Summertime Death

by Mons Kallentoft

  The magma is oozing and flowing around the feet of the people drinking beer in the square of this small city in this small, small corner of the world.

  Here I stand.

  I have to embrace violence, love it the way that I understand love. Evil is scentless, soundless, is has no texture, yet at the same time it is every smell, every sound, and all the experiences of the world that a person can feel against their skin.

  A buried girl.

  A boy kicked to death after a party.

  A thirty-three-year-old student blown into a thousand pieces on a bus.

  A bomb buried in the sand of a beach in paradise.

  I refuse, I refuse, I refuse to believe you, Janne.

  But you’ve seen war.

  Maybe a beer in the square?

  No.

  Your society isn’t mine.

  Not tonight.

  I’m Batman, Malin thinks. Damaged goods, yet trying to watch over something.

  She carries on along Hamngatan, up towards the Hamlet bar. A hint of smoke from the forest fires reaches her nose. They’re still open, and she takes a seat at the bar, feeling safe there, surrounded by the decades-old wooden panelling.

  Only her and a few of the closet alcoholics at a table in the corner.

  The beer is cheap here.

  ‘Evening, Inspector,’ they call.

  She nods in their direction as her beer appears in front of her.

  ‘And a tequila, double,’ she says to the bartender.

  ‘Sure thing, Malin,’ he says with a smile. ‘One of those evenings?’

  ‘You’ve no idea,’ Malin replies. ‘No idea.’

  Daniel Högfeldt has switched off his phone, his articles about the murder ready for tomorrow. He’s gone into one of the paper’s conference rooms and is resting his body in one of the uncomfortable chairs.

  Wants to be alone.

  His body somehow demanding silence.

  He thinks about Malin.

  Where are you now?

  We’re two unhappy souls moving around each other in this city and sometimes we meet and play a static game. For a while he mistook their game for love. But not any longer. He knows, or believes that he knows, exactly what he wants from Malin Fors. And what she wants from him. A conduit to relieve a mass of sexual energy, and that’s why they work so well together in bed: they want the same thing and they both know that the harder they play, the better.

  But sometimes.

  When she’s fallen asleep beside him and he’s lying there looking at her, he wonders.

  Is she the one he’s been waiting for?

  His?

  No, don’t lay yourself open to that sort of disappointment. He doesn’t know much about her, but she has several photographs of her ex-husband Janne in her flat. He seems to be able to calm her down. Like her daughter.

  Where are you now, Fors?

  Daniel gets up.

  Starts walking about the room restlessly, as if to combat the feeling that time is passing far too slowly.

  There’s burning in her dreams.

  It sometimes happens when she’s been drinking. Cold flames eating her legs, trying to pull her into the darkness, whispering: We’ll destroy you, Malin, destroy you, even if you listen to what we’ve got to say.

  What do you want? What do you want to say?

  Nothing, Malin, nothing. We just want to destroy you.

  There are snakes in the dream, and animals with hooves and when she wakes up she remembers the dreams clearly, their constantly changing images, impossible to sort out.

  There’s a boy in the dreams.

  Malin doesn’t know who he is, but she forces him away, as if she had some sort of conscious consciousness even in the dream. That’s the darkest of dreams, like the one Janne has when he dreams about the children in Rwanda, the ones who’d had their hands cut off, the ones he fed in the hospital of the refugee camp. Their eyes. Six-, seven-, eight-year-old eyes full of wisdom about how life would turn out, about how it could have turned out.

  And then the voice of the flames: So you think you can destroy us? Pride, vanity, avarice, a bonfire of all of those, Malin.

  And she wakes up and screams at the voice of the flames, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, and she’s still drunk and can feel the beer and tequila dancing through her body, remembering how she wove her way across the square down towards St Lars’ Church, trying to read the inscription above the side door, and the way the words disappeared before her eyes, but she still knew what they said:

  Blessed are the pure in heart,

  for they shall see God

  Then what?

