Solhage.
She was one of the stars of Linköping FC’s women’s team until they got serious and started buying players from all around the country. After that she couldn’t even get a place in the squad.
Must have been a bitter blow.
Best to give Janne a bit of time to call her before I get in touch.
But if you can handle being a woman in the pathetically macho world of the fire service, you can probably deal with being left out of a football team.
Not long till the morning meeting.
Once we’ve been through the state of the investigation I’ll give Solhage a ring.
19
‘It was actually quite a relief to give up football.’
‘So you weren’t bitter?’
‘Not in the slightest, I was tired of all that kicking, and it was all starting to get pretentious. I mean, commentators on television analysing the game and drawing little lines to show how someone runs. I mean, analysis is supposed to be saved for world affairs, isn’t it?’
Malin laughs.
The masts of the yachts in the lock are sticking up above the stone edge like poles, swaying back and forth and giving the illusion of a dying wind, only there is no wind. In the background Malin can see the yellow wooden façade of the lock-keeper’s cottage, and opposite her, in the shade of the parasol outside the canalside café bar in Vreta Kloster, sits Viktoria Solhage, smiling, a warm smile that softens her thin face framed by her long blonde hair.
The morning meeting hadn’t taken long.
She told them about her meeting with Nathalie Falck.
Otherwise there was nothing to report, nothing new from Karin and Forensics. Their colleagues in Mjölby had checked up on their sex offender, Fredrik Jonasson. His mother could give him an alibi.
They agreed that Malin should talk to Viktoria Solhage alone. Woman to woman.
The phone call to Viktoria Solhage. She hadn’t sounded at all put out.
‘Let’s meet at the canal café bar by the lock at a quarter past ten. I get Sundays off. I live out in Ljungsbro, and it’s a nice bike ride along the towpath. But I haven’t got long. I have to head up to the forest fire later, we’ve all been called in.’
Now the former football star is sitting in front of Malin and talking about the end of one part of her career and the start of the next. Viktoria Solhage was the first female firefighter in the city. Her appointment was controversial, and Malin remembers what Janne said at the time: ‘OK. She passed the tests. But how do I know if she’ll be able to carry me if I pass out in a sudden burst of smoke?’
She’s probably stronger than ninety per cent of the men in the service, Malin thinks as she looks at Viktoria Solhage’s bulging muscles.
‘Pull, for God’s sake, can’t you see that we’re going to hit the edge?’
‘I am fucking pulling!’
Voices from one of the boats in the lock.
Coffee and ice cream in the shade of a parasol, it would have been lovely if the temperature wasn’t already thirty-five degrees in the shade.
‘Janne called, like I said. I was annoyed at first, but what the hell, the important thing here is that no more young girls get raped, isn’t it?’
Viktoria Solhage screws up her nose, then her face becomes expressionless as she waits for Malin’s questions.
‘What do you think,’ Malin says. ‘Is there anyone in the city’s lesbian community who seems particularly aggressive?’
‘I daresay we can all be a bit aggressive, but that much . . .’ Viktoria Solhage shakes her head. ‘Dyke is synonymous with aggression to you lot, isn’t it?’
Malin feels herself blushing. Wants to put her sunglasses on and look away.
‘No, but you know how it is,’ Malin says.
‘How is it? Tell me.’
Malin gives Viktoria Solhage a beseeching look before going on: ‘There’s no one with particularly problematic baggage? Any childhood traumas that you know about? Anyone who was raped?’
‘No, most people keep that sort of thing to themselves, don’t they?’
‘But?’
‘Well, sometimes things can get a bit rough in bed, like they can for anyone. If only you knew. And sure, some girls fight with each other when they’re drunk, competing to see who can be toughest.’
‘Does anything ever get reported?’
‘No, we mostly keep things to ourselves. Maybe if someone went way over the line, but even then most of us would keep quiet. But everyone’s like that, aren’t they? No one calls the pigs . . . sorry, the police, unless they have to.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘As far as we’re concerned, I know why. The police don’t give a damn about what a few dykes do to each other, Malin Fors. There’s a deep mistrust of the police, you ought to know that.’
‘But you can’t think of anyone who’s been in a bad way, anyone who’s been unusually violent?’
Viktoria Solhage looks down into her coffee cup.
