‘That suits us fine,’ Zeke says.
Lawyers, Malin thinks. What in the world would make anyone want to become one of them?
Torben Eklund is the same age as me, but already middle-aged.
A black-faced clock on an unpainted brick wall, the white hands showing 17.25.
Then it hits her.
Maybe in the eyes of young girls I’m already middle-aged. And after that comes death. Doesn’t it?
26
A blue and white police car behind them.
Evening is falling slowly over the road and the forest seems to regain some of its lost verdure, a false nuance, the colour of a blunt knife.
They’re leading the way in the Volvo, three uniforms in the car behind: two factory-farmed recent graduates, lads with bulging muscles and an attitude that suggests they can sort out all the crap society might throw at them. Malin can never understand how that sort of bloke ever gets past the admissions board, but presumably they know how to give all the right answers. She’s seen the websites for people wanting to join the police: This is what they want to hear. And sure, the answers fit and if you’re smart it can work. The third uniform is an old hand called Pettersson, now working part-time because of a bad back, and sometimes Malin can see that he’s in some discomfort, his fingers tensing as he channels the pain from his nerves out into his fingertips so that he can go on.
She can’t remember the new recruits’ names, can’t be bothered to learn them, because who knows how long they’ll be staying? They probably want a transfer to Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö, where the real action is.
The farm in the clearing.
Has she guessed that they’re coming?
Has she cleared things up?
Away?
Zeke’s voice over the radio to the others: ‘Fors and I will go and knock, you get out and wait by the car. Understood?’
Silence. No barking.
Where are the dogs?
Then a yes from Pettersson.
‘Good,’ Zeke says as the car comes to a halt in the farmyard.
They get out.
A watchful silence.
They head for the porch steps.
Malin has the search warrant in her hand.
Has she taken refuge in the forest?
What’s in there?
In those closed rooms?
Malin looks over her shoulder.
They’re standing there, waiting but ready, almost hungry, Pettersson and the new recruits in their hot, dark-blue uniforms. The heat is still oppressive, but the sun has disappeared behind the barns, making it bearable.
‘A torture chamber,’ Zeke says. ‘What if she’s got a fucking torture chamber in there?’
Malin’s clenched fist against the white-painted wooden door.
No one coming to open it.
Someone aiming a weapon at them from somewhere inside?
Maybe. It could happen. Malin thinks the thought momentarily, remembers reading about American cops going out to desolate farms only to get shot, thinks of the officer who was shot and killed by a psycho in Nyköping. Malin knew him, he was in the year below her at the police academy, but they weren’t exactly close.
Another knock.
More silence.
Just the slight rustling of a wind-free forest, from life in motion around them.
‘She must have gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Unless she’s hiding in there.’
‘We’ll have to break the door down,’ Malin says.
‘Check if it’s locked first.’
And Malin slowly reaches her hand out to the door handle, pushes it down and the door swings open, as if someone had left it open for them, as if someone wanted them to go in.
A hall with rag-rugs and a stripped pine bench on bare pine floorboards.
Well-kept, Malin thinks. Cared for.
And silent.
She steps into the hall. Zeke behind her, she can feel his breath, warm, and she knows that he’s giving a sign to the others to spread out around the house and that one of them will watch the door behind them, ready to rush in if anything happens, if there’s any noise.
The kitchen.
Thoughtfully renovated, it must date from the forties, floral tiles and new rag-rugs. The gentle evening light is falling in narrow streaks through a net curtain. The coffee machine is on, the coffee freshly made, the oven is on, and there’s a smell of newly baked buns. Malin sees a tea towel on the worktop over a baking rack, the bulge suggesting coffee-bread, sweetly scented.
‘What the fuck is this?’ Zeke says.
Malin hushes him and they carry on into the house, to the living room, where the television is on, an episode of the old children’s classic, Seacrow Island, that Malin doesn’t recognise. Here again there is a sense of time standing still.
A computer on a desk.
They go up a creaking staircase to the upper floor. The walls are covered with tongue-and-groove panelling, on which Lollo Svensson has hung tinted lithographs of open fields and tractors. The bedroom, the only room upstairs, has whitewashed walls and light streaming in through a bay window, more rag-rugs on the scrubbed floor, everything looks sparklingly clean, as if she uses cleanliness to try to keep something away, or perhaps invite something in.
‘She’s here,’ Zeke says.
‘She’s here somewhere,’ Malin says. ‘I can feel it. She isn’t far away. There’s something here, something.’
And Malin goes back down the stairs, opens the door leading to the cellar and the smell of central heating-oil gets stronger with every step they take.
An oil-fired boiler, shiny and green, in an equally clean room. Cleaning products on a shelf. No bleach.
A door, a steel door ajar, as if it leads to a shelter.
Malin points at the door.
Zeke nods.
Malin opens the door, expecting to see Lollo Svensson hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by contraptions from a medieval torture chamber in complete contrast to the room upstairs, a contrast to the idyll that this old, homely farmhouse actually is.
Then they see her.
She’s sitting on a chair behind a table-tennis table covered with colourful wooden toys, dolls and stuffed animals. She’s wearing a thin, pale-pink dress.
A doll’s house on a shelf. Removal boxes stacked against whitewashed concrete walls.
Lollo Svensson smiles at them, a different person now, her hard facial features soft, resignation manifested in the body that Malin recently thought might harbour the soul of a murderer.
Could it?
Your body? Harbour the soul of a murderer?
‘I knew you’d come back,’ Lollo whispers. ‘So I came down here and waited. Waiting for you to come.’
The soul of a murderer, Malin thinks. We all harbour one of those.
27
The forest seems to be breathing for Linda Karlå.
But with sick lungs.
Only now, in the evening, is it cool enough for running, even if it’s still too hot for most people. The running track in Ryd is deserted apart from her, her feet in new white Nike trainers drumming on the sawdust trail, the electric lighting above her not lit, she doesn’t know if they turn the lights on in summer, at this time of year it stays light late when there are no clouds in the sky.
Maybe it’s stupid to go running alone in the woods considering what’s happened. Before the police have caught the culprit. Who knows what could be lying in wait?
But she isn’t scared.
Air in her lungs.
Her breathing somehow enclosed within her body, her brain.
Her heart is racing, yet somehow controlled, as if she can direct the most important muscle in her body by sheer willpower.
She runs at least twenty kilometres each week. All year round, and she runs the Stockholm marathon and one abroad: when it feels rough in the winter she thinks about Tokyo, New York, London, Sydney, letting the trees become skyscrapers and crowds, her forty-one-year-old body is strong, so strong.