Midwinter Sacrifice

by Mons Kallentoft

  Malin stands at the railing above the pedestrian tunnel, looking down at the house, at the red cottage that once stood there. So small, but, for a boy, a whole universe, the stars in the night sky reminders of how transitory our lives are.

  ‘When Kalle got out Elisabeth was pregnant within a week or so. He was permanently intoxicated, old before his time. It was said that he was beaten by the other prisoners in the jail for something he had done in Stockholm. They said he had once grassed on someone to the police. But women were still just as crazy about him. He would spend Saturdays in the park. Skirts or fighting.’

  Black tiles. Smoke from the chimney. Probably from an open fire.

  ‘Then Bengt’s sister Lotta was born. And it went on from there. Kalle drank and fought, he hit his wife and the boy, and the girl when she wouldn’t stop crying, but somehow they managed. Somehow. Kalle used to stand outside the bakery roaring at people as they walked past. The police let him be. He had got old.’

  Malin goes back to the house, hesitating before she steps on to the driveway. There’s an ancient oak tree in the far corner of the plot. That oak must have been there in your time, Ball-Bengt, mustn’t it?

  It was there in my time.

  I used to run round that oak with my sister. We played there to keep Dad away, to force him to stay away with our laughter, our yelling, our childish shrieks.

  Oh, how I ate.

  As long as I ate there was hope; as long as there was food there was faith; as long as I ate there was no other reality but food; as long as I ate, my grief at what never was stayed in its dark hole.

  But what good did all the running and eating do?

  Instead it was Mum who disappeared. First the cancer took her liver, she spilled away from us within a month or so, and then, yes, what happened then . . . that was when the never-ending night began.

  ‘Social services should have taken the children away then, Miss Fors, when Elisabeth died. But they couldn’t do anything. Kalle wanted to keep them and that was the law. Bengt was perhaps twelve years old, the little girl, Lotta, six. As far as Bengt was concerned, it was probably already over by then. Damaged goods, fit only for throwing away. He was the loneliest of the lonely, the corner kid, a monster to stay away from. How do you talk to people who look at you like you’re a monster? I watched it happen from a distance, and if I have committed any sin, it was that I passed him by then, when he was somehow still there for real, if you understand my meaning, Miss Fors. When he needed me and the rest of us here.’

  But the mother? Elisabeth. When is a raised hand to fend off a blow the only power you have left? When your hands are so badly beaten that you can no longer sew?

  Malin walks round the house.

  She feels eyes watching her from within. How they stare at her, wondering who she is. Fine, you carry on staring. Newly planted apple trees, an idyll of scented flowers: do you know how easy it is for that to fall apart and vanish, never to reappear?

  Mum, even if you haven’t got the strength, come back.

  Was that your prayer, Bengt?

  I can’t say anything more now.

  Even we, I, have limits.

  I want to drift now.

  Drift and burn.

  But I missed her, and I was worried about my sister; maybe that was why I fought back, I don’t know, to hold it together somehow. You can see the houses that surrounded ours. I could see how it was supposed to be, how it could be.

  I loved him, my dad, that’s why I raised the axe that evening.

  Piss kids, dirt kids. Scared kids, teased kids. Never-go-to-school kids. Alcoholic’s kids.

  A girl, a little Lotta who has stopped talking, who smells of wee, who stinks of a misery that has no place in the newly polished Social-Democrats’ ‘people’s home’.

  Two Caterpillar boots breaking the hard crust of the snow in the back garden of a dream villa, a door opening, a suspicious male voice: ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’

  The young police officer, expecting the question, holds up her ID. ‘Police. I’m just taking a look at the plot. Someone who lived here a long time ago is under investigation.’

  ‘When? We’ve lived here since 1999.’

  ‘Don’t worry. It was a long time ago, before this house was even built.’

  ‘Do you mind if I go in? I’m letting in so much cold air.’

  The salesman variety. Highlights in his hair even though he’s almost forty.

  ‘Go ahead. I’m almost done.’

  A mother vaporised by cancer, a father who destroys anything that comes within arm’s length. A howl full of longing echoing from the history of this place, these forests and fields.