  Awake all night, thinking about Tove, longing for Tove, daydreaming about Janne’s familiar body, their original love, and completely wet down there when she finally got to thinking about Daniel Högfeldt.

  Horny.

  In the way you only get from alcohol, and she caressed herself and came without a sound once she’d disentangled herself from the sheet covering her body.

  Can I sleep now?

  But sleep wouldn’t come. Instead it was as if the orgasm lingered within her, making her heart race, and she pulled the sheet over her again, up over her face, and as the morning light gradually dawned beyond the blinds she played dead, turning herself into Theresa Eckeved, trying to feel her fear and despair, trying to feel her way towards what had happened, what had caused the volcano to erupt this time.

  Her body felt alive.

  Her blood was magma in her veins.

  She was longing for more alcohol.

  Then she thought about Maria Murvall. Lying in her room in Vadstena Hospital. About the evil that had put her there.

  The same evil?

  Her brain felt pickled.

  The threads of the case spinning around.

  A dildo? Blue?

  A lesbian? Lollo Svensson. A sex offender? A damaged man? The football team? Prejudice, prejudice, prejudice. Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck. The person who made the call about Josefin Davidsson?

  Silence. Possibilities, prejudices.

  But what else are we supposed to go on? And what about Behzad Karami and Ali Shakbari out in Berga? Sodding bloody family alibis. One of the boys, or more than one, could have crossed a boundary and worked out that you liked it. The owner of the ice cream kiosk?

  A thousand possibilities.

  Drifting dust thrown into the air, needing to be gathered together to form a clear, black jewel.

  The city demands it.

  The papers.

  The victims and their families.

  And me.

  But is there only one truth?

  And with that thought her consciousness succumbed to sleep, and she slept dreamlessly for an hour before she woke up and a new day of the investigation into the tragic girls of Linköping could start.

  29

  Monday, 19 July

  The last remnants of the previous evening’s alcohol seem to disappear as Malin’s body pierces the water of the Tinnerbäck pool.

  Cooler.

  The water ought to be cooler, but it would probably cost too much to keep the temperature lower in a summer as hot as this one. Four lengths will have to do, she can feel her body complaining at the effort, how it wants to rest but at the same time enjoy the relative cool.

  Better than the boiling hot gym at the station.

  Her body wakes up.

  You could go mad not being able to go swimming in a summer like this. A couple of lifeguards with long-handled nets are fishing out prematurely fallen leaves from the pool. Malin looks at the lifeguards as she dries herself with her worn pink towel.

  She skimmed the Correspondent before she left home.

  Six pages about the murder of Theresa Eckeved, statements from Karim Akbar, pictures of the scene of the murder, of her parents’ house, but no statement from them. Photos of Theresa, her body wrapped in plastic, her passport, private pictures. Daniel Högfeldt had had help with the articles from wily old Harry Lavén.


  The headline on the front page: Summertime Death.

  Beneath it: Evil on the Loose in Linköping.

  She was convinced Daniel had written the headlines himself. He must have worked like a madman yesterday, not wanting to take her call, realising that she wouldn’t want to talk about the case, but wanted something else instead.

  Cock.

  How harsh even the thought of the word sounds.

  Malin gathers her things and heads off towards the changing room, feeling the clear, almost scarily blunt smell of chlorine, somehow cleaner than everything else.

  You’re right, Daniel, she thinks. It’s come to the city.

  Summertime death.

  Reporters from what seems like every newsroom of any significance in the country have come to the city, flocking outside the entrance of the police station, journalists clutching notepads, tape recorders, photographers with their extra eyes, cars from Swedish Television and TV4, summertime death a summertime dream for those with papers to sell.

  Malin forces her way through the sweaty huddle of reporters, sweaty herself after the bike ride up here, avoiding Daniel Högfeldt as he throws her a longing look and waves, calling: ‘Have you got anything for me, Malin? Have you got anything to go on?’

  But Malin ignores him, ignores all of them, some faces familiar from previous cases.

