Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

‘Oh, so it wasn’t Janne? No, I didn’t really think it would be.’

  And Paul Anderlöv starts talking, and they listen.

  ‘It happened on a mountain road outside Sarajevo. I was one of the IFOR troops, and it was the sort of shitty, grey, rainy day when it was practically ordained that something was going to be fucked up. It was that sort of day, and it did get seriously fucked up; the jeep hit a mine that had been buried outside a village called Tsika. I remember an explosion, a great sucking explosion, and then I was lying in the road some twenty metres from something burning, and I could hear someone screaming and screaming and screaming, loud enough to bring down the mountains, and then I realised I was the one doing the screaming. Everything down there was just black, no pain, just black and empty.

  ‘Two men died.

  ‘One lost a leg.

  ‘And then there was me.

  ‘I’d happily have changed places with one of the others.

  ‘And now you show up, a couple of fucking cops, and what the hell do you know about anything? You know nothing.’

  They let the silence do its work.

  Then they ask the questions that have to be asked.

  The cretinous, asinine questions.

  From haze to clarity, as the poet Lars Forssell wrote, Malin thinks. From clarity to haze.

  ‘What were you doing on the night between Thursday and Friday?’

  ‘Have you ever met Josefin Davidsson?’

  ‘Can anyone give you an alibi?’

  ‘So you still have the desire even if the ability is gone. Did your frustration make something snap?’

  ‘So you weren’t in the Horticultural Society Park?’

  ‘But you do like teenage girls, then?’

  Paul Anderlöv’s eyes are fixed to the Ikea clock, the same sort I’ve got in my kitchen, Malin thinks. But the second-hand still works on yours.

  Paul Anderlöv doesn’t respond to Zeke’s insinuations.

  Relinquishes the day to the unending ticking of the clock.

  ‘Why do I feel like a complete bastard, Zeke?’

  The heat envelops them, forcing sweat from their pores, the sunlight reflected in the cars around them.

  ‘Because you are a bastard, Fors. A case like this one turns us all into bastards, Malin.’

  ‘The price of truth.’

  ‘Stop philosophising.’

  Boundaries crossed, moved.

  ‘Lunch?’ Zeke says. ‘I could murder a pizza.’

  Conya on St Larsgatan.

  Best pizza in the city. Big, greasy, unhealthy.

  The owner usually lets them off paying when he’s there.

  ‘Police, free of charge.’

  Like an American cop film. Zeke loves it. Corrupt? Maybe a little, but the owner refuses to let them pay.

  One of the many hard-working, frowned-upon immigrants in this city, Malin thinks as she takes a bite of her Capricciosa.

  The piece of paper Viktoria Solhage gave her is on the table in front of her.

  The name on it: Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson. An address, a phone number.

  ‘Louise,’ Zeke says. ‘Could a Louise have Lovelygirl as a nickname?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t you think?’

  ‘Lovelygirl,’ Zeke says. ‘A healthy dose of self-irony?’

  ‘It’s a long shot, Zeke, to put it mildly,’ Malin says, feeling how the pizza is making her feel fatter and greasier with every passing second.

  ‘Lovelygirl,’ Zeke says once more. ‘Isn’t that what all men want, really? A Lovelygirl?’

  ‘Yes,’ Malin says. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Bloody good pizza,’ Zeke says, giving a thumbs-up in the general direction of the open kitchen.

  The man standing by the pizza oven smiles, picking out ingredients from small plastic tubs and burying some of them in tomato sauce on a freshly spun base.

  21

  I’ve been lying here, fettered to time and this cold darkness for far too long now.

  Where are you, Dad?

  Just tell me, you’re not coming. Not now. Not ever. Or maybe sometime far, far in the future. I don’t want to be stuck here that long.

  It’s horrid here. And I’m so frightened, Dad.

  So just come.

  Take me away from the voices.

  Voices.

  Like worms on top of me.

  I’ve heard your fawning, bloated noises for ages now.

  Your voices.

