Then the pressure eases, the weight on her body disappears and the white walls and yellow ceiling come into view again, the apparatus in the windowless gym in the cellar, the smell of sweat.
She gets up. They are alone in the room. Most of their colleagues go to gyms in the centre of the city: ‘They’re better equipped.’
Johan is grinning. ‘That eighth one seems to be the problem,’ he says.
‘You shouldn’t have stepped in,’ Malin says. ‘I would have done it.’
‘You’d have crushed your windpipe if I’d held back any longer.’
‘Your turn,’ Malin says.
‘No more for me today,’ Johan says, tugging his sweaty, washed-out blue Adidas top away from his chest. ‘The kids.’
‘Yeah, blame the kids.’
Johan laughs as he walks away. ‘It’s only exercise, Malin. No more, no less.’
Then she is alone in the room.
She gets on to the treadmill. Turns up the speed, almost to maximum. Then she runs until her vision starts to go white again, until the world disappears.
Jets of warm water on her skin.
Closed eyes, black around her.
A conversation with Tove some hours before.
‘Can you heat up something from the freezer? Or there’s some curry left from the weekend. Dad didn’t quite manage to eat all of it.’
‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll sort something out.’
‘Will you be there when I get home?’
‘I might go and study with Lisa. We’ve got a geography test on Thursday.’
Study, Malin thinks. Since when did you have to do that?
‘I can test you if you like.’
‘Thanks, that’s okay.’
Shampoo in her hair, soap on her body, her breasts, unused.
Malin turns off the shower, dries herself, throws the towel in the wash-basket before taking her clothes out of her locker. She gets dressed, puts on the yellow and red Swatch Tove gave her for Christmas. Half past seven. Zeke would be waiting outside in the car. Best to hurry. The professor who is going to tell them about rituals probably doesn’t want to have to wait all evening for them either.
19
They walk quickly between the panelled, brick-coloured buildings. The ground crunches beneath their feet, the grey paving carefully gritted, but with patches of ice every now and then. The path between the silent, oblong buildings becomes a wind-tunnel where the cold can gather its strength and get up speed to hit their bodies. The cones of light from the lamps hanging above them sway in the wind.
The university.
Like a rectangular city within the city, laid out between Valla and the golf course and Mjardevi Science Park.
‘I didn’t know academic life could seem so bleak,’ Zeke says.
‘It isn’t bleak,’ Malin says. ‘Just tough.’
She spent two years studying law part-time, with Tove crawling round her legs and Janne off in some jungle or on some mined road God knew where, and her patrol duties and nightshifts and night nursery, alone, alone with you, Tove.
‘Did you say C-block?’ The letter C shines above the nearest entrance. Zeke’s voice sounds hopeful.
‘Sorry, F-block.’
‘Fuck, it’s cold.’
‘This cold stinks.’
‘Maybe. But it still doesn’t seem to have any smell, does it?’
A single light is shining on the second floor of F-block. Like an outsized star in a reluctant sky.
‘He said to press B 3267 at the door, and he’d buzz us in.’
‘You’ll have to take your gloves off,’ Zeke says.
And a minute later they are standing in a lift on the way up, Professor Soderkvist’s voice vague and difficult to pin down over the speaker a few moments ago.
‘Is that the police?’
‘Yes, Inspectors Fors and Martinsson.’
A buzz, then warmth.
What was I expecting? Malin thinks as she settles on to an uncomfortable chair in the professor’s office. A creaky old man in a cardigan? A history professor doesn’t count as one of the really posh ones, the ones who make her so uncertain. But what about this one?
He’s young, no more than forty, and he’s attractive; maybe his chin’s a bit weak, but there’s nothing wrong with his cheekbones and his cool blue eyes.
He is leaning back in an armchair on the other side of a pedantically tidy desk, apart from a messily opened packet of biscuits. The room is perhaps ten square metres in size, over-full bookshelves along the walls, and windows facing the golf course, silent and deserted on the far side of the road.
He smiles, but only with his mouth and cheeks, not with his eyes.
He is hiding one hand, the one he didn’t shake hands with, Malin thinks. He’s keeping it under the desk. Why are you doing that, Professor Soderkvist?
‘You had something you wanted to explain to us?’ Zeke says.
The room smells of disinfectant.
‘Midwinter sacrifice,’ the professor says, leaning even further back. ‘Have you heard of that?’
‘Vaguely,’ Malin says.
Zeke shakes his head and nods to the professor, who goes on.
‘A heathen ritual, something the people you would call Vikings used to do once a year round about this time of year. They made sacrifices to the gods for happiness and success. Or as a penance. To cleanse the blood. To be reconciled with the dead. We don’t know for sure. There’s very little reliable documentation about this ritual, but we can be sure that they made both animal and human sacrifices.’
‘Human sacrifices?’
‘Human sacrifices. And the sacrifices were hung in trees, often in open places so that the gods could get a good view of them. At least that’s what we believe.’
‘And you mean that the man in the tree on the Ostgota plain could be the victim of a modern midwinter sacrifice?’ Malin asks.
‘No, that’s not what I mean.’ The professor smiles. ‘But I do mean that there are undoubted similarities in the scenario. Let me explain something: there are residential courses and hotels in this country that organise harmless midwinter sacrifices at this time of year. With no connection to the darker sides of the sacrifice, they arrange lectures about Old Norse culture and serve food that they suppose would have been served in those days. Commercial mumbo-jumbo. But there are others who have a less healthy interest in those days, so to speak.’
‘A less healthy interest?’
‘I come across them occasionally during my lecture tours. The sort of people who evidently have difficulty living in our age, and who prefer to identify themselves with history instead.’
‘They live in the past?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Is this about the old ?sir beliefs?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. We’re talking about the pre-Norse period here.’
‘Do you know where they are, people like this?’