  Gottfrid’s voice: ‘He took the axe, Miss Fors. He wasn’t even fifteen at the time. He waited in the house for Cornerhouse-Kalle to come home from one of his drunken fights. Then, when the old man opened the door, he hit him. The boy had sharpened the axe, but the blow wasn’t clean. The blade hit him on the ear, almost severing it from the head in one clean cut. They say it was dangling like a flap from just a few sinews. And Kalle ran out of the cottage, blood pouring down his neck, down his body. His screams echoed right across town that night.’

  The snow is white, but Malin can sense the smell of Cornerhouse-Kalle’s alcohol-diluted blood. Can sense the smell of Ball-Bengt’s fourteen-year-old despair, his little sister Lotta in the bed she has wet herself in, her mouth open, eyes full of a terror that will probably never fade.

  ‘He never touched her. Even if there was talk of that as well.’

  ‘Who never touched her?’

  ‘Neither the old man, nor Bengt. I’m sure of that, even if neither of them escaped suspicion.’

  Traces of blood running through history.

  The girl was adopted. Bengt spent a year or so in a foster home, then was sent back to Kalle. His father was earless, with a bandage round his head and a white patch over the hole where his ear should have been.

  Then the old man died early one spring. After a few furious years when they spent most of their time watching each other, him and Bengt. His heart gave out in the end. They found Ball-Bengt, who couldn’t have been much more than eighteen at the time. ‘He’d been living with the corpse for more than a month. Only going out to buy bread, apparently.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Social services organised the sale of the house. It was torn down, Miss Fors. And they put Bengt in a flat in Härna. Trying to draw a veil of forgetfulness over the whole affair.’

  ‘How do you know all this, Gottfrid?’

  ‘I don’t know much, Miss Fors. Everyone round here knew what I have just told you. But most of us are dead now, or have forgotten. Who wants to remember such terrible people? Remember the madmen?’

  ‘And after that, once they’d installed him in the flat?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve kept to myself these last ten years or so. He fetched balls. But he was clean and tidy the few times I saw him, so someone must have cared.’

  Malin gets back in the car and turns the ignition.

  In the rear-view mirror the tunnel quickly becomes a shrinking black hole. She breathes in, breathes out.

  Someone may have cared, but who?

  I close my eyes and feel Mum’s warm hands on my three-year-old body, how she nips my bulges, how she burrows her nose into my round belly and how it tickles and feels warm and I never want her to stop.

  Carry on looking, Malin, carry on looking.

  17

  Zeke’s eyes are cold, annoyed when he meets her at the entrance of Police Headquarters. He has a go at her as they walk the few steps to her desk in the open-plan office. Johan Jakobsson nods from his own corner, Börje Svärd isn’t there.

  ‘Malin, you know what I think about you going off on your own. I tried to call but you had your mobile switched off the whole time.’

  ‘It felt urgent.’

  ‘Malin. It doesn’t take much longer to pick me up here than it does to find a whore on the Reeperbahn.
How long would it have taken to come by here? Five minutes? Ten?’

  ‘A whore on the Reeperbahn? Zeke, what would the ladies in the choir say about that? Stop sulking. Sit down and listen instead. I think you’re going to like this.’

  Afterwards, when Malin has told him about Bengt Andersson’s father, Cornerhouse-Kalle, and the world he created, Zeke shakes his head.

  ‘Human beings. Wonderful creatures, aren’t we?’

  ‘Have they got anywhere with the archive?’

  ‘No, not yet. But it’ll be easier now. They can focus on specific years. He has no criminal record, but that’s because he was only fourteen when it happened. We just need to get confirmation of what the old man said. It won’t take long now. And the death certificate was issued this morning. So I managed to get a name in social services in Ljungsbro, a Rita Santesson.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘Only briefly over the phone.’

