Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

though he is wearing a padded jacket with a fur collar, there is something direct yet elegant about the way his body moves, his way of somehow owning and exercising power over the ground he’s walking on.

She meets his gaze, and she sees a glimpse of a mocking smile in it, a story beyond this moment, a secret history that he knows she doesn’t want anyone here to be aware of. And she sees the calculation: I know, you know, and I’m going to use that to get what I want, here and now. Extortion, Malin thinks. It won’t work on me. When are you going to play your trump card, Daniel? Now? Why not? It’s a good opportunity. But I won’t back down. We may be the same age, but we’re really not that similar.

‘Was he murdered, Malin? How did he get up in the tree? You have to give me something.’

Suddenly Daniel Hogfeldt is very close; his straight nose seems to be almost touching hers. ‘Malin?’

‘Not another step. And I’m saying nothing. I don’t have to do anything.’

And the mocking smile in his eyes gets even clearer, but Daniel decides to retreat.

The photographer’s camera clicks as she moves about just beyond the cordon round the tree and body.

‘Not so close, you idiot,’ Zeke shouts, and from the corner of her eye Malin sees the two uniformed officers rush off towards the photographer, who slowly lowers her camera and backs away nearer their car.

‘Malin, he must have been murdered if you need to keep the site clean, so you have to say something. It doesn’t look like a suicide, if you ask me.’

She shoves Daniel aside, feels her elbow touch his, wants to go back and repeat the gesture again, but instead she hears him calling after her, and thinks, How the hell could I? How could I be so stupid?

Then she turns back to face the journalist from the Correspondent: ‘Not one step on to that field. Back to your car, and stay there, or, even better, get out of here. It’s cold and there’s nothing else going on; you’ve got pictures of the body, haven’t you?’

Daniel smiles a practised boyish smile, which, unlike his words, cuts right through the cold.

‘But Malin, I’m only doing my job.’

‘All that’s going to happen now is that the forensics team are going to turn up and start doing their job, that’s all. We’ll take it from there.’

‘I’m done,’ the photographer calls, and Malin thinks that she can’t be more than eight or nine years older than Tove, and how her bare fingers must ache.

‘She’s freezing,’ Malin says.

‘I dare say she is,’ Daniel says. Then he pushes past Malin towards the car without looking back.

When the thought first occurred to me, that she was actually going to help me down, I grew tired of hanging here. Because that is my state. I drift, and I am here. I am in one place, and everywhere. But this tree is no place of rest; perhaps rest will never come. I don’t know yet.

So, all these people in their padded clothes.

Don’t they see how vain they are?

Do they imagine they can keep out the cold?

Can’t they get me down now?

I’m tired of hanging around like this, of this game you’re playing with me down there in the snow below me. It’s fun watching how your steps in the snow become tracks, tracks I can amuse myself by following, round, round, like restless memories hidden in inaccessible synapses.

‘I can’t stand that man,’ Zeke says as the Correspondent’s car disappears off in the cold. ‘He’s like a cocaine-fuelled leech with ADHD.’

‘And that’s why he’s so good at his job,’ Malin says.

Zeke’s American-inspired metaphors turn up when you least expect them, and Malin has often wondered where they come from. As far as she knows, Zeke has never shown any fondness for American popular culture, and he probably hardly knows who Philip Marlowe is.

‘If he’s so fucking clever, what’s he doing on a local paper?’

‘Maybe he’s happy here?’

‘Yeah, right.’

Then Malin looks over at the body. ‘What do you think it’s like, hanging up there?’

The words hung in the cold air.

‘It’s just meat now,’ Zeke says. ‘Meat can’t feel anything. Whoever that person was, whatever sort of human being he was, he isn’t here any longer.’

‘Even so, he still has things to tell us,’ Malin says.

Karin Johannison, analyst, pathologist and researcher at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science, with a part-time post as a crime-scene investigator with the Linkoping Police, is flapping her arms around her heavily padded body, elegant even though conducting an inelegant gesture. Small fragments of feathers fly up in the air like misshapen snowflakes and Malin imagines that the jacket must have been incredibly expensive considering how well-padded its red fabric is.

Even in her fur hat and with cheeks red from the February chill, Karin is the spitting image of a slightly aged Riviera princess, like a middle-aged Francoise Sagan, without a cloud in her sky, far too attractive for the job she does. The suntan from her holiday in Thailand at Christmas is still lingering on her skin and sometimes, Malin thinks, I wish I could have been like Karin, married to money and the easy life.

They approach the body cautiously, stepping in footprints already there.

Karin is behaving like an engineer, pushing aside any thoughts of the naked human being in the tree in front of them, refusing to see the fat, the skin, what had once been the face, suppressing any empathy with the thoughts that might have passed through the swollen body’s brain, and which are now slowly settling over the city, the plain and the forests like an ominous murmur; a whimper that could perhaps only be silenced in one way, through an answer to the question: Who did it?

‘What do you see, Karin?’

I know, Malin thinks. You see an object, a screw or a nut, a narrative machine that needs to be analysed, that will be allowed to tell its innate story.

‘He can hardly have got up there by himself,’ Karin says, standing almost immediately below the body. She has just photographed the footprints around it, laying a ruler beside them, because even if they are in all likelihood merely their own and Peter Liedbergh’s they need to be checked.

Malin doesn’t answer. Instead she asks, ‘How long do you think he’s been dead?’

‘Impossible to know just by looking at him. I’m going to have to work without any preconceptions on this one. We’ll get answers to those questions in the post-mortem.’

The answer she was expecting. Malin thinks instead of Karin’s suntan, her plump jacket and how the wind is cutting straight through her own Stadium coat.

‘We need to take a look at the ground before we get him down,’ Karin says. ‘We’ll have to bring in the heater the army have got up in Kvarn, and erect a tent so we can get rid of all this snow.’

‘But won’t you just end up with a quagmire?’ Malin asks.

‘Only if we carry on too long,’ Karin replies. ‘They can probably have the heater here in a few hours. If they’re not on duty somewhere else, that is.’

‘He shouldn’t be left hanging there much longer,’ Malin says.

‘It’s minus thirty out here,’ Karin says. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to the body in this sort of cold.’

Zeke has kept the engine running and there is probably a forty-degree difference in temperature between the inside of the car and the air outside. Warm breath is turning to ice crystals on the side windows.

Malin gets into the passenger seat.

‘Quick, shut the door,’ Zeke snaps. ‘So, has Mrs Johannison taken charge of the situation?’

‘Kvarn. She’s getting the heater from there.’

Another two patrol cars have arrived, and through the tracery of the crystals Malin sees Karin direct the uniformed officers out in the field.

‘We might as well go now,’ Zeke says.

Malin nods.

As they drive back past Sjovik’s fruit farm Malin turns on the radio, tuning it to P4. An old friend of hers, Helen Aneman, presents a programme on that channel every day between seven and ten o’clock.

Her friend’s soft voice comes on as ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ fades out.