I dream that the snakes are moving again, somewhere. How a girl the same age as you, Tove, is moving though the green-black trees of something that seems to be a park at night, or a forest beside a distant, black-watered lake, or shimmering blue water that smells of chlorine. I imagine her drifting across yellowed grass, as far, far away a water-sprinkler wisps corrosive drops above a freshly cut lilac hedge.
I dream that this is happening, Tove.
It is happening now and I get scared and stiffen as someone, something creeps out of its hiding place in the darkness, rushing up behind her, knocking her to the ground and the roots of the surrounding trees wrap around her body, snaking deep within her like warm, live snakes, whose slithering bodies are full of hungry, ancient streams of lava.
She screams.
But no sound comes out.
And the snakes chase her across a wide-open plain that was once verdant but is now reduced to a charred, flaking skin. The ground is cracked and from the jagged depths bubbles a stinking, hot, sulphurous darkness that whispers with a scorching voice: We will destroy you, little girl. Come. We shall destroy you.
I scream.
But no sound comes out.
This is a dream, isn’t it? Tell me it’s a dream, Tove.
I reach out my hand across the sheet beside me but it’s empty.
Janne, you’re not there, your warm warmth.
I want you both to come home now.
Even you have gone, Daniel. Taken your cool warmth and left me alone with the dream and myself in this depressing bedroom.
I think it was a bad dream, but perhaps it was good?
2
Tove and Janne are eating bacon and eggs on a spacious balcony with a view of Kuta Beach, and not even the memory of the terrorist bombs remains.
Tove and Janne are tanned and rested and their radiant smiles reveal shining white teeth. Janne, muscular, has already taken a morning swim in the cooled hotel pool. As he got out of the water a beautiful Balinese woman was waiting on the edge with a freshly laundered and ironed towel.
Tove is beaming fit to match the sun.
Smiles even more broadly at her father and asks:
‘Dad, what are we going to do today? Eat rice with honey and nuts in a Buddhist temple of ivory-white marble? Like the pictures in the brochures?’
Malin adjusts her Ray-Bans with one hand, and the image of Janne and Tove vanishes. Then she takes a firmer grip on the handlebars of her bicycle as she pedals past the Asian fast-food stall on St Larsgatan just before Trädgårdstorget, thinking that if you only let your thoughts go, they can come up with all sorts of things, conjuring up images of anyone at all, making caricatures of even the people that you know and love most.
The self-preservation instinct. Let your subconscious make parodies of your loss and anxiety and jealousy.
It’s no more than a quarter past seven and Janne and Tove are in all probability on the beach now.
And Janne doesn’t even like honey.
Malin presses the pedals down, picking up an almost imperceptible smell of smoke in her nostrils, the city tinted slightly yellow by her sunglasses.
Her body is starting to wake up.
But she feels a resistance. It feels as if it’s going to be even hotter today. She didn’t want to look at the thermometer in the kitchen window at home. The tarmac is oily under the wheels, it feels as if the ground might crack open at any moment and release hundreds of glowing worms.
A cycling summer.
Nothing’s any distance away inside the city. At this time of year everyone who can cycles in Linköping, unless the heat just gets too much. She prefers the car, but somehow all the talk about the environment in the papers and on television must have got to her. Think of future generations. They have the right to a living planet.
At this time of day Malin is completely alone on the streets, and in the plate-glass windows of H&M in the square there are adverts for the summer sale, the words flame-red above pictures of a famous model whose name Malin realises she ought to know.
SALE.
Heat on special offer this year. Stocks are way too high.
She stops at a red light near McDonald’s at the corner of Drottninggatan, adjusts her beige skirt and runs her hand over her white cotton blouse.
Summer clothes. Ladylike clothes. They work OK, and in this heat skirts are always better than trousers.
Her pistol and holster are concealed beneath a thin cotton jacket. She recalls the last time she and Zeke were out at the firing range, the way they frenetically fired off shot after shot at the black cardboard shapes.
The burger chain is in a building from the fifties, a grey stone façade with concave white balconies. On the other side of the street sits the heavy brown building from the turn of the century where the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord has her clinic.
The shrink.
She saw right through me.
Malin remembers what Viveka said to her during a conversation they had had towards the end of a murder investigation.
‘What about you, why are you so sad?’ Then: ‘I’m here if you want to talk.’
Talk.
There were already far too many words in the world, far too little silence. She never called Viveka Crafoord about herself, but had called several times in connection with cases where she wanted ‘psychological input’, as Viveka herself put it. And they’d had coffee several times when they’d bumped into each other around town.
Malin turns around.
Looks back towards Trädgårdstorget, towards the flashy new bus-stops and containers full of reluctant flowers on the patterned paving, the red-plastered façade of the building containing the seed shop and Schelin’s café.
A pleasant square, in a pleasant city.
A plastered façade, shielding insecure people. Anything can happen in this city, where old and new collide, where rich and poor, educated and uneducated are in fact constantly colliding with each other, where prejudices about those around you are aired like bedclothes. Last week she had been in a taxi with a middle-aged taxi-driver who had had a go at the city’s immigrant community: ‘Spongers. They don’t do a stroke of work, we should use them as fuel for the incinerator at Gärdstad, then we’d get some use out of them.’
She had wanted to get out of the car, show her ID, tell him she was going to arrest him for incitement to racial hatred, the bastard, but she had stayed silent.
A black man in green overalls is walking across the square. He is equipped with a pair of long-handled pincers to save him having to bend over to pick up litter and cigarette ends. The bottles and cans have already been taken care of by Deposit-Gunnar or another of the city’s eccentrics.
Malin looks in front of her, as St Larsgatan forms a straight line out of the centre of the city, only turning when it reaches the edge of the smartest district, Ramshäll.
Hasse and Biggan live there, Markus’s parents. Close to the hospital, both of them doctors.
The light turns green and Malin pedals onwards.
The beer and tequila from last night have left no trace in her body. Nor has Daniel Högfeldt. He crept out while she was asleep, and if she knows him at all he’ll be in the newsroom now, cursing the lack of news, waiting for something to happen.
Malin cycles past the medical school, hidden behind leafy maples, and a hundred metres off to the right, at the end of Linnégatan, she can make out the Horticultural Society Park. Beyond the school the buildings thin out, making way for a car park, beyond which lies the Hotel Ekoxen, generally regarded as the best in the city. But Malin turns the other way, down towards the entrance of the Tinnerbäck Swimming Pool. Tinnis, as the pool is known locally, opens at seven, and in the car park by the entrance there are just two cars. An elderly red Volvo estate and an anonymous white van, possibly a Ford.