  ‘You didn’t go out there? Or pick me up. Now I’ll have to go back out there again.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Malin, you might go off on your own, but I don’t. We’re doing this together, aren’t we? Anyway, going out to Ljungsbro is fun.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘They’re following up the last of the door-to-doors, and they’re helping the domestic burglary unit after a break-in at some Saab director’s villa over the weekend. Apparently they stole a painting, some American, Harwool I think it was, worth millions.’

  ‘Warhol. So a theft from a director’s villa is more important than this?’

  ‘You know how it is, Malin. He was only a fat, lonely man on benefits. Not exactly the foreign minister.’

  ‘And Karim?’

  ‘The media have calmed down, so he’s calmed down. And a stolen Warhol might make it into Dagens Nyheter.’

  ‘Okay, let’s go and talk to Rita Santesson.’

  Rita Santesson looks like she’s falling apart before their eyes. Her light green crocheted top is hanging off her skinny shoulders, and her legs are little more than two sticks in a pair of beige corduroy trousers. Her cheeks are sunken, her eyes watery from the strip-lighting, and her hair has lost any colour it may have once had. Reproductions of Bruno Liljefors prints hang on the yellow-painted fabric wallpaper: a deer in snow, a fox attacking a crow. The blinds are pulled down, as if to keep out reality.

  Rita Santesson coughs, and with unexpected force throws a black file bearing Bengt Andersson’s name and ID number on to the worn pine top of the desk.

  ‘That’s all I have to give you.’

  ‘Can we take a copy?’

  ‘No, but you can take notes.’

  ‘Can we use your office?’

  ‘I need it to meet a client. You can sit in the staffroom.’

  ‘We’ll need to talk to you afterwards as well.’

  ‘We can do that now. As I said, I really don’t have much to tell you.’

  Rita Santesson slumps down on to her padded chair. Gestures towards the orange plastic chairs, evidently for visitors.

  She coughs, from deep in her lungs.

  Malin and Zeke sit down.

  ‘So, what do you want to know?’

  ‘What was he like?’ Malin asks.

  ‘What he was like? I don’t know. The few times he was here he seemed distant. He was on antidepressants. Didn’t say much. Seemed withdrawn. We tried to get him to register for invalidity benefit, but he was strongly opposed to that. I suppose he still thought there was a place for him somewhere. You know, hope is the last thing that people let go of.’

  ‘Nothing else? Any enemies? People who didn’t like him?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. He didn’t seem to have any friends or enemies. As I said—’

  ‘Are you sure? Please, try to remember.’ Zeke’s voice, forceful.

  ‘Well, he did want to know about his sister. But that wasn’t part of our job. I mean, helping him to keep tabs on his family. I don’t think he dared contact her himself.’

  ‘Where does his sister live now?’

  Rita Santesson points to the file. ‘It’s all in there.’

  Then she gets up and gestures towards the door.

  ‘I’m seeing a client in a couple of minutes. The staffroom is at the end of the corridor. If you don’t have any more questions?’

  Malin looks at Zeke. He shakes his head.

  ‘In that case . . .’

  Malin gets up. ‘Are you certain there’s nothing else we ought to know?’

  ‘Nothing that I want to go into.’

  Rita Santesson seems suddenly energised, the sickly tiger master of its cage.

  ‘Nothing you want to go into?’ Zeke bursts out. ‘He was murdered. Hung up in a tree like a lynched nigger. And you “don’t want to go into” something.’

  ‘Please don’t use that word.’ Rita Santesson purses her lips tight and shrugs, the movement making her whole body shake.

  You hate men, don’t you? Malin thinks. Then she asks, ‘Who did he used to see before you?’

  ‘I don’t know, it should be in the records. There are three of us in this office. None of us has been here longer than a year.’

  ‘Can you give us the numbers of the people who used to work here?’

  ‘Ask in reception. They should be able to help.’

  A sour smell of burned coffee and microwaved food. A flowery waxed cloth on an oval table.

  Sombre reading. They pass the pages between them, taking turns to read, make notes.

  Bengt Andersson. In and out of mental hospitals, depression, a loner, different contact names, a transit station for social workers on the way up.

  Then something happens in 1977.

  The tone of the notes changes.

  Words like ‘lonely, isolated, in need of contact’ start to appear.

