, context and meaning from the fact that she and Tove are both there. As if all the intuitive contact disappears somewhere on the way between all the transmitters, cables and satellites.
‘Which book are you reading?’
‘Several. But I didn’t like Madame Bovary. It’s really old-fashioned.’
The sound of a xylophone in the background, a band playing in the hotel dining room?
‘Is that some sort of orchestra I can hear?’
‘They’re playing in the dining room. Is it hot at home?’
‘Boiling, Tove.’
‘It’s not too bad here. Do you want to talk to Dad?’
‘Why not.’
‘Malin?’
Janne’s voice.
‘Yes. So how are you both?’
‘Fine. But it’s hot. How are things at home?’
‘Hot, unbelievably hot. I’ve never known anything like it.’
‘You should be here with us. It’s nice here.’
Bali.
Be there, Malin thinks, just disappear from the heat here and those unfortunate girls?
The way he disappeared to Bosnia, to Rwanda, to Somalia, anywhere that didn’t involve the impossibility of their love. She has heard his voice a thousand times over crackling phone lines and felt her stomach clench and fill with a hot, black, anxious lump.
Sarajevo. Kigali. Mogadishu.
Janne’s voice on those crackling lines, a message of what could have been, a greeting from a life that never was.
The same thing now.
‘I read about the forest fires on the Correspondent’s website,’ Janne says. ‘They could do with me at home right now.’
And she gets angry. Thinks: I could do with you now. But you, we, never realised it. You always gave in to your damn restlessness. Will you ever grow up enough to put your foot down and say that this is my place on the earth? It doesn’t automatically follow that it’s grown-up to build latrines in a refugee camp or drive a truckload of flour along mined roads. Being grown-up can mean staying put.
The anger dissipates as rapidly as it blew up.
‘The others can cope, Janne.’
‘But it said that one fireman has been seriously injured.’
‘I miss you both,’ Malin says. ‘Give Tove a kiss from me. It’s time she was in bed.’
The Correspondent’s website.
The computer illuminates the bedroom, which would be completely dark without the flickering light from the screen.
The blinds closed tight, their jaws clenching to keep out the evening light.
Forest fires holding the area in their grip. One fireman injured when he tripped over on burning moss. Burns to his face and hands, that must be the one Janne had read about. The pictures in the paper are dramatic, with firemen like little clay figures in front of a huge wall of flame that is ready to set fire to them, burn them.
Daniel Högfeldt hasn’t called her again, but he called Sven five times during the day.
He links the cases in one article. And writes about them in separate pieces as well.
Summer Linköping is shaken after a violent rape in the Horticultural Society Park and the disappearance of . . .
Linköping shaken?
Sleepy, more like. Drowsy with heatstroke.
The articles are short on detail. They’re leaving things open for the time being.
Daniel and the media make their own evaluations. For them the cases are one and the same, Theresa’s disappearance no ordinary disappearance, the connection is good for them, even if Sven doesn’t want anyone to link the cases together and thus help conjure up an evil monster for summer in Linköping.
She’s just seen him on the local news. His eyes flicking to and fro, showing an uncertainty that Malin has never seen before, as if the camera were devouring him. ‘At this point we can’t say for certain . . . we are continuing to investigate . . . no connection . . .’
Karim Akbar had called in from holiday. Wondered if he ought to come in, look after the hyenas, as he put it to Sven.
Sven’s reply: ‘Take your son fishing, Karim. Write your book.’
Then she reads an article about the heatwave. About a stream of deaths among elderly inhabitants in sheltered accommodation, how home helps have found several elderly clients dead from heart attacks; how they can’t cope with the heat or the dry atmosphere of the air conditioning. One district nurse quoted as saying: ‘It’s terribly hot in our patients’ flats. They’re having trouble drinking enough fluids and regulating their body temperature. And we don’t even have time for our regular rounds when so many people are on holiday.’