Aftonbladet: What the Killer is Like.
Dagens Nyheter: A Swedish Serial Killer?
The Östgöta Correspondent: The Linköping Killer: Man or Woman?
He skims the articles, nothing new, nothing they don’t already know, interviews with people in the city, young girls swimming at Tinnis.
We’re scared. We don’t go out at night.
There’s a really weird atmosphere in the city.
I’ve got a fourteen-year-old daughter. I worry whenever she goes out.
Per lets the screensaver click in on his laptop, pictures of a beach in Thailand.
God, what wouldn’t I give to be there now? At that moment he sees Sven Sjöman heading towards their desks, from a distance it looks as though he’s shuddering as he makes his way through the office. Am I going to end up like that? Per thinks: so tired, and sort of slow? Sven’s body might be tired, but the look in his eyes is all the more alert, and Per can see that Sven has something important for them.
Two strangers, Sven thinks as he heads towards Per and Waldemar’s desks. Outsiders, even though they belong to the same force. The man of the future and the brute, the rumours that precede them both, Ekenberg a rotten egg who’s been lucky enough to get away with it.
Sven has seen a lot of men like Ekenberg during his years in the police. He’s always tried to keep away from them, or, as a senior officer, to get rid of them.
The ends do not justify the means.
Unless perhaps they do? In a case like this?
Sven recalls the girl’s body in the Railway Park. Her eyes white and blind, like a sightless deer, polished stones that have lost their shine, their beauty.
Sven stops at their desks, two pairs of eyes staring at him, one pair, Per’s, still seem to be somewhere else, but Waldemar’s exude concentration on the task at hand.
‘We’ve heard from Telia. The call has been localised to Mariavägen in Wimanshäll. There’s a Suliman Hajif living there, he cropped up alongside Karami in the gang rape case last winter, although he was never a suspect. The likelihood is that the two of them have fallen out somehow and Suliman just wants to make life difficult for Karami.’
The two outsiders have stood up.
‘We’re on our way,’ Waldemar says, and Sven sees his eyes turn black, the pupils expanding in anticipation of something that Sven would prefer not to express in words.
‘Take it easy now. Be careful.’
Per nods.
‘Who knows,’ he says. ‘We might be getting close.’
Ten minutes later they pull up on Mariavägen, outside a small, white block of flats, two storeys surrounded by a garden with unkempt apple trees.
The heat and light pounce on them as they get out of the car.
‘Sunglasses on,’ Waldemar grins.
The air conditioning just had time to get going, turned up to maximum, and now a difference in temperature of some twenty-five degrees lets the heat get a stranglehold on them, driven on by the light.
They approach the house along a gravel path almost completely covered by weeds.
‘Do you reckon he’s home?’
‘Probably,’ Waldemar says. ‘These lazy bastards usually sleep all day and do their dirty work at night.’
‘Listen, let’s take this a bit more calmly, OK?’
Waldemar doesn’t reply, pressing the buzzer for another flat, not Hajif’s.
No answer.
Four flats.
‘Do you know the postcode?’
‘Sorry, no idea. We can call in and find out.’
Flat number two, no answer, and from behind, Per sees the muscles in Waldemar’s back tense under his jacket as he takes aim at the door and slams into it with full force. The door gives in and Waldemar tumbles into the stairwell but stops himself from falling.
‘Now he knows we’re on our way.’
‘Don’t you just love bad landlords? That door should have been replaced years ago. Come on, quick.’
And they rush up the stairs to the first floor. No doors have opened to see where the noise came from.
Nothing but emptiness and silence and a grey-speckled stone floor and shabby pale-blue walls. Hajif’s front door is painted pink.
They ring the bell.
Sounds from inside the flat.
No peephole.
Steps approaching the door, then disappearing.
‘He’s on his way out,’ Waldemar says. ‘He’s going to run.’
And once again he throws himself at the door and this one too flies open without putting up much resistance, and in the narrow, messy hall stands a young man with a well-toned upper body and black hair in a ponytail. His dark eyes glare at them in surprise as he pulls on a pair of white sports underwear, his cock, pierced with a cock-ring, visible, half erect.
‘Listen, Paki, we need to talk to you. Nothing to get worked up about,’ Waldemar says, and Suliman Hajif pulls up his underwear, runs back into the flat, towards an open balcony door at the back of the building.
‘Get him!’ Waldemar yells, and Per rushes after Suliman Hajif, throwing himself at his legs just as he steps out onto the balcony, and the young man falls forward, headfirst, into the solid grey balcony railings, which give way and his body is dragged out, down, and he screams as he flails above the drop, the yellow grass four metres below.
‘You’re not going to fall,’ Per says as he fights to keep hold of Suliman Hajif on the balcony. He tries with all his strength to pull him up; he could break his neck in a fall like that, and then what good would he be?
Waldemar’s hand on one of Suliman Hajif’s feet.
They pull together, and up he comes, lying on his stomach and putting up no resistance as Waldemar cuffs him and drags him onto the white-lacquered wooden floor in the living room.
‘What the hell was that all about?’
Per is panting, catching his breath, and slaps Suliman Hajif on the back.
‘We just want to talk to you.’
‘Well, maybe not just that,’ Waldemar says.
He’s pulled open the doors of the built-in cupboards. Per turns around, sees piles of magazines, the inside walls of the cupboards covered with porn pictures, serious, hardcore stuff, women shackled to racks, women being whipped.
Sex toys neatly lined up.
Masks.
Whips.
Chastity belts.
And there, in splendid isolation on the bottom shelf of one of cupboards, a blue dildo. The paint flaking off its strangely transparent surface.
44
Interview Room One.
The dark-grey ceiling seems to be falling in on the even darker walls, a tape recorder on a black tabletop, Zeke and Malin on one side of the table, Lollo Svensson on the other, dressed in a white T-shirt with the words ‘Bitch Power’. Her face and the look in her eyes radiate defiance, and she hasn’t asked for a lawyer.
Malin thinks, feels, how best to open this lock, is there any way? She thinks that it’s probably impossible, before saying: ‘So, you like young girls?’
Lollo Svensson glares into Malin’s eyes, full of hatred now, but not towards me, Malin thinks, towards something else, and she thinks: if we can find the core of that hatred we can find the killer, the core of that hatred could be the core of this evil, this violence.
‘Young girls. How come?’
Zeke scratches his shaved head, says: ‘Do you want to look after them?
‘And then things got out of hand with Theresa and Sofia, but Josefin managed to escape? Is that it?’
Lollo Svensson stiff, her mouth a thin line, her lips stuck together with age-old glue.
‘Do you want to be nice to them? Have you got a special flat you take them to? Or a building somewhere on the farm? Nathalie Falck has been out to the farm. Was Theresa out there as well?’