Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

‘Johan, we’ve got other things to do as well,’ Borje says. ‘We don’t have the luxury of concentrating on just one case.’

‘Is the meeting over?’ Zeke asks, pushing back his chair and standing up.

The moment they have all got to their feet the door opens.

‘You can all sit down again.’

Karim Akbar says these words with all the gravity his muscular, thirty-seven-year-old body can muster, then goes to stand beside Sven Sjoman and waits while the other four officers sink into their chairs again.

‘You appreciate how important it is,’ Karim says, and it strikes Malin that there isn’t a trace of an accent in his speech, despite the fact that he was already ten years old when he arrived in Sweden. He speaks clear, empty, standard Swedish.

‘How important it is,’ he repeats, ‘that we get this sorted out,’ and it sounds just like he’s talking about a dissertation that needs restructuring before a viva.

Hard work and application.

If you start on minus and want to get to double-plus, you can’t afford to leave anything to chance. Karim has written controversial opinion pieces in Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, perfectly chiselled to match the needs of the age. His opinions have upset a lot of people: immigrants must meet certain requirements; benefits need to be linked to linguistic ability in Swedish after just one year in the country. Exclusion can only become inclusion with a lot of effort.

His face appears regularly on television discussion programmes. Make demands, liberate people’s innate potential. Look at me, it can be done. I am living proof.

But what about the timid? Malin wonders. Those who were born diffident?

‘We know this is what our job is about. Solving crimes like this,’ Zeke says, and Malin sees Johan and Borje smiling furtively as Sven pulls a face that means: Calm down, Zeke, let him make his speech; just because you don’t make a fuss doesn’t mean that you’re nothing but a manual labourer for him. For God’s sake, haven’t you grown up, Martinsson?

Karim gives Zeke a look that says: Show me respect, and don’t use that tone, but Zeke doesn’t look away. So Karim goes on instead: ‘The press, the media, will make a big deal out of this, and I’m going to have to answer a lot of questions. We have to come up with the solution quickly; it’s a matter of showing how efficient the Linkoping Police are.’

Malin thinks that it sounds like Karim’s words are being spoken by an automaton. No one talks like that in real life, and the competent individual in front of her is playing the role of a competent individual, when he would really prefer to relax and show… well, what?… his vulnerable side?

Then Karim turns to Sven. ‘Have you allocated resources?’

‘Fors and Martinsson are in overall charge. They have all necessary resources at their disposal. Jakobsson and Svard will assist as much as they can. Andersson is off sick and Degerstad is still on her course in Stockholm. That’s the situation right now.’

Karim takes a deep breath, holding the air in his lungs for a long time before breathing out.

‘Okay, this is what we’re going to do. Sven, as usual you will have overall responsibility as primary investigator, and you other four can form a team. Everything else will have to wait. This has the very highest priority.’

‘But-’

‘This is how it has to be, Martinsson. I don’t doubt that you and Fors are very capable, but right now we need to focus our resources.’

Sven’s stomach seems to have grown even larger, the furrows on his brow even deeper.

‘Do you want me to contact the National Criminal Investigation Institute? We don’t yet know formally that he was even murdered.’

Karim is heading towards the door.

‘No National Crime. We’re going to sort this out ourselves. You’re to report to me every three hours, or whenever there are any new developments.’

The noise of the door slamming behind him echoes round the room.

‘You heard what he said. You can divide the work up between you and report back to me.’

The children playing on the other side of the nursery windows are gone. A yellow, Calder-inspired mobile is swaying gently beneath the checked curtains.

Blue, fat-mottled skin.

Beaten and alone in the ice-cold wind.

Who were you? Malin wonders.

Come back and tell me who you were.

6

Now they have erected a tent beneath me, its green colour turned grey by the evening. I know they are warm in there, but none of that warmth reaches me.

Can I even feel warmth any more? Could I ever? I lived in the land beyond, free in one way from your world, but what a freedom it turned out to be.

But I no longer have any need of your warmth, not as you understand it; there is warmth around me. I am not alone, or rather I am exactly that, alone, I am loneliness, I am the core of loneliness. Perhaps I was the core of loneliness when I was alive? The most basic substance of loneliness, the mystery whose solution we are approaching, the chemical reaction, the seemingly simple yet all-encompassing process in our brains that gives rise to perceptions which in turn give us consciousness, the precondition for the reality we believe to be our own. The lamps burn late in researchers’ laboratories. Once we have cracked that code, we will have cracked them all. Then we can rest. Laugh or scream. Stop. But until then?

Wandering, working, searching for the answers to all manner of questions.

It’s hardly surprising, the way you carry on.

The snow melts, trickling away, but you won’t find anything, so get rid of the tent, bring in a crane and get me down. I’m a strange fruit, I’m not supposed to hang here; it spoils the balance, and it’s starting to make the branch creak. Even the tree is protesting, can’t you hear it?

Well, exactly, you’re all deaf. Just think, how quickly we actually forget. Think what the meanderings of our thoughts can do to us, where they can lead us.

‘Mum, have you seen my eye-shadow?’

Tove’s voice from the bathroom sounds desperate, annoyed and resigned all at the same time, yet simultaneously full of a resolved, focused and almost frightening determination.

Eye-shadow? That hasn’t happened for a while. Malin can’t remember the last time Tove wore any make-up, and wonders what’s going on this evening.

‘Do you want eye-shadow?’ Malin calls from her place on the sofa. The news has just started, with the man in the tree as the third item, after a statement from the Prime Minister and some meteorological expert who says that the current spell of cold weather is conclusive proof of climate change, that we’re heading for a new ice age which is going to cover the whole of Sweden under metres of granite-hard crystals.

‘Why else would I be asking?’

‘Are you seeing a boy?’

There is silence from the bathroom, then a single ‘Damn’ when the make-up bag balanced on the bathroom cabinet evidently tumbles to the floor. Then: ‘It’s here. I found it, Mum.’

‘Good.’

A male reporter from the Ostgota newspaper is standing at the darkened crime- scene, floodlights illuminating the tree in the background, and you can just make out the body in the tree, but only if you know it’s there.

‘I’m standing in a frozen field several miles outside Linkoping. The police have…’

Throughout the region people are watching the same pictures as me, Malin thinks. And they’re wondering the