she is now?’
Silence on the line.
‘Oh, dear Lord,’ Ebba Nilsson eventually says.
‘Sorry?’
Zeke takes his eyes off the road, looks at Malin.
‘You were about to say something?’
‘Maria Murvall was raped up in the woods by Lake Hultsjon a few years ago. Didn’t you know?’
Rita Santesson: ‘Nothing that I want to go into.’
Maria.
Murvall.
The name, it was familiar.
The Motala Police case. I remember now. I should have made the connection.
Maria Murvall.
Was she the only one who cared, Bengt?
Even your sister turned her back on you.
The logic of emotions.
A swirl of snow blows across the road.
Was she the only one who cared, Bengt?
And she was raped.
25
What are you doing in the forest all on your own?
This late, little girl?
No mushrooms at this time of year, and too late for berries.
Dusk is falling.
Tree trunks, undergrowth, branches, treetops, leaves, moss and worms. They’re all getting ready for the most intimate abuse.
Child-killers. Rapists. Is it one man? Or several? A woman, women?
They creep up on you as you walk through the forest, whistling. The eyes. They see you. But you don’t see them.
Or are they waiting further on, the eyes?
Darkness is falling fast now, but you aren’t scared, you could walk this track with your eyes blindfolded, getting your bearings by smell alone.
The snakes, spiders, everything that decays.
An elk?
A deer?
You turn round, still, silence falls over the forest.
Walk on. Your car is waiting by the road; soon you’ll see Hultsjon lazing in the last of the evening light.
Then everything gets dark.
Footsteps on the track behind you.
Someone pulling your legs from under you, pressing you down on to the damp ground, hot and sweet breath on your neck. So many hands, so much force.
It doesn’t matter what you do. Snake-fingers, spider-legs, they eat through your clothes, the black roots of the trees stifle your screams, tying you for ever to the silence of the earth.
The worms crawl up the inside of your thighs, sticking out their claws, tearing your skin, your insides.
How coarse, how hard is a tree trunk?
Flesh and skin and blood. How hard?
No.
Not like that.
No one hears your screams in the black vegetation. And if they heard your screams, would they come?
No one is listening.
There is no salvation.
Only the damp, the cold and the pain, the relentless harshness that burns in you, tearing apart everything that is you.
For ever silent.
Sleep, dream, wake.
The sweet breath in the air you are breathing in the forest night. Naked body, bleeding body, doomed to wander the edge of the forest around Hultsjon.
You must have walked a long way.
You were breathing. The night-chill fled in panic when you crept out on to the road. The car headlights.
You had walked so far.
The lights grow, blind, corrode.
Is it death that is coming? Evil?
Again?
It came yesterday, didn’t it, with quick steps it ran up, from where it lay hidden behind scarred bushes.
26
‘Maria Murvall.’
Zeke rubs his fingers against the steering-wheel.
‘I knew I’d heard the name before. Shit. Me and names. She was the girl who was raped up by Hultsjon four years ago. A really nasty case.’
‘Motala Police.’
‘Right on the boundary, so they took it. They found her wandering about on a road almost ten kilometres from where it happened. Some truck-driver taking a load of shingle to a building site up in Tjallmo found her. She’d been torn to shreds, badly beaten as well.’
‘And they never caught him.’
‘No. I think it even got on to
Malin shuts her eyes. Listens to the sound of the engine.
A man hanging in a tree.
His concerned social worker raped four years ago. Wandering the forest.
Cornerhouse-Kalle. The debauched, mad father.
And it all keeps popping up in the investigation, all mixed up, yet it still fits together, somehow.
Coincidence?
Try the theory out on Zeke.
‘Bengt Andersson. He must have come up during that investigation. If she really did care as much about him as everyone says.’
‘Must have done,’ Zeke says, pointing at a car they are overtaking. ‘I’ve been thinking about getting one of those Seats. They’re owned by Volkswagen these days.’
I know, Zeke, Malin thinks. Janne must have told me ten times or more when he got on to the subject of his cars.
‘Isn’t the car you’ve got now good enough?’