  The same social worker throughout this period: Maria Murvall.

  Now the sister appears in the notes. Maria Murvall writes: Bengt is asking after his sister. I checked the archive. His sister, Lotta, was first placed in a foster home, then adopted by a family in Jönköping. New name, Rebecka Stenlundh.

  So Lotta had to become a Rebecka, Malin thinks, Andersson became Stenlundh. Rebecka Stenlundh, her name changed like a cat with new owners after the old ones got tired of it.

  Nothing else about the sister, except: Bengt is worried about contacting his sister, a phone number, an address in Jönköping, jotted down in the margin. Then an unthinkable reflection: Why am I so concerned?

  Maria Murvall.

  I recognise that name. I’ve heard that name before.

  ‘Zeke. Maria Murvall. Don’t you think it sounds familiar?’

  ‘Yes, it does. Definitely.’

  New words. In a good mood. After all my visits and constant nagging, I’ve sorted out his hygiene and cleaning. Now exemplary.

  Then an abrupt end.

  Maria Murvall replaced first by a Sofia Svensson, then an Inga Kylborn, then Rita Santesson.

  They all form the same judgement: Shut off, tired, difficult to get through to.

  The last meeting three months ago. Nothing odd about that.

  They leave the folder with reception. A young girl with a nose-ring and jet-black hair smiles at them, and says, ‘Of course,’ when they ask for the phone numbers of Bengt Andersson’s social workers.

  Five names.

  Ten minutes later the girl hands them a list. ‘There you go. I hope it’s useful.’

  Before they leave Malin and Zeke do up their jackets and pull on their hats, gloves and scarves.

  Malin looks at the clock on the wall. The institutional sort, black hands on a greyish-white background: 15.15.

  Zeke’s mobile rings.

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . . yes . . . yes.’

  With the phone still in his hand Zeke says, ‘That was Sjöman. He wants us back for a group meeting at quarter to five.’

  ‘Has anything happened?’

  ‘Yes, some old boy from the history departme
nt at the university phoned. He evidently has some theory about what might have inspired the murder.’

  18

  Sven Sjöman takes a deep breath as he casts a quick glance at Karim Akbar, who is standing next to him in front of the whiteboard in the meeting room.

  ‘Midwinter sacrifice,’ he says, leaving a long pause before going on: ‘According to Johannes Söderkvist, Professor of History at the university, that was evidently some sort of ritual where people long ago sacrificed animals to the gods. And the sacrifices were hung in trees, hence the clear connection to our case.’

  ‘But this was a human being,’ Johan Jakobsson says.

  ‘I was coming to that. There were human sacrifices as well.’

  ‘So we may be dealing with a ritual murder, carried out by some sort of latter-day heathen sect,’ Karim says. ‘We’ll have to consider it as one of our theories.’

  One of what theories? Malin thinks. She can see the headlines before her: SECT KILLING! HEATHEN GROUP REVEALED.

  ‘What did I say?’ Johan says. ‘It’s got ritual written all over it.’ No triumph in his voice, just a blunt statement of fact.

  ‘Do we know of any sects of that sort? Heathen sects?’ Börje Svärd throws the question across the room.

  Zeke leans back. Malin can see scepticism spreading through his body.

  ‘We aren’t aware of any sects of that nature right now,’ Sven says. ‘But that isn’t to say that there aren’t any.’

  ‘If there are,’ Johan says, ‘they’ll be on the net.’

  ‘But going to such lengths,’ Börje says. ‘I mean, it’s pretty far-fetched.’

  ‘There are things in our society that we’d rather not think are possible,’ Karim says. ‘It feels like I’ve seen most of them.’

  ‘Johan and Börje,’ Sven says, ‘you start looking into this business of sacrifices and sects on the net, while Malin and Zeke talk to Professor Söderkvist and see what he’s got to say for himself. He’ll be expecting you this evening in the faculty.’

  ‘Okay,’ Johan says. ‘I can do this at home this evening. I think we can get a long way just by surfing around the net. If there’s anything out there. But that means we’ll have to drop the stolen painting.’