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

by Mons Kallentoft

  ‘We were too different.’

  And maybe you just didn’t fuck that much any more? Malin thought. She felt the cynical thought run through her whole body. When did I get like that?

  Elin went on: ‘She wants children, but I don’t. And the sex had got really rubbish.’

  Malin breathes air into her lungs, tries to force the pain out of muscles full of lactic acid, and she keeps running, sees the world as a tunnel of bushes, leaves, grit that turns into tarmac, the sky half-covered by cloud above her.

  She tries to think about Börje Svärd.

  He can have five hundred metres.

  But all she has time to think about is his dogs. His two Alsatians, and the rumours of his affairs. His smart clothes, with his long, Marlboro-man coat and broad-brimmed hat, very sexy and elegant, according to the ladies of Linköping.

  Her vision starts to go black.

  I can’t take another step.

  Yes, I can.

  Malin runs past the sports hall, then up to Hamngatan, and she races past McDonald’s, down towards the church, and she sees the sign outside the pub, the windows of her flat, and stumbles, but manages to stay upright.

  She slumps in front of the door to her building. Feels her stomach tighten, happy that she didn’t eat anything before she set off.

  Even so, she can’t help it. Her stomach cramps and she vomits yellow bile onto the pavement.

  ‘You need to stop doing that,’ a voice says. ‘You’re far too beautiful to make yourself feel that bad.’

  Malin lifts her head.

  Looks into Daniel’s tired face, and wonders what it is that she’s feeling.

  5

  Evy Kvist is up early, as usual, and is eating a bowl of plain yoghurt standing at the counter in the kitchen of her villa in the Ugglebo district of Ljungsbro, some ten kilometres outside Linköping.

  Her husband is still asleep, and her thoughts turn to their children, both of whom have moved out and are studying down in Lund.

  As she puts her empty bowl in the sink the family’s seven-year-old boxer dog, Frida, gets up from her basket and lumbers over to the outside door. She waves her tail excitedly as Evy puts her leash on: the new neighbours are scared of dogs.

  Then they head out for a walk along the banks of the Göta Canal. The morning air clears her lungs and the sun warms Evy’s forehead as they walk along the path beneath the old oak trees.

  The tourist season hasn’t properly started yet, so the locks at Heda are deserted as she leads Frida over to the other side of the canal, stepping carefully across the narrow platform on top of the lock gate.

  Eva wonders if she should go the long way around, via Hedaängen and off to Blåsvädret, or take the shorter path to Vreta Kloster and then come back the same way.

  She’s between jobs, so has all the time in the world, the weather’s good, and Frida loves being outside, but still Evy chooses the shorter route. She wants to get home to the book she’s currently reading, and wants to be back in time to say goodbye to her husband before he leaves for work.

  She carries on along the western bank of the Göta Canal, looks around to see if anyone else is about, then, when she’s sure she’s alone, she lets Frida off her leash.

  The dog gives herself a shake.

  Then she sets off along the canal path as if she has an infinite supply of energy, and Evy feels envious of Frida the way you envy someone who has something you want but know you will never have.

  A few hundred metres further on, a road curves to run parallel with the canal. The road is lined with tall bushes. Evy sees the dog stop by the bushes, shake herself again, and then disappear under the bushes and emerge on the other side.

  Frida stops.

  Throws her head back and starts to howl, then settles into a long, persistent bark.

  Evy starts to run. She runs towards Frida faster than she has ever run towards anything, faster than she knew she could run.

  Something’s wrong.

  Frida is still barking.

  There’s something not right.

  What have you found? We should have gone the long way around.

  Evy reaches her. Looks in beneath the bushes, down into the ditch beside the canal.

  The dog barks.

  Howls.

  Evy Kvist feels her legs give way beneath her. She’s never seen a dead body before.

  If this is what they look like, she never wants to see one again.

  6

  The skin is bluish white, marbled, with red blood vessels on the legs and torso, the genitals hidden by one leg. The position of the body is unnatural, yet still calm in the way that only the dead can manage. As if they’re surrounded by soil before they’re even in the ground, Malin thinks.

  White flowers have rained down from the bushes above, catching in the man’s short blond hair, green leaves scratching his skin.

  He’s lying in the ditch by the side of the canal, beneath some vegetation. He’s about twenty years old, no more, his face is contorted, the area around his nose and mouth is swollen and red.

  His face is oddly familiar, but she can’t place him.

  The ditch is dry. The grass around the body appears untouched.

  It’s quiet here, Malin thinks as she takes a step towards the body.

  Quiet in a completely new way.

  It feels as if something has disappeared, withdrawn in order to return later, and is now lying in wait just out of reach. As if the death in front of them were worse than any other death they have seen before.

  Malin, Zeke, and Elin Sand came out here as soon as they got the emergency call. A hysterical woman walking her dog had found a body, a naked man.

  They realised at once that they were dealing with a murder. Men are not usually found naked and dead in these parts, or anywhere else on the planet, and now Malin is standing alone, looking down at the body and wondering: Who are you? How did you end up here?

  Behind her she can hear Zeke trying to calm the woman, Evy Kvist, and her dog is still barking occasionally, as if it understands that something’s wrong, and that it can’t do anything about it.

