‘So she could have been held captive somewhere for a couple of days,’ Sven says. ‘And then moved here.’
‘Someone might have seen something,’ Zeke says.
‘You think so?’ Malin says. ‘This is a pretty remote spot if you’re not here to go swimming.’
‘People, Malin. They’re always on the move, you know that as well as I do.’
Malin sees herself in the Horticultural Society Park the other night.
Did you see me then? You who did this?
You who are doing this, you’re trying to put something right, that has to be it. It must have been dark when you dragged the body down here, the trees bearing witness as you buried her in the ground. And why so close to the water where most people are? Maybe you wanted us to find her. What is it that you want from us?
‘How did she die?’ Malin asks, as an unexpectedly cold wind blows past her legs and out across the lake.
‘I don’t know yet,’ Karin replies. ‘The head injury was probably the cause of death, but as you can see there are clear strangulation marks around her neck.’
‘Sexual violence?’
‘No clear signs of penetration. But I’ll have to examine her more closely.’
Karin.
Smart, not to say driven, but her view of the dead is like an engineer looking at a machine.
‘It’ll be hard to find any forensic evidence,’ Karin says. ‘There must have been hundreds of people who came here to swim over the past few days. Any footprints or other evidence has probably disappeared by now.’
‘Unfortunately that’s all too likely,’ Sven says. ‘But the scene can probably tell us a fair bit about the perpetrator, if we just give it some thought.’
The perpetrator?
Malin thinks. You’re so sure about things, Sven. Just as sure as I am that that gut of yours is going to be the death of you if you don’t do something about it soon.
‘What do we think about a connection with Josefin?’ Malin asks.
‘They’re probably linked,’ Sven says. ‘Both girls scrubbed clean the same way. But we can’t be absolutely certain. Karin, you’ll have to check for traces of paint.’
I can see you and hear you, all you strangers, and I understand that you’re talking about me, but I don’t want to listen to your wretched words.
Wounds on my body.
Sexual violence.
Perpetrator.
Penetration?
No.
Captive, captive, dead.
Dead.
A blow to the head.
And who’s dead? Not me, I’m fourteen years old, do you hear? You don’t use words like dead about someone who’s just fourteen years old. I’ve got many years of life ahead of me, at least seventy, and I want those years.
I want them back.
Give them to me, Dad.
I refuse. Refuse.
I feel no pain and if I did have those wounds that you’re talking about then surely I’d be screaming?
But my voice.
It can’t be heard, but is audible nonetheless, and the words are different, it’s as if I’ve grown up in this dream and woken up with a new register.
Register?
I’d never use that word.
Let me be! Don’t touch me!
Let me sleep, dream myself away, let me be. What are you doing with me?
All the awful things I’ve been dreaming.
Go away, now.
Let me carry on sleeping.
I can see a face.
A woman’s face, it’s a thin, pleasant face framed with blonde hair that blends into the pale green of the trees, the blue of the sky.
She’s looking at me.
I want to get up, but it’s like I don’t exist. Don’t I exist? But if I didn’t exist, then you wouldn’t be talking about me, would you?
Malin crouching down over the girl.
One eye open, the other closed, almost pleading for sleep. The body still, almost pressed into the ground. Bruising around the neck.
The scrubbed body.
The neat, trimmed wounds.
Just like Josefin Davidsson in the Horticultural Society Park.
Sven may still have a few doubts, but it must be the same person, the same people, behind this. From now on these cases are one and the same.
Soil under the girl’s nails, the only trace of dirt.
You wanted to get away from here.
Didn’t you?
The girl in the pictures in the house in Sturefors.
Now here. A scared father trying to keep calm. An anxious mother giving them the photographs. And then what?
I promise you one thing, Theresa: I won’t give up until we’ve got him.
Or her.
Or him.
Or . . .
The mantra within Malin like a prayer, and she looks away from the girl’s single open eye and up at Sven. He’s making a plan, drawing up an internal checklist of how to move forward with this, everything that needs to be done and mustn’t be forgotten. Calling in off-duty officers, going door-to-door around every house within a two-kilometre radius, questioning all the people on the beach, today, yesterday and the day before, appearing in the media and pleading with anyone who might have seen something, the removal of the body, the wait for Karin’s report, informing the parents . . . telling them this unbearable news.
Malin knows whose job that will be. Sometimes they have someone with them when they break news like that, a priest or a counsellor, but often they do it themselves. And who knows how long it might take to rustle up a priest in the dog days of summer?
Tove in Bali.
I shan’t think about that.
Burdens.
And then Malin looks at Theresa again.
Her scrubbed-clean mouth lies open, as if she had been suffocated with de-oxygenated air, as if someone wanted to stop her words getting out, or maybe just demonstrate the importance of oxygen, that it means everything, that the earth, from which we come, is all that we have.
On the other side of the cordon people are starting to move away now that the uniformed officers have made a note of their names and asked the preliminary questions, and a few of them gaze longingly up towards the shuttered ice cream kiosk.
Sometimes, Malin thinks, a police investigation is all about the art of the impossible.
Up in the meadow a cow is lowing, as a gathering breeze stirs the grass. The smell of smoke from the forest fires doesn’t reach here, but Malin can still sense the crackling in the air, how millions of possibilities have been set in motion.
‘Malin!’ the summer-temp journalist calls after her as she heads off towards the meadow. ‘What have you got for me?’
‘No more than you can see for yourself,’ Malin says without stopping.
The journalist is wearing a large pair of sunglasses, and they make her look stupid.
‘Was she murdered?’
Damn stupid question.
‘Well, she didn’t bury herself.’
Two of the people from the beach, a man and a woman in their thirties, are standing by the kiosk, in front of the brightly coloured poster of the various ice creams, pulling their jeans on over their bathing suits.
Malin goes over to them and they give her a look that says that they’d rather be left alone, and the man says: ‘We’ve already said what we saw, that we came here to go swimming, and then some mutt found her.’