There’s always something that comes between people.
Religion.
Like in Bosnia.
Tribal loyalty.
Like in Rwanda.
And always politics, money, ambition and game-playing.
And often people like me. The willing cleaners. The ones who show up in the immediate wake of the catastrophe.
Things that have happened, recently and long ago. They collide, one way or another, in a moment of history, and then everything changes direction. An explosion of violence and you just have to deal with it.
A warm wind on his face.
Africa.
Cold wind.
Balkans.
A raw, damp cold that he will always carry with him.
Her voice on the phone just now, the poor, crackling line. The same tired performance as so many times before, their words, the things they say without saying anything at all.
What have I done?
Malin.
What the hell have we done? What are we doing?
It’s time to stop messing about and to start playing the game seriously.
Janne goes in from the balcony. Lies down on his bed next to his daughter. Listens to her breathing.
Malin is dreaming of a cold wind whistling through tightly packed ground. Of a tiny little creature whimpering and trying to find its way into her hands.
She dreams of an open field made of sky and fluffy clouds.
She dreams that she’s swimming in the sea with Tove and Janne, and alongside them swims a fourth person, faceless but not frightening, more like the incarnation of everything good that a person can be, if only in a warm summer’s dream.
Sven Sjöman’s wife Sonja looks at her husband. The way his stomach seems to spill across the mattress, the increasingly deep wrinkles on his face, and she listens to his snoring, the way it seems to get louder with each passing year, with every kilo added to his stomach. But one minor miracle: she accepts the snoring, it has become a part of her, her life, them.
She usually wakes up at three o’clock or so.
Lies there quietly beside him and looks out between the drawn curtains, how the garden outside, its shapes, assume different guises according to the season.
The darkness of summer is relative.
The trees, apples and pears and plums, are clearly visible, not even imagination can turn them into anything but trees.
She usually pretends to be asleep when he creeps out of bed to go down to his woodwork room in the basement. She knows he wants to think that she’s asleep, that he’d never leave her alone in bed if she let him know she was awake.
He bought a new lathe in June.
There’s going to be a lot of bowls. He’s started selling them in the craft shop at the castle.
In August they’re going to Germany.
Sven reluctant, increasingly resistant to long journeys as the years pass, while she is keener.
‘We should go to Australia. Go and see how Joakim’s doing.’
‘Nineteen hours on a plane? The lad’ll be home for Christmas. Isn’t that enough?’
Driving down to Germany.
Minor roads.
Hotels where no one else ever seems to have stayed.
Sven.
They’ve been married more than thirty years.
She sees his anxiety in his sleep, the girls, all the terrible things she read about in the paper, all the things he refuses to talk about.
Zeke Martinsson has woken up, is in the kitchen of his villa in Landeryd, waiting for the coffee machine.
The smell of coffee, of waking up, of a new day spreading through the room.
The clock on the cooker says 05.23.
He almost always sleeps right through undisturbed, waking up early and fully rested.
The house is hot.
Must be twenty-eight degrees. His wife wanted to buy an air-conditioning unit for the bedroom, but this heat can’t last much longer, and then that would be ten thousand down the drain. But what’s ten thousand?
Martin’s going to earn millions. Just from playing a bit of ice hockey. Has already done so.
But everything’s good if it isn’t bad.
Brain surgeons earn nothing compared to ice hockey players. And nursing assistants?
The whole thing is just one big joke.
And the girls. Theresa and Josefin. What’s happening?
Those bastard gangbangers in Berga. Stupid kids with a completely sick imported view of women. They bring out the worst in me.
And Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck.
What are they hiding?
Zeke pours himself a mug of coffee. Sips at the hot drink, feeling his body wake up simply from breathing in the vapour through his nose. He puts the mug down on the kitchen table, goes out into the hall, opens the front door.
The garden is still. Flowers, bushes, trees. Like dark, frozen figures.
Dad spent ten years in Åleryd geriatric hospital before he was allowed to die. Stiff, locked inside himself by a Parkinson’s Disease that no medicine, old or new, could do anything about. Like a denuded tree in a garden.
Zeke creeps out in nothing but his underwear.
No neighbours at home, or up, if they happen to be home against all expectation. He opens the letterbox, puts his hand in and pulls out the Correspondent.
Looks down in the box for advertising flyers but it’s empty, just a few earwigs creeping into one corner.
He holds the paper up to the sky, at such an angle that he can make out the headlines in the dawn light, see the picture on the front page.
Pictures of Theresa Eckeved.
From the same sequence as the pictures they got from her parents yesterday.
Girl missing for a week . . . parents pleading for information . . .
Zeke folds the paper.
Coffee.
Must drink more coffee.
Make my brain pure and clear.
Today holds something important in store for me.
12
Peter Sköld has blond highlights in his hair, and he’s so thin, almost painfully skinny, and his father Sten, a man with determined green eyes and a sharply chiselled face, looks at his son with a pained expression when he crosses his bare legs as he sits down on the chair in the staffroom at the police station.
Neither of them seems tired, even though they must have set off early that morning from their place in the country.
And Malin sees it at once.
Peter Sköld is aware of the significance of silence.
Why?
Because you have things that belong only to you, don’t you, Peter?
Malin sits down and Zeke goes over to the coffee machine.
‘Coffee, anyone?’
But father and son decline and Malin, who has already kick-started the day with three mugs, also turns down his offer.
‘Thanks for getting here so early.’
The clock on the wall says twenty past eight.
‘It only takes an hour or so to get here, more or less,’ Sten Sköld says. ‘And now that Theresa’s gone missing it’s the least we can do.’
Malin looks over at Peter Sköld.
What’s that I can see in his face?
Fear? Cynicism? Silence.
‘So are you a couple, you and Theresa?’ Malin asks.
The answer comes quickly. Peter Sköld’s slender hand through his hair.
‘Yes.’
Zeke sits down at the table with a steaming hot mug of coffee.
‘You don’t seem to spend much time with her,’ Sten Sköld says to his son.
‘Like you’d know about that? We’re together.’
‘Did you notice anything different the last time you met?’ Malin asks.
‘No, like what?’
‘That dance you mentioned, where you met for the first time. There have never been any dances like that,’ Malin says.
Peter Sköld’s eyes flit about before he looks up at the ceiling.