Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

  The man sounds resigned, but also annoyed.

  ‘Probably nothing,’ Malin says. ‘But we need to talk to him.’

  The man points towards a door with a plastic window.

  ‘My son’s in the stockroom. You can go through.’

  Ali Shakbari is standing at a bench screwed into white tiles, trimming some red roses. The whole room has a strange, pleasant perfume. When he catches sight of them he grows afraid, the look in his brown eyes oddly watery. You want to run, don’t you? Malin thinks.

  ‘Ali,’ Zeke says. ‘How are things?’

  No answer, and Ali puts the secateurs down on the bench slowly, his thin, sinewy body in perfect shape under his white cotton overalls.

  ‘What were you doing the night before last?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Defiant now.

  Malin explains about Josefin being found in the Horticultural Society Park.

  ‘And you think I had something to do with it?’

  ‘We don’t think anything,’ Malin says. ‘So, what were you doing?’

  ‘Dad and I were cleaning the stockroom. We didn’t finish until 3.00 a.m. It’s so fucking hot that it’s easier to work at night.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  Ali’s father is standing in the doorway to the stockroom, holding the door open and radiating authority.

  ‘Then I drove him home. He was home by about 3.30.’

  Malin looks around the stockroom.

  Every inch of the room is sparkling clean, well ordered.

  Too clean? Malin thinks before picking up one of the red roses from the bench.

  ‘These are lovely,’ she says.

  ‘Finest quality,’ Ali Shakbari’s father says.

  There are two sorts of people in the world. Hunters, and the hunted.

  So far in this investigation those roles haven’t been fixed.

  Are we the ones being hunted, drifting like motes of dust on the hot breeze? Malin wonders. So far we haven’t reached the point where we’re doing the stalking. Not yet. But maybe now, as a result of what I can see under the glass, in the hot light of the four lamps placed around the small but powerful microscope. The answer may lie in this blue substance, a blue truth.

  The fragments are so tiny that they’re hard to focus on.

  The edges of the tiny blue fragments almost jagged.

  A windowless laboratory in the basement of the National Forensics Lab, which smells of chemicals and disinfectant. A humming noise from a fume cupboard.

  Zeke’s heavy breathing beside Malin, Karin’s voice in her head: I know what it was, Malin. What the doctors found inside her.

  ‘What you’re looking at is fragments of paint,’ Karin says. ‘The sort of paint that’s normally used to colour plastic.’

  The blue fragments blur in front of Malin’s eyes. Floating.

  Is the truth moving about somewhere down there?

  Or something else?

  A first clue.

  A blue colour, dead particles moving, as if they had been buried alive under the glass.

  Malin raises her head from the microscope and looks at Karin.

  ‘What could the paint have come from, what sort of object?’

  Zeke sounds impatient, irritable because of July’s never-ending hot weather, or possibly just because Karin is in the room.

  Karin’s voice is mild: ‘It’s impossible to say, it could be any one of a thousand things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as a garden hose, the handle of a cheap mop, a salad server, a lamp-stand, a toy spade.’

  Malin, Zeke and Karin fall silent.

  Josefin Davidsson penetrated without knowing it.

  Theresa missing. Hints of lesbian activity on her Facebook page. Lovelygirl.

  Does all of this fit together?

  Nathalie Falck. Almost like a man. What do men have that women don’t?

  What’s the voice?

  Here and now.

  Malin listens to the room. Something is taking shape in front of her eyes.

  What are the girls in this investigation saying? Theresa, Josefin, Nathalie?

  ‘Such as a dildo,’ Malin says. ‘A dildo.’

  And she doesn’t know where the words come from, but they’re there in the room.

  ‘Sure, such as a dildo,’ Karin responds. ‘Not at all impossible.’

  ‘How do we go about looking into this?’ Malin says, turning to face Karin. ‘Is it even possible to get any closer than guesswork?’

  ‘Manufacturers keep records. We can start by checking the most likely products, I mean the sorts of thing this paint could have been applied to. Such as a dildo.’

