57
Collins Mechanics AB, outside Vikingstad.
The tarmac car park stretches about a hundred metres from the edge of a dense forest to a security lodge and the heavy boom blocking the only opening in a ten-metre-high fence crowned with perfect coils of barbed wire.
The company supplies components to Saab General Motors. One of the few successful companies on the plain, three hundred people work on the automated construction of car parts. Just a few years ago there were seven hundred, but it is impossible to compete with China.
Ericsson, NAF, Saab, BT-Trucks, Printcom: they have all cut back or disappeared completely. Malin has noticed the changes that happen to areas when manufacturing industry is shut down: violent crime increases, as does domestic abuse. Despair is, contrary to what many politicians might say, a close neighbour of the fist.
But after a while everything reverts in a peculiar way to how it was before. Some people get new jobs. Others are put on training courses or forced or persuaded to take early retirement. They become either artificially necessary, or finished, and end up on a fault-line, on the edges of the society that the Murvall family wants no part in, at any cost. Other than on their own terms.
The realisation that one is used up, Malin thinks. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to be faced with that conclusion. Being unwanted, unneeded.
Beyond the impenetrable fence lie windowless, hangar-like white factory buildings.
It looks like a prison, Malin thinks.
The guard in the lodge is dressed in a blue Falck uniform, and his face lacks any distinct boundary between cheeks, chin and neck. In the middle of all that skin, creation deigned to introduce a couple of grey, watery eyes that stare sceptically at Malin as she holds up her police ID.
‘We’re looking for a Karl Murvall. I gather he’s IT manager here.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘It doesn’t matter what purpose,’ Zeke says.
‘You have to state-’
‘Police business,’ Malin says, and the watery-eyed man looks away, makes a call, nods a couple of times before hanging up.
‘You can go to main reception,’ he says.
Malin and Zeke walk along the road leading to the entrance. They walk past enclosed production halls, a walk of several hundred metres, and halfway along there are a couple of open doors; worn pulleys hang in their hundreds from beams in the roof, as if they have long been idle and are just waiting to be used. A revolving etched-glass door beneath a ceiling held up by metal beams leads into the reception area. Two women are seated behind a mahogany counter; neither of them appears to notice their arrival. On their left is a broad marble staircase. The room smells of lemon-scented disinfectant and polished leather.
They walk up to the counter. One receptionist looks up.
‘Karl Murvall is on his way down. You can wait on those chairs over by the window.’
Malin turns round. Three red Egg armchairs on a brown carpet.
‘Will he be long?’
‘Only a minute or so.’
Karl Murvall comes down the staircase twenty-five minutes later, dressed in a grey jacket, yellow shirt and a pair of too short dark blue jeans. Malin and Zeke get up when they catch sight of him and go to meet him.
Karl Murvall holds out his hand, his face expressionless. ‘Detective Inspectors. To what do I owe this honour?’
‘We need to talk in private,’ Malin says.
Karl gestures towards the armchairs. ‘Here, perhaps?’
‘Maybe a conference room,’ Malin says.
Karl Murvall turns round and starts to walk up the stairs, looking over his shoulder to make sure Malin and Zeke are following him.
He taps in a code on the lock of a glass door, and it slides open to reveal a long corridor.
Inside one of the rooms they pass can be heard the loud, whirring sound of fans behind a frosted-glass door. A dark shadow behind the door.
‘The server room. The heart of the whole operation.’
‘And you’re responsible for that?’
‘That’s my room,’ Karl Murvall says. ‘I’m in control in there.’
‘And that was where you were working the night Bengt Andersson was murdered?’
‘That’s right.’
Karl stops at another glass door, taps in another code. The door slides open, and round a ten-metre-long oak table are a dozen black Myran chairs, and in the middle of the table a dish of shiny red winter apples.
‘The committee room,’ Karl says. ‘This should do.’
‘Well?’
Karl Murvall is sitting opposite them, his back pressed against his chair.
Zeke squirms on his.
Malin leans forward. ‘Your father wasn’t a sailor.’
The expression on Karl Murvall’s face doesn’t change, not one single muscle tenses, no anxiety in his eyes.
‘Your father,’ Malin continues, ‘was a Ljungsbro legend by the name of Karl Andersson, also known as Cornerhouse-Kalle. Did you know that?’
Karl Murvall leans back. Smiles at Malin, not scornfully, but an empty, lonely smile.
‘Nonsense,’ he says.
‘And if that’s true, then you and Bengt Andersson are, I mean, were, half-brothers.’
‘Me and him?’
Zeke nods. ‘You and him. Didn’t your mother ever tell you?’
Karl Murvall clenches his jaw. ‘Nonsense.’
‘You don’t know anything about this? That your mother had a relationship with Cornerhouse-’
‘I don’t care who was my father or not. I’ve left all that behind me. You have to accept that. You have to appreciate how hard I’ve had to fight to get where I am today.’
‘Can we take a DNA sample from you so that we can compare it with Bengt Andersson’s? Then we’d know for sure.’
Karl Murvall shakes his head. ‘It’s just not interesting.’
‘Really.’
‘Yes, because I know. You don’t need to do any tests. Mum told me. But because I’ve tried to leave my other half-brothers and their life behind me, I really don’t care about any of that.’
‘So you are Bengt Andersson’s half-brother?’ Zeke asks.
‘Not any more. Now he’s dead. Isn’t he? Was there anything else? I have another meeting I need to get to.’
On the way back to the car Malin looks over at the edge of the dark forest.
Karl Murvall didn’t want to talk about his stepfather, didn’t want to talk about what it was like growing up in Blasvadret, didn’t want to say anything about his relationship with his brothers, his sister. ‘Not another word. You’ve got what you wanted. What do you know about what it’s like being me? If there’s nothing else you want to know, duty calls.’
‘But Maria?’
‘What about Maria?’
‘Was she as kind to you as she was to Ball-Bengt? Kinder than Elias, Adam and Jakob? We understand that she was kind to Bengt. Did she know that you were his half-brother?’
Silence.
