same thing: Who was he? How did he get there? Who did it?
In the eyes of the television viewers, I am the provider of television truth, I make sure that evil people are locked up behind bars. I am the person who is expected to transform anxiety to security, but things are never so simple in reality, outside the screen. Out here everything is a test card, rich in nuances where it is impossible to take in everything, where meaning is everywhere and nowhere, with a clock ticking away and everyone waiting for something new, something clearer, better, to take over.
‘Mum, can I borrow your perfume?’
Perfume?
She’s got a date, Malin thinks. Which would be a first. Then: Who? Where? When? A thousand questions, thoughts, anxieties in myriad forms run through her in a fraction of a second.
‘Who are you seeing?’
‘No one. Can I borrow your perfume?’
‘Of course.’
‘… the body is still hanging here.’
The camera moves to one side, and in the abrupt darkness above the tent the body sways back and forth and Malin wants to change the channel, but at the same time she wants to watch. Cut to that afternoon’s press conference. Karim Akbar in a well-pressed suit in the large meeting room in Police Headquarters, his black hair slicked back, his face serious, but his eyes can’t conceal how much he loves the spotlight, how it seems to validate him.
‘We don’t yet know for certain that he was murdered.’
Microphones from TV4 in the foreground. A question from the mass of journalists; she recognises Daniel Hogfeldt’s voice.
‘Why have you left the body hanging there?’
Daniel. What are you up to now?
Karim answers confidently. ‘For technical reasons concerned with the investigation. As yet we don’t know anything. We’re keeping an entirely open mind.’
‘Mum, have you seen my red polo-neck?’ Tove’s voice from her own room now.
‘Have you looked in the drawer?’
A few short seconds, then a triumphant voice. ‘Found it!’
Good, Malin thinks, then ponders what keeping an open mind means and is likely to mean: going round to every farm and cottage within a three-kilometre radius from the tree, knocking on the doors of farmers, commuters and workshy folk on sick leave.
‘Really? No, I haven’t noticed anything.’
‘I’m always asleep at that time of day.’
‘In this sort of cold I stay indoors.’
‘I keep myself to myself, it’s better that way.’
The same response for Johan and Borje as for her and Zeke: no one knows anything, no one has seen anything. It’s as if the hundred-and-fifty-kilo body flew up into the noose in the tree, parking itself on the end of the rope in anticipation of attention.
Back to the studio.
‘Naturally we’ll be following developments in Linkoping.’ Pause. ‘In London…’
Then Tove is standing in the door to the living room.
‘I read about that on the net,’ she says. ‘Are you in charge of it?’
But Malin can’t answer her daughter’s question. Instead she just gawps when she sees her, the child who was lying in bed this morning; the little girl who went into the bathroom just quarter of an hour ago is transformed. She is wearing make-up and has tied up her hair, and something has happened, a hint of a woman has superimposed itself over her daughter’s appearance.
‘Mum? Mum, hello?’
‘You look lovely.’
‘Thanks, I’m going to the cinema.’
‘I’m working on the case.’
‘It’s a good thing I’m going to Dad’s tomorrow, so you can work late.’
‘Tove. Please. Don’t say that.’
‘I’m off now. I’ll be home by eleven. The last screening ends about then, but we’re having coffee first.’
‘Who are you going with?’
‘Anna.’
‘If I said I didn’t believe you, what would you say?’
Tove shrugs. ‘We’re going to see the new Tom Cruise film,’ then Tove gives the name of a film Malin has never heard of. Tove is as liberal in her choice of film as she is selective in her taste in books.
‘I haven’t heard of that one.’
‘Oh Mum, you don’t know anything about stuff like this.’
Tove turns and disappears from Malin’s sight, but Malin can hear her rummaging in the hall. She calls, ‘Do you need any money?’
‘No.’
And Malin wants to follow her, doesn’t believe any of this, but knows that she shouldn’t, can’t, won’t. Unless she will?
‘Bye!’
Anxiety.
Johan Jakobsson, Borje Svard, Zeke: all parents are familiar with it, that anxiety.
It’s cold out.
‘Bye, Tove.’
And the flat closes around Malin.
She turns off the television with the remote.
Leans back on the sofa and takes a sip of her tequila, the one she poured herself after they’d eaten.
She and Zeke had been out to Borensberg and spoken to Liedbergh’s lover. The woman was around forty, neither beautiful nor ugly, just one of the mass of normal women with passions to live out, to fulfil. She offered them coffee and home-baked buns. She told them she was single and unemployed, how she tried to fill her days while applying for any jobs she thought she might stand a chance of getting. ‘It’s hard,’ Peter Liedbergh’s lover had said. ‘You’re either too old or you haven’t got the right qualifications. But something will turn up.’
The woman confirmed Liedbergh’s story. Then she shook her head. ‘It’s a good job he went that way. Who knows how long that man might have been left hanging there otherwise in this cold.’
Malin looked at the porcelain figurines arranged on the kitchen windowsill. A dog, a cat, an elephant. A little porcelain menagerie for company.
‘Do you love him?’ Malin asked.
Zeke shook his head instinctively.
But the woman didn’t take against the question.
‘Who? Peter Liedbergh? No, not at all.’ She laughed. ‘You know, it’s just something we women need, isn’t it, a bit of company?’
Malin sinks further into the sofa. She thinks about Janne, about how difficult he finds it to talk, how he sometimes feels like a black outline superimposed over her own. In the window she can see the tower of St Lars, and waits for the bells to ring, tries to hear if there are any whispering voices in the darkness.
