The street where Sture Folkman lives is an obscure cul-de-sac just behind a run of shops right in the centre of town, and number twelve is a three-storey block of flats. The ground-floor shop is occupied by the National Federation of Disabled Persons.
They park.
Take it for granted that the old man is home.
The door to the flats isn’t locked, Finspång so small that they don’t need coded locks, people free to come and go as they please all day long.
They read his name on the grey-green list of names in movable white lettering, he lives on the third floor.
‘That’s the bastard,’ Zeke says.
‘Take it easy now,’ Malin says. ‘He’s an old man.’
‘OK, so he’s old. But some crimes never go away, and can never be forgiven.’
‘Get lost,’ says a hoarse voice through the letterbox, and it contains a meanness, a malice that is evident in a way that Malin has never experienced before, and the pink walls of the stairwell seem to turn blood-red and collapse in on them as they stand there.
‘I don’t want anything. Get lost.’
‘We’re not selling anything. We’re from the Linköping Police, and we’d like to talk to you. Open the door.’
‘Get lost.’
‘Open up. Now. Or I’ll break the door in,’ and the man inside seems to hear that Zeke is serious and the door is unlocked and opened.
A tall, thin man with a bent back, his body frozen by what looks like Parkinson’s.
You didn’t do it, Malin thinks, but then they never really thought he had.
A long nose that distracts attention from a weak chin, and Sture Folkman stares right at them, his eyes grey and cold.
Cold as the tundra.
Cold as the Arctic.
Like a world without light, that’s how cold your eyes are.
Black gabardine trousers. A white nylon shirt and a grey cardigan in spite of the heat.
‘What the hell do you want?’
Malin looks at his hands.
Long, white, bloodless fingers dangling towards the rag-rugs in the hall, tentacles ready to feel their way up, in.
Green plush sofas.
Black and white photographs of family farms long since sold off.
Heavy red velvet curtains shutting out all the light. A bookcase with books about chemistry, and a complete set of the Duden encyclopaedia in German.
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
Sture Folkman’s response when they explained why they were there.
But Malin and Zeke still went into the living room, sitting down in a couple of armchairs, waiting.
Sture Folkman hesitated in the hall.
They heard him moving around in the kitchen, scrupulously clean, Malin noticed that as they went past, old-fashioned knives with Bakelite handles in a block on the draining board.
Then he came in to them.
‘Get lost.’
‘Not until you answer our questions.’
‘Get lost, back to Linköping. That’s where you said you were from, isn’t it? Fucking stuck-up dump. I was at your oh-so-wonderful hospital last month. Fucking shit urologist.’
He slumped onto a ladder-backed chair beside the bookcase.
‘I’ve never had any dealings with the cops.’
‘You should have done.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You subjected Louise Svensson to sexual abuse, repeatedly. There’s no point trying to deny it, we know all about it.’
‘I . . .’
‘And doubtless you went on to do the same to your new family. Where are they now?’
‘My last wife died four years ago. A brain tumour.’
‘And your two daughters?’
‘What do you want with them?’
‘Answer.’
‘She’s a long way away. In Australia.’
‘Do they live there?’
Sture Folkman doesn’t answer.
‘Do you know anything about the murders of young girls in Linköping?’
‘What would I know about that?’
‘Do you think Louise could have had anything to do with them?’
Sture Folkman knits his fingers, sniffs them, then lets his hands rest on his black trousers.
‘Have you got any other assaults on your conscience?’
Zeke sounds the way he always does just before he explodes, just before violence.
‘Well? Have you?’
‘Zeke.’
Sture Folkman raises his hands towards them, his white fingers a jagged fence.
‘What do you really want? What do you want?’
On the way back to the car Malin can see Zeke trembling with loathing and anger.
He tosses the keys to her.
‘You drive.’
And Malin sits behind the wheel as they leave Finspång behind them. They’re surrounded by dense forest when Zeke finally speaks.
‘He had a point, the old bastard. What were we doing there really?’
‘Following up on a line of inquiry, Zeke. That’s what we do. We look back in case it helps us move forward.’
‘But still. It feels so remote that it’s bordering on desperation.’
Malin doesn’t reply.
Instead she fixes her eyes on the road, thinking about what must happen to your soul if you get nightly visits from those white fingers throughout the years when your faith in other people assumes its final form.
It makes you watchful.
Scared.
A conviction that everyone probably wants to hurt you.
That everyone hates you.
An inability to fit in, instead an urge to seek out anything broken, to validate what’s broken within yourself.
Life as a lonely, aimless wanderer.
Everything that could be defined as self-esteem fingered to destruction.
Cracks in doors concealing a darkness into which you could tumble helplessly.
49
The beach outside Sturefors in the dying afternoon light. The heat is making Waldemar Ekenberg’s jacket stick to his body as he stands beneath the oak inside the cordon.
The holstered pistol is warm against his chest, not even metal shielded by cloth and shade can resist the heat.
Suliman Hajif is standing beside what was Theresa Eckeved’s grave, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, allowed not to wear custody clothing for this excursion. His hands are behind his back, the handcuffs fastened tight to make sure he doesn’t try anything.
The bathers have found their way back.
When they arrived the bathers stared in their direction from behind their sunglasses, now they’ve gone back to swimming. Presumably they think that the reason for their visit is too frightening to be allowed to blemish such a dreamy summer’s day as this: That was where they found her. It’s the police. It happened. How old was she? Fourteen. Summertime death. Over there, by that oak tree.
Only two boys, wearing identical blue swimming trunks, are standing outside the cordon and staring up at them through blue-tinted glass. The ice cream kiosk is closed, otherwise the boys would probably each be clutching a cone.
Inquisitive.
‘Off you go, now.’
Per Sundsten tries to make his voice sound authoritative.
Sven Sjöman hadn’t been convinced about their idea: taking him out to the crime scenes to get him to break down, confess.
‘His lawyer will have to go too.’
‘Sod the lawyer. We haven’t got time for that,’ Waldemar said. ‘The girls, Sjöman, think of the girls.’
‘OK, but take it easy. Nothing unnecessary.’
As he sat at his desk in the open-plan office, Sven hesitated, his face wrinkling with awareness of their excesses.
‘Get lost.’
And Waldemar fixes a stare on the boys until they lumber off, embarrassed, down the little beach and back into the water.
‘So this was where you buried her. And was this where you killed her as well?’