  In the entrance she is met by Karim Akbar, dressed in an immaculately pressed beige linen suit and a pale blue shirt that contrasts neatly with the slightly darker tone his skin has turned after all that sunbathing in Västervik.

  Malin isn’t surprised to see him, but nor is she pleased. She knew he wouldn’t be able to stay away when there was a top-drawer media storm in the offing.

  ‘Malin,’ he says. ‘Good that you’re here. I felt I had to come in and manage the press conference, and keep an eye on the investigation.’

  ‘Welcome home,’ Malin says. ‘But the investigation’s under control. You know that Sven’s one of the force’s most experienced preliminary investigators. Aren’t you supposed to be writing a book over the summer?’

  ‘Forget the book, Fors. The press conference is at nine o’clock. They’ll have to wait outside until then.’

  ‘Do you know what you’re going to say, Karim?’

  ‘It’s quarter past eight. We’ll have to have a meeting right away. Martinsson and Sjöman are already here. Why are you . . .’

  Karim stops himself.

  Looks Malin deep in the eyes, right into her tiredness, and lets what he was about to say drop.

  Instead: ‘How’s Tove getting on in Bali?’

  Malin smiles: ‘Fine, last time I spoke to her. Thanks for asking. But it’ll be good to have her home again.’

  ‘I’m sure it will,’ Karim says.

  And Malin knows that he wants to say something about the Islamists on the island, knows that he practically loathes them for making life difficult for anyone whose appearance suggests that they could be Arabic.

  It is exactly half past eight.

  The air conditioning in the meeting room is grumbling unhappily, the four of them sitting around the table, the blinds in the windows facing the playground pulled down to keep the light out.

  Four officers.

  A Monday morning, after a weekend at work for three of them. Tiredness is creeping up on her, in spite of the adrenalin that an important case always releases.

  One police chief, one preliminary investigator and two inspectors, far too few for a case of this significance, and all four of them know it; and they know that holidays will be cancelled or colleagues from neighbouring districts called in. Or there’s another option.

  Sven Sjöman is the first to speak: ‘There are far too few of us to handle this, we know that. My suggestion is that we call in National Crime, to save us interrupting our colleagues’ holidays or calling in people from other districts.’

  ‘Not National Crime,’ Karim says, and Malin knew that was what he was going to say. ‘I’ve checked with Motala, Mjölby and Norrköping. We can have Sundsten from Motala and Ekenberg from Mjölby. Norrköping is understaffed as it is, so they can’t let us have anyone. But Sundsten and Ekenberg will be here today, tomorrow at the latest. Börje’s in Africa and Johan’s away with his family, somewhere in Småland, I believe.’

  ‘Ekenberg,’ Zeke exclaims. ‘Do we really want that idiot here?’

  Malin knows what Zeke means. Waldemar Ekenberg is infamous for being completely reckless in his work, and he’s also infamous for getting away with it in all the internal investigations that follow. But he isn’t without his admirers and supporters in the force: Waldemar Ekenberg certainly gets things done when they need to be done.

  ‘We have to take the people that are available,’ Sven says. ‘I shall be keeping an eye on Ekenberg personally.’

  ‘And Sundsten? Who’s that?’

  ‘Some bright young thing. He spent a year in crime in Kalmar before moving to Motala. Supposed to be pretty smart.’

  ‘Good,’ Zeke says. ‘We need all the help we can get.’

  ‘You’re right there,’ Malin says.

  ‘The more I think about these two cases,’ Zeke goes on, ‘the messier everything gets, sort of hazy. It’s a bit like looking at a fire, and just when you think you’ve fixed your eyes on a flame, it’s gone.’

  Sven takes a deep breath, which makes him cough badly, turning his already red face a shade darker, and Malin worries that this heat is about to mess with Sven’s already hard-pressed heart.

  ‘So,’ Karim says. ‘What have we got and what do we know? Can you give me an update?’

  ‘Malin?’

  Sven hasn’t recovered from his fit of coughing.

  ‘We have two crimes,’ Malin says. ‘Although we’re basically convinced we’re dealing with one and the same perpetrator.

