Stockholm and the Police Academy, when Janne moved to Bosnia: If I become really good at getting rid of evil, then goodness will come to me.
Surely it could be as simple as that?
Then love might be possible again. Mightn’t it?
On her way out of the flat Malin feels the pistol pressing against her ribcage. She carefully opens the door to Tove’s bedroom. She can make out the walls in the darkness, the rows of books on the shelves, can sense Tove’s oddly proportioned teenage body under the turquoise duvet. Tove sleeps almost soundlessly, has done ever since she was two. Before that her sleep was disturbed, she used to wake several times a night, but then it was as if she realised that silence and calm were necessary, at least at night, as if the two-year-old instinctively knew that a person needs to keep the night free for dreams.
Malin leaves the flat.
Goes down the three flights of stairs to the door of the building. With every step she feels the cold come closer. It’s practically below zero in the stairwell.
Please let the car start. It’s almost cold enough to freeze the petrol to ice.
She pauses at the door. The chill mist is drifting in waves through the streetlamps’ cones of light. She wants to run back upstairs, go into the apartment, tear off her clothes and creep back into bed. Then it comes again, her longing for Police Headquarters. So: pull the door open, run to the car, fumble with the key, open the door, throw yourself in, start the engine and drive off.
The cold takes a stranglehold when she walks out; she imagines she can hear the hairs in her nose crackle with every breath, and feels her tear-ducts grow treacly, but she can still read the inscription above one of the side doors of St Lars: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’.
Where’s the car? The silver Volvo, a 2004 model, is in its place, opposite the St Lars Gallery.
Padded, bulky arms.
With difficulty Malin gets her hand into the pocket where she thinks the car keys are. No keys. The next pocket, then the next. Damn. She must have left them upstairs. Then she remembers: they’re in the front pocket of her jeans.
Her stiff fingers ache as she thrusts them into the pocket. But the keys are there.
Open now, bloody door. The ice has somehow spared the keyhole and soon Malin is sitting in the driver’s seat swearing: about the cold, about an engine that merely splutters and refuses to start.
She tries again and again.
But the car refuses.
Malin gets out. Thinks: I have to take the bus, which way does it go?
Damn, it’s cold, fucking bloody car-fucker, then her mobile rings.
A clawed hand on the angry plastic gadget. She can’t be bothered to see who it is.
‘Hello, Malin Fors.’
‘It’s Zeke.’
‘My fucking car won’t start.’
‘Calm down, Malin. Calm down. Just listen. Something big’s happened. I’ll tell you when I see you. Be with you in ten minutes.’
Zeke’s words hang in the air. From his tone of voice Malin can hear that something serious has indeed happened, that the coldest winter in living memory just got a few degrees less forgiving, that the cold has just shown its true face.
2
German choral music blasts through the car as Zacharius ‘Zeke’ Martinsson keeps a firm grip on the wheel and drives past the detached houses on the outskirts of Hjulsterbro. Through the side window he glimpses the red and green gables of the rows of generously proportioned houses. The painted wood is covered with frost and the trees that have grown tall in the thirty years since the houses were built look emaciated and malnourished in the cold. But, even so, the whole area looks unusually cosy and well-cared-for; it looks prosperous.
The doctors’ ghetto, Zeke thinks. That’s how the area is known in town. And it is undeniably popular among the doctors at the hospital. Opposite, on the other side of the main Sturefors road, on the far side of a car park, are the squat white blocks of flats in Ekholmen, home to thousands of immigrants and Swedes at the bottom of the pecking order.
Malin sounded tired, but not newly woken. Perhaps she slept badly. Maybe I should ask if anything particular has happened? No, best let it be. She only gets cross if you ask how she is. Zeke tries to keep his mind off what they are on their way to. Doesn’t even want to know what it’s going to look like. They’ll see soon enough, but the boys in the patrol car sounded seriously shaken, and no wonder, if it was as bad as they said. He’s got good at this over the years, delaying, postponing the crap even if it sometimes hits him hard.
Johannelund.
The boys’ league football pitches down by the Stangan River are covered with snow. Martin used to play there for the Saab team before he decided to concentrate full-time on ice hockey. I’ve never been much of a football dad, Zeke thinks, and now, now things are starting to go really well for the boy, I hardly have the energy to get to his matches. Last night was terrible. Even though they beat Farjestad 4-3. No matter how I try, I just can’t love that game, its overblown toughness.
Love, Zeke thinks, is either there or it isn’t. Like my love of choral music.
They practise two evenings a week, Da Capo, the choir he’s been a member of since he dared himself to go almost ten years ago. Concerts maybe once a month, a trip to some festival once a year.
Zeke likes the undemanding nature of his relationships within the choir; no one cares what anyone else does the rest of the time, they meet, they talk and then they sing. Sometimes, when he’s standing with the others, surrounded by song in a bright church hall, he imagines that it might really be possible to belong to something, to be part of something bigger than his own insignificant self. As if there were a simplicity and self-evident joy to the singing that couldn’t possibly contain anything evil.
Because it’s a question of holding evil at bay, as best you can.
On their way towards evil now. That much is clear.
The Folkungavallen Stadium. The next rung in the ball-game ladder. The football stadium was run down, ripe for redevelopment. The Linkoping women’s team is one of the best in the country, a group of women bought for the purpose, including a lot of national players, but who have never succeeded in winning over the town’s inhabitants. Then the swimming pool. The new buildings beside the multistorey. He turns into Hamngatan, past the big shops, Hemkop and ahlens, and then he can see Malin standing there shivering outside her door. Why isn’t she waiting inside?
She is huddled but still seems somehow indefatigable as she stands with her arms round her body, her whole being sort of anchored to the ground in spite of the cold, in the certainty that this is the start of another day where she can devote herself to what she’s best suited to.
And she really is suited to it, to police work. If I’d done anything wrong, I wouldn’t want her after me, Zeke thinks, and he whispers to himself, ‘Right, Malin, fuck it, what’s today got in store for us then?’
The choral music turned down to a minimum. One hundred whispering voices in the car.
What can a human voice tell us? Malin thinks.
Zeke’s voice has a hoarseness like no other Malin has ever heard, a tempered, demanding tone that vanishes when he sings, but which became even more pronounced when he just told her what had happened:
‘Apparently it’s a bloody awful sight,’ he says, the hoarseness making his words sharper, ‘according to the boys in the car when they called in. But when is it ever anything else?’
Zeke is sitting beside her, behind the wheel of his Volvo, his eyes fixed on the slippery road ahead.
Eyes.
We depend on them. Ninety per cent of the impressions that make up our image of the world around us come from our eyes. What we can’t see almost doesn’t exist. Anything can be hidden away in a cupboard and it’s gone. Problem solved, just like that.
