Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

‘During that last track I took a look at the Correspondent’s site. This is no normal day in Linkoping, dear listeners. And I don’t mean the cold. The police have found something in an oak tree in the middle of the plain, towards Vreta Kloster.’

‘That was quick,’ Zeke said over the noise of the radio.

‘He’s no slacker, Daniel,’ Malin says.

‘Daniel?’

‘If you feel like starting the day with something stomach-churning,’ the velvet voice on the radio says, ‘have a look at the pictures on the Correspondent’s website. A very unusual bird in a tree.’

5

Daniel Hogfeldt leans back against his office chair and the responsive backrest dips towards the floor.

He rocks back and forth like he used to in Grandfather’s rocking-chair in the cottage out in Vikbolandet, the one that burned down soon after Grandma finally passed away at Vrinnevis Hospital in Norrkoping. First Daniel looks out through the window at Hamngatan, then across the open-plan newsroom at his colleagues crouched over their computers, most of them completely indifferent to their work, happy with what they’ve got, and tired, so tired. If there’s one poison worse than all the others for journalists, Daniel thinks, it’s tiredness. It messes people up, ruins them.

I’m not tired. Not in the slightest.

He mentioned Malin in his article about the man in the tree: Malin Fors of Linkoping Police did not want to give any…

Back and forth.

Just like most crime investigations he had covered.

The clatter of keyboards, the sound of people calling across the newsroom, and the smell of bitter coffee.

Several of his colleagues are so cynical it is affecting their productivity. But not him. It is a matter of maintaining respect for the people whose stories and mishaps are his daily bread.

A naked man in a tree. Hanged.

A blessing for anyone with newspaper pages to fill and sell.

But also something else.

The city will wake up. No question at all.

I’m good at what I do, because I know how to play the ‘journalistic game’, but also because I know how to keep my distance and how to play people.

Cynical?

Hamngatan was swept in winter outside.

Crumpled sheets in Malin Fors’s apartment. Only two blocks away.

Sven Sjoman’s wrinkled brow, his bulging gut, the denim shirt carelessly tucked into his brown wool trousers. His face as lifeless and grey as the jacket he is wearing, his thin hair the same colour as the whiteboard he is standing in front of. Sven prefers to keep meetings small, then to inform anyone else involved as and when. In his opinion, large meetings like they have in other police districts are never as productive.

He starts the way he usually does with a meeting of this sort, when they are about to start work on a big new case. The question who? needs to be answered, and it is his responsibility to set the question in motion, to give it a direction that will hopefully lead to the answer: him, her, them.

There is a deceptive emptiness, a trickling poison in the meeting room. Because all five of the officers assembled know that when that question is left hanging in the air, it can influence and change an entire community, a region, a country, a whole world.

The room is on the ground floor in one of the old military barracks in the A1-district that was rebuilt as the central police station about ten years ago when the regiment was disbanded: military out, law and order in.

Outside the barred windows is a ten-metre-wide, snow-covered lawn, then a playground, empty and desolate; the swings and climbing-frames are painted in primary colours but the white frost has turned them all into a collage of grey. Beyond the park, inside the nursery school’s large windows, Malin can see children playing, running to and fro, doing all the things that make up their world.

Tove.

It’s been a long time since you ran about like that.

Malin called her from the car, and Tove answered on her way out of the flat: ‘Of course I got up.’

‘Wrap up warm.’

‘What, do you think I’m stupid or something?’

Zeke: ‘Teenagers. They’re like horses on a racecourse. They never do what you want.’

Sometimes when they’ve been working on particularly violent cases, with pictures pinned up on the walls of the meeting room, they close the blinds to shield the children in the nursery, so that they don’t see the sort of thing they probably see on television every day, flickering past on an unguarded set, image added to image, as the child learns to trust its own eyes.

A slit throat. A burned corpse hanging from a lamppost, a swollen body in a flooded town.

And now Sjoman’s words, the same words as always, his gruff voice: ‘So, what do you think we’ve got here? Any ideas, anyone? There have been no new missing person reports, and if that was going to happen it would probably have happened by now. So what do we think?’ A question tossed into the room by a standing man to people sitting round an oblong table, his finger pressing the play button, words like music, like notes, hard and brittle between the four walls.

Johan Jakobsson speaks up, and it is obvious he has been waiting to hear his own voice, that he has been wanting to say something, anything, if only to put an end to his own tiredness.

‘It’s got ritual written all over it.’

‘We don’t even know for sure that he was murdered,’ Sven Sjoman says. ‘We can’t be sure until Karin Johannison is finished. But we can presume that he was murdered. That much is clear.’

You don’t know anything for certain, Malin. Until you know. Until then: the virtue of ignorance.

‘It looks like a ritual.’

‘We have to keep an open mind.’

‘We don’t know who he is,’ Zeke says. ‘That would be a good start, finding out who he is.’

‘Maybe someone will call in. The pictures are in the paper already,’ Johan says, and Borje Svard, who has been silent up to now, sighs.

‘Those pictures? You can’t see the face.’

‘How many people that overweight can there be round here? And before too long someone will wonder where that fat man has disappeared to.’

‘Don’t be so sure,’ Malin says. ‘This city’s full of people that no one would notice if they went missing.’

‘But he looks different, his body-’

‘If we’re lucky,’ Sven interrupts Johan, ‘someone will call in. To begin with we’ll have to wait for the results of the search of the scene and for the post-mortem. We can start knocking on doors in the area, find out if anyone saw or heard anything, if anyone knows anything we ought to know. We have, as you’re well aware, one question that has to be answered.’

Sven Sjoman, Malin thinks. Four years left before he reaches sixty-five, four years left at risk of a heart attack, four years of overtime, four years of his wife’s tasty and lovingly prepared but dangerously fatty food. Four years of too little exercise. A widow-making stomach. But Sven is still the voice of reason in the room, the voice of experience, pushing no particular angle, stressing sensible, disinterested, mature methodology.

‘Malin, you and Zeke will be in charge of the preliminary investigation,’ Sven says. ‘I’ll see that you get the resources you need for the foot-work. And you two can help them as much as you have time for.’

‘I’d have been happy to take this on,’ Johan says.