But Waldemar backs down this time.
‘Have you got the number for your friends?’
‘Sure.’
Ten minutes later they’re sitting in the car on the way back in to the city, Arto Sovalaski’s alibi confirmed by a drunk Finn on the other side of the Kalmar Sound.
‘Well, that’s that line of inquiry exhausted,’ Waldemar Ekenberg says. ‘Let’s get back to the station and put the squeeze on Suliman one last time before he gets out.’
‘They let him go last night,’ Per says.
‘Did they, now?’ Waldemar says. ‘Did they, now?’
A bit of a lie-in.
They indulged themselves seeing as it’s Saturday, and it’s nine o’clock when Malin goes downstairs to meet Zeke
The second Saturday of this case. Just over a week has passed since the eruption. But it feels like several years, as if they’re dealing with a drawn-out plague.
The heat hasn’t improved. It may even be a bit worse.
The grey stone façade of the church is quivering in the air, fading into a sickly yellow nuance, and the quiver in the air means that Malin can’t make out the inscription.
Zeke, where are you?
He called ten minutes ago as he was passing Berga, so he should be here by now.
Tove still asleep up in the flat.
Malin walks down the street, taking a look in the windows of the St Lars gallery, at the colourful paintings by artists like Madeleine Pyk and Lasse Åberg. She doesn’t know much about art, but what she sees hanging on the walls of the gallery makes her feel ill.
Vera Folkman.
How broken is she?
Damaged, damaged goods. We should put in a claim for the damage.
Like that couple in the US who adopted a little girl from Ukraine who turned out to have learning difficulties. The story goes that they sent her back in a FedEx box and that she froze to death en route, in a plane ten thousand metres above the ground.
A car horn.
Zeke.
The next minute she’s sitting in the air-conditioned cool of the car. She breathes out. Doesn’t notice the white van parked at the top of Ågatan.
Tove stretches out in bed, her mum’s bed, it’s still nice to sleep there sometimes.
She’s meeting Markus later, and today she’s going to tell him, it’s over, that she still likes him, just not like that, and that they can still be friends.
But he won’t want that.
She sits up.
Just from the light creeping through the gaps in the Venetian blinds she can tell this is likely to be the hottest day since she got home from Bali.
They ring the bell of Vera Folkman’s flat on Sturegatan. She lives on the first floor, but there’s no answer, the whole flat gives a strangely abandoned impression from the outside.
‘Gone, baby, gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Damn, it’s hot already. Hotter by the second.’
The longer they stand outside the flat, the more they become aware of a smell coming from inside.
‘It smells of animal crap,’ Zeke says.
‘Maybe she keeps cats in there?’
‘Well, whatever it is, it stinks.’
‘Maybe she’s in Australia,’ Malin says, turning on her heel and starting to go back downstairs. ‘She could have left her pets inside.’
‘It’s probably cooler there than it is here, even in Alice Springs,’ Zeke says.
‘That’s supposed to be the hottest place in the world.’
‘Wrong. Linköping’s the hottest place in the world.’
Tove sitting firmly on her bicycle.
Her pink top tight against her body.
The world sleepy and yellow through her sunglasses.
She pedals past Tinnis, but instead of heading up Ramshällsbacken she turns off towards the hospital, heading back down towards the Hotel Ekoxen. She has a funny feeling that someone’s following her, that someone’s watching her, trying to get closer. But she carries on pedalling, getting slightly out of breath, and she thinks it must be her nerves ahead of her conversation with Markus that are making her twitchy.
She’d felt it ever since she got her bike from the stand down by the church.
But where were the eyes?
She looked around, nothing suspicious, nothing different, just fewer people in this hot, summertime empty city.
And now she is coasting down towards the hotel, and turns around, and isn’t that the same van that was parked outside the flat? At home? The one that drove past her outside Markus’s yesterday?
Scared now.
And she stops at the hotel.
Opens the gate leading to the airy, yellowing Horticultural Society Park.
That was where they found one of the girls.
But at least the van can’t follow me in there.
A dark figure behind the wheel. Who?
She’s cycling fast, her daughter, and I mustn’t give myself away, I shall take her like I took the others, it will be quick.
She mustn’t see me and she’s stopped at the gate of the park and she looks scared.
But I’m nothing to be scared of.
I’m just going to see to it that you start living again. I’m an angel-maker. That’s what I am.
But she disappears.
Cycles into the park. She must have seen me. I drive past, pulling my cap down over my face. Time, my time, our time, will soon be here. Hands firm on the wheel now.
What time?
Tinnis, over there. That’ll do.
Shall I call Mum?
No.
The van goes past, it doesn’t stop, and the person inside it wearing a cap drives on.
I’m just twitchy.
There must be hundreds of white vans in Linköping.
Hardly anyone in the park. She cycles back to the gate by the hotel.
No van in sight.
She cycles straight to Markus’s house, determined, focused, just like Mum. Just like Mum, she thinks.
57
Zeke is sitting in the shade of a sickly yellow Festis umbrella in the outdoor café at Tinnis. He’s just peeled the plastic from a meatball sandwich. Malin wanted to take a swim at lunchtime, and he protested at first, didn’t they have more important things to think about than swimming?
But she insisted.
Said she couldn’t deal with the gym in this heat.
Wanted to go swimming, and she insisted in a way that was almost manic, in a way that only Malin can be: controlled, but still intense and relentless. He has learned to listen to her when she’s like this, knows she’s trying to find meanings and signifiers that can lead them on.
The sun has free rein over the clear sky.
The trees on the far side are shading the outdoor pool, and the indoor pools are shut off, empty while work is being done on them.
He doesn’t feel like swimming.
Too many people. And even more at lunchtime.
Pools like this never feel clean, no matter how much chlorine they have in them. They met a woman on the way out when they arrived at the pool. She was dressed in white and carrying a black bag in one hand and a test-tube holder in the other. Presumably something to do with pool maintenance.
But it doesn’t matter, Zeke thinks, taking a bite of the sandwich. Even if they have the strictest hygiene standards, I still don’t want to go swimming here.
Malin doesn’t care.
She’s standing in her red costume on what looks like a sugar lump, ready to dive in.
The water of the pool rinsing her body.
Cool, take long strokes, feel the chlorine cleaning her skin, lungs, another stroke, it’s supposed to hurt or it isn’t doing any good. The red balls of the lane marker become a red line as she speeds up.
She breathes and her muscles lurch and she takes another stroke, and little by little she fights her way to the edge, maybe thirty metres away now.