Earth Storm_The new novel from the Swedish crime-writing phenomenon_Malin Fors

by Mons Kallentoft

  He imagines he can hear footsteps behind him. Stops, turns around, but there’s no one there.

  He walks on. The effect of the beer is getting worse, and he’s weaving badly now. Ahead of him one of the street lamps is broken, and where there ought to be a cone of light he can see a square black shape, a van, by the looks of it.

  He carries on walking.

  He’s never been scared of the dark, that sort of thing’s for poofs.

  Get rid of them as well.

  The Pride Festival makes him feel sick.

  Something about the street, the van, the broken lamp, unsettles Peder Åkerlund, and he crosses the road, doesn’t want to go too close to the vehicle. Can’t put his finger on why.

  A few streets away he can hear two people talking too loudly, obviously drunk. On their way home, like him.

  He’s opposite the van now. It looks like it’s been painted by hand, with matt black paint. He speeds up, and is already past it when he hears one of the side doors open, then a voice: ‘You’ve got to help me.’

  A terrible sound from his lungs.

  ‘I can’t breathe.’

  It sounds like the man in the van is being asphyxiated by some invisible force, and Peder Åkerlund wants to carry on walking. But he also wants to help.

  ‘My asthma inhaler. It’s in that bag, over in the corner. Can you get it for me? I can’t reach it myself.’

  Not an immigrant. Unless he’s learned to speak perfect Swedish.

  This is someone in trouble. And you have to help your fellow man.

  If not, you’re no better than an animal, a poof. A Muslim.

  He steps over the body lying on the ridged metal floor of the van, can just make out the bag in the corner, and he digs around inside it, finds a plastic object. He can feel that it’s an inhaler, but it’s too dark for him to see what state the van is in.

  Dirty or clean?

  It smells of iron.

  Blood?

  No.

  Yes. And urine. Excrement.

  And Peder Åkerlund thinks that he shouldn’t be here, he should have carried on walking when he heard the weak voice, but it touched something deep inside him, and he had to help.

  Be a hero, maybe.

  Like those nutters in Syria. The guys from Ryd who blew themselves to pieces, voluntarily. At least we’re rid of them here now.

  Be like them. Only in reverse. Save this man and end up in the paper for a reason everyone can agree is good. Mum and Dad as well.

  Peder Åkerlund turns around. Bends over the gasping man, holds out the inhaler.

  ‘Here you are.’

  The man holds out his hand.

  Grasps the inhaler and puts it to his mouth.

  Takes a deep breath.

  Then another.

  And then Peder Åkerlund sees the man quickly and with unexpected agility and force turn the inhaler towards his own face and let it off like it is a fire extinguisher. He hears a different hissing sound, and his eyes flare with pain. His mouth fills with fuggy air, and against his will he breathes it in, feels himself being shoved backwards hard, and he hits the back door of the van with full force.

  The metal doesn’t give way.

  His eyes are stinging now. Burning, as if he were going to be blind for ever.

  His lungs are smarting, and he tries to stand up, knows he has to stand up, but he can’t, the man is on top of him, pressing him down, and Peder Åkerlund screams silently because his eyes are burning, and then he feels something cold and chemical against his nose and mouth and tries to flail with his arms.

  But his arms won’t move.

  His thoughts fade.

  He hears laughter and shouting.

  Sees his mother’s face in front of him.

  Then a sharp pain in one temple. And his eyes stop burning. Everything seems to stop.

  How much time has passed?

  Peder Åkerlund is lying on the cold metal floor, he realises where he is, feels the van moving.

  Bouncing. Are they heading into the forest, or down some rough gravel track somewhere else?

  He can feel tape around his wrists. Over his mouth.

  His eyes are stinging rather than burning, and in spite of the darkness he knows he isn’t blind.

  He’s lying on his stomach and his chin is bouncing on the floor, his nose too, and it starts to bleed, the metallic smell is his own blood now.

