Johan Jakobsson’s voice over the mobile, still sleepy, probably only just arrived for the meeting.
‘Can you check something for me, before you get to work on Rickard Skoglof’s hard drive?’
Malin asks Johan to check the loss of the ship, the names of the sailors.
‘It’s too old to be in the database of the National Administration for Shipping and Navigation,’ Johan says.
‘That sort of thing must be on various websites. Someone must be interested enough in it?’
‘Bound to be. The heroes of the merchant navy probably have admirers who make sure they aren’t forgotten. If not, the information should be held by the Shipping Federation.’
‘Thanks, Johan. I owe you one.’
‘Don’t make any promises until you know that I can come up with something. Then it’s time for the hard drive.’
Malin hangs up as she turns into Vretaliden care home.
Malin doesn’t make herself known at reception, but even though she walks quickly through the lobby she recognises the smell of unperfumed disinfectant, how its chemical unnaturalness makes the whole place seem depressed. In a home, Malin thinks, you use disinfectant that smells of lemons or flowers, but not here. And this is home for some people. People who really deserve a different smell than this.
She takes the lift up to ward three, and walks along the corridor towards Gottfrid Karlsson’s room.
She knocks.
‘Yes, come in.’ The voice faint but still powerful.
Malin opens the door, walks in slowly, sees the thin body under a yellow blanket in bed. Before she has time to say anything the old man opens his mouth.
‘Miss Fors. I was hoping that you would come back.’
Malin thinks that everyone waits for the truth to come and pay them a visit, that no one comes with the truth or helps it along of their own volition. But perhaps this is the nature of truth: is it not a sequence of elusive, shy occurrences rather than any one powerful supposition? That fundamentally there is only a
Malin approaches the bed.
Gottfrid Karlsson pats the blanket next to him. ‘Come and sit here, Miss Fors, beside an old man.’
‘Thank you,’ Malin says, and sits down.
‘I’ve had the reports of your case read out to me,’ Gottfrid Karlsson says, looking at Malin with almost blind eyes. ‘Terrible things. And the Murvall brothers seem to be particularly delightful. I must have missed them just before I left. But of course I know about their mother and father.’
‘What was their mother like?’
‘She never made much fuss. But I remember her eyes, and I used to think, There goes Rakel Karlsson, and that woman is not to be messed with.’
‘Karlsson?’
‘The same surname as me. Karlsson is probably the most common name on the plain. Yes, that was her name before she married Blackie Murvall.’
‘And Blackie?’
‘A drinker and a braggart, but deep down he was probably just scared. Not like Cornerhouse-Kalle. Different mettle entirely.’
‘And her son, she had a son before her marriage to Blackie, didn’t she?’
‘I seem to remember something of the sort, although his name escapes me. I think his name was… Ah well. Some names disappear from memory. As if time were erasing things inside my head. But one thing I do remember: the boy’s father was shipwrecked while she was still pregnant.’
‘How was she with the boy? It must have been difficult?’
‘You never used to see the child.’
‘Never saw him?’
‘Everyone knew he existed, but you never saw him. You never saw him out and about with her.’
‘And then?’
‘He must have been two years old when she married Blackie Murvall. But, Miss Fors, there were rumours.’
‘What sort of rumours?’
‘I’m not the one to talk to about that. You should talk to Weine Andersson.’
Gottfrid Karlsson puts his old hand on Malin’s.
‘He lives in Stjarnorp care home. He was on the
The door of the room opens and Malin turns round.
Sister Hermansson.
Her short curly hair seems to be sticking straight up, and today, now that she must have swapped her thick glasses for contact lenses, she looks a good ten years younger.
‘Detective Inspector Fors,’ she says. ‘How dare you?’
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‘No one, not even the police, can come and see any of my residents unannounced.’
‘But-’
‘No one, Inspector Fors, no one. And that includes you.’
Sister Hermansson dragged Malin to the little nurses’ station out in the corridor, then went on the attack.
‘The residents here can appear stronger than they are, but most are weak, and at this time of year, when the cold is at its worst, we often lose several in quick succession, and then things get very anxious for my…’
To start with Malin got angry. Residents? Didn’t that mean that this was their home? That they could do as they liked? But then she realised that Hermansson was right, and if she didn’t make the effort to protect the old people, who else would?
Malin apologised before she left.
‘Apology accepted,’ Hermansson said, and looked visibly pleased.
‘And you should change your disinfectant,’ Malin added.
Hermansson looked at her quizzically.
‘Well, you use unperfumed. There are hypoallergenic perfumed disinfectants that smell much nicer and probably don’t cost much more.’
Hermansson thought for a moment.
‘Good idea,’ she said, and began to look through some papers as if to underline the fact that the conversation was over.
And now Malin is heading towards her car over in the car park, when her mobile rings.
She jogs back to the lobby, and, inside the chemical-scented warmth once more, pulls out her phone.
‘We were right. The Shipping Federation had it on its database.’ Johan Jakobsson sounds very pleased with himself.
‘So an M/S
‘Exactly. He wasn’t among the men rescued in lifeboats.’
‘So some of them did survive?’
‘Yes, it looks like it.’
‘Thanks, Johan. Now I really do owe you one.’
Ruins.
And a lake where the ice seems to have settled for good. Malin takes her eyes off the road for a few seconds to glance at Lake Roxen. Cars driving along a ploughed path over the metre-thick ice slip across in relative safety, and on the other side of the lake, far off in the distance, smoke is streaming from the chimneys of postage-stamp-sized cottages.
Stjarnorp Castle.
It burned down in the 1700s, was rebuilt, and to this day is still the residence of the Douglas family, and it still