  An animal’s despair.

  Instinctive intelligence and inadequate language.

  Elin Sand walks over and stands close to Malin, who can sense her breath, almost feel it against the back of her neck, but Elin’s breathing is soundless, why is everything so quiet here?

  ‘What do you make of this?’ Elin asks. ‘It’s pretty obvious he was murdered.’

  Malin nods but says nothing. Keen to keep hold of the frightening silence, trying to understand what it means. The body, its nakedness, the vulnerability of bare skin even though there’s no longer any life to protect.

  It’s very clear that someone dumped him here, and she looks at his face again. The nose is straight. Cheekbones sharp, as though chiselled with an ice pick. She can’t help feeling that she ought to recognise him, know who he is.

  She racks her brain, gets close to finding something, when Elin Sand says: ‘Karin’s here.’

  Damn.

  Whatever she was close to finding vanishes at the sound of Elin’s voice.

  ‘Can’t you ever keep quiet?’ Malin hisses, and Elin throws her long arms out and says: ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise we’d imposed a ban on talking.’

  Malin looks up towards the gravel path leading up to the canal from the old Motala road.

  Karin parks her white Volvo estate, gets out, opens the boot, and removes the bag containing her forensic equipment. She glances at Zeke, nods to him, and the dog barks at her. She and Zeke never display their feelings for each other at work. Malin knows they both think it unprofessional. They work with life and death, grief and violence, and there’s no place for expressions of love.

  Karin comes over to Malin and Elin, and looks down at the body in the ditch.

  ‘Well he didn’t get there on his own,’ she says.

  Then she pauses.

  ‘You haven’t touched anything?’
>
  ‘Actually, we have,’ Elin says. ‘As much as we could. I gave him a great big hug.’

  Karin snorts, then laughs.

  ‘I didn’t know you were into necrophilia, Elin.’

  Tasteless.

  Where does the line run? What I’ve just said, Karin thinks, what am I allowed to say or not say in the vicinity of the victim of a crime? How far am I allowed to go?

  What I said was on the wrong side of the line, but it feels as if our boundaries have shifted, as if the members of the team have become harder, more heartless than we used to be. We’re more cynical, more pessimistic, and our words have to reflect that, while gallows humour masks the impossibility of the things that have actually happened.

  That will happen.

  Mentioning necrophilia in the vicinity of someone who’s only just died.

  Get a grip, Karin.

  She looks over towards Zeke, his shaved head shining in the sun. He’s a handsome man, more handsome with each passing year. It’s as if the contours of his head and face are becoming more chiselled over time, their lines and expressions clearer.

  And he’s a good dad to Tess.

  Our little girl. My daughter.

  Our daughter.

  Malin and Elin Sand are standing over by the crime unit’s blue Saab now, they’ve pulled back, realised they were in the way. They’re talking, but Karin can’t hear what they’re saying.

  She does her job, tries to focus on that alone. Examine the body, secure the evidence around it, footprints on the bank of the canal, tyre marks on the road. And then, when she’s done all that, she goes back to the body again.

  It’s naked.

  Alone.

  And oddly free of visible damage. All she can see is a noticeable swelling around the nose and mouth, which could suggest that he was drugged by someone pressing a rag soaked in some sort of anaesthetic over his face.

  There’s a bruise on the back of his head.

  Maybe he put up a fight before he lost consciousness.

  Over by the road she managed to find tyre tracks leading up here. The tracks made by the blue Saab are the most prominent, but there are several others beneath those.

  Karin crouches down beside the body. Feels her knees creak and protest.

  Did someone drive you here in a vehicle?

  Or did they kill you here? And then undress you?

  The former seems more likely.

  She walks along the edge of the ditch towards the road. Stares down at the grass. It looks too neat, as if someone had tidied it.

  Where the ditch meets the road she crouches down again. The stems of some small flowers have been snapped, and there are faint drag marks in the grit on the road that could have been made by the man’s heels.

  She goes back to the body. Looks at the heels, pulls a magnifying glass from her pocket, sees the almost microscopic splinters of grit caught in the dry cracks of the heels.

  That’s how you got here, Karin thinks, and then she looks up at Malin and Elin, and waves them over.

  Zeke stays behind with the woman and her dog.

  She seems calmer now, and the dog has stopped barking.

  ‘So, you were out walking your dog, the same route you take every morning?’

  Zeke is making an effort to sound calm, and it works, because he is calm. He manages to bring Evy Kvist out of the state of near-shock she was in when they arrived.

  ‘You talk to her,’ Malin had said. ‘She seems to need reassuring.’

  He put an arm around her to start with, comforting her, so that she would feel that all the bad things would come to an end, and if she wanted him to, he could arrange for her to see a counsellor, but first she had to talk to him.

  And now she’s answering his questions.

  The dog has stopped barking at last.

  ‘I took the short route today. She likes it. Sometimes I go the long way around.’

  ‘And it was your dog who found him first?’

  Evy Kvist nods.

  ‘I let her off the leash and she rushed off.’

  ‘Did you see anyone else here?’

