It’s hotter at home that it was there.
And the light is ten times sharper.
It’s a good thing I’ve got good sunglasses.
Mum doesn’t like wearing sunglasses, she thinks they distort reality. I like it when the world gets a bit more yellow.
Her heart is pounding in her chest as she stands up to pedal up the hill into Ramshäll, past the brick villas and the big wooden houses occupied by the most prominent of the city’s inhabitants.
Markus’s mum and dad are people like that. Doctors, both of them. She’d liked that as well to start with; their big house, not at all like at home, it was a bit like one of the books she’d read: the girl of the people, the man better off, like a prince or duke.
But the house became normal as well, it wasn’t like in any of the books. Bali. That wasn’t normal.
On her way to the house and Markus now. He wanted to come up with something to do, and he must have been able to tell from her voice over the phone last night that she wasn’t sure. She thought about it last night as she was falling asleep. How she somehow can’t imagine seeing Markus the way she used to. Of course they can meet up, but not like that.
How to say that to him?
It’s like she means more to him.
A white van drives past her, slowly, presumably looking for an address, probably a gardener.
Finally, their white brick villa. The big apple trees look sad, the trunks look like they’re about to crack in the heat. The front door opens before she’s even had time to park her bike on the path.
Markus.
Thin and pale, and he smiles.
Tove smiles back, thinking: Hope my smile looks genuine. It’s good that he can’t see my eyes.
Then she thinks: Is it always like this? That when you aren’t in love any more everything is just flat? Isn’t there anything else?
Karin Johannison is in her office, feeling restless. She gets up, sits down, puts her feet up on the desk, her pink painted toenails perfectly matching the narrow pink stripes of her Prada sandals. She bought them in Milan back in the spring, when she and Kalle were there on a shopping trip.
Restless.
Karin doesn’t know why, but one of the reasons is probably that she and Kalle had sex like idiots all night, they had the windows open and the night heat, damp but somehow fresh, had made them wilder than usual.
She can feel him inside her still, wants him inside her now, is that why she can’t sit still?
They don’t really talk to each other much any more.
Not about anything.
And certainly not about the fact that they have never been able to have children, in spite of a thousand doctors and as many appointments. Instead they fuck. They’ve been doing that ever since they first met, and now their fucking is confirmation, that they’re OK, that they still look at each other, and Karin thinks that that gets them a long way, but only a child can get you all the way.
Wordless love is nothing to be afraid of. Words don’t get you far anyway.
But there’s something more than her residual lust that’s making her restless.
Have I missed something important?
Is that why I feel restless?
Karin sits down, switches on the computer, reads through her report about Josefin Davidsson. Watertight.
She reads through her report about Theresa Eckeved.
Probably murdered out at the beach.
Why?
No marks on the body to suggest it had been moved after death.
The soil under her nails matched the soil found at the scene, in both structure and content.
But.
Did I check all her nails? All the soil?
No.
I should have done. There could have been different soil under different nails.
Sloppy.
Heat-fuddled sloppiness.
I was probably rushing, wanted to get a report to Malin and the others as soon as possible, and I took it for granted that the soil was the same under all her nails.
Have to check now. As long as there’s still some soil left under the other nails.
She remembers the scrubbed clean body.
Scrubbed, but there were still traces of soil under the nails, even if they were scarcely visible. Why did the killer miss that? Unless it wasn’t there for the killer, in his or her dark tunnel.
She’s standing beside what was once me in other people’s eyes, scraping the soil from under the nails of my left middle and index fingers.
I know who the woman is, Dad.
What does she want now?
I’ve never got used to the chill of this room. The small windows up by the ceiling, the metal worktops, the stainless steel cabinets containing us, the drawer-like metal bed where I am lying now, and then there’s the smell of surgical spirit and a lack of fresh air. It’s a clean smell, clean, but heavy with sorrow and a feeling that this was how it all ended up, no more, no less.
What does she want with my fingers?
With the soil?
Must you be so methodical, efficient? That’s actually me lying there on the stainless steel, my body completely cold, scrubbed clean, the blood stiff in its veins.
But it’s still me.
Tell her, Dad.
I want her to stop treating me like an object. Do you hear, you, the one called Karin?
I want you to stroke me over the forehead, I want you to show that I am still someone as I lie there, but you’re working quietly and methodically, and that makes me even more scared.
Please.
Stroke my forehead.
Put my hair in place.
Show me that I’m still a person.
The air-conditioning unit in the lab has given up and the building’s own ventilation system can do little more than circulate the hot air from outside. For some tests, those requiring cold, this would be a disaster, and Karin has called the engineers.
But she doesn’t need cool for soil analysis and drops of sweat are beading on her forehead, she’s not wearing her white lab-coat and her pale-mauve sleeveless Ralph Lauren top is glowing under the neon lights.
The body down there just now.
She doesn’t know why, but before she pushed it back into the refrigerated cabinet she stroked the girl over the forehead. Several times. Calmly and carefully. Gently stroking her hand over Theresa’s brow. She’s never done anything like that before.
The sheet detailing the first soil analysis on the worktop.
The new sample in the microscope.
Her eye focuses.
She can see at once that they aren’t the same soil. The soil under these nails is from somewhere else. The soil under the nails of the other hand was sandy, its crystalline structure sharper.
She does other tests. This new soil is typical mineral-rich compost, the sort you buy in sacks from garden centres. This soil comes from a garden, or a park.
So, Karin thinks, she could have been moved after death, and if she were struggling to get away, scratching at the earth to get a grip and flee, she did it somewhere other than the beach. The soil from the beach could have got there as the body was pulled down the slope or put down on the ground.
But where?
Malin will probably think this is interesting, even if it doesn’t really mean anything at all.
Karin opens the curtain.
She can just make out the yellow-white façade of the hospital.
One week until her holiday.
I’ll end up getting ill if I don’t get away from here.
Karin looks around the lab. Test tubes, flasks, fume cupboards, eye-baths, all of it very sexy in an inexplicable way. She sees herself up on the worktop, her cotton skirt around her thighs, Kalle thrusting deep inside her.