‘Shit,’ Malin says.
‘You’ll get him,’ Karin says.
‘If it is a him,’ Malin says.
The smoke from the fires in the Tjällmo forest is noticeable in the car park in front of the police station and the National Forensics Lab where Karin works.
The forests north of Ljungsbro are burning now, and the fire is spreading. There are extra bulletins of both local television news programmes about the advance of the flames.
Are the fires deliberate?
Who started them?
Why have fires broken out in so many places at the same time?
Zeke gets into the driver’s seat of the Volvo.
Malin pauses by the door, hears him curse the heat inside the car and closes her eyes, trying to follow the smell of the fire up above the city, seeing in her mind’s eye how the heat presses the few people left, little more than dots, towards the tarmac, and she follows herself out over the plain, the scorched fields and the blue of Lake Roxen, and she sees the fires, the way they’re eating and jumping their way through the forest, leaping recklessly from treetop to treetop in an explosive dance, destroying pretty much everything in their path, but also creating the possibility of new life.
And Janne, wanting to be back home with the rest of his crew, wanting to put on his protective clothing and head out into the boiling, smoke-fogged darkness to save whatever can still be saved.
‘Malin, are you going to stand there all day?’
Soot, Malin thinks. Dirt. How long do firefighters have to scrub their faces after a day like this?
‘Malin!’
She jerks herself free of her thoughts and gets into the heat of the car.
I’m dead.
There’s no point fighting it.
The plastic, in spite of its dense darkness, is like cling-film around me, it can’t hold me here any longer. It never could, really, but somehow it feels safe. I understood my freedom when I was suddenly there with you, Mum and Dad, where I could see your despair, when I wanted to tell you that I’m here, in spite of everything, and that it’s sort of OK, even if I’m still scared and worried and sad that my life ended up being as short as it was.
But what does time matter?
Easy for me to say.
Mum and Dad.
I know that time will drag for you. There’s nothing that makes time drag more than pain.
And your pain will never pass.
It will change colour over the years, marking your bodies and the way you’re judged by the world.
You will become your grief, Mum, Dad, and maybe there’s some comfort in that. Because if you are your grief for me, then you are also me, and if you’re me, then we’re together. Don’t you think?
I want to comfort you, Dad.
Somehow I’ll find a way to let you know that I’m OK, as soon as I think I am.
Only one person can ease my anxiety, and she knows it.
I rise up towards the sky.
The heat that torments you all doesn’t exist for me. The heat isn’t even a smell here.
I drift down towards the Volvo, look into Malin Fors’s face. She doesn’t know it, but with each passing day the look in her blue eyes grows a bit more tired, but also a bit more certain.
Only the sadness is constant.
And the fear that she tries so vainly to hold at bay.
On the way to the prosecutor, one of the ones on duty over the summer, not particularly happy to be called in to the office on a Sunday afternoon. The same prosecutor who earlier rejected Sven Sjöman’s offer to relinquish legal responsibility for the preliminary investigation, saying that they would have to hold on to that responsibility themselves until they had made some progress.
Malin had spoken to Sven over the phone, and he had given them permission to proceed: ‘Search the house, but you and Zeke shouldn’t go alone, who knows what she might do if it turns out you’re right.’
Sven had also said that at long last, ‘and far too fucking holiday-late’, they had got hold of the list of calls made from Theresa’s mobile, and that she had called Nathalie Falck a lot, Peter Sköld occasionally, and no one else except her parents. ‘She seems to have been a bit of a loner,’ Sven said. They hadn’t heard anything from either Yahoo! or Facebook, and Forensics were still working on identifying the dildo. A quick search on the net had come up with more than nine hundred manufacturers.
Malin thinks about Josefin Davidsson. About the hypnosis that she hasn’t had time to sort out. Must get around to doing that.
The prosecutor.
A recently appointed young man named Torben Eklund.
Malin looks through the windscreen.
But instead of the city she sees her face, her eyes, the look in them, and she wonders what happens to that look with the passage of time, and then she gets scared, feeling a chill run through every vein and capillary, an ice-cold and sharp sting of stardust. That isn’t my face in the windscreen, she thinks, it’s Theresa Eckeved’s face, and Malin knows what she wants, what her lifeless white skin, her clear, radiant, colourless eyes want.
Her mouth is moving.
What happened?
Who?
What, how?
I am putting my trust in you, Malin Fors, to bring me some peace.
Then the face is gone, replaced by Malin’s own familiar features. The face and features that are somehow just as they are.
Josefin Davidsson pulls the thin white sheet tighter around her body, not wanting to see the bandages and think about the wounds, but knowing that they’re there whether she likes it or not.
She notices the chemical smell of the hospital room, and the pain she can’t remember the cause of. But she realises that that memory, buried somewhere deep within her, is important.
She could have gone home on Friday. But she wanted to stay over the weekend, and they let her. The doctor understood when she said that she liked how peaceful it was here.
She’s watched television out in the dayroom. Read on the newspaper websites, the Correspondent and others, that they’ve found a girl’s body at a beach out near Sturefors.
I have to get to my memories, Josefin thinks, and the sky outside the window is growing pale, late afternoon blue and empty, just like her memory. But it’s there, they did it in biology, memories are like electricity, and a person can remember everything that’s ever happened to them under the right circumstances.
But do I want to remember?
Am I scared that he or she or they are going to come back?
No.
I’d be dead if that was what they wanted.
The hospital cotton is soft, so soft, and she shuts her eyes, drifts off to sleep even though the room is full of the brightest light and bubbling life.
‘No problem. I’ll sign a search warrant straight away.’
Torben Eklund’s voice as neutral as his office in the courthouse on Stora torget, his grey face thin but still bearing an inexplicable double chin.
‘How’s the investigation going?’ he asks.
‘Forward, slowly,’ Malin replies.
‘We have extremely limited resources over the summer,’ Torben Eklund goes on. ‘That’s why I’ve decided to leave responsibility for the preliminary investigation with the police.’