‘What make is it?’
‘A red Crescent, three gears.’
‘You haven’t been in touch with anyone over the internet? Anyone who seemed odd?’
‘I don’t do that sort of thing. MySpace? Chat rooms?
Banging on the wall from the corridor. Malin has been expecting it.
Zeke’s words just a moment before: ‘Your daughter has been attacked and a blunt instrument has been inserted into her vagina. Probably with force.’
And Ulf Davidsson kicks the wall, clenches his fists, mutters something Zeke doesn’t understand. Birgitta Davidsson is silent beside her husband, staring into the door.
Then her words.
‘But she doesn’t remember, so it’s as if it didn’t happen, isn’t it? Like it doesn’t exist?’
Ulf Davidsson collects himself, stands still beside his wife, putting his arm around her shoulders.
‘No,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t exist.’
The family on the bed in front of them.
Questions recently asked still hanging in the air. The answers floating around them with the dust particles.
‘Everyone else is away for the summer, but we’re staying at home this year.’
‘Telephone numbers of any friends we ought to talk to?’
‘No, no special friends, really.’
‘Yes, we’re staying in the city, saving up for the winter, we’re going to Thailand.’
‘They don’t want to hear about . . .’
‘Any boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Anyone else who could have had something to do with this?’
‘Not that we can think of.’
‘No idea.’
‘No one in your closest circle of acquaintances? Family?’
‘No,’ Ulf Davidsson says. ‘Our families don’t live around here. And none of them would do anything like this.’
Two girls.
Theresa. Josefin.
And neither of them really seems to exist. They’re like shadows of dust in the summer city, invisible and nameless, almost grown-ups, insubstantial as the smoke from the forest fires.
Then a knock on the door.
It opens before anyone has time to say ‘come in’.
A sweeping mop. A huge black man in overalls that are too small for him.
‘Have to clean,’ he says before they can object.
In the corridor, on the way towards the lifts, they meet a middle-aged blonde woman wearing an orange skirt that Malin guesses is from Gudrun Sjoden.
Malin’s finger on the lift button.
‘That must be the psychologist,’ Zeke says. ‘Do you think she’ll get anything?’
‘No chance,’ Malin says, thinking that if they’re going to stand the slightest chance of solving this, Josefin Davidsson will have to remember, or else a witness will have to have seen something, or else Karin Johannison and her colleagues at the National Forensics Lab will have to come up with something really good.
Hypnosis, Malin thinks.
Anyone can remember anything under hypnosis, can’t they?
9
It’s half past one.
Indoctrinated children all around Malin.
The dry, cool air finds its way down her throat and out into her lungs, shocking her body, triggering its defence mechanisms even though the experience is pleasant. Harsh colours making her eyes itch: yellow, blue, green. A clown, pictures, numbers, and an artificial smell of frying.
But it’s cool in here.
And I’m hungry.
The tinted windows make the crashing daylight outside bearable, and I don’t have to wear those damn sunglasses, they impose a filter on reality that I hate. But you have to wear sunglasses out there. The light today is harsh, like having an interrogation lamp aimed right into your eyes, the beams like freshly honed knives right into your soul.
McDonald’s by the Braskens bridge, on the side of the river facing Johannelund. Malin doesn’t usually let the great Satan satisfy her hunger, but today, after their visit to the hospital, she and Zeke make an exception.
Kids with Happy Meals.
The walk from the hospital entrance to the car, parked in the sun on the wide-open car park, made them doubt it was actually possible to be outside at all in heat like this. Then the car, it must have been sixty degrees in its stuffy interior, hot as a sauna, with a protesting engine, a smell of hot oil and the air from the vents first hot, then cold, cold, cold.
The restaurant half full of families with children. Overweight immigrant girls behind the counter jostling each other, giggling and directing quick glances towards them.
‘Isn’t there any way of tracing the person who made the call about Josefin?’
Zeke aims the question into thin air.
‘Not according to Forensics. Pay-as-you-go. We’ll have to leave it as a question mark and move on. And hope whoever it was gets in touch again.’
Malin takes another bite of her Filet-O-Fish.
‘And the bicycle?’
‘Could have been stolen. Or it’s just somewhere else. She could well have been attacked in a completely different location, and moved to the Horticultural Society Park. Impossible to know until she remembers. We’ll have to get everyone to keep an eye out for the bike.’
Zeke nods.
‘Well, we can start by calling Theresa Eckeved’s boyfriend,’ Malin says once she’s taken another bite of greasy American fish.
‘You or me?’
‘I’ll call. You carry on eating.’
‘Thanks. Damn, this crap tastes really good when you’re hungry. Martin would go mad if he saw me eating this shit.’
‘Well, he can’t see you,’ Malin says, pulling the piece of paper with Theresa Eckeved’s boyfriend’s phone number from her pocket.
He answers on the fourth ring.
‘Peter.’
‘Is that Peter Skold?’
A gravelly teenage voice, sullen, sarcastic.
‘Yes, who else? To the best of my knowledge, I’m the only person with this number.’
Do teenagers really talk like that?
But maybe Tove would use that sort of phrase. A bit old-fashioned, affected.
‘My name is Malin Fors. I’m a Detective Inspector with Linkoping Police. I’ve got a few questions about your