  ‘What do you think, Malin?’ Zeke asks.

  ‘I don’t know. But a dildo doesn’t seem unlikely. Her vagina wasn’t really injured, just penetrated. As if the object had been designed to do that.’

  ‘But surely it’s possible to cause damage with a dildo?’

  ‘Yes, if you’re hard-handed. But then, you can cause damage with anything.’

  ‘My experience is that the vagina almost always shows serious damage when hostile penetration occurs with an object that isn’t designed for the purpose,’ Karin says. ‘It could very well be a dildo. You can get both hard and soft models.’

  ‘You’re an expert?’ Zeke says.

  ‘No,’ Karin says. ‘But that much I do know.’

  And then the realisation of where the paint came from, that it was scraped out from within Josefin. Malin thinks of Maria Murvall, the young girl who was raped in Tjällmo forest several years ago and now sits mute in a mental institution. The crass words in the report about her shredded innards, her body lying on the bed of her room in Vadstena last winter, when Malin visited in connection with another case.

  Probability, Malin thinks. Forces herself back to concrete facts.

  Thousands of things and their language, listen to the language of these things instead, to what they’re saying now. The air conditioning in the room splutters, a slow coughing sound spreading through the ventilation pipes before it falls silent and almost at once a debilitating heat starts to take over the room.

  ‘God, how stupid,’ Karin says. ‘Now it’s packed up and who knows how long they’ll take to fix it in the middle of the holidays like this, if there are any of them working at all.’

  ‘They’re probably working,’ Zeke says.

  ‘A dildo,’ Malin says. ‘That makes sense, even if our perpetrator could in theory have used pretty much anything.’

  She says nothing about her earlier thought about a lesbian connection. But surely lesbians often use dildos? Or is that just prejudice? No, one of her classmates at Police Academy had proudly shown her her collection and given her detailed descriptions of dildo technique.

  Zeke nods in agreement, no trace of doubt in his eyes.

  ‘I was thinking that I could get Forensics to check dildo manufacturers,’ Karin says. ‘See what sort of paint they use. It might take a while, but you’d be surprised how much even the strangest businesses know.’

  Then Karin leans forward and puts her eye to the microscope, saying: ‘It really is a beautiful shade of blue, isn’t it? Clean and pure, like spring water.’

  Outside the heat has taken a firm grip on the air, and the wind, insofar as there is any, is hot, dragging through already parched treetops. The smoke from the forest fires is pungent on the air, the wind must be coming from Tjällmo today.

  The fires keep getting worse. This morning an elderly couple had to be evacuated from the house they’d lived in for sixty years.

  The light seems to attack your eyes, any sunglasses that let you see anything at all are helpless against it. And she could really do with clear vision right now, to see all the connections that are scraping away at her consciousness like little shards of metal.

  Malin and Zeke retreat to the lobby of the National Forensics Lab and its relative cool, where they sit down on one of the red Lammhult sofas
, panting, unable to summon the energy to walk the hundred metres to the police station.

  ‘Shit,’ Zeke said. ‘I didn’t think it could get any hotter.’

  ‘Oh, it can,’ Malin says. ‘And this damn light. Even the thought of it gives me a headache.’

  ‘So, a dildo?’

  ‘I don’t know, Zeke. Maybe.’

  Zeke runs a hand over his shaved head.

  ‘So who uses dildos?’ he says.

  Malin thinks, not answering Zeke’s question, preferring to leave it open and let Zeke see the connection for himself.

  ‘Someone who’s been chemically castrated? Someone suffering from impotence? Someone who just feels like it? Lesbians?’

  ‘Lesbians,’ Malin says, lingering over the word to let Zeke realise what she means.

  ‘So that’s what you’re thinking?’ Zeke says with a smile. ‘Lovelygirl on Theresa’s Facebook page. Nathalie. And Josefin? Do you think she’s lesbian as well?’

