‘She smells of bleach,’ Rydström adds. ‘Her whole body is sort of white. The wounds on her arms and legs also seem to have been rinsed and cleaned up, very carefully.’
‘Get her into the ambulance,’ Malin says. ‘It’ll be calmer for her in there.’
‘She doesn’t want to,’ Niklasson says. ‘We’ve tried, but she just shakes her head.’
‘Does she seem to know where she is?’
‘She hasn’t said a word.’
Malin turns to Rydström and Johansson.
‘No one else was here when you got here?’
‘No. Like who?’ Johansson says.
‘The person who called in, for instance.’
‘There was no one here.’
Malin pauses.
‘You two,’ Malin says. ‘Cordon off the crime scene. Start by the fountain down there and draw a ring around us here.’
Malin sits down slowly on the bench. Careful not to invade the girl’s space, trying to get closer to her with friendliness.
‘Can you hear me?’ Malin asks, looking at her gleaming white skin, the wounds on her arms like neat islands. The girl looks as though she’s been outside naked through a whole cold winter’s night, in spite of the heat. There’s an innocence to her white skin, as if she has danced with the devil on the edge of death and somehow survived.
The girl remains still, mute.
A faint smell of bleach in Malin’s nostrils.
It reminds her of the pool at Tinnis.
The young paramedic on her other side is sitting in silence, doesn’t seem bothered that Malin hasn’t introduced herself.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’
Silence, but a very small sideways movement.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Can you remember?’
‘You don’t have to be afraid.’
But no reaction, no answer, nothing.
‘Stay with her,’ Malin says, getting up. ‘Don’t leave her alone.’
Down by the fountain the two uniformed officers are attaching the cordon tape to a tree, and Niklasson is busy inside the ambulance.
‘Can we take her to the hospital?’
The young paramedic’s voice is soft and amenable, soothing.
‘My name’s Ellinor, by the way. Ellinor Getlund.’
Malin holds out her hand.
‘Malin Fors, Detective Inspector. You’ll have to wait before taking her to hospital, even if she ought to go straight away. She might start to talk if she spends a bit more time here at the scene. I’m going to take a look around in there in the meantime.’
A summerhouse shaded by a tall oak.
Sweat under her blouse.
The clock on her mobile says 08.17.
Already it’s as hot as the fires of hell.
The summerhouse has its own microclimate. A strange, damp heat hits Malin as she steps cautiously into the open space. It must be a good five degrees warmer than outside even though there are no walls, it’s more a collection of pillars than a room.
Unnaturally warm in here.
As if the atmosphere had gathered together some particularly troublesome molecules in one place, as if an invisible devil were dancing in the air.
She looks down at her feet. Takes care not to stand in any footprints. A pool of blood some distance away, some smaller splashes of blood around it, together they almost form the shape of a body.
What?
Blood that’s flowed out of her.
A black shadow. What were you doing here at night?
You’re no older than my Tove. You ended up here even though you shouldn’t have.
No clothes, no traces of fabric that Malin can make out with her naked eye.
A mobile ringing, Ellinor Getlund’s measured voice behind Malin. The voice coming closer. Has she left the girl alone?
Malin crouches down. Breathing. Runs her hand over the floorboards, careful not to touch anything that their crime scene investigator and Forensics expert, Karin Johannison, might want to look at.
Sees the blood on the railing above the place where the girl was lying.
Did someone throw you over the railing? Or did you climb over it yourself?
Children’s voices in the background.
Ignore them. What are they doing here, so early?
Malin gets up and walks over to the railing. Marks made by loads of shoes on the other side, footprints, bushes some distance away, some broken branches. A tree, a rough pine slightly further in. Was that where you waited? Did you pull her into those bushes? Or did someone else leave those tracks? Entirely unrelated? Did it all happen in a completely different way?
Children.
Lots of them.
They’re laughing.
Saying: ‘Police. Ambulance.’
And then they scream, and scream again, and agitated women’s voices echo through the park, then Niklasson’s voice.
‘What the hell?’
Malin turns around.
Ten preschool children in yellow tunics. They’re howling now. Two teachers with surprised looks on their faces. A naked, beaten, wounded, but unnaturally clean girl moving towards them from the bench. The children sick with fear, as if they had suddenly infected each other with a virus of terror in the face of the strange, scary sight coming towards them.
The children are screaming out loud.
‘I told you to stay with her!’ Malin roars.
Ellinor Getlund heading after the girl, her mobile in one hand, the orange blanket, hastily plucked up from the gravel beside the bench, in the other.
The naked, glassy girl climbs over the fence around the swings, not caring about the wounds on her arms and legs, or the dried blood on the inside of her thighs. She walks across the sand. Sits down on one of the tyres and starts swinging back and forth, a pendulum motion that seems to be an obstinate attempt to obliterate time.
Her gleaming white body, the blood on her thighs somehow luminous.
Down by the fountain Rydström and Johansson are still fumbling with the cordon as if nothing had happened.
Where are you, Zeke? Malin thinks. I need you here right now.
4
Zeke standing cautiously beside Malin in the summerhouse.
He arrived just after they had got the girl down from the swing, wrapped her in the orange blanket and sat her down inside the ambulance. She climbed in without objecting.
The preschool children have made a collective retreat from the park. Once their initial fear had subsided they seemed mostly amused by the funny lady swinging without any clothes on, and wanted her to carry on, and some of them were upset when Malin and Ellinor Getlund helped the girl down.
Malin explained to one of the preschool teachers that the playground was a crime scene, but that they would probably be able to use it again tomorrow. The woman didn’t ask what had happened, and seemed mainly concerned with getting the children away from there as quickly as possible.
Zeke came running up the path from the fountain and the summerhouse. His clean-shaven head was nodding up and down and the beads of sweat in the wrinkles on his forty-five-year-old forehead became more obvious the closer he got. Light-blue shirt, light-blue jeans, beige linen jacket. Black hiking shoes, far too heavy for this weather, but very official.
Malin couldn’t help herself snapping as he stopped beside her, breathless. She was standing beside the car, and had just given Ellinor Getlund a severe reprimand.
‘At a crime scene you do what the police officer in charge tells you, and I told you to stay with her.’
Ellinor Getlund not backing down, asking instead: ‘When can we take her? She needs to get to hospital.’
‘When I tell you.’
‘But . . .’
‘No buts.’