Andersson.
Is he capable of working out what’s of interest to us? Malin thinks.
Biology essays.
Yes, he probably is.
‘What else?’
Malin can hear the expectancy in her own voice.
‘She empties the memory cache regularly, so I haven’t been able to track her surfing habits very far back. The information might be on the hard drive, or maybe we could get it from the service provider’s servers, but that’ll take time.’
‘How long?’
‘Weeks. Information wiped from the cache is left as fragmentary traces on the hard drive. It takes time to build up any sort of comprehensible picture from them. And at this time of the summer the service providers won’t be terribly keen on going through their server logs.’
‘But?’
Malin can tell from Willy Andersson’s voice that he’s found something else.
‘From what I have been able to find in the memory cache and web browser, I can see that she has a Facebook page.’
Willy Andersson clicks to open the page.
Theresa Eckeved’s face.
Innocent. But also hard.
No notes. Only a few friends: Peter Sköld, Nathalie Falck. Only one who leaves comments: a certain Lovelygirl. Nothing more than an alias.
‘Hello darling!’
‘You’re so beautiful.’
‘Suck me.’
‘Can you find out who this Lovelygirl is?’ Malin wonders.
‘She’s a registered user, but she hasn’t got a page of her own,’ Willy Andersson replies. ‘I can get in touch with Facebook and see if they can give us any information that could help us identify her.’
‘Anything else?’
Sven sounds almost pleading, but there’s a note of relief in his voice. A Lovelygirl, something to go on.
‘She’s got a Yahoo email account as well,’ Willy Andersson says. ‘But I can’t get into it.’
‘Are Yahoo likely to be any quicker than Facebook?’
‘I doubt it. I’ll try them both, and we’ll see.’
‘Get onto it,’ Sven says. ‘And make sure they know why it’s urgent.’
‘Nothing on MySpace? YouTube?’
Malin remembers the videos on YouTube a year or so ago of a teenage girl being raped and abused. It turned out to be her best friends torturing her.
Peter Sköld. Nathalie Falck. Torturers?
‘Nothing on MySpace. I haven’t checked YouTube, but I can do some searches today.’
‘Get onto it,’ Sven says again. ‘Get onto it.’
‘And Peter Sköld and Nathalie Falck haven’t got their own pages either?’
‘No, not as far as I can see,’ Willy Andersson says, getting up, and his thin, beige cotton trousers hang slack around his skinny legs.
Andersson.
Forty years old.
Looks more like fifty.
‘Good work,’ Sven says.
‘It was pretty straightforward,’ Willy Andersson says as he unplugs the computer and puts it under his arm. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he says, and then he’s gone, and only the heat and the sound of the door closing linger in the meeting room.
‘So, you two. What are you up to?’
‘We’re going to see Behzad Karami.’
And a silence descends on the room. A quite specific silence that Malin recognises and likes, the silence in an investigation where the thoughts of the officers coalesce around an idea, a line of inquiry worth following up.
‘Lesbians,’ Sven says. ‘Could there be a lesbian angle to this case? That Lovelygirl on Facebook certainly gave the impression of being homosexual.’
‘And Nathalie Falck is pretty masculine,’ Zeke says, and Malin thinks that he’s being prejudiced, but deep down she agrees. She can feel the suggestions in the room.
‘So, there could be a lesbian angle. Keep it in the back of your minds,’ Sven says.
‘Maybe Nathalie Falck knows who that Lovelygirl is?’ Malin says.
‘OK, time for the gangbangers,’ Zeke says, standing up. His eyes full of expectation.
A code.
We need a damn code for the lock.
It’s just after half past nine. They’re standing in the shade under the porch in front of the door of a run-down block of flats. The once-yellow brick of the façade has faded to ochre, and the surrounding grass and flowerbeds look as if no one cares or is paid enough to look after them. Cigarette ends, cans, broken green bottles.
Malin can see herself in the glass of the door, her face improbably long and her skin somehow glowing.
Berga.
Only a few kilometres from the centre of the city, and just seven hundred metres from Ramshäll.
Another world.
Unemployment.
Immigrants.
And the usual: single mothers trying to raise their children to be decent people, as best they can with underpaid jobs that swallow up ten hours a day.
Absentee fathers are no myth here.
Most of the inhabitants of Berga are probably at home, even though it’s summer.