  Evy Kvist thinks.

  ‘No, I was all alone. There was no one else here.’

  Apart from the man in the ditch, Zeke thinks.

  ‘And you didn’t touch anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about your dog?’

  ‘No, she didn’t either. She just started barking.’

  He’s already taken her address and phone number, and doesn’t really have any further questions right now. It’s obvious that the woman had nothing to do with the murder, so when she asks if she can go, he says: ‘Yes, of course.’

  He watches as the woman takes her dog and starts to walk along the towpath beneath a canopy of oaks in blossom.

  ‘Give us a ring,’ he calls after her. ‘If you need someone to talk to.’

  Malin is standing at the edge of the ditch, looking down at Karin. Elin Sand is rocking gently beside her, and Malin can feel her breath again.

  But she can’t hear it this time either.

  There’s a muteness here, and it’s as if the murdered young man is screaming to her without making any sound.

  Smothered longing.

  Muffled.

  That’s what’s happened, Malin thinks. The world has been transformed into a silent scream.

  7

  Daniel Högfeldt is clutching the wheel tightly. In front of him he can see the ancient church at Vreta Kloster on the top of the ridge, off to the east the expensive villas are feeling their way up the slope, away from Lake Roxen, and a few silvery masts are swaying in the marina between the upper and lower locks.

  The fields of rape are singing out, bright yellow, and the radiance of the flowers lends a buttery glow to the whole picture, as if the oil has been overpowered by butter.

  He’s drunk four cups of coffee. Taken two caffeine pills. But he still feels indescribably tired.

  When his phone rang and he saw it was his contact in the police station he couldn’t help answering. He was lying naked in Malin’s bed, home from the night shift, and had just fallen asleep when the call woke him. So he tugged off his eye mask and answered.

  A naked body.

  Even in his sleep-addled state, he knew instinctively that this was something big.

  So now he’s sitting in his car, awake for more than twenty hours in a row, and he puts his foot down, passes the roundabout by the convent, and heads on towards Blåsvädret, past the white-tiled school.

  It doesn’t take long to reach the turning.

  He pulls in. Sees Karin Johannison’s white Volvo and the crime unit’s blue Saab.

  He sees Elin, Zeke, and Karin.

  And Malin.

  They’re standing by some bushes, staring down the slope, and God, she’s beautiful, with the wind tugging at her hair and revealing her narrow neck.

  My lips on that neck.

  You want me to be rough, you refuse to let me be anything else. But that will come. Things will change.

  He gets out of the car, taking his camera with him. He’s having to work without a photographer more and more. Only occasionally is there enough money for a professional photographer.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Malin calls out. Daniel is walking towards them along the road, his bulky camera slung over his shoulder. She can hear that she sounds irritated, but she’s actually pleased to see him, pleased that he’s the first journalist on the scene.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be asleep?’

  She knows he’s tired, but also that his source at the police station must have called him. He refuses to say who it is, and she hasn’t pushed him. It would be against the law for him to reveal his source. Sometimes she wonders if it’s her. Do I talk in my sleep; do I say things about work that I forget I’ve said? Did I call him about this? She feels like pulling her phone out to check the list of calls, but stops herself.

  I. Didn’t. Call. Him.

  He has dark ri
ngs under his eyes, and his skin is grey, the way only lack of sleep can make it.

  Every so often she teases him about his discretion.

  ‘Come on, who is he?’

  ‘It could be a she.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘No. We both know it isn’t you.’

  Do we?

  He walks up to them. A tentative smile that quickly turns into a look of concern.

  ‘Hi. What have you got?’

  The others say hello, and Karin points down into the ditch. Nowadays, Malin knows they think Daniel is OK. He’s not as pushy as some of the journalists from the evening tabloids can be.

  ‘It’s not a pretty sight,’ Zeke says.

  Daniel steps closer, looks down into the ditch, at the body of the murdered young man.

  Malin sees his eyebrows rise.

  Not from revulsion or fear, but genuine surprise.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he says. ‘Christ.’

  ‘What is it?’ Karin asks.

  ‘Yes, what?’ Elin adds.

  ‘Don’t you recognise him? That’s Peder Åkerlund.’

  8

  Peder Åkerlund.

  That’s what she couldn’t quite get hold of just now. She did recognise him, and now that she hears his name, Malin knows who he is.

  A member of the Sweden Democrats.

  Peder Åkerlund used to be on the council before he was forced to step down after saying that all Muslim men abuse women and would rape their own daughters if given the chance. A student studying journalism at the university bumped into him at the Hamlet and recorded his drunken ramblings. It was a big deal.

  Daniel’s voice says what she’s thinking.

  ‘The nationals made a big deal of it.’

  She remembers the whole debacle. The way the media tried to get Jimmie Åkesson, the party leader, to apologise, but he merely referred them back to the party’s local representatives. He dodged the question. Refused to apologise for someone else’s behaviour. Or even to condemn the claims.

  Peder Åkerlund.

  Racist.

  And now here he is, lying below us.

  ‘He must have had plenty of enemies,’ Daniel says, and Malin feels the wind against her neck, a mild wind carrying an early promise of summer.