boundary of dysfunction. Malin is just as surprised every time she finds herself in a place like this, by the fact that they still exist. The quiet happiness of the old Social-Democratic ‘people’s home’. Two point three swings and slides per child.
No answer.
It is just after nine o’clock; perhaps they should have called and announced their arrival, but does she even know about what happened to her brother?
‘No, we’ll just head over there.’ Zeke’s words.
‘We might be bringing bad news.’
‘Wasn’t she told before his name was made public?’
‘No one knew he had a sister then, and it’s a long time since the papers showed that level of consideration.’
Malin rings the bell again.
The rattle of locks on the neighbour’s door.
An old woman’s face, friendly, smiling. ‘Are you looking for Rebecka?’
‘Yes, we’re from Linkoping Police,’ Malin says, and Zeke holds up his ID.
‘From the police? Goodness.’ The old woman screws up her eyes in alarm. ‘I hope she isn’t involved in any unpleasantness? I can’t imagine that she is.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Zeke says in his gentlest voice. ‘We’d just like to talk to her.’
‘She works down in the ICA supermarket. Try there. She’s the manageress. You’ve never seen a nicer ICA shop. I can promise you that. And you should see her son. You won’t meet a nicer boy. He’s always helping me with one thing or another.’
Just as they are heading towards the automatic doors of the ICA shop, Zeke’s phone rings.
Malin stops beside him, listens to him talk, sees him frown.
‘Yes, okay, so it checks out, then?’
Zeke hangs up.
‘They’ve found that business with the axe in the archive,’ he says. ‘What the old man told you seems about right. Lotta, Rebecka, saw it all. She was eight years old at the time.’
Vegetables and fruit in neat rows, and a smell of food that makes Malin hungry. Signs with beautiful lettering, every corner well-lit, everything announcing:
The old woman was right, Malin thinks. Nothing shabby or slapdash, just an apparent desire to give people something pleasant in their everyday lives. Someone wanting to make a bit of extra effort for other people. Showing a bit of consideration must surely be good for business. Anyone would want to return to this shop.
A middle-aged woman at the till, plump, with blonde, tightly permed hair.
Rebecka?
Zeke’s voice: ‘Excuse me, we’re looking for Rebecka Stenlundh.’
‘The boss. Try over at the butcher’s counter. She’s marking up the meat.’
Over at the butcher’s counter a thin woman is crouched down, her dark hair in a net, her back bowed under a white coat with the red ICA logo.
It looks like she’s hiding behind that coat, Malin thinks, as if someone’s going to attack her from behind, as if the whole world wishes her ill and you can never be too careful.
‘Rebecka Stenlundh?’
The woman spins round on her wooden sandals. A pleasant face: gentle features, brown eyes with a thousand friendly nuances, cheeks with skin that radiates health and a light suntan.
Rebecka Stenlundh looks at them.
Then one of her eyebrows twitches, and her eyes shine bright and clear.
‘I’ve been expecting you,’ she says.
22
‘Do you think he’s expecting us?’
Johan Jakobsson leaves the words hanging limply in the air as they pull into the drive.
‘Bound to be,’ Borje Svard says, flaring his nostrils in a way that makes the brown hairs of his moustache vibrate. ‘He knows we’re coming.’
Three grey stone buildings in the middle of the Ostgota plain, a few kilometres outside a sleepy Maspelosa. The buildings seem almost suffocated by the snow piled in drifts against the already inadequate windows. The thatched roofs are pressed down by the weight of all the white. There are lights in the building to the left. A newly built garage, with shrubs planted all round it, has been squeezed in between two large oaks.
Only one problem: Maspelosa never wakes up, Johan thinks.
A few farms, some detached houses built in the fifties, a few council houses scattered across the open landscape: one of those settlements on the plain that life seems to have left behind.
They stop, get out, knock.
From the building opposite comes the sound of mooing. Then the sound of something banging on metal. Borje turns round.
The low, crooked door opens.
A head almost entirely covered in hair peers out of the darkness inside.
‘And who the hell are you?’
The beard shaggy, seeming to cover the whole of his face. But his blue eyes are as sharp as his nose.
‘Johan Jakobsson and Borje Svard, Linkoping Police. Can we come in? I presume you’re Rickard Skoglof.’
The man nods. ‘ID first.’
They hunt through their pockets, have to take off their gloves and undo their coats to find their ID.
‘Happy now?’ Borje asks.
Rickard Skoglof gestures with one hand as he pushes the door open with the other.
‘We’re born with the gift. It arrives in our flesh the moment we arrive in this dimension.’ Rickard Skoglof’s voice is as clear as ice.
Johan rubs his eyes and looks round the kitchen. Low ceiling. The draining-board full of dirty plates, pizza boxes. Pictures of Stonehenge on the walls, Old Norse symbols, rune-stones. And Skoglof’s clothes: obviously home-made trousers of black-dyed canvas and an even blacker kaftan-like affair hanging loosely over a fat stomach.
‘Gift?’
Johan can hear how sceptical Borje sounds.
‘Yes, the power to see, to influence.’
‘Soothsaying?’
The house is cold. An old eighteenth-century farmhouse that Rickard Skoglof has renovated himself: ‘Got it cheap, but it’s bloody draughty.’
‘Soothsaying is the word for it. But you have to be careful about using the power. It takes as much life as it gives.’
‘So why a website about your sooth?’
‘My soothsaying. In our culture we’ve lost track of our roots. But I have comrades.’
Rickard Skoglof crouches down and goes into the next room. They follow him.
A worn sofa against one wall, and a huge computer screen, switched off, set up on a shiny desk with a glass top, two whirring hard drives on the floor, a modern black leather office chair behind the desk.
‘Comrades?’
‘Some people who are interested in soothsaying and in our Old Norse forebears.’
‘And you have meetings?’
‘A few times a year. Most of the time we communicate on discussion forums and by email.’
‘How many of you are there?’
Rickard Skoglof sighs. He stops and looks at them. ‘If you want to carry on talking you’ll have to come out to