Takes a deep breath.
You want to say something, Malin thinks. But Viktoria Solhage hesitates, turns to look at the canal and the lock, and the gates that are slowly closing again.
‘Can you imagine being stuck in a little ditch like that all summer?’
‘You were about to say something, weren’t you?’
‘Okay.’
Viktoria Solhage turns to face Malin.
‘There is one girl,’ she says. ‘She seems to be dragging a lot of shit around, and there’s gossip about her being particularly violent. There’s a hell of a lot of rumours about what she went through as a child. If I were you, I’d probably take a look at her.’
‘What’s her name?’
Viktoria Solhage looks down at her cup again. Then she pulls out a pen and paper from her handbag, writes down a name, address and phone number.
‘Look,’ she says, pointing at the canal. ‘There they go.’
Malin turns around.
Sees the yachts in the next section of the canal, heading for the lock that leads to the little lake halfway down towards Lake Roxen.
‘Once they’re out in the Roxen,’ Malin says as she turns around again, ‘they’ll be free of the ditch. Good for them, eh?’
Viktoria Solhage smiles.
‘The canal isn’t called the divorce ditch without reason.’
Malin puts the piece of paper in the front pocket of her trousers.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘One last thing. Does the name Nathalie Falck mean anything to you?’
Viktoria Solhage shakes her head and says: ‘Promise me one thing, Malin. Don’t let this business turn into something that reinforces the image of lesbians as macho idiots.’
‘I promise,’ Malin says.
‘In Stockholm, at any rate in the centre of the city, people are very tolerant about the way other people want to live, but out here in the country it’s different. Most people have never even met anyone that they know is homosexual. You can imagine how much fun it would be if the city got the idea you were hunting a lesbian killer.’
‘I’ve got something we should follow up.’
Zeke’s voice hoarse over the mobile.
Malin has just waved goodbye to Viktoria Solhage, who disappeared along the towpath up towards Ljungsbro, and is now cursing her stupidity. The place where she left the car is no longer in shadow, and the sun is now baking its dark-blue frame.
It must be at least a hundred degrees in there.
And the damn light is cutting right through her sunglasses and seems to have made giving her a headache its only goal.
‘What did you say?’
As she says the words a dust-cloud drifts past, making her cough.
‘I’ve got something we should look into.’
‘What?’
No answer, instead: ‘Did you get anything from Solhage?’
‘A name. We’ll have to check her out. And you?’
‘I got a text message from an anonymous
sender.’
‘We get those every day.’
‘Don’t try to be funny, Malin.’
Then Zeke reads aloud from his mobile.
‘Check Paul Anderlöv. A very unfortunate man.’
Silence.
So Hasse did it: ignored the law on confidentiality.
She hadn’t thought that he would.
‘Who do you think sent it?’ Malin asks.
Zeke snorts.
‘That’s something neither you nor I want to know. But I’m not stupid, Malin.’
‘So you know what it’s about?’
‘Yes. Like I said, I’m not stupid.’
The Volvo is hotter than a sauna.
A very unfortunate man.
Bloody hell, Malin thinks. Is this right? Shouldn’t he be left in peace?
One naked, wounded girl on a swing, one girl missing. Reality a grey, yellow, charred mess.
Malin is in her car on the way back to the city.
Outside the windscreen the plain is still, like a mirage conjured up by slowly smothered flames, as if a shimmering blue sky, stretched far too thin, has set fire to the fertile farmland that stretches all the way to the luminous horizon. The heat is hammering the ground with absolute confidence.
The open fields are drooping under the vault of the sky and the rye and corn are slowly burning up beneath the sun’s rays, the rape is curled towards the ground, pale yellow, whimpering as if every golden leaf were gasping for air and were just waiting to be buried with the worms.
They’re the only thing moving out here on the plain right now.
Glowing worms that have spilled out of the volcanic cracks shaken forth by evil.
Zeke is waiting in his car outside the house in Ryd. His engine idling, the air conditioning on full-blast.
The yellow-brick building near the centre is only three storeys high, yet still seems to contain the misery of the whole country in concentrated form, with its satellite dishes beside the windows, its cluttered balconies and outdoor spaces, and the general air of abandonment. The paths between the buildings are desolate, but the flats inside are teeming: refugees, drug addicts, social outcasts, the lowest status workers, people excluded from society.
