‘Blasvadret is a Bermuda triangle,’ Zeke says. ‘Anything can happen here.’
One single street.
Blasstigen, ‘windy way’.
Five red-painted wooden houses on one side, garages and workshops on the other, one breezeblock building with drawn blinds. Another larger whitewashed house further on at the end of the road, almost invisible through the swirling snow.
The houses in Blasvadret that aren’t inhabited by the Murvall family are silent, their owners presumably at work. The clock on the dashboard says 11.30, almost lunchtime, and Malin feels her stomach rumble.
Food, please, not coffee.
The Murvall brothers live next to each other. The last two wooden houses and the breezeblock building are theirs, the white house their mother’s. The windows of the wooden houses are dark, and car wrecks are randomly strewn about the plots, half covered by snow and ice. But there are lights on behind the blinds of the brick building. A broken, bowed, black iron-railing rocks in the wind. The workshop opposite has heavy, rusty metal doors, and in front of it stands an old green Range Rover.
Zeke stops the car.
‘Adam’s house,’ Zeke says.
‘Okay, let’s see if he’s at home.’
They do up their jackets, get out. More wrecked cars. But not like Janne’s. These are wrecked beyond salvation; no loving hand will ever try to fix them up. In the drive is a green Skoda pick-up. Zeke peers at the back, running his glove through the snow, shakes his head.
The wind is howling beyond words, great angry gusts, with hidden little bursts of Arctic chill that easily and nonchalantly push through the fabric of their jackets, the wool of their jumpers.
Sand on the concrete steps. The bell doesn’t work and Zeke bangs on the door, but the house is silent.
Malin looks in through the green glass of the door. Vague shapes of a hallway, children’s clothes, toys, a gun cabinet, mess.
‘No one at home.’
‘Probably at work at this time of day,’ Malin says.
Zeke nods. ‘Maybe they’ve gone straight.’
‘It’s odd,’ Malin says, ‘do you see how the houses seem to belong together somehow?’
‘They’re one and the same,’ Zeke says. ‘Not physically, but if houses have souls, then these share one.’
‘Let’s go to the mother’s house.’
Even though the white wooden villa is just seventy-five metres down the road, it’s impossible to make out anything but the outline, and the white wood that occasionally shimmers through the surrounding whiteness.
They walk towards the house.
As they get close the gusts of snow and chilly haze disperse and they see that the whole garden is full of mature apple trees. Their branches sway darkly in the wind, and Malin breathes in through her nose, closing her eyes briefly and trying to pick up the smell of apple blossom and fruit that must be here in spring and autumn.
But this world is scentless.
She opens her eyes.
The building’s facade has settled and the crooked wood seems tired, yet somehow still defiant. Light is streaming through the windows.
‘Looks like Mum’s home,’ Zeke says.
‘Yes,’ Malin says, but before she can say more she is interrupted.
A man, tall and with at least a week’s worth of stubble around a well-defined mouth. He’s dressed in green overalls, and has opened the door of the white house. The man is standing on the porch and staring askance at them.
‘And who the fuck are you two? If you take another step on this property I’ll get my shotgun and blow your brains out.’
‘Welcome to Blasvadret,’ Zeke says with an expectant smile.
‘We’re from the police.’
Malin holds up her ID as they approach the man on the porch.
‘Can we come in?’
And now she sees them.
All the people, the family watching them through the windows of the white house: tired women, children of various ages, a woman in a shawl with deep-set black eyes, a sharp nose and thin white hair draped over the shiny skin of her cheeks. Malin looks at the faces, the half bodies behind the windows, and thinks that it’s as if the bits of these people that she can’t see had grown together. That this family’s thighs, knees, shins and feet were bundled together, inseparable, different, yet somehow superior.
‘What do you want with us?’ The man on the porch throws the words at them.
‘And who do we have the honour of talking to?’
Zeke’s bluntness seems to have an effect.
‘Elias Murvall.’
‘Okay, Elias, let us in. Don’t leave us standing out here in the cold.’
‘We don’t let anyone in.’
From the house comes a sharp female voice, the mark of someone used to getting her own way.
‘Let the police in, now, boy.’
Elias Murvall steps aside, follows them into the hall, where they are hit by the smell of burned cabbage.
‘And you can take your shoes off.’ The woman’s voice again.
The hall is full of winter coats, garishly coloured children’s jackets, cheap padded jackets, an army raincoat. Ahead of her Malin can see a living room: period furniture on Wilton rugs, reproductions of Johan Krouthen’s sun- drenched Ostgota meadows. A misplaced computer screen of the latest, thinnest design.
Malin pulls off her Caterpillar boots, feeling exposed in her bare socks among these people.
The kitchen.
Around an enormous table laid for lunch in the middle of the room sits what must be the whole Murvall family, silent and expectant, more people than she saw in the windows, no longer grown together. Malin counts three women with small children, babies in their arms, children of various ages on other chairs; shouldn’t some of them be at school? Home schooling? Or are they still too young?
Two more men in the room, one with a neatly trimmed beard, the other clean-shaven. They’re dressed in the same sort of overalls as Elias who let them in, and they have the same powerful appearance. The clean-shaven one, who looks youngest, must be Adam. He is knocking a napkin on the table as if the tabletop were a door, his eyes such a dark blue that they are almost black like his mother’s. The middle brother, Jakob, thinning hair, sitting in front of the stove, his gut showing through his overalls, looks at them with hazy eyes, as if he’s encountered thousands of police officers who wanted something from him, all of whom he’s told to go to hell.
The mother is standing by the stove. The short, thin old woman is dressed in a red skirt and grey cardigan. She turns towards Malin.
‘On Wednesdays my family gets cabbage bake.’
‘Nice,’ Zeke says.
‘What do you know about that?’ the mother says. ‘Have you ever tasted my cabbage bake?’
At the same time she points with one hand at Elias, gesturing as if to say, Sit down at the table. Now!
Several of the children lose patience, jump down from their chairs and run out of the kitchen into the living room, then up the stairs.
‘Well?’ The old woman stares at Malin, then at Zeke.
Zeke doesn’t hesitate, in fact he even smiles slightly as he tosses the words into the room: ‘We’re here on account of the murder of a Bengt Andersson. He was one of the people questioned in connection with the rape of your daughter, Maria Murvall.’
And Malin, in spite of the incident the words refer to, feels a glow inside. This is what it should be like. Zeke is entirely unbowed, heads straight to the heart of the hornets’ nest. Commands respect. I forget sometimes, but I know why I admire him.
No one round the table moves.
