Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

  Torben Eklund’s voice as neutral as his office in the courthouse on Stora torget, his grey face thin but still bearing an inexplicable double chin.

  ‘How’s the investigation going?’ he asks.

  ‘Forward, slowly,’ Malin replies.

  ‘We have extremely limited resources over the summer,’ Torben Eklund goes on. ‘That’s why I’ve decided to leave responsibility for the preliminary investigation with the police.’

  ‘That suits us fine,’ Zeke says.

  Lawyers, Malin thinks. What in the world would make anyone want to become one of them?

  Torben Eklund is the same age as me, but already middle-aged.

  A black-faced clock on an unpainted brick wall, the white hands showing 17.25.

  Then it hits her.

  Maybe in the eyes of young girls I’m already middle-aged. And after that comes death. Doesn’t it?

  26

  A blue and white police car behind them.

  Evening is falling slowly over the road and the forest seems to regain some of its lost verdure, a false nuance, the colour of a blunt knife.

  They’re leading the way in the Volvo, three uniforms in the car behind: two factory-farmed recent graduates, lads with bulging muscles and an attitude that suggests they can sort out all the crap society might throw at them. Malin can never understand how that sort of bloke ever gets past the admissions board, but presumably they know how to give all the right answers. She’s seen the websites for people wanting to join the police: This is what they want to hear. And sure, the answers fit and if you’re smart it can work. The third uniform is an old hand called Pettersson, now working part-time because of a bad back, and sometimes Malin can see that he’s in some discomfort, his fingers tensing as he channels the pain from his nerves out into his fingertips so that he can go on.

  She can’t remember the new recruits’ names, can’t be bothered to learn them, because who knows how long they’ll be staying? They probably want a transfer to Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö, where the real action is.

  The farm in the clearing.

  Has she guessed that they’re coming?

  Has she cleared things up?

  Away?

  Zeke’s voice over the radio to the others: ‘Fors and I will go and knock, you get out and wait by the car. Understood?’

  Silence. No barking.

  Where are the dogs?

  Then a yes from Pettersson.

  ‘Good,’ Zeke says as the car comes to a halt in the farmyard.

  They get out.

  A watchful silence.

  They head for the porch steps.

  Malin has the search warrant in her hand.

  Has she taken refuge in the forest?

  What’s in there?

  In those closed rooms?

  Malin looks over her shoulder.

  They’re standing there, waiting but ready, almost hungry, Pettersson and the new recruits in their hot, dark-blue uniforms. The heat is still oppressive, but the sun has disappeared behind the barns, making it bearable.

  ‘A torture chamber,’ Zeke says. ‘What if she’s got a fucking torture chamber in there?’

  Malin’s clenched fist against the white-painted wooden door.

  No one coming to open it.

  Someone aiming a weapon at them from somewhere inside?

  Maybe. It could happen. Malin thinks the thought momentarily, remembers reading about American cops going out to desolate farms only to get shot, thinks of the officer who was shot and killed by a psycho in Nyköping. Malin knew him, he was in the year below her at the police academy, but they weren’t exactly close.

  Another knock.

  More silence.

  Just the slight rustling of a wind-free forest, from life in motion around them.

  ‘She must have gone,’ Zeke says. ‘Unless she’s hiding in there.’

  ‘We’ll have to break the door down,’ Malin says.

  ‘Check if it’s locked first.’

  And Malin slowly reaches her hand out to the door handle, pushes it down and the door swings open, as if someone had left it open for them, as if someone wanted them to go in.

  A hall with rag-rugs and a stripped pine bench on bare pine floorboards.

  Well-kept, Malin thinks. Cared for.

  And silent.

  She steps into the hall. Zeke behind her, she can feel his breath, warm, and she knows that he’s giving a sign to the others to spread out around the house and that one of them will watch the door behind them, ready to rush in if anything happens, if there’s any noise.

  The kitchen.

