‘Theresa is missing, Nathalie. You have to tell me what you know.’
And Nathalie Falck turns her round face towards Malin, looks her deep in the eyes.
‘But I don’t know anything else. I know Theresa, but I don’t know everything about her.’
Her pupils contract. A sign of lying.
But are you really, actually lying?
‘What about Josefin Davidsson, do you know her?’
‘You mean the girl in the park? Oh, come on! I’d never even heard of her until I read about her in the paper.’
By the entrance to the cathedral, some seventy-five metres behind them, someone turns a rack of postcards.
‘Why do you come here?’ Malin asks, recognising her own visits to the memorial grove up in the Old Cemetery, and thinking that Tove would never come here of her own accord, the library is her place.
‘I like the way it’s so peaceful. And big. There’s room for me in here, somehow.’
‘It’s certainly big.’
‘What do you think has happened to Theresa?’ Nathalie Falck asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Malin answers. ‘Do you?’
Then Nathalie points to the altarpiece, at the angular, painted figure of Christ.
‘Do you believe in virgin birth?’
Malin doesn’t know how to react to the question.
Virgin birth?
‘I mean,’ Nathalie Falck says, ‘what’s the point of innocence when everything pure and beautiful always ends up dirty? Is it actually possible to talk about such a thing as fucking innocence in the first place?’
It’s just after midnight when Malin lies down on her bed for the second time that evening. It’s just as hot and lonely as the rest of the flat.
She has the radio on.
Helen Aneman is talking about the heat and the forest fire, how one of the firemen from Mjölby who was taking part in the effort to put it out had been surrounded by flames on a gravel track and had been seriously injured.
‘He’s in the University Hospital right now, and I think we should all spare a thought for him and his family.’
Then music.
‘Into the Fire.’
Bruce Springsteen’s epic about the firemen who headed straight into the burning World Trade Center to save others. The wonderful thing about human beings: how we can instantly drop our responsibilities for family, friends, acquaintances, and sacrifice our lives for someone completely unknown to us, our neighbour.
May your strength give us strength
.
How the possibility of sacrifice makes us human.
May your hope give us hope
.
And she has read that the firemen who survived said that they never hesitated, never felt any fear, nor any sense of duty, just a feeling of being one and the same as those in need.
May your love give us love.
If people are reincarnated, let those firemen come back.
Then the song ends and she turns off the radio.
She shuts her eyes. Waits for sleep and dreams, but instead her thoughts race around her skull.
Nathalie Falck. Lovelygirl. What is it that Nathalie isn’t saying? Can’t do any more there. Let time do its work. Josefin. Her closed memory.
Norrköping and Linköping have lesbian women in the fire brigade, Janne has told her, but who are they? Maybe they could tell her something?
It’s a cavalcade of prejudices, this investigation.
Immigrant youths gang raping young girls.
Lesbian firefighters, police officers.
They had a quick discussion after the meeting, about the obvious facts: that there were plenty of dykes in the force, but that Petreaus was the only open homosexual in Linköping.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ Sven said. ‘Petreaus is on holiday. Don’t get her mixed up in this.’
‘You’re right,’ Zeke said. ‘All hell would break loose.’
Reality, unreality.
When did you last have your hair cut by a male hairdresser who wasn’t gay?
Which was more or less how Zeke could have put it.
Nathalie Falck.
She wants to look tough, but deep down she seems scared, shy, as if she’s spent the whole of her short life running, trying to get to grips with who she is. But perhaps that’s what we all do, Malin thinks. Try to get to grips with life, and most of us just about manage to keep our heads above water. It’s so much easier to run away from the pain and rush instead into the embrace of comfortable well-being.
The tequila is at the top of the cupboard above the fridge.
Her body is twitching for alcohol. Her stomach, heart, soul are whispering: warm us, sedate us, make us soft. Combat the heat with the heat of strong liquor. That’s who you are, Malin.
She breathes in the warm air.
A faint, faint smell of burning wood.
Thinks of the firemen: ‘Up the stairs, into the fire.’
18
Words unspoken.
They drift through the room like dead souls.
Intimations. But of what?
I never had any brothers or sisters, Malin thinks as she walks through her parents’ flat by the old Infection Park.
It’s just after eight o’clock, Sunday morning, the city even more desolate than on a normal morning. I’m the last person on earth, Malin had thought as she walked to the flat. All the others have burned up. She left her bike at home, wanted to get her body going by walking, stick one angry finger up at the heat.
She wants to water the plants before the morning meeting they agreed to have at half past nine, the need for overtime self-evident now: they can’t lose a second in this investigation. Up earlier than necessary in spite of the lack of sleep in the heat. In spite of the large shot of tequila she drank in two burning gulps.
Weakness in the face of desire. It’s always desire that gets out of control, it doesn’t matter what sort it is.
The flat.
Four rooms and a kitchen, on the third floor of a house built just after the turn of the last century. Four rooms full of furniture from the house in Sturefors, of memories, of intimations of disappointments, unfulfilled dreams and lies, but also of a negotiated love, her parents’ own particular love.
We stick together. But we have no respect for each other, we hate each other’s bodies, we each have no interest in the other, in their words, opinions, dreams, longings, but we shuffle along side by side with our secrets and lies, and as long as we do that then we still have something. Don’t we?
Like hell you do, Malin thinks.
She and Janne. How they really didn’t have in common any of the things you’re supposed to have in common. No interests. No hopes. But they had something that must have been there right from the start. An obvious love, as if together they manifested each other’s humanity, the fundamental goodness, faith and warmth that must always, always be life’s ultimate truth.
Everyday and reality.
Sorrow and pain.
Day after day they saw how their love wasn’t enough, how it clung on but fell apart, and not even Tove could hold them together.
A nameless catastrophe. And Janne was on his way to Bosnia along with the Rescue Services Agency. A fucking note on the table.
In our hour of need we stick together.
And he disappeared and she took Tove with her to Stockholm.
Love can remain but become impossible. The feeling that something very real between them still remains.
She curses that feeling. That’s a before-tequila feeling, the very worst of all. Or the next worst.
Unbearable.
Maybe I need something to believe in, Malin thinks.
You’ll water the plants, won’t you?