Zeke has kept the engine running and there is probably a forty-degree difference in temperature between the inside of the car and the air outside. Warm breath is turning to ice crystals on the side windows.
Malin gets into the passenger seat.
‘Quick, shut the door,’ Zeke snaps. ‘So, has Mrs Johannison taken charge of the situation?’
‘Kvarn. She’s getting the heater from there.’
Another two patrol cars have arrived, and through the tracery of the crystals Malin sees Karin direct the uniformed officers out in the field.
‘We might as well go now,’ Zeke says.
Malin nods.
As they drive back past Sjövik’s fruit farm Malin turns on the radio, tuning it to P4. An old friend of hers, Helen Aneman, presents a programme on that channel every day between seven and ten o’clock.
Her friend’s soft voice comes on as ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ fades out.
‘During that last track I took a look at the Correspondent’s site. This is no normal day in Linköping, dear listeners. And I don’t mean the cold. The police have found something in an oak tree in the middle of the plain, towards Vreta Kloster.’
‘That was quick,’ Zeke said over the noise of the radio.
‘He’s no slacker, Daniel,’ Malin says.
‘Daniel?’
‘If you feel like starting the day with something stomach-churning,’ the velvet voice on the radio says, ‘have a look at the pictures on the Correspondent’s website. A very unusual bird in a tree.’
5
Daniel Högfeldt leans back against his office chair and the responsive backrest dips towards the floor.
He rocks back and forth like he used to in Grandfather’s rocking-chair in the cottage out in Vikbolandet, the one that burned down soon after Grandma finally passed away at Vrinnevis Hospital in Norrköping. First Daniel looks out through the window at Hamngatan, then across the open-plan newsroom at his colleagues crouched over their computers, most of them completely indifferent to their work, happy with what they’ve got, and tired, so tired. If there’s one poison worse than all the others for journalists, Daniel thinks, it’s tiredness. It messes people up, ruins them.
I’m not tired. Not in the slightest.
He mentioned Malin in his article about the man in the tree: Malin Fors of Linköping Police did not want to give any . . .
Back and forth.
Just like most crime investigations he had covered.
The clatter of keyboards, the sound of people calling across the newsroom, and the smell of bitter coffee.
Several of his colleagues are so cynical it is affecting their productivity. But not him. It is a matter of maintaining respect for the people whose stories and mishaps are his daily bread.
A naked man in a tree. Hanged.
A blessing for anyone with newspaper pages to fill and sell.
But also something else.
The city will wake up. No question at all.
I’m good at what I do, because I know how to play the ‘journalistic game’, but also because I know how to keep my distance and how to play people.
Cynical?
Hamngatan was swept in winter outside.
Crumpled sheets in Malin Fors’s apartment. Only two blocks away.
Sven Sjöman’s wrinkled brow, his bulging gut, the denim shirt carelessly tucked into his brown wool trousers. His face as lifeless and grey as the jacket he is wearing, his thin hair the same colour as the whiteboard he is standing in front of. Sven prefers to keep meetings small, then to inform anyone else involved as and when. In his opinion, large meetings like they have in other police districts are never as productive.
He starts the way he usually does with a meeting of this sort, when they are about to start work on a big new case. The question who? needs to be answered, and it is his responsibility to set the question in motion, to give it a direction that will hopefully lead to the answer: him, her, them.
There is a deceptive emptiness, a trickling poison in the meeting room. Because all five of the officers assembled know that when that question is left hanging in the air, it can influence and change an entire community, a region, a country, a whole world.
The room is on the ground floor in one of the old military barracks in the A1-district that was rebuilt as the central police station about ten years ago when the regiment was disbanded: military out, law and order in.
Outside the barred windows is a ten-metre-wide, snow-covered lawn, then a playground, empty and desolate; the swings and climbing-frames are painted in primary colours but the white frost has turned them all into a collage of grey. Beyond the park, inside the nursery school’s large windows, Malin can see children playing, running to and fro, doing all the things that make up their world.
Tove.
It’s been a long time since you ran about like that.
Malin called her from the car, and Tove answered on her way out of the flat: ‘Of course I got up.’
‘Wrap up warm.’
‘What, do you think I’m stupid or something?’
Zeke: ‘Teenagers. They’re like horses on a racecourse. They never do what you want.’
Sometimes when they’ve been working on particularly violent cases, with pictures pinned up on the walls of the meeting room, they close the blinds to shield the children in the nursery, so that they don’t see the sort of thing they probably see on television every day, flickering past on an unguarded set, image added to image, as the child learns to trust its own eyes.
A slit throat. A burned corpse hanging from a lamppost, a swollen body in a flooded town.
And now Sjöman’s words, the same words as always, his gruff voice: ‘So, what do you think we’ve got here? Any ideas, anyone? There have been no new missing person reports, and if that was going to happen it would probably have happened by now. So what do we think?’ A question tossed into the room by a standing man to people sitting round an oblong table, his finger pressing the play button, words like music, like notes, hard and brittle between the four walls.
