One naked, wounded girl on a swing, one girl missing. Reality a grey, yellow, charred mess.
Malin is in her car on the way back to the city.
Outside the windscreen the plain is still, like a mirage conjured up by slowly smothered flames, as if a shimmering blue sky, stretched far too thin, has set fire to the fertile farmland that stretches all the way to the luminous horizon. The heat is hammering the ground with absolute confidence.
The open fields are drooping under the vault of the sky and the rye and corn are slowly burning up beneath the sun’s rays, the rape is curled towards the ground, pale yellow, whimpering as if every golden leaf were gasping for air and were just waiting to be buried with the worms.
They’re the only thing moving out here on the plain right now.
Glowing worms that have spilled out of the volcanic cracks shaken forth by evil.
Zeke is waiting in his car outside the house in Ryd. His engine idling, the air conditioning on full-blast.
The yellow-brick building near the centre is only three storeys high, yet still seems to contain the misery of the whole country in concentrated form, with its satellite dishes beside the windows, its cluttered balconies and outdoor spaces, and the general air of abandonment. The paths between the buildings are desolate, but the flats inside are teeming: refugees, drug addicts, social outcasts, the lowest status workers, people excluded from society.
But there are two worlds here.
Some of the blocks contain student flats: people with dreams, their lives ahead of them, and beyond some tall oaks Malin can just make out Herrgården, the science students’ bar and bistro.
Malin nods to Zeke through the side window and he opens the door and gets out.
‘So this is where the unfortunate Paul Anderlöv lives?’
‘This is where he lives,’ Zeke says.
‘How do we explain how we found out about him?’
‘We don’t,’ Malin replies.
20
The thing about pain is that it’s an eternal curse, because it wipes out time. It bestows an intimation of death and a stench of carrion upon a present that seems never-ending.
The physical pain disappeared long ago.
But psychological pain?
Medication.
But it doesn’t help, and nothing gets better with time, no, everything gets worse, the pain is always new and each time it is more assured, more arrogant.
I am pain, Paul Anderlöv thinks as he hears the doorbell ring.
And he gets up from his armchair, turns down the volume of Days of Our Lives on the television and makes his way out to the hall. Once again, he is struck by the fact that his body seems to have disappeared, become limp and saggy instead of hard like it was before.
Fourteen years since it happened.
But it could just as well have been yesterday.
Malin holds up her ID towards the unshaven man in the doorway, his face simultaneously sunken and swollen, his cropped hair thin on his scalp.
‘We’re from the police. We’d like to ask a few questions,’ Malin says. ‘Are you Paul Anderlöv?’
The man nods.
‘Can we take it out here?’ he goes on to say. ‘It’s a mess inside, and I don’t really like inviting people in. Has there been some sort of trouble in the neighbourhood?’
‘We’d prefer to come in,’ Zeke says in a voice that doesn’t leave any room for discussion.
And Paul Anderlöv backs down, showing them into a sparsely furnished living room with messy heaps of newspapers and motoring magazines. There’s a noticeable smell of smoke, vodka and spilled beer, and in the corners there are dustballs the size of sparrows.
Malin and Zeke sit down on a pair of chairs by the low coffee table.
Paul Anderlöv sinks into an armchair.
‘So, what do you want?’
He’s trying to sound tough, Malin thinks, but he just sounds resigned and tired and his green eyes are uncertain, tired beyond the limits of tiredness, and he’s sad in a way that Malin has never seen anyone sad before.
‘Have you heard about the rape in the Horticultural Society Park?’
When he hears the word rape it’s as if all the air and water and blood disappear from Paul Anderlöv’s body, as if he realises why they’ve come. His head sinks down towards his chest and he starts to shake and whimper. Malin looks at Zeke, who shakes his head, and they both realise that they’ve crossed a boundary, the boundary that justifies intrusions into people’s lives in the search for the truth.
Malin gets up.
She sits down next to Paul Anderlöv on the sturdy arm of the chair, put he pushes her away.
‘Go to hell,’ he says. ‘After all, I’ve been there long enough.’
Paul Anderlöv collects himself, seems to pull himself together, makes coffee, puts away a pair of white washing-up gloves as he asks them to take a seat in the kitchen, with a view of the civic centre in Ryd.
‘I’m not so stupid that I can’t work out the way you’re thinking,’ he says. Resignation in his voice, but also relief. Perhaps because he knows that they’re going to listen to him.
‘I read about the dildo and I understand perfectly well, and I’m not even going to comment on the fact that it’s idiotic and superficial and simplistic. But I understand your thinking. Could he be sexually frustrated? Mad?
‘Well, I’m not mad. Sexually frustrated? You bet I am, what do you think it’s like living like this, you should see what I look like down there,’ and Zeke looks involuntarily away from Paul Anderlöv and out of the window, but the shabby brick and panelled façade of the civic centre give little comfort and he notices a spider outside the window, and an almost invisible web stretching from one side of the frame to the other.
‘Anyway, how did you find me? Actually, I don’t even want to know. Maybe it was through Janne, your ex, Fors, I know him. We were in Bosnia together, in ’94. We’ve had a few beers together, talking about our time in the field, or rather: I talk about my memories to him. He’s as quiet as a broken car stereo.’
‘Janne hasn’t said anything about you.’
‘Oh, so it wasn’t Janne? No, I didn’t really think it would be.’
And Paul Anderlöv starts talking, and they listen.
‘It happened on a mountain road outside Sarajevo. I was one of the IFOR troops, and it was the sort of shitty, grey, rainy day when it was practically ordained that something was going to be fucked up. It was that sort of day, and it did get seriously fucked up; the jeep hit a mine that had been buried outside a village called Tsika. I remember an explosion, a great sucking explosion, and then I was lying in the road some twenty metres from something burning, and I could hear someone screaming and screaming and screaming, loud enough to bring down the mountains, and then I realised I was the one doing the screaming. Everything down there was just black, no pain, just black and empty.
‘Two men died.
‘One lost a leg.
‘And then there was me.
‘I’d happily have changed places with one of the others.
‘And now you show up, a couple of fucking cops, and what the hell do you know about anything? You know nothing.’
They let the silence do its work.
Then they ask the questions that have to be asked.
The cretinous, asinine questions.
From haze to clarity, as the poet Lars Forssell wrote, Malin thinks. From clarity to haze.
‘What were you doing on the night between Thursday and Friday?’
‘Have you ever met Josefin Davidsson?’
‘Can anyone give you an alibi?’
‘So you still have the desire even if the ability is gone. Did your frustration make something snap?’
‘So you weren’t in the Horticultural Society Park?’