But I felt the drops.
They’re lingering. What do the drops smell of? They have a different smell from how water usually smells. Do they smell of iron? Animal waste?
Your feet.
I hear them trampling on me.
Above.
And I think I’m lying down, but maybe I’m the one swimming, maybe the moist darkness around me is water. It must be water, I like water.
And now you’re playing.
Where’s my ball, Mum?
Shall I catch it for you? My arms can’t. They’re stuck by my sides and I try to move them, I try, but they seem stuck in whatever it is that surrounds me.
But why are you trampling on me?
I don’t want you to trample on me.
Where am I?
Where are you, Dad?
I can swim, I can float, but I’m not getting anywhere.
I can swim. But I can’t breathe.
My room is closed.
The nursery on the other side of the small park outside the crime team’s meeting room is closed for the summer. There are no children using the swings or the red-painted slide, no three-year-old hands digging in the dry sand of the sandpit.
The heat is barren, the city in summer almost the same.
Instead there are two decorators inside the nursery school’s windows. They’re both up ladders, bare-chested, and are rhythmically rolling pink paint onto one of the walls, much faster than it looks.
Happy colours.
Happy children.
Malin looks around the meeting room. Pale-yellow, fabric-textured wallpaper, a greying whiteboard on the short wall by the door. They were issued with new chairs back in the spring. There was a manufacturing fault on the old ones, and the new ones, of curved wood with black vinyl seats, are astonishingly even more uncomfortable than the old ones, and in the heat the vinyl sticks damply to the cloth covering your buttocks. The police station’s air conditioning can’t cope with providing a tolerable temperature.
The clock on the wall of the meeting room says 10.25. The morning meeting is severely delayed today because of the girl in the Horticultural Society Park.
How hot is it now?
Thirty-five degrees outside, thirty in here?
Opposite Malin sits a suffering Sven Sjöman. The patches of sweat under the arms of his brown checked shirt are now spreading towards his gut, which has grown even larger during the spring and early summer.
Be careful, Sven.
Heart attacks are common in the heat. But you’re sensible enough to move slowly. I know that much. If you have one defining feature, it’s that you’re sensible. You’re fifty-five years old, you’ve been in the police for thirty-three of them, and you’ve taught me all I know about this job.
Almost, anyway.
But most of all you’ve taught me to believe that I’m well-suited to detective work.
You’re the most talented officer I’ve ever worked with, Malin.
Do you realise what words like that mean, Sven?
Perhaps you do, otherwise you wouldn’t say them.
Zeke next to her. Pearls of sweat under his nose and on his brow. Her own scalp feels damp, like it does after she’s been to the gym.
‘Well, we make up the sum total of the Crime Department’s investigative unit this summer,’ Sven says. ‘So it’s entirely up to the three of us to make sense of last night’s events and work out what happened to the girl who says her name is Josefin Davidsson. Something else came in this morning. A girl by the name of Theresa Eckeved, fourteen years old, has been reported missing by her parents. I’ll take responsibility as lead investigating officer for both cases.’
‘Oh dear,’ Zeke says. ‘There’s a theme developing: girls.’
First nothing happens, Malin thinks, then nothing happens, and then everything happens all at once.
‘Missing,’ Malin says. ‘A fourteen-year-old? She’s probably just run away from home.’
‘Probably,’ Sven says. ‘Theresa Eckeved’s parents have told me what’s happened. But we’ll start with Josefin Davidsson.’
‘One thing at a time,’ Zeke says with a smile, and Malin can see that he has got some energy back in his over-heated, summer-weary, hard-working grey eyes. The whole thing is a bitter paradox, the way violence and suffering provide them with work and to that extent make them happy. Should I be feeling this happiness? Malin thinks.
Gloom and happiness, she thinks.
If I mix those two feelings up, what do I get? One of the nameless sensations that you are bound to experience as a police officer at some point. One of those emotions that makes you feel guilty, that makes you doubt the nature of humanity, not so much because of what you see and hear, but because of what it does to you.
Rape.
That gets you moving.
Murder.
And suddenly you’re bursting with energy.
‘Josefin Davidsson is currently being examined by doctors up at the University Hospital. They’ll work out whether she was raped, and they’ve appointed duty psychologists to give her support, and try to get her to talk.’
‘I checked,’ Malin said. ‘There are a hundred and twenty Davidssons in Linköping alone. We’ll have to put everyone we’ve got onto calling them all if she doesn’t talk and no one gets in touch.’
‘And we don’t know who called to say she was out in the park,’ Zeke says.
‘No. That could be tricky,’ Sven says. ‘The call probably came from a pay-as-you-go mobile. We all know how it is. It could have been a passer-by who doesn’t want anything to do with the police. Or someone involved in the attack. And none of Josefin Davidsson’s family has contacted us yet,’ he goes on. ‘Not a peep. We’ll have to organise door-to-door inquiries in the flats around the park. And when the doctors and psychologists have finished, you can try to question her at the hospital.’
‘Maybe she’s older than she looks,’ Malin says. ‘Allowed to be at home on her own when her parents are away.’
‘Which leads us to Theresa Eckeved,’ Sven says. ‘Her parents have been to Paris and Theresa wanted to stay at home in their villa out in Sturefors with her boyfriend.’
Malin shudders when she hears the words ‘villa’ and ‘Sturefors’.
Sturefors.
The suburb of Linköping where she grew up.
Thousands of images come flooding back to her. How her parents used to skirt around each other instead of walking side by side. How she used to run through the rooms, in the garden, always with a feeling of not knowing where she was, that reality was something utterly different to what she was experiencing, and that every corner, bush, word, inference concealed a secret. A longing to be grown up and the vain expectation that everything would look clearer then.
Her girlhood bedroom. Posters of Duran Duran.
Nick Rhodes.
See them walking hand in hand across the bridge at midnight.
Girls on film
.
‘But when they got home yesterday Theresa was gone, and when they called her boyfriend’s parents it turned out that he’d been at the family’s place in the country the whole time, without Theresa.’
Markus.
Tove.
She may not exactly have lied at the start of their relationship, but she concealed the truth. The lengths she went to to try and find her own place for a love she thought would make me angry. She didn’t even trust me that much. Thought I’d try to make her see sense. And I did as well. Convinced myself I was protecting you, Tove, but I wasn’t: I was only trying to stop you making the same mistakes as me. Bloody hell, I was twenty when I got pregnant with you, Tove. I couldn’t bear to see you enter the same confused place as me, the same sick, dual feeling of love and of being backed into a corner. So I didn’t trust you, thinking of myself, and you hid your first love from me.