And love of children. That is the first sort of love.
‘What really happened between you and Cornerhouse-Kalle, Rakel?’
Rakel turns to her, stares at Malin, and the pupils of the old woman’s eyes grow large and black, as if they were trying to convey a thousand years of female experience and torment. Then Rakel blinks, closing her eyes for a few seconds before saying, ‘That was so long ago. I can’t even remember. I’ve had so many worries over the years with the boys.’
An opening, Malin thinks, for the next question.
‘Haven’t you ever worried,’ she asks, ‘that your boys might find out that Cornerhouse-Kalle was Karl’s father?’
Rakel Murvall fills her own cup with coffee. ‘The boys have that knowledge.’
‘Have they? Have they really, Rakel? Being found out telling lies can ruin any relationship,’ Malin goes on. ‘And what power does the person who had to lie possess?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ Rakel Murvall says. ‘You’re talking a lot of nonsense.’
‘Am I really, Rakel?’ Malin says. ‘Am I really?’
Rakel Murvall closes the front door behind them.
Sits down on the red-painted rib-backed chair in the hall, looks at the photograph on the wall, of herself surrounded by the boys in the garden when they were young, Blackie in the picture too, before the wheelchair.
Fucking little brat. You must have taken that picture.
If you disappear, disappear for good, she thinks, then maybe my secrets can remain my own.
If he disappears there will only be one or two rumours left, and I can lock those away in a dark wardrobe. He needs to go now, it’s as simple as that. Be got rid of. Anyway, I’m so tired of him existing.
She picks up the receiver.
Calls Adam.
The little lad answers, his boy’s voice high and innocent.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello, Tobias. This is Grandma. Is your daddy there?’
‘Hello, Grandma.’
Then the line goes quiet, before an older, gruffer voice says, ‘Mother?’
‘You need to come over, Adam. And bring your brothers with you. I’ve got something important to tell you.’
‘I’m coming, Mother. I’ll tell the others.’
I used to cycle up here.
The forest was mine.
You would go hunting near me sometimes. I could hear your shots all year long, and even then I wished that you would come to me.
Mother, why were you so angry?
What had I done? What have I done?
Images and warmth. I am an angel under an apple tree of biscuit crumbs. The fire is warm again. It’s nice here in my hole, but I’m lonely. But I’m not scared of loneliness. Because you can’t be scared of what you are, can you?
I can sleep a bit longer here in my darkness. Then you’ll come and get me, to let me in. And then I’ll become someone else, won’t I? When you let me in.
‘What do we do now?’
Zeke is driving towards Vreta Kloster, the church like an ancient fortress on top of a hill maybe a kilometre away, the stables of Heda Riding Club on one side of the road, open fields on the other.
Malin wanted to knock on the brothers’ doors, ask them if they knew whose son their brother Karl was, but Zeke told her to think about it.
‘If they don’t know, the old woman has a right to her secrets, Malin. We can’t just blunder into her past and stir things up.’
And she knew that Zeke was right, in spite of the possible consequences of not telling them. If they stopped considering other people, no matter who they were, how could they ever demand consideration from anyone else?
In answer to Zeke’s question: ‘We wait for Sjoman’s search teams. They’re getting ready to go through the forest, but it’s too cold for the dogs. They’re taking a couple with them anyway, apparently.’
Then: ‘Do you think we should get up there first?’
‘No, Malin. We didn’t find anything yesterday, so how would we be able to find anything today?’
‘I don’t know,’ Malin replies. ‘We could take a look at where the body was found, and the site of the other tree. Well, where it ought to be, anyway.’
‘We’ve had a car looking since last night. We would have heard if they’d found anything.’
‘Have you got any better suggestions?’
‘None at all,’ Zeke says, and does a U-turn. They head back the same way they’ve just come, past the houses in Blasvadret, where they see the brothers heading together towards their mother’s house.
‘How long do you think it’ll take Karin to have the results of the tests on Karl Murvall?’ Malin asks. ‘I want to know if he was the one who raped Maria Murvall.’
‘Do you think he did?’
‘No, but I want to know. I think she’s deceiving us again. I just don’t know how. But I know that she’d never have let us in if she didn’t have something to gain from it herself. She’s still directing this. And she’ll grasp at any straw to protect what she thinks of as hers.’
Malin takes a deep breath.
‘And to preserve her secrets.’
Adam, Elias and Jakob Murvall are sitting round the table in their mother’s kitchen. Sipping cups of freshly brewed coffee, eating biscuits their mother has just warmed in the oven after getting them out of the freezer.
‘How are the biscuits, boys?’
Rakel Murvall is standing by the stove, with the
Appreciative noises from the table, and they listen to what their mother goes on to tell them, what she didn’t want to say until they had sat down and been given some coffee.
‘Martinsson and Fors,’ she says. ‘They’ve just been here, asking after Karl. If it wasn’t him who tortured and forced himself upon that girl in the paper, the one they found by the side of the road, why would they have come out here? What with the complaint of harassment I made and everything? Why would they risk it?’
She holds up the
Lets them read the headline, see the picture of the road.
‘The police are looking for Karl. And it says in the paper that they found the girl with exactly the same injuries as Maria. And if you look on the computer you’ll see that the police raided his flat last night.’
‘So it was him who took Maria in the forest?’ Adam Murvall spits out the words.
‘Who else could it have been?’ Rakel Murvall says. ‘He’s missing now. It must have been him, this was done the same way. Exactly the same way.’
‘His own sister?’
‘The bastard.’
‘Monster. He’s a monster. Just like he always was.’
‘But why would he do that?’ Doubt in Elias Murvall’s voice.
‘And why do we hate him so much? Have you ever wondered about that?’ Rakel pauses, then continues in a lower voice: ‘He was a monster right from the start, never forget that. And he hated her. Because she was one of us, and he wasn’t. Because he’s mad. You know yourselves how he used to hide away in the forest. And that hole of his is only five kilometres or so from where Maria was attacked, so it must have been him. It all fits.’
‘Five kilometres is a long way in the forest, Mother,’ Elias says. ‘We may have had suspicions about him before now, but even so, Mother.’
‘It all fits, Elias. He raped your own sister in the forest as if she were nothing. He destroyed her.’
‘Mother’s right, Elias,’ Adam says calmly, then takes a sip of his coffee.
‘It makes sense,’ Jakob says. ‘It all makes sense.’
