Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

His, hers, theirs?

They aren’t here, she thinks. The eyes are somewhere else, far away.

Sweet breath, warm, and it ought to be unfamiliar, but it isn’t.

Soon the chemical feeling reaches her eyes, then her ears. And pictures and sound are gone, the world is gone and she doesn’t know if she’s falling asleep or dying.

Not yet, she thinks. I’ve been drugged, haven’t I? His face there at home, my face.

Not yet, yet, yet, yet…

She is awake.

She knows that. Because her eyelids are open and her head is aching, even if it is completely dark. Or is she sleeping? Confused thoughts.

Am I dead?

Is this my grave?

I don’t want to be here. I want to go home, to my loved ones. But I’m not scared. Why aren’t I scared?

That sound must be an engine. A well-maintained engine that does its job with joy in spite of the cold. Her wrists and feet ache. It’s impossible to move them, but she can kick, tense her body in a bow and kick against the four walls of the space.

Shall I scream?

Of course. But someone, him, her, them, has taped her mouth shut, a rag between her teeth. What does it taste of? Biscuits? Apples? Oil? Dry, drier, driest.

I can fight.

Like I’ve always done.

I’m not dead. I’m in the boot of a car and I’m freezing and kicking, protesting.

Thump, thump, thump.

Can anyone hear me? Do I exist?

I hear you.

I am your friend. But I can’t do anything. At least not much.

Perhaps we can meet afterwards, when all this is over. We can drift side by side. We can like each other. Run round, round the scented apple trees in a season that is perhaps one eternal long summer.

But first: a car feeling its way forward, your body in the boot; the car stops in a deserted lay-by and you are drugged again, your kicks were too much; the car drives across the field and up into the very closest darkness.

64

Ramshall.

The very brightest side of Linkoping.

Perhaps the very finest part of the city, to which the door is closed to most people, where the most remarkable people live.

Maybe it’s the case, Malin thinks, that everyone, consciously or unconsciously, assumes the guise of importance if the opportunity arises, whether large- or small-scale.

Look, we live here!

We can afford it, we’re the kings of the 013 area-code.

Markus’s parents’ house is in Ramshall, among houses owned by Saab directors, successful entrepreneurs, well-heeled doctors and successful small businessmen.

The villas are almost in the middle of the city, clambering up a slope with a view of the Folkungavallen Stadium and Tinnis, a large communal outdoor swimming pool whose site every property developer in the country covets greedily. At the end of the slope the settlement disappears into the forest or rolls away in narrow streets down towards Tinnerbacken pond where the dirty-yellow boxlike hospital buildings take over. Best of all is living on the slope, with a view, closest to the city, and that’s where Markus’s parents live.

Malin and Tove are walking side by side in the glow of the streetlamps, and their bodies cast long shadows along the well-gritted pavements. The residents would probably like to put up a fence around the whole area, or an electric fence with barbed wire and a security guard on the gate. Ideas of gated communities aren’t entirely alien to certain right-wing politicians on the city council. So a fence around Ramshall isn’t perhaps as unthinkable as it might seem.

Stop. Thus far but no further. Us and them. Us against them. Us.

It doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes to walk from the flat to Ramshall, so Malin decided to brave the cold, in spite of Tove’s protests: ‘Look, I’m coming with you. So you can walk with me.’

‘I thought you said it was going to be fun?’

‘It will be fun, Tove.’

On the way they walk past Karin Johannison’s villa. A yellow-painted house from the thirties with a wooden facade and a veranda.

‘It’s cold, Mum,’ Tove says.

‘It’s healthy,’ Malin says, and with every step she feels her restlessness subsiding, how she is preparing herself to get through the dinner.

‘You’re nervous, Mum,’ Tove suddenly says.

‘Nervous?’

‘Yes, about this.’

‘No, why would I be nervous?’

‘This sort of thing always makes you nervous. Going to someone’s house. And they are doctors.’

‘As if that makes any difference.’

‘Over there,’ Tove says, pointing along the street. ‘Third house on the left.’

Malin sees the villa, a two-storey building of white brick, surrounded by a low fence and with clipped shrubs in the garden.

Inside her the house expands. It becomes a fortified Tuscan hill-town, impossible for a lone foot-soldier to capture.

Inside the house there is a smell of warmth and bay leaves and the cleanliness that only a hard-working Polish cleaner can conjure forth.

The Stenvinkels are standing in the hall, they have shaken Malin by the hand and she is swaying, unprepared for the unrelenting friendliness.

Mum, Birgitta, is a senior physician at the Ear Clinic, and wants to be called Biggan, and it’s sooo lovely to meet Malin at laaast, when they’ve read so much about her in the Correspondent. Dad, Hans, a surgeon, wants to be called Hasse, hopes they like pheasant, because he got hold of a couple of lovely ones down at Lucullus. Stockholmers, upper middle class, brought to the back of beyond by their careers, Malin thinks.

‘Am I wrong,’ she asks, ‘but can I hear that you’re both from Stockholm?’

‘Stockholm? Does it really sound like it? No, I’m from Boras,’ Biggan says. ‘And Hasse’s from Enkoping. We met when we were studying in Lund.’

I know their life history, Malin thinks, and we haven’t got further than the hall.

Markus and Tove have disappeared into the house, and now Hasse is leading Malin into the kitchen. On a sparkling stainless-steel worktop sits a misted cocktail shaker and Malin capitulates, doesn’t even contemplate trying to resist.

‘A martini?’ Hasse asks.

Biggan adds, ‘Watch out, though. He makes them very dry.’

‘Tanqueray?’ Hasse says.

‘Please,’ Malin replies, and minutes later she is standing with a drink in her hand and they say a toast, and the alcohol is clean and pure and she thinks that at least he knows his drink, Hasse.