message?’
‘I don’t know anything about any shots through any damn windows. I’m not saying anything else now. You can keep on all night. From now on I’m saying nothing.’
‘Like your sister?’
‘What do you know about my sister?’
‘I know she was kind-hearted. Everyone says so.’
The muscles of Adam Murvall’s face relax slightly.
‘You know things don’t look good for you, don’t you? Threatening an officer, resisting arrest, obstructing an investigation. With your background, those are pretty serious charges.’
‘I didn’t threaten anyone. I was just handing over a letter.’
‘I know how angry you can get, Adam. Were you angry with that repulsive fat Bengt? The man who raped your sister? The man who ruined her kind heart? Well? Adam? Did you hang-’
‘I should have.’
‘So you-’
‘You think you know it all.’
‘What is it I don’t know?’
‘Go to hell.’ Adam Murvall whispers the words, before he slowly puts his finger in front of his mouth.
Sven turns off the tape recorder, gets up. He walks out of the room, leaving Adam Murvall alone behind him. He sits improbably straight-backed, as if his spine were one single beam made of steel, impossible to bend.
‘What do you think?’ Sven Sjoman looks round at them.
Karin Akbar watchful by the door.
‘There’s something that doesn’t fit,’ Malin says. ‘Something.’ But her brain can’t work out what.
‘He’s not denying it,’ Johan Jakobsson says.
‘They’re hard men,’ Zeke says. ‘Deny, admit? Never, either one would be giving in. It just isn’t an option for people like them.’
‘Sven’s decided to hold him. We’ll stick him in our coldest cell tonight, see if that softens him up,’ Karim says, and the group falls silent; no one knows if he’s serious or just joking.
‘That was a joke,’ he says. ‘What did you think? That I was going to turn this station into some Kurdish hellhole?’
Karim laughs. The others smile.
The clock on the viewing-room wall. The black hands indicate twenty past eleven.
‘I think,’ Malin says, ‘that it might be worth talking to the whole Murvall family. That’s what I think. Tomorrow.’
‘We can hold him for a week. The brothers and mother are due in tomorrow. We can bring the wives in as well.’
Behind the soundproofed glass Malin watches as two uniformed custody officers lead Adam Murvall out of the interview room, off to a cell in the detention unit.
The sky is crystal clear.
The Milky Way is smiling at humanity; the far-travelled light is dim yet simultaneously comforting and warm.
Malin is standing with Zeke in the car park, beside the black Mercedes belonging to Karim Akbar.
Almost midnight.
He is smoking one of his rare cigarettes. His fingers look like they’re turning blue with the cold, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.
‘You should take it a bit easier, Fors.’
The light from the stars fades.
‘A bit easier with what?’
‘With everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘Just come down a gear or two, slow down.’
Malin stands still, waiting for the warmth of the moment to reappear, but it’s taking its time, it’s never going to come.
Zeke puts out his cigarette, hunts for his car keys.
‘Do you want a lift?’
‘No, I’ll walk,’ Malin says. ‘I need a bit of fresh air.’
Adam Murvall lies on his bunk in the police station, the blanket pulled round his muscular frame, and thinks of the words Blackie always used to say, over and over again like a mantra, when he used to sit drunk in his wheelchair in the kitchen.
Blackie gave in. And he never even realised.
Then Adam Murvall thinks of Mother, of how she can rely on him like he has always been able to rely on her. She has somehow always stood like a wall between them and all the bastards.
Adam isn’t the sort who’d talk, and the children, they must be asleep by now, even if it took Anna a long time to get them off.
Adam Murvall sees seven-year-old Anneli’s thin ribcage rise and fall, he sees three-year-old Tobias’s wavy blond hair against a sheet with its pattern of blue sailing-boats, and he sees the little eight-month-old lad on his back in his cot. Then Adam falls asleep, dreaming about a dog standing outside a door in the middle of winter. It’s a crystal-clear night and the dog is barking so loudly that the rusty nails holding the door together shake. And Adam dreams that he is sitting at a nicely laid table in the kitchen of a big white house, and that a hand covered in the finest little veins pulls a leg off one of the roast chickens on the table, and how the same hand throws the leg out through the window to the dog.
He is still standing in the snow and barking.
The chicken leg makes him quiet.
Then the barking starts again.
A voice now: Let me in.
Don’t leave me out here.
I’m freezing.
36
It is no bad dream.
It is just how it is.
Janne is walking up and down in the living room. The young boys from the refugee camp in Kigali came to him again tonight, just now. They were carrying their hacked-off feet on their upturned hands, approaching his bed with them like bloody trophies. The dark red blood dripped on to his sheets, steaming and smelling freshly of iron.
He woke up in a soaking wet bed.
Sweat.
As usual.
It’s as if his body remembers the humid nights in the jungle and is adapting itself to the memory rather than the present.
He creeps upstairs and peers into Tove’s room. She’s asleep inside, safe in the warm.
Markus is asleep in the guest room. He seems an okay kid, from what Janne could tell during their short meal, before Tove and Markus disappeared into Tove’s room.
He hadn’t said anything to Malin about Markus staying over. She didn’t seem to know, though he would always be able to say that he assumed she did. She would protest, but that’s okay, Janne thinks, as he creeps back downstairs again. Better that we keep an eye on them than the alternative, so they don’t have to sneak into his
