Shalom on Tradgardsgatan have the biggest pizzas in the city, the best tomato sauce, and the ugliest interior: plaster walls with amateur frescoes of nymphs; cheap, plastic patio tables.
They share a calzone.
‘Does Dad know about this?’
‘No.’
‘Okay.’
‘What do you mean?’
Malin takes a sip of her Cuba Cola.
Her mobile rings again.
Daniel Hogfeldt’s name on the small display.
She hesitates, then clicks the call away.
‘Dad?’
‘It just feels important that you haven’t told him either.’
Tove looks thoughtful. She takes a bite of the pizza before saying, ‘Weird.’
A fluorescent light flickers above their heads.
There’s competition in love, Tove, Malin thinks. There’s competition and loss in everything.
21
It is just after midnight.
Daniel Hogfeldt presses the door button on the wall and the main door to the
He looks down Hamngatan as he takes a breath of the icy air.
He called Malin. To ask about the case, and to ask about… yes, what was he going to ask her about?
Even though his thick jacket is done up to the neck, the cold wins in just a few seconds and forces its way through the fabric.
He heads home quickly along Linnegatan.
At St Lars Church he looks up at the darkened windows of Malin’s flat, thinks of her face and eyes, and of how little he knows about her, and what he must look like to her: a fucking irritating journalist, a male chauvinist with some sort of irresistible sex appeal and charm. A body that does the job well enough when her own body needs fulfilment.
Fucking.
Hard or soft.
But people have to fuck.
He walks past H &M and thinks about the distance in that ‘people’. Fucking isn’t something you or I do, ‘people’ do it; an alien entity separate from our bodies.
The phone-call from Stockholm today.
Flattery and coaxing, promises.
Daniel wasn’t surprised.
Am I done with this dump now?
The front page of the
In spite of the darkness she can read the headline, which, in its urgent, tabloid manner, bears Daniel Hogfeldt’s unmistakable signature: POLICE SUSPECT RITUAL KILLING.
You made the front page, Daniel. Congratulations.
An archive picture of a serious Karim Akbar, a statement given over the phone late yesterday evening:
Secret networks? The ?sir belief-system?
Daniel has interviewed Professor Soderkvist, who claims to have been questioned by the police for information, and that he had explained ritual killings to them during the day.
Then a screenshot of a website about the ?sir faith, and a passport photograph of a Rickard Skoglof from Maspelosa, who is identified as a central character in such circles.
A fact box about midwinter sacrifices.
Nothing else.
Malin folds the paper and puts it on the kitchen table, and makes a cup of coffee.
Her body. Muscles and sinews, bones and joints. Everything aches.
Then the sound of a car-horn down in the street.
Zeke. Are you here already?
The Ikea clock on the wall says quarter to seven.
I’m the one who’s late.
What exactly is this winter doing to me?
Zeke at the wheel of the green Volvo. Tired shoulders, limp hands. German choral music in a minor key fills the car. The pair of them are equally tired. The E4 cuts through white-clad fields and the frozen landscape of the plain.
Mobilia outside Mantorp, a retail park, Tove’s favourite outing, Malin’s nightmare. Mjolby, Granna, Lake Vattern as a strip of white hope in front of a horizon where nuances of grey meet other nuances of grey, forming a confusion of cold and darkness, an eternal lack of light.
Zeke’s voice comes as a liberation, loud enough to drown out the music.
‘What do you think about this Old Norse stuff?’
‘Karim seemed fairly positive about it.’
‘Mr Akbar. What do factory-farmed police chiefs like him know about anything?’
‘Zeke. He’s not that bad.’
‘No, I suppose not. Mr Akbar presumably has to give the impression that we’re making progress. And the holes in the window, have you had any more thoughts about them now you’ve had time to sleep on it?’
‘No idea. Maybe they’ll lead to something. But what, I don’t know.’ Malin thinks that this is just like every big investigation, that obvious connections are hidden somewhere close to them, just out of reach, mocking them.
‘When was Karin going to have her analysis of the glass finished?’
‘Today or tomorrow.’
‘Just one thing,’ Zeke goes on. ‘The more I think about Ball-Bengt up there in the tree, the more it all feels like some sort of pagan invocation.’
‘I’ve been feeling the same,’ Malin says. ‘Well, it remains to be seen if there are any links to Valhalla or anything else.’
Malin rings the doorbell of Rebecka Stenlundh’s flat. She lives on the second floor of a yellow-brick block in the hills just south of Jonkoping.
The view from the flat must be wonderful, and in the summer the area must be lush with the green of all the birch trees. Even the garages a little way down towards the road look attractive, with orange-painted doors, surrounded by well-maintained hedges.
The place where Rebecka Stenlundh lives is neither one thing nor the other. Not lovely, but nice enough, a
Not a dumping-ground for social service cases and immigrants. The sort of place where people live out their lives unobserved, largely unnoticed and unwanted, but still well thought of. A life on the fault-line, close to the