  You’re happy about something.

  Why?

  I have no idea why you sound so happy, because here, here with me everything is damp and cold and the dream never seems to end. But maybe this isn’t a dream? Maybe it’s something else?

  Swimming! Swimming!

  Is that what you’re shouting?

  I love swimming. Can I join in? Can we go swimming together? I’ve got a pool in my garden at home.

  Am I in the pool now, with my eyes shut?

  A dog is barking, but everything’s dark, so dark and, if I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d free myself from my muscles, my body, and then the being that is me would drift off.

  But that isn’t allowed in this dream.

  No.

  So instead, your happy cries. Up there? That’s right, isn’t it?

  Earth and sand and a wet chill, a damp plastic chill, the grains close but not actually inside.

  Is this a grave?

  Have I been buried alive?

  I’m fourteen, so tell me, what would I be doing in a grave?

  Swimmers.

  More than usual on a Sunday.

  No entrance fee to the beach at Stora Rängen, you just leave your car further up and walk over the meadow where Farmer Karlsman has been kind enough not to put any bulls this year.

  He did that one summer a few years back, before the kiosk was here. They wrote about it in the Correspondent. But the farmer didn’t back down that year.

  The visitors are so carefree, with their families, children and women and men all enjoying the heat and the dubious cooling effect of the warm water, protecting their skin with expensive sunblock, their eyes with even more costly glasses.

  And now, Slavenca Visnic thinks, now they’re queuing at my kiosk, waiting impatiently for me to open up. Just hold on a bit, you’ll get your ice cream. The children so happy to be getting ice cream, you can’t buy more happiness than that for seventeen kronor.

  Just hang on, be grateful that I’m here at all.

  Aftonbladet? Expressen?

  Sorry, no newspapers.

  Who are you really, you whom society has left behind, you who don’t have anywhere else to go? We share that fate at least. In one sense, anyway.

  Slavenca puts the key in the door of the beach kiosk, tells the crowd in front of the shutters to calm down, I’m about to open up, you’ll get your ice cream in a minute.

  Beyond the people, almost naked, she can see the water of the lake, sees them strutting in the sun, thinks that the reflections make the surface of the water look like transparent skin. And the big oak tree over there by the lake. Always so secretive.

  Her kiosk at the Glyttinge pool is closed.

  Spoiled youngsters who don’t want summer jobs. Future ministers of leisure.

  Sometimes she thinks that the whole of Sweden is one big leisure committee consisting of people who’ve always had it too good, who don’t have the faintest idea about sorrow.

  Then she opens the shutters.

  An ugly kid, eight years old or so, a girl, is at the front of the queue.

  ‘A Top Hat,’ she says.

  ‘I’m out of those,’ Slavenca says, and smiles.

  A dog is barking down by the oak, on the patch of ground where the grass has somehow vanished and been replaced by bare earth.

  The dog has just peed up against the tree, but now he’s frantic.

  Standing to attention, marking that there’s something there, something hidden that needs to be found.

  He barks and b
arks and barks.

  His paws digging, digging, digging.

  I can hear noises, barking.

  Slowly, slowly they drag me out of my dream, up, up. I want to wake up now, I want to wake up.

  But I’m not going to wake up. Am I?

  Am I going to wake up, Dad?

  I’m stuck in something much worse, much stranger than sleep. But how did I get here?

  Someone has to tell me, tell everyone, tell Mum and Dad. They must be worried; I don’t usually sleep this late. And what are those other noises? It sounds like digging, and someone, a woman’s soothing voice saying: ‘OK, Jack, OK. Come here now,’ and the barking turns into whimpering, and someone says: ‘OK, stay there, then, stay there.’

  Slavenca is taking a break from the relentless selling of ice cream, ignoring the next customer, leaving the surprised woman to stand there glaring into the kiosk, at the fridge full of drinks.

  Don’t be in such a rush, she thinks. If it gets even hotter you’ll buy more ice cream and drinks.

