Gota Canal, one of maybe ten outsized houses in a square around a well-maintained playground, a black Subaru jeep parked out on the street by the bushes.
Malin’s finger on the doorbell, the standard black and white model, their name written in shaky handwriting on a piece of paper behind the little plastic rectangle just beneath the button.
Kalmvik.
It’s dark and cold now; evening has arrived in Ljungsbro, and, as time passes, night creeps in with its even fiercer cold.
Joakim Svensson and Jimmy Kalmvik were alone in the flat from seven to half past eleven. How can they be sure that the boys really were in the flat then? That they didn’t sneak out and get up to anything? Could they have harmed Bengt Andersson in that time? Got him out to the tree? Or might Joakim Svensson have snuck out after his mum got home?
Nothing’s impossible, Malin thinks. And who knows how many films they may have seen for inspiration? Could the whole thing have been a boyish prank that got out of control?
Henrietta Kalmvik opens the door wide.
No hesitant little crack.
‘You’re from the police? Aren’t you?’
Big red hair, green eyes, sharp features. An elegant white blouse over stylish dark blue trousers: a woman in her mid-forties who knows what she looks good in.
‘Is that your car?’ Malin asks. ‘Out on the street?’
‘Yes. Nice, isn’t it?’
Henrietta Kalmvik leads them into the house, gesturing to them to hang up their jackets in the second of two halls. As Malin shrugs off her padded jacket she sees her almost glide over the parquet floor into the living room, where two white leather sofas frame a table whose legs look like a fat lion’s paws in red marble.
Henrietta Kalmvik sits down on the smaller of the sofas and waits for them.
There’s a pink Chinese rug on the floor. On the wall above the larger sofa hangs a mostly orange painting of a naked couple on a beach at sunset. Outside the window is a snow-covered pool lit up by a floodlight, and Malin thinks how nice it must be to take a morning swim out there when the weather’s warmer.
‘Sit down.’
And Malin and Zeke sit down next to each other on the larger sofa, the leather sinking beneath them. It feels like she’s disappearing into the soft padding. She notices a turned wooden bowl on the table, full of shiny green apples.
‘I presume the head of the school called you,’ Zeke says.
‘Yes,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says.
And then the same questions they asked Margaretha Svensson.
The same answers, yet somehow not the same.
Henrietta Kalmvik’s green eyes fixed on the pool outside the window as she says, ‘I gave up on Markus a long time ago. He’s impossible, but as long as he stays within the law he can do what he likes. He has his own room in the basement, with his own entrance, so he can come and go as he pleases. If you tell me he was tormenting Bengt Andersson, I’d say he probably was. And guns? Not impossible. He stopped listening to me when he was nine. He used to call me a “stupid fucking bitch” when he didn’t get what he wanted. And in the end I stopped trying. Now he comes home to eat. Nothing else. I do my own thing, I’m a member of the Lions, and the Jazz Club in town.’
Henrietta Kalmvik falls silent, as if she’s said all she has to say.
‘I suppose you want to see his room?’
She gets up and heads down some stairs leading to the basement.
They follow her once more.
In the basement they walk through a laundry room and another room containing a sauna and a large Jacuzzi, before Henrietta Kalmvik stops in front of a door.
‘His room.’
She steps aside.
Lets Zeke open the door.
The room is a mess, the king-size bed unmade, oddly positioned in the middle of the room. There are clothes scattered all over the stone floor, along with comic books and sweet wrappers and empty drinks cans. The white walls are bare and Malin thinks that very little light must get in through the windows.
‘Believe it or not,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says, ‘he likes being down here.’
They look in the chest of drawers, pick through the things on the floor.
‘Nothing out of the ordinary here,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you know where Jimmy is now?’
‘No idea. I dare say they’re just hanging about somewhere, him and Jocke. They’re like brothers, those two.’
‘And Jimmy’s father? Is there any chance we could talk to him?’
‘He works on an oil rig out in the North Sea. Somewhere off Narvik. He’s away three weeks, then home two.’
‘It must get lonely,’ Zeke says, closing the door to Jimmy Kalmvik’s room.
‘Not really,’ Henrietta Kalmvik says. ‘It suits us both not to be in each other’s pockets. And he earns an awful lot of money.’
‘Has he got a mobile out there?’
‘No, but you can call the oil rig itself if it’s urgent.’
‘When will he be home?’
‘Saturday morning. On the morning train from Oslo. But call the rig if it’s urgent.’
40
A voice at the other end of the line, the crackling makes the Norwegian unclear, dreamlike, as Zeke reverses out of the Kalmviks’ drive.
‘Yes, hello? You wanted Goran Kalmvik? He hasn’t been here for just over a week now. His shift ended last Thursday, and he’s not expected back for two weeks. I can’t hear you very well, not… Where he might be? At home… oh, I see… in that case I’ve no idea… yes, he works two weeks and is off for three.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Malin says when she has hung up. ‘Kalmvik’s dad isn’t on the rig. Hasn’t been there for over a week.’
‘Henrietta didn’t seem to have any idea about that,’ Zeke says. ‘What do you think it means?’
‘It could mean anything. That he was at home last week when Bengt Andersson was murdered and that he could have helped the boys if they managed to go a bit too far with one of their pranks against him. Or he’s been deceiving his wife and has a mistress or something even juicier somewhere else. Or maybe he’s just having some time off on his own.’
‘Is it Saturday he’s due home?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’ll be hard to get hold of him before that. Do you think Henrietta’s lying? That she’s only pretending not to know anything? Trying to protect him and their son?’
‘It didn’t look like it,’ Malin says. ‘I’d say not.’
‘Okay, let’s drop Kalmvik for now, Fors. Let’s brave the cold and darkness and go and take a look at the Murvalls’ cabin in the forest. It would be just as well to get a bit further with all this.’
Just as well, Malin thinks, closing her eyes and relaxing and letting the images in her head come and go as they like.
Tove on the sofa at home in the flat.
Daniel Hogfeldt, bare-chested.
Janne’s picture beside the bed.
And then the image that forces all the others aside, that expands and burns into her consciousness, an image