Two blocks away from where they are now standing Malin found one of her old school friends, dead from a drugs overdose. In a small one-room flat on the first floor, her first year with the Linköping Police, when she moved back with Tove after graduating from the Police Academy.
A smell had been coming from the flat.
The neighbours had reported it.
And she and a colleague had gone around, and he had been lying on the floor beside the bed, the place an absolute tip, and he stank and his body must have swollen up but by the time they arrived it looked almost shrivelled.
Jimmy Svennson with three Ns.
He used to be quite a charmer. Pothead turned junkie turned dead.
What’s the smell now?
Scorched summer.
‘What are we going to do about the door, Malin?’
‘Wait until someone comes.’
‘You mean . . .’
‘I was joking, Zeke. A little morning joke,’ and Malin pulls her key-ring from the inside pocket of her pale-blue jacket, sticks the skeleton key in the lock and twists. ‘This sort of lock’s easy.’
Zeke looks at her admiringly.
‘I have to say, you’re bloody good at that, Fors.’
The stairwell smells of mould, and the lime-green walls are in serious need of a coat of paint.
No lift.
They’re panting by the time they reach the third floor.
‘Bet you he’s asleep,’ Zeke says as he presses the doorbell beside Behzad Karami’s door.
They ring again and again.
Malin calls Behzad Karami’s mobile number, there’s no landline listed.
There must be a terrible amount of ringing inside the flat.
She was off her face.
Then the voice on the mobile, with just a faint trace of an accent in his Östergötland Swedish even though Karami was already eight years old when he moved here.
‘Do you know what time it is, you bastard?’
‘This is Malin Fors. Police. If you open the front door, the ringing will stop.’
Zeke’s finger on the bell.
‘What?’
‘Open the door. We’re standing outside.’
‘Fuck.’
Over the phone Malin hears a body moving, then there’s rattling behind the door, Zeke’s finger ringing constantly now, and the sound of the doorbell getting louder and louder the more the door opens.
‘Good morning, Behzad. So you’ve gone and messed things up for yourself again, have you?’
Zeke’s voice full of distaste as he lets go of the bell.
Behzad Karami’s face puffy with sleep and possibly alcohol, and who knows what else? Tattooed torso, powerful shoulders, a choker of animal claws and teeth around his neck. Nineteen years old, his big, black, shiny BMW parked closer to the centre.
On the other hand.
Af
ter a spell in youth custody he was never found guilty of anything. And we couldn’t get him for the rapes, and maybe his ‘business’ is going well? What do I know? Malin thinks.
‘We’ll come in,’ Zeke says, and before Behzad Karami can protest Zeke has pushed him aside, stepped inside the hall and on into the single room.
Behzad Karami hesitant.
Branded since he sat in jail while they investigated whether or not the gangbang of the paralytic Lovisa Hjelmstedt could be classed as rape or serious sexual assault.
But the case had collapsed.
She agreed to it, and witnesses had seen her dancing with Behzad Karami and Ali Shakbari at the club, seen her leave with them of her own accord, even if she was so drunk by then that she could hardly walk.
‘Not done any cleaning for a while, Behzad?’ Zeke says. ‘But a mummy’s boy like you probably can’t manage that, eh? Keeping things clean?’
Behzad Karami standing in front of Malin in the living room. His back is covered by a showy fire-breathing dragon.
‘I clean whenever the hell I feel like it. It’s none of your business, you pi . . .’
‘Say it,’ Zeke snarls. ‘Make my day. Finish what you were going to say.’
‘Zeke, calm down. Sit down on the bed, Behzad.’
The rough wallpaper is full of scorch-marks and stains, and on the bed is a torn pink sheet. The blinds are pulled down over the view of Berga’s rooftops. A huge flat-screen television is screwed to one wall, and the stereo and speakers take up most of the free floor space. The tiny kitchen is oddly clean, as if it has recently been used and scrubbed very, very thoroughly.
Behzad Karami sinks onto the bed, rubbing his eyes, says: ‘For fuck’s sake, couldn’t you have come a bit later, what the hell do you want?’
‘A girl was raped yesterday. She was found in the Horticultural Society Park,’ Malin says.
‘Don’t suppose you know anything about it?’ Zeke says.
And Behzad Karami looks down at the green lino floor, shakes his head and says: ‘We didn’t rape Lovisa, and I haven’t raped anyone else either. Get it? When the hell are you going to get it?’
