Malin drinks the last of her coffee.
Source in Police Headquarters? Who? Maybe more than one.
She suppresses an urge to screw up the paper; she knows Tove will want to read it. On the worktop sits the baking-tray with the baguettes. Two for Tove. She’ll be happy when she finds them.
The area’s morning paper.
Loved by almost everyone in the whole city; they know that from their opinion polls, from the tumult that ensues on the few occasions when the paper doesn’t appear because of problems at the printers. Sometimes it feels like people are hugging the
Daniel Hogfeldt is sitting at his computer in the newsroom.
The love, the response from the readers is still mostly a positive thing. If he writes something good, he’ll get ten emails congratulating him instantly.
He’s happy with the pieces in today’s paper, and has rewarded himself with a fresh-baked cinnamon pastry from Schelin’s down in Tradgardstorget. Bengtsson, one of the old guard, doesn’t have the energy to liven up his texts, and you need energy to cover a crime story like the murder of Bengt Andersson. Finely tuned energy to heighten the inherent drama. The city might be depressed, rendered mute by the cold. But from the emails he has received after those articles about the case, he can sense the disquiet, that fear is alive and well in Linkoping, and there are the beginnings of anger that the police seem to be doing nothing.
‘We pay fifty per cent tax and the police still aren’t doing their job…’
Daniel has spent two days in Stockholm.
He stayed at the Hotel Anglais on Stureplan, with a view of all the swaggering fools around that ridiculous concrete mushroom.
He even got to meet the editor-in-chief, the fawning psychopath. But the whole thing felt wrong: sure, a bigger paper, higher salary, but so what?
Stockholm.
Not now. Not yet.
First follow the example of that woman from the
If I’m going to go to Stockholm, I’m going to arrive as a king, or at least a prince. Just like I am here.
I wonder what Malin Fors is up to now.
I wouldn’t mind seeing her.
Bound to be worn out from work, angry and horny. Just like I get when I’m working too much and sleeping too little. Human.
I’ll email the chief editor today and turn them down.
The three-year-old resists as Johan Jakobsson tries to open her mouth. The blue tiles of the bathroom seem to be folding in on them, but that mouth is going to open.
‘We’ve got to brush our teeth,’ he says. ‘Otherwise the tooth troll will come.’ He tries to get his voice to sound both firm and happy, but realises that he mostly sounds whiny and tired.
‘Open wide,’ but she wants to run off and instead he holds her tight, and squeezes her jaw with his fingers, but not too hard.
Then she pulls free. Runs out of the bathroom, leaving Johan sitting on the toilet seat on his own. Fuck the tooth troll.
Work. When is this case going to open up? When is something going to jump out at them? Soon they’ll have been through the whole of Rickard Skoglof’s hard drive and they haven’t found a thing. Sure, emails to the kids who hung the animals in the tree, and some other weird emails to other ?sir types, but nothing criminal. They’ve only got a couple more password-protected files to check.
His whole life feels like a clenched mouth right now. And Malin and Zeke just seem to get more and more frustrated. And Borje suspended. But presumably he’s with his wife, or the dogs, or at the firing range. Although maybe that’s the last thing he feels like doing right now.
Karim Akbar passes the five-hundred-kronor note across the counter of the dry-cleaner’s. He uses the one in the shopping centre in Ryd for two reasons: they open early, and they clean better.
Behind him the shopping centre: run-down and small. A Co-op shop, a newsagent’s, a combined key-cutting and shoe-repair shop, and a gift shop that seems to have been left untouched since it went bankrupt.
Three suits on thin hangers covered in plastic. One Corneliani, two Hugo Boss, ten white shirts in a neat pile.
The man behind the counter takes the note, thanks him and makes to hand him his change.
‘That’s okay,’ Karim says.
He knows that the man who runs the cleaner’s is from Iraq, and fled here with his family during Saddam’s time. Who knows what he went through? Once when Karim was leaving his suits the man wanted to talk about himself, about his engineering qualifications, about the man he could have been, but Karim pretended to be in a hurry. However much he admires the man for fighting for his family, he’s part of the problem, part of what makes him and almost everyone else of foreign extraction a second-class citizen, makes them the sort of people who run the services that the Swedes won’t touch. It ought to be forbidden for immigrants to run pizza restaurants and dry- cleaners, Karim thinks. That would get rid of the stereotype. The politically correct might object, but that’s the reality. But of course it would be impossible. What about me? I’m not the slightest bit better than him, even if I’m made out to be.
Alienation breeds exclusion.
Exclusion breeds violence.
Violence breeds… Yes, what?
The infinite distance between people. The Murvall family that want nothing more than to be left outside, in peace, and then there is everyone who dreams of being inside, to feel that they belong. Dreams and reality match up in far too few cases.
My dad, Karim thinks as he leaves the dry-cleaner’s. It was passive violence that drove him to his death.
But I never talk to anyone about him. Not even my wife.
The cold hits Karim when he opens the door.
His black Mercedes is glinting even in the gloomy winter light.
And then he thinks about the killers, or the killer, they’re hunting. What is it that they want? What are they trying to achieve?
Zeke pulls open the door of Police Headquarters.
Walks into reception and it smells of sweat and overworked radiators, and one of the uniformed officers standing by the steps to the basement calls out, ‘How’s it going with Martin, is he going to play the next match? Wasn’t there something to do with his knee?’
The ice-hockey player’s dad.
Is that how they see me?
‘He’s playing, as far as I know.’
Martin has had offers from NHL clubs, but nothing has worked out so far. They don’t quite seem to want to let him in yet. Zeke knows that ice hockey will make the lad rich sooner or later, rich in a way that’s hard to imagine.
But not even a hoard of pirate treasure would make him have any respect for the game itself. The padding, the tackles, the sense that it’s all make-believe.
Bengt Andersson isn’t make-believe. Nor is the evil that’s out there.
You can’t have a load of padding on, Zeke thinks, when you’re tackling the worst aspects of humanity. What we