  ‘No. But the perpetrator could be. A definite line of inquiry, anyway.’

  Zeke nods.

  ‘So who else would use a dildo?’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone else.’

  ‘Maybe some unlucky bastard who’s lost his crown jewels altogether?’

  ‘You reckon?’ Malin says.

  ‘How can we know? Or else the scum in Berga have come up with a new way of humiliating women,’ Zeke says.

  Malin stares in front of her.

  Sees how Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami filled Josefin Davidsson with cheap wine, then took turns raping her on a sofa with a blue-painted dildo. Sees them laughing, exhibiting the very worst of masculinity, even though they’re scarcely more than boys.

  That’s racist, Malin thinks.

  Shrugs off the image of the boys.

  Malin and Zeke sit in silence beside each other on the sofa. Breathing in the air, cool and dry, looking out at the heat, at the way it’s making the air in the police station car park vibrate and snake.

  Tove and Janne in Bali, cooler than here.

  It’s ten past nine and Malin is sitting at her kitchen table, eating a dish of soured milk and oat-grits. She’s so tired she couldn’t even be bothered to slice a banana.

  Hot in the flat.

  No air conditioning.

  She raised the dildo idea with Sven over the phone, he thought it sounded like a lead worth pursuing, and said that he’d get some uniforms to check places where you could buy blue dildos on the net, in parallel with Karin’s work: ‘That’s how people buy that sort of stuff these days, isn’t it?’

  Daniel Högfeldt.

  She thought for a while that there could be something more than just the physical between them, and maybe there is, but mostly it’s this: the way their paths cross, day after day, until they meet up in his or her flat. But not tonight, he’s still in the city, Malin knows that much, and not in this heat, this isolation. Her own sweat is enough, and exhaustion is making every muscle wither and buckle, and she’s missing Tove and Janne so badly that it’s on the point of turning into grief.

  Her mobile rings.

  It’s in the living room.

  Malin puts the spoon down, gets up, hurries through to find it. Guesses that something’s wrong.

  Karim Akbar’s number.

  ‘Malin here.’

  ‘Malin, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Just because there’s been a rape, you start harassing local immigrants?’

  How could he know?

  ‘We . . .’

  ‘No excuses, Malin. Take a look at the Correspondent’s website, it’s all there in black and white.’

  ‘Hang on, Karim, calm down.’

  ‘And now every single bloody media organisation in the country is calling me for an opinion.’

  Karim’s in his element.

  Malin can’t work out if he’s genuinely angry or just pretending to be, and is actually happy to get some media coverage in the news drought. All his articles and appearances are controversial, but politically safe in the attitude towards integration that he represents. What’s Karim’s long-term goal? A ministerial post? But he doesn’t even belong to a political party.

  Her computer is on in the bedroom.

  Click, click, click.

  The Correspondent’s website.

  A photograph of Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami standing outside the blocks of flats in Berga.

  Headline: No Evidence: Police Harassing Immigrants.

  The caption to the picture: We had nothing to do with the rape in the Horticultural Society Park, but the police are hassling us just because we’re immigrants.

  Daniel’s tabloid angle: The Correspondent has tried to obtain a statement from representatives of the Linköping Police today, but no one was available.

  A blatant lie to fit the story.

  And you’ve been in my bed?

  And doubtless will be again.

  ‘Are you still there, Malin?’

  There must have been a two-minute silence on the line, quite unlike Karim.

  ‘I’m here, Karim. It was just an idea, one of many leads, you can see that, can’t you?’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘And they were the suspects in the Lovisa Hjelmstedt case.’

  ‘I know, Malin, but surely you can see how bad this looks?’

  ‘Enjoy the attention,’ Malin says.

  Karim laughs, but his laughter is hollow and tired.

  14

  The phone on the table in front of Malin.

  It’s glowing.

  Who the hell does Karim Akbar think he is, sticking his nose into their work?

