Without warning the boy takes a step back and slams the door with full force.
‘Shit,’ Borje shouts, rattling the door. ‘You check the back and I’ll take the front.’
They draw their weapons, split up, sticking close to the wall, their jackets catching on uneven planks.
Johan crouches, creeps under the windows along the terrace; the stained green planks creak beneath his feet. He reaches his arm up and tests the handle of the terrace door.
Locked.
Five minutes pass, then ten. Silence from inside the house, no one seems to be moving in there.
Borje sticks his head up, tries to see through the window into what must be a room. Darkness within.
Then Borje hears a noise from the door beside the garage, and it flies open and the boy races out with something black in his hand. Shall I take him? Borje has time to think, but he doesn’t shoot him, instead starts chasing the boy as he sprints off down the road between the houses.
Borje chases the boy towards the centre of town and the Motala River, then into a street off to the left. There are children playing in a garden. His heart is racing fit to burst but with every step he gets a bit closer.
The boy is growing in his vision in front of him. The gardens seem to get bigger then smaller in turn to each side of him. His shoes drum on the gritted streets, left, right, left. The boy must know these streets like the back of his hand.
Tired now.
They’re both running slower.
Then the boy stops.
Turns round.
Aims the black thing at Borje, who throws himself to the ground, towards a heap of snow.
What the fuck is he doing, the idiot, does he know what he’s forcing me to do?
The heaped snow is sharp and cold.
Before him Borje Svard sees his wife, motionless in bed, his dogs, excitable as he approaches their run; he sees the house and the children far away in distant countries.
He sees a boy before him, holding a gun aimed at him.
Torturing dogs. A child. The Dobermann’s taped-up mouth.
Fingers closed around a trigger. The boy’s, his own.
Aim for the leg. The shin. Then he’ll go down, and there’s no vein to tear open so he won’t bleed to death.
Borje fires and the sound is short and powerful and before him on the road the boy collapses, as if someone had pulled his legs out from under him.
Johan heard the noise from the front of the house and rushed round.
Where did they go?
Two directions.
Johan runs upwards and then left. Are they round that corner?
Heavy breathing.
Cold in his lungs, then he hears the shot.
Shit.
And he runs towards the direction of the sound.
And he sees Borje creeping towards a body lying in the middle of the gritted street. Blood is running from a leg, a hand clawing at the snow, reaching for the wound. The boy’s black hair like an array of shadow on the white snow.
Borje gets up, kicks something black away from the body.
Then the body starts to make a noise; a scream of pain, despair and fear, maybe also confusion, cuts through the walls of the residential area.
Johan runs up to Borje.
‘He stopped and took aim at me,’ Borje pants through the screaming. Then he points at the weapon in the snow. ‘A fucking plastic replica. The sort of thing you can buy from a thousand websites. But how the hell was I supposed to see that?’
Borje crouches down next to the boy, says, ‘Take it easy now. It’ll get sorted.’
But the boy carries on screaming, holding his leg.
‘We have to get an ambulance out here,’ Johan says.
Malin looks out over the empty playground.
Thinks: What’s going on round here? Why is all this happening now? She doesn’t know why, but maybe it’s because a breaking point has been reached, and something is collapsing right now, in a torrent of violence and confusion.
Young people.
Drifts of confused young people.
And it doesn’t seem to fit.
‘They’ve operated on him. We’ll talk to him later.’ Sven Sjoman’s weary voice. ‘His dad confirms that it was their dog, that he bought it for the boy.’
‘What else did the father have to say?’ Zeke asks.
‘That the boy wasn’t at home last night, that he’s spent the last few years living in a world of computer games, Internet, death metal and, as his father put it, “a general interest in the occult”.’
‘Poor sod,’ Zeke says, and Malin can see that he seems to be reflecting. Maybe he’s getting a bit of sensible perspective and thinking that his anxieties before Martin’s matches are ridiculous, that he knows his worries are silly and that he really ought to get over them, once and for all. There are ten thousand dads in Linkoping who’d love to have a son like Martin. And when’s the next home match?
Presumably Zeke has no idea.
He probably gets a sore backside at the very thought of the Cloetta Centre.
‘The father’s a sales executive for Saab,’ Sven goes on. ‘Spends three hundred days travelling each year. Places like Pakistan and South Africa.’
‘Any friends?’ Malin asks.
‘None that the father could name.’
‘Borje?’ Johan Jakobsson, anxiety in his voice.
‘You know how it is. Taken off active duties until the incident has been investigated.’
‘It’s open and shut,’ Malin says. ‘He fired in self-defence. Those replicas look exactly like the real thing.’
‘I know,’ Sven says. ‘But when was anything that simple, Fors?’
Room ten of ward five in Linkoping University Hospital is dark, apart from the light cast by the reading lamp above the bed.
Sivert Norling is sitting in a green armchair in the gloom by the window. He is a tall, gangly man, and even in the dim light Malin can see that his blue eyes are hard. His hair is cropped and his legs stick out across the floor. Beside him sits his wife, Birgitta. She’s blonde, dressed in jeans and a red blouse that makes her face, already red from crying, look even more swollen.
In the bed lies the boy, Andreas Norling.
He seems vaguely familiar to Malin, but she can’t place him.
The boy’s leg is in traction, and his eyes are cloudy with painkillers and narcotics, but according to the doctors he can manage some questions.
Zeke and Malin are standing beside his bed, and a uniformed officer is sitting on guard outside the door.
The boy refused to say hello when they came in, and now he has defiantly turned his head away from them, his black hair looks like angry streaks of ink across the white pillow.
‘You’ve got something to tell us,’ Malin says.
The boy lies there silent.
‘We’re investigating a murder. We’re not saying you did it, but we have to know what happened out at that tree last night.’
‘I haven’t been near any tree.’
The boy’s father gets up, shouts, ‘Now you just have the common damn decency to tell them what you know. This is serious. It’s not some bloody game.’
‘He’s right,’ Malin says calmly. ‘You’re in a whole lot of trouble, but if you talk to us perhaps things will get a bit
