‘Never,’ Malin says.
Zeke nods his clean-shaven head. Perched on an unusually long neck, his skull doesn’t seem to belong to his short, sinewy body. His skin is stretched over his cheekbones.
Malin can’t see his eyes from where she’s sitting. But she trusts her memory of them.
She knows those eyes. Knows that they sit deep in his cranium, and are usually calm. In their dull grey-green colour there is always a polished, almost bottomless light that is harsh and gentle at the same time.
At forty-five, he’s got a lot of the calmness that experience brings, although the years have somehow made him more restless, implacable, or, as he said to her after a few too many beers and shorts at the Christmas party: ‘It’s us against them, Malin. Sometimes, no matter how sad it sounds, we have to use their methods. That’s the only language a certain type of man understands.’ He said it without bitterness or satisfaction, it was simply a statement.
Zeke’s restlessness isn’t visible, but she can feel it. What on earth must he go through at Martin’s games?
‘… a bloody awful sight.’
It had taken eleven minutes from when Zeke had phoned for him to pick her up outside her flat. His blunt assertion made her shiver even more, at the same time making her feel strangely elated, against her will.
Linkoping through the windscreen.
The avaricious city, in spite of its size, the veneer over its history strangely thin.
What had once been a factory city and a marketplace for farmers soon became a university city, the factories largely shut down, the residents cajoled into education, into colleges, into the university, and soon the most self- aware city in the country was rising from the plains, with the most remarkable inhabitants in the country.
Linkoping.
The city as though born in the 1940s, the city as an insecure academic with a past that must be swept under the carpet at all costs. With people who want to be better than they are, and put on dresses and suits to go and drink coffee in the city centre on Saturdays.
Linkoping.
An excellent city to get ill in.
Or, even better, to get burned in.
The University Hospital is home to the pre-eminent burns unit in the country. Malin was there once, in connection with a case, dressed in white from head to toe. The conscious patients were screaming or moaning, the tranquillised dreaming of not having to wake up.
Linkoping.
Domain of flyboys. The home of the aeronautics industry. Steel crows croaking in the air: the Flying Barrel, Draken, Viggen, Jas. It all bubbles up and spills over and suddenly the newly wealthy are strolling the streets, their technology companies sold to the Americans.
Then there are the surrounding plains and forests. Home to all those whose genes cannot accommodate rapid change, those whose coding protests, refuses. Those who feel that they never have their feet on firm ground.
Janne. Are you one of them?
Is it that our coding doesn’t work at the same pace?
Indians of the primal forests. People in communities like Ukna, Nykil and Ledberg. You can see the natives in tracksuit bottoms and clogs alongside the doctors and engineers and test pilots out at Ikea on Saturdays. People forced to live side by side. But if their coding objects? If loving your neighbour is impossible? In the fracture between then and now, between here and there, inside and outside, sometimes violence is born as the only option.
They drive past Skaggetorp.
Happy white houses from the building boom of the sixties, around a deserted centre, their rented apartments now housing people from far away. People who know how it feels when your uniformed torturers knock on the door at night, who have heard machetes whine through the air just as dawn is waking the jungle, people who are not exactly the toast of the Immigration Office.
‘Do we want to go through Vreta Kloster, or shall we take the Ledberg road?’
‘This isn’t really my territory,’ Malin replies. ‘But it should be straight on, I think. So, how was the match last night?’
‘Don’t… Those red seats there are torture on the backside.’
Zeke drives past the turning for the Ledberg road and carries on towards Vreta Kloster.
Off to the east Lake Roxen opens out. Covered in ice, like a misplaced glacier, and ahead of them, beyond the lake, the villas on Vreta Kloster’s millionaires’ row clinging to the slope rising from the reeds. The locks on the Gota Canal alongside, waiting for the summer’s hobby sailors and canal boats full of rich American tourists.
The clock on the dashboard: 7.22.
A bloody awful sight.
She wants to tell Zeke to put his foot down, but stays quiet, closing her eyes instead.
By this time people have usually started to arrive at the station, and she would be saying good morning to the others in the Investigation Section of Linkoping’s Crime Unit from her place behind her desk in the open-plan office. She could work out their mood, identify precisely which tone would apply that day. She would think, Good morning, Borje Svard. You’ve been up and walked your dogs; it’s never too cold to show your Alsatians a bit of love, is it? There’s dog hair on your sweater, on your jacket, in your own ever-thinning hair. Your dogs’ barks are like voices to you. And how do you cope, really? What must it be like to see someone you love suffer the way your wife suffers every day?
Good morning, Johan Jakobsson. Trouble getting the kids to bed last night? Or are they ill? There’s a winter vomiting bug going around. Have you been up cleaning sick all night, you and your wife? Or did you experience the simple joy of children falling asleep early and happy? Is your wife dropping them off today, and you picking them up? You’re on time, you’re always on time, Johan, even if there’s never enough time. And the worry, Johan, I can see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice, it never goes. I know what it means because I’ve got it as well.
Good morning, boss. And how is Inspector Sven Sjoman today? Be careful. That stomach is far too big, in quite the wrong way. A heart-attack stomach, as the doctors at the University Hospital say. A widow-making stomach, as they joke in the staffroom of the intensive care unit before bypass operations. Don’t look at me in that beseeching way, Sven; you know I always do my best. Be careful. I need everyone who believes in me to stay believing, because it’s so easy to have doubts, even if our driving force is far greater than we might think. And then his words, advice:
Good morning, Karim Akbar. You know that even the youngest, most media-friendly police chief in the country needs to stay on the right side of us ground troops? You glide through the room in your well-pressed, shiny Italian suits and it’s always impossible to guess which way you’ll go. You never talk about
‘Malin, what are you thinking? You look like you’re miles away.’
Now Zeke’s words are the crack of a whip and Malin is yanked back from her game, back to the car, back to their progress towards the incident, towards the violence that exists in the cracks, back to the winter-bitten landscape.
‘Nothing,’ she replies. ‘I was just thinking about how nice and warm it must be in the station right now.’
‘You’ve got this cold weather on the brain, Malin.’
‘How could I not get it on the brain?’
‘If you harden yourself against it, it’ll go away.’
‘The cold?’
‘No, thinking about it.’
They pass Sjovik’s fruit farm. Malin points through the window, towards the frost-covered greenhouses. ‘Now, over there,’ she says, ‘you can buy tulips in spring. Tulips in every colour you can think of.’