  She’s put her prices up and people complain about her charging twenty kronor for a Coke, seventeen for an ice lolly.

  OK, so don’t buy them, then.

  Bring your own drinks with you.

  But if the ice cream company gets to hear about her raised prices she won’t be allowed to sell their products any more. So what, there are other suppliers. Anyway, I ought to be in the forest with the other volunteers, tackling the flames.

  And that dog over there.

  He shouldn’t be barking like that, shouldn’t be there.

  He’s frantic, as if there’s a bitch on heat buried by that tree.

  Mad dogs. Mad men. Desire can lead to anything.

  And that ugly girl who was first in the queue, she’s looking down into the hole the dog’s digging.

  What on earth does she think she’s going to see?

  The wet and the dark are getting thinner, and that dog barking is getting louder, the voices have died out behind the barking and am I waking up now? The light up there, and the digging, and then my view is clear, but fuzzy, grainy, as if there were soil or sand in my open eye.

  Am I free now?

  Can I go home?

  And I see a black dog, its nose and teeth, and he’s barking excitedly and I want to get up, but my body doesn’t exist.

  And the dog disappears and instead there’s a girl, the same age as me, no, younger, and her face changes, distorts, and I see her mouth form a scream and I want to tell her to stop screaming, it’s only me, waking up at long last.

  My body does exist, but do I?

  Slavenca rushes out of the kiosk and down towards the girl and the dog, people are rushing over, all the bathers, and the scream is contagious, yes, even the water and the trees and the cows up in the meadow seem to be screaming.

  ‘Out of the way,’ Slavenca says, then she’s standing on the edge of the hole, looking down.

  A girl’s open eye beneath thin plastic, blue, curious.

  The life gone from those eyes long before.

  You poor thing, she thinks.

  She’s seen a lot of eyes like that, Slavenca, and all those mute memories come back to her now, lifeless memories of a life that never happened.

  PART TWO

  In the eyes of summer angels

  On the way towards the final room

  You were left to rest and wait close to purifying water.

  Murdered, but perhaps not yet dead.

  I know that rebirth is possible, that innocence can come back. It didn’t work with you, my earthbound angel, but it will work with someone else, because how else are the spiders’ legs to disappear, how else can I put a stop to the rabbits’ claws tearing away deep within me?

  Our love couldn’t evaporate, no matter how much pain the hot summers brought with them, no matter how much the tentacles crept over our legs.

  This city has masses of trees, parks and forests. I am there among the black, silvery trees. You are also there somewhere. I just haven’t found you yet.

  I want to get there now, feel your breath on my cheek. I want to have you here with me.

  So don’t be scared.

  No one will ever be able to hurt you again.

  22

  The blue and white tape of the cordon. The steaming water of the lake in the early afternoon light, like the bare skin of the people standing in the shadows of the trees on the slope, on the other side of the tape, watching the police officers with curious, hungry eyes.

  The uniforms are fine-combing the ground down towards the shore where Malin, Zeke and Sven Sjöman, together with Karin Johannison, the duty Forensics officer, are carefully freeing the body from the soil and transparent plastic. It’s unnaturally white, scrubbed, its cleansed wounds like the craters of dark, red-blue volcanoes in a dead human landscape, the greyish skin recently touched by hungry worms for the first time.

  ‘Careful, careful.’ Karin’s words, and they are careful, slow, keen to preserve any evidence that might be left in the location where the body was found.

  Mingling with the bathers are the journalists, from local radio, television, from the papers, from the Correspondent. Daniel Högfeldt isn’t there, but Malin recognises the young female temp who interviewed her for a piece of coursework she was doing about crime-reporting at the journalism college back in the spring.

  Where’s Daniel?

  He doesn’t usually miss something like this.

  But presumably even he gets Sundays off. And if that’s true, good luck to him.

  The muffled sound of digital cameras.

  Eyes eager to get closer, to document events so that they can be sold on.

  Malin takes a deep breath.

  Is it possible to get used to this heat?