  It is not the job of a police chief to micro-manage an investigation, but Karim has never really been able to stick to the boundaries, and an unspoken pact has developed among the detectives in the Crime Unit: let Karim do what he likes, and we’ll get on with our work. Because Karim isn’t short of good qualities, and he actually has complete confidence in his officers. And he’s good for the police in Linköping, his fondness for the media has focused attention on the work of the police in the city, and this attention has been rewarded with an increased budget from higher up.

  Everything, Malin thinks, lying back on the sofa, absolutely everything can be traced back to this bloody mediatocracy, celebrity culture, the rapturous elevation of the mediocre, the uninteresting into a form of religion. Our souls have no peace, Malin thinks, so we take an interest in Nothing.

  Hair colours.

  Skirt length.

  Who’s fucking who.

  Celebrity weddings, divorces, collagen injections, sex scandals . . .

  Well, thank God Tove doesn’t care.

  Karim.

  Friends with the Minister for Integration. They share the same view of immigrants: make demands, be tough, but woe betide anyone else, any non-immigrant, if they should happen to say something negative – then the air grows thick with verbal detonations.

  Malin takes a deep breath of the air in the flat, the smell of a long hot summer where evil has started to make its move.

  Sometimes she imagines evil as a shapeless black beast moving through the undergrowth and city alike. Who the beast is waiting for, who it might be, are as yet unknown.

  She switches off the television.

  Gets up.

  Goes out of the flat.

  Vague ideas of what she wants.

  The pub downstairs is open, the clattering air conditioning audible out in the street.

  Call Daniel? Shout at him? Fuck him? Make use of his damn cock. Drink herself senseless. But there’s nothing worse than having to work with a hangover, and they have to work tomorrow, even though it’s Saturday.

  Call Zeke and see if he fancies going for a beer?

  Call Helen from the local radio station; it’s been ages since they met up.

  In the sky above her a third of the moon is glowing against a thousand pale stars, and she can see them stretching out their hands to each other without ever
quite reaching.

  ‘Zeke here.’

  He answers on the third ring.

  His voice gruff, as if he’s just woken up.

  ‘It’s me, I was just wondering if you fancy a beer and a chat about the case. I can’t relax, what do you think?’

  Thinks: I sound manic.

  Lonely?

  No question.

  Just as I am.

  ‘Malin, it’s half past nine, you ought to be in bed getting your strength back for tomorrow. We’ve got a lot to do. I was on my way to bed, so no beer for me. We have to work tomorrow, you know that.’

  ‘Did you say half past nine?’

  ‘Exactly, Fors.’

  Silence on the line.

  ‘But you can come out here if you like. We can have a chat. Gunilla can make us some tea and sandwiches, we’ve got Kinda gherkins.’

  Zeke’s wife.

  Niceness and normality personified.

  A pharmacist at the chemist’s on the main square.

  Too nice.

  ‘Thanks, but no thanks, Zeke. I don’t want to intrude. See you first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Good night, Malin.’

  She’s left standing on the pavement with her phone in her hand.

  Shall I go into the pub?

  In again and up to the flat?

  Call Tove, Janne?

  Her skin is crawling, and not because of the heat.

  Damn this thirst. This urge. I know it doesn’t do a bloody bit of good.

  Then in her mind’s eye she sees Josefin Davidsson in her hospital bed. Her face contorted with nightmares, with suppressed memories.

  Shortly afterwards Malin is walking across Trädgårdstorget, perfectly aware of where she’s going. The evening is slipping slowly into night and the square’s only open-air terrace is empty, a dark-skinned waiter is collecting the ashtrays, there are no glasses to clear on any of the tables.

  She walks along Drottninggatan, past the imposing residential blocks. Cars pass: a green Volvo, a white pick-up.

  The black iron gate of the Horticultural Society Park beneath her hand, still warm from the day’s scorching sun, but not hot enough to burn.

  Malin opens the gate and steps into the park, quite alone now, presumably no one dares to come here at this time of day now, after what’s happened.