But there are two worlds here.
Some of the blocks contain student flats: people with dreams, their lives ahead of them, and beyond some tall oaks Malin can just make out Herrgården, the science students’ bar and bistro.
Malin nods to Zeke through the side window and he opens the door and gets out.
‘So this is where the unfortunate Paul Anderlöv lives?’
‘This is where he lives,’ Zeke says.
‘How do we explain how we found out about him?’
‘We don’t,’ Malin replies.
20
The thing about pain is that it’s an eternal curse, because it wipes out time. It bestows an intimation of death and a stench of carrion upon a present that seems never-ending.
The physical pain disappeared long ago.
But psychological pain?
Medication.
But it doesn’t help, and nothing gets better with time, no, everything gets worse, the pain is always new and each time it is more assured, more arrogant.
I am pain, Paul Anderlöv thinks as he hears the doorbell ring.
And he gets up from his armchair, turns down the volume of Days of Our Lives on the television and makes his way out to the hall. Once again, he is struck by the fact that his body seems to have disappeared, become limp and saggy instead of hard like it was before.
Fourteen years since it happened.
But it could just as well have been yesterday.
Malin holds up her ID towards the unshaven man in the doorway, his face simultaneously sunken and swollen, his cropped hair thin on his scalp.
‘We’re from the police. We’d like to ask a few questions,’ Malin says. ‘Are you Paul Anderlöv?’
The man nods.
‘Can we take it out here?’ he goes on to say. ‘It’s a mess inside, and I don’t really like inviting people in. Has there been some sort of trouble in the neighbourhood?’
‘We’d prefer to come in,’ Zeke says in a voice that doesn’t leave any room for discussion.
And Paul Anderlöv backs down, showing them into a sparsely furnished living room with messy heaps of newspapers and motoring magazines. There’s a noticeable smell of smoke, vodka and spilled beer, and in the corners there are dustballs the size of sparrows.
Malin and Zeke sit down on a pair of chairs by the low coffee table.
Paul Anderlöv sinks into an armchair.
‘So, what do you want?’
He’s trying to sound tough, Malin thinks, but he just sounds resigned and tired and his green eyes are uncertain, tired beyond the limits of tiredness, and he’s sad in a way that Malin has never seen anyone sad before.
‘Have you heard about the rape in the Horticultural Society Park?’
When he hears the word rape it’s as if all the air and water and blood disappear from Paul Anderlöv’s body, as if he realises why they’ve come. His head sinks down towards his chest and he starts to shake and whimper. Malin looks at Zeke, who shakes his head, and they both realise that they’ve crossed a boundary, the boundary that justifies intrusions into people’s lives in the search for the truth.
Malin gets up.
She sits down next to Paul Anderlöv on the sturdy arm of the chair, put he pushes her away.
‘Go to hell,’ he says. ‘After all, I’ve been there long enough.’
Paul Anderlöv collects himself, seems to pull himself together, makes coffee, puts away a pair of white washing-up gloves as he asks them to take a seat in the kitchen, with a view of the civic centre in Ryd.
‘I’m not so stupid that I can’t work out the way you’re thinking,’ he says. Resignation in his voice, but also relief. Perhaps because he knows that they’re going to listen to him.
‘I read about the dildo and I understand perfectly well, and I’m not even going to comment on the fact that it’s idiotic and superficial and simplistic. But I understand your thinking. Could he be sexually frustrated? Mad?
‘Well, I’m not mad. Sexually frustrated? You bet I am, what do you think it’s like living like this, you should see what I look like down there,’ and Zeke looks involuntarily away from Paul Anderlöv and out of the window, but the shabby brick and panelled façade of the civic centre give little comfort and he notices a spider outside the window, and an almost invisible web stretching from one side of the frame to the other.
‘Anyway, how did you find me? Actually, I don’t even want to know. Maybe it was through Janne, your ex, Fors, I know him. We were in Bosnia together, in ’94. We’ve had a few beers together, talking about our time in the field, or rather: I talk about my memories to him. He’s as quiet as a broken car stereo.’
‘Janne hasn’t said anything about you.’
‘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 kno
w 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.
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