  He can’t move his legs. They must be taped as well. He tries to free himself, but it’s impossible.

  His trousers are wet and sticky. Those smells are also his now. His whole body has contracted with fear, first cramping, then into a jellyfish softness.

  His head is thudding.

  Have the coloureds got him? Those Muslim cunts? The gay pride wankers?

  Fuck them.

  His thoughts scare him. What if they can hear me thinking, if they hit me and ram my nose into the floor and break it? And he feels like screaming.

  But he can’t scream.

  The tightest piece of tape is the one covering his mouth.

  3

  Something forces its way into Malin’s brain.

  Into her sleep. Beyond the dream of evil creatures in dense jungle. An alien sound, a tone she recognises, and she rubs her legs and stomach, the sound is her phone, and she sees an opportunity to escape. She reaches for the bedside table. The phone lies there in sleep and wakefulness alike, and now she’s holding it in her hand.

  She sits up. Opens her eyes and yells, and she sweats as she hears the ringtone, and it goes on ringing.

  The white sheet is damp now.

  There’s a light flickering outside the window. There must be something wrong with the street lamps.

  She presses to take the call. Hopes it’s Daniel. But why would he be calling now?

  Then the dream outside the dream: it’s Tove. She’s got hold of a satellite link and has decided to call even though it’s the middle of the night. Knows she has to call whenever she gets the chance.

  ‘Are you awake, Mum?’

  And the longing forms itself into sound now.

  ‘Tove?’

  ‘I got a link. Just for a few minutes. How are you?’

  ‘I should be asking you that.’

  Malin hears Tove take a deep breath.

  ‘It’s hot here. And humid.’

  ‘Has there been any sign of trouble there?’

  ‘No. But there are rumours.’

  ‘What sort of rumours?’

  Malin can hear crackling on the line, but she imagines she can also hear the jungle in the background. The sound of living things in motion.

  ‘That the rebels have gathered a force near here.’

  ‘Are you going to be evacuated?’

  ‘It’s just rumours.’

  Malin’s wide awake now, feels like yelling at Tove and demanding that she jump on the first helicopter away from the camp and the children’s home.

  ‘We’re heading out tomorrow,’ Tove says. ‘We’re taking medicine and food to some villages in the mountains.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘It’s not dangerous. We’re the good guys, that’s how they see us.’

  Naïve.

  You’re naïve, Tove.

  ‘It has to be done, Mum. There are children with cholera up there, and they’ll die if we don’t do something.’

  Nothing naïve in those words.

  You’re better than me.

  ‘Are you scared?’

  ‘There’s no point being scared.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  The connection breaks, and Malin doesn’t know if Tove had time to hear her plea.

  She looks at the alarm clock on the desk next to the computer.

  04.33.

  She’ll never get back to sleep now.

  The alarm clock is over on the desk, so she has to get out of bed to switch it off. Up until ten months ago she never had any trouble getting up, but something’s changed, a first sign of old a
ge in her body.

  Tove.

  Thinking about her is like a form of sickness now. Longing replaced by poisonous anxiety.

  She gets out of bed.

  Looks out at the courtyard at the back of the building. The dark windows of the office block, and the flashing, which must be coming from Repslagaregatan. She can just make out her reflection in the glass, imagines she can see Tove behind her. Seven years old, sitting on the living-room floor playing with the cut-out dolls she found at her grandparents’. Lost in play, making the world harmless and comprehensible at the same time.

  Malin turns around.

  Tove’s there. Small and beautiful, tentatively conjuring up her own world, making it her own.

  That little girl is gone now. She’s a different person, somewhere else. She’s an anxiety, a sickness, a different sort of love.

  You had to run when you were younger, Malin thinks. You’re heading towards something now, not away from it.

  And that’s a blessing.

  4

  Malin has a new game to make her run even faster. To forget her body’s protests and keep moving.

  She plays the thinking-about-her-workmates game.

