What do we do now?
That’s what she thought, and she noticed Janne’s clumsiness when he opened his mouth, saying: ‘You should have come too.’
And at that moment she wanted to hit him, jump on him and beat the shit out of him, while at the same time wanting to sit on an aeroplane resting her head on his shoulder, Tove asleep by her side, the two of them awake in a comforting, whispering simplicity.
But instead she said: ‘Janne, for God’s sake. You know that’s impossible,’ and she could feel that she had said, whispered, screamed those words a thousand times before, that they had become their mutual invocation, a sort of truth simply because they had been spoken and thought enough times, and Tove shouldn’t have to hear this tired crap.
Tove horribly aware beside Janne, horribly conscious of the subtexts.
What are we doing to you, darling child?
They had left the flat, Janne’s friend Pecka beeping on the horn impatiently down in the street. An agitated farewell. A bad omen.
And she had gone straight to bed.
No. She had gone straight to Daniel Högfeldt’s flat.
Let him hold her tight against the chrome frame of his Mio bed.
Then he had banged the sorrow out of her.
And it was nice.
Malin walks past the main hospital building on her way out of the police station.
She spent a long time in the gym, then talked to Ebba in reception for half an hour, about the heat and teenage daughters, Ebba has twins, sixteen years old and a real handful.
Then Malin had spent hours sitting at her desk, thinking, still sweating, catching up on her paperwork, reading the Immigration Agency file on Slavenca Visnic, which had been emailed to her by the young uniform Zeke had given the job to earlier in the day.
That was quick, she had thought when she saw the email in her inbox. And then she had read the file on the screen, how Slavenca Visnic arrived in Sweden from Bosnia in 1994, after her husband and two children, four and six years old, were burned alive when their house in Sarajevo was hit by incendiary grenades, how she had been captured by Serbian troops when she tried to escape the inferno of the city. How they raped her for two weeks, how day and night lost all meaning, how she managed to escape, but refused to say how, wandering through the forests and along the roads at night until she reached Dubrovnik, where she had somehow managed to make her way to Italy, and had finally shown up in Ystad in the far south of Sweden.
Pregnant.
Abortion, eighth week, carried out in Norrköping.
Malin had noticed at once that the timeline didn’t fit.
The dates when she must have been raped by the Serbs, the date of the abortion.
At least twenty-four weeks between them.
Something alive.
Something killed.
So that something else can live.
A picture of Slavenca Visnic, long dark hair, sharp features, tired and angry eyes. But determined.
Is it you? Malin had thought then. Is it you? She thinks now, as she looks up at the windows of the hospital, points of light against the growing darkness of the evening sky.
She carries on.
Heavy steps.
Down towards the Horticultural Society Park, towards the trees of the park, and their darkness.
Malin walks along the path leading down to the summerhouse where Josefin Davidsson was found naked and disorientated, moving slowly, undressing herself in her thoughts and trying to capture what might have happened.
You want young girls. You scrub them clean. What do you want from the girls? Their innocence? Why one dead, one alive? Did she run away from you? Josefin? The wounds you inflict are clean, and, on Theresa, even neatly trimmed. You want things to be as good as possible, is that it?
Fear and loneliness.
I don’t want to be here.
Swings, not moving.
The sound of the city in slow motion, sleepy. The smell of the forest fires still noticeable, but weaker tonight, the wind in the other direction.
Something blue.
Then a cracking sound from up in the trees, is there someone there? Is someone watching me? A bird of prey, perhaps?
Malin turns around, a black shadow is moving rapidly towards her.
What the hell?
What the hell’s happening?
Run away.
It’s moving.
I’m floating, shouting in your ear, but you hear nothing.
I disappear.
Don’t want to see hear know about this.
But we’ll soon meet again.
If you don’t listen to me, we’ll soon meet again.
Sofia Fredén was reluctant to accept the job of dishwasher at Frimis, the old freemasons’ hotel and club, didn’t want to spend the summer working. But it was absurdly well paid, and easy to get to by train from Mjölby, the station just a stone’s throw from the hotel.
Now she’s tired after a long shift in the heat and humidity.
And she walks without thinking, with her brain somehow shut off, through the very darkest part of the Railway Park down towards the station, the lights of the city are close, nothing can happen to her here and in her ears she has the earplugs of her iPod, music downloaded from the net, Jens Lekman’s bombastic music, and it makes her feel slightly less tired.
She walks past the grove of rowan bushes and maples and a large oak tree.
Singing along.
And Sofia Fredén doesn’t hear something start to move in the bushes behind her, doesn’t hear something approaching, just feels the force of an arm being wrapped around her from behind, and a second later she’s lying between four tall rowan bushes, on shitty, urine-stinking ground, deep within the darkness of the city, trying to save her own life.
The deer vanishes. When the creature noticed Malin it turned and ran off towards the stage over by the Hotel Ekoxen.
Malin’s heart is still pounding from the adrenalin.
She goes inside the summerhouse. Sits down on one of the wooden benches, trying to piece together the fragments of the case she’s carrying inside her.
People, places.
Except they form nothing but a grey, shapeless mass, and a shiver of anxiety runs through her body, a shimmering whiteness that takes root deep in her diaphragm.
It’s a good sign for Linköping that deer dare to venture so close to the centre.
But something more than just deer is in motion, they’re not alone tonight.
There are two of us now, Malin.
But Sofia Fredén doesn’t yet know about her predicament.
I’ll try to help her as best I can.
But I’m afraid my fear means that I can scarcely look after myself.
Please, Malin, kill off my anxieties. That’s one of the things that we human beings are supposed to do for each other.
I know that now, as I drift up here.
33
Tuesday, 20 July
The clock on the Tekniska Verken building says 05.42.
Already bloody light.
The black bicycle is weaving back and forth over the tarmac, the quickest route from the villa out in Stångebro is past the Cloetta Centre, through the tunnel under the railway and up through the Railway Park.
Hungover.
But I’m Superman, thinks Patrik Karlsson, as he pedals on towards the tunnel.
The party last night. They had a barbecue in his garden, his mum and dad away in the country, and now he’s on his way to his summer job at Frimis as a breakfast waiter.