‘Us? A gun? Where would we have got that from?’
Innocent as lambs.
‘Are you interested in the ?sir belief-system?’ Zeke asks.
And they both look nonplussed. Stupid, or guilty, impossible to tell which.
‘Interested in what?’
‘The ?sir belief-system.’
‘What the fuck’s that?’ Jimmy Kalmvik says. ‘Believing in
Full-blown chauvinist pigs, when they’re scarcely out of short trousers. Noisy, rowdy. But dangerous?
‘Torturing cats? So he blabbed, Unning,’ Jimmy Kalmvik says. ‘The little shit. He’s so fucking useless.’
Zeke leans over to him, his eyes looking like a snake’s. Malin knows what that looks like. She hears his voice, its gruffness as cold as the night approaching outside the windows.
‘If you touch Fredrik Unning I will personally see to it that you have to eat your own entrails. Shit and all. Just so you know.’
33
‘Yes, she can stay over.’
Janne’s text arrives at 20.15. Malin is tired, on her way home in the car from the gym at work, obliged to clear her head after a day full of too much human crap.
They went back to the station after talking to Ljungsbro’s bullies, and in the passenger seat beside Zeke she summarised the situation to herself.
Bengt Andersson is teased and bullied and possibly more than that by testosterone-charged little bastards. We’ll have to talk to their parents tomorrow. See where it comes from. Nothing to get them on so far. The offences against Bengt Andersson that they admitted to stopped being chargeable with his death, and may have been youthful mischief as much as anything else.
The shots through the living-room window.
?sir nutters out on the plain. The murder apparently carried out as a heathen ritual.
And then the Murvall family casting its large shadow across the whole investigation. Weapons in a gun cabinet.
Maria Murvall silent and mute, raped. By whom? Bengt?
Malin wanted to answer no to that question. But knew that she couldn’t yet close any doors in any direction, to any room. Instead she had to try to get an overview of something impossible to get an overview of. Listen to the voices of the investigation.
What else was still to emerge from the darkness of the plain, the forests?
‘Yes…’
She sees the first word of the text.
Her concentration leaves the road for a few moments.
Yes.
We made that promise to each other once, Janne, but we didn’t manage to find a way through what lay before us. How over-confident can you get?
Malin parks and hurries up to the flat. She fries a couple of eggs, sinks into the sofa and turns on the television. She gets stuck on a programme about some excitable Americans competing to build the most perfect motorbike.
The programme cheers her up in an uncomplicated way, and after a couple of advertising breaks she realises why.
Janne could easily be one of those Americans, happy beyond belief to let go of routine, of his memories, and just devote himself to his real passion.
She sees the bottle of tequila on the table.
How did that get there?
You put it there, Malin, when you cleared the plate and the remains of your eggs.
Amber liquid.
Shall I have a bit?
No.
The motorbike programme is over.
Then the doorbell rings and Malin thinks it must be Daniel Hogfeldt, transgressing the final boundary and turning up unannounced, like they were officially in a relationship.
Hardly, Daniel. But maybe.
Malin goes out into the hall and pulls open the door without checking through the peephole. ‘Daniel, you bastard…’
No.
Not Daniel.
Instead a man with blue-black eyes, a smell of engine oil, grease and sweat and aftershave. Burning eyes. They are screaming, almost in a fury, at her.
He stands outside the door. Malin looks into him: anger, despair, violence? He’s so much bigger than he was in the kitchen. What the hell is he doing here? Zeke, you should be here now. Does he want to come in?
Her stomach clenches, she feels scared, in a fraction of a second she starts to tremble, invisibly. His eyes. The door, have to shut the door, nothing puppyish about this man’s determination.
She slams the door, but no, a heavy black boot in the gap, a fucking boot. Hit it, kick it, stamp on it, but the steel toe-cap makes her stockinged feet useless, and the naked pain is hers instead.
He’s strong. He puts his hands in the gap and starts to push the door open.
No idea to try and stop him.
Maria Murvall. Is the same thing happening to me?
Scared.
A thought more than a feeling now.
Adam Murvall.
Did you hurt your sister? Is that where the look in your eyes comes from? Is that why you got so angry today?
Nothing but fear. Force it aside.
Where’s my jacket, with my pistol? But he’s just staring at me, smiling, leering, and then he stares again, confused, pulls his foot back, doesn’t force his way in, pulls his hands back, turns and leaves as quickly as he must have come.
Shit.
Her hands are shaking, her body twitchy with adrenalin, her heart racing.
Malin looks out into the stairwell. There’s a note on the stone steps, shaky handwriting:
As if all this were a steak, or dough, or a tired old man. Then a vague threat. You should…
Now Malin feels it again, the fear, it bubbles up as the adrenalin runs out of her body and fear becomes terror, and fast, shallow breathing takes over.
How the hell could he be so fucking stupid?
The man outside the door.
He could have taken me, just like that. Broken me.
I was alone.
She goes back to the sofa. Sinks down. Resists the temptation to drink tequila. Five minutes pass, ten, maybe half an hour before she pulls herself together and calls Zeke.
‘He’s just been here.’
