She runs her hand over the draining board, smells her hand, lemon-scented detergent. She opens a cupboard, finds an unopened bottle of bleach.
She can hear Zeke roaring in the living room.
Knows that Zeke’s anger can be so terrifying that it forces out truths, admissions of guilt where you least expect them.
‘You’re mad, you fucking pig.’
Zeke’s eyes black as he comes out into the hall and finds her in the kitchen.
‘We’re done here,’ he says. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘Not quite,’ Malin says, and goes back in to Behzad Karami.
He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily.
‘The kitchen. How come it’s so clean?’
‘Mum did it the day before yesterday.’
‘One last thing: do you know where we can get hold of Ali?’
‘Try his dad’s flower shop on Tanneforsvägen. Interflora. He’s helping out over the summer.’
The car’s air conditioning is straining.
Malin at the wheel.
Zeke singing along loudly to the choral song filling the car.
Sundsvall church choir sings Abba.
The winner takes it all, the winner takes . . .
Zeke’s voice isn’t as gruff when he sings as when he talks. Malin has learned to put up with the music, partly because she has begun to see the point of singing in a group, but mainly because she can see what the music, and the sense of belonging, does for Zeke, the way he can switch in a matter of minutes from an adrenalin-pumped alpha male to a cheery, tuneful, almost harmonious man.
They’re heading towards Tannefors.
Past the deserted skateboard ramps at Johannelund, the scorched yellow grass of the forgotten little fields between the river and the blocks of flats, then they cross the Braskens bridge. Down to the left the mismatched buildings of the Saab factory huddle in the heat.
Aeronautics industry.
Actually a weapons industry.
But the pride of the city, nonetheless.
Because that’s what Linköping is like, Malin thinks. Self-conscious, almost arrogant, wanting to be smart and a little bit exceptional, an exquisite little metropolis in the big wide world. A reluctant rural town, a provincial city with delusions of grandeur, but without any real self-awareness or sense of style. Which is why it’s hard to think of a more provincial provincial city than Linköping.
‘What are you thinking about, Malin?’
‘The city. How it’s actually pretty OK.’
‘Linköping? Has anyone said otherwise?’
As Zeke’s question hangs in the air Malin’s mobile rings, the call cutting through the car and into their ears.
‘I’m done with the tests, Malin. I’ve analysed what the doctors at the University Hospital found inside Josefin Davidsson.’
Karin Johannison’s voice.
Ice-cold, self-assured in the heat.
‘We’re on our way,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve just got to get something out of the way first.’
13
Most of the drops turn to steam, wiped out before they have time to land on the countless potted plants standing on the shelves beneath the florist’s limp red awning. The noisy whirr of the humidifier bores into Malin’s brain, but fades away when they step into the damp cool of the shop.
The tall, dark man behind the counter immediately assumes a watchful, hesitant posture; he recognises them, Malin’s sure of that.
Malin shows her ID.
The man nods but doesn’t say anything.
‘We’re looking for Ali Shakbari.’
‘What’s he done now?’
The man sounds resigned, but also annoyed.
‘Probably nothing,’ Malin says. ‘But we need to talk to him.’
The man points towards a door with a plastic window.
‘My son’s in the stockroom. You can go through.’
Ali Shakbari is standing at a bench screwed into white tiles, trimming some red roses. The whole room has a strange, pleasant perfume. When he catches sight of them he grows afraid, the look in his brown eyes oddly watery. You want to run, don’t you? Malin thinks.
‘Ali,’ Zeke says. ‘How are things?’
No answer, and Ali puts the secateurs down on the bench slowly, his thin, sinewy body in perfect shape under his white cotton overalls.
‘What were you doing the night before last?’
‘What do you mean?’
Defiant now.
Malin explains about Josefin being found in the Horticultural Society Park.
‘And you think I had something to do with it?’
‘We don’t think anything,’ Malin says. ‘So, what were you doing?’
‘Dad and I were cleaning the stockroom. We didn’t finish until 3.00 a.m. It’s so fucking hot that it’s easier to work at night.’
‘It’s true.’
Ali’s father is standing in the doorway to the stockroom, holding the door open and radiating authority.
‘Then I drove him home. He was home by about 3.30.’
Malin looks around the stockroom.
Every inch of the room is sparkling clean, well ordered.
Too clean? Malin thinks before picking up one of the red roses from the bench.
‘These are lovely,’ she says.
‘Finest quality,’ Ali Shakbari’s father says.
There are two sorts of people in the world. Hunters, and the hunted.
So far in this investigation those roles haven’t been fixed.
Are we the ones being hunted, drifting like motes of dust on the hot breeze? Malin wonders. So far we haven’t reached the point where we’re doing the stalking. Not yet. But maybe now, as a result of what I can see under the glass, in the hot light of the four lamps placed around the small but powerful microscope. The answer may lie in this blue substance, a blue truth.
The fragments are so tiny that they’re hard to focus on.
The edges of the tiny blue fragments almost jagged.
A windowless laboratory in the basement of the National Forensics Lab, which smells of chemicals and disinfectant. A humming noise from a fume cupboard.
Zeke’s heavy breathing beside Malin, Karin’s voice in her head: I know what it was, Malin. What the doctors found inside her.
‘What you’re looking at is fragments of paint,’ Karin says. ‘The sort of paint that’s normally used to colour plastic.’
The blue fragments blur in front of Malin’s eyes. Floating.
Is the truth moving about somewhere down there?
Or something else?
A first clue.
A blue colour, dead particles moving, as if they had been buried alive under the glass.
Malin raises her head from the microscope and looks at Karin.
‘What could the paint have come from, what sort of object?’
Zeke sounds impatient, irritable because of July’s never-ending hot weather, or possibly just because Karin is in the room.
Karin’s voice is mild: ‘It’s impossible to say, it could be any one of a thousand things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as a garden hose, the handle of a cheap mop, a salad server, a lamp-stand, a toy spade.’
Malin, Zeke and Karin fall silent.
Josefin Davidsson penetrated without knowing it.
Theresa missing. Hints of lesbian activity on her Facebook page. Lovelygirl.
Does all of this fit together?
Nathalie Falck. Almost like a man. What do men have that women don’t?
What’s the voice?
Here and now.
Malin listens to the room. Something is taking shape in front of her eyes.
What are the girls in this investigation saying? Theresa, Josefin, Nathalie?
‘Such as a dildo,’ Malin says. ‘A dildo.’