And she doesn’t know where the words come from, but they’re there in the room.
‘Sure, such as a dildo,’ Karin responds. ‘Not at all impossible.’
‘How do we go about looking into this?’ Malin says, turning to face Karin. ‘Is it even possible to get any closer than guesswork?’
‘Manufacturers keep records. We can start by checking the most likely products, I mean the sorts of thing this paint could have been applied to. Such as a dildo.’
‘What do you think, Malin?’ Zeke asks.
‘I don’t know. But a dildo doesn’t seem unlikely. Her vagina wasn’t really injured, just penetrated. As if the object had been designed to do that.’
‘But surely it’s possible to cause damage with a dildo?’
‘Yes, if you’re hard-handed. But then, you can cause damage with anything.’
‘My experience is that the vagina almost always shows serious damage when hostile penetration occurs with an object that isn’t designed for the purpose,’ Karin says. ‘It could very well be a dildo. You can get both hard and soft models.’
‘You’re an expert?’ Zeke says.
‘No,’ Karin says. ‘But that much I do know.’
And then the realisation of where the paint came from, that it was scraped out from within Josefin. Malin thinks of Maria Murvall, the young girl who was raped in Tjällmo forest several years ago and now sits mute in a mental institution. The crass words in the report about her shredded innards, her body lying on the bed of her room in Vadstena last winter, when Malin visited in connection with another case.
Probability, Malin thinks. Forces herself back to concrete facts.
Thousands of things and their language, listen to the language of these things instead, to what they’re saying now. The air conditioning in the room splutters, a slow coughing sound spreading through the ventilation pipes before it falls silent and almost at once a debilitating heat starts to take over the room.
‘God, how stupid,’ Karin says. ‘Now it’s packed up and who knows how long they’ll take to fix it in the middle of the holidays like this, if there are any of them working at all.’
‘They’re probably working,’ Zeke says.
‘A dildo,’ Malin says. ‘That makes sense, even if our perpetrator could in theory have used pretty much anything.’
She says nothing about her earlier thought about a lesbian connection. But surely lesbians often use dildos? Or is that just prejudice? No, one of her classmates at Police Academy had proudly shown her her collection and given her detailed descriptions of dildo technique.
Zeke nods in agreement, no trace of doubt in his eyes.
‘I was thinking that I could get Forensics to check dildo manufacturers,’ Karin says. ‘See what sort of paint they use. It might take a while, but you’d be surprised how much even the strangest businesses know.’
Then Karin leans forward and puts her eye to the microscope, saying: ‘It really is a beautiful shade of blue, isn’t it? Clean and pure, like spring water.’
Outside the heat has taken a firm grip on the air, and the wind, insofar as there is any, is hot, dragging through already parched treetops. The smoke from the forest fires is pungent on the air, the wind must be coming from Tjällmo today.
The fires keep getting worse. This morning an elderly couple had to be evacuated from the house they’d lived in for sixty years.
The light seems to attack your eyes, any sunglasses that let you see anything at all are helpless against it. And she could really do with clear vision right now, to see all the connections that are scraping away at her consciousness like little shards of metal.
Malin and Zeke retreat to the lobby of the National Forensics Lab and its relative cool, where they sit down on one of the red Lammhult sofas, panting, unable to summon the energy to walk the hundred metres to the police station.
‘Shit,’ Zeke said. ‘I didn’t think it could get any hotter.’
‘Oh, it can,’ Malin says. ‘And this damn light. Even the thought of it gives me a headache.’
‘So, a dildo?’
‘I don’t know, Zeke. Maybe.’
Zeke runs a hand over his shaved head.
‘So who uses dildos?’ he says.
Malin thinks, not answering Zeke’s question, preferring to leave it open and let Zeke see the connection for himself.
‘Someone who’s been chemically castrated? Someone suffering from impotence? Someone who just feels like it? Lesbians?’
‘Lesbians,’ Malin says, lingering over the word to let Zeke realise what she means.
‘So that’s what you’re thinking?’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘Lovelygirl on Theresa’s Facebook page. Nathalie. And Josefin? Do you think she’s lesbian as well?’
‘No. But the perpetrator could be. A definite line of inquiry, anyway.’
Zeke nods.
‘So who else would use a dildo?’
‘I can’t think of anyone else.’
‘Maybe some unlucky bastard who’s lost his crown jewels altogether?’
‘You reckon?’ Malin says.
‘How can we know? Or else the scum in Berga have come up with a new way of humiliating women,’ Zeke says.
Malin stares in front of her.
Sees how Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami filled Josefin Davidsson with cheap wine, then took turns raping her on a sofa with a blue-painted dildo. Sees them laughing, exhibiting the very worst of masculinity, even though they’re scarcely more than boys.
That’s racist, Malin thinks.
Shrugs off the image of the boys.
Malin and Zeke sit in silence beside each other on the sofa. Breathing in the air, cool and dry, looking out at the heat, at the way it’s making the air in the police station car park vibrate and snake.
Tove and Janne in Bali, cooler than here.
It’s ten past nine and Malin is sitting at her kitchen table, eating a dish of soured milk and oat-grits. She’s so tired she couldn’t even be bothered to slice a banana.
Hot in the flat.
No air conditioning.
She raised the dildo idea with Sven over the phone, he thought it sounded like a lead worth pursuing, and said that he’d get some uniforms to check places where you could buy blue dildos on the net, in parallel with Karin’s work: ‘That’s how people buy that sort of stuff these days, isn’t it?’
Daniel Högfeldt.
She thought for a while that there could be something more than just the physical between them, and maybe there is, but mostly it’s this: the way their paths cross, day after day, until they meet up in his or her flat. But not tonight, he’s still in the city, Malin knows that much, and not in this heat, this isolation. Her own sweat is enough, and exhaustion is making every muscle wither and buckle, and she’s missing Tove and Janne so badly that it’s on the point of turning into grief.
Her mobile rings.
It’s in the living room.
Malin puts the spoon down, gets up, hurries through to find it. Guesses that something’s wrong.
Karim Akbar’s number.
‘Malin here.’
‘Malin, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Just because there’s been a rape, you start harassing local immigrants?’
How could he know?
‘We . . .’
‘No excuses, Malin. Take a look at the Correspondent’s website, it’s all there in black and white.’
‘Hang on, Karim, calm down.’
‘And now every single bloody media organisation in the country is calling me for an opinion.’
Karim’s in his element.
Malin can’t work out if he’s genuinely angry or just pretending to be, and is actually happy to get some media coverage in the news drought. All his articles and appearances are controversial, but politically safe in the attitude towards integration that he represents. What’s Karim’s long-term goal? A ministerial post? But he doesn’t even belong to a political party.