  She runs along beside the Stångå River, past the overblown villas of Tannefors, under the dense foliage of the old birch trees, feeling her heart pump as the soles of her shoes pound the ground fast, first tarmac, then grit, and she glances at the watch on her wrist.

  06.20.

  Has anything happened in the city overnight? Will they finally have something to do? They haven’t had a big case since March, when a gay man was beaten to death late one night in Berga. His brother was responsible, egged on by their father.

  They didn’t like his sexual orientation, wanted him to keep it to himself. So as not to bring dishonour on his family. But he wanted to come out, seeing as that, thankfully, is perfectly acceptable in this rainbow nation.

  It was Sven Sjöman’s last case.

  He’s retired now, and, as far as Malin knows, right now he’s in the basement of his house standing at his lathe, carving something beautiful to sell at the market. He’ll have had one of his crispbread sandwiches with strong, low-fat cheese.

  It took Sven a long time to take the decision to retire, but now that he’s done it he seems relieved. Didn’t appear to be remotely upset when they celebrated his retirement with strawberry cake and Henkell Trocken.

  Right up to the last minute he nagged her to take over from him, but she refused. Didn’t want to be in charge. He tried to imply that she was being cowardly, but that wasn’t it. She prefers only having to take responsibility for herself. At least at work, anyway. And she likes being out in the field. If she had taken Sven’s job, she’d have had to spend far more time behind a desk.

  Malin can feel her heart beating in her chest.

  Working hard instead of longing.

  An external appointment was made. A Göran Möller.

  He started a month or so ago, and Malin took an immediate liking to the blunt, art-loving fifty-five-year-old. But he’s no Sven Sjöman. He doesn’t fill the vacuum left after her previous thoughtful, sharp boss, who used his wealth of experience to steer them in the right direction in all their investigations.

  Göran Möller is single. His wife walked out on him and the children when they were small, and got married to a German from Berlin.

  A week or so after he started, Göran Möller took her to lunch. They went to the City Hotel, where they sat in the glazed veranda facing the square, and he told her he had spoken to Sven and had realised that she, Malin, was the key member of the Violent Crime Unit. And that he was happy for that to continue to be the case. In most places he had worked, one strong, competent detective had set the tone. And that almost always produced results.

  ‘But,’ he had said, ‘you need to bear in mind that I’m the boss.’

  Malin swallowed a serious flash of anger and took a forkful of her steak, then looked into her new boss’s green eyes and asked: ‘What else did Sven tell you?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About all the nonsense.’

  ‘I think he told me most of it,’ Göran Möller said. ‘But you’re better now, according to what he told me.’

  Göran Möller paused.

  ‘So what have you heard about my nonsense?’

  Göran Möller’s reputation went before him. He had been forced to leave Landskrona after some ill-advised remarks about immigrants during the riots in Malmö in the spring of 2010. He had said that it wasn’t OK to set fire to cars even if your name was Mustafa and you’d experienced traumatic things in Iraq. That people had to pull themselves together. Then, after he was transferred to Helsingborg, he had defended a police officer who had shouted ‘fucking niggers’ over police radio when some thugs had thrown a Molotov cocktail at their patrol car.

  After that his position in Skåne became untenable. You couldn’t defend colleagues who expressed racist views without some sort of punishment.

  ‘I don’t care about that,’ Malin had said. ‘As far as I understand it, you’re about as far from racist as anyone can be. People can come out with all sorts of things in certain situations without meaning anything by it. And as police officers, we need to understand that. Whether it concerns us or other people.’

  Göran Möller smiled.

  ‘You should probably have taken the job,’ he said. ‘You can bear to see people for what they are.’

  When he smiled he looked younger than his fifty-five years. But usually his cheeks sagged a little, making him look a bit like a boxer puppy, and his nose was disproportionately long and pointed.

  Göran Möller has got character, she thought. And you can’t help listening to what he has to say. But as she sat there at the table, she couldn’t help feeling that there was something missing, without quite being able to put her finger on what.

