‘Lesbians,’ Sven says. ‘Could there be a lesbian angle to this case? That Lovelygirl on Facebook certainly gave the impression of being homosexual.’
‘And Nathalie Falck is pretty masculine,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks that he’s being prejudiced, but deep down she agrees. She can feel the suggestions in the room.
‘So, there could be a lesbian angle. Keep it in the back of your minds,’ Sven says.
‘Maybe Nathalie Falck knows who that Lovelygirl is?’ Malin says.
‘OK, time for the gangbangers,’ Zeke says, standing up. His eyes full of expectation.
A code.
We need a damn code for the lock.
It’s just after half past nine. They’re standing in the shade under the porch in front of the door of a run-down block of flats. The once-yellow brick of the façade has faded to ochre, and the surrounding grass and flowerbeds look as if no one cares or is paid enough to look after them. Cigarette ends, cans, broken green bottles.
Malin can see herself in the glass of the door, her face improbably long and her skin somehow glowing.
Berga.
Only a few kilometres from the centre of the city, and just seven hundred metres from Ramshäll.
Another world.
Unemployment.
Immigrants.
And the usuaclass="underline" single mothers trying to raise their children to be decent people, as best they can with underpaid jobs that swallow up ten hours a day.
Absentee fathers are no myth here.
Most of the inhabitants of Berga are probably at home, even though it’s summer.
Two blocks away from where they are now standing Malin found one of her old school friends, dead from a drugs overdose. In a small one-room flat on the first floor, her first year with the Linköping Police, when she moved back with Tove after graduating from the Police Academy.
A smell had been coming from the flat.
The neighbours had reported it.
And she and a colleague had gone around, and he had been lying on the floor beside the bed, the place an absolute tip, and he stank and his body must have swollen up but by the time they arrived it looked almost shrivelled.
Jimmy Svennson with three Ns.
He used to be quite a charmer. Pothead turned junkie turned dead.
What’s the smell now?
Scorched summer.
‘What are we going to do about the door, Malin?’
‘Wait until someone comes.’
‘You mean . . .’
‘I was joking, Zeke. A little morning joke,’ and Malin pulls her key-ring from the inside pocket of her pale-blue jacket, sticks the skeleton key in the lock and twists. ‘This sort of lock’s easy.’
Zeke looks at her admiringly.
‘I have to say, you’re bloody good at that, Fors.’
The stairwell smells of mould, and the lime-green walls are in serious need of a coat of paint.
No lift.
They’re panting by the time they reach the third floor.
‘Bet you he’s asleep,’ Zeke says as he presses the doorbell beside Behzad Karami’s door.
They ring again and again.
Malin calls Behzad Karami’s mobile number, there’s no landline listed.
There must be a terrible amount of ringing inside the flat.
She was off her face.
Then the voice on the mobile, with just a faint trace of an accent in his Östergötland Swedish even though Karami was already eight years old when he moved here.
‘Do you know what time it is, you bastard?’
‘This is Malin Fors. Police. If you open the front door, the ringing will stop.’
Zeke’s finger on the bell.
‘What?’
‘Open the door. We’re standing outside.’
‘Fuck.’
Over the phone Malin hears a body moving, then there’s rattling behind the door, Zeke’s finger ringing constantly now, and the sound of the doorbell getting louder and louder the more the door opens.
‘Good morning, Behzad. So you’ve gone and messed things up for yourself again, have you?’
Zeke’s voice full of distaste as he lets go of the bell.
Behzad Karami’s face puffy with sleep and possibly alcohol, and who knows what else? Tattooed torso, powerful shoulders, a choker of animal claws and teeth around his neck. Nineteen years old, his big, black, shiny BMW parked closer to the centre.
On the other hand.
After a spell in youth custody he was never found guilty of anything. And we couldn’t get him for the rapes, and maybe his ‘business’ is going well? What do I know? Malin thinks.
‘We’ll come in,’ Zeke says, and before Behzad Karami can protest Zeke has pushed him aside, stepped inside the hall and on into the single room.
Behzad Karami hesitant.
Branded since he sat in jail while they investigated whether or not the gangbang of the paralytic Lovisa Hjelmstedt could be classed as rape or serious sexual assault.
But the case had collapsed.
She agreed to it, and witnesses had seen her dancing with Behzad Karami and Ali Shakbari at the club, seen her leave with them of her own accord, even if she was so drunk by then that she could hardly walk.
‘Not done any cleaning for a while, Behzad?’ Zeke says. ‘But a mummy’s boy like you probably can’t manage that, eh? Keeping things clean?’
Behzad Karami standing in front of Malin in the living room. His back is covered by a showy fire-breathing dragon.
‘I clean whenever the hell I feel like it. It’s none of your business, you pi . . .’
‘Say it,’ Zeke snarls. ‘Make my day. Finish what you were going to say.’
‘Zeke, calm down. Sit down on the bed, Behzad.’
The rough wallpaper is full of scorch-marks and stains, and on the bed is a torn pink sheet. The blinds are pulled down over the view of Berga’s rooftops. A huge flat-screen television is screwed to one wall, and the stereo and speakers take up most of the free floor space. The tiny kitchen is oddly clean, as if it has recently been used and scrubbed very, very thoroughly.
Behzad Karami sinks onto the bed, rubbing his eyes, says: ‘For fuck’s sake, couldn’t you have come a bit later, what the hell do you want?’
‘A girl was raped yesterday. She was found in the Horticultural Society Park,’ Malin says.
‘Don’t suppose you know anything about it?’ Zeke says.
And Behzad Karami looks down at the green lino floor, shakes his head and says: ‘We didn’t rape Lovisa, and I haven’t raped anyone else either. Get it? When the hell are you going to get it?’
His voice.
Suddenly afraid.
Behind the muscles and tattoos he’s just a boy, yet also a man who feels ashamed when people around town whisper behind his back, judged by the public court of a provincial city.
‘That’s him, the one who raped . . .’
‘Bloody animal. That’s what they’re like, those . . .’
‘Where were you the night before last?’
‘I was at my parents’. We’ve got family over from Iran. Check with them. Seven people can tell you I was there until five o’clock in the morning at least.’
‘And after that?’
‘Then I came back here.’
Josefin who remembers nothing. Was she attacked before or after the cinema? What time?
‘You came straight back here?’
‘I just said so.’
‘Why should we believe you?’ Zeke says, patting Behzad on the head.
‘What about Ali, do you know what he was doing then?’
‘No. No idea. Are you going to fuck about with him as well?’
Malin can see Zeke getting angry, how he’s trying to stop himself hitting Behzad Karami. Instead he says in a loud voice: ‘So you didn’t go down to the Horticultural Society Park after the party? Didn’t hide there waiting for a girl to go past?’
Malin takes a step back, out into the hall. She goes into the little kitchen, a completely different world from the rest of the flat; cupboard doors gleaming white, albeit worn.