Johan Jakobsson speaks up, and it is obvious he has been waiting to hear his own voice, that he has been wanting to say something, anything, if only to put an end to his own tiredness.
‘It’s got ritual written all over it.’
‘We don’t even know for sure that he was murdered,’ Sven Sjöman says. ‘We can’t be sure until Karin Johannison is finished. But we can presume that he was murdered. That much is clear.’
You don’t know anything for certain, Malin. Until you know. Until then: the virtue of ignorance.
‘It looks like a ritual.’
‘We have to keep an open mind.’
‘We don’t know who he is,’ Zeke says. ‘That would be a good start, finding out who he is.’
‘Maybe someone will call in. The pictures are in the paper already,’ Johan says, and Börje Svärd, who has been silent up to now, sighs.
‘Those pictures? You can’t see the face.’
‘How many people that overweight can there be round here? And before too long someone will wonder where that fat man has disappeared to.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ Malin says. ‘This city’s full of people that no one would notice if they went missing.’
‘But he looks different, his body—’
‘If we’re lucky,’ Sven interrupts Johan, ‘someone will call in. To begin with we’ll have to wait for the results of the search of the scene and for the post-mortem. We can start knocking on doors in the area, find out if anyone saw or heard anything, if anyone knows anything we ought to know. We have, as you’re well aware, one question that has to be answered.’
Sven Sjöman, Malin thinks. Four years left before he reaches sixty-five, four years left at risk of a heart attack, four years of overtime, four years of his wife’s tasty and lovingly prepared but dangerously fatty food. Four years of too little exercise. A widow-making stomach. But Sven is still the voice of reason in the room, the voi
ce of experience, pushing no particular angle, stressing sensible, disinterested, mature methodology.
‘Malin, you and Zeke will be in charge of the preliminary investigation,’ Sven says. ‘I’ll see that you get the resources you need for the foot-work. And you two can help them as much as you have time for.’
‘I’d have been happy to take this on,’ Johan says.
‘Johan, we’ve got other things to do as well,’ Börje says. ‘We don’t have the luxury of concentrating on just one case.’
‘Is the meeting over?’ Zeke asks, pushing back his chair and standing up.
The moment they have all got to their feet the door opens.
‘You can all sit down again.’
Karim Akbar says these words with all the gravity his muscular, thirty-seven-year-old body can muster, then goes to stand beside Sven Sjöman and waits while the other four officers sink into their chairs again.
‘You appreciate how important it is,’ Karim says, and it strikes Malin that there isn’t a trace of an accent in his speech, despite the fact that he was already ten years old when he arrived in Sweden. He speaks clear, empty, standard Swedish.
‘How important it is,’ he repeats, ‘that we get this sorted out,’ and it sounds just like he’s talking about a dissertation that needs restructuring before a viva.
Hard work and application.
If you start on minus and want to get to double-plus, you can’t afford to leave anything to chance. Karim has written controversial opinion pieces in Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, perfectly chiselled to match the needs of the age. His opinions have upset a lot of people: immigrants must meet certain requirements; benefits need to be linked to linguistic ability in Swedish after just one year in the country. Exclusion can only become inclusion with a lot of effort.
His face appears regularly on television discussion programmes. Make demands, liberate people’s innate potential. Look at me, it can be done. I am living proof.
But what about the timid? Malin wonders. Those who were born diffident?
‘We know this is what our job is about. Solving crimes like this,’ Zeke says, and Malin sees Johan and Börje smiling furtively as Sven pulls a face that means: Calm down, Zeke, let him make his speech; just because you don’t make a fuss doesn’t mean that you’re nothing but a manual labourer for him. For God’s sake, haven’t you grown up, Martinsson?
Karim gives Zeke a look that says: Show me respect, and don’t use that tone, but Zeke doesn’t look away. So Karim goes on instead: ‘The press, the media, will make a big deal out of this, and I’m going to have to answer a lot of questions. We have to come up with the solution quickly; it’s a matter of showing how efficient the Linköping Police are.’
Malin thinks that it sounds like Karim’s words are being spoken by an automaton. No one talks like that in real life, and the competent individual in front of her is playing the role of a competent individual, when he would really prefer to relax and show . . . well, what? . . . his vulnerable side?
Then Karim turns to Sven. ‘Have you allocated resources?’
‘Fors and Martinsson are in overall charge. They have all necessary resources at their disposal. Jakobsson and Svärd will assist as much as they can. Andersson is off sick and Degerstad is still on her course in Stockholm. That’s the situation right now.’
Karim takes a deep breath, holding the air in his lungs for a long time before breathing out.
‘Okay, this is what we’re going to do. Sven, as usual you will have overall responsibility as primary investigator, and you other four can form a team. Everything else will have to wait. This has the very highest priority.’
‘But—’
‘This is how it has to be, Martinsson. I don’t doubt that you and Fors are very capable, but right now we need to focus our resources.’
Sven’s stomach seems to have grown even larger, the furrows on his brow even deeper.
‘Do you want me to contact the National Criminal Investigation Institute? We don’t yet know formally that he was even murdered.’
Karim is heading towards the door.