  ‘Well,’ Göran Möller said in conclusion, ‘you won’t get any more chances from me. Not like you did with Sven.’

  To her surprise, Malin didn’t get angry. His words merely frightened her.

  Shit, she thinks now. One of her shoelaces has come undone.

  She has to stop, doesn’t want to trip over.

  You need a few constants in life, Göran Möller thinks, turning up the heat in the shower.

  He likes hot showers. They wake him up better than cold ones.

  His constant is art. Classical painting.

  He’s happy to have been given the job in Linköping. He spent a long time in quarantine after the debacle in Helsingborg, and for a while he thought he’d spend the rest of his career compiling statistics.

  But Sven, an old acquaintance, came to his rescue in the end.

  Hot water runs down his back. The taste of his morning coffee lingers in his mouth, and he thinks: I know I’m a good police officer. I’m not a racist. But sometimes it isn’t easy to determine whether your thoughts and feelings are racist even if that isn’t the intention.

  Better to stay quiet.

  Learn to keep your mouth shut.

  Göran Möller turns the water off. Wraps a towel around his body and stands in front of the mirror.

  He likes the team in the Violent Crime Unit.

  Börje, Waldemar, Johan, Elin, Zeke, and Malin. He’s never been in charge of a better group of detectives.

  Sven warned him about Malin, about her alcoholism, but also said: ‘You won’t find a better detective. Give her plenty of room to manoeuvre.’

  Göran noticed Malin’s talent immediately. But also her need for boundaries. He wasn’t planning on being the surrogate dad that Sven had evidently been to her.

  Sven also warned him about Waldemar Ekenberg’s tendency towards violence.

  ‘But it can be useful sometimes.’

  Violence is useful, from time to time, Göran Möller thinks, as he puts on a white shirt. But violence always leads to more violence, and where it ends is never easy to predict.

  He hasn’t seen any
trace of Waldemar Ekenberg’s violence. But the battered old detective has stopped smoking, without even using nicotine patches, and has been in a filthy mood.

  The others in the group don’t seem to care. People say things, do things. Sometimes they mean well, but things turn out badly. And sometimes the other way around. Like when his wife left him and the children. They were better off without her, and the kids had turned into decent human beings.

  Göran Möller is happy on his own. He’s seen a lot of terrible things in his career, and he doesn’t want to share that with anyone.

  Push it to the limit, Malin. Burst your heart.

  She reaches the sluices at Braskens bridge. She speeded up for five hundred metres and now she can feel her body tugging her towards the benches on the little island in the middle of the river.

  But she resists. Feels her knees creak, and finds herself thinking about Johan Jakobsson.

  Six months ago his daughter started to suffer severe pain in her body. One knee swelled up and some nights she would cry out in pain. The doctors at the University Hospital confirmed that she had an aggressive form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. They pumped her full of cortisone, which made her body puff up, and she got so depressed that she stopped going to school.

  Malin can see how much Johan is suffering when he talks about his daughter. How unhappy he is because she isn’t happy, as if he’d like to make her suffering his own but knows there’s no way he can do that.

  In the depths of our pain we are all alone.

  Chief of Police Karim Akbar, and prosecutor Vivianne Södergran have had a son. Karim is on paternity leave and paid them a visit not long ago. The buggy was from Louis Vuitton and must have cost a fortune, but there was no denying that it matched Karim’s pin-striped suit perfectly.

  Malin runs back towards the centre of the city.

  Increases her pace still further, feels that she is capable of it, that her body can deal with anything today.

  But the body’s energy is finite. It’s good that Sven left while there was still time.

  Her partner, Zeke Martinsson, is more balanced than she has ever seen him. He seems to be happy with Karin, and to have no regrets about getting divorced.

  Elin Sand has become a more integrated member of the group, but revealed a few days ago that she had broken off the relationship she had been having with a doctor.