Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

‘Well, okay.’ The door closed, the chain rattled, then the door opened again.

‘Come in.’

A one-room flat, sofa-bed, a small table, a tiny kitchenette. Furniture from Ikea, lace curtains and a stripped, rustic wooden bench, probably inherited. Pizza boxes, beer cans, a box of white wine. On the windowsill an ashtray, full to overflowing.

She saw Malin looking at the ashtray.

‘I don’t usually let them smoke in here. But I couldn’t make them go outside yesterday.’

‘Them?’

‘My friends. We were doing some surfing last night as we drank, and that was when we saw him and the request for people to call in. I phoned straight away. Well, almost straight away.’

She sat down on the bed. She wasn’t fat, but her vest bulged as she sat.

Zeke sat on a chair. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘Not much, except that he lives round here. And his name. Apart from that, nothing. Is it him?’

‘Yes, we’re almost certain.’

‘God, it was all everyone was talking about last night.’

False memories, Malin thought. Recollections of other people are juicy conversation topics at parties. Just wait till you hear what happened to a friend of a friend…

‘So you don’t know anything about who he was really?’

‘Not much. I think he was on the sick. And everyone called him Ball-Bengt. I thought it was because he was so fat, but the Correspondent said different.’

They left Pamela Karlsson with her mess and her headache and went on to an address on Ugglebovagen, an architect-designed villa on four levels, where every room seemed to have a view of the fields and, in the distance, Lake Roxen. A hollow-eyed insurance broker named Stig Unning opened the door after they knocked on the gilded lion’s head.

‘It was my son who made the call. You’ll have to talk to him, he’s down in the basement.’

The son, Fredrik, was playing a computer game. Thirteen maybe, thin, acne, dressed in jeans and an orange T-shirt that were too big for him. Dwarfs and elves were dying in droves on the screen.

‘You called us,’ Zeke said.

‘Yes,’ Fredrik Unning said without looking away from the game.

‘Why?’

‘Because I recognised the picture. I thought maybe there was some sort of reward. Is there?’

‘No, sorry,’ Malin said. ‘You don’t get paid for recognising a murder victim.’

A gnu was blown to pieces, a troll had its limbs torn off.

‘Should have called Aftonbladet instead.’

Bang. Dead, dead, dead.

Fredrik Unning looked up at them.

‘Did you know him?’ Malin asked.

‘No. Not at all. I mean, I knew his nickname, and I knew he stank of piss. No more than that.’

‘Nothing else we ought to know?’

Fredrik Unning hesitated and Malin saw a flash of fear cross his eyes before he once again fixed his gaze on the television screen and waved the joystick back and forth frenetically.

‘No,’ the boy said.

You know something, Malin thought.

‘Are you quite sure you haven’t got anything else to tell us?’

Fredrik Unning shook his head. ‘Nah, nothing. Not a damn thing.’

A red lizard dropped a huge rock on the head of a hulking great monster.

The third person on the list was a Pentecostal pastor, Sven Garplov, forty-seven, who lived in a fairly average newly built villa on the other side of the Motala River, on the outskirts of Ljungsbro. White brick, white wood, white gables, white on white as if to keep sin away. On the way there they drove past the Cloetta factory, its corrugated roof like an angry sugar snake, its chimney pumping out promises of a sweet life.

‘That’s where they make chocolate wafers,’ Zeke said.

‘I wouldn’t say no to one right now,’ Malin said.

Even though they were in a hurry, the pastor’s wife, Ingrid, offered them coffee. The four of them sat on green leather sofas in the white-painted sitting room eating home-made biscuits, seven different sorts, as per tradition.

Butter in the biscuits. Just what she needed.

The pastor’s wife sat in silence as he talked.

‘I have a service today, but the congregation will have to wait. A sin of such a serious nature has to take precedence. He who waits to pray never waits for long. Wouldn’t you say, Ingrid?’

His wife nodded. Then she nodded towards the plate of biscuits.

They both helped themselves for the second time.

‘He was evidently a troubled soul. The sort of whom the Lord is fond, in His own way. We spoke about him briefly in the congregation once, and someone, I forget who, mentioned his name. We agreed that he was a very lonely man. He could have done with a friend like Jesus.’

‘Did you ever speak to him yourself?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean, did you ever invite him to your church?’

‘No, I don’t think that ever occurred to any of us. Our doors are open to everyone, although perhaps slightly more open to some people than others. I have to admit that.’

And now they are standing outside the front door of a Conn Dyrenas, thirty-nine, who lives in a flat on Cloettavagen, right behind the football ground, Cloettavallen. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds for the door to open.

‘I heard you come,’ the man says.

The flat is full of toys, great drifts of them. Plastic in all manner of gaudy colours.

‘The kids,’ Conn Dyrenas says. ‘They’re with their mother this weekend. We’re divorced. Otherwise they live with me. You miss them terribly when they’re not around. I tried to have a lie-in this morning, but still woke up at the same time as usual. I got up and surfed the net. Would you like coffee?’

‘We’ve just had some, so no, but thanks anyway,’ Malin says. ‘Are you quite sure it’s Bengt in the pictures?’

‘Yes, no doubt at all.’

‘Did you know him?’ Zeke asks.

‘No, but he was still part of my life.’

Conn Dyrenas walks over to the balcony door, gesturing to them to follow.

‘You see that fence over there? He used to stand there waiting for the ball whenever Ljungsbro IF played at home. It didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, or freezing, or boiling hot in the summer. He was always there. Sometimes he used to stand there in winter, looking out at the deserted pitch. I guess he missed it. It was like he’d sorted out a job for himself, something to do with his time here on earth. He ran after the ball when it went over the fence. Well, maybe not ran. Lolloped. And then he would throw it back. People in the stands used to laugh. Okay, it did look funny, but my laughter always stuck in my throat.’

Malin looks at the fence, white in the cold, the roofed stand with the clubhouse behind it.

‘I kept thinking about asking him in for coffee one day,’ Conn Dyrenas says. ‘So much for that idea.’

‘He seems to have been a very lonely person. You should have asked him in,’ Malin says.

Conn Dyrenas nods, goes to say something, but remains silent.

‘What else do you know about him?’ Malin asks.

‘I don’t know much. There was a lot of gossip, though.’

‘Gossip?’

‘Yes, about his dad being mad. That he used to live in a house and one day smashed an axe into his father’s head.’

‘Really?’