The chains, the noose. The sacrifice.
I had made a sacrifice for you.
But what happened with her?
I remember waking up in the field and she was gone. I snaked back to the car, crept in and managed to start it. I made my way back here.
But was she hanging in the tree?
Or was she somewhere else?
She must have been hanging. I drove out what was wrong, I made the sacrifice.
So you’ll soon be here to open the door.
You’ll be coming with love, won’t you?
What’s happened? What’s been done?
It smells of apples in my hole. Apples, biscuits and smoke.
The Philadelphia Church sign is illuminated in the middle of the day, as if to advertise: God is here! You just have to step inside and meet Him. The church building is right next to McDonald’s on the other side of Drottninggatan, and it has a faithful and well-heeled congregation. She remembers Free Church people from her sixth-form days. They were polite, wore fairly trendy clothes, but they were still geeks, or at least that was how she saw them. As if there were something missing. As if there were a remarkable hardness in all that fluff and softness. Like candy-floss with sharp tacks in.
Malin peers up the street.
Where’s Zeke?
She’s just called him, told him to pick her up outside the church, that they were going out to Collins to bring in Karl Murvall.
There’s the Volvo.
He pulls in, and before he has completely stopped the car Malin has opened the door and jumped into the passenger seat.
Zeke eager: ‘What did the psychologist say?’
‘I promised not to say.’
‘Malin,’ Zeke sighed.
‘But it was Karl Murvall who murdered Bengt Andersson and tried to murder Rebecka Stenlundh. There’s absolutely no doubt at all.’
‘How do you know that? Didn’t he have an alibi?’
Zeke is heading along Drottninggatan.
‘Female intuition. And what’s to say he couldn’t have disconnected the sensors with the help of the computer system, cut a hole in the fence surrounding Collins, and just crept out that night? That he didn’t sort out the business of the update beforehand?’
Zeke accelerates. ‘Okay, why not, maybe the sensors were controlled from inside that server room,’ he says. ‘But they saw him in the room.’
‘Maybe they only looked through the frosted glass,’ Malin says.
Zeke nods, says, ‘Family’s always worst, isn’t it?’
The gate at the entrance to the Collins site seems to have grown since they were last there, and the forest by the car park gives the impression that it’s got thicker, become more enclosed. The factory buildings slouch like the depressed barracks of an internment camp behind the fence, ready to be shipped off to China any day now, and filled with workers earning a hundredth of what those working inside currently earn.
You again, the guard at the gate seems to think. Won’t you ever stop asking me to open this hatch and let in the cold?
‘We’re looking for Karl Murvall,’ Malin says.
The guard smiles and shakes his head. ‘Then you’ve come to the wrong place,’ he says. ‘He was fired the day before yesterday.’
‘So he got fired. You don’t happen to know why? I don’t suppose you get to hear things like that?’ Zeke says.
The guard looks insulted. ‘Why does anyone get fired?’ he asks.
‘What do I know? You tell us,’ Zeke says.
‘In his case it was for strange and threatening behaviour against his work colleagues. Anything else you want to know?’
‘That’ll do,’ Malin says. She doesn’t feel up to asking about the night of the murder and the fence. Somehow Karl Murvall managed to get out that night.
‘Can’t we put out an alert for him?’ Malin asks Zeke as they are heading away from Collins’ car park towards the main road. They pass a lorry whose trailer is weaving alarmingly on the road.
‘No. You have to have something concrete to go on.’
‘I have.’
‘Which you can’t reveal.’
‘It’s him.’
‘You’ve got to come up with something else, Fors. You can always take him in for questioning.’
They pull out on to the main road, swerving to avoid a black BMW patrol car driving at least forty kilometres an hour too fast.
‘But we have to find him.’
‘Do you think he’ll be at home?’
‘We can always give it a try.’
‘Is it okay if I put on some music?’
‘Whatever you want, Zeke.’
Seconds later the car is filled with a hundred German voices.
‘Ein bisschen Frieden, ein bisschen Sonne…’
‘Eurovision classic as a choral work,’ Zeke shouts. ‘Always cheers you up, doesn’t it?’
It’s half past three by the time they ring on the door of Karl Murvall’s flat on Tanneforsvagen. The varnish on the door is peeling and for the first time Malin notices that the whole stairwell could do with some work; no one seems to look after the communal areas.
No one opens.
Malin looks in through the letterbox. Newspapers and post untouched on the floor.
‘We can’t ask for a sodding search warrant either,’ Malin says. ‘I can’t refer to what Viveka Crafoord told me, and just because Rebecka Stenlundh has been attacked doesn’t mean we can march in here.’
‘Where can he be?’ Zeke wonders in a loud voice.
‘Rebecka Stenlundh mentioned a forest and a hole.’
‘You don’t mean we have to go out in the forest again?’
‘Who else could we have seen that night? It must have been him.’
‘Do you think he’s staying in the hunting cabin?’
‘Hardly. But there’s something in the forest. I just know there is.’
‘No point waiting, then,’ Zeke says.
The world shrinks in the snow. Collapses into a dark space that contains everything under the atmosphere. Packed together into a sluggish black hole.
You’re hiding secrets, Malin thinks. You dark old Ostgota forest. The snow is harder than last time, the crust is bearing my weight. Maybe the cold has slowly turned the snow into ice? An ice age created in just a few months, forever changing the vegetation, the landscape, the tone of the forest. The trees around them are rough, abandoned ancient pillars.
One foot in front of the other.
Of all the children whom no one sees, who are abandoned, whose fathers and mothers don’t care about them, who are forsaken by the world, some will always fall out, go mad, and the world that deserted them will have to take the consequences.
In Karin’s Thailand.
In Janne’s Bosnia and Rwanda.