  Thoughtfully renovated, it must date from the forties, floral tiles and new rag-rugs. The gentle evening light is falling in narrow streaks through a net curtain. The coffee machine is on, the coffee freshly made, the oven is on, and there’s a smell of newly baked buns. Malin sees a tea towel on the worktop over a baking rack, the bulge suggesting coffee-bread, sweetly scented.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Zeke says.

  Malin hushes him and they carry on into the house, to the living room, where the television is on, an episode of the old children’s classic, Seacrow Island, that Malin doesn’t recognise. Here again there is a sense of time standing still.

  A computer on a desk.

  They go up a creaking staircase to the upper floor. The walls are covered with tongue-and-groove panelling, on which Lollo Svensson has hung tinted lithographs of open fields and tractors. The bedroom, the only room upstairs, has whitewashed walls and light streaming in through a bay window, more rag-rugs on the scrubbed floor, everything looks sparklingly clean, as if she uses cleanliness to try to keep something away, or perhaps invite something in.

  ‘She’s here,’ Zeke says.

  ‘She’s here somewhere,’ Malin says. ‘I can feel it. She isn’t far away. There’s something here, something.’

  And Malin goes back down the stairs, opens the door leading to the cellar and the smell of central heating-oil gets stronger with every step they take.

  An oil-fired boiler, shiny and green, in an equally clean room. Cleaning products on a shelf. No bleach.

  A door, a steel door ajar, as if it leads to a shelter.

  Malin points at the door.

  Zeke nods.

  Malin opens the door, expecting to see Lollo Svensson hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by contraptions from a medieval torture chamber in complete contrast to the room upstairs, a contrast to the idyll that this old, homely farmhouse actually is.

  Then they see her.

  She’s sitting on a chair behind a table-tennis table covered with colourful wooden toys, dolls and stuffed animals. She’s wearing a thin, pale-pink dress.

  A doll’s house on a shelf. Removal boxes stacked against whitewashed concrete walls.

  Lollo Svensson smiles at them, a different person now, her hard facial features soft, resignation manifested in the body that Malin recently thought might harbour the soul of a murderer.

  Could it?

  Your body? Harbour the soul of a murderer?

  ‘I knew you’d come back,’ Lollo whispers. ‘So I came down here and waited. Waiting for you to come.’

  The soul of a murderer, Malin thinks. We all harbour one of those.

  27

  The forest seems to be breathing for Linda Karlå.

  But with sick lungs.

  Only now, in the evening, is it cool enough for running, even if it’s still too hot for most people. The running track in Ryd is deserted apart from her, her feet in new white Nike trainers drumming on the sawdust trail, the electric lighting above her not lit, she doesn’t know if they turn the lights on in summer, at this time of year it stays light late when there are no clouds in the sky.

  Maybe it’s stupid to go running alone in the woods considering what’s happened. Before the police have caught the culprit. Who knows what could be lying in wait?

  But she isn’t scared.

  Air in her lungs.

 
Her breathing somehow enclosed within her body, her brain.

  Her heart is racing, yet somehow controlled, as if she can direct the most important muscle in her body by sheer willpower.

  She runs at least twenty kilometres each week. All year round, and she runs the Stockholm marathon and one abroad: when it feels rough in the winter she thinks about Tokyo, New York, London, Sydney, letting the trees become skyscrapers and crowds, her forty-one-year-old body is strong, so strong.

  It would be dangerous for someone less well-trained to go running in this heat.

  But she can handle it.

  She actually thinks the Ryd track is too flat, it might be worth taking the car out to the hills of the Olstorp circuit.

  Pressure in her chest.

  Onwards, Linda, onwards.

  The trees.

  The sawdust.

  The lights. The tree up ahead.

  Its trunk unnaturally thick one metre above the ground.

  Is it really a tree? A body? Behind the tree. Something waiting. For me.