  ‘On Thursday morning Josefin Davidsson was found, disorientated, in the Horticultural Society Park, raped with something that seems likely to have been a blue-coloured dildo. She had a number of wounds, probably inflicted by a knife. Her body was scrubbed clean with bleach, and the wounds carefully washed. She’s still in the University Hospital and doesn’t remember anything about what happened, or what led up to it. The sexual nature of the crime led us to check out a recently released sex offender, but he has a solid alibi. A door-to-door of the surrounding flats hasn’t given us anything. No one saw or heard anything. And no witnesses have come forward. The presumed use of the dildo led us to look into the possibility that the perpetrator is female, possibly from the city’s lesbian community, where the use of dildos could be fairly widespread. This line of inquiry led us to Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson, who refused us entry to her home, which is why we applied for a search warrant – the search was carried out yesterday. And produced absolutely nothing. She suggested in passing that presumably now we were going to talk to, quote, “the whole fucking women’s football team”. Forensics are checking her computer at the moment to see if there’s anything to go on there, for instance if she’s the person behind Lovelygirl on Theresa Eckeved’s Facebook page.’

  Malin falls silent.

  Hesitates.

  Says nothing about the line of inquiry that led her and Zeke to the unfortunate Paul Anderlöv. Never mind. He should be left in peace.

  Instead she goes on: ‘How we got to what we know is in the reports, although of course I’m protecting the identity of my sources. We’ve also checked out Ali Shakbari and Behzad Karami. But they’ve got alibis as well, albeit provided by their families.’

  ‘I already know that,’ Karim snaps, evidently annoyed all over again at the suggestion of prejudice in this line of inquiry.

  ‘I’m just trying to update you, Karim,’ Malin says calmly. ‘So that you can make a splendid statement, sorry, truthful statement to the journalists.’

  ‘Let her carry on,’ Zeke says.

  ‘Then yesterday Theresa Eckeved was found murdered at the beach at Stavsätter. She had been buried, wrapped in
ordinary transparent bin-bags, but a dog belonging to one of the bathers still managed to catch the scent. From a quick preliminary investigation Karin Johannison at National Forensics says that Theresa Eckeved was also abused with what seems to have been a blue dildo, which is why we’re fairly convinced that these cases are linked. The cause of Theresa Eckeved’s death was strangulation, but she had also received a blow to the head from a blunt object. She appears to have been killed at the beach. And she was scrubbed clean as well, according to Karin’s analysis, using bleach, just like Josefin Davidsson. And her wounds were obsessively cleaned, trimmed with a very sharp, and very precise object, possibly a scalpel.’

  ‘So we’ve got a lunatic on the loose in the city?’

  Malin is taken aback by how blunt Karim is being, he doesn’t usually use such straightforward language.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Zeke says.

  ‘A person,’ Malin says. ‘Don’t use the word lunatic. A damaged, sick individual.’

  And she thinks of the girls’ wounds, how they are similar yet different, as if they illustrated an almost tentative approach to violence.

  ‘A scalpel,’ Karim says, breaking her train of thought. ‘So who would have a scalpel?’

  ‘Possibly a scalpel,’ Malin says. ‘Possibly. A scalpel is chemical, clean, like chlorine. You can buy them from any chemist.’

  ‘Do we need to give Josefin Davidsson any protection?’ Karim goes on to ask.

  ‘If the killer wanted her dead, he would probably already have made sure of that,’ Sven says. ‘She didn’t seem to be in any fit state to escape, or to have actually done so.’

  ‘We’ll have to check with her parents,’ Karim says, before going on: ‘The pair of you have made a lot of progress.’

  ‘Yes, you have,’ Sven agrees.

  ‘But we haven’t got anywhere.’

  Zeke drums his fingers on the table.

  ‘Zeke, she was only found yesterday,’ Sven says.

  ‘Theresa, yes, but we’ve had longer to work on Josefin Davidsson. And we still don’t even know who called us about her.’