do is no game.
‘Have you seen the way I look?’
Karim Akbar is standing by the counter in the coffee room and holding up the photo of himself in the paper.
‘Couldn’t they have chosen a different one?’
‘It’s not that bad,’ Malin says. ‘It could have been worse.’
‘How? Have you seen what I look like? They’re just choosing pictures that give the impression we’re desperate.’
‘Forget it, Karim. You’ll probably be in the paper again tomorrow. Anyway, we aren’t desperate. Are we?’
‘Never desperate, Malin. Never.’
Malin opens up her email. Some of the usual administrative circulars, a bit of spam, and a message from Johan Jakobsson.
‘Nothing on the hard drive so far. Only a few more folders to check.’
And then an email marked in red.
‘CALL ME.’
From Karin Johannison.
Why couldn’t she call herself?
But Malin knows how it is. Sometimes it just seems easier to send an email.
She types a reply: ‘Have you heard anything?’
She presses send and it isn’t more than a minute before her inbox pings.
She opens the new email from Karin. ‘Can you come over?’
Answer: ‘I’ll be at the lab in ten minutes.’
Karin Johannison’s office at the National Laboratory of Forensic Science has no windows, apart from a glass partition on to the corridor. The walls are covered from floor to ceiling with simple bookcases, and on the desk are stacks of files. The yellow linoleum floor is covered with a thick, red, high-quality carpet that Malin knows Karin has brought in herself. The carpet makes the whole room noble and pleasant, in spite of all the mess.
Karin is sitting behind the desk, as impossibly fresh as ever.
She invites Malin to sit down, and she settles on to the small stool by the door.
‘I’ve had the results from Birmingham,’ Karin says. ‘And I’ve compared the results with Bengt Andersson’s profile. They don’t match. It wasn’t him who raped his Maria Murvall in the forest.’
‘Was it a man or a woman?’
‘We can’t tell. But we can tell that it wasn’t him. Did you think it was?’
Malin shakes her head. ‘No, but now we know.’
‘Now we know,’ Karin says. ‘And the Murvall brothers can be told. Do you think one of them killed Bengt Andersson? And would maybe want to confess if they found out they got it wrong?’
Malin smiles.
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘You’re good at chemistry, Karin,’ Malin says. ‘But you’re not quite so good at people.’
The two women sit in silence.
‘Why couldn’t you have told me this over the phone?’ Malin asks.
‘I just wanted to tell you in person,’ Karin replies. ‘It seemed better somehow.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re so shut off sometimes, Malin, tense. And we keep bumping into each other in the course of our work. It’s no bad thing to meet like this, in a calmer setting occasionally. Don’t you think?’
As she is walking out of the lab, Malin’s mobile rings.
Malin talks as she crosses the car park, past a garage with its doors closed, towards the parking spaces over by the bushes where her Volvo is parked next to Karin’s grey, shiny Lexus.
Tove.
‘Hello, darling.’
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Are you at school?’
‘On a break between maths and English. Mum, you remember that Markus’s parents want to have you over for dinner?’
‘I remember.’
‘Can you do tonight? They’d like to do it this evening.’
Smart doctors.
The same evening.
Don’t they know that other people have busy lives?
‘Okay, Tove. I can manage that. But not before seven o’clock. Tell Markus I’m looking forward to it.’
They hang up.
As Malin opens the car door she thinks, What happens when you lie to your children? When you do your children harm? Does a star go out in the sky?
62
‘Are there stones left unturned?’ Zeke asks.
‘I don’t know,’ Malin says. ‘I can’t see the whole thing properly right now. All the pieces, they don’t seem to fit together.’
The clock on the brick wall is slowly ticking towards twelve.
The office at the station is almost deserted. Zeke is sitting behind his desk, Malin on a chair next to it.
Desperate? Us?
Not desperate, but fumbling.
When Malin got back from the forensics lab they had an endless meeting where they went through the state of the investigation.
First the bad news.
The disappointment in Johan Jakobsson’s voice from his seat along one side of the table: ‘The penultimate folder on Rickard Skoglof’s computer only contained a load of average porn,
‘Let’s hope there are some secrets in there,’ Zeke said, and Malin could hear that his voice concealed the fervent wish that this whole thing would soon be over.
Then they stumbled about together. Tried to find the investigation’s voice, the common, cohesive thread. But no matter how they tried, they kept coming back to the start: the man in the tree and the people around him, the Murvalls, Maria, Rakel, Rebecka; the ritual, the heathen faith, Valkyria Karlsson, Rickard Skoglof; and the vanishingly small chance that Jimmy Kalmvik and Joakim Svensson might have done something really stupid during the few hours when only they could provide alibis for each other.
‘We know all that,’ Sven Sjoman said. ‘The question is, can we do much more with any of it? Are there any other paths that might be more productive? Can we see any other paths?’
Silence in the room, a long, painful silence.
Then Malin said, ‘Maybe we could tell the brothers that Bengt Andersson wasn’t the person who raped their sister? Maybe they’d have something else to say if they knew that?’
‘Doubtful, Malin. Do you think they would?’ Sven said.
Malin shrugged.
‘And they’ve been released,’ Karim Akbar said. ‘We can’t bring them in again just for that, and if we go out and talk to them now without anything more concrete, they’d doubtless make allegations that we’re harassing the whole family. The last thing we need is more bad publicity.’