  Malin is standing in Lollo Svensson’s kitchen, waiting, listening. Trying to understand, because in Lollo’s words there is a hint of the feelings that will lead them in the right direction in this case.

  The uniforms are back by the car out in the farmyard again, restless now that they’ve realised that the anticipated drama has become a yawn.

  Malin and Zeke gave them the task of searching the barns and smaller outbuildings, but they didn’t come up with anything, just snuffling pigs and rabbits in cages and a load of clutter that must have been left behind by the farmer who sold the place to Lollo Svensson. The dogs were asleep in a fenced run, almost drugged by the heat, or something else. No signs of violence, of evil, just things, abandoned things, unfettered by memories, of no value except as pieces of a puzzle for the archaeologists of future civilisations.

  ‘I want to be left in peace,’ Lollo Svensson says. ‘That’s why I bought the farm. Can you understand that?’

  She’s sitting on a ladder-backed chair at the kitchen table. Back to her cocky, blunt, unpleasant, butch self again. The gentle individual they found downstairs among the toys in the basement vanished the moment they came back upstairs.

  A human wall, Malin thinks. A grey dressing gown over the pink dress. What’s happened to her? To you? How did you end up like this?

  Malin sees herself in the kitchen.

  Snooping about in the dark. In the most private things. In the pain. And she knows she’s good at it, and she knows she likes doing it.

  Damn you, Fors.

  How did you end up like this?

  ‘I didn’t have anything to do with the attacks on those girls. Are you going to talk to the whole fucking women’s football team now as well, then? There are supposed to be loads of dykes there, aren’t there? Go and talk to them!’

  ‘What about the toys in the basement? How do you explain those?’ Zeke doesn’t succeed in concealing his curiosity, a desire to understand that stretches far beyond their investigation.

  ‘I don’t explain them at all. They’re toys from when I was small. I get them out sometimes. Nothing odd about that.’

  Linda Karlå is standing still on the sawdust trail. There’s something close by. But what?

  Something is moving in the forest, even though everything’s still. Is that a crawling sound? A person? The smell of decay, or cleanliness? Thoughts fly through her head and on into her heart and stomach, forming themselves into fear.

  No.

  I’m not scared.

  The forest is big, it’s making her small and alone even though it’s no more than a few hundred metres to the yellow blocks of flats and villas over in Valla on the other side of Vallavägen.

  No movement over by the tree. But there’s someone there.

  I’m sure.

  And then she thinks of the girls again, the one they found murdered, the one they found raped and disorientated in the Horticultural Society Park, and she’s struck by how foolhardy it was of her to set out alone on a running track, now that real evil has shown its face in Linköping.

  How stupid can you be, Linda?

  A movement.

  A person on the track?

  Heading towards me?

  Sweat on my white vest. My breasts hard under the sports bra.

  I’m so scared that I can’t move.

  Zeke is rocking from foot to foot in one corner of the farmyard.

  No dildo. No sex toys at all.

  The evening is still debilitatingly hot. Lollo Svensson is inside the farmhouse, watching them through the kitchen window, can’t seem to get shot of them soon enough. In the dull light the barns look crooked, almost ready to collapse under the weight of the mournful evening sky.

  The dogs have started barking over in their run.

  The car with the uniforms is disappearing down the gravel drive, soon no more than a misplaced noise from the dense forest, a pulse through old leaves and desiccated moss.

  ‘She’s mad,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you think she’s Lovelygirl?’

  ‘We’ll have to see what Forensics find on the computer.’

  ‘But is she mad?’

  ‘Because she likes looking at her old toys? I’m not sure. But she’s certainly different,’ Malin says. ‘Who knows what sort of crap she’s been through? And what wouldn’t a person do to survive?’

  ‘Can we find out?’

  ‘Do we need to?’

  ‘Do we want to?’

  ‘I don’t think she’s got anything to do with this,’ Malin says.