‘No National Crime. We’re going to sort this out ourselves. You’re to report to me every three hours, or whenever there are any new developments.’
The noise of the door slamming behind him echoes round the room.
‘You heard what he said. You can divide the work up between you and report back to me.’
The children playing on the other side of the nursery windows are gone. A yellow, Calder-inspired mobile is swaying gently beneath the checked curtains.
Blue, fat-mottled skin.
Beaten and alone in the ice-cold wind.
Who were you? Malin wonders.
Come back and tell me who you were.
6
Now they have erected a tent beneath me, its green colour turned grey by the evening. I know they are warm in there, but none of that warmth reaches me.
Can I even feel warmth any more? Could I ever? I lived in the land beyond, free in one way from your world, but what a freedom it turned out to be.
But I no longer have any need of your warmth, not as you understand it; there is warmth around me. I am not alone, or rather I am exactly that, alone, I am loneliness, I am the core of loneliness. Perhaps I was the core of loneliness when I was alive? The most basic substance of loneliness, the mystery whose solution we are approaching, the chemical reaction, the seemingly simple yet all-encompassing process in our brains that gives rise to perceptions which in turn give us consciousness, the precondition for the reality we believe to be our own. The lamps burn late in researchers’ laboratories. Once we have cracked that code, we will have cracked them all. Then we can rest. Laugh or scream. Stop. But until then?
Wandering, working, searching for the answers to all manner of questions.
It’s hardly surprising, the way you carry on.
The snow melts, trickling away, but you won’t find anything, so get rid of the tent, bring in a crane and get me down. I’m a strange fruit, I’m not supposed to hang here; it spoils the balance, and it’s starting to make the branch creak. Even the tree is protesting, can’t you hear it?
Well, exactly, you’re all deaf. Just think, how quickly we actually forget. Think what the meanderings of our thoughts can do to us, where they can lead us.
‘Mum, have you seen my eye-shadow?’
Tove’s voice from the bathroom sounds desperate, annoyed and resigned all at the same time, yet simultaneously full of a resolved, focused and almost frightening determination.
Eye-shadow? That hasn’t happened for a while. Malin can’t remember the last time Tove wore any make-up, and wonders what’s going on this evening.
‘Do you want eye-shadow?’ Malin calls from her place on the sofa. The news has just started, with the man in the tree as the third item, after a statement from the Prime Minister and some meteorological expert who says that the current spell of cold weather is conclusive proof of climate change, that we’re heading for a new ice age which is going to cover the whole of Sweden under metres of granite-hard crystals.
‘Why else would I be asking?’
‘Are you seeing a boy?’
There is silence from the bathroom, then a single ‘Damn’ when the make-up bag balanced on the bathroom cabinet evidently tumbles to the floor. Then: ‘It’s here. I found it, Mum.’
‘Good.’
A male reporter from the Östgöta newspaper is standing at the darkened crime-scene, floodlights illuminating the tree in the background, and you can just make out the body in the tree, but only if you know it’s there.
‘I’m standing in a frozen field several miles outside Linköping. The police have . . .’
Throughout the region people are watching the same pictures as me, Malin thinks. And they’re wondering the same thing: Who was he? How did he get there? Who did it?
In the eyes of the television viewers, I am the provider of television truth, I make sure that evil p
eople are locked up behind bars. I am the person who is expected to transform anxiety to security, but things are never so simple in reality, outside the screen. Out here everything is a test card, rich in nuances where it is impossible to take in everything, where meaning is everywhere and nowhere, with a clock ticking away and everyone waiting for something new, something clearer, better, to take over.
‘Mum, can I borrow your perfume?’
Perfume?
She’s got a date, Malin thinks. Which would be a first. Then: Who? Where? When? A thousand questions, thoughts, anxieties in myriad forms run through her in a fraction of a second.
‘Who are you seeing?’
‘No one. Can I borrow your perfume?’
‘Of course.’
‘. . . the body is still hanging here.’
The camera moves to one side, and in the abrupt darkness above the tent the body sways back and forth and Malin wants to change the channel, but at the same time she wants to watch. Cut to that afternoon’s press conference. Karim Akbar in a well-pressed suit in the large meeting room in Police Headquarters, his black hair slicked back, his face serious, but his eyes can’t conceal how much he loves the spotlight, how it seems to validate him.
‘We don’t yet know for certain that he was murdered.’
Microphones from TV4 in the foreground. A question from the mass of journalists; she recognises Daniel Högfeldt’s voice.
‘Why have you left the body hanging there?’
Daniel. What are you up to now?
Karim answers confidently. ‘For technical reasons concerned with the investigation. As yet we don’t know anything. We’re keeping an entirely open mind.’
‘Mum, have you seen my red polo-neck?’ Tove’s voice from her own room now.
‘Have you looked in the drawer?’
A few short seconds, then a triumphant voice. ‘Found it!’
Good, Malin thinks, then ponders what keeping an open mind means and is likely to mean: going round to every farm and cottage within a three-kilometre radius from the tree, knocking on the doors of farmers, commuters and workshy folk on sick leave.
Midwinter Sacrifice Page 4