His voice.
Suddenly afraid.
Behind the muscles and tattoos he’s just a boy, yet also a man who feels ashamed when people around town whisper behind his back, judged by the public court of a provincial city.
‘That’s him, the one who raped . . .’
‘Bloody animal. That’s what they’re like, those . . .’
‘Where were you the night before last?’
‘I was at my parents’. We’ve got family over from Iran. Check with them. Seven people can tell you I was there until five o’clock in the morning at least.’
‘And after that?’
‘Then I came back here.’
Josefin who remembers nothing. Was she attacked before or after the cinema? What time?
‘You came straight back here?’
‘I just said so.’
‘Why should we believe you?’ Zeke says, patting Behzad on the head.
‘What about Ali, do you know what he was doing then?’
‘No. No idea. Are you going to fuck about with him as well?’
Malin can see Zeke getting angry, how he’s trying to stop himself hitting Behzad Karami. Instead he says in a loud voice: ‘So you didn’t go down to the Horticultural Society Park after the party? Didn’t hide there waiting for a girl to go past?’
Malin takes a step back, out into the hall. She goes into the little kitchen, a completely different world from the rest of the flat; cupboard doors gleaming white, albeit worn.
She runs her hand over the draining board, smells her hand, lemon-scented detergent. She opens a cupboard, finds an unopened bottle of bleach.
She can hear Zeke roaring in the living room.
Knows that Zeke’s anger can be so terrifying that it forces out truths, admissions of guilt where you least expect them.
‘You’re mad, you fucking pig.’
Zeke’s eyes black as he comes out into the hall and finds her in the kitchen.
‘We’re done here,’ he says. ‘Aren’t we?’
‘Not quite,’ Malin says, and goes back in to Behzad Karami.
He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, breathing heavily.
‘The kitchen. How come it’s so clean?’
‘Mum did it the day before yesterday.’
‘One last thing: do you know where we can get hold of Ali?’
‘Try his dad’s flower shop on Tanneforsvägen. Interflora. He’s helping out over the summer.’
The car’s air conditioning is straining.
Malin at the wheel.
Zeke singing along loudly to the choral song filling the car.
Sundsvall church choir sings Abba.
The winner takes it all, the winner takes . . .
Zeke’s voice isn’t as gruff when he sings as when he talks. Malin has learned to put up with the music, partly because she has begun to see the point of singing in a group, but mainly because she can see what the music, and the sense of belonging, does for Zeke, the way he can switch in a matter of minutes from an adrenalin-pumped alpha male to a cheery, tuneful, almost harmonious man.
They’re heading towards Tannefors.
Past the deserted skateboard ramps at Johannelund, the scorched yellow grass of the forgotten little fields between the river and the blocks of flats, then they cross the Braskens bridge. Down to the left the mismatched buildings of the Saab factory huddle in the heat.
Aeronautics industry.
Actually a weapons industry.
But the pride of the city, nonetheless.
Because that’s what Linköping is like, Malin thinks. Self-conscious, almost arrogant, wanting to be smart and a little bit exceptional, an exquisite little metropolis in the big wide world. A reluctant rural town, a provincial city with delusions of grandeur, but without any real self-awareness or sense of style. Which is why it’s hard to think of a more provincial provincial city than Linköping.
‘What are you thinking about, Malin?’
‘The city. How it’s actually pretty OK.’
‘Linköping? Has anyone said otherwise?’
As Zeke’s question hangs in the air Malin’s mobile rings, the call cutting through the car and into their ears.
‘I’m done with the tests, Malin. I’ve analysed what the doctors at the University Hospital found inside Josefin Davidsson.’
Karin Johannison’s voice.
Ice-cold, self-assured in the heat.
‘We’re on our way,’ Malin says. ‘We’ve just got to get something out of the way first.’
13
Most of the drops turn to steam, wiped out before they have time to land on the countless potted plants standing on the shelves beneath the florist’s limp red awning. The noisy whirr of the humidifier bores into Malin’s brain, but fades away when they step into the damp cool of the shop.
The tall, dark man behind the counter immediately assumes a watchful, hesitant posture; he recognises them, Malin’s sure of that.
Malin shows her ID.
The man nods but doesn’t say anything.
‘We’re looking for Ali Shakbari.’
‘What’s he done now?’
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?
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