  ‘Me neither,’ Zeke says. ‘But she still hasn’t got an alibi.’

  My heart.

  Where is it?

  There, holding all of my fear.

  It’s about to burst beneath my ribs.

  Linda Karlå is running, her trainers conquering metre after metre of the trail, as the forest twists around her.

  Is someone chasing me?

  It sounds like something enormous is slithering after me, as if the tree roots are lifting from the ground and trying to trip me up, burrow through me with a thousand sharp, calcified nodules, then hide me under a thin layer of soil, consuming me slowly, but I can run so fast.

  Faster now.

  The sound of hooves. Hooves?

  She runs.

  Finally the vegetation opens up.

  The car park.

  Her car on its own. No one following.

  She throws herself into the residual heat of her Seat.

  A deer?

  Something else was watching me out there as well.

  I’m sure of it, Linda Karlå thinks as she starts the car and drives away.

  But what?

  The sound of hooves disappearing into the forest. The darkness that was snapping at her heels.

  28

  Stora torget is vibrant with artificial light from the big open-air bars and the surrounding buildings. Mörners Inn, Stora Hotellet, Burger King, their chairs and tables set out on the tarmac and paving stones, the first of these boasting tall canopies that turn its customers’ conversation into indistinct chatter, a sound full of expectation and happiness.

  It is just past ten o’clock.

  A lot of people even though it’s a Sunday.

  The air is still warm, but people are daring to venture out, eager for the condensation running down the outside of a well-filled glass. There is a rumbling sound from down on Ågatan, the whole street full of bars, and in the winter, spring and autumn there’s always trouble there at weekends. The Correspondent has printed acres of coverage about pub-related violence, but at the same time people need to let their hair down, and the concentrated nature of the location is manageable for the police. We know where things are likely to kick off, Malin thinks as she looks across at the seating areas.

  Probably no one I know there.

  And if anyone I do know should happen to be there, I don’t want to meet them.

  Zeke dropped her off outside the flat, and
under the cold water of the shower she felt how much she missed Tove, Janne, Daniel Högfeldt; she wanted to call him and tell him to come over, drive out some of what she’s seen today.

  Let him work off some of her frustration.

  But he didn’t answer and instead she lay down for a while on Tove’s bed, pretending to watch over her daughter, who is on the other side of the planet, in paradise, not far from crazy bombers.

  And Tove’s scent, caught in the sheets.

  And Malin began to cry.

  Sad in a simple and obvious way about the way everything had turned out with her and Janne, with her and herself, and the unmentionable thing that the psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord had glimpsed just by looking at her. But then Malin did what she always does. Forced herself back, the tears, all the sorrow, then got up and left the flat. Some types of loneliness are worse than anything else.

  All the customers in the terrace bars. The chink of glasses. The twirling waitresses. There is still life in summertime Linköping, even if this heat, this evil, are doing their best to drive any sense of joy into the ground.

  Shall I sit down here? Among everyone else?

  She stands still, letting the evening enter her body.

  Evil. Where does it start?

  In front of her the square transforms into a volcanic landscape, as hot, glowing magma seeps out between the paving slabs in destructive black streams. Evil, a human undercurrent that history sometimes gathers up into an eruption, in one place, one person, in several people. You can become evil, or come close to it, sometimes so close that you can feel its breath, and then you realise that it’s the breath from your own lungs hitting you in the face. Malevolence, fear, the way Janne once told her after drinking too much whisky that he thought that war lay at the heart of human nature, that we are really all longing for war, that God is war and that violence is only the start, that the whole fucking world is just one vast act of abuse, a pain that will only end when humankind is wiped out.

  ‘We want war,’ Janne said. ‘There’s no such thing as evil. It’s just a made-up word, a pathetic attempt to give a name to the violence that’s bound to happen. You, Malin, you cops, you’re just fucking tracker dogs, you sniff about, trying to keep something utterly fundamental at bay.’