  No.

  But it’s better than freezing cold.

  Can nature self-combust as a result of events caused by human beings? Attack us in protest at all the stupid things we do to one another? In her mind’s eye Malin can see the trees on the meadow, the oaks and limes, tear their roots from the earth and furiously beat everyone to the ground with their sharp branches. Burying us with our wicked deeds.

  The sweat is dripping from Zeke’s brow and Sven is panting, his heart-attack gut juddering up and down above his belt as he squats on the ground with a blank expression on his face.

  ‘It has to be Theresa Eckeved,’ he says. ‘It looks like she’s been wrapped in ordinary transparent bin bags.’

  ‘No chance of tracing them,’ Malin says.

  The girl’s face scrubbed clean under the plastic, her body naked, as white as her face, almost entirely uncovered now, also scrubbed clean. There’s a deep open wound in the back of her head, and wounds as big as saucers on her arms, stomach, thighs, all cleaned and somehow trimmed at the edges, like neatly tended flowerbeds, blue-black, nurtured.

  ‘It’s her,’ Malin says, noting the stench of decay, no smell of bleach here. ‘I recognise her from the photographs. It’s her, no doubt about it.’

  ‘No doubt at all,’ Zeke agrees.

  And Sven mutters: ‘Just because it’s hot as hell, surely the whole world doesn’t have to go to hell.’

  Malin looks at the body.

  ‘It’s like someone’s cleaned her really, really carefully,’ Malin says.

  ‘Like someone wanted to make her, the wounds, as clean and neat as possible. Like with Josefin, only even more so.’

  White skin, black wounds.

  ‘Yes,’ Zeke says. ‘Almost like a ritual.’

  ‘She doesn’t smell of bleach.’

  ‘No, she smells of decay,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks: You’re no older than Tove, what if it was you, Tove? What would I have done then? And then she sees herself sitting on the edge of her bed with her service pistol in her hand, raising it slowly to her mouth, ready to let a bullet explode her consciousness for ever.

  Fear. You were scared, weren’t you?

  You must have been scared.

  Ho
w did you get there in the ground?

  ‘That’s what we’re going to find out,’ Malin says, and Zeke and Karin and Sven all look at her.

  ‘Just thinking out loud,’ Malin says. ‘How long has she been here?’

  ‘Considering how damp the skin is from the plastic it was wrapped in, and how the body has started to bloat in spite of the earth on top of it, I’d guess three days, maybe four. It’s impossible to say for sure.’

  ‘Three days?’ Zeke says. ‘She could have disappeared up to six days ago.’

  ‘I can’t say right now if she was moved here after she died,’ Karin says. ‘I’ll try to figure that out.’

  ‘So she could have been held captive somewhere for a couple of days,’ Sven says. ‘And then moved here.’

  ‘Someone might have seen something,’ Zeke says.

  ‘You think so?’ Malin says. ‘This is a pretty remote spot if you’re not here to go swimming.’

  ‘People, Malin. They’re always on the move, you know that as well as I do.’

  Malin sees herself in the Horticultural Society Park the other night.

  Did you see me then? You who did this?

  You who are doing this, you’re trying to put something right, that has to be it. It must have been dark when you dragged the body down here, the trees bearing witness as you buried her in the ground. And why so close to the water where most people are? Maybe you wanted us to find her. What is it that you want from us?

  ‘How did she die?’ Malin asks, as an unexpectedly cold wind blows past her legs and out across the lake.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Karin replies. ‘The head injury was probably the cause of death, but as you can see there are clear strangulation marks around her neck.’

  ‘Sexual violence?’

  ‘No clear signs of penetration. But I’ll have to examine her more closely.’

  Karin.

  Smart, not to say driven, but her view of the dead is like an engineer looking at a machine.

  ‘It’ll be hard to find any forensic evidence,’ Karin says. ‘There must have been hundreds of people who came here to swim over the past few days. Any footprints or other evidence has probably disappeared by now.’