‘Well, that was a great help,’ Zeke says. ‘Well, almost, anyway.’
‘If I understood that right,’ Malin says, ‘she was attacked in a forest, driven to a storeroom somewhere, where she was abused until she managed to escape and found her way to the Horticultural Society Park?’
‘She was probably sedated in the forest,’ Viveka says.
‘But she didn’t say anything about who did it?’ Zeke says.
‘Not a damn thing,’ Malin adds.
‘I’m sorry,’ Viveka says. ‘But interviews conducted under hypnosis seldom give straight answers. The consciousness never wants to remember the very worst things.’
‘You tried your best,’ Malin says.
‘Can we try again? In a couple of days?’
Zeke converted, he seems to believe in this now.
‘I don’t think there’d be much point,’ Viveka says. ‘The memory is connected to the instinct for self-preservation. She’s shut off again now.’
Malin feels tired.
Wants to get home to Tove.
Wishes this investigation would finally get somewhere.
Anywhere, almost.
51
The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 6.15. The second hand is firmly attached, yet still seems somehow lost as it goes around. A summing-up meeting instead of a morning meeting.
The investigating team gathered around the table.
All of them tired, the greasy skin of their faces damp with sweat, their clothes crumpled and dirty from fine summer dust.
The run-through has just started.
Malin has told them about Svea Svensson and Sture Folkman, and about the hypnosis of Josefin Davidsson.
Bad news from Karin Johannison. The forensic examination of Suliman Hajif’s flat didn’t come up with anything. His computer contained a whole load of porn, but nothing to connect him to the murders in any way.
Blue Rose had sold thirty-four dildos, and one of the police constables had identified ten sites on the net that sold the same model. So, without a confession or some new evidence, they were stuck as far as Suliman Hajif was concerned.
‘How could we have missed checking out Blue Rose at the start of this?’ Zeke says.
‘We assumed that everyone bought that sort of toy on the internet,’ Malin says. ‘None of our heat-addled brains even considered that tragic little shop.’
‘Mistakes happen in every case,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘We could have saved Forensics some work. But there’s no way we can get anywhere with Blue Rose’s customers. Of course we can ask them to contact us, but that won’t get us anywhere. No one’s going to come forward and say they bought a dildo. I think we can all agree on that, can’t we? Hajif. Are we making any progress there?’
‘He has no alibi, but otherwise we haven’t got anything.’
Malin can hear the exhaustion in Waldemar Ekenberg’s voice. He probably wishes he was back in his villa in Mjölby, with just his usual hooligans to bully.
Another of their constables, Aronsson, had poked about in Sture Folkman’s personal history after Malin asked her to. According to the archive, one of the two daughters from his marriage to Gudrun Strömholm, Elisabeth, had committed suicide when she was seventeen. The officers investigating the case never had any doubt about the cause of death, and Forensics had given an unambiguous verdict. Elisabeth Folkman had hanged herself. Reason: unknown.
No longer so unknown.
Aronsson.
The best constable in her year.
She had also checked with the police in Nässjö about the fishing accident in which Louise Svensson’s father drowned.
His body had been found floating beside a rowing boat out in the middle of a lake, Ryssbysjön, with a wound in his forehead. Gunnar Svensson was assumed to have tripped in the boat, hit his head on the railing and fallen overboard, unconscious. Traces of blood had been found on the railing.
Sven tells them that they have finally and rather unexpectedly received a response from Yahoo! about the password to Theresa Eckeved’s email account, and that the only correspondence was ten emails to Lovelygirl, who, to judge by the content of the emails, was Louise Svensson. Her farm was mentioned by name. According to what they had got from the emails, no meeting had been arranged that could have coincided with the date of the murder. But there was still no answer from Facebook.
You want to keep your grubby little secrets, Louise, Malin thinks. Presumably you hoped that we wouldn’t find out what you’ve been up to? And once we did find out, you went on trying to protect yourself, your memories, everything that you are.
A lonely person living in the middle of the forest. But still a sex offender.
Then Sven tells them that the Specialist Unit in Stockholm was working on a psychological profile of the perpetrator, but that it would take time because the whole department was on holiday at the same time, and the relief psychologist had a bad cold.
‘Psychologists, pah! Wimps,’ Waldemar says.
Malin thinks about what Viveka Crafoord said about the killer’s profile, but keeps it to herself, it’s just idle speculation by Viveka based on non-existent evidence.
‘You’ll have to carry on with all lines of inquiry,’ Sven says. ‘Try to find new ones. Use every bit of intelligence you’ve got. Ekenberg, Sundsten, interview all the sex offenders you can get hold of.’
Karim Akbar beside Sven, worried, knows that he’s the one who’s going to have to face the media again, trying to duck their questions without having anything substantial to give them. The press conference has been arranged for seven o’clock that evening.
As they are all leaving the room Karim asks Malin to stay behind.
He asks her to sit down again.
‘Malin,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to tell you how much I want to get back to the house down in Västervik and go swimming again.’
He wants to talk to me about swimming?
‘Did you want anything in particular?’
‘Yes, I want you to take part in the press conference.’
‘The press conference? You know how much I hate things like that.’
‘That’s an order, Malin. If I haven’t got any new information for them, then at least I can give them a few minutes with the prettiest face in the Linköping Police.’
Anger wells up inside Malin.
At the same time she feels reluctantly flattered by Karim’s compliment.
‘Malin, joking aside, I don’t want to stand there on my own again with nothing to say. It would be nice if you could come along and say nothing as well. And helpful. It might calm them down a bit.’
‘So you don’t mean that stuff about being prettiest, then?’
Karim grins.
‘Look in the mirror, Malin.’
‘Can we let them have the dildo?’
‘That it was the same model?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, that could lead to everyone assuming that Suliman Hajif is guilty. He doesn’t deserve that yet. You saw the papers yesterday. That was bad enough.’
The papers had been full of pictures of Suliman Hajif with his face blacked out. Headlines like: Summertime Killer Caught? Terror in Linköping.
The prettiest face?
So that’s where this crazy summer has got me?
A role as a shop-window dummy.
Twenty minutes later Malin and Karim are standing before a group of journalists in the foyer of the police station. Of the television stations only SVT is there, but there are several radio stations and maybe ten press reporters, a couple of photographers, presumably from the Correspondent and the TT news agency. Twice as many journalists just a couple of days ago, her summer angels are quickly becoming less interesting, selling fewer papers now that the investigation’s got bogged down.