‘Everywhere, Malin. Everywhere. I’ll take Folkman’s flat.’
‘She’s got her.’
‘Yes. Probably. I’ll make sure everyone takes their service weapons with them.’
‘I’ll take mine.’
They hang up.
‘Come on,’ Malin says to Janne once she’s fetched her pistol from the gun cabinet in the bedroom, the holster hidden under a thin white cotton jacket.
‘We’ll go back to yours, see if she’s there.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter past nine.’
‘She’d be back by now if she went to the seven o’clock showing at the cinema.’
‘Shouldn’t one of us stay here in case she comes?’
Right thinking, Janne, but wrong.
‘We’re doing this together,’ Malin says. ‘She’s our daughter.’
Then Malin writes a note and leaves it on the hall floor.
TOVE, CALL US!
Mum and Dad
64
Something’s approaching.
I’m awake, my head is thumping, enough for me to know that I’m awake. Where am I?
I’m lying on something hard and I can’t move, what’s that scratching behind me, and the smell, it stinks here and I’m not at home, where’s my book, did I fall asleep under the tree?
My whole body aches.
Tove tries to pull her arms up, but they’re tied down.
Something’s approaching.
A faceless face, a nothing face and now I’m screaming, but there’s cloth in my mouth, I can feel it.
Close.
I strain and pull.
Mum.
Dad.
Then cold against my nose, and sleep, miraculous sleep. I want to get away from here.
Because I am just falling asleep, aren’t I?
Nothing else?
The house, in a remote patch of woodland just outside Malmslätt, is smothered with scaffolding. The yellow wooden façade is being replaced, the rot has finally won, and Malin looks at the cars, one, two, three, four wrecks, God only knows what make.
Janne’s hobby.
Doing them up and selling them.
Making a bit of extra money.
The only problem is that he never sells any of the cars. There are four American cars in perfect condition sitting in the workshop and garage. He never drives them, never puts them on show, he just has them.
She never understood the cars.
Thought they were about as unsophisticated as anything could possibly be.
White trash. And it was only years later that she realised that it was her mother’s distaste for anything that could be regarded as unrefined haunting her, that she had unconsciously adopted her mother’s attitudes and that this had influenced her relationship with the only man on the planet she can categorically state that she has loved.
They lived here together.
Before the catastrophe.
Before the divorce. Before Bosnia and all the other godforsaken places Janne has been.
You keep the house, Janne.
We won’t be there when you get home.
Gathering this ‘we’ together now. This is what we do. Janne opens the front door and they call into the darkness of the house: Tove, Tove, but their shouts don’t sound very persuasive.
Janne turns on the lights.
We are here, this is where we ought to live together.
They go from room to room in this house, looking for their daughter, but she isn’t there, she isn’t anywhere.
‘What do we do now?’
Janne’s question directed at the kitchen sink, a glass of water in his hand.
‘We drive around.’
‘Shouldn’t we just wait at home to be there when she gets home?’
‘Do you really believe that’s going to work, Janne? Waiting drives me mad. We’ll drive around. Looking for her. In parks, anywhere.’
‘You don’t think she could have gone somewhere else?’
‘Not Tove, you know that as well as me, Janne.’
The kitchen lamp flickers, hesitates before there’s a small pop and it goes out.
They stand opposite each other in the darkness.
‘Fucking hell,’ Janne says, then clutches her tightly to him.
Zeke is sitting in his car on Sturegatan, outside Vera Folkman’s flat.
Dark as a bat-cave up there.
He’s been up and rung the bell.
Like the grave.
And the smell.
Cadaverous, more noticeable now.
No sign of her, no sign of Tove.
My problems with Martin and his ice hockey.
Luxury problems.
What the hell am I sitting here for? There could be something up there that could help us. Tove might even be up there.
Malin. I’m doing this for you.
And Zeke gets out of the car, crosses Sturegatan and goes into the building.
The stench from the flat is overwhelming now.
Something’s died in there.
An image in Zeke’s mind: a gutted stomach, steaming entrails pouring out.
I can blame concern about sanitation.
Then the lights go on in the stairwell, heavy breathing, someone carrying something heavy up the stairs.
Is that you coming now? Zeke wonders and creeps halfway up the next flight of steps, pressing against a bare stone wall, listening to his own breathing, his heart beating faster and faster.
Janne and Malin drive past the library. The building a dark shape in Slottsparken.
This was where she was the last time I spoke to her, Malin thinks, and says: ‘She goes there a lot.’
Jane doesn’t answer, looking instead up at the park, but he doesn’t see Tove’s bicycle in the shadows against one of the trees.
‘Let’s head out to Skäggetorp,’ Malin says.
Slavenca Visnic’s flat deserted.
Janne asks: ‘Who lives here?’
‘A woman connected to the case.’
She told him about Vera Folkman on the way back from his, that she’s got a terrible feeling that the very worst has happened, or is in the process of happening.
The look of panic in Janne’s eyes.
This time he needs to save himself. No one else, and he looks tired standing there in the heat, in the light of a streetlamp in Skäggetorp, his cheeks still smeared with soot, his frame somehow diminished by lack of sleep.
‘You need to sleep,’ Malin says.
‘How could I possibly sleep now?’
‘I can drive you home.’
‘Malin, leave it. Let’s carry on.’
Waldemar Ekenberg pushes open the door of Behzad Karami’s allotment cottage and Behzad Karami leaps up from the bed when he sees who his visitor is.
Waldemar raises a hand.
‘Calm down. I just wanted to see if you were alone.’
Behzad Karami sits down again.
‘Do you want some?’
He points at the bottle of vodka on the floor.
‘Thanks,’ Waldemar says.
Behzad Karami pours out two glasses of vodka.
‘Well, cheers.’
‘I didn’t think your sort drank.’
‘I drink.’
‘The fucker’s taken the daughter of one of our colleagues now. Can you imagine?’
‘Did you come to apologise?’
Waldemar downs the vodka before putting the glass back on the floor.
‘There’s no room for apologies in this world, lad. Never forget that.’
The person carrying something heavy has stopped outside Vera Folkman’s door. Panting, trying to revert to more regular breathing.
Zeke has his pistol in his hand, the safety catch is off, he moves down, the sound of the other person’s breathing loud enough to hide his footsteps.
Wait?
Or go now?
The stairwell is dark.
Why don’t they turn the lamp on again?
The jangle of keys?
And Zeke leaps down two steps, presses the illuminated red button and the landing outside Vera Folkman’s flat is bathed in light.