As deep as he possibly can.
Markus a metre or so from Tove on the sofa in the recreation room.
Cooler down here, the indoor pool behind the glass empty for the summer.
‘In the summer you swim outside!’ Markus’s mum Biggan had said when Tove asked about it in June.
He wants her to come closer. He doesn’t need to say it, it’s obvious from his body language. But Tove doesn’t want to, wants to tell him that she has to go, but she doesn’t know where to start.
He’s going to be upset.
‘Come and sit next to me.’
His Iron Maiden T-shirt is just childish. Like all hard rock. As if he doesn’t want to grow up, even though their bodies do.
But they haven’t had sex.
Markus has wanted to, and so has she, but they still haven’t. To start with they used to lie next to each other in the recreation room, under an itchy, brightly patterned, crocheted blanket, and she would hold him in her hand, but no more than that, and he would have his fingers on her pants, but no further.
The heat, different from the sort when she just looked at him, scared her.
She doesn’t know why.
53
The conversation had been short. Just after a morning meeting during which nothing new was raised.
Karin Johannison had told Malin that Theresa’s body might have been moved, and that there was high-quality compost under her fingers, and Malin had pointed out at once that if she had been moved from somewhere then the likeliest place was her home, the beds in the garden were full of new compost. It might be worth a look.
She and Zeke met up with Karin in the car park outside the National Forensics Laboratory, best to arrive together even though Karin was driving her own car, its boot full of the equipment needed for fieldwork.
They pull up outside Theresa Eckeved’s parents’ villa.
As they drove past Malin’s childhood home she looked the other way. It was as if the house was calling inaudibly to her, as if it wanted her to go there, and try to recreate what had existed a long time ago.
‘Secrets,’ the voices seemed to cry.
‘Come, and we’ll tell you some secrets.’
‘Are you coming?’ Zeke calls to Karin, frowning, his tone aggressive rather than impatient. Malin imagines that he might just be annoyed that Karin may have missed something that turns out to be important, but how many times have they overlooked things? Like the porn shop?
But no one is faultless. Things being overlooked are part of every investigation.
‘I’m coming. Could you maybe help me with one of my bags?’
Zeke goes over to Karin, picks up one of her large black bags and they head up a white paved path, the bushes not watered, forgotten.
They ring the bell and Sigvard Eckeved opens the door half a minute later.
Surprise and suspicion, but also anticipation.
Have you got him?
And Malin sees the hope in his green-blue eyes, a flash of life, and she says that they have reason to believe that their daughter may have been murdered in a different location from the beach and that they would therefore like to conduct a cursory search of the house, just to rule out the possibility that she was attacked at home.
‘You can’t imagine that I, we . . .’
‘Not for a second,’ Zeke says, and Sigvard Eckeved steps aside and his body is heavy, as if the true note of grief had penetrated his system and taken it over.
‘If it would help your inquiries, you’re welcome to burn the whole house down.’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘There are probably enough fires around here as it is.’
‘True enough,’ Sigvard Eckeved says. ‘Well, do whatever you need to. The wife’s in the city seeing her shrink.’
Malin is going through the beds around the terrace and pool, searching for clues, broken twigs, signs of a struggle, but all she can find are withered red roses that long ago gave up in the heat.
She’s out in the sun and has to keep wiping the sweat from her eyes and forehead. She can see Zeke on the other side of the lawn, where there’s a large vegetable patch between the lawn and the neighbour’s fence.
Karin inside the house.
Malin had just been thinking how well she fits in with this chic pool environment, in her skirt and her silly pale-mauve armless designer top.
Then Zeke calls out: ‘Over here!’
And Malin can hear from his voice that he’s confident, that he’s found something important.
‘She must have tried to escape next door.’
The vegetable patch is full of drooping potatoes, bolted carrots, rhubarb that no one bothered to pick. The signs of a struggle are obvious, almost solidified in the drought and lack of rain and absence of watering, and they can see footsteps, the way her body must have fallen into the plants, then how someone had tried to pull Theresa backwards and she had struggled, digging her fingers in the soil, trying to cling to life.
‘We need Karin,’ Zeke says. ‘Whatever she’s up to. I imagine she’s inside, in the cool.’
Sigvard Eckeved has slumped onto one of the chairs on the terrace, his daughter’s death even closer now, physically in their home, and it seems to Malin that he’s been struck with the realisation that they can’t possibly go on living here, now that this is/has become a place of violence.
Malin crouches down beside him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘It’s OK,’ Sigvard Eckeved says, and Malin realises what this loss means for him, that things can’t get any worse, that there might even be some small comfort in the fact that his daughter was at home when she was attacked.
‘But I don’t know,’ he says. ‘How am I going to tell the wife? It’ll break her.’
Once Karin has finished in the vegetable garden she turns to Malin, who has been watching from the shade of a pear tree.
‘She most likely would have come from the pool,’ Karin says. ‘The perpetrator probably attacked her there and she tried to escape in this direction. I didn’t find anything inside, no traces of blood or anything.’
‘You’ll need to check around the pool.’
‘That’s where I’m heading next, Malin.’
A minute later Karin is going around the pool, and the water seems to simmer in the heat, inviting and off-putting at the same time in its ostentatious blueness. Karin sprays Luminol on the wooden decking and the stone edge of the pool, hoping that the liquid will make any traces of blood glow in the relative darkness as she goes along shading the ground with a blue towel.
‘I knew it,’ Karin says when she reaches the part of the pool closest to the garage. ‘I knew it,’ she repeats.
Malin hurries over, and Zeke emerges from inside the house.
Sigvard Eckeved remains seated on his chair, his face expressionless.
‘Look here,’ Karin says, waving them over, and under the towel are some twenty small patches surrounded by splashes. ‘The perpetrator tried to get rid of it. But I can promise you that this was where Theresa received that blow to the head.’
‘Can you get a blood-type or anything from that?’
Zeke hopeful.
‘I’m afraid not. Nothing like that,’ Karin replies. ‘What you see here are just little ghosts of reality.’
Malin is crouching beside Sigvard Eckeved again.
‘Who would have had any reason to be here?’
‘Who?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There’s no one who comes to mind?’
‘No one. Sorry.’